http://www.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2009/02/16/daily10.html
Obama tours solar-power facility at Denver museum
President Barack Obama inspected a solar-power facility at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science Tuesday just before he signed the $787 billion economic-stimulus package.
The museum's rooftop solar photovoltaic system consists of 465 solar panels on the southeast and southwest wings of the museum.
The panels generate a portion of the museum's electrical power.
The tour was in keeping with the alternative-energy theme of the bill-signing event at the museum.


http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/17/green-fact-of-the-day/

“Obama will use as much energy in flight to CO as the museum’s solar panels can produce in 4 years.”

Thought you might find this interesting - according to the info I found on Boeing’s website and elsewhere, the 747-200 that operates as Air Force One uses anywhere from 5 to 7 gallons of fuel per mile, depending on how full it is. At roughly 1500 miles from DC to Denver, that’s at least 15,000 gallons of fuel round trip. There are 33.4 kilowatt hours of energy in a gallon of fuel, meaning this trip will use about 500,000 kilowatt hours of energy. According to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s own website, their solar installation has generated only 90,000 kilowatt hours of energy since it was installed last June!

"This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

Wow

I find it utterly amazing how the lunatic, right wing fringe all of the sudden is so concerned NOW with CO emissions.

Right.
Hypocrisy indeed.
Sort of like the hypocrisy when it comes to the born again cons that have suddenly as of January 20, 2009 become fiscal conservatives after 8 years of record deficits under George Bush & a Republican Congress.

Correct me if Im wrong but I believe it was YOU that brought up the subject of hypocrisy:

"To paraphrase the Clintons: It's the hypocrisy, stupid."

Unwilling to play with the big boys, the "skeptics" had their second annual "It's a Conspiracy" pow-wow. The Heartland Institute hosted the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, though don't let the name fool you. What was billed as a conference regarding "new research that contradicts claims that Earth’s moderate warming during the 20th Century primarily was man-made and has reached crisis proportions" was nothing more than the usual regurgitated nonsense from a who's who list of deniers and fake experts. You know you're off to a bad start if you give away more seats than there were paying attendees (and of the 800 registered, only 600 showed, compared to the CC's 2,500).

You only have to look at their scattershot approach at debunking prevailing scientific theory... It's the sun. it's not the sun. It's natural. It's the cosmic rays. It's the oceans. It's the PDO. It's volcanoes. There is warming. There isn't warming. We get the whole litany of recycled/debunked nonsense we all have seen in each and every Skeptic Op-ed Of The Week in an incoherent mess where half the presenters contradict the evidence of the other. What's really surprising (well, not to anyone who's been paying attention) is that this orgy of mental deficiency hasn't changed at all from the previous year. With such an obvious level of confusion on the current state of things, you'd think that over time and with further research you'd see at least some form of a cohesive argument forming instead of simply throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Instead you get exactly the opposite... The core "skeptic" argument hasn't moved beyond "Al Gore is a doodie head". They're simply united in their hatred for Gore, Mann, Hansen, and all things liberal.

You'll also notice that they aren't really contradicting global warming at all... No one is disputing the radiative properties of CO2. No one is disputing the fact that the planet is emitting less radiation than its absorbing from the sun. They either A) deny there's warming, wishing the excess energy out of existence, or B) they believe some sort mechanism will magically kick in preventing further warming, exactly as it didn't do so during similar climate shifts of the past.

'Course, legitimate science isn't their point or purpose anymore now than it was when they were trying to sell us "smoking isn't bad for you."

A sure sign that it's all nonsense is the fact that Al Gore hilariously remains the head of their manufactured conspiracy and not someone far more impressive or equipped. Al Gore. Not Hansen, or Mann, or any of the JASON's responsible for the report from the 70's, none of the actual scientists whose work Gore cites in his speeches... Al Gore. Bjorn Lomborg just recently attempted to slay this windmill... er... "giant" in a public "debate":

Quote:

The next question came from Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician who has assembled a group of Nobel Prize winners who say many other global problems such as clean drinking water merit attention before futile efforts to deal with an exaggerated fear of global warming. "I don't mean to corner you, or maybe I do mean to corner you, but would you be willing to have a debate with me on that point?" asked Mr. Lomborg.

To which Gore rightfully replied:

Quote:

“I want to be polite to you,” Mr. Gore replied. He then proceeded to say Mr. Lomborg’s work had been discredited. "The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a 'on the one hand, on the other hand' issue," he said. "It's not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake."

That was definitely the polite way of addressing Lomborg's existence as a complete hack. As Greenfyre notes:

Quote:

Can there be a more telling confession that you have nothing of substance to offer than challenging a public figure to debate matters of fact and science? People who have facts, evidence and reasoned analysis simply lay it out for the world to see. Did Einstein offer to debate? Hell no! He just published his work for the scientific community to assess. Newton? No debates, just published. There were debates about evolution, but these were at the insistence of the Deniers like Bishop Wilberforce. Darwin himself would have nothing to do with them. His work spoke for truth. His attitude was that if they could fairly dispute it with actual evidence then they should do so. In matters normally determined by fact and evidence, those who have nothing to offer but performance want to “debate.”

