Climate Hustle demolishes climate alarmism

Be sure to see this movie Monday, May 2 – during its one-night nationwide engagement

Without presenting it to the US Senate, as required by the Constitution, President Obama has signed the Paris climate treaty. He is already using it to further obligate the United States to slash its fossil fuel use, carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth … control our lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties … and redistribute our wealth. Poor, minority and working class families will suffer most.

China, India and other developing economies are under no such obligation, unless and until it is in their interest to do so. For them, compliance is voluntary – and they cannot afford to eliminate the fossil fuels that supply 85% of all global energy, generate some 90% of developing nations’ electricity, and will lift billions of people out of abject poverty. That’s why these countries have built over 1,000 coal-fired power plants and are planning to build 2,300 more – while unaccountable EPA bureaucrats are shutting down US coal-fired generators, and getting ready to block natural gas production and use.

What if the entire foundation for this energy and economic insanity were erroneous, groundless, fabricated … a climate con job – a Climate Hustle?

That is exactly what CFACT’s new movie demonstrates is actually going on.

Climate Hustle is the perfect antidote to the destructive, demoralizing climate alarmism that dominates political decisions and obsesses the Obama White House and EPA. You owe it to yourself to see it.

It’s coming to a theater near you on Monday, May 2, for a special one-night engagement.

I saw Climate Hustle April 14, at its U.S. premiere on Capitol Hill in Washington. The film is informative and entertaining, pointed and humorous. As meteorologist Anthony Watts says, it is wickedly effective in its using slapstick humor and the words and deeds of climate alarmists to make you laugh at them.

It examines the science on both sides of the issue … presents often hilarious planetary Armageddon prophecies of Al Gore, Leonard Nimoy and other doomsayers … and lets 30 scientists and other experts expose the climate scares and scams, explain Real World climate science, and delve deeply into the politics and media hype that have surrounded this issue since it was first concocted several decades ago

Sizzling temperatures. Melting ice caps. Destructive hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts. Disappearing polar bears. The end of civilization as we know it! The end of Planet Earth!

Emissions from our power plants, cars, factories and farms are causing catastrophic climate change!

Or are they? Is there really a “97% scientific consensus” on this? Or is “dangerous manmade climate change” merely the greatest overheated environmentalist con-job and shell game ever devised to advance the Big Green anti-energy agenda?

See this amazing film on May 2, and find out for yourself. To learn where it’s showing near you, and to buy tickets, visit www.ClimateHustle.com

You’ll be glad you did.

Climate Hustle is hosted by award-winning investigative journalist Marc Morano.  A former communications director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Morano is publisher of CFACT’s ClimateDepot.com. The film is a production of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and CDR Communications. See the movie. Bring your friends. Make it a party. www.ClimateHustle.com

Paul Driessen

WHERE YA GET'N YER WATER MARC?

Dear Representative’s Vigil and Coram, Senator Scott.

House Members of the Agriculture, Livestock & Natural Resources Committee.

Regarding HB16-1337   http://www.leg.state.co.us/clics/clics2016a/csl.nsf/fsbillcont3/BA2EBB0220371C3D87257F4D006374BC?open&file=1337agr_01.pdf

We neither oppose or support HB16-1337. For as it stands, we believe it begs answers to the following critical questions before any Yes or No vote can be made.  

We encourage you to please seek verifiable answers to these questions.

1)    Whose Vested Water Rights Property is included? Have they been identified and properly notified, "Your property is included in HB16-1337."

2)    Who's involved in this bill? Why do they deem said bill necessary?

3)    Who will benefit and who will be negatively impact?  

4)    How will HB16-1337 be funded?

5)    In referencing "district,” does it mean District “Water” court? If yes, shouldn’t the word “Water” be included along with the specific Water District #?

Since Water Districts are only authorized to enforce, administer and penalize within the defined boundaries of their district, it is imperative the Water District # be so noted.

Bill states, "State Administrative Procedure Act…” Does this imply HB16-1337 will return rightful authority to State water engineers to administer water in prior appropriation?"

