Age of no reason

Australian conservative journalist Andrew Bolt has fun with Greenie deceptions:

WHAT a relief it was, to be given the top 10 reasons to panic about global warming. At last - the list that would save me from doubt! It's been tough, resisting this new faith. I'd ask for proof that humans really have been heating the world up to hell with their exhausts, and believers would stare at me as if I were coal. As a furious green told a weekend paper, sceptics like me are "Holocaust deniers that make themselves look so disgustingly evil".

Even during these latest warnings that the Great Barrier Reef would die in 20 years and polar bears soon after - wild warnings to coincide with the coming into force of the Kyoto protocol - I couldn't find faith. So I thanked The Age, Australia's most Left-wing daily paper, for launching a crusade to convert sinners like me - pages and pages on global warming, starting on Saturday with a huge graphic: "10 Reasons to Start Worrying Now." And a headline screaming: "WAKE UP. THIS IS SERIOUS." Here, then, was a carefully researched list of the 10 clearest signs a serious newspaper could find of the harm already caused by global warming. These 10 Truths had to end all doubt. But - forgive me my sin - I checked this list against the facts. Forgive me again, but is this tosh truly all it takes to panic an entire newspaper - and so many of you, dear readers? Is reason now dead? Let's go through The Age's 10 "reasons to start worrying now", so you can see I do not say all this for the fun of farting in church.

1: Hudson Bay

Claim: "Polar bears have become thinner", as sea ice retreats. Facts: A Canadian Wildlife Service study did say Hudson Bay's bears were thinner - but as polar bear expert Mitch Taylor recently noted: "We're seeing an increase in bears that's really unprecedented." The CWS study also said earlier melting of sea ice may make it harder for bears to catch food - but said this melting affected only western Hudson Bay. Indeed, there was "a gradual cooling trend in eastern Hudson Bay . . . and the Labrador Sea". What's more, Greenland, which also has polar bears, has cooled since 1940. More bears, then. And more cold.

2: Tuvalu

Claim: These Pacific islands are "shrinking with rising sea levels". Facts: Australia's National Tidal Facility monitors Tuvalu's sea levels and found: "The historical record from 1978 through 1999 indicated a sea level rise of 0.07 mm per year", with "no visual evidence of any acceleration". At this rate, Tuvalu's seas will in 100 years rise by the thickness of a pen. "We have never believed these island will go under water," said University of South Pacific oceanographer Than Aung. But our seas have risen - 120 metres in the 17,000 years since the last Ice Age, without human gases to fuel it. Satellites detect almost no rise in the past decade.

3: Antarctica

Claim: Fewer Adelie penguins breed, as seas warm. Facts: The New Zealand Journal of Ecology in 1990 found "the numbers of Adelie penguins in the Ross Sea have increased greatly", and suggested global warming was to blame. Now there are fewer Adelies (in some colonies, but not overall) and that's a sign of warming, too. Yeah, sure, whatever. But several recent studies, including one by NASA, agree Antarctica - with 90 per cent of the world's ice - has grown colder and more ice-bound over the past 20 years or more. Ice-breakers this month had to cut through 80 nautical miles of ice instead of the usual 10 to reach McMurdo station.

4: Glacier National Park, Montana, US

Claim: Montana's glaciers are melting away. Facts: Climatologist Professor Patrick Michaels says these glaciers have melted since the end of the Little Ice Age 150 years ago - well before we were belching all this carbon dioxide - and Montana's temperatures in the past century of growing industrialisation have not risen significantly.

5: China

Claim: Many of China's glaciers are melting. Facts: China has had to thaw out from the Little Ice Age that killed the famous citrus groves of Jiangxi. The Chinese Science Bulletin in 2003 said scientists found evidence in peat deposits in Hongyuan that China had a warm period around 1000 years ago, before the Little Ice Age, "suggesting ... the main driving force of Hongyuan climate change is from solar activities". Fancy - warming being caused by the sun. New studies agree solar activity may indeed be behind some of the surface temperature changes we think we've seen - a 0.6 C warming from 1890 to 1940, followed by a cooling of 0.2 C until 1975, and a 0.4 C warming since.

