If All You See…

By William Teach December 31, 2016 – 1:00 pm

…is a sky full of carbon pollution that will doom us all in 2017, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is The First Street Journal, with a post on bureaucratic stupidity

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If You Believe In The Free Market You Should Totally Believe In ‘Climate Change’ Or Something

By William Teach December 31, 2016 – 7:56 am

Being the last day of 2016, I’m breaking the Laws Of The Internet and using “Or Something” in a second headline. It’s worth it

Why Free Market Believers Should Naturally Accept Climate Change Science

Are you someone who has faith in the power of free markets? Then you should naturally accept the evidence that human activity is bringing about climate change.

Free and competitive markets work efficiently in large part because they are phenomenal information aggregators, gathering and sorting facts about consumer preferences and business production costs, and guiding market participants to engage in actions that provide benefits to both sides. Markets can easily help figure out the most efficient way to deliver coffee to people’s homes, for example, or to reduce air pollution in cities. Markets also determine which ideas succeed (the iPhone, for instance) and which ones fail (Kool Kardashian Kard).

Likewise, scientific ideas thrive or perish in a marketplace of their own. Whereas participants in an economic market are rewarded for delivering goods or services well, participants in the marketplace of scientific ideas get rewarded for overturning conventional thinking. This is because the scientific method works not by proving theories but by disproving them: Scientists pose and test rival explanations, and ultimately, the concepts that are disproven fall away while those that aren’t prevail.

Of course, that’s not what is happening with those who are in charge of “climate science”, where there is a preconceived notion, and the data and methodologies are changed to conform to those notions.

After more than 25 years, the idea that human activity has led to greater greenhouse-gas emissions and, thus, greater climate change has won out over competing theories to explain how the Earth’s climate system operates. Over time, the number of rival explanations has declined, rather than increased. And refinements to the dominant theory have strengthened, rather than weakened, the case for it. At a meeting I recently attended, the chairman of a university’s department of Earth and planetary sciences announced that he would no longer hire scholars in climate science because “the science is done.” While important measurements and observations will continue, the theoretical questions at the frontier have been answered.

This is just another way of saying “the science is settled, no one is Allowed To Question It.” Because science.

In the end, then, it is inconsistent to simultaneously accept that markets are powerful ways to allocate goods and services in the economy and also deny that human activity is causing substantial climate change. There’s room to argue over the economic implications of climate change or the best ways to mitigate and adapt to it, but the scientific consensus is no longer a matter of debate.

Of course, the so-called free markets have massive government interference, and the science of climate does, as well. Regardless, it is a cute, yet false, allegory. Most climate scientists are under the pay of governments, at least those in positions of power. They aren’t going to get funding, much less keep their jobs, if they start saying “um, guys, really, CO2 isn’t doing that much, our models are failures, and we sound more like a doomsday cult than a scientific community. Plus, this whole thing about increasing government power and raising the cost of living on people really doesn’t play well.”

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Washington Post: The President Refuses To Face Reality On Russia Or Something

By William Teach December 31, 2016 – 7:33 am

No, not that president. Not the one who’s been in office since 1/20/2009. The other one, which has the Washington Post Editorial Board Very Concerned

Trump refuses to face reality about Russia

ALTHOUGH PRESIDENT Obama’s sanctions against Russia for interfering with the U.S. presidential election came late, his action on Thursday reflected a bipartisan consensus that penalties must be imposed for Moscow’s audacious hacking and meddling. But one prominent voice in the United States reacted differently. President-elect Donald Trump said “it’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.” Earlier in the week, he asserted that the “whole age of computer has made it where nobody knows exactly what is going on.”

No, Mr. Trump, it is not time to move on. U.S. intelligence agencies are in agreement about “what is going on”: a brazen and unprecedented attempt by a hostile power to covertly sway the outcome of a U.S. presidential election through the theft and release of material damaging to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. The president-elect’s dismissive response only deepens unanswered questions about his ties to Russia in the past and his plans for cooperation with Vladi­mir Putin.

That’s cute, as there’s still no concrete proof that Russia swayed the election, and, really, if the DNC and Hillary Clinton, along with John Podesta, were competent, it wouldn’t be a problem. It wasn’t Russia which implemented an unsecured server outside the control of the federal government, nor did they place material on the laptop of Huma Abadin’s pervert husband, Anthony Weiner.

What the WPEB is attempting to do is the same as other Democrats, and Mr. Obama: delegitimize Trump’s win, because they’re sore losers. And, where was this concern over Russia the past 8 years? The Washington Post certainly made fun of Mitt Romney and his concern about Russia back during the 2012 elections. Here’s what Claudia Rossett has to say

Obama from his first year in office pursued policies of appeasement and retreat that invited Russian aggression.

