Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago). Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.<

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal

“Curt” is Curtis G. Callan, Jr of Princeton University, and serves as President of the American Physical Society.  “Hal” is Harold Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Physics at UC Santa Barbera and former Chair of that department.  He is also a former member of the Defense Science Board and Chairman of its Technology Panel, as well as having chaired that panel’s study on Nuclear Winter.  He is a former member of an advisory committee on Reactor Safeguards and of the President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee.  He was Chairman of the American Physical Society Nuclear Reactor Safety study, and was a member of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board, and he served in the US Navy during World War II.  There is little we can add to his conviction that the scientific community has allowed itself to become tainted, and that it has lost its credibility due to the desire for ever greater fame and funding.

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The State of Texas has filed suit in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, claiming that the US Environmental Protection Agency’s declaration that it is empowered to regulate “greenhouse gas” emissions is based on faulty science and must be reversed.

In a lawsuit filed last week, Governor Rick Perry and Attorney General Greg Abbott, along with Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples, stated that the EPA’s declaration that it is empowered to regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the Clean Air Act is based on unfounded conclusions and will imposed $billions in hardships on the state.

Abbott adds that the declaration is legally without support, because the agency’s claim is largely reliant on the International Panel on Climate Change conclusions which have been largely discredited

“The EPA should not blindly accept what the world has begun to second-guess,” said Abbott.

We have long questioned the validity of the EPA declaration, and remain convinced that the EPA has no power to interpret or adjust the Clean Air Act on a whim in order to support the ideology of its leadership.  The EPA is not a legislative body, and it is not empowered to enact legislation.  Climate Change science such as was touted by the IPCC has been refuted, and many of its scientists have been discredited for having manipulated data and having been highly selective in their choices of “Independent peers” to review those findings.  As such, we applaud the actions of Governor Perry and his colleagues

Now that those scientists have been quieted, others are beginning to speak out about findings that further refute theories such as the increasing levels of carbon in our environment.  Several such scientists have recently announced findings that ocean dwelling plankton will migrate relatively long distances to thrive in the middle of the ocean, seeking nutrients in the form of nitrates they consume, as well as CO₂.  The little buggers consume about 20% of all the CO₂ consumed by plants worldwide.

For almost three decades, oceanographers have been puzzled by the ability of microscopic algae to grow in mid-ocean areas where there is very little nitrate, an essential algal nutrient. In this week’s issue of Nature, MBARI chemical oceanographer Ken Johnson, along with coauthors Stephen Riser at the University of Washington and David Karl at the University of Hawaii, show that mid-ocean algae obtain nitrate from deep water, as much as 250 meters below the surface. This finding will help scientists predict how open-ocean ecosystems could respond to global warming.

…Surface waters in this and other mid-ocean areas contain almost no nitrate or other plant nutrients. Yet each year, microscopic algae (phytoplankton) flourish in these vast, open-ocean areas. Although miniscule in size, these mid-ocean algae consume about one fifth of all the carbon dioxide taken up by plants and algae worldwide.
To solve this mystery, Johnson and his fellow researchers used a robotic drifter called an Apex float, which automatically moves from the sea surface down to 1,000 meters and then back again, collecting data as it goes. Researchers at the University of Washington outfitted this drifter with an oxygen sensor and a custom version of Johnson’s In Situ Ultraviolet Spectrophotometer (ISUS), which measures nitrate concentrations in seawater.

…From January through October of each year, the instruments on the drifter showed a gradual increase in oxygen concentrations in the upper 100 meters of the ocean. At the same time, the float detected a gradual decrease in concentrations of nitrate in deeper waters, from 100 to 250 meters below the surface.
Johnson and his coauthors found that the amount of oxygen being produced near the surface through photosynthesis was directly proportional to the amount of nitrate that was being consumed in deeper water.

Won’t be happening around here, though.  As we reported here several weeks ago, there is a large area of the Gulf of Mexico, below the mouths of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers, that is dead, unable to support life because it is deprived of oxygen due to the runoff of excessive agricultural fertizers in the midwest, a direct result of the ethanol movement and its promotion of the use of corn for a fuel resource. 

Fertilizers dissolved in the river waters exacerbate the growth of algae, which in turn depletes the Gulf waters of oxygen.  As reported today in the Baton Rouge Daily Business Report, that dead zone, which over the past five years has averaged about 6000 square miles, may this year approach as much as 7800 square miles, or about the size of New Jersey.

