The Chill Factor Versus Al Gore's Global Warming Talk-a-Thon

While Al Gore engages in a 24-hour talk-a-thon to convince Americans that "global warming" is real and a big threat that demands "green" energy, "alternative" energy, "conservation", et cetera, national weather services provide a different look, an accurate picture, of the chill factor that is the reality for September 15-16 in the USA.

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The Slow, Certain Death of the Global Warming Theory

By Alan Caruba

I have been predicting the death of the global warming theory since late in the last decade when it became obvious that the Earth had entered into a cooling cycle. By 2009 the leak of thousands of emails between the “scientists” whose computer models the claims were based upon revealed they were in a state of panic regarding this obvious phenomenon.

Employed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming (IPCC), those “scientists” have since been protected by the universities who benefited greatly from the huge grants of public funding they received. The issue of whether such men should be prosecuted for deceiving the entire world remains to be decided.

The lead player, Dr. James Hansen, still on the payroll of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is the man who told Congress in 1988 that global warming threatened mankind and the Earth. He has since switched to lying about coal and oil, two of the fossil fuels on which the economies of all nations depend, claiming they are deadly pollutants that must be abandoned in favor of “clean energy”, wind and solar.

Former Vice President Al Gore, the most public face of “global warming”, has become a public joke. Recall, however, that he received a Nobel Prize and an Oscar in additions to the millions earned from the sale of “carbon credits” to offset “greenhouse gases.” Some exchanges devoted to these credits have closed their doors. The proposed Cap-and-Trade legislation based on them lingers in Congress.

One need not be a climate scientist or meteorologist to conclude that humans have nothing to do with the climate or the weather. Watching huge hurricanes wreak havoc, along with other weather-related events should be enough for anyone to conclude that humans do not “cause” such things.

Occam’s Razor is the ancient principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely the correct one, but billions in public funding, taxpayer’s dollars, have been diverted to the “research” that corrupt scientists have used to justify the global warming fraud.

MIT Professor, Dr. Richard Lindzen, an internationally recognized authority on atmospheric science, said, "Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age."

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to those courageous scientists that stood their ground against the global warming fraud. Recently the Heartland Institute, in concert with the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and the Science and Environmental Policy Project, published “Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report.” It is 430 pages co-authored by Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Robert M. Carter, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, all of whom have been among the scientists repeatedly slandered as “global warming deniers” and “skeptics” for their efforts to educate the public.

The report, in careful documented, scientific language identifies the way the warmist’s computer models over-estimated the amount of warming, ignored the fact that increased carbon dioxide benefits plant growth, that there is less melting in the Arctic, Antarctic and on mountain tops than claimed, and that there is no sign of acceleration of sea-level rise in recent decades.

A recent Rasmussen survey indicates that upwards of 60% of Americans have concluded that humans have nothing to do with “global warming” or any other aspect of the climate. This is extraordinary when one considers how the mainstream media, the curriculums in the nation’s schools, and the unceasing efforts of major environmental organizations have tried to impose the global warming claims on the public.

In a similar fashion, “The Other Climate Theory” by Anne Jolis, an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, describes how a project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has put what may well be the final nail in the global warming coffin. The work of physicists using particle beam technology, CERN confirmed that the Sun’s cosmic rays enhanced cloud formation. The IPCC’s 2007 report had peremptorily dismissed this possibility, but then the IPCC’s reports have been the basis for the global warming fraud, asserting a “consensus” among scientists that never existed.

Thus the scientific method of describing a phenomenon, formulating a hypothesis to explain it, and performing tests to confirm or reject a hypothesis, has once again demonstrated that “global warming” is just so much hot air.

This is not stopped the Environmental Protection Agency from doing everything in its power to destroy the energy sector of the nation based in part on the global warming fraud.

Universities across America have entire departments and units devoted to keeping the global warming fraud alive. The mainstream press is heavily invested in it. Schools continue to frighten children with its claims. All this and other efforts will fail because science—real science—does not support it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Global Warming and GOP Politics

By Alan Caruba

Here’s a handy guide to the campaigns to be the Republican candidate in 2012. Any effort to advance the “global warming” hoax, discredited since 2009 when it was revealed that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change computer models were all rigged, should disqualify a candidate from serious consideration.

Texas Governor Rick Perry is already well ahead of his GOP competitors for the nomination and has actually passed President Obama in a recent poll regarding the voter’s choice in 2012. Much of this can be attributed to his attack on Obama’s failure to stimulate job creation, but his position doubting “global warming” is a contributing factor.

Rep. Michelle Bachmann has also voiced doubts about “global warming”, but it is former Gov. Mitt Romney who is likely to be the biggest loser on the topic.

It is comical that former Vice President Al Gore, the face of the “global warming” fraud, chimed in back in June to endorse Romney’s “global warming” position. He praised Romney for not heeding, according to Politico.com, “right-wing calls to reject the science behind climate change.” There is no valid science behind “global warming” and never was. Climate change is something that has been on-going for the last 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s existence.

The great Flip-Flopper, Romney will prove the biggest loser. At an August town hall meeting in New Hampshire he was asked whether he believed that “global warming” was real and he responded by saying he didn’t know. “Do I think the world’s getting hotter,” he asked rhetorically. “Yeah, I don’t know that but I think it is”, adding that “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.”

He doesn't know much on the subject, does he? Well, Mitt, here's a tip, the Earth has been in a perfectly natural cooling cycle since 1998. Suffice to say, humans have nothing to do with its climate and it should be worrying that Romney doesn’t know this.

Worse yet, Romney said “I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may well be significant contributors to the climate change and global warming you’re seeing.” Wrong on all counts!

Jon Huntsman, a former governor of Utah and Obama appointee as ambassador to China, is also in the GOP race, though most Republicans are probably unaware of this. He recently tweated that, “To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy. Okay, Jon, you’re crazy. To be this massively uninformed and misinformed at this date rules you out of consideration.

I do not know the other fading GOP candidates’ position on “global warming”, but I suspect most of them, if they want any chance to capture the nomination, will flee from suggesting there is a shred of truth to it. At least I hope so.

It should be a factor in the GOP choice because the “global warming” hoax has been the cause of legislative initiatives that have cost Americans billions over the course of many years.

As for President Obama, we know all too well that he has been in the tank for “global warming” along with most environmental claims. For a multiplicity of reasons, he has to GO.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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It's Just a Heat Wave

By Alan Caruba

The most surprising thing about the current heat wave affecting much of the United States is that no global warming charlatan is claiming that it is the result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Since the late 1980s, Americans were assailed with the global warming hoax until, in November 2009, the release of emails between the trolls ginning up false “climate models” were exposed.

These days the term “climate change” is used as a substitute for “global warming”, but fewer of us are fooled by this. Al Gore is planning a last-ditch effort in September to revive the hoax, but that will fail.

Even those in the mainstream media are too embarrassed to report the absurd notion that CO2, a trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (0.0380%) vital to all vegetation on the planet has anything to do with climate cycles. A new cooling cycle that kicked in around 1998 is the predictable result of less solar activity.

This is not to say it’s not hot. Heat waves are as common to summer months as blizzards are to winter ones. For those who possess the memory of fungus, there was a heat wave that engulfed the East Coast from July 4 through 9th in 2010. Weather records reflect that heat waves are a natural event, often following or preceding record setting cold waves.

While Al Gore and the last holdouts of the global warming hoax continue to tell us that CO2 emissions (the use of fossil fuels for energy to produce electricity, drive anywhere, and manufacture anything) will destroy the world, the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon announce a finding that will blow the CO2 nonsense to bits.

Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, reports CERN has demonstrated “that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in the earth’s atmosphere.” Cosmic rays are subatomic particles from outer space. More clouds means that less of the sun’s warmth reaches the Earth’s surface.

This completely overturns the torrent of lies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been churning out for decades. The IPCC’s scientists went into full panic mood as a new cooling cycle asserted itself in 1998.

As Avery points out, the IPCC scientists had deliberately ignored “the Medieval Warming (950-1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC-600BC) or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.” There was also a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 to account for as well.

