Pope Francis and Climatism

National Geographic published a fascinating article on his Holiness, Pope Francis. Robert Draper and Dave Yoder, who gained unprecedented access to the pope, wrote about and photographed the pope extensively.

The Conclave chose the former Argentinian, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, and “vaulted him from relative obscurity into the papacy.  To many observers – some delighted, other discomfited – the new pope already had changed seemingly everything, seemingly overnight.”  http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/08/vatican/draper-text

One of the images of archbishop Bergoglio, an Argentinian born of Italian parents, was showing the archbishop kneeling on stage in front of “men of lesser status.” The picture was published by Cabildo, a conservative Catholic journal, with the caption “apostata.”

Self-described as a “callejero,” the Jesuit priest frequently visited the ghetto and rode the subway, a “wanderer” in search of lost souls. He was made bishop in 1992 and cardinal in 2001.

Massimo Franco, a Roman author, explained his meteoric rise. “His election arose from a trauma – from the sudden (and for nearly six centuries, unprecedented) resignation of the sitting pope, Benedict XVI, and from the mounting sentiment among more progressive cardinals that the hoary and Eurocentric mind-set of the Holy See was rotting the Catholic Church from within.”

The beautiful Catholic Churches in Europe are rather empty of parishioners on most days; they are fabulous museums where tourists admire the icons, the tombs of the famous statesmen and former popes, statues, and reliquaries with a sense of reverence, admiration, appreciation, and awe. Occasionally some tourists do pray.

Robert Draper reported that Pope Francis does not wear a bulletproof vest because, Francis told his friend, Norberto Saracco, “The Lord has put me here. He’ll have to look out for me.”

Highly independent, Pope Francis accompanied a friend to the elevator at the end of a visit so that, he joked, … I can be sure you don’t take anything with you.” Regarding his independent spirit, Robert Draper quoted the Vatican spokesman, “In a sense, this is positive, because in the past there were criticisms that someone had too much power over the pope. They cannot say this is the case now.”

Changes in the Vatican happen with any new pope. But Ramiro de la Serna, Franciscan priest from Buenos Aires said, “I believe we haven’t yet seen the real changes. And I also believe we haven’t seen the real resistance yet either.”

Uncomfortable with the Swiss Guards following him everywhere for his own safety, Draper writes that the pope has eventually “resigned to their near-constant presence.” Bemoaning the fact that he cannot walk the streets of Rome like he used to walk in the streets of Buenos Aires, he feels “penned in.”

Pope Francis admits that he never follows his impulses because “the first answer that comes to me is usually wrong,” he said.

People have criticized the pope for embracing an imam, Omar Abboud, after praying with him and the rabbi Skorka at the Western Wall.

Graciously, Pope Francis gives sage advice to engaged couples. “The perfect family doesn’t exist, nor is there a perfect husband or a perfect wife, and let’s not talk about the perfect mother-in-law! It’s just us sinners.” In response to a question about gay priests, Draper reported that the pope had said, “Who am I to judge?”

The pope seems to be shaking Vatican and revolutionize the world. Draper believes that “This would appear to be the pope’s mission: to ignite a revolution inside the Vatican and beyond its walls, without overturning a host of long-held precepts.” He quotes la Serna, the pope’s Argentinian friend, “He won’t change doctrine. What he will do is return the church to its true doctrine – the one it has forgotten, the one that puts man back in the center. By putting the suffering of man, and his relationship with God, back in the center, these harsh attitudes toward homosexuality, divorce, and other things will start to change.”

His climate change encyclical and the invitation to address the U.S. Congress in the fall are evidence that he is hugely successful. He has inserted himself into the global warming debacle now turned into a veritable industry of climate change, a wealth redistribution scheme to combat poverty around the globe, and an attempt to control every facet of our lives through environmentalism, led by the United Nations with its many organizations staffed by third world bureaucrats and developed world socialists/Marxists.

In late July 2015, sixty environmentally-friendly mayors from cities like Boston, Boulder, New York City, San Francisco, Oslo, Stockholm, New Orleans, Birmingham (Alabama), Vancouver, Libreville (Gabon), Siquirres (Costa Rica), and Kochi (India) met for a two-day conference in Vatican City to pledge to the pope to reduce global warming and to help the urban poor deal with the onslaught of global warming which seems to affect them disproportionately while the rest of “the working class” are experiencing cooler temperatures due to seasonal changes.

These mayors belong to the Carbon Neutral Cities Alliance and have committed themselves to reducing CO2 emissions by “at least 80 percent by 2050.” Gov. Jerry Brown of California is the leader, having “enacted the toughest greenhouse gas emission standards in North America.”

At the conclusion of the two-day conference, mayors were also asked to sign a declaration against slavery and human trafficking.

Mayor Gregor Robertson of Vancouver signed the declaration  that states “human-induced climate change is a scientific reality and its effective control is a moral imperative for humanity.” So the “climatism” rhetoric has changed now from “consensus science is settled” to “human imperative.”

Mayor William Bell of Birmingham, Alabama, discussed segregation as he experienced it, a “close-cousin to slavery,” he said. He was elated to follow the pope’s call to end all forms of modern-day slavery.

Oslo’s mayor Stian Berger Rosland was cheered by his colleagues when he announced that he was “the first Catholic mayor of Oslo since the Reformation.”

