On Tuesday December 8, 2015, Mark Steyn appeared at a US Senate hearing on “climate change”, called by Senator Ted Cruz’s Sub-Committee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. (Read his article about it here.)

This was his opening statement:

His words recall Jillian’s Rule:

Any idea that needs a law to defend it from criticism is ipso facto a bad idea.

The media, including Fox News, and the police, the president, and all Democrats, are having difficulty finding a motive behind the massacre of San Bernardino, carried out yesterday by a Muslim man and a Muslim woman.

Daring commentators go so far as to say that the killing might have been Islamic terrorism, acts of which, they recall, have been carried out from time to time in America and elsewhere; or it might have been workplace violence – which they’d much prefer it to be.

We are happy to come to their aid and resolve the dilemma.

For jihadis, they are the same thing.

Islamic lore has it that the whole non-Muslim world is the Dar-al-Harb, the Place of War. And that whole vast wicked region is their workplace.

So – you see – by killing non-Muslims, Muslims are performing acts of workplace violence in order to terrorize the infidel. And that is not wrong, it is the work they are instructed to do by no less a boss than Allah himself.  

We are all aware that workplace violence is an everyday occurrence. It’s as American as apple pie. Why make a fuss about it?

When you should be worrying about global warming.

We were delighted to read this today by Scott Johnson at Powerline, as we are in deep sympathy and total agreement with it:

Watching Barack Obama in action at the Paris conference on the phenomenon formerly known as global warming, I have a thought about saving the planet. The planet must be saved from Barack Obama. The man has done enormous damage. We will be living with the consequences for a long time. Living, if we are lucky and if the next president undoes some of the damage he has done. The man is an ideologue as impervious to experience as the worst men who ever lived.

And to add to our pleasure (temporary relief from the gloom we post almost every day), we found these reports of a scientist’s and some mathematicians’ demolition jobs on the man-made-up global warming lie.

This is from CNS News:

A German scientist has accused the National Aeronautics and Space Agency’s (NASA) Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) of altering temperature records between 2010 and 2012 to produce the illusion that the Earth has been warming since 1950.

GISS datasets are used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to document global warming.

In a presentation at the 2012 EIKE Climate Conference in Germany, Professor Friedrich-Karl Ewert, a retired geologist and data expert from the University of Paderborn, said that he examined publicly available archived temperature records from 1,153 weather stations around the globe going back to 1881 and found evidence of “massive” tampering by GISS between 2010 and 2012.

Ewert noticed that “the temperature data of Reykjavik [Iceland] and Nuuk Nuur [Greenland] had been changed retroactively,” veteran German television journalist Gunter Ederer writes. The 2012 data was higher than the temperatures recorded before 2010. The German scientist then randomly selected 120 weather stations around the world and manually compared the archived data to GISS’ 2012 temperature records.

“He always came to the same conclusion: The temperature supplied from 2012 showed a higher warming than the published [archived data] in 2010,” Ederer writes.

Ewert also found that since 1881, four distinct cooling stages have alternated with three warming phases. He says the Earth is currently in a cooling phase.

And since a stronger warming cycle occurred before carbon dioxide emissions began to rise, Ewert concluded that  “an influence of our CO2 emissions [on] temperatures can not be seen.”

“Mankind always knew that constantly there are climate changes,” according to a translation of Ewert’s EIKE article. …

Ewert also claims to have found 10 different statistical methods used by NASA-GISS to change the overall trend from cooling to warming.

“Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950…. A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII, a clear warming appears – although it never existed,” Ederer writes.

“Using the NASA data from 2010 the surface temperature globally from 1940 until today has fallen by 1.110°C, and since 2000 it has fallen 0.4223°C. … The cooling has hit every continent except for Australia, which warmed by 0.6339°C since 2000. The figures for Europe: From 1940 to 2010, using the data from 2010, there was a cooling of 0.5465°C and a cooling of 0.3739°C since 2000.”

Noting that “an entire industry of air rescuers and the resulting trillions of dollars that are so invested [in deindustrialization] are at stake”, Ederer adds that “the thesis of man-made global warming has taken on a whole new meaning: Yes, it is always made by people when the data are adjusted to fit the theory“.

