Friday, April 30, 2010

Global Warming and NASA - and the EPA

Popular Science reports:  In 1985, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey found a giant hole in the ozone layer of Earth's atmosphere over the South Pole. This discovery prompted a largely successful international effort to ban CFCs, the chemicals largely responsible for man-made thinning of the ozone layer.
Unfortunately, a new analysis from Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) suggests that stopping ozone depletion may actually increase global warming and speed up sea level rise. This discovery pits two important environmental missions against each other, while highlighting the complexity of our effect on the planet.
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New Scientist reports: ...GOODBYE air pollution and smoky chimneys, hello brighter days. That's been the trend in Europe for the past three decades - but unfortunately cleaning up the skies has allowed more of the sun's rays to pierce the atmosphere, contributing to at least half the warming that has occurred.
Christian Ruckstuhl of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland and colleagues took aerosol concentrations from six locations in northern Europe, measured between 1986 and 2005, and compared them with solar-radiation measurements over the same period.
"The decrease in aerosols probably accounts for at least half of the warming over Europe in the last 30 years," says Rolf Philipona, a co-author of the study at MeteoSwiss, Switzerland's national weather service.
The latest climate models are built on the assumption that aerosols have their biggest influence by seeding natural clouds, which reflect sunlight. However, the team found that radiation dropped only slightly on cloudy days, suggesting that the main impact of aerosols is to block sunlight directly.   [Oops - does this mean we need to beginning using aerosols with CFC's once again?  I'm confused.]
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Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano is emitting between 150,000 and 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) per day, a figure placing it in the same emissions league as a small-to-medium European economy, experts said on Monday.  
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This week’s Obama NASA speech stirred up controversy in more ways than one. There’s the fact that he said he plans to ditch going back to the moon in favor of landing on asteroids. There’s also his stated plan to privatize space exploration. Add to that the usual grand plans with little if any detail or idea as to how to make those plans come into fruition, and you have controversy. One person sees it one way, another sees it another way. The Obama NASA speech in Florida this week even got a commentator on MSNBC a little vexed. It seems that no NASA employees allowed to hear the president’s plans for the future of American exploration into space.
Obama took a trip down to Florida to give a speech to NASA about is vision for the future of U.S. space travel. The problem is, the whole this was apparently staged. I know, I know, staging Obama is not news. However, this one was not just the ever-present teleprompters we’ve grown so accustomed to that we don’t even comment on them any more. It wasn’t even just the planted questions or the invitation only audience. This one went so far that it even caught the attention of long-time NBC science correspondent Jay Barbree. It seems that Obama’s speech to NASA didn’t include NASA. NASA was simply not invited.
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Proving once again that weather and Mother Earth cannot be easily predicted comes this news from Brussels: The computer models that guided decisions to impose a no-fly zone across most of Europe in recent days are based on incomplete science and limited data, according to European officials. As a result, they may have over-stated the risks to the public, needlessly grounding flights and damaging businesses.
“It is a black box in certain areas,” Matthias Ruete, the EU’s director-general for mobility and transport, said on Monday, noting that many of the assumptions in the computer models were not backed by scientific evidence.
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 CNX News reports:  President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency is encouraging the public to create video advertisements that explain why federal regulations are "important to everyone."

The contest, which ends May 17, will award $2,500 to the makers of the video that best explains why federal regulations are good and how ordinary citizens can become more involved in making regulations. The videos must be posted on YouTube and can be no more than 60-90 seconds in length.

In the current contest, each video must include the slogan “Let your voice be heard,” and it must direct viewers to the government’s regulatory website www.Regulations.gov. The winning video will then be used by the entire federal government to promote the regulatory process and enhance the public’s participation in it.
[I am not knowledgeable enough to do it, but if I could, I would send in a video about why overreaching federal regulations are NOT good. This is particularly true for regulations for which Congress is not allowed to vote, a usurpation of our Constitutional three branches of government.  To my knowledge, the EPA is not one of those branches.  It would include the questions I pose below, by the way.]
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From the Little Traverse Conservancy news:  Just a few mile southeast of Petoskey, MI lies a high glacial moraine, deposited onto the land when the ice masses retreated more than 11,000 years ago.  From atop this hill are sweeping views of Little Traverse Bay.  [What I've always wanted the global warming crowd and EPA to answer is this: what caused the glaciers to "retreat" 11,000 years ago?  Or what caused Greenland (so called because it was verdant and green at one time) to become a land of ice? If they could answer that it was mankind, then I might begin to believe that we actually have the capacity to stem what Planet Earth has been up to for millions of years.]  
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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Obama quote

