The turtle war

If people were not allowed to own chickens and if chicken eggs and meat could not be legally sold, how many chickens would there be? The reason chickens, cattle, catfish, and goldfish are not endangered is because they are owned by private parties, bred and raised in captivity, and sold for commercial profit - hence there are billions of these animals. The poor sea turtle is endangered precisely because the global environmental lobby refuses to let sea turtles be commercially farmed and marketed.

Four decades ago, you might well have bet that Cayman would eventually be known best for its turtle farms, rather than as a tourist destination and one of the world's largest financial centers, but economically ignorant environmentalists, who tell us they love sea turtles, have ensured there will be fewer of them.

Sea turtles have been around since the age of dinosaurs, a hundred million years or more. The typical weight of a nesting green female sea turtle is around 300 pounds. She will drag herself up on a beach at night, dig a hole above the high-tide mark, and most often lay between 100 and 135 eggs at a time. She may do this up to seven or so times a season, becoming almost an egg-laying machine.

The eggs typically take six to eight weeks to hatch. The hatchlings first must dig themselves out of the sand, and then scurry down to the water without serving as tasty meals for raccoons and sea birds. Mortally rates are extremely high for the hatchlings through their first couple of years of life. It is estimated fewer than 1in 1,000 sea turtles makes it to sexual maturity. Yet, as many as 30 percent of 2-year-old turtles make it to maturity.

Sea turtles have great economic value. The meat is low in fat and high in protein, and is very tasty (much like veal). Turtle soup was a favorite of Winston Churchill's and millions of others. Turtle leather is attractive and durable. The shell has many uses, including jewelry, and turtle oil has been used in cosmetics.

Sea turtles, like many animals and fish not raised in farms, are over-exploited because no one owns them; and as a result, their numbers in the wild have been declining for hundreds of years. The turtles also have been suffering from a loss of habitat. Their nesting areas, tropical beaches, are also preferred by humans for living and leisure. Human activities, such as boating, fishing and beach sports, take their toll of turtle eggs and hatchlings. As the human population grows, particularly in tropical beach areas, the turtle is increasingly pushed out.

The solution put forward by many environmentalists was to ban any global trade in turtle products, which was eventually accomplished in the 1970s. The problem is the turtle does not recognize national borders, and hence protection does not work because low-income countries have little incentive or means to stop turtle poaching or more profitable uses for beach areas.

In the 1960s, several visionaries and entrepreneurs were able to see the potential and benefits of turtle farming. They established a turtle farm in Cayman with the goal of selling the meat and other turtle products for profit, while releasing substantial quantities of 2-year-old turtles into the sea to replenish wild stocks. (If turtle eggs are incubated and the hatchlings are raised to 2 or 3 years of age, mortality rates are very low.)

After considerable time and expense (it takes a sea turtle many years to grow to maturity), the founders of the turtle farm proved the concept's viability. Unfortunately, by the time they were able to develop what could have been a profitable business, the endangered species act was passed in the U.S., as well as similar laws in other countries. These laws, in essence, prohibited the international marketing of turtle products which doomed the Cayman project.

Eventually, the Cayman government took over the farm, which it has now turned into a major tourist attraction and turtle research center. The bad news is that thousands of workers in tropical countries are denied jobs in what could be very profitable agricultural businesses, millions of potential consumers around the globe eat less healthy meats and the poor sea turtle continues to be endangered - all because of economically ignorant environmentalists and their political sycophants. We know socialism keeps people poor, but socialism (by not allowing private ownership) also keeps many animals unnecessarily scarce.

Source






MIT's inconvenient scientist

Speech codes are rare in the industrialized, Western democracies. In Germany and Austria, for instance, it is forbidden to proselytize Nazi ideology or trivialize the Holocaust. Given those countries' recent histories, that is a restraint on free expression we can live with.

More curious are our own taboos on the subject of global warming. I sat in a roomful of journalists 10 years ago while Stanford climatologist Stephen Schneider lectured us on a big problem in our profession: soliciting opposing points of view. In the debate over climate change, Schneider said, there simply was no legitimate opposing view to the scientific consensus that man - made carbon emissions drive global warming. To suggest or report otherwise, he said, was irresponsible.

