Climate Change

 As I sit here writing, I have the White House Health Care Summit running in the background. This is the meeting where President Obama invited Congressional leaders to sit down at the table in front of the American public and talk about how to find common ground over what has become a very divisive, political debate about healthcare.

So far, I am hearing the Republicans say "start over" and Democrats say "we can't wait" ad nauseum. I say, "Lock them in the room, get out a piece of paper and pencils, and start writing."

Two weeks ago, BP America, Caterpillar Inc. and ConocoPhillips decided not to renew their membership in the US Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), an alliance of major businesses and environmental groups calling for federal regulation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Since then, there have been some wild assertions about the health of the movement for clean energy in America. A lot of people are looking at this like tea leaves, and trying to figure out what it means, so here's my reading.

Businesses in America are realizing that a clean energy economy is no longer a dream or a goal - it is a requirement. Businesses have a choice between obstinately clinging to the fossil economy (already dead) or reading the writing on the wall and getting behind the clean energy movement. Thousands of businesses and organizations across the country get it:

 Last week, two conservative Republican Senators, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and John Barrasso of Wyoming, called for an independent probe of the IPCC -- the international scientific body that summarizes the latest climate science -- and asked the Senate to halt all climate action until that happens.

What a maroon:

"It's a hoax. It's nonsense. It's a bunch of green folks who think they know how to live better than you do," [Luetkemeyer] said. "Man-made global change is nonsense."

The Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate released a great video yesterday with military perspectives on clean energy, climate change and national security. 

Ed Emery jams with Orly Taitz, July 2009

Via The Turner Report, I see that birther Rep. Ed Emery (R-Lamar) thinks that global warming and climate change are a bunch of hooey.

As a scientist, I have been frustrated for some time over the absence of logic in some of the climate-change declarations...

In the rippling heat of “consensus,” the ostrich of Climate-Gate is being permitted to continue its economic destruction undetected and unimpeded. Someone has to say something – maybe it should be Missouri. The climate is important to all of us, but it is time to demand that predictions be based on measured data and developed following the scientific method, not political consensus.

World-renowned Jerry Nolte (R-Gladstone) sponsored a forward-thinking and well-researched resolution last week (HCR 32) calling for Congress to reject any cap-and-trade legislation to reduce climate changing emissions. 

In addition to expressing concern with the modest increases in energy costs that would come from such a system -- costs that would be nowhere near what Republican leaders and their industry allies have promised -- Nolte's resolution follows the lead of Missouri's top climate change denier, Blaine Luetkemeyer, in criticizing the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Incredibly, scientists and scientific organizations continue to spew bogus global warming data, undeterred by moronic politicians and industry-funded smear campaigns.  It's shameful, really.  

Printed today in the New York Times:

PAST DECADE WARMEST ON RECORD, NASA DATA SHOWS

The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show.

I can't help but wonder what prominent Republican Catholics -- folks like Cong. Blaine Luetkemeyer and Crazy Eddie Martin -- think of this left-wing garbage coming out of the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen last month, saying Monday that world peace depends on safeguarding God's creation...

Benedict has been dubbed the "green pope" for his increasingly vocal concern about protecting the environment, an issue he has reflected on in encyclicals, during foreign trips and most recently in his annual peace message. Under Benedict's watch, the Vatican has installed photovoltaic cells on its main auditorium to convert sunlight into electricity and has joined a reforestation project aimed at offsetting its CO2 emissions.

Via MPNblog.com, I see that Vicky Hartzler thinks climate change and global warming is just one great big "hoax."  

Given the importance of military issues and voters in the 4th District, maybe Hartlzer can explain why Pentagon planners now officially consider global warming a threat to national security?  As ThinkProgress notes, the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review "will report that climate change could result in food and water scarcity, pandemics, population displacement, and other destabilizing events that could create conflict."

In the Southeast Missourian: 

The Tribune's Janese Heavin has the scoop on a really interesting development in the story of Gary Forsee's opposition to federal clean energy legislation. For several days, he's sustained criticism for lending support to the Republican efforts to kill the legislation. Then yesterday, things got a whole lot worse for the President of the UM System when it was reveled that the calculations at the core of this opposition were incorrect.

In light of these facts, Forsee began to walk back his opposition at a Mizzou campus town hall earlier today, and reaffirmed his support for reducing carbon emissions.

I'm don't have anything particularly insightful or clever to say about this column -- it's just embarrassing.

There have been some very disturbing and yet enlightening developments about the real science surrounding theories of man-made global warming. In recent days, we also have seen our state’s major university system provide a detailed accounting of how harmful and expensive cap-and-trade legislation will be to higher education in Missouri.