Big Government is Stupid Government – Tea Party Nation

Big Government is Stupid Government – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

Nothing enhances a president’s reputation than to be seen in the company of other world leaders and Obama will have an abundance of photo-ops as he meets in Ireland with the G8 to address the many woes of the world. Too bad they think he is a dunce.

Given the unrelenting headlines about the Obama administration, it is worth worrying that Big Government is Stupid Government. It is inherently a danger to freedom. Just ask anyone who ever lived under communism.

While there are many fine people in government, those at the top of the current roster seem to be a collection of the most incompetent, inept, naïve, ignorant, and uninformed morons to have ever gathered around that big table where the cabinet meets. If, in fact, they really do get together except for the occasional photo-op.

The last Secretary State and President-in-Waiting, Hillary Clinton, flew a million miles in the job, but no one can point to anything she actually accomplished and she, apparently, had no idea what was going on at State. The present Secretary, John Kerry, is convinced that global warming is the greatest threat to, well, everything and is still trying to get the Palestinians to agree to peace terms with Israel; something they have refused to do since it opened doors for business in 1948.

Eric Holder, the Attorney General, cannot seem to remember anything. Usually you expect a lawyer to keep a few facts in mind such as the contents of the U.S. Constitution, but Holder is an exception or, like Obama, he read it and didn’t like it.

Other than Valerie Jarrett, only the White House reporters seem to know the names of his closest advisors. Tim Carney, the spokesman for Obama, has carved out a place in history as the biggest, lying weasel to ever hold that job. Oh how I miss the beautiful and intelligent Dana Parino, Bush43’s spokesperson. Happily I get to see her on “The Five”, a Fox News daily gab fest.

After Rahm Emanuel left the job as Obama’s chief of staff to become the Mayor of Chicago, the city has turned into a killing ground the equal of downtown Baghdad.

Obama is utterly devoted to Big Government and, thanks to Obamacare, the IRS is trying to hire the equivalent of an armed forces division to administer it. The popularity of Obamacare, plus the scandals, currently is plunging to depths that even the pollsters are beginning to measure in single digits. The President’s numbers are reaching new lows as well.

A notable aspect of Big Government is the increasing size of various pieces of legislation such as the so-called immigration reform and the Common Core education bills. Beginning life as No Child Left Behind under Bush43, this latter bill is not likely to be reauthorized. Any piece of legislation that exceeds a thousand or more pages in a one-size-fits-all is doomed to failure.

At this writing, the House is getting ready to vote for a trillion-dollar food stamp and farm bill about which few Americans are even aware. It’s a huge giveaway for a nation that is essentially broke. As Congress gets close to its summer break, all manner of comparable mischief will occur. Recall that Obamacare was passed on Christmas Eve 2009!

For the same reason, the ever-expanding surveillance of everyone’s electronic communications comes with the built-in limitation that the more signals intelligence it gathers, the less likely it will produce any results, except after the next attack. The NSA employs tens of thousands of analysts to deal with all the “signent” is acquires and, other than that which focuses on places like Yemen, the rest is not likely to yield much of value.

A government big enough to access every phone call and email from 310 million Americans is also failed to take serious action when the Russians
warned that two jihadists were living in Boston.

The other aspect of Big Government is the way the Obama administration has enlarged the numbers of Americans receiving food stamps, disability payments, and other “free” stuff that is not free, but dependent on those who still have a job. Social Security and Medicare are barely solvent and Medicaid is bankrupting the states that must contribute to it.

According to the American Enterprise Institute, “The number of federal employees has risen under President Obama. There were 2,790,000 federal workers in January 2009 when the president took office, and now there are 2,804,000 workers. The fact is that there is no month during President Obama’s term when the federal workforce was smaller than it was in the first month of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The president took over in January 2009. Every month after January 2009 has seen more federal workers than were employed in January 2009.

It would be wrong to suggest that federal workers are not productive, but the sheer size of this workforce suggests that Big Government takes a lot of people out of the private sector and provides them with employment that comes with a multitude of perks that adds to the federal debt for which everyone must be taxed.

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have,” is attributed to Thomas Jefferson, as is “Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” This was true in the 1700s and is true today.

With considerable foresight, the Founders wanted a central government that was intended to remain limited in size, scope, and power. The Department of Homeland Security—the hasty reaction to 9/11—has metastasized into an Orwellian giant that should, at the earliest moment possible, be disassembled into its component parts.

The nation would no doubt benefit from putting an end to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the government mortgage companies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and comparable entities that are mostly the result of government’s vast expansion in the latter half of the last century and this new one.

Term limits is another idea worth considering. I sometimes think that the longer a Senator or Representative stays in Congress, the more senile, incompetent, and indifferent they become to the voters.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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The Worst President Ever – Tea Party Nation

The Worst President Ever – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

All through George W. Bush’s two terms, the Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi and others claimed that they represented “a culture of corruption” and yet I cannot recall any significant examples, nor does a look back at those years reveal any scandals resulting from his administration’s governance. It was not perfect, but it was not corrupt.

This term, however, marked Barack Obama’s first term and now his second which is currently imploding from a confluence of scandals involving Benghazi-Gate, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Justice. Let’s not forget “Fast and Furious.”

