The hidden agendas of sustainability illusions by Paul Driessen

Absurd, impractical sustainability precepts are actually a prescription for government control

As President Trump downgrades the relevance of Obama era climate change and anti-fossil fuel policies, many environmentalists are directing attention to “sustainable development.”

Like “dangerous manmade climate change,” sustainability reflects poor understanding of basic energy, economic, resource extraction and manufacturing principles – and a tendency to emphasize tautologies and theoretical models as an alternative to readily observable evidence in the Real World. It also involves well-intended but ill-informed people being led by ill-intended but well-informed activists who use the concept to gain greater government control over people’s lives, livelihoods and living standards.

The most common definition is that we may meet the needs of current generations only to the extent that doing so will not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainability thus reflects the assertion that we are rapidly depleting finite resources, and must reduce current needs and wants so as to save raw materials for future generations.

At first blush, it sounds logical and even ethical. But it requires impossible clairvoyance.

In 1887, when the Hearthstone House became the world’s first home lit via hydroelectric power, no one did or could foresee that electricity would dominate, enhance and safeguard our lives in the myriad ways it does today. Decades later, no one anticipated pure silica fiber optic cables replacing copper wires.

No one predicted tiny cellular phones with superb digital cameras and more computing power than a 1990 desktop computer or 3-D printing or thousands of wind turbines across our fruited plains – or cadmium, rare earth metals and other raw materials suddenly required to manufacture these technological wonders.

Mankind advanced at a snail’s pace for thousands of years. As the modern fossil-fuel industrial era found its footing, progress picked up at an increasingly breathtaking pace. Today, change is exponential. As we moved from flint to copper, to bronze, iron, steel and beyond, we didn’t do so because mankind had exhausted Earth’s supplies of flint, copper, tin and so on. We did it because we innovated – invented something better, more efficient or practical. Each advance required different raw materials. 

Who today can foresee what technologies future generations will have 25, 50 or 200 years from now? What raw materials they will need? How we are supposed to ensure that those families meet their needs?

Why then would we even think of empowering government to regulate today’s activities today based on the wholly unpredictable technologies, lifestyles, needs, and resource demands of distant generations? Why would we ignore or compromise the needs of current generations, to meet those totally unpredictable future needs – including the needs of today’s most impoverished, energy-deprived, malnourished people, who desperately want to improve their lives?

Moreover, we are not going to run out of resources anytime soon. A 1-kilometer fiber optic cable made from 45 pounds of silica (Silicon is the Earth’s most abundant element in the crust [CRA additions]) carries thousands of times more information than an equally long RG-6 cable made from 3,600 pounds of copper, reducing demand for copper.

In 1947, the world’s proven oil reserves totaled 47 billion barrels. Over the next 70 years, we consumed hundreds of billions of barrels – and yet, in 2016 we still had at least 2,800 billion barrels of oil reserves, including oil sands, oil shales and other unconventional deposits: at least a century’s worth, plus abundant natural gas. Constantly improving technologies now let us find and produce oil and natural gas from deposits that we could not even detect, much less tap into, just a couple decades ago.

Sustainability dogma also revolves around hatred of fossil fuels, and a determination to rid the world of them, regardless of any social, economic or environmental costs of doing so. And we frequently find that supposedly green, eco-friendly and sustainable alternatives are frequently anything but.

U.S. ethanol quotas eat up 40% of the nation’s corn, cropland the size of Iowa, billions of gallons of water, and vast quantities of pesticides, fertilizers, tractor fuel and natural gas, to produce energy that drives up food prices, damages small engines and gets one-third less mileage per gallon than gasoline.

Heavily subsidized wind energy requires standby fossil fuel generators, ultra-long transmission lines and thus millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals and fiberglass. The turbines create chronic health problems for people living near them and kill millions of birds and bats – to produce intermittent, wholly unreliable electricity that costs up to 250% more than coal-based electricity.

For all that, on a torrid August 2012 day, Great Britain’s 3,500 giant wind turbines generated a mere 12 megawatts of electricity: 0.032% of the 38,000 MW the country was using at the time.

The United Kingdom also subsidizes several huge anaerobic digesters, intended to convert animal manure and other farm waste into eco-friendly methane for use in generating electricity. But there is insufficient farm waste. So the digesters are fed with corn (maize), grass and rye grown on 130,000 acres (four times the size of Washington, DC), using enormous amounts of water, fertilizer – and of course diesel fuel to grow, harvest and transport the crops to the digesters. Why not just drill and frack for natural gas?

