Eco-Fascism Leading the Way To Democrat Utopian Ideals

(Foden Toons: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Fodentoons/)

“Fear is the most powerful enemy of reason. Both fear and reasoning are essential to human survival, but the relationship between them is unbalanced. Reason may sometimes dissipate fear, but fear frequently shuts down reason. As Edmund Burke wrote in England 20 years before the American Revolution,” no passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning past fear.” …. “Facts no longer matter. We simply decide how we want to see the world and then go out and find experts and evidence to back our beliefs.” (WUWT)

The above cartoon notes this recent story (h/t to Climate Depot) from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where Democrat Senator (RI) Sheldon Whitehouse asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch if there “are there other circumstances in which a civil matter under the authority of the Department of Justice has been referred to the FBI?”To which the AG responded,

This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,” Lynch answered. “I’m not aware of a civil referral at this time.

  • In a poll of 1,000 likely voters, Rasmussen Reports asked if the “government [should] investigate and prosecute scientists and others including major corporations who question global warming?” A full 27% of Democrats replied in the affirmative, as did 12% of Republicans. (Breitbart)

This is an update to my very frightening post about where Democrats are headed in this country. And that is, where every other leftist government has ventured into… fascism. Except this time, it is “eco-fascism.”

More in this UPDATE from IBD (hat-tip to GAYPATRIOT):

Conform or else. That’s the message of the global warming alarmists. Those who don’t buy into the man-made climate change narrative should be prosecuted as criminals.

“Put officials who reject science in jail,” someone named Brad Johnson who says he’s executive director of something called Climate Hawks Vote tweeted last month.

At roughly the same time, Mark Hertsgaard typed a screed in The Nation which ran under the headline:

“Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us: The victims of Hurricane Harvey have a murderer — and it’s not the storm.​”

“How long,” Hertsgaard asked, “before we hold the ultimate authors of such climate catastrophes accountable for the miseries they inflict?”

And then there’s Bill Nye, the Junk Science Guy, who hasn’t been able to cover up his apparent desire to see “criminal investigations” against those ignoring his truth. It’s not hard to see through him, though. He dissembles like a politician but his appetite is clear.

The urge to prosecute and imprison those who don’t believe as they have been commanded to is not a new wrinkle among the alarmist tribe. Three years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sounding like, well, a Kennedy, said the Koch brothers “should be in jail, I think they should be enjoying three hots and a cot at The Hague with all the other war criminals.”

“Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is a criminal offence and they ought to be serving time for it.”

The Kochs’ crime? Selling energy resources to willing buyers and funding organizations that have reservations about the climate change story we’re constantly being told……..

AL GORE

…For the third time in the last few years, Al Gore, founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project, spoke at the festival on Friday. Naturally, his interactive discussion focused on addressing the climate crisis. The former vice president focused on the need to “punish climate-change deniers, saying politicians should pay a price for rejecting ‘accepted science,’” said the Chicago Tribune.

Gore said forward-thinking investors are moving away from companies that invest in fossil fuels and towards companies investing in renewable energy. “We need to put a price on carbon to accelerate these market trends,” Gore told the Chicago Tribune, referring to a proposed federal cap-and-trade system that would penalize companies that exceeded their carbon-emission limits. “And in order to do that, we need to put a price on denial in politics.”…

(Eco Watch)

Bill Nye

Via Moonbattery (more at: Climate Depot):

Climate commie Bill Nye the Pseudo-Science Guy has joined the ranks of totalitarians who want skeptics of the floundering global warming hoax imprisoned

[….]

Science? This isn’t about science. Global warming, climate change, climate chaos, or whatever they call the hoax next week is about hard left authoritarian politics. The Bill Nye–level pseudo-science is strictly window dressing.

Meanwhile, there has been no statistically significant warming for the past 23 years despite rising levels of beneficial CO2, shedding light on why warmists have been resorting to coercion to prop up their hoax.

Various Democrats

Also note that Democrats are actively investigations into people who counter the anthropogenic global warming narrative:

Dem Congressman “sent requests to seven universities asking for detailed records on the funding sources for affiliated researchers who have opposed the scientific consensus on man-made global warming.”

(Washington Times)

Harassment prompts scientist to stop his research debunking extreme weather claims – CU Climate Expert Dr. Roger Pielke Jr.: I am Under ‘Investigation’ – Accuses Dems of ‘a politically-motivated ‘witch hunt’ designed to intimidate me (and others) and to smear my name”

(Climate Depot)

As The Post’s Joby Warrick reported earlier this week, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D- Ariz.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, asked seven universities for detailed records on the funding sources for seven scientists, many of whom are unconvinced that humans are the driving force behind recent climate change.

In a letter to Grijalva released this afternoon, the American Meteorological Society (AMS) — a scientific and professional society representing atmospheric and oceanic scientists — expressed strong opposition to the inquiry.

“Publicly singling out specific researchers based on perspectives they have expressed and implying a failure to appropriately disclose funding sources — and thereby questioning their scientific integrity — sends a chilling message to all academic researchers,” the AMS wrote.

The AMS joins a cast of individual scientists who have spoken out against the inquiry…

(Washington Post)

Here are some of tha main Democrat Culprits:

Democrats may be flustered after a week of being accused of engineering an anti-science “witch hunt,” but they aren’t backing down from their investigations into the financial backing of climate change researchers who challenge the movement’s doomsday scenarios.

Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, told National Journal this week that he may have been guilty of overreach even as he defended his probe into the funding sources of seven professors, now known as the “Grijalva Seven.”

Three Senate Democrats — Barbara Boxer of California, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island — are conducting their own probe of 100 fossil fuel companies and trade associations funding climate research….

(Washington Times)

Senator Bernie Sanders

No Dissent Allowed: U.S. Senators introduce amendment to muzzle climate ‘denial apparatus’ – Senator Bernie Sanders co-sponsors

Via: DesmogBlog: U.S. Senators Introduce Amendment, Call On Fossil Fuel Industry To End ‘Climate Denial and Deception‘ – Democratic U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Ed Markey (MA) and Brian Schatz (HI) introduced an amendment into the energy bill yesterday intended to express Congress’s disapproval of the use of industry-funded think tanks and misinformation tactics aimed at sowing doubt about climate change science…Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) joined the amendment as a co-sponsor once it was introduced.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

Hat-tip to Climate Depot. This comes from the Weekly Standard:

  • Sen. Whitehouse (D-RI): ‘In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise…The parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking.”

….That’s right — a sitting U.S. Senator is suggesting using RICO laws should be applied to global warming skeptics. Courts have been defining RICO down for some time and in ways that aren’t particularly helpful. In 1994, the Supreme Court ruled RICO statutes could be applied to pro-life activists on the grounds that interstate commerce can be affected even when the organization being targeted doesn’t have economic motives. 

Obviously, there’s a lot of money hanging in the balance with regard to energy policy. But when does coordinating “a wide range of activities, including political lobbying, contributions to political candidates, and a large number of communication and media efforts” go from basic First Amendment expression to racketeering? The tobacco analogy is inappropriate in regards to how direct the link between smoking and cancer is. Even among those who do agree that global warming is a problem, there’s a tremendously wide variety of opinions about the practical effects. Who gets to decide whether someone is “downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change” relative to the consensus? If message coordination and lobbying on controversial scientific and political issues can be declared racketeering because the people funding such efforts have a financial interest in a predetermined outcome, we’re just going to have to outlaw everything that goes on in Washington, D.C.

Who are the cigarette execs? Morano explains:

  • …it’s the global warming scientists who are the ones fulfilling a narrative. I mean we have Michael Oppenheimer, one of the lead U.N. scientists, took an endowment from Barbra Streisand. Hollywood – he’s the climatologists to the stars. It’s so insulting to imply that somehow skeptical scientists are on the pay like tobacco companies. It’s the height of arrogance when you look at the actual data, the global warming scientists, through government grants, foundations, through media empowerment, have the full advantages of government money, foundation money, university money. There’s not even any comparison.’

Green News also notes proposed “jailing” of “deniers:

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has a new plan to combat climate change: sue fossil fuel companies for fraud. In a May 29 op-ed in The Washington Post , Whitehouse argued that the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to discredit climate science and attack environmentalists may constitute deliberate deception of the kind the tobacco industry perpetrated in previous decades. In 2006, a federal judge found the tobacco industry guilty of fraud in a civil lawsuit brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Cigarette companies’ efforts to hide the health effects of tobacco consumption included lying about the findings of…

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, Jr.

GayPatriot adds some commentary:

Robert F. Kennedy took his private jet and his motorcade of SUV’s to the Climate Alarmist for Socialism Party in New York City, pausing long enough to explain how people who don’t believe in man-caused Global Warming should be jailed and punished…. Almost half of Americans admit to being skeptical of climate change; the progs better plan on building a lot of camps.

A not so surprising thing happened as they do at all large Democratic gatherings, a whole bunch of trash was left behind. Continuing with Breitbart:

This week in New York City somewhere around 400,000 litterbugs descended on the Big Apple, and not to celebrate the wonderful news that the planet hasn’t warmed in 18 years. Instead they gathered to do, uhm, whatever this is , and to pretend Global Warming is real and dire, so that those pushing this phony crisis can tell the rest of us what to do and how to live our lives. (Breitbart)

Here, PJTV interviews the hypocrisy flowing from JFK Jr:

JOHN KERRY

John Kerry is blaming future calamities on those of us who deny the Left’s main contention that man-made CO2 is the main driver behind our planet’s weather system. Here is the WaPo article via Climate Depot:

…Kerry noted that he was speaking in Hampton Roads, where the land the city is built on is sinking as sea levels are rising twice as fast as the world’s average. He said political opponents who doubt the science of climate change are posing a threat to everyone.

  • “The science tells us unequivocally, those who continue to make climate change a political fight put us all at risk,” he said. “And we cannot sit idly by and allow them to do that.”

