Clearing the air on fossil fuels: Here is the rest of the story

Commentary by James Shott

A few years ago Hal Willis, a scientist from the University of California, Santa Barbara, resigned from the American Physical Society after 67 years as a member, citing the global warming/climate change issue and the blind allegiance to global warming theory by so many of the Society’s members, as well as the organization’s failure to challenge these members in the name of true scientific investigation, and citing trillions of dollars of research funding as a major reason the practice of true science on climate change has been replaced by ideological advocacy.

Of the climate change issue Willis said, “It is the greatest pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a scientist.” His position has support from other scientists, among them Dr. Ivar Giaever, a 1973 Nobel Prize-Winner for physics.

Giaever joined more than 70 Nobel Science Laureates in signing an open letter in October of 2008 expressing strong support for then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, who had said “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” Seven years later he believes Obama’s warning was a “ridiculous statement.” He told a Nobel forum last July, “I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem.”

Dr. Richard Lindzen is emeritus professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT. Citing the growing shrillness of the cries about “global warming” during his 30 years there, during which time he says “the climate has changed remarkably little,” he notes that the less the climate changes, the louder the warnings of climate catastrophe become.

In a recent video presentation by Prager University, he said that participants in the climate change debate fall into one of three groups.

Group One, he says, is associated with the scientific part of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Working Group 1), and are scientists that generally believe recent climate change is due to burning fossil fuels, which releases CO2 (carbon dioxide) and might eventually dangerously harm the planet.

Group Two is made up of scientists who, like Lindzen, don’t see the problem identified by Group One as an especially serious one. They say there are many reasons why the climate changes – the sun, clouds, oceans, the orbital variations of the Earth, as well as a myriad of other inputs, none of which are fully understood.

Group Three is made up of politicians, environmentalists and the media. Climate alarmism provides politicians money and power and environmentalists also get money as well as confirmation of their religious zealotry for the environment, while the issue satisfies the media’s need for a cause to support, money and headlines. Said Lindzen, “Doomsday scenarios sell.”

From the climate alarmists’ point of view, virtually every problem on Earth stems from climate change, as Lindzen said, “everything from acne to the Syrian civil war.”

The Director of the Center for Industrial Progress, and author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein, shows us in a Prager University video presentation that contains thorough sourcing for his assertions that burning fossil fuels has improved the lives of millions in the developed world by helping solve their biggest environmental challenges, purified their water and air, made their cities and homes more sanitary and kept them safe from potential catastrophic climate change.

Could we have built reservoirs, purification plants, and laid networks of pipes to bring clean water to homes without fossil fuels, he asks? Fossil fuels can do the same for those in the developing world, if the powers that be will allow it. More fossil fuel use equals more clean water, he said.

He further shows that despite an increase in fossil fuel use from 1.5 billion tons in 1970 to around 2.0 billion tons in 2010, emissions dropped from about 300 million tons to about 150 million tons during the same period. This resulted from using anti-pollution technology powered by … fossil fuels.

If CO2 emissions cause harmful changes in the environment, and if emissions have increased, then more people must be suffering “climate-related deaths,” due to things like droughts, floods, storms and extreme temperatures. But no, Epstein said. “In the last eighty years, as CO2 emissions have rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths worldwide has rapidly declined – by 98 percent.”

“In sum,” Epstein said, “fossil fuels don’t take a naturally safe environment and make it dangerous; they empower us to take a naturally dangerous environment and make it cleaner and safer.”

A large segment of the public has bought into the “we are killing our environment” idea put forth by the climate alarmists, and now meekly accept it when the United Nations and their own government advocate harmful solutions to climate change, ignoring the mounting pile of contrary data. Consequently, the economic damage done to regions of the U.S. and the thousands of American workers put on the unemployment line by the foolish policies of the Obama administration basically are accepted as necessary.

A strong case has been made that fossil fuels aren’t significantly harmful, and that they have been and will be extraordinarily helpful to the people of the world, if only we will listen.

Cross-posted from Observations

A look at the world’s largest solar energy production facility

Commentary by James Shott

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, built by Bechtel, is a joint effort of NRG, Google, and BrightSource Energy, and is said to be the largest state-of-the-art renewable energy production project of its kind.

Ivanpah is a $2.2 billion solar project in the California desert consisting of three solar thermal power plants on a 4,000-acre tract of public land near the Mojave Desert and the California-Nevada border. The facility was financed in part by $1.5 billion in federal loans, utilizes more than 170,000 mirrors mounted to the ground that reflect sunlight up to three 450-foot-high towers topped by boilers that heat water to create steam, which in turn is used to generate electricity.

The green energy and climate change lobbies are, of course, excited about from this dream-come-true example of how the U.S., and eventually the world, can survive and thrive without pollution-causing coal-burning and natural gas-burning electricity production facilities.

But their hopes have exceeded reality, as is so often the case with these idealistic dreams. The project has three major problems, one of which has produced a huge rift between the left’s internal factions. While green energy folks are ecstatic over the huge solar plant, other environmentalists are outraged that the plant has killed thousands of birds, many of which are fried to death.