6: Afghanistan

Claim: A long drought in Afghanistan, and also in Australia, "may be the product of climate change". Facts: Afghanistan's drought seems broken by recent heavy rain and snow. Rainfall over Australia rose slightly over the past century, says the Bureau of Meteorology, and our worst known drought came in the 1890s. But do such inevitable changes to local climates prove anything?

7: Great Barrier Reef

Claim: Warmer seas are turning the reef white. Facts: An El Nino caused coral bleaching in 1998, but the reef recovered, as it did again in 2002 - and from worse events in 1782-1785 and 1817. After all, the reef is 60 million years old, and has survived much hotter times. Dr Andrew Baker, head of America's Coral Research Laboratory, says bleaching may be how a coral adapts - by expelling one of the algaes that help it thrive to make room for a better one. In fact, reefs "could do well in a warmer world", Australian geochemist Professor Malcolm McCulloch has said, since "warmer ocean temperatures allow expansion of reefs to sub-tropical regions".

8: Arctic Ocean

Claim: The ice is melting. Facts: The Arctic warmed until 1938, but then cooled before warming again - so is still no "hotter" now than it was 60 years ago. Greenland, however, is still colder and icier than it was then, says the Danish Meteorological Institute, and was once so warm that Vikings thought it a truly green land.

9: Snowy Mountains and Victorian Alps

Claim: Snow gums have moved up the ranges as they've warmed. Migratory birds are affected too. Facts: One study claims snow gums are now found 30m higher up mountains. Horror - more trees! But does this prove a global warming? No one knows. Another study found four species of migratory birds now arrive a little earlier in spring - but one a little later. Yes, and...?

10: The Netherlands

Claim: Flycatcher birds migrate from Africa to find Europe so warm that the caterpillars they eat have emerged sooner than usual. Facts: Very sad, but is global warming or local warming to blame? And are a few warmer years in one area a trend, or a natural cycle of an Earth that knew warmer times often before?

And that is it. That's The Age's list of the most frightening signs of global warming. See how little there is in it to justify this panic. The truth is that despite the hype, not much about global warming is known for sure, not even how much the Earth has heated, and whether our carbon dioxide (CO2) caused it. So say even lead authors of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose doctored "predictions" are most used to frighten us.

One of them, Professor John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, asks: "Will increases in CO2 affect the climate significantly? Are significant changes occurring now? Climate models suggest the answer is yes. Real data suggests otherwise."

Adds another, Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "The temperature is always changing for the earth, so it has only two choices - going up or going down. It has done both, and that doesn't say it's due to CO2; it doesn't say it's going to continue; it doesn't say anything beyond that." This is why Lindzen calls the Kyoto accord, which demands expensive cuts to our emissions, "absurd".

But so much is absurd in the global warming hysteria, not least the media's willing surrender of its reason.

Source





Group Using Polar Bear to Force Greenhouse Gas Reduction

The liars fail to mention evidence that polar bears are actually thriving of course

"A conservation group is attempting to use the federal Endangered Species Act to clobber the U.S. government over global warming. The Center for Biological Diversity on Wednesday announced it has filed a formal petition to have the polar bear added to threatened species list. "Polar bears may become extinct by the end of end of this century because their sea-ice habitat is literally melting away due to global warming," the group said in a message on its website.


Listing polar bears under the Endangered Species Act will "provide broad protection to polar bears," the Center said; and it will require federal agencies to "ensure that any action carried out, authorized, or funded by the United States government will not 'jeopardize the continued existence' of polar bears, or adversely modify their critical habitat." So, if global warming is threatening polar bears, the U.S. government would be obliged to do something about greenhouse gas emissions that (some believe) cause global warming.