Kerry called climate change more than a threat to the habitats of butterflies and polar bears. He said it has a direct impact on military readiness…

Various DEMOCRAT Leaning Person’s

….In 2009, New York Times Paul Krugman accused Congressmen who voted against climate cap-and-trade bill of ‘treason against the planet!

‘Execute’ Skeptics! Krugman’s sentiment joined by fellow climate fear promoters

In June 2009, a public appeal was issued on an influential U.S. website asking: “At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers.” The appeal appeared on Talking Points Memo, an often cited website that helps set the agenda for the political Left in the U.S.

The Talking Points Memo article continues: “So when the right wing fucktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events – how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?” (For full story see: ‘Execute’ Skeptics! Shock Call To Action: ‘At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers’ — ‘Shouldn’t we start punishing them now?’ – June 3, 2009)

After all the attention drawn to it by Climate Depot, the Talking Points Memo article was later pulled and the website published a retraction and apology, but the sentiment was stark and unequivocal and has significant company among climate fear promoters.

On June 5, 2009, Joe Romm of Climate Progress defended a posting on his website warning that climate skeptics would be strangled in bed for rejecting the view that we face a man-made climate crisis. “An entire generation will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds,” warned the message posted on Climate Progress.

Romm, a former Clinton Administration official, pulled the comments after Climate Depot drew attention to them. “The original was clearly not a threat but a prediction — albeit one that I certainly do not agree with. Since some people misread it, I am editing it,” Romm wrote.

Small sampling of threats, intimidation and censorship:

NASA’s James Hansen has called for trials of climate skeptics in 2008 for “high crimes against humanity.” In 2006, the eco-magazine Grist called for Nuremberg-Style trials for skeptics. In 2008, Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki called for government leaders skeptical of global warming to be thrown “into jail.” In 2007, The Weather Channel’s climate expert called for withholding certification of skeptical meteorologists.

A 2008 report found that ‘climate blasphemy’ is replacing traditional religious blasphemy. In addition, a July 2007 Senate report detailed how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation.

In 2007, then EPA Chief Vowed to Probe E-mail Threatening to ‘Destroy’ Career of Climate Skeptic and dissenters of warming fears have been called ‘Climate Criminals’ who are committing ‘Terracide’ (killing of Planet Earth) (July 25, 2007) In addition, in May 2009, Climate Depot Was Banned in Louisiana! See: State official sought to ‘shut down’ climate skeptic’s testimony at hearing.

November 12, 2007: UN official warns ignoring warming would be ‘criminally irresponsible’ Excerpt: The U.N.’s top climate official warned policymakers and scientists trying to hammer out a landmark report on climate change that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be “criminally irresponsible.” Yvo de Boer’s comments came at the opening of a weeklong conference that will complete a concise guide on the state of global warming and what can be done to stop the Earth from overheating.

October 28, 2008: License to dissent: ‘Internet should be nationalized as a public utility’ to combat global warming skepticism – Australian Herald Sun

U.N. official says it’s ‘completely immoral’ to doubt global warming fears (May 10, 2007) Excerpt: UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland declared “it’s completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s scientific “consensus.”

Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics (January 17, 2007) Excerpt: The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming. This latest call to silence skeptics follows a year (2006) in which skeptics were compared to “Holocaust Deniers” and Nuremberg-style war crimes trials were advocated by several climate alarmists.

Professor Lawrence Torcello

This comes way of WUWT, and highlights the tendency of the Left towards totalitarian thinking in order to make their vision “work.

Scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison, a US philosophy professor argues on a website funded by the UK government.

Lawrence Torcello – assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, writes in an essay at The Conversation that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence”. (H/T Bishop Hill)

What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.

More @ Breitbart

What next, numbers tattooed on our arms because we hold an opinion different from Torcello?

DAVID SUZUKI

Here is David Suzuki calling for jail, and the PBS host more worried that there isn’t enough space [yet?] for us to be jailed:

David Suzuki has called for political leaders to be thrown in jail for ignoring the science behind climate change.

At a Montreal conference last Thursday, the prominent scientist, broadcaster and Order of Canada recipient exhorted a packed house of 600 to hold politicians legally accountable for what he called an intergenerational crime. Though a spokesman said yesterday the call for imprisonment was not meant to be taken literally, Dr. Suzuki reportedly made similar remarks in an address at the University of Toronto last month….

(Marquette Warrior; See also the National Post)

Scientist Suggests Imprisoning Former Canadian PM For Anti-Global Warming Views

  • Suzuki: “I really believe that people like the former Prime Minister of Canada should be thrown in jail for willful blindness. If you’re the CEO of a company and you deliberately avoid or ignore information relevant to the functioning of that company, you can be thrown in jail… And to have a Prime Minister who for nine years wouldn’t even let the term ‘climate change’ pass his lips! If that isn’t willful blindness, then I don’t know what is.”

Reason.org ends with a great commentary on this freedom restricting idea of the above lunatic:

In 2012, in a proceeding straight out of the Inquisition, an Italian court convicted six scientists for providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” in the lead-up to the earthquake. Now, a philosophy professor says that case may provide a worthwhile example for the treatment of scientific dissenters—specifically, “climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.”…

…He ultimately allows that he wouldn’t actually criminalize poor scientific communication—just anybody who might support dissenting scientists, or receive such support.

If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism….

We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.

If you’re trying to figure out how that doesn’t threaten the free exercise of speech, Torcello assures us, “We must make the critical distinction between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs, and the funding of a strategically organized campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions.”

InquisitionSo…You can voice a dissenting opinion, so long as you don’t benefit from it or help dissenters benefit in any way?

By the way, according to RIT, Torcello researches “the moral implications of global warming denialism, as well as other forms of science denialism.” Presumably, his job is a paid one. But this is OK, because…the majority of scientists agree with his views on the issue?

Let’s allow that they do—and that a majority of scientists agree about man-made climate change and a host of other issues. Just when does the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition meet to decide what is still subject to debate, and what is now holy writ? And is an effort to “undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus” always criminally negligent?…

More @ Reason

20-Scientists Write Obama

In a recent article, 20-leading scientists have come out to recommend legal action (jail) for those of us who use science to counter AGW types:

Twenty climate scientists called for RICO investigation in a letter to Obama and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The scientists argue that the systemic efforts to prevent the public from understanding climate change resembles the investigation undertaken against tobacco. They draw inspiration from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse who said on the Senate floor that there might be a similar conspiracy here, and a civil trial could provide the tools of discovery needed to find out.

[….]

[Note: This call for treating skeptics as racketeers comes the same week that the New York Times promoted equating climate skeptics to Hitler. See: The Next Genocide NYT OpEd: Climate “deniers” present “intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s”….

(Climate Depot)

World Court

One law professor is calling for the World Court to “rule on climate science to quash skeptics” ~ leading one writer to say:

  • If this thinks that the World Court or any other court is remotely qualified to “settle the scientific dispute,” he is a total fracking moron advocating a crime against humanity on a scale not seen since the trial of Galileo. (WUWT)

Indeed.

Its “funny” how the left HATES profit.

Climate Change: Virtue Signaling for the Rich (Plus: Acid Rain)

Rupert Darwall explains why climate change has cynically been adopted as the cause célèbre by America’s wealthy elites, in particular in Silicon Valley.

Rupert Darwall chronicles how the fraud of the acid rain scare created a playbook for today’s climate change movement.

Some stright facts:

Myth: Acid rain has caused a large portion of U.S. lakes to become acidic.

Fact: In a recent study of 7,000 Northeastern lakes, only 3.4% were found to be acidic. Most of these lakes are just as acidic as they were before the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, most of the acidic lakes in the United States are in Florida, where there is the least acid rain.

Myth: Data taken by proponents of the acid rain theory is accurate and conclusive.

Fact: Proponents of the acid rain theory have rested their claims on a deeply flawed series of articles by G.E. Likens and his co-workers in the 1970s. A careful evaluation of Likens’ research conducted by a group of scientists at Environmental Research and Technology, Inc., reveals that his data collection and selection was deliberately biased to support the desired conclusions.

Myth: Acid rain destroys vegetation.

Fact: Acid rain actually has a positive impact on vegetation. The nitrogen and sulfur characteristic of acid rain, act as nutrients essential for plant growth. The world’s first acid rain study concluded that, “the principle effect of acid rain is the improvement of crop yields and crop protein content.”

Myth: Acid Rain is unnatural.

Fact: Rainwater is naturally acidic. Because water is such a good solvent, even in the cleanest air, rainwater dissolves some of the naturally present carbon dioxide, forming carbonic acid. According to EPA regulations, Ph levels any lower than 5.0 are environmentally harmful. Yet, an analysis of ice from the Antarctic and the Himalayas, deposited hundreds and thousands of years ago when the environment was presumably pristine, had Ph values ranging from 4.8 to 4.2.

Information from Environmental Overkill by Dixy Lee Ray (Regnery Gateway, 1993); Trashing the Planet by Dixy Lee Ray (Regnery Gateway, 1990).

SEE FULL PRESENTATIONS:

 

Farmer Fined $2.8 Million for… Farming (Eco-Fascism)

  • The above is another example of this Eco-Fascism… “…Justice Scalia released the Court’s opinion, with Justices Ginsburg and Alito seperately concurring, that private property and due process trump government “strong-arming of regulated parties.” And it feels so good.” (TOWNHALL)

I think this is an important story posted by HOTAIR. The whole topic of Leftist Eco-Fascism is in fact:

Out in California, a farmer is facing millions of dollars in fines for plowing a field that he purchased and planting wheat. If that sentence sounds like something out of a George Orwell novel to you, you’re not alone. His supposed crime was to have “disturbed” the Waters of the United States, a term which gained massive popularity under the Obama administration’s EPA rules. In this case, the land that John Duarte purchased and was plowing did not include a river, or even a stream, but rather “seasonal wetlands” which develop swampy areas during the rainy season but then dry up for the rest of the year. (Free Beacon)

A California farmer is facing a $2.8 million fine for failing to get a permit to plow his own field.