Just connect the dots, from Obama’s 2009 fawning “reset” with Putin, to his 2012 confidential promise, caught on an open microphone, of post-reelection flexibility, to his 2013 handover of his “red line” in Syria to the ministrations of Putin.

Then came Obama’s 2014 de facto acceptance of Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea, and Obama’s de facto deference right up to the present date of Russia’s increasingly bold reach back into the Middle East, including air strikes in Syria.

Having declared in 2011 that it was time for Syria’s President Bashar Assad to go, Obama today — following the rise of ISIS and more than 400,000 deaths in Syria’s war — leaves the U.S. sidelined as Russia, Iran and Turkey seek a deal that would strengthen Assad’s grip on power. Small surprise if along the way Putin concluded he could at no serious cost cyber-meddle with the U.S. itself.

With just three weeks left in office, Obama is flat out of time to remedy his eight-years of failure to contain Russia. But Obama does have time, if he harps chiefly on Russian hacking, to smear doubts across the legitimacy of Trump’s election.

The WPEB wonders if Trump’s dismissal is from a lack of experience. What of the guy who’s been president since 2009, and has the above track record? They even write

Mr. Trump has been frank about his desire to improve relations with Russia, but he seems blissfully untroubled by the reasons for the deterioration in relations, including Russia’s instigation of an armed uprising in Ukraine, its seizure of Crimea, its efforts to divide Europe and the crushing of democracy and human rights at home.

Who was president while that occurred?

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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If All You See…

By William Teach December 30, 2016 – 1:00 pm

…is a wonderful low carbon sailboat sailing the trackless seas raised by carbon pollution, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Fire Andrea Mitchell, with a post on California decriminalizing underage prostitution.

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Democrat AGs Really Want Trump To Keep Obama’s Clean Power Plan

By William Teach December 30, 2016 – 10:30 am

Most of these Attorney Generals are also involved in harassing Exxon and lots of private organizations, demanding all their correspondence on a fishing trip to intimidate them and shut down their 1st Amendment Rights, such as NY AG Eric Schneiderman, who has had multiple suits thrown at him

(NY1) State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is spearheading an effort to save one of President Barack Obama’s plans to curb global warming.

In a letter sent Thursday, Democratic attorneys general in 15 states urged President-elect Donald Trump to preserve Obama’s Clean Power Plan. It seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by about one-third by 2030, but it’s being blocked by lawsuits from states and fossil-fuel companies.

The Supreme Court halted the plan in February while the lower court reviews the litigation.

Trump has stated that the CPP is gone when he gets into office, regardless of how the courts rule. We’ll see if that happens when he assumes office. Regardless, if these Dem AGs like the plan so much, they should lobby their governors and general assemblies to institute the policies at the state level, burdening their Democrat voting citizens with the higher costs and shakier power grid.

We also learn

(TPM)  Fourteen Democratic state attorneys general urged Donald Trump in a letter sent Wednesday to have his administration continue defending President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a monumental effort to address climate change that is the target of a lawsuit brought by more that two dozen, largely conservative states.

The letter also rebutted the legal arguments that some of the attorneys general suing Obama over the regulations made in their own letter sent to Trump earlier this month. The signees threatened to sue Trump if he followed those red state officials’ advice to simply instruct the Environmental Protection Agency not to enforce the climate plan.

Twenty four states have sued the Obama administration regarding the CPP. Trump’s best option is to simply cancel the CPP with a wave of his pen. If this is good enough for Obama, it’s good enough for Trump.

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People Plan To Freeze Themselves In A Polar Plunge For ‘Climate Change’ Or Something

By William Teach December 30, 2016 – 7:52 am

Yes, it is that loopy time of the year

More than 200 Mainers Set to Take Polar Bear Plunge

With temperatures forecast to be in the mid to upper 20s, a group of dedicated Mainers will be taking a plunge into the Atlantic on Saturday at East End Beach in Portland to draw attention to climate change.

This will be the seventh year that Dr. Tony Owens, an emergency-department physician at Maine Medical Center, is taking the polar bear dip. He said all these folks braving the cold get people talking, and for some it may be the first time that they are talking about the impacts of climate change.

“My primary goal,” he said, “is to support that mission of highlighting climate change – global warming – and to try to engage citizens in supporting a sustainable environment.”

The event, which helps raise funding for the National Resources Council of Maine, kicks off with a 5-kilometer race at 11 a.m. and ends with a noon plunge into the Atlantic Ocean at East End Beach.

