The Agenda is Primary, Not the Science or the Facts

I have repeatedly pointed out that the government mandates and subsidies for ethanol production from corn and other plant sources were based on claims that net energy would be produced and air pollution would be reduced.  These were false claims and this is now well-known.  Nonetheless, Congress has not enacted new legislation to repeal the bad mistake and eliminate the mandates for ethanol use in gasoline mixtures and the subsidies for its production.  This has not happened even though this situation has driven up food prices, in addition to fuel prices, as another bad consequence.  The reason no needed reform has occurred is because the ethanol laws were actually passed to purchase the votes and to gain campaign money from many farmers and from ethanol producers.  It was a way for politicians to increase their control over parts of the private sector.

The total scientific collapse of the catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis, has not caused Obama and the progressives (fascist socialists) to back off on promoting alternative energy sources with mandates and subsidies at all.  Obama called for a big push to increase government controls on energy in his State of the Union address.  The EPA still seems bent upon putting draconian controls on CO2 emissions and the use of fossil fuels under the Clean Air Act as well.  The progressive machine moves forward, despite the knowledge that man's CO2 emissions have no more than a trivial effect upon climate.  Why?

The very reason that NOAA dropped out hundreds of temperature reporting stations from the surface temperature records, which reported cooler temperatures than other retained stations did, to make it falsely appear that the earlier warming cycle of the late 1970s and 1980s was continuing, makes it very clear that an agenda was long dominant over any issues of science.  The agenda of the catastrophic man-made global warming scheme was a great desire to gain massive new control over the energy sector of our economy and over all users of energy.  Basically, all American businesses are highly dependent upon energy, which is why sudden price hikes in oil have set off 10 of the 11 recessions since WWII, including the present one.  Those Americans who do not own a company dependent upon energy costs, work for one or still have a residence they must heat and cool.  The power grab by the progressives to take over the control of energy is huge.  That goal remains, whether the science of catastrophic man-made global warming has become laughable or not.

So, the fascist socialist left is not giving up.  They are attempting to make another transition in their claim on power over the American people.  They used to base it entirely on fairness and economic equality, but the fall of the USSR made the claims of central economic planning look pitiful.  Their hollowness was too easily seen in the rapid movement of Eastern Europeans away from communism and socialism.  They had lived in socialism's depressing and deadening grasp.  They fled with elation to Capitalism.  Even the Chinese Communist government realized they had to drop much of their central economic planning.  The fascist socialists in the West adopted environmentalism and global warming as the agenda that would allow them to increase their power over the People.  Now that rationale has fallen apart on the global warming side and the environmental harm exaggerations on many other fronts are more and more being questioned also.  Where can they turn?

The new approach is rather desperate.  The claim is we will run out of fossil fuels, they are dirty, and alternative energy can produce more jobs.  Someday, we will run out of fossil fuels, but they are plentiful and cheap still.  This gives us plenty of time to develop alternative energy and there is no reason for pell-mell crash programs.  The free market will develop the new energy as it is needed.  Let companies drill in the American waters and in national forests and allow them to develop oil shale, as it makes sense.  Let them also use wind generation, solar, and geothermal power as they can find and develop markets for them.  There is no need for huge, wasteful government programs.  The evolution of technology will be much more efficient at its private sector pace.  As for cleanliness, we have already made huge strides in cleaning up our fossil fuel use.  A rationally paced program to continue such work will be wiser again than any crash program.  The real problems with pollution are in the poorer countries of the world and the solution is to bring the highly efficient Capitalist system to them, so they can afford to clean up their countries, as we have cleaned up the U.S.  Will alternative energy produce new jobs?  Yes, but we want it to produce net new jobs.  A government policy of killing coal miners, oil drillers, railroad, and energy-using industry jobs in massive numbers to create a pittance of new alternative energy jobs, is a fool's errand.

But, of course, I am treating the claims of the progressive fascist socialists as though they are motivated by a respect for reason.  They are not.  They are motivated by a desire to control the lives of others.  They want to tell every American what his values should be and then give him a strict set of rules to manage his life.  We are all to be the slaves of the college-educated elite of progressive fascist socialists who want to control us.  They are to be our rulers, our tyrants supreme.  Are we going to allow this?  I do not think so.  I think we are about to start throwing these rascals out of government in droves!  But, it is clear that they will never stop seeking to rule us and if we are to be free, we must never stop fighting this ravenous beast of fascist socialism.

Our Government Propaganda Mill on Energy & Global Warming Still Churns

The many false claims of the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists have been used over and over as justifications for new government controls, spending programs, the picking of winners and losers in U.S. industry, forced changes in our lifestyles, wiping out jobs not considered green, and huge increases in all of our energy costs.  I received this in an e-mail about another government attempt to use these false claims for such purposes from the Science and Environmental Policy Project earlier today:

As a whole, the US media has been dismissive of the importance of Climategate and subsequent revelations. The non-scientific claims of the IPCC are considered by many commentators as insignificant. A reading of Chapter 9, “Transforming the Energy Sector and Addressing Climate Change,” in the recently released Economic Report of the President illustrates the significance of the scientifically unsupported claims by IPCC.

The chapter begins by citing claims that CO2 emissions will likely cause large temperature increases – all from IPCC models that have never been validated thus have no predictive power. It continues with claims of “increased mortality rates, reduced agricultural yields in many parts of the world, and rising sea levels that could inundate low-lying coastal areas.” 