John Duarte bought 450 acres of land near Modesto in 2012 and is now being sued by the federal government for plowing near areas the government considers to be “waters of the United States.”

The case will head to trial in August. The government claims that Duarte violated the Clean Water Act because he did not obtain a permit to work near the wetlands.

USA Today has all the details here but it’s reminiscent of other cases brought against landowners in the past. One of the major sticking points is that farmers are supposed to be exempt from these rules. But the government is claiming that the “ripper” blades he used while plowing were “discharging material” into “wetlands.” And for that he’s being fined millions of dollars.

Duarte never even got to harvest the wheat that he planted because the government was all over him. Keep in mind that we’re not talking about dumping chemicals into a stream or building some sort of permanent structure. The guy was plowing. He was literally moving dirt a foot or so to the side so he could plant his crops….

(read the rest)

Myth #2: America Is The World’s Leading Threat To The Environment

A series of 5-myths via Daniel Flynn’s excellent book — Machiavelli said, “One who deceives will always find those who allow themselves to be deceived.”


MYTH #2: AMERICA IS THE WORLD’S LEADING THREAT TO THE ENVIRONMENT

INVENTING “FACTS” TO promote one’s political objectives is certainly not a phenomenon confined to feminists. Radical en vironmentalists also willingly twist the facts when attempting to promote a political agenda. The more politicized the agenda, the deeper their belief seems to become.

  • Environmentalists claim that humans have depleted the forests for their own selfish motives. Some of the more extreme green activists implant steel spikes in trees to injure loggers or place themselves in trees to prevent timber harvesting. Reforestation and advances in *­fighting technology, however, have ensured that Amer­ica has more trees now than at any point in over 100 years. As John Tierney points out in a New York Times Magazine article, “Yes, a lot of trees have been cut down to make today’s newspaper. But even more trees will probably be planted in their place. America’s supply of timber has been increasing for decades, and the nation’s forests have three times the amount of wood today than in 1920.”
  • In his best-selling book Earth in the Balance, then senator Al Gore commented, “We now know that [automobiles’] cumulative impact on the global environment is posing a mortal threat to the security of every nation that is more deadly than that of any military enemy we are ever again likely to confront.” Do we really “know” this? Cars av­eraged around 14 miles to the gallon in the mid-1970s. Today, they average more than 30 miles to the gallon. Automobiles rolling off the assembly line today emit 99% fewer hydrocarbons, 96% less carbon monoxide, and 90% less nitrogen oxide than cars hitting the street 30 years ago. Things are getting better, not worse.
  • “The battle to feed humanity is over,” Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb famously proclaimed in 1968. “In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” The Population Bomb prophesied that “a minimum of ten mil­lion people, most of them children, will starve to death during each year of the 1970s. But this is a mere handful compared to the number that will be starving before the end of the century. And it is now too late to take action to save many of those people.” Needless to say, this modern-day Malthus erred. Since intellectuals and jour­nalists deemed Ehrlich’s ideology correct and cared less about his incorrect facts, the Stanford professor has be­come a media darling, and his book has gone on to sell millions of copies.

Perhaps the greatest myth advanced by environmentalists posits that the primary villain responsible for the planet’s eco­logical problems is the United States. An anticapitalist protes­tor curiously described the September 11 terrorists as “lashing out against the American foreign policy, which is basically to protect the American lifestyle, which is an unsustainable life­style…. We will never have peace until everybody basically lives the same way.” Apart from the disingenuousness of pro­jecting one’s personal ideology on the terrorists, does the rest of the world demand that we adopt their standard of living, or do they instead envy our prosperous position? “Economically, we can only hope that other nations will never achieve our stan­dard of living, for if they did, the earth would become a desert,” author James Loewen opines, proposing that nations regress to “zero economic growth” even if it takes an international body to enforce the goal.

Yet it is not technology or the United States that threatens the environment. Americans breathe cleaner air and drink cleaner water than almost anyone. The World Resources Insti­tute’s rankings of the world’s most polluted cities list no U.S. metropolises in its top tier. In fact, China boasts 9 out of the 10 most polluted cities. An Asian magazine’s study listed Beijing, Mexico City, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Hong Kong as the globe’s most environmentally inhospitable cities. Pollution in many other countries is far worse than it is in the United States. An inconvenient fact confronts environmentalists who are quick to blame America for ecological ills: It is not the United States that pollutes Lanzhou, New Delhi, or Mexico City.

The United States is a more environmentally considerate nation than it was just a few decades ago. The air is cleaner. Of the six air pollutants that the Environmental Protection Agency began tracking in 1975, all six are down significantly today. Some of the pollutants measure a mere fraction of their former presence. Lead stands at less than a tenth of its 1975 level, while carbon monoxide has slipped to less than half its 1975 level. The amount of forest acreage has risen dramatically. The U.S. Forest Service reports that the number of new trees has ex­ceeded the number of trees cut down in every year since 1952. The water is cleaner. Scenes such as the Cuyahoga River aflame are a distant memory. Now people actually fish in the Cuya­hoga. The United States compares favorably to other indus­trialized nations in the cleanliness of its waterways. The Mississippi, for instance, is cleaner than the Seine, the Rhine, and the Thames. Would anyone prefer drinking from the Ganges or the Volga than from the Colorado?

New Republic writer Gregg Easterbrook points out that we have much to cheer about regarding the environment. Indus­trial toxic emissions declined by nearly half from 1988 to 1996, several formerly endangered species now thrive, the govern­ment and the private sector cleaned up a third of all Superfund toxic waste sites, and forest area continues to expand. He fur­ther states,

Twenty-five years ago, only one-third of America’s lakes and rivers were safe for fishing and swimming; today two-thirds are, and the proportion continues to rise. Annual wetlands loss has fallen by 80 percent in the same period, while soil losses to agricultural runoff have been almost cut in half. Total Ameri­can water consumption has declined nine percent in the past 15 years, even as population expands, especially in the arid South­west. Since 1970, smog has declined by about a third, even as the number of cars has increased by half; acid rain has fallen by 40 percent; airborne soot particles are down 69 percent, which is why big cities have blue skies again; carbon monoxide or “winter smog” is down 31 percent; airborne lead, a poison, is down 98 percent. Emissions of CFCs, which deplete strato­spheric ozone, have all but ended.

Technological innovation has at times harmed the environ­ment. Today, technology serves the environment. Pesticides and genetic engineering have increased crop yields, feeding the millions of people the environmentalists warned would surely starve by now. Sewage treatment is so advanced that the same water some Californians flush down their toilets eventually re­cycles back clean through their faucets. Energy now burns cleaner, with technological advances allowing some alternative energy sources to cause no pollution at all. Yet the naysayers persist. Doomsday prophet Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, maintain, “Most people do not recognize that, at least in rich nations, economic growth is the disease, not the cure.” – The facts vindicate the very opposite view. The growth in the U.S. economy over the past quarter century coincided with and resulted in a health­ier environment.

As implied by the “ism” affixed to it, environmentalism sometimes acts as a surrogate religion for its followers. The zeal of the committed environmentalist is based on faith—and faith in something false, at that. Logic and reason play next to no role in swaying the radical environmentalist’s devotion to his creed’s sacred tenets, such as the belief that economically ad­vanced nations threaten Mother Nature. Since many environ­mentalists believe that they’ve received an enlightenment that passed the rest of us by, they rationalize their use of deception to achieve their desired ends. When you’re saving the world, what’s the harm in telling a few lies to achieve your objective?

The problem is that, although environmentalists may cava­lierly think that they are saving the world, they are not doing anything of the sort. Their more misguided crusades have in­flicted pain on a great number of people. Victims include log­gers harmed by “tree sitters” and other activists, apple growers put out of business by the phony Alar scare, and Africans placed at greater risk for malaria because of the ban on DDT While a need for a movement that safeguards the health of the environ­ment clearly exists, we could do without the kind of environ­mentalism that relies on deception, dogmatically forgoes cost-benefit analyses of its policy prescriptions, and seeks laws whose results frequently betray their intentions.

In the wake of 1992’s Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, a group of scientists released a document decrying “the emergence of an irrational ideology that is opposed to scientific and indus­trial progress and impedes economic and social development.” The Heidelberg Appeal, as the statement became known, even­tually bore the signatures of 3,000 scientists, including more than 70 Nobel Prize winners. “The greatest evils which stalk our earth are ignorance and oppression, not science, technology, and industry,” concluded the document. Environmentalists blaming American technology and energy use for the world’s ecological maladies would be wise to heed the message of these men of science.

Short Bio’s on Obama’s Radicals – William J. Murray

I updated a couple posts to compliment this excerpt, they can be found here:

This is an excerpt dealing with some short biographies of people Obama chose to surround himself with. You can see they are radicals who export Marxist ideals into public policy as well as some overtly anti-American positions. I would say “enjoy” the read, but I cannot.


  • William J. Murray, Utopian Road to Hell: Enslaving America and the World With Central Planning (Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2016), 165-174.

REGULATORY UTOPIANS

CASS SUNSTEIN

Cass Sunstein was the Edward Mandell House/Rexford Tugwell char­acter in the Obama administration. He was appointed to run Obama’s White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in 2009. He left the administration in 2011 to return to Harvard, where he continues to brainwash his students into supporting his anti-Constitutional and totalitarian beliefs.

Sunstein is the consummate Progressive and utopian tyrant. He believes that the Constitution is a “living document”—code words for liberal judges having the power to interpret the Constitution and law in general to support the latest leftist political agenda.

