Remember ABC's Climate Predictions for 2015? Climate Hoaxers Wrong Again

New York City underwater? Gas over $9 a gallon? A carton of milk costs almost $13? Welcome to June 12,  2015. Or at least that was the wildly-inaccurate version of 2015 predicted by ABC News seven years ago. Appearing on Good Morning America in 2008, Bob Woodruff hyped Earth 2100, a special that pushed apocalyptic predictions of the then-futuristic 2015.

The segment included supposedly prophetic videos, such as a teenager declaring, "It's June 8th, 2015. One carton of milk is $12.99." (On the actual June 8, 2015, a gallon of milk cost, on average, $3.39.) Another clip featured this prediction for the current year: "Gas reached over $9 a gallon." (In reality, gas costs an average of $2.75.) 

On June 12, 2008, correspondent Bob Woodruff revealed that the program "puts participants in the future and asks them to report back about what it is like to live in this future world. The first stop is the year 2015."  

As one expert warns that in 2015 the sea level will rise quickly, a visual shows New York City being engulfed by water. The video montage includes another unidentified person predicting that "flames cover hundreds of miles." 

Then-GMA co-anchor Chris Cuomo appeared frightened by this future world. He wondered, "I think we're familiar with some of these issues, but, boy, 2015? That's seven years from now. Could it really be that bad?" 

Ultimately, ABC delayed the air-date for Earth 2100 and the one-hour show didn't debut until June 2, 2009. The program showcased the terrible impact of global warming from 2015 through 2100. In the special, a "storm of the century" wiped out Miami. Other highlights included a destroyed New York City and an abandoned Las Vegas. By 2084, Earth's population will apparently be just 2.7 billion. 

On June 13, 2008, ABCNews.com promoted the special by hyperventilating, "Are we living in the last century of our civilization?" Unlike the 2015 predictions, that suggestion hasn't (yet) been proven wrong.

Seven years later, the network has quietly ignored its horribly inaccurate predictions about 2015. When it comes to global warming claims, apparently results don't matter for ABC.  

via: NewsBusters

No Global Warming in over 18 Years but we still have Global Warming

Probably the fact that there has now been no “global warming” for 18 years and six months. Not only does this contradict all the doomladen climate models cited in the IPCC’s various reports – none of them predicted the so-called “Pause” – but it also means that not one of the kids in school being fed climate propaganda by their on-message teachers has ever personally lived during a time of global warming.

So it’s quite understandable that – just as they tried to do with the “Medieval Warming Period” and also “the decline” (which proved so troubling to Michael Mann and his pals) – the alarmists are doing their damnedest to write the “Pause” (or, if you will, “hiatus”) out of scientific history.

And now they’ve done it!

Or so the journal Science tells us in a new paper being greeted with a predictably rapturous reception by the usual suspects at the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.

Here, for example, is Pravda’s take:

The so-called hiatus has been touted by non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science.

Those claims have resonated; two years ago, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change felt the need to explain why the Earth was not heating up as expected, listing such reasons as volcanic eruptions, reduced solar radiation and the oceans absorbing more heat.

“The reality is that there is no hiatus,” said Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. He is the lead author of a study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science

So that’s it then, is it? Game over for the deniers, now dramatically disarmed of their most powerful weapon by “the Science”?

Er, not quite, no, as this exquisitely damning rebuttal from the Global Warming Policy Forum makes clear.

The thrust of Karl’s paper is this: that far from staying flat since 1998, global temperatures have carried on rising. It’s just that scientists haven’t noticed before because they’ve been looking in the wrong place – on land, rather than in the sea where all the real heat action is happening.

And how did Karl et al notice what everyone else has missed until now? Well, by using a specialised scientific technique called “getting your excuses in early before the Paris climate conference in December.”

Essentially, this technique involves making adjustments to the raw temperature data (sound familiar?) and discovering – lo! – that the sceptics were wrong and the alarmists were right all along. 

Read More at: Breitbart

EPA Chief Gina McCarthy is another Clueless Left Wing Idiot

Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA, can't answer basic questions about global temperatures, climate models or numbers of hurricanes. She didn't know being a global warming zealot requires knowledge of math.

If the science of climate change was "settled," you'd think one of the generals in the war on global warming would have memorized the numbers that point to our planetary doom from a menace the administration says is a greater threat than terrorism.