That brings us to the political arena, where the terminology is circular, malleable, infinitely elastic, the perfect tool for activists. Whatever they support is sustainable; whatever they oppose is unsustainable; and whatever mantras or protective measures they propose give them more power and control.

The Club of Rome sought to build a new movement by creating “a common enemy against whom we can unite” – allegedly looming disasters “caused by human intervention in natural processes” and requiring “changed attitudes and behavior” to avoid global calamities: global warming and resource depletion.

“Building an environmentally sustainable future requires restricting the global economy, dramatically changing human reproductive behavior, and altering values and lifestyles,” said Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown. “Doing this quickly requires nothing short of a revolution.”

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and workplace air conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable,” Canadian arch-environmentalist Maurice Strong declared.

“Minor shifts in policy, moderate improvements in laws and regulations, rhetoric offered in lieu of genuine change,” former Vice President Al Gore asserted – “these are all forms of appeasement, designed to satisfy the public’s desire to believe that sacrifice, struggle and a wrenching transformation of society will not be necessary.” Environmental activist Daniel Sitarz agreed, saying: “Agenda 21 proposes an array of actions intended to be implemented by every person on Earth. Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all humans, unlike anything the world has ever experienced.”

“Sustainable development,” the National Research Council declaimed in a 2011 report, “raises questions that are not fully or directly addressed in U.S. law or policy, including how to define and control unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, and how to encourage the development of sustainable communities, biodiversity protection, clean energy, environmentally sustainable economic development, and climate change controls.” In fact, said Obama science advisor John Holdren, we cannot even talk about sustainability without talking about politics, power, and control. Especially control.

Of course, the activists, politicians and regulators feel little pain, as they enjoy salaries and perks paid by taxpayers and foundations, fly to UN and other conferences at posh 5-star resorts around the world, and implement agendas that control, redesign and transform other people’s lives.

It is We the Governed – especially working class and poor citizens – who pay the price, with the world’s poorest families paying the highest price. We can only hope the Trump Administration and Congress will dismantle and defund sustainable development, thealter ego of cataclysmic manmade climate change.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A ConstructiveTomorrow (www.CFACT.org), and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

American Carbon Trading Exchange Dies

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which received start-up funding from the socialist Joyce Foundation on whose board Barack Obama served, announced on 21 October that it was ending its carbon trading mission.  The CCX has provided voluntary, but legally binding, greenhouse gas reduction pledges or offsetting carbon emissions permits.  CCX was an investment of Al Gore's Generation Investment Management and the political clout machine at Goldman Sachs.  While voluntary at first, the CCX was anticipating the massive theft of wealth from Americans upon the Waxman-Markey cap and trade law being passed to make carbon trading mandatory.  Steve Milloy noted on 6 November that the media has completely ignored the failure of the CCX, which they had done so much to promote.

The failure of the Copenhagan meeting to set up a greenhouse gas emissions reduction commitment to follow the Kyoto Protocol which is ending in 2012, the refusal of the U.S. Senate to pass cap and trade legislation, the Great Socialist Recession, ClimateGate, the scientific failure of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, the surge of the Tea Party movement, and the upcoming Republican control of the House of Representatives, a renewed balance in the Senate, and the Republican control of most state governorships and legislatures have finally slowed down the momentum of the wrongheaded crusade against the use of fossil fuels with requirements to substitute unreliable and very expensive so-called "sustainable energy."

GM, Ford, IBM, American Electric Power, Chevron Oil, Intel, Bank of America, GE, BP, Alcoa, Caterpillar, and FP&L are among many companies who have bought carbon offsets or pledged reductions instead of investing in new equipment or keeping long-time employee Joe on during the Great Socialist Recession.  Not to be too cavalier, there are some cases in which energy use reductions actually did make economic sense, though buying carbon emissions credits never did.  Overall, political and environmental pressures certainly did distort the market and did cause many Joe's to be let go and other young David's to never be offered their first job.  GM, American Electric Power, and Chevron were buying trees in Brazil in order to get emissions credits.  Each of these companies has laid people off during the recession, while they played the ruse of being environmentally conscious.  Indeed, there are many claims that two-thirds of the carbon emissions reductions claimed on the exchanges are bogus, but they still cost money to play the game.

The value of Greenhouse Gas Emissions credits traded in the U.S. dropped 47% to $387.4 in 2009.  The volume of trades of CO2 tons fell by 26% to 93.7 million tons, though that was a volume 39% higher than in 2007.  The fact the value of trades fell more than did the volume shows that the value of a ton of CO2 was lower in 2009.  It is now much lower in 2010!  The HSBC climate index follows companies making at least 10% of their total revenues from selling goods and services related to climate change and dropped CCX and Trading Emissions from their index when the value of their market capitalization fell below $400 million as the share prices of these firms fell 37% between 1 September 2009 and 19 March 2010.  The CCX was bought by the IntercontinentalExchange Inc. or ICE, along with the European Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange, in April 2010 for about $634.5 million.  The European Climate Exchange is still bolstered by mandatory carbon trading requirements due to the Kyoto Protocol.


