Bend Over When you Hear the Oink

Today the US Senate will begin debate on S.2191: "A bill to direct the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to establish a program to decrease emissions of greenhouse gases, and for other purposes (read the bill to learn the "other" purposes)." This is in fact a new record with regard to so called "pork barrel" spending in the legislative history of such outrages and is tacitly approved by the presidential nominee designate of the Republican Party.

For anyone who is interested, "greenhouse gases" include: H2O (water) which covers more than 70% of the globe and the lower atmosphere, CO2 (carbon dioxide), a necessary ingredient in plant photosynthesis which is the nutritional basis for all life forms on the planet and CH4 (methane) which is produced by the biodegradation of all nutrients.

Both the impact on global temperature of greenhouse gases as well as the extent of their anthropogenic sources is hotly debated by scientists of various persuasions but has been seized upon by politicians in order to advance their own agendas of increasing governmental power. In the United Kingdom a proposal has been put forward in Parliament to issue each citizen a "carbon ration card" which would allow each individual a stated amount of CO2 production and would be required to be presented at the purchase of any fossil fuel product, airline ticket or pay an energy utility bill. Given the chances of the Democratic Party soon achieving control of both the executive and legislative branches of the US government can such an outrage be excluded from being foisted upon our own population? How far down this green mile (pun alert) can we expect the requirement of an "exhale permit" for each individual? After all, the quantity of CO2 in the exhaled breath of living organisms is not inconsiderable.

Update: 13:49 Hrs.:

Law professor wants to use courts to fight global warming

EUGENE — University of Oregon law professor Mary Wood is tired of waiting for government officials to take action on global warming. So she’s devised a new legal tool to hurry them up.

Drawing on her background in both natural resources and property law, Wood has developed a theory that claims the atmosphere is an asset that belongs to all but is held in trust by the government. The government has a legal obligation to protect that trust from harm, she argues, just as financial managers have a legal obligation to protect the monetary assets in their care.

“The main problem with climate is that no government is taking responsibility for it and our government is sitting idle [but not for long] while this catastrophe is unfolding,” Wood said

Gentle reader, if you believed I was engaging in hyperbole regarding an "exhale permit", read more
here.

THE PHONY APOCALYPSE

During the 1950s and 60s many youngsters of an impressionable age began exhibiting signs of "psychological" trauma due to being fed a regular diet of fear of thermonuclear warfare. These fears were fed mostly by the government schools through audio visual presentations and the weekly obligatory "drills" training them in the practice of "duck and cover" and evacuation to the nearest fallout shelter. The new fear being spoon fed to the younger generation by the "educational" system is the gospel as preached by the global warmistas.

“For many children and young adults, global warming is the atomic bomb of today…Parents say they're searching for ‘productive’ outlets for their 8-year-olds' obsessions with dying polar bears. Teachers say enrollment in high school and college environmental studies classes is doubling year after year. And psychologists say they're seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon.”

Since those earlier days we have continued to experience a steady increase in the intrusion by the various levels of government into every facet of our lives, from the regulation of the amount of water used for flushing toilets to the penalties for removing mattress labels. No activity has escaped the scrutiny and regulation by our so called "public servants". Additionally, the assertion that our leaders must be exempted from these onerous ukases is almost universally posited on the assumption that their efforts on our behalf must not be hampered. Hence Al Gore shuttles to and from global warmista presentations and his hideously pollution generating residence in a pollution-spewing private aircraft while crusading for our retrogression to an 18th century economy. All this is to be excused by the purchase of "carbon offsets" (warmista indulgences) from a corporation in which he is a major shareholder.

Since the warmista jihad cannot prevail on the basis of rational and logical debate, the opposing skeptics must be either ignored or silenced by threats and intimidation. The need to silence the skeptics recently became more urgent subsequent to a debate sponsored by the New York debating society Intelligence Squared

On the alarmist side of the debate were the Union of Concerned Scientists Brenda Ekwurzel, NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt and University of California oceanographer Richard C. J. Somerville [all dependent on government grants].

The skeptical view of global warming alarmism was presented by Massachusetts Institute of Technology meteorologist Richard S. Lindzen, University of London bio-geographer Philip Stott, and “State of Fear” author Michael Crichton, who is also a Harvard-trained physician and an instructor at Cambridge University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A pre-debate poll indicated that, by 2-to-1 (57 percent to 29 percent, with 14 percent undecided), the audience believed that manmade global warming was a crisis. But in the post-debate poll, the audience reversed its pre-debate views — the ranks of the skeptics swelled to 46 percent, the believers plummeted to 42 percent and the undecided declined slightly to 12 percent.

