Add this guy to the roles of those who owe their livelihood to the Obama stimulus plan. Is he creating more jobs? No. …growing the economy? No.

He’s researching the myth that is man-made global warming.

A scientist in the middle of the ClimateGate scandal received economic stimulus funds last June.

As NewsBusters reported on November 28, Penn State University is investigating Professor Michael Mann, the creator of the discredited “Hockey Stick Graph,” for his involvement in an international attempt to exaggerate and manipulate climate data in order to advance the myth of manmade global warming.

According to the conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research, Mann received $541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.

It’s one thing to see stimulus dollars funding worthless but predictable make-work projects employing government workers whose jobs were never at risk in an era overseen by liberals hell bent on growing the public sector. It’s quite another to see funding of borrowed taxpayer dollars diverted to support a failed and blatant liberal cause.

It should be a crime.

In timely fashion, Monckton presents the most definitive cross examination of a Global Warming Alarmist zealot ever. Points to both participants for the civility. But wow… Global Warming Alarmism doesn’t come out smelling so fresh in this one.

(H/T to the always excellent Global Warming Hoax Weekly Roundup, at the Daily Bayonet)

Just as our time on earth represents a slim slice of the eons since our planet was formed, our current atmospheric episode is a respite in a wild ride featuring extreme heat, cold and large objects falling on our heads.

We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

And governments and groupies have been deceived by jet-setting rock stars and carbon-trading billionaires.

Lucky us…

The stroke of luck that’s misled us? The sheets of ice in whose shadow we made a living for two million years peeled back 12,000 years ago leaving a lush new Garden of Eden. In that Eden we invented agriculture, money, electronics and our current way of life. But that weather standstill has held on for an abnormally long amount of time. And it’s very likely that this atypical weather truce shall someday pass.

Man-made Climate Change enthusiasts are not only politically-motivated opportunists, they must also be the most arrogant people on earth, thinking we actually have a role in the climate of the relative pebble we live on as it screams through the universe.

The Earth is a traveler. Its angle as it sweeps around the sun produces the massive weather flips we call seasons—the dance from summer to winter and back again. But there’s more. Our planet has a peculiar wobble—its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. This is called the Milankovich cycle, named for the Serbian engineer and geophysicist who discovered it.

But the wobbles in our trip around the sun are just a start. The sun is a traveler, too. It circles the black hole at the galaxy’s core every 226 million years. And it takes its tiny flock of planets with it. That means us. The result?

The journey around the galactic core is fraught with dangers. For example, every 143 million years we pass through a spiral arm of the galaxy, an arm that tosses tsunamis of cosmic rays our way. Those rays produce massive climate change. Then there’s the innocent-sounding stuff astronomers call galactic “fluff,” massive clouds of cosmic dust lurking in our solar system’s path that also cause dramatic climate change.

Meanwhile, the sun itself is going through a cycle from birth to death. As a result of its maturation, good old reliable sol is 43% warmer today than it was when the Earth first gathered itself into a globe of planetesimals 4.5 billion years ago.

The bottom line? Weather changes and the occasional meteor have tossed this planet through roughly 142 mass extinctions since life began 3.85 billion years ago. That’s an average of one mass extinction every 26.5 million years. Where did these mass die-offs come from? Nature. There were no human capitalists, industrialists or cultures of consumerism to blame.

…unless you have a Convenient Agenda that is.

So while the uncovering of the East Anglia CRU Email scandal is into its third week with scarcely a peep of direct coverage, it seems the usual suspects are hard at work trying to shore up the thesis, on a public relations and political front (although certainly not a scientific one).

I flipped on MPR twice this weekend, more or less at complete random.

The first time, I turned the show on to Speaking of Faith – the normally-excellent Minnesota-based production that explores religion and faith in all its many flavors, to normally-fascinating depth.  The show is one of MPR’s few regular programs whose podcasts I listen to punctiliously.  But today…:

A conversation about climate change and moral imagination with environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben. He’s been ahead of the curve on this fantastically complex issue since he wrote The End of Nature in 1989. We explore his evolving perspective on human responsibility in a changing natural world.

