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12
Oct 10

Pat Toomey: Global Warming Pollution Is ‘Very Much Disputed’

Pat Toomey, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, agrees with Christine O’Donnell about global warming. Like O’Donnell and the rest of the GOP Senate candidates, Toomey questions the overwhelming scientific evidence that manmade pollution from burning billions of tons of oil and coal is warming the planet. “There is much debate in the scientific community as to the precise sources of global warming,” Toomey claimed in June, even though the National Academies of Science have explained that the “compelling case that climate change is occurring and is caused in large part by human activities is based on a strong, credible body of evidence.” Responding to a caller on WITF radio on Friday, Toomey expanded on his ignorance of scientific reality:

My view is: I think the data is pretty clear. There has been an increase in the surface temperature of the planet over the course of the last 100 years or so. I think it’s clear that that has happened. The extent to which that has been caused by human activity I think is not as clear. I think that is still very much disputed and has been debated.

Listen here:

“I just can’t see the argument for doing great economic damage, costing tens of thousands of jobs here in Pennsylvania, for a very uncertain gain, if any,” Toomey concluded, attacking policy to limit greenhouse pollution. Toomey’s top contributors include coal giant Murray Energy ($ 16,655) and Koch Industries ($ 15,000).

Think Progress

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11
Oct 10

Brave scientist calls out the global warming fraudsters

Big money and big politics have corrupted Big Science, and global warming is the proof.
American Thinker Blog

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10
Oct 10

The Corruption at the Heart of the Global Warming Scam

John

Hal Lewis is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. A distinguished scientist who has been, among other things, the Chairman of the Technology Panel of the Defense Science Board, Lewis was a member of the American Physical Society for sixty-seven years. Until last Wednesday, when he resigned from the Society in protest over the corruption of science by global warming alarmism. His letter of resignation is reproduced in full here. These are some highlights:

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. …

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. …

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.

Power Line

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10
Oct 10

Nobel Peace Prize is Biased Toward the West: Global Times, People’s Republic of China

Does the West, through the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, unfairly single out China for criticism? According to this editorial from China’s strictly state-run Global Times, awarding Chinese democracy activist Liu Xiaobo with the Peace Prize was a ‘display of arrogance and prejudice against a country that has made the most remarkable economic and social progress.’ Once again, the current Chinese government seems to regard economic prowess as a pass for not providing the political freedoms enshrined in its own constitution.

The somewhat restrained government-approved editorial starts out this way:

Friday the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, an incarcerated Chinese criminal.

The Nobel committee once again displayed its arrogance and prejudice against a country that has made the most remarkable economic and social progress in the past three decades.

The Nobel Prize has been generally perceived as a prestigious award in China, but many Chinese feel the Peace Prize is loaded with Western ideology.

Last century, the prize was awarded several times to pro-Western advocates in the former Soviet Union, including Mikhail Gorbachev, whose efforts directly led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Western preference of the Nobel committee didn’t disappear with the end of the Cold War.

READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, your most trusted translator and aggregator of foreign news and views about our nation.

The Moderate Voice

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9
Oct 10

Bill Maher Applauds Osama Bin Laden for His Stance on Global Warming

If global warming is the modern secular religion, HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher has bought into it hook, line and sinker.

On the Oct. 8 broadcast of his program, immediately following a segment criticizing a congressional candidate that was a Nazis reenactor for exercising bad judgment, Maher ironically had some words of praise for the founder of al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden, who is believed to have ordered the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which caused the deaths of over 2,700 people on American soil.

Why would bin Laden be worthy of such praise? Because of his statement on the issue of anthropogenic global warming, which according to Maher was devoid of the usual violent rhetoric one might expect from a leader of extremist Islam.

“All right, let me ask — let me quote another person who is not in favor in this country and that’s Osama bin Laden,” Maher said. “He put out a tape last week. And there was nothing about violence or attacking America. See, Lindsay Lohan, people can change. It was about the Pakistani flood.”

