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USA Today‘s house editorial today bemoans the fact that Climategate “gives ammunitiion to the skeptics,” but concludes that “the overwhelming scientific consensus remains that the Earth is warming, largely because of human activity, with potentially calamitous consequences involving melting ice caps, rising sea levels and shifting agricultural patterns.”

So do they get a skeptic to fill the daily “Another View” slot they offer to rebut their editorial? No — they get another alarmist! Under the panicky-but-now-tired headline “We need to act quickly!”, Melanie Fitzpatrick of the Union of Scientists Concerned About Their Grant Funding writes:

Now that the United States and other countries are finally moving to seriously address global warming, polluter-funded front groups and their allies in Congress are making exaggerated claims about stolen e-mails from climate scientists in a last ditch effort to derail action.

I guess Ms. Melanie missed the memos about the vast wealth that flows to alarmist science and environmental pressure groups, which they extract both from taxpayers and extort from those same “polluters” she’s talking about. And what a shock — she’s yet another politically disinterested, principled scientist who contributes to the Huffington Post.

While climate experts were off at the Copenhagen summit working on their tans (in sunny Copenhagen), the EPA pulled a fast one. As the Washington Post noted in an article that was actually quite good in providing the negatives, the agency formally announced that six gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, pose a danger to the environment and the health of Americans and said it would begin drafting regulations to reduce those emissions.

So if you think the recent poll showing most Americans reject the basis of global warming legislation, plus the scandal over “climategate,” may have derailed the Waxman-Markey legislation you may be right. But you’d be wrong in thinking the crisis has passed. The EPA was explicitly given the power by the Supreme Court to regulate greenhouse gases and could produce a web of regulations far worse than Waxman-Markey. The only recourse of opponents would be in the courts (see previous sentence) or via Congress cutting funding to the agency. And would this Congress really do that?

For more, see this Forbes piece on the issue published before the EPA announcement, and the EPA press release. This is bad news, folks!

This, I think, has to go down as one of the creepiest “editorials” written by global warming alarmists recently. Clive Hamilton, ABC News in Australia’s public “intellectual,” has an open letter to the child of someone who works for the fossil fuel industry. Here are some selections:

“Hi there,

There’s something you need to know about your father.

Your dad’s job is to try to stop the government making laws to reduce Australia’s carbon pollution. He is paid a lot of money to do that by big companies who do not want to own up to the fact that their pollution is changing the world’s climate in very harmful ways.

Because of their pollution, lots of people, mostly poor people, are likely to die. They will die from floods, from diseases like dengue fever, and from starvation when their crops won’t grow anymore.

The big companies are putting their profits before the lives of people. And your dad is helping them.

. . . . .

I am sure it’s hard for you to hear these words, but there is something you can do to help. Why not sit your dad down and have a good talk to him. Tell him you want him to stop helping the big companies that are spoiling the future for you and all the other kids at school. Tell him that the family would rather have less money if he had a different job, one you could be proud of.

Tell him that you know he will feel much happier inside if he is doing something to make Australia and the world a better place, instead of going to work every day to make it a worse one.

Your dad has lost his way, and you might be the only person in the world who can help him find it again. So talk to him.

Yours sincerely”

This is on par with the official opening video for the  COP15 meeting in Copenhagen –  full of nightmare visions of a child caught in a global-warming-produced  catastrophe – producing earthquakes, no less.  (It’s very well-produced, of course.)

Do these people have any idea what their fear-mongering is doing to the minds of children – other than making them terrified, anxious, and sleep-deprived?

Today the Obama administration issued a final ruling that greenhouse gases “endanger” health and human welfare. Here’s an wonky explanation of why this is a big deal:

Under the Clean Air Act, an “endangerment” finding means that the EPA will have to grant a waiver to those states (such as California) that want to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. The EPA has already agreed to do so. When “pollutants” that “endanger” human health and welfare are regulated, the EPA must expand its regulatory program to include “stationary” sources. The EPA has already announced that it will do so.

This is where Obama wants to get off the “endangerment” train, with the ability to regulate stationary and mobile sources (i.e., industry and cars) with almost complete discretion. These “endangerment” powers give the President tremendous leverage in a number of complex negotiations.

For example, the Obama administration already has told Congress that it will regulate greenhouse gases unless lawmakers deliver a cap-and-trade bill to his desk. The “endangerment” prerogatives also are the President’s bargaining chip in Copenhagen, where he plans on scoring his first diplomatic victory since his election night.