Monica Fein of Argentina’s Mercociudades (Network of cities in Latin America) stated her goal, “We want sustainable development, without excluding the extremely poor” and “We fundamentally want to leave our children and future generations with a planet that isn’t contaminated.”

Madrid’s leftist mayor, Manuela Carmena, stated that sexual slavery occurs in the world because “society has not been educated enough about sexuality” and prostitution exists. The mayors heard the testimony of two Mexican women who were victims of modern-day slavery.

San Francisco mayor, Edwin Lee, pledged to “completely phase out the use of petroleum diesel” in its city’s vehicle fleet and replace them with renewable diesel by the end of 2015.

The New Orleans mayor, Mitch Landrieu, warned about environmental degradation, citing the case of New Orleans and its Hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005, including the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. His city supplies one-quarter of all the seafood produced in the U.S. and more oil and gas to the U.S. than Saudi Arabia. “But that economic benefit comes at a cost,” he said.

Mayor Chammany of Kochi talked about the Indian caste system, “one of the worst forms of slavery known to man.”

Mayor of Stockholm stated that the 2015 Paris conference must “exclude fossil fuels as an option and just focus on long-term sustainable energy sources.” Mayor Karin Wanngaard proudly announced that 75 percent of her city’s public transportation runs on renewable energy. Her goal is to make Stockholm fossil-fuel free by 2040.

The mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, promised to reduce New York City’s emissions 40 percent by 2030.

Jerry Brown, the governor of California had very harsh words for climate skeptics – they are “seeking to falsify the scientific record” in the process of trying to “bamboozle” the public with their propaganda, putting “troglodytes” in office rather than environmentally-responsible leaders. These bamboozlers try to convince scientists, politicians, and the public that global warming is a fraud. The climate change skeptics are “deniers of the obvious science.” I am not sure what the definition of “obvious science” is, it must be a close cousin to consensus science, certainly not based on fact. http://cruxnow.com/life/2015/07/21/updates-on-the-mayors-conference-at-the-vatican/

Robertson said that “Vancouver is among a group of cities focused on eliminating fossil fuels and shifting towards 100 percent renewable energy.” That will be interesting to watch. http://vancouverobserver.com/news/vancouver-mayor-energized-vatican-climate-conference

The Vatican tried to connect climate change with human trafficking by claiming that global warming is responsible for creating “environmental refugees” who flee their homes because of drought or other climate-caused natural disasters. This begs the question, was climate change responsible for slavery in Egypt, in the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East, Africa, or modern slaves in Islamic cultures?

The Paris climate negotiations in December (Who would have thought that humans could modify climate and negotiate it?) will have a final declaration that states, among other things, that “human-induced climate change is a scientific reality and its effective control is a moral imperative for humanity.”

The document demands not just transition to low-carbon and renewable energy, but making “urgent investments” in sustainable development, rich countries footing the investment bill for the poor countries and divesting away from the military. Who needs an army, a navy, or an air force when the world is so peaceful and non-threatening?

As my good friend Chriss R. pointed out, this was an extraordinary event for Marxist politicians from around the globe to meet at the Vatican with the pope to discuss something that has nothing to do with religion or the salvation of souls. Furthermore, who paid for the very expensive trip of each mayor who flew to Rome on 60 different jets spewing carbon into the atmosphere?

If it was the taxpayers, how does that sit with atheists and spiritualists for their politicians to chat up a religious leader? Don’t they usually reject the church and vociferously demand separation of church and state? If it was the Catholic Church that paid for the trip of all these socialists, why did the church not use the money to help the starving poor instead?

Pope Francis is quoted by National Geographic as having said, “It’s very entertaining to be Pope.” Is it helpful to use a powerful moral authority to influence something that is not real, has no basis in real science or fact, and it will definitely cause more poverty around the globe?

The deep de-carbonization meeting in Paris, The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) is likely to draw at least 10,000 government and UN representatives, all arriving on carbon-spewing jets. But the rules of the new climatism science are just for ordinary people, not for those who control the world. http://cop21.gouv.fr/en

Deep decarbonizing is a must for the masses. As Dr. Klaus Kaiser stated, “How else can you reduce the world population from 7 to 8 billion to fewer than one billion which Professor HJ Schellnhuber opines as necessary? He is the director of the Potsdam Institut fuer Klimafolgenforschung,” a German government-sponsored entity for “climate impact research.” The Pontiff named “Schellnhuber to the 400-year old institution of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (PAS).” Schellnhuber is the co-author of the encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si. http://canadafreepress.com/article/74512

 

The Climate Change Industry Changes the Energy Market

Countries and companies around the globe have spent trillions of dollars to stop the Earth from warming and the Earth did not get the message, it responded by cooling.  Not to worry, environmentalists who were blatantly wrong and tried to say that cooling is part of global warming, changed their golden goose agenda to climate change. Even though climate change is real, it is called seasons, critics of the climate change industry, of climatism, have been marginalized under the rubric of global warming heretic deniers.

The United Nations came up with a clever scheme to convince the world that the “Four Horsemen of Environmental Apocalypse, overpopulation, resource depletion, pollution, and climate devastation” will annihilate humanity as we know it. The Club of Rome, premier environmental think-tank, consultants to the United Nations, explained how they succeeded:

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

According to Dr. Steve Goreham, with the establishment of U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, “climatism was born and controlling carbon has become a bureaucrat’s dream.”

