I want to know if any of these so-called scientist are going to go to jail? If anyone in corporate America had committed fraud one tenth the size of this fraud, they’d be tried in the media and locked up in short order. We threw Martha Stewart in jail for selling a stock on insider information, a crime that shouldn’t even be a crime in the first place. Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme did harm to others. In no way was his crime inflicted on every man, woman and child in the world, and we sent him to jail for 150 years.

It could be the smoking gun that finally quashes the climate-change industry.

The Daily Telegraph of London reports that some of the world’s top climate scientists engaged in nothing less than fraud to perpetuate the theology that man is responsible for supposedly cataclysmic global warming.

The purported evidence comes in the form of thousands of e-mails and other documents pilfered from the computer servers of the world-renowned University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit.

One e-mail “refers to a ‘trick’ being employed to massage temperature statistics to ‘hide the decline’ in temperatures.” Which only solidifies the credibility of those who contend the “science” of global warming is anything but “settled” and is in every way “junk.”

Couple this revelation with a new book by Christopher Booker that, claim by claim, debunks what the grim reapers of climate change have been peddling.

Nevertheless, the world’s politicians are “proposing the most damaging measures ever put forward in history — cuts in carbon emissions, if implemented, would plunge our world back to the Dark Ages — to meet a crisis which it now seems was never going to happen anyway,” writes Mr. Booker.

It’s time to end this madness.

via Climate fraud – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Hopefully, we can now move beyond this fraud, and get back to creating energy, unleashing business enterprise and reducing costs of energy for all Americans.

Here are some great excerpts from a Wall Street Journal article this morning. I’m so frustated, I don’t even have comments on it. Just take notice of the bold areas.

Since regular mammography became standard practice in the early 1990s, mortality from breast cancer—the second leading cause of cancer death among American women—has dropped by about 30%, after remaining constant for the prior half-century. But this week the 16-member task force ruled that patients under 50 or over 75 without special risk factors no longer need screening.

So what changed? Nothing substantial in the clinical evidence. But the panel—which includes no oncologists and radiologists, who best know the medical literature—did decide to re-analyze the data with health-care spending as a core concern.

The task force concedes that the benefits of early detection are the same for all women. But according to its review, because there are fewer cases of breast cancer in younger women, it takes 1,904 screenings of women in their 40s to save one life and only 1,339 screenings to do the same among women in their 50s. It therefore concludes that the tests for the first group aren’t valuable, while also noting that screening younger women results in more false positives that lead to unnecessary (but only in retrospect) follow-up tests or biopsies.

Of course, this calculation doesn’t consider that at least 40% of the patient years of life saved by screening are among women under 50. That’s a lot of women, even by the terms of the panel’s own statistical abstractions. To put it another way, 665 additional mammograms are more expensive in the aggregate. But at the individual level they are immeasurably valuable, especially if you happen to be the woman whose life is saved.

The recommendation to cut off all screening in women over 75 is equally as myopic. The committee notes that the benefits of screening “occur only several years after the actual screening test, whereas the percentage of women who survive long enough to benefit decreases with age.” It adds that “women of this age are at much greater risk for dying of other conditions that would not be affected by breast cancer screening.” In other words, grandma is probably going to die anyway, so why waste the money to reduce the chances that she dies of a leading cause of death among elderly women?

…every Democratic version of ObamaCare makes this task force an arbiter of the benefits that private insurers will be required to cover as they are converted into government contractors. What are now merely recommendations will become de facto rules, and under national health care these kinds of cost analyses will inevitably become more common as government decides where finite tax dollars are allowed to go.

More spending on “prevention” has long been the cry of health reformers, and President Obama has been especially forceful. In his health speech to Congress in September, the President made a point of emphasizing “routine checkups and preventative care, like mammograms and colonoscopies—because there’s no reason we shouldn’t be catching diseases like breast cancer and colon cancer before they get worse.”

It turns out that there is, in fact, a reason: Screening for breast cancer will cost the government too much money, even if it saves lives.

via Mammograms Provide Preview of ObamaCare – WSJ.com.

