Daily Caller

But why are bed bugs back? Though they’ve been sucking humans’ blood since at least ancient Greece, bed bugs became virtually extinct in America following the invention of pesticide DDT.

There were almost no bed bugs in the United States between World War II and the mid-1990s.

Around when bed bugs started their resurgence, Congress passed a major pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes of chemicals that had been effective bed bug killers.

The debate isn’t over long-banned DDT, since modern bed bugs have developed a tolerance for that chemical. But in the pre-1996 regime, experts say, bed bugs were “collateral damage” from broader and more aggressive use of now-banned pesticides like Malathion and Propoxur.

Now some health officials are clamoring to bring those chemicals back to help solve the bed bug “emergency.” Meanwhile, EPA bureaucrats have downplayed the idea and environmentalists are pushing hard against the effort, citing safety concerns. (more…)

Michelle Malkin:

It’s not enough that the White House is moving to lock up hundreds of millions of acres of land in the name of environmental protection. The Obama administration’s neon-green radicals are also training their sights on the deep-blue seas. The president’s grabby-handed bureaucrats have been empowered through executive order to seize unprecedented control from states and localities over “conservation, economic activity, user conflict and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts and the Great Lakes.”

Democrats have tried and failed to pass “comprehensive” federal oceans-management legislation five years in a row. The so-called “Oceans 21” bill, sponsored by Democratic representative Sam Farr of California, went nowhere fast. Among the top reasons: bipartisan concerns about the economic impact of closing off widespread access to recreational fishing. The bill also would have handed environmentalists another punitive litigation weapon under the guise of “ecosystem management.” Instead of accepting defeat, the green lobby simply circumvented the legislative process altogether.

An example of liberal fascism. Remember, the left whining about Bush shredding the Constitution?

In late July, President Obama established a behemoth 27-member “National Ocean Council” with the stroke of a pen. Farr gloated: “We already have a Clean Air Act and a Clean Water Act. With today’s executive order, President Obama in effect creates a Clean Ocean Act.” And not a single hearing needed to be held. Not a single amendment considered. Not a single vote cast. Who gives a flying fish about transparency and the deliberative process? The oceans are dying!The panel will have the power to implement “coastal and marine spatial plans” and to ensure that all executive agencies, departments, and offices abide by their determinations. The panel has also been granted authority to establish regional advisory committees that overlap with the existing regional and local authorities that govern marine and coastal planning.

No wonder the anti-growth, anti-development, anti-jobs zealots are cheering. The National Ocean Council is co-chaired by wackadoodle science czar John Holdren (notorious for his cheerful musings about eugenics, mass sterilization, and forced abortions to protect Mother Earth, and for hyping weather catastrophes and demographic disasters in the 1970s with his population-control-freak pals Paul and Anne Ehrlich) and White House Council on Environmental Quality head Nancy Sutley (best known as the immediate boss of disgraced green-jobs czar/avowed Communist Van Jones).

HT: Maggie’s Farm

Terry Anderson in the WSJ:

As oil continues to gush from BP’s Macondo well and politicians posture, it is time for us to ask why we are drilling in such risky places when there is oil available elsewhere. The answer lies in the mantra NIMBY—”not in my back yard.”

BP was drilling for oil in 5,000 feet of water in the Mississippi Trench, more than 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The site was leased in March 2008 from the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service. The area is one of an increasingly limited number of places available for oil and gas development in the United States.

Because most private lands have been explored, public lands offer the most potential for oil and gas development. However, the NIMBY principle has significantly restricted development on those lands. According to 2008 Energy Department figures, nearly 80% of potentially oil-rich offshore lands are off limits to oil and gas development, and 60% of onshore lands are.

In my backyard, Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester have introduced a bill aimed at halting oil and gas exploration in the Flathead River drainage area near Glacier National Park. They have already pressured Chevron and ConocoPhillips to relinquish their exploration leases on the land, placing 75% of the leases off limits to development.

And of course, there is the perennially contentious issue of drilling in ANWR, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The government estimates that the area could produce 750,000 barrels of oil per day.

Whether more exploration on federal lands would make the U.S. energy independent is debatable, but more onshore development would certainly be safer. In early June there was a blowout in western Pennsylvania. Did you see it on the nightly news? No, because it was capped in 16 hours. The Texas Railroad Commission, the state agency that regulates oil and gas production there, recorded 102 blowouts of oil and gas wells since the start of 2006, resulting in 10 fires, 12 injuries, and two deaths. None of those made the nightly news either. The largest oil spill on Alaska’s North Slope in 2006 was from a pipeline leak. It dumped only 6,357 barrels and had no disastrous impacts.

Drilling can be done with greater environmental sensitivity onshore. For many years the Audubon Society actually allowed oil companies to pump oil for its privately owned sanctuaries in Louisiana and Michigan, but did so with strict requirements on the oil companies so that they would not disturb the bird habitat.

Explaining the process years ago, one sanctuary manager said, “when the cranes punched in, the hard hats have to punch out.” Until the Gulf blowout, Audubon was even considering leasing more land for development on the Louisiana coast under such strict terms.

When kids play baseball, there is a risk that windows will get broken. Playing on baseball fields rather than in sand lots, however, lowers the risk considerably. Putting so much onshore land off limits to oil and gas development is like closing baseball parks. More windows will be broken and more blowouts result where they are difficult to prevent and stop.

Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, launched the modern environmental movement and led to the banning of DDT in much of Africa. It can be destructive when misused, but can otherwise save lives.

But now that has changed.

…Some commentators and activists have raised concerns about DDT contaminating the environment if it is used in vector control. As with the other insecticides used in IRS, DDT causes minimal or zero contamination of the wider environment.

Because DDT does not escape into the wider environment, it poses little or no threat to wildlife. Results from the 2008 MIS demonstrated the dramatic progress Zambia is making in its fight to control malaria. Since 2006, malaria parasite prevalence in children has been reduced by 50 percent, and moderate to severe anemia has been reduced by more than 60 percent.

