Tag Archives: climate

Cnut

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Catholic leaders—”representatives of bishops conferences from around the globe”—have produced a document urging climate “negotiators” meeting in Paris next month to stop global climate change. The Catholics’

10-point proposal calls for governments to approve legally binding limits to global average temperatures, set a mid-century decarbonization goal….

Never mind that humanity has no control over global temperature; indeed, climate-related temperature variations have been demonstrated to be closely linked to the sun’s output variability, and the variability of the Earth’s (and Moon’s) orbital behaviors. Never mind, too, that atmospheric CO2 is plant food, without which we’d have no hope of feeding our multitudes; that when atmospheric CO2 was orders of magnitude higher in earlier epochs, life on Earth was lush; and never mind that significant changes in atmospheric CO2 are trailing indicators confirming the increasing health of Earth from the burgeoning life exhaling all that CO2 and alternatively confirming the ailing of Earth as life decreased in the face of cooling and Ice Ages, and so exhaling less CO2 into the atmosphere.

It’s amazing to me that Catholic leadership should commit so blatant a sin of arrogance. They would do well to learn from King Cnut’s example, wherein he attempted to stop the tide as a demonstration to his subjects of the limits of mere human power.

Candidate For…

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…Panderer-in-Chief.

Hillary Clinton, Democratic Presidential candidate has decided she opposes the Keystone XL pipeline—because it’s a distraction. With her view of the pipeline on the table, the distraction of it kept her from talking about her climate warming…stuff.

Of course, she could have settled the distraction by supporting the pipeline, too: the question’s unsettled state was the distraction. Thus, her opposition is just naked pandering to the leftist climatistas; it has no other purpose at all.

Hillary Clinton—Special Interest-in-Chief wannabe.

Tax Pollution

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That’s what Richard Revesz thinks we should do, instead of subsidizing this or that energy company or industry. In his Wall Street Journal piece, Revesz thinks that “greenhouse gases, smog precursors and other pollutants” should be taxed and all those subsidies done away with.

He’s half right. Subsidies have no place in American economics. To the Democrats who say “green” energy companies need the subsidies in order to grow (quickly or at all), they’ve answered the claim themselves, although they’re loathe to admit it: if a company needs a government subsidy to exist or to grow in our competitive economy, it isn’t ready for our economy. To others who say the oil and gas companies need the subsidies (a relative pittance, anyway, compared to green’s subsidies), the answer also is no they don’t. They can compete.

Revesz would be fully right if we could arrive at an accurate definition of “pollution.” Consider the current en vogue “pollutant,” atmospheric carbon dioxide. Pseudo-climatologists and other “environmentalists” like to fear-monger over CO2 in our air. They carefully ignore the fact that increases in atmospheric CO2 come after planetary warming by some 800-1,300 years. Far from being a pollutant, it’s the ordinary output of respiring life and with those lagging increases it confirms the increasing health of the planet and its burgeoning life.

Until facts stop getting in the way of the money flow, there’s no possibility of accurately defining “pollutant,” and so there’s no reasonable way to tax it.

There’s Science

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…and there’s…science.

The Environmental Protection Agency for years has issued costly clean air rules based, in part, on two ’90s-era studies linking air pollution with death.

But, critics say, the same agency has stymied efforts to access the data behind them.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy thinks that suppression is entirely jake [emphasis added in the summary of her position].

For its part, the EPA has argued that releasing the data could compromise confidential personal information, and that it didn’t have access to all the research anyway, among other issues. The agency made an effort to contact the original institutions behind the studies in 2013, but Republicans say they again would not hand over everything.

There’s so much wrong with that, so much that’s wholly dishonest. For starters, what rule-making data has personal information among them? The data clearly were aggregated and stripped of personal information, since they were gathered by responsible researchers. The data clearly were aggregated and stripped of personal information, also, because such information is completely irrelevant to the studies for which they were collected and would only have cluttered the data.

Then, on what basis is EPA making rules when they don’t have all the underlying data? Is this another case of We Know Best, we don’t need no stinkin’ data?

To add insult to her disingenuosity, McCarthy added this to her testimony in front of the House Science Committee:

The EPA totally supports both transparency as well as a strong peer-reviewed independent science process, but the bill I’m afraid I don’t think will get us there. I don’t actually need the raw data in order to develop science, that’s not how it’s done. … I do not know of what value raw data is to the general public.

Wow. “I don’t actually need raw data….” We don’t need no stinkin’ data. And the transparency bit that McCarthy so fatuously claimed: she’ll be transparent, but only with her chosen few.

She doesn’t know the value of the data to the general public? Here’s all she needs to know about the value of raw data to the general public: her boss—that general public—wants it.

Regulation

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The Environmental Protection Agency will soon announce it plans to regulate airline emissions, asserting they contribute to global warming and endanger public health, according to industry and environmental groups.

But here’s the truth of it, accidentally revealed by National Association of Clean Air Agencies Executive Director S William Becker:

…he [President Barack Obama] can’t ignore imposing additional greenhouse gas reductions on this uncontrolled industry.

The Left has to regulate everything. Because ordinary Americans are just too stupid to manage our own affairs.