The very first example of the changes that would mark his administration was the announcement of Obama’s “czars”, a shadowy group of advisors whose power to set and influence government policy without any congressional oversight appears to have transcended that of his cabinet members, many of whom would contribute to lengthening the recession he “inherited” as the result of the 2008 financial crisis while increasing the national debt and deficit to heights never before seen in the history of the nation.

What we have come to learn in his first term was that Obama had scant regard for the Constitution, the guiding instrument of governance. It was in his view an “imperfect” instrument and yet, with amendments, it has guided the nation to superpower status since its ratification in 1791, a process that took four years from the 1786 Annapolis Convention that called for a Constitutional Convention.

What we learned though in his first campaign and first term was that Obama lies about everything, starting with his personal life. What we have learned is that his answer to everything is to give another speech, hold another press conference, issue another executive order, and to dismiss any criticism as “a sideshow”, and to host a number of dinners to give the impression he is willing to work with Republicans in Congress. In truth, he rarely interacted even with Democrats in Congress.

In short, Obama has never addressed his duty to govern. He has instead maintained a non-stop process of campaigning and fund-raising. It did not work in 2010 when voters returned power to the Republicans in the House and now he is doing everything he can to regain Democrat control there in 2014.

His priority on September 11, 2012, the night in which he was informed of the attack on the Benghazi consulate in Libya, was to go to bed in order to get a good night’s sleep before flying off to Las Vegas for more fund-raising the next day, skipping his daily intelligence briefing. An American ambassador had been killed along with three other personnel, but it did not alter his schedule.

This is a President who spent his entire first term blaming his predecessor, George W. Bush, for every problem that crossed his desk and demanded his attention.

This is a President whose foreign policy in the Middle East failed to address events there while delegating responsibility to his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton who as of 2 AM the morning of September 12th knew that it was an orchestrated attack by al Qaeda. And then, in concert with the White House, told Americans that it was the result of a video and was a “spontaneous” event.

This is a President who has withdrawn U.S. troops from Iraq, a nation now wracked with daily bombings and has set in process the withdrawal from Afghanistan, a nation that will fall once again under the control of the Taliban. The alleged ally of America, Pakistan, now fears for its stability from the same threat. Both wars, the longest since the Vietnam War, were and remain unpopular, but both were intended to reduce the role of al Qaeda in the Middle East. That role has now expanded into the Syrian civil war and was manifest in Mali.

His response was to depend on isolated drone attacks in Yemen and elsewhere, and of course his authorization of the assassination of Osama bin Laden for which he took total credit despite the fact that the effort had begun in the Bush years.

In the years prior to Benghazi-Gate we have now learned that Obama was using the Internal Revenue Service to harass organizations associated with the Tea Party movement, that identified themselves as “patriots”, or had a pro-Israel agenda. In a similar fashion his Environmental Protection Agency was denying Freedom of Information inquires to organizations opposed to its policies while granting access to those who supported it.

In his first term, his Department of the Interior pursued policies that denied access to drilling for oil and natural gas on federally owned lands and while his Department of Energy wasted billions on “renewable energy” companies manufacturing solar panels no one wanted to purchase, going bankrupt one after another. At one point the President advocated using algae—pond scum—as a source of energy.

This is a President who promised his “stimulus” program would put Americans back to work and revive the economy.

This is a President who has continued to tell Americans that global warming is the greatest threat to the nation and the world despite a sixteen-year cooling cycle in progress.

The current scandals, derided as being “politicized” by Republicans, suggest that impeachable offenses have been authorized and committed by branches of the administration he leads. The current makeup of Congress in which the Senate is still controlled by Democrats suggests that impeachment would be difficult to pursue, but the 2014 midterm elections could and should change that.

The worst of his offenses is Obamacare, described by members of his own party as “a train wreck”, and a program to be administered by the IRS!

It is not hyperbole to say Barack Obama is the worst President in the history of the nation.

Ask the millions of Americans who are still unemployed more than four years since his first inauguration.

Ask the millions of new graduates from colleges and universities who cannot find jobs commensurate with their degrees.

Ask the millions of Americans unable to retire due to the agonizingly slow recovery of the economy.

And ask the mainstream media, after years of ignoring his failures have suddenly awakened to the seizure of Associated Press phone records after acting as mere stenographers for his daily “talking points.”.

The question is how long before he is either impeached or forced to resign as the dream of “hope and change” has turned to hopelessness and the change has become the “transformation” of America from the greatest economy the world has ever known to a debtor nation disrespected by allies and enemies alike.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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Earth Day’s Big Lie – Tea Party Nation

Earth Day’s Big Lie – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

Monday, April 22, is Earth Day. Begun in 1970, it led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. It is the global platform for the Big Lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) is causing the Earth to warm and the basis of the environmental movement’s ceaseless efforts to reduce the use of energy for any reason.

Carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has been increasing, but the Earth has been cooling due to reduced solar radiation. CO2 has virtually no relationship to the climate except to show up well after a significant change has occurred.