DDT is not only highly effective in malaria control, but it is also significantly cheaper than the other insecticides that are suitable for indoor residual spraying (IRS). It is easy to use and safe for both the residents of houses sprayed and the sprayers themselves.

More people than ever are sleeping under bed nets and two-thirds of all households are protected by at least one ITN or indoor residual spraying. Use of DDT to fight malaria has been increasing since it was endorsed in 2006 by the World Health Organization and the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI), a U.S. aid program launched by former President Bush.

USAID provides approximately $26 million per year to Malawi under PMI to purchase and distribute about 1, 600, 000 long life insecticide-treated bed nets, according to its Malawi office fact sheet.

…rules must be obeyed. Where’s the boss to stop this nonsense?

Outside the Beltway:

One of the most frequently heard stories coming out of the Gulf Region over the past two months is the extent to which bureaucracy is standing in the way of efforts to cleanup the oil spill and prevent it from causing further damage to coast areas. The most recent example of that can be seen in the Coast Guard’s order barring ships designed to suck the oil off the water from sailing:

Eight days ago, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal ordered barges to begin vacuuming crude oil out of his state’s oil-soaked waters. Today, against the governor’s wishes, those barges sat idle, even as more oil flowed toward the Louisiana shore.

“It’s the most frustrating thing,” the Republican governor said today in Buras, La. “Literally, yesterday morning we found out that they were halting all of these barges.”

Sixteen barges sat stationary today, although they were sucking up thousands of gallons of BP’s oil as recently as Tuesday. Workers in hazmat suits and gas masks pumped the oil out of the Louisiana waters and into steel tanks. It was a homegrown idea that seemed to be effective at collecting the thick gunk.

“These barges work. You’ve seen them work. You’ve seen them suck oil out of the water,” said Jindal.

So why stop now?

“The Coast Guard came and shut them down,” Jindal said. “You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, ‘Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil.’”

A Coast Guard representative told ABC News today that it shares the same goal as the governor.

“We are all in this together. The enemy is the oil,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer.

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

I’m not against martime safety, of course, but it strikes me as more than a little absurd that the Coast Guard it worry about life vests and fire extinguishers while the Governor of Louisiana is worrying about stopping the oil from entering the Louisiana marshes. At the very least, it would seem reasonable that, in an emergency situation such as the one the Gulf Coast has been in since April 20th, the enforcement of rules like these could be modified so that they don’t interfere with actual productive work.

If there is a reason to fault the Federal response to the oil spill, I think it can be found in actions like this where the blind adherence to rules stands in the way of reasonable efforts to get the job done.

Andrew Malcolm in the LA Times:

…Trust me, the president said, tomorrow I’m going to give those BP execs what-for. As CBS’ Mark Knoller noted on his Twitter account, the president has allotted exactly 20 whole minutes this morning — 1,200 fleeting seconds — to his first-ever conversation with the corporation responsible for the disaster.

Then, he’s got an important lunch with Joe “I Witnessed the World Cup’s First Tie” Biden.

Well, just-believe-in-my-change-to-believe-in may have been good enough to win Obama’s party primaries and the general election in 2008 and drag along into office enormous congressional majorities of fellow party travelers.

But after yelling “JOBS!” for a year and getting a protracted Democratic intra-party fight over Obama’s beloved healthcare instead, Americans wanted some Oval Office specifics Tuesday evening on stopping the uncontrolled undersea oil escape.

Instead, Obama was like a Harvard-trained nurse talking vacation to a new patient bleeding all over the ER floor. Hello, could we please stop the blood flow here before we discuss the long-term recovery?

Obama’s delivery did not really come alive until the end when the ex-community organizer got into his favorite Big Picture stuff. Memo to American Homeowners: Do not call Obama over to fix your leaking roof – or pipe. Have him design a new house, no, better yet an entire neighborhood or city from scratch.

Following the advice of his chief of staff, Rahm “I Got a Rent-Free Apartment from a BP Adviser” Emanuel, Obama is determined to leave no crisis unused. When he got into the decades-long fossil fuel addiction rehab stuff, his eyes shone. His delivery punched up.

Now, that is an issue that requires greatness. Another galactic reform out of Hyde Park. It sounds swell unless mega-trillion-dollar federal deficits are on your mind, which voter polls now show ranks with terrorism as Americans’ top fears.

Obama’s historic presidential campaign was not only big in terms of an unprecedented three-quarters of a billion dollars to win. It was about Big Promises. He was going to change America, radically reform the entire education system, healthcare, comb the entire federal budget line-by-line, oh, and change the 200-year-old partisan ways of the capitol. About the only big change the White Sox fan didn’t promise was getting the Cubs a World Series ring.

Robert Bryce in the Washington Post:

Americans are being inundated with claims about renewable and alternative energy. Advocates for these technologies say that if we jettison fossil fuels, we’ll breathe easier, stop global warming and revolutionize our economy. Yes, “green” energy has great emotional and political appeal. But before we wrap all our hopes — and subsidies — in it, let’s take a hard look at some common misconceptions about what “green” means.

1. Solar and wind power are the greenest of them all.

Unfortunately, solar and wind technologies require huge amounts of land to deliver relatively small amounts of energy, disrupting natural habitats. Even an aging natural gas well producing 60,000 cubic feet per day generates more than 20 times the watts per square meter of a wind turbine. A nuclear power plant cranks out about 56 watts per square meter, eight times as much as is derived from solar photovoltaic installations. The real estate that wind and solar energy demand led the Nature Conservancy to issue a report last year critical of “energy sprawl,” including tens of thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines needed to carry electricity from wind and solar installations to distant cities.

Nor does wind energy substantially reduce CO2 emissions. Since the wind doesn’t always blow, utilities must use gas- or coal-fired generators to offset wind’s unreliability. The result is minimal — or no — carbon dioxide reduction.