World’s leaders, politicians, corporations, universities, and NGOs have been captivated by the climate change industry even though the theory of global warming has failed miserably and all the climate models were proven wrong. They declared war on fossil fuels and waged it with a vengeance at the expense of taxpayers and electricity users.

Suddenly using too much energy derived from coal, oil, and natural gas became a sin even though energy is the driver of global prosperity. Environmentalists have decided to deny the same opportunity for prosperity from cheap fossil fuel energy to millions of citizens of third world nations, forcing them instead into expensive solar and wind energy they cannot afford. Hydrocarbons became the black sheep, and billions and billions in subsidies were spent to make room for renewables.

“It's in our interest - and we wouldn't be able to stop it anyway - for the poorer countries, which only are responsible for about 20 percent of the globe's pollution, to develop, but they should develop according to a different path, a different industrial prescription than we did.”  (Michael Oppenheimer on This Week with David Brinkley, 31 May 1992) http://www.princeton.edu/step/people/faculty/michael-oppenheimer/in-the-news/Correcting-Glenn-Beck-.pdf

Environmental NGOs lectured impressionable students that nobody should be drilling at all because fossil fuels destroy the planet, we should pay $10 per gallon like Europe, use renewables and learn to live modestly on solar and wind,  if we can afford them. If we must return to medieval living to save one of God’s creatures, then we should.  It is getting serious when even the oil producers have bought into climatism.

But environmentalists are not all equal. They want electricity to their smart devices that use more power than a refrigerator. They want tents, shoes, sunglasses, caps, and clothes made from hydrocarbons but they are protesting fossil fuels. They want their Priuses and electric cars but have no idea that the electricity to power them comes from hydrocarbons. Some enviro-denizens are Nimby (Not in My Back Yard) when it comes to unsightly wind turbines. Others are Banana (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything). And yet others are Nope (Not On Planet Earth). There is too much oil, “enough to deep fry the planet.”

Dr. Steve Goreham, Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America, and author of Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, described the collateral damage from the war on hydrocarbons using Europe as an example of an “energy disaster unfolding.” He said, “there are 487 national climate change laws in 66 nations” and they are hurting the economies of those respective countries.

Europe is a basket case of subsidized and mandated renewables that has resulted in higher electricity rates for customers, causing electricity penury among some of the citizens of Germany. Giving renewables output priority, energy from other sources like nuclear, hydropower, and fossil fuels was scaled back.  Germany shut down nuclear power plants and Germany and France banned hydraulic fracturing. The market for electricity and wholesale prices became dependent on the mercy of weather and wind, regardless of demand.

There was a massive installation of solar panels in Germany even though Germany is not exactly the sunshine state.  Spain decided to use Diesel generation for its solar panels because the solar panel electricity was too expensive, 23 cents per kWh. The ugly wind turbines everywhere produced inefficient and undependable electricity.

Dr. Goreham also mentioned that some countries imported wood from Alabama to burn as electricity generator instead of dirty coal. The Green Revolution has been so expensive for Europeans that subsidies were dropping in every area, followed by layoffs in the renewable industry. The wind industry in the U.S. gets 2.3 cents per kWh in tax credit in order to compete.

Even though IPCC said that “burning biomass is carbon neutral,” the reality is that biofuels release as much or more carbon dioxide than coal does. And the trading of carbon on the carbon markets is failing. People can pay all the carbon footprint taxes in the world and it will not make a bit of difference in the actual CO2 in the atmosphere. It will just make the traders and the companies richer.

Dr. Fred Singer, physicist and emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, reminded us that the climate change industry does not take into account the CO2 emissions from operation and maintenance of renewables such as how often these devices must be replaced (solar panels, wind turbines, parts, lubricants), and the transmission costs. Wind and solar power does emit CO2 in the construction process, during the mining of the metals used, lubricants, etc.

Even the President blamed the low GDP on cold weather. Perhaps it is time for global warmists turned climatists to be exposed again.

Honest scientists say that we have enough fossil fuels reserves for centuries of use. In the world’s economy renewables should compete without subsidies, we should worry about the Smart Grid’s vulnerability from hackers, solar flares, and EMPs, we should conserve energy wisely, protect nature sensibly, and let the carbon credits scheme go into the trash bin of expensive hustles.

 

 

 

Real Science and the Nebulous Consensus Science

Dr. Fred Singer
Professor Emeritus

Several presentations at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Ontario, California, dealt with the issues of anthropogenic global warming promoted by the climate change industry.

Dr. S. Fred Singer, founder of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), and Ken Haapala, current president of SEPP, discussed the “National Environment Assessment: Peeling the Speculative Onion.” Haapala spoke of “climate fears and finance” and our government’s limitations on CO2 emissions as a “policy in search of a problem.”

Because the global warming (climate change) predictions have proven inaccurate, the fear of non-existent anthropogenic global warming should be called correctly “projections,” said Haapala. “None of the models have undergone the rigorous scientific testing required for verification and validation.”

Satellite images taken since December 1978 provided the most rigorous and comprehensive data measured in the mid-troposphere. It is where the greenhouse gas effect takes place. According to Haapala, four sets of measurements taken with weather balloons by two independent groups agree closely.  But a weather balloon does not cover the globe “comprehensively” and surface measurements are taken on land when 71 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by oceans.

Haapala said that “there is good agreement between the average of the two sets of satellite measurements and the average of the four sets of weather balloon measurements, but significant disparity between the average of the model runs and the observations. This disparity is increasing over time.” Because model runs are expensive and time consuming, many of the models proposed by climate change promoters have “only one or two runs.”