Emily O’Donnell, one of the more than 200 who pledged to dash and dip this weekend, said it gets family and friends to understand the depth of her commitment to getting the word out on the need for action to slow climate change.

Nothing says climate change like taking a fossil fueled vehicle to the beach to freeze your buns off. Warmists are rather amusing, though, in their spreading awareness silliness.

Owens, who also is a board member of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, said that when they take the dip they will be at ground zero for one of the major local impacts of climate change: sea-level rise.

Oh, really? Perhaps the good doctor should have checked the hard data, rather than relying on scaremongering, in which we find for Portland, Maine: “The mean sea level trend is 1.87 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.15 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1912 to 2015 which is equivalent to a change of 0.61 feet in 100 years.” The other Maine stations are similar.

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After Trolling Obama, Russia Plans Retaliation Over Expulsions

By William Teach December 30, 2016 – 7:03 am

Let’s start off with how excited the NY Times Editorial Board is that Obama finally did something

While it is definitely too late, and may also be too little, there should be no doubt about the correctness of President Obama’s decision to retaliate against Russia for hacking American computers and trying to influence the 2016 presidential election.

It would have been irresponsible for him to leave office next month and allow President Vladimir Putin to think that he could with impunity try to undermine American democracy. That would have been a particularly dangerous legacy given President-elect Donald Trump’s alarming affinity for Mr. Putin and stubborn refusal to accept the conclusion of American intelligence agencies that Russia’s cyberattacks were aimed at helping him and hurting Hillary Clinton. The president-elect told reporters dismissively before Mr. Obama’s decision was announced that Americans should “get on with our lives” and forget about the hacking scandal. So much for that wishful thought.

His latest response shows real teeth, chiefly in the form of sanctions on Russia’s two leading intelligence services, the F.S.B. and GRU, including four top officers of the military intelligence unit who the White House believes ordered those attacks. Mr. Obama also placed sanctions against a number of other individuals and companies, such as the Special Technology Center, which conducts signal intelligence.

Mr. Obama also expelled 35 Russian intelligence operatives and barred Russian diplomats from using two recreational compounds in the United States. The White House said this action was specifically in response to a two-year pattern of harassment of American diplomats in Russia by Kremlin security personnel.

Here’s the thing: where’s the proof? The joint FBI/DHS report is vague and simply shows that people and countries like to hack and phish and stuff. Nor is there any proof that Russian “hacking” made any difference in the election. This is how the Russian’s responded

Mitt Romney would like an apology. And now we get

(Washington Post) Russia’s Foreign Ministry on Friday suggested that President Vladimir Putin expel 35 U.S. diplomats and close two properties used by the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as part of the growing diplomatic slugfest over Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. (snip)

“It is regrettable that the Obama administration, which started out by restoring our ties, is ending its term in an anti-Russia agony. RIP,” Russian Prime Minister DmitryMedvedev wrote Friday on Twitter.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in a statement carried by the Interfax news service, called for 31 employees of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and four diplomats from the U.S. Consulate General in St. Petersburg to be declared “persona non grata” and forced to leave the country.

Further, he suggested the Russian government ban the use of a vacation cottage, or dacha, on the outskirts of Moscow often used for holiday receptions and a warehouse in the Russian capital used by diplomatic staff.

“We hope that these proposals will be considered as quickly as possible,” Lavrov said, portraying the response as symmetrical to the U.S. measures. “Of course, we cannot leave such acts unanswered; reciprocity is a diplomatic law in international relations.”

So, good news, Obama is doing a heck of a job in bringing back Cold War era diplomatic rows as he gets ready to walk out the door.

More: Putin punks Obama even more

(Zero Hedge) Which (Putin) did on Friday morning, when in a stunning reversal, the Russian leader took the high road, rejected the Lavrov proposal, and in a statement posted by the Kremlin said that Russia won’t expel any Americans in retaliation to US moves, in a brutal demonstration of just how irrelevant Obama’s 11th hour decision is for US-Russian relations.(snip)

From the full statement posted on the Kremlin website:

Although we have the right to retaliate, we will not resort to irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy but will plan our further steps to restore Russian-US relations based on the policies of the Trump Administration.

And with that one statement, Obama lost the diplomatic war with Russia.   

It’s a sad state of affairs when the POTUS is getting punked by a Russian strongman.

Here’s the full Putin statement

We regard the recent unfriendly steps taken by the outgoing US administration as provocative and aimed at further weakening the Russia-US relationship. This runs contrary to the fundamental interests of both the Russian and American people. Considering the global security responsibilities of Russia and the United States, this is also damaging to international relations as a whole.