State Constitution of Colorado Article XVI repeatedly refers to Water as Water. It does not include the words surface and ground water, for water is connected and to be used together (conjunctive use).

When who-so-ever put water to beneficial use, they received a date of adjudication and an allotment quantity.

Legislation that would separate  ground from surface - then favor one over the other would violate Colorado Prior Appropriation of "Water."6)   Are Water Rights Owners receiving their allotment quantities in prior appropriation?  Are you aware of any Water Rights Owners who are being denied use of their Vested Water Right Property? If yes, have they received "just compensation" for "takings?"

For your consideration: Review of Mr. Marc Arnusch's following comments sees them as accusations; accusations this bill might be based on? 

Marc Arnusch claims this bill “finally puts a stop to the games played by those looking to take advantage of our designated groundwater system.” Please ask Mr. Arnush to expand on “games,” identify “those looking to take advantage of our designated groundwater system," define "designated groundwater system" and explain to the committee the rates and amounts he appears concerned about.

Mr. Arnusch further states, “The financial resources available to many of the local management districts, like Lost Creek, are no match to those looking to speculate on the future value of water in our communities.”

Please ask Mr. Arnusch to identify “financial resources, local management districts,” and “those looking to speculate on the future value of water in our communities."

Is it possible that Mr Arnusch's concerns could be more appropriately dealt with in a court of law... rather than on General Assembly's time and taxpayer dollars?

We urge you to please demand answers to all before mentioned questions and verifiable answers made public and timely enough to give included Water Right Owners equal opportunity to respond.  

Verifiable answers will give you opportunity to determine if, with corrections, the bill should proceed or die.

WESTERN WATER LAW - - The Wayne Hage Case

Hage Set to Appeal Ninth Circuit Ruling in Forage Right

Case to U.S.  Supreme Court;

Western Water Law Hangs in the Balance

              In January, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, Susan P. Graber, Kim McLane Wardlaw, and Mary H. Murguia, Circuit Judges, in an opinion by Judge Graber, handed down a decision reversing all of the findings of Nevada Federal District Court Chief Judge Robert C. Jones in his 103-page decision in U.S. v. Hage (2007).  Judge Jones had found among other things that government officials had “entered into a literal, intentional conspiracy to deprive the Hages not only of their (grazing) permits but also of their vested water rights.”  The Court added, “This behavior shocks the conscience of the Court and provides a sufficient basis for a finding of irreparable harm…” 

            During the 21-day trial in 2012, the lead Justice Department attorney assured Wayne Hage and the Estate’s attorney that the Ninth Circuit would almost certainly rule in favor of the BLM and USFS.  He said the United States government was not concerned if Judge Jones ruled against them because the DOJ could get any decision they wanted out of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

            Consistent with the Justice Department’s prediction, the Ninth Circuit panel issued a scathing ruling reversing all of the trial court’s decisions, excoriating Judge Jones for supposed bias against the government Defendants. Wayne N. Hage and the Estate of E. Wayne Hage are appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

         The ruling from the Ninth Circuit runs contrary to 150 years of western water law and precedent as well as the laws governing the infrastructure across federally administered lands in the West.  It denies that there is right of access to vested livestock watering rights.   The Ninth Circuit decision, as handed down by the three-judge panel, is also in direct conflict with the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in the related case, Hage v. U.S., (1991), (between the same parties regarding the same property).  There the Court recognized access as an essential component of a water right.  If a right to access to a vested water right can be subject to a government bureaucrats will, either in its use or its maintenance, then you have no water right.  A person’s ownership of water becomes a mirage.  State law no longer controls the time, place, or manner of use of water.  A federal agency, and more particularly a federal bureaucrat, would now control the access to that water. 

         In addition to a conflict between rulings in two different federal courts, due to the appellate panel’s brazen violations of the appellate rules of procedure regarding findings of fact and other procedural errors, analysts believe there is an increased likelihood that the U.S. Supreme Court will review the Ninth Circuit Court’s ruling.   (Analysis of U.S. v. Hage and Court Decisions are available upon request.)

