GREENIE DOGMA HAS ALREADY DOWNED ONE SHUTTLE AND HAS ENDANGERED THE LATEST FLIGHT

As recently as last month, NASA had been warned that foam insulation on the space shuttle's external fuel tank could sheer off as it did in the 2003 Columbia disaster - a problem that has plagued space shuttle flights since NASA switched to a non-Freon-based type of foam insulation to comply with Clinton administration Environmental Protection Agency regulations.

"Despite exhaustive work and considerable progress over the past 2-1/2 years, NASA has been unable to eliminate the possibility of dangerous pieces of foam and ice from breaking off the external fuel tank and striking the shuttle at liftoff," the agency's Return-to-Flight Task Force said just last month, according to The Associated Press. But instead of returning the much safer, politically incorrect, Freon-based foam for Discovery's launch, the space agency tinkered with the application process, changing "the way the foam was applied to reduce the size and number of air pockets," according to Newsday. "NASA chose to stick with non-Freon-based foam insulation on the booster rockets, despite evidence that this type of foam causes up to 11 times as much damage to thermal tiles as the older, Freon-based foam," warned space expert Robert Garmong just nine months ago.

In fact, though NASA never acknowledged that its environmentally friendly, more brittle foam had anything to do with the foam sheering problem, the link had been well documented within weeks of the Columbia disaster. In February 2003, for instance, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported: "NASA engineers have known for at least five years that insulating foam could peel off the space shuttle's external fuel tanks and damage the vital heat-protecting tiles that the space agency says were the likely 'root cause' of Saturday's shuttle disaster."

In a 1997 report, NASA mechanical systems engineer Greg Katnik "noted that the 1997 mission, STS-87, was the first to use a new method of 'foaming' the tanks, one designed to address NASA's goal of using environmentally friendly products. The shift came as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was ordering many industries to phase out the use of Freon, an aerosol propellant linked to ozone depletion and global warming," the Inquirer said.

Before the environmentally friendly new insulation was used, about 40 of the spacecraft's 26,000 ceramic tiles would sustain damage in missions. However, Katnik reported that NASA engineers found 308 "hits" to Columbia after a 1997 flight. A "massive material loss on the side of the external tank" caused much of the damage, Katnik wrote in an article in Space Team Online. He called the damage "significant." One hundred thirty-two hits were bigger than 1 inch in diameter, and some slashes were as long as 15 inches. "As recently as last September [2002], a retired engineering manager for Lockheed Martin, the contractor that assembles the tanks, told a conference in New Orleans that developing a new foam to meet environmental standards had 'been much more difficult than anticipated,'" the Inquirer said. The engineer, who helped design the thermal protection system, said that switching from the Freon foam "resulted in unanticipated program impacts, such as foam loss during flight."

Source. (Some more choice comments on the matter at Pardon my English)




NASA AND THE OZONE HOAX

Some recent history

In the years between the Challenger and Columbia explosions, NASA lent its name and prestige to many green crusades, particularly those of Gore for "spaceship Earth." And ironically, critics say, in the early 1990s the politicians at the agency curried favor with the left by playing a crucial role in hyping the ozone scare that led to actions partly responsible for the predicament it found itself in with the Freon-free foam. In February 1992, for instance, NASA announced that satellite and other measurements showed chlorine-monoxide molecules thought to be derived from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and to destroy ozone were increasing inside the arctic polar vortex. At a press conference, NASA raised the specter of a rapidly approaching hole in the ozone layer, which deflects the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

"We believe now that the probability of significant ozone loss taking place in any given year is higher than it has been before," said James Anderson, the NASA project leader. Media stories immediately followed with horrific scenarios predicting hundreds of thousands of cases of new skin cancer resulting from ultraviolet exposure. Then-senator Gore, who chaired a Senate subcommittee responsible for NASA funding, captured the moment to warn that there soon would be an "ozone hole over Kennebunkport," the Maine summer home of then-president George H.W. Bush, if Congress didn't rapidly phase out Freon and other CFCs. Spooked by an international campaign to bless all this as indisputable and scientific, the Senate passed a resolution 95 to zero to phase out CFCs by 1995, five years sooner than the 1987 Montreal Protocol required, and Bush issued an executive order requiring a phaseout by this date.

