A recent Rasmussen poll found 20% of voters feel we should eliminate capitalism to protect the environment. That’s like saying we should eliminate teachers to improve education.
Truth be told, capitalism has helped cleanse our planet—improving living standards while protecting the environment. Rather than eliminate capitalism, policymakers need to unleash it.
Markets incentivize efficiency by rewarding people for coming up with ways to do more or do better with less. People choose—and businesses make—more efficient products because it saves them money while delivering what customers want.
Over the past decade, market forces have driven a massive transition within the energy industry. In 2008, coal provided roughly half of the country’s electricity generation. Now, coal’s share is about a quarter. Increased production of natural gas has driven energy bills and emissions downward.
In direct response to cheap gas, the Nuclear Energy Institute organized nuclear power plants nationally to find operating efficiencies that have reduced costs by 19%, saving consumers $1.6 billion and keeping emissions-free electricity in the marketplace.
The energy industry is far from the only sector that has made positive economic and environmental contributions. For instance, the cement industry is collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to explore how to refine its processes in ways that will improve resiliency, reduce emissions, and save lives. Investments in cement, steel, plastic, and other building materials will make our houses and highways sturdier and our products more durable—with a smaller environmental footprint.
All of these activities result directly from free enterprise—companies providing consumers with the goods and services they want while using fewer resources and emitting fewer unwanted emissions.
The jury found that the state owed those counties $1.1 billion in damages, including $674 million the counties contend they lost since 2001 because the state didn’t cut enough trees. The verdict also includes $392 million in future damages, which assumes the state will continue to manage the state forests in the same fashion, and fail to maximize timber revenues for the next 50 years.
Oregon loses $1 billion timber lawsuit to rural counties
The state of Oregon breached its contract with 13 rural counties and 151 local taxing districts by failing to maximize timber harvests on state forests and resulting payments to those counties during the last two decades, a jury in Linn County found on Wednesday after nearly a month-long trial.
The jury found that the state owed those counties $1.1 billion in damages, including $674 million the counties contend they lost since 2001 because the state didn’t cut enough trees. The verdict also includes $392 million in future damages, which assumes the state will continue to manage the state forests in the same fashion, and fail to maximize timber revenues for the next 50 years.
The verdict, delivered mere hours after deliberations began, is a blow to the state, its beleaguered Department of Forestry, and environmental and recreational groups around the state. But the decision was not entirely unexpected. Observers say the plaintiffs aggressively venue-shopped the case to find a sympathetic judge and jury, and the state had lost almost all the significant pre-trial rulings.
The state is likely to appeal the verdict, but the judgement will accrue interest at 9%, or $90 million a year, which ups the ante considerably to resolve the case quickly.
It seems that every day, another smart person or group is slowly & surely chipping away at the weak structure of the man made global climate change religion that has held us hostage for many years.
Just this week alone, President Trump wisely pulled America out of the economy crippling Paris Accord, which would have done nothing to affect the climate, but killed countless jobs in the U.S.
Then, Wednesday gifted us another shocker!
We now find that NASA just revealed the results of a thorough study on West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier, which was originally thought to be bleeding off ice at an alarming rate. Had other more aggressive models been accurate, the world’s sea levels would have risen by 1%, a significant margin from a global perspective.
A NASA Study Shows Thwaites Glacier’s Ice Loss May Not Progress as Quickly as Thought
Ice velocities (meters per year) of Thwaites Glacier (approximate location outlined with dashed line)and neighboring glaciers in West Antarctica; inset map shows location. The ocean bottom temperature appears as shades of red (degrees Celsius). Ocean areas shown in gray are too shallow to affect the glacial undersides. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The melt rate of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is an important concern, because this glacier alone is currently responsible for about 1 percent of global sea level rise. A new NASA study finds that Thwaites’ ice loss will continue, but not quite as rapidly as previous studies have estimated.
The new study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, finds that numerical models used in previous studies have overestimated how rapidly ocean water is able to melt the glacier from below, leading them to overestimate the glacier’s total ice loss over the next 50 years by about 7 percent.
Thwaites Glacier covers an area nearly as large as the state of Washington (70,000 square miles, or 182,000 square kilometers). Satellite measurements show that its rate of ice loss has doubled since the 1990s. The glacier has the potential to add several inches to global sea levels.
The new study is led by Helene Seroussi, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It is the first to combine two computer models, one of the Antarctic ice sheet and one of the Southern Ocean, in such a way that the models interact and evolve together throughout an experiment — creating what scientists call a coupled model.
Previous modeling studies of the glacier used only an ice sheet model, with the effects of the ocean specified beforehand and unchanging.
This is where the dishonesty is exposed. The global warming disciples will design models which favor results supporting their world view.
Seroussi and colleagues at JPL and the University of California at Irvine (UCI) used an ocean model developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge with an ice sheet model developed at JPL and UCI. They used data from NASA’s Operation Icebridge and other airborne and satellite observations, both to set up the numerical model simulations and to check how well the models reproduced observed changes.