As stated, this is an annual occurrence we hear little or nothing about because it is a negative environmental effect of the “renewable energy” agenda of the ethanol loving environmental movement – an element of the movement that drove oil drilling prematurely into mile-deep waters resulting in the spill that is devastating our coastline. 

Science is not our enemy.  There is much yet to be learned about our planet and our universe, such as the beneficial consumption of CO₂ by ocean dwelling organisms helping to keep our environment in balance.  It is when politicians who don’t understand the science try to twist and distort it in support of an agenda that it becomes a problem.

The movement grew, and Mr. Gore and others began encouraging the growth of “green industries” and reductions in the exploration, production, refining and use of fossil fuels, and associated these fuels with their global warming scenario.

The country elected a liberal Congress, comprised primarily of attorneys with little technical training.  The few with medical training proved an invaluable asset in the recent healthcare debate, but no such analogues exist in that body with regard to the debate over climate change.

We elected a liberal president with undergraduate training in political science and international relations, a graduate degree in law, and work experience in academia, community organizing, and politics.

Now we have a crisis in the Gulf in the form of a leaking oil well.  Oil has been spilled before, and it will be spilled again, but no spill has ever been so timely, if managed advantageously, so as to provide support for climate change activists.

And suddenly, climate change correcting, green jobs creating Cap and Trade legislation is back on the table.

Energy policy and climate are two highly technical, somewhat related topics that neither our present body politic nor the majority of Americans are academically prepared to understand.  They tend to believe what they’re told, and allow emotion or the desire for personal gain to outweigh factual information.

While this writer is severely limited in his depth of technical knowledge on the subjects, it is hoped that we can assess and weave together contributions from the dissertations of others who are truly qualified.

Remember “the scientific method” from middle school?  Science follows a methodology; pose a question, research the topic, form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis through experimentation, and publish the results.  Perhaps the most important step in the process is the final one, for in publishing, the scientist is inviting others to challenge the results.

Climate change advocates, best personified by Al Gore, are not scientists, and they don’t have the knowledge or desire to participate in open debate.  The “science” on which their argument was based has been discredited, but their audience has conveniently not been informed.  Advocates such as Mr. Gore preach ideology, not science.  As a geophysicist at the University of Oklahoma, David Deming, recently noted,

There are two problems with Al Gore. First, he’s a demagogue who lacks an appreciation for the ethics and methods of science. Second, he’s a not a scientist, but a celebrity and politician who does not understand the technical aspects of science. Put succinctly, the man simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But Gore is now advising the world on complex technical issues related to energy and climate.

Continuing,

Al Gore refuses to debate his critics. He has repeatedly dodged a debate with Christopher Monckton. Instead of engaging skeptics in reasoned discussions, Gore has relentlessly demonized those who disagree with him. In a series of infamous character assassinations, he has stated that people who are skeptical of the hysterical global warming scenario he has been promoting (and profiting from) are comparable to the lunatic fringe who believe that the Apollo Moon landings were filmed on a movie stage. He has also compared global warming skeptics to people who believe that the Earth is flat.

Al Gore is not a scientist.  He will not subject his suppositions to debate, for he carefully assembles those suppositions in such a manner as to misinform, and he knows they won’t stand up to scrutiny.

For example, Mr. Gore and his ilk have produced graphs and charts correlating increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with increasing global temperature, and have craftily shaped the dialogue to suggest that rising carbon dioxide levels are the cause, and global warming is the effect.  In fact, the opposite is true.

Much of the earth’s carbon dioxide is dissolved in our oceans, and it is more soluble in colder water.  Rising temperatures release it to the atmosphere.

There’s An Inconvenient Truth that climate change alarmists would rather you not know.

Al Gore and his followers have an agenda, and it has little or nothing to do with saving the planet.  It has much more to do with paying for his new California mansion and his lavish lifestyle.

Political ideologues such as our Congress and President have an agenda, too.  About-to-be proposed (again) climate change legislation, about which more below, will divert much of the remaining American manufacturing base to more environmentally tolerant venues overseas, and in fact contains provisions to address the creation of massive unemployment.  The House version of that legislation, already passed, provides that if jobs are moved overseas, displaced workers will receive unemployment compensation equal to 70% of lost wages for three years, along with training expenses associated with starting a new career, and relocation costs!

Why?

The legislation is designed to transfer high paying domestic jobs to underdeveloped nations so those workers can enjoy a higher standard of living.

“Spread the wealth around,” remember?

Now we have an oil well leaking in the Gulf of Mexico.  Environmentalists are up in arms, declaring that the US must cease and desist in exploration and production of offshore energy resources.  Those activities, too, will simply shift to other, less environmentally concerned nations from whom we’ll buy it and have it shipped in tankers.

