Looks like it's all bull

[H/T to Tom Nelson]  A blunder has seen New Zealand blamed for climate change caused by other countries, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation has acknowledged.

The FAO report, Livestock's Long Shadow, made public last year to world acclaim, states that livestock contributes 18 per cent of the global warming effect, even more than transport.

But buried in the report is the information that deforestation - mainly in the Amazonian rainforest - is included in that figure. Without it, livestock's contribution falls to less than 12 per cent.

This has been ignored in public statements made since the report's release. The most controversial was by the chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, who urged people to eat less meat.

Great article by John Tierney in The New York Times contrasting the ’soft’ Barack Obama vs ‘hard’ John McCain approaches to America’s energy future yesterday. The soft path includes “energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants” while the hard path is more “about building nuclear power plants.” Tierney does a great job making the case for the hard approach over the soft approach, so read the whole thing, but his conclusion is the best part of the piece:

By scaring people about the tiny levels of radiation emitted during the normal operation of a nuclear plant, Mr. Tucker says, greens have effectively encouraged the construction of coal plants that actually release more radiation because of the traces of uranium in coal dust. He argues that the risks of terrorist attacks and nuclear waste have been exaggerated, particularly by the environmentalists who objected when the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste depository was being designed to guarantee a level of safety for only 10,000 years.

Any guesses where Al Gore points the blame for the June floods and tornadoes that ravaged Iowa?  Yep!

As reported by the Des Moines Register, the world's most famous Chicken Little told attendees of a Saturday night Democrat fundraiser in that city that the devastating floods were due "to man-made emissions causing more water to evaporate from oceans, increasing average humidity worldwide."

He went on say that:

"In 66 of your 99 counties, the flood damage was truly historic. No one has ever seen a flood like this."

Wrong.

Henry Paulson

One provision in the bill provides preferential tax treatment to publicly-traded institutions that engage in the trading of carbon offsets.  So no matter if your company is green or not, you can receive tax incentives from participating in the carbon trading market if your organization is publicly traded.  But how did it stay in the bill?

Henry Paulson didn’t ask for the carbon credit incentive in the bill, but after reviewing his stance on global warming during his tenure at Goldman Sachs, it’s obvious that he wouldn’t have opposed the addition.  Paulson believed that participation in the carbon market would spur the development of technologies that would lead to a less carbon-based economy.  The Washington Post reported in 2006 that Goldman Sachs believed in the scientific consensus of global warming.  Shocker. 

[H/T to co2sceptics.com]  In his debate with Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. Joseph Biden stated categorically that he was certain that human activity was causing global warming. Sen. Biden seems not to be aware that there has been no global warming since before 2002 and that there has never been a time in climate history when carbon dioxide was a significant cause of climate change.

Biden's comments about global warming during his debate with Sarah Palin indicate he holds a very dangerous view about Earth's climate, climate change, and global warming.

Biden claims he is absolutely convinced that global warming is real and that it is caused by human activity.

In February, the geniuses at Mensa will host keynote speaker James Hansen, among others, to frighten them with scary stories. How can bright people believe, like the UN Secretary General, that computer model scenarios of the future are more frightening than Hollywood movies? Because they’re . . . real?

Well, apparently because they also accept observed, um, truths like “It is now firmly established that Earth’s global surface temperature is increasing and that human emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are the primary cause of that global warming.”

Ahem.