Paul Krugman

He means “action” on man-made global warming. We’ll come back to his musing after a moment.

The other day, Krugman wrote an essay featuring Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist, who speculated that the earth was doomed unless something is done “before it’s utterly too late.” By “something” they both meant “elect Barack Obama.” Weitzman wrote a paper with “sophisticated” equations and which assumed climate model output was infallible, said that we humans will “effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it.” Again says Krugman:

Goracle disciple John McCain told the Detroit News last December that “we’ve got to do everything” to address global warming. Of course, that was before gas prices hit $4 a gallon and became the Number One (or Two, depending on your poll) issue in America. Suddenly, McCain was trying to do everything to keep energy prices low — including a pandering summer “gas tax holiday.”

Offended by this swerve from the righteous path, fellow Goracle disciple and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman landed on Brother John (and McCain’s odd bedfellow Hillary Clinton) with both feet.

Lindy Burns

When will the ABC rein in its global warming catastrophists? On 774 ABC Melbourne this afternoon we have presenter Lindy Burns talking about the warming catastrophe that “chills my heart” and leaves her wondering “whether we have any hope at all”. She keeps crossing to an exhibition on the alleged sea level rises that she claims threatens Tuvalu with global warming doom, interviewing professional alarmists like Rob Gell. And, of course, she interviews at wailing length the ever-flighty Marian Wilkinson on her trip to the Arctic Circle to see global warming with her “own eyes” - as if melting ice in one part of the world proves man is heating the whole planet to hell. Both despair at the fate of the polar bear, and the planet.

Entirely missing from the interviews are the following facts:

Today, the Washington Post repeated an old canard about the “deadly” accident at Three Mile Island (in the fourth paragraph — see update below).

If they mean the effects that the media coverage of Three Mile Island had on the U.S. nuclear-plant construction industry, “deadly” is certainly appropriate. But one gets the feeling that they imagine that people actually died.

The Manhattan Institute’s Max Schulz authored a report in 2006 called Energy & the Environment: Myths & Facts, which included Zogby polling that found that 38 percent of Americans thought Three Mile Island was deadly in the conventional sense. 

Back on April 6th of this year I made an observation about the trend in the CO2 data from the Mauna Loa Observatory dropping and possibly “leveling off”.

For that I was roundly criticized by those “in the know” and given the full Bulldog treatment.

Well, it’s happened again. With the release of the July data from Mauna Loa Observatory, a new twist has occurred; this time there’s been a first ever trend reversal of the monthly mean CO2 levels from January to July. Here is the familiar Mauna Loa graph:

Source data: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/

The sudden formation of tropical storm Edouard in the Gulf of Mexico has Texans on hurricane watch for the second time in a month—and raises talk again of the link between global warming and tropical storms.

Washington Post columnist Joel Acenbach predicted as much over the weekend, warning that the next big storm or natural disaster would be chalked up to global warming and climate change. Mr. Acenbach wasn’t denying global warming—despite a howl of outrage at his skepticism from parts of the blogosphere—but arguing against “weather alarmism.”

That’s the idea that weird weather, from Iowa floods to European heat waves, is directly attributable to man-made global warming. Mr. Acenbach says conflating weather and climate is counterproductive for real environmentalists—because weather is famously fickle, and gives ammunition to climate-change deniers.

The most critical problem we now confront is not global warming or how to tax emissions, but providing enough affordable fuel to avoid severe recession before alternative energy can become reality. The Lucky Country faces a choice between disaster and a unique opportunity.

Oil supply

Over the past two years climate all over the world has inexplicably begun a pronounced cooling. This is contrary to all expectations from global warming theory and growing other evidence is also indicating that the threat has been overestimated. However, the obsession with catastrophic climate change seems to have distracted attention from a much more certain and immanent danger. The oil supply vital to the entire economy is not keeping up with increasing demand while presently all focus is on renewable energy solutions that will require decades to develop and implement.

This Sunday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi again promised to use all her power to prevent the House from voting on any measure that would allow new oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf. A majority of Americans support new oil exploration in these regions. Pelosi has tried to prevent the House from even debating whether or not to increase domestic energy production, but this past Friday a small group of conservatives took over the House floor after Democrats voted to go on a five-week paid vacation.

After the vote to adjourn, 48 conservatives simply refused to leave, continuing to speak from the well of the House floor. The lights were turned off, the microphones were shut off, and the C-SPAN cameras were ordered to go dark, but the remaining members stayed to do the people’s business. Reporters were asked to leave the speaker’s lobby but the remaining conservatives escorted the press one by one to a press gallery directly above it. When Capitol Police closed the tourist galleries, the House members invited the visitors down to the chamber floor. A boy in the visitors gallery asked, “When do you think you’re going to get this vote?” Republican Policy Chairman Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) declared, “This is the People’s House. This is not Pelosi’s Politburo.”

If Barack Obama is in the White House, Democrats win a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi has fewer pesky Republicans to ignore in the House, this will be energy rule No. 1:

Forget more drilling. Offshore. Alaska. Doesn't matter.

Then step two, let slip by an unidentified Democratic aide recently in The Hill newspaper: "Right now, our strategy on gas prices is, 'Drive small cars and wait for the wind.' "

In other words, suck it up, gas-guzzlers. Break out the Carter-era sweaters and hair shirts, turn down the thermostats this winter, and let the drill bits rust. Policies of the 1970s are good enough for the 21st century.

Only when the high priests of sacrifice see true remorse, and combustion engines are offered up on the conservation altar will a mighty wind blow - from top Democrats, not turbines - touting the wonders of alternative energy.

It seems that even ABC's George Stephanopoulos is getting fed up with Congressional Democrats blocking efforts by Republicans to expand offshore oil drilling in order to bring down gas prices.

On Sunday's "This Week," Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Cali.) was asked repeatedly why she refuses to allow this issue to come to a vote.

The look of disgust on Stephanopoulos's face as Pelosi mumbled non sequitur after non sequitur was almost more telling of his sense of frustration than the number of times he asked virtually the same question: "Why won't you permit a straight up or down vote?"

Readers should prepare themselves for an alternate reality, for Madame Speaker was quizzed on Sunday like never before (video available here, rush transcript from closed captioning, photo courtesy ABC News):

IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US. First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003. Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian, stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans said, has become pretty conclusive.

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output and lifestyle.