What Is This World Coming To?

Your tax dollars are being used to help a start-up automotive manufacturing company called Fisker Automotive.  The car company received $529 million from the US government so that it can build hybrid sports cars — in Finland!

The Fisker will sell for about $89,000.00 US so not only will Americans not get jobs building them for the $529 million investment — Americans probably can’t afford to buy them, either.    So why would the US government kick out a half a billion dollars in taxpayer money to build a foreign car for foreigners?

Fisker Motors says it will use the loan money to produce a $40K family sedan that hasn’t been designed yet for American families but in the meantime, production on the $89K Karma, pictured here,  is due to begin this December.

Fisker Motors managed to get the half-billion dollar loan through connections with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a veteran Silicon Valley venture-capital firm of which Gore is a partner.

Employees of KPCB have donated more than $2.2 million to political campaigns, mostly for Democrats, including President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign contributions.

When the DOE was asked if Gore had any influence on Fisker’s application, DOE representative Matt Rogers was quick to reply, “Absolutely not.”

Of course it didn’t.  Using American tax dollars to build cars in Finland that Americans can’t afford  – why would anybody question  that?

UK’s Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington.

Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday.

The House Democrats don’t want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face,” Monckton told Climate Depot in an exclusive interview. “They are cowards.”

According to Monckton, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), Ranking Member on the Energy & Commerce Committee, had invited him to go head to head with Gore and testify at the hearing on Capitol Hill Friday. But Monckton now says that when his airplane from London landed in the U.S. on Thursday, he was informed that the former Vice-President had “chickened out” and there would be no joint appearance. Gore is scheduled to testify on Friday to the Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment’s fourth day of hearings on the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. The hearing will be held in 2123 Rayburn House Office Building.

According to Monckton, House Democrats told the Republican committee staff earlier this week that they would be putting forward an unnamed ‘celebrity’ as their star witness Friday at a multi-panel climate hearing examining the House global warming bill. The “celebrity” witness turned out to be Gore. Monckton said the GOP replied they would respond to the Democrats’ “celebrity” with an unnamed “celebrity” of their own. But Monckton claims that when the Democrats were told who the GOP witness would be, they refused to allow him to testify alongside Gore.

“The Democrats have a lot to learn about the right of free speech under the US Constitution. Congress Henry Waxman’s (D-CA) refusal to expose Al Gore’s sci-fi comedy-horror testimony to proper, independent scrutiny by the House minority reeks of naked fear,” Monckton said from the airport Thursday evening.

“Waxman knows there has been no ‘global warming’ for at least a decade. Waxman knows there has been seven and a half years’ global cooling. Waxman knows that, in the words of the UK High Court judge who condemned Gore’s mawkish movie as materially, seriously, serially inaccurate, ‘the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view,’” Monckton explained. Monckton has previously testified before the House Committee in March.

(See: Monckton: Have the courage to do nothing…US Congress told climate change is not real ) Monckton has also publicly challenged Gore to a debate. (See: Al Gore Challenged to International TV Debate on Global Warming By Lord Monckton - March 19, 2007 )

Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon.

Glenn Beck does an Al Gore-style Power Point explanation of how we got where we are now.

Shamelessly leeched from the Heritage Foundation’s Blog:

Good news, Mr. Gore. You no longer have to worry about polar bears arduously attempt to settle on a piece of breaking ice as portrayed in your documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. (The animated version Gore used in his movie can be seen at the 4-minute mark, to the tune of some strange Latin music, here.)

In any event, according to data compiled by Illinois’s Arctic Climate Research Center,

Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago. Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.”

Is there any good reason for the polar bear to be listed under the Endangered Species Act? Senior Policy Analyst Ben Lieberman writes,

Its global numbers have increased substantially, from an estimated 8,000–10,000 in 1965–1970 to 20,000–25,000 today. Clearly, any warming that has occurred has not had an adverse impact on polar bear numbers. This is true of the polar bear populations in Alaska, Canada, Russia, and other nations.

Unfortunately, the requirements for listing have never been particularly rigorous. In the case of polar bears, it may only require speculation that continued global warming will reduce the amount of summer ice in the Arctic that the bears rely upon.”

It appears that the polar bears are in good shape. Maybe Gore should shift his full attention to whales.

According to a report in National Geographic Magazine, “Arctic warming has become so dramatic that the North Pole may melt this summer, report scientists studying the effects of climate change in the field.”

“We’re actually projecting this year that the North Pole may be free of ice for the first time [in history],” David Barber, of the University of Manitoba, told National Geographic News aboard the C.C.G.S. Amundsen, a Canadian research icebreaker.”

Global warming proponents love to say things like “first time in history” as if ‘history’ only goes back as far as the earliest climate records. That is generally considered to be around 1850. Earlier records exist, but they are generally unreliable.

