ARROGANT GREENIE BUREAUCRATS THINK THEY OWN THE COUNTRY

A four-year "study"? Why not let the people vote on it instead?

"The Bureau of Land Management's surprise decision last week to halt permit work on three controversial gas wells west of Choteau is part of a broader plan that will halt drilling on the Rocky Mountain Front for at least the next four years, the agency announced Tuesday. Rather than taking a piecemeal look at individual leases, the BLM has decided to do a thorough study of the entire Front, said Rebecca Watson, assistant secretary of land and minerals management for the Department of Interior. The study will allow government agencies to make some long-term decisions about the future of the ecosystem, she said. [Good of them!]

Also Tuesday, another branch of the Interior Department, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, announced an ambitious proposal to place conservation protection on about 170,000 acres along the Front. The announcements came during a news conference in Billings.

The BLM late last week stopped work on a million-dollar environmental review of a proposal to drill three natural gas wells in the Blindhorse Outstanding Natural Area of the Front."

More here.





AUSTRALIA'S "WORST DROUGHT" ACTUALLY QUITE ORDINARY

Wok Hughes is once again hitting the climate doomsters with the facts:


"Many claims have been made by advocacy groups the media and prominent people that 2002 was the "..worst drought in a hundred years.." or "..worst drought ever..". In early 2003 we were very suspicious of these claims because most rainfall histories we reviewed showed dryer episodes than 2002 at varying time-spans back into the past but very rarely did we have to look back 100 years to find a dryer episode. At that time we did not have an Australia-wide dataset but earlier in 2004 we noticed the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) had posted on an ftp site a ~370 station "high quality rainfall dataset" (HQRD) which we have reviewed.

What did we do ? We examined annual data for each station, and after rejecting stations that either; had no data for 2002, or had too many missing years or garbled data. We ended up with 253 stations with useful series of annual rainfall totals, most of which extended back about a century, some about 120 years and a few from more remote areas covered maybe half of the 20C. We then manually checked the number series to pinpoint the most recent dryer episode compared to 2002, taking into account 2001 if that was also a dry year. The timespans back to the next worse drought episode were rounded to the nearest decade and colour coded with a mapping program used to portray the station localities.

It is obvious from the map that for vast areas of Australia the 2002 drought was simply a repetition of a similar but dryer event not too distant in the past. Claims of "..worst drought in a hundred years.." or "..worst drought ever.." can only be justified for a very small proportion of the area of Australia, mainly in western Queensland. The name "Great West Queensland Drought of 2002" is proposed.

How is it that the Myth of "Australia's worst drought" grew so fast and these manifestly inaccurate claims get such wide currency ? We have to realize that the media thrives on gloom and doom bad news stories to sell papers and rate well on TV. This will not change but we must be very sceptical of any claims made on the media connected with the environment. The media are natural allies of Green groups who have made an art form of distorting the science of natural phenomena to generate gloom and doom / sky falling in stories to convince us how terrible our society is so we will vote for them or at least give them money. In the case of drought there are also farming and rural groups suffering financial uncertainty and it is unreasonable to expect an accurate view of distant historical events from them".

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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