GREENPEACE OBSTRUCTS RECYCLING

AND jobs for poor Indians

Indian police have detained around a dozen Greenpeace activists during a protest over plans to scrap in India a French aircraft carrier which they said contains tonnes of highly toxic material. Environmental group Greenpeace, which organised the protest outside the French Embassy in the Indian capital, urged Paris and New Delhi not to allow the Clemenceau to reach a scrapyard in the western Gujarat state next month without first being decontaminated in France. The group says that vulnerable scrapyard workers in countries like India risk developing serious health problems after handling toxic waste. "We call upon the Indian Ministry of Environment to scrap their decision to allow this ship to come to India," Greenpeace campaigner Ramapati Kumar said, adding India did not have the facilities to handle the ship safely, unlike France. "India is not a dumping ground for France," Kumar said.

The ship set sail from the French naval base of Toulon last week for the massive Alang ship breaking yard in Gujarat, despite similar protests in France. The French Embassy in New Delhi did not immediately comment on the Greenpeace allegations.

The environmental group says the decommissioned ship - which served in the 1991 Gulf War - is fitted with hundreds of tonnes of hazardous material, including 500 tonnes of asbestos. The French Government has said there are only 45-50 tonnes of toxic and non-biodegradable materials in the ship, according to media reports. "We don't want toxic scrap to come to our country," Greenpeace activist Vivek Sinha said as dozens of policemen surrounded protesters. Greenpeace said in a report published in December that thousands of workers involved in the shipbreaking industry in countries like India, Pakistan and China have probably died over the past two decades due to accidents or exposure to toxic waste.

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TWO MAVERICK LETTERS THAT THE "SYDNEY MORNING HERALD" CARELESSLY PRINTED

Cool change on the way, but not for another decade

Scientific evidence is emerging to show the world's mean temperature will drop by 0.4 to 0.7 Celsius over the 25 years starting in 2015. This cooling will come about because the solar sunspot cycle will collapse sometime between 2011 and 2022 and remain subdued until the 2040s.

I know this is hard to believe, given the recent heatwave conditions. However, in the past 1000 years, on each occasion when the sunspot cycle has collapsed, the world's mean temperature decreased significantly. We should start preparing for these cooler temperatures.

Ian Wilson Toowoomba (Qld)

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Three correspondents (Letters, January 3) claim that on the basis of a few recent hot days, global warming is now proved. Not so fast. That may be so, but the evidence is by no means set yet, if it ever will be, because there are plenty of reputable scientists who disagree.

Last month was Perth's coldest December on record, and while December here was on average very hot, it was made so by a few extreme days. If you cast your mind back, a lot of people remarked how mild the first part of December was and that Christmas Day was relatively pleasant.

Tasmania is experiencing cool weather while Europe is in the grip of one of the worst cold snaps for many years.

New Year's Day was reported as the hottest in 67 years, which suggests that there were very hot days more than half a century ago, too. I'm not opposed to the reduction of carbon dioxide and other pollutants but let's not make claims that are accepted only because the bandwagon is passing by.

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The Carbon Dioxide Fear

A mocking article by Jason Katz Cooper, a biologist in Northern Virginia:

A new report in the prestigious British journal Nature shows how greenhouse gasses (normally associated with global warming) are now slated to cause global freezing as well. This has led me to throw in the towel and admit, as liberals have been arguing for the past 25 years, that CO2 really is the main problem confronting humanity. As Al Gore succinctly summed it up, "global warming is more serious than terrorism." After all, it causes so many calamitous things (whereas terrorism only kills people).

John Roach reporting for National Geographic News reports that the world's surface temperature has warmed 1øF (0.6øC) in the last 100 years. This is a calamity in and of itself to be sure. The Nature report adds to this tragedy that in addition to warming, greenhouse gasses will cause the earth to cool at the same time - quite a trick. But this is just the beginning of the horrors of greenhouse gasses. Let us take a quick look spanning the globe:

From Colorado, through National Geographic News we learn with remorse that swallows, are showing up to their U.S. breeding grounds about 12 days earlier than they were 30 years ago, according to Hector Galbraith at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Galbraith calls the results "worrying."

