Oil and Gas Reserves Are Increasing And Fugitive Methane Emissions Are Decreasing.

The National Journal posting “The U.S. Has Much, Much More Gas and Oil Than We Thought” relates that the Interior Department says that the Bakken and Three Forks formations in North and South Dakota and Montana have twice as much oil and three times as much gas as previously estimated in 2008.  The USGS  now believes that these two formations hold 7.4 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.  This is good news and surely there will be more upward valuations of  US oil and natural gas reserves in other  formations.

The Alarmists Are The Real Deniers

The new normal according to the Alarmist warmers is that “cooling is warming.”  Every possible weather event, if it is unpleasant, is due to global warming. As the readers  of this post are very intelligent,  they remember that until the last 15 + years, the Alarmists have told us that global warming would mean hotter summers and winters.  That is what the alarmist’s climate models predicted but those predictions are being shown to be terribly wrong.  So what’s an alarmist to do?  They are hoping that you don’t notice that they are changing their mantra without ever acknowledging that they were wrong.

But what are the facts?   The “Updated on 23 April 2013” chart, below, shows that in the past two weeks, the US has experienced 4163 record low temperatures for this time of year.  We believe that this is weather and it is always changing.  But to the desperate Alarmists, it is the result of global warming.

Chart by Ham Weather.com (click on chart to enlarge.)

A posting by David Deming  in the Washington Times, titled “The real deniers of climate change”  characterizes the data verses the alarmists contention.  He says:

“The Northern Hemisphere is experiencing unusually cold weather. Snow cover last December was the greatest since satellite monitoring began in 1966. The United Kingdom had the coldest March weather in 50 years, and there were more than a thousand record low temperatures in the United States. The Irish meteorological office reported that March “temperatures were the lowest on record nearly everywhere.” Spring snowfall in Europe was also high. In Moscow, the snow depth was the highest in 134 years of observation. In Kiev, authorities had to bring in military vehicles to clear snow from the streets.

Cold-weather extremes are a natural climatic variation, and this is exactly the point. If the world were experiencing a climate crisis owing to global warming, there shouldn’t be a single record low temperature anywhere in the world. The Associated Press has assured us, though, that this cold spell is not only consistent with a warming globe, it is actually caused by global warming. The proffered explanation is that cold weather in Europe is a result of melting sea ice in the Arctic. If this special pleading strikes you as unusually tendentious, it is all in the best tradition of explaining away ex post facto any weather event that appears to contradict the ruling paradigm.”

Deming cites numerous examples of the how wrong the Alarmists have been over the years.  The full posting is worth the reading to see what he has to say.

He concludes with this:

“With each passing year, it is becoming increasingly clear that global warming is not a scientific theory subject to empirical falsification, but a political ideology that has to be fiercely defended against any challenge. It is ironic that skeptics are called “deniers” when every fact that would tend to falsify global warming is immediately explained away by an industry of denial.”

cbdakota

“The Magic Washing Machine”—–Limiting Energy Access To The World’s Poor Is Wrong

You have to give credit to the Green NGOs in that they are much more upfront about their goals than most of the Global Governments. Greenies want to stop development of all fossil fuel sources and they would like to see the nuclear industry dismantled and no new nukes built.  The Obama Administration is not quite that ambitious, at least for now, although there is not much difference in their objectives. Examples of goals the Administration have announced are: kill coal,  minimize (and in some cases prevent any) use of Federal lands for accessing the mineral resources and raise the price of gasoline and electricity.

Who is it that will feel the most pain, if this cabal is successful?  It will be the poorest among us, of course.  They justify their actions by saying that the Earth will really, really, really go to hell if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels.  And besides they add, we will have wind and solar farms takeover the job of supplying power.  Wind and solar farms are not ready for prime time and who knows if they will ever be. The experience around the world demonstrates that when and if these renewables do replace fossil fuels, the power supplied will be more costly than that supplied by fossil fuels.  No help for the poor here.

