Cooler Heads Digest 18 June 2010

In the News

He Blinded Me with Science
Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, 18 June 2010

Obama’s Energy Push Is Divorced from Reality
Charles Krauthammer, Investor’s Business Daily, 18 June 2010

The Primary Problems with Wind Power
Jerry Graf, MasterResource.org, 17 June 2010

Senate Liberals Threaten Opposition to an Anti-Energy Bill
Alexander Bolton, The Hill, 17 June 2010

The Oilers vs. The Stealer
George Neumayr, American Spectator, 17 June 2010

Sen. Kerry’s Keen Sense of Euro Green Scene
Chris Horner, Planet Gore, 16 June 2010

Brava, Sen. Murkowski
Marlo Lewis, GlobalWarming.org, 14 June 2010

The Senate’s Global Warming Circus
Iain Murray, Washington Times, 14 June 2010

Movie Star Misses Mark on Mining
William Yeatman, Human Events, 14 June 2010

Climate Change: What the Polls Really Show
Andrew Kohut, New York Times, 11 June 2010

News You Can Use

IPCC Exposed

From Climate Change: What Do We Know about the IPCC?, in press for Progress in Physical Geography, by the University of East Anglia’s Mike Hulme:

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgment, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies.”

Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, performed a cross examination of the IPCC’s evidence for anthropogenic climate change, and concluded:

“on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the [reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.”

Inside the Beltway

Myron Ebell

Democrats Can’t Find the Votes

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) held the second meeting of his Democratic caucus on Thursday to try to hammer out a deal on an anti-energy and/or energy rationing bill to bring to the Senate floor in July.  Little progress was made beyond the fact that everyone seems to agree that they cannot round up the sixty votes needed to pass a cap-and-trade bill such as Senator John Kerry’s (D-Mass.) American Power Act.  One idea being considered is to replace the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House on June 26, 2009 with some place-holder provisions, pass that on the Senate floor, and then hold it until after the election when a conference committee could then put an energy-rationing bill together during a lame-duck session.  Perhaps enough defeated Democrats (who no longer need to worry about the interests of their States but are now interested in their next job in the administration or as lobbyists) would then be willing to vote for it to reach sixty votes.  This is possible-in fact, we have learned that anything is possible in a lame-duck session-but not easy to achieve.

Obama Fails To Convince

President Barack Obama gave a nationally-televised speech from the Oval Office on Tuesday on the BP oil leak in the Gulf and the need to create a new clean-energy economy that will get us off oil.  Like most of Obama’s speeches, it was articulate without being intellectually coherent or persuasive.  Media commentators were uniformly negative in their reviews.  The most perceptive was a video compilation by Jon Stewart on the Daily Show of eight presidents beginning with Nixon vowing to get the U. S. off oil.

The Cooler Heads Digest is the weekly e-mail publication of the Cooler Heads Coalition. For the latest news and commentary, check out the Coalition’s website, www.globalwarming.org.