With no disrespect to sausages and laws, Bismarck’s most famous aphorism clearly requires updating. “Scientific research” is bidding furiously to make the global shortlist of things one should not see being made.

Understandably so. Sciences at the cutting edge of statistics and public policy can make blood sports seem genteel. Scientists aggressively promoting pet hypotheses often relish the opportunity to marginalise and neutralise rival theories and exponents.

The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.

The source of that shame is a toxic mix of institutional laziness and complacency. Too many scientists in academia, industry and government are allowed to get away with concealing or withholding vital information about their data, research methodologies and results. That is unacceptable and must change.

It's no wonder the Obama administration doesn't like to talk about jobs. It's obvious from the chart below that few in the administration have ever created a job in the private sector - or even worked outside of government. It also explains why they downplay the impact of radical legislation like health care reform or cap-and-tax on American businesses.

A friend sends along the following chart from a J.P. Morgan research report. It examines the prior private sector experience of the cabinet officials since 1900 that one might expect a president to turn to in seeking advice about helping the economy. It includes secretaries of State, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Transportation, Energy, and Housing & Urban Development, and excludes Postmaster General, Navy, War, Health, Education & Welfare, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security—432 cabinet members in all.

When one considers that public sector employment has ranged since the 1950s at between 15 percent and 19 percent of the population, the makeup of the current cabinet—over 90 percent of its prior experience was in the public sector—is remarkable.

Sustainability Officer Training is perfect for businesses that are looking for ways to become environmentally healthy.  We offer a well rounded training program into two and a half, knowledge packed days, and show any business how to install an eco-friendly program that anyone can see importance in.  For a long time, the Green transition for businesses has been left to the best efforts of a group of people within an organization who had no formal training in environmental education.

The online Sustainability Officer Training will provide participants with a heavy introduction to the Greening process.  They will be shown how to implement a program that merits respect and will save money.  Green is also about efficiencies, and we know how to make Green pay in the short and long run.  The final project at the Sustainability Officer Training is to prepare a Green program for your business that fits the needs of your company and allows your team to control the application of the program.  You will leave with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to plan an Authentically Green Program in your company.

It is almost impossible to imagine that the problems of environmental duties could be so well organized in a two-day session that will produce such superior results, but it will.  With knowledgeable material, the Sustainability Officer Training will provide you with the most vital issues in the Green World. In fact, the last segment provides a Green program that will allow any business to Go Green despite the size or type.

Successful businesses have realized that "Going Green can save your company thousands of dollars in lost revenue!" Most businesses see the Greening process as another expenditure that is good for the earth, but not good for the bank account. That type of thinking is changing, and the savings realized by companies that use Greening processes is far more priceless than ever imagined.

You must realize that your cost of daily operation is sure to go up in the near future. The Cap and Trade legislation will add a hidden cost to everything we use.  The cost of energy alone is predicted to go up by 200-300%. Your carbon output may even be taxed.  In the past, businesses hired sustainability experts to speed up their procedures, reduce waste, and increase profits. Green officers are the modern version of sustainability experts. When it comes to a sustainable issue, there are areas of waste that will greatly affect your company's profits for the years to come.

Greenwashing is something that every business must keep away from because it will mostly likely come back as very bad press.  It is not credible enough to talk or promote your company as Green by good worth of some Green adjustments to your operation. To be Green Business Certified, your company will want to be validated by a true independent third party like the Green Business League, Inc. This is awarded when a company is able to acquire enough points for already having Green practices.

Sustainability Officer Training offers a significant edge for any business. Don’t waste time "trying to be Green, and then doing a poor job of it," when actually establishing a Green program will give your business a Green Business certification that is earned not bought.  Find out how Going Green will save your business an immense amount of money each year, and you will also profit from the impressive marketing value of an authentically Green certification.

Look three to five years down the road and ask yourself whether being a Green business will be necessary. Obama's must read books during his Martha's Vineyard vacation was "Hot, Flat, and Crowded" by Thomas Friedman. He has appointed a Green Czar with sweeping powers to push a Green agenda across our country. Climate change, population growth, and the need to heal our world will hurt any company that does not have Green practices or programs.  To sign up or learn more go to www.sustainabilityofficertraining.com.

Washington Democrats should listen to the American people and abandon their plans to impose a job-killing government takeover of health care and a new job-killing national energy tax. These two cornerstones of the Administration’s agenda threaten to hurt small businesses and destroy millions of additional American jobs. It’s time for the President to hit the reset button and work with Republicans for better solutions, before more debt is piled on our children and more American jobs are destroyed.

We must keep up the good fight. this week will tell us whether politicians are listening to the people on health care. Or are they just going to ram it down our throats

By Austin Ramzy / Beijing Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2009 for Time Magazine

If you want to visit the front line of China's environmental struggle, there are lots of places to choose from. You could drop in on Changqing, in northwestern Shaanxi province, where on Aug. 17 hundreds of people stormed a smelting plant blamed for toxic emissions that left more than 850 children with lead poisoning. Or there's Wenping, in central Hunan province, where days later 1,300 children were found to have been sickened by pollution from a manganese factory.

