Professionals meet to discuss environmental literacy

This virtually reeks of the long-standing progressive paradigm. Liberal/Progressives gotta love this approach. It sounds so…nice, who could possibly object?

A group of seven professionals – all holding positions that touch the environment in some way…

Foxes guarding the henhouse: all have a vested interest in the environmental bureaucratic industry.

…pondered ways to teach children about the natural world Wednesday at the South Dakota Discovery Center.

OK. This COULD be either a good or bad thing. The devil is in the details…some of the following details don’t give cause for optimism.

They attended a session that’s part of the Discovery Center’s effort to create an environmental literacy plan that can be used widely throughout the state. The center is tapping a grant by the Environmental Protection Agency to create resources for parents, superintendents, teachers and others in a position to teach children about the environment, said Anne Lewis the special projects director of the Discovery Center.

Hmmmm. EPA? By its record, not exactly a source of balanced information these days.

Marie Steckelberg, with Steckelberg Consulting, in Yankton, led the discussion by asking questions designed to elicit views about environmental education. Steckelberg said she’d taught science education at the University of South Dakota.

Let’s see. Ms. Steckelberg has an EdD – an Education Doctorate, and as noted in the article she taught science education…NOT the same thing as science. One other notable thing from her professional website is an expertise in grant writing…how to leap through the hoops of bureaucracy in order to gain access to the Federal cash spigot.

One of the participants, Paul Lepisto, is the regional conservation coordinator for the Izaak Walton League of America.

There are some good programs that the League promotes. There is also an orientation towards limiting and restricting access to needed resources, including energy resources. May be a wash overall, but based on this setting it seems like another progressive front, albeit a rather mild one compared to some other advocacy groups.

He said his goal was to draw a different kind of attention to nature. “(The more) we can do to get kids more in tune with the environment and natural resources and the love of spending time outdoors, the better,” he said.

Uh, anyone think about what the Boy Scouts do with this stuff? Ooops. Sorry. Not politically correct. My bad!

Lewis said a catalyst for an environmental literacy plan was a 2009 federal bill called “No Child Left Inside.” States with their own plans, she said, would be eligible to receive federal money if the legislation passed.

Ah yes…the prospect for a place at the Federal cash teat! If only that pesky Congress would realize the importance of this vital conditioning educational program and pass the bill…!

The legislation has languished, Lewis said,…

Oh, rats! (sarcasm alert!)

…but she noted the value for creating such plans nonetheless – and she said there were some other funding opportunities.

Yeah, maybe B.O. can figure out a way to call it stimulus, or something. If the Feds can cough up the cash, we’ll be waiting to do the job (and of course get a sweet pay package out of it all for planning and administrating this bit of progressive conditioning education.

A goal, she said, is “to help guide people in their sphere to develop environmental literacy skills.”

Translation: We experts will educate all you yahoos out there, and only after we shove down your throats give you an appreciation for OUR view of “environmental literacy skills” will you too be fit to enter the participatory process.

By the way, searching the web tells one that the above-mentioned “No Child Left Behind” is presented in best left/lib/progressive terminolgy as “a movement”.

The Chief has actually seen some other peer-reviewed scientific papers about low level radiation being beneficial to living cells and organisms. Like water, sodium, zinc, copper, and many other substances, some is helpful (and in some cases even ESSENTIAL), while too much of the same thing can be harmful, up to the level of fatality.

With the terrible earthquake and resulting tsunami that have devastated Japan, the only good news is that anyone exposed to excess radiation from the nuclear power plants is now probably much less likely to get cancer.

This only seems counterintuitive because of media hysteria for the past 20 years trying to convince Americans that radiation at any dose is bad. There is, however, burgeoning evidence that excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine.

As The New York Times science section reported in 2001, an increasing number of scientists believe that at some level — much higher than the minimums set by the U.S. government — radiation is good for you. “They theorize,” the Times said, that “these doses protect against cancer by activating cells’ natural defense mechanisms.”

Among the studies mentioned by the Times was one in Canada finding that tuberculosis patients subjected to multiple chest X-rays had much lower rates of breast cancer than the general population.

And there are lots more!

Take away message: without absolute evidence, don’t sweat the small stuff!

New rules would cut thousands of coal jobs

The Obama administration’s own experts estimate their proposal for protecting streams from coal mining would eliminate thousands of jobs and slash production across much of the country, according to a government document obtained by the Associated Press.

