This broke yesterday, just in case you missed it. Seems like those dire “Scientific” predictions that the Himalayan glaciers are all gonna melt away due to Global Warming were a bit less than scientific, in fact, this bombshell that has fueled the Global Warming hysteria for years was based upon a short phone call to an obscure Indian scientist who was speculating out his ass because there had been NO formal research done to back up said speculation!

Say what? From the UK’s Times Online:

A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
Related Internet Links

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped:

Go read it all. Ain’t it grand that our Obamessiah and his HarryPelosi lawmakers want to followup Obamacare with Cap & trade Crap & Tax legislation to tax the livin’ bejeesus out of all of us to stop the Global Warming that ALL, most, some, a few, well, maybe one or two, real-live-actual climate scientists actually, really, well maybe just a little bit believe.

Mostly they are just trying to keep that Global Warming grant money rolling in. Ol’ Big Al Gore just wants you to buy his Carbon Offsets so that he can light up that big ol’ mansion of his.

BTW — it’s balls off the brass monkey freezin’ in Boston. That won’t stop the Brown voters! Maybe we’re gonna get a pass on both Obamacare and Crap & Tax?

Go Scott Brown!

[Welcome Rifters readers! Just so's ya know, we keep our knuckles clean shaven and our women and chillin's all protected and stuff around here, so play nice. Geez, if I was as scared shitless as all you Global-Warming-Is-Real guys I'd be changin' my tidy whitties every hour on the hour! Enjoy -- 'Okie']

Last Friday it was announced that the servers of University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit had been hacked and over a thousand emails and several dozen documents had been released to the Internet. These emails and documents present Anthropogenic Climate Change as an ongoing, scientists-protected hoax of massive proportions. As James Delingpole’s Telegraph.co.uk’s article asks: Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Manipulation of evidence:

{…}

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

{…}

Suppression of evidence:

{…}

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

{…}

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

{…}

How best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.

Be sure and visit that link for all the goodies inside those ellipses! Some of the damning emails can be read over at whatsupwiththat.com; here’s a couple to whet your appetite for Global Warming Hysterical Fabrications and other nonsense — like instructions on how to “salvage” the discredited hockey stick graph presentation using Mike’s Nature Trick and this Phil Jones fella’s cheeriness at the death of a fellow scientists that happened to be a warming skeptic:

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or
first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers
Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) xxxxx
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) xxxx
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@xxxx.xxx
NR4 7TJ
UK

————————–

From: Phil Jones
To: mann@vxxxxx.xxx
Subject: Fwd: John L. Daly dead
Date: Thu Jan 29 14:17:01 2004

From: Timo H‰meranta
To:
Subject: John L. Daly dead
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:04:28 +0200
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510
Importance: Normal

Mike,
In an odd way this is cheering news ! One other thing about the CC paper – just found
another email – is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals
to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.

Cheers
Phil

“It is with deep sadness that the Daly Family have to announce the sudden death of John
Daly.Condolences may be sent to John’s email account (daly@john-daly.com)
“
Reported with great sadness

Timo H‰meranta

Did you see this on your nightly network news? I wouldn’t know as I don’t watch those propaganda outlets anymore. Fox News covered it and notes that:

In an exclusive interview in Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition, Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley CRU, confirmed that the leaked data is real.

I guess MSNBC couldn’t afford to ignore it. CBS News, ABC News and the Washington Post run the AP piece calling the email leaks appalling. The New York Times does cover the hacking but IMO tries to mitigate the damage a bit:

The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air comments:

Do scientists use data to test theories, or do they use theories to test data? Scientists will claim the former, but here we have scientists who cling to the theory so tightly that they reject the data. That’s not science; it’s religious belief.

For me, The Anchoress has the perfect wrapup:

So, we can’t trust science to give us data uncorrupted by agendas. We can’t trust the press to give us news uncorrupted by agendas. We can’t trust the government to do much of anything, purely out of service to America. We can’t trust the schools to actually teach our children the basics. Who can we trust?

Perhaps it is down to trusting ourselves as much as we dare, and trusting God even more, in the end.