The second problem is that the so-called green energy plant is not as green as you might expect: It burns fossil fuels and produces pollution. Ivanpah burns natural gas each morning for start-up, up to 525 million cubic feet of natural gas annually, and reportedly burned 867,740 million BTU of natural gas, which is enough to power the annual needs of 20,660 Southern California homes, and it emitted 46,084 metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2014.

Furthermore, it has so far failed to produce the expected power it is contractually required to deliver to PG&E Corp. As a result, the solar plant may be forced to shut down unless the California Public Utilities Commission gives permission for PG&E to overlook the shortfall and give Ivanpah another year to sort out its problems.

The Wall Street Journal reported that spokesmen for Ivanpah’s operator, BrightSource, and NRG declined to comment on its future, but NRG said it has taken more than a year to adjust equipment and learn how to best run it. The Journal also reported that the Energy Department supports giving the plant, which started operating in early 2014, more time.

Advocates also paint an over-positive picture of solar energy job creation. The Solar Energy Industries Association touts spectacular job growth in the solar industry, boasting “the solar industry continues to support robust job growth, creating 35,052 new jobs in 2015, a growth rate of approximately twelve times greater than that of the overall economy.”

The overall job creation rate was a pitiful 1.74 percent, and 12 times that figure means roughly 21 percent for the solar industry. That sounds pretty good, but fast job growth during new industry “booms” is not unusual. Touting such growth is good PR, even when it exaggerates reality.

But when you analyze this project, it quickly becomes clear that government has more to do with this increase than does the actual market demand for workers in solar energy. You, the taxpayer, heavily subsidized this industry, and when taxpayer money pays the bills, an industry can and does create jobs without a real demand for them.

Under President Barack Obama, the federal government has wasted billions of dollars of hard-earned taxpayer money on green energy efforts that failed, or under-performed, even as it enacted policies that punished Americans working in the coal industry and related businesses with substantial unemployment, created income problems in the economies of coal producing states, and burdened all Americans with higher energy prices. The administration’s tunnel vision on reducing the non-existent or miniscule effects on the environment of fossil fuel energy production that have powered the U.S. and most of the world for decades, has caused untold misery.

The heralded Solyndra debacle put 1,100 people out of work when it closed down, and wasted $535 million in government loans. And, the Abound Solar plant, which got $400 million in federal loan guarantees in 2010, when the Obama administration sought to use stimulus funds to promote green energy, filed for bankruptcy two years later. That facility sits unoccupied, is littered with hazardous waste, broken glass and contaminated water, and will require an estimated $3.7 million to clean and repair the building for use.

None of this pain and suffering was needed; the normal progress of technological advancement would eventually have gradually replaced fossil fuels as the primary source of electricity, when those less polluting methods were up to the task, like the automobile replaced the horse and buggy.

Once the left gets an idea, however, it dives in head first, eyes closed, with a “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” approach that generally produces more harm than good.

Barack Obama lets nothing get in the way of his ideological fantasies, least of all reality. Any harm and destruction that occurs is regarded as necessary collateral damage on the way to his socialist Utopia.

Cross-posted from Observations

Credit where credit is due for human-caused climate change advocates

You have to admire the determination of those that persist in promoting the idea that what humans do as they live on the Earth is the proximate cause of severe damage to the environment. They believe that having evolved from living in caves to using the Earth’s riches to make electricity, fuel vehicles, and improve their lives, humans are slowly killing the planet.

It is certainly reasonable to investigate and discuss this idea, but the debate must be honest and any argument has to be supported by data, pure data, not manipulated data, and not just “friendly” data that is constructed in such a way as to support a particular point of view.

In this debate over whether human activities negatively affect the environment, talking points have replaced factual data, talking points carefully, and sometimes deceitfully constructed from the most favorable pieces that support the argument. We know this because the arguments don’t reason out, and also because some of these prominent scientists got caught with their hands in the cookie jar a few years ago.

But the manmade climate change faction is a stubborn lot and stick to the talking points no matter what other information may be circulating, and when new arguments come along, or when there is a spike in the discussion favoring the perspective contrary to theirs, they shift into high gear.

For example, talking points appeared, of all places, in the 2015 State of the Union message, when President Barack Obama presented faulty information as truth when he spoke to the nation. The President of the United States said, “2014 was the planet’s warmest year on record.”

Some data support this assertion, but even that data isn’t definitive. The supposed increase is just two-tenths of a degree Celsius, but is within NASA’s margin of error. And, the “record” at the top of which 2014 purportedly sits goes back only 135 years, a mere blink of the eye in the Earth’s long history. Essentially what this means is that at some point in that brief eye blink the temperature may have been higher than at any other time in that eye blink, or maybe not.

Playing havoc with the climate change faction is the Medieval Warm Period that ran from the 9^th century to the 14^th century. Some say it was actually warmer then than now, while others say it really was about the same as the mid 20^th century.

