Rise in carbon emissions has led to massive increase in trees and plants

From The American Thinker Blog:

If all the extra leaves growing because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere were laid end to end, it would cover a space twice the size of the continental U.S.

That's the conclusion of a new study conducted by 32 scientists and 24 institutions.

Whoops, so all the extra CO2 is causing trees to grow better. This is a bad thing how?

The Week in Pictures -- Peak Trump Edition

From the guys at Powerline Blog:

California Clean Air Board Ignoring Deadly Truck Fires

From Legal Insurrection:

California’s owner/operators of trucks, small business owners, and farmers and ranchers, whose livelihood is tied to having affordable, safe, and reliable trucks for transporting goods, were targeted by the California Air Resources Board, and required to install Diesel Particulate Filters in all commercial trucks.

“When CARB made this regulation, it kicked thousands of independent truckers out of this business,” Caldwell said. “If I had started my business today under CARB regulations, I couldn’t do it.”

And now their trucks are exploding thanks to the California Air Resources Board’s ‘Truck and Bus Regulations’ to control emissions from diesel engines.

The Diesel Particulate Filter devices were hailed by CARB, in countless public statements and Executive Orders, as an inexpensive, easy to install, device that could be implemented on all diesel powered engines throughout the State of California within just a few years. The CARB claimed the use of the filters would thereby improve air quality in the Los Angeles and San Joaquin basins.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

It took some time, but CARB has finally publicly acknowledged that the Diesel Particulate Filter is expensive to install and maintain, mechanically unreliable, and the warranties are inadequate both as to time, mileage and scope of coverage.

But even worse, the Diesel Particulate Filter clogs, causing engine fires. These engine fires erupt, and have caused numerous very serious and even deadly accidents, as well as devastating property damage.

Useless technoligy that has been proven faulty. But how could such a faulty device be allowed to be forcefully installed on diesel truck?

Bucking the highly fashionable notion that California’s air pollution is deadly, Dr. James Enstrom was one of only a few scientists willing to blow the whistle on the fraudulent science perpetrated at the California Air Resources Board.

Enstrom challenged the scientific research that the California Air Resources Board and California Legislature used to enact policies regulating diesel fuel emissions. And then he was fired from his job of 35 years at University of California, Los Angeles.

Enstrom exposed the cover-up of “junk environmental science.” He also outed the phony scientist Hien Tran at the California Air Resources Board, as well as the Legislature’s subsequent adoption of regulations stemming from the fake science.

Consequently, the university gave Enstrom his walking papers rather than admit they were wrong, and risk losing the gravy train of ongoing public grants and funding.

Corruption at CARB, what a surprise.

Steyn puts Warmists in the Dock

From The American Thinker:

One might ask why Steyn is so hell-bent on exposing Michael Mann rather than broadly addressing the issue of climate change -- and why he structures his book so that it reads like the sequential testimony of a hundred different witnesses, interspersed with witty Steyn asides? The answer is that Steyn, National Review, et al. are being sued for defamation by the aforementioned Dr. Mann. In other words, true to form, Mann is using intimidation to silence critics. Specifically, the legal case concerns a National Review blog post dated July 15, 2012, in which Steyn quotes aerospace engineer Rand Simberg’s negative comments about the Penn State hockey-stick inventor, including the remark that Mann has become “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science.” Steyn proceeds in a mere 147 words to distance himself somewhat from Simberg’s metaphor, to identify Mann as “the man behind the fraudulent ‘hockey-stick’ graph,” and to note that the same college president who “declined to find one of its star names [Paterno] guilty of any wrongdoing” and who was forced to resign over the Sandusky scandal also oversaw the exculpatory investigation of Mann after the “Climategate” emails were made public.

The fact that this speech-suppressing defamation suit in the D.C. courts has been going on for years without media outrage clearly shows that Steyn’s derogatory book title applies to American journalists and courts as much as to the now-greatly-diminished Penn State climatologist.

I know a bit about lawsuits. It does take a lot of time to get anything done, except when the judges wants to get things done (Think Prop. 8).

But when it does go to trial, and it will, Steyn will wipe the floor with Mann.

How One Man Has Essentially Bought the California Legislature

From Ace of Spades HQ:

De Leon and Steyer have been super-glued together of late. As the Bakersfield Californian reported, "Steyer, a major donor to Democrats nationwide, is pouring money into the California Capitol, and de Leon is introducing bills that echo Steyer's environmental agenda." Steyer has appeared at hearings for de Leon's Senate Bill 350, which would mandate a 50 percent cut in gasoline consumption in the Golden State by 2030. The only way to achieve that goal would be to increase prices substantially. Hardest hit by Proposition 39 and the scorched-earth environmentalism of SB 350 would be de Leon's own constituents in East Los Angeles, one of the poorest areas in a state with the highest poverty rate in the nation. Working- and middle-class Californians with long commutes or who drive trucks for a living would suffer the consequences.

Steyer wants to become the next Governor of California. The irony of his transformation to a green warrior, it that he made his fortune in coal.

