Climate conference at odds with reality
Climate conference at odds with reality
President Barack Obama, on the opening day of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris earlier this week, said the event was “a turning point … the moment we finally determined we would save our planet.” French President Francois Hollande was more apocalyptic, warning the world was at a “breaking point” on climate change.
Also jetting in to attend the conference are former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which has greatly increased energy costs, and current Gov. Jerry Brown, who, before leaving California, blasted Republican governors and members of Congress for denying climate change.
Although some sort of agreement likely will be hammered out in Paris, the only real turning point at hand is that Obama soon will be gone from office. For one thing, the climate data used to justify Draconian regulations are just not reliable. Writing this year in the Telegraph of London, Christopher Booker detailed how, for 30 years “the official temperature records … were systematically ‘adjusted’ to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.”
Then there’s the difficulty of getting an agreement with developing nations, who need fossil fuels to lift their peoples out of poverty. Last week, Secretary of State John Kerry branded India and its 1.25 billion people a “challenge” on climate change because they keep building carbon-spewing power plants. Arvind Subramanian, the Indian government’s chief economic adviser, replied that such an attitude was “climate imperialism” that would “spell disaster for India and other developing countries.” In addition, China this year OK’d the building of 115 coal-fired power plants.
In California, residents have seen that carbon taxes have funded the high-speed rail boondoggle. And Schwarzenegger’s landmark legislation and other laws have increased energy costs so high that 15 percent of people in the central county of Tulare and other counties suffer “energy poverty,” meaning 10 percent or more of their incomes go to energy, according to a recent Manhattan Institute report. That’s a major reason California now has the nation’s highest poverty rate.
Such is the reality beyond the greenhouse-gas emitting conference in Paris.
— The Orange County Register
Biowar boondoggle: An early-warning system is mired in false alarms
A report by the Government Accountability Office on the nation’s $1 billion germ warfare defense network does not inspire confidence. The network of air samplers called BioWatch in cities across the country is supposed to differentiate between harmless germs and lethal pathogens that could be unleashed by terrorists.
The 100-page report released Nov. 23 says BioWatch, installed in 2003, fails miserably at its primary duty. It is more likely to register a false alert about harmless germs than detect deadly pathogens. But benign germs are everywhere, making it crucial that BioWatch is smart enough to tell the difference between them and pathogens intended to do harm.
False positives could trigger overly aggressive responses by public safety officials based on bad information. Several major public events were nearly disrupted because of false alarms by BioWatch, including the 2004 Super Bowl in Houston, the 2006 National League baseball playoffs and the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.
Because the system is unable to perform as designed, mistaken alerts undermine public trust because there’s no way to know when an alarm is legitimate. This creates an unacceptable level of ambiguity for a system that has cost so much.
If BioWatch can’t offer credible assurance that its alarms mean something, then it is a government boondoggle. If that’s the case, the U.S. doesn’t really have an effective early-warning system for bio-terrorism.
The Department of Homeland Security must do what it can to fix BioWatch. If it can’t, then no one should pretend that it is offering Americans any protection.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette