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“Winter offered as proof of warming” declares a headline in the print edition of the Washington Post, although perhaps the irony of that  later struck the editors and they softened it a bit in the online edition to “Harsh winter a sign of disruptive climate change, report says.”

Nothing especially outrageous here. The enviros have been doing this for years; indeed, it’s why they adopted the term “global climate change” so that any change in climate or even just weather – which obviously this is – can be portrayed as a result of man’s nefarious activities in putting greenhouse gases into the air. The report, incidentally, is from the National Wildlife Federation that makes money by promoting global warming in the same way that GM makes money selling trucks.

But folks are having trouble buying it. A poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked respondents to rank 21 issues in terms of priority. Global warming came in dead last. It’s come in last before, but this time just 28 percent of those surveyed list global warming as a top priority, down from 35 percent in 2008.

Climategate, Himalayagate, Pachaurigate, and now NOAAgate — it’s hard to keep up with all the relevations and allegations buzzing around some of the biggest names in climate science.  

Earlier this week in the Telegraph, the intrepid James Delingpole debuted “Amazongate.” Like Himalayagate, this is a case in which the IPCC relied on a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report, rather than a peer-reviewed scientific study, to make a scary claim about global warming.

The IPCC (Working Group II, Ch. 13, p. 596) says that, “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” due to global warming. The IPCC’s reference for this claim is Rowell and Moore (2000), which turns out to be an IUCN/WWF report, Global Review of Forest Fires.  

The IUCN/WWF report does cite a peer-reviewed study to support the 40% estimate: Nepsted et al. 1999. Large – scale Impoverishment of Amazonian Forests by Logging and Fire, Nature, Vol. 398, p. 505. The study is available here. 

But the Neptsed study doesn’t quite say what WWF suggests it does. The study says: “Because of the severe drought of 1997 and 1998, we calculate that approximately 270,000 km2 of Amazonian forest had completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil by the end of the 1998 dry season. In addition, 360,000 km2 of forest had less than 250mm of plant-available soil water left by this time . . .”

The IUCN/WWF report reproduces that statement almost verbatim:
“Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall. In the 1998 dry season, some 270,000 sq. km of forest became vulnerable to fire, due to completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil. A further 360,000 sq. km of forest had only 250 mm of plant-available soil water left.”

However, IUCN/WWF’s paraphase adds something — the “up to 40%” estimate. That figure does not appear in Nepsted et al.

Since the Amazon rain forest is estimated at 8.2 million km2 (http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/), it would seem that about 8% (630,000 km2) of the region was threatened by the drought in 1998, not 40%.

Note also that the terms “climate change” and “global warming” do not appear in the text of the Nepsted study (although footnote 14 references a paper titled “Amazonian deforestation and regional climate change”).

Apparently, the IPCC recycled two claims in the IUCN/WWF report that the report’s supposed source – Nepsted et al. (1999) — did not make: namely, 40% of the rain forest is risk, and this is due to global climate change.

There may be other reasons to conclude that climate change endangers 40% of the rain forest, but they are not to be found in Nepsted et al. (1999) — the source for the IPCC’s source.

Rep. Earl Pomeroy, North Dakota Democrat, writes today that he’s had enough of EPA’s efforts to regulate CO2:

It is time to end the irresponsible game of chicken being played with the future of energy regulation in this country. Those in favor of sweeping new regulations on our economy to address the issue of global warming are demanding that Congress quickly pass a “cap-and-trade” bill on greenhouse gas emissions or face a battery of new mandates to be developed and imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency. This type of legislative extortion is not an appropriate strategy to pass any bill in Congress — especially a complicated and far-reaching cap-and-trade proposal that could have a dire impact on North Dakota.