While mandatory carbon trading requirements do not have a national basis in the U.S., they are required in some regions of the U.S.  The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states has Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine as members.  This group of masochistic states is committed to the following state economy mass destruction goals for the region:

2009 - 2014, 188,076,976 short tons of CO2 Emissions, 0% growth
2015, 183,375,052 tons, 2.50% reduction, 1 and one-third years of the output of the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii, of one many tens of thousands of volcanic vents on land and underwater
2016, 178,673,127 tons, 2.56% reduction
2017, 173,971,203 tons, 2.63% reduction
2018, 169,269,278 tons, 2.70% reduction

Now using energy efficiently is wise, but the entire purpose of the state mandates is to drive companies to make energy use reductions that do not make economic sense.  This Northeast - Middle Atlantic alliance is not the only regional alliance requiring member states or provinces to commit Hari Kari.  The Western Climate Initiative is another.  A wise investor would bet against energy-intensive companies with major operations in either set of states.  Those in the Western Climate Initiative are California, Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec.  These state based requirements are providing business for the European Climate Exchange.

Kristel Dorion who has worked for 10 years on carbon offset projects under the United Nation's Clean Development Mechanisms program says that investors are looking elsewhere than carbon offsets.  It is about time.

Gore The Bore Resurfaces on Climate Change

Al Gore, the pontificater, the bore, the Yale elitist with the gentleman C grades in easy courses, has risen from the dead with an Op-Ed to the New York Times on 28 February 2010. It had seemed he was keeping a low profile due to the many revelations of bad science and outright fraud being the real source of the claims for the catastrophic man-made global warming due to CO2 emissions alarm. While he is about to make many assertions that man needs to take action to prevent global warming, there are some very interesting evasions of offering any evidence that global warming is occurring or that it is in fact caused by man's use of fossil fuels. He also hedges his bets on the reality of man-made catastrophic global warming in effect by saying that we must

deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

Let us examine this energy and alternative energy job claim for a moment and then I will move on the global warming issues.  He complains that we have a growing dependence on oil from the most unstable region of the world.  Well, Iraq is embarking on an ambitious program to expand its oil production to exceed that of Saudi Arabia [The Economist, 20-26 Feb 2010].  It may not accomplish this quickly, but if it even comes close to matching the output of Saudi Arabia, the cost of oil will remain very reasonable for many years to come and the alternative energy companies Al Gore has invested heavily in will not be able to compete, even with much larger government subsidies than our government drowning in debt can provide.  OK, yes, Iraq is still in this volatile region, but every additional supply of oil adds to our energy security.  Of course, one can also ask Gore why he and his Progressive friends who care so much about energy security and who do not want to pay for oil abroad will not allow us to explore, drill, and develop oil fields in our own off-shore waters and in the ridiculously innumerable acres of government-held land in the U.S.  Neither does he explain why taxing the oil companies more heavily will help them to find more oil in the U.S. and abroad.  Neither does he explain why sending money abroad to buy oil is somehow worse than sending money abroad to buy any other goods, services, or resources.  We live in a global economy, which he seems to disparage with his fear of depending upon a global oil market, which in fact is a great advantage to us in stabilizing the price of oil and assuring its availability.

Next he makes the outrageous claim that we trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy.  I really do not know what he is basing these claims on.  It is true that China is rapidly increasing its output of cheap, inefficient solar panels largely for sales to countries with mandates requiring that they generate power with expensive solar power plants.  The technology is more advanced in the U.S., but our costs of production are rather high.  Perhaps Al Gore should call for a steep reduction in our absurdly high corporate income tax which makes it very difficult for American companies to compete in the global markets Al so fears.  After all, the U.S. and Japan, whose economy has not been able to get out of the starting blocks for the last 15 years, have the highest corporate taxes in the world today and Obama wants to make them higher!  Of course, Al would probably want a tax reduction only for his solar power companies, being a crony capitalist.  Then he also claims that he has enumerated the most important sources of jobs for the 21st Century.  What do you suppose the track record Teddy Roosevelt would have had for predicting the main sources of jobs in the 20th Century in 1910?  Or, you may substitute the name of any politician of that time you might prefer.