With our lives and futures in the hands of the likes of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid one has to plead, “Oh Mighty God — please help us!”

Over at The Washington Times, Amanda Carpenter’s Hot Button makes note that what Senate Dems and the Obama White House have so far failed to do to the coal industry, the EPA is working overtime to accomplish:

While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama said his cap-and-trade tax plans would “bankrupt” anyone building a coal-fired power plant. Although those taxes haven’t materialized, the Environmental Protection Agency has put the brakes on 79 surface mining permits in four states since he was elected.

The EPA says these permits could violate the Clean Water Act and warrant “enhanced” review. But the agency went even further last week, announcing plans to revoke a permit for the Spruce No. 1 Mine in West Virginia – a move that has caused anxiety among coal-state Democrats about the future of the industry under the Obama administration.

Mr. Obama’s opposition to coal has been apparent since January 2008 when he told the San Francisco Chronicle he would clamp down on miners by enacting a cap-and-trade system that would make it too expensive to stay in business. “So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can,” he said at the time. “It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

Although his favored cap-and-trade bill hasn’t yet been passed, West Virginia’s Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin III, who supported Mr. Obama’s candidacy, called the EPA moves part of a stealth campaign to stifle the industry.

Yeah, just what this country needs right now, another big industry to go into permanent decline — dragging a lot of others along for the ride, not to even mention all the rest of us with much higher energy bills due to the higher cost of coal, or the complete lack of it altogether. All in the name of combating so-called Anthropogenic Climate Change, formerly know as the Holy Order of Global Warming. This secular church is being propped up today with some new rounds of statistics that argue against what most of us have observed first hand — “they” say that the numbers tell us that it’s not getting cooler right now, but it’s still getting hotter.

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.

Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press.

{…}

“If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect,” said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

“[C]herry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend[.]“ Hmmm, isn’t that exactly what those Global Warming proponents have done for years now with their slavish regard for the discredited “Hockey Stick” graph?

In his LA Times column today, Fido, a.k.a. the climate criminal, Liberal Fascists author Jonah Goldberg puts all the hoo haa about stressing over man-caused global warming into perspective.

Some climate-change activists would take your dog away — and spend trillions on other efforts — rather than come up with solutions that could actually work to offset carbon levels.

{…}

The push in Congress for a huge new carbon tax is a dangerous farce. Yes, it’s true that CO2 levels and global temperatures have risen since the Industrial Revolution, and that’s something to take seriously. But the political reality is that truly meaningful global restrictions on CO2 emissions in the near future simply will not happen, and pretending otherwise is a waste of time, money and political capital.

{…}

Meanwhile, an international bureaucracy pushes “global governance” to combat climate change, heedless of popular sentiment. America’s founders revolted to protest too much taxation and too little representation. The notion that America will sacrifice its sovereignty and treasure — and dogs! — to reduce warming by a fraction a century from now is absurd.

If you cannot afford — politically, morally or economically — the solution to a perceived problem, then it’s not a solution.

So, will the Dem wits in Congress actually cram Cap & Trade Crap & TAX down our throats like the shit sandwich that it is? Will you, Mr. or Mrs. American citizen accept being told by your government to freeze your keester off in the Winter and sweat your gonads off in the summer so that little entrepreneurs in China and India can pump the world full of C02 as they please? Not that doing so would hurt the trees any mind you. Or maybe, like John Holdren, the Obama administration Science Czar, you’re a big fan of the Chinese way of population control — one child per family — enforced however cruelly is necessary?

As Dennis Prager is so fond of saying, “If you don’t believe in God, you’ll believe in anything.”

Yeah, you’ll believe that little ol’ us can actually destroy, or save, the planet Earth . . .

Right! Anyone want to buy a bridge?

A week ago today I wrote about the death of the Hockey Stick graph, you know, that lyin’ chart loved by Global Warming Alarmists all over the globe as the unequivocal proof that all us mankind is killin’ Gaea with our nasty ol’ CO2 emissions. Uh, the so-called scientific consensus it turns out is based on manipulated-cherry-picked data sets which resulted in the infamous chart — a deliberate attempt to scare the livin’ bejeezuz out o’ the great unwashed.