Agencies like the EPA would normally be prohibited from jumping out in front of congressional action under the Constitution of the United States. However, the Supreme Court has ruled that the EPA can use a statute passed 20 years ago — the Clean Air Act — even though that law was written to address acid rain, not greenhouse gas emissions. Throughout this Congress, the cap-and-trade crowd has worked cheek to jowl with the EPA to try and pass this bill. Whenever a critical point in the legislative process has been reached, more rumblings would burst forth from the EPA regarding potential administrative action, just to make certain all were aware of what was in store if proposed legislation stalled out.

Looks like Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski may get more Democratic support for her motion to halt EPA than originally thought.

Hat tip: My Heartland Institute colleague Peter Fotos.

If so, then I’m bad to the bone, because my favorite scene in the James Cameron mega-hit was the one where the jarhead mercenary blasted the blue peoples’ home tree to smithereens. TIIIIIIIMBEEEER!!!!!!! Gotta get me some of that unobtainium!

I am kidding-I don’t actually condone the destruction of an alien civilization for the sake of extracting a rare, valuable mineral*, although I did love the scene in question. Rather, my intent is to make light of Cameron’s clichéd eco-plotline, which centers on the supposed evils of natural resource extraction.

In Avatar, the “bad” guy is a huge corporation intent on exploiting deposits of “unobtainium,” an anti-gravity mineral, on a distant planet. The “good” guys are a race of humanoid giants, who look blue, but act very, very green.

Over the course of the nearly 3-hour movie, the bad guys try to kill the good guys to get at the magic rock, but the good guys win a big battle, and send the bad guys back to earth, which, we are told, is heavily polluted.

As if the take home message-drilling/mining is wrong!-wasn’t heavy-handed enough, Cameron has one of the blue people come right out and say it: Minerals should be kept in the ground.

Uggh. What a load.

And what a pity. The most popular movie ever is predicated on the notion that human civilization shouldn’t exploit its natural resources. Millions of people, around the world, will be exposed to this nonsense.

There was a time when humans were an engineering-minded people intent on creating wealth by conquering nature. As I recently wrote in my hometown paper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

From the 18th century to the 20th century, heavy industry-such as coal mining-was the primary metric of a nation’s economic development. Industry was exalted. To be industrialized was to be civilized.

Times have changed.

In today’s America, heavy industry is considered “dirty.” Instead of goods and services, the United States manufactures environmental lawyers and government regulators.

Raw capitalism is left to the Chinese, who busily build a coal-fired electricity plant every week to power the production of exports for the global market. By contrast, environmental lawyers in the United States recently celebrated the 100th scuttling of a proposed coal plant.

This dubious accomplishment is facilitated mightily by eco-fables of the Avatar sort.

*I should note that I am all for the destruction of a non-reasoning species’ habitat for the extraction of mineral deposits. For example, I wholeheartedly disagree with the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempts to shut down coal mining in Appalachia in order to protect a species of bug that lives for a day. When it comes down to a conflict between human beings’ welfare and that of a bug, or even a polar bear, I fall squarely on the side of mankind.

At his BBC blog Andrew Neil lays out the itemized fraud from the 2007 UN IPCC report that has been rolling out in recent days, previously reported by the BBC and other formerly mainstream media as “sound” and “consensus” science. So many “Gates,” and so many discredited reporters:

But the flood gates really opened after the IPCC had to withdraw its claim that the Himalayan glaciers would likely all have melted by 2035, maybe even sooner.

This turned out to have no basis in scientific fact, even though everything the IPCC produces is meant to be rigorously peer-reviewed, but simply an error recycled by the [World Wildlife Fund], which the IPCC swallowed whole….

Then at the weekend another howler was exposed. The IPCC 2007 report claimed that global warming was leading to an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Like its claims about the glaciers, this was also based on an unpublished report which had not been subject to scientific scrutiny — indeed several experts warned the IPCC not to rely on it.

Now after Climate-gate, Glacier-gate and Hurricane-gate — how many “gates” can one report contain? — comes Amazon-gate. The IPCC claimed that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests were risk from global warming and would likely be replaced by “tropical savannas” if temperatures continued to rise.

