BUYING THE CHEAPEST IS ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY

In order to help the environment, we're encouraged to recycle and upgrade to vehicles and equipment that produce less pollution - hydrogen powered cars, for example. Problem is, some studies show that recycling has a larger impact on the environment than does using virgin resources. And that hydrogen-powered car may not generate pollution in its exhaust, but how much pollution was created to generate that hydrogen? What to do? How to decide? William Baldwin has an answer:

You could drive yourself crazy calculating all the direct and indirect inputs behind a consumer choice, so here's a handy rule, courtesy of Jerry C. Taylor, head of natural resource studies at Cato: If you care about the environment, go for the cheaper item. "Prices are a signal for all of the resources that go into producing something," he says.

Of course, some will argue that the price of something isn't a good indicator, because so many goods that have a signficant environmental impact are subsidized. Their prices don't reflect their "true costs" in environmental terms. So don't order people to spend their money on hydrogen powered cars. Don't shame people into ignoring prices and other economic signals. End subsidies.

Post lifted from Rite Wing Techno-Pagan





MORE ON THE TSUNAMI

I have just put up here an article by Louis Hissink that looks at the recent tsunami event in the light of the new/old plasma universe physics. Louis believes that the recent event helps us to understand some puzzling geology from the past.





MORE ON THE FLAWS OF THE ACIA "STUDY" OF POLAR MELTING

EarthJustice, Friends of the Earth, the Center for International Environmental Law and other groups were busy in Buenos Aires, persuading Arctic Inuit Indians to sue an assortment of corporations for climate genocide, or something like that. The Inuits‚ subsistence traditions are threatened, they claimed, by catastrophic warming caused by our wanton use of fossil fuels. Attempting to paint their claims with a thin veneer of science was Dr. Robert Corell, lead author of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) study that had gotten the New York Times, Washington Post, London Guardian and other liberal media folks all agog.

"Very rapid and severe climate change in the Arctic," rising sea levels from the projected melting of Greenland's ice shelf, changes in animal habitats and possible shifts in ocean currents "present serious challenges to human health and food security, and possibly even the survival of some cultures," Dr. Corell solemnly intoned. Even now, "abnormally warm" weather might be causing wildlife to disappear, and the Inuits snowmobiles to fall through the ice. To back up these gloom-and-doom claims, he presented an array of glitzy charts and maps.

But the linchpin of his Armageddon theory lies in a temperature graph that depicts a 33-year warming trend, during which temperatures rose nearly 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F). Project that out in a straight line, Dr. Corell said, and it's easy to foresee a potentially devastating temperature spike of 4.5 C or 8.1 F over the next century. Rising seas would surely inundate New York City, Bangladesh and the Florida keys, as another graphic graphically showed.

Thankfully, it's all just the stuff of Hollywood horror movies. Not only is the ACIA study flawed. It's as plausible as the "science" in "The Day After Tomorrow." Its horrific scenarios depend on Dr. C's deliberate selection of the 1971-2003 time snapshot, and his faulty assumption that this trend will continue, forever. Relatively cold in 1971 -- warmer in 2003 -- Arctic meltdown by 2100, if we don‚t slash fossil fuel use immediately.

But what if he and his team had selected a different window, just a few years earlier -- such as the period 1938 to 1966? During those three decades, Arctic temperatures FELL 3.5 C (6.3 F), according to studies by American, Canadian, Russian and other researchers. At this rate, equally misleading computer models could easily show, temperatures would plummet a whopping 12.5 degrees C (22.5 F) in just one century - and reach the temperature of dry ice (minus 109 F) in just five centuries. Talk about impacting wildlife and Inuit culture. This scenario is just as ludicrous - and just as reasonable -- as the scenarios that Corell & Co. are peddling. Actually, it's only a slight exaggeration of what their predecessors -- the global cooling alarmists who have since morphed into today's global warming alarmists -- did back in the 1970s.

That's when they, Newsweek (see its April 28, 1975 issue) and anxious colleagues were worrying about agricultural disaster brought on by global cooling -- because of our wanton use of fossil fuels, naturally. Had they been quicker on their feet back then, they would no doubt have found some natives in Hawaii (or Tuvalu) to file lawsuits to stop that cultural genocide.

However, it's a fact of life here on Planet Earth that our climate can be as unpredictable and cyclical as the solar and orbital variations that play prominent roles in determining that climate. Thus we get mild temperature shifts every 40 years or so, and much more significant changes every few hundred years -- amid interglacial periods that are marked at either end by massive walls of ice flowing down from this same Arctic, obliterating everything in their path: forests the last time, maybe entire cities the next. The global environmental movement, however, has long portrayed our planet as a stable, idyllic utopia - until evil people, corporations and technologies ruined everything. It has a nice, neat Garden of Eden ring to it. But it ignores the Ice Ages, Medieval Warm Period, Viking colonization of Greenland back in the days (950-1300) when people could actually grow crops there, and Little Ice Age (1350-1650) when northern seas were choked with ice and Europe was plunged into an era of cold, wet, stormy weather that destroyed crops, caused famines, and hammered populations, communities and cultures.

The ample historical record of these events underscores how turbulent and uncertain Earth's climate has always been. (It's doubtful that cavemen, Vikings, Medieval alchemists or a lost race of aliens from another galaxy caused those past climate mood swings.) To suggest that we have suddenly arrived at an immutable ideal state may serve the pressure groups‚ political ends, but it is not reality.

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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