Al Gore goes on to say:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

 I have dealt enough with the scientific scandal of the claims made by the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists that I will not lay out the magnitude of the problems here again, though I will continue to discuss those problems in other posts.  I am just going to say that this attempt to minimize the scientific problems of the global warming alarmists has not held up in Australia or now in the United Kingdom and is beginning to collapse on the heads of such alarmists in the U.S. also.  Many comedians are now picking up on this fraud and that is usually the end of any theory being taken seriously!  So, Al Gore shows himself here as an ostrich with his head in the sand.  Perhaps this is a delaying tactic, so he will have time to unload his alternative energy stocks on other Progressive suckers.

By the way, when I tried to warn other alumni of Brown University and Case Western Reserve University of how the scientific argument for man-made global warming had fallen apart and that the alternative energy companies were going to have a very hard time of it as a result a couple of months ago, I was called rude, trailer trash, a flat-earther, and many other names by a great many alumni.  Some of them had invested in alternative energy, one planned to work for such a company when he finished his graduate studies, one was an associate professor whose research grants depended upon the scare, and many others were just being good religious Progressives.

Al goes on to say:

the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

The record of the UN IPCC reports has been to consistently overestimate the sea level rise and there is no reason known to me to think that more recently they have underestimated sea level rise to come.  The Arctic ice cap expands and contracts mostly due to winds and not due to melting, so it is rather insensitive to any modest warming, such as that since the end of the Little Ice Age.  In any case, if sea ice melts, it does not change the sea level!  The ice on Baffin Island and on Greenland can cause the sea level to rise, but there is no reason to think all that ice is going to melt either.  This is just more groundless alarmism perhaps issued to help his stocks hold value until he can unload them.  As for Antarctica, most of the continent has been experiencing ice expansion, not contraction, in recent times and again there is no reason for alarm.  Furthermore, there is no link to man's CO2 emissions here.

Then he makes the claim that

January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.

And this is almost certainly nonsense also.  The official NOAA land surface temperature data has been so badly manipulated to make it seem as though the world has been warming that we now know that data is useless for establishing whether a given month or year is one of the warmer months or years in the last 130 years.  Absolutely a meaningless claim.  This is the word of an inveterate liar, so that everything such a liar has to say must be taken as meaningless.  How naive does Gore think the American People are?

Now let us examine a perfectly illogical statement Al made:

Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.

Prof. Phil Jones, the former head of the CRU at the University of East Anglia and a stalwart alarmist, recently stated that there has been no significant global warming since 1995.  Since 2001, there has been a slight cooling, if anything, though this may also be regarded as insignificant.  Now, if there was warming from 1990 to 1995 and then the warming stopped, the decade from 2000 to 2010 would be the warmest decade in recent history, even though no warming had occurred since 1995.  But, Al wants us to believe that the claim that the last decade was the warmest means that warming has not stopped.  This does not logically follow Al.  You should have taken a philosophy course in remedial logic at Yale, Al.  The claim that the last decade has been the hottest since modern records have been kept is also based on the warming manipulated surface temperature records, which disagree with the satellite temperature records which are more accurate and have not been tampered with to try to create an exaggerated warming.

Al goes on to make the argument that the recent heavy snowfalls are the result of global warming causing an increase in winter humidity.  I have already debunked this argument in an earlier post.

Al's specious claims continue:

Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.

The global warming pollutant is primarily CO2 and it is not a pollutant any more than water vapor is.  By far the most ice is in the Antarctic and it is not melting as claimed.  Other ice-covered areas are growing and contracting from year to year as they usually do, but perhaps with a very slight tendency to melt due to the recent end of the Little Ice Age.  But, the seas are actually rising at a very slow rate compared to the average rise since the end of the last major Ice Age.  While some have rashly predicted that hurricanes will become stronger, there is no evidence in history to support this and the likelihood is disputed by the best experts on violent storms.  Last I knew, there was also no reason to believe that flooding and drought were significantly worse than at other times in history.  I have no idea where Gore got that claim.  As for the seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures, these go through cycles historically and there is no link to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.  Where does Al get all of this nonsense?  Probably from his day dreams, which he spent so much time doing when he got a D in the course of the global warming advocating professor he now claims was so important to him when he was at Yale.

Gore now ramps up the scale of human misery to be caused by global warming:

the displacement of hundreds of millions of climate refugees, civil unrest, chaos and the collapse of governance in many developing countries, large-scale crop failures and the spread of deadly diseases.

