Somerset apple farmer Julian Temperley in his flooded home

In America we have the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruining lives and making homo sapiens an endangered species.

In Britain they have the Environment Agency doing the same thing.

Much of Britain is flooded.

Go here to read about it and see dramatic pictures.

Some lefties, notably Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour Party, are blaming global warming.

But Christopher Booker blames the Left, with good reason. He writes at the Telegraph:

As I stood on the Somerset Levels on Thursday, watching one of the most spectacular sights known to nature – the aerobatic display of half a million starlings preparing to roost in the reeds – there was no clue that a few miles to the west a disaster was taking place: the flooding of 26 square miles of the Levels with water up to 6ft deep, marooning whole villages and likely to block the main A361 road across the county for weeks to come.

What is truly shocking about this “major incident”, as it has now been officially declared – costing, it is estimated, well over £50 million to clear up – is that it is not just largely man-made but it results from a deliberate decision by a Government agency out of control.

Talk to the locals, and to the experts of the Royal Bath & West agricultural society, representing hundreds of farmers – the Levels comprise a fifth of all Somerset’s farmland – and they are in no doubt as to why these floods are the most devastating in memory: it is because, since it took over prime responsibility in 1995 for keeping this vast area drained, the Environment Agency has deliberately abandoned the long-standing policy of dredging its rivers.

Thanks to the agency, the four main rivers have become so clogged with silt that there is no way for floodwaters to escape. The farmers and the local drainage boards that used to keep the pumping stations in working order are only too keen to play their part in clearing the maze of drainage ditches. But the agency’s officials have decreed that, as soon as silt is lifted on to the banks, it cannot be spread on nearby fields without being classified as “controlled waste”, making it so difficult to move that much of it just slides back into the water.

Last Wednesday in Westminster Hall, the four MPs for the area, one Tory and three Lib Dems, were at one in blaming this disaster squarely on the Environment Agency, calling one after another for the resumption of dredging. Leading the debate, Bridgwater’s Tory MP Ian Liddell-Grainger pointed out that, while the agency says it doesn’t have the £3 million needed to dredge the rivers, it is happy to see £31 million spent on dismantling flood defences on the nearby coast to provide a wildlife habitat.

The Levels farmers pay hefty rates to their drainage boards, only to see £560,000 a year of it going to the Environment Agency – to be spent, as they see it, on little more than providing its officials with shiny new 4x4s to drive around in announcing “flood alerts”, and to provide warnings on local television of yet more inundations that they did nothing to avert.

What the tens of thousands of people who live and work on the Levels want to see is our Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, taking a grip on this disaster, by forcing the Environment Agency to spend a fraction of its £1.2 billion a year income on a job it was set up to do.

The flooded town of Marlow in Buckinghamshire

Prince Charles, heir to the throne of a disintegrating United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is a firm believer in man-made global warming.

The issue is not scientific as much as political.

British monarchs and their immediate heirs are not allowed to take sides in party political controversies.

The excellent Viscount Monckton of Brenchley takes Prince Charles to task for doing so.

We gladly reproduce his letter from Watts Up With That?:

His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales,

Clarence House, London.

Candlemas, 2014

Your Royal Highness’ recent remarks describing those who have scientific and economic reason to question the Establishment opinion on climatic apocalypse in uncomplimentary and unroyal terms as “headless chickens” mark the end of our constitutional monarchy and a return to the direct involvement of the Royal Family, in the Person of our future king, no less, in the cut and thrust of partisan politics.

Now that Your Royal Highness has offered Your Person as fair game in the shootout of politics, I am at last free to offer two options. I need no longer hold back, as so many have held back, as Your Royal Highness’ interventions in politics have become more frequent and less acceptable in their manner as well as in their matter.

Option 1. Your Royal Highness will renounce the Throne forthwith and for aye. Those remarks were rankly party-political and were calculated to offend those who still believe, as Your Royal Highness plainly does not, that the United Kingdom should be and remain a free country, where any subject of Her Majesty may study science and economics, may draw his conclusions from his research and may publish the results, however uncongenial the results may be.

The line has been crossed. No one who has intervened thus intemperately in politics may legitimately occupy the Throne. Your Royal Highness’ arrogant and derogatory dismissiveness towards the near-50 percent of your subjects who no longer follow the New Religion is tantamount to premature abdication. Goodnight, sweet prince. No more “Your Royal Highness”.

