Steven Milloy of junkscience.com does his usual good job of poking holes in the hyperbole of AGW believers, but particularly against our old non-friend, Dr. James Hansen—the chief climate soothsayer who prophesied twenty years ago while testifying before the U.S. Senate that our destruction at the hands of CO2 would take twenty years! Here we are twenty years later...still here, with the global mean temperature continuing its downward trend as CO2 continues rising (still in minute proportions compared to water and methane).
Before you decide to give Hansen his props as some unassailable, incorruptible climate scientist, you should check out these links at the U.S. Senate Committee for Environment and Public Works (currently the minority page). There is a ton of information here about Hansen, including his financial ties to moveon.org benefactor, George Soros. Isn't that cute? We hear incessantly that climate scientists who debunk global warming are in the pockets of "big oil," and yet here is an example where the "Father of Global Warming" (yes, weird that honor is not reserved for Al Gore) is in the pocket of one of the wealthiest liberal elites to ever walk the ever-cooling Earth.
As an added bonus, John McCain is showing that he’s Obama’s equal on climate stupidity. OR maybe he believes that the American public has been so brainwashed that he has no choice politically but to get on-board with the insanity. It might be a smart political move, but it’s ultimately bad for America.
Look folks, there may be a future in America without oil, but in the near term, oil will be required to continue driving our economy. There’s currently no energy source that is as efficient and as safe as petrol, though some arguments could be made for nuclear energy.
With Y2K, millions were spent to head-off a problem that never occurred. People everywhere panicked and hoarded food, fuel, medicine, and so on, preparing for the coming apocalypse. Proponents would say that spending those millions prevented the disaster, but I’m not certain that’s the case—there was no real way to be completely prepared.
Now, we’re poised to spend trillions in hopes of reducing CO2 emissions, and I contend that it won’t make much of a difference. Wait and see, sheep. The Earth will not succumb to disaster at our hands, and the alarmists will be able to shout that their enacted, expensive solutions made the difference! That’s why they need to sustain the pipe-dream until some sort of large government action is taken; then they can claim their actions led to success. Wait and see, sheep, wait and see. One can almost read this boondoggle like a cheap novel.
Junk Science: Where's McCain’s 'Fuel Cell Express'?
NASA’s James Hansen tried this week to surf the 20th anniversary of his famous congressional testimony that launched global warming hysteria. Apparently not wanting to be left out of the green hoopla, John McCain tried to catch Hansen’s wave.
Both wiped out with embarrassing proposals.
You might have thought that Hansen’s main talking point this week would have been, "See, I was right." But, of course, he wasn’t, so he couldn’t take any credit.
With 20 years of real-life data to compare against Hansen’s 1988 predictions, it’s clear that reality has way underperformed on his fantasy of carbon-dioxide-stoked warming.
No doubt this is in large part due to Hansen’s yet-to-be-validated assumption that manmade CO2 emissions drive global climate in a meaningful way.
Hansen has been so far off the mark in forecasting global warming that he seems to have forsaken it altogether in favor of simply declaring that atmospheric CO2 levels must be reduced from the current level of about 380 parts per million to less than 350 ppm "to preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed."
But there is no scientific analysis to support 350 ppm or any other specific target as the preferred level of atmospheric CO2; moreover, 350 ppm also is not something likely to happen in our lifetimes no matter what we do.
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Bereft of science, Hansen was left to do what he does best — act the drama queen, as he did in 2006 when he likened the Bush administration to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union for reviewing his public presentations before he made them.
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Earlier this week, as part of his proposal that taxpayers award $300 million to the developer of the next generation auto battery that would leapfrog hybrid and electric car technology, McCain also proposed that auto manufacturers be given a $5,000 tax credit for every zero-emissions vehicle they sell.
But when you do the math, McCain’s proposal turns out to be little more than a taxpayer rip-off in favor of ZEV makers
