Yesterday during his second Inaugural Address Barack Obama promised to blow billions of taxpayer dollars on more global warming junk science projects.
Via Watts Up With That:
After all, his donors have to get paid. Eighty percent of Obama’s green energy “investments” his first term went to committed donors.
Much of the money was lost. During his first term over 19 of Obama’s green ventures went belly-up after receiving billions of dollars. But that won’t stop him from committing more of your cash to this failed cause.
Yesterday, James Delingpole at The Telegraph tossed cold water on Obama’s reckless statements on climate change.
The first sentence is a blatant untruth. Concerted global action so far to deal with the threat of climate change has resulted in: higher energy prices; more deaths from fuel poverty; more intrusive regulation; the destruction of rainforests and the squandering of agricultural land on biofuels; higher food prices; famine and food riots – as a result partly of the drive for biofuels; the entrenchment of corporatism and rent-seeking to the detriment of free markets; the ravaging of the countryside with ugly solar farms and even uglier wind turbines; the deaths of millions of birds and bats; the great recession. How any of this has in any way benefited either our children (who are going to find it far harder to find a job) or future generations is a complete mystery.
The second sentence is a devious combination of the junk factoid and the non sequitur.
That “overwhelming judgement of science” is a reference to the comprehensively discredited Doran survey: the one where the “97 per cent of climate scientists” turned out to consist of just 75 out of 77 climate scientists who could be bothered to reply to two silly and dubious questions.
As for the idea that “science” ever has such a thing as an “overwhelming judgement”: this would be news to Galileo, Newton, Einstein and indeed all the great scientists of history, all of whom made their names by advancing theories which completely overturned the “overwhelming judgement” of their contemporaries.
It’s probably true, up to a point, that “none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms”. But only if you accept that everyone lives in a region susceptible to fires, drought and powerful storms, which not everyone does.
What Obama is presumably trying to slip into that weasel sentence is the notion that “science” is overwhelmingly of the view that raging fires, crippling drought and more powerful storms are increasing as a result of “climate change” (note incidentally how he’s careful not to say whether or not it is man-made, thus enabling him to cover all eventualities). But if this is the case, I’d dearly love to see the evidence that this is a) anthropogenic b) controllable or c)historically unprecedented. Certainly, according to this graph at Watts Up With That?, there is nothing particular weird or alarming about recent weather activity. On an index of “Extreme Weather” in the US since 1910, last year – 2012 – ranks a very modest 54th.
Read the rest here.