How did that happen? Did the Vikings burn fossil fuels in their factories, boats and land vehicles? If not, the Earth must have somehow managed to warm itself. And then it cooled itself, because after the Medieval Warm Period came the Little Ice Age when the Vikings must have abandoned the factories, gone back to sailing vessels and ox carts, and killed all the methane producing animals, causing 500 years of dramatic global cooling.

There are other warm periods further gumming up the argument: the Roman Warm Period of approximately 2,000 years ago, and the Minoan Warm Period of roughly 3,000 years ago.

An Associated Press story on Jan. 16, that might have been the impetus for the president’s dragging the subject into the State of the Union message, reported that 2014 was the hottest year on record, citing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

The AP has since clarified the story, noting that the case is much less certain than originally stated. The NASA press release upon which the AP story relied neglected to say that NASA put only a 38 percent certainty on the assertion that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880.

The human-caused climate change idea is fraught with problems going back decades. Back in 1970 and 1971 newspapers across the country predicted a coming ice age due to atmospheric pollution, and other catastrophes. More recently, the Hockey Stick Graph made with faulty data, and the Climate Research Unit’s email revelations, cast grave doubt on the conclusions about climate change.

Considering that the Little Ice Age started in the 14^th century and lasted 500 years until the 19^th century, if the warming period that followed lasts only as long as The Little Ice Age, which is not a long period for either a warming or cooling, it will continue until roughly the 24^th century, or between 2300 and 2400 AD. Therefore, should anyone be surprised if the climate is warming in 2015? We should, in fact, be very concerned if it isn’t warming.

Natural occurrences have produced alternate periods of warming and cooling for at least thousands of years, and all scientists agree on that. Earth should be warming now, given the brief time since the last cooling trend ended. Is the warming proceeding faster than before? Probably not. But if so, why? The sun? Man’s activities? Was it something else, like what happened in the Medieval Warm Period? Probably.

We don’t need to implement expensive and harmful measures that will make negligible changes if and until the evidence – reliable evidence, not manipulated evidence – is far more compelling than it is today. Perhaps what really needs to be investigated is the role of filthy lucre in this controversy.

Taking a look at how green energy is working in Europe and America

As the United States grapples with conflicting ideas about whether and to what extent man causes global climate change, the zealous movement to do away with using fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas to produce electricity and switch to “green” sources like wind and solar energy goes forward, full speed ahead.

Far ahead of the U.S. in this campaign are some nations in Europe that some policymakers tout as having adopted smart energy policy. They think the U.S. should follow the lead of countries like Germany and Spain and more heavily subsidize renewable energies like wind, solar, biomass, etc. and tax fossil fuel users more heavily.

Now that Europe’s green energy policies have been in place for several years, a look to see how they have worked might help us decide whether this is a good plan for the U.S. to follow.

From Canadafreepress,com comes information about Germany’s energy policies. The news here is not so good; green energy policies are driving up energy prices and forcing hundreds of thousands of people into energy poverty. Specifically, a study of Germany’s experiences found:

• Residential German electricity prices are nearly three times higher than electricity prices in the U.S. 
• As many as 800,000 Germans have had their power cut off because of an inability to pay for rising energy costs. 
• Germany’s feed-in tariff scheme provides lavish subsidies to renewable energy producers. 
• On-shore wind has required feed-in tariffs that are in excess of 300 percent higher than market prices. 
• Germany’s Renewable Energy Levy, which subsidizes renewable energy production, cost German households $9.6 billion in 2013. 
• The cost to expand transmission networks to integrate renewables stands at $33.6 billion, which grid operators say accounts “for only a fraction of the cost of the energy transition.”

Information from the Institute for Energy Research produced some data on the effects of Spain’s push for green energy that began in 1994. The program involved tariffs, quotas and subsidies, and has earned kudos from international leaders, including President Barack Obama.

The Spaniards have seen increases in electricity rates from 2005 to 2011 of 92 percent for domestic users and 78 percent for industrial users, while during that same period the U.S. saw rate increases of 24 percent for domestic users and19 percent for industrial users from fossil fuel produced electricity.

Here is a comparison of Spanish and American rates per kilowatt-hour:

• Spain – Domestic $29.46 and Industrial $14.84 
• U.S. - Domestic $11.69 and Industrial $6.81.

While prices were increasing in Spain the level of carbon dioxide actually rose, rather than declining, increasing 34.5 percent from 1994 to 2011. As a result of this the Spanish government confessed in 2012 that it can’t afford to continue subsidizing green energy.

Meanwhile, the French energy and environment minister, Segolene Royal, who was appointed to the position last spring, plans to create 100,000 jobs by 2017 with her green energy growth initiative. She wants to reduce France’s 75 percent reliance on nuclear energy for electricity production to 50 percent by 2025 by investing in wind, solar, biomass and marine energy sources. She also plans to help 500,000 low-income families add insulation to their homes.

