Obama’s Climate Change Speech Ignores Science & EU Experience

William F. Jasper
New American
June 26, 2013

President Obama was playing to his most extreme “green” constituency in his climate and energy speech at Georgetown University today, blasting global warming skeptics as “flat-earth society” ostriches with their heads in the sand. President Obama said he does not have “patience for anyone who denies that this problem is real.”

“We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat-Earth society,” Obama said. “Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.” Obama claimed that the call for urgent action to stem the threat of global warming is based on the “overwhelming judgment of science, of chemistry, of physics, and millions of measurements.”

The president apparently has not gotten the memos; his Oval Office staff must be keeping him in the dark concerning very important recent developments in climate science and even more significant developments in climate and energy policies. As wereported yesterday, some of the leading voices in the global warming alarmist choir have been admitting that the climate catastrophes predicted by the computer models have not materialized and that the alleged “scientific consensus” is a fraud. The influential British journal, The Economist, suggested in an article on June 20, that “the public has been systematically deceived” for years with all this talk of certainty and consensus about dire consequences attributed to man-made, or anthropogenic, global warming (AGW), and the supposed urgent need for drastic, costly, painful public policies to address the “crisis.”

“The planet is warming. Human activity is contributing to it,” Obama said in his Georgetown speech.

The president seems to be unaware that even top climate alarmists have admitted that there has been no evidence of global warming for at least the past 15 years. This absence of warming has been the source of much head scratching, debating, and theorizing in the climate activist circles. As we have reported, the UK Met Office and Professor Phil Jones, the former director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, are among the many alarmists who have been forced to acknowledge the reality of the lack of any warming trend or crisis. The New American’s recent articles (see below) on the false consensus list dozens of top scientists who have defected from the alarmist ranks, and provide links showing literally thousands of scientists contest the warming theories President Obama champions as the basis for his energy policy proposals.

The president’s energy program, outlined in this White House Fact Sheet and detailed in “The President’s Climate Action Plan,” both released today, would place onerous new restrictions on coal fired power plants and other fossil fuels and would direct billions more dollars into funding “renewable energy” sources, such as solar and wind. As we have reported, these are policies that have already proven to be enormously wasteful here in the United States, and in Germany and other European nations (seehere and here) have proven to be disastrous.

Spain has already shown us the destruction that can be wrought by the kind of government-mandated “green jobs” President Obama is proposing. Dr. Gabriel Calzada Álvarez is an Associate Professor at King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, Spain, where he teaches Applied Economics at the Environmental Science Faculty. In March 2009, along with two colleagues from the same University, Dr. Calzada released a major study on the Spanish experience with “green jobs.”

In testimony to the U.S. Congress, before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Prof. Calzada presented highlights from the study, including these sobering facts:

• For every 1 green job financed by Spanish taxpayers, 2.2 jobs were lost as an opportunity cost.

• Only 1 out of 10 green job contracts were in maintenance and operation of already installed plants, and most of the rest of the working positions are only sustainable in an expansive environment related to high subsidies.

• Since 2000, Spain has committed €571,138 ($753,778) per each “green job,”

• Those programs resulted in the destruction of nearly 110,500 jobs.

• Each “green” megawatt installed on average destroyed 5.39 jobs elsewhere in the economy, ?and in the case of solar photovoltaics, the number reaches 8.99 jobs per megawatt hour installed.

“Spain has already attempted to lead the world in a clean energy transformation,” Dr. Calzada told the congressmen. “But our research shows that Spain’s policies were economically destructive. When the president of a country with a relatively low unemployment rate like the US decides to learn how to create jobs from a country like Spain with the highest unemployment rate among developed countries, it should be in a field where that country has a demonstrable track record of job creation. Unfortunately, this is not the case of job creation in Spain through public support for renewable energy.”

James Lovelock, considered by many to be one of the “founding father” scientists of the environmentalist movement in the U.K., has been unsparing in his criticism of wind power and his former global warming alarmism, which he now says grossly exaggerated the non-crisis of climate change. Professor Fritz Vahrenholt, one of Germany’s most famous “greens” and a longtime AGW alarmist and champion of renewable energies, has likewise admitted to having been very, very wrong on these matters. Like Lovelock and many other leading scientists, Vahrenholt is calling for an end to the climate change hysteria and an end to the “green” lobby attacks on conventional fossil fuels.

