In Algoreland, Failure is a Success

As eco-expert Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," continues its limited run, one has to question the success of a movie that has pulled in a measly $1.34 million in the last two weeks. Gore's apologists are claiming that if you look at the small number of theaters the movie is playing in - 77, the average take is almost $18,000 per outlet. Of course, it certainly helps if the 77 theaters are located in liberal strongholds such as New York City or Los Angeles. Try showing this political film in Winston-Salem, North Carolina or any city in Texas. How anybody can triumph a movie that has pulled in a mere $1.34 million and call it a success is beyond ludicrous - except in Algoreland.

To take this liberal spin to an even more confusing level, it's now being reported that Gore's name can no longer be found on Paramount Studio's poster campaign for the 100-minute film. "It's not a political movie," a top studio executive said (Uh-huh), but that still doesn't explain the removal of the ex-Vice President's name from the posters, as the Drudge Report revealed -- Research from a competing film studio might be on to something more obvious as to the name wiped clean of the newest print run of posters; ".marketing research showed little audience interest in a movie starring Al Gore," says a movie executive.

Could it be that the only inconvenient truth here is that the movie is a box office bomb?

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GREENPEACE LEAFLET MELTDOWN

Their cynicism inadvertently displayed

Environmentalist group Greenpeace is claiming an anti-nuclear memo issued last week for President's Bush's visit to the Limerick nuclear power plant near Pottstown, Pa., was an in-office joke that mistakenly got released, but no one at the organization is laughing.

Bush, on his second visit to a nuclear power plant within the last year, called for the expansion of nuclear power generation by reviving fuel processing, reducing regulations on the industry and developing procedures for handling radioactive wastes. In many quarters, nuclear energy is increasingly seen as part of the solution to U.S. energy independence and as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "Nuclear power helps us protect the environment and nuclear power is safe," the president said.

Greenpeace, in preparation for the president's visit, distributed a fact sheet opposing expansion of nuclear energy and warning of the dangers posed by the Limerick reactors. "This volatile and dangerous source of energy" is no answer to the country's energy needs, the memo, issued by Greenpeace Media Officer Steve Smith, read.

Smith continued, apparently at a loss for words: "In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."

Unfortunately, the fact sheet "fill-in-the-blank and all" was sent out. Smith told the Philadelphia Inquirer a colleague who inserted the exaggerated language into a draft was responsible for the mix-up. "Given the seriousness of the issue at hand, I don't even think it's funny," Smith said. A final version of the fact sheet was later released, without mention of Armageddon. It warned of potential meltdowns and airplane crashes.

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ANOTHER SCARE DEBUNKED: MALDIVES MORE RESILIENT TO CLIMATE CHANGE THAN THOUGHT

New model of reef-island evolution: Maldives, Indian Ocean

By P.S. Kench, R.F. McLean, S.L. Nichol, 2005, Geology, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 145-148

A new model of reef-island evolution, based on detailed morphostratigraphic analysis and radiometric dating of three islands in South Maalhosmadulu Atoll, Maldives, is presented. Islands initially formed on a foundation of lagoonal sediments between 5500 and 4500 yr B.P. when the reef surface was as much as 2.5 m below modern sea level. Islands accumulated rapidly during the following 1500 yr, effectively reaching their current dimensions by 4000 yr B.P. Since then the high circum-island peripheral ridge has been subject to seasonal and longer-term shoreline changes, while the outer reef has grown upward, reducing the energy window and confining the islands. This new model has far-reaching implications for island stability during a period of global warming and raised sea level, which will partially reactivate the energy window, although it is not expected to inhibit upward reef growth or compromise island stability. ... Contrary to most established commentaries on the precarious nature of atoll islands, our data and model present an optimistic view for the Maldivian islands. They have existed for >5000 yr, are morphologically resilient rather than fragile systems, and are expected to persist under current scenarios of future climate change and sea-level rise.






GLOBAL COOLING AGAIN?

Statement as of 8:55 am EDT on June 7, 2006

Record event report:
National Weather Service Tallahassee FL
855 am EDT Jun 7 2006

... Record low temperature shattered at Tallahassee Florida!...

AR 6:51 am EDT this morning... the temperature at the Tallahassee Regional Airport dropped to 54 degrees. This obliterates the old record low of 57 degrees set in 1991.

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BRITISH GREENIES HATE AIR TRAVEL

In 1929, when flying was still in its infancy, one writer who loved taking to the skies wrote: "Flying was a very tangible freedom.... It was beauty, adventure, discovery -- the epitome of breaking new worlds." Fast forward 70 years to 1999 and one prominent British newspaper columnist wrote: "Flying across the Atlantic is now as unacceptable as child abuse." He went on to say that because planes emit CO2s that harm the environment, they are contributing to a "killing field" that will make "genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering."

