Tag: Views

By Alan Caruba

One of the most curious and, frankly, frightening aspects of environmentalism is its hatred of the use of energy. One can draw a straight line between the Carter administration that imposed a windfall tax on the U.S. oil industry and the present Obama administration that is all for offshore oil drilling just as long as it takes place in Brazil, not America.

There is, in fact, offshore oil exploration and drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, particularly near Florida. The problem is that it is being undertaken by China and Russia.

In America, Ken Salazar, Obama’s Secretary of the Interior, is likely to slow offshore development, but it should be noted that 85% of the nation’s continental shelf has long been under a ban against exploration and development, and was throughout the eight years of the Bush Administration. The same holds true for vast oil deposits in Alaska’s ANWR area.

Until the 1970s, America’s economy thrived on affordable energy. Fully 85% of all the energy we need and use comes from coal, oil and natural gas. That is not going to change despite all the blather about “renewable energy” sources such as solar or wind. Neither of these has proven to be either reliable or affordable without huge government subsidies wherever they have been tried.

As Seldon B. Graham, Jr. notes in his book, “Why Your Gasoline Prices Are High”, in 1981 a windfall profits tax was imposed, “This tax, in effect, sent U.S.A. Oil’s exploration and drilling budgets straight to the government to spend as it pleased; thereby leaving little or no exploration and drilling budgets for USA Oil.”

The result was “a death notice” to the industry. “Many U.S. oil and gas companies went bankrupt because of the windfall profits tax. Those U.S.A. oil companies which survived were forced to go overseas to explore and drill in foreign countries.”

The result of the windfall profits tax was that it forced “the U.S.A. to defend Middle East oil.” And that, dear reader, is why we are still in the Middle East providing an umbrella of protection, rescuing Kuwait from Iraq, then having to re-invade Iraq, and now faced with a decision to militarily end Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons with which to threaten other Middle East nations.

Graham, with more than fifty years experience in the oil industry, has also been vocal in opposition to yet another idiotic government mandate, the addition of ethanol to every gallon of gasoline drivers must purchase.

Ethanol is touted as another “clean” energy alternative, but Graham notes that even as it reduces the mileage available from each gallon, it also emits more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. “Clean biofuel is the big lie”, says Graham. That said, carbon dioxide not only plays no role in “global warming”, but there is no global warming; the Earth being in a cooling cycle for the past ten years.

Just like Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama regards oil, natural gas, and coal as the enemy. Jerome Corsi of World Net Daily recently warned that “President Obama declared war on oil and natural gas at the United Nations global warming summit and he made the same pitch to the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh.”

Obama told the UN, “I will work with my colleagues at the G20 to phase out fossil fuel subsidies so that we can better address our climate challenge.”

On September 10, Buddy Kleemeir, chairman of the Independent Petroleum Association of America told a Senate Finance Committee that “The Obama administration’s budget request would strip essential capital from new American natural gas and oil investment by radically raising taxes on American production.”

A recent New York Times article noted that “The oil industry has been on a hot streak this year, thanks to a series of major discoveries…these discoveries, spanning five continents, are the result of hefty investments that began earlier in the decade when oil prices rose…”

First, note that the discoveries are the result of risks taken nearly a decade ago. It takes a long time to find new oil reserves and it requires billions of dollars. Second, note that these discoveries have largely been in other continents.

Third, if U.S. policy deliberately reduces the ability to make those investments by phasing out “fossil fuel subsidies”, it ensures that the nation remains dependent on Middle East and other foreign oil imports. Fourth, it puts the lie to the endless talk of America becoming “energy independent.”

America has been systematically stripped of access to its own interior and offshore energy reserves since the 1970s and at the heart of this conspiracy have been the many environmental organizations that have first secured legislation to enable their obstruction and second to impose, often through the courts, measures that attack, not just energy, but agriculture, timber, and other formerly thriving elements of the nation’s economy.

The destruction of America is moving apace and we have a president who continues to lie about “global warming” in order to further its decline.

Caruba blogs daily at factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com

By Alan Caruba

As the months pass by in the Obama administration, some traits are beginning to emerge that inform us in a general way what we’re up against.

