Say, Will Republicans Need a New Message on Climate Change in 2016?

By William Teach November 21, 2014 – 11:11 am

Actually, I do.  But it is one that is different from what far Left Progressives think the GOP message should be

(Roll Call) Senate Republicans were swept into power vowing to fight the White House’s “war on coal,” but at least one says they need a broader message than “no” in 2016.

“I think there will be a political problem for the Republican Party going into 2016 if we don’t define what we are for on the environment,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said. “I don’t know what the environmental policy of the Republican Party is.”

Graham, who worked on a climate change proposal in 2010 with Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., suggested that what worked in the midterms might not work the next time around.

Of course,  there is a big difference between “Climate change” and environmentalism. And,  in case people missed it Graham is not particularly popular with the Conservative base.

Exit polling after the elections showed that nearly 60 percent of voters believe climate change is a “serious problem.”

Of course,  when stacked up against other issues,  it tends to come in last or next to last.

Former South Carolina Republican Rep. Bob Inglis — who founded the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, which seeks to convince conservatives to combat climate change — agrees with Graham.

“If conservatives plan on winning the White House back, we’ve got to have something on the menu that addresses this felt need for action on climate,” he said.

OK,  you have the tenor of the article,  all about how the GOP needs to follow along with their own Progressive members and start Believing and Do Something. I could write something with serious proposals, because their is some overlap regarding alternative energy and such,  but,  I’ve already done that lots of time,  so I suggest the GOP message for 2016 is “well,  if you Warmists believe so strongly then lead the way by example.”

Read: Say, Will Republicans Need a New Message on Climate Change in 2016? »

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Upgrading To WordPress 4.0.1

By William Teach November 21, 2014 – 9:06 am

I’m about to upgrade to 4.0.1, so if anything looks a little strange, that’s why. Please let me know. Thanks!

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Say, Remember When Warmists Said “Climate Change” Would Reduce Lake Effect Snow?

By William Teach November 21, 2014 – 8:53 am

This was Warmist Eric Holthaus just two days ago

Global Warming Is Probably Boosting Lake-Effect Snows

In the aftermath of a massive lake-effect snowfall event in western New York state on Tuesday, it’s worth asking: Is climate change playing a role here? Because, I mean, come on. Seventy—seven zero—inches, people. And another huge round is forecast for Thursday, by the way. Buffalo deserves answers.

The short answer is: yes. Global warming is probably juicing lake-effect snows, and we’ve had the data to prove it for quite some time.

Could there be some truth to a warmer world contributing to more lake effect snow? Sure. More research is needed, but, of course, even if true, this in no way proves anthropogenic causation, at least from a global perspective. It could be a land use and/or UHI (urban heat island effect). It could be a case that this is increasing during an 18+ year Pause.

But, hey, what did Warmists used to say?

(The Hockey Schtick) But scientists have, in the past, concluded that global warming causes reduced lake-effect snow, not increases in lake-effect snow:

1) “Trend Reversal in Lake Michigan Contribution to Snowfall” [2012]

A general increase in LCS [lake-contribution snowfall] from the early 1920s to the 1950–80 period [during the 1970’s ice age scare] at locations typically downwind of the lake was found. Thereafter, LCS decreased through the early 2000s, indicating a distinct trend reversal that is not reported by earlier studies. The reasons for this reversal are unclear. The reversal is consistent with observed increasing minimum temperatures during winter months after the 1970s, however.

2) CLIMATE CHANGE AND LAKE-EFFECT SNOW

Thus, there may be little change in the frequency of heavy lake-effect snow in the Lake Superior snowbelt and a substantial decrease in the southern Lake Michigan and Lake Erie snowbelts. Air-temperature [warming] was found to be the primary determining factor in reducing the frequency of heavy lake-effect events in this study…Anticipated regional impacts of climate change on lake-effect snow patterns – suggest almost no change [in lake-effect snowfall] in the northernmost belts but approximately a 50% decrease in southernmost belts.