This claim is backed up by a scientific-looking reference but on closer investigation turns out to be yet another non-peer reviewed piece of work from the WWF. Indeed the two authors are not even scientists or specialists on the Amazon: one is an Australian policy analyst, the other a freelance journalist for the Guardian and a green activist.

Yep, this is the “scientific consensus” that Al Gore based his post-VP life upon; the imagined groundswell that so many politicians used to justify government growth; the nonexistent evidence that journalists cited to justify their alarmism activism. It’s the two words that every global warmist (whether lying or deceived themselves) threw in the face of skeptics in an attempt to intimidate. Didn’t work!

No wonder why hardly any of them wanted to debate and those who did got slaughtered. We tried to explain that the “consensus” was an illusion. You — yes, I’m talking about you, Society of Environmental Journalists — would have none of it.

Now you’re stuck in the shoes of the environmental equivalent of Jayson Blair as your newspapers and television stations fall apart, and while what’s left of your audience doesn’t care about the issue you hold so precious. But it’s your good fortune that you still qualify for the do-nothing flack positions that are plentiful in both government and nonprofit arms of the environoia industry.

Last Thursday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, introduced a resolution of disapproval, under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to overturn EPA’s endangerment finding. Murkowski’s floor statement and a press release are available here.

As you’d expect, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and other apostles of Gorethodoxy were quick to condemn the resolution as an attack on the Clean Air Act, science, public health, and the children.

Rubbish!

At a press conference she organized on the same day the resolution was introduced, Boxer and others tried to spin the Murkowski resolution as a referendum on science – as if Congress, King Canute-fashion, could alter the results of scientific research.  

A strong case can be made that the endangerment finding is scientifically-challenged. But that’s not what the Murkowski resolution is about.

As the Senator made clear in her floor statement, and as you can see from the text, the resolution is a referendum on the propriety of EPA taking control of the economy without so much as a by-your-leave from the people’s elected representatives. The Murkowski resolution vetoes the endangerment finding’s regulatory force and legal effect, not its intellectual content.

EPA’s endangerment finding, as I explain in this column on Pajamas Media, would launch an era of runaway regulation without representation. The Murkowski resolution is a gutsy action to safeguard the economy, government’s accountability to the people, and the separation of powers under the Constitution.

In an update to my blog on the alleged melting of the glaciers atop the Himalayas (and imminent extinction of the yeti), the scientist behind the bogus claim in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report claiming the Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the , did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the coordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 relied on magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled into a 2005 report by the warmist World Wildlife Fund. Lal and his team then cited this as their source.

Moreover, the WWF article also contained a arithmetic error. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 meters a year should in fact have said 23 meters – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121, said the newspaper.

As to the 2035 melting date, it “seems to have been plucked from thin air.”

Which is only right, considering how very thin the air is atop the Himalayas.

As I mentioned yesterday, Scott Brown’s election is making the Democrats do all kinds of things that they wouldn’t have considered even last week. Bloomberg reports that cap-and-trade is dead (citing California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, for one) for this year, so the Dems’ thinking is to try and move some of the alt-energy initiatives into a jobs bill:

Chief executives officers of Exelon Corp., Nike Inc., and 81 other companies [yesterday] urged Obama and lawmakers to enact climate legislation. In a letter, the group called for “strong policies and clear market signals that support the transition to a low-carbon economy and reward companies that innovate.”

The new Senate version of the jobs bill may include funding for a “cash for caulkers” program providing grants to make homes more energy efficient, said Lowell Ungar, policy director for the Washington-based Alliance to Save Energy.

“The money will run out from the recovery act and if there’s not further legislation to push these retrofits, there’s a real risk that the infrastructure we’re creating right now will wither,” Ungar said in an interview. “The people who are being trained right now to do these retrofits will no longer have jobs.”

Translation: “Rewarding companies that innovate” means giving them taxpayer dollars or else they’ll go out of business. Mr. Ungar could not have said it more plainly.