To the astonishment of many, it is an administration filled with Marxists. The “Green Jobs” czar Van Jones was exposed as one and resigned. Now it has been revealed that yet another, Mark Lloyd, designated as the “Diversity” czar, holds the Venezuelan dictator, Hugo Chavez, in high esteem, calling his power grab “an incredible revolution.”

Even before these two, it was learned that Carol Browner, the “Environmental” czar, was a highly regarded member of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society, which is part of the Socialist International.

As various members of the Obama administration expressed their views on events and issues, we discover that they hold most Americans in low esteem. David Axelrod, the communications advisor to President Obama, dismissed an estimated 1.8 million Americans who participated in the September 12 protest march saying, “They’re wrong.”

There hasn’t been a comparable event in years, but “They’re wrong.”

Given the polls that all say that the nation’s economy is the number one issue that needs to be fixed, the White House has embarked on two major pieces of legislation guaranteed to wreck it still more. Healthcare “reform” should have the same priority as fixing the nation’s infrastructures of roads, bridges and ports, but instead there has been a non-stop effort to initiate a government takeover one sixth of the nation’s economy. Some people might call that Marxist.

Likewise, the hideous “Cap-and-Trade” bill, a huge tax on the generation and use of all energy has been the other administration priority. If you wanted to reduce America to third-world nation status, just increase the cost of energy while, at the same time, opposing any offshore exploration and extraction of oil and natural gas, and making it nearly impossible to build any coal-fired plants that currently provide just over fifty percent of all electricity.

This brings me to Dr. Steven Chu, the Secretary of Energy, the subject of a September 21 Wall Street Journal article that reported “Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

There is no reason, zero reason, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is no global warming and, even if there was, carbon dioxide, (CO2) the primary gas over which controls would be imposed, has nothing to do with climate change. Instead, hundreds of years after a warming, it shows up in the atmosphere in somewhat enhanced amounts. And even that is a good thing because CO2 is essential to all life on Earth as plant food.

“The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should,” opined Dr. Chu. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.”

I daresay the American public are not like teenagers, nor should they be regarded or treated as such, but therein lies the unbearable arrogance of the Obama administration.

The notion that the President of the United States has to be on all five (save Fox) Sunday morning talk shows says that his handlers believe viewers must be overwhelmed with a torrent of lies to accept the administration’s position on healthcare reform. When one anchor noted that an element of the reform package was a hidden tax—an excise tax—that simple truth was brushed aside.

The President’s speech at the United Nations repeated every lie about “climate change” we have been hearing since the 1980s and that repetition is so unpersuasive that “global warming” ranks last among the priorities that Americans have these days. It’s no longer Obama’s “Audacity of Hope”, it is the audacity of his lies that confront all Americans.

The Earth has been cooling since 1998. It is making the global warming liars desperate to get whatever national and international action taken before it becomes even more evident. The fact that the President would address it as justification for any action his administration might take reveals the depths of deception that exist within it.

The kind of arrogance and outright deception Americans are witnessing is increasingly distressing and generating a lot of anger. It’s not going to go away. Hugo Chavez may have fans inside the Obama administration, but beyond the gates of the White House he is known for what he is, a dictator.

To borrow a phrase from a Hollywood film, fasten your safety belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Caruba blogs daily at factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com

By Alan Caruba

From December 6 through the 18th, a conference sponsored by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will gather in Copenhagen, Denmark, to explore ways to “prevent global warming” and I would like to be among the first to tell all those idiots checking their passports and deciding what to pack that they can all stay home.

This is not an original thought on my part and, in fact, is occasioned by Prof. Henrik Svensmark. He is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Technical University of Denmark and, not surprisingly, knows a lot about the Sun and climate.

Permit me to share some of his thoughts. In a September 9th opinion titled, “While the Sun Sleeps”, Prof. Svensmark wrote, “Last week, the scientific team behind the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported that the number of sunspot-free days suggest that solar activity is heading towards its lowest level in about 100 years.”

“Everything indicates that the Sun is moving into a hibernation-like state and the obvious question is whether it has any significance for us on Earth.” Good question, Professor! Particularly since the Sun is the sole source of heat for the Earth. When it takes a nap, everybody takes notice.

