GREEN BIGOTS
First they destroyed the gasoline station, so that you have to drive miles out of your way to get gas. Then they destroyed a parking lot. Now they want to destroy a dam and a reservoir that supplies more than 2 million people with water. No, these are not al-Qaeda terrorists. These are our own home-grown fanatics -- and the places mentioned are all in Yosemite National Park. They call themselves environmentalists but a more accurate term would be green bigots. What makes someone a bigot is that he wishes to deny other people the same rights he has. That is the hallmark of the environmental zealot.
Green bigots operate internationally, just like the more famous fanatics. They are trying to stop a hydroelectric dam from being built in Uganda and they have already succeeded in getting "nature preserves" created in various parts of Africa -- which is to say, vast amounts of land where Africans are forbidden to hunt for food because the green bigots prefer keeping the land "natural."
African economist James Skikwati in Kenya put the case against affluent Western environmental extremists very plainly when he said, "wealthy countries want the Earth to be green, the underdeveloped want the Earth fed." He asked: "What gives the developed nations the right to make choices for the poor?" A hydroelectric dam in Uganda would bring electricity to millions of Africans but it would also annoy the delicate sensibilities of environmentalists in Berkeley who like waterfalls.
By and large, the green bigots use politics, nuisance lawsuits, and physical obstruction, rather than violence, but some of them do not hesitate to booby-trap trees, threatening those who cut them down with injury or death. And they use the media to spin their party line.
A recent newspaper story -- headlined "Renaissance at Yosemite" -- refers to new restrictions on people who visit Yosemite National Park, created at the urging of environmentalist groups. "The fight to get people out of cars and onto bikes and buses has been won after years of bitter wrangling," the story says. If people wanted to get out of their cars and onto bikes and buses, they could have done this at any time and without any wrangling. We are talking about green bigots forcing millions of visitors to Yosemite to do what the green bigots want, rather than what the visitors themselves want.
Such ego trips by coteries of self-exalting people are treated in the media as idealism, rather than the petty tyranny it is. Making it a hassle to drive a car in Yosemite means letting the green bigots regiment visitors in buses. Instead of going where you want to go, when you want to go there, you will go where the park bureaucracy wants to take you.
When you are in your own car, you can stop and get out to walk around when you see something you like, or just go to the bathroom when you need to. When you are regimented in buses, you can go only when and where the bus schedule permits. For young children and the elderly especially, this can turn what could be an enjoyable experience into needless stress.
The last thing you can expect to learn from most media accounts of the activities of green bigots is an account of other people's objections to their power grabs. Instead, there is a whole vocabulary of misleading words used to paper over and sugar coat the plain fact that green bigots feel entitled to impose their vision at the cost of other people's rights. Thus it is called a "renaissance" to lose your right to choose what you want to do in Yosemite. There is never a lack of excuses when people want to boss other people around. There are lots of vague and lofty words about a "fragile" or "sensitive" environment -- but ask the green bigots for concrete criteria by which we can determine whether a particular environment is or is not "fragile" or "sensitive." Then ask for hard evidence. You are not likely to get any.
The story about the "renaissance" in Yosemite speaks of the new changes as having "restored" the Merced River. I have watched the Merced River flowing and cascading through Yosemite for more than 20 years without seeing anything that needed to be "restored." Maybe honesty needs to be restored.
Source
SAVE THE SHARK!
Comment from a reader: "After a killer shark attack off South Australia, environmentalists are opposing the government's plan to hunt and kill the maneater. Maybe they should put their convictions where its mouth is and create a human chain in the water to 'protect' the shark
MAJOR CLIMATE CHANGE OCCURRED 5,200 YEARS AGO: EVIDENCE SUGGESTS THAT HISTORY COULD REPEAT ITSELF
An expert glaciologist concludes that big changes happen NATURALLY -- due to solar oscillations -- and that we don't know enough to do anything about it
Glaciologist Lonnie Thompson worries that he may have found clues that show history repeating itself, and if he is right, the result could have important implications to modern society. Thompson has spent his career trekking to the far corners of the world to find remote ice fields and then bring back cores drilled from their centers. Within those cores are the records of ancient climate from across the globe. From the mountains of data drawn by analyzing countless ice cores, and a meticulous review of sometimes obscure historic records, Thompson and his research team at Ohio State University are convinced that the global climate has changed dramatically. But more importantly, they believe it has happened at least once before, and the results were nearly catastrophic to emerging cultures at the time. He outlined his interpretations and fears today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.
A professor of geological sciences at Ohio State and a researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center, Thompson points to markers in numerous records suggesting that the climate was altered suddenly some 5,200 years ago with severe impacts. He points to perfectly preserved plants he discovered that recently emerged from the Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes as that glacier retreats. This monstrous glacier, some 551 feet (168 meters) deep, has shown an exponentially increasing rate of retreat since his first observations in 1963. The plants were carbon-dated to determine their age and tests indicated they had been buried by the ice for perhaps 5,200 years. That suggests that somehow, the climate had shifted suddenly and severely to capture the plants and preserve them until now.
In 1991, hikers found the preserved body of a man trapped in an Alpine glacier and freed as it retreated. Later tests showed that the human -- dubbed Oetzi -- became trapped and died around 5,200 years ago. Thompson points to a study of tree rings from Ireland and England that span a period of 7,000 years. The point in that record when the tree rings were narrowest -- suggesting the driest period experienced by the trees -- was approximately 5,200 years ago. He points to ice core records showing the ratio of two oxygen isotopes retrieved from the ice fields atop Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro. A proxy for atmospheric temperature at the time snow fell, the records are at their lowest 5,200 years before now.
He lists the shift by the Sahara Desert from a habitable region to a barren desert; major changes in plant pollen uncovered from lakebed cores in South America, and the record lowest levels of methane retrieved from ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica and all occurred at the same time -- 5,200 years ago. ''Something happened back at this time and it was monumental,'' Thompson said. ''But it didn't seem monumental to humans then because there were only approximately 250 million people occupying the planet, compared to the 6.4 billion we now have. ''The evidence clearly points back to this point in history and to some event that occurred. It also points to similar changes occurring in today's climate as well,'' he said. ''To me, these are things we really need to be concerned about.''
