Green v. black: "Among the many luxuries wealth can buy is insulation from reality -- the most dangerous luxury of all. Another dangerous luxury is a sense of being one of the wonderfully special people with superior wisdom and virtue. Environmental extremism flourishes among those who can afford both luxuries. Did you know people in the wealthy San Francisco suburb of Sausalito, across the bay, own 80,000 acres of land in Kenya? What are they doing with it? They are setting it aside as a nature preserve, to keep poor people in Kenya from hunting animals for food on those 80,000 acres. ... What are rich people doing, in the first place, trying to stop poor people on the other side of the world from getting something to eat? They are feeding their own egos by hindering poor Africans from feeding themselves.




LAW TWISTED ON BEHALF OF "MIGRATORY BIRDS"

Soviet-style Greenie bureaucrats say you can't fill in a puddle without their permission

John A. Rapanos, a 68-year-old Michigan landowner faces a 10-month federal imprisonment and up to $10 million in fines. Rapanos cleared and graded 175 acres of fallow farmland that he had owned since 1950 with the intention of constructing a shopping center. When the shopping center deal fell through, he leased the land to a local grain farmer. What was his crime?

Under the Clean Water Act, no person may discharge, dredge or put fill material into the navigable waters of the United States without a permit. The closest navigable waters to Rapanos' land are in Saginaw Bay, some 20 miles away. Rapanos' crime in the eyes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was that he filled in depressions on his land without permission.

According to his defense at the California-based Pacific Legal Foundation, "the Corps has argued that isolated pools and puddles were magically transformed into `navigable waters,' and subject to regulations, merely by the stopover of `migratory' birds." With the Corps' reasoning, you could go to jail if you had a tree stump ground out and filled the hole.

In the early stages of Rapanos' case, U.S. District Judge Lawrence Zatkoff -- noting that a drug dealer had been before him that day -- said rebelliously, "Here we have a person ... who commits crimes of selling dope, and the government asks me to put him in prison for 10 months. And then we have an American citizen, who buys land, pays for it with his own money, and he moves sand from one end to the other, and the government wants me to give him 63 months in prison. Now if that isn't our system gone crazy, I don't know what is. And I am not going to do it."

More here.





Nobody Told the Birds About Global Warming

Again it is only a retired Professor who is in a position to speak the truth:

If your mind is made up about global warming, all confirmation is welcome, no matter how flimsy or suspect. Even the free movement of birds is used to confirm warming and alarm our citizens. The National Wildlife Federation states on its Web site, "The Brown Thrasher is in danger of disappearing from Georgia." In a global-warming editorial, one newspaper noted the thrasher is returning from winter migration 21 days earlier than it did 20 years ago.

Bullfeathers! Humans have very sensitive instruments for measuring temperature and still are uncertain of global warming; how does our state bird know? In contrast to this suspicious behavior of the brown thrasher, other species have been nesting progressively farther south for more than half a century; not as if our climate is becoming warmer, but as if it is cooling. Nobody but a few serious birdwatchers seems to have noticed. World-famous ecologist Eugene Odum and co-workers noted the invasion of 14 species into the Athens area in the 20th century, mostly from the north.

The American robin is familiar to Georgians and perhaps we think of it as being everywhere, not shifting in its habits. But it underwent radical change in the 20th century, building its nests farther south. In 1946 Odum noted, "Until only a very few years ago it nested only in the extreme northern part of the state, but now has spread almost the length of the state."

Confirmation comes from the annual North American Breeding Bird Survey, conducted every year across the country by the U.S. Geological Survey. In Pike County near Griffin, the survey has found an average of 21 robins per year since 1994, one third more than the count of brown thrashers. During those years, two robins per year were counted in Wrightsville, well into the Coastal Plain. So, although robins have always migrated north across Middle Georgia in late winter, in recent decades they have been nesting there during summer, and even farther south. In August, I saw robins in Statesboro, where my brother said they nested in his yard.

The song sparrow in Georgia is spreading southward, too: In 1946, Odum and Burleigh described a line from Ellijay to Cleveland to Lakemont in extreme Northeast Georgia that "approximately represents the present `front'" for the bird. Today, the Breeding Bird Survey regularly finds the song sparrow near Cartersville (Bartow County; two per year since 1980), Bowdon (Carroll County; none before 1993; almost two per year since then), and Siloam (Greene County; none before 1982, but 3.9 per year since)......

The next time someone declares global warming is disrupting ecological habitats, remember the dozens of birds spreading their nests southward across Georgia. Perhaps they are responding to southern cooling, because the South has, in fact, cooled. Not, of course, in cities like Atlanta, which developed "heat islands," but in smaller places representing the countryside. Most records for such places in Georgia show a cooling in the 20th century. A graph for Newnan, from the Web site of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, shows that temperatures there have cooled 2.5 degrees to 3 degrees since the 1920s.....

Some "thrashers" in this scuffle over global warming need a reality check, and it ain't the birds

More here.

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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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