Posts from — November 2008

Read Christopher Booker’s column in The Telegraph.

“Mr Obama begins by saying that “the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”. “Sea levels,” he claims, “are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Far from the science being “beyond dispute”, we can only deduce from this that Mr Obama has believed all he was told by Al Gore’s wondrously batty film An Inconvenient Truth without bothering to check the facts. Each of these four statements is so wildly at odds with the truth that on this score alone we should be seriously worried.

(…)

Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a “federal cap and trade system”, a massive “carbon tax”, designed to reduce America’s CO2 emissions “to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050″. Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.

Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage “clean energy” sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing “18 gigawatts of installed capacity”, only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.

He talks blithely of allowing only “clean” coal-fired power plants, using “carbon capture” - burying the CO2 in holes in the ground - which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn’t even yet been developed. He then babbles on about “generating five million new green jobs”. This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those “dirty” coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity.

If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth’s richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even “sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant”. The only way to avert the “collapse of human civilisation”, according to the Great Moonbat, would be “the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050″.

For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.”

“The globe is freezing. Even Al Gore is looking for an extra blanket”, says Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Record snowfalls, lowest-ever temperatures, polar ice accumulating faster than ever - what happened to global warming? Don’t worry, it’s just been rebranded. It is now called “climate change” which covers every possibility of what might happen to the globe. Clever thinking.

“It’s clear now that the earth has been cooling for the past decade”, Wesley Pruden writes, “to the sorrow of the special pleaders and despite everything Al can do about it. The solar cycle peaked, the sun is quieter, the sunspots have faded and everybody but Al is cooling off.

Even the United Nations says so. The director of the U.N.’s panel on climate change concedes that nature has overwhelmed everything man can do and it might even be another decade before man can rally and the warming resumes. Until then, like it or not, nature rules the cosmos.”

Read the entire column in today’s Washington Times.

Rachel Marsden has written a refreshing piece about the religion of global warming and its Demagogue Number One - The Goracle.

Forget any sort of environmental leadership position that would limit him to America - The Goracle simply cannot be contained. Within mere days of the Obama win, Gore exploded like Chernobyl all over the op-ed pages of the New York Times:

“The inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he - and we - must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly gworing threat posed by the climate crisis.”

From the next almost president through climate prophet to Global Saviour, it’s been quite a journey for Al Gore. Let’s hope Obama can keep his head cool. Al Gore shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near an official position.

Hello, everybody. I am sorry for not writing any posts in months. I am currently devoting all my time to the Swedish version of my blog and to writing a book about climate issues. I didn’t mean to let you down in any way and I will try to write a post from time to time, just to let you know that I am still alive and still skeptical.