         In order for the Ninth Circuit to overturn the findings of the trial court in U.S. v. Hage, they had no option but to assert Judge Jones had bias against the government Defendants.  Under the rules of appellate procedure the Ninth Circuit was bound by Judge Jones’ findings of fact, unless the justices went to the extraordinary measure of finding the judge had bias and had abused his discretion, which they did.  Interestingly, Judge Jones was not the only trier of fact to make such findings.  Chief Judge Loren Smith, from the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington D.C., after hearing similar testimony during two separate trials in the related case of Hage v. U.S. (1991), made virtually identical findings of fact.  Two well respected, experienced jurists, both Chief Judges of their respective courts, separated by the width of the country, separated by decades of hearings, having nothing in common but considering the conduct of the U.S. Forest Service and BLM employees against the Hage family, both reached virtually identical conclusions. 

         Two generations of the Hage family, beginning during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, have spent nearly 40 years in courts defending their Constitutionally protected property interests in federally administered land and their right to be allowed to graze their livestock around their vested waters as Congress clearly sanctioned.   They have prevailed in three administrative appeals.  They have successfully litigated three substantial federal court cases at the trial level in two separate federal courts.  They have successfully defended their vested water rights against competing claims by the United States in a state water adjudication.  The courts in multiple published decisions have repeatedly recognized their vested water rights, easements, rights-of-ways, forage, and improvements on federally administered land.  Those rights stand on appeal in the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. 

         It is only the Ninth Circuit three-judge panel, after a 45 minute hearing, which determined that they are better arbiters of the truth than the two judges from two separate federal courts who actually saw the evidence and heard witnesses testify over a combined period of 43 trial days.  The Ninth Circuit panel, in reaching their desired outcome in U.S. v. Hage has managed to significantly diminish western water law and the laws governing rights of ways for roads, ditches and canals across federally administered lands, leaving the Hages no choice but to seek relief at the U.S. Supreme Court. (Analysis of U.S. v. Hage and Court Decisions are available upon request.)   

        

# # # # #

For those who support the Hages and their efforts to protect western water rights and ranching, donations to help fund the Supreme Court appeal would be greatly appreciated.  Tax-deductible donations are being accepted and earmarked for U.S. v. Hage by:

Protect the Harvest

480 Southpoint Circle

Brownsburg, IN 46112

Phone:  (844) 360-8300; Email: info@protecttheharvest.com.

(Please identify as being for “U.S. v. Hage”)

Direct contributions can also be sent directly to:

Wayne N. Hage

P.O. Box 513

Tonopah, NV 89049

Analysis of U.S. v. Hage and Court Decisions available upon request.  Also, for those interested in filing Amicus or Friend of the Court Briefs, contact:

Ramona Hage Morrison

(775) 722-2517

rhmorrison@sbcglobal.net

Mark Pollot, Esq.

(208) 867-8389

ConResCtr@cableone.net

For a Summary of Hage saga:

FOX NEWS SPECIAL, “Enemies of the State”

https://youtu.be/67yR-Gj5u70

“Enemies of the State” (shorter version)

https://youtu.be/wJpapKqv2mE

Range Magazine Article and Winner of the “Freedom of the Press Award”

Click on article in red titled, “Eye of the Storm”

http://www.rangemagazine.com/features/winter-13/range-wi13-contents.htm

BIG AL'S (Gore) CLIMATE CHIMES MAKE BILLIONS! Cha Ching!

Deep-sixing another useful climate myth

The vaunted “97% consensus” on dangerous manmade global warming is just more malarkey

David R. Legates

By now, virtually everyone has heard that “97% of scientists agree:  Climate change is real, manmade and dangerous.” Even if you weren’t one of his 31 million followers who received this tweet from President Obama, you most assuredly have seen it repeated everywhere as scientific fact.

The correct representation is “yes,” “some,” and “no.” Yes, climate change is real. There has never been a period in Earth’s history when the climate has not changed somewhere, in one way or another. 