The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement document says the agency’s preferred rules would impose standards for water quality and restrictions on mining methods that would affect the quality or quantity of streams near coal mines. The rules are supposed to replace George W. Bush-era regulations that set up buffer zones around streams and were aimed chiefly at mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia….

OSM’s proposal — part of a draft environmental impact statement — would affect coal mines from Louisiana to Alaska.

The office, a branch of the Interior Department, estimated that the protections would trim coal production to the point that an estimated 7,000 of the nation’s 80,600 coal-mining jobs would be lost. Production would decrease or stay flat in 22 states…

To add a bit of additional perspective, half of the US supply of electricity is coal based. Sort of hard to recharge the new Chevy Volt autos if there’s less electricity available! Regulators working at cross-purposes? According to the lib-progs isn’t government supposed to be MORE efficient at management? Never mind….if we’re rational, we already know the answer to THAT…and “it ain’t that pretty at all”…but I digress.

The National Mining Association blasted the proposal, saying OSM is vastly underestimating the economic impact.

“OSM’s preferred alternative will destroy tens of thousands of coal-related jobs across the country from Appalachia to Alaska and Illinois to Texas with no demonstrated benefit to the environment,” the trade group said. “OSM’s own analysis provides a very conservative estimate of jobs that will be eliminated, incomes that will be lost and state revenues that will be foregone at both surface and underground coal mining operations.”

OK, you know the envirowackos say that’s just the big corporations trying to defend their turf…the impact won’t REALLY be that bad, would it? But wait, the states aren’t too thrilled with D.O.I./OSM either:

They blasted the proposal as “nonsensical and difficult to follow” in a Nov. 26 letter to OSM Director Joe Pizarchik. The letter was signed by officials from Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.

“Neither the environmental impact statement nor the administrative record that OSM has developed over 30-plus years of regulation … justify the sweeping changes that they’re proposing to make,” West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection official Thomas Clarke told AP on Wednesday.

As your electric rates continue to increase, due to the inexorable operation of supply (decreasing) and demand (increasing), give thanks to the administration for it’s energy and employment reduction plans.

Eight Botched Environmental Forecasts

1. Within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.” Dr. David Viner, senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, interviewed by the UK Independent, March 20, 2000.

Hmmm. Just finished shoveling some of the “very rare and exciting event”. According to the local forecast I’ll get a chance to do so on Thursday, and again the following Sunday. OK. I know that Viner is a Brit…but wait…they’ve been getting hammered with snow the last few years over there too.

2. “[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” Michael Oppenheimer, published in “Dead Heat,” St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Was down at Fremont, NE on the Platte river last summer. Seemed to be a fair amount of boating going on. Haven’t seen a new dust bowl either.

3. “Arctic specialist Bernt Balchen says a general warming trend over the North Pole is melting the polar ice cap and may produce an ice-free Arctic Ocean by the year 2000.” Christian Science Monitor, June 8, 1972.

Somebody must have forgot to tell the “Ice Road Truckers”

4. “Using computer models, researchers concluded that global warming would raise average annual temperatures nationwide two degrees by 2010.” Associated Press, May 15, 1989.

Not by a long shot…try 0.7 deg F

5. “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” Life magazine, January 1970.

Would you believe 3-5% then, less now since air quality has been greatly improved.

6. “If present trends continue, the world will be … eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.” Kenneth E.F. Watt, in “Earth Day,” 1970.

More believable for January in South Dakota, but doesn’t this sort of clash with some of the other predictions about polar ice, etc?

7. “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.

Good thing for Erlich he isn’t a gambler!

8. “In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970

Someone forgot to tell the fish.

Meanwhile, these same folks are STILL predicting disasters that, like the object of the cryptozoological search programs, never quite live up to their objectives…and they are STILL believed?  Who’d have thunk it!

