National Forest Legal News Blog

The Wall Street Journal has this article entitled "How to Forge a Consensus: The impression left by Climategate emails is that the global warming has been rigged from the start." 

The Telegraph has this piece by Gerald Warner entitled "Climategate emails sweep America, may scuttle Barack Obama's Cap and Trade Laws."

And the Guardian has this opinion piece entitled, "Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away" from George Monbiot, who calls global warming opposition liars, but also come down hard on his own global warming scientists for hiding and covering up bad facts instead of engaging us, the critics.

Wyoming - A proposal to drill a single oil well in the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming is stirring up opposition amongst environmentalists.  The Forest Service is trying to push the proposal through without a full blown environmental review under a categorical exclusion for projects that don't require new roadbuilding and involves fewer than four drilling sites.  You can read more at the AP and the Casper Star Tribune.  but expect environmentalists to file suit despite the clear legal exception.  

Ok, so why is it that categorical exclusions don't require significant environmental study?  Well, the law requires that the Forest Service study effects from projects that may have a significant effect on the environmental.  Categorical exclusions represent a small project of the kind the Forest Service has studied and approved a hundred times over.  Based on the Forest Service's history and experience there is no need to study each and every small project.  As such, the categorical exclusion is available.  

As expected the mainstream media, i.e. CNN, NY Times has begun to spin the Climategate scandal as nothing more than a right wing conspiracy to take emails and comments out of context.   For those of you looking for a complete update on this breaking scandal you can check out the blog that helped start it all, Air Vent.

D.C. - Colorado Senator Mark Udall has co-sponsored a bill aimed at giving the Forest Service greater authority to immediately mark and treat areas infested with the pine beetle.  Udall called the pine beetle one of the greatest natural disasters faced by the West.  You can read more about the bill at The Summit Daily News and the Seattle Post Intelligencer.  

The Wall Street Journal offers this piece on the climate scientists fraud.  It begins with one of the emails from Phil Jones, the University's Climate Research Unit Director: 

'The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind."

My opinion:  If this was coming from a government official covering up research on some drug, they'd be fired.  If this case from a private business, there would be criminal investigations.  Instead, it comes from climate scientists whose data the public officials have been relying on to impose taxes and significantly burden our economy to fight a fake condition.  This is fraud and these scientists belong in jail just like those from Enron.  They have concocted fraudulent data in an attempt to induce specific reliance by the public and private industry.  The costs to date of compliance have been in the billions due to fraud.

I like this piece from the Telegraph with more extensive quotes from the scientist's emails and their attempts to quash the skeptics and suppress/delete conflicting data.  An excerpt from the Telegraph article:

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

You can also read this piece from the Washington Times.  Upon my most current check, there was no coverage of this breaking news on CNN at all.  

As if there was ever any doubt, here's the proof.  Emails and documents smuggled /hacked from a UK university revealed that climate scientists changed data to hide the declining global temps.  You can read about it at London's Telegraph.  This has U.S. congressmen calling for an investigation into "Climategate".  One particular email sticks out from a climate "scientist".  He writes: 

"I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

The data allegedly shows discussions of how to keep scientists who were global warming skeptics out of the scientific literature.  The climate "scientists" deny wrongdoing and blame this all on those who wish to disrupt the global consensus at the Copenhagen conference.  Let me be the first one to say that this certainly disrupts any "consensus" out there.  Global warming is now a confirmed lie.  You can keep up with the breaking news on this global scandal at Wikipedia's Climategate page.  

Wyoming - I was reading this article about a $10 trailhead parking fee for the West Tensleep Trailhead in the Bighorn National Forest.  The writer is clearly distressed by the user fee and calls for it to be repealed. Somehow the idea that an environmentalist has to pay a fee to access the Forest Service's trail system is wrong?  I don't understand.  Environmentalists rail that we need to pay a carbon tax.  We need to pay tolls on our highways. We need to stop destructive grazing.   Whatever happened to the Tragedy of the Commons that environmentalists lecture about?  If you allow people to take public lands or use resources for free they will be abused and overused.  Instead, you put a price on it to deter free use and make actual users pay for their share.  Apparently, this principle only applies to others when dealing with environmentalists.

D.C. - According to the Washington Post John McCain intends to block all USDA nominees until Secretary Vilsack allows the Arizona Snowbowl snowmaking to go forward.  The controversial project (at least with native americans and environmentalists) allows the resort to make snow will treated wastewater.  The project had been approved and legal challenges failed.  Apparently, Vilsack is delaying and dragging his feet over the project that had cleared approval and appeals.  

Pennsylvania -   A family was found after being lost in the Allegheny National Forest overnight. I can only imagine the next time this guy wants his wife and kid to going hiking with him.  Sure honey, remember the last time we went hiking and you got us lost overnight in the forest?  You can read more in the Philadelphia Enquirer and at GoErie.com.