Hi, there, Chazza! You are a commoner now, just like most of Her Majesty’s subjects. You will find us a cheerfully undeferential lot. Most of us don’t live in palaces, and none of us goes everywhere with his own personalized set of monogrammed white leather lavatory seat covers.

The United Kingdom Independence Party, which until recently I had the honor to represent in Scotland, considers – on the best scientific and economic evidence – that the profiteers of doom are unjustifiably enriching themselves at our expense.

For instance, even the unspeakable Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has accepted advice from me and my fellow expert reviewers that reliance upon ill-constructed and defective computer models to predict climate was a mistake. Between the pre-final and final drafts of the “Fifth Assessment Report,” published late last year, the Panel ditched the models and substituted its own “expert assessment” that in the next 30 years the rate of warming will be half what the models predict.

In fact, the dithering old fossils in white lab coats with leaky Biros sticking out of the front pocket now think the rate of warming over the next 30 years could be less than in the past 30 years, notwithstanding an undiminished increase in the atmospheric concentration of plant food. Next time you talk to the plants, ask them whether they would like more CO2 in the air they breathe. Their answer will be Yes.

The learned journals of economics are near-unanimous in saying it is 10-100 times costlier to mitigate global warming today than to adapt to its supposedly adverse consequences the day after tomorrow.

Besides, in the realm that might have been yours there has been no change – none at all – in mean surface temperature for 25 full years. So if you are tempted to blame last year’s cold winter (which killed 31,000 before their time) or this year’s floods (partly caused by the Environment Agency’s mad policy of returning dozens of square miles of the Somerset Levels to the sea) on global warming, don’t.

You got your science and economics wrong. And you were rude as well. And you took sides in politics. Constitutionally, that’s a no-no. Thronewise, mate, you’ve blown it.

On the other hand, we Brits are sport-mad. So here is option 2. I am going to give you a sporting second chance, Charlie, baby.

You see, squire, you are no longer above politics. You’ve toppled off your gilded perch and now you’re in it up to your once-regal neck. So, to get you used to the idea of debating on equal terms with your fellow countrymen, I’m going to give you a once-in-a-reign opportunity to win back your Throne in a debate about the climate. The motion: “Global warming is a global crisis.” You say it is. I say it isn’t.

We’ll hold the debate at the Cambridge Union, for Cambridge is your alma mater and mine. You get to pick two supporting speakers and so do I. We can use PowerPoint graphs. The Grand Debate will be televised internationally over two commercial hours. We let the world vote by phone, before and after the debate. If the vote swings your way, you keep your Throne. Otherwise, see you down the pub.

Cheers, mate!

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

The Europeans made nearly a $100 billion wrong bet on renewable energy, and their economies and citizens have taken a big hit. Now they’ve awakened to their mistakes.

We confess to enjoying more than a little Schadenfreude over this report.

It comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

The media aren’t paying much attention, but in recent weeks Europe has decided to run, not walk, as fast as it can away from the economic menace of green energy.

That’s right, the same Europeans who used to chastise us for not signing the Kyoto climate change treaty, not passing a carbon tax and dooming the planet to catastrophic global warming.

In Brussels last month, European leaders agreed to scrap per-nation caps on carbon emissions. The EU countries — France, Germany, Italy and Spain — had promised a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030 (and 80% by 2050!). Now those caps won’t apply to individual nations.

Brussels calls this new policy “flexibility”.  Right. More like “never mind”, and here’s why: The new German economic minister, Sigmar Gabriel, says green energy mandates have become such an albatross around the neck of industry that they could lead to a “deindustrialization” of Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel said earlier this year that overreliance on renewable energy could cause “a problem in terms of energy supply” — and she’s always described herself as a green politician and a champion of these programs.

A good example that of how politicians, preoccupied with riding the winds of popularity, fail to think things through.

But green dreams have collided with cold economic reality.

Of course they have. The only question was how long it would take.

Green programs aren’t creating green jobs but green unemployment at intolerable double-digit rates.

The quip in economically exhausted Europe these days is that before we save the planet, we have to save ourselves.

Now European leaders are admitting quietly that they want to get into the game of fracking and other new drilling technologies that have caused an explosion of oil and gas production in the U.S. …

If Europe wants to remain competitive, these nations must tap the fountain of abundant and cheap shale gas and oil. … European leaders now realize a major factor behind the economic woes in euroland is that electric power costs are two to three times more expensive than in the U.S.