Indeed. I attended a week's worth of lectures on global warming at the Chautauqua Institution last month. Al Gore delivered the kickoff lecture, and, 10 years later, he reiterated Schneider's directive. There is no science on the other side, Gore inveighed, more than once. Again, the same message: If you hear tales of doubt, ignore them. They are simply untrue.

I ask you: Are these convincing arguments? And directed at journalists, who are natural questioners and skeptics, of all people? What happens when you are told not to eat the apple, not to read that book, not to date that girl? Your interest is piqued, of course. What am I not supposed to know?

Here's the kind of information the ``scientific consensus" types don't want you to read. MIT's Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen recently complained about the ``shrill alarmism" of Gore's movie ``An Inconvenient Truth." Lindzen acknowledges that global warming is real, and he acknowledges that increased carbon emissions might be causing the warming -- but they also might not.

``We do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change" is one of Lindzen's many heresies, along with such zingers as ``the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940," ``the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average," and ``Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why."

When Lindzen published similar views in The Wall Street Journal this spring, environmentalist Laurie David, the wife of comedian Larry David, immediately branded him a ``shill." She resurrected a shopworn slur first directed against Lindzen by former Globe writer Ross Gelbspan, who called Lindzen a ``hood ornament" for the fossil fuels industry in a 1995 article in Harper's Magazine.

I decided to check out Lindzen for myself. He wasn't hard to find on the 16th floor of MIT's I.M. Pei-designed Building 54, and he answered as many questions as I had time to ask. He's no big fan of Gore's, having suffered through what he calls a ``Star Chamber" Congressional inquisition by the then senator . He said he accepted $10,000 in expenses and expert witness fees from fossil- fuel types in the 1990s, and has taken none of their money since.

He's smart. He's an effective debater. No wonder the Steve Schneiders and Al Gores of the world don't want you to hear from him. It's easier to call someone a shill and accuse him of corruption than to debate him on the merits.

While vacationing in Canada, I spotted a newspaper story that I hadn't seen in the United States. For no apparent reason, the state of California, Environmental Defense, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have dragged Lindzen and about 15 other global- warming skeptics into a lawsuit over auto- emissions standards. California et al . have asked the auto companies to cough up any and all communications they have had with Lindzen and his colleagues, whose research has been cited in court documents.

``We know that General Motors has been paying for this fake science exactly as the tobacco companies did," says ED attorney Jim Marston. If Marston has a scintilla of evidence that Lindzen has been trafficking in fake science, he should present it to the MIT provost's office. Otherwise, he should shut up.

``This is the criminalization of opposition to global warming," says Lindzen, who adds he has never communicated with the auto companies involved in the lawsuit. Of course Lindzen isn't a fake scientist, he's an inconvenient scientist. No wonder you're not supposed to listen to him.

Source





Is Urban Sprawl an Urban Myth?

High-altitude photos combined with satellite images show that modern American cities are just bigger versions of older American cities.

As cities spread into surrounding territories, roadways clog, pollution increases, social inequities expand, and the costs of municipal services like sewers and the police rise. Or do they? University of Toronto economist Matthew Turner and his colleagues decided to quantify one component of change: urban sprawl. They compared satellite images of the entire continental United States in 1976 and 1992, the most recent year complete data were available, and divided the country into 8.7 billion 98-foot squares to examine the question in unprecedented detail.

Predictably, the photo evidence revealed that America has grown: Nearly 2 percent of the country was paved by 1992, for example, a third more than in 1976. Not so predictably, the percentage of growth that is sprawl is not increasing. "Although there is more development, on average, that development isn't any more scattered," Turner says. In other words, modern American cities are really just bigger versions of older American cities.

Turner's observations of individual cities are also surprising. Miami, for example, is about a third more compact than either New York or San Francisco, while Pittsburgh sprawls more than even Atlanta or Washington. He attributes about 25 percent of the difference to topographical factors like groundwater accessibility, weather, and mountains. The rest is pure human influence: Cities constructed during the automobile era are more scattered, while cities where employment is centralized and taxpayers shoulder more infrastructure costs tend to build on a relatively cheaper and more compact scale.

More here

***************************************

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.

*****************************************