Thursday, September 07, 2006

Greer, the disgusting Greenie

Although he was an outspoken conservationist, lots of Greenies disliked Steve Irwin out of jealousy -- he got so much of the publicity and admiration that they crave -- AND he was a supporter of Australia's conservative government. So they made various specious complaints about him "disturbing" the animals he filmed. So what we see below from Australia's chief ratbag -- "publicity at any price" Germaine Greer -- is a regurgitation of that. It shows what scum she is (and always was) that she should at this time defame such a brave and brilliant man. It is a credit to Australia's responsible Left that her words were rightly dismissed by one of their chief spokesman as "politically correct claptrap"



Feminist Germaine Greer should keep her thoughts about the death of Steve Irwin to herself, Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said today. In an article in British newspaper The Guardian, Ms Greer said that the animal world had finally taken revenge on Irwin for causing stress to the animals he handled. "I think Germaine Greer should just stick a sock in it," Mr Rudd said in Canberra today. "You have got a grieving mother, you have got a couple of grieving young kids and a grieving nation and what to you get from Germaine Greer? You get a bucket load of politically correct pap - it's just nonsense.

"Steve Irwin was a nature conservationist, an animal conservationist and made a huge contribution to the preservation of wildlife worldwide. "And what do we get from Germaine Greer? - some gratuitous, politically correct claptrap. She should put a sock in it," he said.

Greer said she had "not much sympathy" for Irwin if he was grappling with the stingray that killed him on the Great Barrier Reef. Those on the boot with Irwin say he was not in any way harassing the stringray when it lashed out at him as he swam over it.

But The Guardian quoted Greer as saying: "As a Melbourne boy, Irwin should have had a healthy respect for stingrays, which are actually commoner and bigger in southern waters than they are near Port Douglas." She described Irwin's behaviour as "bizarre", noting the famed incident when he held his baby son while feeding a crocodile during a show at his Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast. "The whole spectacle was revolting," Greer said. "The crocodile would rather have been anywhere else and the chicken had a grim life too, but that's entertainment at Australia Zoo. "The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin, but probably not before a whole generation of kids in shorts seven sizes too small has learned to shout in the ears of animals with hearing ten times more acute than theirs, determined to become millionaire animal-loving zoo-owners in their turn."

Police yesterday said footage of the incident showed Irwin in no way harassed or provoked the stingray.

Source

Below is a reality-based account of Steve Irwin:



An American diver who owes his life to Steve Irwin says he was shattered to learn about the Crocodile Hunter's death. "He saved my life," an emotional Scott Jones said today from his home in Iowa. "I've lost a good friend."

Mr Jones was part of a tragic scuba diving expedition in the Sea of Cortez, off the coast of Mexico, in 2003. Mr Jones' friend, 77-year-old Katie Vrooman, died during the dive after a sea surge knocked her twice against rocks. Mr Jones fought to hold on to her unconscious body for almost two hours and, while hanging off rocks and floating in the water, attempted to resuscitate her. Eventually Mr Jones had to let Ms Vrooman's body go and he spent a harrowing night alone perched on rocks.

In a lucky twist of fate, Irwin and his film crew happened to be in the vicinity shooting a documentary and heard an SOS call on their radio that two divers had gone missing. Irwin, who had never met Mr Jones or Mr Vrooman, decided he would abandon his film project to try to find them.

Mr Jones was precariously sitting on a rock outcrop dehydrated and scarred from being battered on the rocks. Irwin, dressed in his khaki shorts and shirt, dived in the water and swam across to save Mr Jones.

At the time, Mr Jones did not realise Irwin was a celebrity. The quietly-spoken Mr Jones said he had heard of Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan, but not the Crocodile Hunter. "After they got me on to the main boat, Steve helped me get my wetsuit off me and he went below to do something," Jones recalled. "Somebody behind me said 'So what do you think of the Crocodile Hunter?' "So I was looking around for Crocodile Dundee. I thought when the makeup comes off Dundee's looks must change. "But, when I finally got home my daughter turned the Animal Planet channel on and I started watching his show from then. "It was wild. He was jumping on crocodiles and things like that."

Jones and his wife Deborah sent flowers to Irwin's wife, Terri, and kids, Bindi and Bob. They are also planning a trip to Australia to speak to his family. "We'd love to go to Australia and tell his wife and kids just what a great man he is," Mr Jones, who declined to tell his age, adding it was a secret, said. "He was a hell of an educator, from kids all the way up to old farts like me. "He was a hero." Mr Jones, an experienced diver, said he was surprised a stingray, "one of the most gentle creatures in the ocean" caused Irwin's death.

