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  • NASA's Hansen prefers rule by decree to fight 'global warming'

    MICHAELS: China-style dictatorship of climatologists
    NASA's Hansen prefers rule by decree to fight 'global warming'

    By Patrick J. Michaels

    MICHAELS: China-style dictatorship of climatologists - Washington Times

    The Washington Times

    6:01 p.m., Monday, January 17, 2011
    MugshotJames Hansen

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    November's election made it quite clear that the people of the United States do not want to radically change our society in the name of global warming. Pretty much every close House race went to the Republicans, while the Democrats won all the Senate squeakers. The difference? The House on June 26, 2009, passed a bill limiting carbon-dioxide emissions and getting into just about every aspect of our lives. The Senate did nothing of the sort.

    The nation's most prominent publicly funded climatologist is officially angry about this, blaming democracy and citing the Chinese government as the "best hope" to save the world from global warming. He also wants an economic boycott of the U.S. sufficient to bend us to China's will.

    NASA laboratory head James Hansen's anti-democracy rants were published while he was on a November junket in China, but they didn't get much attention until recently. On Jan. 12, the hyperprolific blogger Marc Morano put them on his Climate Depot site, and within hours, the post went viral. In a former life, Mr. Morano was chief global-warming researcher for Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican.

    According to Mr. Hansen, compared to China, we are "the barbarians" with a "fossil-money- 'democracy' that now rules the roost," making it impossible to legislate effectively on climate change. Unlike us, the Chinese are enlightened, unfettered by pesky elections. Here's what he blogged on Nov. 24:

    "I have the impression that Chinese leadership takes a long view, perhaps because of the long history of their culture, in contrast to the West with its short election cycles. At the same time, China has the capacity to implement policy decisions rapidly. The leaders seem to seek the best technical information and do not brand as a hoax that which is inconvenient."

    Has this guy ever heard of the Gang of Four? Or the Cultural Revolution, which killed those who were inconvenient? Or the Great Leap Forward, which used the best technical information to determine that a steel mill in every backyard was a good idea?

    Mr. Hansen has another idea to circumvent our democracy. Because Congress is not likely to pass any legislation making carbon-based energy prohibitively expensive, he proposed, in the South China Morning Post, that China lead a boycott of our economy:

    "After agreement with other nations, e.g., the European Union, China and these nations could impose rising internal carbon fees. Existing rules of the World Trade Organization would allow collection of a rising border duty on products from all nations that do not have an equivalent internal carbon fee or tax.

    "The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil-fuel addiction ... or ... accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being."

    The WTO, in fact, has not "ruled" that it can impose environmental tariffs of any kind, much less those of such magnitude that they would destroy the world's largest economy.

    Mr. Hansen is just dreaming here. But that's not surprising. He has been very creative over the years.

    In 1988, he reportedly told Bob Reiss, author of yet another apocalyptic screed, "The Coming Storm," that in the next 20 years, "The West Side Highway [in Manhattan] will be under water" and, "There will be more police cars" in New York because "well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up."

    Well, there are more cops and less crime, and the West Side is high and dry. One out of three isn't bad for baseball, but it is horrendous for science.

    In 1988, he testified in front of Congress, showing the temperature forecast for coming decades. He had three emission scenarios: One was labeled "A," which he called "business as usual." It actually underestimated the growth in greenhouse-gas emissions since then. Even with that error, which should have enhanced global warming more than he predicted, observed temperatures fell far short. He predicted 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. This was an overestimate of more than 40 of what was observed between then and now.

    How about his scenario "B," which assumes "decreasing trace gas growth rates?" That one overestimates warming by a bit less than 40 percent (37 percent, to be artificially exact). Scenario "C" is irrelevant, as it assumed massive cuts in emissions beginning in 1988.

    His forecasts of climatic change for nearly the last quarter-century are fantasy, as is his notion that dictators are better than democracy and that our country should be bullied into submission.

    Patrick J. Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of "Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know" (Cato Institute, 2009).

    © Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

  • #2
    Hansen and Friedman like the ChiComs so much, they oughtta marry 'em.

    -dale

    Comment


    • #3
      Mr. Hansen? I'm sorry, your license to breathe has been revoked for sheer and utter stupidity. This will also help us reduce carbon emissions. On behalf of the staff and management, thank you, and have a good day
      Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

      Abusing Yellow is meant to be a labor of love, not something you sell to the highest bidder.

      Comment


      • #4
        Liberal socialists are all for democracy as long as the public agrees with them.
        "Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

        Comment


        • #5
          Figure the science thread is for science here can be the politics.