Over the course the reliable historical record, there have been two recorded warming periods: 1910-1945 and 1976 - 2000. The UN’s International Panel on Climate Change reported that, over the past 100 years, the global temperature has increased 0.74 degrees C (or just over 1 degree F)

However, there is a level of uncertainty regarding global temperature statistics estimated at about .05 degrees since 1950 and as much as 0.15 degrees before that. And the UN IPCC itself concluded in 1997 that; ” that the ability to monitor the global climate was inadequate and deteriorating.”

However, even if the Arctic were to completely thaw in September, it would not raise sea levels. And Antarctica is cooling, not warming. So the only way Al Gore’s cataclysmic flooding can take place is for Greenland’s glaciers to melt and for the runoff to make it to the North Atlantic.

However, a new study has concluded that Greenland’s rate of melting is not accelerating, and in fact may actually be decreasing when viewed over a longer timescale. The study, which used 17 years of satellite measurements to reach its conclusions, determined the overall yearly movement of ice to the sea is not increasing, and is actually decreasing in some places.

The researchers noted the speedup observed by past studies was strictly a short-term transient phenomena, occurring primarily in the summer months.

So, if you are among those who has invested in a piece of the Arizona desert, hoping to leave their heirs beach-front property in fifty years, maybe you should rethink that investment strategy. It isn’t gonna happen.

Global warming is a business, not a science. There is money to be made in selling the disease and power to be had by offering the cure. If the symptoms fail to cooperate with the diagnosis, then the only alternative is to invent new symptoms.

So the Arctic is melting. Maybe. We’ll revisit this again in September. It will interesting to hear the explanation for why it didn’t.

Last year it was revealed that Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for climate change (I thought climate change was ’science’) was among the nation’s worst energy hogs. Al’s carbon footprint was twenty times that of the average American household.

Gore countered by claiming that he buys ‘carbon offset credits’ (which is really nothing more than buying stock in ‘green’ companies. Even after it was revealed that Gore has a majority stake in Global Management, which sells the ‘offsets’. So in essence, Al Gore offsets his carbon footprints by buying stock from himself.)

“A man’s commitment to his beliefs is best measured by what he does behind the closed doors of his own home,” said Drew Johnson, President of the Tennessee Center for Policy Research. “Al Gore is a hypocrite and a fraud when it comes to his commitment to the environment, judging by his home energy consumption.”

This year, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research conducted another study of Al Gore’s domestic carbon footprint. Although Gore claimed to have invested a little cash since to make his home more energy efficient, it seems that the problem isn’t that his home is an energy hog. It’s the people who live in it.

Since taking steps to make his home more environmentally-friendly last June, Gore devours an average of 17,768 kWh per month –1,638 kWh more energy per month than before the renovations – at a cost of $16,533. By comparison, the average American household consumes 11,040 kWh in an entire year, according to the Energy Information Administration.

By contrast, President Bush has been criticized harshly by environmentalists for his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and its mandatory cuts on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for global warming.

An April 2001 article in USA Today described the president’s 4,000-square-foot single-story limestone house in Crawford as an “eco-friendly haven.”

“Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into purifying tanks underground — one tank for water from showers and bathroom sinks, which is so-called ‘gray water,’ and one tank for ‘black water’ from the kitchen sink and toilets,” it said. “The purified water is funneled to the cistern with the rainwater.”

In addition, “the Bushes installed a geothermal heating and cooling system, which uses about 25 percent of the electricity that traditional heating and air-conditioning systems consume.”

Accuweather’s ‘go-to’ guy when the weather gets bad; like when a hurricane is approaching the East Coast, or when tornado swarms flatten the Midwest, or when flooding like that now ravaging Idaho and Indiana hits, is a fellow called Joe Bastardi.

Joe appeared on the O’Reilly Factor the other day to explain why the storms and flooding have nothing to do with global warming. Poor, innocent Bastardi! Like anyone who dares speak against one of the sacred cows of American liberalism, he was immediately pilloried by the leftist blogosphere.

Bastardi had the bad form to suggest that what everybody else is calling ‘climate change’ is what used to be called ‘recurring weather patterns.’

“We’re back in the ’30’s, ’40’s and 50’s. This back and forth cycle that occurs, we saw it in the 1890s to 1910. … And people are just getting carried away and fascinated when, if they go back and look at what happened before, you can see the similarities.

According to Joe, there were similar periods of prolonged heat and cold, with attending tornado swarms, flooding, etc., and that we’re currently in transition from a period of prolonged heating (by ‘prolonged’ we’re talking a decade or two) to a cooling trend.

I don’t remember the ’30s and 40’s but I remember the 50’s and 60’s. It was a lot colder than it is now. I also remember reading the 1974 cover stories in Time and 1975’s Newsweek predicting the dawn of a new Ice Age in the 21st century.

The reason behind those two articles was the fact that global temperatures had been steadily cooling since 1940. Doesn’t anybody else think it strange that global warming didn’t start to show up until after the environmental movement was born? Or that the birth of the environmental movement was in response to fears of global cooling?

Or, and this is a biggee –that it was cooler BEFORE we started worrying about the affects of pollution on the atmosphere?