On April 18, the Wall Street Journal reported that the International Energy Agency had announced that, despite spending “more than $2 trillion in investment into renewable-energy projects…the world had made almost no progress over the past 20 years in reducing the carbon content of its energy supplies.” It has never needed reduction. How many hospitals, schools, bridges, and other useful things that could have been built instead?

According to Wikipedia: “Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is present in all known life forms, and in the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.] This abundance, together with the unique diversity of organic compounds and their unusual polymer-forming ability at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, make this element the chemical basis of all known life.” (Emphasis added)

Not one single piece of vegetation can exist without CO2. Without vegetation all animals and all humans would die. The Earth would look like Mars. One of the pillars of environmentalism is that humans are the greatest threat to the existence of the 4.5 billion-year-old Earth. The essence of Earth Day is that you are the enemy, primarily for your use of energy (coal, oil, and natural gas).

A global propaganda campaign will glorify Earth Day and its message is that you must change your life to accommodate the lies that sustain the environmental movement and permit government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency to strangle the economic life of the nation.

On Earth day there will be thousands of events to promote its anti-energy, anti-technology, and anti-humanity message.

There are thousands, of environmental organizations. Here, for example, are some Earth Day recommendations from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

# Wash clothing in cold water. According to the NRDC, “this saves a great deal of money as the bulk of the energy tied to clothes washing is used to heat water.”

# Cut clothes dryer energy by 20 to 40 percent. “It is more efficient to spin water out of clothing than bake it out in the dryer.”

# Select the ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ picture setting on your TV.

An environmental group called the Food Tank recommends the following:

# “Get in touch with agriculture. “This time of year, many people are starting to plan vacations.” Forget Disney Land; instead choose a “farm-stay” in which participants spend a few days or weeks living with a host family…helping around the farm in exchange for free food and lodging.”

# “Buy food with less packaging.” This ignores the fact that modern packaging ensures the safety of the foods you purchase. Even ancient civilizations either burned refuse or created landfills.

# Do-it-Yourself projects such as “turning old t-shirts into produce bags to save plastic, starting seeds in eggshells…”

Behind the many Earth Day suggestions is the environmentalists’ insistence on a general return to an era when household tasks were undertaken without machines that used electricity, before the ubiquitous benefits of plastic, and less cars were on the roads. In the 1940s my late mother had to wash clothes by hand and hang them in the back yard or basement to dry. Food was kept cool in an ice box before the invention of refrigerators. This is Earth Day’s idea of saving the Earth.

Everyone wants clean air and clean water. We have it. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the 1970s have achieved their goals. Substituting “clean energy” such as solar and wind power has proven to be expensive and impractical as neither of these produce sufficient energy (about 3% at present) to power America. Taxpayers have lost billions in the government loans made to solar and wind power companies while traditional sources of power contribute billions to the economy.

The Earth is not endangered, nor should it be worshipped as a pagan religion.

Behind environmentalism is panoply of schemes intended to enrich those who advocate “global warming” and/or “climate change.” Governments around the world are abandoning “clean energy” programs and returning to traditional and abundant forms of energy.

The “science” behind climate change and the claim of a “consensus” among the world’s scientists is a lie. Computer models have been rigged to produce “warming” data while the planet has been in a natural cooling cycle for the last seventeen years!

On Earth Day, you will be assailed by these and countless other claims, but you will do yourself and the Earth a big favor if you ignore them.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

 

A Carbon Tax Would Destroy America – Tea Party Nation

A Carbon Tax Would Destroy America – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

If you want to know what a carbon tax on emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would do to America you need only look at the destruction of industry and business in Australia, along with the soaring costs for energy use it imposes on anyone there.

“The carbon tax is contributing to a record number of firms going to the wall with thousands of employees being laid off and companies forced to close factories that have stood for generations”, Steve Lewis and Phil Jacob reported in a March 18 issue of The Daily Telegraph, a leading Australian newspaper.

“Soaring energy bills caused by the government’s climate change scheme have been called ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’ by company executives and corporate rescue doctors who are trying to save ailing firms.”

The passage of a carbon tax in America would have the exact same results and it remains a top priority for the White House and Democrats in Congress who see it as a bonanza in new funding for the government.

As Paul Driessen says in a Townhall.com commentary, “More rational analysis reveals that dreams of growth are nothing more than dangerous tax revenue hallucinations. They would bring intense pain for no climate or economic gain.”

Too many Americans still believe that CO2 is causing global warming, but CO2 plays no role in climate change and is barely 0.038 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. More to the point, there is no warming and hasn’t been for the last seventeen years as the Earth is in a natural cooling cycle that has prolonged the advent of spring with severe snow storms throughout the nation.

There is no scientific justification for such a tax, but those advocating it don’t care about the science. They care about raising revenue for an ever-growing government to spend and waste.

Driessen points out that “Hydrocarbons (coal, oil, and natural gas) provide over 83% of all the energy that powers America. A carbon tax would put a hefty surcharge on everything we make, grow, ship, eat, and do. It would put the federal government in control of, not just one-sixth of the economy, as under Obamacare, but 100% of our economy and lives. It would make the United States increasingly less productive, less competitive globally, less able to provide opportunities for our children.”