“Greedy Lying Bastards” Fails To Draw An Audience

“Greedy Lying Bastards” the film, was on the list of top box office attractions  for one weekend.  It grossed $45,000 the weekend of March 8-10 and its place was #45 out of 50. With that  kind of gross, it is no surprise that it did not make it back since then. The film is said to have cost $1,500,000 to produce.  For comparison, that weekend’s top grossing movie was “OZ the Great and Powerful”, which pulled in $79,100,000.

The critics at the movie review site, Rotten Tomatoes,  gave it 73 out of 100 which is a very favorable rating.   A typical review was that by John Hartl for the Seattle Times in which he said:

“ The title says it all in “Greedy Lying Bastards,” a blistering attack on politicians, propagandists, dissemblers and other climate-change deniers.No longer taking the relatively polite approach of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” the filmmakers set out to focus on the celebrities who have been most successful in using the media to encourage a sense of doubt in a skeptical public.”

The reviewers held nothing back as most of them always love the liberal theme.

I suppose their next production will be the “Those Dirty Rotten Bastards That Used The New Black Panthers To Prevent Entry To The Theater To See Our Epic Production Greedy Lying Bastards”.  They have to blame someone for their failure.

cbdakota

Wealthy Green NGOs Versus The Heartland Institute

Willie Soon and David Legates made a presentation in Delaware explaining why they believed  man-made global warming is overblown and illustrated their position by showing the data that belies the alarmist computerized predictions of  CO2-caused  global catastrophe.  How did the major Delaware newspaper cover this? Poorly, because they are in the tank for man-made global warming.  How can you know that,  you are wondering.  The paper’s reporter felt it necessary to make anything that Soon and Legates said suspect by using  ”Some environmental groups have pointed to Soon’s and Legates’ ties to organizations financed by fossil fuel and deeply con­servative interests, in­cluding the George C. Marshall and Heartland institutes.”   This is the usual innuendo that greens and their allies in the media use.    They have a dearth of factual data so they make personal attacks.

Actually this piece of untruth was pretty tame compared to that by Juliet  Eilperin of the Washington Post where she embellished the story by putting in the amounts of funding she believed had been given to Marshall and Heartland by Exxon and the Koch Brothers.  But more on this later.

I suppose that you know there are many issue oriented organizations –Non-Government Organizations (NGO)– out there trying to persuade people to their  point of view.  A very large number of them have the mission of persuading you that global warming is a crisis and that unless we stop using fossil fuels, we are dooming the future generations to terrible catastrophes.  Where do they get their money?  Before we try to shed some light on  that  question, lets look at the relative size of the green NGOs  and the George C Marshall and Heartland Institutes.

A partial list* of Green NGOs is tabled below.  The following data are from Charity Navigator  which rates a NGOs using the information supplied by that NGO. The data is for  2012 or the last fiscal year of these organizations. ”Program expenses” result from the direct effort to accomplish their mission.  They also have administrative and fund raising expenses which I have not tabled.

Green NGOs                                 Program Exp $K    Assets$K       CEO pay$K

Nature Conservancy                       672,757                      5,180,559           493

World Wildlife Fund                       139,971                         271,695           496

Environmental Defense                   70,755                          137,034          426

Nat. Resc. Defen. Council               76,931                          197,413            381

Sierra Club Foundation                   46,672                            82,622          157

World Resource Inst.                       34,831                            59,902         376

Union of Concerned Scientists     18,029                            29,879           240

Strats for Global Envir                        5,641                               4,945         355

Ctr for American Progress             31,390                             36,626         250

Greenpeace US  **                                 9,601                               9,407         153

subtotal                                               1,106,390

* As a means of approximating the  numbers of the NGOs that are global warming advocates,  we note that more than 700 NGOs  registered to attended COP 17 held in Durban,  South Africa.  See here, here and here.  (h/t to Willis Eschenbach)  Those that attended are just a fraction of the total of all the green NGOs.

**Greenpeace International’s 2011 budget was € 241 million, their program expenditures were €160 million  and it leads 27 regional offices, one of which is Greenpeace US.

