Listen Now: Morano on Trump’s eliminating EPA climate regs: ‘Heads are exploding’ in DC
…Watch: Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry smacks down warmist Michael Mann for denying calling her a ‘denier’
AP’s Borenstein calls out Michael Mann for a whopper: ‘Mann said he didn’t call Curry a denier. But in his written testimony he called Curry ‘a climate science denier’ – Associated Press: At first Mann said he didn’t call Curry a denier. But in his written not oral testimony he called Curry “a climate science denier.” Mann said there’s a difference between denying climate change and “denying established science” on how much humans cause climate change, which he said Curry did.
Also see: Warmist Michael Mann tells whopper at congressional science hearing?…
Mag: ‘The UN Paris Agreement Is Burning’ – Trump’s EPA climate reversal ‘will basically render UN agreement null’
New Republic – BY EMILY ATKIN
[Trump’s EPA executive order] will basically render the Paris agreement null. Leading climate scientists and climate policy experts told me the order—paired with Trump’s recent indication that he wants to undo car fuel efficiency standards—will leave the U.S. unable to meet its commitments under the international accord. And if the country that has historically emitted the most carbon over the course of its lifetime doesn’t meet its commitments, it’s unlikely other nations will, either.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but Gore’s back
By Chris Woodward (OneNewsNow.com)
Action films, romantic comedies, and animations aren’t the only things coming to theaters this summer – so is Al Gore.
Gore: “The next generation would be justified in looking back at us and asking: ‘What were you thinking? Couldn’t you hear what the scientists were saying? Couldn’t you hear what Mother Nature was screaming at you?'”
That’s a portion of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power – the follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth, which followed Gore on the lecture circuit as he tried to bring awareness to what the former vice president calls “dangerous man-made global warming” or “climate change.”
An Inconvenient Sequel will again document the environmental activist’s travels, along with his push for alternative energy and statements in 2016 from now-President Donald Trump. If you ask Marc Morano of Climate Depot, it appears that Gore is up to his old tricks again.
“We actually sent an undercover agent up to Robert Redford’s film festival in Utah and they got into the film,” says Morano. “I haven’t seen it myself, but the film sounds like it was going in one direction – [but] then Trump won and they had to do some quick rewrites. So now it’s a cautionary tale.”
Critics and news outlets have pointed out that An Inconvenient Truth was inaccurate when it hit the screens in 2006. Michael Bastach of The Daily Caller wrote in May 2016 that years later, Gore’s film is “still alarmingly inaccurate.” It was also in 2016 that Gore’s doomsday clock expired, causing David French to write “Apocalypse Delayed” in a related article for National Review. More recently, columnist Aaron Bandler documents what he categorizes as the “nine biggest lies” in the first installment.
Morano has also taken exception to things in An Inconvenient Truth.
“It appears Al Gore justifies his absurd claims of Florida being underwater by showing scenes of Hurricane Sandy flooding, as if that’s the sea-level rise,” says Morano about An Inconvenient Sequel. “First of all, he implied that sea level would be permanently rising, not a storm surge; and second, Sandy was a bad storm – but it still doesn’t account for the fact that hurricanes are actually on the decline and big, severe ones are unbelievably on the decline.”
An Inconvenient Sequel is due in theaters in late July. Meanwhile, Morano and the …
Al Gore Has Made Another Science Fiction Movie About ‘Global Warming’
COMMENTARY
Al Gore Has Made Another Science Fiction Movie About Global Warming
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore addresses participants during a three-day climate change training and workshop on how best to address the effects of global climate change in the Philippines. Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, has a new movie out on the climate change issue called “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power.” (AP)
A decade ago, Al Gore’s 2006 faux-umentary about climate change called “An Inconvenient Truth” won two Oscars. No, it wasn’t in the propaganda or fantasy category, though it should have been. It was filled with so many falsehoods that a British judge said it could not be shown to students unless it included a notice pointing out the errors.
A quick Google search shows there is no shortage of articles outlining the movie’s flaws and identifying Gore as the carnival huckster that he is.
Despite the problems with “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore is back with “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” scheduled to open this summer. No doubt the politically correct voters at the Academy will adore this one, too. Gore speaks the language of the self-righteous, self-appointed moral superiors, so they will be happy to again celebrate one of their own while welling up inside with a sense of pride.
