Man-made climate change ‘a pagan religion’

Russ Steele

This came in over the email transom, and is recommended by a regular reader of this blog. It cuts to the core of our discussion with Steven Frisch, who is unable to discuss the science of global warming, resorting instead to appeals to authority, which is a fundamental tenet of an ideology.

In a new book French philosopher Pascal Bruckner called the belief in climate change “a pagan religion.”

Watch more from Bruckner, who describes how this belief follows a “pagan religion” scenario where man must be punished for sinning against mother earth in this video:

http://downloads.cbn.com/cbnnewsplayer/cbnplayer.swf?aid=29173

You thoughts on the video are most welcome in the comments.

Mandatory ‘Big Brother’ Black Boxes In All New Cars From 2015

Russ Steele

Where have these people been? I wrote this in 2004 for the Capital Journal. That was eight years ago.

“No one wants a stranger invading their privacy, looking over their shoulder watching every move. Yet, every time the driver of a late model car turns the key, they could be inviting an unknown observer. An observer who can report indicator light status, seat belts on or off, motor speed, vehicle speed, brake activation, crash forces, and event times; should the driver be involved in an accident. All valuable information to reconstruct an accident, determine accident responsibility, check for insurance fraud, or to make critical medical decisions at the accident site.”

Consider this from Infowars:

A bill already passed by the Senate and set to be rubber stamped by the House would make it mandatory for all new cars in the United States to be fitted with black box data recorders from 2015 onwards.

Section 31406 of Senate Bill 1813 (known as MAP-21), calls for “Mandatory Event Data Recorders” to be installed in all new automobiles and legislates for civil penalties to be imposed against individuals for failing to do so.

“Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall revise part 563 of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, to require, beginning with model year 2015, that new passenger motor vehicles sold in the United States be equipped with an event data recorder that meets the requirements under that part,” states the bill.

Although the text of legislation states that such data would remain the property of the owner of the vehicle, the government would have the power to access it in a number of circumstances, including by court order, if the owner consents to make it available, and pursuant to an investigation or inspection conducted by the Secretary of Transportation.

When I worked for TRW, a major supplier of auto airbags in the 1990s they included an event recorder in every airbag controller. Why?  Because people were suing TRW, claiming their accident was caused by the airbag going off. The IC recorder collected the acceleration forces for about 20 second before any crash.  It was soon clear which took place first, the accident and then the airbag going off.

I suspect this legislation does not have anything to do with crash recording, which has been in place for years for any vehicle with airbags. It is more about recording where the vehicle drives so that government agencies can collect road taxes.  This has been on the mind of the Department of Transportation for years.

I wrote this in December of 2004, again almost eight years ago:

Mary Peters, Federal Highway Administrator for the Transportation Research Board in Washington D.C., acknowledged the problem at a January highway finance session, saying, “The bottom line is we cannot depend on fossil fuel-based taxes in the future.” Peters suggests the solution to declining revenue is a “public utility model where we pay for what we use, based on the time of day we use it, and how many other people want to use it.” In effect this would be a market-based solution for allocating a limited resource — a congestion and pollution free roadway.

Having an onboard recorder is consistent with this solution. I suspect the recording device is nothing more than a Camel’s nose under the tent flap, a recorder being sold as a safety device, but then adopted for it’s the real intended use.  If you have evidence to the contrary please share it.

What Arnold’s memoirs need: A chapter on his betrayal of California

Russ Steele

This crossed my mind, but decided not to waste my time to suggest that Arnold write about his landmark disaster — AB-32, The Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

Chris Reed, writing at the CalWatchDog was not so reticent:

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s offbeat request last week on his Facebook page for the public to tell him what to write about in his pending memoirs got the result he wanted: lots of attention.

“More than 2,000 people responded: Talk about bodybuilding, your childhood and your time on movie sets, they wrote,” said an account in the Sacramento Bee. “Talk about politics. And sex.”

But the former governor’s upcoming book is unlikely to truthfully detail perhaps the most profound and far-reaching action of Schwarzenegger’s life: his decision to betray Californians and saddle their economy with a permanent burden because of his determination to be remembered as a green icon.

I refer to Schwarzenegger’s 2006 decision to embrace and sign AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 – a bill forcing California utilities to switch to cleaner but much costlier forms of energy and establishing a cap-and-trade pollution credits market for heavy industries.

The state media’s amazingly incompetent and biased coverage of AB 32 treats it as an open question whether forcing California businesses to pay much higher costs for energy than firms in rival states and nations will help them or hurt them. Reporters covering energy and the environment also never mention the very related fact that one of the main rationales for AB 32 — that it would inspire the rest of America and the rest of the world to copy the Golden State in fighting global warming — never came to pass

Read the rest of Chris’s article HERE.

What do you think that Arnold should write about AB-32?

Consensus Reality Check

Russ Steele

In the comments section of this post Steven Frisch wrote:

The truth is the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, and scientific organizations agree that the climate is changing, that it is at least substantively human caused, and that it is a serious threat. You guys can crwo (sic) all you want about whether or not the word ‘consensus’ is a scientific term, but that does not change the facts.