Not a word of controversy or skepticism to be heard, naturally – and this from a show that gives intellectually-ravenous credibility to every variety of lack of belief as well as all of the world’s manifestations of it – just the blithe acceptance that man-made global warming is a fact, and that collectivizing our society is our only real hope.

Still, it was better than On The Media – a program for whom leftist apologetics seems to be an unstated given.

For years, George Monbiot has written for the British newspaper The Guardian about the dangers of man-made climate change and how the denial industry sows confusion. But when he wrote recently “we’re losing,” it seemed a surprising admission. He explains why, despite scientific consensus, much of the public remains unswayed.

Quote of the day: Brooke Gladstone asked Monbiot about Copenhagen.  “I’ve heard many people who wish we just had a huge Communist world government, so we could just do what needed to be done”.

Runner-up quote of the day? Monbiot on the East Anglia scandal (!):  “This was a disaster – we have to make sure our science is absolutely foolproof”.

Sorry, George – that train left the station.

Like this one, ripped from the headlines:

Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex

But just because the joke writes itself doesn’t mean we can’t, too.

Have at it, readers!  The comment section is open for your versions of the story – and like those Danish doxies’ ministrations, it’s absolutely free, although that offered by the Scand0-Strumpets, the  “Happy Ending” will be purely rhetorical.

So what we have here are “Scientists”, caught red-handed trying to doctor data, jiggle the “Peer Review” process and defame rather than scientifically refute their critics, in a scam whose goal was to secure their funding and, by the way, bring epic and unprecedented political power to their (inevitably liberal) political benefactors – which is, by any measure, fraud.  Which is a crime.

But Barbara Boxer – the stupidest person ever to serve as a US Senator – knows who the real enemies are:

“You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,'” she said during a committee meeting. “Whatever it is, the main issue is, Are we facing global warming or are we not? I’m looking at these e-mails, that, even though they were stolen, are now out in the public.”

The e-mails, from scientists at the University of East Anglia, were obtained through hacking.

That seems an odd thing to state as a conclusion; I’ve heard that it’s equally likely they were obtained from a conscientious whistle-blower.

At any rate,  Boxer seems to be serving the dictates of her lord and master Rahm Emanual, and is putting this crisis to good use:

Boxer said her committee may hold hearings into the matter as its top Republican, Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), has asked for, but that a criminal probe would be part of any such hearings.

“We may well have a hearing on this, we may not. We may have a briefing for senators, we may not,” Boxer said. “Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated.

“This is a crime,” Boxer said.

The biggest crime of all is that Barbara Boxer has a job more responsible than serving burgers at a truck stop.

Professors, ironically, claim that all their notes on man-made global warming got lost when their moms inadvertenty tossed ’em.  Really:

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss [of, like, all the raw data “supporting” their “thesis”] following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

Which must have been when the dogs got it.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

I’ve long held that the biggest problem with the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, other than the very presence of Algore,  is that the entire approach has been fundamentally political rather than scientific; not just in the way that all evidence that would seem to support the theory is taken as proof, but that all evidence that would seem to undercut the theory is considered proof as well, of course, but in the way that “scientists” and their p0litical benefactors declared the debate irrevocably settled even as skepticism grew rather than shrank.

And this was before it transpired that the leading proponents are, it would seem, scientific frauds.

It took almost thirty years for the last Japanese soldiers to believe that Hirohito had surrendered.  There are still Nazis, Communists and Independence Party “members” around and about.   I don’t think Kathleen Soliah and her supporters around California and Highland Park have sworn off their violent pasts even today.  And with those as behavioral models, it would seem we’re going to be stuck with the detritus of the AGW cult for quite some time.

But perhaps we’ve turned the corner, and with the bullying and hectoring of the fake-science lobby terminally discredited, perhaps we can actually deal with the problems that do exist.  Whatever they are.

From the tearful pleas of rock stars to politicians pounding their hammy fists, the Man Made Global Warming movement has been a maypole for liberals for what seems like twenty years now.