But, as Micah Morrison documented in Insight [see "The Wizards of Ozone," April 6, 1992], many prudent scientists, including some who worked for NASA, dissented from the dire predictions. They noted that natural factors such as storms, winds and volcanoes affect ozone measurements. When chlorine monoxide went back to normal levels in a few weeks, NASA stood silently by without issuing so much as a press release to put the anomalous "crisis" in perspective. "We aren't going to put out [another] press release until we have a complete picture and a complete story to tell," NASA spokesman Brian Dunbar told Morrison.

In the Insight article, Morrison noted that NASA, which in the early 1990s was "concerned to preserve its share of the federal budget and carve out a new role for itself ... reaped a bonanza of publicity as guardian of the ozone." After Gore became vice president, no doubt with an eye on its appropriations, NASA continued to raise the alarm for various environmental scares. "Earth is a planet on fire! The Earth is burning," proclaimed NASA senior research scientist Joel Levine in a 1995 speech quoted by the the Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk.

So when its own foam was declared to be environmentally unfriendly, NASA officials apparently rushed to change it, even minimizing some of the safety consequences, according to some critics. "They wanted to be super-green," says S. Fred Singer, the atmospheric scientist who invented the ozone-meter device to measure the ozone layer in the 1950s. He now is a critic of environmental alarmism as president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project.

More here





THE DESTRUCTIVE LEGACY OF A GREENIE PREMIER

Bob Carr, Premier of Australia's most populous State (NSW), has just resigned. (An Australian State Premier is similar to an American State governor)

In the past few days the one area of Bob Carr's premiership that has received almost nothing but praise has been his environmental achievements. It's interesting that Carr was both an environmental and a fiscal conservationist, and that these were two of his strengths. They were also, as is often the way, among his weaknesses. His environmental record is worth a closer look.

In his diary for November 30, 1999, Carr proudly recorded how cabinet had discussed creating more national parks and "how our controversial land-clearing restraints . were now vindicated, with Queensland having to act under pressure". Soon after, a train crashed at Glenbrook, killing seven people. In the subsequent inquiry, Justice Peter McInerney found that train safety had declined since Carr had became Premier.

In January 2003, another train crashed, at Waterfall, also killing seven people. In the same month, a fire that started in the Brindabella National Park in NSW spread to Canberra, killing four people and destroying about 500 houses. Fires in Kosciuszko National Park at the same time burned out three-quarters of the park area, an environmental holocaust that destroyed millions of plants and animals.

These conjunctions raise two interesting questions about the green achievements of Carr's premiership. To what extent did the environmental focus influence - and distract from - his other actions? And, while we now have an enormous number of national parks, how extensive is the damage that's been done to them and their neighbours through poor management of fire and other problems?

Carr's passion for the environment influenced his premiership in more ways than you might think. Consider water: his curious failure to build a new dam. Or housing: his failure to release enough land to meet housing demand, which caused so much suffering for so many people. The dream of the quarter-acre block has been denied many, and the struggle to meet inflated house prices has dramatically affected family life. Carr's reluctance to extend the city into the bush and farmland around Sydney has had profound social and cultural effects.

His environmental policies have had different, but equally disturbing, effects on the country. Carr's last major achievement as Premier was spending an estimated $30 million earlier this month to buy the 80,000-hectare Yanga Station near Hay and turn it into a national park. Yanga is reputedly the largest freehold farm in the state. In May, Carr announced the permanent conservation of 348,000 hectares of woodlands in the Nandewar and Brigalow belt in the state's west, at a cost of about $80 million. This and the Yanga decision will destroy hundreds of jobs. There have been announcements of transition programs and hoped-for income from eco-tourism, but this needs to be compared with what has been destroyed - real jobs and real communities, in some cases going back five generations.

The Government has been uncharacteristically quiet about the purchase of Yanga. One reason for this could be that nationalising the means of production was removed from the ALP platform some time ago. Another might be that the National Parks and Wildlife Service recently released its State of the Parks 2004 report, revealing its failure to care for most parks adequately. Which leads to the obvious question of why the Government has burdened it with new responsibilities. Money desperately needed to look after existing parks has been blown on yet more expansion.

The lack of emphasis on management stems partly from philosophical confusion. Many environmentalists believe, and have persuaded city people to believe, in the notion of pristine wilderness - a state to which nature can be returned by creating national parks. In their excellent book Going Native, Michael Archer and Bob Beale note that the NSW Wilderness Act 1987 (passed when Carr was environment minister) defines wilderness as an area that is "in a state that has not been substantially modified by humans and their works or is capable of being restored to such a state". According to Archer and Beale: "This might apply to the surface of Pluto or the centre of the Earth, perhaps, but it would be arrogance or ignorance to presume that there is any place on Earth that hasn't, at some time in the past, been managed or substantially affected in some way by humans."