          People belong in jail for this scam.


          Yes, Virginia, A Climate Cover-Up
          Yes, Virginia, A Climate Cover-Up - Investors.com
          Posted 01/20/2011 06:53 PM ET

          Junk Science: Democrats in Virginia are trying to stop their attorney general from probing climate fraud carried out by university researchers at taxpayer expense. Are they afraid of finding the inconvenient truth?

          It's not the crime, it's the cover-up, as the saying goes. In the case of former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann and his supporters, it may be both. Not only did Mann participate in perhaps the greatest scam of modern times, but he may have also have fraudulently used taxpayer funds to do so.

          At least Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli thinks so, and has been diligently trying to obtain from U.Va. documents and e-mails related to Mann's work there. Mann reportedly received around $500,000 from taxpayer-funded grants from the university for research there from 1999 to 2005.

          Cuccinelli is alleging a possible violation of a 2002 statute, the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. The AG has said that he wants the documents, including grant applications and e-mails exchanged between Mann and 39 other scientists and university staffers, to help determine whether Mann committed fraud by knowingly manipulating data as he sought the taxpayer-funded grants for his research.

          Mann was at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal when e-mails were unearthed from Britain's Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. In one e-mail sent to Mann and others by CRU director Philip Jones, Jones speaks of the "trick" of filling in gaps of data in order to hide evidence of temperature decline:

          "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline." It was that attempt to "hide the decline" through the manipulation of data that brought down the global warming house of cards.

          Mann was the architect behind the famous "hockey stick" graph that was produced in 1999 but which really should be called the "hokey stick." Developed by Mann using manipulated tree-ring data, it supposedly proved that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century.

          Mann et al. had to make the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800 to 1400) and the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1600 to 1850) statistically disappear.

          The graph relied on data from trees on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. Here, too, the results were carefully selected. Just 12 trees from the 252 cores in the CRU's Yamal data set were used. A larger data set of 34 tree cores from the vicinity showed no dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages. They were not included.

          ttempting to block Cuccinelli and rising to Mann's defense are Virginia state senators Chap Petersen and Donald McEachin. They are backing legislation that would strip the attorney general's office of its power to issue "civil investigative demands," otherwise known as subpoenas, under the 2002 statute.

          They claim they are defending academic freedom, but they are trying to hide what many consider academic fraud, work that found its way into the reports of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It led to Kyoto and Copenhagen, and formed the basis for the EPA's endangerment finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that needs to be regulated.

          After Mann left U.Va., he went to Penn State, which the Obama administration awarded with $541,184 in economic stimulus funds to save, according to recovery.gov, 1.62 jobs so that Professor Mann could continue his tree-ring circus fraudulently advancing the myth of man-made global warming that through equally bogus remedies like cap-and-trade and EPA regulations would bring the U.S. economy to its knees.

          In a glaringly arrogant e-mail, Mann said he was grateful to the legislators for pressing the issue and hoped the action would give Cuccinelli "some second thoughts about continuing to waste their time and resources attacking well-established science." Hide the decline, then hide the truth.

          We hope the legislation fails, the truth will come out and Mann et al. will be held accountable for engineering a scientific and economic fraud that would have made Bernie Madoff blush.
          To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

          Comment


          • #6
            PRUDEN: The booger man of left-wing dreams

            By Wesley Pruden

            -

            The Washington Times

            8:07 p.m., Thursday, January 20, 2011
            PRUDEN: The booger man of left-wing dreams - Washington Times
            ANALYSIS/OPINION:

            The booger man is scaring our European friends and relations again. The Ugly American, blundering about the landscape like Gulliver on the sauce, is back to haunt their timid reveries. They thought they saw Gulliver in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they recognized him in full in Tucson, Ariz.

            The banging and clanging of public debate, particularly over President Obama's attempt to impose a welfare state with the gassy bloat held so dear on the Continent, make Europeans' teeth itch. And not just Europeans actually in Europe.

            It's the way Americans make free with free speech — rich, robust and occasionally over the top — as if they were armed with a Constitution that guarantees them the right to say whatever pops into their heads, nice or not.

            "To many Europeans," writes Simon Jenkins of the Guardian, the tribune of left-thinking London folk eager to transform Albion into a Little England worthy of Europe, "the echo across the Atlantic came from a people isolated from the outside world and unable to handle today's social and scientific progress. The debate [over Mr. Obama's health care scheme] was infused with nastiness and xenophobia, as if the United States was a land of tribes bred only to hate the outside world, and often themselves."

