Next year in California, state regulators are likely to have the emergency power to control individual thermostats, sending temperatures up or down through a radio-controlled device that will be required in new or substantially modified houses and buildings to manage electricity shortages.

The proposed rules are contained in a document circulated by the California Energy Commission, which for more than three decades has set state energy efficiency standards for home appliances, like water heaters, air conditioners and refrigerators.

The changes would allow utilities to adjust customers’ preset temperatures when the price of electricity is soaring. Customers could override the utilities’ suggested temperatures. But in emergencies, the utilities could override customers’ wishes.

Just one more step…

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First, here’s what the Daily Mail says he said:

The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.

The German-born Pontiff said that while some concerns may be valid it was vital that the international community based its policies on science rather than the dogma of the environmentalist movement.

His remarks will be made in his annual message for World Peace Day on January 1, but they were released as delegates from all over the world convened on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali for UN climate change talks.

The 80-year-old Pope said the world needed to care for the environment but not to the point where the welfare of animals and plants was given a greater priority than that of mankind.

And here are some direct quotes:

“Humanity today is rightly concerned about the ecological balance of tomorrow,” he said in the message entitled “The Human Family, A Community of Peace”.

“It is important for assessments in this regard to be carried out prudently, in dialogue with experts and people of wisdom, uninhibited by ideological pressure to draw hasty conclusions, and above all with the aim of reaching agreement on a model of sustainable development capable of ensuring the well-being of all while respecting environmental balances.

“If the protection of the environment involves costs, they should be justly distributed, taking due account of the different levels of development of various countries and the need for solidarity with future generations.

“Prudence does not mean failing to accept responsibilities and postponing decisions; it means being committed to making joint decisions after pondering responsibly the road to be taken.”

Author Simon Caldwell seems to embellish things a bit.  Fortunately, he didn’t pass up the opportunity to quote Cardinal Pell regarding the warming of Mars:

“The industrial-military complex up on Mars can’t be blamed for that,” he said in a criticism of Australian scientists who had claimed that carbon emissions would force temperatures on earth to rise…

Gotta love that quote from Cardinal Pell.

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H/T to Gerald for this one! 

Alfred Nobel felt horrible about the uses to which his invention — dynamite — was put. So he endowed the Nobel Peace Prize and instructed that it go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Al Gore has done exactly none of those things.

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Do the kooks running this website think that America’s memory is so poor that we won’t recognize this as being straight from Stalin’s Russia?

Someone has updated wikipedia to reflect this development:

CNN Meteorologist Rob Marciano clapped his hands and exclaimed, “Finally,” in response to a report that a British judge might ban the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” from UK schools because, according to “American Morning,” “it is politically biased and contains scientific inaccuracies.”

“There are definitely some inaccuracies,” Marciano added. “The biggest thing I have a problem with is this implication that Katrina was caused by global warming.”

More, including video clip, here.

Countdown until Rob Marciano is escorted from CNN Center.  5…4…3…2…1…

Those “tolerant” neo-pagan global warmers can’t have anything like this.

Four stately lime trees ceremoniously planted near a popular Roman Catholic shrine in 1983 for a visit to Austria by the late Pope John Paul II are being uprooted to make way for a large grandstand for next month’s pilgrimage by Pope Benedict XVI.

Environmentalists have criticized the action, but church and municipal officials are playing down the trees’ significance.

“This shows the hypocrisy of the church,” said Lambert Schoenleitner, a regional spokesman for the environmentalist Green Party in the southern province of Styria.

Schoenleitner believes nature should be revered as much as faith and doesn’t think trees should be sacrificed for an event that will last just a few hours.

Organizers say the trees must go to make room for a 52 1/2-foot-high steel grandstand to accommodate some of the thousands of pilgrims who will flock to the shrine town of Mariazell, 60 miles southwest of Vienna.

Okay, I agree that it may be a bit silly to remove the trees.  But, seems new ones could easily be planted after the grandstand comes down.

H/T to Curt Jester

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“It’s a bit patronising for us 21 year olds to try to start to change the world,” said Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders, explaining why the group is not on the bill at any of Al Gore’s charity concerts.

“Especially when we’re using enough power for 10 houses just for (stage) lighting. It’d be a bit hypocritical,” he told AFP in an interview before a concert in Paris.

Bass player Nick O’Malley chimes in: “And we’re always jetting off on aeroplanes!”

And the singer from 80s pop sensations The Pet Shop Boys, Neil Tennant, attacked the arrogance of pop stars who put themselves forward as role-models.

“I’ve always been against the idea of rock stars lecturing people as if they know something the rest of us don’t,” he was reported as saying by British music magazine NME.

The entire industry, therefore, is not totally stupid…just most of it.

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The mud at the bottom of B.C. fjords reveals that solar output drives climate change – and that we should prepare now for dangerous global cooling

Maybe, just maybe, we have to adapt and we can’t do a darn thing to control the climate.  Maybe.

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A guy named Anthony Watts is a former TV weather guy

Watts did what Al Gore never did … he started searching out and looking at some of the 1,221 weather stations that the federal government uses to gather data on temperatures.  That data, of course, is then used to tell us of the threat of global warming!  Government standards say that these temperature measuring stations should be 100 feet from buildings, not on a hot concrete surface, and so forth.  Well, it would seem that these regulations aren’t exactly being adhered to.

This really is interesting stuff.  He’s found weather observation stations where they get jet blast, in parking lots, near cell towers, basically all kinds of places where they’ll be subjected to conditions that skew temperature readings.  Ever notice during a baseball game how the temp on the field is 3-5 degrees hotter than the reported local temperature (or the temp in the stands for that matter?)  Big hunks of metal, like cell towers, or asphalt, or being surrounded by buildings are all things that create false higher temp readings.

Now, these stations used to be out in the middle of fields, adhering to the weather service’s standards – but they were encroached upon by development.  They used to be in a field, now they’re surrounded by a buildings or parking lots or both.  Some have been moved because they were encroached on…but the old data continues to be used.

The really scary thing?  This bad data is being used in the computer systems that model and predict “global climate change” over time.  In other words, the ones that claim our temp is rising and we’re all gonna die.

Watts also documents observations stations that have remained adherent to standards – they have not been developed around.  And guess what?  They don’t show increases in average temps as do the ones that are now in parking lots or near a/c exhausts.  Hmm…

Here’s an example:

(one thing not pictured here is the barbecue grill that the firefighters bring out a couple of times a week and park right in front of the temp sensor to cook their dinner.)

Now, take a look at the last hundred years of temp readings from this station:

And it goes on, example after example. And we’re thinking about making major lifestyle changes based on this type of data.

As of this writing, Watts’ site has been so slammed that it’s down, but it should be up again soon.

Surfacestations.org 

Meanwhile, his blog is up and running:

Watts up with that? 

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—-the best people, the most enlightened people—-do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—-these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism….

H/T to Gerald