ECO PORN

Tommy and Leona are having sex on a tree stump in the middle of a Norwegian clear-cut. Leona, with a mop of brown dreads and a lip ring, looks dreamily across the demolished forest as Tommy, a little shaggy in nothing but a knit hat, works his magic. A few minutes earlier, Leona and Tommy stood at the same spot lecturing about the evils of industrial forestry. But now they're moaning in feral ecstasy, overcoming the powerful negativity of the place -- the broken branches and dried-out logs -- with the juices of the life force itself.

Welcome to F--forforest.com (FFF), a porn site with a difference. Along with raw, explicit images and videos with scenes like the one described above, FFF is well stocked with facts about the world's forests. On the Web site, naked sylphs share space with graphs of forest loss over time and exhaustive lists of the benefits tropical rain forests provide to society. It's a novel approach to eco-activism, certainly, but one the duo hopes will help save the planet. Indeed, in its first year of operation, this unlikely project has raised nearly $100,000 for rain forest protection through the sale of paid memberships. "Everyone must try to create something good using what they have," Tommy told me by phone from the apartment the couple shares in Berlin. "We had nothing, just our bodies." With backgrounds in progressive and green theater and teaching troubled teens, Leona Johansson, 21, and Tommy Hol Ellingsen, 28, wanted to do more than just protest the state of the world -- they wanted to make a difference. To them, eco-porn is the obvious choice. "Porn makes really, really a lot of money," Tommy continues in his soft Norwegian accent, "so why not use that money for good?"

Easy enough, right? But, so far, the pair's biggest challenge has been giving the money away. It's a conundrum they didn't anticipate when they got their start in their native Norway, where they managed to obtain seed funding from the federal government. "We said we were starting an alternative environmental organization," says Tommy.

Most of the material on FFF features the gentle Burning Man-esque couple and/or their friends romping in every imaginable combination. The great outdoors is a favorite setting, of course, but scenes are also set in apartments, photo studios, sex clubs and elsewhere. The sex runs the gamut from couplings involving vegetables used as sex toys to performances by scary-looking shaven-headed German Goths and is unflinchingly graphic. Like those of most porn scenarios, the plots of the video segments are vestigial at best, but in written material and between the scenes, Leona and Tommy share their feelings for the forest with visitors to the site.

But even Norway has its limits. In front of 5,000 people at a music festival last summer, the couple delivered a brief talk about human impacts on natural forests. Shedding his clothes, Tommy asked the crowd, "How far are you willing to go to try to save nature?" He and Leona, grinning, then launched into a raunchy live demonstration of precisely how far they'll go for the forest. Front and center on top of a speaker, the pair ground into each other while a local band played a heavy metal dirge called "Go Forth and F--."

Leona and Tommy, along with the band, were charged by authorities in Kristiansand, Norway, with staging a public sex show. When Tommy dropped his pants in the courtroom, the couple was fined the equivalent of $1,500 each, but they refused to pay. Instead, they moved to more liberal-minded Berlin, where FFF is now produced....

But not everyone shares this enthusiasm for FFF's brand of environmental education. In one session featured on the site, Leona, in a blue wig, starts the lesson by flogging another woman with a huge leek. This unorthodox approach hasn't ingratiated FFF to mainstream environmental organizations, who Leona and Tommy feel are too prudish to embrace the potential of porn -- or even to accept its money. "WWF (formerly known as World Wildlife Fund) Norway didn't want to speak with us -- they pushed us out of the office," says Tommy. "We wrote to WWF in the Netherlands; they said they couldn't take our money, either. After the court case, suddenly, nobody wanted to talk to us at all."


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NO CONSENSUS ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING -- DESPITE MUCH UNSCIENTIFIC COERCION

First of all, the UN IPPC's (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) propensity to self-delusion could be mentioned. In IPCC's beauty parlour, curves have occasionally been 'corrected' to better fit the man-made global warming hypothesis. The infamous hockey stick is of course the most notorious example of this practice. As early as November 2003, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick published their bombshell article on the flaws in the reconstruction of the Northern Hemisphere temperatures by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, in Energy & Environment. But the article was initially ignored. Only after that the updated version of the article appeared in the Geophysical Research Letters, in February 2005, it started to dawn on the established climate science community that something was wrong. The latter article had been preceded by a paper by Hans von Storch (climate specialist at the GKSS Research Center in Geesthacht near Hamburg - not a climate sceptic), et al, in Science, October 2004, with a similar message. Hans von Storch went even so far as to qualify the hockey stick as 'Quatsch' (rubbish).