The impact of a climate change of that magnitude on a modern world would be tremendous, he said. Seventy percent of the population lives in the world's tropics and major climate changes would directly impact most of them. Thompson believes that the 5,200-year old event may have been caused by a dramatic fluctuation in solar energy reaching the earth. Scientists know that a historic global cooling called the Little Ice Age, from 1450 to 1850 A.D., coincided with two periods of decreased solar activity. Evidence shows that around 5,200 years ago, solar output first dropped precipitously and then surged over a short period. It is this huge solar energy oscillation that Thompson believes may have triggered the climate change he sees in all those records. ''The climate system is remarkably sensitive to natural variability,'' he said. ''It's likely that it is equally sensitive to effects brought on by human activity, changes like increased greenhouse gases, altered land-use policies and fossil-fuel dependence. ''Any prudent person would agree that we don't yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don't, we should be extremely cautious in how much we 'tweak' the system,'' he said. ''The evidence is clear that a major climate change is underway.''
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.
Comments? Email me or 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.
*****************************************
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Saturday, December 18, 2004
AN EVOLUTIONARY VIEWPOINT ON GLOBAL WARMING
Professor Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey is worried about - stop me if you've heard this one before - global warming. For this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecture, he'll be warning that the merest smidgeonette of an increase in temperature in the south polar seabed will lead to the loss of a zillion species. As the oceans warm, the ice shelves that extend from the polar depths into the sub-Antarctic light will shrink, and the thick mats of algae on their underside will vanish, and the billions of tiny krill that feed on them will perish, and pretty soon, up at the scenic end of the food chain, all those cute seals and penguins and whales will be gone.
And all this will happen if the temperature goes up two degrees, from butt-numbingly freezing to marginally less butt-numbingly freezing. "It is going to be really unpleasant," Prof Peck tells the Guardian. "We are going to lose things - we just don't know how much."
Maybe if the Antarctic food chain is incapable of evolving to cope with a two-degree increase in temperature across many decades, it isn't meant to survive. Science tells us that extinction is a fact of life, and that nature is never still: long before the Industrial Revolution, long before the first lardbuttus Americanus got into his primitive four-miles-per-gallon SUV to head to the mall for the world's first cheeseburger, there were dramatic fluctuations in climate wiping out a ton of stuff. Yet scientists and their cheerleaders, the hyper-rationalists at the progressive newspapers, have signed on to the idea that evolution should cease and the world should be frozen - literally, in the case of Prof Peck and his beloved algae - in some unchanging Edenic state.
More here
CRICHTON AGAIN
Michael Crichton has done us all the very valuable service of getting his comments into Parade Magazine -- a weekly insert magazine in many U.S. newspapers on Sundays. He is thus getting out to a very wide audience an antidote to the constant drumbeat of lying Greenie propaganda. The whole article is a delightful read with heaps of good points but below are just a few excerpts:
This year I turned 62, and I find I have acquired-along with aches and pains-a perspective on the world that I lacked as a younger person. I now recognize that for most of my life I have felt burdened by highly publicized fears that decades later did not turn out to be true. I was reminded of this when I came across this 1972 statement about climate: "We simply cannot afford to gamble.We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who [disagree] are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored." This author wasn't concerned about global warming. He was worried about global cooling and the coming ice age.
We're all going to freeze! Or is it sizzle?
It may be mostly forgotten now, but back then many climate scientists shared his concern: Temperatures around the world had fallen steadily for 30 years, dropping half a degree in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. Pack ice was increasing. Glaciers were advancing. Growing seasons had shortened by two weeks in only a few years.
In 1975, Newsweek noted "ominous signs that weather patterns have begun to change.with serious political implications for just about every nation." Scientists were predicting that "the resulting famines could be catastrophic." Human beings never tire of discussing the latest report that tells us the end is near.
But it is now clear that even as Newsweek was printing its fears, temperatures already had begun to rise. Within a decade, scientists would be decrying a global warming trend that threatened to raise temperatures as much as 30 degrees in the 21st century. Such predictions implied palm trees in Montana, and they have since been revised downward. By 1995, the UN midrange estimates were about 4 degrees over the next 100 years. Although concern about warming remains, the prospect of catastrophic change seems increasingly unlikely.
Oh no, it's a population explosion!
Similarly, for all of my adult life, informed people have lived in continual anxiety about an exploding world population and the inevitable resulting mass starvation and environmental degradation. In the 1960s, experts like Paul Ehrlich spoke with conviction: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich argued for compulsory population control if voluntary methods failed. In the 1970s, The Club of Rome (a global think tank) predicted a world population of 14 billion in the year 2030, with no end in sight.
Instead, fertility rates fell steadily. By the end of the century, they were about half what they were in 1950, with the result that many now expect world population to peak at 9 billion or so and then to decline. (It's estimated to be about 6 billion today.) And mass starvation never occurred either. Instead, per capita food production increased through the end of the century because of the "green revolution" resulting from increased agricultural efficiency and better seeds. Grain production increased as much as 600% per acre, bringing unprecedented crop yields around the world.....
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Professor Lloyd Peck of the British Antarctic Survey is worried about - stop me if you've heard this one before - global warming. For this year's Royal Institution Christmas lecture, he'll be warning that the merest smidgeonette of an increase in temperature in the south polar seabed will lead to the loss of a zillion species. As the oceans warm, the ice shelves that extend from the polar depths into the sub-Antarctic light will shrink, and the thick mats of algae on their underside will vanish, and the billions of tiny krill that feed on them will perish, and pretty soon, up at the scenic end of the food chain, all those cute seals and penguins and whales will be gone.
And all this will happen if the temperature goes up two degrees, from butt-numbingly freezing to marginally less butt-numbingly freezing. "It is going to be really unpleasant," Prof Peck tells the Guardian. "We are going to lose things - we just don't know how much."
