Dick Morris reminds us that Obama’s liberal policies may be just as big a problem for voters than his character:
The Debate McCain Must Force By Dick Morris Real Clear Politics June 25, 2008
…In our new book, Fleeced, we try to bring the debate back down to earth, focusing on the specific plans that Obama has announced during his presidential primary campaign and discussing the consequences. This is the debate Barack Obama hopes he can avoid.
Consider his proposals:
• In effect, he would legislate a 60 percent tax bracket for upper-income Americans, killing all initiative and innovation. He’d raise the top bracket to 40 percent. He’d apply FICA taxes to all income, not just that under $100,000 as at present. So add 40 percent plus FICA’s 12.5 percent plus Medicare’s 2 percent plus state and local taxes averaging, after deduction, at 5-6 percent, and you have a 60 percent bracket.
• He would double the capital gains tax, saddling the 50 percent of Americans who own stock with dramatically higher taxes.
• He’d double the dividend tax, hitting elderly coupon-clippers now retired and depending on fixed incomes.
• He wants to cover 12 million illegal immigrants with federally subsidized health insurance, dramatically driving up costs and forcing federal rationing of healthcare. As in the U.K. and Canada, you will not be permitted certain medical procedures if the bureaucrats decide you are not worth it.
• He proposes requiring Homeland Security operatives to notify terror suspects that they are under investigation within seven days of starting the investigation.
• He says that unless they can establish that there is “probable cause to believe that a certain individual is linked to a specific terrorist group,” Homeland Security cannot seize his documents and search his business. The current standard is only that the search be “relevant” to a terror investigation.
And let’s not forget that Obama is just fine with higher gas prices and opposes all new coal, petroleum and nuclear energy.
Not All Foreigners Love Obama
I’m sure that readers are bored with the last week’s Obama world tour. But if you’ll indulge me for a few seconds, it’s important to know that not all foreigners love Obama. The following Canadian writing in the Toronto, Ontario Globe and Mail had this view:
Obama’s audacity of hubris By REX MURPHY The Globe and Mail July 26, 2008
…The missing element may be the candidate’s equally sterling appreciation of himself. The rally in Berlin was the cue for this line of thought. As far as I know, this was his first visit to Germany. I could see him, on a first visit, as a candidate for the presidency, making calls on the Chancellor, meeting with opposition politicians, doing - as the Windsors call it - a bit of a walkabout.
But what was the idea behind a nominee for the highest office of the United States conducting a campaign rally in Berlin? Throw away those disclaimers from the Obama camp that the rally wasn’t political. Mr. Obama doesn’t knot his tie without politics providing the mirror.
It’s strange to have to note this, but, he isn’t yet president. He has absolutely no record at all of involvement in foreign policy.
Correction: He did offer unqualified, insistent opposition to the Petraeus surge in Iraq, which turned the war around to the point that some of its most relentless critics now maintain “it cannot be lost.” In other words, on the one definitive issue, post-invasion, on his country’s most important foreign involvement, the one decision the inarticulate and sublimely unhip Texan in the White House made alone, and got right, Mr. Obama was perfectly, publicly wrong.
And it’s less than two months ago that, ever so narrowly, he managed to edge Hillary Clinton out of contention for the nomination yet to be confirmed. It was razor close.
Yet, there he was on Thursday, acting in every way as if he were already president delivering, Urbi et Orbi, a proclamation. There was something almost glorious about the presumption: Call it the audacity of hubris. There was also and equally something very reckless about it. The only set who seem more enraptured than a good part of the U.S. media about the Obama campaign is the Obama campaign and the candidate himself.
The self-assurance, the commanding confidence of his campaign may turn out to be a transcending dynamic that rockets him into the White House while Mr. McCain is still trying to find a reporter to talk with. On the other hand, he may be signalling millions of voters that this untested candidate is just a damn sight too cocky for his own, and their, good.
As Curt points out in his post a round up of the AGW and energy news, the debate is raging in Australia , where they are finding resistance to their AGW mandates in the wake of Dave Evans (the man who designed FullCAM - the model that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol) - switch from proponent to skeptic
Meanwhile, enviros and agenda driven pols around the world do their level best to halt any constructive means of affordable, clean energy production, as well as increasing the world’s supply of oil.