Glaciers have beds just as rivers do, and most glacier beds slope downhill in the same direction the glacier is flowing, as a riverbed does. Thwaites Glacier’s bed does the opposite: it slopes uphill in the direction of flow. The bedrock under the glacier’s ocean front is higher than bedrock farther inland, which has been pushed down over the millennia by its heavy burden of ice.
Thwaites has lost so much ice that it floats where it used to be attached to bedrock. That has opened a passageway underneath the glacier where ocean water can seep in.
In this part of Antarctica, the warm, salty, deep ocean current that circles the continent comes near land, and warm water can flow onto the continental shelf. This warm seawater now seeps beneath Thwaites Glacier, melting it from below.
As the glacier continues to melt, grow thinner and float off bedrock farther and farther inland, new cavities will continue to open up. Because the bedrock slopes downhill, there’s no natural barrier to stop this process. Earlier modeling studies assumed that water in the new cavities would continue to melt the glacial underside at the same rate that it’s melting now.
Seroussi’s coupled model found that water circulation is more restricted in these narrow spaces, and as a result, the water will melt the ice more slowly than previously thought.
Seroussi noted that critical factors affecting Thwaites, such as how nearby ocean temperatures will change, are still unknown and represented by different scenarios in different studies. However, “Our results shift the estimates for sea level rise to smaller numbers regardless of the scenario,” she said.
The study is titled “Continued retreat of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica, controlled by bed topography and ocean circulation.”
Pay Attention To How They Fudge Their Research
The dirty tricks of this Climate Change crowd have been exposed a long time ago, but we need to be reminded how dishonest they truly are, & how far they will go to gain control of our money to do whatever their dark hearts desire.
They will create a computer model designed to predict the absolute worst outcome for our climate, regardless of how inaccurate it will turn out to be.
So, we must turn the whole paradigm around on them & use wisdom of the ages to confound these fools. The most accurate way to predict the future, is to study the past. Look at all the climate patterns occurring throughout history, & use that to understand what’s next. They try to tell us that men’s activities are altering the patterns, but the numbers are not backing their claims.
We are finding, our planet is acting precisely the way it has been since men observed weather. Nothing that mankind is doing now will change this.
If volcanoes, which affect climate much more than men, cannot change Earth’s climate patterns or long term intensities, then we are powerless to compete with the world’s climactic clockwork…
From the great mind of Dr. Roy Spencer, Ph. D. I give you the top ten climate discoveries of 2014. And Happy New Year!
Top 10 lists are popular this time of year, so I gave in to the peer pressure. Here’s my Top 10 list of totally true climate stories of 2014. Kind of like that movie “Fargo”, which was not “based on a true story”, but was a totally “true story”.
10. Weather did not even occur before Henry Ford automated the production of the automobile. No, really, look it up.
9. Climate modelers discovered that the Earth is not warming nearly as fast as their models predicted. A multi-billion dollar effort is now underway to make the climate system warm even faster.
8. The Koch Brothers were discovered to be extraterrestrials out to destroy the Earth. If you haven’t heard that yet…you are one of the stupid people who were deemed to be not trustworthy enough with the information.
7. Global sea ice reached a near record maximum, due to a bust-gut effort by Exxon-Mobil which has been making ice cubes in China and shipping them to the poles.
6. Global warming causes cooling. This had always been expected, but it was finally proved by two French literature graduates who Googled it.
5. It’s Bush’s fault.
4. A viable replacement for fossil fuels was finally discovered: Solar Freakin’ Roadways. (If solar panels tilted toward the sun and kept clean are a good idea, then putting them on the ground and running over them with 10-ton trucks is even better!)
3. Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists surveyed agreed that if the global warming issue (and their government funding) went away, their careers would end.
2. The 420th U.N. climate meeting in Lima, Peru, was finally made carbon-neutral with jet travel fueled by methane gathered from unicorn herds, and carbon offsets purchased from Al Gore which will go toward planting of 5.3 billion trees which never die.
1. Carbon dioxide (necessary for life on Earth) was discovered to be different from carbon monoxide (a poisonous gas). The full implications of this finding are still being investigated, but are not expected to interfere with continuing plans to increase energy prices and keep Third World people from becoming First World.
Checking out at the store, the young cashier suggested to the
older woman that she should bring her own grocery bags because
plastic bags weren’t good for the environment.
The woman apologized and explained, “We didn’t have this green
thing back in my earlier days.”
The clerk responded, “That’s our problem today. Your generation did
not care enough to save our environment for future generations.”
She was right — our generation didn’t have the green thing in its day.
Back then, we returned milk bottles, soda bottles and beer bottles
to the store. The store sent them back to the plant to be washed
and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same bottles over
and over. So they really were recycled. But we didn’t have the
green thing back in our day.
We walked up stairs, because we didn’t have an escalator in every
store and office building. We walked to the grocery store and
didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go
two blocks. But she was right. We didn’t have the green thing in
our day.
Back then, we washed the baby’s diapers because we didn’t have the
throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy
gobbling machine burning up 220 volts — wind and solar power
really did dry our clothes back in our early days. Kids got
hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always
brand-new clothing. But that young lady is right. We didn’t have
the green thing back in our day.
