SESSIONS: All right. Carbon pollution is CO2, and that’s really not a pollutant; that’s a plant food, and it doesn’t harm anybody except that it might include temperature increases. Let me ask you one more time: Are you asserting, just give me this answer; if you take the average of the models predicting how fast the temperature would increase, is the temperature in fact increasing less than that or more than that?
McCARTHY: I cannot answer that question specifically.
– Exchange between Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Gina McCarthy (U.S. EPA), March 4, 2015.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Environmental & Public Works has sent this letter to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy on April 1, 2015–and it is all about science and not parody. At a previous hearing, Administrator McCarthy claimed ignorance about climate model temperature predictions (above) but promised to answer the question(s) in writing.…
Continue Reading“When they finish repowering Altamont with 280 more ‘bird-friendly’ machines, these killing fields will easily have five times more deadly rotor sweep than the old Altamont.”
Altamont Pass, the avian mortality capital of the U.S. wind industry since the 1980s (see “The Avian Mortality Problem” in this study), is in the news. But it is more wind-industry propaganda. The story is how safer turbines need to be installed so more birds and raptors could be saved from all those terrible smaller turbines. This hope, endorsed by the new face of Audubon, however, rests on flawed mortality studies.
For those that will not accept the fact that the wind industry manufactured these studies to suit their purposes, here is a very clear example. The Altamont Pass study published in 2004 determined that the small old turbines were killing thousands of eagles, hawks, owls and other birds each year. …
Continue ReadingJerry Taylor has written a lawyer’s brief for climate alarmism and open-ended forced energy transformation via the tax code. Might he like to demolish his new ideas in a second White Paper–“The Libertarian Case Against ‘The Conservative Case for a Carbon Tax'”? It is in his head and can be put on paper–if his emotions can get out of the way.
The intellectual case for government control of greenhouse gas emissions–the all-in cause of the anti-industrial neo-Malthusians–has always been suspect, not unlike earlier man-versus-earth outcries. But climate alarm has become weaker since its heyday (1988–98) for several reasons.
First, temperature rise has slowed significantly in the last 18 years (the warming “pause” or “hiatus“). Second, sensitivity estimates have been coming down toward long-held “skeptic” levels. Third, “fat tail” extreme-warming scenarios for risk analysis are under assault. …
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