Recall that the spill produced by the grounding of the tanker Valdez remains the worst such spill in history.  Know that at current rates of discharge, the Gulf spill will not reach the magnitude of the Valdez spill for about another month and a half.

Know as well that while America remains preoccupied with BP and their crisis in the Gulf, Nigeria calmly announced that they lost 14,000 tons of oil last year due to accident and sabotage, a number that has increased from previous years.  Where is the outcry to regulate or modify Nigerian production?  Rather, no, we should stop exploring so nations such as Nigeria can provide us with energy.

Proponents of reduced domestic exploration like to point out that the majority of our imported oil comes from Canada and Mexico, which brings up two points for consideration.  First, as we reported here last week, by far the worst offshore spill in history was at the hands of Mexico’s PEMEX.  Secondly, if Mexico and Canada have such a wealth of oil, how much more must lie in between?  Does it make sense to add to their wealth rather than our own?

But the ongoing spill in the Gulf plays right into the hands of environmental legislation proponents, and it would be foolish not to recognize how they are using it.  Did the administration move as quickly as they could have to address the crisis, or did they allow it to escalate to their own ideological advantage?  Consider the following timeline from Brian Sussman at “American Thinker,’ who in turn credits deepseanews.com:

Tuesday, April 20. While finishing a well project for British Petroleum (BP), a Transocean rig called the Deepwater Horizon explodes and catches fire approximately 42 miles Southeast of Venice, Louisiana. U.S. Coast Guard District Eight command center receives report at approximately 10 p.m. Of the 126 people on board at the time of the explosion, 115 crewmembers were accounted for. Search begins for missing 11.

Thursday, April 22. The fire rages. A second explosion occurs, causing the rig to sink.

Friday, April 23. Search for missing crew members is suspended. The oil slick grows.

Saturday, April 24. Remotely operated vehicles discover that oil is escaping from two leaks in a drilling pipe about 5,000 feet below the surface. The leaks appear to be releasing 1,000 barrels a day.

Sunday, April 25. The oil slick now covers 600 square miles and is about 70 miles south of the Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana coastlines.

Tuesday, April 27. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal takes action and requests Coast Guard set up protected booms near several wildlife refuges. Meantime, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar say they are expanding the government’s investigation of the explosion that caused the disaster.

Wednesday, April 28. The slick nears to 20 miles east of the mouth of the Mississippi River. BP states a controlled test to burn the leaking oil was successful late Wednesday afternoon.

Thursday, April 29. Governor Jindal declares a state of emergency, and the federal government sends in skimmers and booms to prevent environmental damage.
President Obama says that BP is “ultimately responsible for funding … cleanup operations.” Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) immediately drafts legislation to suspend any plan for further offshore exploration and drilling until a full investigation of the disaster and the development of new protocols are developed.

Friday, April 30. Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) follows Senator Nelson’s lead and calls for immediate hearings with BP executives.

Sunday, May 2. Twelve days after the initial disaster began, President Obama flies to the Gulf coast and delivers a speech. Janet Napolitano blames delays on government response on fairy-tales: “Mother Nature has not exactly been friendly,” she told ABC News.

We have also recently learned that the federal government had prepared a plan to react to a major Gulf spill in 1994, and had it been implemented, the spill might very well have been contained by cleanup booms and burned off.  Yet not a single such boom was on hand, and one was not acquired until eight days after the spill began.

Did the administration intentionally allow the crisis to grow in order to promote its agenda of reduced production of fossil fuels and expansion of green industry?  We’re just asking.

And while we’re asking, we repeat the fundamental question already raised at The Hayride; the spill was burning when the rig went down.  Who gave the order to put the fire out?

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Liebermann (I-CT) plan to introduce climate change legislation this week.  Lindsay Graham (r-SC) has withdrawn his co-authorship because the legislation contains paltry incentives to promote offshore exploration (while more than offsetting that expansion with reductions elsewhere).  This legislation will promote a 17% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020, despite projections of US population growth of 30million energy hungry consumers by that same year.  It will target power producers first, killing the coal industry, followed in six years by the manufacturing sector.  Energy prices will dramatically increase as generating capacity is reduced, for that capacity will not be replaced by nuclear power (the Obama administration is cutting the funding of the US nuclear disposal facility so there would be nowhere to put the waste from new facilities). And (sorry, Al) solar panels and windmills will not make up the difference.