In my home town, they have been talking about a Maglev train for years now. Here is an example of government waste at it’s finest.

It’s argued that a multibillion-dollar, taxpayer-fleecing Pittsburgh maglev line would make the region the epicenter for this technology across the country. Except the country needs maglev as much as it needs more debt.

In remarks last week to state lawmakers, Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute explained why expensive high-speed magnetic-levitation trains are beyond the realm of reasonable implementation.

Just ask China.

The 19-mile maglev line from Pudong Airport to downtown Shanghai rarely sees more than one out of four seats filled, says Mr. O’Toole, an expert in transportation issues. Which explains why China opted for less costly conventional high-speed trains between Shanghai and Beijing.

A $5 billion-plus proposed line between Pittsburgh International Airport and Greensburg wouldn’t fare better.

Even an optimistic projection of 28,000 round-trip passengers daily is a fraction of Pittsburgh travelers, O’Toole said. Moreover, research shows rail service to U.S. airports typically carries only 2 percent to 15 percent of air travelers, he said.

And because maglev uses vastly more energy than conventional high-speed trains, it produces that much more pollution, according to the Center for Clean Air Policy.

Economically and environmentally, Pennsylvania can’t afford to be taken for maglev’s ride.

via Maglev’s myth – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

$5 billion for an train from Greensburg to the Airport? This will do absolutely nothing to boost the economy. The $5 billion would have to be taken from the pockets of productive citizens to fund a useless train. Those people who have been robbed would have used $5 billion for purposes that would result in economic value and job creation. Instead, slime ball politicians believe their pet projects are more important.

If the Maglev was such an economic boon, the private sector would be producing it already. Instead the free market and entreprenuers would use that money for other more profitable ventures. Those ventures would create more wealth and more jobs. Central planning resulted in disaster for Soviet economies, but yet here we are, the supposed capitalist country doing the exact same thing.

In the Wall Street Journal, an op-ed takes Gore to task on his need to continue to see only one side of the global warming debate because he has so much invested in the one side, and all his rewards can only come from one side.

Mr. Gore is quite right that his arguments should be judged on their merits, not on his investments. He’s wrong to think his investments are irrelevant, and, even more, that sincerity is dispositive of anything. Sincerity is no substitute for disinterestedness.

Here are a couple questions: When so much of his position and prestige are invested in a predicted climate crisis, is Mr. Gore likely to be open to contrary evidence? Is he likely to be particularly fastidious about whether proposed steps will actually have an effect on global warming if they also happen to benefit his investments?

Ms. Blackburn’s challenge was in a sense late. Mr. Gore long ago jumped over to the side where salesmanship, by whatever means, was the trumping priority. As far back as 1989, he insisted there was “no dispute worthy of recognition” about the danger of manmade climate change. By now, he titularly heads a vast establishment with a stake in one side of the argument.

Notice, for instance, after a decade in which the earth appears to have stopped warming and even cooled, that global warming advocates have rushed to embrace a computer simulation that predicts this cooling (in retrospect, of course) and allows for indefinite future cooling, even while assuring that the world is destined to face disastrous warming anyway. Isn’t this what forecasters of doom have done since time immemorial when their deadlines for doom haven’t been met?

Mr. Gore’s own predictions of a climate catastrophe have not lessened, but every time he opens his mouth, the costs of meeting the emergency become easier and easier to swallow. They aren’t even costs anymore; as he says in his new book, they are “profits.”

All policy salesmanship naturally defaults toward the proposition of huge benefits and negligible costs (i.e., free lunchism). Isn’t that where Al Gore is today?

Mr. Gore notes that he has poured his own money into two climate action nonprofits, but, whatever his self-felt motives, aren’t these nonprofits functionally propaganda arms (i.e., advertising) that benefit his for-profit investments?

via Holman Jenkins: The Economic Uses of Al Gore – WSJ.com.