But McCarthy was asked some pretty simple questions Wednesday at a Senate hearing Wednesday on her request for $8.6 billion to help fight the claimed imminent doom of climate change, and her performance didn't help her case.

One of the questions involved droughts and the claim that their frequency has increased due to warming that is said to be caused by mankind's increased production of greenhouse gas, such as carbon dioxide, the basis for all life on Earth but judged by the EPA to be a pollutant.

"Let me ask you this," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., inquired of McCarthy. "There was an article from Mr. (Bjorn) Lomborg ... from the Copenhagen Institute. He says, along with Dr. (Roger) Pielke from Colorado, that we've had fewer droughts in recent years. Do you dispute that?"

The seemingly clueless McCarthy pathetically responded that she didn't "know in what context he's making statements like that." Context? Truth has its own context, and the inconvenient truth that McCarthy wasn't aware of, or didn't want to face, is that Pielke and Lomborg are right.

Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado, told the Senate environment and public works subcommittee in July 2013 that droughts have "for the most part become shorter, less frequent and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century." Globally, he said, "there has been little change in drought over the last 60 years."

Sessions also asked McCarthy if we've had more or fewer hurricanes in the last decade. It was another question she said she couldn't answer because "it's a very complicated issue." Well, no, not unless basic math is a complicated issue. Sessions noted that we have in fact gone nearly a decade without a Category 3 storm or higher making landfall in the U.S.

The last hurricane to hit America as a Category 3 or higher was Wilma, which struck Florida on Oct. 24, 2005. Superstorm Sandy had wind speeds barely reaching Category 1 status when it slammed into New Jersey in 2012 and wreaked havoc.

Sessions inquired of the global temperatures that have virtually flatlined for two decades:

"Would you acknowledge that over the last 18 years, that the increase in temperatures has been very little, matter of fact 90% below most of the environmental models that showed how fast temperature would increase?"

McCarthy replied that she didn't know "what the models actually are predicting that you are referring to."

Sessions called her ignorance and inability to outline the danger we supposedly face from climate change, as well as her failure to justify the EPA's funding request, a "stunning development." So do we.

The science is indeed settled, but not the way climate zealots think. McCarthy's lack of knowledge and facts on her side only underscores the fact we have wasted billions on fighting a nonexistent threat and shackled our economy with lower growth and higher job loss.

Thank You: Investors Business Daily

Global Warming and Hurricanes Al Gore WRONG Again

Hard to believe, but it was a mere six years ago the Goracle descended from on high to warn mankind that global warming would inevitably lead to more hurricanes and stronger hurricanes.

He foresaw nothing but death and destruction and a little more jingly in his pocket.

CommonDreams.org quotes the Goracle back in 2005:

… the science is extremely clear now, that warmer oceans make the average hurricane stronger, not only makes the winds stronger, but dramatically increases the moisture from the oceans evaporating into the storm – thus magnifying its destructive power – makes the duration, as well as the intensity of the hurricane, stronger.

Last year we had a lot of hurricanes. Last year, Japan set an all-time record for typhoons: ten, the previous record was seven. Last year the science textbooks had to be re-written. They said, “It’s impossible to have a hurricane in the south Atlantic.” We had the first one last year, in Brazil. We had an all-time record last year for tornadoes in the United States, 1,717 – largely because hurricanes spawned tornadoes.

Don’t look now, Al, but Anthony Watts reports that your prediction was about 180 degrees off. Hurricane activity is now near an all-time low.

During the past 6-years since Hurricane Katrina, global tropical cyclone frequency and energy have decreased dramatically, and are currently at near-historical record lows. According to a new peer-reviewed research paper accepted to be published, only 69 tropical storms were observed globally during 2010, the fewest in almost 40-years of reliable records.

Furthermore, when each storm’s intensity and duration were taken into account, the total global tropical cyclone accumulated energy (ACE) was found to have fallen by half to the lowest level since 1977.

Paging Al Gore. Paging Al Gore. The 2011 hurricane season started June 1. Has anyone seen Al Gore lately?

Thank You: I Hate the Media

Global Warming is Just Not Delivering the Extreme Weather we were Promised.

In a Senate hearing, environmental scientist Roger Pielke of the University of Colorado said it’s “incorrect” to claim that global warming is spurring more extreme weather disasters.

