Co-op Paying Michaels $100K Attributes Global Warming To Plate Tectonics

[hatrack]

No, you just can't make this shit up.

EDIT

In southcentral Montana, for example, five rural electric cooperatives have ignored the obvious promise of windpower (clean, much cheaper than new coal, fast to install, can come on in increments, can be decentralized) to form a consortium attempting to build a 250-megawatt coal-fired power plant east of Great Falls. The co-ops are partnering with the city of Great Falls in order to secure enough water to run the plant (Great Falls has extensive water rights to the Missouri River).

And in Colorado, the Intermountain Rural Electric Association, based in Sedalia, organized a fund-raising campaign to pay Pat Michaels – the Virginia state climatologist, a University of Virginia professor and senior fellow at the Cato Institute – to continue his critiques of other scientists’ work on global warming. The Colorado REA’s fund-raising efforts arose after Michaels spoke at the Western Business Roundtable in fall 2005 and said he was running out of money.

EDIT

IREA gets 94 percent of its power from Xcel Energy, and a significant portion of that is coal-fired. IREA is also a partner with Xcel, owning 190 megawatts in Xcel’s 750 MW coal-fired power plant currently under construction. IREA does not want to see taxes on carbon emissions or mandatory carbon emission caps raise the price of its electricity. The IREA memo, interestingly, concedes that global warming is occurring, but that its primary trigger is not industrial emissions of greenhouse gases but “eccentricities in Earth’s orbit,” the “influence of plate tectonics” (a reference to earthquakes and volcanoes) and “cyclical variations in the sun’s energy output.”

IREA apparently is banking on those “cyclical variations” to save us. The IREA memo says a Russian scientist, Kabibula Absudamatov, is predicting a decrease in the sun’s radiation beginning in 2012, leading to temperature declines, not rises, into the middle of the current century.

EDIT

http://www.billingsnews.com/story?storyid=20263&issue=339

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Actually, they ARE making this shit up. nt

[struggle4progress]

2. Electricity co-op boss catches flak

By Jim Erickson, Rocky Mountain News
August 3, 2006

The general manager of a Sedalia-based electrical cooperative is coming under fire from scientists and co-op members for spending $100,000 to hire a leading global warming skeptic as a consultant.

Some members of the Intermountain Rural Electric Association said general manager Stanley Lewandowski overstepped his authority when he hired Virginia state climatologist - and longtime global warming contrarian - Patrick Michaels as a consultant.

One climate scientist said Lewandowski's action was part of a well-orchestrated campaign to confuse the public about global warming ...

"I just think it's outrageous that Lewandowski feels he can do this without talking to the members of the organization," said John Stencel, president of the Rocky Mountain Farmer's Union and an IREA customer in eastern Aurora ... http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_4890196,00.html