Here are some facts from P. Gosselin writing at the No Tricks Zone. Max Planck Institute Director Admits “Physical Causes Unclear…Models Inconsistent With Observations”!

More cracks like never before are appearing in Germany’s climate alarmism.

Global temperatures remaining flat over 15 years, defying model projections.

Not long ago global warming science was considered settled here. So much so that climate protection has long since been institutionalized.

Now it’s all starting to look like a very expensive mistake. The threat of a spectacular crumble is becoming real.

Michael Odenwald of warmist news magazine FOCUS has written a status report on global warming science: “Global Warming: “A Matter of Standpoint”.(In German, see English quotes below)

As the title suggests, the dispute depends on how one looks at the data, and so the science is becoming more unsettled than ever. German media is beginning to report on the growing number of contradictions.

David Whitehouse: Time to recognize the temperature stagnation As Odendahl describes, the big dispute raging today is whether global warming is continuing, or if it has stalled. According to HadCRUT4, global temperature has remained constant from 1997 to 2011.

FOCUS writes:

However, [David] Whitehouse explains further, the IPCC had predicted a temperature increase of of 0.2°C per decade because of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. But this warming has not occurred. ‘We are now at a point where temperature stagnation is dominating the climate development. One cannot ignore that, even if is not 30 years,’ Whitehouse believes. ‘It is now time for the IPCC and the scientific community to recognize the temperature stagnation as reality.“

FOCUS author Odendahl then adds:

With this, it is becoming very clear that the scientific debate over the greenhouse effect is not yet over.

Steven can read the rest of the report HERE, but it clear that the climate models cited by all the “consensus scientists” have failed to model reality.  Someday real soon now those  ”consensus scientists” will have to wake up to reality.  For the past 15 years the planet has not warmed and in some regions has started to cool.  What will Steven do then, when his religious beliefs in AGW are destroyed by reality?

Voters Vote Their Wallets – Obama Knows Gas Prices are a Wallet Issue

Russ Steele

With gas prices soaring Obama is looking for a way to scapegoat the issue. It is always about blaming some one other than himself. With citizens growning tired of hearing “Bush Did It” Obama has been looking around for some one else to blame. He must have been watching O’Reilly on Fox News, who insists on blaming speculators for the higher gas prices, even though his guests from the Fox Business Channel explain why he is wrong.

I have been tracking fuel prices HERE.

This morning the Heritage Foundation’s Morning Report explains the issue once more in : Obama’s New Gas Price Scapegoat

High gas prices are not a president’s friend, especially in an election year, so it’s not surprising that President Barack Obama is trying his darndest to shift the blame for record-high fuel prices onto something other than his failed energy policies. Yesterday he made a desperate attempt to distract from those failures and redirect America’s gas price rage with a flawed proposal to punish speculators for supposedly driving up the cost of energy.

Speaking from the Rose Garden, the president announced a proposal to spend $52 million to fund increased government oversight of oil futures market trading in addition to harsher civil and criminal penalties for manipulation in energy markets. “We can’t afford a situation where some speculators can reap millions, while millions of American families get the short end of the stick,” Obama said. “That’s not the way the market should work.”

The implication, of course, is that evil Wall Street barons are the reason gas prices are so high, and that they’re walking away with millions at the expense of the rest of the country. (The president even went so far as to invoke Enron.) That simply isn’t the case, and even the president said that “none of these steps by themselves will bring gas prices down overnight” — a point that White House spokesman Jay Carney reiterated in a press conference later in the afternoon when he admitted “it’s hard to know” what the impact of the president’s proposal would be.

Heritage’s David Kreutzer explains that the president’s “the speculators did it” argument is flawed on several levels. If speculators are making unconscionable profits on energy, why are they only doing it occasionally and not all the time? Why are there only speculators in oil, not natural gas (whose current price is about half of what it averaged over the last decade)? And given how the petroleum market works — for every speculator who makes money on a trade, somebody else will lose money — the president’s theory “requires an endless string of chumps to take the other side of the speculators’ deals.” Finally, Kreutzer writes:

For speculation to drive up prices, the speculators must either cause oil production to slow down (which they haven’t) or to pull oil off the market. If the flow of petroleum and its products remains unchanged, the price at the pump will not change. If petroleum is pulled off the market, which can happen even though there are limits to what can be stored, it will eventually come back on the market.

The question becomes, ‘When the oil comes back on the market, is the price higher or lower than when it was pulled off the market?’ The price will only be higher if the amount supplied at that time is lower or the demand is higher. In either of those cases, speculators have helped moderate price fluctuations and will be rewarded with profits. If the price is lower, then the speculators did a bad thing and will be punished by losing money.

You can read the full article HERE.  The bottom line is the President is responsible for a failed energy policy:

If the president truly wanted to lower gas prices, he would work to increase supply. But when given the opportunity, he just says “no.” He turned turned down the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring up to 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada. His Administration has made it even harder for companies to explore and extract domestic energy resources by canceling, delaying, or withdrawing a number of lease sales for exploration and development. Meanwhile, huge swaths of federal lands have been put off limits for energy exploration.