Haapala used a graph of global mid-tropospheric temperature 5-year averages of Warming Predictions v. the Real World, graph developed by McNider and Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, to illustrate the wide-gap comparison between 102 model runs and observations. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303945704579391611041331266

Dr. Fred Singer proposed re-directing public concern from Global Warming (GW) to Global Cooling (GC), including a drastic shift in current policies, “abandoning all mitigation of the greenhouse (GH) gas carbon dioxide.”

An expert in remote sensing and satellites with a specialty in atmospheric and space physics, founding Director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service and Vice Chair of the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, Dr. Singer is of the opinion that “a near-term cooling is among the major calamities facing the population on our planet – while concern about global warming is entirely misplaced. A Little Ice Age (DOB cooling) may arrive within decades – perhaps even sooner. The end of our warm Holocene inter-glacial is rapidly approaching.” He suggested that there is little time to lose in survival preparations and a paradigm change from global warming (GW) to global cooling (GC) is vital.

DOB (Dansgaard-Oeschger-Bond) warming-cooling cycles are solar-controlled and have periods of approximately 1000-1500 years. The most recent cooling phase of the Little Ice Age ended about 200 years ago. Singer and Avery’s 2007 book, Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years, makes a scientific case for these cycles.

Based on deep-sea sediment cores and ice cores scientists are “reasonably sure” of global cooling while rather shaky on global warming. According to Dr. Fred Singer, Earth has experienced “17 Milankovitch-style glaciations in the past 2 million years, each typically lasting 100,000 years, interrupted by warm ‘inter-glacials,’ typically of around 10,000-year duration. The most recent glaciation ended rather suddenly about 12,000 years ago.” He expects the current warm Holocene to end soon. He believes we “have already entered into the next glaciation” which will be discovered in retrospect.

Dr. Singer believes that Little Ice Ages are not “as severe as the major glaciations,” but “present an important threat to the food supply and to current civilization.” Human survival would be possible in developed nations based on available technology but warfare will become a main threat driven by shortages of food and other essential resources.

Dr. Willie Soon, an astrophysicist who authored The Maunder Minimum and The Variable Sun-Earth Connection, discussed the topic of “How Clean is ‘Clean?’ A Common-Sense Proposal.”  Taking aim at the “half-truth + half-truth must make a whole truth” paradigm, which he called a “lie,” Dr. Soon embarked on describing the imagined environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels such as human impact issues regulated by the EPA, an organization that loves to tell people how to live.

“Silencing the people who tell the truth about science cannot stand,” Dr. Soon continued.  Ordinary people do not understand that as an honest scientist, “I do not care where the funding is coming from, I am only interested in the scientific truth,” I want to speed up finding out the truth.

Air pollution should have people dropping dead by now, if you are to believe the global warming alarmists. “Where are the bodies,” he asks? We should drop industrial activity, they say. Showing Beijing as an example of air pollution, the “data is all over the place” measured from 1998 until now.  

If Beijing is so polluted as to kill quickly, Soon said, how do you explain the polluted air levels in a smoking lounge at the airport where nobody really drops dead? Levels of particulate matter (pm 2.5 air quality standards also known as fine particle pollution) are much higher in bars and restaurants in South Korea, for example.

Dr. Soon described how he chased study after study to find out evidence that the $9 billion given to Beijing Olympics Committee to improve air quality (the pm2.5), actually worked. “We know the air quality is bad and people cry when reading the paper in Beijing. What did they do?  Shutting down the factories around to get some clean air. How much did they reduce the emission levels?” He found nothing definitive after a long chase of study after study.

Dr. Soon continued that the data shows, for example, that the air in Delhi or Santiago, Chile is more polluted than Beijing on certain days. Can you control the dust particle concentrations from dust storms in Saudi Arabia, Mongolia, or anyplace there is a desert?  There are serious exaggerations coming from the EPA in regards to sudden death from particulate matter in the air. “There is a lot of politics with no scientific evidence to support the case,” Dr. Soon explained.

“The air is getting cleaner yet more people are suffering from asthma.” Are air pollutants causing the problem, asked Dr. Soon? Is it a health crisis? Yet the EPA refuses to release their science data even during testimony in Congress. Dr. Soon added that the EPA administrator said in essence, “You are going to see only what we want you to see.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJaUO2ZFrX4

Dr. Willie Soon co-authored a paper on “Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide” which concluded that CO2 increases in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries “have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth’s weather and climate.” Higher CO2 levels have increased “markedly” plant growth.  http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/other/increasedco2effects.html

The Heartland Institute shared through its Science Director, Dr. Jay Lehr, the following environmental truths about climate change:

1.       Climate alarmism is promoted through selective MSM reporting.

2.       Temperatures around the globe have not risen since 1998.

3.       Climate has been changing for eons and it is “neither unusual nor harmful.”

4.       Antarctic ice is growing “far more than Arctic ice is melting.”

5.       “900,000 years of ice core records show continuous 1,500-year warming cycles.”

6.       When Greenland was green in the 13^th century, temperatures were seven degrees F warmer.

7.       Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is a necessary gas for plant life just like oxygen is necessary for humans to survive.

8.       CO2 concentration levels have risen historically after, not before warming periods.

9.       “Computer models used to forecast future warming cannot calculate the known past.”