“It is misleading and just plain incorrect to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally,” Pielke said in his testimony before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “It is further incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”

“Hurricanes have not increased in the U.S. in frequency, intensity or normalized damage since at least 1900,” Pielke added. “The same holds for tropical cyclones globally since at least 1970.”

Senate Democrats pointed to the increase in extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes as evidence of global warming. California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer said that “climate change is real” and human activities were the cause, adding that people can “look out the window” to see evidence of it.

“Heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods — all are now more frequent and intense,” said President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address.


Pielke, however, notes that U.S. floods have not increased in “frequency or intensity” since 1950 and economic losses from floods have dropped by 75 percent as a percentage of GDP since 1940. Tornado frequency, intensity, and normalized damages have also not increased since 1950, and Pielke even notes that there is some evidence that this has declined.

Pielke noted in his testimony that droughts have been shorter, less frequent, and have covered a smaller portion of the U.S over the last century. Globally, there has been very little change in the last 60 years, he said.

“The absolute costs of disasters will increase significantly in coming years due to greater wealth and populations in locations exposed to extremes,” Pielke added. “Consequent, disasters will continue to be an important focus of policy, irrespective of the exact future course of climate change.”

Senators sparred over predictions and claims made about man-made global warming. Democrats argued that the effects of global warming can be felt today and Republicans argued that evidence of human-induced warming is thin.


“I would note that it has not been titled ‘Global Warming: It’s Happening Now,’” said Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter. “Maybe that would have been too ironic given the Earth’s stagnant temperature for the past 15 years, a fact that is currently confounding climate scientists and modeling experts who predicted otherwise.”

More of this and More Inconvenient Facts at the: Daily Caller

Expert says public are growing sceptical of climate change

It's been over 18 years since the Earth's temperature last rose - something that Dr Benny Peiser, from the Global Warming Policy Forum, says experts are struggling to understand.

He explains that we are now in the midst of a "crisis of credibility" because the global warming - and accompanied 'Doomsday' effects - that we were once warned about has not happened.

Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) once predicted a temperature rise of 0.2 degrees per decade - but are now baffled by the fact our planet's temperature has not increased for almost two decades.

Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, Dr Peiser said: "What has happened is that the public has become more sceptical because they were told we are facing Doomsday, and suddenly they realise ‘Where is the warming that we were promised?’"

"They say we can predict the climate and the reality is that they can’t."

Because of this so-called "global warming hiatus", Dr Peiser says climate change is not as pressing of an issue as it once was, a fact that should be embraced by the scientific community.

"Climate change used to be a top priority but it has dropped quite significantly - other issues are more important for international meetings," he said.

"The reality is that they are quite relieved in a way, and we should all be relieved that it isn’t such a big problem at present.

"We might have much more time than many people once told us."

However, the reason behind the current pause in rising temperatures remains a mystery, and there are said to be more than 30 theories attempting to decipher what caused this stability.

Some scientists suggest the heat may have gone into the ocean, but Dr Peiser remains unconvinced by this theory.

"Something is clearly balancing out the warming effect of the CO2 [carbon dioxide]," he explained.

"It might be natural factors, it might be the ocean, no one knows for sure.

"It [the warming] could start anytime - and that is an indication that we don’t fully understand the climate.

"That’s a reality that most climate scientists are reluctant to admit."

Read More: The Express UK

Australian Bureau of Meteorology Accused of Fixing Climate Data

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been caught red-handed manipulating temperature data to show "global warming" where none actually exists.

At Amberley, Queensland, for example, the data at a weather station showing 1 degree Celsius cooling per century was "homogenized" (adjusted) by the Bureau so that it instead showed a 2.5 degrees warming per century.

At Rutherglen, Victoria, a cooling trend of -0.35 degrees C per century was magically transformed at the stroke of an Australian meteorologist's pen into a warming trend of 1.73 degrees C per century.

Last year, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology made headlines in the liberal media by claiming that 2013 was Australia's hottest year on record. This prompted Australia's alarmist-in-chief Tim Flannery - an English literature graduate who later went on to earn his scientific credentials with a PhD in palaeontology, digging up ancient kangaroo bones - to observe that global warming in Australia was "like climate change on steroids."

But we now know, thanks to research by Australian scientist Jennifer Marohasy, that the hysteria this story generated was based on fabrications and lies.

Though the Bureau of Meteorology has insisted its data adjustments are "robust", it has been unable to come up with a credible explanation as to why it translated real-world data showing a cooling trend into homogenized data showing a warming trend.