As it proceeds from international practice, Russia has reasons to respond in kind. Although we have the right to retaliate, we will not resort to irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy but will plan our further steps to restore Russian-US relations based on the policies of the Trump Administration.

The diplomats who are returning to Russia will spend the New Year’s holidays with their families and friends. We will not create any problems for US diplomats. We will not expel anyone. We will not prevent their families and children from using their traditional leisure sites during the New Year’s holidays. Moreover, I invite all children of US diplomats accredited in Russia to the New Year and Christmas children’s parties in the Kremlin.

It is regrettable that the Obama Administration is ending its term in this manner. Nevertheless, I offer my New Year greetings to President Obama and his family.

My season’s greetings also to President-elect Donald Trump and the American people.

I wish all of you happiness and prosperity.

That’ll leave a mark.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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Solving ‘Climate Change’ Takes Collective Forced Action Or Something

By William Teach December 29, 2016 – 4:54 pm

Warmist Neil Leary at the Huffington Post is super thrilled to share 5 things you can do just in time for New Year’s to overcome Hotcoldwetdry, and unintentionally provides proof that this is all about government dominance

5 Things To Do About Climate Change, Just In Time For The New Year

After I wrote What a Trump Presidency Means for Fighting Climate Change, a colleague suggested that I write an article with “5 concrete examples of on-the-ground things people can do.” I’ve been mulling that over. You can readily find lists online of 5 things, 10 things, 50 and more things to do about climate change. Many excellent suggestions. Nearly all of them call for individual actions. Things that you can do to reduce your personal carbon footprint.

Individual actions are important. We learn through personal experience what works and what doesn’t, what’s easy and what’s hard. We prove change is feasible. We demonstrate our seriousness by walking the talk. We help motivate others to act. We move the needle, even if just a bit, in the direction that we need to move as a society.

Obviously, Warmists have discovered that living the life they want Everyone Else to be forced to live is hard, hence the reason so few give up their own use of fossil fuels, slap solar panels on their homes and live off the grid, wash clothes by hand, only buy local, etc and so on. But, see, this is the Talking Point they use, that all must be part of the solution, whether they want to be or not.

But a strategy built solely on individual actions will not prevent the calamitous impacts of climate change that will befall us if atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to rise as currently projected. That takes collective action, in both public and private spheres. Actions that fundamentally transform the choices that are available to us, and that promote choices that will build a low-carbon, climate resilient economy that provides for our needs, including the need for a healthy and safe planet with a stable climate.

This is all about Governmental control, no matter how pretty the language. Look at the 5 things

  1. Join with others. (This is about joining groups that advocate that Government pass laws, rules, and regulations to force everyone to comply with your beliefs)
  2. Advocate for federal action. (Big Government forcing compliance)
  3. Support state and local action. (lower level governmental force)
  4. Take action at work. (nag your coworkers and bosses, in an attempt to get everyone to comply with your beliefs)
  5. Talk to your friends, family and peers. (turn them into people who no longer want to talk to you)

So, four out of five are about forcing compliance. Then we get to

If you are a teacher, incorporate climate change into your teaching.

Brainwashing and indoctrination for a political viewpoint.

OK, still looking for things you can do to reduce your personal carbon footprint? Here are a few websites to check out. A word of advice. Don’t let yourself be overwhelmed by long lists of things you should do. Start by picking one thing, something that is both impactful and readily achieved. Do that. Congratulate yourself, pause to reflect, then move on to tackle one more thing.

Good luck with that. They’ll replace a lightbulb and call it a day.

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If All You See…

By William Teach December 29, 2016 – 1:00 pm

…is a horrible kitchen which surely contains an evil refrigerator and dish washer, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Animal Magnetism, with a post on hump day news.

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Warmist Wants Trump Banned From Twitter For Being A Climate Skeptic

By William Teach December 29, 2016 – 12:14 pm

Prick a member of the Cult of Climastrology, and they bleed fascist red

(Daily Caller) A California State, Sacramento academic believes President-elect Donald Trump should be barred from using the Internet because he’s a global warming skeptic.

Joseph Palermo, a history professor and writer at the the university, suggested that Republicans who don’t believe in so-called man-made global warming should not be allowed to use anything produced using science.

“If Trump and his cohort believe the science of global warming is bogus then they shouldn’t be allowed to use the science of the Internet for their Twitter accounts,” Palermo wrote Tuesday in an op-ed for Huffington Post.

Of course, it’s really more of computer science, the same thing ‘climate change’ is based on. However, Twitter works. The computer models from Warmists? Not so much.

See, the problem here for Warmists, and Progressives overall, is that they do not like that people with differing views are allowed to express those views. Hence, they want those views shut down.

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