This legislation will further damage the economy and will lower our standard of living.  It will transfer a portion of America’s wealth to less regulated nations, and will create a more entitlement dependent society in this country.

It has no foundation in science.

It has a solid foundation in ideology.

The author gratefully acknowledges numerous articles at American Thinker for facts and inspiration contributing to this post.

Closer to home considering Louisiana natural resources, we are inclined to suspect that such a unit would be equally efficient and more cost effective were it to be co-fired with natural gas rather than coal.

Meanwhile, National Review Online, in its Planet Gore blog, is reporting that US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has approved the construction of “Cape Wind,” a 130 turbine, 420 megaWatt wind farm to be built off the coast of Nantucket at costs currently projected at $1Billion.  The project has been adamantly opposed by the typically liberal NIMBY residents who only want such facilities built in other people’s back yard.  One not only wonders at the sincerity of the Nantucket activists, but also whether their concerns are driven by an awareness that this thing won’t stand on its own merit, but will necessitate subsidies, either in the form of taxation or premium energy pricing, to function.

 (Interesting sidebar: the Cape Wind turbines will be supplied by the German company Siemens AG.  We wonder what happened to GE’s Jeffrey Immelt and his preferential standing with the White House?)

The dichotomy of these two developments is telling.  While some scientists and engineers are looking “outside the box” at modified conventional energy technologies, our government continues to promote their panacea of “green technologies” which Spain, Germany and Denmark have proven to be bad policy economically.

The editor of Energy Tech, Andrea Hauser, cites in her column this month, her lead in to the article referenced above, an observation made by Andrew Revkin of The New York Times DotEarth blog, that current energy technology will not produce enough energy to meet growing world demands, and that we must identify and develop “new, diverse, more efficient ways of producing energy…”  She goes on to note that “this argument doesn’t even take climate change or CO₂ emissions into consideration – its focus is supply and demand.”

We must ask where else it should be focused?  Should the demand for energy be addressed with the supply of available resources and available and emerging technologies, or should it be addressed with political ideology and subsidized with tax revenue?

The tragic drilling accident in the Gulf of Mexico and the ensuing oil spill will no doubt cause environmental activists to go ballistic over our ongoing dependence on fossil fuels, but the fact remains that oil is available and must be a major player in the domestic energy mix.  If US companies are not allowed to recover it, other nations, with much poorer safety and environmental histories than the US (which that event will certainly overshadow), will.

The United States government is not wrong to supplement research into energy technology, but those funds need to be invested in research to extract greater amounts of the available energy from conventional fossil and nuclear sources, and to further improve the safety of recovering those resources, rather than to subsidize the science fair projects of wind and solar farms which, at the risk of being redundant, we know are economic disasters.  Those funds need to be invested in research to increase the efficiencies of known and emerging technologies, not to substantiate climate change “science” that has already been discredited.

The government of the United States should encourage the development of ideas we know work, rather than ideologies we know don’t.

“The economy is in a crisis.  We must pass stimulus legislation now and fix this by taking over the major investment houses, banking, and the domestic automobile industry.  Only the federal government can resolve this crisis!”

“The housing industry is in a crisis.  We must pass credit legislation now and fix this by bailing out people who are about to lose their homes to foreclosure.  Only the federal government can resolve this crisis!”

“The healthcare industry is in a crisis.  We must pass healthcare legislation now and fix this by taking over the insurance and medical industries.  Only the federal government can resolve this crisis!”

“The environment is in a crisis.  We must pass cap and trade legislation now and fix this by eliminating our dependency on fossil fuels and build a green energy economy.  Only the federal government can resolve this crisis!”

Is a pattern unfolding?  Could they all be a part of a much larger plan?

I think ultimately that the rate of growth of material consumption is going to have to come down, and there’s going to have to be a degree of redistribution of how much we consume, in terms of energy and material resources, in order to leave room for people who are poor to become more prosperous.

- John Holdren, While House science czar

Wealthier nations such as ours, whether that wealth be measured in terms of financial resources, national defense resources, or (in Holdren’s argument) energy resources, must relinquish some of that wealth in order for poorer nations to “become more prosperous.”  Cap and Trade legislation to reduce carbon emissions is, among other things, a vehicle by which the federal government can regulate, and ultimately destroy, our domestic (conventional fossil fuel) energy industry, make us weaker as a nation, and redistribute our wealth to less successful societies.

Economic initiatives are justified with science.  Albeit a social science, the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes offer the foundation by which massive government spending is justified.  The failure of such spending to revive the economy has begun to undermine the theories of Keynes, and his science is losing its credibility.