And this is from another CSN News report:

As the United Nations gear[ed] up for its next international conference on climate change in Paris … a scathing white paper released by a society of French mathematicians calls its fight against global warming “absurd” and “a costly and pointless crusade”.

“You would probably have to go quite a long way back in human history to find [such a] mad obsession,” according to a translated summary of the document released in September by the Paris-based Société de Calcul Mathématique SA.

The mathematicians harshly criticized a “crusade [that] has invaded every area of activity and everyone’s thinking,” noting that “the battle [against] CO2 has become a national priority.

“How have we reached this point in a country that claims to be rational?” they ask, adding that mathematicians “do not believe in crusades. They look at facts, figures, comments and arguments”.

“There is not a single fact, figure … [or] observation that leads us to conclude the world’s climate is in any way ‘disturbed’,”  the paper states. “It is variable, as it has always been. … Modern methods are far from being able to accurately measure the planet’s overall temperature even today, so measurements made 50 or 100 years ago are even less reliable.”

Noting that concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) have “always” varied, the French mathematicians also said that after processing the raw data on hurricanes themselves, they verified that “they are no more frequent now than they have been in the past”.

We are being told that a temperature increase of more than 2 degrees C[elsius] by comparison with the beginning of the industrial age would have dramatic consequences and absolutely has to be prevented. When they hear this, people worry. Has there not already been an increase of 1.9 degrees C? Actually, no. The figures for the period 1995-2015 show an upward trend of about 1 degree C every hundred years! Of course, these figures, [which] contradict public policies, are never brought to public attention.

The French mathematicians also said that the UN’s climate models have failed to take into account natural phenomena that affect climate far more than human activity.

Human impact on the climate is “tiny, quite negligible in comparison with natural causes”, they point out. “Human beings can do nothing about solar activity, the state of the oceans, the temperature of the Earth’s magna, or the composition of the atmosphere.”

Furthermore, the work done by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not meet the basic standards set by reputable scientific journals because its “conclusions go [contrary] to observed facts; the figures used are deliberately chosen to support its conclusions (with no regard for the most basic scientific honesty); and the variability of natural phenomena is passed over without comment”.

Even if there were such a thing as global warming, “then we should celebrate”, the mathematicians said. “And if it does not exist, then we simply shall have to carry on switching on the central heating.”

“French policy [on] CO2 is particularly stupid, since we are one of the countries with the cleanest industrial sector,” the white paper pointed out, slamming “virtuous” policies that have resulted in a significant loss of industrial activity and the resultant loss of jobs that has left three million French unemployed even as global CO2 emissions continue to rise.

“If we were in France to stop all industrial activity (let’s not talk about our intellectual activity, [which] ceased long ago), if we were to eradicate all traces of animal life, the composition of the atmosphere would not alter in any measurable, noticeable way,” they said.

The authors also lamented the abandonment of “the adversarial principle” that distinguishes democracies from dictatorships:

“People who do not believe in global warming have been told to shut up. No public debate, no contradictory discourse. No articles in scientific journals. They simply have been told that the case is proven and it is time to take action … We are simply required to keep quiet and do what we are told. No second opinion is permitted.”

“It is on the debris of the fundamental principles of the law and of democracy that this white paper has been written.”

The number of delegates to the upcoming climate-change “global warming”  conference in Paris – called COP-21 – is estimated to be close to 40,000.

They want to control the climate of the earth. In the words of the old Irish song, “They might as well go chasing after moonbeams, or light a penny candle from a star.”

This is from Canada Free Press, by Dr. Klaus L. E. Kaiser.

(Brief bio of Dr. Kaiser: “After receiving his doctorate in chemistry from the Technical University Munich, he joined Environment Canada’s National Water Research Institute where he served as research scientist and project manager for several research groups. He represented the institute at a variety of national and international committees, gave numerous presentations at scientific conferences, was editorial board member and peer reviewer for several journals, adjunct professor and external reviewer of university theses, and was the Editor-in- Chief of the the Water Quality Research Journal of Canada for nearly ten years. Dr. Kaiser is an author of nearly 300 publications in scientific journals, government and national and international agency reports, books, trade magazines, and newspapers. He has been president of the Intl. Association for Great Lakes Research, and is a recipient of the Intl. QSAR Award. He is currently Director of Research of TerraBase Inc., and is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada. Dr. Kaiser is widely recognized for his expertise in environmental chemistry.)