“The Myth of Green Energy Jobs: The European Experience,” by the American Enterprise Institute, is one of many reports that surveys the economic and environmental disasters caused by renewable energy policies in the EU. This report focuses on the renewables follies in Denmark, Italy, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Even MSM organs such as USA Today, which normally hew to the climate catastrophist line, have reported on Europe’s renewables debacle. Instead of trying to ridicule renowned scientist skeptics by recycling Al Gore’s tired and discredited quips about scientific consensus and “flat-earth society” opponents, President Obama’s speechwriters would serve him better by acquainting him with more of the latest climate research and analyses of the failed energy policies of those countries that have already gone down the road the president is proposing for us.

This article was posted: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 6:10 am

Tags: government corruption, science, weather

View the original article here

Science Challenges Obama on Global Warming

Fred Lucas
CNS News
July 23, 2013

Organizing for Action Executive Director Jon Carson said last week his group, which grew out of President Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, will be calling out “climate deniers.”

“We’ll be calling out the climate deniers who are standing in the way of progress in Washington,” Carson said in an e-mail Thursday, the same day a supporter of more environmental regulations told a Senate committee “the warming over the past 15 years has slowed.”

The OFA included targeting climate deniers as part of the group’s August agenda. The organization is now a 501(c)(4) group that focuses on mobilizing political support for issues advocated by the Obama administration.

Read more

This article was posted: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 at 9:59 am

Tags: climate, domestic news, science

View the original article here

Weird Science always runs a current through its brain before speed dating

A jolt to the brain, and suddenly everyone looks pretty. Our brains are driven by electrical activity, so it's no real surprise that altering the electrical environment can alter the brain's function. In fact, just passing a small current through the right areas of the brain can greatly improve performance on some tasks (a fact that has led one company to offer to zap your brain for better performance in games). But, practically, this should really only work with areas of the brain that are close to the surface; there's just too much insulating material between your skull and the deeper bits of your grey matter.

But some scientists found a clever way to work around that limitation. Looking at the brain's wiring diagram, they realized that there are many connections between the midbrain, which ends up deep inside the skull, and the prefrontal cortex, which is right near the surface. So, a bit of current to the prefrontal cortex could potentially activate areas buried in the midbrain. And indeed it did, with a rather remarkably specific result: everyone started looking pretty. The current caused "increases in participants’ appraisals of facial attractiveness." So, whether or not beer goggles actually exist, electric goggles certainly could.

If a jolt to your brain doesn't do it, then maybe a robotic frog will. Animal courtship displays can be an elaborate mixture of visuals, sounds, and rituals. But how important are the individual parts? To find out, researchers turned to the túngara frog, whose males use a two-part vocalization performed while inflating a large vocal sac on their necks. If you play the two calls separated by too much time, females show no interest, presumably because they don't think the sounds are connected. But the vocal incompetence can be rescued with a robotic frog. If the robot inflates its vocal sac in the awkward gap between the two sounds, the females will realize they're connected and interpret them properly as a mating call.

Forget the last supper; for some lizards, it's the first supper that matters. The common lizard (Zootoca vivipara) has an uncommon parenting approach for lizards, in that it gives birth to live young. As soon as they're born, however, parental care ends—they've got to manage to find their first meal by themselves. Researchers have now found that the ease with which they find that meal makes a huge difference.

The researchers gathered a bunch of newborns, gave half an easy meal, then released the whole bunch into the wild. Not surprisingly, those that ate well tended to stick around the area where they were born, although the researchers had a lot of trouble catching them. And, as they matured, the ones that were fed had smaller litters of offspring.

The authors suggest that the lizards have a critical period just after birth, much like the period in which human infants are especially adept at learning language. It's just that their critical period happens to be only a single meal long.

Fake name, real math improvements. There have been a number of studies looking for reasons why performance in math tests can be influenced by gender stereotypes. Some authors reasoned that the stereotypes had become part of people's self-identity, so they subverted that by having a group of women take a math test under a fake name. Their scores were higher than those of their peers who used real names (males were unaffected by changing names). "These findings suggest that women's impaired math performance is often due to the threat of confirming a negative stereotype as being true of the self," the authors conclude. They also get bonus Weird Science points for including the phrase "L'eggo My Ego" in the title.

