Articles Tagged "Steven Milloy"

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If you’re thinking of becoming a GOP presidential candidate — and who isn’t these days? — you can plan on being pressed on the climate issue.

In the wake of last week’s new report from a panel of the National Research Council (NRC) reiterating its old talking points on climate, The Washington Post editorialized that all (read “Republican”) candidates for political office should be quizzed about whether they agree with the “scientific consensus of America’s premier scientific advisory group.”

Though this threat is intended to intimidate Republicans who tend toward queasiness when confronted with environmental issues, the attack is easy to parry and then even to counterattack — that’s why Al Gore and his enviros duck debating so-called climate skeptics.

First, let’s dismiss a couple of the faulty premises of The Post’s editorial (Climate change denial becomes harder to justify).

Hokey stick creator Michael Mann and a number of fellow alarmists sent a letter to Congress yesterday asking it to take a “fresh look at climate change.”

In the letter’s section “Climate Change Deniers,” Mann et al. state:

… no research results have produced any evidence that challenges the overall scientific understanding of what is happening to our planet’s climate and why.

Some quick thoughts:

» The claim presumes that alarmist research has provided any scientific understanding in the first place. Every climatic prediction made by the alarmists has turned out to be wrong in one way or another. If your “understanding” doesn’t provide for reasonably accurate predictions, then your “understanding” isn’t. Don’t forget Kevin Trenberth’s Climategate e-mail to Tom Wigley:

The state of Texas has filed a new lawsuit against the EPA and the climate rules slate to take effect on Jan. 2.

Following the rejection of a request for a stay of the EPA rules by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Texas has filed its new effort to stay the rules in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

In petitioning the court to review the EPA’s action, Texas claims:

The GHG SIP Call is contrary to both the Clean Air Act and the Constitution. Recognizing the proper role of the States, the Clean Air Act declares pollution prevention to be “the primary responsibility of States and local governments,” and not the federal government. 42 U.S.C. § 7401(a)(3). EPA rejects that approach and seeks to deprive Texas of its right to manage its air resources. It does so by unlawfully replacing a properly-approved Texas SIP, despite Texas’ strong track record of reducing pollution and improving air quality in the State. The United States Constitution also denies the federal government the authority to commandeer the States to carry out its ends, but here EPA attempts just that by threatening Texas with severe economic harm unless the State adopts, on an unrealistic timeline, EPA’s greenhouse gas regulations, which are themselves unlawful.

Self-proclaimed “skeptical environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg is uttering untruths about genuine skeptics while promoting his new movie “Cool It.”

Appearing on Fox Business Channel last Friday, Lomborg was asked by host Stuart Varney whether humans were causing [catastrophic] global warming. “Is it us? Is human beings who are doing this?,” implored Varney.

The skeptical environmentalist replied,

I’m an economist. If you look, if you ask some of the smartest scientists, even very skeptical scientists like Dick Lindzen from MIT or Pat Michaels, they tell us global warming is happening and it is manmade. But the point is it’s not the end of the world as it’s been told.

Surprised to hear that the ranks of the skeptics had been thinned of two of its stars, I checked wth Lindzen and Michaels.

The New York Times’ editorial writers have apparently spent the last 11 months in a Rip Van Winkle-like state of unconsciousness when it comes to climate change.

Monday‘s lead editorial, “In Climate Denial Again,” railed about the 19 of 20 or so Republican Senate candidates who do not “accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.” The Times contrasted those deniers with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2007 report, the group’s “most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change,” and a 2000 promise by George W. Bush to cap carbon dioxide emissions

But nowhere in the editorial did the Times recall Climategate or the other related global warming-related “gates” that the November 2009 scandal touched off—all of which, no doubt, helped make skeptics of 95% of Republican Senate candidates. So here’s a quick recap of what happened over the past year to the legendary scientific “consensus” on global warming.