Writing on HotAir.com Erika Johnsen points out that to accomplish these high-minded goals France will have to throw “gobs and gobs of money” into the mix through subsidies, tax credits and/or consumer quotas, which inevitably end up being paid by consumers through higher prices, higher taxes, or increasing France’s national debt, which is already a serious problem. The French economy is weak, much weaker than Germany’s, and we have already seen what happened in that grand green experiment.

In apparent ignorance of these horrid experiences from our European brothers and sisters, the ideologically blinded Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is driving the U.S. toward green energy use. The EPA does this not through the natural evolution of increased efficiency and value of green energies that gradually supplant older and dirtier fuels, but by punishing the existing producers of the major fuel sources of coal and natural gas that account for 66 percent of our electricity production.

This approach is responsible for killing jobs and harming local economies, and producing higher prices for consumers as the EPA goes merrily along, oblivious to the destruction in its wake, and to the misery the thoughtless drive for green energy has produced for Spain and Germany.

The administration’s “feel-good” emotional support for three risky green companies cost three-quarters of a billion taxpayer dollars. Solar energy companies Solyndra and Abound Solar wasted $529 million and $70 million respectively, and last December hybrid carmaker Fisker Automotive filed for bankruptcy adding another $139 million to the tab.

And now climatologist John L. Casey warns of a shift in global climate, a cold spell to last 30 years, and it has absolutely nothing to do with carbon dioxide emissions. It’s due to the sun. “All you have to do is trust natural cycles, and follow the facts; and that leads you to the inevitable conclusion that the sun controls the climate, and that a new cold era has begun," he said.

Perhaps the EPA will forsake the “green fantasy” in favor of reality.

The election of 2014 is over. What did we learn? Where do we go?

Last week’s mid-term election results surprised almost everyone in some way. Republicans won control of the US Senate, increased their majority in the House of Representatives by 13 seats, and won a number of other victories, as summarized here by The Washington Post:

• Net gain of 8 legislative chambers, increasing from 59 to 67 out of a total of 98 (Nebraska is technically unicameral, but it is dominated by Republicans as well).
• This sets a record for the modern era, breaking the one in 2012.
• Republicans now have total control of 24 states, controlling legislative chambers as well as the governor’s office.
• Republicans have supermajority status in 8 states.
• Control is split in 17 states (3 of whose governors flipped from Democrat to Republican).
• Republicans now have four lieutenant governorships due to defeating Democrat incumbents.
• Democrats have total control in 6 states.

Given the broad and deep defeat of Democrats across the nation it is apparent that the country disapproves of what liberal Democrats have been doing. Those who voted elected Republicans in big numbers, and those that didn’t vote made a strong statement of non-support for the radical policies of liberal Democrats.

A day after the election, President Barack Obama was defiant, showing no inkling that he understood that his policies and the direction he and his fellow liberals had set were to blame for what happened the previous day.

“What we’ve seen now for a number of cycles is that the American people just want to see work done here in Washington,” he said. “They’re frustrated by the gridlock. They’d like to see more cooperation, and I think all of us have a responsibility, me in particular, to try to make that happen.”

That sounds promising, but no more had he sounded the trumpet of cooperation than he committed to going around Congress with a plan to stop deportations and allow as many as 5 million illegal aliens to stay in the United States, at least temporarily. Given that he did nothing on immigration for the first six years of his tenure, except weaken border security, why is this so important now?

His position not only is a slap in the face of Congressional leaders, but also of the American people. Seventy-four percent of voters said in an exit poll by The Polling Company that President Obama should work with Congress rather than go around Congress on immigration.

The Polling Company results showed that "majorities of men (75 percent), women (74 percent), whites (79 percent), blacks (59 percent), and Hispanics (54 percent)," oppose an executive amnesty, and that opinion was shared by Republicans (92 percent) and Independents (80 percent), and even by a majority of Democrats (51 percent).

He is also on the wrong side of the Obamacare issue. The Real Clear Politics Average of polls conducted in October shows that nearly 52 percent of those polled are opposed to Obamacare, while only 38 percent favor it.

Nevertheless, "On healthcare, there are certainly some lines I'm going to draw," Mr. Obama said on Wednesday. "Repeal of the law I won't sign," and he will resist efforts to improve the bill, such as by getting rid of the individual mandate.

This election was certainly not a mandate for Congress and the president to work together to pass the same kinds of legislation that liberal Democrats favored before the election. The people want change.

The mission statement for the new Republican majority should be “First, do no harm.” That means no amnesty, and fix or repeal Obamacare, among other things.

The federal government is too big, too expensive, too intrusive; it is out of control and a danger to the freedom of the American people: Government must be reigned in. That is what the election meant.

Participants in a nationwide CBS News poll in late October were asked what was the most important issue that would affect their vote in the upcoming election. The stagnant economy topped the list at 38 percent.

To get the economy moving we have to cut tax rates across the board, both corporate and personal, which will put millions of dollars in the hands of people and businesses to spend as they see fit.