If you want to read an even better autopsy of the HS graph then head on over to The American Thinker and check out Marc Sheppard’s post, UN Climate Reports: They Lie.

With the Senate getting ready to attack Cap & Trade TAX again just as soon as they finish screwing up health care, we need all the background info we can get!

Technorati Tags: Hockey Stick graph, Global Warming Alarmists, The American Thinker, Marc Sheppard

The Global Warming alarmists keep ratcheting up the rhetoric to ever new heights, trying to scare the livin’ Bejeesus out of us and convince us to submit to more and more onerous taxation via their proposed Cap & Trade Crap & Tax madness. “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.” That hyperbole is from the UN’s Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. [Update: taken from this section of these Remarks to the Global Environment Forum:

If we fail to act, climate change will intensify droughts, floods and other natural disasters.

Water shortages will affect hundreds of millions of people. Malnutrition will engulf large parts of the developing world. Tensions will worsen. Social unrest – even violence – could follow.

The damage to national economies will be enormous. The human suffering will be incalculable.

We have the power to change course. But we must do it now.

As we move toward Copenhagen in December, we must “Seal a Deal” on climate change that secures our common future. I'm glad that the Chairman of the forum and many other speakers have used my campaign slogan “Seal the Deal” in Copenhagen. I won't charge them loyalty. Please use this “Seal the Deal” as widely as possible, as much as you can. We must seal the deal in Copenhagen for the future of humanity.

We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.

Any agreement must be fair, effective, equitable and comprehensive, and based on science. And it must help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change.

Ladies and gentlemen,

The science is clear. We know what to do and we know how to do it. Songdo shows us the way.

[end Update]

Here’s one from Senator Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.) for example. From the Detroit News blog on Tuesday:

Michigan just experienced its coldest July on record; global temperatures haven’t risen in more than a decade; Great Lakes water levels have resumed their 30-year cyclical rise (contrary to a decade of media scare stories that they were drying up due to global warming), and polls show that climate change doesn’t even make a list of Michigan voters’ top-ten concerns.

Yet in an interview with the Detroit News Monday, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.) – recently appointed to the Senate Energy Committee – made clear that fighting the climate crisis is her top priority.

“Climate change is very real,” she confessed as she embraced cap and trade’s massive tax increase on Michigan industry – at the same time claiming, against all the evidence, that it would not lead to an increase in manufacturing costs or energy prices. “Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I’m flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes.“

There’s some rocket-science-level thinking for ya — this loon is on the Senate Energy Committee? With the jobless rate in Michigan, especially in the Detroit area at the catastrophic level, and with urban crime and a city that has even yet not recovered from the riots and burnings of the 60s, their Senator is fixated on Global Warming? Gotta love the snark of that post’s author, Henry Payne:

And there are sea monsters in Lake Michigan. I can feel them when I’m boating.

Last Friday at Science Daily new research results were announced that strongly indicate that it is the known “wobbles” in the Earth’s rotation that cause the large shifts in our planet’s climate, the periodic glaciation and melting that have been going on for over 2.5 million years.

Researchers have largely put to rest a long debate on the underlying mechanism that has caused periodic ice ages on Earth for the past 2.5 million years – they are ultimately linked to slight shifts in solar radiation caused by predictable changes in Earth’s rotation and axis.

In a publication to be released Friday in the journal Science, researchers from Oregon State University and other institutions conclude that the known wobbles in Earth’s rotation caused global ice levels to reach their peak about 26,000 years ago, stabilize for 7,000 years and then begin melting 19,000 years ago, eventually bringing to an end the last ice age.

The melting was first caused by more solar radiation, not changes in carbon dioxide levels or ocean temperatures, as some scientists have suggested in recent years.

“Solar radiation was the trigger that started the ice melting, that’s now pretty certain,” said Peter Clark, a professor of geosciences at OSU. “There were also changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and ocean circulation, but those happened later and amplified a process that had already begun.”

