Climate Progress » Blog Archive » Must-read NOAA [propaganda] smacks down the deniers

And so in spite of the best efforts of the deniers, the American public should have every confidence in the US temperature record and the rather painfully obvious conclusion that the planet is warming:

Q. Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?

A. None at all. Even if NOAA did not have weather observing stations across the length and breadth of the United States the impacts of the warming are unmistakable. For example, lake and river ice is melting earlier in the spring and forming later in the fall. Plants are blooming earlier in the spring. Mountain glaciers are melting. Coastal temperatures are rising. And a multitude of species of birds, fish, mammals and plants are extending their ranges northward and, in mountainous areas, upward as well.

Climate Progress » Blog Archive » Barbour [on the economic dangers of Obama's climate swindle]

The concerns I’ve cited are serious, even if the cap and trade tax works as planned. But many Americans worry it will be an Enron-style financial scheme where Wall Street manipulators make giant profits while ratepayers, motorists and Main Street businesses pay greatly increased costs….

A particularly scary feature of the cap and trade tax regime is that anyone can purchase emissions permits. There is nothing to stop a large government like China from investing heavily in CO2 emissions permits instead of US treasuries. The effect, of course, would be that US-located industries could not buy those permits or that they would have to pay much higher prices for the permits, thereby making our businesses even more uncompetitive with foreign (read: Chinese) manufactures. Market manipulation by speculators is bad enough; driving up demand and prices by foreign competitors is anathema.