Rather than the polar ice caps having shrivelled to mere remnants by now, forecast for many years by all climate modelling enthusiasts, the polar ice shields have been growing by leaps and bounds. For example, according to a recent report by NASA scientists H. J. Zwally et al., the Antarctic ice shield has been growing for 15 years already, even at an alarming rate. Then we learn that near the earth’s opposite pole, in Greenland, the rate of ice accumulation is breaking new records too …. and, last not least, the seasonal growth of the sea ice extent in the Arctic is not far behind.

It must come as total consternation to all those people who have claimed for years now that “climate change” or “global warming” as it used to be termed is about ready to “incinerate” all life on earth. For example, “climate modellers” like S. Rahmstorf …have claimed for years that the polar regions would be most sensitive to any warming and that the polar ice masses were going to recede in a great hurry and that the ocean levels would rise fast. In reality, none of that is the case.

In fact, the polar ice masses continue to grow, some reaching new all-time records in both ice extent and accumulated mass. Also ocean levels are NOT rising as previously predicted. … The climate fear-mongering is nothing but an elaborate hoax. …

Rather than “global warming” a lengthy period of “global cooling” could be in the offing. For some time already, NASA scientists (and others) have predicted the arrival of prolonged periods of low sunspot activity. Their predictions seem to be coming true. With some exaggeration, one could say that “sunspots are nowhere to be seen.” The current 11-year cycle, termed SC-24, is certainly quite reminiscent of those prevalent in the “Maunder Minimum” that are widely thought to have caused the medieval “Little Ice Age” with its mass starvations and general misery throughout Europe.

Perhaps with such facts in mind, the Mathematical Calculation Society of France has recently published a lengthy review with the title “The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade”. It is available also in English at their web site and, apart from the title, contains some other fascinating statements like, for example, the following excerpt in the chapter on “rising” sea levels:

The level of dishonesty is rising much faster than the sea level. It has totally swept scientific literature, where a good many writers endeavor to produce models showing something worrying. The press disregards all the others and its various organs vie to bring them to public attention. 

… The number of delegates to the COP-21 event is likely to be well above 10,000; some reports even estimate the number to be near 40,000. Among the dignitaries [expected] to show up are Pope Francis, U.S. President Obama, and many other world leaders, together with their entourages, media reps and all others. One may actually wonder as to who will NOT be there?

At COP-21, the representatives of many developing nations and non-governmental organisations are hoping to get a binding agreement on massive climate “reparation” funds to flow to them from western societies. India alone appears to angle for $2,500,000,000,000 (over a few years). So far, however, the commitments (or promises) by “donor” nations are falling far short of the (initial) UN goal of $100 billion per year. “Carbon” taxes and other fiscal monstrosities are supposed to pay for all the shenanigans. … This UN “wealth redistribution scheme” may only benefit the ruling elites in poor countries and do next to nothing for the people who are in dire need of reliable, cheap, and plentiful energy.

Underlying all that effort to create a “new world order” is the claim that CO2 produces a runaway global warming. That hypothesis is the (faulty) lynchpin for the entire CO2-catastrophy story. Not only is that story easy to disprove, it is even easy to demonstrate that the opposite is the case.

Without CO2 in the air, there wouldn’t be any plants on earth; none at all, period. All land would be barren and inhospitable places … Without nature’s steady effort to supply the atmosphere with sufficient CO2 from volcanoes and other fissures in the earth’s crust to sustain all life on earth, we would not even exist. Though highly unlikely, a sudden cessation of nature’s CO2 emissions would lead to a rapid decline in the atmospheric CO2 from the current 0.04% to about 0.02% or less. At that level, all plant growth on earth would be slowing to a crawl. Food production would dwindle with mass starvations to quickly follow. Trying as hard as it might then, mankind’s contribution of CO2 to the atmosphere could not make up for nature’s shortfall.

In any event, regardless of who agrees to what at COP-21 in Paris, nature doesn’t care, the polar ice sheets will be waxing and waning as per her dictate alone.

One of the most dangerous lunacies of the Left is its paranoid obsession with “global warming”. The attempts to stop civilization in order to “save the planet” would be funny if they weren’t so threatening.