While the global warming crowd has been telling everyone that they must stop burning coal, using oil or natural gas, and “reduce our carbon footprint”, a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, in just four days, negated every government-mandated effort to control or reduce CO2 emissions worldwide for the past five years! When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it put so much smoke and other gases in the atmosphere that it cooled the Earth’s temperatures for a few years until they dissipated.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is frantically issuing new rules and regulations to reduce the CO2 emissions from utilities and manufacturing facilities before the public realizes that its actual goal is to kill the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of electricity and everything else. It is insanely trying to shut down the mining of coal, while other elements of the Obama regime are trying to stop any drilling for oil.

Unable to scare everyone with the global warming hoax, new horrors are being invented, from ocean acidification to the claim that the atmosphere is being overloaded with nitrogen. Relax, there’s four times more nitrogen in the atmosphere than oxygen and it’s no big deal.

The Greens think you’re stupid

Americans need to be aware that major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are desperate to maintain the fictions required to deprive the U.S. of the energy it needs to function.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just gave $50 million to the Sierra Club to support its “Beyond Coal” campaign. Bloomberg actually thinks it’s a good thing the Sierra Club has managed to stop 150 coal-burning plants from being built. Meanwhile, during the current heat wave, providers of electricity are worrying whether they can continue to meet the increased demand for it. Coal provides 50% of all the electricity we use in America.

How stupid or evil do you have to be to stop building the plants that provide electricity at a time when the population and the demand for it is rising? Must America become a third world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts?

Friends of the Earth are in a panic that Republicans might actually get the U.S. government to cut back on the insane spending that has put the nation on the edge of sovereign default. Lately they’re claiming that Majority Leader, Eric Candor (R-VA) “is threatening to sink the American economy and undermine environmental protections so that his wealthy friends, including big oil corporations, can keep sitting on their cushions.”

That’s the same Big Oil that hasn’t been able to build a single new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s. That’s the same Big Oil that has seen ten oil rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico since the May 2010 Obama “moratorium” for drilling sites in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Brazil. They took a lot of jobs and revenue with them,

If you wanted to destroy America, all you have to do is make it impossible to access several century’s worth of its own huge reserves of coal and the billions of barrels of oil inland and offshore that would, indeed, make America more energy independent.

The next time anyone speaks about “sustainability”, they are talking about turning out the lights and emptying the highways of America. The next time anyone talks about “the environment”, they mean the same thing.

So, remember, it’s just a heat wave. It will end just like all the others and, in a few months, we will all be talking about the blizzards.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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First Ignored, Then Attacked: 6th International Climate Change Conference

By Alan Caruba

In the words of Gandhi, “First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Thursday, June 30, will mark the beginning of the Sixth International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a free market policy center headquartered in Chicago. The conference will be held in Washington, D.C., an appropriate location considering how much hot air emanates from Congress and the White House.

I attended the first conferences that took place in New York City, just across the river from where I live, so I was “there at the beginning” for conferences that were, in the words of Gandhi, largely ignored by the mainstream media and subsequently mentioned but only as the object of mockery.

When, in 2009, emails exchanged between a handful of scientists who provided the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with the most specious, deliberately duplicitous “data” to prop up the “global warming" hoax were revealed, the whole house of cards began to collapse.

It has since been propped up by a bunch of media, political, and science dead-enders who had stacked their reputations on pulling off the great hoax of the modern era; that an infinitesimal amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—0.038 percent—was causing the Earth to heat up, the seas to rise, and Minnie Mouse to announce she was pregnant.

The success of the forthcoming conference, however, has been blessed by the modern form of respect, a preemptory news release attacking it. The Center for American Progress issued a “press call advisory” titled “Climate Deniers Congregate in the Nation’s Capital.”

It began, “The Heartland Institute, a conservative group funded by Exxon Mobil and Charles Koch…” Whoa! Mr. Chairman, we rise to question why the Center for American Progress would engage in an outright lie? Answer: That’s what progressives do because they are immune to the truth.

For the record, neither Exxon Mobil, nor Mr. Koch, has contributed to the cost of the conference. The former has not contributed to the Institute since 2006 and the Kochs have not sent any money in more than a decade.

But let’s finish the Center’s opening sentence that characterized the conference as “boasting a full agenda of notable climate deniers.” The term climate deniers has long been attached to any scientist, academic, politician, or commentator such as myself who had the temerity to point out that every single claim made on behalf of “global warming” was pure horse-hockey.

Since 1998 we have been discussing the new climate cycle, a COOLING one!

The Center for American Progress sought to make light of the conferences’ theme, “Restoring the Scientific Method.” And a damn fine theme it is considering the damage to the entire scientific community that, prior to the global warming hoax, was not famous for deciding what the truth was by “consensus.”

Real science still depends on peer review and the thorough testing of a hypothesis until it can no longer be disputed because it is reproducible. You can say the Earth is flat until you are blue in the face, but it is still round. The “warmists”, however, did everything they could to short-circuit this rigorous process.

The Center for American Progress is concerned that the forthcoming conference asserts that “global warming is not a crisis” and it will be devoted to “ending global warming alarmism” and “disputing that global warming is man-made.”

Would someone please tell the Center that the Earth is now more than a decade into a perfectly natural cooling cycle and that mankind does not control the sun, the oceans, the clouds, the volcanoes, or any climate event? Whenever a tsunami, blizzard, or tornado occurs, Mother Nature’s advice to mankind is “Get out of the way!”

Since I am loath to travel further these days than the Bagel Chateau one town over from where I reside, I shall be watching the conference on streaming video, June 30 to July 1. It should be noted that, in addition to a roster of some of the world’s most respected climate scientists who will make presentations, the Institute has routinely invited some of the most prominent alarmists—warmists—to participate.

A recent Forbes article noted that “a virtual Who’s Who of global warming media hounds” had been invited to participate in the conferences over the years. Conference coordinator, James Taylor, the Institute’s senior fellow for environment policy, said that Al Gore, James Hansen, Michael Mann and others “all seem to have some sort of scheduling conflict whenever they have to share the stage with a scientist who will be challenging their evidence.”

Meanwhile, the egregiously misnamed Center for American Progress will hold a conference call on Wednesday to launch an attack on the conference. No longer ignored or mocked, the Heartland Institute and its conference are clearly on the winning side.

Funeral ceremonies for “global warming” will follow with the mourners all wearing green.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Why the End is Always Near, but Never Arrives

By Alan Caruba

If you were to depend on the Huffington Post for your knowledge of the world, you would remain appallingly ignorant. As a leading website for liberal news and views, it is a platform for sheer nonsense and the wonder of it all is that so much is produced on a daily basis.

Take, for example, the June 20 post “State of the Ocean: ‘Shocking’ Report Warns of Mass Extinction from Current Rate of Marine Distress.” I doubt that most HP readers have a clue how vast the oceans of the world are. They compose the majority of the Earth’s surface, some 70 percent, and contain 97 percent of the world’s water.

According to its website, the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) gathered at the University of Oxford, for “A high-level international workshop”, described as “the first inter-disciplinary international meeting of marine scientists of its kind… designed to consider the cumulative impact of multiple stressors on the ocean, including warming, acidification, and over-fishing.”

“The 27 participants from 18 organizations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats - and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.”

Please, someone, please tell me the last time an international group of scientists did not get together and then announce to the world that some horrid future awaited everyone?

According to the IPSO geniuses, “We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children’s and generations beyond that.” The scientific panel concluded “that the degeneration in the oceans is happening much faster than has been predicted” and, therefore, all the coral reefs “could be gone by 2050.”

Why is it that every one of these apocalyptic groups always predict something “could be”, “might be”, “is expected to”, and a whole raft of wishy-washy terms that add up to “We don’t know, but we want to scare the crap out of you just the same”?

Implicit in this latest prediction is that human actions are responsible for whatever they claim is happening to the oceans. Never mind all the other creatures on Earth, gazillions of insects, millions of birds and all manner of mammals, not to mention all the fish, it is always humans despoiling the Earth.