Maher read the quote from bin Laden, which suggested the industrialized nations were at fault for the recent flooding in Pakistan.

“And his quote – show it there, he said, ‘Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury,’” Maher said, reading bin Laden’s quote. “‘The phenomenon is an actual fact. All the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear the responsibility for testimony global warming crisis.’”

And based on that statement, Maher determined bin Laden was worthy of praise because they agreed on an issue that Maher’s political opponents haven’t bought into.
“Well, I guess my question is, how come a guy in a cave gets it better than every Republican voting for the Senate?” Maher said.

That statement received applause from the “Real Time” in-studio audience, but later in the segment, Maher suggested bin Laden was speaking out in goodwill to draw attention to this crisis in Pakistan because it really didn’t get a lot of coverage in the media.

“Let just say this,” Maher said. “He made this statement because Pakistan – this really didn’t make the papers, but Pakistan had a giant flood this year. And it is the sixth biggest country in the world, and a fifth of it was underwater and 21 million people were displaced. And it was worse than the tsunami.”

S.E. Cupp, author of “Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity” suggested to Maher that maybe he was trying to capitalize on the flood by blaming the United States and whipping up more anti-American sentiment in Pakistan.

“A lot of people think the United States created this flood,” Cupp said. “And that’s the kind of meme he is trying to jump on.”

Nonetheless, Maher didn’t concede that, but just suggested bin Laden was correct and alluded the recent heat wave in Southern California as another example of global warming.

“Global warming may have something to do with it,” Maher replied. “That’s what he was saying. It was 113 degrees in this city last week. Maybe it was more, but the thermometer broke. I’m not lying. The thermometer broke.”

NewsBusters.org – Exposing Liberal Media Bias

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9
Oct 10

OR Gov Candidate Chris Dudley: ‘I Don’t Know’ If Global Warming Is Man-Made

Like Christine O’Donnell and other know-nothing Tea Party candidates, Chris Dudley — the Republican nominee for Oregon’s governor — doesn’t know and doesn’t care if global warming is caused by fossil fuel pollution. Toeing the party line, Dudley opposes the Western Climate Initiative global warming agreement as a “cap-tax-trade” system that would “do damage to the economy and job creation.” He even bashed a weatherization initiative as a boondoggle. “Climate change is probably caused by a variety of factors,” Dudley said in a September interview with the Oregonian, “but that debate is beside the point.” In a gubernatorial debate on September 30, Dudley finally admitted he doesn’t know if pollution is causing global warming:

My thought on global warming is this: that global warming exists, man contributes to it, how much, I don’t know. I don’t know how much is man made and how much is natural.

Watch it:

In contrast, Democratic candidate John Kitzhaber is clear: “I do believe climate change is human-caused, and it poses an enormous threat to our country and to our nation.” While Dudley has been silent, Kitzhaber has issued a strategic roadmap for green economic empowerment in Oregon.

Think Progress

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8
Oct 10

O’Donnell On Whether Global Warming Is Manmade: ‘I Don’t Have An Opinion On That’

CNN’s Jim Acosta had the opportunity to interview GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell yesterday, weeks after the tea party favorite swore off national media appearances. O’Donnell gave Acosta the GOP line on tax cuts, health care, and national security, and joined the rest of the Republican Party’s candidates for U.S. Senate who question the science that global warming is manmade:

ACOSTA: Global warming, is it manmade? Does human activity contribute to global warming?

O’DONNELL: I don’t have an opinion on that. I would have to look at a specific piece of legislation when it comes to cap and trade, the bill that has been pout there supposedly out there to combat climate change. I’m opposed to cap and trade because of the economic consequences. What it will do to the individual household, skyrocketing our utility bills beyond what we can afford, and it doesn’t address the real issue it was intended to address.