More evidence that rising levels of CO2 FOLLOW warming, not precede and cause it. But, here’s the sobering part:

Sometime around now, scientists say, the Earth should be changing from a long interglacial period that has lasted the past 10,000 years and shifting back towards conditions that will ultimately lead to another ice age – unless some other forces stop or slow it. But these are processes that literally move with glacial slowness, and due to greenhouse gas emissions the Earth has already warmed as much in about the past 200 years as it ordinarily might in several thousand years, Clark said.

“One of the biggest concerns right now is how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will respond to global warming and contribute to sea level rise,” Clark said. “This study will help us better understand that process, and improve the validity of our models.”

The research was done in collaboration with scientists from the Geological Survey of Canada, University of Wisconsin, Stockholm University, Harvard University, the U.S. Geological Survey and University of Ulster. It was supported by the National Science Foundation and other agencies.

Sounds like a little Global Warming might be a good thing, no? Hard to grow wheat in Kansas if the state’s under a half-mile high slab of ice! Not that we will ever see that, but our great-great-great-great grand kids might — if they haven’t left this rock for exploration of the final frontier.

However, our new government is totally bought into Al Gore’s madness, and if Crap & Tax becomes law of the land all our taxes will go up, our energy costs will go sky high but not one itsy bitsy bit o’ Global Warming will be curtailed. Good ol’ Al Gore will get even richer though, if that make ya feel better!

Down under, the Australian Senate has rejected their Prime Minister backed climate change legislation. Would that we will see some leadership like that in our own Senate — I won’t be holding my breath on that one . . .

Over at Yid With Lid check out this post: Peer Reviewed Scientific Study–Al Gore is a FRAUD. He presents a good part of the subscription-only report that backs up his post title:

A new scientific paper says that the only warming that is man made is the heat coming from under Al Gore’s collar. The highly regarded Journal of Geophysical Research presented a peer reviewed study by 3 Australasian researchers which shows that natural forces are the dominant influence on climate. According to this study little or none of the late 20th century global warming and cooling can be attributed to human activity.

A few graphs from the report:

“The close relationship between ENSO and global temperature, as described in the paper, leaves little room for any warming driven by human carbon dioxide emissions. The available data indicate that future global temperatures will continue to change primarily in response to ENSO cycling, volcanic activity and solar changes.”

“Our paper confirms what many scientists already know: which is that no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, ETS (emission trading scheme) will exert no measurable effect on future climate.”

Let’s wrap up — A peer-reviewed study by three climate-scientists, published in a major scientific journal says:

That mean global tropospheric temperature has for the last 50 years fallen and risen in close accord with the SOI of 5–7 months earlier shows the potential of natural forcing mechanisms to account for most of the temperature variation.

Or, in layman’s terminology — that ol’ Big Al Gore and his Holy-Order-of-Man-Caused-Global-Warming scientific conclusion conspiracy is nothing but a big, ugly, soon-to-be-way-costly boondoggle!

No (MSM) news at eleven . . .

I can hear it now, ol’ Nanny Nancy gettin’ up and screeching “Pass this bill or we’ll kill this planet!” Or something to that effect. The Waxman-Markey bill passed the House yesterday evening thanks to the defections of 8 Republicans and despite the “no” votes of 44 Democrats. Michelle Malkin has a wanted poster up for “The 8 cap-and-tax Republicans…and the 44 Democrats who voted no”, along with phone numbers so that you can call those 8 suckers and let them know just how much you are looking forward to paying out the wazzoo for so-called “green” energy in the not so distant future.

After all, they’re all like just saving the planet man, don’t ya know? Like Gaia has any trouble handlin’ her own stuff!

In “Voting For Economic Suicide” Hugh Hewitt puts it in perspective:

They could not have read the bill.

A 300 page amendment to a bill that greatly impacts every American and greatly burdens every American business was introduced at 3:00 AM Friday and passed 16 hours later.