Writing in The Partial Constitution (Harvard University Press, 1993), Sunstein pushed the idea of a “First Amendment New Deal,” which would create a government panel of experts to ensure a “diversity of views” on the airwaves. Imagine a panel of presidential appointees determining what constitutes diversity on TV and radio.

Sunstein also believes hunting should be banned, that animals should have the same rights as humans, and that lawyers should be empowered to file lawsuits on behalf of animals. Despite being against the killing of rabbits or deer, he is, like all Progressives, perfectly agreeable to destroying unborn humans at any stage of pregnancy.

In 2004 he published A Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever. In it, he proposed a series of “rights” for individuals that would inevitably result in greatly expanding the power of the federal government over every aspect of our lives.

According to Sunstein, “Much of the time, the United States seems to have embraced a confused and pernicious form of individualism. This approach endorses rights of private property and freedom of contract, and respects political liberty, but claims to distrust ‘government inter­vention’ and insists that people must fend for themselves. This form of so-called individualism is incoherent, a tangle of confusions.”

Sunstein’s views sound like those of Benito Mussolini or Philip Dru in the utopian novel.

JOHN HOLDREN

President Obama appointed John Holdren to run the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and to cochair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Holdren sounds like a very dangerous tyrant in his written state­ments on population control and other issues. In 1977 he coauthored a book with Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich, titled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (W. H. Freeman, 1978), which seriously pro­posed, among other things, that women should be forced to abort their children; that populations should be sterilized by dropping drugs into the water supply; that people who “contribute to social deterioration” should be forcibly sterilized or forced to abort their children; that a “Planetary Regime” should assume total control of the global economy; and that an international police force should be used to dictate how all of us are to live our lives.

Because this was a White House office, the Senate did not have the authority to stop the appointment; however, some senators should have come forward and pointed out on the record that Holdren’s suggestions were very much the same as those of fascist utopian Adolf Hitler.

Holdren openly condemns the free enterprise system as the enemy of the people and a threat to the environment. Writing in his 1973 book, Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions, also cowritten with the Ehrlichs, he called for a “massive campaign . . . to de-develop the United States” and other Western nations.

According to Holdren, the “mad czar” of science and technology:

De-development means bringing our economic system (especially pat­terns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation…. The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.

Elsewhere, he wrote, “By de-development, we mean lower per-capita energy consumption, fewer gadgets, and the abolition of planned obsolescence.”

The Soviet Union successfully did away with “planned obsoles­cence” by eliminating innovation. As no new cars were designed for decades, vehicles like the unsafe Lada lived on unchanged for decades. Like many Progressives who believe jobs should be “preserved” as a right, Holdren does not understand that artificially preserving out­dated industries and nonproductive jobs results in a failure for new industries to come into existence.

DONALD BERWICK

Dr. Berwick was picked by President Obama to run the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Knowing that Berwick’s views were so radical, Obama used a recess appointment to get him into this position so he wouldn’t have to undergo Senate scrutiny. Once his recess gig expired, he simply resigned to avoid having to answer questions under oath before a Senate committee.

Berwick has an open love affair with the British National Health Service (NHS). In his own words, “I’m romantic about the National Health Service. I love it!” In fact, he loves it so much that he says it is an “example for the whole world—an example… that the United States needs now.” ‘Why? Because he considers America’s health care system to be “immoral” and an example of the “darkness of private enterprise.” And in typical utopian-tyrant fashion, he believes that only government-enforced “collective action” can override “individual self-interest.”

He was, however, a bit more honest than his boss, President Obama. He openly admitted that under Obamacare, “the decision is not whether or not we will ration care, the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.” Conservatives always find this a terrifying thing about central planners—their willingness, even eagerness, to assume the role of making life-and-death decisions about the fate of other individuals.

So, how is the love of his socialist life working for British citizens, keeping in mind that this is the same system he wanted to bring to the United States? The Boston Globe shares some quotes from UK newspapers:

“Overstretched maternity units mean mothers face a 100-mile journey to have baby.”

“Hundreds of patients died needlessly at NHS hospital due to appalling care.”

“Cash-strapped NHS trust introduces rationing for common children’s conditions.”

“Standard of care in some wards ‘would shame a third world country.”‘

“Stafford Hospital caused ‘unimaginable suffering.”‘

And to top it all off, in Britain 36 percent of patients wait more than four months for nonemergency surgery. In America, only 5 percent do.

According to Berwick, “Any healthcare funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane, must redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health­care is by definition distributional.”

That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? From Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson to Barack Obama, there’s a clear socialist utopian model in play that results in the control of Americans’ lives through rationed medical care.

These are only three of the most high-profile utopian totalitarians to serve in the Obama administration, but they are typical of those whom the president picked to assist in an Imperial Presidency in which central planning of society has become the goal.

FOOD UTOPIANS

First Lady Michelle Obama and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg are what could be politely referred to as the “Food Police” by the vast majority of Americans who prefer to choose their own foods. A more accurate description would be Food Nazis, because they both desire to dictate to Americans what they will eat, how much they will eat, and what size portions they will be served at restaurants.

Mrs. Obama’s mind-set about Americans may be defined by her husband’s definition of her during pre—White House years as his “bitter half.” Apparently even President Obama knew that his wife was not capable of seeing a glass half full; how, then, could she possibly see that a hamburger with lettuce and tomato was actually a balanced meal?

Michelle Obama decided early on that she would seize the issues of “childhood obesity” and “food deserts” as her crusade while inhabiting the White House. She and her utopian handlers created the “Let’s Move” campaign to force restaurants, schools, and parents to feed children more “nutritious” meals. Initially she wanted a mere $400 million from taxpayers for her program.

Walter Williams was warning against this years ago: 

Lifestyle Nazis Update (02/16/2000)

Without any real evidence, Mrs. Obama has claimed that poor Americans are trapped in what she calls “food deserts,” where they must apparently trudge for miles outside of their dismal neighborhoods to buy a piece of fruit or some celery sticks. According to Mrs. Obama, a food desert is an inner city without a grocery store. She envisioned spending millions of federal dollars to plant grocery stores in those blighted areas so the “poor” won’t have to buy food at mini-marts.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan actually attended Al Sharpton’s National Action Network annual con‑

vention in April 2012. There he told an absurd story about how Barack Obama, who attended Harvard University, knows what “it’s like to take a subway or a bus just to find a fresh piece of fruit in a grocery store.” No fruit at Harvard?

The story may be ridiculous, but Michelle Obama was dead serious about extorting $400 million from American taxpayers to solve the nonexistent problem of food deserts.

In reality there are no such things as food deserts. Researcher Roland Sturm at the Rand Corporation studied food desert claims and found that individuals in urban areas can get any kind of food they want within a couple of miles. He suggested we call these areas “food swamps,” rather than food deserts.

In addition, researcher Helen Lee at the Public Policy Institute in California found that in poor neighborhoods, citizens had twice as many fast-food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier neighborhoods had, and more than three times as many corner stores. These areas had twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocery stores as wealthier neighborhoods.

The truth was exactly the opposite of Mrs. Obama’s claim, but hers satisfied the mind-set of the utopians, who believe they alone could solve problems that never existed. Mrs. Obama later began a second crusade to force restaurants and schools to serve “healthy” foods, ban “junk food,” and bully restaurants into serving smaller portions.

Michelle Obama worked in 2010 to get Congress to pass a nutri­tion bill that would give the Department of Agriculture new powers to regulate school lunches. The bill was passed in December of that year, and now that the regulations have gone into effect, it is having a devastating impact on students and their angry parents.

Under Department of Agriculture edicts, cinnamon rolls and chili are banned. School bands and groups can’t sell candy bars for fund-raising. The government is now mandating portion sizes, including how many tomatoes must go into a salad!

Children are permitted to refuse three items on a tray, but not fruits and vegetables. Of course, the Food Police can’t yet force them to eat their veggies, but it’s not far-fetched to think they might someday. After all, the Obamas have rammed through legislation that initially demanded that nuns buy insurance coverage for contraception and preg­nancy. Fortunately the Supreme Court ended that requirement in 2014.

The new federal guidelines, thanks to Michelle Obama, now limit caloric intake to between 750 and 850 a day for schoolchildren. Teenagers require between 2,000 and 3,000 calories a day to be healthy and grow, and high school athletes need up to 5,000 calories per day. In short, the First Lady is responsible for malnourishing kids through the school lunch program.

In 2006 the three-term mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, decided to add the title “Food Police Chief’ to his list of duties in the Big Apple. That year, he banished trans fats from city restaurants and, in 2010, forced food manufacturers to alter their recipes to include less sodium. He failed, however, to remove salt shakers from the tables. Patrons who receive a dish of food at a New York restaurant that they deem not salty enough may still simply add salt.

In spring 2012 Bloomberg decided that New Yorkers had to be protected even more from themselves, so he issued an edict banning soft drinks larger than sixteen ounces. The ban applied to restaurants, movie theaters, stadiums, and arenas.

In August 2012 Bloomberg banned the distribution of baby formula in city hospitals unless it is medically necessary because he, a man, had decided that new mothers should always breast-feed regardless of their weight, professions, or other personal details. Free formula provided to mothers was also eliminated. Bloomberg determined that breast-feeding is best for children and that new mothers should not have a voice in the decision regardless of their circumstances. But Bloomberg did want women to have freedom of choice to kill their young before they are born. He was willing to give moms the option to abort their unborn babies, but not to feed formula to those who are living.

What is next for those like Obama and Bloomberg? Mandated cal­isthenics each morning at six? Currently the United States seems to be incubating and hatching utopian tyrants at an alarming rate.

WATERMELONS

[Green on the outside, “red” on the inside]

America is threatened not only by the Food Nazis, but by the Watermelon Utopians, who are working to destroy our industrialized civilization and bring us back to an agrarian society in the name of the environment.

These are the Watermelons. They’re Red (Marxist-Leninist) on the inside, but are using the Green movement on the outside to promote totalitarian central-planned government.