There’s no dearth of “cures” offered by “the debate is settled” crowd. And one of these is everyone’s favorite - the electric car. To this I can only say… where is the logic?
To draw the parallel between the “problem” and “cure”, we need to talk water vapor. According to the pro AGW EurCarbon
Greenhouse gases (GHG) are gaseous components of the atmosphere that contribute to the greenhouse effect. The major natural greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36-70% of the greenhouse effect on Earth (not including clouds); carbon dioxide, which causes between 9-26%; and ozone, which causes between 3-7%, methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, and chlorofluorocarbons. The greenhouse gases, once in the atmosphere, do not remain there eternally. They can be withdrawn from the atmosphere:
Some of the beef of many skeptics is that water vapor is not included as mitigating factor in the IPCC’s “consensus” of perceived global warming - now called “climate change” since the 10 year global cooling, most likely to protect the activists/alarmists’ credibility.
EurCarbon argues that naturally occuring water vapor isn’t a factor since it’s duration in the atmostphere is short term (days) and is removed via condensation and precipitation (assuming that we are not in drought conditions, I would guess) while CO2/carbon dioxide is a variable. Again, according to them…
CO2 duration stay is variable (approximately 200-450 years) and its global warming potential (GWP) is defined as 1. Methane duration stay is 12 +/- 3 years and a GWP of 22 (meaning that it has 22 times the warming ability of carbon dioxide) Nitrous oxide has a duration stay of 120 years and a GWP of 310 CFC-12 has a duration stay of 102 years and a GWP between 6200 and 7100 HCFC-22 has a duration stay of 12.1 years and a GWP between 1300 and 1400 Tetrafluoromethane has a duration stay of 50,000 years and a GWP of 6500 Sulfur hexafluoride has a duration stay of 3,200 years and a GWP of 23900.
Despite CO2s low rating, and ratio compared to water vapor, per the pro AGW proponents, it’s the main culprit attacked. Which now brings me to one of their solutions… electric cars for everyone.
Yet the hydrogen/electric car engineering emits… uh… water vapor… the single largest greenhouse gas effect. Should the world revert to all electric cars, that’s a lot of water vapor emitted that is dependent on condensation and rain for removal.
So the question that comes to my mind… just what bright lightbulb thinks it’s a great idea to change the world to cars emitting an increased amount of water vapor (the largest contributor to warming), and then depend on preciptation to remove that water vapor?
Let’s pile on more to their arguments… AGW proponents seem to suggest that our action is necessary to reduce reduce tropical storm activity (BS in itself) and other weather disasters Yet those typhoons and hurricanes they wish to control are a natural factor in cleaning out the high content of water vapor, burying it in the oceans. And if we’re adding more water vapor to the atmosphere, exactly how do they propose this will dissipate without falling back to the earth, producing more violent snow and rain storms, flooding, and other natural disasters?
This strikes me as counterproductive, especially since they are talking about adding massive amounts of water vapor with the electric car emissions.
There are many atmospheric greenhouse gases, some naturally occurring and some resulting from industrial activities, but probably the most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. Water vapor is involved in an important climate feedback loop. As the temperature of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere increases, the atmosphere is able to hold more water vapor. The additional water vapor, acting as a greenhouse gas, absorbs energy that would otherwise escape to space and so causes further warming.
Then we come to the known anomalies of measuring water vapor, and in which level of the atmosphere it is concentrated. It’s variance in not only amounts, but the distribution over the globe, can be seen in as little as minutes, to decades. Again, from the AGU website on water vapor, they fully admit that better ways to study measurements and the water vapor distribution is required to assess the largest contributor to greenhouse gases and it’s effect on climate.
There are questions about how well the current models, both those used in climate studies and those used in forecasting the daily weather, treat water vapor. Modeling would be improved by systematic examination of models’s treatment of water vapor in light of what is now known of its distributions. Some of the questions arise because of the lack of good water vapor observations. The likely benefits of improved water vapor data include better weather forecasts as well as improved climate models.
Different types of measurements are complementary and useful. The challenge is how best to merge the available information on water vapor distribution into an improved description of the time and space variations of water vapor to enhance climate studies.
