Kaminsky starts off with this kicker of a post title:
"The Imperial Bill Ritter (hint: he's not a scientist)"You know who else isn't a scientist? Ross Kaminsky. Just so everyone is up to speed, Ritter is not a scientist so he shouldn't take action as governor on climate change. Ross is not a scientist but he has opinions and everyone should listen to them. Not a strong opener from our friend Ross and it doesn't get much better.
Moving on to the body of the post,
In typical imperial Ritter style, governing by Executive Order rather than through the legislature which at least might represent the will of the people, Ritter is trying to force the state to cut overall emissions by 20% in just over a decade, and by 80% by 2050.That's the 2nd use of the word imperial, this time combined with a grandiose statement about the will of the people. I hate to break it to Ross but Bill Ritter was duly elected by the people of Colorado and his environmental positions were a prominent feature of his campaign. There's nothing undemocratic about a properly elected governor using his constitutional power to guide state policy. Especially when that policy has been a focal point for his campaign and his administration.
Notice too how Ross uses the word "force." That implies that the Executive Order in question has set hardline standards for reduction, has an enforcement mechanism in place and prescribes some sort of penalties for a failure to meet these numbers. Except the EO does nothing of the sort, it merely sets the reduction numbers as "goals." It then instructs various state agencies to gather data (Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment) and (Governors Energy Office and the Department of Revenue) to identify "regulatory and legislative changes that may be needed to provide investor-owned utilities with the incentives to invest in renewable energy resources..." That's it. There are no mandates to private business. There's no hard cap that carries some sort of punitive measures for anyone who does not mean the standards. They are merely goals and the EO merely instructs various agencies and departments of the Executive branch to cooperate with each other and develop a climate plan.
Of course if you didn't read the Executive Order and merely read Ross' blog you wouldn't know that. You would think that the governor had just issued strict and far reaching mandates. I realize that blogs are by their nature partisan opinion pieces but this bit from Ross is shockingly dishonest.
Read the Executive Order yourself right here.
Moving on Ross launches another dishonest attack, this time on biofuels.
The headlong rush by liberal elites in the US and the EU to the use of ethanol is now causing food shortages and riots in the Third World, and bringing zero benefit to the environment.Again, so much to unpack from this one sentence. First, corn based biofuels are not being pushed by "liberal elites" so much as they were being pushed by various government leaders. First and foremost among them was George W. Bush,
Second we have the issue of food shortages. They are real and ethanol biofuels are a factor but not an especially large factor. The current food crisis is being driven by shortages of wheat and rice, not corn. Also contributing is the growing wealth of China and India. Ethanol is, at best, a break even proposition for the environment but it's probably not even that. That is of course why you don't hear leaders pushing for the use of such biofuels.In his 2005 State of the Union Address, President Bush stated that there is "strong funding for...ethanol." In his 2006 Address, he revealed his plan to make ethanol "practical and competitive within six years" after he famously stated "America is addicted to oil." It was this announcement that established ethanol as an alternative energy powerhouse as ethanol stocks immediately bubbled to new highs.
In his 2007 Address, Bush announced that "we must continue investing in new methods of producing ethanol, using everything from wood chips to grasses, to agricultural wastes" in hope of "reducing gasoline usage in the United States by 20 percent in the next 10 years."
This year, however, President Bush didn't specifically acknowledge ethanol in his State of the Union Address; the first time since 2004
Which brings us to our third point where Kamisnky seems to imply that Ritter's Executive Order is advocating for biofuels when, in fact, the terms biofuel and ethanol never appear anywhere in the document.
3 dishonest statements in 1 sentence. That is quite a feat.
Next Ross tries his hand at science,
All the recent data that I've seen from reliable sources such as NASA show that the planet has been cooling slightly for much of the past decade.I'd like to see what data Ross is referring to because when I go to NASA's website I don't see anything of the sort. Instead we see statements such as this,
The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis.That bit of data, from NASA, directly contradicts what Kamisnky claims that NASA's data shows. He's either uninformed or a bald-faced liar. I'll let you decide.