10.   $5 billion is spent annually to prove that man (anthropogenic) caused global warming.

While honest scientists are debating and arguing with incontrovertible facts against the nebulous consensus science fed to the climate change industry which is worth potential trillions, an EPA cleanup crew that was supposed to pump out and decontaminate harmful sludge instead “destabilized a dam of loose rocks lodged in the Gold King Mine near Durango and released it into tiny Cement Creek.” As it flowed into the Animas River, the toxic slurry of arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum, and cadmium reached other tributaries, San Juan and Colorado rivers, and flowed 80-miles from the closed mine site. The Navajo Nation president, Russell Begaye, is planning on suing the EPA. “They are not going to get away with this,” he said. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/10/navajo-nation-aims-to-sue-epa-over-devastating-mining-spill/

This sad event begs the questions, while the EPA is helping de-develop the U.S. by over-regulating CO2, the gas necessary for plant life, are they responsibly guarding the actual pollution in our soil and water?

 

 

 

Replacing the EPA

“It’s time for the national EPA to go. The path forward is now clear and simple: A five-year transition from a federal government bureaucracy to a Committee of the Whole composed of the 50 state environmental protection agencies.

Jay Lehr, Ph.D.
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

To those who say this would fail to adequately protect the public’s health or the environment, I urge you to reflect on the poor job currently being done by EPA, and then to meet some of the men and women staffing state EPA offices and see for yourself the sophistication, commitment, and resources they have to do the job. You will not remain doubters for long.”                 -  Jay Lehr, Ph.D.

 

Dr. Jay Lehr, Science Director at the Heartland Institute, gave a speech at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness conference in Ontario, California, on the topic of “Replacing the EPA.” The author of more than 500 articles and editor of 30 books captivated the audience with his bold proposal to eliminate and replace the mammoth Environmental Protection Agency with a smaller organization composed of a committee of six individuals chosen from all 50 states. He called his plan “Addition by Subtraction.”

In his opinion, the 15,000 employees based in Washington, D.C. and in regional offices around the country “do not do useful work whatsoever.”  Dr. Lehr names himself the “most competent person on the planet” to write a proposal for the elimination of the EPA, saving the taxpayers $6.2 billion annually and improving the environmental protection” because he is the “only scientist alive that played a major role in establishing the EPA.”

Among the many pieces of legislation Dr. Lehr helped write are included the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, Surface Mining and Reclamation Act, Clear Air Act, Federal  Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, and Comprehensive  Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (now Superfund).

Dr. Lehr admits in his proposal, “Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency,” that “these acts worked well in protecting the environment and the health of our citizens, with the exception of Superfund, which proved to be too overreaching and wreaked havoc with U.S. business as company operating within the law were fined countless dollars and required to pay huge sums after the fact for clean-up of waste disposal that had been within the law at the time of the activity.” (pp. 1-2)

Viewing his plan as penance, Dr. Lehr found it appropriate and fitting that the person who helped form the EPA (December 2, 1970) should contribute to its dismissal via a plan that took him two years to develop. Dr. Lehr was happy to announce that Governor Scot Walker of Wisconsin, presidential candidate, has adopted this entire EPA replacement plan.

EPA regions of the U.S.

Dr. Lehr served on a panel in 1968 which was tasked by the director of the Bureau of Water Hygiene in the U.S. Department of Health to study the potential to expand the bureau’s oversight into a full environmental protection organization.” The panel succeeded and the EPA was created. He wrote that around 1981 “liberal activist groups recognized EPA could be used to advance their political agenda.”

Referring to England, Lehr quoted Samuel Adams, who wrote on Jan. 20, 1772 in the Boston Gazette, “If the public are bound to yield to obedience to the laws to which they cannot give their approval, they are slaves to those who make such laws and enforce them.”

Unfortunately today, it is not just the EPA, but many other agencies whose unelected officials produce endless regulations, Lehr added. We have an “over-criminalization in this country” because of endless regulations people have no idea exist, rules that Americans “probably break at least once a week.” He continued, “There are now in the federal regulatory handbook, 200 volumes of 80,000 laws, and 300,000 regulations written by various agencies with the EPA number one offender.”

James Madison warned us in the Federalist papers that … “laws should be made by men of their own choosing. If the laws are so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood,” then we have a serious problem.

Dr. Lehr believes that we are subjected today to so many laws that few people can track. “Big Business, Big Government, and Big Special Interests collude to make such laws” that give them advantage over the competition. “We have a warped economy,” Lehr said, “where the rich get richer, with the rest having less opportunity because the big three are gaming the system to gain political influence… They get privilege.”

Enabling the big three who handicap competitors and take full advantage of public subsidies, “EPA is all but a wholly owned subsidiary of liberal activist groups." Its rules account for about half of the nearly $2 trillion a year cost of complying with all national regulations in the U.S.” (Wayne W. Crews, Ten Thousand Commandments, Washington, D.C.:  Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2014)

Calling it a “rogue agency,” Dr. Lehr proposed to replace, not fix the EPA, by systematically dismantling it and replacing it with a Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies. National EPA could be phased out over five years, said Dr. Lehr. “The Committee of the Whole would determine which regulations are actually mandated in law by Congress and which were established by EPA without congressional approval.” (Replacing the Environmental Protection Agency, Jay Lehr, Ph.D., The Heartland Institute, p. 7)

He proposes that “the EPA research laboratories should be left in place at the national level to answer scientific questions, and even these laboratories must be substantially reorganized.” (Ibid, p. 6)

Specifically, 10 regional offices would be established, cutting back the budget from $8.2 billion to $2 billion a year, and reducing staff from over 15,000 to 300 in the national EPA headquarters in Topeka, Kansas. Of the 300 employees working, there will be six delegate-employees from each of the 50 states.

