NAUGHTY NASA MAN

A NASA scientist has just reviewed the what the satellite data (Yes. Satellite data, not tales from Eskimos) show about the ice cover at the North and South poles. Here is his summary of the data:

"Global warming of about 0.5 to 1 oC during the last century has been observed from meteorological stations around the world and postulated to be caused in part by increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The best regions for detecting the impact of such changes are the polar regions where the signals are supposed to be amplified because of ice-albedo feedbacks. Satellite data reveal that the most remarkable change in the polar regions is in the rapid decline of 9% per decade in the Arctic perennial ice cover which has been observed to be anomalously low in 2002, 2003 and 2004. The sea ice cover in the Bellingshaussen Sea has been observed to be retreating as well, at the rate of 6%/decade. The changes are more modest in the entire Northern Hemisphere with the ice declining at around 2 to 3% per decade only while that in the Southern Hemisphere has been basically constant during the last 25 years.

So if it is GLOBAL warming that is causing some shrinking of the NORTHERN icecap, how come nothing much is happening at the SOUTH pole?





GREENIES RESPONSIBLE FOR MUCH OF THE HIGH CURRENT FUEL PRICES

When you stand at the gas pump and watch those numbers spin by so fast you can't read them keep in mind that the soaring price of gasoline is no accident - it is the work of a new fifth column. Back in the 30s and 40s people who aided and abetted the enemy were known as Fifth Columnists - a term coined during the Spanish Civil War when rebel sympathizers inside Madrid worked against their Soviet-backed enemy from within, while four columns of fellow rebels were attacking the city from outside.

For many years the United States has been the target of another brand of fifth columnists, covert Marxists who by their subversive activities, clothed in the mantle of citizens concerned with the environment, have played havoc with the economy of this nation and the freedoms of the American people. While their campaigns have for the most part been carried out in the open, their sinister motives and behind-the-scenes manipulations have been well hidden and can be discerned only by observing the damage they have done, such as ruinous hikes in the cost of gasoline and heating oil and the deliberately created scarcity of abundant energy resources.

This fifth column is rich and powerful. Just one environmental group, the Sierra Club, can boast of an annual budget of tens of millions of dollars and almost 600,000 members. Their political contributions reach into the millions. A Sierra Club attack on a Congressman's environmental voting record no matter how distorted can be a kiss of death. As a result when the Sierra Club talks, Congress listens - and acts. And another set of regulations ruinous to the economy and the individual freedom of Americans gets on the books.

And the Sierra Club is just one of the many so-called "Green" lobbying groups busy savaging the economy and putting shackles on ordinary Americans powerless to resist the flood of restrictions imposed on them from above by bureaucrats who are forced to comply with the thousands of regulations and laws affecting their agencies, that have been imposed on our national economy, affecting all the rest of us.

As Alan Caruba has observed "One of the first actions 'the government' took was the Environmental Protection Agency announcement that it was suspending the idiotic mandates requiring countless different formulations of gasoline, to insure that a sufficient supply was available nationwide. In one state after another, these mandates insure that different formulations are required in different areas of the same state." Those idiotic regulations are the result of the environmental fifth column's political clout.

To get to the heart of the matter it is important to understand what got us into this mess, and the part that the fifth column played in it. The sudden rise in the cost of oil which translated itself into pump prices was the application of the law of supply and demand - there are more and more consumers of petroleum without a corresponding increase in the supplies of black gold. The Chinese, for example have abandoned rickshaws in favor of gas guzzling automobiles and their demand for oil is getting astronomical.

That was bad enough, but along came Katrina and Rita both of which curtailed refining of crude oil supplies from here and abroad. That's the part of the story of our present situation. But it's only a tiny part of the energy crisis now afflicting the U.S.

Thanks to the environmental fifth column the United States has been unable to take advantage of its own crude oil supplies. Abundant supplies of crude oil beneath the U.S. mainland and offshore, locked in shale deposits, and in Alaska's North Slope remain untapped thanks to the environmentalists who have stopped development of our natural oil resources.

Given an abundant supply of crude oil however, we are still in trouble. Crude oil must be refined before it can become gasoline or fuel oil. Thanks to the fifth column, which has managed to have Congress and local governments impose crippling regulations on their construction and operations, we have not built a refinery in over 30 years and even if we cut all the red tape and start now with a crash program of refinery construction it will be years before they can come on line. In the meantime, gasoline and heating oil will be one of the biggest items on our household budgets.

The environmentalist lobbies and their Democrat and liberal allies keep chanting about the need for the development of new sources of energy while at the same time having done everything in their power for years to prevent the use of an alternative technology long available - nuclear energy. The electric power industry is one of the nation's prime consumers of petroleum - cut power plants out of the chain of petroleum consumers and the availability of gasoline and fuel oil increases by multiples that boggle the mind. And the more gasoline and fuel oil on the market, the cheaper it gets.

Nuclear power can do the trick. It's been there for decades - a resource spurned because of the scare tactics of the environmentalist fifth column - tactics that have created false alarms about the imaginary dangers posed by nuclear power plants. In 1954 the late Admiral Lewis Strauss said that atomic energy would make electricity "too cheap to meter." Providing that energy however, proved to be anything but cheap.