The professor then had a little professorial fun describing the Little Ice Age that occurred after a period of medieval warmth that had begun around 1000 AD. After 1300, however, it got a lot colder. Settlements in Greenland disappeared. The Thames froze over repeatedly. And here’s where we need to pay attention, there were “long periods of crop failure.” Between starvation and disease, it reduced the population of Europe by about a third.

“It is important to note that the Little Ice Age was a global event,” said Prof. Svensmark. It did not end until the mid-to-late 19th century; around 1850 in America. Do your math. That’s five centuries. As the Earth began to warm up and particularly in the last fifty years, “solar activity has been the highest since the medieval warmth of 1,000 years ago.”

Now, keep in mind that a couple of hundred, perhaps a thousand or more diplomats, scientists, and environmentalists are going to gather in Copenhagen for the single purpose of extending or expanding the Kyoto Protocols that are based on the assertion that the Earth is warming even though it is not.

Moreover, the IPCC will announce that, if the industrialized nations do not dramatically reduce the production of “greenhouse gases” (carbon dioxide), we are all doomed. In the United States, the Cap-and-Trade bill which passed the House by a slim margin will be up for consideration in the Senate. It is based on the global warming lie. It will drive up the cost of energy for all Americans and basically wreck the economy!

Like the witches in Macbeth, for years the IPCC has been stirring a cauldron of lies about global warming and the world’s media, intoxicated by the fumes rising from the pot, have never ceased from telling us that the Earth is warming when it is not.

The Sun, however, is not cooperating.

“It now appears that the Sun…is heading towards what is called ‘a grand minimum’ as we saw in the Little Ice Age,” says Prof. Svensmark.

“Indeed, global warming has stopped and cooling is beginning.” At a recent World Climate Conference in Geneva one of the participants predicted the cooling will likely continue through the next 10 to 20 years.

All those IPCC computer models that have been predicting global warming were wrong, are wrong, and will remain wrong for all time until the Earth actually begins to warm again.

If, however, the Earth slips into a new Ice Age and not just a “little” one, it will be several hundred thousand years before they are valid.

The Copenhagen conference is, like global warming, a hoax.

I hear it’s very cold in Copenhagen in the winter.

By Alan Caruba

To understand how insane the Cap-and-Trade bill really is you need to know that it based on the belief that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced to avoid a global warming that is NOT happening.

The American Clean Energy and Security Act is a giant scam involving “carbon credits” to be sold and traded. It is also about billions in taxpayer’s dollars being wasted on wind and solar generation of electricity. If this was a sensible way to produce energy, it would be a dominant producer, but it isn’t. Short of producing electricity by peddling bicycles, it is as inefficient and impractical as possible.

So-called “clean energy” accounts for just over one percent of all the electricity Americans use every day and it exists only because the government subsidizes it by taking your tax dollars and giving them to wind and solar energy producers. Some States require utilities to buy electricity from them.

As for “security”, how much energy security does the United States enjoy if it must import 60% of the oil it uses for transportation and a wide range of products, not the least of which is anything made from plastic?

Real security means drilling and mining right here, right now. There’s plenty of oil in ANWR and offshore. The government forbids access to it. And, where’s there’s oil there’s natural gas as well. As for coal, the U.S. has enough for centuries of affordable electricity, but the environmental organizations have in recent years stopped the building of a hundred coal-fired plants and they brag about it.

A study of the economic impact of the bill by the American Council on Capitol Formation and the National Association of Manufacturers concluded that, if passed, Cap-and-Trade would decrease the Gross Domestic Product of the United States by $2 and $3 trillion by 2030. That’s lost job and lost industrial production.

That’s because Cap-and-Trade would increase the cost of all activities, business and others, by increasing the cost of electricity, the master resource that powers everything in the nation.

Remember, this would be done to limit “greenhouse gas emissions.” This cost would solely be on the backs of Americans while other nations of the world would be free to continue emissions, i.e. providing jobs and producing goods.

Remember, too, that global warming is not occurring. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for a decade.

This bill is so horrible, Americans can only guess at the consequences of its passage. One thing is certain. It would massively expand government because thousands would have to be hired to administer it.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates it would cost $8 billion over a ten-year period because to operate efficiently it would require the approval of approximately 1,500 new regulations and mandates involving at least 21 federal agencies.

