Carbongate

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, June 26, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Climate Change: A suppressed EPA study says old U.N. data ignore the decline in global temperatures and other inconvenient truths. Was the report kept under wraps to influence the vote on the cap-and-trade bill?

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Read More: Global Warming

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This was supposed to be the most transparent administration ever. Yet as the House of Representatives prepared to vote on the Waxman-Markey bill, the largest tax increase in U.S. history on 100% of Americans, an attempt was made to suppress a study shredding supporters' arguments.

On Friday, the day of the vote, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said it was releasing "an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency."

In the release, the institute's Richard Morrison said "internal EPA e-mail messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the administration's agenda of regulating carbon dioxide."

Reading the report, available on the CEI Web site, we find this "endangerment analysis" contains such interesting items as: "Given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data."

What the report says is that the EPA, by adopting the United Nations' 2007 "Fourth Assessment" report, is relying on outdated research by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The research, it says, is "at best three years out of date in a rapidly changing field" and ignores the latest scientific findings.

Besides noting the decline in temperatures as CO2 levels have increased, the draft report says the "consensus" on storm frequency and intensity is now "much more neutral."

Then there's one of Al Gore's grim fairy tales — the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and glaciers the size of Tennessee roaming the North Atlantic. "The idea that warming temperatures will cause Greenland to rapidly shed its ice has been greatly diminished by new results indicating little evidence for operations of such processes," the report says.

Little evidence? Outdated U.N. research? No reason to rush? This is not what the Obama administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were telling us when they were rushing to force a Friday vote on Waxman-Markey. We were given the impression that unless we passed this cap-and-tax fiasco, polar bears would be extinct by the Fourth of July.

We have noted frequently the significance of solar activity on earth's climate and history. This EPA draft report not only confirms our reporting but the brazen incompetence of those "experts" that have been prophesying planetary apocalypse.

"A new 2009 paper by Scafetta and West," the report says, "suggests that the IPCC used faulty solar data in dismissing the direct effect of solar variability on global temperatures. Their report suggests that solar variability could account for up to 68% of the increase in Earth's global temperatures."

The report was the product of Alan Carlin, senior operations research analyst at the EPA's National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE). He's been with the EPA for 38 years but now has been taken off all climate-related work. He is convinced that actual climate observations do not match climate change theories and that only the politics, not the science, has been settled.

Thomas Fuller, environmental policy blogger with the San Francisco Examiner, wrote Thursday in a story developed in conjunction with Anthony Watts' Web site wattsupwiththat.com: "A source inside the Environmental Protection Agency confirmed many of the claims made by analyst Alan Carlin, the economist/physicist who yesterday went public with accusations that science was being ignored in evaluating the danger of CO2."

All this is particularly interesting because of the charges by Al Gore, NASA's James Hansen and others that the Bush administration and energy companies actively suppressed the truth about climate change.

One of the e-mails unearthed by CEI was dated March 12, from Al McGartland, office director at NCEE, forbidding Carlin from speaking to anyone outside NCEE on endangerment issues such as those in his suppressed report.

Carlin replied on March 16, requesting that his study be forwarded to EPA's Office of Air and Radiation, which directs EPA's climate change program. Carlin points out the peer-reviewed references in his study and points out that the new studies "explain much of the observational data that have been collected which cannot be explained by the IPCC models."

For saying the climate change emperors had no clothes, Carlin was told March 17: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office."

In other words, the administration and Congress had their collective minds made up and didn't want to be confused with the facts. They certainly didn't want any inconvenient truths coming out of their own Environmental Protection Agency, the one that wants to regulate everything from your lawn mower to bovine emissions and which says the product of your respiration and ours, carbon dioxide, is a dangerous pollutant and not the basis for all life on earth.

The problem the warm-mongers have is they now are in a position of telling the American people, who are you going to believe — us or your own lying eyes? Forget the snow in Malibu, the record cold winters. Forget that temperatures have dropped for a decade.

In April, President Obama declared that "the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over." Apparently not, for as he spoke those very words his administration was suppressing science to advance a very pernicious ideology.

Key Nations Agree on North Korea Sanctions

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

UNITED NATIONS — Western powers joined with North Korea's key allies Wednesday on a proposal that would impose tough new sanctions against the reclusive communist nation for its second nuclear test, paving the way for quick approval by the U.N. Security Council.

The sanctions would allow foreign countries to stop and search ships heading to and from North Korea, pending approval from the country whose flag the vessel was flying.

The resolution does not, however, authorize the use of force should the stopped ships refuse to allow searches, but the sanctions should allow for more ships to be checked.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice presented the draft resolution to the 15-member council saying it would create "an unprecedented, detailed" regime in which nations "are expected to inspect suspected contraband cargo" on land and the high seas, and then seize and dispose of any contraband.

"This sanctions regime if passed by the Security Council will bite, and bite in a meaningful way," she said. "We think that the message that the council will send should it adopt this resolution is that North Korea's behavior is unacceptable, they must pay a price."

The agreement comes after two weeks of closed-door negotiations by ambassadors from the five permanent Security Council nations — the U.S., Britain and France, and the North's closest allies China and Russia — as well as the two countries most closely affected by the test, Japan and South Korea.

Past sanctions, however, have had little effect in dissuading the regime from pursuing its nuclear ambitions.

The draft, obtained by The Associated Press,>>>

Measuring Cow Burps in Fight Against Climate Change

Tuesday, June 09, 2009
By William La Jeunesse

While Congress considers taxing auto and industrial pollution, a U.N. report fingers another guilty party — cows.

The U.N. accuses our bovine buddies of producing 18 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions — more than planes, trains and automobiles combined.

"Methane is a greenhouse gas. It leads to climate change, that leads to global warming," explains Frank Mitloehner, an air-quality specialist at the University of California, Davis. "What we do is we study how much methane comes from different animal types, let's say dairy cows or steers."

When cows digest their food, stomach bacteria produce methane, an ozone-forming gas considered 23 times worse than carbon dioxide when it comes to trapping heat in the atmosphere.

"They produce approximately 200 or so pounds of methane a year, and that's per animal," says Mitloehner. "Lactating animals produce twice that."

That makes heifers the Hummers of agriculture. At U.C. Davis, scientists use one-of-a-kind "burp tents" to measure the methane emissions of each animal.

"A lot of people think this gas>>>

U.N. Acknowledges Discussing 'Inaccurate Reporting' in Meeting

Thursday, June 04, 2009 By Joshua Rhett Miller


A U.N. spokeswoman acknowledged Thursday that five U.N. officials discussed what they believed was "inaccurate reporting" — specifically by FOX News, the Wall Street Journal and Inner City Press — in a meeting last month.
The spokeswoman, Michele Montas, confirmed during her daily briefing with reporters that the meeting had taken place following the publication of a memo from Under Secretary-General Angela Kane to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that referred to the discussion.
One day earlier, Montas denied that a meeting had taken place to discuss critical news coverage. On Thursday, she made clear that the subject was discussed, but it was not the purpose of the meeting.
She acknowledged to reporters that Ban had received the memo, adding that he had "absolutely no specific reaction" to it.
The memo read: "We propose writing to professional>>>