Consider the price of natural gas in the U.S. vs. other nations in the chart below. U.S. prices are about three to four times lower.

… Few American politicians get it. President Obama talked in his State of the Union speech about doubling renewable energy output over the coming years. … these are exactly the goals the Europeans are abandoning. Why chase the losers?

Why not try a different approach to energy policy? Get rid of all taxpayer subsidies for energy — oil, gas, wind and solar power, biofuels, electric-battery-operated cars and others — and create a true level playing field where every energy source competes on efficiency and cost rather than political/corporate favoritism?

We guess that will not happen while Obama is president. He remains green in judgment.

… and how well the world can do without them.

This is from Global Research, January 19, 2014, by Andrew McKillop:

Think of Al Gore and his associates like David Blood as the Bernie Madoff of the environmental movement. They created a market which has been disintegrating from day one, including a total collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange, but not before the principle players cashed in their shares and abandoned that ship.

It’s an epic story of modern day high priests and sooth sayers, political hubris and pseudo-scientific largess on a scale never before seen in history.

But their story is far from over. Get ready for the epic climbdown.

For Al Gore and his investor fund partner David Blood, their current thrust is more like dancing in the dark than out of the box thinking, due to “warmists” and “peakists” now having to fight on several fronts at the same time. Writing in the Wall Street Journal and similar outlets several times in 2013, they soldiered forward with the claim that “fossil carbon assets” are headed for a bust, and “green energy” can only soar. Along with Britain’s Lord Stern, the former World Bank chief economist and author of the Stern Report on “fighting” global warming, they say all fossil fuels are so dangerous for the world’s climate they must be completely phased out by 2050 or before.

Investing in these fossil carbon assets is therefore, they say, a guaranteed disaster.

Gore and Blood however know well through operating their climate-energy hedge fund, Generation Investment Management, that the “carbon finance” business, especially emissions credits and related financial assets, has already suffered a bust. The world’s only mandatory credits trading scheme – in Europe – is struggling to keep itself afloat. Reasons why Europe’s ETS [Emissions Trading System] is now on political life support, and may be scrapped, include massive over-issue of credits by European governments and the European central authorities, outright fraud and re-issue of already used credits, uncertainty concerning the future value of credits, and other factors such as the intrinsic worthlessness of “hot air credits”.

In a winter during which Niagara Falls partly froze over, for only the second or third time in more than 100 years, the whine that global warming is alive, well, and menacing, becomes difficult to gurgle with a straight face, but it has been so profitable to proponents like Gore that we can understand why they are loath to invent a new Doom Thing. Their twin fight against climate-damaging and rapidly depleting oil, gas and coal reserves also has major real world logic problems.

Massive over-issue of ETS tradable paper was operated not only to make warmists happy, but also to please the carbon market maker banks and climate hedge funds, who rapidly broke any link between this asset creation binge and its real world base or “underlying asset” – of actual European CO2 emissions – which have heavily declined in most EU countries since 2008, except by supreme irony in Green Germany, presently constrained to rapidly increase its coal-fired power production. …

The morph of the ETS system from potentially or possibly useful, to dysfunctional and totally perverse, took no more than about 6 or 7 years from its start in 2005. Today’s credit prices are so low they are no incentive to not emit CO2 …

Global warming, about 7 years ago, was certainly the next big thing. At the time, the No Limits warmist stance was that CO2 emissions – unless we completely stop them – will cause planetary disaster by sometime in the 2045-2099 period, so tailpipe or smokestack emissions must be taxed to extinction. …

Lord Stern claims the “surplus and unusable” financial assets of fossil energy stocks and resources held by major corporations total about two-thirds of all present corporate fossil energy stocks and their declared fossil energy resources, representing several trillion dollars  of worthless “stranded value”. The argument by Gore, Blood and Stern goes on to claim investors have made a fundamental error by failing to understand there is not a calculable risk of global fossil fuel reserves becoming worthless – but an absolute certainty. Investors have made a fundamental investing error by only treating it as a risk and they will pay the consequences as the industries they invested in collapse, possibly in less than 10 years time. …  

Gore and Blood say that investors are foolishly delaying the inevitable move away from, and total abandonment of all fossil fuels. … Lord Stern’s theory of “stranded assets” … was “pure warmist” – global temperatures will radically grow.