…and gave Algore a suitable purpose for his deceitful, pathetic life.

Watch now as world leaders quietly turn their backs and walk briskly away.

As scientists confirm the earth has not warmed at all in the past decade, others wonder how this could be and what it means for Copenhagen. Maybe Al Gore can Photoshop something before December.

It will be a very cold winter of discontent for the warm-mongers. The climate show-and-tell in Copenhagen next month will be nothing more than a meaningless carbon-emitting jaunt, unable to decide just whom to blame or how to divvy up the profitable spoils of climate change hysteria.

“So when Barbara Boxer, John Kerry and all the left get up there and say, ‘Yes. We’re going to pass a global warming bill,’ I will be able to stand up and say, ‘No, it’s over. Get a life. You lost. I won,'” Inhofe said.

Darn it all. I was so hoping not to have to move South in my twilight years.

I thought these “scientists” were just liberal zombies contentedly suckling at the teet of government grants, doing the Motherland’s bidding; the all-growed-up version of the career protesters I observed when I attended the U.

Now, it turns out they were [dramatic music] evil doers!

Hundreds of private e-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

Leave it to the StarTribune to discount the findings, toss the word “evidence” in there for good measure and  essentially say “Sorry. Too late, officer. The Kool Aid is drunk already.”

But the evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.

…because it’s already been eroding…without the help of hackers.

With their help however we have this:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide a decline” in temperatures.

The good news? Algore made a Billion and can retire. Maybe he’ll keep his yap shut now.

I’m currently (okay, not currently, but I wrote this during lunch – ed.) watching big fluffy flakes of an entirely-localized weather phenomenon which should not be considered indicative in any way of the global climate trend (ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT) fall from the sky. By my reckoning this is about the fourth such ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT this month. In this part of Minnesota it would be unusual (though not unprecedented) to have even one such ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT before November. Four ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCTs is pretty notable, and just serves as a vivid reminder how much colder than normal most of this year – especially this month – has been.

Which probably goes a long way toward explaining this…

Survey Says: Americans Not Worried About Global Warming

A new poll out today on Americans’ attitudes about climate change presents sobering findings for those that favor aggressive action to curb U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases.

The survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds a sharp decline over the past year in the percentage of Americans who see solid evidence that global temperatures are rising. According to the survey, conducted between Sept. 30 and Oct. 4 among 1,500 adults reached on cell phones and landlines, fewer respondents also see global warming as a very serious problem; 35% say that today, down from 44% in April 2008.

The survey also points to a decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising as a result of human activity. Just 36% say that currently, down from 47% last year.

The thing is, I am perfectly and contentedly aware that those fluffy white flakes outside my window truly are a local phenomenon and that they do not tell me anything about the global climate. But then I also think the same whenever some hot-headed alarmist points to a single melting glacier, stranded polar bear, or Australian drought as part of the global warming “evidence all around us.” If you’re going to invest so much time and energy fashioning a petard, you ought to be aware about the dangers of hoisting is my point.

It’s entirely possible I’m totally wrong in my views about global warming (it’s natural) and mankind’s role in it (negligible). But even if I’m wrong about that I’m certainly not going to make the foolish argument that the snow flying around outside my window at the moment proves my point. I am, however, going to engage in a little shadenfreude as the fluffy white flakes of ELWPWSNBCIIAWOTGCT help to put a very real chill on the attempted panic of public opinion regarding global warming and the “evidence all around us.”

[note: It’s probably a good idea to note that the above was written by Bogus Doug and not Mitch.  In the site’s recent technical issues, we seem to have lost the post-author thingy.]

[Mitch adds:  The “author name” thing will be fixed this weekend.  Especially if it’s too rainy for yard work]

I traveled to The Badlands in South Dakota this past week where you can literally see millions of years of earth’s history locked in a lava parfait; most of which took place without our existence, let alone our negligible impact

…and UK PM Gordon Brown, who has no scientific basis and of course no political agenda to further, says we have had 50 days to save Mother Earth.