Since water vapor represents the largest contributor, it seems that is further proof that alarmists are jumping the gun with proposed “cures” for climate control… a rather lofty goal in itself.
Instead… in the effort to curb the global warming that is really global cooling in the past decade… we’re planning on releasing vast amounts more water vapor into the atmosphere. And all without a full understanding of how this will affect climate.
I’m no scientist nor chemist, but there’s something that strikes me as odd here. If the atmosphere will hold less water vapor if we cool the planet, but yet we’re planning on releasing more of it that may end up in the upper atmosphere, aren’t we risking a man-made ice age?? Read more to see how I get to that…
ScienceDaily has a couple of articles about the dangers of increasing water vapor levels… not only those we are proposing with a world filled with electric car emissions, but also methane (which turns to water vapor in the atmosphere). From an April 2001 article, NASA has warned that increasing water vapor in the stratopshere may delay ozone recovery, and accelerate climate change. And this is from a AGW believer, as he states:
“Climate models also indicate that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane may enhance the transport of water into the stratosphere. Though not fully understood, the increased transport of water vapor to the stratosphere seems likely to have been induced by human activities.
“Rising greenhouse gas emissions account for all or part of the water vapor increase,” said Shindell, “which causes stratospheric ozone destruction.”
“Half the increase in the stratosphere can be traced to human-induced increases in methane, which turns into water vapor at high altitudes, but the other half is a mystery,” said Mote. “Part of the increase must have occurred as a result of changes in the tropical tropopause, a region about 10 miles above the equator, that acts as a valve that allows air into the stratosphere.”
Readings of water vapor increases 3 to 10 miles up are more ambiguous, Mote said.
~~~
“A wetter and colder stratosphere means more polar stratospheric clouds, which contribute to the seasonal appearance of the ozone hole,” said James Holton, UW atmospheric sciences chairman and expert on stratospheric water vapor. “These trends, if they continue, would extend the period when we have to be concerned about rapid ozone depletion.”
Atmospheric heating happens when the Earth’s atmosphere and surface absorb solar radiation, while cooling occurs when thermal infrared radiation escapes the atmosphere and goes into space. If certain key gases that absorb and emit infrared radiation, the most important being water vapor and carbon dioxide, were not present in the atmosphere, Earth’s temperature would cool to minus 19 degrees celsius, or minus 2 degrees Fahrenheit. The global annual mean temperature is 14 degrees celsius.
Consider that statement… CO2 and water vapor keep us from being at a mean average of 2F degrees… I’d say that’s an ice age. Yet here we are, sans complete science on water vapor, in a race to increasing water vapor, and decreasing CO2…. two necessary ingredients for our liveable climate. How do we know what that change in balance will do? Ice age? Or perhaps even more warming instead?
“It’s hard to tell if those great international agreements [to ban CFCs] work if we don’t understand the other big things that are going on in the stratosphere, such as increases in greenhouse gases and water vapor,” Shindell said. The stratosphere is a dry atmospheric layer between 6 and 30 miles (9.7 and 48.3 kilometers) up where most ozone exists.
~~~
One simulation isolated the impacts of CFCs on ozone, and showed that as CFCs decline, by the year 2040 overall ozone makes close to a full recovery from current low levels. When CFCs, water vapor and temperature changes were all combined in a computer model, by 2040, overall ozone levels recovered only slightly from their current low point.
These computer simulations suggest that climate change from greenhouse gases may greatly slow any anticipated ozone recovery. Shindell said the effects of climate change need to be better accounted for as scientists and others try to track the success of international agreements, like the 1987 Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs.
The paper appears in the latest issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres.
It can be simply said that what we know most of water vapor is that we know very little … nor have we had adequate technology and accurate measurements to use to study of it’s effects with any degrees of accuracy.
With this increased focus on water vapor, we can also conclude that legislative mandates and cures thrust upon the global community - all with very damaging economic repercussions - are extremely premature. Needless to say, it’s entirely possible their cures are worse than the problem they suggest exists.
She’ll be OUR eyes and ears in Minneapolis in September!