It gives them yet another reason to tell themselves that, yes, we are heroic people. The more rational among us call this virtue-signaling.
Some would justifiably wonder why Gore would make a sequel. Does he think that another round of junk science and Gore-ish hectoring will protect the world from the scourge he’s been nagging the public about for decades? Because he’s the man who said at his first movie’s premiere that “unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” Isn’t it simply too late now to do anything?
No doubt Gore’s next fabulous fable will show “evidence” that man is dangerously warming his planet by pointing out some things that are different than they were in 2006 and fit the warming alarmists’ claims that human-driven climate change is going to make things hotter, colder, wetter, drier, windier, less windy, snowier and less snowy.
But what hasn’t changed is the global temperature. It simply won’t budge no
Earth Hour: Hey, Let’s Live Like We’re In Venezuela
COMMENTARY
Earth Hour: Hey, Let’s Live Like We’re In Venezuela
Caracas, Venezuela: A mother with her children are walking past a man searching for food in waste in the street of Caracas. Every hour is “Earth Hour” in Caracas and other socialist “paradises.”(Polaris/Newscom)
Has there ever been in the history of man an event that offered more opportunities for virtue signaling than Earth Hour?
While North Koreans and Venezuelans and Cubans are literally dying for some First World amenities, the rich and ignorant in the developed world turned their lights off for an hour Saturday night to show … what?
Their solidarity with those living under regimes that have ground their economies into hopeless ruins?
Their concern over power bills that have become too expensive due to government-forced use of renewable energy sources?
Their disapproval of socialist systems that have wrecked the modern amenities the people once enjoyed?
No, they turned their lights off to demonstrate that they are morally superior — that unlike those who didn’t participate, they care about the environment.
Clear and independent thinkers had this con figured out years ago. Economist Donald Boudreaux called it, quite accurately, a mindless stunt.
WSJ: ‘Trump is notching early victories is unleashing American energy, which has been held hostage to progressive climate obsessions’
The order directs the Environmental Protection Agency to review the Clean Power Plan, which the Supreme Court stayed last year in an extraordinary rebuke. The plan essentially forces states to retire coal plants early, and the tab could top $1 trillion in lost output and 125,000 jobs, according to the American Action Forum. Also expected are double-digit increases in the price of electricity—and a less reliable power grid. All for nothing: A year of U.S. reductions in 2025 would be offset by Chinese emissions in three weeks, says Rice University’s Charles McConnell.
The rule also fulfills a campaign promise to end Barack Obama’s war on coal. It’s true that market forces are reducing coal’s share of U.S. electric power—to some 30% from about 50% a decade ago—thanks mainly to fracking for natural gas. Yet Mr. Obama still deployed brute government force to bankrupt the coal industry. Mr. Trump is right to end that punishment and let the market, not federal dictates, sort out the right energy mix for the future.
The story is similar on a methane rule that the executive order will begin to roll back. Total U.S. methane emissions have dropped 15% since 1990, as Bernard Weinstein of Southern Methodist University told the House last fall, even though domestic oil-and-gas production has doubled over the past decade. One reason is that energy companies have a financial incentive to capture the stuff and sell it. Still, EPA promulgated expensive new emissions targets, equipment rules and more.
The order also dumps the “social cost of carbon,” which is a tool the Obama Administration employed to junk mandatory cost-benefit analyses for regulations. For example: An EPA power plant rule predicted net benefits from $26 billion to $46 billion, but as much as 65% of that derived from guesswork about the positives of reducing carbon, as Bracewell & Giuliani’sScott Segal explained to Congress at a 2015 hearing. The Obama Administration rolled out these new calculations with no public comment, and the models surely wouldn’t survive a rigorous peer review.…
Trump’s Next Step on Climate: Reconsider EPA’s CO2 is a ‘pollutant’ finding
On Tuesday, in a series of orders, Mr. Trump instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to rework its Clean Power Plan, which would restrict carbon emissions from existing power plants, mainly coal-fired ones. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court stayed enforcement of the CPP pending judicial review.
Mr. Trump also directed the Interior Department to lift its current moratorium on federal coal leasing and loosen restrictions on oil and gas development (including methane flaring) on federal lands. And he instructed all government agencies to stop factoring climate change into the environmental-review process for federal projects. The federal government will recalculate the “social cost of carbon.”
