In The News
The HIll: Drudge, global warming shut down Senate site
Tuesday January 23, 2007
Internet surfers trying to access the Senate’s website on Friday (oh, c’mon, you know you were) might have encountered a bit of a delay. For part of the day, all of the Senate’s Web pages, including senators’ personal pages and committee sites, were down.
The culprits? Two oft-blamed scourges: DrudgeReport.com and global warming. Well, sort of.
Traffic to a blog posted by Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee was so heavy Friday, thanks to a link posted on DrudgeReport.com, that the Senate site got bogged down. The blog entry that caused the stir was critical of the Weather Channel’s call for decertification of meteorologists who are skeptical of global warming.
An e-mail sent to Senate offices by the Sergeant at Arms, whose office was scrambling to fix the problem on Friday, read in part, “Drudgereport.com established a link on their web site to a press release on a Senate committee Web site. This link was creating 30-50,000 queries per hour to senate.gov, which in turn was generating a query to the Press Application for each of those hits.”
EPW ranking member Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) started the blog in December.
Hmm, now if only the Senate could generate that kind of readership for such scintillating online features as “The Senate’s First Decade on the Web.”
Environment & Public Works Committee to Make History with First-Ever Live Senate Blog During State of the Union Address
Monday January 22, 2007
The EWP blog will incorporate commentary, facts and interactive web links with policy reactions to the President and the Democratic response.
Make the EPW blog a favorite bookmark and your must stop Web page to fully enjoy the State of the Union Address and the Democrat response. The EPW blog was launched in December 2006 and features a wide array of news and views on the issues under EPW”s jurisdiction. For more on the committee see: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs
Go to www.epw.senate.gov and be in the know.
PETA Trial Begins on Animal Cruelty Offenses
Monday January 22, 2007
EPW Blog Update: Climate Skeptic Scheduled to Appear on Fox News & CNN Monday Night
Monday January 22, 2007
The Weather Channel Climate Expert Refuses to Retract Call for Decertification for Global Warming Skeptics
Friday January 19, 2007
As of yet, The Weather Channel has yet to officially comment on the matter.
Instead Heidi Cullen, host of the weekly global warming show The Climate Code, tried to redirect the conversation in her blog post http://climate.weather.com/blog/9_11592.html?cm_ven=one_deg_blog&cm;_ite=one_deg_commentary&from;=one_deg_commentary] late Thursday afternoon:
AMS CERTIFIED WEATHERMAN STRIKES BACK AT WEATHER CHANNEL CALL FOR DECERTIFICATION
Friday January 19, 2007
"In 2005 I upgraded the AMS seal of approval to the new "Certified Broadcast Meteorologist" designation. The CBM is the highest level of certification from the AMS, and involves academic requirements, on-air performance, a rigorous examination, and continuing education. I am CBM number 33, meaning I am the 33rd person in the nation to earn it. I wanted to be the first in Alabama, but a couple of guys in Huntsville beat me to it. Just not enough hours in the day!
January 18, 2007 | James Spann | Op/Ed
Well, well. Some “climate expert” on “The Weather Channel” wants to take away AMS certification from those of us who believe the recent “global warming” is a natural process. So much for “tolerance”, huh?
I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. Our big job: look at a large volume of raw data and come up with a public weather forecast for the next seven days. I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can’t find them. Here are the basic facts you need to know:
Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics
Wednesday January 17, 2007
The Weather Channel’s (TWC) Heidi Cullen, who hosts the weekly global warming program "The Climate Code," is advocating that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) revoke their "Seal of Approval" for any television weatherman who expresses skepticism that human activity is creating a climate catastrophe.
Bingaman Climate Propsal ‘Doing nothing while saying that we're doing something.’”
Friday January 12, 2007
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...Heads Stuck In The Tundra
Wednesday January 10, 2007
Heads Stuck In The Tundra
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 1/9/2007
Energy Policy: The new Democratic majority wants to make the ban on oil and gas drilling in the ANWR permanent. Shutting down domestic supply is not a plan for energy independence.
No longer content with merely blocking Republican attempts to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration, Democrats have decided to make that ban permanent, forever protecting species that are in no demonstrable danger and that have flourished in nearby Prudhoe Bay.
While Cuba and China drill off the Florida Keys, Democrats worry about caribou. So do we, but not at the expense of American national and economic security.
On Friday, Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced H.R. 39, legislation that would make the 1.2 million-acre coastal plain of the ANWR a permanently protected wilderness and end efforts to develop its energy resources for the benefit of the American people.
"The consensus is that there should not be drilling in the refuge, so the logical next step is to pass legislation which turns it into a wilderness," Markey said of his bill.
(The measure, by the way, is co-sponsored by Rep. Jim Ramstad, a Republican from Minnesota, proving that environmental hysteria can be a bipartisan phenomenon. )
Certainly there's consensus among America's overseas suppliers, ranging from OPEC to thugs such as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who would dearly like to keep us, uh, over a barrel.
Markey, who once said, "The proposal to drill in ANWR is an ethical crime because there is no national energy crisis," introduced similar legislation in each of the last three congressional sessions. With Democrats in control of the House and the Senate, he feels chances are good to get it through and on the desk of President Bush.
To pass the Senate would take 60 votes, with the GOP filibustering this time. And there's always Bush's second veto. But one never knows, with an undoubtedly friendly media putting pictures of threatened critters on the front page as we are reminded daily of the dangers of fossil fuels melting the Arctic and drowning polar bears by the score.
The "pristine" environment the Democrats describe is far from those wildlife scenes splashed on the evening news.
Winter on the 2,000 acres of the coastal plain where drilling would actually occur — an area smaller than Chicago's O'Hare Airport — is what hell would look like if it froze over. Total darkness reigns for 58 days. The temperature drops to 70 degrees below zero without the wind chill. Your spit freezes before it hits the ground.
As for the caribou, Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation has said the caribou that migrate through nearby Prudhoe Bay, just 60 miles to the west of the ANWR, have increased in number from 3,000 to more than 23,000.
He also notes that another wildlife refuge in Alaska, the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, has had drilling onsite for decades, with no discernible harm.
More than 15 billion barrels of oil have been sent down the Alaska pipeline from Prudhoe Bay over the last three decades, much more than the six months' supply predicted at the beginning by those who predicted a similar environmental disaster there.
Imagine our energy picture today had Prudhoe Bay been blocked as Markey et al. seek to do with the ANWR.
If President Clinton hadn't blocked drilling in the refuge in 1995, it would today be pumping more than a million barrels of oil daily into the American economy. That's two-thirds of the oil taken offline by Hurricane Katrina, which caused a significant price spike.
Just because we can't get all our oil from the ANWR doesn't mean we shouldn't get any of it from there. The U.S. Geological Survey has conservatively estimated that the refuge contains 10 billion barrels of oil, enough to supply the oil needs of Markey's Massachusetts for 75 years.
It's also enough to supply the oil needs of Washington, D.C., a place where there's no shortage of hot air, for 1,710 years. As we've said, with oil exporters like Russia, Iran and Venezuela holding much of the world's energy hostage, there's more than a few thousand caribou at stake.
Click Here for the Article: http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=253236719184724&view=1