Laurie Williams and Allan Zabel are lawyers in the Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco office. They are also married to each other. Williams and Zabel are Global Warming “true believers”. They’ve done the research, and they think the Waxman-Markey-Boxer-Kerry Cap and Trade scheme is a very bad idea.
So they wrote a position paper for the website www.carbonfees.org. They wrote an editorial that was published in The Washington Post.
And they made the following video:
In a precedent-setting ruling, a judge in the UK upholds Mr Tim Nicholson’s right to sue his former employer because he was fired over his environmental beliefs and his green lifestyle.
Climate change belief given same legal status as religion
In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations”.
The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.
When you’re rich, really eight-figure inherited/married wealth rich, a recession means you might opt for the pre-owned Gulfstream IV over the new. If only to let the little people know that you feel their pain.
When you’re poor, bad times threaten your job, your family, your health, or your life. Bad times hurt people at the margins.
The liberal ruling class displays an astonishingly callous disregard of the human cost of bad economic times on the huddled masses whose interests they claim to safeguard.
But even the most clueless patrician among our elected elite would never suggest that a recession is a good thing.
Would he?
Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania is co-author of a paper which was presented to the International Symposium on Forecasting in June. The conclusion: “The paper explained the need for simple methods and conservative forecasts in the face of uncertainty and complexity and pointed out that simple no-change benchmark forecasts are sufficiently accurate for policy decisions. In contrast, simple causal models with CO2 as the policy variable are not credible.”
Prediction markets for temperatures in three and ten years time agree that the no-change forecast is the more likely outcome than the IPCC 0.03C per annum forecast. Finally, similar (analogous) alarms in the past identified by the authors and others turned out to be false alarms. The slides for the talk are available as a PowerPoint file and as a PDF file.
In layman’s terms, Armstrong et al conclude that if you had to bet what the temperature will be in ten years, “the same as today” is a more accurate than any scientific model. And the no-change model is the one they recommend using for climate change policy.
This sounds absurd! Why, there is a well-known Scientific Consensus on man-made global warming! Do you think they’re wrong? Then here’s your chance to make some easy money: The Climate Bet.
Via Tim Blair comes this gem (h/t Skanderbeg):
One of the world’s greatest minds comes up with one of the world’s greatest ideas:
Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by US President Barack Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white.
A global initiative to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so that they reflect more of the Sun’s light and heat could play a big part in containing global warming, he said yesterday.
It would be interesting to get Chu’s estimate on the percentage of the earth’s surface that is covered by roofs, roads and pavements.
As Erick posted on Twitter, “When all it takes to solve global warming is painting my roof white, global warming isn’t a serious problem.”
I have to echo that statement, with the simple addition that, if Chu is serious in his suggestion, then the people who promote AGW as an issue are, quite simply, fundamentally unserious.
To Blair’s last sentence, I can only add this: Guess what already reflects sunlight better than white paint?
Water, snow, and ice.
I wonder what the ratio is of the water-covered portions of planet Earth to the pavement-and-roof-covered portions of planet Earth. Certainly Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu has a formula to figure that little problem out, doesn’t he?
No, I’m not joking.
If you don’t believe me, just click here.
(H/T - “Planet Gore” at NRO)
I wonder what they replaced the carbon with - silicon?
Help….
This is impressive, and has a big carbon footprint:
(Courtesy: Tim Blair)
Sunday open thread….
A few days ago, your humble correspondent noted the story of a trio of British “explorers” who were on a “global warming” icepack survey in the Arctic - and who had become marooned by (surprise) frigid Arctic weather conditions. The story was too hard to pass up, since it had been given the deadpan-irony headline of:
Global Warming Team Stranded by Cold Weather
In some sense it was good fun to mock them for their foolishness. But on the other hand, they were clearly in very deep trouble - marooned by the cold and bad weather, and nearly out of food.
Fortunately, they were rescued in the nick of time by a (carbon-belching) Twin Otter, and are now safe.
But one really does have to wonder about the bone-headedness (and sanity) of people who do silly things like this and nearly get themselves killed.
More below the fold….
As anyone who followed the Kyoto Protocols back in the 1990s can tell you, even if you believe that government action to stem carbon emissions would be desirable, Kyoto wasn’t a genuine effort to get a worldwide agreement on limiting emissions: it exempted seven of the world’s eight most populous nations (the U.S. being the lone exception) from its provisions, including rapidly growing economies like China (now the world’s number one carbon emitter) and India. And neither of those countries, with more than a billion inhabitants each, has any intention of being subject to the kinds of restrictions that President Obama’s carbon emissions “cap-and-trade” plan would impose on U.S. industries, much less during a global recession. Including industries that employ lots of the blue-collar union workers the Democrats purport to represent.
Those industries’ and unions’ solution, naturally, is even more government taxes and regulations: use trade barriers to try to inflict the same harm on foreign manufacturers as on American ones. Hey, why not start a trade war? Just remember, one thing, though: Senator Smoot and Congressman Hawley both lost their bids for re-election in 1932.