The Left’s Plot to Impoverish America’s Middle Class and Enrich Left-Wing Billionaires

From Powerline Blog:

“Nothing in American politics is more corrupt than the environmental movement.

The scheme took shape at a meeting in the White House in December 2013, after which the Obama administration launched coordinated with the “core group” of activist Democrat governors to design one of what we see are three tracks to promote the climate agenda. One was run by the Steyer network and left-wing foundations. Another is run by governors with green groups, which are “useful” but whose “standard NGO shaming strategy might not deliver”. A third, run by the White House includes, in the words of a senior aide, “a few other tracks with private sector and unusual allies”.

What’s it all about? Money. Money for the politically connected, at your expense.”

“[W]hat is clear is that 1%-ers are using ‘climate’ policies to destroy politically disfavored industries in order to transfer wealth to the politically preferred,” said Craig Richardson, E&E Legal Executive Director. “The campaign by self-serving individuals must be made known to the public as policymakers consider this plan that will destroy parts of our economy and ruin the most efficient, affordable, and clean energy system ever created.”

The very definition of crony capitalism.

Why Does Obama Want to Reduce CO2 Emissions?

From John Hinderaker at Powerline Blog:

As his policies, foreign and domestic, are collapsing on pretty much every front, President Obama has increasingly sought refuge in talk about global warming. He wants the U.S. to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide, and the EPA has done its best to bring this about via increasingly stringent regulations on coal-fired power plants. The Democrats wanted to enact cap-and-trade, but couldn’t get it through Congress, so Obama is doing the best he can through administrative action. Simultaneously, the administration has poured billions of dollars into specious “green” energy projects, many of which can’t be kept alive even with lavish subsidies, although their developers always walk away with their pockets full.

But why?.................

So what’s the point? I don’t have a high opinion of President Obama’s abilities, but he isn’t a complete idiot. So I assume he understands that his war on CO2, and his provision of billions of dollars in subsidies to “green” energy, won’t make any perceptible difference to the Earth’s climate, if you assume the alarmists’ models are correct. So why does he do it? I think there are two reasons.

First, the Left has made an enormous investment in promoting misinformation about global warming. You can’t get through elementary school in the U.S. without being hectored about your family’s carbon footprint. (“I will never live in a house bigger than John Edwards’,” my then-third-grade daughter wrote in response to a question about what she, personally, intended to do to change the Earth’s climate.) Those millions of misinformed people are now voters, and Obama is secure in the knowledge that the newspapers and television networks haven’t done anything to educate them.

Second, to the Obama administration, the fact that “green” energy cannot survive without government subsidies and mandates isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. It allows the Democrats to slide billions of dollars to their cronies, like Tom Steyer, the left-wing billionaire who is now the number one financial supporter of the Democratic Party. Steyer made his first fortune by developing coal projects, and is making his second fortune as a Democratic Party crony, developing uneconomic but heavily subsidized “green” energy projects. So the war on coal and other sources of CO2, while it can’t have any impact at all on the climate, has turned into a funding mechanism for the Democratic Party.

Well, that make sense.

It's the most logical answer I've heard.

What Kind of Fool Am I?

From Mark Steyn Online:

Daniel J Kornstein and his co-counsel Mark Platt were the driving force behind the most consequential free-speech legislation this century. Dan is an expert libel lawyer and a principled freedom-of-expression fighter whose clients have included Vanessa Redgrave, Bill Clinton, the Monkees, Harvey Keitel, Wilford Brimley, Fatal Vision author and sometime Sarah Palin neighbor Joe McGinnis (who died earlier this month), and King Michael of Romania, who made Dan one of the first inductees into the Order of the Crown of Romania in over 60 years. I've promised Dan that if we win this case I'll get him made a Knight of the Garter or at least a Companion of the Order of Canada. Where I fall on that spectrum of clients, I'm not sure - I'd like to think somewhere between King Michael and Wilford Brimley, but it may be closer to the Monkees, and Peter Tork at that. ...................

Dan and Mark's most important client in the last decade or so was Rachel Ehrenfeld, whose book Funding Evil happened to include rather more details of Khalid bin Mahfouz's bankrolling of al-Qaeda than the Saudi billionaire cared to have revealed to the world. So he sued her in a London court. Dan and Mark got Dr Ehrenfeld to countersue in New York to prevent Mahfouz from ever collecting, and, when the court declined to acknowledge it had personal jurisdiction over Mahfouz, they got the legislature to take up the issue and pass "Rachel's Law". This law prevents New York courts from enforcing libel judgments from other countries with lower standards of freedom-of-speech protection.

I'm so glad that Steyn wised up and hired profession counsel to handle his libel case against Michel "Hockey Stick" Mann. It looks like he hired a couple of heavyweights as well.

The Week in Pictures - Polar Vortex Edition

From the Guys at Powerline Blog:

So True!!!

The Week in Pictures -- Ship of Fools Edition

From the guys at Powerline Blog: