North Coast Online

Carbon-Constrained?

There's one huge flaw in the Buffalo News editorial today on the siting of new energy plants.

The [Republican-controlled] Senate may argue that this is a review process and every type of technology should be considered, but in a carbon-constrained world, in which this country now exists, and in a world in which safety and security is an issue, it makes sense not to fast-track every coal or nuclear power plant. [emphasis mine]

We do not live in a "carbon-constrained" world.  Carbon is a most plentiful element.  If it's constrained, that's only through the efforts of those who adhere to an unproven scientific theory that it's causing the earth's climate to warm unnaturally. 

I suspect that Senate Republicans are probably reacting more to big business interests out of concern for campaign donations than they are the principals of sound science.  Nonetheless, they're on the right side.  But damn, just for once, I wish they'd stand up for a principal.

The 'Call Your Bluff' Tax

If we have to tax carbon dioxide emissions (and I don't think we do) then at least let's do it based on measured atmospheric temperature increases.  If the temperature goes up, so does the tax.  If the global warming crowd is wrong, though, and it remains constant or even drops, um, so does the tax.

We skeptics would be mollified and the advocates couldn't refuse -- that is unless stopping global warming isn't their real goal. 

Carbon Offset Hi-Jinks

This carbon-offset business at some point will turn out to have been a huge scam.

Sterling Sommer was accredited within the past month, a process the firm started at the request of one of its biggest client’s, HSBC. About three years ago, the bank became more interested in environmentally sensitive practices when its London-based chairman Stephen Green announced that he wanted HSBC to be “carbon neutral.”

This means the $1.8 trillion bank with offices in 82 countries, has found ways to make up for the carbon dioxide it emits using energy to heat and electrify its buildings by doing things such as buying renewable windpower.

And if you believe that, I've got a sub-par mortgage for you.

George Bush -- Diplomat Extraordinaire?

Kimberley Strassel thinks that, at least when it comes to global warming, he just might be.

Don't expect anyone to admit it. When Mr. Bush unveiled his new climate framework last week, calling on the world's powers to reduce greenhouse emissions, it was portrayed as a capitulation. He'd removed the last "obstacle" to world unity on this issue, and seen the error of his ways. At this week's Democratic presidential debate, every candidate vowed to fix the damage Mr. Bush had done to America's international reputation, his Kyoto failure the obvious example.

There's been a capitulation on global warming, but it hasn't happened in the Oval Office. The Kyoto cheerleaders at the United Nations and the European Union are realizing their government-run experiment in climate control is a mess, one that's incidentally failed to reduce carbon emissions. They've also understood that if they want the biggest players on board--the U.S., China, India--they need an approach that balances economic growth with feel-good environmentalism. Yesterday's G-8 agreement acknowledged those realities and tolled Kyoto's death knell. Mr. Bush, 1; sanctimonious greens, 0.

Last week when I heard the mainstream press exulting that Bush had finally come around to Kyoto, I wondered what the heck they were talking about.  He's done nothing of the sort.

Ve Vill Not Allow Dissent

This is pitiful.

The head of NASA told scientists and engineers that he regrets airing his personal views about global warming during a recent radio interview, according to a video of the meeting obtained by The Associated Press.

NASA administrator Michael Griffin said in the closed-door meeting Monday at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena that “unfortunately, this is an issue which has become far more political than technical, and it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it.”

“All I can really do is apologize to all you guys.... I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this,” he said.

He stated his own opinion -- a rather widely-held one -- but now thinks he must grovel before the anthropogenic global warming mafia.  Here's his "shocking" remark.

“I have no doubt that ... a trend of global warming exists,” Griffin said on NPR. “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.”

That's what passes for controversy these days.   Tell my why, if this is a debate over science, that no opposing findings can be expressed openly without condemnation.  Never mind, I'll answer it myself. 

It isn't a debate over science, it's political.  The theory of greenhouse gases' causing global warming may have started out as science, but it's become little more than a justification to crusade against the industrialization of the developed world.

Al Gore likes to say (cutely) that the Earth has a fever, but the sweat seems to be dripping down the brows of the warming advocates, themselves.  They're starting to realize that as climate science advances, it's getting harder and harder to scare us into passing their anti-human agenda into law. 

Time grows short -- must distort, subvert and exaggerate while they can.

Can't Even Stage A Little Symbolism These Days

Al Gore wanted the UK to switch its lights off simultaneously to, well, I don't know what.  But National Grid has nixed it.  The resultant power surge when everyone lit up again, they warn, would burn out circuits, overload powerlines and even put patients on life-support in danger. 

Things would be so much simpler if only we lived in solar-powered huts in old-growth forests and bought  strictly local.

Garbage In, Global Warming Out

I installed my window air conditioner this afternoon.  At the same time, I took care to move my indoor/outdoor temperature sensor from that windowsill to another so the A/C's exhaust wouldn't distort its readings (duh).  One town in Oregon never bothered to do that and global warming data got another shot in the arm.

[UPDATE:] Check this out, too.

Please, Please, Please, Prove Us Right

The media is hoping desperately for a terrible hurricane season.

Climate Change

I grow increasingly convinced that the theory of anthropogenic global warming is false.  The evidence mounts that the CO2 greenhouse effect has been overstated, and former believers have become skeptics, themselves.  But even if I'm wrong -- even if man has created the conditions that are changing our climate, I could never agree to the suggested fixes.

Czech President Vaclav Klaus on Wednesday called for a rational debate on global warming, rejecting what he called "hysteria" driven by enviromentalists.

"Let's bring the debate to whether the 0.6 (degree Celsius warming over the last century) is much or little, how much Man has contributed to the warming and ... if there is anything at all Man can do about it," Klaus said when presenting his book "Blue, Not a Green Planet."

He charged that groups other than scientists have now seized on the topic and ambitious environmentalists are fueling a global warming hysteria that has no solid ground in fact and allows manipulation of people.

"It is about a key topic of our time, and that is the topic of human freedom and its curtailment," Klaus said.

"The approach of environmentalists toward nature is similar to the Marxist approach to economic rules, because they also try to replace free spontaneity of the evolution of the world (and of mankind) with ... global planning of the world's development," Klaus writes in his book.

Luckily, for us skeptics, the climate change hype has finally become un "sustainable."

It's Not The Theory That Bothers Me -- It's The Response

If Larry Summers were representative of the human-caused global warming believers, I'd be much less inclined toward skepticism.

[D]eveloping countries are where most of the future action has to be. They will account for 75 per cent of the increase in emissions over the next quarter century and are now making the infrastructure investments that will shape their future economies.... [A]ny international regime that does not include them will [simply] not work... as energy intensive activities relocate to the developing world....

Read the whole thing at Brad DeLong's blog.