Removing Dangerous Trees From California Wildfire Blocked By Spotted Owl

Article by  Jonah Bennett

U.S. Forest Officials have finally made the decision to allow loggers to remove trees left from an area hit by raging California wildfires last year, but environmentalists shot back, saying they will sue to protect the interests of the spotted owl.

The decision, released Wednesday, pits environmentalists against loggers over what is to be done with the dead trees still left over from last year’s blaze, the Associated Press reports. Scorching over 400 square miles of Yosemite National Park’s backcountry, Stanislaus National Forest and bleeding into other regions, the wildfire decimated 11 homes, costing around $125 million dollars to put out.

Supervisor Susan Skalski of Stanislaus National Forest stood by her decision to allow the logging.

“I did my best to balance all these important goals, with the intent of providing a decision that best serves the public interest. I realize that my decision will not please every member of the public,” she stated. Part of the reason for the move is for public safety, that is, ensuring that blackened and damaged trees don’t fall onto the roads and seriously injure people, but environmentalists pointed to the plight of the spotted owl as being a more worthy concern.

“This is an ecological travesty,” said Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist and founder of the John Muir Project, an environmentalist group. “It’s basically an extinction plan for the California spotted owl.”

Unhappy with Skalski’s decision, Hanson intends to drag the issue into court and to additionally file a federal petition requesting that the California spotted owl be listed as endangered. On the other hand, California Republican Rep. Tom McClintock was disappointed that the decision took so long in the first place, since it may be unlikely that the area receives any bids from the timber industry, now that the trees are in an advanced state of deterioration.

“They’ve taken so much time I’d be surprised they get any bids at all,” McClintock said. “If they did, it’s a fraction of the acreage that could have been salvaged.”

Alaska Physician Shuts Down Practice, Citing Obamacare

Article by Sarah Hurtubise

After a long list of Obamacare failures in Alaska, one physician is shutting down his decades-old practice, charging that the health-care law and other federal programs are “unsustainable” for practicing doctors.

Dr. William Wennen, a plastic surgeon, is closing his Fairbanks practice after 38 years of working in the state. Dr. Wennen blames federal health insurance programs, citing Obamacare, Medicaid and Medicare, for shutting down his practice.

“It is an unsustainable system,” Dr. Wennen wrote to his customers in a letter obtained by The Daily Caller. “I am personally writing off upwards of three quarters of a million dollars annually in free/uncompensated care.”

“My reasons for closing down the office are simply economic,” Wennen wrote. “The governmental agencies that are supplying ‘medical insurance’ to the elderly, the disadvantaged, the indigent and the sick, injured, or disabled have placed an unrealistically low value of worth on physician’s services.”

Medicaid typically has the lowest physician reimbursements of any federal program. Doctors have been protesting pay cuts for services through Medicaid and Medicare. It’s increasingly difficult for customers to actually find health care providers that accept the coverage — especially in private practice, where doctors are more hard-pressed to be profitable than at big-budget hospitals. (RELATED: Less Than Half Of Doctors In Nation’s Largest Cities Accept Medicaid)

“Within the last month, Fairbanks has lost three other much respected physicians for the same or similar reasons,” Dr. Wennen wrote. ”I am not the first and certainly will not be the last of the exodus of physicians from active practice because of all of this.”

Dr. Wennen is far from alone in his stark opposition to the health-care law. A recent survey from the Physicians Foundation found that 46 percent of doctors in the U.S. would give Obamacare a “D” or an “F,” the Washington Examiner reported.

For his part, Wennen hopes to continue providing medical care through other avenues, but can no longer afford to keep his practice. Other doctors nationwide have simply refused to accept coverage provided by federal agencies — even private coverage sold through Obamacare exchanges. (RELATED: Doctors Begin To Refuse Obamacare Patients)

If other physicians follow in Dr. Wennen’s footsteps, Alaskans may have an even more difficult time accessing health care in the future. And that’s after Obamacare’s already hit the state especially hard — the state Obamacare exchange is facing some of the highest rate hikes in the nation.

Premera Alaska is upping its rates by 37 percent — and says even that isn’t enough. The state insurance department expects Premera will lose $5 million in 2015 alone at these rates. The only other carrier, Moda, will up rates by 27 percent.

WEATHER CHIEF: OBAMA 'PROSTITUTING' CLIMATE SCIENCE

Article by GREG COROMBOS

As President Obama tries to rally the world to embrace his agenda to curb carbon emissions, Weatherbell Chief Forecaster Joe Bastardi is condemning the “prostituting” of climate science by Obama and others to further what he considers a political agenda.

On Tuesday, Obama addressed the United Nations Climate Summit, saying the world needs to confront the effects of man-made climate change and that no responsible nation can sit on the sidelines while the condition of the earth hangs in the balance for future generations. He also says the U.S. is one of the nations most responsible for the rise of carbon dioxide levels and, in turn, global temperatures.