When Mike’s America named Skye at Midnight Blue Blogger of the Year it was because of her eagerness to get out there be part of the action and give her readers live reports from the scene at events in Washington, DC or her own Victory Coalition in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
So, it should suprise no one that Skye’s desire for adventure and generosity in sharing with readers shouldn’t take another bold new course.
Skye: Official blogger at the GOP Convention!
Skye will be filing on the scene reports from the 2008 GOP Convention in Minneapolis and giving those of us who stayed at home a taste of how much fun a convention can be.
Here’s her announcement video:
Readers will be invited to interact with Skye online throughout the convention, September 1-4.
Support Skye-Live
It’s not cheap to have your own personal blogger on the ground in Minneapolis, so we’re hoping the generosity of our readers will be equal to the generosity of spirit Skye puts into every one of her blog posts.
Here are a few suggestions on how you can help:
$5 buys Skye a drink at one of Minneapolis’s better watering holes as she grills nervous delegates on their choice for McCain’s V.P. $20 buys Skye a reasonable lunch near the convention site while she hobnobs with the press and asks “why ARE you people so in the tank for that lightweight Obama?” $50 buys Skye a fine meal at a swanky restaurant while she needles sheepish RNC officials on their general timidity. $100 goes a long way towards buying Skye a comfortable, yet fashionable, pair of shoes so she can catch the shuttle bus back to her hotel room and tell us all the inside scoop before trotting off to another party.
A little roundup of global warming news that should perk some interest. First there is Christopher Bookers editorial in The Telegraph about the fraud known as James Hansen:
There are four internationally recognised sources of data on world temperatures, but the one most often cited by supporters of global warming is that run by James Hansen of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
Hansen has been for 20 years the world’s leading scientific advocate of global warming (and Al Gore’s closest ally). But in the past year a number of expert US scientists have been conducting a public investigation, through scientific blogs, which raises large question marks over the methods used to arrive at his figures.
First they noted the increasingly glaring discrepancy between the figures given by GISS, which show temperatures continuing to race upwards, and those given by the other three main data sources, which all show temperatures having fallen since 1998, dropping dramatically in the past year to levels around the average of the past 30 years.
Two sets of data, from satellites, go back to 1979: one produced by Dr Roy Spencer, formerly of Nasa, now at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, the other by Remote Sensing Systems. Their figures correspond closely with those produced by the Hadley Centre for Climate Studies of our own Met Office, based on global surface temperature readings.
Right out on their own, however, are the quite different figures produced by GISS which, strangely for a body sponsored by Nasa, rely not on satellites but also on surface readings. Hansen’s latest graph shows temperatures rising since 1880, at accelerating speed in the past 10 years.
The other three all show a flattening out after 2001 and a marked downward plunge of 0.6 degrees Celsius in 2007/8, equivalent to almost all the net warming recorded in the 20th century. (For comparisons see “Is the Earth getting warmer, or colder?” by Steven Goddard on The Register website.)
Hansen's monthly temperature reports are wildly out of line with every other global temperature measure, and the delta increases each month
Three of the four global temperature measures have shown world temps flat or cooling since 2001, with Hansen the exception
Hansen's NASA rejects satellite temperatures, relying instead on ground-based mercury systems, while the other three would kill for the NASA satellite data
Satellite data–of both temperature and ocean levels–increasingly disagree with Hansen's reports
Hansen, unlike the leading scientists of the other three bodies, stands alone in calling for international dictatorship to combat global warming
Hansen is the most politically active of the leading scientists in the field
Hansen has a lifetime's reputation to lose if he's wrong
In Australia the debate over a proposed Emission Trading System is fast becoming one on the cost of the program, and if its worth it to do if the worlds worst polluters are not doing it also:
DESPITE breathless expectations to the contrary, Malcolm Turnbull will not turn this week’s two-day Liberal Party debate on the shape of an emissions trading system into a defacto leadership contest with Brendan Nelson.
If Turnbull loses the fight inside the shadow cabinet over Nelson’s bid to make the introduction of an Australian ETS conditional on the big emitters China, India and the US committing to a global ETS framework first, the shadow treasurer will fall into line. The word committing is important. Nelson will only be demanding timetables - not action from the global giants - as his price for introducing an Australian ETS.