* DHMO contributes to global warming and the “Greenhouse Effect”, and is one of the so-called “greenhouse gasses.”
* DHMO is an “enabling component” of acid rain — in the absence of sufficient quantities of DHMO, acid rain is not a problem.
* DHMO is a causative agent in most instances of soil erosion — sufficiently high levels of DHMO exacerbate the negative effects of soil erosion.
* DHMO is present in high levels nearly every creek, stream, pond, river, lake and reservoir in the U.S. and around the world.
* Measurable levels of DHMO have been verified in ice samples taken from both the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps.
* Recent massive DHMO exposures have lead to the loss of life and destruction of property in California, the Mid-West, the Philippines, and a number of islands in the Caribbean, to name just a few.
* Research has shown that significant levels of DHMO were found in the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 which killed 230,000 in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and elsewhere, making it the deadliest tsunami in recorded history.
* It is widely believed that the levee failures, flooding and the widespread destruction resulting from Hurricane Katrina along the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005 were caused or exacerbated by excessive DHMO levels found in the Gulf of Mexico, along with other contributing factors.

So what’s the problem? DHMO = “dihydrogen monoxide”….for the chemically illiterate, that means it has 2 atoms of hydrogen in one of its molecules, along with one oxygen…H2O, otherwise known as WATER!

UN Climate Change Delegates Support Prank Petition to Ban Water; Derail U.S. Economy

…got to hand it to the folks at the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. They‘ve come up with a creative new way to expose the scientific ignorance of many of today’s climate change fanatics….CFACT asked attendees of the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico, to sign two different petitions. The first asked participants to support the purposeful destabilization of the United States economy (see article for details…realistically, what else would one expect from a bunch of UN envirowonks)

And to prove that some people will sign anything that has the right buzz words — think “global effort,“ ”international community,“ and ”planetary” — COP 16 participants were asked to sign in support of a ban on a dangerous chemical compound: water.

The second project was as successful as the first. It was euphemistically entitled “Petition to Ban the Use of Dihydrogen Monoxide-DHMO (translation water).” It was designed to show that if official U.N. delegates could be duped by college students into banning water, that they could essentially fall for anything, including pseudo-scientific studies which claim to show that global warming is man-caused.

Despite the apparently not-so-obvious reference to H2O, almost every delegate that collegian students approached signed their petition to ban that all too dangerous substance, which contributes to the greenhouse effect, is the major substance in acid rain, and is fatal if inhaled.

You’ve got to just love it! Moonbats caught in the act of being themselves!

Tough new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency restricting greenhouse gas emissions would reduce the global mean temperature by only 0.006 to 0.0015 of a degree Celsius by the year 2100, according to the EPA’s analysis.

THAT’s saving the planet?

The authors cite the EPA’s own staff to show that greenhouse gas regulations, which would require major sources of CO2 (carbon dioxide) to obtain permits and limit their output, could seriously harm the economy if implemented.

“It is clear throughout the country, PSD (Prevention of Significant Deterioration) permit issuance would be unable to keep up with the flood of incoming applications, resulting in delays, at the outset, that would be at least a decade or longer, and that would only grow worse over time as each year, the number of new permit applications would exceed permitting authority resources for that year.” the EPA wrote in the Federal Register on June 3.

Lest you think SD would not be seriously and negatively affected since it’s not a heavy industrial state, among other proposed regulatory issues are some that specifically target rural areas (dust standards, animal CO2, etc.)

Other proposed EPA regulations include:
— pending regulations on emissions from industrial and commercial boilers which the Republican staff says are stringent enough to make some factories shutter rather than become compliant, and risking 798,000 jobs;
— higher emissions standards for cement plants, which involves 15,000 jobs;
— and increased National Ambient Air Quality Standards for the amount of ground-level ozone to 60 parts per billion, which the EPA estimates could cost $19 billion to $90 billion to implement.

Top House Republicans have formed the Rural America Solutions Group aimed at working on issue that effect agricultural areas of the country, and held a forum Wednesday on what they termed “the EPA’s Assault on Rural America.”

They heard from witnesses representing the beef and cattle industry, farmers, coal workers, and others affected by the many new and proposed regulations laid out in the report.

At the forum, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) said, “In many instances, the EPA is overreaching its authority. Instead of operating within the law, EPA believes it can dictate to Congress that legislation needs to be passed for more government authority. And if Congress doesn’t act, it threatens to regulate anyway. Every day, the EPA seems to demonstrate how vastly disconnected it is to the folks who feed us.”

Republicans invited EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to attend the forum, but she did not appear, nor did she send a representative.

All this for a alleged small fraction of one degree over a century? There is another issue at play here…and it’s NOT climate change. Can you say P-O-W-E-R, D-O-M-I-N-A-N-C-E, and C-O-N-T-R-O-L?

