If you believe this, I have a bridge you'll REALLY like

Yep, I'll just bet those warlords in Nigeria, the Sudan and Libya can't wait to spend someone else's money on CFL light bulbs and solar panels...

Africa wants $67 bln a year in global warming funds

Mon Aug 24, 2009 7:35am EDT

* Leaders seek unity ahead of Copenhagen talks

* Climate change seen hitting poor nations hardest



By Tsegaye Tadesse

ADDIS ABABA, Aug 24 (Reuters) - African leaders will ask rich nations for $67 billion per year to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world's poorest continent, according to a draft resolution seen by Reuters on Monday.

Ten leaders are holding talks at African Union (AU) headquarters in the Ethiopian capital to try to agree a common stance ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen in December.

Experts say Africa contributes little to the pollution blamed for warming, but is likely to be hit hardest by the droughts, floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels forecast if climate change is not checked.

The draft resolution, which must still be approved by the 10 leaders, called for rich countries to pay $67 billion annually to counter the impact of global warming in Africa.

It said there had been serious limitations on Africa's ability to negotiate in the past because of a lack of a coherent stance on global warming by African governments.

"The negotiating team need to be backed with the political weight at the highest level in the continent to ensure that the African voice on climate change negotiations is taken with the seriousness it deserves", the document said.



CALLS FOR COMPENSATION

Earlier this year, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi called on rich countries to compensate Africa for warming, arguing that pollution in the northern hemisphere may have caused his country's ruinous famines in the 1980s. [ID:nLP93207]

A study commissioned by the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum that was released in May said poor nations bear more than nine-tenths of the human and economic burden of climate change.

The 50 poorest countries, however, contribute less than 1 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions that scientists say are threatening the planet, the report said.

Africa is the region most at risk from warming and is home to 15 of the 20 most vulnerable countries, it said. Other areas also facing the highest level of threat include South Asia and small island developing states. [ID:nLS1002309]

Developing nations accuse the rich of failing to take the lead in setting deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, and say they are trying to get the poor to shoulder more of the burden of emission curbs without providing aid and technology.

A new climate treaty is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December. But a senior U.N. official has warned the discussions risk failure if they are accelerated. [ID:nLE676941]

Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said only "selective progress" had been made towards trimming a 200-page draft treaty text in Bonn earlier this month, one of a series of talks meant to end with a U.N. deal in Denmark. (Writing by Jeremy Clarke; Editing by Daniel Wallis)

Wonder what RFK Jr. would say about this...

Remember when the junior RFK hysterically declared that Katrina and the busy hurricane season of 2005 was rock solid evidence that we were doomed to ever-increasing storms of ever-increasing intensity an body counts for warming the planet?

Global and Northern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Activity [still] lowest in 30-years

Tropical cyclone (TC) activity worldwide has completely and utterly collapsed during the past 2 to 3 years with TC energy levels sinking to levels not seen since the late 1970s. This should not be a surprise to scientists since the natural variability in climate dominates any detectable or perceived global warming impact when it comes to measuring yearly integrated tropical cyclone activity. With the continuation (persistence) of colder Pacific tropical sea-surface temperatures associated with the effects of La Nina, the upcoming 2009 Atlantic hurricane season should be above average, as we saw in 2008. Nevertheless, since the Atlantic only makes up 10-15% of overall global TC activity each year (climatological average during the past 30 years), continued Northern Hemispheric and global TC inactivity as a whole likely will continue.


Continue reading at http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/

Well, at least the russians get it

From Pravda - essentially the New York Times - of Russia. (Pravda means Truth in English)

Looks like we're not warming at all. In fact, we're entering another Ice Age...

http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-0/

It's at least as defensible of an explanation of the science, ice cores and geologic time, as any AGW hysteriscist's . Brrrr. I need a blankie.

Make no mistake...AGW is about getting at your money

Scene: Capital Rotunda. Two members of congress fret over where to get the funds to cover the ballooning federal deficit.

Congressman 1: Hmmm. Where can we possibly come up with those trillions we need to cover all of these deficits and bailouts we keep racking up?

Congressman 2: Easy. Tax the shit out of everyone and everything.

Congressman 1: But nobody will go along with THAT!.

Congressman 2: Sure they will. Haven't you ever seen a 'Save the Children' commercial? Even you have to admit that you at least thought about mailing in a few bucks to feed 'Pablo'. We just tell everyone we're going to use the money to save cute furry things like polar bears, harp seals and penguins. We'll give them all cute little names "Gigi" and "Momo". With just a few pennies a day, YOU can make a difference....

Congressman 1: BRILLIANT!!! We don't even have to tell anyone what we're going to do with the money. I LOVE IT!

Congressman 2: Exactly. What a bunch of chumps people are.

Be afraid. Be very, very afraid....


EPA 'Cow Tax' Could Charge $175 per Dairy Cow to Curb Greenhouse Gases
Farm Bureau warns just this one rule may increase milk production costs up to 8 cents a gallon.

By Jeff Poor
Business & Media Institute
12/30/2008 4:55:19 PM

Call this one of the newest and innovative the ways your government has come up with to battle greenhouse gas emissions.

Indirectly it could be considered a cheeseburger tax, but one of the suggestions offered by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in its Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) for regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act is to levy a tax on livestock.