Climate control legislation is similarly justified with science.  That science, too, has of late been similarly discredited.  Climatologists, who have screamed about anthropogenic global warming, the characteristic warming of the earth as a result of human activity, have been publicly humiliated as their data and its conclusions have been demonstrated to have been falsified.  Acting generally under the now discredited, Nobel prize winning United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climatologists have received funding to “prove” that human activity is causing the earth’s temperature to, on average, steadily increase, and have vindicated their findings by having it reviewed by their “peers,” like minded climatologists who have also received such research funding.  Their private correspondence was revealed, and much of their data had been “lost.”

From a recent update in Der Spiegel:

Plagued by reports of sloppy work, falsifications and exaggerations, climate research is facing a crisis of confidence. How reliable are the predictions about global warming and its consequences? And would it really be the end of the world if temperatures rose by more than the much-quoted limit of two degrees Celsius?

Life has become “awful” for Phil Jones. Just a few months ago, he was a man with an enviable reputation: the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, an expert in his field and the father of an alarming global temperature curve that apparently showed how the Earth was heating up as a result of anthropogenic global warming.

Those days are now gone.

Nowadays, Jones, who is at the center of the “Climategate” affair involving hacked CRU emails, needs medication to fall sleep. He feels a constant tightness in his chest. He takes beta-blockers to help him get through the day. He is gaunt and his skin is pallid. He is 57, but he looks much older. He was at the center of a research scandal that hit him as unexpectedly as a rear-end collision on the highway.

His days are now shaped by investigative commissions at the university and in the British Parliament. He sits on his chair at the hearings, looking miserable, sometimes even trembling. The Internet is full of derisive remarks about him, as well as insults and death threats. “We know where you live,” his detractors taunt.

Jones is finished: emotionally, physically and professionally. He has contemplated suicide several times recently, and he says that one of the only things that have kept him from doing it is the desire to watch his five-year-old granddaughter grow up.

Much of the American public is ignorant of these developments, because the “mainstream media,” which blindly supports this administration’s efforts, has not reported it.  As such, the President and his Congress continue to justify their actions and their legislative agenda on its basis.

New studies reported today would suggest that the climatic changes we are seeing are natural.  It’s the sun, stupid!

Northern Europe experienced an unusually harsh winter of 2009.  For that matter, so did Louisiana, but this report indicates that scientists have demonstrated that lessened solar activity affected the jet stream in such a manner as to cause northern Europe to experience their bitter winter.  Active solar activity = warming.  Reduced solar activity = cooling.  And there’s nothing man is doing to cause it, nor is there anything we can do to stop it.

It’s time to put an end to the misrepresentation of climatology and its misuse by radical governments.  As Fred Singer of American Thinker suggested today,

Only a thorough investigation will be able to document that there was really no strong warming after 1979, that the instrumented record is based on data manipulation involving the selection of certain weather stations (and the omission of others that showed no warming), plus applying insufficient corrections for local heating. 

How to confirm this? The only possibility may be an investigation by the U.S. Congress. Not this Congress, of course. But after the November 2010 elections, control of important committees like Science may change. Hearings that use real experts can then unravel ClimateGate, demonstrate the manipulation of temperature data, and once and for all destroy the “warming trend” on which the IPCC has based its fanciful conclusion of anthropogenic global warming .

Once accomplished, it will become possible to do away with the myth that CO₂ is a pollutant and all of the controls and regulations that are based on this mistaken notion. Yes, that includes EPA’s Endangerment Finding on CO₂ and all cap-and-tax legislation. The nation, and indeed the world, will be better off.

Yet again we see the importance of the conservative movement taking back Congress.  We have to get rid of Lindsay Graham (r-SC) and the progressive asses he rode in on!

America cannot prosper utilizing solar panels and windmills as our primary energy sources.  But America’s prosperity is not the objective of our current leadership.  Their objective is to redistribute our wealth to other nations, and to redistribute our power to a centralized government that they control.

And it must be done now!

A press release issued jointly by the EPA and DOT today says

Responding to one of the first major directives of the Obama Administration, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today jointly established historic new federal rules that set the first-ever national greenhouse gas emissions standards and will significantly increase the fuel economy of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules could potentially save the average buyer of a 2016 model year car $3,000 over the life of the vehicle and, nationally, will conserve about 1.8 billion barrels of oil and reduce nearly a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the lives of the vehicles covered.

This action is one important step in fulfilling the Obama Administration’s commitment to moving towards a clean energy, climate friendly economy.