Denmark, the poster child for wind energy boosters, more than doubled its production of wind energy between 1999 and 2007. Yet data from Energinet.dk, the operator of Denmark’s natural gas and electricity grids, show that carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation in 2007 were at about the same level as they were back in 1990, before the country began its frenzied construction of turbines. Denmark has done a good job of keeping its overall carbon dioxide emissions flat, but that is in large part because of near-zero population growth and exorbitant energy taxes, not wind energy. And through 2017, the Danes foresee no decrease in carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation.

2. Going green will reduce our dependence on imports from unsavory regimes.

In the new green economy, batteries are not included. Neither are many of the “rare earth” elements that are essential (more…)

Dan Neil in the LA Times:

This may come as something of a shock, but I am a liberal progressive environmental do-gooder. I know. Just keep breathing. You’ll come around.

I am also a car guy. As such, I am precisely the sort of prospect Renault means to cultivate in its film “Drive the Change” (Publicis), a two-minute corporate manifesto that declares the company’s intention to radically reinvent personal mobility around electric-vehicle technology. The film debuted at the Frankfurt auto show in September, and various “Drive the Change” campaign works — multiplexed across TV, Web and social media formats — will circulate globally as Renault ramps up to sell four new electric models by 2011. Meanwhile, Renault’s partner, Nissan, is on track to launch the Leaf EV in the U.S. by the end of this year, with an eventual sales goal of 150,000 annually.

Wow. Here in the land of the 900-cfm carburetor and 7-yard-long pickup? As a tree-hugging gear head, I should be delighted. Electric vehicles are fast, clean — even if you account for the electricity from coal-fired power plants, the so-called long tailpipe — and they represent the best means to efficiently convert multiple renewable energy pathways (wind, solar, biomass, hydro) to transportation.

So why do I want to kick Renault in the shin?

Because the “Drive the Change” campaign epitomizes, to the point of self-parody, all the worst characterizations the Reactionary Right holds dear about the Loony Left (of which I am, again, a card-carrying member): highhanded, holier-than-thou, gratingly preachy, salvationist, tone-deaf, collectivist. And in several imputations in this film, flat-out wrong.

I honor Renault/Nissan’s commitment to the environment, but the buttonholing sanctimony only makes me want to set an oil derrick on fire.

U2 guitarist David Evans, aka The Edge, wants to build five homes on a Malibu ridge. He’s even built a website to smooth the way.

LA Times columnist Steve Lopez isn’t persuaded.

The Malibu area has been buzzing since a video was added to The Edge’s website in the last several weeks, perhaps in anticipation of an upcoming California Coastal Commission hearing on the proposal. Against a gag-inducing track of New Age music, with birds tweeting in the background, fawning proponents of The Edge’s plans praise the project. His supporters include Bonny Reiss, Gov. Schwarzenegger’s former senior advisor, and, more surprisingly, Mark Massara, head of the Sierra Club’s Great Coastal Places Campaign.

“It’s going to take those visionary leaders being associated with projects like these, that are going to show how to make the California coastline a model of sustainability,” Massara says on the video, in which he all but encourages the Coastal Commission to embrace the proposal.

Clearly The Edge is lining up all the political muscle and environmentalist star power he possibly can. He’s even got a well-connected PR and lobbying firm — California Strategies — backing him up.

And that combination of clout and slick marketing is part of what riles Malibu City Councilman Jefferson Wagner. Although the compound would be outside Malibu city limits, it would require major expansion of a road within the city. Wagner is not inclined to vote in favor, and he’s not a fan of the website testimonial, which makes no mention of all the dust in the wind there’d be once the bulldozers take the mountain.

“It’s a sales-pitch video,” said Wagner, a local surfing legend who has his own nickname — Zuma Jay.

He called the video The Edge’s way of saying: “I’m doing the right thing.”

“But if he was doing the right thing,” Wagner went on, “he wouldn’t need that video, right?”

Not necessarily. To some greenies, the only good development is no development.

John Droz Jr. explains the limitations of using computers to predict anything, let along complicated climate projections.

…despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we aren’t really being run by pandering politicians, self-serving lobbyists, fanatical environmentalists, and greedy Wall Street manipulators. They are the illusion.

There is another even more powerful (but much less visible) agent behind all of these puppets.

The person behind the screen is the computer programmer. And, just like in the Wizard of OZ, they do not want you to look at this real controller.

I’ll probably have to turn in my membership card, but as a computer programmer (and physicist and environmental activist) I’m here to spill the beans about the Wiz.

…

My layperson explanation is that computer programming is all about making assumptions, and then converting these into mathematical equations.

The big picture question is this: Is it really possible to accurately convert complex real-world situations into ones and zeros? Hal may think so, but higher processing brains say no. Yet this is continuously attempted, with very limited success. Let’s pull the screen back a bit more.

We’ll start with an example about how such a model makes assumptions.

One of the computer programs I wrote was for debt collectors. A typical scenario was that a debtor was given a date to make a payment and the collection company didn’t receive it on time. What response is then appropriate?

In such a circumstance the computer program typically makes an automatic contact with the debtor. (Remember there are thousands of these debtors, and it would be prohibitively time consuming for an agency person to manually check into and follow up each case.)

So what to say in this correspondence to the debtor? Well, it comes down to the assumptions made by the computer programmer.

The programmer tries to simplify such situations into mathematical options. In this case they may decide that the question is: “Does the debtor have the money to make this payment: yes or no?” This relatively basic choice then leads to a Boolean progression within the program.

How does the programmer (model) decide on yes or no? Well, other indicators would be used (e.g., were prior payments made on time) to come up with a statistical probability.

Of course, any computer model is not one set of choices, but rather a whole series of yes/no (if/or) calculations that lead to a conclusion. In a complex situation (e.g., debt collection, climate change, or financial derivatives) there could easily be a hundred such choices to deal with.