When former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and philanthropic Chinese martial-arts star Jet Li made their own tour of inspection on Aug. 22, they chose a place that wasn't shrouded in toxic vapors or ravaged by illness. It was the bucolic village of Baigong, in southwestern Guizhou province—a community of blue skies, grape trellises, freshly painted houses and colorful sprays of drying peppers hanging from doorways. Where China's industrial wastelands symbolize its present and past, Baigong may be a tiny herald of the future: its streetlights are solar-powered under a program by Li's One Foundation and the nonprofit Climate Group, which Blair helped launch. "If all Chinese cities had these, we could save a lot of power," said Li. "And also provide a lot of employment," chimed in Blair.(See "10 Next Generation Green Techologies.")

In its breakneck quest for economic growth, the world's most populous nation has created no shortage of environmental disasters—just as other countries did when they, too, industrialized. But the Chinese people are growing impatient with the costs of unchecked development. Around the country, citizens are volunteering for cleanup projects. A small, courageous network of NGOs is naming and shaming the worst polluters. The huge number of pollution-related protests—an estimated 50,000 took place in 2005—unambiguously demonstrates grass-roots resentment of the ecological burden of industrialization. So did a survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project about a year ago, which found that some 80% of Chinese felt protecting the environment should be a priority—a stark contrast to the global perception of the Chinese as a people in feckless pursuit of wealth.

The drive toward development cannot be denied—after the demise of Maoist ideology, growth is the key base of legitimacy for the ruling Communist Party. But it can be harnessed and made compatible with environmental protection. In the words of Shanghai-based environmental lawyer Charles R. McElwee, "the old-fashioned green" of money has become equated with "the new green" of such industries as alternative fuels and energy-efficient materials. That's not as far-fetched as it sounds. In fact, as the Climate Group outlined in an August report, China is already a global leader in environmental technology. It is the world's largest manufacturer of electric bicycles, and may dominate production of electric cars. Chinese factories churn out 30% of the world's solar panels—including those used in Baigong village—and the country is doubling its wind-power capacity annually. "This is not an issue of China's good faith," Blair told TIME. "China is doing an immense amount."(Read "Less Carbon, More Lead.")

He's right. For one thing, the authorities are getting tougher on polluters. On Aug. 14, two factory officials, convicted of chemically tainting a water source for 200,000 residents of China's coastal Jiangsu province, were sentenced to six and 11 years in jail when previously they would have received little more than a fine. (The state-run Xinhua news service noted it was the first time defendants "were jailed on charges of spreading poison.") During his visit, too, Blair met with Premier Wen Jiabao and the chief engineer of the nation's efforts to develop environmentally friendly technology, Vice Premier Li Keqiang. He came away struck by the leadership's willingness to acknowledge the country's pollution woes. The central government has made the environment a key part of its next five-year economic plan, says Blair. "The environment is not a separate chapter," he insists. "It's the core narrative."

It needs to be. China's powerful National Development and Reform Commission and the Development Research Center of the State Council sponsored a recent report suggesting that if it took a number of aggressive measures, China, now the world's largest greenhouse-gas polluter, could hit an emissions peak in 2030 and then begin winding down. But if global warming is to be reversed, more than emissions control will be needed. Just as essential will be the further, rapid development of clean energy. And if the Chinese decide that there's good money to be made in that, you can be absolutely sure that it will happen.

Watch a video about The Tony Blair Foundation.

Callom B. Jones, Guest Columnist

Based upon questionable statistics instead of causal science, the cap-and-trade bill passed by the U.S. House has the potential to make America a second-world country.

The government’s belief in global warming resulted in a bill that effectively prevents us from freeing ourselves from foreign oil dependence via the use of America’s own, plentiful, carbon-based fuel resources.

If this bill becomes law, a cap-and-trade tax will be assessed upon the burning of virtually all carbon-based fuels — oil, coal, natural gas — as a deterrent to burning such fuels for energy. Because virtually our entire energy matrix is geared to the use of these fuels, taxes will be assessed at almost every point in our economy. Additionally, any other activities producing carbon dioxide, natural or not, could become subject to taxation under the bill.

Its object is to cap the emission of CO{-2} from our society and to lower that “cap” progressively over time. Its method is to make all CO{-2}-generating activities more expensive through taxation, raising costs to consumers and making alternative energy sources more “economical” in comparison. Instead of using “green” energy incentives, the government is artificially raising the costs of using carbon-based energy in order to change our behavior.

However, there’s nothing artificial about the increased costs that consumers will have to pay.

Here’s the critical point: Using alternative energy to avoid the tax will not save us money either. It will only appear so compared to the higher costs of carbon-based energy created by the tax. This bill artificially raises the cost of living to all consumers in our society for entirely questionable reasons.

