April, 2016, I Am A Global Warmer Doubter and A Believer In Science: Wasting Taxpayer Money On Stupid Global Warming Projects and More

Every month we have enough material to return to a continuing theme in this blog, namely that “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.” This became of interest because of people like Al Gore who fanatically and verbosely claimed that you had to be an idiot to not believe in manmade global warming. It has been my life belief that anyone that is that loud and that obnoxious is hiding something, that rather than argue facts and reality it is better to beat down and insult anyone who disagrees.

As we have dove into the whole issue of manmade global warming, or its new rebranded title of climate change, we found that Al Gore and people like him were guilty of a number of things:

• Ignoring science and realities that did not support their opinions and positions.
• Rather than have an adult conversation about climate, these types of advocates like Gore sank to the level of insulting those who dared look at ALL science by calling them a variety of names including racists, homophobes, terrorists, flat earth believers, and other slanderous names.
• Continuing to insist that politicians step up their intrusions into our lives with higher taxes, more regulations, and more control of our freedoms and standards of living based on a shaky theory at best.

To see the past posts and the multitude of evidence that we have compiled that showed it is perfectly okay to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, enter the phrase "global warming doubter” in the search box above or go through the monthly historical posts listed on the right side of this page.

Thus, let’s see the latest facts and science that prove you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, regardless of what Al Gore proclaims:

1) We have often discussed the reality that the Obama administration has wasted tens of billions of taxpayer dollars when it gave away our money to alternative energy companies, almost all of which were cronies of the Democratic Party. Almost all of them have gone bankrupt or are near insolvency, e.g. Solyndra, Beacon, A123, and others, providing minimal societal benefit in return. 

And now, according to a recent Townhall article by Matt Vespa, we can add another major failure to this list of failures. Abengoa is a Spanish solar company that for some god forsaken reason was given American taxpayer money but now has filed for bankruptcy. Details of this global warming disaster include the following:

• The company is $16.4 billion in debt.
• The Federal government’s Export-Import Bank gave the company almost two hundred million dollars in loans from U.S. taxpayers.
• The bankruptcy filing now makes it unlikely that any of those dollars will be recovered.
• The total number of loans and loan guarantees totalled over $191 million that was disbursed from 2007 to 2015.

Every Obama administration effort to mess in the market has been a failure, with Abengoa just the latest in a long string of failures. With millions of Americans needing food assistance every month, tens of thousands of Americans dying from drug overdoses every year, veterans not getting the medical care they were promised, etc., why we would risk almost $200 million on a FOREIGN company is beyond me. Very bad priorities.

2) But it is not just alternative energy manufacturing companies like Solyndra and Abengoa that are failures. Consider the failure of a wind energy project in Illinois that came to light recently in the Daily Caller website in an article by Andrew Follet:

• Lake Land College announced plans to tear down the wind turbines on campus since they were not financially viable.
• They were paid for in part by a Federal government grant of $987,697.20 of taxpayer wealth.
• The turbines lasted for less than four years and were very expensive to maintain and keep operating.
• The college confirmed that it has spent almost a quarter of a million dollars in parts and labor costs just to maintain the turbines beyond the construction cost.
• Faced with another $100,000 in expenses needed to make them functional again, after a lightning hit damaged them, the college decided to tear them down once and for all.
• The turbines were supposed to save the college $44,000 annually in electricity costs but only generated a total 8,500 in electricity savings.
• According to the article, the return on investment for the college was -99.14%.
• The original breakeven analysis for the turbines was 22.5 years, an estimate that is now laughable, given that the turbines are being torn down just a few years after they went up.
• The turbines went operational in 2012 after five years of construction in a now vain attempt to reduce the college’s carbon footprint and fight the mythical global warming fight.

Despite another failure in the Federal government’s continual wasting of taxpayer wealth on alternative energy sources, the college has announced that it will replace the failed wind turbines with…. a solar power system to be paid for by, you guessed it, the American taxpayer. All in the name of a global warming theory that falls apart more and more every day, taking taxpayer dollars with it.

3) But the wasting of taxpayer wealth on alternative energy companies and installations is not the only way the Obama administration is wasting your tax dollars while chasing the global warming myth. Consider the following follies and wasting of taxpayer wealth that the Obama administration is pursuing in the name of global warming: 

- The National Science Foundation (NSF) gave a grant of $17,264 to the University of Georgia Research Foundation to study Arctic shrubbery, with the going in assumption that global warming is causing shrubs to grow in the Arctic.

For that money, the American taxpayer will learn the following vital information: “Higher temperatures have already triggered widespread expansion of large, woody shrubs across arctic tundra, and appear to stimulate the loss of soil carbon. This research examines whether shrubs change the composition of microbial communities in a way that positively impacts the shrub growth. This information is critical to understanding how shrubs affect carbon pools of plants and soils in the arctic. Using arctic soils from Alaska, the investigators will establish a plant growth experiment to determine how shrubs respond to different treatments of soil microbes and nutrients. By investigating plants, soils, and microbes in one experiment, this work will improve the accuracy of models of arctic carbon dynamics.”

Seriously, we need to spend taxpayer money to look at plants and model arctic carbon dynamics? And even that was a semi-good idea, how far is $17,000 going to go? You probably could not afford to send researchers to the Arctic for that amount of money never mind build a good science-based model off of it. Tremendous waste of taxpayer wealth.

- But the wasting of money on stupid global warming projects gets better. The Federal government via the NSA granted $350,000 to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to figure out why a bunch of Nordic people abandoned their homes in Greenland several thousands years ago. 

Their inane grant proposal reads as follows: “The climate in southern Greenland is a key area for reconstructions of the North Atlantic Oscillation, a major pattern of northern hemisphere climate, and is also linked to Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation changes, an important oceanic process controlling north Atlantic climate, which recent studies suggest has been weaker over recent decades than at any time in the last 1000 years. This is also the region where Norse settlements were abandoned by the early-15th century; many questions still remain about the causative factors. Although climate change is often cited as the reason for settlement failure, this explanation rests on a very poorly constrained scientific foundation and other explanations have also been proposed.”

Which raises the relevant question of, “So what?” So what if they left their settlement because of climate change, how is that the least bit relevant today? Americans are starving, homeless, drug addicted, and in need of good jobs and we are studying idiocy like this.

- One more piece of Federal government global warming insanity. Researchers at the University of South Florida landed a grant of $297,490 to study 5 million year old Mediterranean sea levels. Their grant proposal reads as follows: “This is important because current published sea level highstands during past interglacial climate are significantly above modern sea level and vary widely over time. The precision of such results are still controversial and accurate data to realistically evaluate potential sea level by the century's end is critical.” 

So well over half a million dollars is being spent to measure the Mediterranean sea levels from 5 millions years ago, Nordic settlements from 2,000 years ago, and shrubs in the Arctic to try and figure out the effects of global warming, assuming that 1) global warming exists (something that has not happened in the past 20 years or so) and 2) try to extrapolate what might happen if global warming should ever really kick in. All based on research grants are too small to really accomplish anything and too big to be wasted on such nonsense when so many Americans need help in their lives today, not at the turn of the next century.

Just the first in a series of global warming discussions this month under the theme of, “I am a global warming doubter and a believer in science.” Today was the focus on how our government and society is wasting valuable resources on shoddy, unstrategic science experiments and pipe dreams, wasteful alternative energy installations and stupid, crony-infested alternative energy companies, all under the false god of global warming. 

More global warming nonsense tomorrow.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w