If the world were to become slightly warmer, life in most of the world would become easier, not harder.  There might be some civil unrest in Florida and Arizona, since fewer people from New England, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota would choose to move there upon retirement!  Any slight extension to the growing season would be welcomed, not feared, in those cooler places which the greatest warming has been occurring, if you could actually believe the claims that it has, which you cannot.  The increase in deadly diseases idea does not hold water either.  For instance, it is claimed malaria will spread north.  Nonsense, malaria was widely in the north in the 1800s when it was colder than now.  It moved south mostly because swamps and marshes in the north were drained and because DDT was widely used there in earlier decades.

Next Al Gore informs us about his political, ethical, and human race assessments.  This is interesting.  He bemoans the fact that the economy is now largely global, that the industrial countries do not want to lose their jobs, and that the emerging economies have rising expectations.  He goes on:

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to a period of philosophical dominance for market economics worldwide and the illusion of a unipolar world. It also led, in the United States, to a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere. Over time, markets would most efficiently solve most problems, they argued. Laws and regulations interfering with the operations of the market carried a faint odor of the discredited statist adversary we had just defeated.

Apparently, he thinks the world should be bipolar and that communism somehow made it more properly bipolar.  He thinks a strong belief in market economics is hubris.  He claims that government is the democracy sphere and that it is in opposition to the market sphere.  This is really weird.  Government, even when largely democratic, does not allow everyone the freedom to buy whatever goods and services they choose individually or allow them to start their own business or allow them to work freely for anyone who wishes to hire them.  Government, even so-called democratic government, always tends to interfere with these personal decisions.  There is no more democratic way for a free People to live than in a free market economy.  Yet, Gore tries to make us think that the one-size-fits-all-decrees of government make for a more democratic society than does a free market society.  Hogwash.

Next, Gore sets out on a tirade against television:

Simultaneously, changes in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace.

This is a bit strange too.  The heyday of television for the news was prior to the recent period when Gore wanted carbon cap and trade and restrictions on energy use.  Pretty much all but one news network (Fox) have been touting the Progressive line on global warming and the nefarious role of the industrialized humans, anyway.  One would think he might be railing against the Internet, which he invented, for its role in helping to expand opposition to the Democrats cap and trade schemes, disseminating the evidence that the catastrophic global warming claims were false, enlarging the Tea Party revolt, and getting out the information in the Democrat bills they did not want the People to know about until after they became law.  Oh, but of course, he cannot rail against the Internet, because he invented it!  Then, it is curious that he talks about exploitation of the ignorant and easily victimized People in the same sentence in which he tells us that calling the Progressive program "socialist" is unfair.  I still find the very words exploitation and solidarity sickening after decades of hearing them pour out of the mouths of socialists, Marxists, and communists!

Now the elitist Progressive comes forth strongly again:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Yes, of course, we cannot allow the People to make their own choices in the free market, because we must use the force of government to redeem these sorry sinners.  We, the elitist Progressives, must use the force of government to enforce myriad laws to make the People do what they will not choose to do individually in their own lives.  Of course, many of them are not college educated and many who are did not go to Ivy League quality universities, so we brilliant and well-studied elite will so manipulate the government that these unwashed peasants will do as we tell them to, while we all pretend this was democratically decided.  The People will not make the right personal choices, so we will deceive them into thinking they made the very laws which they would not obey except for the fact that the government will force them to do so.  Government must constrain the private sector to redeem the sinning People.  Government is the Messiah or the elitists who manipulate its levers are the Messiahs.

This sort of manipulation has been going on for a long time.  For most of this time, this caused many people simply to feel disenfranchised.  But, finally, the people became angry about it and they decided they had to do something about being taken advantage of by those who manipulated the levers of government in order to redeem them from the things and actions they loved.  The People have responded with the Tea Party movement.  It is now clear that very many of the People have seen through the Al Gores, John Kerrys, Obamas, Pelosis, Reids, Waxmans, and their ilk.

Perhaps the day of big government redeeming the People will finally come to an end and the People will finally redeem their government.  To do that, they must force it to obey the Constitution, which will take some doing.  But once you see through the obscurantism of the Gores, this becomes a lot easier.  The man behind the curtain has finally been seen and he is not impressive at all.

UN IPCC AR4 Errors on Himalayan Glaciers Revealed

An article in the Seattle Times by Seth Borenstein notes that numerous claims made about the melting of glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains in the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 were wrong.  As usual, all of the errors made it appear that global warming was much more dire than it actually is.  Here are the errors in a half page of the report:

• "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world." Cogley and Michael Zemp of the World Glacier Monitoring System said Himalayan glaciers are melting at about the same rate as other glaciers.
• It says that if the Earth continues to warm, the "likelihood of them disappearing by 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high." Nowhere in peer-reviewed science literature is 2035 mentioned. However, there is a study from Russia that says glaciers could come close to disappearing by 2350. Probably the numbers in the date were transposed, Cogley said. 
• The paragraph says: "Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035." Cogley said there are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.
• The entire paragraph is attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from the WWF, Cogley said. And further, the IPCC likes to brag that it is based on peer-reviewed science, not advocacy group reports. Cogley said the WWF cited the popular science press as its source.
• A table says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840 meters. Then comes a math mistake: It says that's a rate of 135.2 meters a year, when it really is only 23.5 meters a year.

The Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh says that some glaciers are expanding and others are receding more slowly than indicated in the UN IPCC report. But secondly, note that an Indian scientist did speculate, not in a published paper, that the Himalayan glaciers might vanish by 2035.  He says his speculation should not have been used in the UN IPCC report.  Note that losing 400,000 square kilometers of glacier by 2035 is a much greater loss of sources of fresh water than is the loss of some fraction of the 33,000 square kilometers of actual Himalayan glacier and a much greater contributor to images of sea level rise.  The error on calculating the rate of retreat of the Pindari Glacier is especially foolish, since it was particularly easy for any reader to check the calculation.  The article rate of 23.5 meters/year is also actually wrong.  The rate is really 23.7 meters/year.

This set of errors, all favoring alarmism, is simply another indicator of a massive scientific fraud orchestrated by the UN IPCC, the Hadley Center and CRU of Great Britain, and NOAA and the NASA GISS of the U.S.  All of them aided and abetted by Al Gore, Tony Blair, Obama, Pelosi, many other socialist politicians, and much of the socialist press, which is most of the press.  The People have been massively betrayed here again by many scientists, almost all universities, many politicians, and most of the press.  The desire for money from governments and/or more control and power over other people's lives is just too great.  This is a great lesson in the perils of government grown beyond its rationally limited powers as defined in our Constitution, now ignored by our government and the fascist/Marxist/environmentalist intellectual pretenders and posers.

UN IPCC Head Makes Big Money from Global Warming Fears

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri was a railway engineer, who earned a Ph.D. in economics and became the director of the Tata Energy Research Institute in Delhi, India in 1981.  This institute was set up in 1974 by India's largest privately owned business, the Tata Group.  He headed the UN IPCC as its chairman when the AR4 report of 2007 was produced and claimed that catastrophic man-made global warming was a certainty.  As is the case with Al Gore, Dr. Pachauri is making many millions of dollars a year off of his status as a leading catastrophic anthropogenic global warming "expert."  He sits on dozens of company boards of directors or acts as an adviser to them.  He advises carbon traders and industries with an interest in sustainability or being perceived as "green."

When people oppose the idea of catastrophic man-made global warming, they are often said to be in the employ of oil and coal firms, whether they are or are not.  Conservatives and libertarians are aware that Al Gore is making money from his advocacy of man-made global warming, but they have said little about Dr. Pachauri making many millions per year from his advocacy.

More Hockey Stick Temperature Data

I found the short version of J. Storrs Hall's history of temperature in the the Greenland ice from Watts Up with That?  I am going to present a shorter version here with my comments, but it is worth looking at the original version, which also goes further back in the history of the Earth.  Meanwhile, let us all be very sure that we have a solid understanding of the relatively recent steady and stable climate provided to us by beneficent natural forces prior to man's industrial age, in which man acquired the capability to kill the Earth and promptly set out to do so.  Yes, we all on board with Obama and so many leaders of governments all over the world gathered in Copenhagen who are only too happy to lay down the law and restrict our energy use for the good of the Earth.  ......Good, you know me well enough to know that the last couple of sentences were tongue in cheek, mimicking the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming nuts!

At the Foresight Institute, J. Storrs Hall had some interesting graphs made from NOAA ice core data (Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.)

Let us look at the recent history of this Greenland ice core data and note how stable the temperature was prior to 1840 during the Little Ice Age.

Note the unique rise from 1840 to about 1880.  This is a terribly sudden rise.  Now just as Mann and Briffa look at their bristlecone and tree ring data sets with flat temperature histories in much of this same period and then append the land surface instrumental measurement data to the late 20th Century as enhanced by the urban heat island effect to create a similar hockey stick set of temperature data, we examine this data in the same mindset.  Well, clearly the early industrial age, though limited to Britain mostly at that time, with the U.S. and Germany as minor players, was very effective in altering the world's climate!  Shame on those Brits!  It's really their fault.  They should pay us punitive taxes!  Indeed, the Brits owe everyone in the whole world.