Back then, we had one TV, or radio, in the house — not a TV in
every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a
handkerchief (remember them?), not a screen the size of the state
of Montana. In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand because
we didn’t have electric machines to do everything for us. When we
packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used wadded up old
newspapers to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap.
Back then, we didn’t fire up an engine and burn gasoline just to
cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power. We
exercised by working so we didn’t need to go to a health club to
run on treadmills that operate on electricity. But she’s right.
We didn’t have the green thing back then.
We drank from a fountain when we were thirsty instead of using a
cup or a plastic bottle every time we had a drink of water. We
refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we
replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the
whole razor just because the blade got dull. But we didn’t have the
green thing back then.
Back then, people took the streetcar or a bus, and kids rode their
bikes to school or walked instead of turning their moms into a
24-hour taxi service. We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an
entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn’t
need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from
satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest
pizza joint.
But isn’t it sad the current generation laments how wasteful we old
folks were just because we didn’t have the green thing back then?
Please forward this on to another selfish old person who needs a
lesson in conservation from a smartass young person.
Remember: Don’t make old people mad.
We don’t like being old in the first place, so it doesn’t take much
to piss us off.
Just in case you’ve never been here before, CO2 is not a pollutant! I was going to post links to my other threads on this subject, but there are just way too many. To find them put, co2 is not a pollutant, in the search bar.
Just when you think they can’t get any worse, the Enviro-nuts come up with a new one.And NO, this is not satire from The Onion.
With an increasing number of golf balls discarded each year, the Danish Golf Association devised a number of tests to determine the environmental impact of golf balls on their surroundings.
It was found that during decomposition, the golf balls dissolved to release a high quantity of heavy metals. Dangerous levels of zinc were found in the synthetic rubber filling used in solid core golf balls. When submerged in water, the zinc attached itself to the ground sediment and poisoned the surrounding flora and fauna.
Course manager for the Danish Golf Union, Torben Kastrup Petersen, said the scale of the problem is unknown: “There has been very little research on the environmental impact of golf balls, but it’s safe to say the indicators are not good. We are planning to collaborate with environmentalists in America to conduct more tests to fully explore the extent of the problem.”
How much money do we, the taxpayers, have to spend on dumb people? If you can’t figure out it’s smokey outside when the whole forest around you is burning, maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to live unsupervised.
And just how much is this costing me to move in equipment to tell me the obvious?
A pair of air sensors are now monitoring the air in Eastern Shasta County near ongoing wildfires.
Scroll the map to Burney and Fall River Mills to see readings from the temporary monitors.
After a story in the Record Searchlight and on Redding.com Thursday, the state Air Resources Board hauled the monitors to the Intermountain Area to augment the county’s permanent monitor in Anderson, which wasn’t monitoring pollutants from the fires because they were too far away. That monitor is the only one of the three maintained by the county that gauges particulate pollution, such as ash put off by wildfires.
This afternoon the Burney monitor showed good air quality and the Fall River Mills monitor indicated unhealthy air quality for sensitive groups. Source
I am so sick of this Nanny State bullshit I can’t even put it in words. If there’s miles of forest burning in your immediate area, do you really have to be told the air quality might be bad?
The chemicals, called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), were introduced widely in the 1990s to replace ozone-depleting gases used in air conditioners, refrigerators and insulating foam.
They worked: The earth’s protective shield seems to be recovering.
But researchers say what’s good for ozone is bad for climate change. In the atmosphere, these replacement chemicals act like “super” greenhouse gases, with a heat-trapping power that can be 4,470 times that of carbon dioxide.
Now, scientists say, the world must find replacements for the replacements — or these super-emissions could cancel out other efforts to stop global warming.
“Whatever targets you thought you were going to make,” said David Fahey, a physicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “it will be undermined by the fact that you have . . . additional emissions that you hadn’t planned on.”
Steve Milloy notes that there is a 60 day public comment window before the EPA makes some really stupid laws.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is seeking comment on its proposed finding that greenhouse gases threaten the public welfare. The agency will be accepting comments from the public for 60 days.
It’s time for a green TEA party. Tell the EPA that you are taxed-enough-already and that you oppose the agency’s use of junk science to tax and regulate you even more.
It seems that every day, another smart person or group is slowly & surely chipping away at the weak structure of the man made global climate change religion that has held us hostage for many years.
The new study is led by Helene Seroussi, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. It is the first to combine two computer models, one of the Antarctic ice sheet and one of the Southern Ocean, in such a way that the models interact and evolve together throughout an experiment — creating what scientists call a coupled model.
Glaciers have beds just as rivers do, and most glacier beds slope downhill in the same direction the glacier is flowing, as a riverbed does. Thwaites Glacier’s bed does the opposite: it slopes uphill in the direction of flow. The bedrock under the glacier’s ocean front is higher than bedrock farther inland, which has been pushed down over the millennia by its heavy burden of ice.
The dirty tricks of this Climate Change crowd have been exposed a long time ago, but we need to be reminded how dishonest they truly are, & how far they will go to gain control of our money to do whatever their dark hearts desire.
Bob's Bites 
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