The Public Policy
Copenhagen or Bust
Ms. Henny-Penny is back, dizzy with climate warming.
Some time has passed since we’d heard from Ms. Henny-Penny, founder and recording secretary of The Holy Order of The Sky Is Falling, so we went around to the farmyard to see how she was doing. We found her in a state of high excitement. Why so aflutter, we asked:
Ms. H-P: That wonderful U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-moon gave a thrilling speech the other day. He said we have four months to save the planet.
Us: You mean it will burn to a crisp from global warning in four months?
Ms. H-P: No, silly. He was referring to the international climate change conference in Copenhagen in December. That’s when we will pass the international plan to save the planet from global warm — er — climate change.
Us: You had one of those conferences last December and nothing came of it. Then this spring Mr. Obama came back from a G-8 conference proclaiming that all had agreed to cutting carbon emissions by a huge amount by 2050, but no one signed anything.
Ms. H-P: This time it will be different.
Us: How? The Indians recently told Hillary Clinton, thanks-but-no-thanks when she urged them to sign on to an agreement to limit carbon emissions, and the Chinese have always said, “no.”
Ms. H-P: I think THOTSF’s pontiff, Al Gore, may give the keynote address at the Copenhagen conference and that will change minds.
Us: You’re kidding.
Ms. H-P: You skeptics are like Holocaust Deniers, ignoring the facts.
Us: The Holocaust was real and there’s plenty of evidence to prove it. As for global warming or climate change or whatever you want to call it, I have some bad news. A group of distinguished scientists has written an open letter to Congress which declares, “You are being deceived about global warming. 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 become an embarrassment to them.”
Ms. H-P: That’s just what you think.
Us: No, it’s what such scientists as Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT, and Robert Austin and William Happer, both professors of physics at Princeton, and several others say in their letter.
Ms. H-P: Nevertheless, it’s better to be safe than sorry and if the Senate will pass the cap-and-trade bill we’ll all be safer.
Us: The only thing THAT would do is add to everyone’s electricity bills and cripple our economy.Of course it would also give Congress and the administration a new pot of money to dole out to favored interests.
About the Author
Peter Hannaford was closely associated for a number of years with the late President Reagan, beginning in the California Governor’s office. His latest book is Presidential Retreats.
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GringoBob | 9.30.09 @ 8:39AM
amen Mr Hannaford - over 35,000 PhD's and scients have signed up against the alarmists and they continue to deny there could possibly be an alternative point of view or cause of global warming
http://StopEPA.com
http://Group912.org
owyheewine| 9.30.09 @ 9:15AM
I'm reading a fascinating book by Ian Plimer, an earth scientist from Australia,"Heaven and Earth The missing science of clomate change". It lays out in detail the huge numbert of factors that affect the climate, all of which are more important than CO2. I have to wonder about the intellectual capacity of scientists that have bought in to the silliness of the greenhouse gas fantasy. Science challenged politicians have some excuse given their limited mental abilities, but science educated professionals have to be promoting job opportunuties. Any list of supporting scientists is almost exclusively made up of government supported parasites.
Ray| 9.30.09 @ 12:11PM
owyheewine, the drive for 'climate change" CO2 reductions isn't to actually change anything, it's to impose control over something.
You see, the people who want to impose control over CO2 emissions is doing so solely because they WANT that control. They know that they can't actually control the climate, but they believe that they CAN, and therefor SHOULD, control something. In this case, they want to control the energy production of the entire world.
The use "global warming" is just an excuse to legitimize that control by claiming that one small component of climate, CO2, is what's causing the climate to change, and if we control CO2 we can, and should, control the climate, both now and in the future.
Of course, the control freaks never tell people that climate is actually a combined series of inter-connected forces where the dominant force is the solar radiation. But we can't actually control the sun's output, so they even mention it. It's the the same with current wind speed and direction, atmospheric moisture content, or any other component of climate that they don't have the ability to control (yet).
The only consistency in all of their arguments is CONTROL! We CAN control something, therefor we MUST control something. This is why I call them control freaks, because that's just what they are.
Sarah| 9.30.09 @ 1:02PM
It was just over two decades ago that I was first introduced to this whole global warming bunk. While I was a mere sophomore in high school at the time, even with my limited education I knew that it was all such a pile of hooey. I came home and said as much to my father, a physicist. He agreed with me, but said that there would be much to learn about the whole possible phenomenon in the future. And boy, howdy was he right.