We should note that there has been a further temperature rise in fits and starts after 1900 of about another 0.5 C.  Dare we look further back in history as seen by Greenland ice?  Awwww......sure, why not.  We are intrepid explorers here!

Hmm.....You mean before the Little Ice Age there was a warm period which was much warmer than it was in 1900?  It was even warmer than now!  Who woulda thunk?  And look at that awful temperature rise from 900 AD to 1025 AD of 1.7 C.  What do you suppose those people coming out of the Dark Ages in Europe did to cause that?  Were they really roasting that many Christian heretics in bonfires?  Was it due to all the blacksmiths hammering out armor and making swords?  I guess whatever they were doing must have stopped in about 1025 AD.  Maybe they noted the fact that their activities had caused man-made global warming.  I bet they all got together in Copenhagen and signed a treaty to burn less wood and charcoal!  Apparently, after that, it got colder and everyone was really happy again!  Man warming the Earth being such an awful bad thing and all.

 

Dare we look still further back?  Of course, we are all fearless here!

Oh my!  It was as warm (at least in Greenland) from about 2500 BC to 500 AD as it is now!  What on earth were those Romans and Greeks and Persians and Indians and Chinese doing then to cause those high temperatures?  Oh, and how come there was ice on Greenland at all?  How dare the ice in Greenland not have melted in 1200 BC when it was about 2.2 C warmer than now.  Al Gore, the inventor of the internet, says it should melt when that warm and flood the Earth with sea levels 20 feet higher than now.

J. Storrs Hall keeps going back and shows us what we really should worry about.  Namely, the Earth has had a real fascination with ice ages in earlier times.  He reminds us, as I have in the past, that if you want to worry about climate change, worry about the way natural forces tend to give the Earth many an ice age.  We should be very thankful it is warm.  Of course, if it were as warm as it was from 2500 BC to 500 AD, we might actually have good reason to be happy.  After all , man made some pretty good advances in that time, when according to Obama and Gore, man should have been too miserable to function.  He should have been hiding deep in his cool caves.

So, Obama and Gore, the UN, and all those European leaders, and the reluctant Indians and Chinese are all sitting down and trying to put the blacksmiths out of work.  If they put enough blacksmiths out of work, do you suppose they can bring on the return of the Little Ice Age?  Wouldn't that be just grand?

Al Gore Cancels Presentation in Copenhagen

Apparently, Al Gore is afraid of the possible heat from 3000 ticket holders for his 16 December 2009 presentation called Climate Conclusion.  Yes, he has a new presentation based on his book Our Choice.  Those who paid $1200 for tickets were going to be allowed to shake his hand.  He has backed out, the heat from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia document dump and the resulting scandal, in which most of the leading climate scientists strongly backing the idea of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have been revealed as data manipulators and schemers to prevent the scientific airing of opposing viewpoints, being too much for him.  Being the politician he is, he can only stand to be loved and cannot take criticism.  His future will be full of criticism now.

The 3,000 Danes who bought tickets will have their money refunded if they take their tickets back to the ticket window where they had bought them.  Would it not be great if everyone who has already been fleeced with higher energy prices or had their jobs threatened by idiot politicians who say they want to kill the coal industry or want no more coal-fired power plants built could be reimbursed?  There surely are coalminers out of work in this recession who would still be employed were it not for the catastrophic AGW fraud.  The same is true for the industries that transport coal.  Perhaps the Democrats in Congress would have allowed a bit more oil drilling if it were not for this AGW nonsense.  The sales of more SUVs might have employed more Americans. Of the 15.7 million Americans unemployed, how many are out of a job due to Obama's tough talk on destroying the coal industry, bankrupting coal-fired power plants, and his threatened energy restrictions?  How many are out of work in anticipation of new foolish regulatory rulings by the EPA, which will not listen to its internal dissenters?

There are many reasons why the unemployment in America has hit such high numbers, the most unemployed since the Great Depression.  But the attacks on energy use and the negative effects of subsidies for alternative energy developments must surely already be responsible for several hundred thousands of the unemployed.  If we allowed more drilling for oil, a few 100,000 more Americans could easily be employed.  Exxon Mobil says it can create 160,000 new jobs with the development of oil fields on and off shore.  Many other oil companies could create tens of thousands of new jobs each.  Yet, we allow the rabid environmentalists and the catastrophic AGW alarmists to cripple our economy still.  When will these wrongheaded policies change?