            This is only one man's cranky exercise of envy and ignorance, but it's a symptom of fear growing elsewhere in the once-robust West, where noisy debate and ferocious argument gave birth to the civilization that tamed the jungle of terrors and superstition. Voices that once might have thundered against the despotism of malicious ignorance now blame the hard-bought freedoms of democracy itself for the terrors of the night.

            James E. Hansen, the NASA "climatologist" who is the source of much of the dubious science on which the global-warming scam is based, thinks the West should abandon its "fossil-money democracy" and copy the Chinese way of regulating debate. But we don't need no stinking free speech.

            Mr. Hansen took a junket to China just before Thanksgiving and returned with gratitude for the Chinese example of regulating "democracy." He now regards China, with none of the hobbles of plain talk and free elections, as the "best hope" to save the world from global warming. "I have the impression that Chinese leadership takes a long view, perhaps because of the long history of their culture, in contrast with the West with its short election cycle. At the same time, China has the capacity to implement policy decisions rapidly. The leaders seem to seek the best technical information and do not brand as hoax that which is inconvenient."

            Mr. Hansen, who obviously prefers the short view, would dispense with the freedom of speech that makes freedom of scientific inquiry possible. He has not been punished for spreading fear and ignorance as he would be in a culture where being wrong is the way to humiliation and worse. He is free to propose, as he did in Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, that because Congress won't enact a law to make coal prohibitively expensive, China should lead a boycott of the U.S. economy. "The United States then would be forced to make a choice. It could either address its fossil-fuel addiction … or accept continual descent into second-rate and third-rate economic well-being."

            Mr. Hansen can expect no knock on his door in the middle of the night to answer for what in China would be regarded as treasonous trash talk, nor should he fear any punishment for predicting two decades ago that in 20 years New York City's "West Side Highway will be under water." Neither Mr. Hansen nor anyone else can water-ski down the West Side Highway yet, though Mr. Hansen might urge everyone else to try.

            A few swallows hardly make a summer, but such nonsense by a prominent London columnist and a prominent American scientist is exactly the kind of virulent nonsense we heard from certain of our own pols and pundits in the wake of tragedy in Tucson. "Free speech," Mr. Jenkins writes, "is a Hobbesian jungle. It requires a marketplace of rules, including rules that maintain fair and open competition." Just so, and here's a set of rules that have worked wonderfully well for more than two centuries: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

            This makes everything else possible. Fearful Europeans should try it. It works.

            • Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

            © Copyright 2011 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.
            To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

            Comment


            • #7
              sounding the theme of "competitiveness." It sounds positive -- don't we all want to be competitive? But upon closer analysis, this is the worst of crony capitalism.

              Take, for example, his new BFF: GE's Jeffrey Immelt. Obama is showing him off to demonstrate his new business friendly outlook, but Immelt's appointment as an Obama advisor should serve as a warning to those concerned about the noxious collaboration of big business and big government. Scott Johnson of Powerline writes a must-read post on the subject:

              Before the GM and Chrysler bailouts, GE chief executive officer Jeffrey Immelt saw the money to be minted in environmentalism. GE would hold itself out as an environmental leader under the rubric of Ecoimagination. Then it would join up with big government, promote the global warming hoax and cash in on it through the regulatory regime of cap-and-tax. Ecoimagination is the public relations campaign that in part represents GE's strategic partnership with big government. See, for example, the friendly 2005 Forbes article "GE turns green."

              GE got a taste of the good life when it got in on the bank bailout. As the Washington Post reported in a major article in mid-2009, GE had quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government's key bank bailout programs. At the same time GE also avoided many of the restrictions faced by the big banks.

              The Post noted that GE did not initially qualify for the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, under which the government guaranteed debt sold by banks: "But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE."

              Likewise, Fred Barnes examines the difference between a pro-growth agenda and crony capitalism:

              Immelt is a classic example of a rent-seeking CEO who may know what's good for his own company but not what produces economic growth and private sector job creation. He supported Obama on the economic stimulus, Obamacare, and cap and trade - policies either unlikely to stir growth and jobs or likely to impede faster growth and hiring....

              Immelt's support for cap-and-trade was pure rent-seeking. The measure was certain to drive up energy costs and weaken the economy, but GE was expected to benefit enormously. The cap-and-trade bill passed the House, but died in the Senate in 2009. However, the Environmental Protection Agency may, on its own, act to curb greenhouse gases, as cap-and-trade would have.

              But, of course, Immelt is a symbol of, not the underlying flaw in, Obama's economic approach.