Maybe if the Antarctic food chain is incapable of evolving to cope with a two-degree increase in temperature across many decades, it isn't meant to survive. Science tells us that extinction is a fact of life, and that nature is never still: long before the Industrial Revolution, long before the first lardbuttus Americanus got into his primitive four-miles-per-gallon SUV to head to the mall for the world's first cheeseburger, there were dramatic fluctuations in climate wiping out a ton of stuff. Yet scientists and their cheerleaders, the hyper-rationalists at the progressive newspapers, have signed on to the idea that evolution should cease and the world should be frozen - literally, in the case of Prof Peck and his beloved algae - in some unchanging Edenic state.
More here
CRICHTON AGAIN
Michael Crichton has done us all the very valuable service of getting his comments into Parade Magazine -- a weekly insert magazine in many U.S. newspapers on Sundays. He is thus getting out to a very wide audience an antidote to the constant drumbeat of lying Greenie propaganda. The whole article is a delightful read with heaps of good points but below are just a few excerpts:
This year I turned 62, and I find I have acquired-along with aches and pains-a perspective on the world that I lacked as a younger person. I now recognize that for most of my life I have felt burdened by highly publicized fears that decades later did not turn out to be true. I was reminded of this when I came across this 1972 statement about climate: "We simply cannot afford to gamble.We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who [disagree] are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored." This author wasn't concerned about global warming. He was worried about global cooling and the coming ice age.
We're all going to freeze! Or is it sizzle?
It may be mostly forgotten now, but back then many climate scientists shared his concern: Temperatures around the world had fallen steadily for 30 years, dropping half a degree in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. Pack ice was increasing. Glaciers were advancing. Growing seasons had shortened by two weeks in only a few years.
In 1975, Newsweek noted "ominous signs that weather patterns have begun to change.with serious political implications for just about every nation." Scientists were predicting that "the resulting famines could be catastrophic." Human beings never tire of discussing the latest report that tells us the end is near.
But it is now clear that even as Newsweek was printing its fears, temperatures already had begun to rise. Within a decade, scientists would be decrying a global warming trend that threatened to raise temperatures as much as 30 degrees in the 21st century. Such predictions implied palm trees in Montana, and they have since been revised downward. By 1995, the UN midrange estimates were about 4 degrees over the next 100 years. Although concern about warming remains, the prospect of catastrophic change seems increasingly unlikely.
Oh no, it's a population explosion!
Similarly, for all of my adult life, informed people have lived in continual anxiety about an exploding world population and the inevitable resulting mass starvation and environmental degradation. In the 1960s, experts like Paul Ehrlich spoke with conviction: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich argued for compulsory population control if voluntary methods failed. In the 1970s, The Club of Rome (a global think tank) predicted a world population of 14 billion in the year 2030, with no end in sight.
Instead, fertility rates fell steadily. By the end of the century, they were about half what they were in 1950, with the result that many now expect world population to peak at 9 billion or so and then to decline. (It's estimated to be about 6 billion today.) And mass starvation never occurred either. Instead, per capita food production increased through the end of the century because of the "green revolution" resulting from increased agricultural efficiency and better seeds. Grain production increased as much as 600% per acre, bringing unprecedented crop yields around the world.....
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Friday, December 17, 2004
THE BUENOS AIRES CONFERENCE
I guess I should say something more about all the hot air coming out of the big Greenie conference in Buenos Aires at the moment. Choosing a city with a name that means "Good Air" for a conference designed to tell us that the atmosphere is going to hell in a handbasket may even indicate a rare Greenie sense of humour, I guess. There is one report here. Excerpt:
"Clear-eyed enviros know they're losing. A frank new report, "The Death of Environmentalism" (available at www.TheBreakthrough.org), issued last week by two Green strategists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, admits that warming advocates have failed. They haven't "come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that a majority of Americans could get excited about."
True. But don't wait for the Greens to lead. Instead, responsible advocates are building a consensus around the right approach, which concentrates not on destroying the economies of developing countries through limits to growth, but on improving those economies through the use of more energy -- the best leverage for boosting living standards. Wealth, after all, makes health. As a nation gets richer, it gets cleaner.
Poor farmers in China, India and Africa burning dung and charcoal are releasing not just CO2 but real pollutants into the air. The role of rich nations should be to transfer technologies that produce cleaner energy more efficiently.
Meanwhile, there's important research to be done. We still don't know whether the rise in temperatures is natural and cyclical (it was warmer many centuries ago when the Vikings colonized Greenland) or human-induced.
But the radicals are losing. Michael Crichton, author of science-based bestsellers like "Jurassic Park," has a new book, "State of Fear," which casts serious doubt on global warming and extremists who espouse it. As Crichton says, "Why are we not feeding people in this world who are hungry? Why are we not giving clean water to the almost billion people who don't have clean water? The greatest source of environmental degradation is poverty. Why aren't we cleaning up poverty?"
Those are the right questions for the multitudes in Buenos Aires".
LOMBORG AT BUENOS AIRES
"A former member of Greenpeace who became disillusioned with what he saw as bad eco-science urged a United Nations climate change conference to "save the world" by ignoring global warming. "Climate change is a huge thing, but there is very little that we can do about it," Bjorn Lomborg told CNSNews.com following a speech in Buenos Aires on Monday. Lomborg, the author of the new book Global Crisis, Global Solutions, also wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book devoted to debunking many of the alarmist claims of environmental groups. He is attending the U.N.'s Conference of Parties or COP-10 meeting on climate change here.
In an essay published Monday in the London Telegraph, Lomborg wrote that "global warming has become the obsession of our time" and "is the moral test of our age." Lomborg believes that global warming is real and is caused by C02, but he adds that mankind can "do very little about the warming." Lomborg, an associate professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, is in Buenos Aires trying to convince world governments to worry less about climate change and concentrate instead on what he considers solvable problems, such as AIDS, poverty and inadequate sanitation.
Lomborg organized the "Copenhagen Consensus," an international team of economists and others who conducted a cost-benefit analysis of the world's most pressing problems. "So in a curious way, global warming really is the moral test of our time, but not in the way its proponents imagined. We need to stop our obsession with global warming and start dealing with the many more pressing issues in the world, where we can do [the] most good, first and quickest," Lomborg argued. According to Lomborg, any effects that global warming may have on people 100 years from now will be muted because poor nations are projected to be much wealthier and thus better equipped to deal with any climate complications. "The people who are going to be affected by it in 2100 are likely going to be much richer," Lomborg told an audience at the Universidad de Ciencias Monday night. "By the U.N.'s own scenarios, everyone [in poor nations] will be at least as rich as we are today in the developed world in 2100; and much more likely, they will be 2 to 4 times more wealthy than the developed world is today. Of course, the developed world will be even much richer than that," Lomborg predicted.
