The poll, taken last Friday through Sunday, found wide support for many proposals advanced by Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, their parties' presumptive nominees. Obama's ideas had broader support, and he was viewed as better able to handle energy issues. But 21% said neither candidate would do a good job.

Energy and gas prices top the list this year when voters are asked what's extremely important to them in choosing a candidate.  Read rest…

Hell -- otherwise known as Congress -- has officially frozen over. For the first time since the 1950s, Members will skip town today for the August recess without either chamber having passed a single appropriations bill. Then again, Democrats appear ready to sacrifice their whole agenda, even spending, rather than allow new domestic energy production.

Or even a mere debate about energy. The Democratic leadership is stonewalling any measure that might possibly relax the Congressional ban on offshore drilling. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid know that they would lose if a vote ever came to the floor, and they're desperate to suppress an insurrection among those Democrats who are pragmatic about one of the top economic issues. Behind this whatever-it-takes obstructionism is an ideological commitment to high energy prices. The rulers of the Democratic Party want prices to keep rising.

A good gauge of the radicalism of their energy blockade is the lowest common denominator of this energy fight: The effort to blame "speculators" for $4 gas was promoted by both Barack Obama and John McCain, as well as nearly everybody else in Washington. Sure enough, the House voted 276-151 on Wednesday for a bill that would have driven oil futures trading overseas.

Paul Krugman has a strange, very angry and even borderline incoherent piece today, saying things like this:

“Most criticism of John McCain’s decision to follow the Bush administration’s lead and embrace offshore drilling as the answer to high gas prices has focused on the accusation that it’s junk economics — which it is.

A McCain campaign ad says that gas prices are high right now because ‘some in Washington are still saying no to drilling in America.’ That’s just plain dishonest: the U.S. government’s own Energy Information Administration says that removing restrictions on offshore drilling wouldn't lead to any additional domestic oil production until 2017, and that even at its peak the extra production would have an ‘insignificant’ impact on oil prices.”

Oddly, Krugman then touts the wisdom of promising to adopt cap-and-trade schemes — without mentioning that these policies’ impact wouldn’t even rise to the level of “insignificant.” This should not be surprising from a guy who ceaselessly promotes Kyoto, which also wouldn’t do a thing (look at how well the ETS is working in Europe) but would impose staggering costs, according to none other than his preferred authority, EIA. Who's being dishonest here?

Walter Cunningham

For example, recently generated NASA data enabled scientists to finally understand the Gulf Stream warming mechanism and its effect on European weather. Such data will allow us to improve our models, resulting in better seasonal forecasts.

NASA’s Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide (CO2). This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists.

Climate understanding and critical decision making require comprehensive data about our planet’s land, sea, and atmosphere. Without an adequate satellite system to provide such data, policy efforts and monitoring international environmental agreements are doomed to failure. Our satellite monitoring capability is being crippled by interagency wrangling and federal budget issues. As much as a third of our satellites need replacing in the next couple of years.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposes lifting the moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the Outer Continental Shelf. She won't even allow it to come to a vote.

With $4 gas having massively shifted public opinion in favor of domestic production, she wants to protect her Democratic members from having to cast an anti-drilling election-year vote.

Moreover, given the public mood, she might even lose. This cannot be permitted. Why? Because as she explained to Politico: "I'm trying to save the planet; I'm trying to save the planet."

A lovely sentiment. But has Pelosi actually thought through the moratorium's actual effects on the planet?

chrysanthemum flowers

This is how one of the greatest pesticides ever invented, DDT, got banned. It had nothing to do with its beneficial effect, i.e., saving millions of lives from malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases, and everything to do with the fabricated “science” put forth by Rachel Carlson in her book, “Silent Spring.”

Since 1970, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has done more to remove from use some of the best pesticides ever invented for the protection of property from termites to one all-purpose pesticide that was applied with nothing more toxic than water!

So, naturally, the July 31 announcement by the Center for Public Integrity that they had discovered a vast conspiracy to keep everyone from finding out that pyrethrins and pyrethroids were responsible for 1,030 deaths out of more than 300,000,000 Americans in 2007 must be analyzed as virtually worthlessness.

The New York Times Magazine published a story "Ice Free" by Stephan Faris, hawking his new book "Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, From the Amazon to the Arctic, From Darfur to Napa Valley", to be published in January.

In the article, Faris notes "Greenland's ice sheet represents one of global warming's most disturbing threats. The vast expanses of glaciers- massed, on average, 1.6 miles deep - contain enough water to raise sea levels worldwide by 23 feet. Should they melt or otherwise slip into the ocean, they would flood coastal capitals, submerge tropical islands and generally redraw the world's atlases. The infusion of fresh water could slow or shut down the ocean's currents, plunging Europe into bitter winter."

A Response to Gavin Schmidt’s Critique of Monckton’s “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered”

Excerpt: For the second time, the FalseClimate1 propaganda blog, founded by two co-authors of the now-discredited2 “hockey-stick” graph by which the UN’s climate panel tried unsuccessfully to abolish the mediaeval warm period, has launched a malevolent, scientifically-illiterate, and unscientifically-ad-hominem attack on a publication by me. 

My 8000-word paper, Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered3, was published in Physics and Society in July 2008, after a request from the editors that I should submit a paper setting out the methods by which the UN had overstated the likely warming in response to doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (More...)

Monckton Rebuts Dr. Arthur Smith of American Physcial Society

Excerpt: Dr. Smith’s criticisms of my paper are superficially ingenious but in reality unmeritorious. Objectively speaking, the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity, which is faithfully, concisely, and correctly expounded in the first part of my paper, suffers from multiple exaggerations and contains serious conceptual flaws – such as the abuse of the Bode equation – and is subject to uncertainties whose combined effect is so great as to render meaningless its 2007 conclusion that, to a 90% confidence interval, we have been responsible for more than half of the warming that may have occurred over the past half-century, and which ceased with the great el Nino of 1998. Were we to be permitted to stray from the mathematics and physics just for a fleeting instant, we might say of the IPCC’s conclusions what Pope Innocent X said of the Treaty of Westphalia – that they are “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and empty of meaning for all time.” (More...) 

The report, published in the journal Global Change Biology, suggests biologists often use only one of the 31 different climate-change models provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Those models, while generally consistent at predicting climate, can differ significantly in providing data about how the living conditions for certain species are expected to change, the study found.

Co-author Jonathan Newman, a professor of environment biology at the University of Guelph, was researching the impact of climate change on the swede midge, an invasive insect that has been affecting canola crops in the United States since 1996 and has now migrated to southern Ontario.