CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen rebuts arguments from alarmists that recent hurricanes are evidences of the damages of global warming. Indeed, Driessen shows how the use of fossil fuels has dramatically reduced the cost in human life from hurricanes and other severe weather events.
CFACT policy advisor Larry Bell refutes the claims of alarmist activists that hurricanes Harvey and Irma were “enhanced” as a result of climate change — and shows that the same alarmists had made the same statements in prior years regarding prior hurricanes — and then there was a 12-year lull.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen reports on positive changes in forest management at two federal agencies — Interior under Ron Zinke and Agriculture under Sonny Perdue. New policies will go a long way at reducing deaths of humans, animals, and plants from forest fires, and dramatically lower the costs of forest management while increasing the amount of forest land available for recreation and harvesting. As Driessen says, cleaning out dead, diseased, burned, overgrown trees would bring countless benefits — and make our forests healthy again.
CFACT science and policy advisor H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute reports that the EPA (and other federal agencies) skew the real cost-benefit numbers in promoting massive regulations. One example: While the Obama Clean Power Plan might have saved 21,000 lives (as the EPA claimed), the rules would also also resulted in from 102,500 to 164,000 early deaths. The HONEST Act hopes to correct these discrepancies.
The Department of the Interior will announce recommendations to President Donald Trump Thursday on whether to rollback or remove national monument status from 21 designations.
CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell rehashes the Enron scandal and the linkage between chief climate alarmist Al Gore, Gore’s fellow traveler Tim Wirth, and the late Ken Lay of Enron … all of whom lost big when the U.S. Senate refused by a 95-0 vote to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Despite the Enron failure, Gore managed to fearmonger his way into multiple millions for his own mammoth houses.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen champions a new book, for which he provided one essay, entitles, “Climate Change: The Facts 2017,” which covers climate changes through the ages and reveals the devious tricks that alarmist “researchers” have used to modify and “homogenize” actual temperature data to fit their alarmist computer models. Driessen then points out the tremendous human cost of these foolish, people-killing policies that are insisted upon by the radical greens and are sadly being adopted in all too many places.
Despite the hysteria created by the break-off of a sizable section (12%) of the West Antartica ice sheet,, the fact remains that overall Antarctic ice has been increasing in recent years. A newly discovered rift valley deep under the ice sheet, together with the presence of active subsurface volcanoes, may account for the massive iceberg, but glaciologist Dr. Kelly Brunt assserts that the potential effects of even an entire collapse would be “nothing to lose sleep over.”
CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell hails the action by EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to seek peer-reviewed investigations of facts and fictions regarding key areas of agreement and dispute on climate policy. Bell notes that Mother Nature is a far bigger player in climate change than is human activity, and that indeed even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits that the climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen calls out Duke University, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, and the British Center for Ecology and Hydrology for falsifying or fabricating data, ignoring critical data (and thus cherry-picking data for the “right” result), and other egregious sins — with a special emphasis on how these and other institutions conspired to make neonicotinoid pesticides into bee killers rather than bee life savers (which they often are).
CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen explains the huge costs and inefficiencies of replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar, and biomass fuels.
Aside from protests by Al Gore, Leonardo Di Caprio, and friends, the public didn’t seem to raise its carbon dioxide (CO2) anguish much above the Russians-election frenzy when Trump exited the Paris Climate Accords. Statistician Bjorn Lomborg had already pointed out that the Paris CO2 emission promises would cost one hundred trillion dollars ($100 trillion) […]
CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell calls out Ben Santer, Kerry Emanual, and Naomi Oreskes for their shrill opposition to genuine peer review that might well expose fake science. And for good reason. Santer is one of the top perpetrators of false and misleading information through his work with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen, with climatologist David Legates, asks those who claim that “we are still in” the Paris climate accord pay their equal share of the U.S. payment mandated by the Paris accords? How also will they justify the loss of jobs, revenues, and even the health of their constituents — almost all of whom were not consulted when these leaders made their high-sounding pronouncements — all of whom did so without providing a pathway for making the payments to the UN or the early retirement of fossil fuel power sources and replacement with the massive, very expensive wind and solar and biomass units needed to keep America’s electrical grid functional without major interruptions in service? The fact is that none of these blowhards can answer these questions, so they prefer to ignore them, hoping they will not have to do so.
CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell chronicles the hysteria over climate change over the past 100 years– starting in 1922 when the Washington Post predicted most coastal cities would be uninhabitable “within a few years.” But by 1974 Time Magazine was warning of an impending Ice Age. It was back to warming by 1989 — but the warming trend fizzled out by the end of the world (er, Y2K) — leaving money-hungry activists with “climate change” as their solgan word — a term now defined as anything that happens is bad but we at the UN can just have all of your money,
The rants of pesticide-hating environmentalists may theaten the honeybee population much more than the subject of their rage — neonicotinoid pesticides that destroy Varroa destructor mites that actually do kill millions of bees. CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen explains that the installation of a beehive on the Vice President’s residence could focus on how to protect bees from these vicious, though tiny, predators that suck the bee’s hemolymph blood-equivalent out of them, compromising their immune systems and vectoring in a dozen of more viruses and diseases into honeybees and colonies.
CFACT policy advisor Larry Bell notes that even Fox News’ Chris Willace has drunk the Kool-Aid, as he assaulted President Trump for refusing to subject American citizens to the whims of a UN agreement that intentionally targeted the U.S. for punishment. Apparently, there are a large number of Americans who still want to be horsewhipped for the sins of their forebears (which while vile were universal at the time). Wallace, it appears, has joined the Jellyfish backbone crowd.
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen urges EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to revise the review process for threatened and endangered species to include broad-based Extending the review beyond the litigants and the agencies to include all parties impacted by the designation to have a voice. Only then can the review incorporate all the topics addressed by experts and affected parties — people who can help evaluate the science and policy implications for the affected species, as well as for farming, construction, jobs, families, and other species. This article focuses on recent designations of bumble bees.
To the consternation of alarmists, New York Times op ed writer Bret Stephens openly questioned the “consensus” that has demanded uniform acceptance without question of the global warming/climate change orthodoxy. As CFACT policy analyst Larry Bell reports, Stephens asserts that ordinary citizens have a right to be skeptical of an “overweening scientism.” He wisely warns us to remember that “history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.”
CFACT Senior Policy Advisor Paul Driessen lauds President Trump’s call for a review of recent land withdrawals under the Antiquities Act — as do residents of western states whose economic and personal freedom has been severely impinged by these heartless actions by grandstanding Presidents. While federal agencies own just 0.3% of Connecticut and Iowa, and 0.6% of New York, they own, manage and control 63% of all land in Utah; 61% in Alaska and Idaho; 80% in Nevada; 29% to 53% in the other western states. Restrictive federal land use policies severely affect job creation and economic opportunities for states, communities, families and our nation as a whole, for little environmental benefit.