Since they’re not bound by logic, fact, or reason, cheap theatrics is all they have to win such a debate. Against an ill-informed and scientifically illiterate public, most of whom who don’t know how long it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun, cheap theatrics is all they need:

Quote:

It is very hard to win a staged debate with people who make stuff up. It is next to impossible to do so if they are skilled debaters. And you are guaranteed to lose if it isn’t a one-on-one debate. Why? The only way to out-debate somebody who makes stuff up is to call them out on it. And if they keep doing it, you have to keep calling them out. Even the most skilled debater has difficulty publicly questioning the honesty and integrity of opponent again and again (which is why you rarely see anyone attempt it). But you’ll never convince an audience that multiple ‘experts’ are making stuff up.

As David Mamet put it:

Quote:

In these fibbing competitions, the party actually wronged, the party with an actual practicable program, or possessing an actually beneficial product, is at a severe disadvantage; he is stuck with a position he cannot abandon, and, thus, cannot engage his talents for elaboration, distraction, drama and subterfuge.

The fact that the scientific community still agrees with Gore (or to put it correctly, he agrees with them. Gore remains nothing more than a messenger.) sadly remains irrelevant to Lomborg.

Great post,Heretic. I bet some of the skeptics of global warming also belong to this organization.
http://theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?PHPSESSID=560c55538e242dd918443528120e99c6&topic=11211.0:
"NASA and other world space agencies have pictures of the Earth from space, and in those pictures the Earth is clearly a globe; in this day and age, hasn't it been proven beyond any doubt that the Earth is round?"

A: NASA and the rest of the world's space agencies who claim to have been to space are involved in a Conspiracy to keep the shape of the Earth hidden. The pictures are faked using simple imaging software.

A little humor never hurts!

A risk analysis of AGW, the first of an entire series of vids. Check the rest out here.

Here is an excellent article that discusses why Cap and Trade will be an effective way to cut carbon dioxide emissions. According to this article,Cap and Trade has already worked to lower acid-rain emissions.

wrote:

In 1989, environmental and market-oriented players from both sides of the aisle set up a cap and trade market for the emission of sulphur dioxide (SO2), a cause of acid rain. Remember acid rain? Greens groused that tradable permits were a license to pollute. Industry wailed about the cost. But within five years, SO2 was under control, down 45 percent. And the cost to utilities was only 0.6 percent of operating expense. Cap and trade beats the taxing tradition of Washington's "make it so" command-and-control. It strips power from bureaucrats, because all of us tend to be smarter than any of us. It sets the right aggregate goals and incentives, makes a market in outcomes, regulates carefully, monitors diligently, and gets out of the way. And it's simpler than a carbon tax because it enlists private sector creativity in finding efficiencies rather than funding lawyers to make flamboyant end runs around the tax code.

Yale Environment 360 has an interesting write up on Cap and Trade vs. Carbon Tax, via Michael Tobis at Only In It For The Gold.

His assessment of the whole argument makes a lot of sense:

Quote:

If this is the best they can do, I find the cap-and-trade arguments very unconvincing both in themselves and by comparison with those advanced by carbon tax proponents. This (from Fred Krupp of the EDF) seems to be the crux of their argument: Quote: From an environmental point of view, the advantage of an emissions cap over a carbon tax is clear: A cap puts a legal limit on pollution. A tax does not. Guessing what level of tax might drive the pollution cuts we need to avert runaway climate change is a risk we simply can’t afford to take. Only a cap with strong emissions reduction targets — and clear rules for meeting them — can guarantee that we achieve the environmental goal. That is the sort of argument you get from people who are not telling you their real motivations. The time constant of the problem is thirty years; the time constant of a tax rate is what? The Fed adjusts the prime several times a year. It's an argument without foundation in reality, and yet all the proponents quoted here are flogging it very hard. As usual when people advance ideas that seem obviously wrong to me, I wonder how they are motivated to convince themselves of this. Compare to, say, Jeffrey Sachs's argument: Quote: Cap-and-trade emissions trading seems to politicians to be the ideal solution. It is “market-based,” does not require the T-word (taxes), and can be worked out with special-interest groups in back-room negotiations. For the rest of us, however, cap-and-trade seems a funny way to do business. A straightforward carbon tax has vast advantages. It can be levied upstream at a few dozen places — at the wellhead, the mine face, and the liquid natural gas depot — rather than at thousands or tens of thousands of businesses. A carbon tax covers the entire economy, including automobiles, household use, and other units impossible to reach in cap-and-trade. A carbon tax puts a clear price on carbon emissions for many years ahead, while a cap-and-trade system gives a highly fluctuating spot price. A carbon tax raises a clear amount of revenue, which can be used for targeted purposes (R&D for sustainable energy) or rebated to the public in one way or another, while the revenues from a cap-and-trade system are likely to be bargained away well before the first trade ever takes place. As usual, Sachs makes sense to me. You?

Though sparks' article makes a lot of good points to, especially since such a system has worked already. A confusing yet interesting discussion...