Less Fire, More Ice

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, February 23, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Environment: The claim that man's activities are heating the planet was weakened when it was learned that a glitch caused satellites to undermeasure the volume of Arctic ice. Doom has been overdone.

The global warming speculation has more holes in it than Al Gore's oversized carbon footprint has square miles. Deeply infected with statistical and common sense problems, the climate change argument is beginning to crumble. Suddenly what many considered irrefutable evidence has more in common with fables than scientific work:

• The famed hockey stick chart that supposedly shows Earth's temperature rising sharply in response to the industrial age is not an accurate measure of what has actually occurred. This stick, used by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to scare the public into believing that human activity is causing the Earth to warm, has been revealed to be in error.

The unmasking happened five years ago when Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick crunched the numbers and uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann used to create the chart.

Mann and his co-researchers also conveniently left the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age out of the temperature chart, a deception, whether intended or not, that renders their entire work unreliable.

• Global temperatures peaked in 1998, a fact that contradicts the assertion that man's continued pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is making the planet hotter. This was not predicted by the climate models that say we're headed for a warm period.

Nor can anthropogenic global warming be explained when introduced into the argument is the fact that 1934, when far fewer carbon-spewing machines existed than we have today, is the hottest year on record.

Global warming alarmists invested heavily in convincing everyone that 1998 was the hottest year and 2006 the third warmest. After correcting for faulty data, NASA had to backtrack.

At the same time NASA made the correction, it also reported that six of the top 10 hottest years are from a period before 90% of the 20th century growth in carbon emissions occurred.

• In 2007, it was learned that the placement of temperature stations across the U.S. had skewed readings. Equipment at a site in Oregon was found to be just 10 feet from an air conditioning exhaust vent. The sensor at another Oregon station is located on a rooftop near an air conditioning unit. A Tahoe, Calif., station is located next to a drum where trash is burned.

A volunteer group has found that 69% of the 807 stations it has rated (of the 1,221 U.S. Historical Climatological Network stations) are located less than 12 yards from an artificial heating source; 11% are located "next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot or concrete surface."

Most interesting is a comparison between two California stations located within 40 miles of each other. The station in Orland is isolated from man-made influences and has recorded falling temperatures since the late 19th century. Meanwhile, the Marysville station, once in a remote area but now surrounded by artificial heat sources, has shown increases in temperatures over a similar period.

• Last week, researchers at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center admitted that from early January to the middle of this month, "sensor drift" in the satellite monitors used to measure sea ice caused them to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles. That's a significant area roughly the size of California.

Will the alarmists and media apologize for spreading fear about shrinking sea ice that was not really shrinking? Not likely. They'll move on to something else to hype. But it won't change the facts on the ground — or in the sea.

I read the IBD first, everyday.

ACORN's Senator

Despite efforts to blame the rescue bill's failure on the GOP, it should be remembered that 95 Democrats — some 40% of the Democratic Caucus — withheld support. Obama himself also deserves blame — not only for the bill's failure, but also for the crisis it was designed to solve.

As the New York Times reports, "Aides to Mr. Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure." Is the reason the fact that the slush fund for ACORN in the original bill, siphoning off 20% of any future profits for such activist groups, was trimmed from the tree?

Obama, who once represented ACORN in a lawsuit against the state of Illinois, was hired by the group to train its community organizers and staff in the methods and tactics of the late Saul Alinsky. ACORN would stage in-your-face protests in bank lobbies, drive-through lanes and even at bank managers' homes to get them to issue risky loans in the inner city or face charges of racism.

In the early 1990s, reports Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center, Obama was personally recruited by Chicago's ACORN to run training sessions in "direct action." That's the euphemism for the techniques used under the cover of the federal Community Reinvestment Act to intimidate financial institutions into giving what have been called "Ninja" loans — no income, no job, no assets — to people who couldn't afford them.

CRA was designed to increase minority homeownership. Whenever a bank wanted to grow or expand, ACORN would file complaints that it was not sufficiently sensitive to the needs of minorities in providing home loans. Agitators would then be unleashed.