The Center for Biological Diversity noted that the U.S. currently produces 24 percent of the world's greenhouse gases -- and it says the Bush administration has adopted a climate plan "that will allow emissions to continue to grow rapidly. The United States must quickly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to a small fraction of current levels or polar bears will become extinct," said Kassie Siegel, lead author of the polar bear petition.....

As Cybercast News Service previously has reported, the Endangered Species Act frequently is invoked by activists to stymie landowners, ranchers, farmers, developers, road-builders and the oil, mining and timber industries. For many, it's become more of a "land use" issue than a species protection issue.

A bill introduced in the 108th Congress to reform the Endangered Species Act is expected to be reintroduced in the current 109th Congress. House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) has said he will make ESA reform a priority for his committee. According to Pombo, "Under the mantra of species protection, radical environmental organizations use the ESA to raise funds, block development projects, and prohibit legal land uses of nearly every kind. "By filing inordinate numbers of lawsuits under the ESA, environmental organizations have hand-cuffed the [Fish and Wildlife Service] to courtroom defense tables, draining the time, money, and manpower Congress intended the service to spend on species recovery in the field."

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GLOBAL WARMING BELIEF IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF AN OLD SCIENTIFIC FOLLY

Note: This is from an article NOT specifically concerned with environmentalism but its applicability is obvious

"There is a strange incongruity, observable throughout the intellectual history of man, that never ceases to amaze me. Why is it in the field of ideas that dramatic new visions of truth are so often met with vehement opposition from a society's intellectuals -- the very men of the mind who are most dedicated to the pursuit and demonstration of truth? How can the intellectuals of today's era -- so acutely aware of humanity's bigoted resistance in the past to Galileo, Semmelweis, Pasteur, and other radical discoverers of history -- succumb to the same blind obstinacy in face of the new truths confronting them?

There are several reasons why this propensity for intolerance to new thinking has prevailed throughout history among intellectuals. As the physicist Fred Hoyle tells us, scientists are human. They are, far more often than the lay public perceives, victims of dogmatism and the tendency of all humans to argue from pre-set ideas.

Despite their much-heralded pledge to objective inquiry, scientists are quite capable of bias and suppression in order to preserve their long-standing beliefs. When a large portion of one's life has been passionately devoted to the validation of an idea, it becomes most difficult to accept the invalidity of that idea. Therefore truth, the most highly prized goal of all, is often forsaken to protect fragile egos and support previous convictions.

This tendency of scientists to be obstinate in the face of new truth manifests itself through the paradigm shift. As Thomas S. Kuhn demonstrated in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, all of science is based upon the establishment of paradigms, or what can be termed an overall "way of viewing things" in a particular field. And once a paradigm is established, it becomes difficult for most thinkers to dispute its basic premises even when that paradigm is found to be in error.

For example, the 1st century Egyptian astronomer, Ptolemy, established the Ptolemaic paradigm of the solar system, which depicted the earth as its center with the sun and planets revolving around the earth. Copernicus and Galileo came along and overthrew this way of thinking with a truer paradigm that depicted the sun as the center of the solar system. Newton established the mechanistic paradigm in physics during the early 18th century, and Einstein followed with a much truer relativity paradigm two hundred years later. Pasteur established the germ paradigm in medicine during the 19th century, while Darwin gave us the evolution paradigm in biology.

A paradigm is thus an all-inclusive Big Picture based upon a fundamental premise in a field of study that undergirds the "why of things" in that particular field. Even when false, a paradigm often prevails as accepted truth for a long period of time because the prevailing minds and methodology of the era are inadequate to grasp reality more clearly. But falsity persists as truth also because humans fall prey to inertia. They seek mental comfort and choose paths of least resistance, which leads them to settle into a certain paradigm as if it is inviolable. For example, even after Copernicus made it obvious around 1500 AD that the Ptolemaic concept of the universe was a fallacy, it still prevailed in intellectual circles for another 180 years until Galileo drove the final nails into its coffin.

