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Cap & Traders Shanghaiing America

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Reuters reported on Friday that Commerce Secretary Gary Locke told the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai that Americans should pay for China’s greenhouse polluting.

Yes, you read that right.  Americans and our consumption of Chinese-made goods is the reason China is such a big global warming bad guy.

“It’s important that those who consume the products being made all around the world to the benefit of America — and it’s our own consumption activity that’s causing the emission of greenhouse gases, then quite frankly Americans need to pay for that.”

Ummm…ok, Gary.  Why don’t you explain to Americans just how that jives with the fact that China’s pollution is a result of their production of steel, cement, aluminium, paper and chemicals, most of which are consumed in China rather than exported?

In contrast, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come mainly from domestic consumption, such as fuels to heat and cool buildings and to power vehicles.  Only about 25 percent of U.S. emissions are caused by factories.

De Nile about global warming ain’t just a river in Egypt any more.  Apparently it’s now also a river in China down which Americans are being shanghaied.

The Great & Powerful O…bama?

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Logic.  It’s a beautiful thing.  It’s also the stuff of which common sense is made.  Life is made up of continually connecting the dots and coming to a conclusion.  It’s not rocket science, though rocket science and, indeed, all science does basically this very same thing.

If….

Then….

Else….

When you fall off a horse and find yourself unable to move one of your arms without severe pain, you go see a doctor who will x-ray your hurting arm.  If it’s broken, then the doctor will set it so it will heal properly, else they will send you home with instructions to take pain medication and take it easy for a while.

When you’re driving down the highway at night and your car stalls, you pull over to the side of the road and look at the gas gauge.  If it’s on empty then you will call for help, else you’ll walk down the highway to the nearest exit (or sit there unhappily, hoping someone will notice your plight and stop).

There is a difference between “hard science” and what is often called “soft science”.  Hard science is the realm of mathmeticians, biologists, engineers, etc.  They work with hard facts (1 + 1 = 2) and conclusions are based on the ability to consistently repeat a scenario.  This is why your lights turn on when you flip a switch, how your doctor knows when to prescribe an antiobiotic and which one will work, and how man got to the Moon and back.  It is the source of your reading this font on your monitor screen.

Soft science, on the other hand, mimics hard science in its attempts to validate a conclusion but, very simply speaking, its conclusions are far more likely to be mere possibility than real probability because the number of variables is simply far too large to get easily from point A to point B.  Soft science is the realm of psychologists, sociologists, even astrologers.  For example, psychologists study human behavior and tell us things like people who torture animals as children are more likely to grow up to be something really bad, like serial killers.  Astrologers look at a “map” of the time of a person’s birth and tell us of things for which a person has the most affinity.  Because of its inherent element of chance (i.e. too many variables to calculate, often called “choice”), soft science has always been far more fascinating to a majority of people, as evidenced by the never-ending speculation on the predictions of Nostradamus, the Mayans (2012, anyone?), the Bible, etc., as well as documentaries about everyone who doesn’t live a “normal life”, from Jesus to Charles Manson to Michael Jackson. 

People often confuse the two, however, and this is when you find “hard” scientists mocking their “soft”-studying counterparts.  Personally, I believe both sides have a place at the table but it is important to understand what that place is, what it really means for each to be in their proper place, and only then place your bets accordingly.  Think of hard science like putting your money in a savings account.  You’re guaranteed to draw interest on it and come out ahead.  Soft science is like buying a lottery ticket or investing in the stock market.  You may – or you may not – come out a winner.

Confusing the two can also have deadly consequences.  One example is the Holocaust.  Scientists of the “soft” kind determined there was something wrong with Jews, insisted their “hard” counterparts prove their conclusions, and we all know how that worked for everyone involved.  (Well, everyone knows it except a handful of pinheads like Iranian President Ahmadinejad.) 

On the subject of global warming we find a mix of hard and soft science coming together in a way almost as terrifying as the Holocaust.  Hard science is telling us one thing (humans are having little to no effect on the cyclical climate of the Earth) but soft science is telling us something else.  Did I mention that soft science is more often than not influenced by the personal psychology of the scientist?  You can pick up a stone and put it in a bucket, then pick up another stone and put into the bucket, too, then look in the bucket and see two stones.  A hard scientist who calculated there would be three stones in the bucket sees the two stones as tangible proof their calculations were wrong and instead of denying what they see, go back to examine where they messed up (original premise? method? mathmatical equation?).  Then they repeat their experiment and eventually end up with a final, documented conclusion that putting one stone in a bucket, then another stone in the bucket will always give you two stones in the bucket.  In the case of global warming, though the calculations of (government-supported, meaning vested interest-personal agenda) scientists have found to be wrong, instead of going back to find the flaws in their premise, methods, or calculations, the sponsors of the hard scientists (driven by soft scientists) are insisting that they simply throw away any data that doesn’t support their mistakes.   The scientists are, in effect, being told that the speck of dirt left in the bucket because someone didn’t clean it out before they used it to hold the stones must count as their third stone. 

