We’ve heard it all before. Climate Change causes war and famine. Supporters of Climate Change legislation have scared us with all the plagues of Egypt for years, to trying to liberate us from fossil fuels. It’s actually been linked to every Biblical catastrophe, short of a rain of frogs.

So It should come as no big surprise that Discovery News posts this article linking “Climate Change” to wars, political unrest, famine, and generations of humans almost an inch shorter than their ancestors. (That’s a new one actually. Perhaps the oceans aren’t really rising; maybe we’re all just getting a lot shorter.)

But if you read the article a little more closely, you’ll notice something peculiar. The climate change the author is warning about here, isn’t global warming, it’s global cooling. According to the article, scientists writing for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have compared historic records of famine and wars, and population, against temperature records. They have found that the cooler the planet gets, the more frequent the wars; during the warm periods, people stop fighting, and go home to make babies. Hence, warming periods coincide with population surges.

For the first time in recent media history, all the calamities listed have occurred when the Earth got colder. Consequently, a warmer climate is actually good for humanity. It’s what I’ve always suspected. Warming is much better than cooling.

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Like clockwork—you can count on the activist old media to take a human disaster and make it political.

They are still searching for bodies in Missouri and leftists have started their chant of “global warming,” ”climate change,” or “global cooling,” or “global whateveritisthisweek.”

NBC’s Al Roker jumped right out of the box on Tuesday and laid the blame for the killer tornados on “climate change.”

In a conversation with Martin Bashir on MSNBC Al imparted his god-like wisdom upon us;

“And you know look – yesterday, or the day before yesterday; we had the tornado in Minneapolis. We have had these tornadoes and earlier this week we had a tornado in Philadelphia. And so, you know our weather, or climate change is such now that we are seeing this kind of weather not just in rural parts of our country, but in urban centers as well.”

I’ll put this right up there with the comments after Katrina when Robert Kennedy Jr. blamed George W. Bush for the hurricanes because he didn’t sign the Kyoto Treaty. “The Kyoto Treaty clearly forbids hurricanes from coming ashore,” said Kennedy. “Without the protection of this vital document, the United States will continue to remain vulnerable to bad weather.”

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These fire and brimestone preachers of the left give the Southern Baptist with which I grew up a run for their tithing. As a kid spending weekends in the Ozarks, I remember my granny’s preacher shaking his fist, his jowls waving in the wind not unlike a bloodhound’s, excoriating the congregation and condemning it to hell. It’s a similar feeling whenever I watch some of the more virulent personalities on the left, the ones who, while reminding me of the aforementioned southern preacher, simultaneously remind me of Carrie White’s mom.

(Chick hated freedom AND hair conditioner.)

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In a column she posted at the Huffington Post, USEPA Administrator Lisa Jackson continued in her attempts to rebrand the Agency into something it never has been nor was intended to be: a creator of wealth. Jackson surely recognizes that the tired, old “sky is falling” message that has traditionally driven environmental agendas has less traction than ever given the economic realities of 2010. So, while she isn’t ready to abandon the fear-mongering tactics that are ingrained in the green movement, Jackson is working hard to create a parallel reality, one in which there is an absolutely phenomenal return on investment whenever the government imposes a new round of environmental regulations.

In a draw-dropping example of the old saw that “correlation does not equate to causation” the administrator told America that the Clean Air Act has created a venerable cornucopia of riches:

“…as air pollution has dropped over the last 40 years, our national GDP has risen by 207 percent. The total benefits of the Clean Air Act amount to more than 40 times the costs of regulation. For every one dollar we have spent, we have received more than $40 of benefits in return, making the Clean Air Act one of the most cost-effective things the American people have done for themselves in the last half century.”

How does one calculate a whopping 4,000% return on Clean Air Act investments? If you’re the EPA, you point to increased productivity that you happily attribute to less lost time due to illness in the workplace, as well as avoided medical costs. Not that you actually have to prove that any of those results actually occur. All you need is a few pointy-headed academics with calculators who can punch the right numbers, attach a certain value to sick days and medical condition and – voila – you too can create trillions in phantom economic benefits.

That’s the method that has been used to justify just about every major piece of Clean Air regulation and Jackson’s EPA has shifted this technique into hyper-drive. If the numbers that she uses to justify the sweeping, radical environmental initiatives her Agency is pushing are to be believed, nobody will ever miss work again and the health care industry will have to close its doors for a lack of business. And yes, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. (more…)

Along with the usual cable suspects, ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC were sporting so much green yesterday that I thought I it was St. Patrick’s Day and that I had awakened from a Rip Van Winkle-like coma after sleeping for almost eleven months.  Nope, it was Earth Day 2010.

All day we were blanketed with stories and information about our responsibilities to the planet and how we could change our lives to pollute less.  And I wondered what the leaders of this great nation were doing today.  How were they leading by example?

Well, as it turns out, our leaders did some big things for the planet on Earth Day:

• President Obama flew Air Force One to New York City so he could address the Wall Street people and the country about plans to clean up the financial industries.
• Vice President Joe “BFD” Biden fired up Air Force Two and also came to New York so he could be a guest on “The View” and finally address the issue of his profane outburst at the signing of the Health Care Bill (a month ago).
• The U.S. Air Force launched a “secret space plane” last night as well.

