GreenWatch Newsletter 14 (February 12, 2009)

Featured Story:

A bushfire raged through Australia earlier this week, devastating towns north of Melbourne. The latest report puts the death toll at 181, and it's expected to rise. While the fires are suspected to have been set on purpose (All fires that cannot be tracked to a lightning strike are assumed to have been deliberately started), members of the Green Agenda practically leaped over one another to offer their take on the cause of the tragedy.

"The bushfires are the worst natural disaster in Australia in 110 years. The previous worst bushfire was the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983 which killed 75 people.

"The blazes have increased pressure on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to take firm action on climate change as scientists blamed global warming for the conditions that fueled the disaster."

There's a word for this kind of brazen exploitation of the loss of life: "Shameless."

In America, we're familiar with scientists and politicians exploiting national tragedies to promote their own agendas. The same phenomenon occurred in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Scientists, the media, and even a certain politician railed on about how the deadly storm was caused by global warming. It practically became accepted knowledge that Hurricane Katrina was an storm of unprecedented power and the cause of that power was global warming. In reality, the deadly hurricane struck land as only a class 3 hurricane, the horrific death toll was caused not solely by the storm, but by poor maintenance of the levees that should have protected New Orleans from the storm surge and by inadequate preparation and response by the local, state, and federal governments. Not to mention the fact that scientists actually have no idea what effect global warming has on hurricanes, since at different times they have "linked" global warming to more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, weaker hurricanes, and none of the above.

But the Green Agenda in Australia is perhaps even more shameless. Why? Because the extent of the damage may be directly linked to a policy they worked to enact; a policy that may have cost dozens of Australians their homes, and a few their lives.

Angry residents last night accused local authorities of contributing to the bushfire toll by failing to let residents chop down trees and clear up bushland that posed a fire risk.

During question time at a packed community meeting in Arthurs Creek on Melbourne's northern fringe, Warwick Spooner -- whose mother Marilyn and brother Damien perished along with their home in the Strathewen blaze -- criticised the Nillumbik council for the limitations it placed on residents wanting the council's help or permission to clean up around their properties in preparation for the bushfire season. "We've lost two people in my family because you d*ckheads won't cut trees down," he said.

One family, however, refused to follow the draconian zoning regulations that prioritize the rights of trees over the safety of people (as the Green Agenda always seems to do). In 2002, Lian Sheahan and his family ignored the rules and bulldozed 250 trees surrounding their house. For this, they were called law breakers, forced to appear before a magistrate and fined $50,000. His family was "emotionally and financially drained."

Then the fires struck. The result? In his own words:

"We are the only house standing in a two-kilometer area."

I guess sometimes "criminals" do prosper.

This Week's Headlines:

Obama Nominee for Chief Science Advisor to the President Believes 1 billion will die from global warming by 2020

New York Times Headline, May 15, 1932

A New Denier Emerges (And Pays the Price)

CO2 Emissions Hit New High

Most Egregious Claim of the Week:

Already a Nobel Prize Laureate and an Emmy and Oscar winner, Al Gore added another trophy to his ever increasing collection: The Grammy for best spoken word album for An Inconvenient Truth. That means the voters decided that of all the "spoken word albums" released this year, the absolute pinnacle was the audio book of the book of the film of the PowerPoint presentation that has long since been scientifically discredited on virtually every criteria.

Sounds pretty egregious to me.

GreenWatch Newsletter 13 (January 29, 2009)

So Al Gore braved the winter storm and the world's sense of irony to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on global warming. As usual, Mr. Gore's testimony was riddled with scientifically questionable claims and hyperbole passed off as indisputable facts: "This would bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten the fabric of life everywhere on earth...And this is within the century, if we don't change." As usual, Mr. Gore's claim of a scientific consensus went unchallenged ("The scientists are practically screaming from the rooftops") despite more and more scientists coming out as skeptics. And as usual, Mr. Gore's standing to profit from alternative fuel technology subsidies, as he hoped to include in the stimulus, went ignored by the media and committee alike. As usual, the dissenters did their best to point out Gore's inconsistencies. As usual, they were ignored by the media.