“These historic new standards set ambitious, but achievable, fuel economy requirements for the automotive industry that will also encourage new and emerging technologies,” said Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. “We will be helping American motorists save money at the pump, while putting less pollution in the air.”

“This is a significant step towards cleaner air and energy efficiency, and an important example of how our economic and environmental priorities go hand-in-hand,” said EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson. “By working together with industry and capitalizing on our capacity for innovation, we’ve developed a clean cars program that is a win for automakers and drivers, a win for innovators and entrepreneurs, and a win for our planet.”

So after 14 months in office, they’re finally getting around to responding to one of Obama’s first directives.

According to that press release, EPA received over 130,000 public comments, mostly favorable, by the September 2009 deadline.  Apparently the Department of the Interior could take some lessons from the EPA in analyzing public comments, as DOI has still not issued their analysis of public comments regarding offshore drilling that concluded in the same time period.

EPA claims that these new regulations will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 960 million metric tons over the lifetime of the vehicles regulated, and conserve about 1.8 billion barrels of oil.

While conserving oil is not necessarily a bad thing, the required reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, that stuff we exhale and our plants love, is again based on science that nobody (well, almost) believes any longer.  Climate change scientists and their conclusions have been grossly discredited, yet the Obama administration continues to impose regulations that are founded on it.

And what are other benefits?  The technology to achieve these regulations will cost about $900 per vehicle, and purportedly will result in a net savings of about $3000 in fuel costs over the life of the vehicle, if you believe government estimates.  But what they don’t say is that in order to achieve these reductions and comply with the new regulations, the vehicles that are manufactured will be tiny econo-boxes that the American public repeatedly demonstrates they do not want.

What is the technology?

NHTSA and EPA expect automobile manufacturers will meet these standards by more widespread adoption of conventional technologies that are already in commercial use, such as more efficient engines, transmissions, tires, aerodynamics, and materials, as well as improvements in air conditioning systems. Although the standards can be met with conventional technologies, EPA and NHTSA also expect that some manufacturers may choose to pursue more advanced fuel-saving technologies like hybrid vehicles, clean diesel engines, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and electric vehicles.

What about natural gas?  But that would be another fossil fuel.

Mechanical efficiency can only be maximized to a certain extent, and car companies have been stretching that envelope for years.  So, as we were advised by these same geniuses during the presidential campaign, keep your tires inflated and save the planet.

America still loves its big vehicles.  SUV and pickup truck sales plummeted two years ago when gasoline prices escalated wildly, and once those prices started falling, those sales returned.  So if a product that the public wants is not offered, and the product offered is not what the public wants, what should we expect to happen to car sales?  If sales again plummet, what will happen to stockholder value in American car companies?

These are not rhetorical questions.  You and I as tax payers are those stockholders.

But according to the EPA,

Climate change is the single greatest long-term global environmental challenge. Cars, SUVs, minivans, and pickup trucks are responsible for almost 60 percent of all U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions.

So let’s get rid of them!

Once again the Obama administration is forcing new regulations on our flailing economy and our society, and this time they are not even debating it in Congress.  They tried that with Cap & Trade, and fortunately that legislation is gasping for breath, though Lindsey Graham is desperately trying to perform CPR and revive it.

This is but another example of the Obama administration attempting to impose its vision and ideology of a massive government on our society and our struggling economy before the November elections.

Obamacare, phase 2.

I don’t think so.

“Cap and Trade” is legislation that, as most readers are well aware, will penalize major industries, primarily utilities, oil refiners, and petro-chemical producers, for emitting carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in quantities the legislation defines as excessive.  The legislation passed long ago in the House of Representatives, but has been competing with healthcare legislation for attention in the Senate.  During the period of time that it has languished, the fundamental science that supports it has been demonstrated to not be credible.  (See here for our most recent report.)  Carbon emissions from man-made sources are no longer perceived as causing global warming, and that phenomenon is itself in question, yet in its infinite wisdom and its motivation to find new ways to generate tax revenue, grow government, and redistribute wealth, Washington has chosen to ignore the absence of sound science or the economic devastation various forms of the legislation would bring about, and continues to espouse the legislation as necessary.

Carbon dioxide can be injected into dormant fields to provide additional recovery of oil.  Denbury Resources, Inc. is presently constructing a pipeline from Louisiana to Texas to transport sufficient volumes of CO₂  to accomplish that feat in a now dormant field near Houston.  Ted Griggs, author of the article at the Advocate, presupposes that Louisiana industries will invest the untold millions of dollars necessary for carbon capture, that utilities and investors will build the pipeline network to move it, and that it will thus be available for additional recovery of crude.  Dormant fields in the Gulf of Mexico and in coastal states will presumably yield sufficient quantities to boost domestic production by over 3billion barrels per day.