When asked how he would deal with the potential growth of the new EPA, Dr. Lehr admitted that this detail has not been worked out yet. The chairman of the Committee of the Whole would be elected by the 300 delegate-employees to a three-year term.

The drawdown would be:

-          Year One – all employees would be told of the five-year transition period to allow them time for alternate employment; all 300 new employees would transfer, start working, and decide assignments to various subcommittees

-          Year Two – Offices of Policy, Administration and Resource Management, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance will be relocated from Washington and from regional offices to Topeka

-          Year Three – Offices of Air and Radiation and Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention would transfer to Topeka

-          Year Four – Offices of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, and Offices of Water would be moved to Topeka

-          Year Five – Offices of Chief Financial Officer, General Counsel, Environmental Information, and the Office of the Administrator would also move to Topeka.

Transition members would be assigned periodically to Washington, D.C. and to regional offices to study the activities of the existing branches. If attrition is high early on, transfer of responsibility may be earlier than planned. Each state would be allocated $20 million to augment the new responsibilities.

Dr. Lehr, as one of the founders of the EPA, believes strongly that his plan can be implemented “efficiently and quickly.”

 

 

 

 

JPL and Its Spacecraft Exploratory Missions

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

On a recent trip to California, I was constantly reminded of what is wrong with California, a state whose economy was so booming decades ago that, had it been a stand-alone state, it would have been the world’s sixth largest economy.  Looking at this state now, ravaged by years and years of Marxist policies, open borders, unchecked illegal immigration, anchor babies, multiculturalism, insane diversity rules, sanctuary cities, multi-lingual school system, illegal voting, tax everything and tax again, and environmentalist-driven water use plans including but not limited to dumping billions of fresh water into the ocean in order to save the Delta smelt while orchards and fields are starved for water and trees and crops have long dried out.

California is more concerned with smoking habits if you take into account expensive signs posted everywhere announcing in big, bold letters to those who can read English, “Warning: Birth Defects – Tobacco smoke is known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

California is so protective of animals and planets, even wolves and planet Earth need lawyers. Earthjustice was offering their services through a beautiful ad at the airport for the traveling endangered wolves culled by indiscriminate killing.

California was the golden state, the sunshine state, but the gold has long run out, the luster is now tarnished, perhaps golden brown on account of all the dead grasses from the three-year drought.

The new Cassini spacecraft JPL lab
Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

California still does something right, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.  For over fifty years, JPL‘s robotic missions have explored every planet in our solar system. Today, in addition to monitoring Earth and exploring the solar system, JPL “probes deep space in our galaxy and outward to the greater universe.” Managed by the California Institute of Technology for NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center for domestic as well as international entities.

JPL built many firsts:

-          Mariner 2 in 1962, the first successful interplanetary spacecraft

-          Mariner 9 in 1971, the first spacecraft to orbit another planet (Mars)

-          Voyager 2 in 1979-1989, the first tour of the outer planets

-          Galileo in 1997, the first orbit of Jupiter

-          Cassini in 2004, the first orbit of Saturn

-          Deep Impact in 2005, the first comet impact

-          Voyager 1 in 2013, the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space

Cassini is a cooperative mission of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, with other hundreds of scientists and engineers from Europe and the U.S.  The spacecraft’s final orbits have been named the Grand Finale.

The orbiter Cassini, the largest interplanetary spacecraft built by NASA was launched on October 15, 1997, from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with a Huygens probe aboard owned by the European Space Agency. In 2017, when the Grand Finale spacecraft falls into Saturn’s atmosphere, it will end twenty years of extraordinary mission of exploring Saturn, its rings, Titan, icy satellites, and the magnetosphere. During the first decade of orbiting, 500 gigabytes of scientific data were beamed to Earth through NASA’s Deep Space Network; Cassini made 200 orbits of Saturn, 132 close flybys of Saturn’s moons and discovered seven new moons.

Top discoveries of Cassini include:

-          Huygens probe onboard Cassini parachuted to Titan, the first such landing on a moon in the outer solar system

-          Icy plumes were found spraying from “tiger stripe” fissures on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons

-          The moons on Saturn were active and dynamic – showing how planets and moons form

-          Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has rain, rivers, lakes, and seas and is surrounded by thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere, perhaps similar to what Earth’s was like long ago

-          Images of the northern storm of 2010-2011 which covered Saturn for months

-          Radio-wave patterns are not tied to Saturn’s interior rotation

-          Images of vertical structures inside the rings piled more than 2 miles high

-          Titan’s prebiotic chemistry

-          Giant hurricanes at both Saturn’s poles

-          North polar hexagon of Saturn

By the end of its 20-year mission, the new Cassini probe assembled with a much larger antenna will make “detailed maps of Saturn’s gravity and magnetic fields, revealing how the planet is composed on the inside,” how much material is in the rings, and perhaps elucidate the mystery of how fast the interior of the planet is rotating. It will take pictures of rings and clouds and “sample icy ring particles being funneled into the atmosphere by Saturn’s magnetic field.”