Gordon Brown said negotiators had 50 days to save the world from global warming and break the “impasse”.

Mr Brown warned that negotiators were not reaching agreement quickly enough and said it was a “profound moment” for the world involving “momentous choice”.

“So we should never allow ourselves to lose sight of the catastrophe we face if present warming trends continue.”

Sorry, Sir. You mean cooling trends, right?

See, if I were Brown, I’d use even more syllables that that…to underscore the behemothic endangerment; the precariousness of our posterity.

What an amateur.

Meanwhile venues from Australia to here in the Twin Cities have experienced the coldest first two weeks in October on record.

HT John H

World oil and gas reserves E are vastly, vastly higher than predicted:

The World Gas Conference in Buenos Aires last week was one of those events that shatter assumptions. Advances in technology for extracting gas from shale and methane beds have quickened dramatically, altering the global balance of energy faster than almost anybody expected.

Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, said proven natural gas reserves around the world have risen to 1.2 trillion barrels of oil equivalent, enough for 60 years’ supply – and rising fast.

“There has been a revolution in the gas fields of North America. Reserve estimates are rising sharply as technology unlocks unconventional resources,” he said.

Gas reserves in particular are seemingly immense – and, being a clean-burning fuel already, should obviate the need for “clean coal” (which is still on the drawing board).

Downside; pundits are seeing this news and saying it pre-empts the need for new nuke plants.  Let’s not get cocky, here…

Headline: “Saudis ask for aid if world cuts dependence on oil:

There are plenty of needy countries at the U.N. climate talks in Bangkok that make the case they need financial assistance to adapt to the impacts of global warming. Then there are the Saudis.Saudi Arabia has led a quiet campaign during these and other negotiations — demanding behind closed doors that oil-producing nations get special financial assistance if a new climate pact calls for substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels.

That campaign comes despite an International Energy Agency report released this week showing that OPEC revenues would still increase $23 trillion between 2008 and 2030 — a fourfold increase compared to the period from 1985 to 2007 — if countries agree to significantly slash emissions and thereby cut their use of oil. That is the limit most countries agree is needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Subsidies for the Saudis.

Call it “Cash for Monarchs”.

For about forty years the greatest scientific experts in the world were in broad agreement that the evolution of the human species included a critical phase involving a large brained but otherwise ape-like creature known as Eoanthropus dawsoni, or, more colloquially “Piltdown Man.” Piltdown man was discovered by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson in a gravel pit in the village of Piltdown, in East Sussex, England. Dawson subsequently presented his find to the Geographical Society of London in 1912.

So broadly accepted was the existence of this creature as a critical step of human evolution that it was cited by famed lawyer Clarence Darrow in perhaps the most famous event in in the popular mind involving evolutionary theory since Darwin – the Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1926. However in 1953 the world was stunned to discover that, far from being a critical step in human evolution, Piltdown Man had never existed at all. The fossil which lead to this belief was, in fact, a hoax.

But despite its notoriety there are useful lessons we can draw from the Piltdown hoax. One of the central lessons is that whenever a scientific problem beckons for a solution there is a predisposition within the scientific community to accept a certain kind of solution: the kind of solution which neatly fits the prevailing assumptions.

Piltdown was accepted readily despite flaws which were apparent from the start because it fit. It was not some groundbreaking revelation which caused scientists to rethink their assumptions about human evolution. Far from it. It was the very fulfillment of those assumptions. It was the long sought after “missing link” between man and the ape, and it looked exactly like they assumed it would – a big-brained ape. Mankind, so the thinking of the time went, first developed intelligence and afterward learned to walk upright and make tools and use language and the like. That was the story of human evolution as science was trying to tell it. Piltdown looked like it could have walked right out of that story book.

(more…)

The latest chapter of the left’s carefully reasoned and mature dialogue on public policy comes from the UK Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland:

Anyone who cares about the survival of our planet should start praying that Barack Obama gets his way on reforming US healthcare. That probably sounds hyperbolic, if not mildly deranged: even those who are adamant that 45 million uninsured Americans deserve basic medical cover would not claim that the future of the earth depends on it. But think again.