The gross distortions continue,
the Arctic sea ice regained more than everything it lost in the prior summerReally? Perhaps Kaminsky should let the folks at NOAA know that because they are pretty concerned. From an article at the Science Daily website published just 15 days ago,
NOAA scientists are now flying through springtime Arctic pollution to find out why the region is warming — and summertime sea ice is melting — faster than predicted. Some 35 NOAA researchers are gathering with government and university colleagues in Fairbanks, Alaska, to conduct the study through April 23...I could continue, there are other distortions and lies scattered throughout Kaminsky's post but I think I've made my point. It's clear that Ross Kaminsky is at best grossly uninformed on the issues. Why the Denver Post would employ him to fill their apparent glibertarian quota is beyond me. Some amount of partisan spin is to be expected in blog posts but this is just embarrassing. Shame on the Post for publishing such fact-free nonsense and shame on Kaminsky for being so utterly dishonest.
Observations from instruments on the ground, balloons, and satellites show the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the globe. Summer sea-ice extent has decreased by nearly 40 percent compared to the 1979–2000 average, and the ice is thinning.
Cross-posted at Colorado Pols
3 comments:
Mr. Balboni,
It's amusing to see you suggest I am uninformed on the science of climate change as you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Furthermore, you intentionally try to criticize the facts by implying I've said something other than what I said, such is in item 7 below.
I believe I have answered all or nearly all of your questions about the science of climate change. I have certainly answered enough to demonstrate that it is you, not I, who is the prevaricator on the issue. I would bet that you haven't spent 10% of the time I have thinking about the issue, and your responses to me make that clear.
I'm not going to spend time here talking about the "imperial Ritter" stuff. People can agree to disagree about the politics.
But facts are stubborn things and not open to debate as much as you'd wish they were, as you watch the climate alarmsists' world come crashing down around them. Here are responses to your muddle-headed critiques to the scientific facts I presented. (The first comment is a political note, the last is an economic note, and the 6 in between are the science which you so greatly fear.)
1) I have slammed Bush and other non-liberals for buying into the ethanol disaster. But many of them were relatively late to the game, which was mostly pushed by a combination of environmentalists and special interests.
2)Here is the story whose existence you deny about NASA data showing slight ocean cooling in recent years:
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=8926a1d3-f43f-4f8b-811d-0a0daa3e1012&k=39580&p=1
3) Related to the issues in my original note, here's a NASA page showing the vast majority of Antarctica cooling over the last 20 years:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17257
4) Four major temperature measurements show noticeable cooling since last year:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/january-2008-4-sources-say-globally-cooler-in-the-past-12-months/
5) Another NASA study showing that "many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming":
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2007-131
6) Your statement about the 2007 temperatures as reported by the Goddard Institute is adequately debunked in the Colorado Springs gazette:
"What they hid is that the warmth was the result of a temporary spike caused by a strong El Niño which drove up land and air temperatures. January was the warmest month of 2007 and the temperatures have declined sharply in a dramatic plunge with significantly colder winters and mild summers in both hemispheres. Every climate monitoring agency has reported declining atmospheric, surface and ocean temperatures, along with increased snow cover and ice volume."
http://www.gazette.com/opinion/climate_34705___article.html/solar_output.html
7) The article you misleadingly reference regarding Arctic ice is specifically discussing summer ice melting, where I talked about the winter ice recovery. Here is the graph substantiating my factual assertion that during this past winter the ice regained more than everything it lost the prior summer:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg
8) Your economic idiocy is showing when it comes to the food shortage. The fact that the shortage is in wheat and rice rather than corn does not mean that the ethanol policy isn't the problem. Once the government added additional large subsidies for ethanol, farmers substituted to planting corn away from planting other crops, contributing to shortages of those other crops. That trend is beginning to reverse now because the original government-caused distortion has forced the price of the other crops up so high that farmers are returning to planting them.
For anyone intersted I respond to Kaminsky in detail here,
http://coloradopols.com/showComment.do?commentId=138659
Needless to say his response to me is more of the same, cherry picked data and quotes that paints a fundamentally dishonest picture of the state of our climate.
Apologies, try here:
http://coloradopols.com/showComment.
do?commentId=138659
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