The ANPR, released early this year, would give the EPA the authority to regulate greenhouse gas for not only greenhouse gas from manmade sources like transportation and industry, but also “stationary” sources which would include livestock.

The New York Farm Bureau assigned a price tag to the cost of greenhouse gas regulation by the EPA in a release last month.

“The tax for dairy cows could be $175 per cow, and $87.50 per head of beef cattle. The tax on hogs would upwards of $20 per hog,” the release said. “Any operation with more than 25 dairy cows, 50 beef cattle or 200 hogs would have to obtain permits.”

Kate Galbraith, correspondent for The New York Times, noted on the Times’ “Green Inc.” blog that such a “proposal is far from being enacted” and that the “hysteria may be premature.”

But Rick Krause, senior director of congressional relations for the American Farm Bureau, warned it’s certainly feasible – especially based on the rhetoric of President-elect Barack Obama and the use of the EPA to combat global warming. Such action by an Obama administration would take an act of Congress for livestock to be exempt.

“The new president has been on record as saying that he really supports regulating greenhouse gases out of the Clean Air Act,” Krause said to the Business & Media Institute. “So, we really have to keep an eye on it. Legislation would really be the only way to exempt it at this point – the cow tax.”

Krause said it is difficult to quantify the cost that might be passed directly to the consumer by farmers from the legislation, but predicted it would mean higher costs for dairy production.

“It’s hard to figure what it would do to consumer prices since farmers, unlike other industries, really can’t pass their cost along directly like utilities and things do,” “About the only thing we could realistically come up, in terms of any of this stuff – it would add between 7 and 8 cents per gallon of milk costs to farmers. So it would cost them 7 or 8 cents more to produce a gallon of milk.”

Even the Department of Agriculture warned the EPA that smaller farms and ranches would have difficulty with limits as much as 100 tons annually on emissions:

“If GHG emissions from agricultural sources are regulated under the CAA, numerous farming operations that currently are not subject to the costly and time-consuming Title V permitting process would, for the first time, become covered entities. Even very small agricultural operations would meet a 100-tons-per-year emissions threshold. For example, dairy facilities with over 25 cows, beef cattle operations of over 50 cattle, swine operations with over 200 hogs, and farms with over 500 acres of corn may need to get a Title V permit. It is neither efficient nor practical to require permitting and reporting of GHG emissions from farms of this size. Excluding only the 200,000 largest commercial farms, our agricultural landscape is comprised of 1.9 million farms with an average value of production of $25,589 on 271 acres. These operations simply could not bear the regulatory compliance costs that would be involved.”

Science Suddenly Shoots Holes In Your 'Settled Science'?

...No problem! Just make up some new science!

The Warm Turns

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Posted 12/30/2008

Climate Change: The Earth has been warming ever since the end of the Little Ice Age. But guess what: Researchers say mankind is to blame for that, too.

---

As we've noted, 2008 has been a year of records for cold and snowfall and may indeed be the coldest year of the 21st century thus far. In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month of October.

Global thermometers stopped rising after 1998, and have plummeted in the last two years by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius. The 2007-2008 temperature drop was not predicted by global climate models. But it was predictable by a decline in sunspot activity since 2000.

When the sun is active, it's not uncommon to see sunspot numbers of 100 or more in a single month. Every 11 years, activity slows, and numbers briefly drop near zero. Normally sunspots return very quickly, as a new cycle begins. But this year, the start of a new cycle, the sun has been eerily quiet.

The first seven months averaged a sunspot count of only three and in August there were no sunspots at all — zero — something that has not occurred since 1913.

According to the publication Daily Tech, in the past 1,000 years, three previous such events — what are called the Dalton, Maunder and Sporer Minimums — have all led to rapid cooling. One was large enough to be called the Little Ice Age (1500-1750).

The Little Ice Age has been a problem for global warmers because it serves as a reminder of how the earth warms and cools naturally over time. It had to be ignored in the calculations that produced the infamous and since-discredited hockey stick graph that showed a sharp rise in warming alleged to be caused by man.

The answer to this dilemma has supposedly been found by two Stanford researchers, Richard Nevle and Dennis Bird, who announced their "findings" at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. According to them, man not only is causing contemporary warming. He also caused the cooling that preceded it.

According to Bird and Nevle, before Columbus ruined paradise, native Americans had deforested a significant portion of the continent and converted the land to agricultural purposes. Less CO2 was then absorbed from the atmosphere, and the earth was toasty.

Then a bunch of nasty old white guys arrived and depopulated the native populations through war and the diseases they brought with them. This led to the large-scale abandonment of agricultural lands. The subsequent reforestation of the continent caused temperatures to drop enough to bring on the Little Ice Age.

Implicit in this research is that the world would be fine if man wasn't in the way. We either make the world too cold or too hot, a view held by many in high places.

In a speech at Harvard last November, Harvard physicist John Holden, President-elect Obama's choice to be his science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, presented a "top 10" list of warming solutions.

Topping the list was "limiting population," as if man was a plague upon the earth. This is a major tenet of green dogma that bemoans the fact that the pestilence called mankind comes with cars, factories and overconsumption of fossil fuels and other resources.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre of Canada's Carleton University, says: "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Indeed, a look at a graph of solar irradiance from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows little solar activity during the Little Ice Age and significant activity during recent times.

Don't blame Dick and Jane — blame sunspots.

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