To understand the implications of that, let’s just consider the case where there are ten such decision points — each with a “yes” or “no” answer. At the end of such a pipeline, that means that there are 2¹⁰ (i.e., 1024) possible results. That’s a lot of different potential conclusions.

Unfortunately, there are actually many more possibilities! The assumption that this debtor situation could be condensed down to a “yes” or “no” answer is not accurate. There are several other real situations that fall outside of “yes” or “no.”

For instance, what if the debtor never got a notice in the first place that the amount was due by the date the agency is monitoring? Or what if the debtor sent the money and it got lost in transition? Or what if the debtor made the payment to the original person they owed, rather than the collection agency? Or what if the debtor sent in the money on time, and the collection agency incorrectly didn’t credit the debtor for the payment? Etc., etc.

Read on.

Jonah Goldberg:

…Bolivian president Evo Morales was interviewed by Al Jazeera television while in Copenhagen. “The principal obstacle to combating climate change is capitalism,” he explained. “Until we put an end to capitalism, it will continue to be a big obstacle for life and humanity.”

Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe proclaimed in a speech: “When these capitalist gods of carbon burp and belch their dangerous emissions, it’s we, the lesser mortals of the developing sphere, who gasp and sink and eventually die.”

Right. That is, unless Mugabe kills them first.

The big name in the anti-capitalism club was, of course, Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan national-socialist strongman. In a typical stem-winder, he belched: “Capitalism is a destructive model that is eradicating life, that threatens to put a definitive end to the human species.”

I don’t know how to say “chutzpah” in Spanish, but you’ve got to hand it to the leader of the world’s No. 5 supplier of oil for bemoaning the system that keeps his regime afloat by buying his product.

Now, I know that nice, moderate progressive types are rolling their eyes at my cynical effort to associate their noble activism with support for socialism and thugs. Fair enough. Let us concede that many, perhaps even most, proponents of draconian restrictions on carbon emissions have no sympathy for socialist dictators and do not want to chuck capitalism in the dustbin of history. But surely it should trouble these responsible greens that they’re in bed with a Star Wars cantina of villains and monsters.

Also, if environmentalists want to avoid the “watermelon” charge (“green on the outside, red on the inside”), maybe the delegates and activists in the audience shouldn’t have given Chávez such a loud and boisterous round of applause? Perhaps the folks who gave him a standing ovation didn’t help either? (more…)

I remember this from the giddy days of the Whole Earth Catalog when there were so many cool utopian ideas floating around.

Then most of us grew up. Byron York explains:

In the high desert of central Arizona, more than five thousand miles from the global-warming summit in Copenhagen, sits an aging and unfinished vision of the enviro-friendly, sustainable life that some climate change activists foresee for us all. It’s called Arcosanti, created in 1970 by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri, and it is the prototype of a green community of the future.

The only problem is, it doesn’t work. And it never did.

Arcosanti is an “arcology,” a word Soleri coined by combining “architecture” and “ecology.” In Soleri’s vision, an arcology is a self-contained city in which hundreds of thousands of people live in a small space, their needs met by green energy sources, recycled and sustainable products, and carefully planned social and cultural events. There are — G0d forbid — no cars.

In a Soleri design, masses of people are packed into the small-footprint arcology so that the land surrounding the community can remain pristine, unpolluted by human touch. It was an idea much in fashion a few decades back. “As urban architecture, Arcosanti is probably the most important experiment undertaken in our lifetime,” wrote Newsweek in 1976.

Soleri designed models of many futuristic communities, guided by his intense dislike of U.S.-style development. “The ‘American Dream,’ as physically embodied in the single-family house,” he once wrote, “has to be scrapped and reinvented in terms which are coherent with the human and biospheric reality.”

Despite his many designs, the only community Soleri ever attempted to build is here, on the edge of the Agua Fria River canyon about 70 miles north of Phoenix.

Still, Soleri managed to win the National Design award for Lifetime Achievement.

LA is deep in the red, but has money for this.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will lead a delegation of nearly a dozen Los Angeles officials to Copenhagen this week as part of a business and environmental trip tied to the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

Villaraigosa will leave Saturday for his first stop in Berlin, where he will meet with government and business leaders involved in the solar power movement.

“The mayor hopes to advance some talks that have been going on and talk of the benefits that are available in Los Angeles with tax breaks in economic zones and the Community Redevelopment areas,” spokeswoman Sarah Hamilton said Monday.

Europe and the 27 countries in the European Economic Community account for $30 billion in business in Los Angeles and, Villaraigosa said, there is wide interest in what Los Angeles has done on the environmental front.

“In four years – and no one thought it was possible – the DWP has gone from 4 percent renewables to 15 percent and we are looking to get to 20 percent,” Villaraigosa told a group of environmental leaders Monday meeting in his office, where he talked of his plans for the summit.

Yep, and rates have shot up. Way to go, Speedy.

From Pajamas Media:

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed ^[1] three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal — for nearly three years — to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “Climategate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer code, and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

All of that material, and that sought for years by CEI, goes to the heart of the scientific claims and campaign underpinning the Kyoto Protocol, its planned successor treaty, “cap-and-trade” legislation, and the EPA’s threatened regulatory campaign to impose similar measures through the back door.

CEI sought the following documents, among others. NASA’s failure to provide them within thirty days will prompt CEI to file suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia:

– Internal discussions about NASA’s quiet correction of its false historical U.S. temperature records after two Canadian researchers discovered a key statistical error, specifically: discussion about whether and why to correct certain records, how to do so, the impact, or wisdom, or potential (or real) fallout there from or reaction to doing so (requested August 2007).

– Internal discussions relating to the email sent to James Hansen and/or Reto A. Ruedy from a Stephen (Steve) McIntyre calling their attention to the errors in NASA/GISS online temperature data (August 2007).