The Nobel Socialist Cheering Award

In 1938, Sir Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Edouard Deladier, Prime Minister of France reached an agreement with Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini that Germany should take over the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia.  The response of most people was that war had been avoided and a lasting peace was attained by this agreement.  I expect the only reason the Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded to Chamberlain and Deladier and perhaps also to Hitler and Mussolini was the timing.  The agreement was made on 29 September 1938.  If Peace Prize announcements were made then in early October, as now, Chamberlain and Deladier would not have had time to be nominated for the prize in time.  So, they would have been given the prize in 1939, but for one small problem.  The invasion of Poland by Germany on 1 September 1939 would have ended any possibility of Chamberlain and Deladier winning the Nobel Peace Prize of 1939.  But if Germany had waited until 1940 to invade Poland, they may very well have won the prize in 1939, especially if the people now on the selection committee were on it then!

Let's look at some of the supposedly distinguished winners of this prize:

2001  The United Nations and Kofi Annan

2002  Jimmy Carter

2005  International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei

2007  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore

2009  Barack Hussein Obama

The United Nations is awash in corruption, kowtows to kleptomaniacs, dictators, and socialist regimes, and subverts the rights of the individual while pretending to support a long list of human rights, which are not rights at all.  Annan was deeply immersed in the corruption and all of these faults.

Jimmy Carter has time after time affirmed corrupted elections and generally given his approval to any socialist government no matter how much harm they bring to their people.  He is an appeaser and often times a lunatic.  For instance, he was one of the many leftists who recently claimed that much of the opposition to Obama was due to racism.  He is fond of picturing the United States as a mean and cruel country which tramples the rights of other nations.

The International Atomic Energy Agency and its head Mohamed ElBaradei have been extensively criticized for ineffective and weak operations by American experts.  They seem to have accomplished almost nothing.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore are best known for the terribly untrue science they have pedaled, while backing an ever greater intrusion of governments and international groups of governments into our affairs.  No wonder the socialist applauded them.

The award just given to Barack Hussein Obama has one and only one basis.  He has accomplished nothing of note for world peace.  But, he has apologized to everyone for any imagined hurt, mostly hurt feelings due to inadequacy, that any country, no matter how dictatorial and cruel, may have felt.  He consistently chooses to placate every other nation, while prostrating America.  This sends shivers of ecstasy down the leg of any committed socialist and world government enthusiast.

Obama correctly says he has not yet done anything worthy of this award.  Well, actually one does not have to do anything worthy of a prize for promoting peace to win this prize.  That is clear from the list of winners of the award above.  He has been given the prize as an incentive to continue prostrating America and its interests to those of the many socialist, dictatorial, and kleptocratic countries of the world.  He has said he is determined to earn the award with his future actions.  I believe Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee are on the same page.  He will indeed earn the prize in terms of its America-prostrated purpose.

Some Good, Some Odd Beliefs

I was looking at the latest Fox News Opinion Poll today and saw some very good, but also some incongruous beliefs held by Americans.

First, the most encouraging belief is that most Americans (60%) believe that "No matter what the outcome, the court should follow what the Framers meant when they wrote the Constitution.", while only 26% agreed with "If necessary, the court should ignore what the Framers meant to reach the outcome it feels is appropriate for today." 8% believed in some mix of these two interpretations of the Constitution. Surprisingly, more Democrats agreed (44%) with the Framers' intent than with the felt appropriate for today interpretation. Republicans agree with the Framers predominantly (78%), while 61% of independents went with the Framers.

Now the complete brain warp:

• 69% of the voters in the Presidential Election voted for Obama who does not believe in interpreting the Constitution as the Framers intended it to be interpreted. The only way this should be possible is if Obama did not win many of the Democrat votes in the today's interpretation category, but did win pretty much all the Independent vote, but only those who believe in the Framers' interpretation. Of course, we know this is not the case, so here is a complete disconnect on this most critical issue between what the voters believe in and how they voted.
• 42% believed Hilary Clinton would make a good Supreme Court Justice. This cannot be squared with the 60% belief in the Framers interpretation of the Constitution.
• 32% believe Al Gore would be a good Justice. This one can be mathematically squared with the 60% belief in the Framers intent, but in practice, it is clear that it is not so.

Clearly, the people have no idea at all about what major politicians think about the Constitution, have no ability to judge their actions for their Constitutionality, and/or have no idea what the intent of the Framers of the Constitution was!

On the good side again, only 1% believed a woman should be disqualified to serve as a justice of the Supreme Court because she was a woman, only 2% believed a minority member was disqualified to serve, and only 17% believed a homosexual was disqualified.

It turns out that Independents are the people who believe that most other Americans are less happy than Democrats and Republicans think they are. But, when asked how happy they are themselves, Independents are almost as happy as Republicans. Neither of them are anywhere near as happy as the power wheedlers are. The Democrats are having a heyday apparently.