People can and do have some influence on our climate. For example, downtown areas are warmer than the surrounding countryside, and large-scale human development can affect air and moisture flow. But humans are by no means the only source of climate change. The Pleistocene ice ages, Little Ice Age and monster hurricanes throughout history underscore our trivial influence compared to natural forces.

As for climate change being dangerous, this is pure hype based on little fact. Mile-high rivers of ice burying half of North America and Europe were disastrous for everything in their path, as they would be today. Likewise for the plummeting global temperatures that accompanied them. An era of more frequent and intense hurricanes would also be calamitous; but actual weather records do not show this.

It would be far more deadly to implement restrictive energy policies that condemn billions to continued life without affordable electricity – or to lower living standards in developed countries – in a vain attempt to control the world’s climate. In much of Europe, electricity prices have risen 50% or more over the past decade, leaving many unable to afford proper wintertime heat, and causing thousands to die.

Moreover, consensus and votes have no place in science. History is littered with theories that were long denied by “consensus” science and politics: plate tectonics, germ theory of disease, a geocentric universe. They all underscore how wrong consensus can be.

Science is driven by facts, evidence and observations – not by consensus, especially when it is asserted by deceitful or tyrannical advocates. As Einstein said, “A single experiment can prove me wrong.”

During this election season, Americans are buffeted by polls suggesting which candidate might become each party’s nominee or win the general election. Obviously, only the November “poll” counts.

Similarly, several “polls” have attempted to quantify the supposed climate change consensus, often by using simplistic bait-and-switch tactics. “Do you believe in climate change?” they may ask.

Answering yes, as I would, places you in the President’s 97% consensus and, by illogical extension, implies you agree it is caused by humans and will be dangerous. Of course, that serves their political goal of gaining more control over energy use.

The 97% statistic has specific origins. Naomi Oreskes is a Harvard professor and author of Merchants of Doubt, which claims those who disagree with the supposed consensus are paid by Big Oil to obscure the truth. In 2004, she claimed to have examined the abstracts of 928 scientific papers and found a 100% consensus with the claim that the “Earth’s climate is being affected by human activities.”

Of course, this is probably true, as it is unlikely that any competent scientist would say humans have no impact on climate. However, she then played the bait-and-switch game to perfection – asserting that this meant “most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

However, one dissenter is enough to discredit the entire study, and what journalist would believe any claim of 100% agreement? In addition, anecdotal evidence suggested that 97% was a better figure. So 97% it was.

Then in 2010, William Anderegg and colleagues concluded that “97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support … [the view that] … anthropogenic greenhouse gases have been responsible for most of the unequivocal warming of the Earth’s average global temperature” over a recent but unspecified time period. (Emphasis in original.)

To make this extreme assertion, Anderegg et al. compiled a database of 908 climate researchers who published frequently on climate topics, and identified those who had “signed statements strongly dissenting from the views” of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The 97–98% figure is achieved by counting those who had not signed such statements.

Silence, in Anderegg’s view, meant those scientists agreed with the extreme view that most warming was due to humans. However, nothing in their papers suggests that all those researchers believed humans had caused most of the planetary warming, or that it was dangerous.

The most recent 97% claim was posited by John Cook and colleagues in 2013. They evaluated abstracts from nearly 12,000 articles published over a 21-year period and sorted them into seven categories, ranging from “explicit, quantified endorsement” to “explicit, quantified rejection” of their alleged consensus: that recent warming was caused by human activity, not by natural variability. They concluded that “97.1% endorsed the consensus position.”

However, two-thirds of all those abstracts took no position on anthropogenic climate change. Of the remaining abstracts (not the papers or scientists), Cook and colleagues asserted that 97.1% endorsed their hypothesis that humans are the sole cause of recent global warming.

Again, the bait-and-switch was on full display. Any assertion that humans play a role was interpreted as meaning humans are the sole cause. But many of those scientists subsequently said publicly that Cook and colleagues had misclassified their papers – and Cook never tried to assess whether any of the scientists who wrote the papers actually thought the observed climate changes were dangerous.