According to Tom Bethel in the September issue of the American Spectator, since 1979, no new nuclear facilities not already under order have been built. We had the magic wand for the energy crisis, and we simply threw it away....

The next time you stand at the pump and watch your hard earned dollars go gushing into your car's fuel tank, remember who did this to you. And this is hardly the least of the crimes committed by the environmental fifth column. In the name of the socialist doctrine they conceal within their breasts, they have imprisoned you and our fellow Americans in a web of destructive regulations that are slowly strangling out economy. And that's what they want. When the economy hits bottom, they have Karl Marx waiting in the wings to take charge.

More here





HYBRID CARS WON'T SAVE YOU MONEY

That’s the conclusion of Joe White, Detroit Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal, who looked into buying a Prius for his own daily driver. White was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition September 30.

White first looked at trading in his Subaru for a Prius, and found that at roughly $3 per gallon for gas, he wouldn’t recover his financing costs. Joe figured that at his annual mileage, he’d save about $746 a year in fuel costs, but it would take too long to recover the premium he’d pay for the hybrid.

Next he looked at the hypothetical situation of someone without a car looking to buy either a Honda Civic or the Prius. In this case, the fuel savings were roughly $506 per year, versus a purchase price difference of about $8,000. Without even considering cost-of-money issues, it would take nearly 16 years just to break even.

With the current tax deduction of $2,000 converting to a $2,000 tax credit January 1, which decreases every year thereafter, the government subsidies don’t make the switch economically feasible, either.

The bottom line? Unless gas prices go a lot higher, or the government increases hybrid subsidies, or both, buying a hybrid probably won’t save you money. Of course, there are the intangible but real benefits of reducing your personal environmental impact, but then you have to ask yourself if you’re really getting the biggest bang for your environmental investment.


Source






THE ANTI-SCIENCE LEFT

When it comes to the Intelligent Design debate (and note that I myself am an atheist but I claim no virtue or superiority for that), the Left are vocal in claiming that they are the ones who are "scientific" and "reality-based". But that is just the usual insincere leftist posturing with no genuine committment behind it at all. As the following excerpt points out:

"Consider the environmentalist movement. Environmentalism is generally considered to be a scientific movement, its views based on facts discovered by climatologists and ecologists trying to understand nature. But the warnings and prescriptions issued by environmentalists are often anything but fact-based.

In 2004, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment issued "Impacts of a Warming Arctic," a report that proclaimed, "Global warming could cause polar bears to go extinct by the end of the century by eroding the sea ice that sustains them." Yet the facts contained in the group's own report clearly disprove their claims: they show that the temperature fluctuations recorded by the group represent, not a continual warming trend, but the warming phase of a warming/cooling cycle; they show that these temperature fluctuations cannot be the result of increased manmade emissions of greenhouse gasses; they show that, at worst, human activity has caused a .6 degree Celsius rise in average global temperature since the start of the Industrial Revolution, even though average global temperatures can naturally fluctuate more than three degrees. To top it all off, the group's key finding clashes with all available evidence, which indicates that the population of polar bears has actually increased!

Such a massive departure from the truth cannot be the result of honest error--it can only be achieved by people who believe that misrepresenting the facts is a virtue when it serves a noble cause. Yet such is the mentality of the environmentalists, and while this case is striking, it is by no means unique. Whether the issue is global warming (or global cooling), DDT, acid rain, the depletion of the rainforests, or the Alar scare, every single environmental panic has been shown to be, if not completely baseless, then wildly exaggerated. "We have to offer up scary scenarios," said Stanford University Environmentalist Stephen Schneider, "make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being right."

To be scientific demands more than a science degree. It means basing conclusions on facts rather than searching for (or creating) facts to confirm one's convictions. Yet despite environmentalism's consistent record of false predictions, faulty methods, and deceptive claims, the left continues to embrace the environmentalist cause.

The reason is obvious--the left isn't pro-science at all. No one is more explicit about this than the left itself, at least when they are speaking off the record, safely tucked away inside the walls of academia. In their book, Higher Superstition, Paul Gross and Norman Levitt catalogue the academic left's assault on science from all quarters of the social sciences: post-modernist, Marxist, feminist, multiculturalist, and, of course, environmentalist. Each of these schools, sometimes distinct from the others, sometimes not, has its own complaint about science. Science, say the post-modernists, is just our culture's particular faith, no better than any other culture's myths. Science, say the Marxists, "is really bourgeois' science." Science, say the feminists, "is poisoned and corrupted by an ineradicable gender bias." Science, say the multiculturalists, is "inherently inaccurate and incomplete by virtue of its failure to incorporate the full range of cultural perspectives." Science, say the environmentalists, embodies "the instrumentalism and alienation from direct experience of nature which are the twin sources of eventual (or imminent) ecological doomsday."....

To defend science, one must first defend man's mind. And if one wants to defend man's mind, one must replace the baseless acceptance of ideological dogma with a passionate, unwavering commitment to the truth. One must stop searching for facts to fit one's vision, and fix one's vision on the facts.

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.

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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