CEI Today: Planetary emergency cancelled, union bosses paid during shutdown, and vindictive park closures

GLOBAL WARMING – MARLO LEWIS

Globalwarming.org: IPCC Cancels Planetary Emergency

Okay, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not do so in as many words. But in addition to being more confident than ever (despite a 16-year pause in warming and the growing mismatch between model projections and observations) that most recent warming is man-made, they are also more confident nothing really bad is going to happen during the 21st Century.

The scariest parts of the “planetary emergency” narrative popularized by Al Gore and other pundits are Atlantic Ocean circulation shutdown (implausibly plunging Europe into a mini-ice age), ice sheet disintegration raising sea levels 20 feet, and runaway warming from melting frozen methane deposits.

As BishopHill and Judith Curry report on their separate blogs, IPCC now believes that in the 21st Century, Atlantic Ocean circulation collapse is “very unlikely,” ice sheet collapse is “exceptionally unlikely,” and catastrophic release of methane hydrates from melting permafrost is “very unlikely.” You can read it for yourself in Chapter 12 Table 12.4 of the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report. >

SHUTDOWN IMPACT ON UNION BOSSES – TREY KOVACS

Workplacechoice.org: Obama Administration Memo: Keep Paying Union Bosses on Official Time

Over the weekend, the House unanimously passed the Federal Employee Retroactive Pay Fairness Act. If passed by the Senate, all furloughed federal employees will receive back-pay over the duration of the government shutdown. While paying public employees to not work is absurd, the federal government already does this. In what is known as union official time, the practice that allows unionized federal government workers to perform union duties unrelated to their jobs while still being paid their government salary.

Worse, the Office of Personnel Management, the federal agency in charge of managing federal employees, changed its government shutdown guidance to allow union representatives to work on paid official time.

OBAMA SHUTS DOWN TOURIST ATTRACTIONS – RJ SMITH

Openmarket.org: Some Genuine Vindictiveness in Park Closings

The attempted forced shut down of the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina may provide some insight into the attitudes of the National Park Service in shutting down private concessionaires on federal lands that still have open access for the public.