The case for a carbon tax simply doesn’t exist, but there are powerful forces in Congress and the support of the White House to impose such a tax. The power of the environmental movement and its long history of lies about the climate, primarily the global warming hoax, cannot be dismissed or ignored.

In Australia, “The Australian Securities & Investments Commission reports there were 10,632 company collapses for the 12 months to March 1—averaging 886 a month—with the number of firms being placed in administration more than 12 percent higher than during the global financial crisis.” It represents “a record high…led by widespread failures in manufacturing and construction, which accounted for almost one-fifth of collapses.”

Greg Evans, the chief economic economist for the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said that “It defies logic to adopt a policy which even the Treasury acknowledges will lower our standards of living and be harmful to national productivity.” Adding to Australia’s struggling companies, the carbon tax and one on mining were showing up as “sovereign issues” in discussions with foreign investors.” Who would want to invest in Australia if these two taxes were destroying the economic strength of the nation?

Politics in Australia is no less a battleground than here in America. Australia’s Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who introduced the carbon tax, just beat back a bid by her Labor Party’s dissidents to reinstall former leader Kevin Rudd who lost to her in 2010 and 2012. Much of the opposition to her comes from the harm being inflicted by the carbon and mining taxes.

Marlo Lewis is a senior fellow in energy and environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. During the 2012 campaign, he described a carbon tax as “political poison for the Republican Party.” Mitt Romney opposed it, but ‘the big attraction of carbon taxes these days is not as a global warming policy but as a revenue enhancer. In both parties, deficit hawks and big spenders (often the same individuals) are flailing for ways to boost federal revenue.”

That is precisely the problem afflicting a nation whose Congress and President could not find a reason to cut anything from the federal budget. The result was the “sequestration” that imposed cuts neither party could agree upon.

In a Fox News article, “Here comes Team Obama’s carbon tax”. Phil Kerpen, president of American Commitment and author of “Democracy Denied” reported that “The Treasury Department’s Office of Environment and Energy has finally begun to turn over documents about its preparations for a carbon tax in response to transparency warrior Chris Horner’s Freedom of Information Act request. The documents provide solid evidence that the Obama administration and its allies in Congress have every intention of implementing a carbon tax if we fail to stop them.”

President Obama’s nominee to be the next Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz, is on record wanting to double or triple the cost of energy, much as his predecessor wanted.

A carbon tax, if enacted, would totally undermine a nation that has a debt climbing toward $17 trillion and millions unemployed in an economy that is struggling to inch its way out of the depths of the financial crisis.

If you wanted to destroy America, you could do it with a carbon tax. Australia is reeling from the cost to its economy and the higher energy costs its people are paying. We don’t want that here.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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An Hour of Darkness. Or Light! – Tea Party Nation

An Hour of Darkness. Or Light! – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

On Saturday, Greens around the world will turn off their lights in a symbolic “Earth Hour” gesture against climate change, the term they adapted in the face of the fact that the Earth has been cooling for seventeen years and is on the cusp of a mini-ice age that will ensure cold weather for many years to come.

Earth Hour is a protest against the use of electricity—energy—to light our lives in countless ways. Anyone who has gone through an outage as I did in the wake of Hurricane Sandy will tell you that life without electricity is an immediate return to primitive times. Mine lasted a week and included the loss of access to the Internet and the ability to use my computer and every other piece of equipment in the apartment. It was not fun.

We derive electricity from burning coal, from natural gas, from nuclear fission, and from hydroelectricity generated by huge dams. The least amount of electricity we use comes from oil and, in particular from wind and solar, a bare two percent or so. These latter two sources exist only because of government subsidies and mandates. Without these they could not compete against far more affordable and effective sources. Oil, of course, fuels all our vehicles.

What Americans generally have not absorbed is the fact that the large, multi-million dollar funded environmental organizations oppose every form of energy we use. Here is a week’s schedule of events planned to lead up to and follow Earth Hour in New Jersey by the Sierra Club chapter.

# On Thursday, March 21, they sponsored a “Fracking Waste Ban Lobby Day” in the state capital of Trenton.

# On Saturday they will sponsor an “adventure aquarium trip” devoted to sea turtles and a lecture on “how our plastic addiction impacts them.” We are no more “addicted” to plastic than to oil from which it is produced and found in virtually everything we use. Energy is not the enemy. It is the lifeblood of a successful economy and society.

# On Sunday there will be a town hall meeting about “clean energy solutions” in concert with Climate Mama, 350.org and the Sierra Club with a panel that will discuss how clean energy, solar and wind, “can dramatically reduce our use of fossil fuels and move our state forward without the pollution.” It will also discuss how “climate change has impacted you.” Americans are not going to reduce the use of fossil fuels, oil, coal, and natural gas. We already enjoy the cleanest air and, more importantly, the Earth in general and America in particular has enormous reserves of these energy reserves.

