Environmental news from France: President Francois Hollande's scooter

                                                                    (image by wiki)

Model AMCA Troupes Aeról Portées Mle. 56 - modified by the French military that incorporated an anti tank weapon. It is not known whether M. Hollande uses a modernized version of this French military vehicle.
 

The latest environmental news from France:

Closer, echoing reports published on various websites in recent days, said Hollande routinely drives through Paris on his scooter to spend the night with his 41-year-old mistress.

Shouldn't France's socialist president Francois Hollande at least be complimented for using an environmentally friendly mode of transport during his nightly escapades?

Perhaps not:

When it comes to emissions of nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbons – so-called smog-forming pollutants – motorcycles and scooters emit many times more per kilometre than cars and trucks. 2 stroke scooters are much worse than 4 stroke scooters when it comes to smog forming pollutants and, when it comes to smog, are worse than most cars.
In short, scooters produce fewer greenhouse gasses (GHG’s) than automobiles and GHG’s are the primary enemy of climate change. But scooters produce a lot more smog forming emissions than an automobile. These are the emissions that put a haze in the air and provide poor air quality for breathing.

Germany's new foreign minister on a EU charm offensive

Steinmeier at his most charming

On Tuesday this week Germany's new socialist foreign minister told journalists in Brussels that he would launch a new EU charm offensive:

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said on Tuesday he hoped to rectify his country's image in Europe

On Thursday Herr Steinmeier apparently launched his charm offensive:

"We must not avoid confrontation with populists, nationalists, with these brainless people who call themselves eurosceptics"

We are looking forward to the next steps in the Steinmeier charm offensive ...

David Cameron incorrectly links storms to climate change

This might be a good reason for David Cameron to fire his scientific adviser - if he has one:

In response to a question from Tim Farron during Prime Minister's Questions in which the Liberal Democrat MP suggested the recent weather was a "destructive and inevitable consequence, at least in part, of climate change", Mr Cameron said: "I agree with my honourable friend that we are seeing more abnormal weather events.
“Colleagues across the house can argue about whether that is linked to climate change or not. I very much suspect that it is.”

The alarmist Met Office had to correct the PM:

But Nicola Maxey from the Met Office said there was a crucial distinction between weather and climate change.
“What happened at the end of December and at the beginning of January is weather,” she said.
“Climate change happens on a global scale, and weather happens at a local scale. Climate scientists have been saying that for quite a while.
“At the moment there's no evidence to suggest that these storms are more intense because of climate change.

EU Commission vice president Viviane Reding: "We need to build a United States of Europe with the Commission as government"

Of course we have already known for long what the overpaid, useless top eurocrats in Brussels want. But with regard to the forthcoming European elections, it's good that one of them declared it openly - it makes it easier to vote against their megalomaniac plans.

So, thank you very much for your kind assistance, Mrs Reding! Hopefully you will continue spreading the message!

A campaign for the European Union to become a "United States of Europe" will be the "best weapon against the Eurosceptics", one of Brussels' most senior officials has said.

Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission and the longest serving Brussels commissioner, has called for "a true political union" to be put on the agenda for EU elections this spring.

"We need to build a United States of Europe with the Commission as government and two chambers – the European Parliament and a "Senate" of Member States," she said.

Mrs Reding's vision, which is shared by many in the European institutions, would transform the EU into superstate relegating national governments and parliaments to a minor political role equivalent to that played by local councils in Britain.

Under her plan, the commission would have supremacy over governments and MEPs in the European Parliament would supersede the sovereignty of MPs in the House of Commons.
 

Mark Steyn on the "Global warming's glorious ship of fools"

Mark Steyn reports on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition:

But still: you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint.
But alas, eating one’s shipmates and watching one’s extremities drop off one by one is not a part of today’s high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists uploaded chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year singalong of such hearty un-self-awareness that it enraged even such party-line climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin, the plonkingly earnest enviro-blogger of the New York Times. A mere six weeks ago, pumping out the usual boosterism, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that, had Captain Scott picked his team as carefully as Professor Chris Turney, he would have survived. Sadly, we’ll never know — although I’ll bet Captain Oates would have been doing his ‘I am going out. I may be some time’ line about eight bars into that New Year number.

Unlike Scott, Amundsen and Mawson, Professor Turney took his wife and kids along for the ride. And his scientists were outnumbered by wealthy tourists paying top dollar for the privilege of cruising the end of the world. In today’s niche-market travel industry, the Antarctic is a veritable Club Dread for upscale ecopalyptics: think globally, cruise icily.

Read the entire article here

Jens Pedersen, senior scientist at Denmark's Technical University: "The Earth is entering a very unpleasant cooling period"

Jens Pedersen, senior scientist at Denmark's Technical University, is worried about the Earth entering an unpleasant cooling period:

 

There are signs that the Earth is entering a very unpleasant cooling period. Sunspot activity remains very low.

"The sun has been very unusual for almost 15 years now," Jens Pedersen, senior scientist at the Denmark's Technical University, said.

