While it is nice to see Energy Company people standing up for themselves and even though everything in this speech is true it will be ignored because of the source. The Enviro machine has learned that branding the energy companies as evil liars and stoking the fires of public outrage at energy costs(which makes no sense in a cap and trade world) is far more effective than having a defensible position backed by data.

Misdirected anger is the most dangerous force in the world when those enraged see that they were mislead, that anger can shift fast and have real consequences. Politicians never learn this lesson, then pay for it.

I just hope it is in time to stop the insanity.

His comments are well made, and the points are well taken. Sadly, the MSM will never pick up on this because "he is in the back pocket of big oil" and "what did you expect him to say?".

But Al Gore's continuous vaporous exhalations will continue to be picked up by Nat. Geo. and we will hear of ice bridges breaking off in the Antarctic and how it is all the white, middle aged North Americans fault.

Sad, really.

Thirty years ago I started high school, and it was kinda neat, thinking how he world would be AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY!!! Wow. Cool. Yawn...

We read books like "The Fate of the Earth" (guess the conclusion), "Entropy", etc.

Shorter James: we were DOOMED, DOOOOOMED, I tells ya.

I was scanning some magazines while purging my files a few months ago, and came across a pre-Y2K magazine article. Guess the scenario? Yep. Doom and gloom.

Geeze, does NOBODY read Julian Simon anymore?

Sorry, this article just doesn't cut it with me. Far to simply written and practical to be realistically a part of to days thinking and logic.

So it is quite obvious that students at Utah Valley University receive a much better education than given at any Ivy, Stanford or other elite!!! Bravo!!

similar experience , graduating in engineering exactly 33 years ago.

my life has been barraged with fearmongering journalists from day one, duck and cover, famines, global cooling , nuclear winter, cold wars, energy shortages, threats of nationalisation of industries in Canaduh, all step function disasters in the eyes of the media. what we have witnessed instead is a continuum of redtape loops, regulations , taxes and general erosion of freedom all under the guise of mitigation of the coming disaster , none of which came to fruitition.

took me years to develop enough skeptism, even though I grew up in the skeptical generation of the sixties.

That about sums it up for me... what he said!

The problem with logic is that it's lost on "true believers."

You will never reason a believer out of their beliefs any more than you can reason a Mormon, Catholic or Muslim out of their god.

They believe. It isn't about facts or logic.

A wise man once said that you can never talk someone out of an opinion no one talked them into to begin with.

I am an "old guy" too heard all the looming disaster stories, we will starve, silent spring (ddt), running out of oil yada yada, the bottom line is well, the bottom line, we will tax the be-jesus out of you and this will magically cool the planet, I guess that works better than "throwing a virgin into a volcano" no heavy lifting and "virgins" are somewhat difficult to aah recruit for the saving the tribe project.

That was a great speech. All but this part:

We have a finite amount of wealth in the world. We have a long list of problems – hunger, poverty, malaria, nuclear proliferation, HIV, just to name a few. Your generation should ask: how can we do the most good with our limited wealth?

"Wealth" is nothing more than a symbol of our value based on our ingenuity and productivity. To say that it's limited is to say that we're limited...

Richard,

More accurate is that we have a finite level of wealth - at any given moment in time -

Add to that the fact that level can go up or down depending on how foolish the government and other leftards are at meddling in the economy.

In order to grow the level of wealth, you have to let the people do it.

western, and you are CEO of which company again?

Just finishing 'State of Fear' by Michael Crichton. Not a particularly great novel, but a good read none the less. He uses it to deliver many of the same 'inconvenient realities' as does Mr. Rattie.

It is difficult to believe how sheeple can follow the Gores and Suzukis and all the other Chicken Littles when common sense is actually fairly easy to find. I guess it's also easy to ignore or overlook.

I no longer worry about global warming/climate change.

I was hit by a small piece of falling sky this morning, proving that the real danger is that the old adage is true . . . the sky is falling.

Interesting post on Rush Limbaugh site.

Apparently, the EPA has a report that says politics, not science, is a major driver on the issue.

It's come out in Congressional hearings, but i haven't heard a word about it in the MSM yet.

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_051309/content/01125113.guest.html

Cap 'n Trade really means "Cap in hand".

Hey mister got a dime?