# On Wednesday, March 27, another panel will engage in “pipeline education”, ignoring the fact that America has 170,000 miles of pipelines that transport oil and natural gas throughout the nation. They are safe and secure, but none carry ethanol, a chemical that erodes not only pipelines, but damages the engines of millions of cars and trucks. The pipeline panel will likely take note of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada that has been delayed for five years now and cleared of any charges of environmental harm.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute suggests that Earth Hour is a good time to celebrate “Human Achievement Hour”, a way to debunk the global warming hoax and the nonsense surrounding “climate change”, a process that has gone on for billions of years on the planet. The notion that people can do anything about the climate is so absurd it defies the imagination.

Earth Hour is just one more way for the Greens to continue spreading their lies about fossil fuels, plastic, and chemicals they want to demonize despite the advances in health and longevity, the manufacture of products we use, and the extraordinary lifestyle we enjoy with abundant food and protection against the multitude of insect and rodent pests that afflict us, along with the many species of weeds that affect crops.

Not that long ago, Greens were spreading nonsense about “peak oil”, saying that the Earth was running out of this energy source, but new reserves of oil are being found all the time. Between 1945 and 2010, the United States alone produced 167 billion barrels of oil, more than eight times more oil than the amount of proven oil reserves it had in 1944. Oil doesn’t merely fuel our cars and trucks, but as fracking techniques have been developed, more and more of it is available. Between 1980 and 2010, the U.S. produced 77.8 billion barrels of oil and still had 20.7 billion barrels of oil reserves left.

What Americans should keep in mind during Earth Hour is that we have a White House that has done everything in its power to deprive us of the coal, oil and natural gas that we have at our disposal. It has restricted the exploration and extraction of billions of barrels of oil from offshore of our east and west coasts, and in Alaska. It has generated regulations that have already shut down coal-fired plants and is seeking to impose greater restrictions despite the fact that we have enough coal to keep them operating for hundreds of years.

With more than 1.7 trillion barrels of recoverable oil under our soil, we have enough oil to fuel our present needs for the next 250 years. Delaying the Keystone XL pipeline has deprived the nation of thousands of jobs and will result in $5 billion being spent annually to import oil. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has wasted billions on “clean energy investments.”

Americans know their energy bills are increasing as the result of anti-energy policies, know that the energy sector, if allowed to flourish, would provide thousands of jobs, and should know that every drop of oil and cubic foot of natural gas we secure from our own reserves would reduce the cost to everyone in every way.

Turn on your lights at 8:30 PM on Saturday. Turn them all on. Send a message to the White House and to the world that energy is the heartbeat of life and economic growth for America and the world.

Hating energy is another form of hating humanity.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

 

The Mini-Ice Age has Arrived–Despite What Obama Says – Tea Party Nation

The Mini-Ice Age has Arrived–Despite What Obama Says – Tea Party Nation.

by Alan Caruba

Climatologists and meteorologists are familiar with the last Mini Ice Age (MIA) that occurred between 1350 and 1850 AD. It is also referred to as the Little Ice Age. Suffice to say it was cold and, as such weather cycles tend to do, it altered history in a variety of ways.

The failure of crops was one aspect of the cold spell and in France the revolution that overthrew the monarchy is attributed to the unhappiness of its citizens, but famine in the northern hemisphere was widespread. In the United States, it is best recalled for the horrid winter our revolutionary war soldiers spent at Valley Forge. At one point during the cycle Americans spent what they called “a year without summer” when the weather remained too cold to plant crops.

Since climate is cyclical, it is not surprising that the MIA followed the Medieval Warm Period, also known as a climate optimum. Crops flourished, empires rose and declined, and neither cycle had a thing to do with so-called greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and everything to do with what was happening on the sun.

As spring arrives in the U.S., there was also a broad band of snow storms that comes with it.

One of the world’s most respected long-term climate forecasters is Piers Corbyn, an astrophysicist whose expertise is relied upon by corporations and others who need to know what the weather will really be as opposed to the criminally false claims about global warming. His website, WeatherAction, is well worth visiting.

In his own words, “WeatherAction is involved in the Global Warming/Climate Change debate where we point out that the world is now cooling not warming and there is no observational evidence in the thousands and millions of years of data that changes in CO2 have any effect on weather or climate. There are no scientists in the world who can produce such observational data. There is only effect the other way, namely that ocean temperatures control average CO2 levels.”

Recently Corbyn announced that “The CO2 story is over. It has been pointing the world in the wrong direction for too long. The serious implications of the developing mini ice age to agriculture and the world economy through the next 25 to 35 years must be addressed.” World cooling is now locked in says Corbyn, citing the decrease in average solar activity and a jet stream that is often further south than normal, resulting in extreme weather events.

Following in the heels of Corbyn’s forecast was the release of a new report by Dr. David Whitehouse, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and what makes it fairly extraordinary after decades of global warming propaganda is that he concludes that there has been no statistically significant increase in annual global temperatures since 1997. That’s seventeen years of atrocious lies about a warming earth.

The irony that Dr. Whitehouse includes in his report is that the atmospheric composition of carbon dioxide has increased during that time from 370 ppm to 390 ppm. So, everything you have been told about carbon dioxide emissions and those of other so-called greenhouse gases “causing” a warming earth is just lies, lies, and lies.