A machine may finally tell us if a baby is faking it. Infants cry for all sorts of reasons—attention, food, serious illness, what have you. Since their cries don't communicate specifics, parents are left guessing as to what the cause might be. But a Brown University researcher named Barry Lester ("who has studied baby cries for years," which sounds a bit sadistic) hopes to change that. Lester has developed a computerized shriek analysis system that he hopes can divide a baby's cries into all their salient features. Once he has that, he can start using machine learning to see if there are common features when babies are crying for known reasons. Potentially, this work can ultimately lead to some simple infant translation devices.

View the original article here

Weird Science always runs current through its brain before speed dating

A jolt to the brain, and suddenly everyone looks pretty. Our brains are driven by electrical activity, so it's no real surprise that altering the electrical environment can alter the brain's function. In fact, just passing a small current through the right areas of the brain can greatly improve performance on some tasks (a fact that's led one company to offer to zap your brain for better performance in games). But, practically, this should really only work with areas of the brain that are close to the surface; there's just too much insulating material between your skull and the deeper bits of your grey matter.

But some scientists found a clever way to work around that limitation. Looking at the brain's wiring diagram, they realized that there are many connections between the midbrain, which ends up deep inside the skull, and the prefrontal cortex, which is right near the surface. So, a bit of current to the prefrontal cortex could potentially activate areas buried in the midbrain. And indeed it did, with a rather remarkably specific result: everyone started looking pretty. The current caused a "increases in participants’ appraisals of facial attractiveness." So, whether or not beer goggles actually exist, electric goggles certainly could.

If a jolt to your brain doesn't do it, then maybe a robotic frog will. Animal courtship displays can be an elaborate mixture of visuals, sounds, and rituals. But how important are the individual parts? To find out, researchers turned to the túngara frog, where males use a two-part vocalization performed while inflating a large vocal sac on their necks. If you play the two calls separated by too much time, females show no interest, presumably because they don't think the sounds are connected. But the vocal incompetence can be rescued with a robotic frog. If the robot inflates its vocal sac in the awkward gap between the two sounds, the females will realize they're connected and interpret them properly as a mating call.

Forget the last supper; for some lizards, it's the first supper that matters. The common lizard (Zootoca vivipara) has an uncommon parenting approach for lizards, in that it gives birth to live young. As soon as they're born, however, parental care ends—they've got to manage to find their first meal by themselves. Researchers have now found that the ease with which they find that meal makes a huge difference.

The researchers gathered a bunch of newborns, gave half an easy meal, then released the whole bunch into the wild. Not surprisingly, those that ate well tended to stick around the area where they were born, although the researchers had a lot of trouble catching them. And, as they matured, the ones that were fed had smaller litters of offspring.

The authors suggest that the lizards have a critical period just after birth, much like the period in which human infants are especially adept at learning language. It's just that their critical period happens to be only a single meal long.

Fake name, real math improvements. There have been a number of studies looking for reasons why performance in math tests can be influenced by gender stereotypes. Some authors reasoned that the stereotypes had become part of people's self-identity, so they subverted that by having a group of women take a math test under a fake name. Their scores were higher than their peers who used real names (males were unaffected by changing names). "These findings suggest that women's impaired math performance is often due to the threat of confirming a negative stereotype as being true of the self," the authors conclude. They also get bonus Weird Science points for including the phrase "L'eggo My Ego" in the title.

A machine may finally tell us if a baby is faking it. Infants cry for all sorts of reasons—attention, food, serious illness, what have you. Since their cries don't communicate specifics, parents are left guessing as to what the cause might be. But a Brown University researcher named Barry Lester ("who has studied baby cries for years," which sounds a bit sadistic) hopes to change that. Lester has developed a computerized shriek analysis system that he hopes can divide a baby's cries into all their salient features. Once he has that, he can start using machine learning to see if there are common features when babies are crying for known reasons. Potentially, this work can ultimately lead to some simple infant translation devices.

View the original article here