Got it. If President Obama doesn’t get “his way” on health care we’re all gonna die!!! This is exactly the kind of cool, dispassionate reason we’ve come to depend on from the left, and why we take their warnings about overheated rhetoric coming from the right so seriously.

Anyway, I sure hope the president gets around to deciding what “his way” on health care is supposed to be, and letting the Democratic leadership in Congress know. Is he going to get working on that right after this next round of speeches or something? Now that we know the planet is doomed without his stamp of approval on some kind of actual health reform thingy, can he maybe shift his schedule around to get cracking on this?

Because I, for one, can’t wait to see the kind of super-human focus and bipartisan coalition he brings to bear on < superhero-theme-music > saving the planet < /superhero-theme-music > after his dazzling performance on health care… insurance… whatever… reform.

The world’s oldest sophomore, Tom Friedman, has discovered the wondrous advantages of one-party autocracy over our current system of government. No, I am not exaggerating.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

If you’re new to Friedman’s writing, or perhaps still nostalgically influenced by his presumably serious position as a columnist for the New York Times, you might think this is merely an attention grabbing opening lede which will be smoothly integrated into an otherwise sensible opinion piece as he develops his thoughts on this. You possibly also still believe in the Easter Bunny.

(more…)

Apparently tired of letting Western millionaires have all the fun bashing the world’s leading economic nations while demanding huge sacrifices of their wealth as payment for ruining the planet, the nations of Africa decided to jump into the game. Being new to this particular shakedown racket you’ll forgive them for their embarrassing directness:

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 25 (IPS) – An African Union proposal demanding billions of dollars in compensation for the impacts of climate change is taking shape.

It is time for Africa to aggressively engage with climate change negotiations to ensure its interests are met in the designing of global responses, said African Union (AU) Commission chair Jean Ping. AU officials say the lack of a coordinated stance on global warming by African governments has placed serious limitations on Africa’s ability to negotiate in the past. To put this right, a meeting to formulate a common stand ahead of the Copenhagen meeting has just concluded in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

African experts on climate change and high-level representatives of AU member states have recommended Africa demand between $67 billion and $200 billion annually in compensation.

There’s something almost refreshing in the directness here. No attempt to get rich on the sly via some hard to understand “cap and trade” scheme, or misdirected funds or grants with earth-friendly names. Their message is simple: Pay. Up.

(more…)

Quick: which era would you consider the greatest in human history? I’ll give you a few moments to think about it.

…

…

…

What did you come up with? Did you choose the classical era, with the birth of modern philosophy, democracy, and classical art? Or perhaps you’re someone who appreciates the achievements of the modern world, in which the health and wealth of people around the world is greater than its ever been? Or did you focus on some other time? The era of revolution perhaps where men through off the rule of kings for representative governments?
Turns out you’re all wrong. It’s actually been all downhill since the Paleolithic…

IMAGINE a small group of farmers tending a rice paddy some 5,000 years ago in eastern Asia or sowing seeds in a freshly cleared forest in Europe a couple of thousand years before that. It is here, a small group of scientists would have you believe, that humanity launched climate change. Long before the Industrial Revolution—indeed, long before a worldwide revolution in intensive farming, the results of which kept humanity alive—people caused unnatural exhalations of greenhouse gases that had an impact on the world’s climate.

I imagine this is just the first step in a longer scientific trend leading to the conclusion that coming down from the trees was a bad idea in the first place. And of course this will be rivaled by the school of scientific thought contending that the trees themselves were a bad move and we shouldn’t have even left the oceans (a little inside joke there, from a book which rapidly seems to find it’s once absurd-seeming humor challenged by an increasingly absurd reality).

Minnesota came close to repealing its decade-and-a-half old ban on nuclear power plants in the last session; the Senate approved the repeal, and it failed in the House by about a dozen votes.