Have we not lived with this tiresome nonsense since the early days of the environmental movement and, in particular, the creation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? A recent editorial in The Washington Times exposed the way the latest IPCC pronouncement that “the entire world will soon depend on renewable energy” was lifted from a paper whose primary authors were from Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council!

The IPCC has managed to destroy the integrity and the trust in science that has taken centuries to be built. Its constant flogging of the bogus global warming fraud has caused everyone except the Green Kool-Aid drinkers to conclude that scientists cannot be trusted.

Many can’t. Over the years, they have been seduced by billions in government funds for research that always seems to confirm whatever the political agenda is at the time. Galileo was put under house arrest by the Vatican because his findings conflicted with the teaching of the Church at that time. Now governments just buy scientists by the boatload. In addition, the scientists working for government agencies such as NASA know where their paycheck comes from.

A caveat, please. I am privileged to know quite a few scientists as the result of spending the last thirty years debunking global warming. A relative handful of very brave men and women risked their academic and professional careers to dispute the IPCC and other charlatans. From June 30-to-July 1, the Heartland Institute will convene its sixth international conference devoted to the truth about "global warming", i.e., that it is a massive lie. So, yes, there are many good scientists and interested parties who fought the good fight.

Compounding the problem here in the U.S., the nation’s schools have been totally co-opted by the Green agenda and whatever passes for science is mostly some version of the Gaia religion spoon-fed to the kiddies in pre-school, kindergarten, and up to graduation. The process continues at most colleges and university. The result is a generation or two of enviro-robots for whom science is little more than propaganda.

So, like the marine prognosticators, be polite, listen to their ravings, and ignore them. Be serene and secure in the knowledge that the sun, the oceans, the clouds, the volcanoes, and other factors affecting the Earth are immune to any but the ancient cycles that were known by Chinese, Mayan and druid astronomers long, long ago.

That is why the end is always near, but thankfully never seems to arrive.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Obama's Killing the Economy One Day at a Time

By Alan Caruba

A theme I have returned to over the past three years is my view that President Barack Hussein Obama is a moron. A big part of me wants to attribute his decisions to ignorance, but another part sees a thoroughly malevolent ideology directing those decisions. I don’t think he likes America or Americans.

The world these days is a very unhappy place. In Western nations, Europe and the United States, there has been so much profligate spending and so many “entitlement” programs that financial structures are beginning to crack like poorly maintained bridges or dams.

The Democrats, led by Obama, Senate Majority Harry Reid, and former House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, have supported the destruction of Medicare with Obamacare which is now wending its way through the courts with 26 States joined in opposing it. In this and so many other ways this trio, supported by party linevotes has created an environment of fear and uncertainty that is playing havoc with the economy.

Millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that the Federal Reserve, despite being authorized in 1913, is a central bank with its own agenda and not even subject to a congressional audit. As was the case leading up to the Great Depression of the 1930s, its policies are contributing to the current financial crisis. This week Wall Street listened to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s outlook on economic growth and stock prices took a dive.

All of the Obama administration’s economic policies have proven to be models of stupidity and three years on from Obama’s 2009 inauguration, every single element of the economy is in the toilet.

A June 8 opinion by Martin Feldstein, published in the Wall Street Journal, was titled, “The Economy is Worse Than You Think.” Like the 1960’s robot on TV’s “Lost In Space”, Feldstein and a legion of economists are shouting, “Danger, America, danger!”

Is anybody surprised that every one of Obama’s original economic advisors except for Tim Geithner at Treasury has left for the ivory towers from whence they came? With tenured jobs waiting, they are secure even if the rest of us are not. Geithner came from the ranks of the Federal Reserve and that is hardly a recommendation these days.

Soon, Obama will be able to say, like France’s King Louis XV, “Après moi le déluge”,

To provide you with just one example. You have to be stupid to cling to a completely debunked “global warming” hoax whose real purpose was to create a new source of wealth for people like Al Gore via the sale of “carbon credits.” These are permission slips to emit carbon dioxide (CO2) while producing energy, such as utilities, or using it to manufacture and produce virtually everything from steel to the local baked goods.

The problem for those advocating carbon credits is that there is no global warming. A new cooling cycle began in 1998 and the Earth has been cooling ever since. The Mississippi River flooding is the result of melting snow from a winter that produced record amounts. Future winters will become more extreme and last longer because that’s what happens when the Earth cools.

Not only is the Earth cooling, as it did from 1300 to 1850 in what is now called the “little Ice Age”, but CO2 has nothing whatever to do with the climate. It comprises 0.038% of the atmosphere. Manmade CO2, deemed the culprit because it is the result of burning fossil fuels, oil, gas, and coal, for energy, has nothing to do with climate. The primary factor was and is the Sun. It has been that way for 4.5 billion years.

So why do we read that the Obama administration’s Department of Agriculture has spent $17.4 million “to explore market for carbon credits”? Why is the administration still fixated on a Cap-and-Trade bill they say will reduce CO2 when it is not a problem? Somebody is still looking for a big payday, but the rest of us have just seen $17.4 million of our money flushed down the Green toilet.

The problem here is that the Chicago exchange that was set up to cash in on the CO2 cash cow has folded and the ones in Europe have collapsed as well. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack may want to establish an American carbon market, but having already wasted millions toward this objective, someone needs to tell him to stop.

That someone would normally be the President, but our President is not normal. He is a pathological narcessist and liar.

In the past three years, Obama has doubled the national debt, often with “stimulus” bills that stimulated nothing.

Obama’s Gulf of Mexico “permatorium” has put 87,000 workers in the oil industry out of work with a moratorum on drilling permits that courts have twice declared illegal, but which continues to this day.

Americans have been forced to witness a succession of short-term, quick fixes to the economy that have fixed nothing and made things worse. That’s a pretty good definition of stupidity.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Global Warming Charlatans Feel the Heat

By Alan Caruba

The University of Virginia, after vigorously resisting a Freedom of Information Act (FOI) request for data related to the emails of Michael Mann, was the subject of a court order to make them available. While global warming is known worldwide for its claim that manmade warming would doom the Earth, the names and machinations behind the fraud are far less well known.

Mann, a climatologist, was part of a relatively small clique of charlatans who, working for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), conjured up all manner of “proof” that the Earth was on dangerous trajectory, heating up. Mann invented the “hockey stick” graph that demonstrated this bit of climate magic.

With Al Gore as the most famous face of global warming, Mann and others lent credibility to the IPCC that called for massive reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions resulting from energy use of fossil fuels, primarily oil and coal.

Mann’s problem began when the “hockey stick” graph was debunked and demolished as bogus. All this occurred while Mann was on the faculty of the University of Virginia and while large amounts of research grant money were being received by the University to support Mann and others.

Since 1990, it is estimated that $100 billion of taxpayer’s funding went to support “climate research” by thousands of scientists who, it turned out, were unable to find and certainly not measure any evidence of human influence on global temperature.

The same thing was occurring across the Atlantic in England where the University of East Anglia was home to Mann’s IPCC co-conspirators. On May 25th, the Guardian reported that Nobel Laureate, Sir. Paul Nurse, complained that the British version of FOI was being used to “harass” some climate scientists by requesting data and other research materials.

Given the collusion of both the University of Virginia and of East Anglia, it should come as no surprise that both institutions held their own boards of inquiry and cleared the climate scientists on their staffs of any wrongdoing. That explains why the court had to drag them into demonstrating the probity of their activities.

This is far from a spat between some universities and their scientists, and "skeptics" challenging the global warming fraud. It most certainly is a fraud when global warming claims are used to impose a huge cost to consumers when utilities and other large emitters of carbon dioxide are required by law to utilize “alternative” sources such as wind and solar power or to install multi-million dollar technologies to needlessly reduce CO2 emissions.

Plainly stated, CO2 emissions have zero effect on the weather or the climate.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, who have brought a law suit, American Electric Power v. Connecticut, all the way to the Supreme Court, note that “It is impossible to determine whether emissions by any particular power plant—or U.S. electricity production as a whole—have affected warming trends and, if so, how.” A decision is pending.