JPL also monitors the Earth’s climate through its GRACE-FO (Follow On in 2017) by tracking Earth’s water in motion with more precise measuring instruments than its predecessor GRACE.  Tracking variations in gravity which was assumed to be caused by the movement of water, JPL monitors changes in underground water storage, water stored in lakes and rivers, soil moisture, ice sheets and glaciers, and sea levels caused by adding water to oceans.

NASA's Aquarius spacecraft

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

As a man-made global warming skeptic, I was interested in the mission of Aquarius. According to JPL’s museum, Aquarius provides data to “improve computer models” to help “researchers better understand our climate.” NASA’s Aquarius takes 300,000 measurements per month “to advance our understanding of ocean salinity’s role in Earth’s water cycle, ocean circulation, and climate.”

The spacecraft assembly area for the new Cassini was exhibiting a huge meringue pie-like spacecraft. The huge room was at the time deserted.

The Science Division of JPL included four areas of research:

-          Understanding our Universe (from the Earth to the Planets and Beyond)

This included theoretical studies, observations, laboratory experiments, data analysis, advanced instrument development focused on current or future NASA missions.

JPL states, “Research areas include studying the causes and effects of climate change on Earth, the origin and nature of planetary bodies, the search for life beyond Earth, and the nature and evolution of the universe – all vital scientific issues being addressed by NASA.”

-          Earth Science

“JPL Earth scientists conduct research to characterize and understand the atmosphere, land, and oceans on our home planet in order to make better predictions of future changes through the use of observations to improve models. Our wide-ranging research topics include studies of the composition of the atmosphere with a focus on greenhouse gases, air quality and ozone; the global water, carbon and energy cycles, including clouds, snow, ice and vegetation; ocean circulation and interactions between oceans, atmosphere and sea ice; and earthquake fault systems, volcanic eruptions, and the composition of Earth’s surface.”

-          Planetary Science

Understanding origins, evolution, structure of planets, satellites, and smaller bodies in the solar system; geology and geophysics of terrestrial planets, particularly Mars, satellites, planetary atmospheres, comets, asteroids, properties of planetary ices, chemistry, astrobiology, search for water beyond Earth; and instrument development for future missions.

-          Astrophysics and Space Sciences

Studying the Sun and its heliosphere, solar wind, formation of stars,  formation of planetary systems, exoplanets, formation, structure, and evolution of our own galaxy, distant galaxies, the Universe; development of instruments to “characterize astrophysical objects including exoplanets, proto-planetary disks, interstellar molecular clouds, distant galaxies, black holes, and the Cosmic Microwave Background, the relic radiation from the Big Bang.”

Mars was explored by twin rovers Spirit and Opportunity which found evidence of long-term water near their landing site in 2004. Sojourner studied rocks, dust, and weather on Mars during its 1997 mission. Opportunity’s mission found that a meteorite had crashed into a 65-foot basin (Eagle Crater) previously covered by a “body of salty water deep enough to splash in.” These Mars rovers ranged in size from a footstool (Sojourner), golf cart (Opportunity and Spirit), and an SUV (Curiosity).

Mariner 10 (1973-1975 missions) visited the scorched Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. The rover found that “some deep craters may contain deposits of water ice hidden from the heat of the Sun.”

According to JPL, “Venus shows what happens when a heavy carbon dioxide atmosphere and thick clouds smother the surface of a volcanic world. The clouds absorb heat from the Sun and from the surface and prevent it from escaping. As a result, a runaway greenhouse suffocates the planet. Volcanic eruptions have built low-level mountains, pancake-shaped domes and ancient rivers of lava.” The Magellan mission and Earth-based radars help draw the map of Venus.

JPL’s satellite Explorer 1 began its survey of Earth in 1958. The only planet that is largely covered by salt water, Earth has only 2.5% fresh water. According to JPL, over two-thirds of this fresh water is frozen in the icecaps of Antarctica and Greenland. “Less than 1% of Earth’s fresh water is accessible for direct human use.”

Earth’s crust, divided into tectonic plates, carries the ocean and land on “their backs” so to speak. Earth is wrapped in an atmosphere made up “almost entirely of nitrogen, a smaller amount of oxygen, and other gases.” It is this combination that supports life on earth.

When reading this quote from JPL, Dr. Klaus Kaiser added, "One of these 'other gases' is carbon dioxide (CO2) on which all life on earth depends!"

JPL tracks through its Jason 1 and Jason 2 the movement of warm waves of water east across the Pacific every few years called El Nino, measuring “the changes in sea surface height to an accuracy of 3.3 centimeters (about 1.3 inches).”

Earth-observation satellites monitor the land, ocean, ice, and atmosphere. It can see, for examples, how the Mississippi River Delta water carries soil to the sea, creating mudflats and marshlands. Same satellites can monitor hurricanes, their size, intensity, wind speeds, and motions. JPL’s orbiting ASTER instrument can show soil erosion to shorelines.

Apollo 17 (1972) took the first ever full view picture of Earth and the first-ever photograph of Earth’s south polar regions taken from space. In 1978 SEASAT “set the stage for today’s ocean-observing satellites.”

A U.S.-French oceanography mission called TOPEX/Poseidon measured “global sea surface height from 1992-2005. It provided data about the heat stored in the ocean, and the speed and direction of the currents.”  This information provided short-term weather and global climate variations. Could this be considered a base-line measurement?