This is a global problem. Earlier this year, Breitbart reported that similarly dishonest adjustments had been made to temperature records by NASA and NOAA. Similarly implicated are the UK temperature records of the Met Office Hadley Centre and at Phil "Climategate" Jones's disgraced Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

One of the many disingenuous arguments used by climate alarmists against sceptics is mockingly to accuse them of being conspiracy theorists. "How could global warming possibly not be a problem when all the world's temperature data sets from Australia to the US to the UK clearly show that it is? Are you seriously suggesting that so many different scientists and so many distinguished institutions from across the globe would collude in such a massive lie?" their argument runs.

Our answer: yes we bloody well are.

Read More: Breitbart London

Both NASA and NOAA caught fixing Global Warming Data

Scientists at two of the world’s leading climate centres - NASA and NOAA - have been caught out manipulating temperature data to overstate the extent of the 20th century "global warming".

The evidence of their tinkering can clearly be seen at Real Science, where blogger Steven Goddard has posted a series of graphs which show "climate change" before and after the adjustments.

When the raw data is used, there is little if any evidence of global warming and some evidence of global cooling. However, once the data has been adjusted - ie fabricated by computer models -  20th century 'global warming' suddenly looks much more dramatic.

This is especially noticeable on the US temperature records. Before 2000, it was generally accepted - even by climate activists like NASA's James Hansen - that the hottest decade in the US was the 1930s.

As Hansen himself said in a 1989 report:

In the U.S. there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country.

However, Hansen subsequently changed his tune when, sometime after 2000, the temperatures were adjusted to accord with the climate alarmists' fashionable "global warming" narrative. By cooling the record-breaking year of 1934, and promoting 1998 as the hottest year in US history, the scientists who made the adjustments were able suddenly to show 20th century temperatures shooting up - where before they looked either flat or declining.

But as Goddard notes, the Environmental Protection Agency's heatwave record makes a mockery of these adjustments. It quite clearly shows that the US heat waves of the 1930s were of an order of magnitude greater than anything experienced at any other time during the century - far more severe than those in the 1980s or 1990s which were no worse than those in the 1950s.

These adjustments, however, are not limited to the US temperature data sets. Similar fabrications have taken place everywhere from Iceland to Australia.

The fact that supposedly reputable scientists can make these dishonest adjustments and get away with it is, notes long-time sceptic Christopher Booker, one of the more remarkable anomalies of the great climate change scam.

Breitbart London

Antarctic Ice Melt nothing to do with Global Warming

A study by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin found that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is collapsing due to geothermal heat, not man-made global warming.

Researchers from the UTA’s Institute for Geophysics found that the Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica is being eroded by the ocean as well as geothermal heat from magma and subaerial volcanoes. Thwaites is considered a key glacier for understanding future sea level rise.

UTA researchers used radar techniques to map water flows under ice sheets and estimate the rate of ice melt in the glacier. As it turns out, geothermal heat from magma and volcanoes under the glacier is much hotter and covers a much wider area than was previously thought.

“Geothermal flux is one of the most dynamically critical ice sheet boundary conditions but is extremely difficult to constrain at the scale required to understand and predict the behavior of rapidly changing glaciers,” UTA researchers wrote in their study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The geothermal heat under the glaciers is likely a key factor in why the ice sheet is currently collapsing. Before this study, it was assumed that heat flow under the glacier was evenly distributed throughout, but UTA’s study shows this is not the case. Heat levels under the glacier are uneven, with some areas being much hotter than others.

“The combination of variable subglacial geothermal heat flow and the interacting subglacial water system could threaten the stability of Thwaites Glacier in ways that we never before imagined,” lead researcher David Schroeder said in a press release.

“It’s the most complex thermal environment you might imagine,” echoed co-author Don Blankenship “And then you plop the most critical dynamically unstable ice sheet on planet Earth in the middle of this thing, and then you try to model it. It’s virtually impossible.”

Read More: The Daily Caller

The Supreme Court still buying into Global Warming Junk Science

Recently a fractured Supreme Court largely upheld the EPA Environmental Protection Agency’s radical rule designed to shut down the power plants that produce the most affordable electricity. The justices continue to accept the EPA’s labeling of carbon dioxide as a “pollutant.” This harmless gas, the agency insists, is melting the planet.