Science has already backed off from that kind of assertion. [Even the latest IPCC report]  says 10-year warming is presently at 0.09 degC, meaning that warming of 2 degC will need well over 200 years.

For Stern, Gore and Blood the timeframe is vastly shorter, and they regularly cite the IEA’s carbon-conscious-calculator, which in fact directly draws on the Stern Report of 2006, and claims that two-thirds of all global fossil fuel reserves “will never be used”. Because they must never be used …

Why should they perform an “epic climbdown” (which we’d be delighted to see them do, but expect them to avoid somehow or other)? Because they could not be more wrong about fossil fuels, according to this October 2013 report in Scientific American:

Fossil fuels continued to dominate the global energy sector in 2012 …

Coal, natural gas and oil accounted for 87 percent of the world’s primary energy consumption last year …

Coal is expected to surpass oil as the most consumed primary energy source in the world … China alone accounted for more than half the world’s total coal consumption, mostly for electric power generation.

But natural gas is also seeing significant gains, both in the United States and in countries like Japan, which are shifting their energy portfolios away from nuclear power. …

For the first time in 2012, global gas production exceeded 3 billion metric tons, marking the third consecutive year of both rising production and consumption, according to the report. With the exception of 2009, when the Great Recession resulted in lower energy demand for all fuels, natural gas use has been steadily rising since 1970, according to the report.

Oil, too, has seen a surge in production in the United States … even though globally, oil use accounted for a slightly smaller share of total energy consumption, from 33.4 to 33.1 percent. In 2012, the United States produced oil at record levels and is expected to overtake Russia this year as the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas combined, according to the report.

Consequently, the [United States] is importing decreasing amounts of these two fossil fuels, while using rising levels of its natural gas for power generation …

Although oil may be losing some share of the world’s total primary energy consumption, it is still expected to be the dominant fuel for transportation globally and will continue to grow in absolute numbers going forward. The United States, for example, increased oil production by 13.9 percent last year, its highest recorded increase ever …

And even though natural gas, biofuels and electric vehicles are growing in popularity in many isolated parts around the world, the world’s growing appetite for transportation fuels will likely keep oil as a dominant primary energy resource for the foreseeable future.

Among the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls there is one titled The War of the Children of Light  and the Children of Darkness.

It is a perpetual war: Good against Evil.

It is fought in most of the world’s mythologies, and in almost all of them Good will win in the end. (The exception is that of the Norsemen. They foresaw the triumph of Evil.)

Dennis Prager, writing at Townhall, describes how the two sides of the conflict appear to him now:

In both personal and public life, you can know a great deal about a person or a group if you know what most bothers them – and what doesn’t bother them.

A news item this past week made this point with glaring clarity. It reported a meeting that the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights had on Friday. Before revealing the subject of that meeting, let’s review for a moment what is happening in the world …

North Korea continues to be an affront to the human species. That North Korea, whether or not it had nuclear weapons, is not a central concern is an indictment of humanity.

That the West, with the noble exception of Canada under Stephen Harper, is appeasing the dictators of Iran, is an indictment of the West.

Add to this list the U.N.’s and the world’s ignoring of the Chinese government’s continuing suppression of all dissent and its decades-long violent eradication of Tibet’s unique and ancient culture.

Then add the slaughter of millions in Congo over the last decade, the 100,000-plus killed in Syria just last year, most of them civilians killed by their own government, and the blowing up, burning alive, and throat-cutting of untold numbers of innocent people by violent Islamists on a daily basis.

In other words, if what bothers you most is evil – the deliberate infliction of cruelty on people by people – North Korea, Congo, China, Syria and radical Islam will bother you more than anything else on the world scene.

So, then, what was the subject of the meeting convened Friday by the United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights?

The alleged racism of the name of the National Football League’s Washington team, the Redskins.

That’s right. All these horrific evils are happening as you read this, and … the United Nations had a meeting about the name Washington Redskins.

The U.N. is not alone in paying undue attention to the Redskins’ name. The left in the United States is nearly obsessed with it. President Barack Obama has spoken out against it. The Washington Post editorial board has demanded that the team drop the name. In the herd-like way that governs media, innumerable columnists and sports writers have written passionate columns against the name, and increasing numbers of sports writers have vowed to never again write or speak the name.

This left-wing obsession with a non-evil exemplifies the left’s moral universe. That universe is preoccupied with lesser evils while nearly always ignoring the greatest evils.