The solutions inevitably touted by this new religious sect invariably involve additional taxes and additional governmental regulations. Qui bono? Duh!

Consensus is Not Science

As a former sailor aboard a small sailing vessel for many years ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ has developed a habit of being attuned to the weather and the concomitant changes associated with approaching weather systems. The National Weather service has significantly contributed to public safety and convenience by its use of satellite and radar observations. These observations are fed into computers which generate predictive models which are somewhat reliable for short periods. The further out into the future the predictions cover, the less certain their validity. For example the NWS recently tracked a weather system traversing the U.S. and predicted the arrival of severe weather including rainfall and thunderstorms in northwest Georgia on a specific date 4 days in the future according to the computer models. As the system's progress was monitored the arrival time and rainfall amounts changed 24 times over the 4 days of computer generated predictions and the system in fact arrived a day and a half later than predicted and resulted in 50% less rain than anticipated. The point is that predictions ARE NOT SCIENCE and at best an educated guess. Would you bet the rent money on the next month's weather forecast? This is in fact what the global warmistas insist we do by accepting their predictions of catastrophic near future climate change.

Climate Change alarmists [warmistas] seek to overturn the view that the temperature of the planet earth will remain hospitable to human, animal and plant-life. Curiously, despite all that has been written about "Climate Change", I have yet to learn anything about testable predictions. Are there any on the horizon?

Global Warming theory is only controversial because its proponents insist on the reliability of their long range dire predictions of floods, desertification, etc, which, in turn, necessitate draconian changes in the national and world economies. Somehow, in the ensuing hubbub over the alarmist predictions, climate scientists have forgotten their primary duty to provide convincing experimental data to validate their theory.

It is incumbent on climate scientists to make predictions derived from their theories about phenomena that can be observed over the next few years. Indeed, it is their scientific duty as proponents of the theory to provide the experimental evidence, and not the responsibility of the skeptics to disprove it. Those are the established rules of science.

One can observe that it is difficult to experiment on the world; however similar daunting challenges have been overcome by resourceful and ingenious scientists throughout history.

In 1632 Galileo Galilei was accused of heresy for questioning the Aristotelian "consensus model" of the universe which held that the sun and all other heavenly bodies revolve around the earth. He was threatened by the Inquisition with torture for holding these views, despite the fact that he - and anyone who troubled to do so - could see through a telescope that moons orbit the planet Jupiter.

An old man, Galileo was forced to recant and confess his error; he thereby escaped being burnt at the stake and was instead sentenced to house-arrest for the rest of his life. Science and history have of course proven him right. Ever since, the notion of enforced "consensus" has been anathema to scientists. Until now.

At present the warmistas are insistent that failure to accept their view that catastrophe is imminent is heresy even though these prognostications rely on a process little more reliable than reading the entrails of a goat.

Gore Lied People Cried

The self proclaimed prophet of the global warmista religion who stated that "in order to garner support for the "unjustified" attack of Saddam Hussein's Iraq President Bush "lied to Congress and the American people" by "playing on our fears" and exaggerating the the danger has recently revealed himself to be a shameless hypocrite:

After our item on scientists critical of Al Gore's "global warming" alarmism, a reader called our attention to an interview with Gore that appeared last May in a publication called Grist:

Q: There's a lot of debate right now over the best way to communicate about global warming and get people motivated. Do you scare people or give them hope? What's the right mix?

Gore: I think the answer to that depends on where your audience's head is. In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

"An over-representation of factual presentations of how dangerous it is." Isn't that what people accused President Bush of offering vis-à-vis the erstwhile Iraqi regime? Didn't this lead a certain former vice president to thunder, "He betrayed this country! He played on our fears!"?

And it's not as if Gore's "over-representations" don't have harmful effects. They've caused a lot of people to get really sad and stressed out. Consider this report from BusinessWeek:
In recent years, the TED conference has gained a reputation for blissfully big ideas buoyed by unrelenting optimism. So few conference goers were prepared for venture capitalist John Doerr to choke up with emotion as he kicked off the second day of talks on Mar. 9.

"I'm scared," he told the audience, looking down at his 15-year-old daughter in the front row. "I don't think we're going to make it."

Doerr issued a passionate call to action for everyone to make environmental concerns their "next big thing."

And this one from the Post-Chronicle, about someone called Jennifer Garner:

Jennifer has also confessed she cries more now she is a mother. The actress believes the experience has made her more caring.

She said: "Since I became a mother, I cry more because I care about things more.

"I can't watch a movie where something happens to a child. And I've always cared about global warming and breast cancer, but now there seems to be an urgency about them."

I guess it's OK for the warmistas to use hype but not proponents of the war on the jihadis.