“If the standstill (lower temperatures) continues for a few more years,” wrote Dr. Whitehouse, “it will mean that no one who has just reached adulthood, or younger, will have witnessed the earth get warmer during their lifetime.”

Now here’s the kicker. The President of the United States, according to a recent Business Week article, “is preparing to tell all federal agencies for the first time that they should consider the impact on global warming before approving projects, from pipelines to highways.” The result “could be significant delays for natural gas export facilities, ports for coal sales to Asia, and even new forest roads, industry lobbyists say.”

“In taking the step,” said Business Week reporter Mark Drajem, “Obama would be fulfilling a vow to act alone in the face of a Republican-run House of Representatives unwilling to pass measures limiting greenhouse gases.”

The President, as usual, is lying through his teeth. There is no global warming or, as it is more frequently called these days, climate change unless you include a colder earth in that change.

The result will be four years of a second term in office during which Obama and his minions will do everything they can to slow what little is left of the U.S. economy, currently growing at a rate that requires a microscope to detect.

For the rest of us, the Mini Ice Age has arrived.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

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Bipartisan group set to take Keystone decision out of Obama’s hands – Washington Times

Bipartisan group set to take Keystone decision out of Obama’s hands – Washington Times.

By Ben Wolfgang – The Washington Times

President Obama has often used executive authority to get around Congress — and he has promised to continue that approach in his second term.

But now a bipartisan group of lawmakers wants to turn the tables on the White House.

Late last week, Rep. Lee Terry, Nebraska Republican, introduced a bill to take approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline out of the president’s hands. The measure has the support of at least two Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The bill eliminates the need for a presidential permit and would officially green-light the 1,700-mile pipeline, designed to transport oil sands from Canada through the U.S. to refineries on the Gulf Coast. It also would create thousands of jobs in the process.

“The time is up. No more delays. It’s time to build the Keystone pipeline,” Mr. Terry said at a Capitol Hill news conference Friday.

The move comes on the heels of a similar proposal in the Senate. Sen. John Hoeven, North Dakota Republican, and Sen. Max Baucus, Montana Democrat, have put forth legislation to approve the project using Congress‘ authority under the Commerce Clause.

Other Democratic senators, including Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Sen. Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, are co-sponsoring the bill, as are a half-dozen Republican senators.

“The Keystone pipeline is the perfect opportunity to put Montanans, and folks across the country, to work right now,” Mr. Baucus said in a statement last week, after the measure was introduced. “American workers cannot afford to wait any longer for Keystone jobs, and there is absolutely no excuse for further delay.”

Of course, both pieces of legislation would need to be signed by the president whose powers it would strip. While it appears both bills could easily pass in their respective chambers, it’s unclear whether either could garner enough support to overcome a potential veto by Mr. Obama.

At the very least, the bills once again demonstrate the growing sense of frustration in Congress over the administration’s handling of the project.

Mr. Obama has continually put off a final decision on the pipeline, even in the face of growing pressure from lawmakers, the oil and gas industry and even the Canadian government, which has begun to make clear that it intends to do business with China and in other Asian markets if the U.S. refuses to build Keystone.

The president reportedly told lawmakers last week that he is nearing a decision, but it’s still unclear exactly when the White House will give an answer.

The answer isn’t expected until summer, at the earliest, after the State Department finalizes its comprehensive environmental impact review of the project.

A draft of that report, released earlier this month, seems to pave the way for approval of the project. The long-awaited study found that the pipeline will have little or no impact on greenhouse gas emissions, one of the most frequent complaints raised by environmentalists and other opponents of the project.

Specifically, the study said that the fuel eventually will be developed and made into burnable fuel by someone — if not by the U.S., then by China.

The study also found that Keystone would have little, if any, impact on American demand for crude oil. Environmental groups have dismissed the report and ramped up pressure on Mr. Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry — formerly one of Congress‘ loudest voices on climate change and the environment — to kill the project once and for all.

The study, had it been a damning indictment of the project, could have been used by the White House as environmental justification for rejecting Keystone. Instead, it is being held up as proof that the pipeline should be built immediately.

“All of this unnecessary delay has done nothing to improve our energy security or our economy,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaska Republican and co-sponsor of the Senate bill. “If the White House can’t see that, then it’s time for Congress to act.”

Related articles

• Unlock Keystone (nationalreview.com)
• Baucus on Keystone: ‘We Should Have Been Building It Yesterday’ (nationalreview.com)
• API: Reviews back Keystone XL (upi.com)
• 70% of Americans Support Building the Keystone Energy Pipeline (speaker.gov)

 

Obama Halts Global Warming by Executive Order – John Ransom – Townhall Finance Conservative Columnists and Financial Commentary

Global Warming (Photo credit: mirjoran)

 

Obama Halts Global Warming by Executive Order – John Ransom – Townhall Finance.

 

President Obama has apparently halted global warming by a secret executive order, which, amongst other things, commands the seas to stop rising, the world to begin to heal and the Chevy Volt assembly line to show a profit in 2013 despite a MSRP of $39,999, less $7,500 in government rebates.

 

This is the only conclusion that I can come to as I ponder the Global Warming Alarmists Brigade’s latest effort in pseudo-science, or what I like to call “Science for Journalists.”