To continue the work of TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason 1 was launched in 2001. This satellite monitors “global ocean circulation, studies interactions between the ocean and atmosphere, improves global climate predictions, and monitors events such as El Nino.”

Launched in 1999, SEAWINDS “senses ripples caused by winds near the ocean’s surface. Knowledge of wind speed and direction helps scientists understand climate and weather patterns, changes in Arctic sea ice and icebergs, and variations in snow and soil moisture levels on land.” (Museum archives)

The most complete high resolution digital topographic database of Earth was mapped by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) on the 11-day flight aboard the space shuttle Endeavour, the manned-space program that was scrapped by the Obama Administration.

And there is our closest celestial neighbor, the Moon, magnificently desolate and covered in millions of craters created by the impact of asteroids and comets. JPL discovered in recent times that the Moon “holds at least small amounts of water.” Galileo surveyed the moon during its 1992 passing to Jupiter.

Galileo spacecraft

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

Galileo used a 400-Newton retrorocket to slow it down enough to be captured into orbit. The propulsion system was provided by Germany and built by Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm (MBB).

JPL crashed three Ranger spacecraft into the moon’s surface. Surveyor missions were able to soft-land on the Moon and Surveyor 7 photographed the rim of Tycho Crater. This landing paved the way for humans to land on the Moon, proving that a spacecraft “would not sink into the lunar surface.”

According to JPL archives, the 1969 Apollo 12 lunar landing was made by astronauts within 200 meters (656 feet) of Surveyor 3.

Venus was explored by Magellan from 1989-1994 and was able to map its surface from orbit even though its atmosphere was very thick. Flight controllers tested a maneuver called “aero-braking.”

Our solar system, moving through space at 250 kilometers (155 miles) per second, is part of the Milky Way Galaxy, and was born about 4.6 billion years ago.  The Sun, one of more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, is orbited by eight major planets, their moons and rings, asteroids, comets, and dwarf planets.

“The Sun gives off energy created by reactions in a nuclear furnace at its core. That power plant supplies virtually all the energy for our solar system. Our star sustains life and affects climate processes on Earth. Violent transfers of matter and energy from the Sun to the Earth, such as solar flares, can disrupt our communications systems and endanger astronauts.” (JPL Museum Archives)

Genesis collected between 2001-2004 samples of the solar wind – a stream of charged particles flowing out from the Sun. It returned them to Earth for analysis in laboratories.”

Comets contain in their nucleus “the oldest material in the solar system.” JPL’s Deep Space 1 spacecraft passed by Comet Borrelly in2001 and sent back interesting photographs of jets forming a coma of dust and gases.  “A comet is a time capsule from the formation of the solar system.” Comet Hale-Bopp wowed millions in 1996-1997 with its “tails of dust and blue plasma stretching across the sky for weeks.” In the year 4385, this comet will come close to the Sun again.

Meteorites collected from Antarctica and around the globe are metal or stone fragments that fall to Earth from asteroids, Earth’s Moon, Mars, or comets.

JPL tracks asteroids, pieces of smaller planetary bodies made of rock.  Most are found in the Asteroid Belt and some have orbits that bring them in close proximity to Earth. They can be a few meters to over 900 kilometers across. The second most massive asteroid is Vesta (530 km across). Most asteroid orbit the Sun in the Asteroid Belt located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system and is made up of gas and clouds with ammonia crystals and other ices. Jupiter’s strong gravitational pull keeps her moons and rings in check.  Voyager 1 discovered Jupiter’s ring and the volcanoes on it.

Galileo Galilei looked at Saturn through his telescope in early 17^th century and declared that Saturn had “ears.” Voyager 1 spacecraft photographed with high resolution this giant planet made of gas. The Hubble Space Telescope took clear photographs that elucidated the mystery of its atmospheric composition. Using data from Cassini’s ultraviolet-sensitive instrument, a colorized version of Saturn’s rings was drawn. Among the many moons embedded in Saturn’s rings, scientists at JPL have studied Enceladus and Titan. Apparently Enceladus’ ice volcanoes spray frozen particles into space through geyser-like vents. Titan has a smog-like atmosphere which it is believed to resemble the “primordial Earth.”

The “ice giant” Uranus shrouded by methane was visited by Voyager 2. Uranus has the coldest atmosphere of all the planets hence his moniker of a frigid world. “Uranus orbits the Sun on its side.”

Voyager 2 visited Neptune in 1989 and its moon Triton, with its “coldest surface in the solar system.” A “cantaloupe terrain” and “geysers that spout dark material from beneath its surface of nitrogen ice” were also discovered. A “near twin to Uranus,” Neptune has an atmosphere composed of hydrogen and helium with traces of methane.

Pluto, a dwarf planet and member of the Kuiper Belt, is a frigid world two-thirds the diameter of Earth’s Moon, with a methane ice surface and a very thin atmosphere. Pluto makes one trip around the Sun in 248 years.

JPL's empty control room

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2015

 

The Space Flight Operations Facility, a National Historic Landmark since 1985, controls dozens of missions. Each team of controllers is responsible for communications to and from their assigned spacecraft via the sensitive antennas of the Deep Space Network. These antennas swivel on their bases and track spacecraft from horizon to horizon, dividing the earth into three sections, both listening and talking to their targets. The largest antennas are 10 stories tall with dishes 230 feet across.

The Space Flight controllers coined a phrase that allows one to say, once I visited the Space Flight Operations Facility, “I’ve been to the center of the Universe.”