While the technology is sound, there are several fallacies in this hypothesis.  As noted, the reduction of carbon emissions is no longer supported by science.  Secondly, it is much more likely that rather than invest in carbon recovery, many of the industries that will be penalized by the legislation will simply shutter their domestic facilities and relocate to more “carbon friendly” locales.  Finally, with the Obama administration clearly opposed to domestic oil production, they’ll no doubt oppose this recovery method as well.  Pipeline construction will be found to endanger an innocuous creature and will thus be blocked.

Editors at the Advocate presented their article as news.  It is more appropriately an opinion piece reflecting that publication’s tendency to support left-leaning policy rather than the posture of most Louisiana readers.  This, too, is an opinion post, based on the fundamental premise that unsound legislation supported by disproven science cannot be good for Louisiana.

That’s correct. Fishing.

This morning, ESPN Outdoors ran a piece outlining a situation in which the administration appears to be moving toward a “federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.” Apparently, there is such a thing as an Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, run out of the White House, and since June of last year they’ve been working on a scheme to regulate the abovementioned waterways so as to control virtually everything that happens within them.

That, says ESPN Outdoors reporter Robert Montgomery, includes whether Americans will be allowed to fish. According to the article…

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

“Now we see NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the administration planning the future of recreational fishing access in America based on a similar agenda of these same groups and other Big Green anti-use organizations, through an Executive Order by the President. The current U.S. direction with fishing is a direct parallel to what happened in Canada with hunting: The negative economic impacts on hard working American families and small businesses are being ignored.

“In spite of what we hear daily in the press about the President’s concern for jobs and the economy and contrary to what he stated in the June order creating this process, we have seen no evidence from NOAA or the task force that recreational fishing and related jobs are receiving any priority.”

According to the article, there have been a bevy of white papers and policy documents pouring forth from environmentalist nuts since Obama’s election and many of them describe “overfishing” while making no apparent distinction between commercial and recreational fishing. Angling groups and recreational boating groups have been screaming about the cozy atmosphere between the Obama administration and the green gang for months, and no one has paid them any attention. As a result, it is now expected that by the end of this month some sort of final report from the task force will spill out, with an Executive Order from the president implementing the recommendations in the report on “marine spatial planning” that will, as Montgomery puts it, amount to zoning laws that might outlaw recreational fishing in certain areas.

What is “marine spatial planning?” If you think that is a sinister-sounding piece of jargonistic bovine scatology, we agree. Looking at this Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force’s work product to find answers, things get even more unsettling. They’ve released an “interim framework” document in December, the outline of which is below:

A New Approach to How We Use and Protect the Ocean, Coast, and Great Lakes. The Interim Framework is designed to: decrease user conflicts; improve planning and regulatory efficiencies and decrease their associated costs and delays; and preserve critical ecosystem function and services.  The Interim Framework describes how such plans would be developed and implemented, and provides timeframes and steps for phased implementation of the framework.

Moves us Away From Sector-by-Sector and Statute-by-Statute Decision-Making. While many existing permitting processes include aspects of coordinated planning, most focus solely on a limited range of management tools and outcomes (e.g., oil and gas leases, fishery management plans, and marine protected areas).  Comprehensive marine spatial planning presents a more integrated, comprehensive, ecosystem-based, flexible, and proactive approach to planning and managing uses and activities.

Brings Federal, State, and Tribal Partners Together in an Unprecedented Manner to Jointly Plan for the Future.  The Interim Framework is not a top-down planning effort. Rather, it describes a new approach to Federal resource planning that is regionally based and developed cooperatively among Federal, State, tribal, and local authorities, and regional governance structures, through the establishment of nine regional planning bodies.

Places Science-Based Information at the Heart of Decision-Making.  Scientific data, information and knowledge, as well as relevant traditional knowledge, will be the underpinning of the regionally developed plans.

Emphasizes Stakeholder and Public Participation.  The planning process would be fully transparent and participatory – requiring frequent and robust stakeholder engagement throughout all steps of the process (i.e., development, adoption, implementation, adaptation and evaluation).

