Category Archives: Environment

More Scandals–EPA This Time


Posting from Hotair.com titled  “Psst: There are four separate scandals going on at EPA right now” is an interesting read.  The four do not include the EPA “study” as directed by the Supreme Court to determine if CO2 were a threat to the nation.  Of course the EPA found that it was a serious, immediate threat and was then granted the right to write regulations to control CO2.   The biggest fool was of course the Supreme Court that turned that question over to the EPA assuming the Court actually expected a reasoned decision.  The EPA really never did a study, just took the IPCC report, which meant that the question was answered in the affirmative.  All they had to do was to silence their own people that had a different opinion, which they did, and ignore any of the written comments which were not consistent with their already formulated decision. Got that off my chest, at least for a while.  On to the Hotair posting.

They are:

1)   The EPA gave an ethics award to fake employee, “Richard Windsor,” who was already just an unethically created e-mail alias for the agency’s former head, Lisa P. Jackson.

2)   The EPA makes conservatives pay a fortune for FOIAs to be granted while waiving fees for liberal groups.

3)   EPA contractors are basically Gym, Tan, and Laundrying in new, swanky rec rooms thanks to your tax money.

4)   The EPA leaked confidential information on farmers and cattle facilities to environmental groups. No bigs.

My guess is that the first one could be the big one if they can get Lisa P Jackson’s emails that she created using the name of Richard Windsor.

The details for each of the four scandals are covered in the posting which can be accessed by clicking here. I hope that Congress looks into these.

cbdakota

Climate Models Epic Fail


Dr. Roy Spencer posted ‘EPIC FAIL: 73 Climate Models vs. Observations for Tropical Tropospheric Temperature” on his website.  The posting used,  “Courtesy of John Christy, a comparison between 73 CMIP5 models (archived at the KNMI Climate Explorer website) and observations for the tropical bulk tropospheric temperature (aka “MT”) since 1979.” That chart is shown below:     (Click chart for better view.)

christy1stchartCMIP5-73-models-vs-obs-20N-20S-MT

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Time To Talk Temperature—May 2013 Global and Sea Surface Update


The source for this posting comes from work done by Dr Roy Spencer.  His web site can be accessed by clicking here.

Satellite Measured Atmospheric Temperature Anomalies.

First the University of Alabama –Huntsville (UAH) satellite global temperature anomaly.  The May anomaly dropped to +0.074 C from April’s anomaly of +0.103.  The global temperature anomaly in January 2013 was +0.504 which was the highest temperature since early 2010. This chart below covers the time period that the satellite system has been in existence.  By contrast with the ground based temperature measuring systems, the satellite system is essentially global in that it is measuring lower atmospheric temperature of the ¾ of the globe represented by the oceans as well as the ground.  It is the gold standard of global temperature measurements in my opinion. (Click on Charts to Enlarge.)

May13UAH_LT_1979_thru_May_2013_v5.5

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Will The OPEC Cartel Break Up?


Because the OPEC cartel provides about 40% of the world’s crude oil, it has been able to control the crude oil price.  Its members meet and set the amount of crude they will produce for sale opposite the forecast world demand.  They can reduce or increase production to raise or lower prices. Other major crude producers outside of OPEC have been able to sell all their crude oil but acting independently are unable to displace OPEC’s role as the selling price arbiter.   As you would expect, OPEC wants the price to be high but recognizes that if they set it too high, demand will drop and competitors will be encouraged to prospect for more crude.   Within OPEC, the members have their own issues that make setting the production levels and thus the price, not easy.  However, Saudi Arabia, currently the world’s largest producer of  crude oil,  is said to be the primary voice in this process.  When the OPEC members meet, as they did on May 31st, to set the production level/price, one big factor was how much of their government’s budget is derived from the oil revenues.  And what is the price of crude oil that makes that budget whole? The graph below, from the American Interest’s posting “OPEC Sweats: How Low Can Oil Prices Go?illustrates the price needed to balance their government’s budget:

2013_fiscal_breakeven_point-e1370293236725

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The Obama Administration Targets Congressional Skeptics


President Obama is not content with just targeting the news reporters, whistle blowers  and conservative groups such as the Tea Parties, he is now singling out Congressional skeptic by name in hopes he can get them voted out of office.

He is practicing Chicago Politics at the national level.  Chicago politics operates on the basis of denigrating your opponent.  This style of politics lacks logic, good ideas, etc.  so they result to insult and innuendo.

The President’s website lists those Senators and Representatives that do not agree with his plans to artificially reduce availability of fossil fuels and to force taxes on those people and businesses that use them.

If you click here, you will be sent to the President’s website and see a list of Congressional people he wants removed.  Each of the named individuals is credited with a quote they have made which is to give reason to why they should be removed.  I think it likely will have the opposite effect if the usual uninformed liberal voters actually read the quotes. The low information voters may never before have seen the logic expressed in these quotes.

The liberals often revel in their retelling of President Nixon’s “enemies list.”  I believe that the current president’s “enemies list”  makes Nixon’s pale by comparison.

cbdakota

EV Charging Station Co. Better Place Files For Bankruptcy.


Better Place joins the ranks of electric vehicle (EV) business to declare for bankruptcy.  Better Place had planned to develop a prototype EV battery-swap operation in Israel.  A network of stations were installed that would allow the EV owner to replace the battery with a new one in about the “same amount of time it takes to fill a gasoline tank on a regular car”. The idea was to remove range anxiety.  Israel was thought to be an ideal place because driving distances are relatively short.