The introduction of Cap-and-Trade would “create the nation’s largest commodity market in which polluters would buy and sell rights to emit carbon dioxide” according to a recent Washington Times article, but it is essential to understand that emitting CO2 is not “pollution.” Carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant. It is a gas vital to all plant life on Earth. If CO2 were a pollutant, than surely oxygen is as well because oxidation causes rust.

The Cap-and-Trade’s carbon credits could “be a $2 trillion market within five years,” said Bart Chilton, commissioner of the Commodities Futures Trade Commission.

So Cap-and-Trade is NOT about greenhouse gases or global warming. It is about trading credits for the right to GENERATE or USE ENERGY.

How insane is that?

Keep in mind that the present financial crisis is the direct result of the GOVERNMENT getting into the mortgage loan market in the form of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, purchasing loans from banking institutions and mortgage lenders who were required by law to make bad loans. Those loans, in turn, were “bundled” and resold as assets, but they were worthless.

Nothing is more worthless than carbon credits. Nothing is more dangerous to the economic future of the nation than the Cap-and-Trade Act. The U.S. Senate must defeat this bill which has already been passed by the House. YOU must defeat this bill by demanding your Senators vote against it.

In 1898, an article by the great French novelist, Emile Zola was published in L’Aurore. It was addressed to the President of France. Zola accused the military of having wrongly convicted Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, of treason, incarcerating him for years on Devil’s Island. The title of the article was “J’Accuse!” Zola’s courage has been an inspiration for writers ever since.

By Alan Caruba

If there is one thing Americans began to rapidly conclude following his inauguration in January, it is that President Barack Obama lies all the time and that those lies are often blatant. In pursuit of the “Cap-and-Trade” act that is a huge tax on all energy use in America, Obama’s favorite mantra is that massive subsidies to wind and solar energy producers, as well as biofuel producers, will generate millions of new “green” jobs. Perhaps the worst part of this lie is that they will actually destroy jobs. In the July edition of Energy Tribune, Michael Economides and Peter Glover co-authored “Green Jobs: Fast-Tracking Economic Suicide.” I know Economides and he is internationally recognized as one of the world’s authorities on energy issues. “Creating ex nihilo—literally, out of nothing—used to be a theological concept, God’s prerogative. Today, it seems, President Obama and certain Western politicians claim to possess the ability to do it,” write the article’s authors. “Against all the laws of economics and the marketplace, President Obama and others believe they can create millions of ‘green’ jobs ex nihilo, literally out of thin air, via cap and trade.” There are two driving forces behind Cap-and-Trade. One is the claim that “green” energy producers will generate new jobs if the government just provides a combination of legislative mandates for its use (wind and solar) and, two, that a massive new trading apparatus in “carbon credits” for the generation of “greenhouse gas emissions” will protect the Earth against “global warming.” It is increasingly obvious to everyone that the Earth is cooling, breaking thousands of previous records for cool weather in cities around America and similar conditions worldwide. The tide, too, is turning against the “global warming” hoax that is failing in the face of the obvious cooling weather and climate. Using “global warming” to justify any government mandates or to empower the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” is a lie. It is a very big lie. Carbon dioxide is vital to all life on Earth. As the Energy Tribune authors point out, “To generate real industrial jobs, however, you need a basic commodity to trade, such as oil, gas or coal.” This is in marked contrast to wind and solar energy. “The trouble is that alternative energy technologies currently don’t work. That is to say, they remain inefficient, offering a very poor energy return on investment.” “Cut off the flow of public subsidies and the alternative energy industrial revolution would grind to a halt tomorrow.” In the real world, in 2008 the Marcellus gas industry in Pennsylvania generated $2.3 billion in total value added, more than 29,000 jobs, and $240 million in state and local taxes. If you extrapolate that to other sectors of the energy industry, you would be looking at thousands of real jobs, not lost jobs, but President Obama and his sycophants would rather you not know about that. If you had a choice, would you prefer to see wind, solar and biofuel energy producers receive billions in taxpayer subsidies or would you prefer to see independent energy producers permitted to extract oil and natural gas or the coal industry have access to the U.S. reserves that would provide electricity for centuries to come? This is not mere conjecture. The experience of European Union nations demonstrates that “for every green job created, a real job is destroyed elsewhere in the economy.” Carbon regimes drive manufacturing to nations that do not impose limits on coal, oil and natural gas. For example, “Germany’s Angela Merkel is insisting on major exemptions for German heavy industry come December’s global climate summit in Copenhagen. Merkel’s government is also supporting the building of 26 new coal-fired power plants across Germany.” Compare that with one hundred such plants whose construction was thwarted in the United States by environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. “In June, deputy head of Poland’s Solidarity trade union, Jaroslaw Gresik, estimated that the EU’s climate policy would cost 800,000 European jobs.” Widely circulated data from a study of the heavily subsidized wind and solar energy industry in Spain revealed that its alternative energy program destroyed nearly 110,500 jobs elsewhere in its economy or 2.2 jobs destroyed for every ‘green job’ created. Consumers there have seen their electricity rate increase by 31 percent. Other independent studies reveal that Obama’s claim of five million new “green” jobs would cost an estimated $500 billion to create. Wake up, America! The Big Lie about “Green jobs” is going to cost jobs. The Cap-and-Trade bill is a massive tax increase. The summer recess is the time to contact your Senator and Representative and tell them you oppose Cap-and-Trade. If it is passed, it will undermine the economy, cost jobs, and leave the nation increasingly dependent on the import of energy resources while our own lay underground, unexplored, untapped, unused. Source

