Time to consult a prophet, rather than profits

Comment by Andrew Bolt on recent pontifications from trendy Australian business leaders

When six business bosses lecture you piously on climate change, mind your wallet. Last Friday the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change warned -- repent! -- that "climate change is real". It had asked someone in the CSIRO, joined with the Australian Conservation Foundation, and settled what even the world's climate experts can't agree on. We face doom. A small rise in temperature will mean "97 per cent of the (Great Barrier) Reef could be bleached". We'll lose nearly half our cattle and other livestock through pests, heat and diseases. Rain won't fall yet storms will devastate forests, because "the tendency to more extreme weather events is well established in the scientific literature". We now had to slash our gas emissions, and even give cows vaccines to stop farting, so "we will have more time to adapt to a harder and more varied climate".

Naturally The Age, which has got green religion, reported all these claims as facts from impartial authorities. But now for real story. As I reported last week, the Great Barrier Reef will probably increase with warmer seas, say scientists from the CSIRO and Australian Institute of Marine Science. And if warmer weather indeed causes more pests, scientists are sure to find yet more cures -- the real secret to healthier stock. As for warming causing more extreme weather, a British House of Lords committee, which grilled 40 experts last year, concluded: "There is uncertainty and controversy about the underlying data required to substantiate this claim". Certainly hurricane centres, such as the World Meteorological Organisation, insist hurricanes are not getting worse through warming.

What's more, there is fierce argument over how much warming is even caused by man. Only last week, 60 top experts in climate science and related disciplines sent a letter to the Canadian PM saying "global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise' ".

Even if climate change is man-made, there is nothing Australia can do to change it in any way we could measure. Our emissions will be dwarfed by India's and China's for a start. So we're being sold snake oil that won't solve a problem that might well not be our fault. It might not even be a problem. The House of Lords report even suggested we might not be worse off with warming, on the whole, given how much better plants will grow.

So why might the six businesses say such wild things? Well, they include IAG and Swiss Re, two insurance groups who sure have a policy for nervous you. Then there's the paper recycler Visy, the gas (rather than dirty coal) power company Origin, the gimme-cash Westpac and BP, which changed its name from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum to make you think you're actually filling your car with flowers. Still want to believe we're doomed? At least consult a prophet, rather than profits.






THE GREEN SCARE

Post lifted from Attack Machine

Liberals fancy themselves rationalists, free-thinkers unimpeded by religious doctrine. Which is amusing when you watch them get strident over environmental issues. I had a friend instantly reach a boil when I dared question the dogma of human-created global warming. And that was all I was doing, questioning.

Jonah Goldberg writes about Al Gore and his new film, An Inconvenient Truth::

Now, it's true that Earth has gotten warmer -- one degree since the 19th century -- and it will probably get warmer still. And it's probably true that human activity plays a significant part in all that. But it's also true that we don't have a clear picture of what's happening now, never mind what will happen. Just ask the 60 climatologists from around the world who wrote Canada's prime minister that "observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future." But that's all beside the point to Gore & Co., who say the time for debate is over. And if you disagree, get ready for the witch hunt. Major news media have gone after scientists who argue there's still time to study global warming rather than plunge into some half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.

As Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT, recently lamented in the Wall Street Journal: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."

And dissenters pay a heavy price.

In Vanity Fair, writer Mark Hertsgaard alleges that Frederick Seitz, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences and the former president of the prestigious Rockefeller University, was a shill for, of all things, the tobacco industry. A press release by the National Environmental Trust proclaims: "Scientist Who Spearheaded Attacks on Global Warming Also Directed $45M Tobacco Industry Effort to Hide Health Impacts of Smoking". Seitz, a giant in American science, says this is all "ridiculous, completely wrong." Now 94, Seitz explained to TCSDaily.com that R.J. Reynolds had given Rockefeller University $5 million a year for basic research. Seitz says he directed the money toward non-tobacco-related efforts in the study of prions (the virus-like proteins that cause mad cow disease), tuberculosis and other diseases. Prion researcher Stanley Prusiner thanked both R.J. Reynolds and Seitz in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

But Gore & Co. aren't troubled by such details because the smears are all for a good cause. That's why Gore saw nothing wrong in bullying dissident climate change scientists when he was a senator or waging a mean-spirited campaign to discredit the work of his old mentor, Harvard oceanographer Roger Revelle, because Revelle thought alarmism was unwarranted.

Hence the irony of the title An Inconvenient Truth. It is the GREEN scare that has no patience for inconvenient truths. For example, Gore blames the disappearing snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro on global warming, but a 2003 study in Nature identified the clear-cutting of surrounding moisture-rich forests as the culprit.

In the famously fact-checked New Yorker, Editor David Remnick pens a love letter to Gore in which he laments that Earth will "likely be an uninhabitable planet" if we don't heed Gore's jeremiads. Oh ... come ... on!

April 22 will be "Earth Day" and Chicken Little Marxists Have The Platform

Post lifted from Alain's newsletter

This Saturday, hundreds of thousands of left-of-center environmental activists will gather in parks around the U.S. to hear Earth Day speakers rail against capitalism and President Bush for failing to sign the Kyoto Treaty on the environment. Unfortunately, the Chicken Little brigade will undoubtedly monopolize media coverage this weekend.