Now lets look at what the Charity Navigator has to say about  the  non-green NGOs, George C Marshall and Heartland Institutions and see how they match up with the green NGOs:

George C Marshall                                      342                                   154           24

Heartland                                                   4,008                                  -157         154

subtotal                                                       4,350

The difference is vast.  Can you imagine if you are a green being frightened of these “pipsqueaks” so much that you have to take every opportunity to tell lies about their funding.  That is $1,106,578,000 for programing  versus the $4,350,000 for those fearsome little giants or stated another way, the expenditures for the little giants are 0.4% of the green NGOs.  Note that Heartland is experiencing a deficit.

Earlier I said we would pick up on the  Juliet Eilperin story. She said in a posting that: “The Heartland Institute received more than $7.3 million from Exxon Mobil between 1998 and 2010, and nearly $14.4 million between 1986 and 2010 from foundations affiliated with Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch.”  She had issued a retraction after Joe Bast of Heartland provided the real numbers saying: “ExxonMobil over the course of a decade gave less than a tenth of the amount reported, never amounting to even 5 percent of our annual receipts. The reported level of support from the Kochs was even more egregiously wrong: Except for a gift of $25,000 last year for our work on health care reform, the Kochs hadn’t donated a dime since 1998.”  Also it should be noted that ExxonMobil have not made any contributions to Heartland for the last 7 years.  Why do reporters keep using this innuendo?  Could it be that it is too good to give up even if it is not true?  Or do they not do any research, but rather rely on Alarmist to tell them what to say.

By the way, the Washington Post have closed down their environment desk and have reassign Eilperin to other work.  Did you know that her husband (Andrew Light) is a senior fellow on climate/energy issues at the Center for American Progress (see NGO chart).  Did the Washington Post make this move concerned that there might just be a conflict on interest as she never made her husband’s employment known in her opinion pieces?

Lets get ExxonMobil out of the discussion.   From the ExxonMobil 2011 Corporate Citizenship Report we learn that they are no longer funding anyone that “questions the science of climate change” and that they provided funding to the following advocacy groups and research in 2011:

MIT, Stanford (this is a $100million grant over two years), Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Research Economics and Science, Battelle Pacific Northwestern Laboratory, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, The Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, Resources for the Future, and Center for Strategic and International Studies.

I think that this decision by ExxonMobil was ill advised.  However, fair is fair, so I guess all you who have been saying that a skeptic that took ExxonMobil  money was bought and paid for,  will say that about any Green NGO that takes ExxonMobil  or other fuel supplier’s money.   Can I plan on that?

While taking about the sources of “tainted” money, why is it the Greens go after the Koch Brothers but don’t mention George Soros?    My guess is that because Soros is big source of funding and support for them,  he is off limits.

While the Kochs believe that CO2 is not a major factor causing global warming, it is probably their political positions that most irritate those that deride the Kochs.  The Kochs do support conservative candidates and conservative causes.  But Soros supports political parties too. In fact according to Wiki, Soros spent over thirty million dollars in a failed effort to stop George W Bush from getting a second term.   There is  irony  here in that he is said to have been a major force behind the McCain and Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. Yet he now is heavily into 527 organizations which can and do spend large amounts of money in political campaigns.  He always supports Democrats.  He contributes heavily to liberal causes according to studies.  He puts money into the Tides Foundations which mainly supports liberal causes and the man-made global warming theory.

There are other things that are not so acceptable.  Soros said in 2006, according to Wiki,”"the main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States”.  In 2010 he said ”Today China has not only a more vigorous economy, but actually a better functioning government than the United States”. He seems to agree with the NY Time economist that a dictator would be a better form of government. Simply stated, I do not believe his political views are shared by the majority of the US population.  See here for additional citations of his philosophy.