Miles away In the North Sea greenhouse gasses are busy destroying cold-water plankton and replacing them with - gasp -warm water plankton. But the National Geographic News shows us that this is only the beginning. The loss of specifically cold-water plankton causes decreases in the number of sand eels which causes many species of seabirds to fail to breed (out of empathy with the sand eels perhaps). The world is definitely falling apart.

But it gets more ominous still because the greenhouse gasses are not done. AOL News reports that in northern Russia, frogs have been spotted more often on the tundra and some birds are not even bothering to migrate. Simultaneously over in the North Pole CO2 is causing polar ice to contract to its smallest size in at least a century. But the situation is much graver still.

AOL News takes us to Norway where we learn that reindeer traditionally herded by Sami people-who evidently are a type of people who live in Norway-were vulnerable when winter snows did not fall as much as usual. The article quotes a Sami environmental activist named Prakhova as saying, "Snow is cold for us but for reindeer it is a soft winter bed." She goes on, "Lack of snow also makes it hard for reindeer to feed on lichen because the plants can get covered by sharp ice, which cuts their soft muzzles."

As an American I am embarrassed that my country sent 100,000 troops overseas to defend freedom in Iraq while ignoring the dangers of greenhouse gasses as they kill cold-water plankton, injure reindeer noses, and spread frogs across the great Russian tundra. The temperature right now in Fairfax, Va (from where I write) is 41øF. If we had concentrated our focus instead of Iraq on the CO2 terror it would be 40øF.

Interestingly, as it now turns out greenhouse gasses will cause cooling by the same mechanism as proposed in the movie hit of a summer ago, The Day After Tomorrow - a disruption in the conveyor-belt current that brings warm air northward. At the time environmental activists and intellectual elitists, demonstrating their neutrality, acknowledged that even their best computer models found it unlikely for disruptions in the conveyor-belt currents to cause thousand foot tidal waves to crash into Manhattan, instantly freeze, and cause the entire population of the northeast to move to Mexico. But their models do now predict disruptions of cold-water plankton populations. Which is I suppose, the perfect thing for big hearted liberals to worry about while the rest of us go about the business of fighting terrorism, spreading freedom, and making this planet safe for our children.




ENVIRONMENTALISM IS FAITH-BASED TOO

Despite the claims of its critics, Intelligent Design is indeed a scientific theory that can be-- indeed is--contradicted by evidence. Examples are the human appendix and the inverted construction of the human retina-bad design with good evolutionary explanations.

The real objection to Intelligent Design is not that it is not a theory, nor that it is a theory that we have reason to reject. The real objection is that its supporters are driven by religious, not scientific, motives. Somewhere in the world there must exist someone who was persuaded of its truth by scientific arguments-but looking at those arguments makes it clear that they were generated by people who knew what conclusion they wanted and were doing their best to fudge up reasons to believe it.

My first post in this blog discussed another example of faith based science--Nuclear Winter. Its scientific credentials were a good deal better than those of Intelligent Design. But it was clear from the sales campaign, at a point when the scientific basis was still very shaky, that it was a theory propounded by its supporters for a non-scientific motive. The campaign for nuclear disarmament had gotten a lot of mileage out of the claim, almost certainly false, that fallout from a nuclear war would wipe out life on earth, or at least human life. Nuclear Winter provided a new argument designed to reach the same conclusion-one that might even be true.

Quite a lot of environmentalism fits the same pattern. The economic, biological and climatological arguments--about global warming, species extinction, pollution, and the like--are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. But the driving force, for a lot of those making those arguments, is the essentially religious belief that natural is good.

As evidence, consider how few in the environmental movement are willing to support nuclear power. Nuclear reactors are the one source of power that provides a plausible alternative to fossil fuels-a way of generating electricity almost anywhere without producing CO2 or consuming fossil fuels, and doing it at a cost not wildly higher than the cost of coal fueled generators. They thus provide at least a partial solution to what environmentalists claim are two of the big problems-depletable resources and global warming.

A few environmentalists accept that argument-most, by casual observation, don't. The reason is clear. Nuclear reactors are as unnatural as you can get-a symbol of the evils of high technology, used as such for decades by many of the same people pushing environmentalism.

The risks of faith based science.

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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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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