"Imagine if you were a rich Chinese or a rich Rwandan or a rich Bolivian in 2100, looking back on 2004, saying how odd that the people of 2004 were so concerned about helping me a little bit through climate change and so relatively unconcerned about helping my grandfather and my great-grandfather who needed the help much, much more," he said. "If we can't do everything, let's make sure that we actually do something that is going to help the world a lot rather than just a little," Lomborg said".
Source
THE ACTUAL IMPLICATIONS OF REDUCING CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS
One way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions would be to stop us all from breathing, of course, but, as much as they would no doubt like it, the Greenies are not proposing that. So what are the realistic options? Below is one excerpt from what the engineers have presented at Buenos Aires. I don't think the Greenies will like it. Why can't having your cake and eating it too be allowed?
"Let's take a look at some of what it would take to achieve the WBCSD goal of stabilizing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the next 50 years. First, new low carbon technologies would need to begin being deployed almost immediately. To reduce projected emissions by 1 gigaton per year in 2050, the world would have to build 1400 new combined cycle gas turbine 1 gigawatt power plants rather than coal fired plants. A gigawatt is enough electricity to power about 400,000 homes. That translates into a growth rate of 2.6% per year -- or building 2 new gas power plants per month for the next 50 years. The International Energy Agency projects a 2.4% rate of growth through 2030.
To avoid another gigaton of carbon emissions by 2050 would require building 700 1 gigawatt nuclear power plants rather than the equivalent conventional coal facilities. That means that the rate of growth in nuclear power generation needs to be 4 percent per year rather than the current 2.5 percent. One more gigaton of emissions could be cut if the world's projected 2 billion vehicles in 2050 got 60 miles rather than 30 miles to the gallon. Another could be curtailed by 300,000 5 megawatt wind turbines. Of course, the wind turbines would need to be deployed in an area the size of Portugal and 5 megawatt wind turbines are only prototypes now. Biofuels derived from 250 hectares of high yield crops could avoid another gigaton of carbon emitted per year in 2050. This would mean that a sixth of the world's current cropland would be devoted to producing fuel. That can't be good for biodiversity"
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.
Comments? Email me or 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.
*****************************************
I guess I should say something more about all the hot air coming out of the big Greenie conference in Buenos Aires at the moment. Choosing a city with a name that means "Good Air" for a conference designed to tell us that the atmosphere is going to hell in a handbasket may even indicate a rare Greenie sense of humour, I guess. There is one report here. Excerpt:
"Clear-eyed enviros know they're losing. A frank new report, "The Death of Environmentalism" (available at www.TheBreakthrough.org), issued last week by two Green strategists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, admits that warming advocates have failed. They haven't "come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that a majority of Americans could get excited about."
True. But don't wait for the Greens to lead. Instead, responsible advocates are building a consensus around the right approach, which concentrates not on destroying the economies of developing countries through limits to growth, but on improving those economies through the use of more energy -- the best leverage for boosting living standards. Wealth, after all, makes health. As a nation gets richer, it gets cleaner.
Poor farmers in China, India and Africa burning dung and charcoal are releasing not just CO2 but real pollutants into the air. The role of rich nations should be to transfer technologies that produce cleaner energy more efficiently.
Meanwhile, there's important research to be done. We still don't know whether the rise in temperatures is natural and cyclical (it was warmer many centuries ago when the Vikings colonized Greenland) or human-induced.
But the radicals are losing. Michael Crichton, author of science-based bestsellers like "Jurassic Park," has a new book, "State of Fear," which casts serious doubt on global warming and extremists who espouse it. As Crichton says, "Why are we not feeding people in this world who are hungry? Why are we not giving clean water to the almost billion people who don't have clean water? The greatest source of environmental degradation is poverty. Why aren't we cleaning up poverty?"
Those are the right questions for the multitudes in Buenos Aires".
LOMBORG AT BUENOS AIRES
"A former member of Greenpeace who became disillusioned with what he saw as bad eco-science urged a United Nations climate change conference to "save the world" by ignoring global warming. "Climate change is a huge thing, but there is very little that we can do about it," Bjorn Lomborg told CNSNews.com following a speech in Buenos Aires on Monday. Lomborg, the author of the new book Global Crisis, Global Solutions, also wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book devoted to debunking many of the alarmist claims of environmental groups. He is attending the U.N.'s Conference of Parties or COP-10 meeting on climate change here.
In an essay published Monday in the London Telegraph, Lomborg wrote that "global warming has become the obsession of our time" and "is the moral test of our age." Lomborg believes that global warming is real and is caused by C02, but he adds that mankind can "do very little about the warming." Lomborg, an associate professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, is in Buenos Aires trying to convince world governments to worry less about climate change and concentrate instead on what he considers solvable problems, such as AIDS, poverty and inadequate sanitation.
Lomborg organized the "Copenhagen Consensus," an international team of economists and others who conducted a cost-benefit analysis of the world's most pressing problems. "So in a curious way, global warming really is the moral test of our time, but not in the way its proponents imagined. We need to stop our obsession with global warming and start dealing with the many more pressing issues in the world, where we can do [the] most good, first and quickest," Lomborg argued. According to Lomborg, any effects that global warming may have on people 100 years from now will be muted because poor nations are projected to be much wealthier and thus better equipped to deal with any climate complications. "The people who are going to be affected by it in 2100 are likely going to be much richer," Lomborg told an audience at the Universidad de Ciencias Monday night. "By the U.N.'s own scenarios, everyone [in poor nations] will be at least as rich as we are today in the developed world in 2100; and much more likely, they will be 2 to 4 times more wealthy than the developed world is today. Of course, the developed world will be even much richer than that," Lomborg predicted.