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Oil and Gas Reserves Are Increasing And Fugitive Methane Emissions Are Decreasing.


The National Journal posting “The U.S. Has Much, Much More Gas and Oil Than We Thought” relates that the Interior Department says that the Bakken and Three Forks formations in North and South Dakota and Montana have twice as much oil and three times as much gas as previously estimated in 2008.  The USGS  now believes that these two formations hold 7.4 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  This is good news and surely there will be more upward valuations of  US oil and natural gas reserves in other  formations.

The Alarmists Are The Real Deniers


The new normal according to the Alarmist warmers is that “cooling is warming.”  Every possible weather event, if it is unpleasant, is due to global warming. As the readers  of this post are very intelligent,  they remember that until the last 15 + years, the Alarmists have told us that global warming would mean hotter summers and winters.  That is what the alarmist’s climate models predicted but those predictions are being shown to be terribly wrong.  So what’s an alarmist to do?  They are hoping that you don’t notice that they are changing their mantra without ever acknowledging that they were wrong.
But what are the facts?   The “Updated on 23 April 2013” chart, below, shows that in the past two weeks, the US has experienced 4163 record low temperatures for this time of year.  We believe that this is weather and it is always changing.  But to the desperate Alarmists, it is the result of global warming.
Recordlows2wksUS
Chart by Ham Weather.com (click on chart to enlarge.)
A posting by David Deming  in the Washington Times, titled “The real deniers of climate change”  characterizes the data verses the alarmists contention.  He says:
“The Northern Hemisphere is experiencing unusually cold weather. Snow cover last December was the greatest since satellite monitoring began in 1966. The United Kingdom had the coldest March weather in 50 years, and there were more than a thousand record low temperatures in the United States. The Irish meteorological office reported that March “temperatures were the lowest on record nearly everywhere.” Spring snowfall in Europe was also high. In Moscow, the snow depth was the highest in 134 years of observation. In Kiev, authorities had to bring in military vehicles to clear snow from the streets.
Cold-weather extremes are a natural climatic variation, and this is exactly the point. If the world were experiencing a climate crisis owing to global warming, there shouldn’t be a single record low temperature anywhere in the world. The Associated Press has assured us, though, that this cold spell is not only consistent with a warming globe, it is actually caused by global warming. The proffered explanation is that cold weather in Europe is a result of melting sea ice in the Arctic. If this special pleading strikes you as unusually tendentious, it is all in the best tradition of explaining away ex post facto any weather event that appears to contradict the ruling paradigm.”
Deming cites numerous examples of the how wrong the Alarmists have been over the years.  The full posting is worth the reading to see what he has to say.
He concludes with this:
“With each passing year, it is becoming increasingly clear that global warming is not a scientific theory subject to empirical falsification, but a political ideology that has to be fiercely defended against any challenge. It is ironic that skeptics are called “deniers” when every fact that would tend to falsify global warming is immediately explained away by an industry of denial.”
cbdakota

“The Magic Washing Machine”—–Limiting Energy Access To The World’s Poor Is Wrong


You have to give credit to the Green NGOs in that they are much more upfront about their goals than most of the Global Governments. Greenies want to stop development of all fossil fuel sources and they would like to see the nuclear industry dismantled and no new nukes built.  The Obama Administration is not quite that ambitious, at least for now, although there is not much difference in their objectives. Examples of goals the Administration have announced are: kill coal,  minimize (and in some cases prevent any) use of Federal lands for accessing the mineral resources and raise the price of gasoline and electricity.
Who is it that will feel the most pain, if this cabal is successful?  It will be the poorest among us, of course.  They justify their actions by saying that the Earth will really, really, really go to hell if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.  And besides they add, we will have wind and solar farms takeover the job of supplying power.  Wind and solar farms are not ready for prime time and who knows if they will ever be. The experience around the world demonstrates that when and if these renewables do replace fossil fuels, the power supplied will be more costly than that supplied by fossil fuels.  No help for the poor here.

“Greedy Lying Bastards” Fails To Draw An Audience


“Greedy Lying Bastards” the film, was on the list of top box office attractions  for one weekend.  It grossed $45,000 the weekend of March 8-10 and its place was #45 out of 50. With that  kind of gross, it is no surprise that it did not make it back since then. The film is said to have cost $1,500,000 to produce.  For comparison, that weekend’s top grossing movie was “OZ the Great and Powerful”, which pulled in $79,100,000.

The critics at the movie review site, Rotten Tomatoes,  gave it 73 out of 100 which is a very favorable rating.   A typical review was that by John Hartl for the Seattle Times in which he said:

“ The title says it all in “Greedy Lying Bastards,” a blistering attack on politicians, propagandists, dissemblers and other climate-change deniers.No longer taking the relatively polite approach of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the filmmakers set out to focus on the celebrities who have been most successful in using the media to encourage a sense of doubt in a skeptical public.”

The reviewers held nothing back as most of them always love the liberal theme.

I suppose their next production will be the “Those Dirty Rotten Bastards That Used The New Black Panthers To Prevent Entry To The Theater To See Our Epic Production Greedy Lying Bastards”.  They have to blame someone for their failure.

cbdakota