This is a case of hard science shifting away from its original purpose and thereby jumping with both feet into the murky pond of prognostication.  All for the personal gain of a select few.  Of particular amusement is the involvment of President Obama.  Apparently, attempting to usurp the second coming wasn’t enough, it sounds as if he also wants to usurp Nostradamus’ place in our National Enquirer-minded history.  Witness his fortunetelling:

“A long-term benefit is we’re leaving a planet to our children that isn’t four or five degrees hotter.”  (June 25, 2009)

His presidency would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”  (2008 campaign)

President Obama has also claimed he can snap his fingers and we’ll “block the Sun’s rays to end global warming.”

Simply because his one voice carries to the ears of the most Americans doesn’t change the truth.  The truth that what he says is wrong.  Wrong based on the hard facts of hard science.  So don’t confuse facts with “hopes”.  In the same way the Great & Powerful Oz was eventually revealed to be just a man, the stars might lie, but the numbers never do.

 

(Thanks to our friends at Climate Depot for this morning’s inspiration.)

The Stars Might Lie, But The Numbers Never Do (A Global Warming Review)

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As the House begins its final sprint to rush some sort of cap & trade (tax) legislation to a floor vote this coming week (HR 2454, the Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill), it is worth taking stock of where things stand.  I received an email from an Obama supporter (who once confessed, in secret, that soon after his election they had the beginnings of “serious doubts” about his ability to do his job) that contained what I can only call a progressive’s campaign article from The Nation.  One statement summed up its whole, wordy call to arms to push forward with Obama’s fascist plans:

We also need to expand the agenda for reform. For example, if we are to make the investments vital to our future, as the president has called for, a sustained expansion of public investment is essential–and that will require a far bolder tax policy.

It goes on to blather with reassuring hubris about taxes on the “wealthy” and those evil businesses who dare provide people with private sector jobs, but because of its immediacy, this piece is going to focus on the problems with cap & trade.  And the root cause of cap & trade is the New Religion of global warming.  Now, as we’ve noted here before, the gist of implementing cap & trade as mitigation to global warming is intended to gain government and special interest control of natural resources and thereby gain power and control over American citizens once it is realized that the Earth may more likely be entering a serious cooling period.  Plainly put, it’s all about money, not science.  Science hasn’t been in this picture for decades. 

In response to my friend’s email, I sent back a link to an article that presents an overview of some initial reactions to Obama’s latest “climate report”.  A report that, it should be known, was produced by more than 30 scientists working across 13 government agencies.  A report that, according to a UK Guardian article, was:

 “finalized in late April, but Obama administration officials spent several weeks planning (its)  release, honing the language and graphics to make it accessible to non-scientists and to sharpen its core message:  America must take action on climate change.

As part of the PR surrounding the release of the report, the administration approached the San Francisco consulting firm, Resource Media, which specialises in environmental campaigning, to produce a shorter and more digestible brochure of today’s report for wider public distribution.”

Let’s pretend we have some common sense for a moment and consider this carefully.  If the report was so solid in its facts, why was there a need for the administration to spend “weeks” tweaking its message?  Why did the administration need to hire a PR firm whose sole reason d’etre is putting warm, fuzzy spins on the myth of global warming?

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and comes out of Chicago (or San Francisco), it ain’t worth the pot used to hold the water to cook it in, my friends.

The truth is that the “science” upon which the administration’s “report” is based is flawed.  As in skewed.  As in downright wacked.   And with its purpose being politically-motivated and, based on previous experience, very likely deliberately missing and/or excluding key points.  Another in a series of non-partisan scientific reports was released this month by the Nongovermental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).  Here are a few pertinent excerpts.  It is important to note these scientists didn’t need to use a PR firm to translate (spin) it for you so you can understand what they are saying (emphases mine).:

“The IPCC’s key personnel and lead authors were appointed by governments, and its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) have been subject to approval by member governments of the UN. The scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all supported by government contracts, which pay not only for their research but for their IPCC activities. Most travel to and hotel accommodations at exotic locations for the drafting authors is paid with government funds.”

“The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (IPCCSAR, 1995) was completed in 1995 and published in 1996. Its SPM contained the memorable conclusion, “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” The SAR was again heavily criticized, this time for having undergone significant changes in the body of the report to make it ‘conform’ to the SPM—after it was finally approved by the scientists involved in writing the report. Not only was the report altered, but a key graph was also doctored to suggest a human influence. The evidence presented to support the SPM conclusion turned out to be completely spurious.

 There is voluminous materialavailable about these text changes, including a Wall StreetJournaleditorial article by Dr. Frederick Seitz (Seitz, 1996). This led to heated discussions between supporters of the IPCC and those who were aware of the altered text and graph, including an exchange of letters in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Singer et al., 1997).”