3) Assessment of Potential Effects of Climate Change on Heavy Lake-Effect Snowstorms Near Lake Erie

…Surface conditions favorable for heavy lake-effect snow decreased in frequency by 50% and 90% for the HadCM2 and CGCM1 [models], respectively, by the late 21st Century. This reduction was due almost entirely to a decrease in the number of occurrences of surface air temperature in the range of −10 to 0°C, which in turn was the result of an increase in average winter air temperatures.

So, which is is? Does global warming cause more lake effect snow or less lake effect snow? The answer from Warmists if you ask them? “Yes.” Because, as we all know, no matter what happens with the weather, it will be blamed on “climate change” caused by the actions of Humanity.

Read: Say, Remember When Warmists Said “Climate Change” Would Reduce Lake Effect Snow? »

Posted in Global Warming, New Climate Deniers | 1 Comment | Trackback URL

Obama Trots Out His Sticky Note Plan

By William Teach November 21, 2014 – 8:31 am

I think by now most of us know that Obama announced that, by Imperial Decree, certain illegals will get some sort of deferment, giving those who already decided to break the rules a chance to “play by the rules”

(UK Daily Mail) President Obama announced a plan Thursday night to mainstream millions of illegal immigrants with an executive order allowing them to stay instead of facing deportation, bringing howls from Republicans who complained about so-called ‘anchor babies’ helping their illegal parents remain in the U.S.

The president calmly explained in a 16-minute speech – subtitled in Spanish – the parameters of what angry Republicans are calling a lawless ‘amnesty.’

‘We’re going to offer the following deal,’ he said: ‘If you’ve been in America for more than five years; if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents; if you register, pass a criminal background check, and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes – you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily, without fear of deportation.’

What’s this “we” stuff?

Of course, this order only lasts 4 years, and can easily be rescinded by the next Republican president. Remember, too, that any Democrats who support this can’t pitch a fit if a Republican president does something similar. What if a President Cruz tells law enforcement to ignore any laws restricting ownership of large capacity magazines, or declares that law enforcement should accept all concealed carry permits across the country? For instance, say a North Carolina resident with a CCP goes to NYC, which has no reciprocity, and has significant restrictions, and Cruz says “hey, no problem, no one can bust you if you are carrying while in NYC”?

https://twitter.com/Brand_Allen/status/535482888121499648

I don’t expect polls to get any better. Carl Eric Scott notes

First, there is the simple issue of democratic say. Who were those representatives who did not agree to any of the earlier immigration bills? They were standing for the opinion and judgment of your fellow citizens. The rules for the game were set. And year after year, immigration reform came up for debate, and for complex reasons, which you can say were bad ones or good, the desired bill never made it through. Such is democracy. But now your fellow citizens are told the rules are not set. They are told to accept your victories when you win by the rules, but that you don’t always have to accept their victories when they so win.

What many are not noting is that this is mostly about Obama picking a fight. He’s a schoolyard bully who enjoys conflict over debate, strife over fellowship. Think about it: he barely reaches out to people in his own party in Congress. He prefers heavy polarization and nasty fights.

That said, what, exactly, is Obama’s plan? Other than some bullet points, there are no details.

There are no details on the background checks. What are the terms? What disqualifies them? Notice that there is no requirement to be able to speak English to be able to converse with lawful citizens. What about taxes?

As far as “play by the rules”, the illegals, whether they came across the border illegally or overstayed their visas, have already broken the rules.

Again, there is a dearth of details. What does he mean by ” cracking down”? Notice that this also ignores cracking down on those illegals not at the border.

Again, details matter. So does action. If he was smart, he would immediately order all agencies involved with illegal immigrants to get tough, to act now. That might make the lawless, unconstitutional executive amnesty a bit more palitable to the majority of Americans who are against his plan. He won’t. Because he wants a fight. That can’t be stressed enough.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

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If All You See…

By William Teach November 20, 2014 – 1:00 pm

…is carbon pollution created extreme wind, you might just be a Warmist

The blog of the day is Da Tech Guy, where Fausta wonders why taxes weren’t an issue during the midterms.