And then:

• Cut government spending. There’s more than enough waste in administrative agencies to “pay for” tax cuts.
• Repeal the tax on medical devices imposed by the Affordable Care Act that punishes companies developing needed technology.
• Approve the XL Pipeline, and both create jobs and help end dependence on foreign oil.
• Reign in the EPA, remove the shackles on domestic energy production. Defund it, if necessary.
• Secure the borders and stop the influx of illegals, drug cartels and other criminals from Mexico, and potential terrorists. Deport or jail the criminals among the illegals.
• Start restoring our military to its former strength, and try to reacquire those seasoned officers driven to retirement by the Obama administration.
• Restore selection of US Senators to state legislatures, as it was originally designed.

The left wants to shut down opposition, rather than debate issues

Commentary by James Shott

Not everyone on the left is intolerant of contrary ideas, or afraid of open debate of ideas, or so convinced of their own superiority that they deem civil and informed debate unnecessary, but many of them are.

Back in 2010, thirty liberal organizations, including the Center for Media Justice, the Rainbow Push Coalition, the League of United Latin American Citizens, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers, and Common Cause, among others, supported an effort to have the Federal Communications Commission clamp down on so-called “hate speech” on talk radio, the internet, and the cable television news networks. The imagined “hate speech” resulted from support by those media outlets for Arizona’s illegal immigration bill, which those trying to limit the debate characterized as “one of the harshest pieces of anti-Latino legislation in this country’s history.”

The law, SB 1070, passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature and signed into law by the governor, created state penalties relating to immigration law enforcement, and included trespassing, harboring and transporting illegal immigrants, alien registration documents, employer sanctions, and human smuggling among the things Arizona declared to be state issues.

Given the negligence of the federal government to provide border security, and the harm to residents of border states like Arizona from drug dealers and other thugs and hoodlums who easily move back and forth across the border, passing laws to protect residents against the harm that often results from illegal immigration might be the right thing to do. 

Unless you are one of the intolerant liberals. They basically said that if you support that law, you are a hater and a racist, and being unwilling or unable to discuss the issue in a civil manner, they resorted to: “we say we are right, and that’s the end of the story.”

And then there is Robert Kennedy, Jr. who wants organizations that disagree with the idea that human activities are responsible for global warming or climate change to lose their business charter.

As Mr. Kennedy wrote for The Huffington Post last October, “corporations which deliberately, purposefully, maliciously and systematically sponsor climate lies should be given the death penalty. This can be accomplished through an existing legal proceeding known as ‘charter revocation.’ State Attorneys General can invoke this remedy whenever corporations put their profit-making before the ‘public welfare.’"

He wants to intimidate those organizations – which include both corporations and think tanks – to discourage them from acting in their own best interest or advocating policies they think are beneficial, and/or opposing those policies that would harm them or that they believe are harmful. But not all organizations; just the ones that support or oppose the “wrong things.” 

Coal mining companies would be punished for pointing out the fraud committed by global warming activists, like some of the International Panelon Climate Change scientists, and for challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s water quality standards that are so severe that Evian bottled water and apple juice would be ruled unsafe, but organizations that followed the politically correct line would be left alone. 

Mr. Kennedy is one of the many who is willing to punish Americans who disagree with his ideological mania, so long as it helps him further his narrow ideological goals, and nothing must stand in the way. 

He has forgotten, or perhaps never learned, that freedom of speech is guaranteed to enable Americans to say things that may be unpopular with some or many, and specifically to protect political dissent. But disagreement, debate and discussion of political issues, whether by individuals or by organizations like corporations and think tanks, form the path to informing the public, thus yielding a greater possibility for sensible policymaking and better government.

Mr. Kennedy, like many leftists, is more than happy to force his ideas on the rest of us, and it matters not whether the truth is on his side, or whether a majority agrees with him.

It isn’t difficult to picture him regaling himself in the court of some tin-pot dictator, like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, gleefully ordering “off with their heads” for those who have the temerity to indulge in independent thought.

Steven F. Hayward, inaugural scholar in conservative thought and philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder, says of the left’s tendency to shut down dissent, “These inclinations to rule certain issues out of bounds by denouncing dissenters with moral calumny rather than argument is not a sign of health in liberalism.  It is a sign of ideological senescence.”

Perhaps liberalism is old and tired, which would explain why its adherents gave up that term in favor of “progressivism.” But whatever they call their ideology, the left cannot persuade others to their way of thinking through the power and logic of their ideas, and is why they have to resort to shutting down and shutting up their opponents. 

We see today in America a situation where groups that advocate some idea or action have employed exaggeration, deception and other nefarious means to gain far more influence than their causes warrant. This is wrong on several levels, but more than just wrong, it is a threat to our liberty.

Cross-posted from Observations

Potpourri: Comments on the passing scene

From the “Aha” department: Judicial Watch reports that “Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told the organization on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails, indeed all government computer records, are backed up by the federal government in case of a government-wide catastrophe.”