However, something very unusual is happening despite business-as-usual on The Hill. The American people are starting to catch on to these inconsistencies. According to a Rasmussen poll, 41 % of voters believe global warming is caused by human activity, while 44% believe it is the result of long-term planetary trends. This is a huge swing from as recently as April, when 47% believed it was man made, and just 34% believed it to be a natural phenomenon.

And what to make of this article, from the usually reliably left-leaning Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. Within it, Mr. Milbank mercilessly mocks the former Vice President, repeatedly referring to him as the "Goracle" and mocking members of the committee for fawning at his feet.

Could Al Gore be wearing out his welcome not just with the American public, but even with his once staunchest allies?

One can only hope.

This Week's Headlines

Al Gore's Propoganda

Bundle Up! Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age

Cutting Emissions Will Not Bring Relief

Wind Farms aren't Economically or Environmentally Sustainable

Most Egregious Claim of the Week

We've ranted on it before, and we will undoubtedly do so again, but claims like this one, from Australia's "Climate Change Minister" Penny Wong, simply cannot be ignored:

"Obviously you have to look on a much longer time frame than week to week, but what we do know is that 11 of the hottest years in history have been in the last 12 [years]. And we also know, particularly in the southern part of Australia, that we've seen less rainfall. All of this is consistent with climate change and all of this is consistent with what scientists told us would happen."

Of course, Australia has been enduring a week of excessive heat, so Wong thought it an appropriate time to advance the Global Warming Agenda. From James Hansen's first testimony in 1988, Global Warming propogandists have used any examples of extreme heat to support their agenda, while at the same time dismissing any single piece of countering evidence as irrelevent. They even attempted to change to name of their movement from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" in order to claim any extreme weather conditions for their cause.

The simple fact is that short term weather trends are not, I repeat, ARE NOT indicative of long term anthropogenic global warming and politicians and scientists alike who claim that they are are being irresponsible and, dare I say, unscientific. I leave it Andrew Bolt to explain:

"The more important fact is that the temperature of the world has in fact fallen since 2002, which contradicts climate models that predicted warming as we pumped out ever more carbon dioxide. That's the inconvenient truth Wong repeatedly fails to address, as I found when I asked her about this myself.

All this recent heat has proved is the accuracy of forecasts that Melbourne in summer can be damn hot. And?"

GreenWatch Newsletter 12 (December 10, 2008)

Featured Story:

As most of us know, the theory of global warming, very simply, is that unprecedented levels of man made greenhouse gasses are responsible for trapping heat in the atmosphere of the earth, warming the planet to unprecedented levels. With that in mind, if you could place two headlines together, side by side, that would, at the very least, cause a modicum of doubt in the minds of scientists and politicians, wouldn't it be these two?

Climate Scientists Say 2008 Will be Coolest Year of the Decade

Greenhouse Gasses Hit Modern Day Highs

Of course, in the world of climate alarmism, there is no room for doubt, so when asked if this would be evidence that global warming is slowing, Dr. Peter Stott, the manager of understanding and attributing climate change at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, replied, "Absolutely not. If we are going to understand climate change we need to look at long-term trends."

If decreasing temperatures are not a sign that global warming is slowing, I have just one question for you, Dr. Stott. What is?

To a degree (no pun intended), Dr. Stott is correct. A single year does not an trend make. But before this year, a single year was plenty for the climate alarmists to latch on to as evidence of an irreversible trend. Repeatedly, they would evoke 1998 as the hottest year of the century (even though their science was wrong; 1934 was actually hotter), and after virtually every major storm in the last ten years, someone would claim this was a sign of things to come.

Is it too much to ask that the alarmists at least notice their own double standards?