The problem is that the President can’t stop what he has started. Under the statutory language of the Clean Air Act, the regulation of mobile sources tripwires regulations for all stationary sources that emit more than 250 tons of a designated pollutant. For greenhouse gases, that’s pretty much everything larger than a mansion. These stationary sources would have to get a Prevention of Significant Deterioration permit for any proposed modification, as would any new source. They would also have to get operating permits. The upshot is that millions of buildings would be subject to regulations.

To get around this, Obama’s EPA proposed a “tailoring rule” that would change the language of the CAA so that the threshold would be 25,000 tons. The legality of this is very much in doubt, as it amounts to the executive branch legislating, and is therefore a violation of the separation of powers.

Also under the Clean Air Act, any “pollutant” that “endangers” human health and welfare, and which is regulated for stationary and mobile sources, becomes subject to National Ambient Air Quality Standards. As described above, the Obama administration is in the process of fulfilling all these NAAQS criteria.

Last week, two environmentalist groups petitioned the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases under NAAQS. Soon the EPA will have no choice. Once the NAAQS kicks in-and it will-the American economy is screwed. The government won’t be able to permit anything larger than a mansion. Taken to the extent mandated under the Clean Air Act, the EPA would probably have to order the shut-down of most industrial suppliers and users of conventional energy.

There’s only one remedy for this otherwise inevitable regulatory nightmare. The Congress must pass H. R. 391, legislation offered by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee) that prohibits the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

This is interesting. Watch this short video (not able to embed) from the good guys at AccuWeather and early in the segment they show a map that illustrates the “historical chance of a white Christmas” for the entire continental U.S. If you look carefully you will see that Houston is on the cusp of “none,” or no chance.

I guess they should have asked about their chances for snow in the nation’s 4th-largest city on December 4th. Of course this is not evidence that discredits global warming trends. After all, it’s only a local event, and localized phenomena are only capable of proving global warming, not disproving it.

A lot of us have more than one email account — one for personal use, and one for work. We do that for several reasons. We want to keep our private lives separate from our professional activities. We don’t want bosses and co-workers to know everything that goes on at home. Employers have the right to know what staff members are doing with their work-time and company resources — which includes official email accounts — so those things are subject to scrutiny. If we work for the government (and therefore taxpayers), then we are subject to even greater oversight. So we isolate our personal electronic correspondence and in most cases employers don’t bother to ask about it — and if they did, they’d have some pretty upset employees on their hands.

So here we have Penn State University Climategate-ologist Michael Money-Mann outraged over outsiders viewing his “private” correspondence:

“It’s an 11th-hour smear campaign where they’ve stolen personal e-mails from scientists, mined them for single words or phrases that can be taken out of context and misrepresent what scientists are saying,” said Michael Mann, director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth Systems Science Center, in a teleconference Friday with reporters.

Unless it’s his own employer taking a look:

Mann said he welcomed the inquiry.

“They are just reviewing the facts and (looking) into whether there is any validity to the specious claims, in my view, that are being made,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday night. “That’s exactly what they should be doing, and I am fully in support of that.”

Where’s the outrage, Mike? If these truly were personal correspondence, you’d have a right to be upset and insist that no one view your emails. Of course that’s not the case — you work for a public university, and sent messages to public university addresses of other scientists. It’s more likely that you are expecting Penn State to cover your rear end. You’re probably right.

Let’s break down the alarmist-activist-Leftist-scientists’ primary line of defense, helpfully parroted by the formerly mainstream media: That “they’ve stolen personal emails.”

1. “They’ve” — implies someone from the group of skeptics they disdain was the one to pilfer and expose their messages. But CRU, Mann, and the rest of their cabal have no idea who exposed the records.

2. “stolen” — CRU, Mann, etc. cannot prove the records were extracted by an outside entity. They may have been exposed by a whistleblower. Those types are often celebrated as heroes when they scandals are revealed.

3. “personal” — We’ve already addressed that above and elsewhere.

4. “emails” — yes, and so much more. They don’t even want to talk about the corrupted source code, which a software engineer — who is not a climate skeptic — interviewed by BBC said was, let’s say, less than professional.

But expect the made-up story of “stolen personal emails” to continue — at least until they are discredited about that as well.