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Voxsplaining Executive Amnesty

By William Teach November 20, 2014 – 12:37 pm

Vox’s Ezra Klein gives it the old college try in giving arguments for and against “Obamnesty”

(Vox) For: The president clearly has the power

At this point, fairly few people, even on the right, are arguing that Obama doesn’t have the power to exempt broad classes of people from deportation. President George H.W. Bush granted about 1.4 million unauthorized immigrants a blanket deferral from deportation — that was about 40 percent of America’s unauthorized population, a number similar to what Obama is considering now. And it’s not just Bush: a variety of other presidents have used this power in a variety of other ways.

Except, they were doing it under Congressional authorization based on the 1980’s amnesty, not making it up out of whole cloth. As Jazz Shaw points out, what Obama is looking to do is tell law enforcement to no longer enforce actual law. “This is an executive order to officers of the law to stand down from their duty entirely and ignore criminals who they may – in at least some cases – be able to find and prosecute.” Furthermore, where does Obama get the statutory authority to give pay raises?

Against: The president might have the power — but that doesn’t mean he should use it

“The executive branch is effectively acting in direct defiance of the electoral process,” writes Ross Douthat. “This is where the administration has entered extraordinarily brazen territory.”

Of course, Klein finds that thinking “fuzzy”.

For: It’s sensible and humane

The backdrop to this debate is 11 million unauthorized immigrants live in the United States right now. They work, raise families, pay taxes, start businesses, contribute to their communities — and live under constant, unrelenting fear of deportation.

They commit crimes, they steal social security numbers and identities, ruining countless lives, deflate wages, oh, and how does one start a business without the proper documentation? As far as humane, what about our legal citizens?

Against: The constant, unrelenting fear of deportation is the point

Yes, it is. Obviously, Klein is not happy with the view that criminals should be concerned about being caught.

For: Congress is broken, and that means the president must do more

Whether Congress is broken or not, a separate debate, they are the lawmakers. Otherwise, we might as well be a dictatorship, where the whims of 1 person are forced upon 300+ million citizens.

Against: This could turn paralysis into crisis

This is really what Obama wants. Mr. Nobel Peace Prize prefers strife, conflict, and hyper-partisanship. Along with things being his way or the highway.

We’re either a nation of law, or a nation of whim.

Read: Voxsplaining Executive Amnesty »

Posted in Barry Obama, Illegal Immigration | 12 Comments | Trackback URL

Pause Excuse #66: No Pause If We Only Consider Coldest And Warmest Days Of The Year

By William Teach November 20, 2014 – 10:52 am

Have to keep the cult going

(The Hockey Schtick) A new paper published in Environmental Research Letters finds excuse #66 for the 18+ year “pause” of global warming: There’s no “pause” if you look at only the one single warmest and coldest days per year.

According to the authors and the accompanying editorial, if you use a dataset of extreme temperatures “which is not publicly available” and has data from “areas that don’t have many observations” (with extrapolated (modeled) temperatures) and pick out the one single day per year with the highest and lowest temperatures, those sparse one day per year observations are within one standard deviation of the climate model warming predictions.

Of course, if you instead look at observations from the other 364 days per year, the climate models are overheated by a factor of 3-4 times and falsified at confidence levels exceeding 98%+, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from grabbing at straws and believing in the “faux pause,” or that this paper allegedly “results in increased confidence in projections of future changes in extreme temperature.”

It’s hard to keep up with all the excuses. The Hockey Schtick has an updated list here.

Read: Pause Excuse #66: No Pause If We Only Consider Coldest And Warmest Days Of The Year »

Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 1 Comment | Trackback URL

Democrats Introduce Carbon Fee Legislation In Senate

By William Teach November 20, 2014 – 7:28 am

Hey, why not? Obama and his Democrat henchmen have already done great damage to the economy, why not kick it up a notch?