Thinking through the bill’s economic impact given the limited information released about the bill leads to a list of logical consequences.

•It’s a completely new tax, affecting every American, regardless of income. The government has not said other taxes will be repealed or reduced to lessen the burden. Another broken promise by President Barack Obama.

•To ensure passage in the House, about 85 percent of the revenues the government would have received under the tax will not be received. They didn’t even design the bill to collect the huge amount of taxes generated, although the costs to consumers will not be reduced accordingly — supposedly.

•Since the government is not using the cap-and-trade bill to help pay for the massive deficit spending they have already passed, other taxes will have to be passed or rates on existing taxes will have to be raised. Another broken promise?

•The tax is not assessed worldwide. Therefore, the additional costs assessed upon U.S. businesses simply make those businesses uncompetitive in the world markets. That’ll help pull us out of the recession, won’t it? It will also drive American businesses to close up American operations in favor of overseas operations that will operate without the onerous cap-and-trade tax provisions, costing Americans jobs. Also pretty counterproductive to ending the recession — and to all of our futures.

•Finally, and worst of all, the tax is extremely regressive. Taxes assessed at the business level become product costs to consumers. Fixed-income and poorer Americans will be affected by the cost increases more than more affluent Americans. What slaps in the faces of the very voters that put this administration and Congress in office!

I never would have believed something so heinous would be passed by an American government. You might want to make sure your senator knows how you want him or her to vote prior to the Senate’s vote early this fall.

Callom B. Jones is a stockbroker with Perkins Smart & Boyd Inc. of Fairway. His commentary regularly appears on The Star’s Dollars & Sense blog at economy.kansascity.com.

By Bob Ellis on July 15th, 2009

65 Million Years of Climate Change (Credit: Robert A. Rohde) CLICK TO ENLARGE

A lot of information has come to light in the last day or so which blows yet another hole in the fantasy of anthropogenic global warming.

E Science News published an article yesterday which pointed out massive global warming in the past (before SUVs and power plants) that cannot be explained with an anthropogenic model. Oceanographer Gerald Dickens points out that the best guessing we’ve been doing with our little climate models is likely wrong:

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” said oceanographer Gerald Dickens, a co-author of the study and professor of Earth science at Rice University. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

Today Reuters published a similar article stating that during the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event, temperatures on earth rose 5-9 degrees Celsius within a few thousand years. Far before evil capitalists came along to wreck the planet, earth was much warmer and had no ice at all on the surface, the report says.

Gerald Dickens and Richard E. Zeebe have a peer-reviewed article just published in the journal Nature Geoscience which says “unknown processes accounted for much of warming in the ancient hot spell.” 

Climate Depot cites other scientists who realize how incredibly weak is the foundation for the contention of anthropogenic global warming.

“Over geologic time. there has been 15 to 25 times more CO2 than current concentrations; the claim that this time we will reach a tipping point is alarmist, ludicrous, and totally without foundation,” declared atmospheric scientist Robert W. Endlich on July 12, 2009. Endlich tests weather software at the Physical Sciences Laboratory at New Mexico State University, and is a former weather officer with the U.S. Air Force who has published papers in the technical literature.

More from Reuters:

We now believe that the CO2 did not cause all the warming, that there were additional factors,” said Richard Zeebe, an oceanographer with the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

They estimated about 3 trillion tonnes of carbon (11 trillion tonnes of CO2) was released over several thousand years from the methane deposits, leading to a 70 percent rise in atmospheric CO2 levels from pre-event levels.

But Zeebe said this could only explain a 1 to 3.5 degree Celsius rise in temperatures, adding that a commonly accepted scientific range for a doubling of CO2 is between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees Celsius.

This meant other factors must have been at work to drive up temperatures between 5 and 9 degrees Celsius.

Eleven trillion tons of CO2? And Al Gore’s disciples are whining about our tiny contribution? And this 11 trillion tons of CO2 can only explain a 1-3.5 degree C rise?

How much more glaring evidence do we need before the Koolaid-drinking environmentalists get a grip?

Isn’t the data showing that temperature drives CO2 rises enough? Isn’t the data showing solar activity’s effects on the earth’s temperature enough? Isn’t the data showing large climate change going back thousands of years enough? Isn’t the global warming on other planets (where there are no SUVs or capitalists) enough?

No, nothing will ever be enough for these extremists. Because it really isn’t about saving the planet in the first place. It’s about pushing a socialist agenda to cripple the capitalist nations of the west. It’s about wealth redistribution and socialist schemes under the guise of environmentalism.

While nothing will ever be enough to straighten out the socialists and other Koolaid drinkers, we have more than enough for the American people to force our government to stop treating us worse than foreign dictators and stop this cap and trade global warming tax nonsense in the Senate.

We should not allow our economy to be devastated based on a bunch of nonsense.