Obama Calls Senate Environment Chairman ‘Crazy’ for Doubting Climate Change
Obama rattled off his standard policy stump, with special aim at Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) for bringing a snowball onto the Senate floor in February to argue that terrorism is a greater risk than climate change.
“And the planet is warming; 99 percent of scientists have said it’s warming. And we’ve got the Republican chairman of the Senate Energy and Environment Committee carrying a snowball into the Senate chambers to show that there is still snow and that climate change isn’t happening. I am not making that up. That’s what happened. That’s what happened. That’s crazy,” Obama said. “I was going to quote Kanye, but I can’t because this is a family audience. But it’s cray.”
That’s a reference to a lyric in Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “N*ggas In Paris”: “
‘Environmentalists Who Dream of a World without Themselves’
…UN IPCC Lead Author: 25 Years Of Failed Global Warming Policies Have Made Us Poorer
Environmental economist Richard Tol wants the world to deal with global warming, but his data shows the past 25 years of climate policies in rich countries have done nothing to fundamentally tackle the issue.
If anything, Tol argues, current and past climate policies have only served to make most people a little poorer while benefiting those in politically favored industries or with connections to powerful politicians.
“Twenty-five years of climate policy has made most of us a little poorer,” Tol told an audience gathered at the libertarian Cato Institute Friday, adding that such policies also made “some of us a little richer” — referring to those getting green energy subsidies and government grants.
In Tol’s view, climate policies have been more about “rewarding allies with rents and subsidies rather than emissions reduction.”
Climate Change Kills the Mood: Economists Warn of Less Sex on a Warmer Planet
An extra “hot day” (the economists use quotation marks with the phrase) leads to a 0.4 percent drop in birth rates nine months later, or 1,165 fewer deliveries across the U.S. A rebound in subsequent months makes up just 32 percent of the gap.
The researchers, who hail from Tulane University, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Central Florida, believe that their findings give policymakers three major things to think about.
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1. Birth rates do not bounce back completely after heat waves.
That’s a problem. As summers heat up, developed countries may see already low birth rates sink even lower. Plunging birth rates can play havoc with an economy. China’s leaders recently acknowledged this by ditching the longtime one-child policy and doubling the number of children couples are allowed to have. A sub-replacement U.S. birthrate means fewer workers to pay Social Security benefits for retirees, among other consequences.
2. More autumn conceptions means more more deliveries in summer.
Infants experience a higher rate of poor health with summer births, “though the reasons for worse health in the summer are not well-established,” the authors write. One possibility may be “third-trimester exposure to high temperatures.”
3. Air conditioning might prove to be an aphrodisiac.
Control over the climate at home might make a difference. The researchers suggest that the rise of air conditioning may have helped offset some heat-related fertility losses in the U.S. since the 1970s.
The paper’s title is about as lascivious as the National Bureau of Economic Research gets: “Maybe Next Month? Temperature Shocks, Climate Change, and Dynamic Adjustments in Birth Rates.” The researchers assume that climate change will proceed according to the most severe scenarios, with no substantial efforts to reduce emissions. The scenario they use projects that from 2070 to 2099, the U.S. may have 64 more days above 80F than in the baseline period from 1990 to 2002, which had 31. The result? The U.S. may see a 2.6 percent decline in its birth rate, or 107,000 fewer deliveries a year.
Just when you thought climate change policy couldn’t get any less sexy (PDF).…
What Global Warming: Nasa says Antarctic ice INCREASING by 135BILLION TONNES a year
RICO-teering: How climate activists ‘knew’ they were going to pin the blame on Exxon
Flashback 1977 Shocker: Scientists Knew Man Was Not Responsible! West Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse ‘has nothing to do with climate, just the dynamics of unstable ice’
This story of Antarctic fraud gets much worse though. The Ross Ice Shelf in West Antarctica has been rapidly retreating more than four feet per day since at least 1830, and possibly for centuries. It has nothing to do with CO2, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
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