Like all used car salesmen, Al Gore has a lot full of junk that needs sold. He’s got all his investments wrapped up in the clunkers. If he can’t sell them, he’s rewards will vanish. So what do all used car salesmen do? They smooth talk you and feed you a line of BS to get you to buy their junky cars. Used car salesmen have to convince every person to buy a car though. Unfortunately for us, Al Gore only needs to convince the morons in Washington. Then they force us to buy.

What’s the fastest way to riches? No, it’s not real estate, Carton Sheets. All, you have to do is get the government to force society to buy your BS. This is what Al Gore has done, and he is now heading towards becoming the first billionaire environmentalist. How did he do it? False advertising.

Manmade climate change is said to present humankind with some of its greatest challenges in the planet’s history, not the least of which is an alarming increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters. Massive flooding, super-powered hurricanes, endless tornado seasons and more have all been said to be the direst of consequences of global warming.

In his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore famously proclaimed that, “Temperature changes are taking place all over the world and that is causing stronger storms.” Standing with Hurricane Katrina as a backdrop, the former vice president issued a cautionary tale of disaster in the making, all due to our irresponsible handling of the atmosphere. As recently as February Mr. Gore was giving a presentation showing flooding, drought and wildfires saying, “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.”

President Barack Obama, in a town hall meeting in April echoed the Nobel laureate’s comments saying, “You’re now looking at huge, cataclysmic hurricanes, complete changes in weather patterns.” He followed that in September when in a speech before the United Nations he claimed, “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”

But what if you predicted global natural disaster catastrophes and they didn’t happen? Does that invalidate your entire message? This is the conundrum faced by climate change alarmists as many of their predictions begin to fall flat.

via Predictions of climate change induced natural disasters falling flat.

While most private sector companies would be prosecuted for false advertising, Al Gore just changes his marketing a little and moves forward. I’m sure he’s greasing enough palms in Washington to get away with it. The problem is the people are starting to see through Al Gore’s false stories of man made catastrophe. To believe that man has the power to change the climate is nonsense. We are such tiny factors when you think about the oceans, the sun, cosmic radiation, etc.

Recently, a book, Superfreakonimics, argued that if global warming is real, we don’t have to cut back on our CO2 emmissions. Instead, we could cheaply pump sulfur dioxide into the atomosphere to act as a cooling agent. While thinking about humans minipulating the atomosphere sounds crazy to me, it highlights the lie that Al Gore believes we have to do something. If global warming (now called climate change sinces it’s cooling) is really human created, then the solution posed in the Superfreakonimics book would make sense. Humans could do something to fix it. Al Gore doesn’t buy this though. The authors really don’t either. They are just highlighting that we could fix it cheaper than what Al Gore is proposing if this is the real argument being put out by Gore. Al Gore doesn’t really want a solution as proposed in the book. That doesn’t put money into his pocket. He wants a supposed solution in the form of green technology that doesn’t have to prove itself. That puts money in his pocket, and no one can claim it didn’t work.

Gore himself uses more and more energy everyday with his own private jet, a mansion, and oil to slick his hair back. If he truly believed his own BS, he’d be working out of his house over the internet selling his garbage, but instead he’s travelling the world over wining and dining with the political elite, more than likely on the public dime. So if Al Gore isn’t living up to his own standard, then apparently the standard isn’t worth living up to, and Al Gore has been marketing lies. Anyone have a link to the FTC? I want to submit a false advertising complaint.

In the movie “The Last Boy Scout”, Bruce Willis would ask people that he was about to punch, “Head or Gut?”. If you were an unlucky person who didn’t understand the question, you got both. This is similar to how the government treats industries that they want to get involved in. Apparently, the utilities are asking for the gut, thinking it will be less painful.

The executives’ desire for prompt action is colliding with Washington’s focus on other issues and growing reluctance to tamper with power-industry costs during a weak economy.

An American Electric Power coal plant, with a new carbon-capture unit, in New Haven, W.Va. Most power companies don’t think any effective, affordable technology exists to capture and store their carbon-dioxide emissions.