My own colleagues and I did investigate their analysis more closely. We found that only 41 abstracts of the 11,944 papers Cook and colleagues reviewed – a whopping 0.3% – actually endorsed their supposed consensus. It turns out they had decided that any paper which did not provide an explicit, quantified rejection of their supposed consensus was in agreement with the consensus. Moreover, this decision was based solely on Cook and colleagues’ interpretation of just the abstracts, and not the articles themselves.  In other words, the entire exercise was a clever sleight-of-hand trick.

What is the real figure? We may never know. Scientists who disagree with the supposed consensus – that climate change is manmade and dangerous – find themselves under constant attack.

Harassment by Greenpeace and other environmental pressure groups, the media, federal and state government officials, and even universities toward their employees (myself included) makes it difficult for many scientists to express honest opinions. Recent reports about Senator Whitehouse and Attorney-General Lynch using RICO laws to intimidate climate “deniers” further obscure meaningful discussion. 

Numerous government employees have told me privately that they do not agree with the supposed consensus position – but cannot speak out for fear of losing their jobs. And just last week, a George Mason University survey found that nearly one-third of American Meteorological Society members were willing to admit that at least half of the climate change we have seen can be attributed to natural variability.

Climate change alarmism has become a $1.5-trillion-a-year industry – which guarantees it is far safer and more fashionable to pretend a 97% consensus exists, than to embrace honesty and have one’s global warming or renewable energy funding go dry.

The real danger is not climate change – it is energy policies imposed in the name of climate change. It’s time to consider something else Einstein said: “The important thing is not to stop questioning.” And then go see the important new documentary film, The Climate Hustle, coming soon to a theater near you.

David R. Legates, PhD, CCM, is a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware.

BIG GREEN JOB-KILLING MACHINE!

The Big Green job-killing machine

Environmentalists wield powerful Endangered Species Act to kill jobs, impoverish families

Ron Arnold                     

The abuse of environmentalist power to hurt people never stops.

“Another one gone,” began the Lost Coast Outpost’s report in late January. A.A. “Red” Emmerson, chairman of Sierra Pacific Industries, announced the permanent closure of its sawmill on Samoa Peninsula in Arcata, California – with the loss of 123 crew member jobs (and over 100 secondary jobs that depended on sawmill employment).

Regulatory burdens and reduced allowable harvests from federal forests are the primary reasons for the closure, Emmerson said.

The shutdown of the last mill on once-bustling Humboldt Bay this year was just the latest loss in the timber industry’s long and steady decline under relentless environmentalist pressure and U.S. Forest Service complicity.

A year earlier the North Coast Journal had sadly bid “Goodnight, Korbel” when Arcata’s neighbor lost its 131-year-old sawmill, its 106 direct jobs and numerous local indirect positions. The Pulp & Paperworkers’ Resource Council had previously released its 119-page “Mill Curtailments & Closures From 1990,” counting more than 1,700 nationwide timber-related casualties from 1990 through 2012.

All this damage was launched by the ionic 1991 Spotted Owl court ruling won by a local bird group, Seattle Audubon Society – initially with separate plaintiff Portland (Oregon) Audubon Society – against logging in Washington, Oregon and California.

The owl ruling has been so devastating because Judge William L. Dwyer, of Washington State’s federal district court, granted and stretched Seattle Audubon’s demands to the impossible.

Using the “regional biogeography” principle from a federal “Spotted Owl Task Force” decision, Dywer ruled, “The duty to maintain viable populations of existing vertebrate species requires planning for the entire biological community – not for one species alone. It is distinct from the duty, under the Endangered Species Act, to save a listed species from extinction.”

But even wildlife specialists did not know and could not explain what the “entire biological community” of the three-state area was.

Industry analyst Paul Ehinger & Associates of Eugene, Oregon found that, after just five years, Dwyer’s Seattle Audubon ruling had shut down 187 mills and wiped out 22,654 jobs throughout the three states.

