SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — Last week, more than 200 prisoners at California’s notorious San Quentin State Prison turned out for a “green jobs” fair. The soon-to-be-released felons were greeted by representatives from several nonprofit groups and training programs, all offering advice and information about the ecologically friendly employment opportunities that supposedly await the men beyond the prison’s gates.

The event was sponsored by the California Reentry Program, a social service agency that works with prisoners who are about to re-enter the outside world. While we applaud those who are attempting to assist such convicts, this skeptic believes that teasing these men with environmentally sustainable career options is pure folly.

One of the more prominent eco-orgs present at the jobs fair was Planting Justice. According to their pamphlets, this Oakland-based group is dedicated to “food justice, economic justice, and sustainable local food systems.

By the way, if “food justice” is an unfamiliar term, let me be the first to inform you that it has nothing to do with the carrot stick saying to the potato chip, “It’s not fair that people like you more than they like me.”  Advocates of food justice believe the wealthy have access to healthier food choices than do the poor.  The way to solve it, they believe, is through shakedown operations that result in a redistribution of wealth (a.k.a. tax the rich and create welfare programs).

The inmates of San Quentin also took part in psychobabble discussion groups.  An examination of the topics presented included growing your own food will save money; watching plants grow will develop patience; gardening will teach tolerance toward plants and people; and another that literally promised, “smelling the plants changes behavior.”

Hmm. My guess is smoking certain smelly plants was at least in part responsible for the behavior changes that initially got some of these guys traveling down the wrong road.

Another group present at the green jobs fair was the Insight Garden Program.  Located in San Francisco, this group contends that when the prisoners are  “working in an organic flower garden [they] also become ecologically literate – developing an awareness of their connection to and impact on the world around them.”

The way utopian-minded non-profits like Planting Justice and Insight Garden Program see the world is, if we’ll just give an ex-con a bag of vegetable seeds upon release, he’ll grow his own food, save money, be more patient and tolerant, his overall behavior will forever be altered, and his criminal ways will be a distant image in the rearview mirror of life.

If only it were so easy.

Forgive me for being cynical, but my antenna is way up.  Seems to me, if anything, Planting Justice and the Insight Garden Program may be unknowingly preparing some of these prisoners to become master growers of marijuana and poppy plants.

This month, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), a nonprofit group that denounces intelligent design and supports evolution-only curricula in the classroom, is expanding its mission. The organization is determined to silence global warming deniers, and is unfurling an aggressive effort to teach America’s schoolchildren that climate change is real and is being caused by human activity.

The NCSE has created a website filled with propaganda aimed at equipping educators with rhetoric to denounce what they describe as, “The Pillars of Climate-Change Denial.” The pillars are actually an accurate self-indictment of the global warming movement.  For example, the first pillar states deniers believe, “Climate change is bad science.”

Teaching about anthropogenic climate change certainly is bad science; just examine the earth’s temperature record.  Over many thousands of years the planet has undergone dramatic temperature fluctuations.  In modern times we’ve witnessed seen the same thing, with a slight warming commencing after the conclusion of the Little Ice Age in 1850, leading to a cooling in the 1940s, and returning to a brief warming in the mid-seventies.  Since 1998, the global atmosphere has not experienced any further warming.  Nonetheless, global warming enthusiasts are quick to note that there has been a 1.14 degrees Fahrenheit warming since 1850, but of course they fail to tell you that 88 percent of that rise occurred prior to 1940.  As for atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, those too have varied significantly.

Another hallmark of the denier, according to the NCSE, is the criticism that proponents of “climate change are driven by ideological motivations [which] leads to undesirable social consequences.”

Again, spot-on.  My extensive research on the matter is quite conclusive: show me an outspoken defender of human-induced climate change, and I will show you left-leaning political ideologue.  As I reveal in my upcoming book, Eco-Tyranny, for over a hundred years progressive thinkers have always perceived pollution—both actual and counterfeit—as a clever tool with which to bludgeon capitalism.  Indeed, examine the work of the National Center for Science Education’s president, Kevin Padian, a professor of biology at University California, Berkeley.  Padian is another leftist with a Ph.D. who is hell bent on using his progressive lectern to push his personal perspective.  Besides having been often referenced in Revolution, a magazine that describes itself as, “the voice of the revolutionary communist party USA,” Padian has declaredKarl Marx to be one of the “triumvirate of nineteenth-century European thinkers,” (the others being Darwin and Freud). Like so many cut from a socialist cloth, Padian contends, “Marx’s ideas have been distorted beyond recognition in their political execution.”  In other words, Dr. Padian sounds like the type who believes socialism really can work—it just needs to be done better.