              In the State of the Union address, be prepared to hear lots of talk about "green jobs" (i.e. corporate subsidies), more spending, and an array of policies that don't spur growth as much as they bind business to the Obama agenda. The Bill Daley-Obama-Immelt vision isn't one that promotes competition, lowers employers' costs, reduces regulatory burdens and the like. In fact, Obama is opposed to things that really would aid competitiveness -- reducing the cost of capital and labor, repealing oppressive mandates (including ObamaCare), and doing away with costly goodies for organized labor (e.g. Davis-Bacon "prevailing wage" rules).

              In his response to the State of the Union address, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) has an opportunity to explain the difference between the Republican vision (pro-growth and pro-free markets) and the Obama vision (pro-cronyism). It is a huge mistake for Obama, who has lost independent voters and failed to offer effective pro-jobs policies, to follow a decidedly anti-populist course. Independents, and, indeed, most Americans, share a healthy skepticism about "bigness" -- big insurance, big government, big labor and big business. Republicans would do well to align themselves with "smallness" -- small business, the ordinary worker, and the next generation of Americans who will face diminished opportunities if we don't undergo a serious course correction.
              2011
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              By Jennifer Rubin | January 24, 2011; 9:20 AM ET
              Categories: economy
              To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

              Comment


              • #8
                Newsmax
                Author Larry Bell: Greed Fuels Global Warming Hoax
                Saturday, January 22, 2011 07:50 PM

                By: Henry J. Reske and Ashley Martella

                Truth is exposing the charade of global warming’s scare tactics, professor and author Larry Bell tells Newsmax.TV. Bell, whose new book labels the warming argument a hoax based partly on greed, credits the reality check to a couple of factors, including a good dose of common sense.

                “One is people are looking out the window and noticing that the weather always changes and has been changing and getting cooler actually for the last 10 or 12 years,” Bell said during an exclusive interview.

                Another was the release in 2009 of thousands of hacked e-mails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, “that basically revealed what most people a lot of scientists had known for a long time — that there were a lot of shenanigans going on, to put it in their words,” said Bell, an architecture professor at the University of Houston.

                Story continues below video.

                Jan. 20, 2011 — Larry Bell, author of the new book ‘Climate of Corruption,’ contends that the deliberate distortion of climate data perpetuates inaccurate information about perfectly natural climate changes. He also argues that ethanol is ‘terribly destructive.’
                Global-warming skeptics seized on the material from the university in Norwich, England, as evidence of collusion that advocates of the warming story manipulated data to advance their agenda.

                In a bit of whimsy, with a touch of sarcasm, Bell devoted his book, “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax,” to global warming champion Al Gore. “Dedicated to Al Gore, whose invention of the Internet made this book possible and whose invention of facts made it necessary,” the dedication page proclaims.

                Bell sees no grand conspiracy behind the global warming hoax but instead a collection of common interests shared by those who would benefit from misinformation, such as those who oppose fossil fuels and offshore drilling.

                “A number of common interests,” he said, “not the least of which is that this is an enormous multibillion-dollar climate industry that goes away if there’s no one frightened.”

                Ideology is pushing global warming with constant rounds of stories about weather extremes, such as the recent holiday blizzard that struck the Northeast, he said.

                “You know the weather’s always changing, and you can’t take one season, one event,” Bell said. “First of all, you have to look at it globally . . . You can’t really generalize from that, but the big driver in climate appears to be in the short-term stage the ocean changes which occur on fairly regular cycles and changes in solar activity. And from those predictions, it looks like we are in for a pretty cold few decades at least that’s the indication.”

                One of the biggest misconceptions about global warming is the role of naturally and artificially occurring carbon dioxide, Bell said. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that levels of CO2 have been increasing since the industrial revolution that began in 1700s because of the burning of fossil fuels and that CO2 is one of the main causes of greenhouse gases.

                “Pointing the finger at carbon dioxide as the culprit is a convenient way, of course, of vilifying carbon based fuels,” he said. “I think another . . . is that we have alternate fuels like solar and wind that are going to be the panacea that’s going to solve the problem. Well they’re not. Their capacities are incredibly limited.”

                Bell also had harsh words for ethanol, which he said damages engines and causes farmers to over-fertilize and produce too much corn. Ethanol production also uses huge amounts of water, which lowers the water table, he said.

                “Ethanol is terribly destructive on the environment,” he said.

                Nonetheless, he acknowledges that the demand for foreign oil must be reduced. He suggests conservation, home insulation, nuclear power, and the use of more natural gas.

                Editor’s Note: Get Larry Bell’s book, “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax,” at a good price from Amazon.com — Click Here Now.






                © Newsmax. All rights reserved.
                To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

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