Bastardi believes this is all a smokescreen.

“This is not about the weather. It’s not about climate. It’s not about science. Those things are being used to further another agenda,” Bastardi said. “And as someone who has loved (weather) all his life, it’s really disheartening to see this going on in my country.”

He believes the real purpose of the climate-change movement was on display in the People’s Climate March, which took aim at Wall Street and big business earlier in the week.

“The mask came off. It’s about destroying capitalism, destroying freedom as we know it,” said Bastardi, who earlier this week suggested climate science was “prostituted” by global warming activists.

“I really believe this is an agenda-driven situation, and it’s frustrating to me,” he said. “People got mad at me because I used the word ‘prostituted.’”

He added, “Something I love is now being used for a completely different thing. If there was one positive about that climate march, if you go and look at the people marching and the signs they had up, it should be obvious that it’s not the climate they’re concerned about. It’s the destruction of the American way of life as we were taught: the competitiveness, the capitalism, that type of thing where the individual has the chance to pull himself up. That’s what I believe this is about.”

Bastardi said a dead giveaway that the movement is a fraud can be seen in the evolving terminology of the cause.

“Why would you trust anybody that changed ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’? If you were playing somebody in a baseball game and suddenly he decided to change it to ping-pong because he was getting beat, why would you get involved with them?” Bastardi asked.

“If you look at the 30-plus excuses now that they have for this so-called pause in warming … over two-thirds of their excuses are natural excuses. Oh, the sun’s not doing this. Oh, the volcano. Oh, there’s this or that. It’s hard to believe this whole thing is occurring.”

According to Bastardi, one of the biggest reasons this political movement gained traction is because the media refuse to investigate the basis for it.

“The media is complicit in this. They don’t even bother looking,” he said. “It’s astounding as a 59-year-old man, remembering all the things that the media uncovered and went after, how they just march along like sheep. I don’t get it. I really don’t.”

“You have to tell the truth, even if you believe you have the greater truth. You have to look at the facts. The media and everybody else have to get on to this thing because, in the end, what’s going to happen is if you don’t have energy to drive the lifeblood of your economy, your economy’s not going to go anywhere.”

As for the science, Bastardi said it’s pretty well established what causes temperature fluctuations.

“Nature, not man, rules the climate. You can do the math. It’s common sense to understand that the sun, the oceans and stochastic events far outweigh what CO2 can possibly do,” he said. “It’s boxed in effectively. It’s one-one hundredth of the greenhouse gases, the most prominent being water vapor.”

Bastardi said the global-warming movement’s contention that human activity leads to more carbon dioxide that leads to higher temperatures is already proven false. In recent years, CO2 levels continued to rise even as temperatures cooled, refuting the famed “hockey stick” of Dr. Michael Mann that predicted temperatures would rise with no end in sight.

Bastardi said climate history is even more definitive.

“I’d like the president or anybody else to explain to me how we had an ice age at 7,000 parts per million,” he said. “If you actually looked at the geological time scale and the relationship of CO2 to temperatures, I don’t understand how you can be driving home this point that the United States, or anybody else on the face of the planet, is to blame for so-called climate change.”

As for the leveling off and even reduction in average temperatures in recent years, Bastardi says actual data is a death blow to Obama and other activists.

“All we need to do is watch the temperatures now over the next 10-20 years. As the Pacific began to cool, temperatures leveled off. The Atlantic’s going to cool. They’ll fall even more. I made the statement back in 2007, that by the year 2030, they’ll fall back to where they were back in 1978, the start of the satellite era and when the Pacific went into its warming cycle,” said Bastardi, who also dismisses the concerns of activists that rising ocean levels threaten the lives of tens of millions of Americans in coastal areas.

“Seven inches a century of so-called sea level rise along our coasts is well within natural realms if you look at how far the ocean has varied up and down over the geological time scale,” he said.

“So when these people say these things, you can sense the frustration in my voice. It takes me 10 seconds to refute them. I could go right to something that shows the opposite going on.”

When confronted by arguments like Bastardi’s, global-warming activists contend those are fringe views and that there is near unanimous scientific consensus. In his State of the Union Address this year, President Obama declared that “the science is settled.”

Bastardi said that’s another canard.

“Over 31,000 degreed scientists signed against the Kyoto Accords, 9,000 of them Ph.D.s, for goodness sake,” he said. “Why doesn’t anybody bring that up?”

However, Bastardi said some statistics do tell the story of the impact of fossil fuels and the industrial era have had on the United States, and he urges Obama to examine them.

“Mr. President, take a look,” he said. “The only true hockey sticks from fossil fuel are in per capita GDP for each human being on the earth and life expectancy, which has shot up. Both those things have shot up in the age of fossil fuels.”