Only the brave deny man’s responsibility for super-heating the globe in precincts where the wise and wonderful (just ask them) gather to reassure each other than they know best. “We know the trends,” President Obama told the graduates at the University of California at Irvine the other day. “The 18 warmest years on record have all happened since you graduates were born.”

The charts and graphs devised by NASA and the government’s other science agencies back up the president’s words. And well they should, because the charts, like the “science,” were faked.

The “Steven Goddard Real Science” blog compares the raw U.S. temperature records from the Energy Department’s United States Historical Climatology Network to the “final” processed figures, to demonstrate how the historical data have been “corrected,” using computer modeling.

The modifications made to the past temperature record had the effect of cooling the 20th century, which makes temperatures over the last 14 years appear much warmer by comparison. Such changes don’t square with history, which shows the decade of the 1930s the hottest on record. The Dust Bowl storms were so severe they sent clouds of debris from Texas and Oklahoma to the East Coast, even darkening the skies over the U.S. Capitol one day in 1934.

In an inconvenient article from 1999, written before the data had been “corrected,” James Hansen, then a NASA scientist, acknowledged that the climate had held steady after the Dust Bowl storms. “In the U.S.,” wrote Mr. Hansen, “there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country.” Mr. Hansen, recognized as a godfather of the global warming doomcriers, then predicted that the first decade of the 21st century would be even hotter than the 1930s.

To produce this hotter result, the scientists “adjusted” the temperature records to make it appear so. NASA redrew the temperature chart Mr. Hansen used in 1999, and the new chart shows a dramatically cooled 1930s. The 1990s that Mr. Hansen once said were not so hot became warmer than the 1930s.

With the global warming scam unraveling before his very eyes, President Obama and his administration want action now. “The question is not whether we need to act,” says Mr. Obama. “The overwhelming judgment of science, accumulated and measured and reviewed over decades, has put that question to rest. The question is whether we have the will to act before it’s too late.”

Too late for what? The planetary thermometer hasn’t budged in 15 years. Wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes and other “extreme” weather events are at normal or below-normal levels. Pacific islands aren’t submerged. There’s so much ice the polar bears are celebrating.

Read More: Washington Times

The US has been cooling since the 1930s

 

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century. 

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology. 


via: The Telegraph

Al Gore WRONG on Global Warming Again

 

Self-styled “global-warming” guru Al Gore (shown) and a gaggle of supposed “climate scientists” have egg all over their faces — big time. In 2007, 2008 and 2009, Gore publicly and very hysterically warned that the North Pole would be “ice-free” by around 2013 because of alleged “man-made global warming.” Citing “climate” experts, the government-funded BBC hyped the mass hysteria, running a now-embarrassing article under the headline: “Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013’.” Other establishment media outlets did the same.

According to the dubious theories and predictions advanced by Al Gore and other alarmists, though, none of this should be happening. Speaking to an audience in Germany five years ago, Gore — sometimes ridiculed as “The Goracle” — alleged that “the entire North Polarized [sic] cap will disappear in 5 years.” While the original video of that particular failed prediction appears to have been scrubbed from the Internet, conservative bloggers managed to track down the same footage from other sources. “Five years,” Gore emphasized again, is “the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear.”

The following year, Gore made similar claims at a  UN “climate” summit in Copenhagen. “Some of the models ... suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore claimed in 2009. “We will find out.” Indeed, the bogus prediction appears wildly off the mark, to put it mildly, but the establishment press and Gore apparently do not want the world to find out.

In fairness, Gore was hardly the only hysterical climate-doomsday proponent to be left looking foolish. In December of 2007, the BBC highlighted alleged “modeling studies” that supposedly “indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.” Incredibly, some of the supposed “experts” even claimed it could happen before then, citing calculations performed by “super computers” that the BBC noted “has become a standard part of climate science in recent years.”

“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” claimed Professor Wieslaw Maslowski, described as researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School who was working with co-workers at NASA to come up with the now-thoroughly discredited forecasts about polar ice. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be [sic] our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.” Other “experts” quoted in the BBC article agreed with the hysteria.

In the real world, however, the scientific evidence demolishing the global-warming theories advanced by Gore, the UN, and government-funded “climate scientists” continues to grow, along with the ice cover in both hemispheres. In the Arctic, for example, data collected by Europe's Cryosat spacecraft pointed to about 9,000 cubic kilometers of ice at the end of the 2013 melt season. In 2012, which was admittedly a low year, the total volume was about 6,000 cubic kilometers — in other words, Arctic ice grew by some 50 percent in 2013 over the previous year. Polar bear populations are thriving, too.