Source




GREENIE POLLUTERS IN SWEDEN

Sweden has an international reputation for being environmentally progressive. With two weeks to go before elections, it turns our only a very small percentage of those politicians registered at Parliament actually have an eco-friendly car - and Green Party politicians are most likely to have a polluting old car.

Although ethanol, biogas and hybrids have been big sellers in Sweden the past few years, of the party leaders only Centre leader Maud Olofsson owns one.

Many cars produced in the 80s and before lacked catalytic converters, a small device used to reduce the toxicity of emissions from internal combustion engines. Through a chemical reaction, toxic byproducts from the engine are converted into less harmful emissions.

Even though politicians own so few eco-friendly cars, many have really old, toxin-spewing vehicles.

In the country's car parks, it is estimated 7 percent of cars lack catalytic converters. Politicians in the Green Party and the Centre Party - both of which claim a strong belief in a health environment - have an exceptionally higher number of dirty cars, reported TT.

Some 22 percent of Green Party cars and 18 percent of Centre Party cars lack catalytic converters.

If the boundary was set at 1994, the year converters became much more efficient, one half of Green Party cars pass wouldn't pass the test. About 42 percent of Left Party members drive cars made pre-94, and do 38 percent of Centre Party members

Source






HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE: ANOTHER PESKY GLACIER

The growing Whitney glacier is portrayed as a rare exception but it is not. The Franz Josef glacier in New Zealand, for instance, is growing rapidly. I guess they will find some "special explanation" for that too

Whitney Glacier on Mount Shasta is growing, and scientists think global warming in Northern California is the reason. This is not the way global warming works in most parts of the world.

In the Arctic and the Antarctic, and all along the West Coast north of the California border, temperatures are rising and glaciers are melting. Nisqually Glacier on Mount Rainier on the northern end of the Cascades, for example, has retreated by nearly a mile in the past century and continues to shrink. But Whitney Glacier, on the southern end of the Cascades? "It's still growing," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

According to an article last summer in California Wild, a journal of the California Academy of Sciences, Whitney Glacier is the only ice river in the world that is larger today than in 1890. Tulaczyk and his team, who began studying the glacier in 2002 and now have expanded their work to the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada, link the advancing frozen mass to the unique way California is being affected by global warming.

While in the short term it means more snow, their findings also contain a dire forecast: High-altitude snowpack, a steady source of water for the state as the snow melts during the summer, is probably doomed. Tulaczyk said he and his team reviewed records dating back five decades collected from monitoring stations that measure the snowpack and its moisture content. By comparing those statistics against temperature trends, certain conclusions can be drawn. A key conclusion is that global warming is not just about rising temperatures, but about the capacity of warmer air to carry moisture.

As California's temperature rose by 1 degree Celsius over the past half-century, Tulaczyk said, the snowpack has moved higher up in the mountains. But because warmer air in the winter can carry more water, the amount of snow falling at the high peaks has grown. "At the higher elevations and on Mount Shasta there is more snow being dumped," he said. By their calculations, it takes a 20 percent increase in snow precipitation to counteract a 1-degree rise in the temperature.

So far, greater snowfall at the higher elevations has been able to balance out the loss of lower-elevation snowpack. But with models forecasting temperature increases of another 3 or 4 degrees, Tulaczyk said snow precipitation at the higher levels would have to double to maintain equilibrium. That's not likely to happen, he said. And that means that Whitney Glacier, as well as the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada, soon will begin to disappear before the summer months when their water is most needed.

In a paper published by Climate Dynamics, Tulaczyk and his team reach this grim conclusion: Greenhouse-driven temperature increases will "result in the loss of most of Mount Shasta's glacier volume over the next 50 years with near total loss by the end of the century." In a separate paper, the research team says the same thing will happen in the Sierra Nevada. "Glaciers exist only where snow can persist through all of the summer," Tulaczyk said. "So, disappearance of glaciers on Mount Shasta would mean also that there will be no summer snowpack on the mountain. The mountain will be more like most of the Sierra Nevada. It will have a winter snowpack that will completely melt in spring and summer." ...

For now, however, the still-growing glacier can cause a different sort of problem. In July, during a hot spell, the U.S. Forest Service issued a warning to motorists: Highway 97 was being flooded because of the volume of water melting from Whitney Glacier.

Source

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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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