– Those relating to the content, importance, or propriety of workday-hour posts or entries by GISS/NASA employee Gavin A. Schmidt on the weblog or “blog” RealClimate, which is owned by the advocacy Environmental Media Services and was started as an effort to defend the debunked “Hockey Stick” that is so central to the CRU files. RealClimate.org is implicated in the leaked files and expressly offered as a tool to be used “in any way you think would be helpful” to a certain advocacy campaign, including an assertion of Schmidt’s active involvement in, e.g., delaying and/or screening out unhelpful input by “skeptics” attempting to comment on claims made on the website.

This, and the related political activism engaged in, are inappropriate behavior for a taxpayer-funded employee, particularly on taxpayer time. These documents were requested in January 2007 and NASA/GISS have refused to date to comply with their legal obligation to produce responsive documents.

by Burt Prelutsky

When Barack Obama was campaigning — not that he’s ever stopped — back in 2008, he made a number of promises.  As we all know, like a cad on the make, he was only trying to get us in the sack.  Once he had his way with us, he barely remembered our name, let alone his various vows.

            Some of the things he swore to included keeping lobbyists out of his administration, providing five days for the public to review pending legislation and a bi-partisan approach to problem-solving.  Instead, lobbyists, particularly those representing unions, have freer access to the Oval Office than Michelle and the kids.  Not only is the public not given time to digest major legislation, but neither are the legislators.  Early on, you may recall, Congress was given less than 24 hours to vote on an 1100-page, trillion dollar, so-called stimulus bill; more recently, when it came to health care, Obama was telling the sheep on Capitol Hill to vote even before an actual bill was written!

            So far as bi-partisanship is concerned, the Republicans have been banished to Washington’s equivalent of Siberia.  These days, bi-partisanship simply means that  David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel are in agreement.

            There is one promise, however, that Obama has kept.  He vowed transparency, and anyone who can’t plainly see what the rock star and his left-wing groupies (Axelrod, Emanuel, Jeff Jones, Valerie Jarrett, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn) are up to is simply spending too much time watching “American Idol” and college football.

            Consider, if you will, the way that Obama has managed to take the spotlight off his attempt to grab control of one-sixth of the nation’s economy that’s devoted to health care and to put the kibosh on conservative talk radio and free access to the Internet.  All he had to do was declare war on Fox News.  Just like that, the mass media, otherwise known as faux news, turned its attention to the phoniest battle since Gorgeous George and the Super Swedish Angel hung up their wrestling tights.

            The way the media carried on, you’d have thought Obama was trying to decide whether to send 40,000 additional troops to fight in Afghanistan or to invade Fox.

            On the other hand, it is just possible that Obama’s feud with Fox merely proves that he is as thin-skinned and as vain as some of us have suspected all along, which would fit right in with the narcissism that his constant TV appearances suggests.  Not since FDR have we had a president so in love with the sound of his own voice.  Not since Jimmy Carter have we had a president so convinced of his own saintliness.

            Although Obama is a prime example of egomania, liberals generally hold themselves and one another in such preposterously high regard that normal people — in other words, conservatives — can only laugh.

            For instance, because liberals are always blathering on about how much they love Mother Nature and how concerned they are about ecology, they are never asked to explain why they are so much better at talking the talk than they are at walking the walk.  It’s not just the obvious phonies, either — elitists such as Al Gore, Arianna Huffington, Michael Moore, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Kennedy, Jr., who live in mansions and fly around in private jets, leaving carbon footprints the equivalent of fair-sized communities in their wake — that I have in mind.

            I’m also referring to the crowd that showed up in Washington for Obama’s coronation and left our nation’s capitol looking like a pigsty.

            I’m thinking of the California Coastal Commission, the folks entrusted with keeping the Golden State’s coastline pristine, but who can always be convinced, for the right price, to come up with a variance.

            Another example of ecological hypocrisy involves those young Latinos called taggers and graffiti artists by liberals; vandals and punks by the rest of us.  I have actually heard lefties refer to the spray-painted messes these jerks create as native art.  But, naturally, they never seem to commission the youthful Rembrandts to come out and decorate their fences, walls and garages.

            While on the subject, we shouldn’t overlook the greenies who populate Hollywood and who never once gave George W. Bush a thumbs-up for taking out Saddam Hussein even though his setting fire to the oilfields of Kuwait was the single greatest man-made ecological disaster in history, rivaled only by Adam Sandler’s 30-odd movies.

            Finally we come to nature boy himself, Robert Redford.  Although I am a free market capitalist and believe that Redford should be allowed to build a ski resort, a giant cell phone tower or even have his head carved out of a mountainside, if he chooses to on his own land, I have to question the environmental bona fides of a guy who creates a film festival in the snow-covered hinterlands of Utah.

            I mean, every year, upwards of 50,000 people jet in from all over the world for the Sundance Film Festival.  It may be swell for the Utah economy to have all those coke-sniffing, fossil fuel-burning, mugs showing up to watch bad movies and make distribution deals, but if you were really concerned about preserving the environment, wouldn’t it make more sense for these clucks to stay home and watch the movies on their TV sets the way the rest of us do?

            In my experience, which consists of watching movies on airplanes, a movie that stinks at sea level reeks just as badly at 30,000 feet.  Otherwise, why settle for Utah?  It would make far more sense to hold a film festival atop Mt. Everest.

From Maggie’s Farm.

What follows is a general theory of natural climate variation supported by observation of the changing temperature of the atmosphere and the sea between 1948 and September 2009. This work suggests that strong warming after 1978 is an entirely natural phenomenon.

“Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. The sun is much too sultry and one must avoid its ultry violet rays”. Noel Coward 1932.