Preoccupation with real evil is the greatest difference between right and left. The right was preoccupied with fighting Communism while the left … was preoccupied with fighting anti-Communists.

The right today is preoccupied with fighting Islamism; the left is preoccupied with fighting “Islamophobia.”

One way of putting it is that the right is preoccupied with fighting evil and the left is preoccupied with fighting those who fight evil.

The right is preoccupied with defending Israel against those who wish to annihilate it. The left is preoccupied with Israeli apartments on the West Bank.

This difference was made manifest last week in the address given by the one world leader to exemplify the right’s preoccupation with evil, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper. Talking about all the condemnations of Israel, Harper said:

“Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that: a state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history, that is condemned, and that condemnation is masked in the language of anti-racism. It is nothing short of sickening.”

Yes, but the writer does not go nearly far enough. The Left is not merely preoccupied with fighting those who fight evil, it is occupied with doing evil. The Left  is in alliance with Islam. Its (bewilderingly unintelligent) intelligentsia invent a fake need to “save the planet” from “climate change” as an excuse to advance their own tyrannical rule, reduce population, and impoverish and destroy civilization.

And where are our warriors of the Right to stop them? Let’s see: there’s Stephen Harper and … Well, a few more names may spring to mind. And we do have the immense power of Reason on our side.

Which side is winning, would you say?

Obama wants wind, sun, and algae to provide the energy needed by the nation. He hates coal. Coal mines are being closed, or operating under ever more onerous regulations and restrictions.

But – as Steven Hayward of PowerLine reports , quoting various sources –

If you draw back a bit and take a look around the world, what you find is that the fastest growing source of energy continues to be: Coal. …

China approved the construction of more than 100 million tonnes of new coal production capacity in 2013 – six times more than a year earlier and equal to 10 percent of U.S. annual usage – flying in the face of plans to tackle choking air pollution. The scale of the increase, which only includes major mines, reflects Beijing’s aim to put 860 million tonnes of new coal production capacity into operation over the five years to 2015, more than the entire annual output of India.

Germany too is mining more coal. Much more.

Some windless and cloudy days last month rendered Germany almost entirely dependent on old-fashioned fossil fuels and nuclear to provide their electricity …

Germany’s wind and solar power production came to an almost complete standstill in early December. More than 23,000 wind turbines stood still. One million photovoltaic systems stopped work nearly completely. For a whole week coal, nuclear and gas power plants had to generate an estimated 95 percent of Germany’s electricity supply.

But what will happen when Germany shuts down all its nukes because they fear a tsunami from the North Sea? They’re going to build more coal plants:

Germany’s energy transition has also been a transition to coal: Despite multi-billion subsidies for renewable energy sources, power generation from brown coal (lignite) has climbed to its highest level in Germany since 1990. It is especially coal-fired power plants that are replacing the eight nuclear power plants that were shutdown, while less CO2-intensive, but more expensive gas-fired power plants are currently barely competitive. Energy expert Patrick Graichen speaks of Germany’s “energy transition paradox”: the development of solar and wind farms, yet rising carbon dioxide-emissions.

Europe as a whole is turning, or returning, to coal.

Europe’s appetite for cheaper electricity is reviving mines that produce the dirtiest type of coal … 

Across the continent’s mining belt, from Germany to Poland and the Czech Republic, utilities …  are expanding open-pit mines that produce lignite. The moist, brown form of the fossil fuel packs less energy and more carbon than more frequently burned hard coal.

The projects go against the grain of European Union rules limiting emissions and pushing cleaner energy. Alarmed at power prices [that are] about double U.S. levels, policy makers are allowing the expansion of coal mines that were scaled back in the past two decades …

And in the US, coal – loved or hated – still fuels the nation:

Coal remains the biggest source of fuel for generating electricity in the U.S. and coal exports are growing fast. Demand is being stoked by the rise of power-hungry middle classes in emerging economies, led by China and India. By the end of this decade, coal is expected to surpass oil as the world’s dominant fuel source …

The moral of the story is, as Steven Hayward says: “Reality intrudes on green dreams.”

Or, in the words of another familiar but too often ignored aphorism: “You can’t buck the market.”

Our Fragile Planet, Walter Williams calls it ironically, in an article demonstrating that it is nothing of the sort.

He writes at Townhall:

Let’s examine a few statements reflecting a vision thought to be beyond question.

