A really dumb Greenie: "A French anti-nuclear protester was fatally injured yesterday when his leg was severed by a train carrying radioactive waste to Germany. Paramedics quickly attended to Sebastien Briat, 21, after the incident near the town of Avricourt, but he died on the way to a nearby hospital. He had been caught by surprise by the train while trying to chain himself to the tracks. At least one other demonstrator was injured. The death prompted an outpouring of grief in Germany, where an anti-nuclear group abandoned calls for similar protests. Dozens of French police had been patrolling the tracks to keep protesters off but about 10, including those in a group with Briat, had slipped by".




AN AUSTRALIAN GLOBAL-WARMING DISSENTER

Another retired guy, of course. It's too risky to dissent if you need a job. I am a retired academic myself

"William Kininmonth, Melbourne-based meteorologist and former head of the National Climate Centre, offers a warning in his new book, Climate Change: A Natural Hazard. As the title implies, Kininmonth believes that the threat posed by humans and their carbon economy has been overstated. The official overstater is the International Panel on Climate Change, an outgrowth of the UN that brings together bureaucrats and scientists. In its 1990 report the IPCC confirmed the greenhouse effect: we pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; less radiant heat is able to escape into space; the surface temperature of the Earth rises. The report did venture a forecast -- average temperature could rise three degrees by 2100 -- but caution was expressed and uncertainties were underlined.

Kininmonth has no great quarrel with the 1990 report, although he thinks climate change has more to do with natural cycles than with industrial production lines. But for him the tone of the crucial 2001 IPCC report is altogether more confident and the forecasts more dramatic: temperature could rise as much as 5.8 degrees by 2100. What changed? It's not as if the science had dramatically improved, Kininmonth says. But climate change had gained political momentum. To give the right results, the greenhouse theory had to dumb down climate in all its complexity.

The IPCC, Kininmonth says, reduces climate to a one-dimensional mock-up in which radiation is given too great a part to play. Little weight is given to oceans, vast reservoirs of heat. "The one-dimensional [hypothesis] is a prescription for flat-earth physics whose application leads to erroneous conclusions," he writes. "Those who ascribe to it have been seduced to forget elementary school geography; Earth is a globe with seasonal patterns of solar heating that generate temperature differences between the tropics and the poles."

Nor, says Kininmonth, are these shortcomings made good by the IPCC's much-vaunted computer models. True, the models show rapid improvement and the new wave of ocean research holds great promise. But as things stand, he says, the IPCC models simply cannot give a realistic picture of how atmosphere and oceans interact in our climate system. And that fatally undermines the IPCC forecasts. A flimsy basis, it would seem, for global policy that would constrain carbon industries and cause economic upheaval. Why, then, isn't there a storm of scientific protest? "My personal view is that the majority of scientists don't fully understand the complexities of the climate system, they're following the lead of the IPCC," says Kininmonth. He believes the greenhouse campaign also benefited from lucky timing; the severe El Nino drought of 1982-83 created a thirst for a simple explanation......

More here




AND A BRITISH GLOBAL-WARMING DISSENTER>

You guessed it: Another retired man. Philip Stott is Professor Emeritus of Biogeography in the University of London

"The Republican tornado has rained on Europe's ecochondriacs. Hand-wringing supporters of the battered Kyoto treaty are overcast as Myron Ebell, one of George Bush's senior climate change advisers, accused Sir David King, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government, of being "alarmist". Ebell stated that there would be no change in America's environmental policy after Mr Bush's re-election, and the reasons are clear.

In both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Republicans have been returned with strengthened majorities and any measures seen to hinder the economy will be treated with disdain. And following the letter of the Kyoto Protocol would be expensive. Clamping down on carbon emissions could drain $1 trillion from the world economy, hit production and raise energy prices punitively.

Congress will have no truck with Europe's whining over American withdrawal from the protocol. The electoral map reveals a swath of Republican red from Nevada to Virginia, from Texas to North Dakota - the heartland of the car and GM crops. The more snooty old Europe rattles on about these issues, the more it will drive a wedge between America and itself.

Tony Blair's addiction to the Kyoto Protocol is dangerous. It is an assault on different cultural values which have been honed by history and the wider horizons of geography. Moreover, we know that the Kyoto Protocol will do nothing about climate change: at the most it will delay changes by two years over the next century. To declare otherwise is to mislead.

More embarrassingly, most European countries are far from attaining their own emission targets, although they freely lecture the good folk of Ohio and Oklahoma. Moreover, future energy demand does not lie in the West, but in the East, in China, India, Indonesia and Russia, most of which are not bound to make emission cuts by the Kyoto treaty. China will happily support Kyoto in theory, knowing that it can benefit economically as Western economies make themselves uncompetitive by donning the eco-hairshirt.

Like the vice-presidency, the Kyoto Protocol isn't worth "a pitcher of warm spit" and the Republicans know it."

Source

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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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