Boone Pickens may be a fine man, and has played a colorful and useful role on the American stage for decades. But his "energy plan," which he's spending a fortune to promote on cable TV, is not a plan.

Asserting that something would be good to do is not "a plan." Saying how to do it is "a plan." By this standard, what the legendary oil man is devoting $58 million to pitch hardly amounts to a decent slogan.

He would replace natural gas in electricity production with wind, and use the natural gas to power cars. He fails to mention any practical theory of how to get there -- that would really be "a plan." Instead, he relies on the deus ex machina of Congress, waving a legislative wand to make people do things they would choose not to do, given the extravagant and unjustified costs involved.

Record high temperatures on Baffin Island last month — it hit 27C on July 21 — have made the news around the world, as has the evacuation of 21 visitors from the island’s Auyuittuq National Park. Fear that melt water from the park’s glaciers might lead to flash flooding and landslides has been reported by everyone from AFP to the BBC as proof of the adverse side-effects of man-made climate change.

Meanwhile, it is barely reported outside Alaska that America’s northernmost state is having a record cool summer.
If it reaches 19C in Anchorage today, it will be just the eighth time that’s happened this summer. Indeed, this could be the first summer ever that Anchorage never hits 24C.

Auyuittuq is at 66 degrees north; Anchorage is at 61.

China's use of force to solve Olympic-sized pollution problems may be preview of cap-and-trade policies.

It is not unusual for nations hosting the Olympic Games to orchestrate a false charm for visiting athletes and spectators, and most of all for the media. This typically extends to covering up graffiti and chasing the homeless from the streets. In China, host of the 2008 Beijing Games, residents tell me schools plan to open several weeks late. As has occurred with other games, some businesses are closing.

China’s twist is that it is the state forcing businesses to close, and not just near the games but nationally, to alleviate the nation’s appalling air, water and other pollution problems. A poor but rapidly developing country, China is progressing through what is known as a “Kuznets Curve” on environmental issues. That is, societies first prioritize activities that may cause harm to the environment; after reaching a certain level of wealth, environmental quality attains a value in its own right and people – now richer – affix a cost to it that they are willing to pay in the form of environmental regulations.

What the mainstream media has been feeding our nation on the issue of global warming is more hype than heat and more scam than science. Thus, for a change, we shall look at the facts.

First question:  Where is the heat?

Scientist Robert Balling Jr., director of the Laboratory of Climatology at Arizona State University, examined the temperature records from European ground stations over the last 250 years. What were his findings? He said,  “There had been no warming in Europe during the past 65 years. Europe warmed only .58 degrees Celsius during the past 250 years, with all of the warming taking place between 1890 and the mid-1930s and at the same time as an increase in the output of the sun. 

An in-depth study released by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine states:

WASHINGTON—For many young voters, the environment is a hot-button issue in this year’s presidential election. But some think concern over global warming is overblown.

Self-proclaimed global warming skeptic Roy Spencer, a former NASA scientist, drew applause Wednesday at the conservative Young America’s Foundation conference when he said the hype around the “green” movement is nearing the level of “a state-supported religion.”

Spencer, a climate researcher at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, said that although global warming is occurring, it’s not happening to the extent that many scientists have led the public to believe. Rising global temperatures will not have a significant negative impact on the planet, he said, because most warming has been the result of natural temperature fluctuations, not human causes like increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

“The climate system is relatively insensitive,” Spencer said. “That means that the CO2 we put in the atmosphere really doesn’t do much, maybe only one-tenth or two-tenths of a degree Celsius, which is basically trivial. Climate is going to change anyway, with or without us, so if we cause a little bit of climate change, so what?”

Luckily, the U.S. Climate Change Assessment Report just released by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP PDF Here) is only a “draft” released for the purpose of gathering public comments. This means that the report’s authors still have time to get things in order before a “final” publication is released. The current contents read as if the CCSP authors set aside their list of sizable scientific credentials, and instead opted to write a fantasy piece on how they wished the state of climate science to be, rather than how it actually is.

As it now stands, the draft CCSP report is a gross perversion of science.

It is made even worse that it is coming from a group researchers, who, at one time at least, were regarded as some of the leaders in their fields.

No fair treatment of science discusses a topic with complete disregard to opposing views that are held and published by other credible, qualified and knowledgeable persons.

The continent's bureaucrats hope their counterparts in China, India, and the US will embrace carbon regulation next year in Copenhagen.

The bureaucrats that run the European Union's day-to-day business aren't known for taking risks. Yet back in 2005, when they devised the EU Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS), these pencil pushers gambled that a cap-and-trade scheme would help cut the EU's carbon dioxide emissions. Now, three years on, the environmental benefits from the EU ETS remain unclear: The continent's CO2 output actually rose 1.1 percent last year.

Paul Krugman

It's true that scientists don't know exactly how much world temperatures will rise if we persist with business as usual. But that uncertainty is actually what makes action so urgent. While there's a chance that we'll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there's also a chance that we'll fail to act only to find that the results of inaction were catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run?

It wasn't so long ago that global warmists were acting as if their alarming forecasts had already come true, even likening skeptics to Holocaust deniers. Now they are reduced to saying we really don't know if global warmism is true or not, but since the consequences are so dire if it is, we'd better just assume that it is and act accordingly.

The Chilling Effect: We ran into you at the Americans For Prosperity/RightOnline event, where you were on speaking a panel regarding global warming. Some in the audience were certain that global warming is a hoax, while others were agnostic on the science. Given your review of the issue, what’s your best guess on climate change?

Iain S. Murray: I think it’s pretty conclusive that, all other things being equal, more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere leads to a warmer atmosphere. However, it’s clear from the recent plateau in temperatures, while GHGs have continued to accumulate, that all other things are not equal. We really don’t know very much about the other “forcings,” as they call them, that go in to deciding the global temperature, and clearly need more research on them. We also don’t know very much at all about the history of climate beyond 400 years ago. We need to know not just what regulates the atmosphere, but whether temperature swings are unusual or not.