"Cap in hand" is the perfectly incorrect policy choice to implement in tough economic times.

Squeezing out more energy efficiency from existing methods of power production, I'm all for it.

Cheers

Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief

1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group "True North"

Ah a similar thing happened in Germany. The Armed Forces Network cancelled the Rush Limbaugh television show 1) because of a few complaints an 2) In a survey, only 2 percent of people said they watch it.

Well, the "survey" listed numerous popular television shows but not Limbaugh's. There were write-in spaces at the bottom and Limbaugh was on 2 percent of those. But, by far, his show was written in more than any other. When watchers were asked specifically about his show, a MAJORITY of the respondents said they watch his show. After an uproar, it was brought back.

Your story reminds me of Hitchhiker's Guide where the notice for destroying Arthur Dent's house was posted in the bottom drawer of a locked filing cabinet in a closet in the basement of a large building miles away.

BTW, the members of your military, as small and insignificant as it is, are quite capable and valiant. Few other nations remain by our side in the "central front of the War on Terror."

See, also, David Frum on the "Cap and Trade Racket":

http://www.theweek.com/article/index/96470/The_capandtrade_racket

Frum has lost it on political strategy, but on economic issues, he still has the ability to explain complex issues in a meaningful way.

{quote]"Wealth" is nothing more than a symbol of our value based on our ingenuity and productivity. To say that it's limited is to say that we're limited...[/quote]Richard Evans

Richard,
The present generation is indeed limited. They only read the abstracts (Executive Summaries) of detailed scientific theory or thought. They are simply not interested in the process or the minute details. They will never understand why the proposed solutions fail or in what direction solutions may exist. It’s the generation of instant science. NOT

The AGW Cap & trade will fail for all the obvious reasons.. They could have researched the finer details of project management or understood the 90% meaning of the ridicules claims of a consensus. (Those that successfully author & present technical papers know the 90%, 5 %, 5% formula)

Executive summary: The Cap & Trade Market will have more sellers than buyers... therefore shorts will drive that sucker into the ground. (Day traders will feast on all the negative theory that the MSM has suppressed)

I grew up in the 50's and 60's and recall duck and cover, reds under the beds and Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring".
Then I moved into a world were I learned that there were indeed "reds under our beds and that the emerging "enviromental movement" was an element of that....
Rachel Carson on her death bed said her proudest momment was the banning of DDT. We knew DDT toxicity was bogus and what the results of banning it would be and so did Carson and the "enviros"----millions of malaria deaths in the 3rd world....but politics ruled and in the fullness of time even I contracted malaria.
This current mania is just that a silly dangerous fad....as practical as socialism turned out. Despite the profound failure of the USSR etc...socialism marches on....largely to benefit, in the short term, a select elite.....the pigs have taken over the farm.

Just a point. I graduated High School in the mid 60's. I had been told we would run out of fossil fuels within 10-20 years. We should have run out of it 20-30 years ago.

In the 80's I invested in alternative fuels. That was money down the drain.

Yet I'm hearing the same story from people who don't know anything more than the self proclaimed "experts" of the 50's, 60's and 80's.

Sounded good till the last paragraph, the dumb ass is against hunting!

Aaron:

So, are you going to stop hunting?

Are you that easily swayed?

Good article link 'Kate'. Very blunt and to the point.

'Aaron', I don't think you got the last paragraph.

A nation's wealth can never be measured by money alone. Rather real wealth and the only wealth that truly matters is the number of children the nation has and the number of children that grow into productive adults.

Don't believe me? Try selling a car to a goat because there are no humans to buy the car.

"Pouring cold water on global warming - Global cooling has arrived. Global warming is dead.

There is now irrefutable scientific evidence that far from global warming the earth has now entered a period of global cooling which will last at least for the next two decades.

Evidence for this comes from the NASA Microwave Sounding Unit and the Hadley Climate Research Unit while evidence that CO2 levels are continuing to increase comes from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

Professor Don Easterbrook one of the principle speakers at the recent World Conference on climate change held in New York in March this year attended by 800 leading climatologists, has documented a consistent cycle of warm and cool periods each with a 27 year cycle. Indeed the warm period from 1976 to 1998 exactly fits the pattern of climate changes for the past several centuries long before there were any CO2 emissions. Greenland Ice core temperature measurements for the past 500 years show this 27 year cycle of alternating warm and cool periods. Recently the global temperature increased from 1918 to 1940, decreased from 1940 to 1976, increased again from 1976 to 1998 and has been decreasing ever since.