"I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Oh, yeah, and just for good measure, he's now in the process of healing the racial divide.
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(CNNMoney.com) -- The recovery is picking up steam as employers boost payrolls, but economists think the government's stimulus package and jobs bill had little to do with the rebound, according to a survey released Monday.
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ABC News reports: Fulfilling his commitment made last year in Cairo to help deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and entrepreneurs in the United States and Muslim communities around the world, President Obama today kicked off a two-day Entrepreneurship Summit in Washington, DC. (Snip) “We will bring business and social entrepreneurs from Muslim-majority countries to the United States and send their American counterparts to learn from your countries. Women in technology fields will have the opportunity to come to the United States for internships and professional development. And since innovation is central to entrepreneurship, we’re creating new exchanges for science teachers.” 
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From the New York Post comes the following description of the new Financial  Regulatory Bill: The financial-regulatory bill now before the Senate is so filled with special-interest loopholes and exclusions that it makes the health-care "reform" bill, with its "Cornhusker Kickback" and "Louisiana Purchase," look like a model of rectitude.
The Senate bill, sponsored by Democrat Chris Dodd, claims to subject all "too big to fail" institutions to greater federal supervision, but in fact it only mandates such regulation for bank-holding companies. Regulators would have to make a case-by-case decision on whether to apply it to other financial companies.
The Senate financial-regulation bill offers a stark choice: Do we aspire to be a country where everyone is subject to the same rules? Or do we accept a system where power, influence and money can buy exclusions and exemptions?
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Obama's Debt Committee Panel has been asked to figure out what to do with our government debt.  Isn't it interesting that the panel is not to give us their findings until after the November elections?
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Monday, April 26, 2010

Clinton, Reno and Morris, An Obama Birth Certificate, Goldman Sachs

 The fight is still on...and it's a fight worth having.

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From Fox News: in response to Bill Clinton’s highly publicized linking of the Tea Party movement to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing former Clinton adviser Dick Morris appeared on Sean Hannity's Fox Show disclosing that it was Clinton himself, and not Attorney General Janet Reno, who called the shots during the 1993 botched FBI action that led to the death of seventy-six people.

“Let’s understand what was Timothy McVeigh’s motivation …he himself had said that it was the reaction to the Waco takeover. Bill Clinton orchestrated that takeover.”
“Clinton in fact was so ashamed about what he did in Waco that he was not going to appoint Janet Reno to a second four-year term. She told him in a meeting right before the inauguration day … ‘If you don’t appoint me I’m going to tell the truth about Waco.’ And that forced Clinton’s hand … It’s never been said  before.”
Morris ended up by saying that he never knew what Reno's secret was. It certainly appears that Clinton is covering something up.
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The Arizona House on Monday voted for a provision that would require President Barack Obama to show his birth certificate if he hopes to be on the state's ballot when he runs for reelection.
The House voted 31-22 to add the provision to a separate bill. The measure still faces a formal vote.It would require U.S. presidential candidates who want to appear on the ballot in Arizona to submit documents proving they meet the constitutional requirements to be president.Phoenix Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema said the bill is one of several measures that are making Arizona "the laughing stock of the nation."Mesa Republican Rep. Cecil Ash said he has no reason to doubt Obama's citizenship but supports the measure because it could help end doubt.
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The Washington Examiner opines:  Campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs employees to President Obama are nearly seven times as much as President Bush received from Enron workers, according to numbers on OpenSecrets.org.
President Bush's connections to Enron were well-hyped during the company's accounting debacle that rippled through the economy. Time magazine even had an article called, "Bush's Enron Problem." The Associated Press ran with the headline, "Bush-backing Enron makes big money off crisis." David Callaway wrote that Enron for Bush was worse than Whitewater for Clinton.
It's not even just campaign contributions. There's quite the revolving door. According to our own Tim Carney:
Greg Craig, Obama's first White House counsel, has joined Goldman, we learned this week. He may not have too much pull in the West Wing, which drove him out for hewing too close to Obama's campaign promises, but as a former insider he will provide valuable intelligence to the world's largest investment bank.
Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff, was paid $35,000 as a consultant to Goldman while also working as Bill Clinton's top fundraiser. Obama's fundraiser and economic adviser Warren Buffett is very long on Goldman, having bet on them in 2008 in the expectation of a bailout. Mark Patterson, chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, was a Goldman Sachs lobbyist until months before joining Team Obama. [Though some Republicans are giving their money back to Goldman, we cannot expect for Obama to return his nearly 1 million in donations to his campaign.