“The Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-TAR 2001) was noteworthy for its use of spurious scientific papers to back up its SPM claim of “new and stronger evidence” of anthropogenic global warming. One of these was the so-called “hockeystick” paper, an analysis of proxy data, which claimed the twentieth century was the warmest in the past 1,000 years. The paper was later found to contain basic errors in its statistical analysis(McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003, 2005; Wegman et al., 2006). The IPCC also supported a paper that claimed pre-1940 warming was of human origin and caused by greenhouse gases. This work, too, contained fundamental errors in its statistical analysis. The SEPP response to TAR was a 2002 booklet, The Kyoto Protocol is Not Backed by Science (SEPP, 2002).”

“The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-AR4 2007) was published in 2007; the SPM of Working Group I was released in February; and the full report from this Working Group was released in May—after it had been changed, once again, to “conform” to the Summary. It is  significant that AR4 no longer makes use of the hockey-stick paper or the paper claiming pre-1940 human-caused warming.  Once again  controversy ensued, however, this time when the IPCC refused to publicly share comments submitted by peer-reviewers, then sent all the reviewers’ comments in hard copy to a library that was closed for renovation, and then finally, but only under pressure, posted them online. Inspection of those comments revealed that the authors had rejected more than half of all the reviewers’ comments in the crucial chapter attributing recent warming to human activities.

AR4 concluded that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (emphasis in the original). However, as the present report will show, it ignored available evidence against a human contribution to current warming and the substantial research of the past few years on the effects of solar activity on climate change.

Why have IPCC reports been marred by controversy and so frequently contradicted by subsequent research? Certainly its agenda to find evidence of a human role in climate change is a major reason; its organization as a government entity beholden to political agendas is another major reason; and the large professional and financial rewards that go to scientists and bureaucrats who are willing to bend scientific facts to match those agendas is yet a third major reason.

Another reason for the IPCC’s unreliability is the naive acceptance by policymakers of “peer-reviewed” literature as necessarily authoritative.It has become the case that refereeing standards for many climate change papers are inadequate, often because of the use of an “invisible college” of reviewers of like inclination to a paper’s authors (Wegman et al., 2006). Policy should be set upon a background of demonstrable science, not upon simple (and often mistaken) assertions that, because a paper was refereed, its conclusions must be accepted.”

Translation:  The IPCC is under pressure to conform to economically-motivated political interests.  In my neck of the woods, the conditions under which IPCC scientists “work” is called a conflict of interest.  Lots of folks call it the fox watching henhouse.  No matter what you call it, it is just flat-out wrong and those who would support and encourage any action taken on this kind of bad science must be viewed with nothing less than great suspicion.  For this kind of “science” is when you can rest assured that its supporters  have a vested interest in personal gain, not some lofty goal for the good of humankind. 

It was argued to me that it is merely a few rogue, “flat-earth” or “fringe”-type scientists who are running around trying to destroy Obama’s U.N.-backed (gods help us all) plans.  Nice try but, frankly, it’s as wrong as the early Darwinians believing in and perpetuating the “romantic” view of the Middle Ages being the time it became common knowledge the Earth is spherical, not flat, when they used the same “flat earth” slur against Christians.  The Darwinians gleefully stepped into a stinky “scientific belief” that was the unfortunate – and wrong – result of Washington Irving’s 1828 fictional account of Christopher Columbus’ attempt to sail to Japan in a ship too small to make such a journey.  Fact is that most of the educated world realized the Earth is a sphere by about 3 BCE and only China, despite her technological advancements, took until the 17th century to come to the same realization (and then only because of Jesuits holding high positions as astronomers at the Chinese court).

The bottom line of all this is that is is best argued that there does NOT exist a collective consensus among scientists about the effects of humans on global warming.  And because of that it is dangerous for people to rush to any actions that will have long-term soci-economic ramifications when such long-term socio-economic ramifications are harmful the the majority of Americans solely for the great gain of a few.  Some proof of the size of the disagreement about global warming that liberals simply cannot get their brain cell around can be found in “The Petition Project”.  As of the latest NIPCC report (see Appendix 4, that details the purpose and process by which signatures are collected), 31,478 American scientists have signed the following statement:

PetitionProjectForm-sm

The NIPCC report goes on to state that, “This is a remarkably strong statement of dissent from the perspective advanced by the IPCC, and it is similar to the perspective represented by the NIPCC and the current report. The fact that more than ten times as many scientists have signed it as are alleged to have “participated” in some way or another in the research, writing, and review of IPCC AR4 is very significant. These scientists, who include among their number 9,029 individuals with Ph.D.s, actually endorse the statement that appears above.”

To quote the Mary Chapin Carpenter song, “the stars might lie, but the numbers never do.”  Emails are too easy to ignore, calls and/or faxes to your House Representative (both Washington and local offices) must go out starting tomorrow to tell them that no matter what Nancy Pelosi or President Obama demand, they work for you, the American people, and must vote against H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markley comprehensive energy bill.  Congress must know – in no uncertain terms – that rushing to tax ALL Americans on the basis of bad science is not only stupid, but putting already struggling American lives on the line solely for the sake of a greedy few will be the final straw that will cost them their job.