The World Moves Right, and the US Moves Wrong

I sit here despondent. I had hopes that the House of Representatives was not this stupid. And it almost wasn't; H.R. 2454, The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, passed by 7 votes, and really only 1 vote, as the 219 votes for the bill was only 1 vote over 50% of the entire House. It seems there were 5 votes not cast.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is moving away from AGW lunacy. As this editorial in The Wall Street Journal reports, Australia is voting to kill their cap and trade system, the new government in New Zealand has suspended their weeks-old program before it could do any damage. Poland and the Czech Republic both have taken positions opposed to AGW, and even France appears to be appointing a commission (or assigning the task to a ministry) to look at the science behind AGW again.

Here in the US, the tide is turning as well, though you'd be hard pressed to tell from our "objective" news media.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers.... A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

Why is this happening?

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans.

In Australia, the credit is being given principally to one man.

Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting
evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.

Senator Jim Inhofe continues to lead the battle against AGW in the Senate. I heard part of a speech he was giving regarding HR 2454 earlier this week. He rightfully pointed out that the US unilaterally restricting our CO2 emissions (with the subsequent frightful damage to our economy which would ensue) while other nations, particularly India and China, did nothing to restrict their emissions, would mean that our efforts would be in vain. He estimates that what little American manufacturing that still remains would move to China, where they would escape our oppressive taxation, and that the increased number of coal-fired power plants the Chinese would need to power these new manufacturing plants would ultimately lead to an increased global CO2 levels.

Not that it matters that much, since CO2 is not the cause of the warming we saw in the 1990's.

Current observations indicate that the global temperature peaked in 1998 and has been flat ever since, except for a possible trend toward decreasing over the past 18 months or so. If historical trends, revised computer models, and sunspot minimum factors can be trusted, the temperature will definitely be going down in the years to come.

What depresses me further is that when the temperature does come down, these AGW imbeciles will think that The American Clean Energy and Security Act had something to do with it, thereby reinforcing their delusions of grandeur. And then we may never be able to get rid of this piece of excrement.