"Imagine if you were a rich Chinese or a rich Rwandan or a rich Bolivian in 2100, looking back on 2004, saying how odd that the people of 2004 were so concerned about helping me a little bit through climate change and so relatively unconcerned about helping my grandfather and my great-grandfather who needed the help much, much more," he said. "If we can't do everything, let's make sure that we actually do something that is going to help the world a lot rather than just a little," Lomborg said".
Source
THE ACTUAL IMPLICATIONS OF REDUCING CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS
One way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions would be to stop us all from breathing, of course, but, as much as they would no doubt like it, the Greenies are not proposing that. So what are the realistic options? Below is one excerpt from what the engineers have presented at Buenos Aires. I don't think the Greenies will like it. Why can't having your cake and eating it too be allowed?
"Let's take a look at some of what it would take to achieve the WBCSD goal of stabilizing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the next 50 years. First, new low carbon technologies would need to begin being deployed almost immediately. To reduce projected emissions by 1 gigaton per year in 2050, the world would have to build 1400 new combined cycle gas turbine 1 gigawatt power plants rather than coal fired plants. A gigawatt is enough electricity to power about 400,000 homes. That translates into a growth rate of 2.6% per year -- or building 2 new gas power plants per month for the next 50 years. The International Energy Agency projects a 2.4% rate of growth through 2030.
To avoid another gigaton of carbon emissions by 2050 would require building 700 1 gigawatt nuclear power plants rather than the equivalent conventional coal facilities. That means that the rate of growth in nuclear power generation needs to be 4 percent per year rather than the current 2.5 percent. One more gigaton of emissions could be cut if the world's projected 2 billion vehicles in 2050 got 60 miles rather than 30 miles to the gallon. Another could be curtailed by 300,000 5 megawatt wind turbines. Of course, the wind turbines would need to be deployed in an area the size of Portugal and 5 megawatt wind turbines are only prototypes now. Biofuels derived from 250 hectares of high yield crops could avoid another gigaton of carbon emitted per year in 2050. This would mean that a sixth of the world's current cropland would be devoted to producing fuel. That can't be good for biodiversity"
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.
Comments? Email me or 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.
*****************************************
Thursday, December 16, 2004
THE BUGS ARE BACK
A forgotten old nursery rhyme is having more meaning for Americans these days. "Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite." But they are biting in all 50 states as they haven't bitten since the 1940s, say pest control companies, scientists and health officials. And, indeed, it is making sleep more difficult for Americans of all walks of life -- from denizens of homeless shelters to those visiting the swankiest five-star hotels. Outbreaks of bedbug infestations have been reported from coast to coast, north and south and among rich and poor.
Experts attribute the plague largely to two factors: increased travel and the banning of DDT and other effective pesticides that virtually wiped out "Cimex lectularious," the Latin name for the pest. A November newsletter from Doctors for Disaster Preparedness made the link between the rise of bedbug infestations and the U.S. banning in 1972 of the potent pesticide DDT. "No chemical in history has saved more lives than DDT, and few if any have a better safety record," the organization decried. Dozens of other experts made the connection with DDT and increased travel. The banning of DDT has also been linked worldwide to the major increase in malaria, which annually took the lives of millions before DDT nearly wiped out the mosquito-borne plague. Many countries have reintroduced the use of DDT to fight malaria.
More here
END THE RENEWABLE ENERGY BOONDOGGLE
The renewable-energy lobby is just another oinker with its snout in the trough -- a special interest group slavering after corporate welfare subsidies, special tax breaks, and market rigging rules.
Geman begins by observing that, "Renewable energy advocates are launching a major effort to steer federal and state policies towards far greater utilization of renewable technologies, arguing that decades of research and development have generated mature technologies poised for wider adoption." Now, wait a minute. If those technologies are "mature" and "poised for wider adoption"-wind turbines, after all, have been around for centuries-then why is government intervention needed to ensure their "utilization"? If renewable energy technologies cannot succeed on their own despite "decades of research and development," why should we taxpayers be compelled to keep subsidizing them?
According to an ACORE paper distributed prior to the conference, "It is time to declare an interim success on the 30-year, $14 billion investment in renewable energy technologies, and chart a new course for widespread utilization ('Phase II') of renewable energy in America." But hold on again. When environmentalists enthuse about "renewable energy technologies," they refer chiefly to wind and solar power and biomass fuels, which together supply only 3 percent of all the electricity Americans use-with wind and solar providing less than two-tenths of one percent. If that is all 30 years and $14 billion have accomplished, then isn't it time declare failure and abolish coerced taxpayer support for such techno-underachievers? Not according to the renewable energy industry luminaries Geman cites.
Steve Zwolinski, president of GE Wind Energy, laments that U.S. policy lags behind that of Europe in growing the renewable energy sector: "U.S. policy is not conducive to developing the industry." Yes, and a good thing, too! In America, it is the job of industry to develop itself, not the job of government. What Zwolinski really wants is a government-guaranteed market share for wind-generated electricity, regardless of performance, cost, or efficiency. That may be the European way; it is not the American way.
ACORE President Michael Eckhart advocates federal funding for state renewable energy programs and repeal of the sunset provisions in the current crop of renewable energy tax breaks: "We want renewable energy to be in the tax code." What a noble agenda for the environmental movement! Hide the cost of uneconomic wind farms from local ratepayers (the inevitable effect of federal funding), and, at the same time, further convolute a federal tax code already overloaded with special-interest preferences and loopholes....
"The experience of the 1970s and 1980s taught us that if a technology is commercially viable, then government support is not needed and if a technology is not commercially viable, no amount of government support will make it so." [emphasis added]
Absent special political privileges-federal research and development subsidies, tax breaks, and state RPS programs-today's renewable-energy industry, or most of it, would not even exist. Three decades and $14 billion in direct federal support and untold billions in state taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies have failed to make "green" energy economically self-sustaining. Enough is enough. Congress should terminate, not expand, its patronage of this boondoggle.
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.
Comments? Email me or 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.
*****************************************
A forgotten old nursery rhyme is having more meaning for Americans these days. "Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite." But they are biting in all 50 states as they haven't bitten since the 1940s, say pest control companies, scientists and health officials. And, indeed, it is making sleep more difficult for Americans of all walks of life -- from denizens of homeless shelters to those visiting the swankiest five-star hotels. Outbreaks of bedbug infestations have been reported from coast to coast, north and south and among rich and poor.