There’s a PDF file of this document available which goes into more detail, as on the first page it defines “Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning” as…

CMSP is a comprehensive, adaptive, integrated, ecosystem-based, and transparent spatial planning process, based on sound science, for analyzing current and anticipated uses of ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes areas. CMSP identifies areas most suitable for various types or classes of activities in order to reduce conflicts among uses, reduce environmental impacts, facilitate compatible uses, and preserve critical ecosystem services to meet economic, environmental, security, and social objectives. In practical terms, CMSP provides a public policy process for society to better determine how the ocean, coasts, and Great Lakes are sustainably used and protected now and for future generations.

It goes south from that paragraph of gobbledygook, and it basically goes on and on about the insufficiency of laws governing the different uses of bodies of water and the requirement for a “holistic” approach. Nine different federal bureaucratic agencies to create this “holistic” approach are proposed.

The Task Force in question has as one of its most important members National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco, who as Montgomery reports comes from a background as a honcho with the Environmental Defense Fund and the Pew Oceans Commission – two organizations eaten up with global warming advocacy and “holistic” environmentalism. Lubchenco recently made an imbecile of herself when asked about the Climategate disclosures and the unraveling of the anthropogenic global warming movement’s “science,” which she still ardently defends, and that should naturally make anyone suspicious of government bureaucrats armed with “incontrovertible” science from which regulatory paradise might spring.

In short, research into this issue yields more darkness than light, and this task force’s work product encompasses much more than just recreational fishing – its “holistic” approach to oceans, lakes and the like involves transportation, energy, commerce, aquaculture and all sorts of other perhaps more important sectors than recreational angling. The fact that fishing wasn’t even discussed as a separate case despite the loud opposition within that community should tell you how far gone the green gang and their allies in the administration are.

Following this idiocy to its logical progression gives one a truly frightening scenario. If the federal government is in a position to tell sport fishermen there are areas they can’t fish – or can’t fish without a highly-prized and thus politicized federal license – how far does this go?

Earlier today we referenced the Battle of Stalingrad as an analogy for the health-care struggle going on in Washington. That analogy reminded us of an interesting movie on the subject – Enemy At The Gates, with Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes, Bob Hoskins and Rachel Weisz – about the desperate Soviet effort to beat the Germans back in that pivotal battle.

Well, in that movie there’s a scene - or, more accurately, there isn’t a scene, since it was deleted from the film, in which Law, playing the role of expert sniper Vassily Zaitsev, tells Fiennes, whose character is a political commissar, how he learned marksmanship from his grandfather. It seems Zaitsev’s grandfather was carted off to the gulag for the crime of poaching wolves… 

Sure, you want to keep endangered species from being hunted out of existence. But when that’s not at issue it amounts to the kind of tyranny described in the scene for the government to attempt to control private citizens hunting and fishing. It’s an affront to the American way. And if the concerns expressed in Montgomery’s articles are valid (and research to date offers little reason to doubt them) when this task force’s final report tumbles out later this month, it ought to be a political and social scandal which buries Obama and his administration under a mountain of public outrage – starting with calls for the Soviet-sounding NOAA head’s name off her office door.

UPDATE: Just in case you think this thing is crazy, just take a look at NOAA’s current performance on commercial fishing in Massachusetts. They’re perfectly willing to put commercial fishermen out of business out of a fealty to junk science; how hard is it to believe that they’d interfere with sportfishing?

(Hat tip: Fishermen’s Blues, which  has done a comprehensive job of documenting the carnage the Obama administration has done to the commercial fishing business on the East Coast to date)

– Obstructing release of damaging data and information;
– Manipulating data to reach preconceived conclusions;
– Colluding to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science “consensus”; and
– Assuming activist roles to influence the political process.

Inhofe calls the Climategate affair “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” and is demanding that the Obama administration, through its Justice Department, begin an investigation into the American scientists implicated in the East Anglia e-mails and “the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).”

Inhofe wants to haul former Vice President and climate profiteer Al Gore in front of the committee as well, as he says each one of the assertions made in Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth have been proven false. Inhofe wants to grill Gore on the subject, as well as Dr. Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University and Dr. James Hansen of Columbia University and the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Science – both of whom were implicated in the East Anglia e-mail disclosures.

The crux of Inhofe’s efforts is to change the administration’s policy on climate and energy…

“The report also shows the world’s leading climate scientists acting like political scientists, with an agenda disconnected from the principles of good science. And it shows that there is no consensus-except that there are significant gaps in what scientists know about the climate system. It’s time for the Obama Administration to recognize this. Its endangerment finding for greenhouse gases rests on bad science. It should throw out that finding and abandon greenhouse gas regulation under the Clean Air Act-a policy that will mean fewer jobs, higher taxes and economic decline.”