This posting shows that the Heartland and Marshall innuendo is bogus.  To be fair,  when warmers speak the media should saying something like this— “The non-radical environmental groups have pointed to So and So ties to organizations financed by fossil fuel and deeply liberal interests, in­cluding the Worldwide Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.”  My preference is that media people don’t use these ad hominum attacks because as I have shown, the attacks are neither fair nor truthful.  The use of these attacks only serve to show the media’s ignorance bias.

And we have not touched upon the Government funding which is even larger and perhaps even more imbalanced in the warmers favor.

And we have not  shown how the NGOs operate to influence legislation, and the popular opinion.

More to come.

cbdakota

Chinese Will Not Reduce CO2 Emissions

You have probably seen something in the newspapers to the effect that the Chinese are planing to put in place a carbon tax to manage their emissions.  If you really follows this issue, you  know that the Chinese have made other promises regarding carbon control but they haven’t followed through. Reuters says that the Chinese may get around to putting this program into action but it wont be until the next decade.  The program as described by the Chinese news agencies is laughable. The plan would start at the equivalent of $1.20 per ton and work up to $8 per ton of carbon. The Brookings Institution says this is “puny” and will fail to provide incentives for companies to reduce carbon. What the Chinese are serious about is creating jobs for their people. They have 1.3 billion people with a per capita GDP of $9,100 versus the US’s GDP of $49,800. They will continue to pretend they are serious about reducing CO2 emissions hoping that the US ruins its economy by enacting a “carbon tax” or “cap and trade”.  After 16 years of no global temperature increase, when are the greens going to admit that CO2 is not a major factor?

cbdakota

The UK Gets It, The US Doesn’t–Teaching AGW In Schools

In Great Britain, it is being recommended that the advocacy of man-made global warming be cut from the national curriculum for children 13 and under (see here).  In the US,  teaching of AGW has been recommended for all grades and in every science class. The following  is an overview of this plan and those that have developed it according to a Bloomberg.com posting on 4 March 2013:

 “The Next Generation Science Standards were developed by the National Research Council, the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nonprofit Achieve and more than two dozen states. They recommend that educators teach the evidence for man-made climate change starting as early as elementary school and incorporate it into all science classes, ranging from earth science to chemistry. By eighth grade, students should understand that “human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming),” the standards say.”

February 2013 Global Temperature Update

The global atmospheric temperature anomaly dropped by about 0.33° C to  +.18 degrees above from 30-year (1981-2010) average.

Dr Spencer also reports that the sea surface temperature anomaly for February was

-0.01 º C, relative to the 2003-2006 average.

 

Additional discussion of these anomaly temperature charts can be access by clicking here.

cbdakota

Is Carbon Your Enemy?

I am on a Pointman kick right now, but I can assure you that keeping up with what Pointman has to say is worth your time and his posting ”Sleeping with the Enemy”  is both informative and funny.  He notes that environmentalist believe “carbon” is their enemy even though they really have little understanding who or what that enemy really is.  Pointman gets things going by saying this:

“So, let’s put that other hat on and learn about their elemental enemy. The thing is, I’ve found the alarmists actually don’t do science but like all good scenario explorations, we’ll lose that little detail as part of simplifying the exercise. Let’s get down and boogie up real close to her sexy satanic majesty, Ms. Kickass Carbon. She has a certain ballsy attitude I kinda like.”

By the way, he pays tribute to the Aussies in his audience by naming one of the elements “Vegemitium”.

 Read this enjoyable posting by clicking here.

cbdakota

Environmental Journalism Going Extinct?

Pointman’s March 8, 2013 posting is titled “A Species Facing Extinction”.  In the posting  Pointman concludes the public is growing tired of one scare after another by the alarmist’s.  This is coupled with the economic problems the world is having. The public has to cope with new taxes and the threat of making the price of energy skyrocket. They have had enough.  Pointman says that this is evident in that major media players understand that this is one crisis that is not selling papers or TV space that it once was.  The New York Times has closed its environmental desk. The Washington Post is reassigning environmental reporters to other work. We are aware that the profit motive is draining away as people begin to look to more rational presentations of the news in other arenas.