When I first saw this, I had trouble believing it was serious…Gates et al have to be totally convinced of their status as übermenschen, if not demigods, who are uniquely qualified and endowed to assume on their own authority, the power to  play dominance games with the planet that we all live on. Not even the most arrogant polluting industrial managers (say, of the ChiCom steel industry for example) don’t openly and proudly proclaim a stated goal to consciously and deliberately change the climate of the Earth!

Bill Gates pays for ‘artificial’ clouds to beat greenhouse gases

The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.

The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate.

The arrogance here is breathtaking…especially considering the actual state of the art of much of what passes itself off as “climate science”, but has been proven by the Climategate and other similar revelations to be based on conspiratorial coordination of faked, distorted, and fatally limited data.

Silver Lining, a research body in San Francisco, has received $300,000 (£204,000) from Mr Gates. It will develop machines to convert seawater into microscopic particles capable of being blown up to the cloud level of 1,000 metres. This would whiten clouds by increasing the number of nuclei.

Uh…rain and clouds mostly result from evaporation. The salt mostly stays dissolved in the sea. With Gate’s plan, NOW we can be the lucky recipient of precipitation in the form of salt water…won’t THAT do wonders for maintaining the soil!

Stephen Salter, Emeritus Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Edinburgh, said that there was no need to wait for regulations because the trials would not add chemicals to the atmosphere.

…uh…having taught Chemistry for over a quarter-century, I can assure the learned professor that water (H2O) and salt (NaCl) are in fact chemicals, and that water in it’s vapor phase is a MUCH more powerful greenhouse gas than is carbon dioxide.

But Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the Government, said that experiments with potential consequences beyond national borders needed international regulations. He told The Times: “I do not see any geoengineering solution which does not have unintended consequences or is not far too expensive.”

At least HE has retained some situational awareness concerning unintended consequences!

Let’s hope that this particular form of megalomaniacal insanity is squelched before it afflicts us all.

At times, when mentally cursing yet another BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) from a Windows crash, it was easy to attribute diabolical intent to Bill Gates. Now it looks like he’s in need of crashing the climate like it was a cheap PC.

Hide the Decline II
This video is better than the first one – it illustrates (in passing) what Mann et al did to actually fake the results: omission of unfavorable data, etc.

Mann is NOT a happy camper about all this.

The Chief’s crying crocodile tears.

A key piece of evidence in climate change science was slammed as “exaggerated” on Wednesday by the UK’s leading statistician, in a vindication of claims that global warming sceptics have been making for years.

Professor David Hand, president of the Royal Statistical Society, said that a graph shaped like an ice hockey stick that has been used to represent the recent rise in global temperatures had been compiled using “inappropriate” methods.

“It used a particular statistical technique that exaggerated the effect [of recent warming],” he said.

The glowbull warmists need to take their stick and get the puck out!

Reported from the UK’s London Telegraph. (Of course! You didn’t think the U.S. mainstream media would cover this sort of thing, did you?)

No people on earth are more righteously Green than the Germans. They built the foundations and set the tone of the modern Green movement in, ahem, the 1930s. They invented the phrase Atomkraft Nein Danke. They were the first country to allow nasty, dangerous Sixties eco-radicals to reinvent themselves as respectable politicians. They were the first place to buy, wholesale, into the solar power con, which is why so many of their rooves – especially on churches – shimmer and glow like reflective-coated crusties at a mid-Nineties rave, while the German taxpayer is ruing the day his government ever chose to subsidise (Achtung Herr Cameron!) this fantastically pointless scheme… (Hat tip: Robert Groezinger, et al)

So when the Germans say “Auf Wiedersehn AGW” it really is time for the rest of the world to sit up and take notice. And that’s exactly what they just have said. See for yourself in this tear-inducing glorious feature in one of their leading newspapers.

Der Spiegel has done a number on AGW – one of the best and most comprehensive I’ve read in any newspaper anywhere – and it could hardly be more damning.

Truly, the experience is akin to having honey (really good stuff, heather probably) licked off one’s body by nubile blonde Nibelungen.

For the condensed version see the rest of the piece in the Telegraph.

Or, here’s the complete original very thorough, detailed, and lengthy der Spiegel story itself. The truth is out there!