Watch it:

The Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson notes, “In May, 2010, the National Academies of Science reported to Congress that ‘the U.S. should act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop a national strategy to adapt to the inevitable impacts of climate change’ because global warming is ’caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for — and in many cases is already affecting — a broad range of human and natural systems.’”

For more on O’Donnell’s record, check out our ThinkProgress report: The Old Adventures of New Christine.

Think Progress

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7
Oct 10

Environmental Skeptic Offers Fresh Perspective on Global Warming Debate

If you take Al Gore and replace his global warming apocalypticism with a careful pragmatism and his insistence for title=”blocked::http://www.heritage.org/Research/Commentary/2010/09/The-Costs-of-Cap-and-Trade” href=”http://www.heritage.org/Research/Commentary/2010/09/The-Costs-of-Cap-and-Trade”>energy taxes with a love for human innovation, research and creativity, you will end up with someone similar to Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg. At href=”http://www.thebloggersbriefing.com/”>The Heritage Foundation Bloggers Briefing this Tuesday, Lomborg said he considers global warming to be a legitimate threat – one that is exaggerated and can be handled through the power of human ingenuity.

Lomborg shows his other way to tackle global warming in his new film Cool It. Forget about onerous cap-and-trade legislation, which href=”http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2010/01/what-boxer-kerry-will-cost-the-economy”>Heritage estimates would cost the average family of four $ 3,000 by 2035. Instead, Lomborg sees solutions in further research and experimentation.

One of many possible solutions mentioned in the film is predicated on something Benjamin Franklin discovered when a volcano in Laki, Iceland erupted in 1783. id=”more-44506″>

Franklin made a connection between the volcano’s eruption and the change in the climate. His theory was confirmed in 1991 when scientists determined that the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines href=”http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volcanoes_work/climate_effects.html”>cooled the earth’s overall temperature by almost one degree Fahrenheit.

A href=”http://reason.com/archives/2009/11/03/superfreaking-out-over-climate”>group of entrepreneurs who work for an organization known as href=”http://www.intellectualventures.com/Home.aspx”>Intellectual Ventures have now come up with a way to cool the earth’s temperature using a hose that injects sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. The hose imitates what the eruption in Pinatubo did to lower the earth’s temperature. Such efforts to control the earth’s temperature are known as href=”http://geo-engineering.blogspot.com/”>geoengineering.

There are, of course, legitimate href=”http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2009-04-19-geoengineering_N.htm”>objections to the idea. But if injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere won’t work, maybe another geoengeneering proposal called href=”http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=albedo-yachts-and-marine-clouds”>Cloud Brightening will. The goal of Cloud Brightening is to make marine clouds reflect more sunlight back into space, which would offset Co2.

Geoengineering is still very new and purposely changing the earth’s temperature by even one or two degrees may have href=”http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2009/Murphygeoengineering.html”>considerable unintended consequences that include ocean acidification or even international tensions (India becomes indignant because they miss their monsoon season). However, if global warming is a real threat ( href=”../2010/02/18/the-science-behind-global-warming-not-so-irrefutable/”>which is still highly debatable) and a geoengineering solution like Cloud Brightening doesn’t work, America’s innovative history can assure that a solution will come soon enough.

Lomborg said the U.S. government should spend 0.2 percent of GDP on researching the issue, but there is no reason private organizations and philanthropists can’t take care of the job without Uncle Sam’s help. If there emerges evidence showing that global warming is a serious threat to America’s future, philanthropists, environmentalists and concerned citizens won’t hesitate to fund projects like Intellectual Ventures.

Once all the “poverty fighting” programs of Johnson’s Great Society began, charitable href=”http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/hhs/welfare-spending#_edn50″>giving decreased dramatically, and when welfare reform took place in the 90’s, giving started to increase again. This gives us good reason to believe that individuals will give to a cause if the government gets out of the way. But the federal government has already decided for us that global warming is a pressing issue, and its solution, is once again, more taxes. If individuals decide for themselves that global warming is a serious threat, the solution would mean voluntary, private funding for the things that made America great in the first place: ingenuity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Mark Chenoweth is currently a member of the Young Leaders Program at the Heritage Foundation. For more information on interning at Heritage, please visit: href=”http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm”>http://www.heritage.org/about/departments/ylp.cfm

The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.