VAN JONES

The poster child for this Watermelon movement is Van Jones, a Marxist with a nice smile who hates free enterprise just a bit less than nuclear power and fossil fuels.

In March 2009 President Obama picked Jones to be his “Green Jobs Czar.” In September 2009 Jones resigned after television host Glenn Beck exposed the fact that Jones was a militant Marxist radical.

After his departure from the Obama administration, Jones went to work at the Center for American Progress, a socialist group funded by one-worlder George Soros. Jones also began teaching at Princeton University at the African American Studies and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is a “senior fellow” at the Center for American Progress and is an advisor for the extremist group Green for All, which he founded in 2007.

In an unsurprising way, Van Jones symbolizes the support Barack Obama received from the left that helped him win two terms. Jones also highlights the vast portion of the US population who do want the government to take care of all their needs and are willing to allow government to be the god of their lives in return.

Jones openly said he became a Communist shortly after the 1992 Rodney King riots and the trial. According to Jones, “I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th” and “by August, I was a communist.”

In 1993 he moved to San Francisco and helped found the Bay Area Police Watch, which demonized the police in that city. In 1996 he founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, designed to under­mine the criminal justice system, which he saw as unjust to minorities. The Baker Center received more than $1 million from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

As Jones’s commitment to Marxist-type central planning grew in the late ’90s, he became a leader of the group called STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement).

Then in 2006 Jones endorsed an antipolice day held by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party. Jones considers all American prisons to be racist and nothing more than “slave ships on dry land.”

As a green activist, Jones demanded that America “build a pipe­line from the prison economy to the green economy.” He wants the federal government to hire ex-felons to work in “green jobs” to do weather-stripping for energy efficiency in homes and offices. He did not mention if the home and business owners would be informed of workers’ felony convictions.

According to Jones, in an interview on Uprising Radio in Los Angeles, “The green economy will start off as a small subset” of a “com­plete revolution” against what he calls “gray capitalism.” The goal is the “redistribution of all wealth.”

Part of this anticapitalist effort is being accomplished through Green for All, funded in part by George Soros and our incredibly wealthy former vice president Al Gore—a true multimillionaire of the people. The organization’s alleged purpose is “building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” In reality the plan would use taxpayer dollars to fund centrally planned government-run boondoggles in the inner cities.

Jones has openly admitted that his green agenda is designed to destroy capitalism. “We are going to push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society,” he said.

California’s Green Death of a Thousand Cuts

John and Ken read from an L.A. TIMES article that raises the alarm a bit too late for Californians.

  • Californians are likely to pay more for gasoline, electricity, food and new homes — and to feel their lives jolted in myriad other ways — because their state broadly expanded its war on climate change this summer. The ambitious new goals will require complex regulations on an unprecedented scale, but were approved in Sacramento without a study of possible economic repercussions. Some of the nation’s top energy, housing and business experts say the effort may not only raise the cost of staples, but also slow the pace of job and income growth for millions of California families.

Not that most them care about the business climate anyways. The attrition has been happening for many years (More Businesses Leave California), and California is chasing alternative energy companies (Two Models: Prosperity or Egalitarianism) out of the state as well. An earlier discussion mentioned these new regulations hurting the economy of California (Jerry Brown Just Destroyed California’s Economy), but this article is just another nail in the coffin. Not to mention the many other factors killing California… like the teachers unions (California Teacher Unions Draining State Budget) and the pension promised benefits to the state’s other unions (State Deficits Budget Shortfall on Pensions || The Author of “Plunder” Interviewed).

The United Nations Homogenizes Opinion

Ezra Levant of TheRebel.media on the UN’s blacklisting of Rebel journalists who applied to cover the COP22 climate conference in Morroco. MORE: http://www.LetUsReport.com

Some news via GAYPATRIOT:

…Bowing at the altar of Gaia comes with a significant cost. In Ontario, the province where the Gaia Agenda has been pushed to California-style extremes — energy rates have skyrocketed. And now many Canucks are finding themselves having to choose between having back-bacon in the fridge and heating their homes.

Ontario premiers Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne, via their 2009 Green Energy Act and other poor decisions, have pushed many of the people they govern into dire financial straits thanks to their activist agendas.

“They live as if it’s Cold War Russia,” Miranda from Toronto told me during a phone conversation about her parent’s energy woes. “They use a pellet stove and propane heating. They put construction-style plastic on the windows and extra insulation.”

“They’re considering using food banks this winter,” she said. “I work in international development in third world countries and I’m starting to see the stuff here that I’m seeing there.”

Not everybody is doing so bad. Canada’s Carbon Tax “Slush Fund” promises to become a big, fat gold mine for politically connected cronies and rent-seekers.

Play Socialist Games, Win Socialist Prizes….

Julie Borowski Declares War on Mosquitos

Mosquitoes carry deadly diseases like malaria and Zika virus. Why won’t the government legalize the pesticide DDT?

Jerry Brown Just Destroyed California’s Economy (SB 32) |UPDATED|

California’s annual statewide greenhouse gas (GHG) emission inventory is an important tool for establishing historical emission trends and tracking California’s progress toward the goal set by the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 (AB 32).The law set a target of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

[….]

Governor Edmund G. Brown, Jr. recently established a 2030 greenhouse gas reduction goal of 40 percent below 1990 levels, an interim target toward meeting the 2050 goal of reducing emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels.

(California Air Resourse Board [CARB] — see more in the APPENDIX)

John and Ken discuss how Governor Jerry Brown may have just bankrupted California.

Some main points about the bill:

➤ The new SB 32 requires a massive 40 percent cut from 1990 levels, with a deadline of December 31, 2030. The Bee reports that the new measure gives CARB extended authority to force the extreme reductions upon Californians without setting the parameters of those regulations …. Two related bills, AB 1550 and AB 2722, set out the wealth redistribution piece of the regulatory scheme, taking moneys collected in fines and through extorting businesses and forcing those funds to be spent in districts represented by many legislators voting for SB 32… (BREITBART)

According to author Brad Plumer: “It’s hard to overstate how ambitious this is. Few countries have ever achieved cuts this sharp while enjoying robust economic growth.” The only countries (France and Sweden) that have achieved this, he wrote, did so by increasing their use of nuclear power — something off the table in anti-nuke California. “It will mean reshaping virtually every facet of the state economy, from buildings to transportation to farming and beyond,” he added. “California is essentially offering itself as a guinea pig in the world’s most important policy experiment.”…. What’s really troubling, however, is what these measures will mean for the state’s economy. The additional costs imposed by CARB bureaucrats will make it tougher to keep manufacturing and agricultural jobs from fleeing. Additional land-use edicts mandating fewer suburban developments and an end to major freeway construction will mean higher home costs and more congestion. Radical policies will lead to radical results. This isn’t scare mongering. It’s just the truth. (AMERICAN SPECTATOR)

➤ But it was driven by legislators in poor communities who are critical of the current cap-and-trade system that, according to the Capital & Main blog, “allows big polluters to pollute as long as they pay for credits or offsets purchased in other parts of the state or country. AB 197 requires that the (CARB)… target direct reductions at both stationary and mobile sources in those communities.” Another apparent goal is to force CARB to spend money from the cap-and-trade system more equitably in poorer legislative districts. (IBID.)

Jerry Brown 300 CLEAR

Energy prices, food prices, car costs, etc., will all go up. As California becomes more expensive as a state to do business in, MORE businesses will leave and jobs will be lost. It will leave only the giants in business being able to pay for the extra costs, thus, whittling out competition. California will have a few large corporations left in it as well as a few large unions… all subsidizing the Democrat Party to force competition out of their markets.

The L.A. Times notes this as well:

…“You’re going to be increasing the cost of moving goods through California ports,” said Jock O’Connell, a trade expert at Los Angeles consulting firm Beacon Economics.

Feisty competitors on the South and East coasts have been eating into Los Angeles-area ports’ business, and in June the Panama Canal opened wider channels that may divert more traffic away.

“At some point [importers] reach a tipping point where they say it makes more sense to send goods through Houston, or Charleston,” O’Connell says.

That could be a threat to the hundreds of thousands of Californians who are directly or indirectly employed by port business. “You wind up jeopardizing an awful lot of blue collar workers,” O’Connell said.

Brown dismissed the concerns of business leaders as “very dubious”. This, despite the fact an analysis cited in the article indicates that implementation could cost the state over 300,000 jobs.

(LEGAL INSURRECTION)

This is really a back-door way to implement the previously failed SB 350 and more in order to tax people for California’s unfunded liabilities. JOHN & KEN previously discussed SB 350 noting the harmful effects it would have.

In an excellent article over at the WASHINGTON TIMES, we read this:

Fleeing California: A hostile business climate sends more companies to friendlier states


More than a century ago, Roy Farmer, 20, went door-to-door in Los Angeles with his bags of home-roasted coffee beans. By the 1930s, Farmer Brothers was selling coffee to restaurants throughout the nation. Today the company employs 1,200 men and women and generates $200 million in annual sales to restaurants, convenience stores, hospitals, hotels and universities.

But after surviving depressions, recessions, earthquakes and wars, Farmer Brothers is leaving California, finally driven out by high taxes and oppressive regulations.

The company says it’s fleeing in search of a place where business is appreciated. Relocating its corporate headquarters and distribution facilities from to a friendlier location, Farmer Brothers expects to save $15 million a year. Company executives are looking at Dallas and Oklahoma City. The relocation will bear real consequences for California. Nearly 350 workers will lose their well-paying jobs in Los Angeles alone….

Of course I have been talking about this for years (CARL’S JR. as one example), and posting audio on this issue for years as well…

When California makes it too expensive for alternative energy companies to survive in this state… you know the chickens are coming home to roost!