~~~
Meanwhile furious work is under way behind the scenes ahead of Tuesday’s shadow cabinet meeting and then a gathering of the full party room on Wednesday to find a compromise between the position being argued by Turnbull and environment spokesman Greg Hunt on one side, and Nelson on the other.
Turnbull and Hunt want a 2012 start-up date for an ETS with no conditions, the original position recommended in the Shergold report commissioned by former prime minister John Howard.
But there is a fall-back option for the Coalition: an in-principle acceptance of Nelson’s conditionality regarding the US, China and India, but tempered by the introduction of a slow-track ETS in Australia with both low carbon pricing and implementation trajectories as the trade-off for the big emitters not making the grade post Copenhagen 2009.
Nelson is prepared to consider this option, but only as one among others. Hunt, wanting to avoid a splintering confrontation between Turnbull and Nelson, will be pushing this hard.
The search for compromise marks a dawning recognition inside the Liberal Party that Nelson may have instinctively read the politics of the issue better than Turnbull; that while his condition-based stance on an ETS may be opportunistic it may also be more in tune with community sentiment than the hairy-chested approach taken by Kevin Rudd: an ETS by 2010 and damn the torpedoes.
~~~
Former CSIRO scientist Dennis Jensen has been leading the charge against an ETS inside the Liberal Party room during the past few weeks. Jensen isn’t just opposed to an ETS. He doesn’t believe climate change necessarily exists.
“First, on the science,” Jensen told me. “The data on global temperatures, sea ice extent, tropical upper tropospheric heating and ocean temperature suggests the danger to these do not match with predictions made by the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Having said that, even if you agreed with the IPCC position, Australia going it alone, or becoming involved in an ETS without India, China and the US is pointless.
“The danger for us becoming involved in this scheme is that we will damage our relative trading and economic position compared with those nations that continue to emit. Even if our industry does not go offshore, the economic competitiveness of our industries will be reduced due to increased costs. I am not in favour of sacrificing Australian industry, and Australian jobs and economic competitiveness, on the basis of dubious science, potential increases in the emitted carbon dioxide ‘problem’ and certainly any improvement in the overall ‘global warming’ situation, even accepting the orthodoxy.”
Then there is the news that the corn boom for ethanol has lessened interest in sustainable farming and is resulting in a increase of fertilizer and pesticide use:
MES, Iowa - Most farmers would be pleased with the yields Matt Liebman can get from his corn field - 200 bushels an acre or more.
The average yield last year in Boone County, where Liebman’s head-high corn is growing this summer, was 181 bushels per acre. The national average last year was 151 bushels.
Better yet, Liebman gets his strong yields with far less fertilizer and pesticide than conventional growers use. Applying less fertilizer saves money and reduces polluted runoff.
But Liebman, a Berkeley-trained professor of agronomy at nearby Iowa State University, knows few farmers are going to pay attention to his methods. Not when corn is selling for $6 to $7 a bushel, triple what it did just three years ago.
Farmers are planting more corn than they have in decades, raising concerns that the heavy use of chemicals needed to produce the crop will worsen pollution in rivers and streams.
Following Liebman’s sustainable farming practices would mean a farmer could only plant corn every three or four years on the same ground. Other years, they’d have to plant soybeans and crops like alfalfa and red clover to replace the nitrogen the corn has sucked out of the soil.
“I don’t tell people this is what they should do. I tell them this is something they can do,” Liebman said. “We need to be cognizant of not just production but quality of life and quality of the environment.”
The eastern Colorado wind turbine tapped for the Democratic National Convention’s carbon-offset program has one problem: It doesn’t generate any electricity. Convention organizers are now being questioned for their eagerness to market those credits to delegates.
The DNC has contracted with Vermont-based NativeEnergy to offer delegates “Green challenge” carbon offsets to soften the environmental impact of convention travel. That money is then invested in carbon-free “green” energy sources around the country, including a wind turbine installed this year by the Wray School District RD-2. But a Face The State investigation reveals the district’s turbine has never produced marketable energy due to massive equipment malfunctions.
Amid the rolling hills and verdant pastures of south central Virginia an unlikely new front in the battle over nuclear energy is opening up. How it is decided will tell us a lot about whether this country is willing to get serious about addressing its energy needs.
