Coal or combined coal/gas make up the majority of Wisconsin's power plants ...Scott Walker rang alarm bells saying customer rates will go up as emission levels go down, calling the EPA regs a chain saw to the economy.
FREDERICA FREYBERG: So this has become an argument, then, of jobs versus the health of people or the environment?
SCOTT MANLEY: No, it doesn’t because we actually don’t need this rule to have clean air. We have smog standards, soot standards, carbon monoxide standards in place right now … these are health-based standards that protect human health. This rule…is an incredibly ineffective rule as it relates to global warming and climate change…why are we going to spend billions of dollars and put thousands of middle class factory workers out of a job so that we can have a negligible impact on global temperature?
CBSNews: If the latest report from America's top weather experts is an indication, it's becoming really hard to deny global warming. Temperatures last year across the world reached record highs, according to the "State of the Climate in 2014" report from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Center for Weather and Climate. Sea levels continued to rise andglaciers kept shrinking while record concentrations of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide were recorded in the atmosphere.From NASA, this unnerving gif showing global warming, a supposed fiction pushed by big business. Many Republicans won't even play it safe, you know, just in case:
The most jarring data from the NOAA climate report was on temperatures, with four separate, global data sets confirming the world saw record high temperatures in 2014, with 20 countries from Europe to Mexico setting records. These were the highest temperatures seen in the past 135 years.
WWNO: For decades, Texas has been the center of cattle country, but drought is reshaping the beef map and raising the price of steak. Ranchers are moving their herds from California to Colorado and from Texas to Nebraska by the thousands. They’re seeking refuge from dry weather and cattle producers in the Midwest are making the most of it.Neighboring South Dakota saw a flash rainfall, and then massive blizzard that killed tens of thousands of cattle:
Nebraska Radio Net: Texas, the country’s No. 1 beef state, lost 24 percent of its total beef herd from 2010-2014. Oklahoma saw a 13 percent cut. A freak snowstorm in October of 2013 killed cattle in western Nebraska. The thunderstorms and tornadoes of June this year killed an estimated one thousand head.
jsonline: Cargill Inc. is closing its beef cattle slaughterhouse in Milwaukee, resulting in the loss of about 600 jobs almost immediately … Years of drought have reshaped the U.S. beef industry, with cattle feedlots and meatpacking plants closing because there aren't enough livestock to support them. Plant operators say they don't expect a recovery anytime soon, as it will take years to rebuild herds that were drawn down by an extended drought in cattle-producing states and high animal feed prices.
"There's got to be a way for us to put our fingerprints on it. The standards we have in the state should be driven by people in Wisconsin."
ABC News: Wyoming, the nation's top coal-producing state, is the first to reject new K-12 science standards proposed by national education groups mainly because of global warming components
.The Wyoming Board of Education decided recently that the Next Generation Science Standards need more review after questions were raised about the treatment of man-made global warming. Board President Ron Micheli said the review will look into whether "we can't get some standards that are Wyoming standards and standards we all can be proud of."
Gov. Matt Mead has called federal efforts to curtail greenhouse emissions a "war on coal." Opponents argue the standards incorrectly assert that man-made emissions are the main cause of global warming and shouldn't be taught in a state that derives much of its school funding from the energy industry.
Chad Colby, spokesman for Achieve, one of the organizations that helped write the standards. John Friedrich, a member of the national organization Climate Parents, noted that oil and gas industry giants Exxon Mobile and Chevron support the standards.
Morano: "He (John Kerry) and Sen. Boxer have said this as well, they believe if we pass a climate bill, we can reduce droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornados. This is now akin to Medieval witchcraft, where we used to blame witches for controlling the weather."There's much more. This tightly wound climate denier is hilarious. They have to be kidding.
Huffington Post: Aaron Justus, weatherman for local CBS affiliate WTVR, sure knows how to handle a high-pressure situation.
Faced with volcanic eruptions, massive tropical storms and battles with Godzilla, Justus manages to maintain his professional tone -- giving the good people of Richmond, Va., the information they'll need to get them through the next few days of terror.
Hundreds of thousands of people are still without power around the nation's capital - and left to deal with a record breaking heat wave alone. Fueled by all-time temperature highs on Friday, a massive freak storm ripped across the Mid-Atlantic Friday night - killing at least 15 people and knocking out power to more than three million. West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, and Washington, DC have all declared states of emergency.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the nation - a wildfire continues to scorch Colorado - where tens of thousands of people have been evacuated out of harm's way and more than 350 homes destroyed. On the heels of this freak weather is a new report from climate scientists around the world warning that when it comes to rising sea levels, the tipping point has already been passed.
Scientists with U.S. research group Climate Central warned that even with drastic cuts in CO2 emissions, rising sea levels cannot be stopped over the next few hundred years - threatening roughly a tenth of the world's population that lives in low-lying areas. So here we have massive wildfires, catastrophic storms, and rising oceans - welcome to the new normal - brought to us by transnational oil barons and the politicians they own.
McClatchy News: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded that the EPA’s 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and the environment was based on “an ocean of evidence,” saying the agency’s move to limit those emissions from cars and trucks was “neither arbitrary nor capricious.”
One complaint the court considered was that the EPA had “delegated” its judgment to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international group that summarizes scientific papers on the subject … “It makes no difference that much of the scientific evidence in large part consisted of ‘syntheses’ of individual studies and research,” the court said. “Even individual studies and research papers often synthesize past work in an area and then build upon it. This is how science works. EPA is not required to re-prove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question.”
The National Association of Manufacturers president and CEO, Jay Timmons, said in a statement: “The debate to address climate change should take place in the U.S. Congress and should foster economic growth and job creation, not impose additional burdens on businesses.”
The next steps could play out in Congress, where Republicans have proposed amending the Clean Air Act to prohibit the EPA from making any regulations of greenhouse gases due to climate change.
WaPo/Bloomberg: A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.
The study of the world’s surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of “Climategate,” a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.
He said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference Monday, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades. One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of skeptic groups and the tea party. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions. “Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world,” he said. Still, he contends that threat is not as proven as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is.
LA Times: A team of UC Berkeley physicists and statisticians that set out to challenge the scientific consensus on global warming is finding that its data-crunching effort is producing results nearly identical to those underlying the prevailing view. The hearing was called by GOP leaders of the House Science & Technology committee, who have expressed doubts about the integrity of climate science. The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project was launched by physics professor Richard Muller, a longtime critic of government-led climate studies, to address what he called "the legitimate concerns" of skeptics who believe that global warming is exaggerated.
But Muller unexpectedly told a congressional hearing last week that the work of the three principal groups that have analyzed the temperature trends underlying climate science is "excellent.... We see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups." Muller said his group was surprised by its findings.
The Berkeley project's biggest private backer, at $150,000, is the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. But conservative critics who had expected Muller's group to demonstrate a bias among climate scientists reacted with disappointment. Anthony Watts, a former TV weatherman who runs the skeptic blog WattsUpWithThat.com, wrote that the Berkeley group is releasing results that are not "fully working and debugged yet.... But, post normal science political theater is like that."