If the climate lunatics – such as Obama – get their way, our lives will be (as Thomas Hobbes put it) “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Activists are warning that the upcoming United Nations climate conference is the last chance to save the world. Fair enough. So if no deal is reached at the meeting, can we please stop hearing about global warming?

The 21st session of the Conference of Parties to the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change starts Nov. 30 and will ponderously drag on until Dec. 11. Call it the “Last Chance in Paris”, because that’s what the fearmongers, from the Vatican to Prince Charles, believe it is.

Of course we’ve heard all this before.

It seems as if every time there’s a U.N. climate conference, we hear the warnings: It’s the final opportunity to save Earth, the “last chance”.

• In 2001, Time magazine said the U.N.’s Bonn conference was “a global warming treaty’s last chance“.
• Four years later, activist Mark Lynas wrote in an open letter that the Montreal climate summit represented “a last chance for action“.
• Before the 2007 meeting in Bali, Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth declared that the conference “could be the last chance to avoid the worst effect of global warming“.
• Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery said in 2008 that the Poland “round of negotiations is likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem“.
• Then before Copenhagen in 2009, European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said that conference was “the world’s last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return“.

We could go on. The warnings have continued every year since without fail. So it’s unlikely we’ve heard the last of the “last chance” warnings, even if no agreement is reached in Paris.

But we should have.

There’s a growing stack of evidence that contradicts the alarmists’ warnings and refutes the scientific “consensus” that man is overheating his planet with carbon-dioxide emissions.

Start with NASA’s recent finding that Antarctica is actually gaining ice, not losing it, and the fact that the North Pole has not been ice-free in any summer although climate extremist Al Gore claimed it would be by now.

Then move on to the global warming models used to predict climate calamity. They have been about as accurate as wild guesses.

Why has this happened? Maybe because, as Australian electrical engineer David Evans discovered through mathematical calculation, CO2 is not as strong a greenhouse gas as the U.N. says it is. Evans found that it’s about “a fifth or 10th” of what activists claim it is …

Related to the flawed models is the measured reality that Earth hasn’t warmed in 16 to 18 years.

Other events and circumstances that hurt the warming narrative include: doctored data used by alarmists; admissions by former activists that they either overestimated temperature increases or were simply altogether wrong; and the work of credible scientists that goes hard against the warming claims. [Eg. see here.]

None of these counter-examples will move the activists from their position. They will continue to agitate for government-enforced limits on CO2 emissions and lecture us about how we live.

Their last chance should have come long ago, but now it looks as if they will never run out of them.

An expert in applied mathematics has found a flaw in “the basic climate model which underpins all climate science”.

Here’s the report by Karl Denninger:

A mathematical discovery by Perth-based electrical engineer Dr David Evans may change everything about the climate debate, on the eve of the UN climate change conference in Paris next month.

A former climate modeller for the Government’s Australian Greenhouse Office, with six degrees in applied mathematics, Dr Evans has unpacked the architecture of the basic climate model which underpins all climate science.

He has found that, while the underlying physics of the model is correct, it had been applied incorrectly.

He has fixed two errors and the new corrected model finds the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) is much lower than was thought.

It turns out the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has over-estimated future global warming by as much as 10 times, he says. …

When the IPCC models are re-run with this clear error repaired the lack of correlation with the prediction and actual results disappears. …

So, the new improved climate model shows CO2 is not the culprit in recent global warming. But what is?

Dr Evans has a theory: solar activity. What he calls “albedo modulation”, the waxing and waning of reflected radiation from the Sun, is the likely cause of global warming.

Yes … global temperatures had a very high correlation with observed solar activity which we have a very good record of going back hundreds of years because it was very easy to observe without modern scientific equipment. … They correlate, with a fairly deterministic (that is, fixed) lag time, to global temperatures.

CO2 does not, which means you need to postulate a model that does not square with what we know about the physical properties of carbon dioxide.

Will this finding make any delegates to the Paris gathering of hell’s minions change their opinion that human-generated CO2 is the cause of “global warming”?

It should do, but the “climate change” fanatics are very unlikely to take notice of it. They want to use an absurd threat – that the earth will become too hot to live on if we don’t stop doing what we like and do exactly as they tell us – to destroy market economies, individual freedom, and the autonomous nation state. And establish world Communist government.  