The problem with the pristine wilderness concept is that it ignores history. Much of our landscape was managed by Aboriginal people for maybe 60,000 years, through hunting and the use of fire. This management was sufficiently intrusive for it to have affected the distribution and density of many plant and animal populations. After the Aboriginal people were dispossessed, white people continued to manage much of the land that is now national park, with fire and logging. As with Aboriginal use of fire, the aim was to keep the land open, to avoid the vegetation thickening, and also to keep animal populations at certain levels through hunting. So, traditionally, people have been a part of nature, not separate from it.

Creating a national park and then, as this Government has done, largely letting "nature take its course", means this history stops. Gradually the vegetation thickens, the fuel load grows, the animal populations expand, and weeds proliferate. The park becomes a sort of toxic ecological volcano, spewing out fire, kangaroos, weed seeds, and feral animals such as wild dogs into the surrounding countryside. It takes a few decades to reach this point. A lot of our national parks were created in the 1970s and 1980s, which is why these problems started to become acute in the 1990s.

We can expect these problems to occur at Yanga, where (according to the station's website) the environment of two endangered species - the Australian bittern and the southern bell frog - depends on keeping the red-gum forests open by logging, which will now cease. Biodiversity in the Brigalow forest, so attractive to environmentalists, will change substantially now the timber cutters have been removed.

The existence of major problems in national parks is beyond doubt. The State of the Parks 2004 report shows that staff responsible for 87 per cent of the total parks area believe pest animals are so severe as to be a threat to park values. For concern about weeds, the figure is 91 per cent.

The attempts to counter these threats are minuscule, involving just $17 million last year for what was then about 7.5 per cent of the state's land mass. The report notes proudly that this constitutes a 1700 per cent increase in the level of funding over the past 10 years, and the Environment Minister, Bob Debus, is fond of explaining how much the parks budget has increased. But all this means is that spending a decade ago was a joke. It says nothing about the adequacy of the levels now. A recent report by the Institute of Public Affairs estimates that in 2003 NSW had only one ranger for every 22,700 hectares of park - and many of those were involved in non-maintenance activities.

The State of the Parks 2004 report says that in more than 90 per cent of affected parks, attempts to manage weeds and pest animals are non-existent, non-effective, or producing only a slow change. Disturbing as this is, it only covers the impact of poor management in the parks themselves. Many of the animal and plant pests, like the fires, leave the parks and create major problems for neighbours. This has reached crisis point for many farmers, who have been forced to abandon parts of their farms, and has produced an inquiry by Federal Parliament.

Under Carr, the proportion of the state occupied by national parks increased from about 5 per cent to 8 per cent. Much adjacent farming land is unusable for the above reasons. When you add to this all the private land effectively turned into nature reserves by native vegetation laws, the real figure for land taken by government for conservation purposes is probably more than 10 per cent.

Carr's approach seems to have been to lock up as much land as possible, as cheaply as possible, and leave the problems this creates to the premiers of the future. He has demonstrated an emotional blind spot for the immense suffering this has imposed on so many country people. On the whole, this moral blindness is shared by many people who live in our cities, who are better able to empathise with refugees in the outback than farmers whose property rights have been taken and whose lives are being shattered just a few hundred kilometres away.

In his book Thoughtlines, Carr wrote: "The challenge for people who feel the desperate case to save the natural world, to stop the retreat of nature, is to persuade our fellow Australians that we need to make sacrifices to do it." The record suggests Carr and his environmentalist supporters made no sacrifices. Rather, these were imposed on others: on the kids in Sydney growing up without backyards, the parents with massive mortgages, and the farmers who saw parts of their land nationalised and over-run by wild dogs. And then there's what the policies were supposed to help: all the animals and plants destroyed through the mismanagement of our national parks.

Source




MORE ON THE NEW CLIMATE PACT

The NZ National Business Review has a big wrap up of the new climate pact led by the USA and Australia. I enjoyed this scream of rage from a Greenie:

"Many Kyoto activist groups were livid about the lack of targets and goals in the pact, and the absence of punitive measures. "It doesn't have anything to do with reducing emissions. There are no targets, no cuts, no monitoring of emissions, nothing binding," Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace told Reuters".

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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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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