Last November, a host of private and candid e-mails between climate alarmist-scientists stored at the University of East Anglia (UK) somehow made its way into the public domain and history. Like a shot heard around the world, the e-mails instantaneously validated what the climate skeptics had been saying for more than a decade about the alarmists — that they had cooked the books on global warming science and then conspired to silence and belittle their critics.

The Washington Post today editorializedthat the Virginia attorney general is on a witch hunt. [Click for Cuccinelli's new investigative demand to the University of Virginia.] But even the Post is not too thrillled with Mann’s work, labeling it “not unacceptably poor.” At least now we’re all only debating how “poor” Mann’s hockey stick is.

The Post tries to exonerate Mann by claiming that he was cleared by the National Academy of Sciences and his employer, Penn State. Neither claim is true.

First, while the post refers to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, it was actually a panel of the non-prestigious, for-hire National Research Council that actually reviewed Mann’s work. Below is the NRC’s conclusion about the hockey stick:

The radical green movement is rapidly trying to distance itself from Discovery Channel gunman James J. Lee. That will be difficult to do.

An armed Lee walked Wednesday afternoon into the offices of the Discovery Channel, took hostages and demanded that the TV network alter its programming to suit his demands as laid out in an 11-point manifesto. The incident ended when police shot him dead.

Lee called for saving the Earth by getting rid of people, whom he referred to as “filth,” and stopping global warming. He called for TV programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility, and exposing civilization’s “disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed.”

“All human procreation and farming must cease,” he raved, because “the planet does not need humans.”

Curious to see how the greens would react to the incident, I visited the Grist.org web site, perhaps the most popular green website, where I found an article by Grist senior editor Lisa Hymas entitled, “Discovery hostage taker is a population-obsessed eco-wacko.”. I read on as I had never seen one green refer to another as an “eco-wacko.”

Penn State University just exonerated Professor Michael Mann for wrongdoing related to Climategate. While that good news for Mann is no surprise, it came at a dear cost to Penn State – its integrity.

Soon after Climategate broke last November, Penn State convened an internal committee to investigate Mann, the primary author of the now-infamous and discredited “hockey stick” global warming graph.

Hopes for a bona fide investigation were dashed when the preliminary results were released in February. To the joy of climate alarmists, Penn State announced via press release that Mann was cleared of three of the four allegations against him (regarding falsification/suppression of data, deletion of e-mails/data and misuse of confidential information).  But if one looks past the release and reads the committee’s report, it becomes obvious the fix was in.

The preliminary review included the Climategate e-mails themselves, an interview with Mann, and documents submitted by Mann. While one committee member did informally endeavor to get external views on Mann, they only came from Texas A&M’s Gerald North and Stanford University’s Donald Kennedy.

Who would have guessed that 18 months into the Obama administration and a nearly filibuster-proof, Democratic-controlled Congress that cap-and-trade would still be just a green dream? Not many. But then not many people would probably think there’s enough time or political will to make cap-and-trade happen in the time remaining for this session of Congress. That’s wrong, too.

Since its high-water mark of House passage of the Waxman-Markey bill late in June 2009, it’s been all downhill for cap-and-trade. The health care debate delayed a Senate bill, and the tea party movement made cap-and-trade one of its top targets. By the time the Kerry-Boxer bill was introduced last October, the Republican Members of Chairman Barbara Boxer’s Environment and Public Works Committee felt secure enough to boycott the committee vote on the bill, rendering the unanimous Democratic committee vote meaningless.

The continuing inquisition of the health care bill helped bring about the election of Republican Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts and the evaporation of the Democrats’ 60-vote, filibuster-proof margin. When Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) dared work with Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) on a cap-and-trade bill, the political blowback for Graham was so strong that he looked for the first excuse out, which came in the form of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s supposed prioritization of the immigration bill over cap-and-trade. The Kerry-Lieberman bill has now been relegated to perhaps being offered as a mere amendment to a Senate energy bill, the main focus of which may be the BP oil spill.