Chicago's ACORN used Alinsky's tactics against institutions such as Bell Federal Savings and Loan and Avondale Federal Savings. In September 1992, the Chicago Tribune described the group's agenda as "affirmative action lending."

Obama also helped ACORN get funding. When he served on the board of the Woods Fund for Chicago with Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the Woods Fund frequently gave ACORN grants to fund its activist agenda.

In 1995, Kurtz reports, Obama chaired the committee that increased funding of ACORN and other community organizers. The committee report boasted that the fund's "non-ideological" image "enabled the Trustees to make grants to organizations that use confrontational tactics against the business and governmental 'establishments' without undue risk of being accused of partisanship."

The CRA empowered regulators to punish banks that failed to "meet the credit needs" of "low-income, minority and distressed neighborhoods." It gave groups such as ACORN a license and a means to intimidate banks, claiming they were "redlining" poor and minority neighborhoods. ACORN employed its tactics in 1991 by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA.

As a former White House staff economist writes in the American Thinker, Obama represented ACORN in a 1994 suit against redlining. ACORN was also a driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton administration that greatly expanded the CRA and helped spawn the current financial crisis.

Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. Last November, he told the group, "I've been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career." Indeed he has. Obama was and is fully aware of what ACORN was doing with the money and expertise he provided. The voters should be aware on Nov. 4 of the roles of both in creating the current crisis.

Link:

The Day The Earth Cooled

The Day The Earth Cooled

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, September 25, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Environment: The solar wind is slowing, but Al Gore is still spewing hot air. The Oscar winner is promoting civil disobedience to stop energy and economic growth as the first U.S. emissions cap-and-trade program begins.

Speaking before Bill Clinton's Global Initiative, junk science advocate Gore called on young people to take the law into their own hands because the climate, he claims, is a-changin'. He told the gathering in New York City that "the world has lost ground to the climate crisis" and the time for action is now.

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore said to loud applause.

His comments come two weeks after a British jury acquitted six Greenpeace activists accused of causing property damage at a power plant. The jury felt the "protest" was acceptable because the "protesters" feared the plant would contribute to global warming.

Luddites of the world, unite!

On the same day Gore spoke, scientists involved in NASA's Ulysses project reported that the intensity of the sun's solar wind was at its lowest point since the beginning of the space age — one more indication that the sun, the biggest source of energy affecting the Earth, is getting quiet.

The weaker solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun's magnetic field, but the cause is unknown. Sunspots, which normally fluctuate in 11-year cycles, are at a virtual standstill. In August, the sun created no visible spots. The last time that happened: June 1913.

The results of the Ulysses spacecraft's mission, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory project scientist Ed Smith, show that "we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated."

The consequences for Earth are enormous. The lack of increased activity could signal the start of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event that occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century. It leads to extended periods of severe cooling such as what happened during the Little Ice Age.

It may already be happening. The four major agencies tracking Earth's temperature, including NASA's Goddard Institute, report that the Earth cooled 0.7 degree Celsius in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the Earth was in 1930.

The climate is changing, but not in the direction Al Gore thinks. As the Earth demonstrably cools under a weakening sun, a 10-state coalition on Thursday held the nation's first carbon allowance auction to deal with a warming trend that may have ended a decade ago.

They will impose a minor league version of the Lieberman-Warner economy-killing cap-and-trade rationing system in which emissions are limited by a progressively lowered cap. Emission permits are auctioned off by government, making it a cap-and-tax system. Permits can be traded or sold between companies like baseball cards.

The Lieberman-Warner bill would mandate emission cuts of 44% below 2007 levels. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that it would cost as much as $3 trillion a year in lost GDP in an economy of roughly $14 trillion. It dwarfs the current financial crisis. But then, it's for a good cause — right, Al?

The New York-based Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, launched Thursday, strives to freeze CO2 emissions through 2014 and then gradually reduce them to 10% below current levels by 2018. The states participating are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Like its bigger cousin, it's a job- and growth-killing plan in a time of economic crisis. As the sun slows and the Earth cools, it'll mean higher energy prices during colder and snowier winters.

Al Gore's hippie legions may have to wear their winter coats.