ON THE OTHER HAND ....

Compare and contrast the two articles from "The Scotsman" below. Do you get the impression that nobody knows what they are talking about on this topic?

Article dated 19th Sept.:

"Scotland is facing blackouts this winter amid predictions it will be the coldest in years and lead to power cuts as the national grid fails to cope with extra heating demands. As British Gas today implements its third big price rise in two years, industry representatives warned that, with improvements to the national gas infrastructure still taking place, a prolonged cold spell could see demand for power exceed supply. The Met Office prediction that the UK, and Scotland in particular, would suffer unusually low temperatures and high snowfalls this December and January, has also seen bookmakers prepare for a rush of punters keen to bet on a white Christmas. Paul Noon, the general secretary of Prospect, the trade union which represents the energy industry, said: "There is a very real threat this could be the winter our luck runs out. "The reality is that we have a limited energy supply and if we have a severe winter the national grid will struggle to cope." A Met office spokesman said temperatures were expected to be "significantly colder than average". "We issued the warning to energy companies as there was a concern that they might get caught out with their current supplies." He added: "If the predictions are correct it does increase the likelihood of a white Christmas." An estimated 16 million homes will today see a 14.2 per cent increase in gas and electricity bills from British Gas".

Article dated 2nd. October:

A white Christmas may soon be no more than a dream in many parts of southern England because of global warming, experts warn. Friends of the Earth said the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was making snow in December less and less likely in the south west, south east, East Anglia and parts of the Midlands. And a university climate lecturer said there was a chance that a city such as Norwich might never see a white Christmas again. "You can never say never but the likelihood is that white Christmases are going to become rarer and rarer in southern England - say south of a line drawn between the Wash and the Bristol Channel," said a spokesman for Friends of the Earth. "That is what global warming will mean.

Ski resorts in some parts of Europe may also find that they have no snow. That's happening already in some parts of Scotland." The environmental campaign group spokesman was speaking as Dr Nathan Gillett, a lecturer in climate change at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, made similar predictions in an interview with his local newspaper. "White winters are already rare in Norwich. There are less than one in 20. I think there is a chance we will never see a white Christmas again," Dr Gillett told the Norwich Evening News. "By the middle of the century I don't think we are going to have any more white Christmases because of global warming.





IF IFS AND ANS WERE POTS AND PANS....

There is an old English saying that goes back to Shakespeare's time or thereabouts: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans, there'd be no room for tinkers". Given the state of modern education, maybe it is only old guys like me who still understand that saying so let me explain: The word "an" in both Middle English and Early New English was a synonym for "if". And tinkers are guys who mend pots and pans. So the saying expresses scorn for the proliferation of "ifs" and the way people are always bothering their heads about them. The article below is a good example of such foolish agonizing. It ASSUMES that global warming is going to occur on a large scale in future and IF that were true then what they say might well be right. But they are not even good enough scientists to put in the "if".

"Up to 15,000 Australians could die each year from heat stress, and dengue fever could spread as far south as Sydney by the end of the century unless greenhouse gas emissions are cut, a new report warns. A joint report by the Australian Medical Association and the Australian Conservation Foundation found growing temperatures would lead to increased poverty rates, more migration and large scale population movement in the Asia Pacific. The report urges immediate action by governments and individuals to counter the threat. The two groups called for the greater use of renewable energy, mandatory biofuel blends, and an effective, national emissions control program.

AMA president Mukesh Haikerwal said there had to be a national response to climate change and its effects on human health. "Projected heat-related deaths to 2100 could be halved with strong policy action and, while the zone for potential dengue transmission is likely to move south to Rockhampton or Gympie, it would stay north of [the] more heavily populated south-east Queensland, coastal NSW and metropolitan Sydney," Dr Haikerwal said. "Failure to dramatically cut carbon dioxide emissions will leave the world with serious environmental and health problems.""

etc., etc

More here






DESTRUCTIVE U.N. BIOTECH BUREAUCRACY

"John Bolton, the blunt and controversial U.S. ambassador to the UN, has promised "to advance American interests and ideals at the United Nations." During his first two months on the job, Bolton has denounced the United Nations Development Program for its "unacceptable" funding of Palestinian propaganda and publicly identified "countries who are in a state of denial" about the need for UN reform. He told a reporter that he feels "a little like Rod Serling has suddenly appeared and we're writing episodes from 'The Twilight Zone.'" I'm having a similar experience in Japan as a member of the US delegation to a UN task force on biotechnology-derived foods. The group is a creature of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets food standards on behalf of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Health Organization (WHO).

The very scope of this exercise -- which has gone on for five years and shows no signs of abating -- makes no sense. It is concerned with regulatory requirements only for foods made with the newest, most precise and predictable techniques of biotechnology -- while exempting others made with far more crude and less predictable technologies, including irradiation mutagenesis and hybridization.

