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HI54UNI wrote:Dems Cool On Climate Change As Economic Pressures Escalate

BY SEAN HIGGINS

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 2/23/2009

To environmentalists, there is no more urgent question than addressing global climate change. The new Democrat-led Congress has vowed to pass major cap-and-trade legislation in response.

Later this year. Maybe.

While President Obama said in Canada last week that climate change remains a priority, Congress appears in no hurry to act.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., last week promised a bill "hopefully" by late summer. The House is unlikely to even attempt to pass a major bill until December at the earliest, according to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Crafting a bill is proving tricky. The Democrats now have a larger majority, but many of the newer lawmakers hail from Midwestern and Southern states where emissions cuts could hurt businesses.

http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDA ... e=20090223


The truth about the scam finally comes out in this article:

"One reason for the change, Pelosi said, was that the government needed the money it could get from the auctioning off of the emissions permits under a cap-and-trade program.

"I believe we have to because we see that as a source of revenue," the Chronicle reported her saying.

Appaholic wrote:

HI54UNI wrote:...The truth about the scam finally comes out in this article:

"One reason for the change, Pelosi said, was that the government needed the money it could get from the auctioning off of the emissions permits under a cap-and-trade program.

"I believe we have to because we see that as a source of revenue," the Chronicle reported her saying.

Pelosi's statements' are all one needs to for the recent urgency in addressing global climate change...

travelinman67 wrote:

Appaholic wrote:
Pelosi's statements' are all one needs to for the recent urgency in addressing global climate change...

My, my...aren't we Conkish today...

Gil Dobie wrote:In a related story, 193,000 square miles of polar ice was missed by a recent Satellite sensor error.
In reference, California, the entire state, is 164,000 square miles.

Satellite sensor errors

As some of our readers have already noticed, there was a significant problem with the daily sea ice data images on February 16. The problem arose from a malfunction of the satellite sensor we use for our daily sea ice products. Upon further investigation, we discovered that starting around early January, an error known as sensor drift caused a slowly growing underestimation of Arctic sea ice extent. The underestimation reached approximately 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) by mid-February. Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality control measures prior to archiving the data. See below for more details.

We have removed the most recent data and are investigating alternative data sources that will provide correct results. It is not clear when we will have data back online, but we are working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

AZGrizFan wrote:[


Big Al's hypocrisy just keeps gettin' better and better.

Gil Dobie wrote:

AZGrizFan wrote:[


Big Al's hypocrisy just keeps gettin' better and better.

algore's political spin on science it getting out of control.

Former Vice President Al Gore is pulling a dramatic slide from his ever-evolving global warming presentation. When Mr. Gore addressed a packed, cheering hall at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago earlier this month, his climate slide show contained a startling graph showing a ceiling-high spike in disasters in recent years. The data came from the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (also called CRED) at the Catholic University of Louvain in Brussels.

The graph, which was added to his talk last year, came just after a sequence of images of people from Iowa to South Australia struggling with drought, wildfire, flooding and other weather-related calamities. Mr. Gore described the pattern as a manifestation of human-driven climate change. “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented,” he said. (The preceding link is to a video clip of that portion of the talk; go to 7th minute.)

Now Mr. Gore is dropping the graph, his office said today. Here’s why.

Two days after the talk, Mr. Gore was sharply criticized for using the data to make a point about global warming by Roger A. Pielke, Jr., a political scientist focused on disaster trends and climate policy at the University of Colorado. Mr. Pielke noted that the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters [CRED] stressed in reports that a host of factors unrelated to climate caused the enormous rise in reported disasters (details below).

Dr. Pielke quoted the Belgian center: “Indeed, justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading. Climate change is probably an actor in this increase but not the major one — even if its impact on the figures will likely become more evident in the future.”

And here is the center’s statement (highlight added):

CRED is fully aware of the potential for misleading interpretations of EM-DAT figures by various users. This is a risk all public datasets run…. Before interpreting the upward trend in the occurrence of weather-related disasters as “completely unprecedented” and “due to global warming”, one has to take into account the complexities of disaster occurrence, human vulnerabilities and statistical reporting and registering.

Over the last 30 years, the development of telecommunications, media and increased international cooperation has played a critical role in the number of disasters that are reported internationally. In addition, increases in humanitarian funds have encouraged reporting of more disasters, especially smaller events. Finally, disasters are the convergence of hazards with vulnerabilities. As such, an increase of physical, social, economic or environmental vulnerabilities can mean an increase in the occurrence of disasters.

We believe that the increase seen in the graph until about 1995 is explained partly by better reporting of disasters in general, partly due to active data collection efforts by CRED and partly due to real increases in certain types of disasters. We estimate that the data in the most recent decade present the least bias and reflect a real change in numbers. This is especially true for floods and cyclones. Whether this is due to climate change or not, we are unable to say.

Once again, we would like to point out that although climate change could affect the severity, frequency and spatial distribution of hydro-meteorological events, we need to be cautious when interpreting disaster data and take into account the inherent complexity of climate and weather related processes — and remain objective scientific observers.