But the hockey stick is by no means the only example of 'creative' data handling within IPCC circles. Another intriguing case has been highlighted by Zbigniew Jaworowski (Chairman of the Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, Warsaw). In his written statement for the Hearing before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, March 19, 2004, (http://www.warwickhughes.com/icecore/) he revealed the 'correction' of the dating of ice core measurements in order to obtain a smooth alignment with the - more recent and more accurate - Mauna Loa (Hawaii) observatory record. As Jaworowski explained:

'The data from shallow ice cores, such as those from Siple, Antarctica, are widely used as a proof of man-made increase of CO2 content in the global atmosphere by IPCC. The problem with Siple data is that the CO2 concentration found in pre-industrial ice was 'too high'. This ice was deposited in 1890 AD, and the CO2 concentration was 328 ppmv, not about 290 ppmv, as needed by man-made global warming hypothesis. The CO2 atmospheric concentration of about 328 ppmv was measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, as later as in 1973, i.e. 83 years after the ice was deposited at Siple. An ad hoc assumption, not supported by any factual evidence, solved the problem: the average age of air was arbitrary decreed to be exactly 83 years younger than the ice in which it was trapped. The 'corrected' ice data were then smoothly aligned with the Mauna Loa record, and reproduced in countless publications as a famous 'Siple curve'. Only thirteen years later, in 1993, glaciologists attempted to prove experimentally the 'age assumption', but they failed.'

Against the background of these practices it is surprising that we have often been told that 'the science is settled' and 'all scientists agree'. This is simply not true. Tens of thousands of bona fide qualified scientists have expressed their reservations as regards the man-made global warming hypothesis (see: http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p428.htm). But it could perhaps be argued that most of them were not meteorologists and/or climatologists. What about this latter category? At a recent climate change seminar, organised by the (classical liberal) Friedrich Naumann Foundation, together with the Society for the Freedom of Science, in Gummersbach (near Bonn), Prof. Dennis Brays presented the results of a survey among some 500 German and European climate researchers. They showed that the much-repeated claim of a 'scientific consensus' on anthropogenic global warming is not correct. According to the results, some 25% of European climate researchers who took part in the survey still doubt whether most of the moderate warming during the last 150 years can be attributed to human activities and CO2 emissions.

But perhaps these climate researchers are not connected with the IPCC. There will surely be a consensus within the IPCC? Again, no. Even within the IPCC there are differences of view. John Christy is one of the lead authors of the IPCC. He is professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He is a specialist in satellite temperature measurements. Together with his colleague Roy Spencer of the same institute, he wrote a paper, 'Global Temperature Report 1978-2003', (http://uahnews.uah.edu/pdf/25years.pdf), dismissing much of the scare-mongering by his IPCC colleagues.

Difference of opinion and a free exchange of views are the life blood of scientific progress. Somehow, their value seems to be forgotten in climate science these days. The reactions of his colleagues to Hans von Storch's critique of the hockey stick offer an illustration of the suffocating atmosphere prevailing in those circles. People like him are occasionally being treated as defectors by their colleagues, which is a somewhat embarrassing attitude for scientists who are supposed to be committed to the search for truth. Von Storch: 'They tell me, you cannot say this because it will be immediately misused. Among them there are even people who are really suffering from paranoia and see climate sceptics everywhere.'

Among many of his colleagues Storch even notices a sort of self-censorship: 'The outcome of scientific investigation is being filtered, thus placing public opinion under tutelage. That means that this politically important research is in crisis. It does no longer distinguish between those who make politics, and those who advise on politics, that is: offering policy options.'

Von Storch believes that Michael Crichton's best-seller book 'State of Fear (Harper Collins Publishers, New York 2004) provides an accurate description of the interaction of scientists, governments and mass media in climate policy. He warns that the 'spiral of exaggeration' used by climate alarmists to catch people's attention will undermine the credibility of science.

His colleague, Karin Labitzke (a stratospheric expert of the Free University of Berlin), shares Von Storch's uneasiness. She adheres to the school which believes that the sun is the main driver of global warming. She complains about a ban on free thought ('Denkverbot') imposed on them by the supporters of man-made global warming hypothesis. Labitzke: 'The influence of the sun has been tabooed. When we talk about it, colleagues immediately reproach us for being against energy conservation.'

All this is contrary to good scientific practice. It is high time that climatologists return to old-fashioned sound science, keeping an open mind for alternative hypotheses, and keeping all kinds of distorting political and social influences at bay. They could certainly also benefit from business experience, especially as regards due diligence.

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Nation descends into mercury madness: "Mercury is all over the news these days, which is appropriate for an element named after the messenger of the gods. At some Maryland high schools, hazmat teams rush in to remove mercury that had gone unnoticed. In Washington D.C., a broken thermometer causes a school to close. And across the nation, environmental groups denounce the Environmental Protection Agency's new proposed rules for reducing mercury emissions from power plants as inadequate to protect children. All this seems rather odd to those of us who played with mercury in science lessons at school. The fact is that the health effects of mercury have been dramatically overblown."

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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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