The Earth Day speakers will do what they have done every year since 1970 when the first Earth Day was held: They will trash America as the fountain of all pollution; call for more government regulation of businesses; and continue fighting against energy independence for our nation. Ironically, on the first Earth Day, radical environmentalists were ranting about the alleged coming dangers of "global cooling." Today, they're ranting about global warming. So, which is it? As we will see, the jury is still out on how to interpret complex and incomplete scientific data on global climate changes.

To understand what will happen this Saturday, it is important to know the history of Earth Day. One of the founders of Earth Day was anti-Vietnam War activist John McConnell who proposed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969 that a day be set aside in the spring for Earth Day. His fellow anti-Vietnam War and environmental activists chose April 22nd as Earth Day.

Maybe it was pure coincidence that April 22, 1970, was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lenin, the first brutal dictator of the Soviet Union. But anti-Vietnam War activists at the time were more aligned with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union than they were concerned about American soldiers dying overseas. It is quite possible that this day was set for April 22 to honor their Marxist icon.

One of the leaders of Earth Day was David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth. Brower was described by one biographer as an "Archdruid," who treated the environment as a religion. In later years, Brower traveled to Nicaragua to show support for the Sandinistas, a Fidel Castro-aligned terrorist movement. The current head of Earth Day is Denis Hayes, who was the national coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970. Hayes was interviewed by the National Resources Defense Council and told the organization that his greatest concern is "Human population growth ... we are squeezing other species into extinction at a catastrophic rate. But because the population issue is inextricably linked to such political third rails as immigration, abortion, racism, religious objections to contraception, and Social Security, our politicians resolutely ignore it."

Hayes' Earth Day efforts have been recently joined by a so-called "moderate" evangelical group called the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), which is calling upon Congress to pass legislation to reduce carbon monoxide emissions in the atmosphere. The far-left "evangelical" Pastor Jim Wallis, has also joined the ranks of the Chicken Little brigade.

However, an alternative Christian group, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA), (of which Traditional Values Coalition is a member) has risen up to challenge the "Chicken Little" predictions being made by Earth Day advocates and the poorly advised EEN. The ISA urges that such Chicken Little scenarios be rejected in favor of factual analyses of climate change and whether or not global warming is actually harmful or helpful to the environment.

In a research paper published by the ISA, one scientist argues convincingly that global warming or increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may enhance agricultural productivity throughout the world! In short, climate change may actually help reduce world hunger. Another environmental expert, Paul Driessen, argues that if America signs the Kyoto treaty, the poor and needy will be needlessly harmed. Why? Because by increasing the cost of doing business due to environmental restrictions, many companies will raise prices-thus harming the poor. In addition, many low-paying jobs could be lost due to high production costs-and these quite often impact minorities. (Driessen is a policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death.)

In fact, more than 17,000 scientists have signed the Oregon Petition, a statement that challenges the belief that man-made emissions have contributed to overall global warming. They urged the United States to reject the Kyoto Protocol!

The Earth Day Chicken Little brigade will have the public platform this Saturday to rant against capitalism and humans "squeezing other species into extinction," but science is not on their side. And, fortunately, more and more voices of reason are being heard in the debate over world climate change-and what really needs to be done to solve whatever real environmental problems the world may face. The answer is certainly not to be found in the Marxist-driven proposals of Earth Day activists. Individuals truly concerned about the environment would be wise to read materials produced by the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, the Heartland Institute, and the Acton Institute.






BBC GETS IT BADLY WRONG BUT NO WORRY!

A "major error" has been discovered in the world's biggest online climate prediction project, backed by the BBC. The fault in a Climateprediction.net model launched in February causes temperatures in past climates to rise quicker than seen in real observations. The program, which runs on users' computers when they are idle, aims to generate forecasts of climate change.

The project scientists have now fixed the fault and say the data collected so far is still useful. "At some point in the future, we may have done an experiment like this anyway," Myles Allen, principal investigator of the project told the BBC News website. "People have not been wasting their time."

Climateprediction.net was established more than two years ago, but a new computer model was launched in February this year in collaboration with BBC Four TV. The simulation is more sophisticated than previous versions and provides the scientists, they say, with a more accurate representation of the real world, including an ocean that interacts with the atmosphere. The experiment uses "distributed computing", in which the combined power of numerous PCs is tapped rather than using a single supercomputer. Each participant downloads a program that runs unique climatic simulations from 1920 to 2080 to build a picture of the possible range of outcomes.

The error in the climate models has been traced to a file that is responsible for introducing man-made sulphate emissions into the atmosphere. Sulphate particles reflect sunlight back into space causing a cooling of the atmosphere, in a phenomenon known as "global dimming". "What we've seen in the runs is the unadulterated impact of global warming which means that all of the models have warmed up too fast," Dr Allen said.

The problem was picked up by scientists when a handful of the 200,000 people that have downloaded the program reached the end of the simulation. An announcement by Nick Faull, project coordinator of Climateprediction.net, was posted on the website's message board as soon as the scientists realised that the experiment would have to be started again. "I regret to announce that we've recently discovered a major error in one of the files used by the climate model," it read.

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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