The global warming hoax, which at one point involved a scheme to sell “carbon credits” to industry and businesses so they could continue to emit CO2, enriched those selling the credits in both the U.S. and Europe until the global warming hoax began to implode in November 2009. The exchanges selling the credits closed their doors.

It was in November 2009 that a huge cache of emails between Mann and other IPCC scientists was imported to the Internet where it rapidly became clear that they were very worried that the Earth had entered a natural cooling cycle in 1998 and discussed how to pressure scientific journals to not publish the research of skeptics refuting the hoax.

The IPCC continues to propagate global warming lies, only now it is called “climate change.” Any pubic figure that uses the term “climate change” is lying if for no other reason than the climate of the Earth has been and is always in a state of change.

As courts in the U.S. and England continue to require the global warming charlatans and their universities to make known their alleged “scientific research” and email exchanges to further the hoax, a larger question looms. Should not such activity be deemed a deliberate fraud and should not injured parties, including the whole populations of America and England have a standing in court to see that they are punished?

Unanswered is the role that the mass media played in spreading and defending the global warming hoax. On Memorial Day, when we celebrate the sacrifice of fallen heroes to preserve liberty, the Washington Post published a bizarre editorial criticizing “climate skeptics” for using the FOIA to find out why Mann and the University of Virginia received funding while participating in a massive deception. Unmentioned were comparable Greenpeace FOIA efforts against climate skeptics.

It's worth noting that the global warming/climate change fraud is still being perpetrated in American schools from coast to coast.

Already, a number of Republican candidates for the presidency have refuted global warming or an earlier role in advocating it. For too long, politicians have not just been wrong, but often deliberately ignorant of the truth.

Justice may be slow, but it will be served and that is a lesson the entire scientific community should take note. As more revelations occur, even the mainstream media will be unable to protect the global warming/climate change perpetrators or to be their co-conspirators.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Whatever Happened to Global Warming?

By Alan Caruba

A recent Gallup Poll surveyed people in 111 nations to find out whether they regarded global warming as a serious threat and a slim majority responded saying, in effect, they did not.

Worldwide, only 42 percent said global warming was either a “somewhat serious” or “very serious” threat. In the United States, 53 percent still think it is a somewhat or very serious threat. That was, however, down from 63 percent in polling done in 2007 and 2008.

The Earth began to warm in 1850 after a long period of cooling that began around 1300. It was a natural response to that cooling cycle as the Earth has always gone through such warming and cooling events, some of which we identify as ice ages. The last cooling cycle is frequently referred to as a mini-ice age by meteorologists and climatologists, the latter of whom study long term trends.

The global warming hoax got a kick start in 1988 when Dr. James Hansen, employed by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), testified before a congressional committee that, unless carbon dioxide emissions were drastically reduced, the Earth would heat up. After that, scientists of every description climbed on board the global warming bandwagon and began producing billions of dollars worth of absolute rubbish based on computer models that were deliberately concocted to “prove” it was real.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coordinated the hoax, periodically issuing reports predicting death on a massive scale unless people abandoned using “fossil fuels” such as coal and oil. According to the IPCC, even flatulent cows posed a threat to the Earth’s atmosphere.

The curious thing about global warming was the constant predictions that it would occur in five, ten, twenty, or fifty years. Mother Nature, however, had other plans in mind and, in 1998, the Earth began to demonstrably cool.

The cooling coordinated with well known sunspot cycles on the Sun; the fewer, the colder. They virtually disappeared In 2009, an international panel led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and sponsored by NASA, predicted that Solar Cycle 24 would peak in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots.

We’ve all been victimized by NASA and NOAA predictions, beginning with Dr. Hansen’s. In 2009, Dean Pesnell of GISS admitted that “It turns out that none of our models were totally correct. The Sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way.” This is an obfuscation of the fact that all the models were the equivalent of a marked deck of cards or loaded dice.

According to a January 2011 announcement, one of the latest such models, ginned up by “researchers” of the government agency, Environment Canada, claims that, by the year 3000, global warming will cause the West Antarctic ice sheet to collapse and global sea levels to rise by about 13 feet. This, we were told, would occur if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continued to accumulate in the atmosphere.

It is more of the same nonsense that verges on criminal conduct by all those who have been making such claims for the IPCC, NOAA, NASA, and every other citadel of science, including the world’s leading environmental organizations. They have in common an agenda that opposes the use of all the traditional sources of energy which, in turn, would crash the world’s economies and return us to a pre-industrialized era.

The November 2009 “Climategate” revelations about the IPCC scientists who colluded to deceive the world dealt a lethal blow to the global warming hoax, but the Gallup poll indicates that the news has gotten out rather slowly. The term “global warming” is no longer in use, having been replaced with “climate change.”

Climate change is, in fact, a good description of the Earth’s four seasons. The current global cooling cycle is a reminder that climate change has been occurring for the last 4.5 billion years on planet Earth.

At the very least, the next time you hear anyone using the term “global warming”, you can be sure they think you are stupid enough to fall for whatever he or she has to say on the subject.

These are the people pushing wind and solar power.

These are the people insisting we all drive electric cars.

These are the people doing their best to crash our economy.

These are dangerous people who, wherever possible, should be removed from positions, elected and appointed, of power.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Whatever Happened to Global Warming?

What Greens Really Believe

By Alan Caruba

Earth Day was established in 1970 and millions of Americans and others around the world have been steadily brainwashed to embrace the impression that environmentalism is about protecting the Earth, but when Greens talk among themselves, it is a very different story and a frightening one at that.

The massive propaganda program that supports the Green agenda is impressive in its scope. Its locus is the United Nations whose Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was revealed in 2009 to be a complete hoax based on the manipulation of computer models to predict a warming due to excess carbon dioxide. There never was any threat from CO2. It is a gas that is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. It represents a very minor, even miniscule, part of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Nothing, however, deters the Green agenda and, since the first Earth Day, it has penetrated the nation’s schools and, of course, its politics, deliberately deterring and thwarting access to the nation’s vast reserves of oil, coal, and natural gas; the greatest such reserves in the world! It is a drag on business development. It is the ultimate nanny state seeking to alter people's lifestyles through coercion, legislation, and persuasion.

What most people are unaware of is the fascistic hatred of mankind that underlies the philosophic basis of environmentalism.

Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept, was quoted by William Tuck in “Progress and Privilege”, 1982, as saying “The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals, but absolutely limited by the state.” Lamont Cole, an ecologist, has said, “To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem."

Stewart Brand, writing in the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote, “We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into the Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!”

I doubt most people are wishing for a disaster and, when they occur such as the earthquakes in Haiti and in Japan, the first instinct of decent people worldwide is to mobilize to help those affected. This is a very human reaction, but it is not a Green one.

Helen Caldicott, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, characterized capitalism, saying “Free enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth.”

It is no coincidence that Earth Day is also the birthday of Vladimir Illich Lenin, the founder of the former Soviet Union and devotee of Karl Marx, the creator of Communism. The Communist revolution worldwide led to the murder of an estimated one hundred million throughout the last century.

At the heart of environmentalism, aside from its wish for far fewer humans, is a hatred of capitalism. The failures of communism and socialism everywhere attest to the way state control of all aspects of life is ignored by Greens.

David Foreman, founder of Earth First!, said, “We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects…We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, hold dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wildness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settle land.”

Thus, agriculture, the key to civilization, is decried as harming the Earth and all manner of business and industrial enterprises, dependent on the provision of energy, is regarded as evil.

Major environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club to name just two, oppose the use of coal, oil, and natural gas to provide energy.

So much of what environmentalism preaches and claims in its propaganda is utterly false, but telling lies is part and parcel of the Green message.

Timothy Wirth, a former U.S. Senator (D-CO) said, “What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Virtually everything being advocated by the Obama administration represents this willingness to take action and tell lies about the nation’s need for energy, with the exception of the worst ways of producing it, wind, solar, and biofuels. Even before gasoline prices climbed to new highs, negatively affecting all aspects of life in America, Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, was advocating higher prices.