APPENDIX


The question my wife asked, very astutely, is what are these numbers we are talking about. Here they are:

…Getting to the 2030 and 2050 cuts that California seeks will require steeper cuts than the state has yet experienced over an extended period. Reducing greenhouse gases to the 2020 levels ordered by AB 32 requires a cut of 5.5 percent between 2010 and 2020. Brown’s executive order requires a 40 percent cut below the 2020 target by 2030. That means, in theory, that California would need to reduce emissions about 7 times as quickly between 2020 and 2030 as between 2010 and 2020. 

In practice, however, the acceleration may not be quite so dramatic. That’s because most experts expect California to come in below its 2020 targets. If, for example, California’s emissions come in at around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020, rather than at 431 (the figure needed to exactly meet its 2020 goal), California would need to cut emissions roughly three times faster between 2020 and 2030 than during the preceding decade.

Between 2030 and 2050, emissions will also need to decline much more quickly than has been the case in recent years.

These calculations come with one slight caveat: the state has specified its long-term goals only in terms of percentage reductions, rather than in terms of exact emissions figures. But the exact numbers, when they are formulated, are expected to be roughly what the percentages suggest (eg, around 260 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent for 2030, and 85 metric tons in 2050).

(CALMATTERS)

Here is page one of a more bullet pointed and graphed path (click it for the PDF) to these reductions that are impossible and is only a way for the state to gain more monetary resources to pay for their B.S.

  • A mere 2% of the carbon emissions credits that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) put up for auction in May were sold. The quarterly auction raised only $10 million of the $500 million that CARB projected. That’s awful news for Democrats in Sacramento who planned to spend the windfall on high-speed rail, housing and electric-car subsidies. (WSJ

According to the Vermont Senator’s website, the Democratic Party draft platform reads:

  • “Democrats believe that climate change is too important to wait for climate deniers and defeatists in Congress to start listening to science, and support using every tool available to reduce emissions now.” (Global Warming Is Too Important To Wait For Democracy)

Too important to wait for Congress? Which is why stuff like the above have to be passed via executive order — like Jerry Brown did. Whether on the state or federal levels, Democrats love growing government and regulating every aspect of the citizens life… by fiat. King George is back. It is merely “King George” forcing policies the public would never approve of:

Brown appears bent on forcing cap-and-trade on Californians, stating last month that “they’re going to plead for a market system called cap-and-trade so they can respond in a way that’s more beneficial to their bottom line.” The Bee reported that Brown also lambasted his opponents in Sacramento, calling them “Trump-inspired acolytes,” but concluded that “they have been vanquished” with the passage of SB 32.

(DONALD TRUMP POLLS)

THERE MAY BE A FAIL-SAFE HOWEVER!

In an excellent post at CLIMATE UNPLUGGED, it is noted that this signing into law by fiat would still need to pass a “California appellate court will soon rule as to whether it violates Proposition 13”

In 2006, the California Legislature enacted AB 32, which mandated that statewide greenhouse gas emissions be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020.  California’s cap & trade auction system followed. Last week the Legislature passed SB 32, which extends and deepens AB 32’s original mandate, requiring the state to further reduce emissions to 40% below the 1990 level by 2030. This is ambitious, to say the least, in a state where all of the “low hanging fruit” (cheap emissions reduction) has presumably been harvested.

None of this is news. Nor is it news that the legality of the entire cap & trade structure is on thin ice. A California appellate court will soon rule as to whether it violates Proposition 13 (yes, that Prop 13, for those of you who remember it) insofar as AB 32 did not pass both houses of the Legislature with the requisite 2/3 vote needed for tax increases. And even if AB 32 survives, few lawyers expect the new, post-2020 authorization to pass the forthcoming Prop 26 challenge. Enacted after AB 32 (and so not applicable to it), Prop 26 was explicitly designed to close the many loopholes the politicians exploited to get around Prop 13’s vote requirements.

The “good” news for California is that if its cap & trade system gets overturned, the Air Resources Board must still hit the 2020 and 2030 targets. The bad news is that it will have to achieve truly massive emissions reductions at a breakneck pace solely via pure command and control regulations….

I hope the court sees the unconstitutionality [California’s constitution] of this and kills it all!

Political Droughts (California)

WHY THIS POST? I am combining three posts into one for the person who wants to link the issue to a friend or family member in one post. Mind you this will make the post a bit long, but show clearly that the reason we are in a drought is because of the left in California kneeling before the alter of the [extreme] environmentalist political pressure groups. NOT to mention Jerry brown helped such people his first tenure (as well as other Democrat governors in California) in office to stop MULTIPLE water projects that would help prepare California for it’s droughts.

Please-please keep in mind that if you are one of the political skeptics that has a belief that greedy politicians are out to bankroll their time in office… think about this: would it behoove the State of California (primarily Democrat politicians) to fix the issue… or keep having eco-“type”-groups campaigning for and giving money to the Democrats Party in California AS WELL AS racking in tons of money via fines to a problem THEY created?

I mean, they have to pay for all the social programs in order to keep the their voters happy and voting Dem: California has 11% of the U.S. population, and about 30% of the welfare cases.

Prof. DiLorenzo

Droughts, of course, are a natural phenomenon, but governments often make them worse when government bureaucrats set water prices and allocate water usage. In 2015, California Governor Jerry Brown ordered city and county governments to enforce a reduction in water usage by 25 percent. Failure to do so would result in a $10,000 per day fine. This comes from a state that during the concurrent drought pumped several million acre feet of fresh water into the ocean in pursuit of government-mandated environmental goals.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo, The Problem with Socialism (New Jersey, NJ: Regnery, 2016), 47.

WATER PULSING

My Fox LA op-ed:

…On March 24th of this year, pursuant to the Endangered Species Act, the federal Government ordered a release of 5 billion gallons of water sent down the Stanislaus River, which eventually emptied into the ocean.

The purpose of this release or “pulse” as it’s called, was to raise the level of the river, so 23 steelhead trout could spawn.

So, in effect, just to allow 23 adult fish to possibly mate, water was wasted that could have supplied 150,000 Californians — for a year.

On April 10th, the Feds sent another 5 billion gallon pulse of water (enough water for another 150,000 Californians) down the Stanislaus, for the purpose of helping six steelhead trout reach the ocean and eventually return upriver to spawn.

It all just seems unbelievable.

In this terrible drought situation California finds itself in, it seems incredible to waste this massive amount of precious water.

It deifies common sense.

Billions of gallons of water being flushed to the sea.

This unfortunately is not the only example….

It’s hard to ask Californians to save water – when government is wasting it so needlessly.

200-YEAR LONG DROUGHTS

Don’t forget: drought, fires, and wild weather were blamed on global cooling

THANKFULLY we got out of global cooling so we don’t have to worry about droughts, fires, or wild weather any longer ~ WHEW! That was a close call.

(Real Science, also see, RPT)

Here are excerpts from Kotkin’s article that Prager is reading from in the above audio (video):

The Big Idea: California Is So Over: California’s drought and how it’s handled show just what kind of place the Golden State is becoming: feudal, super-affluent and with an impoverished interior.

….But since the 1970s, California’s water system has become the prisoner of politics and posturing. The great aqueducts connecting the population centers with the great Sierra snowpack are all products of an earlier era—the Los Angeles aqueduct (1913), Hetch-Hetchy (1923), the Central Valley Project (1937), and the California Aqueduct (1974). The primary opposition to expansion has been the green left, which rejects water storage projects as irrelevant.

Yet at the same time greens and their allies in academia and the mainstream pressare those most likely to see the current drought as part of a climate change-induced reduction in snowpack. That many scientists disagree with this assessment is almost beside the point. Whether climate change will make things better or worse is certainly an important concern, but California was going to have problems meeting its water needs under any circumstances.

It’s not like we haven’t been around this particular block before. In the 1860s, a severe drought all but destroyed LA’s once-flourishing cattle industry. This drought was followed by torrential rains that caused their own havoc. The state has suffered three major droughts since I have lived here—in the mid70s, the mid ’80s and again today—but long ago (even before I got there) some real whoppers occurred, including dry periods that lasted upwards of 200 years.

[….]

But ultimately the responsibility for California’s future lies with our political leadership, who need to develop the kind of typically bold approaches past generations have embraced. One step would be building new storage capacity, which Governor Jerry Brown, after opposing it for years, has begun to admit is necessary. Desalinization, widely used in the even more arid Middle East, notably Israel, has been blocked by environmental interests but could tap a virtually unlimited supply of the wet stuff, and lies close to the state’s most densely populated areas. Essentially the state could build enough desalinization facilities, and the energy plants to run them, for less money than Brown wants to spend on his high-speed choo-choo to nowhere. This piece of infrastructure is so irrelevant to the state’s needs that even many progressives, such as Mother JonesKevinDrum, consider it a “ridiculous” waste of money.

[….]

This fundamentally hypocritical regime remains in place because it works—for the powerful and well-placed. Less understandable is why many Hispanic politicians, such as Assembly Speaker Kevin de Leon, also prioritize “climate change” as his leading issue, without thinking much about how these policies might worsen the massive poverty in his de-industrializing L.A. district—until you realize that de Leon is bankrolled by Tom Steyer and others from the green uberclass.

So, in the end, we are producing a California that is the polar opposite of Pat Brown’s creation. True, it has some virtues: greener, cleaner, and more “progressive” on social issues. But it’s also becoming increasingly feudal, defined by a super-affluent coastal class and an increasingly impoverished interior. As water prices rise, and farms and lawns are abandoned, there’s little thought about how to create a better future for the bulk of Californians. Like medieval peasants, millions of Californians have been force to submit to the theology of our elected high priest and his acolytes, leaving behind any aspirations that the Golden State can work for them too.

(CBS) …The Sorek plant produces more than 165 million gallons of fresh water and accounts for more than 20 percent of Israel’s water consumption, according to Udi Tirosh, a director at IDE.