“The world that we live in is beautiful but fragile.” …

Here are a couple of Earth Day quotes: “Remember that Earth needs to be saved every single day.” “Remember the importance of taking care of our planet. It’s the only home we have!”

Such statements, along with apocalyptic predictions, are stock in trade for environmental extremists and non-extremists alike. Worse yet is the fact that this fragile-earth indoctrination is fed to our youth from kindergarten through college.

Let’s examine just how fragile the earth is.

The 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in present-day Indonesia, had the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That’s the equivalent of 13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Preceding that eruption was the 1815 Tambora eruption, also in present-day Indonesia, which holds the record as the largest known volcanic eruption. It spewed so much debris into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight, that 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer” or “Summer That Never Was.” It led to crop failures and livestock death in much of the Northern Hemisphere and caused the worst famine of the 19th century. The A.D. 535 Krakatoa eruption had such force that it blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for 18 months … Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions, Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947), spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind’s activities in our entire history.

How has our fragile earth handled floods? China is probably the world capital of gigantic floods. The 1887 Yellow River flood cost between 900,000 and 2 million lives. China’s 1931 flood was worse, yielding an estimated death toll between 1 million and 4 million. …

What about the impact of earthquakes on our fragile earth? There’s Chile’s 1960 Valdivia earthquake, coming in at 9.5 on the Richter scale, a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time. The deadly 1556 earthquake in China’s Shaanxi province devastated an area of 520 miles. There’s the more recent December 2004 magnitude-9.1 earthquake in the Indian Ocean that caused the deadly Boxing Day tsunami, and a deadly March 2011 magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck eastern Japan.

Our fragile earth faces outer space terror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit earth, creating the Vredefort crater in South Africa. It has a radius of 118 miles, making it the world’s largest impact crater. In Ontario, there’s the Sudbury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago, which has an 81-mile diameter, making it the second-largest impact structure on earth. Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. …

I’ve pointed out only a tiny portion of the cataclysmic events that have struck the earth – ignoring whole categories, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning strikes, fires, blizzards, landslides and avalanches.

Despite these cataclysmic events, the earth survived.

My question is: Which of these powers of nature can be matched by mankind? For example, can mankind duplicate the polluting effects of the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption or the asteroid impact that wiped out dinosaurs?

It is the height of arrogance to think that mankind can make significant parametric changes in the earth or can match nature’s destructive forces. 

Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda.

Barry Commoner said, “Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.”

Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, “On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument.”

With the decline of the USSR, communism has lost considerable respectability and is now repackaged as environmentalism and progressivism.

(That’s WARNING – alarmism – not “warming”.)

Dennis M. Mitchell “has been professionally involved in environmental and tax compliance, monitoring and education for more than 40 years” and David R. Legates is “professor of climatology at the University of Delaware and has been studying climate and its changes for 35 years”. They co-wrote the article we quote here. It can be read in full at Investor’s Business Daily.

Climate alarmists are scrambling to find new shelter from the stress coming from a public that increasingly realizes their doom-and-gloom predictions of climate catastrophe are based on shoddy data, faulty computer models and perhaps outright deception.

No perhaps about it. Remember Dr. Michael Mann’s “hide the decline”?

Despite a measured absence of warming over the last 16 years, they repeatedly cried “wolf.” Alarmists demanded that the world transform their energy and economic systems, slash fossil fuel use and accept lower living standards to reflect the politically manufactured science.

Even as growing evidence conflicted with their dogma, the money, fame and power were too good to surrender for mere ethical reasons.

Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson wailed her agency would need at least 240,000 new EPA employees (each making some $100,000 per year, plus benefits) that she said would be needed just to administer new carbon dioxide regulations — and control nearly everything Americans make, drive, ship and do!

The EPA currently employs some 20,000 people at an annual budget of over $8 billion. The new hires alone would cost taxpayers another $24 billion annually — plus hundreds of billions of dollars in economic pain, manufacturing shutdowns and new job losses that the EPA’s CO2 regulations would inflict.

Year after year, alarmists have [offered ever more] absurd answers regarding where the Earth has mysteriously stashed all the energy that greenhouse gases supposedly trapped.

For years, alarmists said ocean waters were storing the missing energy. But when the ARGO project demonstrated that the heat was not in the ocean, at least [not] down two kilometers beneath the surface, one prominent alarmist responded, “We are puzzled at the results.”