“The planet has not experienced such a rapid warming on a global scale in many thousands of years, and never as a result of emissions from human activity.”

Elsewhere the President’s report cites EPA’s Endangerment Finding, calculates massive increases in property damage from increased severity of storms, justifies cap-and-trade, and promotes spending $60 Billion in cash and $30 Billion in tax credits for alternative energy. Of course tax credits benefit only those with high tax liabilities (high incomes).

The claims of increased mortality rates and reduced agriculture yields (found in IPCC reports) are directly contradicted by late 20^th Century history, the period claimed to be one of unprecedented warming. During this time mortality rates generally went down, human longevity up, and agricultural yields increased dramatically. Ironically, after declaring agricultural yields will decline the President’s report embraced an increase in mandatory bio-fuel use in gasoline from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons by 2022. It does not calculate the farm acreage required for this effort.

The claimed massive increases in property damage are, no doubt, based on IPCC’s claim in which the actual study found no statistically significant link between warming and catastrophic property damage. Sea levels have increased about 400 feet in the last 18,000 years or about 27 inches per century. The report cites a 7 inch rise since 1900 as if it is alarming. The statement that the “planet has not experienced such a rapid warming” has no merit.

Perhaps most journalists consider spending $90 Billion on various schemes to “fight climate change” insignificant. But one would hope for better scientific justification.

The mandate requiring more bio-fuel use will cause many of our food prices to go up greatly in addition to our fuel costs.  If the government were right about crop yields going down, then food prices will be going up badly even without the thoughtless requirement that more farmland be used to make fuel.  In fact, increased CO2 in the atmosphere and warmer weather will more likely lead to increased crop yields, not the lower ones foolishly claimed here.  As I have noted before, plant growth is benefited by higher CO2, which plants find essential for growth.  In many areas, greater warmth leads to longer growing seasons and will allow multiple plantings per year.  Those who worry about greater warmth in the tropics, need to remember that the tropics warm up little due to the cooling effect of increased water evaporation.

I fear that such nonsense as the widespread belief in catastrophic man-made global warming due to man's CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use, the widespread claims that minimum wage laws are good, the lack of a strong blow-back on the ethanol nonsense, the widespread acceptance of farm subsidies and supports, the lack of anger and response to the government's ever increasing meddling with big industries in co-operative efforts to control the market, the tendency for many college-educated people to want the government to takeover the health care industry, and the general belief by that same educated elite that they are qualified to make value and life management decisions for everyone else, have caused me to wonder seriously about the intelligence of many, many Americans.

Fortunately, the Tea Party movement has provided a counterweight to this assessment, in the nick of time, that my fellow Americans are not too bright.  It appears that the dumbness is mostly to be found in the college-educated elite who succumbed to brain lobotomies at the hands of their colleges, the progressive media, and the government.  Some people are simply easily programmed by constant repetitions of propaganda!!!!  But, it turns out that the greater part of the American People have not allowed this propaganda lobotomy process to remove their gray matter.  What a relief!

Natural Forces Cause Major Climate Shifts

Anastasios A. Tsonis, Kyle Swanson, and Sergey Kravtsov of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Atmospheric Sciences Group, the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee claim in "A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts" published 12 July 2007 in Geophysical Research Letters claims that the major climate shifts from 1900 to 2000 can be explained in terms of natural forces.

They constructed a network of observed climate indices for the period and studied their collective behavior. The network of indices synchronized a number of times between 1900 and 2000 and when the synchronization event was followed by a steady increase in the coupling strength between indices, the synchronization was destroyed and a new climate state was generated. Significant changes in temperature trend and in ENSO variability result. The great 1970s climate shift was one such event. This mechanism appears consistent with synchronized chaos theory.

Dr. Tsonis believes another shift occurred about the year 2000 and that it may last another 20 years from now. In other words, he believes that we are in a cooling trend which may last until about 2028. This is a viewpoint which a number of other climate researchers have been stating over the last month or so. That we had probably switched into a cooling period was evident in the research I had noted in a number of studies over the last year or so. See for instance, my 26 Mar 08 note on "The Cooling Oceans and Unwarmed Atmosphere."

Apparently, the claim by man-made global warming alarmists that all scientists believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming caused by the use of fossil fuels has still another counter data point. It becomes ever more likely that if we can delay the precipitous actions of politicians to use government force to make us give up the use of fossil fuels at enormous expense and hardship, this AGW hypothesis is going to turn into a complete train wreck into a deep gorge. When it does, I wish we could count on a backlash against the politicians who have backed this nonsense of impending catastrophe. Unfortunately, the minimum wage raising fools, the ethanol mandaters, the subprime home mortgage cheerleaders, the bailout bucket brigade, the U.S. cannot win a war, and all other Congressional idiocentricities always seem to get a pass from the public. Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Chris Dodd are all sitting fat and happy in Congress still, just to name a few idiocentric standouts.

Our Federal Government Debt

While considering which problems the Federal government should add to its goals to find and develop solutions, we should consider the size of the national debt. It is now over $9.5 trillion, with each and every family owing an $80,831 share of that amount. This is just the money we have already overspent.

Far more alarming is the unfunded future obligations to Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs. These unfunded promises now amount to $53 trillion.

Maybe we should stop to think about Obama's promises to spend still more on alternative energy, ending global climate change, and funding a national health care system, among many other new programs. Possibly, our resources are limited, despite his rhetoric being unlimited.