More Headlines:

Early Snowfalls in Europe Hit Historic Levels

Skepticism on Climate Change

Ten Global Warming Myths

U.K. Greens' Uncivil Disobedience

Energy Goals a Moving Target for States

Most Egregious Claim of the Week:

Something's in the water in Australia. At a UN climate summit in Poland, Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery warned.

Climate Opposition 'Suicidal': Flannery

Flannery expressed concern at Australia's seeming hesitance to fully embrace his end-of-the-world mantra, and then offered up this gem: "There is very little gain with going with the herd, if that results in a treaty that costs us the Great Barrier Reef and costs us most of our biodiversity."

Cost Australia the Great Barrier Reef? According to various sources, the Great Barrier Reef is five hundred thousand years old, with parts that go back as far as twenty million years. As the blog Australian Climate Madness puts it:

"The (Great Barrier Reef) has been in existence for hundreds of thousands of years, and has survived numbers of climate minima and maxima far worse than the conditions we are experiencing now, so why does everyone think that it's suddenly going to disappear?"

Also this week, Australian citizens were advised of a rather bizarre tactic for combating global warming:

Eat Camels to Protect Environment, Aussies Told

Just a few months earlier, Australians were also told to save the world by eating kangaroos.

The koalas must be nervous.

GreenWatch Newsletter 11 (November 3, 2008)

Featured Story:

In a long-hidden interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Democrat Presidential Candidate Barack Obama promised to "bankrupt" anyone wanting to build a coal plant in the United States. In the interview, conducted in January, Obama, in an unexpected burst of candor, admits that if his cap and trade carbon policy is put in place:

"If somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it's just that it will bankrupt them because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted." (to hear his confession, and to see how important coal is to the US economy, click here).

In the same interview, he said that he'll make energy costs "skyrocket." This confession comes on the heels of (well, actually 8 months prior to) Joe Biden's startling exchange on the campaign trail (which you can watch here) wherein he said, "We're not supporting clean coal. No coal plants here in America."

Let's not lose sight of the significance of these statements. Senators Biden and Obama are openly declaring their intentions to effectively shut down an entire industry, one that employs a great number of Americans, based on demonstrably faulty science that only 18% of Americans believe. To have this position, as they seem to, is to in a sense reject reality; the reality that the science on this issue is far from settled, and the reality that there are real people and families whose livelihoods depend upon these industries.

This is a common symptom of the radical green ideology. They advocate for new, drastic, draconian economic policies when the reality of an impending economic recession demands the opposite. They warn of apocalyptic, world shaking climate change when reality has clearly demonstrated otherwise, and their own projections are much more moderate. It is a demand for change at any price, without even considering that the real price when it comes to American workers and their families may be much too high.

This Week's Headlines

Steve Forbes Joins the Ever-Increasing List of Deniers

Anchorage Suffers One of Its Coldest Octobers Ever

Energy Independence: Can It Be Done?

What's Really Happening to the Greenland Ice Cap?

Most Egregious Claim of the Week

Often, this spot in the newsletter is dedicated to latest in a long line of doomsday predictions from a variety of sources. Well, we had another one this week, this time from Stephen Chu, who says that we can expect "disasters in orders of magnitude different from anything we've experienced thus far," and that cities like Tokyo, Mumbai, Buenos Aires, New York, and London will need to be protected from rising seas and violent weather behind sea walls.

Climate Disaster a Significant Possibility Says Nobel Prize Winner Stephen Chu

One of the frequent responses of the radical green agenda, when confronted with the fact that are many many prestigious scientists reject the "consensus" on global warming, is to say that these scientists are not climatologists, so they should be ignored. Well, let's take a look at Mr. Chu's biography, shall we?

Stephen Chu, born 1948 in St. Louis, Missouri, is an American experimental physicist. He is known for his research in laser cooling and trapping of atoms, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. His current research is concerned primarily with the study of biological systems at the single molecule level. He is currently Professor of Physics and Molecular and Cellular Biology of University of California, Berkeley and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Oh, so he's not a climatologist at all? In the words of Tom Nelson, whose blog is an indispensable resource for this newsletter and anyone interested in this issue:

"If alarmist Chu and climate realist Freeman Dyson are both physicists, I wonder why we're supposed to believe that Chu is "one of the world's leading climate and energy experts", while we're supposed to ignore Dyson because he's not a climatologist."