Perhaps Noel Coward’s observation is particularly pertinent in the southern hemisphere where there is less ozone to absorb UVB. During the warming mode, protective ice crystals evaporate, allowing the surface to warm. Most of the warming activity post 1978 has been in the southern hemisphere in late winter and spring. This warming activity is plainly driven by shifts in atmospheric pressure affecting vortex activity. There are two climate modes:

The Warming Mode:

There is a shift of the atmosphere from the poles towards mid and low latitudes under electromagnetic forcing of ionized air.

Weakening of the polar vortexes curtails the flow of ionized nitrogen into the upper stratosphere allowing the survival of oxygen ions and increased ozone formation.

Intermixing of ozone into the upper troposphere raises temperature in the ice cloud zone. Ice crystals evaporate.
More solar radiation reaches the surface which warms.

In the southern hemisphere 200hpa temperature rises much more than in the northern hemisphere exhibiting strong equinoctial maxima.
Peak anomalies in stratospheric temperature occur in September-October rather than March.

A southern spring deficit in ice cloud density promotes warming across all southern latitudes which promotes the El Nino pattern of sea surface temperature at the equator.

Read on.

Patrick Michaels in National Review.

Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Then, the president talked tough, saying, “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

This surely isn’t the first time in world history that some president, premier, or pope has attempted to define science and threaten those who disagree. But the truth of the matter is that disagreement, one way or another, is a given. One can selectively cite recent climate data in support of pretty much any point of view, from the rejection of any influence by humankind at all to the wild notion that the world is about to come to an end.

The ease with which anyone can construct just about any climate argument he wants has to do with the inconstant nature of climate itself. The sun warms the earth, but the amount of energy it radiates changes (right now it’s pretty cold). The earth’s surface is dominated by two very different substances — uneven rocks and large, smooth oceans — so internal climate oscillations and accidents happen as well.

Temperatures seesaw up and down depending upon ever-changing currents of air in the tropical atmosphere and oceans, including El Niño in the Pacific and other weather features elsewhere. They can be either cold or warm. When the warm ones are absent or weak for a decade or so — a common occurrence — temperatures may stay the same or even fall. When there’s a huge warm phase in El Niño, global temperatures rise, as they did in 1998, setting records that have yet to be broken.

Finally, there’s carbon dioxide itself. We put it in the air whenever we burn pretty much anything, be it in a power plant or in an automobile. Everything else being equal, that will warm temperatures at the surface and in the lower atmosphere. Just how much is the subject of a great scientific debate that has yet to be resolved.

And everything else is never equal. Cold portions of El Niño and a cold sun can completely halt carbon-dioxide–induced warming (and clearly have for more than ten years now). And this behavior creates a fertile environment for criticism of the projections of computer models for this century.

For those who distrust the motives of radical environmentalists — the various “crises” being but a pretext for government intrusion in our lives — here are two examples that will either make you cringe or laugh darkly.

First, Lord Stern (great name, eh?) wants the world to cut out meat.

People will need to consider turning vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

That’s mild compared with Alex Renton, writing in the UK Guardian, who wants the west to reduce babies.

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of CO_² every year of their lives. In their turn, they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government’s target of an 80% reduction in our emissions by 2050, we need to start reversing our rising rate of population growth immediately.

And if that makes sense, why not start cutting population everywhere? Are condoms not the greenest technology of all?

World population is forecast to peak at 9.2bn by 2050. According to a report by the LSE for the Optimum Population Trust, the lobbying body currently asking parents to “Stop at Two”, it would cost $220m to provide the family planning that would reduce the 2050 population by half a billion, preventing the emission of 34 gigatonnes of carbon. Introducing low-carbon technology for the same result would cost more than $1 trillion.

So why does population control hardly feature on the agendas of the UN bodies or of the governments now committed to tackling climate change? And why do the development and environmental groups shy away from it? The Guardian’s George Monbiot dismisses the topic as a distraction, the obsession largely of “post-reproductive, middle-class white men… a group more responsible for environmental destruction than any other class in history”. David King, the government’s former chief scientific adviser, argues: “The only way to tackle climate change is to change the way energy is used by those of us that have already been born.”

Guilt, self-loathing, righteous piety — can the return of the hairshirt be far off?

Green is the new religion. “Greener than thou” is the new piety. And casting doubt on the belief that mankind is ruining the planet (our abiding sinfulness) is the new heresy.

Blogger Daily Plunge explains how it works.

Expanding on the points I made yesterday about character assassinations, I stumbled onto this blog post by Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Pielke is a liberal environmentalist who believes in the theory of anthropogenic global warming (a.k.a., human caused climate change); however, he’s made the mistake of correcting many of the alarmist talking points such as idea that there’s been a huge increase in weather-related damage due to global warming. Pielke documents how well respected liberal bloggers like RealClimate and Brad Delong are out to destroy anyone they disagree with on this issue. Read about it in his post “Giant Fish, Big Fish, and Minnows of the Liberal Blogosphere.”

Here’s how it works. The really giant fish — public intellectuals like Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman — confer authority on the big fish of the liberal blogosphere. They do so by applauding the work of the big fish and saying that they trust them. This is a useful exchange because the big fish amplify the writings of the giant fish in the blogosphere and do the dirty work of taking down their political opponents by playing some gutter politics that the giant fish would rather not be seen playing. This has the effect of establishing the big fish as people to be listened to, not because they are necessarily right about things, but because the giant fish listen to them and the giant fish set political agendas.

Anyone who disagrees with the talking points of the big fish are then targets of character attacks. There’s no debate. I have no problem with different opinions or lively debate. People are never going to see eye to eye all the time, but these character assassinations campaigns are just leading to massive groupthink. Many of the global warming alarmists have adopted theory as a religion. Believers of the theory like Pielke are treated like Galileo when he stated that the sun was at the center of the universe.

Funny how easily the left accuses the right of intolerance.

The father of Germany’s Green movement was a Nazi and frequent visitor to Dachau.

Harvest time is here again on Germany’s 1.2 million allotments: potatoes have to be hoisted out of the soil and the last of the peas must be plucked.