By Alan Caruba

There’s an ancient Scandinavian legend that says, “A long time ago, the universe was made of ice. Then one day the ice began to melt and a mist rose into the sky. Out of the mist came a giant made of frost and the earth and the heavens were made from his body. This is how the world began and this is how the world will end, not by fire, but by ice. The seas will freeze and winters will never end.”

Thus begins “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, a book by my friend, Robert W. Felix, published initially in 2005. You can pick up a copy from www.iceagenow.com. While you’re there, pick up “Magnetic Reversals and Evolutionary Leaps” as well. Taken together, both books explain why the Earth, now at the end of an interglacial cycle, is heading into its next ice age and why Darwin got it wrong with his theory of slow, evolutionary mutations accounting for various species being different from one another.

The Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. Homo sapiens, the human race as we know it, have been around for about 40,000 years. We date our modern ancestry back to the Cro-Magnon man who superseded the Neanderthals. The development of agriculture, growing food rather than hunting it, dates back some 7,000 years and civilization in the form of city-states and nations is relatively new; only about 5,000 years.

For all that time, tribes tried very hard to appease the gods of sun and rain to ensure a good harvest. They would sacrifice the spare virgin or offer the hearts of captives. There were elaborate dances and prayers created by the shamans and priests, but humans never quite got the knack of actually controlling the weather or climate because they can’t and never could.

That is until Greenus Homo Sapian came along. This creature who emerged out of the conservation movement hit its stride around the 1970s. Greenus is the Bigfoot of climate, the Satchquatch of weather.

After devoting a decade in the 1970s to correctly predicting that a new ice age was on the way, Greenus, also known as Greens, discovered that they could scare a lot more people by claiming that the Earth was suddenly and dramatically warming.

It turned out to be a fabulous fund-raiser and allowed them to pursue an agenda intended to rid the Earth of as many nasty Homo sapiens as possible. This would be accomplished by getting all kinds of beneficial chemicals banned from use; pesticides, herbicides, anything made from plastic, as well as genetically modified crops that could feed the billions of Homo sapiens.

Mostly, though, the Greens’ enemy were “fossil” or “dirty” fuels that just happened to generate the energy required for all modern society everywhere; coal, oil and natural gas.

The instrument of this “global warming”, according to the Greens, was carbon dioxide, a gas that is vital to all life on Earth. Without carbon dioxide (CO2) not a single bit of vegetation would grow. Remember agriculture? No crops, no food. And, if CO2 was forcibly limited by crazy “Cap-and-Trade” schemes, the Greens could depress the economies of nations.