How have we gone from seeing man-made flight as liberating, something that allows us to go on adventures of discovery, to viewing it as tantamount to abuse, a selfish, uncaring act that we should be ashamed of? I think the contrast between that 1929 view of flying as a very tangible freedom and the more modern view of flying as a kind of abusive pastime shows that there is more to this issue than carbon emissions, pollution and cheap holidays. At root, it is about how we view ourselves, and our role in the world -- and it seems to me that some of today's anti-flying arguments are a microcosm of some of the worst trends of our time, capturing the killjoy, miserabilist spirit that seems to dominate today.

Firstly, today's demands that we should fly less, or should fly more responsibly, always seem to come with a generous side order of snobbery. Green-leaning activists and commentators seem to be especially exercised by "cheap flights", or "easyJet quickies" as they call them. In other words, by flights that allow the working classes to jet off for a week of sun in Spain, or for some revelry in Eastern Europe, or even for some funfair-riding and junk food-eating in somewhere like Florida.

Behind the concern about cheap flights there seems to lurk a deeper concern about the apparently "cheap people" who take them. I'm often struck by how explicitly activists will target a certain kind of flying. One newspaper recently published a 10-point action plan for combating climate change, no.2 of which said: "Put an end to cheap flights." It called for the authorities to "curb passenger enthusiasm" for cheap flying before it has "catastrophic" consequences.

Also, it seems to me that the demands for higher taxes on flying -- even for "prohibitive taxes" -- seem designed to price certain people out of the flying game. Everyone from radical green activists to the Lib Dems and the Tories seems to want higher taxes on flights -- which, in the end, will mean that a certain class of people will have to make do with Bognor Regis instead of Bologna.

Let's not beat around the bush here: the attacks on cheap flights make a clear value judgement about different kinds of holidays. And holidays facilitated by cheap flights are seen as unworthy, as lazy, laddish breaks to sunny destinations that are a waste of time and a waste of environment.

The targeting of cheap flights makes an explicit divide between "our" holidays and "their" holidays -- between the eco-aware middle-class family's trip to Mongolia, where they buy beads from local women and suchlike, and the young hedonistic lads who go for a knees-up in Magaluf. One holiday is seen as worthy, even worth expending some CO2s on; the other is seen as unworthy, "cheap", unnecessary.

That kind of snobbery towards certain tourists has long existed. When the middle classes and, heaven forbid, even the lower middle classes first started venturing on trips to the British seaside one posh Reverend said: "Of all the noxious animals, the most noxious is a tourist." Today we might talk about the noxious gases that tourists leave behind them, rather than about the tourists themselves being noxious, but the sentiment, it seems to me, is quite similar.

But the attack on flying is not motivated only by a loathing of certain tourists, a certain class of people, but also by a kind of self-loathing, a view of all of us as polluters who should tiptoe apologetically around the world, if at all. Beyond the cheap flights discussion our changing attitude to flying itself reveals something about our changing attitude to humanity.

Once flying was seen as pleasurable -- it was nice to ride in the sky and look out at the clouds. In the words of one writer in the last century, being in the air could be "very pure and fine, bracing and delicious." Today, by contrast, we worry about air rage when we're in the skies, the threat posed by other people who might have had a couple of vodkas too many. Or we worry about DVT, the threat posed to our legs by sitting down for too long, or the potential for terrorism.

In the past, travel was seen as something that made us who we were - it contributed to our personalities, to our personal humanity. You would describe someone as well-travelled. People would boast about where they had been and what they learnt while they were there. Today, people tend to come home from holiday and instantly log on to that website where you can apologise for how far you've travelled and donate enough money to plant enough trees to make up for all the CO2s you expended on your trip. You're ashamed of your travelling rather than proud of it.

In the past, flying was seen as a great advancement on past generations, even as a tribute to past generations. Wilbur Wright, one of the great developers of man-made flight, said: "The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors, who in their gruelling travels in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space." Today we don't think about past generations and how much they struggled; we think about the threat that we apparently pose to future generations with all our flying, or we think about the spread of disease. Apparently, the growth of global air travel means that something like bird flu will easily take hold.

What we can see in the flying debate is all our fears and anxieties writ large. Of course, flying may well damage the environment; I'm pretty certain that it lets out harmful emissions. However, lots of stuff we do pollutes -- that is the nature of living in an advanced and industrialised society.

We will have to deal with such pollution and find ways to handle it, because it is unreasonable and unrealistic to say we should have less flying. Let us remember that flying can be a "very tangible freedom" and stop worrying that by travelling we are doing something reckless and irresponsible.

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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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