Experts attribute the plague largely to two factors: increased travel and the banning of DDT and other effective pesticides that virtually wiped out "Cimex lectularious," the Latin name for the pest. A November newsletter from Doctors for Disaster Preparedness made the link between the rise of bedbug infestations and the U.S. banning in 1972 of the potent pesticide DDT. "No chemical in history has saved more lives than DDT, and few if any have a better safety record," the organization decried. Dozens of other experts made the connection with DDT and increased travel. The banning of DDT has also been linked worldwide to the major increase in malaria, which annually took the lives of millions before DDT nearly wiped out the mosquito-borne plague. Many countries have reintroduced the use of DDT to fight malaria.
More here
END THE RENEWABLE ENERGY BOONDOGGLE
The renewable-energy lobby is just another oinker with its snout in the trough -- a special interest group slavering after corporate welfare subsidies, special tax breaks, and market rigging rules.
Geman begins by observing that, "Renewable energy advocates are launching a major effort to steer federal and state policies towards far greater utilization of renewable technologies, arguing that decades of research and development have generated mature technologies poised for wider adoption." Now, wait a minute. If those technologies are "mature" and "poised for wider adoption"-wind turbines, after all, have been around for centuries-then why is government intervention needed to ensure their "utilization"? If renewable energy technologies cannot succeed on their own despite "decades of research and development," why should we taxpayers be compelled to keep subsidizing them?
According to an ACORE paper distributed prior to the conference, "It is time to declare an interim success on the 30-year, $14 billion investment in renewable energy technologies, and chart a new course for widespread utilization ('Phase II') of renewable energy in America." But hold on again. When environmentalists enthuse about "renewable energy technologies," they refer chiefly to wind and solar power and biomass fuels, which together supply only 3 percent of all the electricity Americans use-with wind and solar providing less than two-tenths of one percent. If that is all 30 years and $14 billion have accomplished, then isn't it time declare failure and abolish coerced taxpayer support for such techno-underachievers? Not according to the renewable energy industry luminaries Geman cites.
Steve Zwolinski, president of GE Wind Energy, laments that U.S. policy lags behind that of Europe in growing the renewable energy sector: "U.S. policy is not conducive to developing the industry." Yes, and a good thing, too! In America, it is the job of industry to develop itself, not the job of government. What Zwolinski really wants is a government-guaranteed market share for wind-generated electricity, regardless of performance, cost, or efficiency. That may be the European way; it is not the American way.
ACORE President Michael Eckhart advocates federal funding for state renewable energy programs and repeal of the sunset provisions in the current crop of renewable energy tax breaks: "We want renewable energy to be in the tax code." What a noble agenda for the environmental movement! Hide the cost of uneconomic wind farms from local ratepayers (the inevitable effect of federal funding), and, at the same time, further convolute a federal tax code already overloaded with special-interest preferences and loopholes....
"The experience of the 1970s and 1980s taught us that if a technology is commercially viable, then government support is not needed and if a technology is not commercially viable, no amount of government support will make it so." [emphasis added]
Absent special political privileges-federal research and development subsidies, tax breaks, and state RPS programs-today's renewable-energy industry, or most of it, would not even exist. Three decades and $14 billion in direct federal support and untold billions in state taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies have failed to make "green" energy economically self-sustaining. Enough is enough. Congress should terminate, not expand, its patronage of this boondoggle.
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.
Comments? Email me or 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.
*****************************************
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
GREENIES IN CONFLICT WITH POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
PC wins, apparently
Work on Australia's largest wind farm has been suspended at one of the construction sites after local Aborigines opposing the $170 million project claimed an ancient burial ground was dug up and destroyed.
Archaeologists will next week begin assessing the site, on the proposed Wattle Point wind farm on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula, after excavation last week uncovered bones that the local Aboriginal community says are ancestral.
Police have cordoned off an area around turbine 4 after Narungga Heritage Committee monitor Quenten Agius said he discovered the arm bone of one of his ancestors in topsoil that had been moved by a grader during construction in October. "I was shocked, upset and wild at (developer) Southern Hydro for smashing through our ancestors' burial grounds and angry at the Government for allowing this to happen," Mr Agius said. But an initial study of the remains suggested they "may have been moved from a different part of the Wattle Point site", according to Lange Powell, an official with the Aboriginal Affairs Department's heritage taskforce.
More here
CLIMATE CHANGE BAD FOR WOMEN?
There is a U.N. conference on global warming going on at the moment so more than the usual amount of hot air is blowing through the media. But the statements below are probably the fruitiest:
Severe weather caused by global warming can pose greater physical danger to women than men, a Canadian attending a UN conference on climate change said Friday. "For instance, often women don't know how to swim, so in a flood situation that can lead to a higher instance of death or injury," Angie Daze, a program manager with a Canadian group called Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Change, said.
Other speakers on the sidelines of the Dec. 6-17 conference said women in poor countries are particularly vulnerable to the effects of global warming, which has been blamed for causing more violent storms and rising sea levels, among other problems. "Women are highly dependent on the environment for their family responsibilities" in developing countries, said one environmental worker based in Bangladesh. "Any type of environmental degradation impacts them more severely than men."
More here
HOW PAST CLIMATE CHANGE MAY HAVE OCCURRED
Some Velikovskian reflections by Louis Hissink
A letter writer, Richard S. Woodgate, wrote in the Quadrant Magazine, edited by Henry's contributor Padriac McGuinness, about abnormal weather, past and future and in particular referred to Gavin Menzie's book, 1421: The year China Discovered the World, published in 2003, with a second edition in 2004. Mention was made of a shift in the earth's axis which which appeared to have been associated with a change in the weather.
This is not the first time that shifts of the earth's axis were noted in the historical past, the most infamous being the biblical Joshua Ben Nunn event who commanded the sun stand still by pounding his staff on the ground. Of course no man can do that, (but advocates of anthropogenic global warming assert that while man cannot stop the sun, he surely can change the weather, though it then strikes me that as the devout believe Joshua did stop the sun, then changing the climate would seem a trivial exercise for the devout, whether divine or secular - ask Sir David King - thereby confirming Michael Crichton's observation that anthropogenic global warming is a religious belief rather than scientific fact).