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Let us forget, for a moment, that “Earth Hour” is a pointless exercise serving only to make environmentalists feel better about themselves by marginally reducing electrical demand for 0.01% of the year. Let us disregard, for a moment, that the basic reason for having an “Earth Hour” in the first place is fatuous, because global warming alarmism has as much to do with actual science as alchemy does. Instead, as the MSM pushes this stupidity down our gullets once again, let us consider the effects of “Earth Hour,” in terms of power production and that environment. Indeed, a sober analysis suggests that “Earth Hour” doesn’t do anything to save a planet that doesn’t need saving and that it may in fact rather increase air pollution instead of reducing it.

Let us begin with a question: why is “Earth Hour” scheduled for the evening hours?  Answer: you couldn’t do it during daylight with any credibility. Electric demand is highest during the daytime hours, therefore it’s only then that peaking units (generation assets that only operate during times of high demand) kick in to fill the gap. If “Earth Hour” were held when the sun was out, utilities would respond to the drop in demand by kicking the most expensive generating assets off of the grid. This would surely include one of our more expensive sources of power: wind turbines. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA, a part of the Department of Energy) the cost of wind power is about 50% to 100% more than the cost of coal-fired electricity. It’s obvious that, in times of peak demand, a responsible public utility looking out for consumers’ pocketbooks (and their own profits) will shut down a wind farm in deference to a more efficient, less expensive coal plant. (more…)

You need to give me some money.  And you need to do it right now.

Let’s be clear – this is an emergency.  The time for debate is over.  The time for action is now.  There is a clear consensus among experts in the field of law, like me, that you are legally obligated to give me some money.

Why?  Well, it’s a legal thing, and frankly you wouldn’t understand.  I’m a lawyer; I do understand these things.  You need to trust me.  Our futures – and our children’s futures (particularly my children’s) – depend on it.

Now, I reject any attempt to compare this important crusade to the advocacy of the anthropogenic global warming believers.  Sure, as the latest New York Times op-ed by Al Gore shows, there are some superficial similarities.  Yes, the global warming crowd tells you to believe the “experts” and here I’m telling you to do the same.  But “experts” do play an important role. (more…)

As a trial lawyer, I am jealous of Tom Friedman, that prophet of painfully conventional “wisdom” whose insights grace the ever dustier New York Times op-ed pages.  His latest column, “Global Weirding Is Here”, has managed to achieve what I only dream about as an attorney -– a self-proving argument.

Tom is, of course, an anthropological global-warming disciple and a lay Grand Inquisitor.

So, naturally, the uncooperative weather – you know, those giant snowstorms folks back east might have noticed – provide him with a quandary.  How does one reconcile his faith that the world is becoming one gigantic orchid hothouse with the fact that it seems to be colder all the time?

Well, you start by mocking the heretics – excuse me, the “deniers”: (more…)

Global warming hysteria has often been compared to religion, and rightly so. But, there’s also many theatrical elements to be found, facets of the genre “green drama” that are so very familiar to those of us who have spent our professional careers watching environmental tragedies debut year after year.

Global warming is the blockbuster production of the environmental movement. It’s the Broadway hit that has maintained the rapt attention of environmental activists and policy-makers throughout the course of three decades. The players are familiar, having honed their roles after years of practice.

The directors naturally, and predictably, cast big, bad corporations as villains, with Exxon-Mobil supposedly skulking behind the scenes, passing out bribes to spineless skeptical scientists and obstructing the heroic politicians and activists trying to save innocent mother earth, before it’s too late.  And what a victim to have! Sure, your average activist would be happy to be part of the local neighborhood production of: “Stop Building That New Factory Before It Kills All The Babies In Town (The Musical)”, but the Global Warming Show is truly big time. It’s not just the babies in town that are in danger, it’s everyone’s babies, everywhere. This production has innocent tribes living on sinking tropical islands and disappearing glaciers and forlorn polar bears. Global Warming; it’s the show that’s got it all! (more…)

As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.

The latest boil to burst forth upon the body of environmental journalism began to fester on Thursday, January 7, when the USEPA announced that it was proposing the latest, greatest and most-badly- needed-ever smog standard. (Officially the pollutant is “ground-level ozone”, but we’ll stick with “smog” for convenience). Mainstream media outlets everywhere fell over themselves to heap praise on the EPA for imposing a standard that administrator Lisa Jackson described as “long overdue.” This lead, from the Chicago Tribune’s lead environmental reporter/head Sierra Club cheerleader Michael Hawthorne’s January 8 story, was typical:

“Chicago and other urban areas across the U.S. would need to clamp down harder on air pollution under tough smog limits proposed Thursday by the Obama administration, which scrapped a George W. Bush-era rule that ignored the latest scientific advice.”

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Please click for Part II and Part III.

How a tiny blog and a collective of climate enthusiasts broke the biggest story in the history of global warming science – but not without a gatekeeper of the climate establishment trying to halt its proliferation.

It was triggered at the most unlikely of places. Not in the pages of a prominent science publication, or by an experienced muckraker. It was triggered at a tiny blog – a bit down the list of popular skeptic sites. With a small group of followers, a blog of this size could only start a media firestorm if seeded with just the right morsel of information, and found by just the right people. Yet it was at this location that the most lethal weapon against the global warming establishment was unleashed.

The blog was the Air Vent. The information was a link to a Russian server that contained 61 MB of files now known as Climategate. Within two weeks of the file’s introduction, the story appeared on 28,400,000 web pages.

Not entirely the “death of global warming” as many have claimed – what happened with Climategate is much more nuanced and exponentially more interesting than the headlines convey. What was triggered at this blog was the death of unconditional trust in the scientific peer review process, and the maturing of a new movement – that of peer-to-peer review. (more…)