ABOUT FLAMING TIME! Endangered Species Act reform

Four leading GOP House members and senators announced a joint effort Thursday to rewrite the Endangered Species Act to toughen up habitat and scientific provisions. Environmentalists immediately criticized the plan as the latest attempt to gut the landmark law. The lawmakers said it was the first time members of the House and Senate had banded together at the beginning of a congressional session to amend the 1973 act. Previous attempts to change the law have failed, but they said this time they hoped to produce a single Endangered Species Act reauthorization bill that could be introduced in both chambers. "We've been working on this issue for a long time," said House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif. "And to have the opportunity now to sit down and work across the capital and try to come up with legislation that does move the ball forward and begins to modernize and update the Endangered Species Act is extremely important."

Joining Pombo were Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore.; Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho; and Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I. Chafee, among the Senate's most moderate Republicans, is a newcomer to the issue who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's subcommittee on fisheries, wildlife and water. The lawmakers said they had no specific legislative language yet, but listed goals including increased involvement by states, more incentives for private landowners, and strengthening scientific reviews before species are listed or critical habitat is designated. They contended the law now creates unreasonable regulatory hurdles for property owners while failing to help many species. "Overall we believe that the Endangered Species Act can be less contentious and more effective," Crapo said.

But environmentalists said the act works as written. "For 30 years the Endangered Species Act has been serving as a safety net for species on the brink of extinction, and there can be absolutely no doubt the act is working, and it's one of the most popular laws in the land," said Susan Holmes, senior legislative representative at Earthjustice. "I think if you look at the efforts that we have seen so far from U.S. Rep. Pombo, from Greg Walden, these efforts have been all-out attacks on the Endangered Species Act," Holmes said.

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MERCURY: LOUDMOUTHED GREENIE IGNORANCE FROM HOLLYWOOD

"An American television actress is blasting the U.S. news media for failing to report that "endangered forests are being slaughtered for toilet paper." "I think there is a dummy-down bias (in the media) frankly," said Daphne Zuniga, who starred in the television series "Melrose Place." "The press is reporting things that are absolutely irrelevant to any of our lives and they are sensationalistic and it is damaging," Zuniga told Cybercast News Service. She made the comments Wednesday night at the Washington Press Club Foundation's 61st annual congressional dinner, which she attended as a guest of Congressional Quarterly. "We start to think that these things are important, like [the rape trial of NBA star] Kobe Bryant and [the molestation trial of] Michael Jackson and yada, yada, and meanwhile, you know, endangered forests are being slaughtered for toilet paper, you know, sequoias -- whatever it is," Zuniga told Cybercast News Service.

Zuniga is a member of the Creative Coalition, a social and political advocacy organization with roots in the entertainment industry. Other Coalition members at the press dinner included actor Ron Silver of the "The West Wing," actress Fran Drescher from the television series "The Nanny," and Joey Pantoliano of HBO's "The Sopranos." "I met a congressperson today and I am getting interested in coming to the hill to express my issues, which are environmental mostly, but also [First] Amendment," Zuniga said. She said mercury emissions were her key environmental concern.

According to Zuniga, "One out of six women are toxic with mercury. Mercury comes out of coal plants and chlorine plants. I am toxic, I deal with symptoms, children are born with, you know, autism -- there is an epidemic in this country. This is like, the air that we breath," Zuniga said. "Maybe it's not interesting, but it is definitely newsworthy...unless we have to wait for everyone to be drastically sick so we can sensationalize it," she added.

When asked about a series of new scientific studies showing that U.S. coal-fired power plants emit less than one percent of the world's mercury output, Zuniga responded, "That is false, it is not one percent. "We (the U.S.) have a large percentage of the pollution...We have to be more responsible, we have more resources, and we use more and more," she added. But as Cybercast News Service reported last week, several new studies show that if all U.S. coal-fired power plants were shut down -- resulting in zero mercury emissions -- worldwide levels of mercury would be only slightly affected.

The studies by the Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP) also revealed that mercury emissions from Yellowstone National Park and other natural sources are significantly higher than the amount coming from the 1,100 coal-fired power plants in the U.S. In addition, mercury levels in the atmosphere may have been higher before the advent of coal fired power plants. "This hypothesis appears supported by the presence of higher levels of mercury in 550-year-old Alaskan mummies than levels in a recent sample of pregnant native Alaskan women," said Robert Ferguson, in an interview with Cybercast News Service . Ferguson is the executive director of the CSPP, a public policy research group based in Washington, D.C.

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Jolly hockey sticks....

Post lifted from Envirospin, noting that several recently published scientific papers have shown that the earth has a history of NATURAL rises and falls in temperature

Published this week:

Moberg, Anders, Wibjorn Karlen et al., 2005. 'Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data.' Nature 433, No. 7026, pp. 613-617, February 10, 2005:

"A number of reconstructions of millennial-scale climate variability have been carried out in order to understand patterns of natural climate variability, on decade to century timescales, and the role of anthropogenic forcing. These reconstructions have mainly used tree-ring data and other data sets of annual to decadal resolution. Lake and ocean sediments have a lower time resolution, but provide climate information at multicentennial timescales that may not be captured by tree-ring data. Here we reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the past 2,000 years by combining low-resolution proxies with tree-ring data, using a wavelet transform technique to achieve timescale-dependent processing of the data. Our reconstruction shows larger multicentennial variability than most previous multi-proxy reconstructions, but agrees well with temperatures reconstructed from borehole measurements and with temperatures obtained with a general circulation model. According to our reconstruction, high temperatures-similar to those observed in the twentieth century before 1990-occurred around AD 1000 to 1100, and minimum temperatures that are about 0.7 K below the average of 1961-90 occurred around AD 1600. This large natural variability in the past suggests an important role of natural multicentennial variability that is likely to continue." [my italic]

Precisely. And this excellent work comes after these:

McIntyre, Stephen and Ross McKitrick, 2005. 'Hockey sticks, principal components and spurious significnace.' Geophysical Research Letters (in press);

Loehle, Craig, 2004a. 'Climate change: detection and attribution of trends from long-term geologic data.' Ecological Modelling 171, No. 4, pp. 433-450, February 1, 2004;

Loehle, Craig, 2004b. 'Using Historical climate data to evaluate climate trends: issues of statistical inference.' Energy & Environment 15, No. 1, pp. 1-10, 2004;

McIntyre, Stephen and Ross McKitrick, 2003. 'Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) 'Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series.'' Energy & Environment 14, No. 6, pp. 751-771, October 28, 2003;

Soon, Willie and Baliunas, Sallie, 2003a. 'Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years.' Climate Research 23, pp.89-110, January 31, 2003;

Soon, Willie, Sallie Baliunas, Craig Idso, Sherwood Idso and David R. Legates, 2003b. 'Reconstructing climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 Years: a reappraisal.' Energy & Environment 14, Nos 2 & 3, pp. 233-289, April 11, 2003.

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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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