As a prime example of what the NCSE intends, the University of California at Berkeley operates the website GlobalWarmingKids.net.  On the site, instructors can order “Global Warming for Young Minds,” a handbook aimed at 6- to 10-year-olds. It also offers “Let’s Stop Climate Change” DVDs, in which Simon the hippopotamus encourages children to take action against the dangers presented by global warming.

In the class projects section of a similar website, HotStuffChillOut.org, school kids are told, “We all know about climate change. We all know what to expect. Now we must act.”

The tragic aspect of all such eco-brainwashing is that the scientific method is being bastardized as our students are being told what to think, not how to think. Additionally, all of this indoctrination is stemming from the minds of teachers who hold more in common with Marx, than they do with Madison.

Flying to and from Europe just became more expensive thanks to the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).  The ETS was instituted in January 2005, in an attempt to control greenhouse gas emissions, specifically carbon dioxide.  Initially the scheme applied to power-generating facilities, oil refineries, steelworks, and other heavy industry in Europe.  Now, as of the first of the year, the regulations have reached the airline industry, including aircraft based in the United States.

Flights to and from Europe account for a third of all global air travel, thus this plan is the widest-reaching measure ever imposed by any country, or regional bloc, to regulate CO₂ emissions and further the United Nation’s green agenda.  The new scheme will hold all airlines flying to, from, or within the EU liable for their greenhouse gas “pollution.”  The airlines began the year with an annual allotment of tradable carbon allowances to cover the CO₂ they are allowed to emit without penalty.  Carriers that exceed their limit will be able to buy allowances from other airlines that have emitted less than their quota.  The kingpins at the EU contend that cap and trade is the fairest way to deal with aviation’s contribution to supposed global warming.  The airline industry represents about three percent of worldwide CO₂ emissions.  The plan is designed to rake in the equivalent of over a billion dollars this year alone (900 million Euros).

Cap and trade is a product of the green machinations dreamed up by the United Nations and originally presented to the public at the Rio Earth Summit in 1990.  The stated goal of cap and trade is to force “changes in consumption patterns.”  Ideally, money raised by the scheme is to be used to support government social welfare programs.  As Margaret Thatcher once said, “[s]ocialist governments … always run out of other people’s money.”  Hitting up the airline industry with a carbon fee is just another way for the financially broken EU to tap into a new source of other people’s money.

According to the International Air Transport Association, which represents about 240 airlines comprising 84 percent of global air traffic, the ETS will cost airlines up to $1.17 billion this year; that’s about a quarter of the all the airlines’ profits in 2011.  Estimates are that by 2020 the fees will amount to $3.2 billion.  This year, Germany’s Lufthansa Airlines estimates its annual cost for CO₂ permits at about $490 million.

In December, U.S. air carriers failed to block the ETS from being taxed when flying in and out of European airports.  The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg dismissed arguments that stated that imposing the cap and trade program on foreign carriers infringes on national sovereignty or violates international aviation treaties.

The lawsuit was brought by Airlines for America, which represented U.S. and Canadian carriers.  China, India, Russia, and other several other countries supported the protest.  Beijing has made it perfectly clear that it will not participate in the green scheme.  In an interview with Reuters, Cai Haibo, deputy secretary-general of the China Air Transport Association, said, “China will not cooperate with the European Union on the ETS, so Chinese airlines will not impose surcharges on customers relating to the emissions tax.”  Beijing estimates that if it did participate, the program would cost its state-owned airline $172 million this year.  China thinks that it can play hardball with the EU because its airlines carry enormous numbers of Chinese and other Asian tourists to Europe.  Any disruption would hurt Europe’s travel industry — not a good thing, given Europe’s debt crisis and high unemployment.

Meantime, in the U.S., Delta Air Lines has already added a $6 charge per round trip on tickets sold in the United States for travel to Europe.  Other carriers are expected to follow suit.

So where is our federal government on this?  A bipartisan bill was passed by the House of Representatives in October, directing the Department of Transportation to prohibit U.S. carriers from participating in the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme.  That’s a good start, but here’s the problem: the legislation, called the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011 (H.R. 2594), stalled in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

As we enter a robust election season, Senator Harry Reid, fellow Democrats, and green Team Obama need to be reminded that the majority of Americans could give a rip about the U.N.’s green agenda, and they do not want to be forced to participate in monitoring the EU’s carbon footprint.  We need representation in D.C., as opposed to the usual eco-subterfuge.

Brian Sussman is the morning radio host at KSFO in San Francisco and the author of the upcoming book Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America.

Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America, is the most comprehensive expose’ ever written about the environmental movement—a movement that has become one of the most influential social phenomenon in modern history.  However, while we all desire clean air, pure water, and healthy wildlife, this book proves that radical activists are at the core of this movement, ginning up environmental controversies to push a leftist political agenda.  I spent a year of painstaking research to assemble the facts presented in Eco-Tyranny (there are nearly 500 footnotes) to illustrate that this “green agenda” was originally conceived in the minds of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, first employed on a national level Russian dictator Vladimir Lenin, further refined by global elites at the United Nations, and now has become deeply engrained within the fabric of policy at every level of government within the United States.  Based on junk science, advanced by political activists with Ph.D.’s, instituted by unscrupulous politicians, and sold by a willing media, I contend that unless the green agenda is halted, future life in America will include routine rolling blackouts, water rationing, an anemic economy, constant monitoring of one’s carbon footprint, and a gross stifling of liberty.

I appreciate your support, and I hope I have the opportunity to meet you in person at a speaking event or book signing.  Please help me get the word out regarding Eco-Tyranny.

Brian
January 9, 2012

And they contend they have an undebatable consensus to back up their beliefs.

Rubbish.

As I write in my bestseller, Climategate, tens of thousands of scientists disagree with the theory that contends human consumption of fossil fuels, and the associated carbon dioxide emissions, is warming the planet and altering the climate.   In fact, just to be fair and balanced, here are some of the more recent additions to the growing list of skeptics and deniers:

“In essence, the jig is up. The whole thing is a fraud. And even the fraudsters that fudged data are admitting to temperature history that they used to say didn’t happen…Perhaps what has doomed the Climategate fraudsters the most was their brazenness in fudging the data” – Dr. Christopher J. Kobus, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oakland University, specialist in alternative energy and thermal transport phenomena.

“The energy mankind generates is so small compared to that overall energy budget that it simply cannot affect the climate…The planet’s climate is doing its own thing, but we cannot pinpoint significant trends in changes to it because it dates back millions of years while the study of it began only recently. We are children of the Sun; we simply lack data to draw the proper conclusions.” – Russian Scientist Dr. Anatoly Levitin, director of the geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“Hundreds of billion dollars have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that is not supported by physical world evidences…AGW has been forcefully imposed by means of a barrage of scare stories and indoctrination that begins in the elementary school textbooks.” – Brazilian Geologist Geraldo Luís Lino.

“I am an environmentalist,” but “I must disagree with Mr. Gore” — Chemistry Professor Dr. Mary Mumper, chair of the Chemistry Department at Frostburg State University in Maryland.

“I am ashamed of what climate science has become today.” The science “community is relying on an inadequate model to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming in order to generate funding and to gain attention. If this is what ‘science’ has become today, I, as a scientist, am ashamed.” – Chemist William C. Gilbert published a study in August 2010 in the journal Energy & Environment titled “The thermodynamic relationship between surface temperature and water vapor concentration in the troposphere.”

“The dysfunctional nature of the climate sciences is nothing short of a scandal. Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” The global warming establishment “has actively suppressed research results presented by researchers that do not comply with the dogma of the IPCC.” – Swedish Climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring, of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics Unit at Stockholm University.

“Those who call themselves ‘Green planet advocates’ should be arguing for a CO2- fertilized atmosphere, not a CO2-starved atmosphere…Diversity increases when the planet was warm AND had high CO2 atmospheric content…Al Gore’s personal behavior supports a green planet – his enormous energy use with his 4 homes and his bizjet, does indeed help make the planet greener. Kudos, Al for doing your part to save the planet.” – Engineer and aviation pioneer Burt Rutan, named “100 most influential people in the world, 2004″ by TIME Magazine.

“Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytizing the new faith…My skepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.” – Atmospheric Physicist Dr. John Reid, of Australia’s CSIRO’s (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) Division of Oceanography.

Almost exactly two years since damning emails  were released from Great Britain’s University of East Anglia showing a pattern of deception and collusion between leftist scientists involved in spreading the climate change myth, a new batch of messages has emerged.  You can put your money on the fact that this latest confirmation of the global warming scam will get as little press coverage as the original Climategate scandal did in November 2009.

Of the some 5,000 new whoppers we read:

<3066> From Brian Thorne, a professor emeritus at East Anglia:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

<2884> From Professor Tom Wigley of East Anglia, to Michael Mann, the guy who concocted the many-times-over debunked hockey stick graph used by Al Gore to sell global warming:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive…there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC…

<3373> From Professor R.S. Bradley of East Anglia:

I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year “reconstruction”.