Carbon dioxide was especially abundant in the atmosphere during the Jurassic period and the vegetation was so thick that lizard-like creatures became giants called dinosaurs. They were the masters of the Earth until something happened and they disappeared. Did a giant meteor wipe them out or was it a cyclical magnetic reversal that corresponds time and again with species extinction and the sudden appearance of entirely new species?

The “global warming” myth originated in the United Nations, an organization seeking to be the single, unelected governing institution for the entire Earth. A conspiracy of alleged scientists was brought together as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988. Ever since, we have been assailed with claims that “global warming” was such a threat to the Earth and mankind that radical changes were required to avoid it.

The Greens, however, are running smack into a brick wall called reality.

All over the Earth, temperatures have been steadily falling. It is getting cooler and colder everywhere.

In a recent, desperate effort, the Union of Concerned Scientists announced that “Global warming made it less cool.” That’s right. It’s getting cooler because it’s getting warmer.

Newborn babes arrive fresh from the womb laughing at this absurdity.

At sites like Iceagenow.com and over at the most excellent www.climatedepot.com anyone with access to the Internet can learn about how weather records are being broken daily around the Earth as it cools. In Al Gore’s hometown of Nashville, cold temperatures broke a record set in 1877 when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.

Chicago, Cincinnati, Peoria, California, the Arctic—everywhere!

So, who are you going to believe? The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? The Union of Concerned Scientists? The Sierra Club? Friends of the Earth? U.S. government agencies like NOAA? The National Geographic? Newsweek? Time? President Obama? His cabinet Secretaries? The endless succession of “czars” he keeps appointing?

Congress? You better not believe Congress because they are getting ready to pass the “Cap-and-Trade” bill, incongruously named the American Clean Energy and Security Act. It will crush what’s left of the U.S. economy by imposing taxes on all energy use while dolling out billions to the least effective form of energy, wind and solar energy.

As America and the rest of the globe grow colder, do you really want to pay more for the energy to heat your home? All in the name of avoiding a “global warming” that is not happening?

Or will you cast out the liars in Congress who keep telling you that it’s getting warmer when it’s obviously getting colder?

Will you rebuke a President who is lying to you by returning the Republican Party to power in 2010?

Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at Warning Signs. Every week, he posts a column on the website of The National Anxiety Center

By Alan Caruba

The environmental movement and, in particular, “global warming”, has become a joke. That is always a sign of decline. Unless you’re a comedian, when people start laughing at you it’s never a good thing.

There are often defining moments in the death of a movement and I think I may have spotted one when the Australian July issue of Rolling Stone featured a naked Miranda Kerr on its “Green Issue” cover, chained to a tree while demurely covering her naughty parts to advance the cause of koala bears. Ms. Kerr is described as a “super model” and terribly concerned that there are only 100,000 koalas left. Apparently, “global warming” has something to do with that.

If you have to use nudity to sell your nonsense, you are scrapping bottom; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals does it all the time.

Back in the U.S. one of the biggest idiots in the U.S. Senate, a former candidate for President, John Kerry, had convened a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which predicted that “massive crop devastation, melting glaciers, water shortages, (and) millions of displaced people…will drag the U.S. military into conflict if global climate change goes unchecked.”

Observers may have noticed that Greens no longer refer to “global warming” much anymore as opposed to “climate change.” This is because (a) there is NO global warming and (b) the climate has always been in a process of change over the past 4.5 billion years. If you wanted to ensure that the U.S. military continued to receive billions for defense, claiming that “rising sea levels” will lead to conflicts is a pretty silly way of justifying it, given the threats to peace in the Middle East and elsewhere.

My friend, John Brignell, a British emeritus professor and expert on statistics, maintains a website that features a page devoted to the endless events, trends, and predictions attributed to “global warming.” It is a hoot.

Among the things attributed to “global warming” are acne, a saltier Atlantic Ocean, a decline in the duck and goose population, and, my favorite, why “global warming” is responsible for blizzards and colder winters. http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

A recent story on Discovery.com claimed that the dark-colored sheep of the Scottish St. Kilda islands may fall victim to “rising temperatures”, replacing them with lighter ones. The whole of the British Isles has been experiencing colder weather thanks to a cooling cycle that has been occurring for the past ten years. It’s worse than mere twaddle, a story like this is just one of thousands desperately trying to advance and keep alive the absurd “global warming” theory.