 

Recently Shaun Marcott, Ph.D., published a paper that “proves” that the world is warmer now than at anytime during the last 4,000 years.

 

And the hucksters in the media, if they don’t exactly believe it, at least they publicize it. 

 

“In the new research… Shaun Marcott, an earth scientist at Oregon State University, and his colleagues” reported the New York Times “compiled the most meticulous reconstruction yet of global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, virtually the entire Holocene. They used indicators like the distribution of microscopic, temperature-sensitive ocean creatures to determine past climate.”

 

That all sounds very impressive and meticulous, but is the reconstruction accurate?

 

Ummm, no.

 

David W. Kreutzer, Ph.D., Senior Fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change from the Heritage Foundation told me that the data was rigged in the same way that the famous “Hockey Stick” graph was rigged.

 

The original global warming Hockey Stick was rigged by Michael Mann- the Ph.D. is implied- in order to bring overall historical global temperatures down, so that our present day temperatures can look warmer by contrast.

 

“As a young, relatively unknown recent Ph.D. graduate,” says James Taylor, Forbes columnist and a fellow researcher at Heritage, “Mann attained wealth, fame and adulation among global warming alarmists after assembling a proxy temperature reconstruction that he claimed showed global temperatures underwent a steady, roughly 1,000-year decline followed by a sharp rise during the 20th century. The media reported on the Mann hockey stick reconstruction as if it settled the global warming debate, but objective scientists pointed out several crucial flaws that invalidated Mann’s claims.”

 

Mann achieved these results, in part, by cherry picking data by using proxies for temperature data- proxies like the “distribution of microscopic, temperature-sensitive ocean creatures”- rather than data that would conflict with his goal of showing dramatic, current-day temperature increases.

 

While Manna’s data showed that temperatures were hotter now than any time in 1,000 years, Marcott goes him four times better by showing that the earth has never been hotter in 4,000 years.

 

Taylor, however, says “many temperature studies, including studies presented by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate current global temperatures are cooler than the vast majority of the past 4,000 years.”

 

So do historical records.

 

In fact, records indicate that temperatures today aren’t even the hottest in the last 1,000 years. 

 

Matt Ridley, a global warming supporter, writing in the Wall Street Journal, concludes that there is ample reason to believe that temperatures are cooler now than during the Medieval Warm Period, saying “the evidence increasingly vindicates the scientists who first discovered the Medieval Warm Period.”

 

Ridley cites four recent scientific studies that tend to support the notion that temperatures were hotter then.   

 

Mann’s hockey stick- and Marcott’s too- eliminated an historical epoch called the Medieval Warm Period, a period during which archeological, written and historical records suggest temperatures may have been warmer than today’s.

 

The Medieval Warm Period was a period that saw the Vikings colonize Greenland, between the 10^th and 15^th Centuries, for example, disappearing just as the climate began to cool. It would have been impossible to conceive of the Vikings being able to colonize Greenland without significantly warmer temperatures. It also would have been impossible to have grown varieties of flora that were found on Greenland during that period were the temperatures as cold as today’s.

 

Data actually suggests that the earth stopped warming 15 years ago.  This pause in warming wasn’t anticipated in any climate change models created by global warming advocates.    

 

And that’s really the rub when it comes to climate science.

 

When the data doesn’t go their way- which is almost always- they either re-write the science, the history or rely on an Obama executive order.  

 

Related articles

 

• Warmest Temperatures In 4,000 Years? Not So Fast, Global Warming Alarmists (forbes.com)
• Global Warming is BS (pointsandfigures.com)
• The Hockey Stick, Broken Again (powerlineblog.com)
• Bad Science and Bad Journalism are a Bad Combination – Tea Party Nation (gds44.wordpress.com)
• Broken Hockey Sticks (rightwinggranny.com)
• Green Weenie of the Week: Stick Figure Men (powerlineblog.com)
• Another Hockey Stick? (wattsupwiththat.com)
• ‘More than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries have contributed peer-reviewed papers providing evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was real, global, & warmer than the present’ (climatedepot.com)

 

Bad Science and Bad Journalism are a Bad Combination – Tea Party Nation

Bad Science and Bad Journalism are a Bad Combination – Tea Party Nation.

By Alan Caruba

 

On Wednesday, March 6, the House Science, Space and Technology Committee sent out a notice that its hearing on global warming was cancelled due to the chilly weather and a snowstorm that was about to hit the nation’s capital.

 

The Committee was going to be treated to “a comprehensive briefing on how well scientists understand the climate and humans’ effect on it.” On the same day in 1961, the temperature had hit a record 81 degrees. In 1888, it had been 10 degrees. Anyone who thinks that humans had anything to do with either is mistaken. When it comes to the weather, the only thing that humans do is endure or enjoy it.

 

Understanding it, something that puzzles paleoclimatologists, climatologists, and meteorologists, is the big secret that the public is not supposed to know. For example, none of these folks understands why clouds do what they do. The reason for this easy to understand, the definition of the weather is “chaos.”  It’s the reason meteorologists cannot predict what the weather will be more than four or five days from now.