The few quotes cited here do not begin to illuminate the horrors that environmentalism would visit on mankind or the nihilistic view it holds, but they represent a far greater body of Green writings and statements over the years that indicate the extent of the threat it poses to humanity.

A deluge of environmental propaganda will precede Earth Day, April 22, 2011. It should be seen as a warning to all who believe in the Creator and all who wish to advance a world at peace, one in which humanity benefits from trade, prosperity, and modern technology worldwide.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → What Greens Really Believe

Obama, The Great Prevaricator

By Alan Caruba

“President Obama told congressional leaders there are no plans to use the U.S. military to assassinate Libyan strongman Muammar Gadhafi — despite the administration’s policy of seeking regime change in the North African country — according to sources familiar with a Friday White House Situation Room briefing.”
-- March 25, 2011, Politico.com

Translation: Obama has already given orders to have Gadhafi assassinated.

It’s taken two years, the first in which he was everywhere all the time on television, but it took Americans who weren’t besotted by his dazzling smile, his haute couture, and “no drama, Obama” style, very little time to figure out that whatever Barack Hussein Obama says, you can count on his meaning the opposite and doing the opposite.

No previous administration has been so devoted to twisting the language like a pretzel to avoid saying what he means or does. It’s not a “war” in Libya; it’s a “kinetic military action.” There are no Islamic terrorists and there aren’t dozens, if not hundreds of illegal aliens crossing the Mexico border every day. And, after announcing that his administration was lifting the ban on offshore drilling, it has issued a grand total of one and that was to restart an existing platform.

After identifying Afghanistan as the “real” war in the Middle East and decrying the Iraq war all through his campaign, Obama took weeks to decide what to do there and finally did what Bush had done in Iraq. He increased the number of troops.

I am not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or any other professional judge of what makes anyone tick, but I know a liar when I hear and see one day after day, week after week, and year after year.

This is a President who devoted virtually the entire first year of his term to forcing a Democrat controlled Congress to pass The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, a massive assault on the nation’s health industry. It was accomplished even after a million people journeyed to Washington, D.C. to protest it.

When it was passed, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously said, “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what was in it.” What was in it was more than two thousand pages of regulations creating countless new government entities, driving up the cost of health insurance, and a hideous piece of legislation that generated a deluge of requests for waivers from its draconian destruction of this essential element of the economy.

Twenty-eight States have refused to recognize Obamacare as law. A judge in Florida has deemed it unconstitutional. And it was a lie from start to finish.

This is a President whose first State of the Union speech draw derisive laughter from the assembled Congress when he referred to climate change, the code words for global warming.

This is a President who is pushing for high-speed rail in a nation whose citizens either fly where they want to go or drive where they want to go. The federally run Amtrak has never had a profitable year in its entire history.

This is a President who is pushing for electric cars when there is a perfectly functioning system for cars that use gasoline and the first ones off the assembly line cost so much and go so few miles as to be an instant joke.

By the end of his first term, “It’s Bush’s fault” became another joke and by the end of his second year, Obama had adopted most of his predecessor’s earlier decisions including Guantanamo and military trials despite his stated goal to shut it down.

The original bailout, TARP, came at the end of Bush’s term in response to the financial crisis that occurred just before the 2008 election. Obama has followed that with still more deficit spending to the point where everyone in America has an $80,000 piece of the debt he created.

There is no need to list the endless lies any more. All except his mainstream media shills and the hardcore liberal fools know he lies and does so all the time.

This should it come as a surprise for a man whose entire life is a construction of lies including the birth certificate he refuses to produce.

All hail Obama! The Great Prevaricator!

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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Global Warming, R.I.P.

By Alan Caruba

Have you noticed that you rarely hear “global warming” mentioned on radio or television and the term rarely occurs any more in the print media?

One reason is that it has been replaced with “climate change” and the other reason is that the only people talking about climate change seem to be leaders of governments like the United States or Australia.

To borrow a line from Shakespeare, I come to bury global warming, not to praise it.

An early and unrelenting skeptic from the days it first debuted in the late 1980s, I rather instinctively knew that the only warming occurring was the same natural warming that always follows a cooling cycle; in this case the warming that began in 1850 after the Little Ice Age that began around 1300.

It never made sense to me that “industry” should be blamed for pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when the amount of CO2 was a minuscule 0.038 percent with far greater amounts of hydrogen and oxygen that protect the Earth from becoming the galactic equivalent of a toasted marshmallow.

Then, too, like oxygen, all life on Planet Earth is dependent on CO2, a gas that the Environmental Protection Agency is actually calling a “pollutant.” That is so absurd that I was confident people would laugh the whole “theory” out the door when it was first proposed. But that was over two decades ago.

The end didn’t begin until November 2009 and the release of thousands of “Climategate” emails between the meteorologists supplying the bogus data that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used to generate the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Not since the discovery of the “Piltdown Man” had so many scientists allowed themselves to be taken in by a complete fabrication; one based entirely on falsified computer model data. Worse still, many climbed on board the global warming bandwagon to reap some of the billions in grant money involved.

The fact that “global warming” was generated by the United Nations should have been the red flag that something was not just wrong about it, but that it hid an agenda aimed at Western industrialized nations.

I think global warming gained credibility as much from the support of the leaders of Western nations as from the great difficulty skeptical scientists encountered in gaining any traction against it. To this day President Obama still prattles on about the need for solar and wind power to replace fossil fuels in order to avoid “climate change” from their use.

The current Prime Minister of Australia is busy trying to impose a carbon tax on that nation. The British have dug themselves a deep hole by embracing windmills instead of coal mines. Billions have been wasted by Spain and Germany on alternative energy sources.

The anti-energy agenda will have devastating affects on life in the West. Electricity consumers in the United Kingdom were recently told by the CEO of the country’s grid operation that, by 2020, they will have to get used to having no electricity for periods during the day and night. This will put the U.K. on par with North Korea. And the U.S. is not far behind if it does not quickly reverse current energy policies.

In the U.S., the leading voice for “global warming” became the former Vice President Al Gore who, following his defeat for the presidency ,set about becoming a multimillionaire with all manner of “global warming” projects and enterprises. He would eventually win an Oscar for his documentary and a Nobel Peace Prize that was shared by the IPCC. Today, however, Al Gore is a joke.

The legacy of “global warming” has been the decades-long attack on U.S. energy sources until today our vast resources of coal and oil remain in the ground instead of being available as the price of oil increases due to troubles in the Middle East and the cost of electricity increases due to laws mandating that utilities must buy from wind and solar electricity producers who would be out of business by next week without those government mandates.

The public acceptance of the “global warming” hoax has waned even as the mainstream media has tried to hide the truth. The rise of the Internet has seen to that and other more pressing, real challenges are shoveling dirt onto its grave. 9/11 refocused public attention on a real threat. The 2008 financial crisis still holds the nation in its grip.

And a President whose first two years have generated massive resistance now only occasionally references “climate change.”

The global warming corpse is not quite dead, but dead enough for now. The question is what new fraud will the United Nations and environmental organizations perpetrate? The “acidification” of the world’s oceans? “Species extinction” or “Invasive species”? Be assured, the UN mafia is at work on something.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Global Warming, R.I.P.

Deconstructing the Global Warming Fraud

By Alan Caruba

I have been reviewing books for fifty years and have long since lost count of how many books were written to propagate the global warming fraud, nor how many have been written to deconstruct it. That’s how the war of ideas is fought these days, along with documentaries, blogs and websites, conferences, and all the other ways lies are defeated by the truth.

From the earliest days the global warming “theory” was proposed I knew that it was a complete hoax. It never made any sense to me that an element of the earth’s atmosphere, carbon dioxide that measured an infinitesimal 0.0389%, could have an effect on the planet’s climate. Just one of the so-called “greenhouse gases”, water vapor—clouds—is 51 times greater than CO2.

Moreover, not one single computer model can factor in the effect clouds have on the planet’s weather because not one single meteorologist, living or dead, has a clue why they do what they do. They appear and disappear in the very definition of chaos. So it struck me as odd that all the computer models of the advocates of global warming always came to the same conclusion; it’s coming and the earth's temperature will rise dramatically IF…

IF is the key word that global warming advocates, now called “warmists”, kept saying. If you don’t stop using coal and oil for energy, we’re doomed. If you don’t reduce your personal “carbon footprint”, we’re doomed. If we don’t immediately start using ethanol, wind and solar power, we’re doomed.