Truth has no place in the future they plan for the sad remnant of the human race that might survive their colossal shipwreck of civilization.

(Hat-tip to our highly valued commenter, liz)

Pope Francis compulsively consumes the fashionable drivel that passes for thought among the reactionaries who call themselves “progresssives”, preaches it to the world, and hopes to persuade us all to return to the brutish ways by which our ancestors sustained their brief lives in the Middle Ages.

George Will writes at the Washington Post:

Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony. With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary.

They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak — if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.

Supporters of Francis have bought newspaper and broadcast advertisements to disseminate some of his woolly sentiments that have the intellectual tone of fortune cookies. One example: “People occasionally forgive, but nature never does.” The Vatican’s majesty does not disguise the vacuity of this. Is Francis intimating that environmental damage is irreversible? He neglects what technology has accomplished regarding London’s air (see Page 1 of Dickens’s “Bleak House”) and other matters.

And the Earth is becoming “an immense pile of filth”? Hyperbole is a predictable precursor of yet another U.N. Climate Change Conference — the 21st since 1995. Fortunately, rhetorical exhibitionism increases as its effectiveness diminishes. In his June encyclical and elsewhere, Francis lectures about our responsibilities, but neglects the duty to be as intelligent as one can be.This man who says “the Church does not presume to settle scientific questions” proceeds as though everything about which he declaims is settled, from imperiled plankton to air conditioning being among humanity’s “harmful habits”.  The church that thought it was settled science that Galileo was heretical should be attentive to all evidence.

Francis deplores “compulsive consumerism”, a sin to which the 1.3 billion persons without even electricity can only aspire.

He leaves the Vatican to jet around praising subsistence farming, a romance best enjoyed from 30,000 feet above the realities that such farmers yearn to escape.

The saint who is Francis’s namesake supposedly lived in sweet harmony with nature. –

The son of a rich merchant, St. Francis of Assisi was an early prototype of the middle-class New Left rebel who goes off to live the “simple life” – root vegetables, moral hubris and all – in the name of his religion: Catholic Christianity then, Environmentalism now – the better to annoy his family. No surprise that this Pope chose to reign under his name.

– For most of mankind, however, nature has been, and remains, scarcity, disease and natural — note the adjective — disasters. Our flourishing requires affordable, abundant energy for the production of everything from food to pharmaceuticals. Poverty has probably decreased more in the past two centuries than in the preceding three millennia because of industrialization powered by fossil fuels. Only economic growth has ever produced broad amelioration of poverty, and since growth began in the late 18th century, it has depended on such fuels.

Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, notes that coal supplanting wood fuel reversed deforestation, and that “fertilizer manufactured with gas halved the amount of land needed to produce a given amount of food”. The capitalist commerce that Francis disdains is the reason the portion of the planet’s population living in “absolute poverty” ($1.25 a day) declined from 53 percent to 17 percent in three decades after 1981. Even in low-income countries, writes economist Indur Goklany, life expectancy increased from between 25 to 30 years in 1900 to 62 years today. Sixty-three percent of fibers are synthetic and derived from fossil fuels; of the rest, 79 percent come from cotton, which requires synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. “Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides derived from fossil fuels,” he says, “are responsible for at least 60 percent of today’s global food supply.” Without fossil fuels, he says, global cropland would have to increase at least 150 percent — equal to the combined land areas of South America and the European Union — to meet current food demands.

Francis grew up around the rancid political culture of Peronist populism, the sterile redistributionism that has reduced his Argentina from the world’s 14th highest per-capita gross domestic product in 1900 to 63rd today. Francis’s agenda for the planet — “global regulatory norms” — would globalize Argentina’s downward mobility.

As the world spurns his church’s teachings about abortion, contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage and other matters, Francis jauntily makes his church congruent with the secular religion of “sustainability”. Because this is hostile to growth, it fits Francis’s seeming sympathy for medieval stasis, when his church ruled the roost, economic growth was essentially nonexistent and life expectancy was around 30. …

He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources.

Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.

But when was logical consistency ever a bar to any faith they keep?