But reality doesn't mean anything to the radical greens, remember?

GreenWatch Newsletter 10 (October 22, 2008)

Featured Story:

Much of the radical Green agenda calls for the immediate slowdown of industry throughout the world, or strict government intervention and regulation, both of which would have drastic and immediate effects on the national and global economies. So the question becomes, with our current economic crisis, what will become of the Green movement? Look no further than the first sentence from this story in the National Post:

"To prevent a financial crisis from turning into an economic calamity, the European Union has pulled the emergency brake on green policies."

Europe's Climate Revolt

(National Post)

Wind and solar power are both feeling the crunch. GE has realized that, in this time of economic uncertainty, their expensive clean energy projects just aren't worth it. Lawrence Solomon, National Post columnist and author of the best selling book The Deniers, predicted in a column last weekend that environmentalism as we know it is destined to collapse.

We tend to agree. As Lorne Gunter notes here, the last 30 years of warming have literally disappeared in a single year. The idea of a consensus has been almost completely debunked, as more and more scientists have exposed the folly of the science behind global warming theory. People are not fools, and will not sacrifice the already struggling economy to combat the phantom of global warming.

It brings to mind the famous quote from Abraham Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." In the Green agenda's case, it seems they won't be able to fool anyone too much longer.

This Week's Headlines:

Sun's Protective Bubble is Shrinking

(The Telegraph)

Addiction to the Worst of Worlds

(The Japan Times)

Cuba Drills, Baby, Drills, Now Has More Oil Than U.S.

(Wall Street Journal)

Thais Lead Drive to Natural-Gas Cars (by instituting price caps on a nonprofitable product and imposing it on a nation whose infrastructure can't handle it)

(Wall Street Journal)

Arctic Sea Ice Well Ahead of Last Year's Pace

Most Egregious Claim of the Week:

First they gave me kidney stones. Then they took away my truffles. But at last, the global warming alarmists have got my attention:

Global Warming Leads to Tiger Attacks

(Yahoo News)

Next thing you know they'll be after my favorite football team. Oh wait...

GreenWatch Newsletter 9 (September 17, 2008)

Featured Story:

The Democrat-controlled Congress is on the verge of pushing through a disastrous energy "compromise." But the only thing compromised would be America's energy needs, with a permanent ban on drilling within 50 miles of shore--which is where the biggest and most accessible known deposits are!

And yet the Democrats--with the help of the media--are selling this as a "pro-drilling" bill, on the flimsy grounds that it allows some drilling beyond the 50 mile limit, where we are unlikely to get much oil.

This is a cynical ploy by Nancy Pelosi--a Green favorite--and other Democrats in Congress to trick voters into thinking they are serious about energy. The Institute for Energy Research published a handy primer outlining exactly why this plan is nothing more than a bait and switch:

A permanent ban out to 50 miles locks-up the largest known offshore energy reserves, including those off the coast of California, that are close to existing infrastructure and be produced the fastest.

The plan permanently bans access to 97 percent of the 10.527 billion barrels off the coast of California. It allows the State to decide whether to produce just 3 percent, or 287 million barrels, which is highly unlikely anyway. The remainder...10.24 billion barrels...is off limits.

Keeping the Eastern Gulf of Mexico off limits also denies access to large reserves located close to existing pipeline infrastructure. The plan keeps an estimated 3.65 barrels of oil and 22 trillion cubic feet of natural gas off limits.

Perhaps worst of all, this plan appears to institute a 50-mile ban around energy-rich Alaskan shore--where no ban has ever been in place before and exploration is just beginning! So the Democrats "pro-drilling bill" doesn't open up the California oil that matters and it appears to shut down Alaska.

