THE RACKET – AT 9:44 A.M. ET:  Eric Hoffer, the "longshoreman philosopher" of the 1950s, once remarked that all causes become businesses, and then they become rackets.   Global warming is at the racket stage.  From The Hill: 

The period of atmospheric and surface warming that began in the late 1970s ended in the mid- to late 1990s, but the climate change industry is hot. Witness a new effort by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to use unsupported assertions about the hugely adverse effects of greenhouse gas emissions purportedly now looming large to justify federal auctions of "carbon" permits, with the revenue inevitably used by the political class for purposes of redistribution to favored interest groups.

Van Hollen has introduced The Healthy Climate and Family Security Act of 2014, which would impose steadily declining limits on "carbon pollution" — a classic example of the political propaganda at which the climate change industry is so practiced — by auctioning permits to the "first sellers" of oil, coal and natural gas in the U.S. market. The goal would be an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions below 2005 levels by 2050.

Let us begin with the central congressional "finding" (that is, bland assertion) in the Van Hollen legislation: "The warming of our planet has led to more frequent, dangerous, and expensive extreme weather events, including heat waves, storms, fires, droughts, floods, and tornadoes."

Wow. With respect to the explicit assumption about the "warming of our planet": The most recent warming period ended 15 or more years ago.

And...

The language of the Van Hollen bill goes downhill from there, particularly in terms of the "finding" of "extreme weather events" and associated effects. The past two years have set a record for the fewest tornadoes ever in a similar period, and there has been no trend in the frequency of strong (F3 to F5) tornadoes in the United States since 1950. The number of wildfires is in a long-term decline. It has been eight years since a Category 3 or higher hurricane landed on the U.S. coast; that long a period devoid of an intense hurricane landfall has not been observed since 1900. The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season was the least active in 40 years, with zero major hurricanes. There has been no trend in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, and global cyclone activity and energy are near their lowest levels since reliable measurements began by satellite in the 1970s. There is no long-term trend in sea-level increases. The record of changes in the size of the Arctic ice cover is far more ambiguous than often asserted, because the satellite measurements began at the outset of the warming period from roughly the late 1970s through the mid- to late 1990s. The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895.

COMMENT:  Facts are interesting, aren't they?  And yet the beat goes on.  Grants are given.  "Green" companies are founded, sometimes with federal help.  We're told the sky is falling, but it remains firmly in place.

And this, at least in my region, is one of the coolest summers on recent record.

Al Gore is becoming increasingly inconvenient.  But Obama will regulate away during his last two years in office, damaging our economy on behalf of a set of wobbly theories that wobble more and more every day.

August 12, 2014