For twenty years I've been stuck on that same mantra - that global warming is a crock. I can't count how many times I've been ridiculed by my supposed peers for that opinion. I've never seen an Inconvenient Truth, and would probably vomit in my popcorn if I tried.
How is it that a half-educated female living in the 1980s can come to the correct conclusion without even having half of the facts that we have today? While hundreds of supposedly educated national leaders with reams of information at their fingertips come to the most ridiculous conclusion today?
The mind, it boggles.
Tom| 9.30.09 @ 1:46PM
The alarmists cannot now refute the hypothesis of AGW, so the scam is perpetuated, they would lose too much face should they do so.
Carbon Credits, who the heck thought up that? - the 'business' of carbon credit trading is now very lucrative for some (Al Gore) why shut down the money printer?
Politics, and the culture of fear, if people are afraid and politicians can show how 'alarmed and caring' they are, then power is vested in them through the ballot box.
In order for the politicians to frighten the people, they funnel money towards 'research', this research tells the politicians what they want to hear,ie the sky is falling in, we're all doomed etc.
The whole merry-go-round is self perpetuating.
In order to show 'leadership' and in an effort to show their voters back at home how concerned they are, the politician struts the world stage, talking to others in the same BS language of World Rescue from AGW. Message being that man is bad, and we politicians can save you!
And so it goes........ .
Meanwhile the Earth cools and it looks as though the NE USA is in for a cold winter, I believe that the UK is in for a little of the same, wrap up warm folks!
Tom,
England.
Marc Jeric| 9.30.09 @ 4:07PM
1) There was first in the 1970's the global cooling scam (see e.g. Newsweek April 28 1975 on the Internet); the government-paid scientists (90% of them are rejects of private enterprise) recommended to fight the new ice age by sending our war planes to cover the polar ice with soot in order to increase solar heat and so prevent crushing of New York skyscrapers by the new glaciers;
2) When that did not work we had the global warming hoax in the 1990's, proclaimed by mainly the same government-paid scientists (Dr. Hansen of the NOAA, for example); to prevent the massive heating, fires, flooding of coastal cities, disappearance of Florida, California, and Caribbean islands, massive hurricanes, global famine, and other catastrophic events we should nationalize oil and gas and coal and electricity companies;
3) after 11 years of considerable cooling we are now faced with the climate change flimflam where whatever happens with our climate we should nationalize oil and gas and coal and electricity companies; and why not our banks, car and insurance companies while we are at it. To prevent this catastrophe the best vehicle presumably is international agreements enforced by the United Nations world government.
As for the influence of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas: on a normal day the atmosphere contains 10,000 ppm (parts per million) of water vapor and about 300 ppm of carbon dioxide. The government-paid scientists say that an increase of 100 ppm of CO2 over the next 50 years will result in a catastrophic warming. The thermal absorptivity of water vapor is 4 times larger than that of carbon dioxide; it follows that the CO2 increase will increase the overall thermal absorptivity of the mixture by about 1/4 of one percent. The production of methane from livestock flatulence and the rotting swamps (called "wetlands" by the environmentalists) vastly surpasses the influence of human-produced CO2.
There is the Global Warming Petition Project (see Internet) where 31,478 US independent scientists declared that there is no anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming; of these 9,029 are scientists with PhD degrees. Our environmentalists tried to sabotage this effort by submiiting phony names with phoney degrees - and then claimed the whole effort by the Petition scientists was a fraud. It took us 3 years and a lot of private money to verify the credentials of all the signatories and clean up the Petition of those saboteurs. See also Manhattan Declaration with more such signatories, plus a large number of scientific groups from other countries who state the same.
I am one of these signatories, MS and PhD degrees from UCLA, with majors in thermodynamics and heat & mass transfer.
I think to fight this communist attempt to secure a permanent hold on power should not be fought on the narrow grounds of more taxes - that is the losing proposition; where about 50% of the population is on some kind of welfare we will always be outvoted. The battle should be fought and won on the firm scientific basis.
4) And now we have "cap™" power grab.
SCAM - HOAX - FLIMFLAM - POWER GRAB!!!
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