However, attorneys also said it would just be too dad-gummed hard to go through the backup files to look for evidence of possible criminal behavior. Imagine that: an emergency backup of the entire government, so that if the entire government computer system were to be destroyed, all the information is protected, but it’s so disorganized that you can’t easily find anything. Doesn’t that make the backup essentially useless? Was this system designed and built by the same people that gave us healthcare.gov?

Do you suppose that none of the people at the IRS who claimed the emails had been forever lost knew about this backup? Really? 



 *****

Raising the minimum wage by $2.85 an hour to $10.10 an hour effectively imposes an “unskilled labor tax” on employers of $6,170 per worker, according to the American Enterprise Institute’s Mark J. Perry. That includes not only the increase in wages, but also increases in FICA, Medicare and unemployment taxes.

A survey of 400 U.S. Chief Financial Officers conducted by Duke University finance professor Campbell Harvey shows that a substantial increase in the minimum wage will, as so many have said for so long, cost jobs, as well as reduce job benefits and increase outsourcing.

The survey showed that in response to a $10 per hour minimum wage:
    •    Sixty percent of the firms said they would lay off employees.
    •    Forty percent said they would slash benefits to employees.
    •    Seventy percent said they would increase contracting, outsourcing, or moving actual production outside the United States.

A report on the study by the National Center for Policy Analysis notes that, “Businesses will not simply absorb these costs; they will look for ways to minimize the $6,000 tax by reducing the number of workers they employ, cutting workers' hours, halting additional hiring or finding ways to use automation to replace work done by employees. Employers may also cut employees' non-monetary fringe benefits rather than eliminate their positions.”

*****

Since President Barack Obama ended the War on Terror, America’s new efforts to combat, er … fight, umm … deal with terrorism has a new name: “comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy.” This strategy has already produced more than 150 airstrikes in Iraq that killed ISIL/ISIS fighters, destroyed weapons, and allowed Iraqi and Kurdish forces to reclaim key territory. Thank goodness we are not involved in another war.

The president announced that with allies and Congress, America will lead a broad coalition in a counter-terrorism strategy called Operation Double Bogie to roll back this terrorist threat (from behind?).

*****

While drug smugglers and who knows what other filth sneak in and out of the U.S. over the non-existent southern border, Border Patrol agents busy themselves making birthday cakes for illegal aliens who have crossed the border into the country.

This information comes via Pinal County, Ariz. Sheriff Paul Babeu, who appeared on Neil Cavuto’s “Your World” program last Thursday on Fox News Channel.

The sheriff said, “I can give you a window into this administration because just a month ago, while all this was going on, we heard, myself and countless sheriffs in Fort Worth, Texas, heard … how wonderful it was these Border Patrol agents, federal law enforcement, had a birthday cake for this 13-year-old Honduran, and he’s never had a cake ... I called him on that, and said, ‘how on earth have we arrived at this point where it’s become the job of our Border Patrol agents, who their sole purpose should be to protect our country and secure our border, is to do what you just said, to have a birthday cake for a 13-year-old Honduran?’”


*****

From the Nervous Hospital, Unhinged Ward: Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) claims that Democrats are not “fear-mongers;” but said on “Real Time with Bill Maher,” “It would be very important for the Democrats to retain control of the Senate,” she warned. “Civilization as we know it today would be in jeopardy if the Republicans win the Senate.”

*****

Earlier this year came news from Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that we face increased risks from human-induced climate change. These new risks are, of course, the result of CO2 in the atmosphere, which now has more CO2 than it previously had. Over the last 100 years the number of CO2 molecules in a given quantity of air is up from 3 to 4.

No wonder they are concerned: that represents a 33 percent increase in CO2!

That sounds like a really serious problem, until you realize that the quantity of air in this equation is 10,000 molecules. We now have 4 molecules of CO2 per 10,000 air molecules, instead of 3. The amount of CO2 in the air is now 4 ten-thousandths (.0004), up from 3 ten-thousandths (.0003). Catastrophe has descended on us; we are surely doomed.

Climate change: What 150 years of global warming has done to Earth

As we celebrated the beginning of spring last week, then had our hopes for an end to winter weather dashed by forecasts of snow this week, a new report on global warming/climate change came out.

This report tells us that while the last 16 years where no additional warming of the climate were recorded, the previous 150 years where warming did occur are more important. It also explained what that century and a half of warming has meant for life on the Earth.

Since 1970 environment watchers have made quite a few predictions of dire consequences to the planet caused by the activities of humans that have thrown the environment into chaos, among which are:

• By 1980 all of the important animal life in the sea will be extinct. 
• By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.
• The world will be eleven degrees colder by the year 2000.
• By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by half.
• A general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000.
• Within a few years children just aren't going to know what snow is. Snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event.

Fortunately, none of those predictions has come true, but what has 150 years of warming done to the humans whose dangerous activities are said to be causing it?

Well, according to a report from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) by H. Sterling Burnett, this warming has been beneficial, not dangerous.

Over the last 150 years the Earth has warmed an average of 0.8 degrees Celsius, according to economist Richard Tol, an increase that has had a positive impact on the world’s economy. Dr. Tol, who holds doctorates in economics and environmental economics, and teaches at the University of Sussex and Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, says further that an additional rise of 2.2 degrees in temperature would continue to yield substantial benefits until at least 2080.