A new group, spanning some unlikely bedfellows, has spawned to Ctry to fix the problem:

A coalition of business, labor and environmental leaders has joined a new nonprofit organization to advocate repeal of Minnesota’s ban on new nuclear power plants.

Three veteran Republican operatives organized the group, Sensible Energy Solutions for Minnesota, but on Tuesday they announced formation of a bipartisan board of advisers that represents a wide range of interests.

I’m going to try to book some of these people on the NARN one of these weekends.  Minnesota’s “moratorium” – a culmination of years of paranoia about plants and waste in the nineties – is a vestige from a time of cheap energy and cheaper solutions to vexing issues. 

It’ll be most interesting, as Cap and Trade promised to jack up heating bills enough to make Minnesota too expensive to live in for anyone making less than $60,000 year, to see the defenses the left comes up for this “moratorium”. 

…and apparently failed out as well.

Ten Democrats, including our own embarrassment, Al Franken, are flirting with the idea of turning a near global economic collapse into a full economic collapse. In the name of what? An ever-evolving political land-grab called Global Warming Cooling Climate Change.

The Chinese have already grown in both their skepticism of our solvency as well as their ability to wreak havoc on a US economy that has only recently been moved from the ICU.

Ten Senate Democrats whose votes are pivotal to the success of climate legislation urged the Obama administration on Thursday to support levying tariffs on goods from countries that don’t limit their greenhouse-gas emissions.

…Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, Carl Levin of Michigan, Evan Bayh of Indiana, Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and Al Franken of Minnesota.

From a friend, mentor and founder of a successful money management firm, Peter R.:

“Let’s collect a carbon tariff on imports so we don’ t offshore our carbon production. I’m sure that a trade war with China won’t affect their desire to finance our deficits.”

Those deficits being the bi-products of the failed Bush/Obama “Stimulus” packages and the recently resuscitated CARS fiasco, among a myriad of other unfunded, wasteful and ineffective government expenditures.

The wars of the future may be fought on the internet and in the currency markets. We have allowed the Chinese to gain the upper hand via decades of arrant government fiscal policies. We have found ourselves in the unenviable position of relying on their goodwill.

This is no time to hug a tree.

Setting aside the unpleasantness which characterizes so much of our political discourse today, I’d like to turn my attention to something which we can all celebrate together, as it has absolutely no potential downside.

If you live in a city with a good metro system, you’re probably used to having a swipe card system of some sort – load up money on the card, swipe it as you enter the station and as you exit, and your card is deducted the amount that ride cost…. [W]hat if your swipe card were based on carbon emissions instead? That’s the idea proposed by designer Nick Hunter for this wearable carbon emissions tracker.

Rather than a key or a card, the carbon meter would fit on your hand and glows a particular color – green, yellow, orange or red – depending on how well you’re using your public transportation allowance. Are you saving more carbon by hopping onto a train for a short ride, or would the hybrid bus have actually had the smaller footprint? The meter would let you know. But there’s more…it’d give the government insight on how well the public transportation systems are being used.

Isn’t that great? No longer do we need to debate the complicated trade-offs of energy use versus freedom in regard to an individual’s personal transportation decisions (let alone worry about the tedious science underlying hundred year climate forecasting based on projected human carbon emissions… bo-ring!). The government will take all of that burden off our hands, providing us a rating from “nice” all the way to “naughty” without requiring us to fill out a single form or stand in any lines! All we need to do is put on our government issued “wearable carbon emissions tracker.”

Here’s a picture of what the new wearable emissions device might look like. Prepare to see the future…

(more…)

Do you know Kim Carlson, the “footprint blogger” at the Star Tribune? No? You don’t think so? I believe you’re mistaken. You may not know Kim Carlson by name or by her Strib blog, but you certainly know Kim Carlson. As evidence I submit the first line of her latest post:

I was feeling a bit virtuous as I was bringing my recycling to the curb this morning.

Not many people can summarize their entire personality in a single phrase, but I think Kim did a terrific job of it here, don’t you? I mean you absolutely know this person after reading that sentence. Kim is the kind of person who believes she’s “saving the planet” by her own everyday activities. Recycling makes her feel virtuous. But it doesn’t end there, as you well know. No, when you’re Kim Carlson life is little more than a quest for the next guilt trip.