Factoring in several other desalination plants, an astonishing 50 percent of the country’s drinking water now comes directly from the ocean – an amount capable of supplying the entire city of Los Angeles.

Plant officials also say it offers some of the world’s cheapest desalinated water because of new technology and a series of engineering improvements that have cut down the massive energy normally required to transform seawater into fresh water.

Fountains that were once forced to dry up now are flowing again….

CALIFORNIA WATER PROJECTS

Another MUST READ excerpt by a really well written article is this one by Victor Davis Hanson:

Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental movement would one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reservoir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temperance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for 30 years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as difficult to imagine that environmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities.

All the while, the Green activists remained blissfully unconcerned about the vast immigration into California from Latin America and Mexico that would help double the state’s population in just four decades, to 40 million. Had population growth remained static, perhaps California could have lived with partially finished water projects. The state might also have been able to restore the flow of scenic rivers from the mountains to the sea, maintained a robust agribusiness sector, and even survived a four-or-five-year drought. But if California continues to block new construction of the State Water Project as well as additions to local and federal water-storage infrastructure, officials must halve California’s population, or shut down the 5 million acres of irrigated crops on the Central Valley’s west side, or cut back municipal water usage in a way never before done in the United States.

Victor Davis Hanson, “The Scorching of California: How Green Extremists Made a Bad Drought Worse,” The City Journal, Winter 2015 (Vol 25, No. 1), 82.

DECADES OF WARNING

A great article by Hot Air. This is the end of it… to read the entire thing, click through.

…Southern California has been in the process of running out of water for decades (if not longer) and the current drought is simply amplifying the effects and hastening the decline. I’ve been reading dire (and accurate) predictions about this issue for decades. Nearly twenty years ago there were cautionary tales coming out which discussed the fact that the region was essentially a desert when settlers began moving in and even the relatively small population in the nation’s early history already dwarfed the available natural water supplies. (This is from 1998, long before the current drought cycle.)

Not that we aren’t preoccupied with the issue of future water supplies for a good reason. In the LA Basin alone, we have approximately 6% of California’s habitable land but only .06% of the State’s stream flow — yet we hold over 45% of the State’s population. And if the population projections are to be believed, the entire southland is “scheduled” to grow from our current 16 million to over 24 million people. When policy questions are asked about whether Southern California can support this level of growth, the issue of greatest concern is not traffic or air quality or even quality of life, it is water. And the predominant question asked is “where will this water come from?”

Our water fears are not new. Since the pueblo days of Los Angeles, the lack of local water resources has been seen as the primary problem for the southland’s economic future. All plans for the development of the region have hinged around schemes to secure new water supplies — a fact recognized by Carey McWilliams, the pre-eminent historian of the southland, who wrote in 1946 that “God never intended Southern California to be anything but desert…Man has made it what it is.”

Going back to earlier in the last century, we find that the original reason that Hollywood voted to join the municipality of Los Angeles in 1910 was to gain access to their water rights. The area was already being drained by the growing population and would require later river diversions to feed the thirst of the area. The addition of a drought is a much harsher blow for an artificially created habitable zone.

But is the drought situation something new? Actually, not only the western portion of North America, but central and South America have apparently been experiencing these same cycles for as long as human beings have been around. One of the earliest recorded, but most massive examples was the curious disappearance of the million plus strong civilization of the Mayans more than a thousand years ago. What happened to them? Yep… a series of crippling, decade long droughts.

Identifying annual titanium levels, which reflect the amount of rainfall each year, the Swiss and U.S. researchers found that the pristine sediment layers in the basin formed distinct bands that correspond to dry and wet seasons. According to the scientists, there were three large droughts occurring between 810 and 910 A.D., each lasting less than a decade.

The timing of the droughts matched periodic downturns in the Maya culture, as demonstrated by abandonment of cities or diminished stone carving and building activity.

Experts say the Maya were particularly susceptible to long droughts because about 95 percent of their population centers depended solely on lakes, ponds, and rivers containing on average an 18-month supply of water for drinking and agriculture.

And according to the lake bed core samples they’ve taken, the drought which took out the Mayans wasn’t a one time event.

Scientists have found that the recurrence of the drought was remarkably cyclical, occurring every 208 years. That interval is almost identical to a known cycle in which the sun is at its most intense every 206 years. Nothing suggests the Maya knew anything about the sun’s change in intensity.

See? If only those pesky Mayans hadn’t been burning all of that coal and oil to power their dirty, industrial factories they’d probably still be down there today chopping out the hearts of their enemies. Ah… good times, my friends.

THE RECENT DROUGHT
Global Warming

1934 Not The Hottest Year Globally!?

This post will be an extended rebuttal to a portion of a much longer discussion. It is in response to the cartoonists website, SKEPTICAL SCIENCE, which has been responded to in a manner that should undermine it’s validity. But alas, it does not. So first let me post the graphic that caused the person to run to this propaganda site for a rebuttal:

(#4 above is the year 2006)

This graphic is from a larger conversation I had with a friends father about various issues, one being that 2014 was the hottest year ever. The response is here:

(Here is a good response to 2015 being the Hottest year after 2014) Here is an excerpt from the article:

The year 1934 was a very hot year in the United States, ranking fourth behind 2012, 2006, and 1998. However, global warming takes into account temperatures over the entire planet. The U.S.’s land area accounts for only 2% of the earth’s total surface area. Despite the U.S. heat in 1934, the year was not so hot over the rest of the planet, and is barely holding onto a place in the hottest 50 years in the global rankings (today it ranks 49th).

There are some preliminary thoughts on this before we get into the “nitty gritty.” First, in 1933-1936 (the heat wave and wild weather span), how many countries or persons were recording weather and temperature anomalies? Common sense says that of course, not nearly as much as today. We only started measuring with satellites since 1979. Another head-tilter would be have or did the NOAA or NASA previously note other years as warmer — in the past? We will find this out as we go along.

As you read this stuff (follow links to stories, and the like), that some sites just use the basic data without correcting it. I will discuss this later in the post… but first and foremost, are there reports from those years showing temperature and weather anomalies from around the world? Yes. Here is some evidences:

HEATWAVES – 1935

DROUGHTS – 1935

FLOODS – 1935

Mind you, this is a small sampling from THE NO TRICKS ZONE, many more examples can be found at C3 HEADLINES, as well as a site documenting the United Kingdom’s weather for some years. So it seems that we are looking at a few year GLOBAL weather pattern. AGAIN, we did not have satellites then so we can rely on eyewitness accounts such as these.

However, I wanted to comment on some of the wrong data being used or fudged data to make climate look worse now than in the past. I have to thank the person I was discussing the issue with, because he had posted a story linked to the journal, Nature. All it had was an abstract, and while I am a member of the AAAS, the Nature journal subscription was too much. There were also a list of corrections, so I asked him for either a full article and/or some links to the corrections. Lo-and-behold he gave me a link of a corrected graph that worked in my favor:

The red area is what concerns me… but even with it is has been warmer in the past (to note the bottom line). A professor at Berkeley notes that there is a collusion between some to hide the data that counters the narrative from the “warmists.” Mind you, the following video is for 2014, but I will make a point afterwords:

MRCTV BLOG notes the following that will throw a stone into the shoe of the left about 2015 being the hottest year. Remember, the internet never forgets!

…To explain where NOAA messed up, we have to start with 1997.

In a 1997 report discovered by Thomas Nelson, NOAA said the global average temperature for the year was 62.45 degrees Fahrenheit

As Blogger Wattsupwiththat explains:

In that 1997 report, they say clearly that the Global Average Temperature (GAT) was 62.45°F, based on a 30-year average (1961-1990) of the combined land and sea surface temperatures. Since we know the 1997 El Nino caused a record high spike in temperature, that means that for that 30 year period, there was no warmer GAT than 62.45°F up until that time.

Now, back to 2015. The recently released NOAA report, claiming that 2015 was the hottest year ever, says:

During 2015, the average temperature across global land and ocean surfaceswas 1.62°F (0.90°C) above the 20th century average. This was the highest among all 136 years in the 1880–2015 record, surpassing the previous record set last year by 0.29°F (0.16°C) and marking the fourth time a global temperature record has been set this century. 

It was blogger Wattsupwiththat  who first noticed and explained the funky math. He explains that the recent report compares 2015 to the 20th century average – but, doesn’t mention what that average temperature was.

However, it does give a 20th Century average in its November 2015  State of the Climate Report: – 13.9 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahrenheit):

Now, it’s math time:

  1. According to NOAA, the global average temperature for the 20th century was 57 degrees Fahrenheit.
  2. And the 2015 average was 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit above that average.
  3. In other words, according to this recent NOAA report, 2015 was the hottest year ever at 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit (57+1.62).
  4. And, that 1997 NOAA report states 1997 had an average global temperature of 62.45 degrees.

….According to my calculator:

1997’s 62.45 degrees is 3.83 degrees Fahrenheit higher than 2015’s 58.62 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning that – using NOAA’s own numbers – 2015 cannot be the hottest year on record.  

I will continue with WATT’S UP WITH THAT’S commentary:

As suggested monthly by the mainstream media since April 2015, NOAA and NASA officially declared that 2015 surpassed the 2014 record to become the new hottest year on record and that 2016 could be hotter than 2015! The average global temperatures calculated by NOAA and NASA, however, appear to be inaccurate and unreliable for the following reasons:


In Table 2, we’ve compiled the top five years when the most records were set. When multiple years tie for the high, each individual year gets a fraction of a “record”. So, for example, 1954 and 1933 each get a half of a record for Colorado.