Read the Rest: The New American

Hope Change and Cow Farts

As part of its plan to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the Obama administration is targeting the dairy industry to reduce methane emissions in their operations.

This comes despite falling methane emission levels across the economy since 1990.

The White House has proposed cutting methane emissions from the dairy industry by 25 percent by 2020. Although U.S. agriculture only counts for about 9 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, it makes up a sizable portion of methane emissions — which is a very potent greenhouse gas.

Some of these methane emissions come from cow flatulence, exhaling and belching — other livestock animals release methane as well.

“Cows emit a massive amount of methane through belching, with a lesser amount through flatulence,” according to How Stuff Works. “Statistics vary regarding how much methane the average dairy cow expels. Some experts say 100 liters to 200 liters a day… while others say it’s up to 500 liters… a day. In any case, that’s a lot of methane, an amount comparable to the pollution produced by a car in a day.”

“Of all domestic animal types, beef and dairy cattle were by far the largest emitters of [methane],” according to an EPA analysis charting greenhouse gas emissions in 2012. Cows and other animals produce methane through digestion, which ferments the food of animals.

“During digestion, microbes resident in an animal’s digestive system ferment food consumed by the animal,” the EPA notes. “This microbial fermentation process, referred to as enteric fermentation, produces [methane] as a byproduct, which can be exhaled or eructated by the animal.”

It’s not just the dairy industry that the Obama administration is clamping down on. The White House is looking to regulate methane emissions across the economy from agriculture to oil and gas operations — all this despite methane emissions falling 11 percent since 1990.

Read More: The Daily Caller

As Many As 50 Obama-backed Green Energy Failures

 

The October bankruptcy of solar company Satcon Technology Corp. puts the number of bankrupt or troubled green energy companies as high as 50, according to one estimate.

During the first presidential debate, Republican candidate Mitt Romney said the Obama administration had doled out $90 billion to green energy companies, half of which he said had failed, which sparked a media-wide debate over the accuracy of the claim.

The Romney campaign later clarified that he was talking about the DOE’s 1705 loan program which doled out $16.1 billion to green energy companies, according to the Washington Post. Of the 33 companies that received 1705 loan guarantees, only three have declared bankruptcy.

However, when other subsidies, outside of the 1705 loan guarantees are factored in, the number of government-backed green energy failures is much higher.

The blog Green Corruption’s “Obama green-energy failure” list contains 23 bankrupt and 27 troubled green energy companies which were backed by the federal government. This list uses data compiled by the Heritage Foundation, but also includes some things the conservative think tank doesn’t.

According to the Heritage Foundation, $80 billion was set aside in the 2009 stimulus package for clean energy loans, grants, and tax credits, and 10 percent of these funds have gone to companies that have filed for bankruptcy or are in dire straits.

The Green Corruption estimates are on the high end as others have total number of bankrupt and troubled green energy firms much lower.

The Heritage Foundation’s list contains 34 companies that have either filed for bankruptcy or are faltering as of October 18. Of those 34 listed, nineteen have filed for bankruptcy and fifteen are considered faltering.

The Heritage list only contains companies that received federal funds from the Obama administration’s Energy Department and other agencies, and does not include “other state, local, and federal tax credits and subsidies,” which would raise the amount of taxpayer dollars that was given to these companies.

Another list compiled by the Senate Republican Policy Committee shows a total of 19 government-backed green energy companies that have either gone bankrupt, are in distress, or failing — twelve bankrupt, six in distress, and one failing.

The committee’s list, however, does not include the most recent green energy failure, Satcon Technology Corp., which received a $3 million DOE grant earlier this year and filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 17, making it the second green energy company to file for bankruptcy that week.

Read More: The Daily Caller

The EPA might be headed for a bruising at the Ole Supreme Court

Does federal law empower the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate every non-moving source of carbon dioxide in America? The Supreme Court will decide that question in early 2014.  

