Excerpts:

...one of President Barack Obama's first acts was a memo to agencies demanding new transparency in government, and science. The nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Lisa Jackson, joined in, exclaiming, "As administrator, I will ensure EPA's efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and program, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency."

Except, that is, when it comes to Mr. Carlin, a senior analyst in the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics and a 35-year veteran of the agency...Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."

So much for "overwhelming transparency." -D

Excerpts from here:

A team of scientists with years of expertise in climate issues has written an open letter to Congress asserting the "sky is not falling" and there is no evidence man is causing global warming.

The new letter said the facts are simple: "The sky is not falling; the Earth has been cooling for 10 years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them.

"The finest meteorologists in the world cannot predict the weather two weeks in advance, let alone the climate for the rest of the century. Can Al Gore? Can John Holdren? We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc, but in fact THERE IS NO SUCH EVIDENCE; IT DOESN'T EXIST."

The [cap & trade] legislation would, however, "cripple the U.S. economy, putting us at a disadvantage compared to our competitors," the scientists warned.

-D

In the July 2009 issue of Popular Science, editor Mark Jannot writes things like:

It's clear that the Earth is warming, and that a primary contributing factor is the greenhouse gasses that our march of progress has spewed into the atmosphere. We certainly need to...mitigate the damage all that CO2 is likely to cause.

It's mind-boggling that an editor of a science magazine can make statements like that. Can he really not know that CO2 isn't a pullutant and is vital to life? Can he really be unware of all the scientists who show humans aren't causing warming and in fact Earth may be cooling? Talk about bad science or being a True Believer. -D

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

If the Waxman-Markey global warming bill becomes law, it will have a devastating impact on people but virtually no impact on the planet.

It's a massive energy tax in disguise that promises job losses, income cuts and a sharp left turn toward bigger government, concludes The Heritage Foundation.

By 2035, the bill would:

• Reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion

• Destroy 844,000 jobs annually on average, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by more than 1.9 million jobs

• Raise electricity rates 90 percent after adjusting for inflation

• Raise inflation-adjusted gasoline prices by 74 percent

• Raise residential natural gas prices by 55 percent

• Raise an average family's annual energy bill by $1,500

• Increase inflation-adjusted federal debt by 29 percent ($33,400 additional federal debt per person).

But Waxman-Markey would result in virtually no difference regarding global warming. Climatologists have calculated the impact on temperature to be only hundredths of a degree in 2050 and no more than two-tenths of a degree at the end of the century.

The cost-benefit analysis clearly indicates that this latest Gang Green scheme is all cost and no benefit. Some way to "save" the planet, eh?

-D

MSNBC Headline:

Antarctic ice nearly size of N.Y. City breaks up

Icebergs calve off after ice bridge stabilizing shelf collapsed in early April

Sounds horrible, doesn't it?  I mean, New York City is HUUUUUGE. It's the center of the world! 

Imagine if they had said "three times the size of Yuma AZ" or something like that?  And here's some context:

Antarctica is the coldest, windiest and driest continent. Since all but 2.4% of Antarctica is covered by ice that averages 7,870 feet (2,160 meters) thick, it is also the highest continent. Antarctica is about 4.5 million square miles (14 million square kilometers) in area, which is about the size of the contiguous 48 U.S. states plus about half of Mexico.

So the fraction of that calved represents about .00000006% of Antarctica's 4,500,000 square miiles of ice that is over a mile thick on average.

As Paul notes, calving is a pretty normal process, something echoed by climatologists

Referencing a paper in the scientific journal Nature last month, New Zealand Climate Science Coalition member Dr Willem De Lange, of the Earth Sciences faculty at Waikato University, explains that, in the vicinity of the Wilkins Ice Shelf that has so concerned Greenpeace, “there was a rapid rise in air temperature 40-50 years ago [but] it has been fairly stable since then.  “There are many factors involved in the destabilization of an ice shelf,” said Dr De Lange. “Warmer ocean waters circulating underneath (moving water melts ice faster than warm air), tidal rises and falls, and wave action all contribute to the fracture and eventually breakup of the ice. Now that the ice shelf is breaking up, it will be possible to sample the underlying sediments and determine the history of the shelf. We do not know if the shelf has undergone cycles of expansion and contraction during the last 10,000 years or has been shrinking since the last glacial period. One thing we do know however is that the break up of this shelf is not solely a consequence of current, or even recent weather changes. It is the consequence of changes over long periods, perhaps 1,000-10,000 years in this case, although we can't tell for certain until the necessary data are collected.

Well, at least MSNBC didn't recycle their photos (this time).

Geoengineering. Excerpts:

 Tinkering with Earth's climate to chill runaway global warming - a radical idea once dismissed out of hand - is being discussed by the White House as a potential emergency option, the president's new science adviser said Wednesday...One option raised by Holdren and proposed by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays.

It still is radical, and stupid:

But he said there could be grave side effects. Studies suggest that might include eating away a large chunk of the ozone layer above the poles and causing the Mediterranean and the Mideast to be much drier.

And those are just the predicted problems. Scientists say they worry about side effects that they don't anticipate.

Scare tactics:

He and many experts believe that warming of a few degrees more would lead to disastrous drought conditions and food shortages in some regions, rising seas and more powerful coastal storms in others.

Mankind seemed to prosper in past warm periods. It is harder to adapt to cold periods. Cold is harder on food supplies and energy consumption. More scientists are talking about global cooling now. Suppose geoengineering hastens cooling? 

Politicians need to get out of making science policy, or at least put science before politics when making policy. -D

P.S. The Obama "science advisor," on another subject, said:

The U.S. anti-ballistic missile program is not ready to work and shouldn't be used unless it is 100 percent effective. The system, which would be used to shoot down missiles from countries like North Korea or Iran "needs to be essentially perfect ... that's going to be hard to achieve."

Um, if it's "not ready to work" what shot down that satellite last year and why do we have operational anti-ballistic missile ships and bases?

What good are greenhouse gases? Hugh Ross explains that they are part of God’s design in More Than a Theory: Revealing a Testable Model for Creation :

The end products of greenhouse gas removal [through water cycle, plate tectonics and biological processes] - coal, oil, natural gas, limestone, marble, gypsum, phosphates and sand - are all valuable resources for launching and sustaining human civilization...

Fine-tuning this removal to compensate for the increase in solar luminosity demands fine-tuning of all seven factors governing silicate erosion plus all the factors governing the abundance, diversity, growth, decay, extinction and burial of organisms. Furthermore, all this fine-tuning had to be exquisitely timed and regulated throughout the past 3.5 to billion years.

This continual planning and fine-tuning over an extended time period challenges any reasonable naturalistic explanation.

Ross' excellent new book spells out a testable scientific design model. Something that the intelligent design movement at large as been weak on. -D

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.

Read more in Earth on the Brink of an Ice Age. - D

• The Global Warming Hoax
• Global Warming Skeptic Resources
• Is Al Gore's Inconvenient Fiction a $250 Billion Scam?
• Media Ignore Al Gore's Financial Ties to Global Warming
• Creators of carbon credit scheme cashing in on it