Then I decided to look up some recycling facts and was quickly deflated. According to RethinkRecycling.com, the average Twin Citian still produces 7 pounds of waste per day and one-third of what we throw away at home is recyclable through curbside programs. I suppose it is no surprise that nearly 30 percent of our trash is packaging – urgh!

Urgh! indeed! Why oh why didn’t we compost our packaging or use it as feed for our backyard chickens?! Why oh why didn’t we… oh heck, let’s stop guessing and see where she decides to run with it. It’s bound to be as entertainingly goofy as anything we might invent.

(more…)

India rejects global warming hysteria.

Jairam Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, accused the developed world of needlessly raising alarm over melting Himalayan glaciers.

He dismissed scientists’ predictions that Himalayan glaciers might disappear within 40 years as a result of global warming.

India realizes what conservatives do; that the only way to react to any sort of global climate change (whether man-made or not) is to spread as widely as possible the kind of prosperity that makes innovation possible.  Because it’s innovation, not retrenchment, that’ll solve whatever issues humanity does face with the environment.

…whilst blogging one encounters a piece that’s just so full of good stuff, it’s impossible to come up with a meaningful excerpt.

So just go and read the whole thing.

…apparently the fluorescent light bulb needs a few more.

Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

…as in don’t spend nine dollars on a  ninety-nine cent light bulb.

Compact fluorescents once cost as much as $30 apiece. Now they go for as little as $1 [not as far as I can tell-JR] — still more than regular bulbs, but each compact fluorescent is supposed to last 10 times longer, save as much as $5.40 a bulb each year in electricity, and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from burning coal in power plants.

…that data brought to you by the Government Department of Departments Department.

…or was it a TV commercial featuring Madonna and Tim Robbins?

Take the case of Karen Zuercher and her husband, in San Francisco. Inspired by watching the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” they decided to swap out nearly every incandescent bulb in their home for energy-saving compact fluorescents. Instead of having a satisfying green moment, however, they wound up coping with a mess.

The horrors; a satisfying green moment denied? How could this happen?

Experts say the quality problems are compounded by poor package instructions. Using the bulbs incorrectly, like screwing low-end bulbs into fixtures where heat is prone to build up, can greatly shorten their lives.

Seriously? Light bulbs have an owner’s manual? Oh-never mind, I forgot; these are people getting advice from a movie – made by Al Gore no less.

“We’re both college-educated and pay attention to labels we read,” Ms. Zuercher said. “It feels like someone forgot to put a place to find the information.”

(That’s a funny-soundin’ sentence ya got there m’am – for a college edumacated person)

Um, you mean like the internet?

Some experts who study the issue blame the government for the quality problems, saying an intensive federal push to lower the price essentially backfired by encouraging manufacturers to use cheap components.

Boy, that Barney Frank has his hands in everything these days.

Seriously, I am sure that over time the fluorescent bulb will get better but what is Al Gore gonna tell his peeps when they start realizing how much mercury is ending up in our landfills because people don’t read the part about disposing of fluorescent bulbs?

Twice the cost of a Zamboni at $160,000…

Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is slowly phasing out their Zambonis in favor of Finnish-made IceCats. So is the National Hockey League. And the reason is carbon monoxide: while the Zambonis run on propane or natural gas, the IceCats are all-electric. In an indoor arena, that can make all the difference: it’s no big surprise to read that a study in the American Journal of Public Health determined that replacing carbon-emitting resurfacing machines with electric ones would reduce the concentration of nitrogen dioxide in indoor arenas by 87%.

87% percent of what number? How much difference can a Zamboni or two make in a huge ice arena?

Who’d a thought you could make a Zamboni any uglier.

Is it just me, or is it ironic that the NHL is a spectacle featuring juiced up hockey players beating the piss out of each other while at the same time worrying about inhaling too much NO²?

Hysteria can be hysterical.