The Supreme Court decided Massachusetts v. EPA in 2007, a lawsuit brought by the Bay State (with the support of Gov. Mitt Romney) to force the Bush EPA to make a finding as to whether carbon dioxide is a pollutant that endangers the environment. The Court surprised many legal experts when it held in a 5-4 decision, led by the liberal wing of the Court, that states have standing under Article III of the Constitution to sue the federal government over questions of federal law, despite the fact that it was disputed (1) whether global warming is even happening at all, (2) if so, whether it is caused by human activity generating GHGs (greenhouse gases) like carbon dioxide, and further (3) that is undisputed that only 20 percent of GHGs come from the United States, so no Supreme Court order could effectively remedy this problem even if it exists.

After Barack Obama became president in 2009, the EPA issued an official finding that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that harms the environment, notwithstanding the fact that (1) all animals exhale carbon dioxide, (2) that it is necessary for plants to live, and (3) that every form of fire and combustion generates carbon emissions.

EPA went on to invoke the Clean Air Act, passed by Congress in 1970, as authorizing it to regulate these carbon emissions. Various lawsuits were filed, challenging the unprecedentedly broad scope of these new EPA rules.

On Oct. 15, the Supreme Court granted review in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, limiting the Court’s review in this first modern case exploring this subject to determining whether the EPA’s permitting scheme for new cars legally authorizes the EPA to also regulate all stationary sources of GHGs. If so, then the federal EPA in Washington, DC can regulate not just your local power plant, but also your home stove, fireplace, campfire, and furnace.  

Arguments are likely to be scheduled around February, with a decision before July 2014.

Thank You: Breitbart

Global Warming Fools are Feeling the Heat

On Friday Sept. 27th the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivers its latest verdict on the state of man-made global warming. Though the details are a secret, one thing is clear: the version of events you will see and hear in much of the media, especially from partis pris organisations like the BBC, will be the opposite of what the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report actually says.

Already we have had a taste of the nonsense to come: a pre-announcement to the effect that “climate scientists” are now “95 per cent certain” that humans are to blame for climate change; an evidence-free declaration by the economist who wrote the discredited Stern Report that the computer models cited by the IPCC “substantially underestimate” the scale of the problem; a statement by the panel’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, that “the scientific evidence of… climate change has strengthened year after year”.

As an exercise in bravura spin, these claims are up there with Churchill’s attempts to reinvent the British Expeditionary Force’s humiliating retreat from Dunkirk as a victory. In truth, though, the new report offers scant consolation to those many alarmists whose careers depend on talking up the threat. It says not that they are winning the war to persuade the world of the case for catastrophic anthropogenic climate change – but that the battle is all but lost.

At the heart of the problem lie the computer models which, for 25 years, have formed the basis for the IPCC’s scaremongering: they predicted runaway global warming, when the real rise in temperatures has been much more modest. So modest, indeed, that it has fallen outside the lowest parameters of the IPCC’s prediction range. The computer models, in short, are bunk.

Read More: The Telegraph

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is changing their tune on Global Warming

There have already been leaks from this 31-page document, which summarizes 1,914 pages of scientific discussion, but thanks to a senior climate scientist, I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document. The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC thought in 2007.

Admittedly, the change is small, and because of changing definitions, it is not easy to compare the two reports, but retreat it is. It is significant because it points to the very real possibility that, over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be positive for humankind and the planet.

Specifically, the draft report says that "equilibrium climate sensitivity" (ECS)—eventual warming induced by a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which takes hundreds of years to occur—is "extremely likely" to be above 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), "likely" to be above 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit) and "very likely" to be below 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 Fahrenheit). In 2007, the IPPC said it was "likely" to be above 2 degrees Celsius and "very likely" to be above 1.5 degrees, with no upper limit. Since "extremely" and "very" have specific and different statistical meanings here, comparison is difficult.

Still, the downward movement since 2007 is clear, especially at the bottom of the "likely" range. The most probable value (3 degrees Celsius last time) is for some reason not stated this time.

A more immediately relevant measure of likely warming has also come down: "transient climate response" (TCR)—the actual temperature change expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide about 70 years from now, without the delayed effects that come in the next century. The new report will say that this change is "likely" to be 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius and "extremely unlikely" to be greater than 3 degrees. This again is lower than when last estimated in 2007 ("very likely" warming of 1 to 3 degrees Celsius, based on models, or 1 to 3.5 degrees, based on observational studies).

Most experts believe that warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels will result in no net economic and ecological damage. Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range of the IPCC's emissions scenarios) that there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm.

Read More: The Wall Street Journal