The spectacle of the House voting for a massive tax increase and a 300 page amendment they could not have read is a low point for post-segregationist Congresses. Never have so few read so little about so important a proposal, and yet brazen forward oblivious to the the deeply embarrassing charade it presents to the world. Banana republics make a better show of governing themselves than did the U.S. House of Representatives today.

{…}

The country knows the Obama/Pelosi/Reid Democrats are drunk on power and lurching so far to the left as to stun even partisan Democrats. The Senate may stop this attempt at economic suicide, but independents and Republicans cannot allow the public to forget the recklessness of today’s abdication of responsibility by the hard left House leadership.

There is even a part of the bill called “placeholder”, which will deal with market associated financial derivatives that will have to do with carbon emissions — PLACEHOLDER????!!!!!! So, not only has no one actually read this monster but some of it isn’t even written yet???!!! — and they passed it anyway? And these are the same jokers that are full-speed freight-training a government-option health care bill that they say will be done this summer! Yeah, like we want folks like this to be in charge of our rectal exams! Sheesh!

The 2010 elections can’t come soon enough. The economy isn’t turning around, unemployment is getting higher, government is meddling more and more in our business and private lives — Guess that’s the “change” part of Obama’s hopichanginess he promised.

Perhaps it should have been called “Hopeless Change” . . .

The Daily Telegraph’s Christopher Brooks attended the Heartland Institute’s conference in New York: Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis? Not much coverage of this one by the MSM. Wonder why?

Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. For two days in New York we heard distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tear apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.

Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google “Heartland” and “Quadrant”).

Yet the terrifying thing, as President Klaus observed in his magisterial opening address, is that there is no dialogue on these issues. When recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he found the minds of his fellow world leaders firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers. As I said in my own modest contribution to the conference, there seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore. The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.

I really like Ace’s take on all this:

What are you going to believe, actual data or models that are shown to be unable to predict actual events? How you answer that questions says all that needs to be said on where you stand on the whole issue.

So to sum up, we are going to destroy our economy by taxing and regulating it to death while starting a trade war with a major trading partner (who we expect to continue to finance our reckless spending) all in the name of solving a problem that doesn’t actually seem to be happening.

Yup!

Technorati Tags: Christopher Brooks, Global Warming, Czech President Vaclav Klaus, Richard Lindzen of MIT

Once upon a time, the Obama administration told them-there Congress critters that his Global-Warming-Hysteria CRAP & TRADE plan to control carbon emissions would cost $646 billion spread out over eight years. Now it’s more like TWO TRILLION DOLLARS! Maybe he just misplaced a decimal place or two?

A top economic aide to Mr. Obama told a group of Senate staffers last month that the president’s climate-change plan would surely raise more than the $646 billion over eight years the White House had estimated publicly, according to multiple a number of staffers who attended the briefing Feb. 26.

“We all looked at each other like, ‘Wow, that’s a big number,’” said a top Republican staffer who attended the meeting along with between 50 and 60 other Democratic and Republican congressional aides.

The plan seeks to reduce pollution by setting a limit on carbon emissions and allowing businesses and groups to buy allowances, although exact details have not been released.

At the meeting, Jason Furman, a top Obama staffer, estimated that the president’s cap-and-trade program could cost up to three times as much as the administration’s early estimate of $646 billion over eight years. A study of an earlier cap-and-trade bill co-sponsored by Mr. Obama when he was a senator estimated the cost could top $366 billion a year by 2015.

A White House official did not confirm the large estimate, saying only that Obama aides previously had noted that the $646 billion estimate was “conservative.”

I have to agree with the House Republicans on this one:

“The last thing we need is a massive tax increase in a recession, but reportedly that’s what the White House is offering: up to $1.9 trillion in tax hikes on every single American who drives a car, turns on a light switch or buys a product made in the United States,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John A. Boehner. “And since this energy tax won’t affect manufacturers in Mexico, India and China, it will do nothing but drive American jobs overseas.”

Sounds like a bunch of crappin’ and tradin’ all over the American taxpayer.

More o’ that there CHANGE we can all believe in — Oh, ya betcha yo’ ass!

Technorati Tags: climate-change, cap-and-trade program