However throughout this time CO2 has been added to the atmosphere in increasing amounts. This point was brought out by at the New York conference by Vaclav Klaus the rotating President of the EU and President of the Czech Republic. If CO2 emissions cause temperature rises than why is it that every 27 years the earth climate switches to a cooling mode with decreasing temperature? Clearly there is another explanation that does not include humans. .

Nearly ten years into the 21 century it is clear that the UN IPCC computer models have gone badly astray. The IPCC models have predicted a one degree increase in global temperature by 2011 with further large temperature rises to 2100. Yet there has been no warming since 1998 with a one degree cooling this year being the largest global temperature change ever recorded. Nasa satellite imagery from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has confirmed that the Pacific Ocean has switched from the warm mode it has been in since 1977 to its cool mode, similar to that of the 1945-1977 global cooling period."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2250982/posts

Manbearpig's Retreat: AGW Yodeller is Falling Down, falling down, fa.. d
...-

"Study Halves Prediction of Rising Seas (due to global warming)

A new analysis halves longstanding projections of how much sea levels could rise if Antarctica’s massive western ice sheets fully disintegrated as a result of global warming.

The flow of ice into the sea would probably raise sea levels about 10 feet rather than 20 feet, according to the analysis, published in the May 15 issue of the journal Science.

The scientists also predicted that seas would rise unevenly, with an additional 1.5-foot increase in levels along the east and west coasts of North America and the east coast of southern Africa. That is because the shift in a huge mass of water away from the South Pole would subtly change the shape and rotation of the Earth, the authors said.

Several Antarctic specialists familiar with the new study had mixed reactions to the projections.

But they and the study’s lead author, Jonathan L. Bamber of the British Glaciology Center, agreed that the odds of a disruptive rise in seas from warming over the next century or so remain serious enough to warrant the world’s attention.

They also uniformly called for renewed investment in ice-probing satellites and field missions that could within a few years substantially clarify the risk.

There is strong consensus that warming waters around Antarctica, and Greenland in the Arctic, would result in centuries of rising seas. But glaciologists and oceanographers still say uncertainty prevails on the vital question of how fast coasts will retreat in a warming world in the next century or two.

The new study combined computer modeling with measurements of the ice and underlying bedrock, both direct and by satellite."
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2250979/posts

James Hansen's Glo-Bull Warming predictions graphed against observed temperature;

http://canadianbluelemons.blogspot.com/2009/05/how-good-forecaster-is-nasas-james.html

Here in Edmonton we are going to open the Mill Woods pool for the weekend. It is unheated! Two above right now and snowing. The sky is falling(no sun spots,yet) and we are burning up(so says suzukigorehansen), but it is too darn cold to go swimming on the May Long Weekend and the flowers my neighbors put in last weekend might not make it through this weekend. I'll go with the real science and the real observations. Can't wait for the Catlin team's final synopsis, need some fire starter.

Went for a hike today.

May 14, 2009.

In a snowstorm.

Global warming,cooling,ice cometh or goeth who cares do research be a scientist get grants and drink lots of Brawndo; its got electrolytes, maurice has carbon.

Wayne: RE: State of Fear' by Michael Crichton. I agree with your assessment of the novel, but there is a great essay included at the back. I read the book (borrowed) and then bought a copy just to get that essay. I was so sorry when Michael Crichton died.

An earlier comment below also shows how good news is spun as bad news to the mass of voters that failed science and math classes.

A glacier either expands or retreats. Antarctica is a glacier. If the glacier were truly shrinking it would be "melting" away undetectable to the human eye, not cracking off into the sea. Cracking off into the sea is the sign of an expanding glacier. The tremendous weight of evermore increasing snow and ice pack pushes the edges of the expanding glacier outward into the sea.

Is there any thing a politcian can't get backwards?

But Al Gore's continuous vaporous exhalations will continue to be picked up by Nat. Geo. and we will hear of ice bridges breaking off in the Antarctic and how it is all the white, middle aged North Americans fault.

Sad, really.