Beyond IF came an endless avalanche of claims that global warming was altering or affecting every single natural phenomenon in the world. The claim was that glaciers were melting. Polar bear populations were disappearing. Hurricanes were increasing. The seas were rising. Eventually, just about everything happening anywhere was blamed on global warming.

Follywood and the mass media signed onto this absurdity, ignoring the science involved and the most obvious fact that an entirely natural cooling cycle began in 1998 and continues to this day. The worst of it, however, was a combination of the way the government and the nation’s educational system became parties to this massive fraud. And still are!

The EPA claim that it has the authority to regulate CO2 is a pure lie and it is based on the global warming lie.

Ultimately, however, not one "warmest" ever once pointed to the single greatest factor in the earth’s climate, the sun.

All this brings me to a new book, “Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory”, by eight co-authors, contributors whose expertise ranges across climatology, meteorology, physics, and mathematics, along with an expert in the legal aspects of the hoax. All have been derided as “deniers” and “skeptics.”

I know several of them as Internet friends, I count Hans Schreuder, Joseph A. Olsen, and John O’Sullivan among the many people who have helped me, over the years, to understand the complexities of climate science.

This book is not light reading. Indeed, if you don’t come equipped with an understanding of physics, for example, some chapters will remain beyond your grasp. And mine! Happily, most is easily comprehended. In sum, it is a damning condemnation of the great hoax of the modern era, perhaps the greatest hoax since the bogus economic theory of communism.

Real science is not arrived at by “consensus.” Real scientists actually seek to disprove the findings of other scientists until they cannot be disproved, affirming them finally as accurate.

Real science can be corrupted in the same way as other aspects of society can be. For me, the real crime of global warming is the way governmental agencies, beginning with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, deliberately falsified data, mostly based on computer models, to underwrite the global warming fraud. That is also what NOAA, NASA, and the EPA, have done, to name just three.

Now add in billions of dollars lavished on “climate research” conducted on university campuses from coast to coast. There were exceptions. Some university-based scientists disputed the bogus research and some were threatened with the loss of their jobs. The other crime involves the corruption of formerly respected science journals and general science-related media such as National Geographic.

I have used the words “hoax” and “fraud” interchangeably, but the latter refers to the way global warming was never about the climate and all about a handful of people becoming quite wealthy by setting up exchanges to buy and sell bogus “carbon credits” mandated by governments in order to emit CO2 in the normal process of manufacturing production and other applications.

Others have cashed in building solar and wind farms, or became producers of ethanol. None of these ventures would survive without government mandates requiring their use.

The Cap-and-Trade Act is one such fraud and is currently in the U.S. Senate’s political dead zone, hopefully to never be enacted. It is the global warming equivalent of Obamacare; the death of thousands of jobs and the economy.

I recommend you read “Slaying the Sky Dragon” as the definitive answer to more than twenty years of global warming lies.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Deconstructing the Global Warming Fraud

Al Gore's Incredibly Shrinking Credibility

By Alan Caruba

In 1992 who said: “But the theory of global warming will not be disproved, and the skeptics are vastly outnumbered by former skeptics who now accept the overwhelming weight of accumulated evidence.”

Writing about automobiles, who said, “We now know that their cumulative impact on the global environment is posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront…it ought to be possible to establish a coordinated global program to accomplish the strategic goal of completely eliminating the internal combustion engine over, say, a twenty-five-year period.”

No, it is not President Barack Obama who rescued General Motors from bankruptcy in order to require that it begin building obscenely expensive electric cars that will get you anywhere you want to go so long it’s not farther away than forty miles.

It is, of course, Al Gore and you can read more of his insane ravings in “Earth in the Balance”, published initially just prior to serving as the 45th Vice President of the United States during Bill Clinton’s two terms from 1993 to 2001. In 2000 he was the Democratic Party candidate for President, losing to George W. Bush after an election so close the Supreme Court had to make the final call.

After his defeat, Al Gore apparently decided that, if he could not be President, he could at least become obscenely wealthy by co-founding and becoming chairman of Generation Investment Management, focusing on “sustainable investing.” He co-founded and became chairman of Current TV, a cable and satellite television network “for young people based on viewer-created content and citizen journalism.” Current just hired Keith Olbermann, formerly of MSNBC.

He found time to write “An Inconvenient Truth” about global warming and to star in an Oscar-winning documentary. The book was published in 2006 and The New York Times proclaimed that “Al Gore revisits global warming, with passionate warnings and pictures.” This was followed by a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize shared with the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In late 2009 the wheels began to come off of Al Gore's and the IPCC hoax when thousands of emails between the key perpetrators of its rigged computer climate models were posted to the Internet. Everyone could learn about the conspiracy of lies that were the foundation of global warming.

Plans to impose a massive energy tax known as Cap-and-Trade began to falter. A 2009 United Nations Conference of Parties in Copenhagen resembled a rout as delegates struggled to leave town as a blizzard descended. A 2010 conference in Cancun was mocked as an excuse for UN toadies to dance until dawn and dine like royalty.

In June 2010, Gore and Tipper, his high school sweetheart and wife of 40 years, announced their separation. That same month, Gore paid $8,875,000 for an ocean view villa in Montecito, California. His Nashville mansion burned enough electricity to keep the lights on in several small Tennessee towns.

Today, Al Gore and global warming are synonymous with hypocrisy and deceit on a global scale.

With the advent of record-setting low temperatures and blizzards bringing U.S. cities to a standstill, Gore has been telling anyone who would listen that the cold and snow was the result of—you guessed it—global warming.

On January 31st, noted meteorologist, Dr. Roy W. Spencer, blogged that “No serious climate researcher—including the ones I disagree with believes global warming can cause colder weather unless they have become delusional as a result of some sort of mental illness.”

On February 3rd, Investor’s Business Daily editorialized about “Gore’s Unending Blizzard of Lies.” The same day in Forbes Magazine, Larry Bell, the author of “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax”, said of Gore that “no one has done more to melt down complacent minds with stoked-up claims of fossil-fueled climate peril.”

Behind the global warming hoax was the scheme to put a price on a tiny element (0.0389%) of the Earth’s atmosphere, Carbon Dioxide, that could then be bartered like a commodity as “carbon credits.”

It never had anything to do with climate.

It was Gore, speaking before a 2007 U.S. Joint House Energy and Science Committee, who said, “As soon as carbon has a price, you’re going to see a wave of investment in it.” It was P.T. Barnum who said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”

It was always about the money. If it took a global hoax, a fraud perpetrated by the United Nations’ IPCC and given the complete support of the mainstream media, so be it.

My question is this: If the government could bring Bernie Madoff to justice for perpetrating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, why has Al Gore been given a pass for being the face and voice of the global warming fraud and, by extension, the exchanges established to buy and sell worthless carbon credits? Isn't lying under oath to Congress a crime?

My other question is this: Why is any legitimate news organization still quoting him as if there is a scintilla of truth to his pronouncements about global warming?

Finally, at what point does Gore so completely disgrace himself that no one on planet Earth will believe anything he says?

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Al Gore's Incredibly Shrinking Credibility

Nutty Professors and Nutty New Taxes

By Alan Caruba

Alan S. Blinder is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. All of which might explain why the nation is broke and why “intellectuals” like Blinder are responsible for some of the most stupid ideas ever imposed on citizens who lack their credentials.

In the January 31st edition of The Wall Street Journal, Blinder had a commentary titled, “The Carbon Tax Miracle Cure.” It is a masterpiece of ignorance.

Blinder claimed that “Everyone knows that CO2 emissions are the major cause of global climate change, that climate change poses a clear and present danger to our planet, and that the U.S. contributes a huge share of global emissions.”

One can only conclude that Blinder is among the last of Al Gore’s acolytes who has not heard that the only “climate change” occurring is the same that has been going on for 4.5 billion years on planet Earth.

Blinder’s miracle tax is “a carbon tax—really, a carbon dioxide tax—but one that starts at zero and ramps up gradually over time.” Will someone please tell Binder that the scheme to sell “carbon credits” for the right to emit carbon dioxide (CO2) has gone bust? Even the Chicago Exchange created to foster this “global warming” fraud has closed its doors.

The idiocy of Blinder’s “miracle tax” is that, if you can tax CO2, what is to prevent government from taxing oxygen too? Or nitrogen? Hell, just tax the entirety of the Earth’s atmosphere because, obviously, we are just using too much of it.

Blinder’s justification is that “the U.S. contributes a huge share of global emissions.” So, naturally, Americans should be taxed for exhaling six pounds of CO2 every day, along with every other activity from manufacturing to transportation, as well as heating and cooling our homes and all other structures. Every living creature and most all human activity emits CO2 along with the earth’s numerous active volcanoes.

It probably never occurred to Blinder that all other nations also “contribute” global emissions.

For the record the Earth’s atmosphere is composed of 76.55% nitrogen, 20.54% oxygen, and 0.91% argon. Of the remaining 2% of the atmosphere, water vapor constitutes 1.95%, while carbon dioxide is 0.0389%. Let me repeat that, 0.0389%.

Despite what the liars at the Environmental Protection Agency are loudly shouting these days, carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant.” In earlier eras there was far more CO2 in the atmosphere than now, providing the dinosaurs vast amounts of vegetation on which to dine and something to eat for those dinosaurs with a taste for other dinosaurs.

The only “global warming” in recent times has been the one degree of warming that began to occur at the merciful end of the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. The Earth has, since 1998, entered a new cycle of completely natural cooling due to a solar cycle called the Maunder Minimum when the Sun’s radiation is reduced.

Acknowledging that “this is a terrible time to hit (the nation) with some big new tax”, Blinder nonetheless advocates a carbon tax that “should be set at zero for 2011 and 2012. After that, it would ramp up gradually.”

“The tax might start at something like $8 per ton of CO2 in 2013 (that’s roughly eight cents per gallon of gasoline), reach $25 a ton by 2015 (still just 26 cents per gallon), $40 a ton by 2020, and keep on rising. I’d like to see it top out at more than $300 a ton in, say 2040.”

This would lead, says Blinder, to “lucrative opportunities from carbon-saving devices and technologies.” He envisions “80% of our electricity being generated by clean energy sources in 2035.”

By clean energy Blinder means wind and solar energy which, together, barely produce one percent of the electricity America uses daily. It is unreliable and would not exist were it not for government subsidies and mandates requiring its use.

Meanwhile, the vast bulk of our electricity comes from coal, just over 50%, and a combination of natural gas, nuclear, and hydroelectricity (dams). Even if we blanketed several States with solar mirrors and wind turbines, we could never match the cost effectiveness and efficiency of fossil fuels.

Blinder notes that “No one likes to pay higher taxes” and dismisses value-added taxes (a favorite form of extortion in Europe), but in his view “A CO2 tax trumps them all”, concluding that a carbon tax would reduce oil imports.”

Apparently, it has not occurred to Blinder that extracting some of America’s vast oil reserves, billions of barrels worth, might also reduce oil imports, but what is one to expect from a professor of economics who thinks taxing a minor component of the atmosphere would solve our present economic problems?

Only morons want to turn America’s corn into “biofuels.” Only charlatans want to “reduce” greenhouse gas emissions. And only those locked in academic ivory towers keep insisting that man-made “climate change” is “a clear and present danger.”

You end recessions by reducing taxes, not inventing new ones. You end recessions by encouraging access to the nation’s reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil because that generates real jobs, not “green” ones. And you end recessions by not listening to the likes of Alan S. Blinder.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Nutty Professors and Nutty New Taxes

The Long Winter of 2010-2011

By Alan Caruba

For New Yorkers and those in my part of New Jersey across the river, snow has fallen eight times since December 14, an average of once every five days, 56.1 inches in Central Park as of Jan 27th, and people are, shall we say, taking notice?

Along with the snow come power outages, disrupted bus schedules, air travel delays, commuting by car becomes an auto body repair business bonanza, schools shut their doors, and some people die from weather-related accidents or just from trying to shovel the snow from the driveway.

Having battled the “global warming” hoax since it was first perpetrated in the late 1980s, I have had the good fortune to make friends with many of the world’s top meteorologists and climatologists who joined in the long effort to educate people to the fact that there never was a rapid rise in the planet’s overall temperatures.

Even so, some mainstream media news outlets have continued to file stories incredulously blaming the winter snow storms on “global warming.” The hoax for too many media folk has long since become a religion in which blind faith replaces the objective fact obvious to everyone. It is cold. There is snow. Lots of it.

Indeed, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle since around 1998 as verified by meteorological satellite and other data. Piers Corbyn, an astrophysicist and leading forecaster, said “We’re now headed for a Maunder minimum of very low solar activity. The globe will be much cooler until about 2035, so there will be a lot more of these cold winters in Europe and the USA.”

Considering how the climatologists and meteorologists of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been telling everyone for decades of a coming warming, why should we believe Corbyn and others predicting decades of cold weather? Corbyn studies solar cycles and they determine how warm or cold the Earth is.

It’s the Sun, Stupid

Corbyn’s astonishing record of accuracy has put his native England’s meteorological service to shame for deliberately misleading the British to believe the “global warming” hoax. Not given to vague talk, Corbyn recently said, “The claim that 2010 is the second warmest year on record is delusional, irrelevant and disingenuous. Warmist (warm is cold) explanations for extreme events are as useless as saying ‘Wet days cause rain.’”

It is useful to keep in mind that U.S. agencies such as NASA and NOAA have been issuing similar politically correct and meteorologically incorrect “global warming” claims for years.

Consider weather events just since the beginning of the year.

For the first time since 1945, the maximum daytime temperature in North Korea has remained below zero for nearly a month. In neighboring China, the snowfall in northwest China was accompanied by extreme cold and a snowfall that flattened or damaged 100,000 homes. All around the world there have been similar reports, including sunny Italy that set new cold records, -48.3 degrees on January 19.

In the United States, Minnesota shattered its cold records on January 21 reaching an astonishing -46 degrees. In Florida, eight new record lows were set by January 17 and there was snow in every State of the lower 48. And spring will not debut until March 21!

It’s not like this is a new weather phenomenon. As any meteorologist will tell you, the Earth has gone through numerous warming and cooling cycles. In its 4.5 billion years, scientists estimate there have been at least seventeen full-blown Great Ice Ages. In near past history, the last Little Ice Age is well documented, having begun around 1300 and not ended until 1850. Whatever warming occurred since then, however, has amounted to just over one degree, but that was enough!

Reaching its peak in the 17th century, in England the Thames River froze over. The Little Ice Age is credited with bringing down the French monarchy and ruining Napoleon’s subsequent Russia campaign. In America, the tiny army of George Washington weathered a harsh winter at Valley Forge.

As in previous cooling cycles, it was low solar activity that determined the temperature, not carbon dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gases.

People’s lives depend on our government’s ability to measure and forecast the weather. A government that continues to tell people that “global warming” is real and then throws billions of money on “research” to prove it, while issuing utterly false claims, must be forced to acknowledge reality. The same applies to the energy policies on which everyone depends for electricity, a reliable supply of heating oil, and other elements of the infrastructure.

The lies must end. The end of the cooling cycle is nowhere in sight.

Editor’s Note: To follow cold weather events, visit http://www.iceagenow.com/. For instruments with which forecast weather, visit http://www.weathershop.com/.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The Long Winter of 2010-2011

The Great 'Climate Change' Taxpayer Rip-Off of 2011

By Alan Caruba

Unless I am seriously mistaken or misinformed, the rate of unemployment in the U.S. remains high and the foreclosure rate on homes is approaching the level of the Depression years. Two major bond rating companies, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s just warned that, if the federal government doesn’t stop spending and borrowing, America’s Triple-A highest ranking will be down-graded.