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7
Oct 10

Shocker!!! New Study Says Global Warming is Caused by……THE SUN!

Uh-Oh here it comes! Al Gore and his fellow members of the Church of Global Warming are about to build a giant fire hose so they can put out the Sun. They haven’t announced it as of yet, but they will once they read this new study published in Nature Journal which indicates changes in the Sun’s energy out put is a major factor in the global temperature increases seen in recent years.The study downplays the influence of human-driven carbon emissions. In other words, the only way to stop global warming may be to get rid of the Star in the middle of the solar system.

As the Sun has shown decreased levels of activity during the past decade, it had been generally thought that it was warming the Earth less, not more. Thus, scientists considered that temperature rises seen in global databases must mean that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions – in particular of CO2 – must be exerting a powerful warming effect.

Now, however, boffins working at Imperial College in London (and one in Colorado) have analysed detailed sunlight readings taken from 2004 to 2007 by NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite. They found that although the Sun was putting out less energy overall than usual, in line with observations showing decreased sunspot activity, it actually emitted more in the key visible-light and near-infrared wavelengths.

That visible-light and near-infrared wavelength energy does a great job at penetrating the atmosphere and heat up the surface of the earth (it is that same kind of light that goes through your car windows and make your automobile leather seats burn your butt when you sit down on a summer afternoon. So while many scientists were saying that because the Sun has been pretty calm for the last few decades, the earth should be cooling, in actuality the earth should have been warming at the time.

Contrary to expectations, the amount of energy reaching the Earth at visible wavelengths increased rather than decreased as the Sun’s activity declined, causing this warming effect.

“These results are challenging what we thought we knew about the Sun’s effect on our climate,” says Professor Joanna Haigh of Imperial, lead author of the study.

“It does require verification, but our findings could be too important to not publish them now,” she told hefty boffinry mag Nature, which published the new research. The prof considers that increased sun-powered warming probably had as much effect on global temperature as carbon during the period of her study. .

…Nonetheless, the research indicates that the Sun’s influence on the climate is poorly understood, and that current climate models will probably have to be amended in some way. Other scientists have lately said that solar influences are stronger than established climate theory had originally estimated.

It has also been more and more widely admitted among climate scientists in recent years that among human-caused emissions, other factors – in particular black carbon (soot) and sulphate aerosols – may exercise an influence as powerful as that of greenhouse gases.

While this study is only a first step in the investigation it does poke another hole in the climate change alarmist’s sail. It also gives Al Gore a new career, Solar Fireman.

YID With LID

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5
Oct 10

Levi Strauss Exec Says Measure To Suspend Global Warming Law Would ‘Turn Back The Clock’ For Business

Levi Strauss & Co., the California-based apparel giant that invented blue jeans over a century ago, has come out in strong opposition to Proposition 23, a ballot initiative that would suspend the state’s landmark global warming law, calling it “backward thinking.” In a blog post by Senior Vice President Amy Leonard, the company describes how the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32) has spurred “the clean technology industry and clean energy businesses.” Backed by out-of-state oil companies and the Chamber of Commerce, Tea Party groups are trying to suspend the law, which Leonard says has given California businesses “critical tools” for “energy and climate innovation“:

Proposition 23 would eliminate critical tools recently put in place to promote energy efficiency. It would discourage energy and climate innovation by making it more expensive for businesses to invest in necessary research and development. It would turn back the clock by removing incentives intended to move us ahead.

Levi Strauss is joined by other California-based global companies in opposing Proposition 23, including Clif Bar, The North Face, the Gap, and eBay, the company once run by Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman — who stands in opposition to AB 32.

Think Progress