In the shed, next to the trowel and gloves, there will almost certainly be a well-thumbed copy of the gardeners’ bible written by Alwin Seifert, the country’s organic guru.

Now it emerges that at least some of Seifert’s useful tips in his bestselling book Gärtnern, Ackern-ohne Gift, (Gardening, Working the Soil without Poison) may have been gleaned from his observation of the experimental gardens set up on the grounds around Dachau concentration camp.

Tended by half-starved slave labourers, at least 400 of whom were killed, drowned in the carp pond or trampled into the mud of the latrine trenches, the Dachau gardens were established at the behest of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s security chief, and stretched to 211 blossoming hectares.

Seifert, who after the war became a founder of the Green movement, was one of the top landscape gardeners of the Nazi era. He even had the title Reichslandschaftsanwalt — advocate of the Reich’s Landscape. It was Seifert who managed to persuade the Nazi autobahn planners to make the motorway curve, following the natural contours of the German countryside. The well-connected gardener was also opposed to artificial fertilisers poisoning German soil and went to Dachau, apparently oblivious to the emaciated prisoners, to see what could be done in the gardens and arable fields of the Fatherland.

“The question has to be how much of the information that flowed into his book derived from the research being done in Dachau,” says the Munich-based cultural historian Daniella Seidl, who has been digging in the Bavarian and federal archives. “He was a regular visitor, maintained a correspondence with the head gardener Franz Lippert, and even arranged for a couple from the camp to work in his own household.” Some of the ideas being tried out in the Dachau gardens were certainly adopted by Seifert for use in his own garden in the Tyrol.

First, Oliver Stone is going to make history.

The Academy Award-winning director is shooting a ten part nonfiction series for Showtime about “secret” events in U.S. history.

Stone believes the series will become “the deepest contribution I could ever make in film to my children and the next generation,” he said in a statement to Reuters. “I can only hope a change in our thinking will result.”

Wanna bet he’ll be channeling Howard Zinn?

…his historical takes in the feature film ”JFK” and his Fidel Castro documentary “Comandante” drew criticism, with some slamming his material for being opinionated or flat-out imaginative.

Documentarian Robert Stone is out with Earth Days about the beginning of the environmental movement. From Kenneth Turan’s LA Times review:

A key figure here was Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” attacked the widespread use of pesticides and sounded the first modern alarm about the fragility of the planet. Seen only in newsreels (she died of cancer in 1964), Carson also withstood the kinds of attacks on her conclusions and her politics that all future environmentalists have had to endure.

Rachel Carson’s alarmism about DDT became, in the strident hands of liberals, a death sentence for millions of Africans who died of preventable malaria (the US banished it with DDT).

But liberals never have to apologize — they get celebrated.

Aside from pesticides, another early focus of the movement was overpopulation. Biologist Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” was a major bestseller (there’s a clip of him genially chatting with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show”), and Mills College graduating senior Stephanie Mills caused a national sensation in 1962 when she vowed not to have children in a commencement speech titled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax.”

Paul Ehrlich should be embarassed into hiding, not being interviewed.

Like a crackpot preacher predicting the end of the world, Ehrlich has been spectaularly, specifically wrong.

Here are some of his gems.

• “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines . . . [AND] hundreds of millions of people [including Americans] are going to starve to death.” (1968)
• “Smog disasters” in 1973 might kill 200,000 people in New York and Los Angeles. (1969)
• “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” (1969)
• “Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity . . . in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.” (1976)

As for Stephanie Mills choosing not to procreate, millions of other gullible people believed in Ehrlich’s “population bomb” and chose not to have kids.

Europe is slowly becoming an Islamist continent because Europeans just won’t reproduce. Wacky preachers get laughter and scorn. More dangerous fools continue to get celebrated.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Today’s Americans inherited the wealthiest nation in history — but only because earlier generations learned how to feed, fuel, finance and defend themselves in ways unrivaled elsewhere.

Lately we have forgotten that and instead seem to expect others to do for us what we used to do ourselves.

Take our plentiful, cheap and safe food supply. Long ago, Americans struggled to create farmland out of swamp, forests and deserts, and built dams and canals for irrigation to make possible the world’s most diverse and inexpensive agriculture.

Now in California — the nation’s richest farm state — the population is skyrocketing toward 40 million. Yet hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland this year are going out of production, and with them thousands of jobs.

Why? In times of chronic water shortages, environmentalists have sued to stop irrigation deliveries in order to save threatened two-inch-long delta fish that need infusions of fresh water diverted from agricultural use. And for both environmental and financial reasons, we long ago stopped building canals and dams in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to find sources of replacement irrigation water.

So farmers are asked to produce more food for more people in a desert climate with less water — while environmentalists dream of returning to a pristine 19th-century sparsely populated California of smelt and salmon in their inland rivers. But the end result will be more imported food from less environmentally sound farms abroad.

…such people hold positions of authority.

Today’s “Ask Amy” advice column featured a letter from a couple disturbed that their best friends did not recycle and (horrors!) served them water in single-serve plastic bottles. The writer wanted to know how to deal with this. No doubt, the writer would laugh at the Church Lady for her small mindedness.

Brothers Judd note how the media just can’t bring themselves to give Bush any credit.

EVERY FAILURE OF THE WAR IS DOWN TO W..:

It will take humanity as well as guns to beat the Taliban, says General David Petraeus: David Petraeus, the US general who transformed the campaign in Iraq, has been declared the leading public intellectual. The thinking man’s soldier explains the limitations of shooting and killing (Dominic Lawson, 1/04/09, Times of London)

Sometimes a man’s appearance can be misleading. This one is about 5ft 9in tall, not especially powerful in build; he has ears that stick out and teeth that seem too big for his mouth and he walks with a slightly asymmetric tilt. Yet this is General David Petraeus, the warrior whose “surge” saved America from a humiliating scuttle out of Iraq and who is now the head of United States Central Command (Centcom).Only when Petraeus engages in conversation does everything snap into place. Each of his words is chosen with painstaking precision and the gaze is similarly well directed. Above all there is a sense of restless intelligence; so perhaps it is not so extraordinary that this 56-year-old soldier has been named the world’s leading public intellectual by a panel nominated by two prominent magazines of the thinking classes, Prospect and Foreign Policy.