In Pittsylvania County, just north of the North Carolina border, the largest undeveloped uranium deposit in the United States — and the seventh largest in the world, according to industry monitor UX Consulting — sits on land owned by neighbors Henry Bowen and Walter Coles. Large uranium deposits close to the surface are virtually unknown in the U.S. east of the Mississippi River. And that may be the problem.
Virginia is one of just four states that ban uranium mining. The ban was put in place in 1984, to calm fears that had been sparked by the partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island outside of Harrisburg, Pa. in 1979.
Messrs. Bowen and Coles, who last year formed a company called Virginia Uranium, are asking the state to determine whether mining uranium really is a hazard and, if not, to lift the ban. But they’ve run into a brick wall of environmental activists who raise the specter of nuclear contamination and who are determined to prevent scientific studies of the issue.
~~~
James Kelly, who directed the nuclear engineering program at the University of Virginia for many years, says that fears about uranium mining are wildly overblown. “It’s an aesthetic nightmare, but otherwise safe in terms of releasing any significant radioactivity or pollution,” he told me. “It would be ugly to look at, but from the perspective of any hazard I wouldn’t mind if they mined across the street from me.”
The situation is rich with irony as well as uranium. While you can’t mine yellowcake, it is perfectly legal in Virginia to process enriched uranium into usable nuclear fuel, which is somewhat dangerous to handle. A subsidiary of the French nuclear giant Areva operates a fuel fabrication facility in Lynchburg 50 miles from Chatham. It has been praised by Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, as a good corporate citizen. The state is also home to four commercial nuclear reactors, which provide Virginians with 35% of their electricity. And, of course, the U.S. Navy operates nuclear ships out of Norfolk, Va.
Across the country, there are 104 commercial nuclear reactors. They consume 67 million pounds of uranium annually, the vast majority of which is imported from Australia, Canada and former Soviet republics. The 200-acre Coles Hill deposit (Mr. Coles’s family has lived on the spot since 1785) is thought to contain nearly twice that amount. For Messrs. Bowen and Coles, with the long-term price of uranium near $80 per pound, that means they are sitting on about $10 billion worth of ore. But for the rest of us, it means they are sitting on an opportunity to make the U.S. more energy self-sufficient.
And finally this letter to the editor in The Province is an excellent smackdown of the elitism shown by the man-made global warming crowd and Max Cameron in this editorial:
The earth’s climate has been changing for 4.5 billion years, and there’s nothing he and his like-minded crowd can do to stop it.
But the earth has not warmed since 1998. We have entered a cooling phase, and all the warming of the past 100 years has been wiped out.
None of this showed up on any of the climate-change models.
For Cameron to insinuate that skeptics do not care about the environment or the future of our children shows an unbearable elitist’s arrogance.
Skeptics agree that we have to work hard to gain efficiency and become less reliant on oil, coal and gas. But they do not want to hear half-truths or pseudo-science trumpeted by eco-activists and gravy-train-riding scientists.
The single biggest enemy of the environment and planet Earth, Mr. Cameron, is poverty. Nothing else comes even close.
Just a few of the stories over the last few days that provide some fodder for discussion on the merits of AGW.
The Sheepdogs made for a fabulous presentation against the anemic peace protesters; perhaps they are spreading their dwindling membership too thin with multiple day protests?
We had our Sheepdog motorist make an eyecatching appearance, circling around the block several times to show his support for the troops and America. We cheered loudly every time he drove by, the peace protesters were not amused.
Every week we welcome new friends into our midst. John and Nina were driving past our rally and were compelled to come back at join us. It was a pleasure to meet two such enthusiastic patriots and look forward to seeing your smiling faces at future rallies. Mary Lou and Harry held a family reunion at our rally, introducing their son, Matt accompanied by his girlfriend, and Uncle Bill. We also welcomed today: Howard, John and Jeri - we look forward to sharing many more rallies with you!
Like what you see? Proud of America? Come join us! We rally every Saturday in West Chester, Pa at the corner of High and Market Streets - 10:45am till 12:15pm.
If you can’t make the West Chester Rally, below are other pro-troop rally’s occuring weekly in neighboring counties:
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