Herein lies one of the great human dilemmas: Once a "way of viewing things" is entrenched in any given field, even when new knowledge comes along to refute such a paradigm, it becomes practically impossible (because of the flaws of human nature) for most intellectuals to think outside that paradigm's constraints. They will defend the entrenched view even when its basic conception is shown to be foolish and impossible, especially if they have devoted a vital part of their lives to the teaching and promotion of that "way of viewing things."

This is presently our situation in many intellectual fields. Like the medieval dogmatists, today's academic community also clings to irrational paradigms in face of overwhelming evidence that their views are as untenable as the flat earth theories of old......

Sadly, this kind of blindness and dogmatism in face of error is the inevitable nature of the discovery of truth. The great majority of a society's intellectual community becomes locked into its established paradigms even when those paradigms are shown to be as moronic as treating disease with leeches and creating wealth with paper money. The great majority sees only what is established, never new truths to be discovered. Only a select few who are contrarian thinkers can see the truth and are willing to endure the inevitable ostracism to promote it.

It is to such contrarian minds that the world owes its advances (i.e., its paradigm shifts) -- socially, politically, morally and scientifically -- for the contrarian is possessed of the vision to see beyond his fellows and the courage to challenge firmly entrenched error. He has the ability to mentally encompass wider vistas and integrate more profoundly the vast conceptualizations necessary to get at the truth in any given field of inquiry.

Most importantly the contrarian mind is not plagued with the desire to be popular and acclaimed in his own time. He cares little for establishment acceptance. Not that he will shun acclaim if it happens to come to him, but it is not the primary motivation driving him. Truth is what compels him. Herein lies his strength and one of the important reasons for his acute clarity. The contrarian is not obsessed with popularity, and therefore does not delude himself with the entrenched dogmas of the herd as the more common minds do.

There is a law of life that is identifiable here, and it can be stated thusly: Truth will always reveal itself only to the contrarian, for his is the only mind open enough and creative enough to see it. Not that all contrarians speak truth, for the world is chock full of nuts wading in delirium. But the truth will always come to us only through contrarian minds -- thinkers like Socrates, Galileo, Adam Smith, Pasteur, Einstein, Ludwig von Mises. Establishment intellectuals are needed to solidify and disseminate already confirmed truths, but they are not capable of promoting new truths (or they are not willing to). And because of the flaws in human nature, they invariably become roadblocks to those contrarians that are capable and willing.

Such is the condition of our intellectual fields today. As always, the contrarians are at war with the establishment, and there are profound revolutions going on. Old established paradigms are being shattered. New discoveries and visions in economics, physics, philosophy, biology, medicine, etc. are pouring forth to stir up elemental debates presumed to be settled by those who argue from pre-set ideas.

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CARBON MYTHOLOGY

Measuring past carbon dioxide from deep ice cores (the usual method) has huge problems from ice fracturing under pressure. It means that past levels were much HIGHER than the measurements indicate. But Greenies ignore that, among other things:

A reader writes:

Note from this site that the timeline for all recorded history, apparently begins in 1750. No mention of what CO2 levels might have been in the preceding 5 billion years. Like the carboniferous era, approximately 400 million years ago, when CO2 levels were well over 1,500 ppm - or roughly 4-5 times *higher* than now. Are the Greenies stupid or merely dishonest? According to this link:

"Earth's atmosphere today contains about 370 ppm CO2 (0.037%). Compared to former geologic times, our present atmosphere, like the Late Carboniferous atmosphere, is CO2- impoverished! In the last 600 million years of Earth's history only the Carboniferous Period and our present age, the Quaternary Period, have witnessed CO2 levels less than 400 ppm"

Apparently, the dinosaurs drove a surprising number of SUVs. In celebration of Kyoto's enactment on this day, I shall drive a few extra miles in order to help produce more plant food.

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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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