The winner’s citation declared: “The so-called ‘Petraeus doctrine’ is the only written piece of intellectual output in the last two years that has made a direct difference to the lives of millions. It is the first actively humane warfighting doctrine to come out of the Pentagon, enshrining the idea that winning a modern war requires ensuring the security and wellbeing of the civilian population. Petraeus has also waged a war of ideas against many in Washington who argued that fewer constraints and more ruthless tactics were required in Iraq.” And, it points out, he won.

…every success to a subordinate.

And the media conveniently forget Bush already has protected vast Pacific tracts, including parts of Hawaii, before his latest.

8 YEARS LATER AND NOT A WIT THE WISER:

Bush designates ocean conservation areas in final weeks as president: Move to protect three regions of pristine marine habitat in the Pacific Ocean are in sharp contrast to Bush administration’s record on other green issues (Suzanne Goldenberg, 1/06/09, guardian.co.uk)

George Bush will designate nearly 200,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean as conservation areas on Tuesday, recasting his record on the environment just two weeks before leaving the White House.Tuesday’s formal announcement will establish Bush as the leader who has protected more of the oceans than anyone else in the world, environmentalists said. [...]

“The president has given the world a Texas-sized gift,” said Diane Regas, manager of the ocean programme at the Environmental Defence Fund.
What aspect of his record does it conflict with?

If you don’t know Lomborg, read here.

At Reason’s 40th anniversary event, held in Hollywood on November 14 and 15, “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg kicked things off with an engrossing 30-minute presentation about man-made climate change and the best ways to prioritize and solve global problems ranging from water shortages to poverty to malaria.

The author most recently of Cool It, Lomborg is also the force behind The Copenhagen Consensus, a path-breaking approach toward effecting efficient solutions to the planet’s most pressing issues. “At the end of the day,” says Lomborg, “this is about saying, Yes, global warming is real. It’s often massively exaggerated, which is why we need smarter solutions…. Let’s pick them smart, rather than stupidly. And also, let’s remember that they are many other problems in the world that we can fix so much cheaper and do so much more good….If this is really a question about doing good in the world, then let’s do real good-and not just make ourselves feel good about what we do.”

Go here for Reason magazine’s recent interview with Lomborg, who has been named one of the “100 the most influential people on the planet” by Time, a “global leader for tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum, and “one of the 50 people who could save the planet” by The Guardian.

The trouble with electing presidents who’ve never run anything, who’ve never made a payroll, who’ve never dealt with the real world, is they believe in fantasies.

Rich Lowry:

Barack Obama promised during the campaign to create 5 million “green” jobs in a decade, and they will constitute at least $15 billion a year of his stimulus package. Putting people to work weatherizing homes, building wind farms and constructing a new electrical grid will supposedly save the planet and revive the economy all at once, in a lavish, politically correct free lunch.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm explained on PBS’s “NewsHour” the economic elixir of wind farms: “You need people to know how to build the turbines. You have to have people install the turbines. And turbines have to be connected to the grids. Those are all jobs that can be created if we make a smart investment right now.”

To this point, construction jobs have not been widely viewed as the future of our advanced service-based economy. They once were dismissed as jobs “Americans won’t do.” Never mind. The fundamental problem is that biofuels and wind energy are less efficient and more expensive than coal (which provides more than half the nation’s electricity) and oil (which powers essentially all of its cars).

Currently, 1.8 million jobs in the economy relate to oil and gas (half of them at gas stations). Why layer more than double – if the Obama goal can be taken seriously – that number of “green” jobs on top of already existing energy jobs? Even if all the traditional energy jobs disappear, we will have succeeded only in employing more people in energy than otherwise necessary.

The “green” jobs enthusiasts are making a classic error illustrated by the 19th-century French economist Frederic Bastiat. When a railroad was under construction from France to Spain, someone in Bordeaux suggested that there be a break in the tracks to boost the town’s economy with all the extra work for porters to cart luggage between trains, etc.

Bastiat pointed out that, if breaks in the tracks were such an economic benefit, every town should have one and France should build a “negative railroad” consisting entirely of interruptions.

Of course, the French economy benefited much more from a real railroad delivering the efficient and cheap transport of goods. The push for “green” jobs is about creating a “negative” energy sector – hampering the energy sector we already have to create one that requires more labor.

TRIESTE, Italy -(Dow Jones)- Italy and Germany agree that measures to cut greenhouse gases shouldn’t weigh on the economy, Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel said at a press conference Tuesday, indicating government support for tough new measures in Europe is waning.

Any new European Union decisions on climate change and energy “must be taken in such a way as to not weigh on industry” in Europe, she said at a press conference televised live by Sky Italia.

AS the world celebrates World Toilet Day today, sanitation experts have called for the end of the flushing dunny to save water and provide fertilizer for crops.

Leading health advocates have called for the use of “dry” toilets which separate urine from faeces and remove the need to flush.

Speaking at the recent World Toilet Summit in Macau, World Toilet Organisation founder Jack Sims said the concept of the flushing toilet was unsustainable.

“World Toilet Summit?” God help us.

Mr Sims said a culture where people flushed their loos but disregarded the thousands of litres of wasted drinking water each year was one of sanitation’s greatest challenges.

“This ‘flush and forget’ attitude creates a new problem which we have to revisit,” he said.

There have already been calls by Australian experts to reduce the amount of water wasted through toilet flushing with a proposed new toilet tax.