Mr. Burnett cites data from Dr. Tol showing that climate change has added 1.4 percent to global economic output over the last century, a figure that should rise to 1.5 percent by 2025. The increase in CO2 added 0.8 percent to GDP due to the boost it produced in agricultural production, and the warmer temperatures reduced the demand for heating, adding another 0.4 percent to GDP.

“With higher CO2 levels, plants thrive and become more efficient in their use of water,” the NCPA report states. “And because most of the warming has reduced low nighttime temperatures, the globe has seen fewer growth-stunting frost events, as well as longer growing seasons.”

Citing information from agronomist and geographer Craig Idso, the Stuart report asserts that improved plant growth over a 50-year period starting in 1961 totaled $3.2 trillion, and from today through 2050 increased CO2 will add $9.8 trillion to crop production.

And the greatest benefits in improved agricultural production have occurred in Africa, with one-third of that continent’s countries growing at 6 percent, and the poverty line dropping from 51 percent to 39 percent.

At the same time as this very positive information materializes, an assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology has advocated putting some of those who oppose the manmade climate change theory in jail.

Lawrence Torcello’s stepping-off point came after an earthquake in Italy where six Italian scientists and a defense minister were subsequently sentenced to six years in prison because the official didn’t adequately warn the public following several minor tremors of the possibility, or likelihood, of a full-scale quake, which did occur, and the scientists failed to correct the official’s error.

“When it comes to global warming, much of the public remains in denial about a set of facts that the majority of scientists clearly agree on,” says the philosophy professor. “With such high stakes, an organized campaign funding misinformation ought to be considered criminally negligent.”

It’s quite a stretch to equate people failing to provide information about a likely imminent event with people who financially support the contrarian view of a popular but unproven scientific theory, the contrarian view of which is itself strongly supported by scientists.

Further thwarting the Torcello plan is the indisputable fact that the time between tremors and the earthquake they foreshadowed was a matter of hours, where any harm that might come to humans from opposing the radical prescriptions to combat climate change is years or decades in the future.

Applying the professor’s goofy idea to those who financially supported opposition to the dire predictions listed previously, we might have dozens in prison for being correct.

Liberals seem always to prefer shutting down dissent rather than having civil and productive discussions about the different ideas. This happens for two reasons. First, they are unable to disprove the opposing position with actual facts, and second, their arrogance compels in them the belief that they are always right, and that justifies them using any means necessary to implement their radical and dangerous agenda.

NIPCC report disputes the conventional wisdom about climate change

Commentary by James H. Shott

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is a panel of scientists organized in 2003 by Dr. S. Fred Singer and the Science & Environmental Policy Project. Unlike the better-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is a government-sponsored and politically motivated group with a man-causes-global-warming bias, the NIPCC receives no funding from government and does not share the IPCC’s predisposition that climate change is man-made and therefore requires a United Nations solution.

Hence, Dr. Singer’s group, which consists of some 50 independent scientists from universities and private institutions around the world (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Canada, Italy, the UK, France, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Spain) who disagree with the IPCC’s theory, “seeks to objectively analyze and interpret data and facts without conforming to any specific agenda,” according to a summary of the 1,200-page report “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science” that was released in September of this year.

Most of what we read, see and hear from the media is the opinion held and promoted by the United Nations’ IPCC. No matter what your opinion about whether or not human activities have a significant effect, or any effect, on the Earth’s climate, it certainly cannot hurt to have available the analysis of a group of scientists – the NIPCC – that believes the data show a different reality than that promoted by the IPCC.

Among the group’s findings are:

•    Atmospheric CO2 is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases.

•    Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions, which represents 34 percent of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.

•    The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.

•    The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities.

•    CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population.

•    No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation.

•    The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.

The summary also presents key facts about surface temperature that argue against the UN IPCC’s position, a few of which follow:

•    Whether today’s global surface temperature is seen to be part of a warming trend depends upon the time period considered.

•    Over (climatic) time scales of many thousand years, temperature is cooling; over the historical (meteorological) time scale of the past century temperature has warmed. Over the past 16 years, there has been no net warming despite an increase in atmospheric CO2 of 8 percent. (See second bullet above.)

•    There was nothing unusual about either the magnitude or rate of the late twentieth century warming pulses represented on the HadCRUT record, both falling well within the envelope of known, previous natural variations.

•    No empirical evidence exists to support the assertion that a planetary warming of 2 degrees Centigrade would be net ecologically or economically damaging.

These findings by this group of international scientists that contradict the positions of the IPCC gain strength from the evidence of fraud among scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia, many associated with the IPCC. Emails exchanged between these scientists obtained in 2009 demonstrated fraud, dishonesty and errors in the arguments supporting the theory of man-made global warming.