I could present you with, literally, thousands more, but why?  I wrote an entire book exposing the global warming scam.  I’m getting bored routinely proving that carbon dioxide emissions are not warming the planet.  It’s almost like presenting people with story after story of people getting killed by trying to defy the laws of gravity, in order to prove that gravity is real.

Human caused global warming is bull-bleep. So, let’s move onto the bigger story and answer more significant questions, like:

- Who began the environmental movement?
- What’s the goal of the movement?
- Why are people like those working at the University of East Anglia willing to lie, manipulate, and falsify data to further the goal of the movement?
- How have the American people been lied to by their own government, public and private schools,  and religious institutions regarding the state of the environment?
-  What is the real reason America’s natural resources being kept from harvest?
- Why is the Obama administration planning on purchasing  more federal land from private individuals?
- What is the real motivation for high-speed rail, altering urban zoning laws, tearing down dams, installing Smart Meters, and erecting a new Smart Grid?
- Who is behind all of this, and what do they plan to get out of it?

These are the real questions.  And they will all be answered in my ground-breaking book, Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda Will Dismantle America. The book will be in stores in April.  It will be the most comprehensive expose’ of the environmental movement ever.  The left will hate it because I will rip off their masks.  There will be no rebuttal.  My research is overwhelming. There are over 500 citations in the book.  The green agenda must be stopped, and this book will provide Americans with the information to do just that.

Right now on Monterey Bay, along the central coast of California, tickets ranging up to $32,000 are being written to anyone caught “harassing” a humpback whale.

Let me begin by stating up front that I’m all for saving the whales—in fact, I personally want to collect the whole set.  But, whale harassment?

The excessive penalties have been created to protect all species in the Monterey Bay, which, thanks to Al Gore, is a national marine sanctuary overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Society (NOAA).

Currently the huge humpbacks, which average about 45 feet long, are enjoying a feeding frenzy in the bay, and they’re venturing in to dine just hundreds of yards from the beach.  Sightseeing boats, pleasure craft, and even kayaks, are taking rides out to mingle with the creatures and take photographs, up close and personal.  Having witnessed this whole scene from the shore, it’s pretty clear to me the whales are not being bothered in the least by the onlookers.

Yes, it’s true that with the flip of a tail, one of these whales could seriously injure someone, but that’s yet to occur.  And if it did happen, it seems to me that the injured spectator should receive a Darwin Award, not pay a multi-thousand-dollar fine.

Officially, harassment is defined as “approaching” wildlife.  So, if a whale-watcher is simply floating idly in the water, and a whale pops up next to his or her craft, that’s not considered a violation.  However, that same person seen moving toward a whale will be hit with a minimum ticket of $2,500, written by a member of the Coast Guard.

As a taxpayer, I’d rather see the Coast Guard chasing drug traffickers, as opposed to whale watchers.  I would also like to see NOAA, an agency created by executive order in 1970, stick to doing one thing that we can all agree on: forecasting the weather really well.  NOAA’s National Weather Service requires a reasonable $700 million each year to track hurricanes, tornadoes, and blizzards—and they do a heck of a job.  But the rest of NOAA’s $5.5 billion annual budget is spent on things such as keeping the largest creatures on Earth from being bullied by humans armed with cameras.

It’s like Christmas come early for spoiled children.  The media is going gaga over research by University of California-Berkeley Professor Richard Muller—formerly a global warming “skeptic”—supposedly illustrating a rise in global temperature.

According to Muller and his team at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST), the earth’s climate has warmed well over a full degree (Fahrenheit) since 1950.  In response, the Washington Post says Muller’s study has “settled the climate change debate.”

Debate?  Wasn’t it Al Gore who stood before Congress in 2007 to declare that “the science is settled” when it comes to global warming?  Heck, as chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Sustainable Development Council back in 1995, Gore stated that global warming was a fact and would not be debated.

I’ll share the inconvenient truth regarding temperature in just a moment, but it must be noted that a BEST team member claims the professor is attmepting to mislead the public.  Dr. Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, told the Daily Mail “there is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped. To say that there is detracts from…credibility, which is very unfortunate.”

Digging into the BEST data, one can see what Curry is referring to: global warming has been on ice for over a decade.

What we have is a case of the media not doing its job of properly investigating a story.  I think we also may have a Berkeley professor who was hoping get the rock star treatment at the upcoming United Nation’s climate change summit in Durban, South Africa.

As for the recent history of global temperature swings, here are the facts:

-Between 1850 and 1940, temperatures increased 1°F (.6°C).