The toll expanded like the Big Bang, and running totals are no longer tracked. A few well-off Seattle industry-haters and a liberal judge who paid little attention to the human toll set in motion a curse without end, the “progressive” destruction of the jobs, incomes, hopes and dreams of thousands.

The Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson, Arizona is a legal action environmental group that sues to block human action and doesn’t care who gets hurt. The leader of its three co-founders, Kieran Suckling, had been an activist in the 1980s’ vandalism and sabotage group, Earth First! (The exclamation point was a mandatory identifier.)

Hatred of industry – and the people who ran it – prompted the founders to seek ways to permanently stop natural resource use and led them to form the CBD in 1994. With the help of environmental attorneys, CBD “weaponized” the Endangered Species Act against ranchers, loggers, miners, and human activity in general. That law now trumps virtually everything else.

In fact, about the only time the act doesn’t seem to apply is when gigantic wind turbines slaughter hundreds of thousands of eagles, hawks, falcons, other birds and bats, year after year, nearly eradicating them and “entire biological communities” across vast areas in California, Oregon and elsewhere.

The organization’s self-description says, “As the country's leading endangered species advocates, the Center for Biological Diversity works through science, law and creative media to secure a future for all species, great or small, hovering on the brink of extinction.”

Extremism is a mild term to describe CBD’s blanket enmity to human action. It has even crossed the traditional environmentalist line that protected and revered Native Americans as “people of nature.”

The group joined a federal lawsuit last year to block essential expansion of The Navajo Mine, south of Farmington, New Mexico. The mine sits on a Navajo reservation and is owned by the Navajo Transitional Energy Company (NTEC), a wholly owned subsidiary of the Navajo Nation’s sprawling tribal government.

The mine was established for the sole purpose of delivering all its coal to the nearby Four Corners Power Plants: five coal-fired power plants, majority-owned and operated by the Arizona Public Service Company, to provide electricity to California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

In the process, it generated 800 mine and power plant jobs, many of them Navajos, and $40 million in annual revenue to the Navajo Nation. NTEC was granted a federal permit to expand the mine.

However, the CBD was determined to stop the expansion and shut down the mine via a huge lawsuit. It helped organize a coalition of co-plaintiffs including little local groups such as Amigos Bravos, San Juan Citizens Alliance, and Dine [Navajo] Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, as well as the $100-million-a-year Sierra Club and the powerful Western Environmental Law Center.

The attack by CBD et al. won a Colorado federal judge’s order nullifying the expansion permit. The order was confirmed by the Tenth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals when NTEC lost an appeal for a stay on the lower court’s ruling. Even with that victory, the CBD gang insisted that ongoing mining must also halt, pending a new environmental review of alleged public health and environmental risks from the mine expansion: from pollutants that are actually a minor problem at these technologically advanced and well-run Navajo facilities.

Only the Navajo Nation’s sovereignty, an environmental review and agreements with the EPA to fight regional haze by closing three of the plant’s five units and installing emission controls on the remaining two plants saved some of the jobs and revenue – for now. Of course, all that could change as the CBD gang fights on, threatening to sue the federal permitting agency.

Lost jobs of course mean seriously impaired living standards, health and welfare for unemployed workers and their families. But for the CBD and judges, those concerns are irrelevant.

In January, the Farmington Daily Times reported that the town’s San Juan College received a $1.4 million federal grant to help retrain displaced coal miners and workers in other industries, including oil and gas. But oil and gas operations are also under assault by the CBD gang and various federal agencies, which are using climate change, the EPA’s Clean Power Plan and other regulations to restrict or eliminate leasing, drilling and other resource extraction on western lands.

Clearly, even the sovereignty that comes with being a federally recognized Indian tribe on an established reservation provides no protection against a weaponized Endangered Species Act. Other communities, industries, workers and families are even more powerless.

Once again, poor, minority and working class families are at the mercy of wealthy ruling elites, for whom exaggerated and even fabricated environmental concerns are paramount. It’s wrong, and it has to end.

Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, author of ten books on environmentalist excesses, and editor of the Undue Influence website, which exposes leftist funding and practices.