Then there are other more ancient accounts in Egyptian history where the rising and setting suns exchanged places. Where once the sun used to rise, it now sets, and that this happened more than once. So they said. Modern science, limiting its understanding to Newtonian mechanics, finds these ancient accounts extremely problematical, if nigh well impossible but as we all know too well, science also has a habit of changing when new facts are discovered. So while the past might remain inexplicable using existing theories, it is quite likely that new facts will enable us to explain the past in a more sensible manner than by simply dismissing it as impossible today. That is science, of course, which always changes when new facts are discovered. Religion never changes, even when confronted with overwhelming contradictory fact.
But I am not going to dwell on this because it occurred to me that if the earth did change its axis of spin, or careened, slightly, or significantly in the past, then that would have had the interesting effect of moving regions which were once in the tropics, perhaps into more temperate zones, and those in the temperate, perhaps into the arctic zones. We can change the climate of a place simply by moving it about in space?
This would result in the illusion that a particular religion suffered a severe climate change, which in one sense is true, but this was only because that region was moved to a different latitude by a change in the earth's attitude around its axis of spin. The earth's overall thermal balance would not have changed, but only appeared to have changed from a misinterpretation of the evidence.
This then suggests that during the Medieval warming period Greenland was closer to the equator, and afterwards was moved further north to colder latitudes as the result of some cosmic interaction. That also means that Europe moved to colder climates. Is there any evidence for that? Seems so, if the Korean Choson Annals are anything to go by, as well as the necessity to change the Gregorian calendar, at the time. Of course much research needs to be done in this area, but if no one accepts this, then funding of course will not be allocated. Same old story of facts being quietly ignored by denying funding.
So past climate changes may not have been due to the earth cooling down to an ice age, but that overall thermal balance of the earth remained the same, and the illusion of climate change produced by infrequent careening around its axis, removing areas from the tropics to the arctic or polar regions, as hinted at by many ancients myths and legends of many older civilisations. True? Perhaps, and obviously a lot of research needs to be done to clarify our understanding of the past.
Climate science is far more complex than most of use realise, especially if we are using politically correct histories. The debate has only started.
A careening earth caused by close encounters of the cosmic kind, in an electrically dynamic plasma universe would offer some solutions to the interesting questions made in Richard Woodgate's letter in Quadrant Magazine.
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
PC wins, apparently
Work on Australia's largest wind farm has been suspended at one of the construction sites after local Aborigines opposing the $170 million project claimed an ancient burial ground was dug up and destroyed.
Archaeologists will next week begin assessing the site, on the proposed Wattle Point wind farm on South Australia's Yorke Peninsula, after excavation last week uncovered bones that the local Aboriginal community says are ancestral.
Police have cordoned off an area around turbine 4 after Narungga Heritage Committee monitor Quenten Agius said he discovered the arm bone of one of his ancestors in topsoil that had been moved by a grader during construction in October. "I was shocked, upset and wild at (developer) Southern Hydro for smashing through our ancestors' burial grounds and angry at the Government for allowing this to happen," Mr Agius said. But an initial study of the remains suggested they "may have been moved from a different part of the Wattle Point site", according to Lange Powell, an official with the Aboriginal Affairs Department's heritage taskforce.
More here
CLIMATE CHANGE BAD FOR WOMEN?
There is a U.N. conference on global warming going on at the moment so more than the usual amount of hot air is blowing through the media. But the statements below are probably the fruitiest:
Severe weather caused by global warming can pose greater physical danger to women than men, a Canadian attending a UN conference on climate change said Friday. "For instance, often women don't know how to swim, so in a flood situation that can lead to a higher instance of death or injury," Angie Daze, a program manager with a Canadian group called Reducing Vulnerability to Climate Change, said.
Other speakers on the sidelines of the Dec. 6-17 conference said women in poor countries are particularly vulnerable to the effects of global warming, which has been blamed for causing more violent storms and rising sea levels, among other problems. "Women are highly dependent on the environment for their family responsibilities" in developing countries, said one environmental worker based in Bangladesh. "Any type of environmental degradation impacts them more severely than men."
More here
HOW PAST CLIMATE CHANGE MAY HAVE OCCURRED
Some Velikovskian reflections by Louis Hissink
A letter writer, Richard S. Woodgate, wrote in the Quadrant Magazine, edited by Henry's contributor Padriac McGuinness, about abnormal weather, past and future and in particular referred to Gavin Menzie's book, 1421: The year China Discovered the World, published in 2003, with a second edition in 2004. Mention was made of a shift in the earth's axis which which appeared to have been associated with a change in the weather.
This is not the first time that shifts of the earth's axis were noted in the historical past, the most infamous being the biblical Joshua Ben Nunn event who commanded the sun stand still by pounding his staff on the ground. Of course no man can do that, (but advocates of anthropogenic global warming assert that while man cannot stop the sun, he surely can change the weather, though it then strikes me that as the devout believe Joshua did stop the sun, then changing the climate would seem a trivial exercise for the devout, whether divine or secular - ask Sir David King - thereby confirming Michael Crichton's observation that anthropogenic global warming is a religious belief rather than scientific fact).
Then there are other more ancient accounts in Egyptian history where the rising and setting suns exchanged places. Where once the sun used to rise, it now sets, and that this happened more than once. So they said. Modern science, limiting its understanding to Newtonian mechanics, finds these ancient accounts extremely problematical, if nigh well impossible but as we all know too well, science also has a habit of changing when new facts are discovered. So while the past might remain inexplicable using existing theories, it is quite likely that new facts will enable us to explain the past in a more sensible manner than by simply dismissing it as impossible today. That is science, of course, which always changes when new facts are discovered. Religion never changes, even when confronted with overwhelming contradictory fact.
But I am not going to dwell on this because it occurred to me that if the earth did change its axis of spin, or careened, slightly, or significantly in the past, then that would have had the interesting effect of moving regions which were once in the tropics, perhaps into more temperate zones, and those in the temperate, perhaps into the arctic zones. We can change the climate of a place simply by moving it about in space?