Pedersen said the sun recently reached solar maximum and that there should be a lot of sunspot activity, but there isn't.

"We have to go back 100 years to find a solar maximum that was as weak as the one we are in right now," he told CBN News. "And the recent solar minimum…one has to go back 200 years to find one that was as weak."

The last time the sun was this quiet, North America and Europe suffered through a weather event from the 1600s to the 1800s known as "Little Ice Age," when the Thames River in London regularly froze solid, and North America saw terrible winters. Crops failed and people starved.

Hiding the Evidence

Pedersen said climate scientists know the Earth stopped warming 15 years ago. But the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, of which Pedersen is an expert reviewer, suppressed a recent report from its own scientists that the U.N.'s climate model has been proven wrong.

"In particular one of the issues has been why global warming has stopped during the last 15 years, and climate scientists were very frank that the climate models do not match the climate we observe," Pedersen said.

But politicians removed that embarrassing finding from the final draft.  It's as if the alleged danger from climate change can't be wrong because it is now too important.

It has become a political movement, a cash cow for climate scientists and environmental groups, and a way for world leaders to control economies and people.

 

Read the entire article here

Someone in the Obama adminstration has a good sense of humor: Biden "one of the leading statesmen of his time"

"One of the leading statesmen of his time"?

Definition of a statesman:

"A political leader whose wisdom, integrity, etc, win great respect"

Collins English Dictionary

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates has written a memoir, which at least this blogger looks forward to reading:

The White House is bristling over former Defense Secretary Robert Gates' new memoir accusing President Barack Obama of showing too little enthusiasm for the U.S. war mission in Afghanistan and sharply criticizing Vice President Joe Biden's foreign policy instincts.

In a book set for release next week by the publishing house Knopf, Gates writes that Biden is "a man of integrity," but also a political figure who has been "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." --

... in the case of the Gates book, the White House chose to speak out quickly and sharply.

The National Security Council issued a statement late Tuesday asserting that Obama relies on Biden's "good counsel" every day and considers him "one of the leading statesmen of his time."

 

The fact that the White House considers Joe Biden "one of the leading statesmen of his time" shows that someone in the Obama administration still has a sense of humor.

 

John Kerry's "top priority" when he meets his Iranian counterpart

Now we know what is Secretary of State John Kerry's "top priority" when he meets his Iranian counterpart, Mohammed Javad Zarif:

"Climate change is one of the most urgent and profoundly complex challenges we face;" “That’s why, everywhere I travel as Secretary of State – in every meeting, here at home and across the more than 280,000 miles I’ve traveled since I raised my hand and took the oath to serve in this office – I have made this issue a top priority.”

Janet Daley on the euro 2014: "more and more like the East German Ostmark"

It is easy to agree with Janet Daley's prediction for the eurozone in 2014:

... the eurozone will not collapse – at least, not as definitively as the Communist bloc did 20 years ago. But neither will it take any serious steps to resolve its internal contradictions. The euro will survive – however many democratic governments, constitutional arrangements and national institutions have to be trampled underfoot to preserve it. The pretence will be abandoned that the artificial life-support system on which the currency has been dependent is some temporary emergency measure, and it will come to be accepted as a permanent fixture.
With this, the euro will quite rapidly lose what connections it had with economic reality, becoming more and more like the East German Ostmark, whose value was decided by bureaucratic fiat and sustained by a political act of will. The social costs of this – particularly in southern Europe – will be devastating. But they are unlikely to lead to the sort of violent unrest that once seemed to be imminent. The peoples of the Mediterranean seem too exhausted by hardship to organise national rebellions. They will simply resign themselves to a future of economic dependency and occasional outbursts of neo-fascist disorder.

Read the entire Telegraph column here

Time Magazine Senior Writer: "Climate Change Might Just Be Driving the Historic Cold Snap"

This was to be expected. Warmists like Time's senior writer Bryan Walsh blame the record freeze on global warming!:

Climate Change Might Just Be Driving the Historic Cold Snap
Global warming is sometimes thought of more as “global weirding,” with all manner of complex disruptions occurring over time. This week’s events show that climate change is almost certainly screwing with weather patterns ways that go beyond mere increases in temperature—meaning that you’d be smart to hold onto those winter coats for a while longer.

"Global warming" continues in the US: This week 140 million Americans will see the coldest temperatures in almost 20 years

Flashback March 20, 2000:
"Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".
"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said."

This week 140 million Americans are indeed in for "a very rare and exciting event":

As many as 140 million Americans are bracing this week for a polar blast that's barreling across the country, dumping snow in some places and shattering records.

Much of the United States will see the coldest temperatures in almost 20 years, according to the National Weather Service. They are expected to be 30 to 50 degrees below average in some cities.

To put things in perspective, the weather in Atlanta and Nashville, Tennessee, on Monday will be colder than in Anchorage, Alaska. By Wednesday, nearly half the nation will shudder in temperatures of zero or lower, forecasters said.