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Ignoring the costs of climate legislationMay 27th, 2009 by The WeGetIt.org Team

 

Speed-reader video
 

A speed-reader was hired to read the entire 946-page bill.

That’s what Christopher Booker sees happening in the UK, the US, and around the world.

Booker, co-author with Richard North of Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming–Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth,  wrote in the UK’s Telegraph, “One of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to ’stop climate change.’”

“One measure of the fantasy world now inhabited by our sad MPs,” Booker said, ”was the mindless way that they nodded through, last October, by 463 votes to three, by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever to go through Parliament. This was the Climate Change Act….”

Booker might have pointed, too, at how the Waxman-Markey climate change bill got pushed through the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee. When Republicans wanted amendments read aloud, committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-California) hired an oral speed reader, whose pace–far too fast for anyone to follow thoughtfully–would have reduced reading time to about nine hours. In the face of that threat, Republican committee members backed off. As a result, much of the 946-page bill hadn’t been read by most committee members before they voted on it.

Posted in Government Policy, Public Opinion | No Comments »

Rival to the UN climate panel emergesMay 27th, 2009 by The WeGetIt.org Team

For over a decade the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been looked upon by many as the world’s most authoritative body on climate change science. Increasingly alarming claims in its summaries for policymakers, however, have notoriously exceeded what the technical reports justified, and have undercut its credibility.

Now a new report is about to be released that challenges the IPCC’s hegemony. Climate Change Reconsidered: The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change will be released next Tuesday, June 2nd, at the Third International Conference on Climate Change , in Washington, D.C. The 880-page book is the work of 35 contributors and reviewers led by co-editors S. Fred Singer, one of the world’s foremost atmospheric scientists and head of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, and Craig Idso, of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.According to the publisher, “The authors cite thousands of peer-reviewed research papers and books that were ignored by the IPCC, plus additional scientific research that became available after the IPCC’s self-imposed deadline of May 2006.”

An appendix to the book contains the names of more than 31,400 American scientists – 9,000 of whom hold Ph.D.s in their fields – who have signed a petition to the U.S. government that declares, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

Posted in Climate Realism, Manmade Warming, News & Events, Public Opinion | No Comments »

Giving lie to (old) statisticsApril 22nd, 2009 by The WeGetIt.org Team

Last week’s press release from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, just in time for Earth Day, made quite a splash with its data on religious groups’ views on global warming.

But as interesting as the report was, of more interest is what the report doesn’t say:

  1. Why did most media coverage of the release emphasis apparent strong belief in manmade global warming, when the raw numbers can be read very differently?  
     

    A majority of Americans (53%) question key aspects of human-induced climate change, with a solid majority of Black Protestants (61%) and white evangelicals (66%) expressing either uncertainty about or disbelief in the widely accepted dogma that global warming is real and people are the problem. White Catholics and mainline Protestants are closer to the national average; the only religious group measured that showed a higher-than-average rate of belief in global warming was–ironically–the religiously unaffiliated. 

  2. And, why did the story get such widespread coverage when its data were all a year old?

    The survey from which they came was done April 23-27, 2008, and the report earlier this month just rehashed old numbers.

Meanwhile, a Gallup poll done March 5-9 of this year shows public growing skepticism; the number of scientists  publicly rejecting manmade warming alarm continues to grow; the more theologically or politically conservative pastors are, the more likely they are (68%) to deny manmade warming; and people who believe the Bible is God’s Word are more skeptical of manmade warming than any other population segment in America.

Posted in News & Events, Public Opinion, World View | No Comments »

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