There's much more from IER, I suggest you read the whole thing here. Marlo Lewis on Planet Gore has a helpful summary as well.

The Democrats seem to be counting on the distractions of the election season to slip this one by. Don't let them. Tell your friends. Forward this email. Let's stick this "compromise" on an ice flow and let it drift out to sea.

This Week's Headlines:

Arctic Ice check: .5 million square kilometers more Arctic ice than last year; that's about the size of Spain!

Farmers concerned about unseasonably cold temperatures in Michigan, Kansas, North Dakota, and Wisconsin

DNC carbon offset program raises $18.34

Al Gore's Global Warming find and replace

Most Egregious Claim of the Week:

Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, sat down for an interview with the co-editor of 21st Century Socialism, a British web-magazine, exposing himself as as a fear-monger with no regard for science or accuracy:

"We are heading for catastrophic climate change; if we are lucky, tens of millions dead globally, if we are unlucky, hundreds of millions. There is a real possibility that human civilization doesn't make it to the end of the Century. I think you can avoid that, and therefore the question of green politics becomes fairly central. What that green politics is about, is planning and sharing. It really reverts to the fairly traditional agenda of the left. You can use market mechanisms to come up with some solutions, but the market won't do it without state direction, effectively."

We have to give Mr. Livingstone credit for one thing: At least he's up front about the fact that aggravating fears about "catastrophic climate change" plays right into the hands of those who promote socialism.

Here in the United States, green politicos strive to keep their socialist ambitions under wraps, preferring tactics like telling football fans that global warming could make their favorite teams, professional or college, relocate.

Talk about putting lipstick on a pigskin.

GreenWatch Newsletter 8 (September 5, 2008)

Featured Story:

What does John McCain's selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin mean for his energy policy going forward? If Governor Palin's record is any indication, it means and drill drill drill for oil and natural gas, onshore, offshore, and in ANWR (Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge). For more detail, take a look at this clip on Youtube of Palin describing America's energy policy.

In January, Palin published an Op-Ed in the New York Times advocating against adding polar bears to the Endangered Species list due to the speculative effects of Global Warming.

Governor Palin is clearly a woman with a deep understanding of the energy issue and a terrific command of the facts. She notably differs with Senator McCain when it comes to drilling in ANWR Can she convince McCain to abandon his economically disastrous cap and trade policy?

We shall see.

This Week's Headlines:

Environmental Group Blames Global Cooling on Global Warm...Sorry, on Climate Change

North Pole an Island for First Time in History...but it still has 480,000km more ice than last year.

Kayaker Paddling to North Pole to Increase Global Warming Awareness Gets Stuck in the Ice

The Problem With Pickens

Unusual Snow in New Zealand

Most Egregious Claim of the Week:

DailyTech reported earlier this week that the month of August was the first month since 1913 where no detectable sunspots were recorded. This is significant because climatologists now believe that solar magnetic activity, which causes sunspots, is an influencing factor in the earth's climate, and the recent decrease in solar activity would explain why global temperatures have decreased over the last eight years, in defiance of every projection touted by the radical green movement.

Apparently it was too significant. At the end of the month, the SIDC (Solar Influences Data analysis Center) decided to count two tiny solar specks that occurred on the 21st and 22nd of August; both were initially deemed too small to count. Why this retroactive change? The truth is that we don't know, but the connection between solar activity and global temperature pokes a giant hole in the theory of man-made global warming - a theory so important to those radical, agenda-driven Green types who want to stifle our economy to ineffectively combat an unproven, hypothetical boogieman.

Having said that, the truth is that the purpose of this newsletter is not to tell you what to believe: Our goal, to the contrary, is to simply present the facts on this important issue and leave the conclusions to you. So tell us, good reader, was the recent period of warming caused by an especially active sun that has since gone through an extended period of inactivity leading to almost uniformly reducing temperatures around the world...or are fat people causing global warming?