Some executives said last week they think intervention by the Environmental Protection Agency would be doomed because, for the most part, all the agency can do is order firms to install “best available control technology.” Most power companies don’t think any effective, affordable technology exists to capture and store carbon-dioxide emissions from power plants.

Most power companies prefer so-called cap-and-trade legislation to EPA regulation because the former is expected to give them greater flexibility on how to comply and thus cost them less than EPA regulation, they say.

Still, plenty in the utility sector continue to oppose legislation to cap carbon emissions.

Under cap-and-trade legislation — which the House has passed but the Senate hasn’t vote on yet — the government would require companies to hold permits to emit greenhouse gases. Over time, the government would issue fewer permits, bringing emissions down gradually while allowing companies to trade the permits among themselves. Companies that find it too expensive to reduce their own emissions could pay other firms to reduce theirs. They could also invest in activities that offset carbon-dioxide emissions, such as planting trees.

The EPA would be “forced to pursue a technology road map that doesn’t exist,” warned Jim Rogers, chief executive of Duke Energy Corp., Charlotte, N.C., who also has lobbied the Hill repeatedly to pass a bill.

John Rowe, head of Exelon Corp., Chicago, said that EPA regulation would be “more arbitrary, more expensive, and more uncertain for investors and the industry than a reasonable, market-based legislative solution like cap and trade.”

The executives said they want legislation — and soon — because utilities need to make billions of dollars of investments in coming years and risk bad choices in a legislative void.

via Some Utilities Push Congress to Act on Carbon Emissions – WSJ.com.

Guess who the people are who don’t understand the question? That would be the you and me. We are about to get both in the form of a huge increases in the cost of living. This will come in our utility and health care costs. Not only that, each one of these touches every other part of our lives. Every business is going to be affected by these increased costs, which means they will have to raise prices of their products.

Instead of picking either head or gut, utilities should throw the first punch. They should be telling the public/customers what this means to them. Then again, the government could tell them they can’t do that. Look at Humana during the health care debate. But hey, luckily we still have freedom of speech right?

Thanks to Captain Capitalism, here is more reason why you don’t want government running  your health care. Matter of fact, I don’t think I want the government running the government at this point. We are constantly hearing politicians talk about energy independence. Tell me if this sounds like we could achieve it.

The United States has largest energy reserves on Earth, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service.

As shown in the charts below, the U.S. has 1,321 billion barrels of oil (or barrels of oil equivalent for other sources of energy) when combining its recoverable natural gas, oil and coal reserves.

While Russia is a close second with 1,248 billion barrels, other energy producing nations are far behind. No. 3 is Saudi Arabia (543 billion barrels), followed by China (494 billion barrels), Iran (426 billion barrels) and Canada (221 billion barrels.)

“Our overwhelming coal, natural gas, and oil resources represent tens of trillions of dollars in wealth and millions of American jobs,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R.-Ok.), who, along with Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R.-Alaska), released the report last week. “Whether through decree or purposeful inaction, government policies that unnecessarily restrict or prevent our ability to responsibly produce these domestic resources are threatening, and could eventually undermine, our nation’s economic and national security. We should pursue an all-of-the-above strategy that advances new energy technologies but also prioritizes developing the resources we have today.”

The report also noted that the United States has 28% of all the world’s coal reserves, with Russia again coming in second with 19%.

In addition, the report stated that the United States has tapped into only 13% or 21 billion barrels of its oil reserves, with the other 87% still untouched.

via U.S. Tops in Energy Resources – HUMAN EVENTS.

Would someone tell me why we keep electing these idiots? Just the other day Joe Biden was making fun of Sarah Palin saying her energy plan was “Drill baby Drill”. Acting like she was just a stupid little girl, he said “It’s more complicated than that, Sarah” as the crowd laughed. I’m sure it is more complicated by the billions that the likes of Al Gore stand to make by forcing us to not use our resources, but for average shmoes like me, “DRILL BABY DRILL” sounds like a plan. How about “MINE BABY MINE”?