For example, the task force has selected as one of its new projects, "Food Safety Assessment of Food Derived from [Gene-Spliced] Plants Modified for Nutritional and Health Benefits." This scope of work completely ignores that past problems with unexpected food toxicity in new plant varieties -- in two varieties each of squash and potato, and one of celery -- have resulted from the imprecision of conventional plant breeding. There is a broad scientific consensus that the precision of gene-splicing makes the accidental introduction of toxins or anti-nutrients into new foods far less likely. (Note that no food modified by traditional techniques -- that is to say, virtually the entire diet of Europeans and Americans -- could (or should) meet the existing Codex standards for biotech foods.) It is rather like circumscribing for extra regulation only automobiles outfitted with disk brakes, radial tires and air bags -- and then limiting only those to a lower speed.

I've participated in these kinds of negotiations and meetings for more than a quarter-century, but never before have I had the same feeling that the inmates were running the asylum. This Codex travesty is rife with irony and hypocrisy. First, the conference was opened by Japan's Vice-Minister for Health, Labor and Welfare, who extolled at length the virtues of biotechnology applied to agriculture and food production. However, his government has approved not a single food plant, fruit or vegetable for sale in Japan. In San Francisco, a gene-spliced, virus-resistant Hawaiian papaya costs about $1.25 per pound. Japan won't accept the gene-spliced variety, so they import only conventional Hawaiian papayas (mostly from trees that have been ravaged by the papaya ringspot virus, which diminishes their yield) -- and the cost in Tokyo is about $15 dollars a pound! (This vignette was less like "The Twilight Zone" and more like the British comedy, "Yes, Minister!")

Second, during the plenary the European Community's delegation sanctimoniously lectured the other nations on how to regulate biotechnology. Considering that biotech applied to agriculture is virtually nonexistent in Europe thanks to ill-conceived, unscientific over-regulation and intractable disagreements among European countries, this is rather like the government of Columbia instructing others on how to stop drug trafficking.

Third, at the same time that medical experts around the world are fearful of a pandemic of influenza that could kill tens of millions and disrupt the world's economy, the senior WHO representative kept lobbying the task force to work on "ethical considerations" of gene-spliced organisms. This bizarre concern about the "ethics" of a sweeter melon or pest-resistant potato is rather like worrying about flossing your teeth when you're in the path of a Category 5 hurricane.

Fourth, during five years of negotiations by this task force, the participants -- including the U.S. delegation, now headed by a senior USDA official -- have willfully ignored scientific principles and the basic axiom that the degree of regulatory scrutiny should be proportionate to risk. They have also disregarded the scientific consensus that gene-splicing is an extension, or refinement, of older, traditional techniques of genetic modification, and that it does not warrant discriminatory, excessive regulation. They have overlooked the fact that during almost two decades of widespread use, the performance of gene-spliced crops has been spectacular, with farmers enjoying increased yields, decreased costs of agricultural chemicals, and lower occupational exposures to pesticides. The environmental benefits likewise have been stunning, with less chemical runoff into waterways and greater availability of no-till farming techniques that reduce soil erosion.

Fifth, many who attended this meeting appear to be completely ignorant of the appropriate context of new and conventional biotechnology, unaware that with the exception of fish and wild game, berries and mushrooms, virtually all of the foods in our diet are derived from organisms that have been genetically improved in some fashion. It is pathetic -- and a cruel misuse of resources -- to see representatives here from countries like Sudan, Papua New Guinea, Uganda, Lesotho, Nepal and Laos clamoring for "capacity building" to regulate gene-splicing. Shouldn't the priorities of poor countries be nutritional deficiencies, infectious diseases, occupational safety, and the lack of childhood vaccines and clean water, rather than the discriminatory, gratuitous regulation of a superior agricultural technology that UN-based regulation already has made too expensive to be applied widely to developing countries' crops?

Sixth, this project of Codex (which operates on behalf of the UN's FAO and WHO, remember) makes a mockery of the UN's Millennium Development Goals -- especially the first, and most ambitious: "to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger" by 2015. That can't be accomplished without innovative technology, and there won't be innovative technology if it is regulated excessively and stupidly. FAO calls on one hand for greater allocation of resources to agriculture, and then makes those resources less cost-effective by gratuitous over-regulation of the new biotechnology. (Another UN initiative that has vitiated agricultural biotechnology is the "biosafety protocol" of the UN-based Convention on Biological Diversity, but that's another story.)

Other Millennium Goals inevitably will be compromised, directly or indirectly, by this Codex project (and by the "biosafety protocol" of the CBD). An important way, for example, to "reduce child mortality," the fourth goal, would be to produce childhood vaccines cheaply in edible fruits and vegetables, but there is near-hysteria at Codex over conjectural food-safety problems with this approach. Moreover, when the impoverished of the world are forced to spend more than necessary to grow or obtain food, fewer resources are available for other public health and environmental needs. As Wellesley College political scientist Robert Paarlberg has noted, the continued globalization of this sort of "highly precautionary regulatory approach" to gene-spliced crops will cause the "the biggest losers of all [to be the] poor farmers in the developing world," and "if this new technology is killed in the cradle, these farmers could miss a chance to escape the low farm productivity that is helping to keep them in poverty. How about this for an additional Millennium Goal: Stop genocide-by-regulation by UN bureaucrats".

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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