(Think Progress) In a sense, the problem of climate change is incredibly simple: certain people are dumping carbon into the atmosphere, and in the coming decades we will all suffer from the effects of that pollution. That, in turn, suggests a simple fix: make the emitters pay for that damage in the here and now. If they don’t want to pay, they won’t emit.

That’s the basic theory behind the American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act, which Sen. Sheldon WhiteHouse (D-RI) introduced on Wednesday, along with his co-sponsor Brian Schatz (D-HI).

According to details Whitehouse’s office released to reporters, the bill would impose a fee on all carbon emissions (and other greenhouse gas emissions) beginning in 2015. It would start at $42 per metric ton, and then increase by two percent annually in real terms. The fee would fall on all coal, oil, and natural gas that’s either produced in the United States or imported, and it would cover large emitters from non-fossil-fuel sources as well.

This is all about the free market, you guys

In his speech Wednesday, Whitehouse pointed to this support and previous proposals to put a price on emissions that “were market-based, revenue-neutral tools, aligned with Republican free-market values.”

Really? This is free market? Do I even need to explain the notion that the government instituting a “fee”, setting its price, and then dictating that the fee cost rise 2% annually is the opposite of free market?

But, wait, who does Jeff Ross, writing at Joe Romm’s George Soros funded Climate Progress think will be paying?

By placing a cost on emissions, a carbon fee would encourage every company, institution, and individual to find the least expensive and most effective reductions that work for them. And the diversity and extent of these reductions can go far beyond less use of fossil fuels; it can be changes in daily routines, business models, more use of public transportation, changes to infrastructure, new technology innovations, and on and on. No large or expansive regulation is necessary: just track the emissions, charge the emitters, and let the market do the rest. (Whitehouse’s bill is only 29 pages.)

That’s right, it looks like this would effect each and every citizen, business, and private entity. Of course, Mr. Ross thinks that this fails to go far enough in sticking it to the American people, and wants the fees to rise in cost faster. Furthermore, he thinks much of the money should be refunded back to citizens. Of course, this is not just an economic issue, but a moral one

What the price of carbon emissions should be is ultimately an ethical question as much as an economic one.

See? This jibes nicely with the talking point (which I discussed yesterday) which Warmists are using more and more in which they position this as a moral issue. Just not enough to get Warmists to practice what they preach in their own lives.

The press release from Whitehouse is here, along with a link to the legislation. Whitehouse acknowledges that each and every citizen will be nailed with his carbon tax, be it directly or because the “big polluters” will have to raise their prices, and “promises” that money will be returned to them.

BTW, when will Sheldon Whitehouse give up his own fossil fueled travel? His footprint has to be pretty darned big, what with all his flights from Rhode Island to D.C., Florida, California, and so on.

The U.S. Department of Treasury would assess and collect the fee..

Oh, good, the IRS being even more intrusive in our lives. Feel better?

The legislation requires carbon capture methods. Which do not yet exist. And, of course, this creates all sorts of redistribution of the money (starting on page 24 of the PDF legislation).

Read: Democrats Introduce Carbon Fee Legislation In Senate »

Posted in Carbon Credits, Democrats, Economy, Global Warming | 1 Comment | Trackback URL

Dumbest Pro-Illegals Op-Ed You’ll Read Positions U.S. As Communist East Germany

By William Teach November 20, 2014 – 7:00 am

This is possibly the dumbest one you’ll read today, particularly from a major media outlet. Apparently, the talking points that made their way from the White House to the compliant lapdog legacy media is that what Obama intends to do with his “amnesty”, er, deferred deportation, is all about humanitarianism for these poor, poor folks who entered our country illegally/overstayed their visa. The Washington Post’s Harold Myerson decides to take it a step further and brings in the Berlin Wall. Yes, the Berlin Wall. No, seriously

Obama calculates the human cost of deportations

The commemorations of the 25th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall have thrust into the public spotlight the border guard who ordered the gates opened. The subject of both a new German-language book and film, one-time Stasi Lt. Col. Harald Jäger has recounted why he defied his orders. And his story couldn’t be more relevant to the debate consuming our own nation.