-From 1940 to 1970, the earth cooled about .2°F (.1°C).

-A minor warming of a mere .34°F (.2°C) occurred between 1970 and 1998,  as verified by  NASA-affiliated scientists Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy, at the University of Alabama’s Earth System Science Center.

-Average global temperatures have not warmed since 1998, and since 2008 have been on a slight downward trend.

-A compilation of all temperature records indicates a warming since the mid-19th century of .7°C.

By the way, isn’t it interesting that when another University of California professor came out last year and said global warming was a “scam” the media totally ignored it.  Here’s a link to Professor Emeritus Hal Lewis’s statement.

According to the Associated Press, the farm was forced to shut down the windmills during the night time hours, after the bat, an endangered species, was found dead in September.

By the way, you read the copy correct.  We’re talking about one dead bat.

The wind farm was built by Gamesa Energy USA, and covers parts of Portage, Washington, and Cresson Townships in Cambria County, and part of Blair County, about 60 miles east of Pittsburgh.

A spokesman for Duke Energy, which now owns the wind farm, says it has an agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to determine whether bats are regularly being harmed by the windmills.

The windmills will likely resume nighttime operation in mid-November, when the bats will hibernate until spring.  After that, they’ll probably be shut down again each evening at sunset.

The reduced generation  of electricity from the wind turbines will decrease overall efficiency of the farm, thus causing the cost of this “green” energy source to be even more expensive for the consumer than it already is.

As I share in Climategate, dead birds have been hampering wind farms for years.  In California, home to the oldest and largest wind farm (Altamont, east of San Francisco), millions of dollars in studies, paid for by the utility company,  have been conducted.  Some of the turbines have been turned off, some have been modified, others see limited use.

Says the BBC, Gore staffers blocked broadcast media access to Wednesday’s speech. But British journalists quoted from the address to the Scottish government-sponsored Low Carbon Investment Conference in Edinburgh.

The BBC said Gore’s speech included “a strong attack on the effect of lobbying and money-raising on the U.S. Congress, and on carbon producers who he said employ four Washington lobbyists for every member of Congress.”

“In the language of computer culture, our democracy has been hacked,” the Guardian quoted him as telling the audience, which included Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond.

Citing flooding in Pakistan, China and elsewhere, Gore argued that extreme weather patterns were directly attributable to climate change, and that scientists overwhelmingly backed that viewpoint.

“Every single national academy of science of every major country on earth agrees with the consensus,” Gore was quoted as saying, adding that those institutions were all telling governments that “the need for urgent action is now indisputable.”

No, Al.  It’s not democracy that has been hacked.  You have cracked.  As I detail in my book, Climategate, thousands and thousands of scientists with Ph.D.’s have signed petitions illustrating their denial of human-caused global warming.  You’re pinched because your efforts to use global warming as a ploy to push a socialist agenda, while at the same time lining your personal pockets with greenbacks, is getting trashed by the truth.

Oh, and my next book?  It will  be the most damning expose ever written about you, Albert.  I’ve got lots of never-before-published “stuff” on you (Eco-Tyranny, coming in April).

It’s time for Gore to face climate-reality.  As CNS News rationally notes:

In his speech, Gore referred among other things to recent flooding in Pakistan, where an estimated five million people have been affected, especially in the southern Sindh province.

Pakistani government and meteorological department statistics for river discharges during the monsoon season (July-September) show flooding has occurred frequently, including in 1950, 1956, 1976, 1977, 1986, 1988, 1992, 1994, 2003, 2007 and 2010.

The deadliest flooding on record occurred in 1950, when almost 3,000 lives were lost, followed by the 2010 floods, which cost up to 2,000 lives. Around 1,800 people died during the 1992 monsoon.

Pakistan’s Indus River runs from the Himalayas through Kashmir and Pakistan before emptying into the Arabian Sea. Some 100 million people live in the fertile Indus Valley, and many are at risk when heavier-than-usual rains dump huge amounts of additional water into the Indus.

Experts point out that the Indus is also more prone to flooding than many rivers because it carries significant quantities of sediment, causing waterways to silt up and embankments to breach. With large amounts of water diverted by farmers for irrigation, the remaining water is even less able to cope with the sediment than would otherwise be the case.

Some scientists and meteorologists attribute heavier rains in South Asia, among other things, to higher than usual temperatures in the Indian Ocean, unusual behavior in the jet stream – a high-altitude, fast-moving air current that affects weather patterns – and a shift from an El Nina, the warming Pacific Ocean pattern, to a cooling La Nina.