$79 Billion Spent on Climate Change “Science”!

Here in the United States, the Science and Public Policy Institute just announced the publication of “Climate Money”, a study by Joanne Nova that reveals the federal government has a near-monopoly on climate science funding and has spent “more than $79 billion of taxpayer’s money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.”

The study concludes, understandably, that “Most of this spending was unnecessary.”

The entire bogus “Cap-and-Trade” Act languishing in Congress is about selling “carbon credits.” This is just one degree more disingenuous than selling bottled water when the H2O that comes out of your kitchen faucet is as clean and safe as any you will find from an artesian well. Meanwhile, worldwide, the trading reached $126 billion in 2008.

This is why everything about environmentalism is a scam. Can you think of a single good reason to spend $126 billion for the right to emit carbon dioxide when 97% of it comes from nature? The Earth emits CO2 all the time in the form of volcanic activity, the action of the oceans, storing and releasing it. When you exhale six pounds of it every day?

The desperation you’re seeing and hearing represents Green organizations whose entire agenda is devoted to keeping Americans from having access to any form of energy, destroying our economy, and from the bankers like Goldman Sacks who figure to make billions trading carbon credits.

Americans, many of whom are increasingly out of work, losing their homes and cars, putting off vacations, college for their kids, and any prospect of ever being able to retire are growing tired of this insanity. They have more important things to worry about.

By Alan Caruba

It must be that the believers in “global warming” all live in caves and do not wander out to discover what is really happening on the planet.

The constant and hysterical cries from the global warming crowd claim that we have merely months, weeks and days before we’re toast.

Of course, the “solution” they offer is the appalling “Cap-and-Trade” bill that the Obama gang is trying to rush through Congress. We are supposed to believe that a huge tax on all use of electricity will “solve” the peril of global warming by cutting “greenhouse gas emissions.”

We are supposed to believe it is wise policy to slow or stop the building of coal-fired or nuclear plants to generate electricity.

We are supposed to believe that the vast coal, oil, and natural gas resources throughout the nation are not to be extracted to keep us warm in the coming years of cold weather or to fuel the nation’s vast fleet of cars and trucks.

For many throughout the nation and the world, a walk outside tells them a very different story.

Over at ClimateDepot.com the headlines read: “Baltimore: ‘Record low temp tied, another on the way—a summer without much heat.’” And “Not so peachy: Ohio cold snap takes bite out of local peach crop.” Remember, it’s JULY.

At IceAgeNow.com you will find notices of cold spells in Peru, the coldest May in New Zealand, reports of frost in Canada, and of temperature records shattered in northern Michigan and throughout New England.

AccuWeather.com’s Chief Meteorologist, Joe Bastardi, an expert on long range forecasting, is predicting that “cooler-than-normal weather this summer in the Northeast could point to a cold, snowy winter for the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states.”

Ironically, Bastardi predicts that the cold weather will be “centered over the area from Boston to Washington, D.C.” On September 8, the “climate bill”, aka “Cap-and-Trade” is scheduled for a vote and who knows, the snow could be several feet thick in the streets outside the Capitol? Last year when protesters gathered to demand the coal-fired plant providing energy to the Capitol Building be shut down did so in a snow storm!

Is the Earth cooling? Yes and it has been for a decade. The cooling is likely to continue for several more decades and you better pray it doesn’t turn into a full-fledged new ice age because the planet is at the end of a 11,500 year interglacial period similar to previous cycles that preceded ice ages.

Bastardi attributes his forecast to factors that include “a combination of El Nino and worldwide volcanic activity over the past six to nine months” which he says “may have played a role in causing this trend.”

Not mentioned is the present inactivity of sunspots, solar storms on the Sun that has been ongoing for quite some while. For an explanation of why this is bad news relative to the planet’s overall climate, click here.

The purpose of this exercise is, of course, to point out the obvious. The climate of the Earth, wherever one happens to be is cooling and is likely to continue.

That is why anyone and everyone citing “global warming” is a liar and deserves the contempt, derision, and acrimony of the Earth’s entire population.

Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com