Here is a very informative, very gratifying video of a great physicist demonstrating that there is no global warming, no unusual climate change, no extreme weather …

Norwegian Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever’s speech at a Nobel Laureates Meeting, July 1, 2015:

(Hat-tip to our Facebook commenter, Patrick Pulley.)

Obama’s “war on coal” is actually, of course, his “war on capitalism”.

Stephen Moore writes at Investor’s Business Daily:

At the very moment President Obama has decided to shutter America’s coal industry in favor of much more expensive and less efficient “renewable energy”, coal use is surging across the globe.

A new study by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences detects an unmistakable “coal renaissance” under way that shows this mineral of fossilized carbon has again become “the most important source of energy-related emissions on the global scale“. 

Coal is expanding rapidly “not only in China and India but also across a broad range of developing countries — especially poor, fast-growing countries mainly in Asia”, the study finds.

Why is coal such a popular energy source now? The NAS study explains that many nations are attracted to “(relatively) low coal prices … to satisfy their energy needs”. It also finds “the share of coal in the energy mix indeed has grown faster for countries with higher economic growth”.

In sum, using coal is a stepping stone to prosperity. So much for it being a satanic energy source.

Hardly a day passes without evidence that coal is making a major comeback:

• Some 1,200 coal plants are planned across 59 countries, with about three-quarters in China and India, according to the World Resources Institute.
• Coal use around the world has grown about four times faster than renewables, according to the global energy monitoring publication BP Review of World Energy 2015.
• German coal “will remain a major, and probably the largest, fuel source for power generation for another decade and perhaps longer”, the Financial Times concludes.
• “The U.S. is dropping coal plants at an unprecedented rate, but still nowhere near as quickly as India is adding them,” Bloomberg Business reckons.

“By the end of this year, some 7.5% of the U.S. coal fleet will have disappeared … . But by 2020 India may have built about 2.5 times as much capacity as the U.S. is about to lose.”

Then, of course, there’s the world’s biggest coal addict by far — the People’s Republic of China. According to a 2014 report from Eric Lawson of Princeton University, a leading climate change apocalyptic on the left:

“The reality is that fossil fuels dominate China’s energy landscape, as they do in virtually every other country. And the focus on renewables also hides the fact that China’s reliance upon coal is predicted to keep growing.”

Lawson’s calculations of how coal use is growing in China are jaw-dropping. “From 2010 through 2013, (China) added half the coal generation of the entire U.S. At the peak, from 2005 through 2011, China added roughly two 600-megawatt coal plants a week for seven straight years. And according to U.S. government projections, China will add yet another U.S. worth of coal plants over the next 10 years, or the equivalent of a new 600-megawatt plant every 10 days for 10 years.”

All this underscores the foolishness and futility of the Obama climate-change regulations designed to drastically reduce coal production in the U.S.

The great excuse for the Left’s “war on coal” is that it’s burning adds CO2 to the atmosphere. And the Left has spread the dogma that CO2, the food of all green plants, is a pollutant, a “green house gas” which “causes global warming”.

But even assuming that to be true, as Stephen Moore apparently does …

As we use less [coal] and the rest of the world uses more, the impact on global temperatures will be very close to zero.

Coal production in the U.S. is much safer and less carbon-intensive (clean coal technologies have reduced pollutants by 30%) than coal from other nations. So Obama’s war on coal may make global warming worse.

Some might say this gesture by the Obama administration to cut off coal production in the U.S. is a useful first step to save the planet. Except this isn’t just a cheap sign of goodwill.

It’s a tremendously expensive gesture that will cost America hundreds of thousands of jobs, raise utility prices by as much as $1,000 per family and reduce GDP by as much half a percentage point a year when we are already barely growing. The poor will be hurt most.

What makes the Obama administration regulations doubly destructive is that the U.S. has more coal than any other nation.

With at least 300 years of supply at a value of trillions of dollars, we are truly the Saudi Arabia of coal.

To leave it in the ground would be like Obama telling Nebraska to stop growing corn, Idaho to stop growing potatoes and Silicon Valley to give up on the digital age.

Ironically, the president justifies his war on coal by arguing, “We must lead so that others will follow.” But outside of dreamland, the rest of the world has no intention of following Mr. Obama’s act of economic masochism.

Most nations value getting richer over getting greener — as well they should.

Given the sad state of our economy today, so should we.