When the data consistently conflict with their hypothesis, reputable scientists revise the hypothesis. Five-alarm climate scientists desperately seek … new excuses.

The “puzzling” facts triggered the predictable alarmist tactic of attacking the data and claiming the heat was hiding in the really deep ocean.

Ignoring the physics of the problem — how the asserted heat was transferred from atmospheric carbon dioxide, through the sea surface, and beyond the first mile of ocean waters, without being detected — they expect us to believe that fluid thermodynamics is akin to magic. …

Real scientists have … exposed as illusory the alarmists’ mystical “tropical hot spot.” This sacred cow turns out to be as fanciful as planetary warming hidden in the deepest ocean, or the infamous hockey stick of Michael Mann’s hidden data and secret computer codes.

Have we forgotten that 1998 was to be the tipping point, after which Earth would warm uncontrollably? The 1988 hearing in Washington one hot summer afternoon was dominated by the always-sly James Hansen, who wiped his brow furiously, in a room made stifling by Sen. Tim Wirth’s turning off the air conditioning.

Just because Al Gore switched his CO2 and temperature curves to make it look like rising carbon dioxide levels caused planetary temperature increases — when in fact increasing temperatures always preceded higher CO2 — why should he correct his mistake or return his ill-gotten millions?

Why should his accomplice, IPCC Director and non-Nobel Laureate Rajendra Pachauri, be held accountable for trumpeting made-up stories about melting Himalayan glaciers?

To know more about the deceptions practiced by Dr. Pachauri see our post The most powerful magician the world has ever known, Dec 21, 2009.

When you’re an alarmist, being wrong, lying, cheating, misleading the public and killing jobs simply do not count against you — even when the allegedly human-caused global warming stopped in 1996. …

The serious money has always flowed to alarmists, guilt-ridden environmentalists and control-seeking regulators, whom the world’s taxpayers are generously and unwittingly funding. That’s also the real meaning of the “green” movement and “green” energy.

Now unlike most people in the Western world – if they are to be believed on this subject – we actually like money. Very much. We cannot understand why it is denounced and despised by so many people who nevertheless pursue it tirelessly. We blame nobody who becomes wealthy by any honest means, whether he does it by working with his head or hands, inheriting it, winning it on a lottery or a bet, singing or dancing for it, inventing something, digging it up as ancient coin in his back yard, or buying cheap and selling as dear as the market will let him. We cheer his accomplishment and/or good luck.

We also like Science. Very much.

But the scientists who have become wealthy and dangerously powerful by making false claims that people are over-heating our vast planet, are not only dishonest but have also betrayed Science. We denounce and despise them. 

Our text and the video it refers to come from an article in Investor’s Business Daily, by Andrew Malcolm.

He starts with a delectable irrelevance about a man who didn’t take much notice of the sun when attributing the warming of the earth to humankind:

Former journalist, former representative, former senator, former vice president, former husband, former cable channel owner, former inventor and former environmentalist barker Al Gore has obviously given up the global warming game. It’s amazing what a few hundred million petro-dollars will accomplish.

Malcolm is alluding of course to Al Gore’s sale of his TV company to Al Jazeera.

But now we turn to the sun:

Our Sun has reached middle age as stars go, about four billion years old. It’s grown about 6% in that time and — oh, look, Albert was sort of right about one thing — increased its surface temperature about 300 degrees. You probably didn’t notice. …

In another 4.5- to 5-billion years, right about the time Obama’s national debt will be paid down, our Sun will have used up all its hydrogen fuel. That begins a very long, very nasty decay process that involves cataclysmic things like collapsing and expanding in size out to envelope its three closest planets–Mercury, Venus and — oh-oh — Earth. …

Scientists know all this because, thanks to a generation of space telescopes like Hubble, we can watch the slow-motion decay of other distant suns, even though they may well actually have disappeared by the time the light of their decay story reaches Earth.

NASA is also studying our own star. The Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched three years ago. Even though it’s circling the Earth at nearly 7,000 miles an hour and the Earth itself is moving through space about 46 miles every minute, the observatory can stay focused on the Sun.

It snaps a “photo” of the Sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths.

This new NASA video includes images at the wavelength of 171 angstroms. … The sun particles you see are a little more than one million degrees Fahrenheit.

The four-view of the Sun near the video’s end includes additional wavelengths.