  • According to data on the NOAA website, 1997 was truly the hottest year on record at 62.45 oF. The average global temperature in 2015 was 58.62 oF or 3.83 oF below the 1997 temperature.
  • According to data on the NOAA website, the temperatures such as the 20th century average temperature and annual temperature anomalies, which must be fixed, have different values in the annual global analyses.
  • NOAA and NASA corrected historical temperature data and fabricated temperature data in areas without temperature record systematically, widely, and uni-directionally to “cool” the past in an attempt to prove the soaring temperature trend.
  • NOAA and NASA made efforts to discredit their own satellite data – which is consistent with the balloon data – because it suggests a global warming hiatus since 1998 contradicting with the NOAA and NASA preferred narrative.
  • NOAA and NASA refused to give data and information requested by the US House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology committee. There is no reason for them to withhold the data and information, which are public domain, unless they have something to hide.

The headline “last year was the hottest year on record, this year is hotter than last year, and next year could be hotter than this year” is likely to be repeated years after years until funding for climate change is stopped!

The National Center for Policy Analysis, mentions a change a few years back:

The warmest year on record is no longer 1998 and not because it has been overtaken by a recent heat wave.  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist James Hansen’s famous claims about 1998 being the warmest year on record in the United States was the result of a serious math error, according to H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).

According to NASA’s newly published data:

  • The hottest year on record is 1934, not 1998.
  • The third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006.
  • Three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940.
  • Six of the top 10 hottest years occurred before 90 percent of the growth in greenhouse gas emissions during the last century occurred.

Here we see raw data vs. messaged data run through a hopper. In 2007 NASA adjusted it’s U.S. findings to match the real data:

The measured USHCN daily temperature data shows a decline in US temperatures since the 1930s.  But before they release it to the public,  they put it thorough a series of adjustments which change it from a cooling trend to a warming trend.

[….]

The next blink comparator shows changes in the US temperature record from GISS. It alternates between their 1999 graph and the 2012 version of the same graph. The past is cooled and the present is warmed.

(Real Science)

Is 2014 The Hottest Year? No (Part 2 of a Series)

Here is another post of mine continuing the data set corruption that has been clearly proven. This post is intimately connected with a previous one:

EQUIPMENT FAIL

Here are some examples of fudged data because of sub-standard equipment:

You’d think the answer would be obvious, but here we have a NOAA operated USHCN climate station of record providing a live experiment. It always helps to illustrate with photos. Today I surveyed a sewage treatment plant, one of 4 stations surveyed today (though I tried for 5) and found that for convenience, they had made a nice concrete walkway to allow servicing the Fisher-Porter rain gauge, which needs a paper punch tape replaced one a month.

Here is what you see in visible light:

Here is what the infrared camera sees:

Note that the concrete surface is around 22-24°C, while the grassy areas are between 12-19°C

This station will be rated a CRN5 by this definition from the NOAA Climate Reference Network handbook, section 2.2.1:

Class 5 (error >~= 5C) – Temperature sensor located next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot, or concrete surface.”

More than half of the stations the NOAA use are tainted or wrongly placed equipment. Here is an example of a well maintained station with data sets:

Here is data sets corresponding to a site where heat corrupts the data:

Here are even more corrupt examples of these stations placed next to air conditioner outlets, next to burners, next to lights that glow at night, asphalt surrounding them and buildings that radiate heat as well as block wind (NOTE this continually growing accumulation of these sites at WUWT):

 photo Weather Station Air 8.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 4.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 7.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 6.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 5.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 1.jpg
 photo Weather Station Air 2.jpg

CHANGING DATA-SETS

Another example of changing averages was noted by Steve Goddard and others — even the NOAA have acknowledge it — have been discussing recently is exemplified in Dr. Judith Carry’s post on the matter (from a larger post of mine):


Even the Wall Street Journal chose the higher temperature reading to say that July of 2012 was July was the “hottest month in the contiguous U.S. since records began in 1895.” WUWT found this on accident and it has led to quite a few other revelations as we will see. Here is description in part of what we looking at:

Glaring inconsistencies found between State of the Climate (SOTC) reports sent to the press and public and the “official” climate database record for the United States. Using NCDC’s own data, July 2012 can no longer be claimed to be the “hottest month on record”.

[….]

I initially thought this was just some simple arithmetic error or reporting error, a one-off event, but then I began to find it in other months when I compared the output from the NCDC climate database plotter. Here is a table of the differences I found for the last two years between claims made in the SOTC report and the NCDC database output.

[….]

In almost every instance dating back to the inception of the CONUS Tavg value being reported in the SOTC report, there’s a difference. Some are quite significant. In most cases, the database value is cooler than the claim made in the SOTC report. Clearly, it is a systemic issue that spans over two years of reporting to the press and to the public.

It suggests that claims made by NCDC when they send out these SOTC reports aren’t credible because there are such differences between the data. Clearly, NCDC means for the plotter output they link to, to be an official representation to the public, so there cannot be a claim of me using some “not fit for purpose” method to get that data….

The Wall Street Journal made a graph showing this record setting month (below-left). The more accurate temperature for July likewise is shown in the same graph (below-right):

This looking at the data sets chosen and what is used and isn’t used to support an idea that fails in every way. Combine this obvious cherry-picking with the bias, collusion, and charges against the report that the President used to route Congress, all show we have a problem Houston! But this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It seems the NOAA has been skewing these temps for some time. Why? Because the left uses this as a way to promote an ever growing government and the scientists get more-and-more funding. This data fudging story is newer, and it is evolving quickley, including this newest post via Real Science where Steve Goddard notes that More Than 40% Of USHCN Station Data Is Fabricated. Here is Dr. Judith carry’s synopsis (excerpted), in which she critiques a bit Goddard’s post… but then bows to the evidence:

OK, acknowledging that Goddard made some analysis errors, I am still left with some uneasiness about the actual data, and why it keeps changing. For example, Jennifer Marohasy has been writing about Corrupting Australian’s temperature record.

In the midst of preparing this blog post, I received an email from Anthony Watts, suggesting that I hold off on my post since there is some breaking news. Watts pointed me to a post by Paul Homewood entitled Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas. Excerpt:

So, I thought it might be worth looking in more detail at a few stations, to see what is going on. In Steve’s post, mentioned above, he links to the USHCN Final dataset for monthly temperatures, making the point that approx 40% of these monthly readings are “estimated”, as there is no raw data.

From this dataset, I picked the one at the top of the list, (which appears to be totally random), Station number 415429, which is Luling, Texas.

Taking last year as an example, we can see that ten of the twelve months are tagged as “E”, i.e estimated. It is understandable that a station might be a month, or even two, late in reporting, but it is not conceivable that readings from last year are late. (The other two months, Jan/Feb are marked “a”, indicating missing days).

But, the mystery thickens. Each state produces a monthly and annual State Climatological Report, which among other things includes a list of monthly mean temperatures by station. If we look at the 2013 annual report for Texas, we can see these monthly temperatures for Luling.

Where an “M” appears after the temperature, this indicates some days are missing, i.e Jan, Feb, Oct and Nov. (Detailed daily data shows just one missing day’s minimum temperature for each of these months).

Yet, according to the USHCN dataset, all ten months from March to December are “Estimated”. Why, when there is full data available?

But it gets worse. The table below compares the actual station data with what USHCN describe as “the bias-adjusted temperature”. The results are shocking.

In other words, the adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013. Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C. So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming.

Note as well, that the largest adjustments are for the estimated months of March – December. This is something that Steve Goddard has been emphasising.

It is plain that these adjustments made are not justifiable in any way. It is also clear that the number of “Estimated” measurements made are not justified either, as the real data is there, present and correct.

Watts appears in the comments, stating that he has contacted John Nielsen-Gammon (Texas State Climatologist) about this issue. Nick Stokes also appears in the comments, and one commenter finds a similar problem for another Texas station.

Homewood’s post sheds light on Goddard’s original claim regarding the data drop out (not just stations that are no longer reporting, but reporting stations that are ‘estimated’). I infer from this that there seems to be a real problem with the USHCN data set, or at least with some of the stations. Maybe it is a tempest in a teacup, but it looks like something that requires NOAA’s attention. As far as I can tell, NOAA has not responded to Goddard’s allegations. Now, with Homewood’s explanation/clarification, NOAA really needs to respond….

(H/T to Climate Realist ~ See WUWT and Hockey Schtick for more)


So we see in the above, that temperatures can be changed years later as the totality of the data is included. What was considered the hottest falls to just an average month in the heat index.

And this has — within the past few months — turned into a very large debate.

EQUIPMENT FAIL II

Here is another example of older/faulty equipment:

A Quick Note about the Difference between RSS and UAH TLT data

There is a noticeable difference between the RSS and UAH lower troposphere temperature anomaly data. Dr. Roy Spencer discussed this in his July 2011 blog post On the Divergence Between the UAH and RSS Global Temperature Records.  In summary, John Christy and Roy Spencer believe the divergence is caused by the use of data from different satellites.  UAH has used the NASA Aqua AMSU satellite in recent years, while as Dr. Spencer writes:

…RSS is still using the old NOAA-15 satellite which has a decaying orbit, to which they are then applying a diurnal cycle drift correction based upon a climate model, which does not quite match reality.

I updated the graphs in Roy Spencer’s post in On the Differences and Similarities between Global Surface Temperature and Lower Troposphere Temperature Anomaly Datasets.

While the two lower troposphere temperature datasets are different in recent years, UAH believes their data are correct, and, likewise, RSS believes their TLT data are correct.  Does the UAH data have a warming bias in recent years or does the RSS data have cooling bias?  Until the two suppliers can account for and agree on the differences, both are available for presentation.

 

The bottom line is that those wishing to expand regulation and laws and taxes on the rest of us fudge the facts. But facts-are-facts. And the ship is sinking for these lefties.

DNC Platform Makes Global Warming Skepticism Criminal!

(The above video is from the DAILY CALLER’S post on the subject.) GAY PATRIOT notes the following:

The first rule of a fanatical cult is that you are not allowed to question the teachings of the fanatical cult.

The reason for this has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics….

(read more)