Along with all the other things in the federal budget wish list for 2011 are millions to be spent on climate change.

It helps to understand how obscene this is if you pause to consider (1) there is not one damn thing anyone can do about climate change, (2) climate change has been researched and studied since the late 1980s, enough to fill an entire wing of the Congressional Library to hold all the reports, and (3) the only climate change Americans really need to know about is what the weather will be tomorrow.

With a tip of the hat to Climatequotes.com and the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) report on “research development, fiscal year 2011”, let me share just a few of the ways the Obama administration intends to squander your money.

The magic number is $2,481,000,000 and it represents specific amounts devoted to "climate change" research or other programs requested for the 2011 budgets by an alphabet soup of federal agencies that include the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, Department of Energy (DOE), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of the Interior (DOI), and the Department of Agriculture (DOA).

The figures cited all come from chapter 15 of the AAAS report and you can access it via Climatequotes.com

NOAA’s total budget request is for $5.6 billion, an increase of 17%. It intends to devote $437 million for climate research funding, an increase of $77 million over last year.

Over at the National Science Foundation (NSF), its budget of $7.4 billion (that’s a lot of science!) includes a request for $480 million for Atmospheric and Earth Sciences, $765.5 million for NSF’s Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability program and $19 million for a joint program with DOE “to promote education in clean energy research. An additional $10 million would fund “Climate Change Education” in the nation’s schools. It’s not education, it’s indoctrination.

The Department of Energy which currently is projecting that permits for deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico won’t be forthcoming until, maybe, June. DOE seems oblivious to the fact that the price of oil is set to hit $100 a barrel and higher costs will hit everyone driving anything using gasoline or diesel fuel. Fuel oil prices will rise and any business that uses oil or anything made with oil will be forced to raise its prices. In short, everything.

DOE, however, is in no hurry and, of course, the Obama administration is dead set against ANWR or off-shore exploration and extraction of the BILLIONS of barrels of crude oil projected to exist.

However, DOE is set to receive $28.4 billion in 2011 and that includes $4.6 billion for research and development in its Office of Science and $2.4 billion for energy research and development. Its Office of Biological and Environmental Research is devoted to atmospheric science, including “climate modeling”, which would be allocated $627 million. Last time I checked, oil, coal, and natural gas were not found in the “atmosphere”, but rather were extracted from deep within the Earth.

The entire global warming hoax was and is based on “climate modeling”, all of which consistently found that the Earth was warming at an alarming rate. Except that the Earth is NOT warming. It has been cooling since 1998. And DOE intends to waste $627 million on more modeling. It is worth noting that the most sophisticated models of the National Weather Bureau still cannot predict with any confidence what the weather—not the climate—will be next week.

The Environmental Protection Agency, gearing up to regulate all utilities that produce carbon dioxide and all other industries that do the same, has zero authorization to do so under the Clean Air Act. It is CO2 that is designated by the warmists as the chief culprit for the global warming that is NOT happening.

Despite this, EPA has requested $169 million “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”, with $43.5 million in new funding for “regulatory efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” through the Clean Air Act. And it wants $22 million for its Global Change Research Program. It is time to shut down this rogue agency before it totally destroys the economy.

Even the Department of Agriculture wants $159 million for “climate change research”, an increase of 42% and $179 million for renewable energy, to “help farmers.” Farmers are heavy users of fossil fuels to operate the machinery needed to till, plant, and harvest crops. They need reliable energy, not "renewable" energy.

The Recovery Act of 2009 has managed to blow more than $600 million on climate change research and billions on greenhouse gas mitigation.

This is just the tip of the ‘climate change’ rip-off in terms of billions wasted or soon to be wasted on “research” that can only be deemed an obscene diversion of taxpayer money that will not benefit a single taxpayer, generate any new jobs except for those in government agencies, and further bankrupt a bankrupted nation about to have its credit rating reduced.

The “scientists”, “regulators”, and “administrators” feasting off this federal largess should be handed a shovel to earn a living on one of those “shovel ready” projects we were told about.

Beyond that, if Congress was really intent on cutting back on spending, they could begin by defunding or shutting down the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and all the other federal grifters with their snouts rooting around in the climate change trough.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → The Great 'Climate Change' Taxpayer Rip-Off of 2011

Destroying the Credibility of Science

By Alan Caruba

Back in 1990 when I founded The National Anxiety Center as a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy, I was mainly concerned about the torrent of lies about global warming.

Their beginning is usually dated to an appearance by James E. Hansen before a congressional committee in 1988 in which he claimed that global warming would destroy the earth. To this day Hansen heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has held that position since 1981. There is no rational reason why he continues to be employed by the U.S. government.

Global warming has been widely discredited thanks to the November 2009 release of thousands of emails between UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “scientists” that revealed their collusion to rig the data that supported the fraud.

GLOBAL WARMING. Climate alarmists are already worrying that the public has grown so tired of their idiotic claims that huge blizzards are caused by “warming” they are beginning to pour money into the education of a new generation of “environmental journalists” to ensure that more such lies make it to the front page of your daily newspaper or via other media.

Meanwhile, billions of taxpayer’s dollars have been flushed down the federal government rat hole to fund “research” guaranteed to support the hoax. It gets worse. Despite the defeat of the Cap-and-Trade bill based on the Big Lie that carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases cause global warming, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is attempting an end-run around Congress to impose limits on the carbon dioxide emissions of utilities and every form of manufacturing and business in America.

The EPA is engaged in a perversion of science, but what else is new? Americans have been ill-served by the alphabet soup of government agencies supposedly in place to protect the food we eat, medicines we take, the air and the water. In the process they are just as often stripping Americans of the protection afforded by pharmaceuticals and beneficial chemicals.

VACCINES v. AUTISM. A case in point is an article in the British Medical Journal that “accused a disgraced British doctor of committing an ‘elaborate fraud’ by faking data in his studies linking vaccines with autism.”

The result of that fraud was to convince thousands, if not millions, of parents that vaccines to protect their children against measles and mumps were a threat to their health. The ancillary question is why Andrew Wakefield’s paper was published in 1998. Science journals are expected to peer review such papers and determine if the data presented is valid. If it cannot be reproduced, it fails that test.

DDT. Starting in 1972, an EPA ban essentially ended its use anywhere in the nation and other nations followed suit. A year later a court upheld the EPA and that is an object lesson in what happens when matters of science are decided by men and women, lawyers, with no training or background in science. The DDT hoax continues to cause malaria deaths, particularly in Africa and mostly affecting women and children.

The U.S. is experiencing an outbreak of the bed bug population, eliminated decades ago, because the EPA has banned or limited the use of virtually every pesticide to exterminate them.

ALAR. Recall, too, the fraud perpetrated by environmental groups against Alar, a chemical that was widely used by apple growers to ensure that the crop would ripen in a fashion that permitted an efficient harvest. The Alar hoax cost American apple growers millions in lost revenue until it became known that Alar posed no health threat whatever.

SACCHARINE. Though cleared of charges dating from the 1980s that saccharin was a cancer-causing substance, it took until the 1990s to get it removed from the 9th edition of the “Report on Carcinogens” and it took until mid-December 2010 for the EPA to finally admit what everyone knew by then. You can thank “consumer” groups for foisting this fraud on everyone and agencies of the U.S. government for maintaining it until they no longer could.

BPA. A similar campaign exists to ban BPA, bisphenol-A, a chemical used to line plastic bottles and containers. It is literally a worldwide effort and it too is without any scientific merit. In the same way the claim that linked vaccines and autism, BPA is under attack, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. I have written about this in the past and intend to follow this to demonstrate how these “scientific” frauds debase all science in the process.

Aside from the fact that these claims always begin with a dubious “scientific” study and then escalate as other “scientists” climb on the funding bandwagon, the other element is always the role that the mainstream media plays in keeping the fraud alive until the sheer weight of evidence makes it impossible to do so.

Ultimately, this destroys the trust we normally accord to legitimate scientists, exhausting our ability and willingness to embrace the science that has prolonged and protected the lives of millions.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

More about → Destroying the Credibility of Science