As reported in Human Events online edition, some of the emails revealed contempt for disagreeable scientific data and a “slavish devotion to the climate change political agenda pushed by the politicians and government bureaucrats funding their research.”

In the report’s Conclusion the authors say: “Few scientists deny that human activities can have an effect on local climate or that the sum of such local effects could hypothetically rise to the level of an observable global signal. The key questions to be answered, however, are whether the human global signal is large enough to be measured and if it is, does it represent, or is it likely to become, a dangerous change outside the range of natural variability?”

The Conclusion includes a quote by British biologist Conrad Waddington from 1941: “It is … important that scientists must be ready for their pet theories to turn out to be wrong. Science as a whole certainly cannot allow its judgment about facts to be distorted by ideas of what ought to the true, or what one may hope to be true.”

Those scientists who believe that man’s activities harm the planet should take this good advice to heart.



Cross-posted from Observations

Mr. Slick and Dummy encourage us to ignore the negatives of ethanol

There’s a TV commercial featuring a ventriloquist named Mr. Slick and his dummy, named “Dummy,” promoting the wondrous benefits of ethanol, not by actually listing those specific benefits – as one ought to do if one has real benefits to tout – but by implying that the evil oil companies don’t want you to know about them. Dummy answers questions that make the oil companies look bad, and Mr. Slick, portraying an evil oil baron, is horrified at Dummy’s responses and eventually puts his hand over Dummy’s mouth to shut him up. The announcer then asks the question, “Why don’t the oil companies want you to know the truth about ethanol?”

Ethanol has some useful qualities, like reducing the amount of petroleum-based fuels that are burned and the pollution they produce, but it has many disadvantages.

The all-knowing central planners at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have decreed that gasoline must currently have 10 percent ethanol (E10) mixed in, and the EPA is raising that requirement by 50 percent (E15), thus increasing by a half the negatives of ethanol in gasoline.

Putting ethanol in fuel means currently that approximately 40 percent of the corn from which ethanol is made is used for ethanol instead of food and animal feed. The amount of corn we burn could feed an estimated 570 million people annually. Shifting that much food corn to ethanol production raises the cost of food corn for human and animal consumption, as well as other food crops, such as wheat and hops, because farmers stop growing those crops and start growing corn to get the federal subsidies, and that creates shortages and higher prices for those crops, too. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study prepared for the National Council of Chain Restaurants said the federal ethanol mandate cost each restaurant $18,000 a year in higher food prices. Guess who pays that additional cost?

Every gallon of ethanol produced requires 5 gallons of water, and that affects the dry western states where ethanol is produced by shifting more of the sometimes-scarce liquid to farmers and away from urban areas, and could easily lead to water shortages and/or higher urban water prices.

Worse, however, is the great potential for damage to gas storage tanks, pumping equipment, other equipment involved in the delivery chain and engines that are the end user of ethanol in fuels. This point is supported by a December 2010 study commissioned by the Department of Energy that found 40 percent of new dispensing equipment designed for use with E10 fuels had failed tests, and 70 percent of previously used E10 equipment failed tests.

Ethanol fuels are deadly to small gasoline engines, such as lawnmowers, string trimmers, chain saws, boat motors, motorcycles and ATVs to the extent that manufacturers may void warranties when these fuels are used in their products.

Gasoline stabilizers must be added to ethanol infused gasoline to protect these smaller engines, at a cost, of course. But, however, owners of these machines have an option that car and truck owners don’t have: they can buy pure gasoline that has no added ethanol for only $20 to $32 a gallon.

If you get decent miles per gallon from your car or truck, you’d be getting even better mileage without ethanol in your gas. E10 and E15 mixtures routinely get fewer miles per gallon because ethanol contains less energy than pure gasoline. Estimates of lost miles per gallon range from 3-to-5 percent, to as high as 20 percent.

The Renewable Fuel Standard mandates the use of corn-based ethanol and other biofuels for transportation fuel. It promised less dependence on foreign oil and lower fuel prices and greenhouse gas emissions; however, many view the mandate as an economic and environmental boondoggle.

The benefits of infusing gasoline with ethanol to improve emissions from gas burning vehicles and tools are unclear. There has been some reduction in the use of petroleum in fuels, but the price we have paid for it has been comparatively high when the costs of producing ethanol and blending it with gasoline are considered, along with the increased prices of food for humans and animal feed. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has launched a bipartisan review of the Renewable Fuel Standard to determine its level of success.

Government efforts to make our lives better nearly always fail, or at least unleash new problems on the American people. The feds thought incandescent light bulbs that have served us so well for so long used too much energy, so they have mandated that we use the new CFL bulbs, which do use less electricity, but cost more and contain mercury, and create a haz-mat emergency when one of them breaks. Efforts to clean up emissions from electricity production have produced job losses in the coal and power industries and forced the sale of more domestic coal to foreign countries that do not make any effort to clean up their emissions.

Government mandates cost us billions of dollars a year for compliance, plus the cost of the bureaucracy to create and monitor compliance with regulations. Given the poor record of success the government has amassed, we’d be much better off with less government interference.