A couple of things to watch for in the fast-moving video below: At 1:11:02 you’ll see the largest solar flare of this cycle, from Aug. 9, 2011. At 1:28:07 watch the frozen Comet Lovejoy flash by on a very close encounter of the solar kind on Dec. 15, 2011. …

And at 1:51:07 that black dot zipping by in the upper left is Venus passing between Earth and the Sun, as it does every century or so. …

NASA constructed this video by taking two images per day from the observatory’s first three years.

Scientists chose this light range to allow views of the Sun’s increased activity over three years of its 11-year activity cycle. The video’s elapsed time also allows human eyes to detect the Sun’s 25-day rotation. (If it looks like the Sun tilts at times, it’s not. It’s the spacecraft rolling to recalibrate focus.)

 

Man-made global warming is a scare worked up to serve political objectives of the Left. It is deplorable that scientists have sacrificed their integrity to help perpetrate the fraud. For them, obviously, leftist ideology is more important than science.

Fortunately other scientists are not letting them get away with it.

We quote in part a letter from Dr. David Deming to the Bellingham Herald dated April 8, 2013. It’s from Watts Up With That?

Author’s note: this article was originally submitted as a “letter to the editor” to the Bellingham Herald, a newspaper that published an attack on Dr. Don Easterbrook. The Herald refused to publish my rebuttal. … 

Letter to the Editor by Dr. David Deming

I write in rebuttal to the March 31 letter by WWU [Western Washington University] geology faculty criticizing Dr. Don Easterbrook. I have a Ph.D in geophysics and have published research papers on climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. In 2006 I testified before the US Senate on global warming. Additionally, I am the author of a three-volume history of science.

I have never met Don Easterbrook. I write not so much to defend him as to expose the ignorance exhibited in the letter authored by WWU geology faculty. Their attack on Dr. Easterbrook is the most egregious example of pedantic buffoonery since the Pigeon League conspired against Galileo in the seventeenth century. Skepticism is essential to science. But the goal of the geology faculty at WWU seems to be to suppress critical inquiry and insist on dogmatic adherence to ideology.

The WWU faculty never defined the term “global warming” but described it as “very real,” as if it were possible for something to be more real than real. They claimed that the evidence in support of this “very real” global warming was “overwhelming.” Yet they could not find space in their letter to cite a single specific fact that supports their thesis.

There is significant evidence that would tend to falsify global warming. The mean global air temperature has not risen for the last fifteen years. At the end of March the global extent of sea ice was above the long-term average and higher than it was in March of 1980. Last December, snow cover in the northern hemisphere was at the highest level since record keeping began in 1966. The UK just experienced the coldest March of the last fifty years. There has been no increase in droughts or wildfires. Worldwide hurricane and cyclone activity is near a forty-year low.

One might think that the foregoing facts would raise doubts in scientists interested in pursuing objective truth. But global warming is not so much a scientific theory subject to empirical falsification as it is a political ideology that must be fiercely defended in defiance of every fact to the contrary. In the past few years we have been told that not only hot weather but cold weather is caused by global warming. The blizzards that struck the east coast of the US in 2010 were attributed to global warming. Every weather event – hot, cold, wet or dry – is said to be caused by global warming. The theory that explains everything explains nothing.

Among the gems in the endless litany of nonsense we are subjected to are claims that global warming causes earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. …  I am not aware of any member of the WWU geology faculty criticizing these ridiculous claims. Their vehemence seems to be reserved for honest skeptics like Dr. Easterbrook who advance science by asking hard questions.

At the heart of the WWU geology faculty criticisms was the claim that peer review creates objective and reliable knowledge. Nonsense. Peer review produces opinions. Scientists, like other people, have political beliefs, ideological orientations, and personal views that strain their scientific objectivity. One of the most disgusting things to emerge from the 2009 Climategate emails was the revelation of an attempt to subvert the peer-review process by suppressing the publication of work that was scientifically sound but contrary to the reviewer’s personal views.

The infamous phrase “hide the decline” refers to an instance where a global warming alarmist omitted data that contradicted his personal belief that the world was warming. This sort of bias is not limited but pervasive. Neither is science a foolproof method for producing absolute truth. Scientific knowledge is always tentative and subject to revision. The entire history of science is littered with discarded theories once thought to be incontrovertible truths. …

Dr. David Deming’s curriculum vitae may be found here.