 

Instead, we continue to be the victims of global warming charlatans, some of whom are “scientists”, while other scientists have been engaged in debunking their lies since the 1980s. The only thing we know for sure is that the global warming “scientists” are destroying the public’s confidence in the integrity of climate science.

 

The Wall Street Journal ran a story on March 9, “In Study, Past Decade Ranks Among Hottest”. It was about a study published in a recent issue of the Journal Science claiming that a one degree temperature variation resulted in 2000-2009 being “one of the warmest since modern record-keeping began.” Their claim is that the planet will be warmer in 2100 than it has been for 11,300 years. That’s about the amount of time since the end of the last ice age and the beginning of the Holocene, an epoch of warm weather that gave rise to civilization—about 5,000 years ago.

 

Such predictions are utterly bogus. They are based on rigged computer models which have been constantly be exposed for their lies. Both the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. government engage in this fraud. The study cited was funded by the National Science Foundation. A problem the public encounters is the often inaccurate information put forth by NOAA, NASA and other government agencies. One literally needs a background in the science involved to know when they are off the mark.

 

Climatologists measure changes in centuries, not decades. As the article asked, is the alleged hottest decade the result of “greenhouse gas emissions from human activity—or can it be explained as part of natural, long-term variations in temperature?” Generally unknown to the public is the fact that water vapor is a major “greenhouse gas” and plays a significant role in the earth’s overall temperature.

 

The “Science” study drew immediate criticism. James Taylor, the editor of The Heartland Institute’s “Environment & Climate News”, a national monthly, said “Global temperatures are essentially the same today as they were in 1995, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were merely 360 parts per million.” These levels “rose ten percent between 1995 and 2012, yet global temperatures did not rise at all.” That’s worth repeating, “global temperatures did not rise at all.”

 

This does not stop the “Warmists” from concocting their “studies” or journalists from repeating their lies in newspapers like The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal article was more cautious and balanced.

 

As Marc Morano noted at ClimateDeport.com, a leading skeptics’ website, the earth is cooler today than 28% of the past 11,300 years. Yes, cooler. It has been cooling for nearly seventeen years and it is the direct result of an unusual solar condition. It is supposed to be in a “solar maximum with lots of sunspots, magnetic storms, but there are few at this time, resulting in less radiation and cooler temperatures for the Earth.

 

Moreover, since the intervals between ice ages are approximately 11,500 years, we are closer to another ice age than any bogus warming.

 

“The new study is also counter to the preponderance of existing peer-reviewed studies,” said Morano, “showing the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warming were both as warm or warmer than today without benefit of modern emissions or SUVs.”

 

In 2009, one of the nation’s leading climatologists, MIT’s Dr. Richard Lindzen, wrote, “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in (a) global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.”

 

“Such hysteria,” warned Dr. Lindzen, “simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing.”

 

© Alan Caruba, 2013

 

Blog: What’s a warmist to do?

Blog: What’s a warmist to do?.

Thomas Lifson

Warmism – the belief that CO2 emissions are dangerously warming the earth – gets all the propaganda support the mainstream media can offer, and yet the public stubbornly refuses to give a damn. It must be terribly frustrating for Al Gore and all the others who have hitched their wagons to this theory. Patrick Michaels outlines the problem they face at Forbes. He uses a recent example of two research papers published, one linking global warming to some new horror, and the other pointing out the evidence is inconclusive. The alarmist paper got all the media coverage. Michaels dubs this “asymmetric” coverage:

The type of global warming science reported to the public grows asymmetrically, with alarming evidence receiving far more exposure than evidence for more modest changes and impacts, or, climate-as-usual.

And what’s the bottom line? People still don’t give a darn.

The prestigious National Opinion Research Center (NORC), located at the University of Chicago, just released a report on what it calls “priority worries”.

Given a list of 8 “problems”, only 3.6 per cent of Americans rank “Environment” as their highest priority. Within a sub-list of seven environmental “problems”, 19.6% rate climate change as “extremely dangerous”, where it ranks fourth out of the seven.

My greener friends are convinced that this is all because of the mean old Koch brothers. But if that’s true, they must have huge propaganda operations inFinland, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Flanders, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Lithuania, Latvia and France, where even lower percents rate climate change as “extremely dangerous”. And they must be really active in Argentina (despite its nationalized oil companies), where environment ties for dead last among the eight issues, and only 5.9 per cent of the respondents ranked it as the most important environmental problem. (Weirdly enough, it ranks absolute lowest in Israel).

Nor have the numbers really budged much….

You might say that climate alarmism has lost its traction. The public is now inured to claims of impending disaster. Americans didn’t take seriously the Obama administration rhetoric on sequester  either. Crisis fatigue has set in.

Warmism may have completely lost traction. The medicine isn’t working, and increasing the dosage won’t help. The poor warmists are becoming pathetic.

Related articles

• Memo To Global Warmists: Australia Is Not The Whole World (papundits.wordpress.com)
• Warmists Retrench As Climate Refuses To Warm — ‘Climate crystal ball gazers can predict anything they want, but physical reality will not be denied’ (climatedepot.com)
• One More Global Warming Alarmist Retracts (papundits.wordpress.com)