On the evening of Nov. 9, 1989, prompted by an erroneous announcement from an East German Politburo spokesman that his compatriots would be free to cross the border, thousands of East Berliners flocked to the checkpoint Jäger supervised. His superiors told him to keep the gates closed, though he could let a few people through, provided he marked the passports of those he determined were activists and blocked their reentry when they came back.

When one such young couple returned from the West, going home to their small children, Jäger saw that while the wife could reenter, her husband’s passport had been stamped, forbidding his return. Jäger faced a choice. “My responsibility was clear — enforce the law and split the couple,” he recalled to the Financial Times. “But at that moment it became so clear to me . . . the stupidity, the lack of humanity. I finally said to myself, ‘Kiss my arse. Now I will do what I think is right.’ ” He let the couple in. Then he commanded the guards to throw open the gates. The rest is history — and a lesson to a nation now embroiled in a different, but not that different, contest between the imperatives of custom and law, as some construe it, and those of keeping families together.

Got that? The U.S. is like Stasi run East Germany, and Mr. Obama is Lt. Col. Jäger, the super awesome guy who refused the order to stop the husband from returning to the (restrictive police state of) East Germany, and further went on to open the gates allowing East and West German families to reunite. Hooray! Because that’s no much different from what’s going on here in the United States. Except that there is no wall holding our citizens in.

What the pundits have tended to overlook, as well, is the humanity behind Obama’s apparent willingness to act without congressional approval. Every year since Obama became president, the government has deported roughly 400,000 undocumented immigrants, with little regard to whether they’ve broken any law save crossing the border without papers or overstaying their visas — or whether their kids are wondering where their parents have gone. On Tuesday, the Pew Research Center reported that in 2012, some 13 percent of schoolchildren in both Texas and California had at least one undocumented parent. That’s a lot of parents, a lot of kids.

Humanity has its place. So does The Law. Those parents are welcome to take their children with them when they are deported. No one will “stop them at the gate”, keeping the children here. Where are the Liberals complaining about families being broken up when one parent is sent to jail, be they illegal aliens or proper citizens? Furthermore, the majority of major countries have similar laws. Many of them, such as Mexico, make being “undocumented” a criminal act, worthy of jail time.

None of this is to equate the legitimacy of our laws and policies to those of the late, unlamented East Germany. But even democracies can, and not infrequently do, violate the most elemental human rights. Stripping children of their parents is such a violation. It’s time — past time — to stop the stupidity, the lack of humanity.

Except that Meyerson did equate the U.S. to East Germany. What was the point of the first 3 paragraphs, otherwise? No one is stripping children of their parents (we could probably discuss hyperactive government organizations attempting to take children from their parents over things like a parent owning a gun, along with other measures), as the children are, again, welcome to go with the parents. Humanitarianism is worthless without Law. These parents voluntarily chose to come to the U.S. illegally or overstayed their visas. This is on them. It was their own actions. If you chose to break into a building and get arrested and sent to jail, separating you from your children, whose fault is it?

The parents could leave with their kids and apply to return, doing it the right way. They chose to instead agitate for the U.S. to blow off our laws and accommodate them. They demand this. The cost will be born by U.S. citizens, and what of the humanitarianism of those who emigrated to the U.S. legally? Amnesty is telling these people they’re chumps.

Crossed at Right Wing News.

Read: Dumbest Pro-Illegals Op-Ed You’ll Read Positions U.S. As Communist East Germany »

Posted in Illegal Immigration, Unhinged Tools | 2 Comments | Trackback URL

Here We Go: Eric Holthaus Blames Global Warming For Buffalo Snow

By William Teach November 19, 2014 – 4:04 pm

I was actually surprised he didn’t do this in a Slate post I referenced earlier of his. I guess he was waiting to tweet it

He’s not the only one going down this road. There are plenty of other tweets. He’s one if the biggest, though.

Read: Here We Go: Eric Holthaus Blames Global Warming For Buffalo Snow »

Posted in Collapsing Science, Global Warming | 4 Comments | Trackback URL
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