In addition to industrial pollution, there were two World Wars, billions of tons of explosives, the firebombing of most of Europe and Japan, and two thermonuclear explosions. Just think of the man-made pollutants created by just those two world wars!

Factories belched unrestricted pollution until the 1970’s. The very FIRST UN environmental conference wasn’t held until 1972 in Stockholm (in response to the threat of an Ice Age).

So, how come it got warmer after World War I (does the ‘Oklahoma Dust Bowl’ ring a bell?) and then so much cooler after World War II that scientists were predicting an Ice Age? Or why it started getting warmer after we started cleaning up the environment but not before? These are fair questions. But if anybody answers them, they run the risk of being labeled an ‘environmental heretic’.

Joe Bastardi has long since joined John Coleman [founder of the WeatherChannel] among the ranks of the Meteorological Dispossessed; heretics who dared to suggest that there is not enough evidence to suggest that the planet is irreversibly warming, rather than simply going through a normal weather cycle.

Bastardi has been a member of the heretic list ever since he responded in public to Al Gore’s equation of those who question global warming with those who think the moon landing was faked .

I am absolutely astounded that someone who refuses to publicly debate anyone on this matter and has no training in the field narrated a movie where frames of nuclear explosions were interspersed in a subliminal way in scenes of droughts and flood, among other major gaffes, can say these things and then have them accepted… by anyone.

[...] What gets me most is he goes on unchallenged one-on-one on this. Never in all my years of competition have I seen someone elevated to a level that he is, in any thing, without any face-to-face competition to establish credibility.

[...] anyone that believes he knows absolutely what is going to happen with the climate in the future, well you be the judge as to who is the card carrying member of the flat Earth society, that person, or the skeptic.

We were astounded, too, Joe. But what can you do? After all, the ’science is settled’ on the matter — just like it was in the 70’s.

“Look! Up in the sky! Is it an Ice Age? Is it Global Warming? Is it . . . the weather?? No! — the sky is falling . . . we must go tell the king!

More than 31,000 scientists across the United States, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields including atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties, have signed a petition rejecting “global warming,” the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth’s climate, according to a report in Worldnetdaily.

“Mr. Gore’s movie, asserting a ‘consensus’ and ’settled science’ in agreement about human-caused global warming, conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary movie goers and to public school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore’s movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse,” said project spokesman and founder Art Robinson.

Weeks before announcing a $300-million, three-year advertising campaign to raise awareness about global warming, Al Gore was conducting a slide show for a group of investors in Monterey, Calif., touting companies such as Bloom Energy, Amryis , Mascoma and other firms that are not household names — yet.

These bio-fuel and green technology firms could be poised to take off, Gore told his audience.

“Here are just a few of the investments I personally think make sense,” he said during the March 1 presentation. “I have a stake in these so I’ll have a disclaimer there.” (See Video)

Gore’s admitted stake in those companies comes from his partnership in the venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). Gore joined the firm last November, forging a partnership between KPCB and the London-based Generation Investment Management, a firm Gore chairs, and which steers investments in green and “sustainable” companies.

Gore has lobbied Congress and state governments to enact bolder environmental regulations. Gore’s defenders counter that he and his partners are simply looking at companies that will have long-term sustainability during the “climate crisis.”

Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-enterprise think tank, said in an interview: “There are a bunch of folks that stand to make real money, who have invested a lot in companies that are not worth real money until the agenda that this ad campaign is advocating is achieved.”

As a private citizen, Gore is not required to publicly disclose how much of his personal fortune is invested in the venture capital firm. KPCB spokeswoman Brianna Woon declined to say how much Gore had invested in the firms, and she said the firms couldn’t comment at this time on whether the greentech companies can succeed without government action.

Lack of government action could delay profits, but the free market is nonetheless moving toward clean energy on its own, said Gary Patterson, an analyst with the Fiscal Doctor Inc., of Wellesley, Mass. He predicts a good return for the venture capital firm’s green investments.

“It would be very helpful if you have government initiative. Without it, it will take longer for these to be economically viable,” Patterson told Cybercast News Service

So Al doesn’t just expect America to subsidize China and India, he expects America to subsidize Al Gore. The science may not be completely settled, but the finances are.

And there are still people out there  who remain True Believers!  It was Abraham Lincoln who said ‘you can’t fool all of the people, all the time’ — but Lincoln never met Al Gore.

The global warming activists are in a real pickle; here they’ve just about got us convinced that Atlanta is about to become beachfront property and then it started to get cold again. What’s an activist to do? Never give up. Never surrender!

According to one proponent, global warming is still with us, and its real, and the science is settled and all of that, but still, it’s getting colder. Why? Well, even global warming needs a vacation. So ours is taking ten years off.

Parts of North America and Europe may cool naturally over the next decade, as shifting ocean currents temporarily blunt the global-warming effect caused by mankind, Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said.

Average temperatures in areas such as California and France may drop over the next 10 years, influenced by colder flows in the North Atlantic, said a report today by the institution based in Kiel, Germany. Temperatures worldwide may stabilize in the period. Read the rest of this entry »