…
Because they don’t attack the climate-change regulatory problem at its root, Mr. Trump’s orders will not provide enough clarity to U.S. energy companies—particularly electric utilities and coal-mining companies—for their long-term business forecasting or short-term capital investment and head-count planning.
To accomplish that, the Trump administration, led by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, needs to target the EPA’s 2009 “endangerment finding,” which labeled carbon dioxide as a pollutant. That foundational ruling provided the legal underpinnings for all of the EPA’s follow-on carbon regulations, including the CPP.
It also provided the rationale for the previous administration’s anti-fossil-fuel agenda and its various climate-change initiatives and programs, which spanned more than a dozen federal agencies and cost the American taxpayer roughly $20 billion to $25 billion a year during Mr. Obama’s presidency.
The endangerment finding was the product of a rush to judgment. Much of the scientific data upon which it was predicated—chiefly, the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—was already dated by the time of its publication and arguably not properly peer-reviewed as federal law requires.
Although this initially reported “pause” was subsequently eliminated through the downward manipulation of historical temperature data, this latest IPCC assessment calls into question both the predictive power and input data quality of most global climate models, and further highlights the scientific uncertainty surrounding the basic premise of anthropogenic climate change.
An updated EPA endangerment finding based on an objective review of the latest available scientific data is warranted, along with a more sober discussion of the threat posed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the “public health and welfare of current and future generations,” in the words of the original endangerment finding.
As long as the 2009 finding remains on the books, it will …
Bjorn Lomborg: Trump gutting EPA climate regs show UN Paris treaty is ‘a paper tiger’
USA Today – By Bjorn Lomborg
According to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. promised to cut more energy-related CO2 emissions than any country in the world from 2013 to 2025, under the Paris climate treaty.
The problem is that this promise never had much ground in reality.
The primary measure America offered to achieve the promised cuts was the Clean Power Plan, which required the U.S. power sector to reduce CO2 emissions.
Yet this plan, even if fully enacted, would have achieved just a third of the U.S. promises under the Paris Agreement. If it had remained in effect for the entire century, my peer-reviewed research using United Nations climate change models found that it would have reduced temperature rises by an absolutely trivial 0.023 Fahrenheit at the end of this century.
Without the Clean Power Plan, U.S. emissions will likely increase slightly.
…
The treaty is nothing but a paper tiger: Its only legal underpinning is that all nations submitted promises — but those promises do not need to be kept.
In truth, Trump’s action just exposes what we have known for a while: The Paris Agreement is not the way to solve global warming.
Even if every nation fulfilled everything promised — including Obama’s undertakings — it would get us nowhere near achieving the treaty’s much-hyped, unrealistic promise to keep temperature rises under 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The U.N. itself has estimated that even if every country lived up to every single promised carbon cut between 2016 and 2030, emissions would be cut by just one-hundredth of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 2 C.
My analysis, similar to findings by scientists at MIT, shows that even if these promises were extended for 70 more years, then they’d only reduce temperature rises about 0.3 degrees F by 2100.
Moreover, many poor nations signed up to the treaty largely because of a promise of $100 billion a year of “climate aid” from rich nations, starting from 2020. Over the past five years, rich countries have managed to come up with only a 10th of one year’s promise.
It is only a matter of time before taxpayers from wealthy nations balk at the bill waiting for them. That will make many developing countries back out of the whole process.
This climate approach rehashes a failed policy that wasted decades: From …
TRUMP TO ANNOUNCE MORE BIG CLIMATE SCIENCE CUTS
President Donald Trump is looking to cut another $140 million in funding from government-funded global warming science programs, according to Space.com.
Trump will ask Congress to cut $90 million in funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) weather satellite programs and another $50 million from NASA global warming science programs.
The programs slashed include: NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite R (GOES-R), Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS), and Earth Observing Nanosatellite-Microwave (EON-MW). These programs all study earth’s climate and measure global warming.
NOAA spends more than $100 million on global warming while NASA’s budget includes more than $2 billion for global warming and earth science. This money is generally specifically allocated to improve climate modeling, measurement of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and weather prediction. In comparison, NASA’s other functions, such as astrophysics and space technology, are only getting a mere $781.5 and $826.7 million, respectively, in the 2017 budget proposal.
Federal agencies plan to spend $27 billion on global warming-related programs next year. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates the federal government spent $77 billion from 2008 to 2013 on climate programs.