This would result in the illusion that a particular religion suffered a severe climate change, which in one sense is true, but this was only because that region was moved to a different latitude by a change in the earth's attitude around its axis of spin. The earth's overall thermal balance would not have changed, but only appeared to have changed from a misinterpretation of the evidence.
This then suggests that during the Medieval warming period Greenland was closer to the equator, and afterwards was moved further north to colder latitudes as the result of some cosmic interaction. That also means that Europe moved to colder climates. Is there any evidence for that? Seems so, if the Korean Choson Annals are anything to go by, as well as the necessity to change the Gregorian calendar, at the time. Of course much research needs to be done in this area, but if no one accepts this, then funding of course will not be allocated. Same old story of facts being quietly ignored by denying funding.
So past climate changes may not have been due to the earth cooling down to an ice age, but that overall thermal balance of the earth remained the same, and the illusion of climate change produced by infrequent careening around its axis, removing areas from the tropics to the arctic or polar regions, as hinted at by many ancients myths and legends of many older civilisations. True? Perhaps, and obviously a lot of research needs to be done to clarify our understanding of the past.
Climate science is far more complex than most of use realise, especially if we are using politically correct histories. The debate has only started.
A careening earth caused by close encounters of the cosmic kind, in an electrically dynamic plasma universe would offer some solutions to the interesting questions made in Richard Woodgate's letter in Quadrant Magazine.
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
LOMBORG ON GLOBAL WARMING
Global warming has become the obsession of our time. From governments and campaigners meeting for the climate summit in Buenos Aires right now we hear the incessant admonition: making global warming our first priority is the moral test of our age.
Yet they are wrong. Global warming is real and caused by CO2. The trouble is that the climate models show we can do very little about the warming. Even if everyone (including the United States) did Kyoto and stuck to it throughout the century, the change would be almost immeasurable, postponing warming by just six years in 2100.
Likewise, the economic models tell us that the cost is substantial. The cost of Kyoto compliance is at least $150billion a year. For comparison, the UN estimates that half that amount could permanently solve the most pressing humanitarian problems in the world: it could buy clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education to every single person in the world.
Global warming will mainly harm the developing countries, because they are poorer and therefore less able to handle climate changes. However, even the most pessimistic forecasts from the UN expect the average person in the developing countries to be richer in 2100 than we are now. So action on global warming is basically a very costly way of doing very little for much richer people far into the future. We need to ask ourselves if this indeed should be our first priority.
More here
THE AUSTRALIAN "GREENS" ARE REALLY TROTS
Comment on the move of a prominent Greenie, Peter Garrett, into the Australian Labor party and a Federal parliamentary seat
The environment is merely a flag of convenience for a large faction of the [Green] party, a mother-earth issue onto which they have parasited their real agenda. That's why Brown and several hectorers on the Green Senate tickets spent so much time talking about everything but the environment during the election campaign. They couldn't help themselves. They fought the election on the Iraq war. Why? Because while many Greens are dedicated environmentalists, the party is basically a branding exercise, a new package around an old product that most political consumers will never buy.
Take Lee Rhiannon, a Greens member of the upper house in NSW. Her mother was Freda Brown, for many years the head of the Union of Australian Women, a communist front in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Rhiannon also started in politics through a communist front, the Eureka Youth League. She came to notice during a campaign in support of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, working for another communist-dominated organisation, the Seamans Union of Australia, which raised funds, of questionable origin, to help send a remnant Australian team to Moscow in defiance of the federal government's boycott.
Or take Sylvia Hale, another Green in the NSW upper house. Her political career began as a Trotskyite at Sydney University in the mid-'60s, where she and Hall Greenland ran a front called the ALP Club, which had nothing to do with the ALP. She later morphed into the Greens and was elected to Parliament last year.
Garrett learnt the hard way about how Trots operate when he made his first tilt at parliament 20 years ago as a Senate candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party. He thought he could control the Trots, but the Socialist Workers Party took over the NDP and Garrett was gone by 1985. Like most hosts invaded by the Trot virus, the party died.
There are many reasons why Garrett didn't join the Greens, but given the party's power structure there was no guarantee he could parachute into the No.1 spot on the Senate ticket in NSW. It was also obvious that the excessive influence of the post-Trots meant the party was dominated by a brand of politics that was self-ghettoising.
This should have been the breakthrough year for the Greens. The Democrats were disintegrating. Iraq had gone bad. Drought and climate change were ravaging the environment. Labor had abandoned the left. Yet the Greens got 7.4 per cent of the Senate vote and 732,000 votes, an increase of 163,000, but a very modest harvest considering the 1.2 million votes for progressive parties three years earlier. And they did not win control of the Senate.
The progressive vote sank this year. Down the Dunnybowl. And Peter Garrett walked into Parliament, knowing the environmental crisis was too important to be left to the Greens.
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.
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.
*****************************************
Global warming has become the obsession of our time. From governments and campaigners meeting for the climate summit in Buenos Aires right now we hear the incessant admonition: making global warming our first priority is the moral test of our age.
Yet they are wrong. Global warming is real and caused by CO2. The trouble is that the climate models show we can do very little about the warming. Even if everyone (including the United States) did Kyoto and stuck to it throughout the century, the change would be almost immeasurable, postponing warming by just six years in 2100.
Likewise, the economic models tell us that the cost is substantial. The cost of Kyoto compliance is at least $150billion a year. For comparison, the UN estimates that half that amount could permanently solve the most pressing humanitarian problems in the world: it could buy clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care and education to every single person in the world.
Global warming will mainly harm the developing countries, because they are poorer and therefore less able to handle climate changes. However, even the most pessimistic forecasts from the UN expect the average person in the developing countries to be richer in 2100 than we are now. So action on global warming is basically a very costly way of doing very little for much richer people far into the future. We need to ask ourselves if this indeed should be our first priority.
More here
THE AUSTRALIAN "GREENS" ARE REALLY TROTS
Comment on the move of a prominent Greenie, Peter Garrett, into the Australian Labor party and a Federal parliamentary seat
The environment is merely a flag of convenience for a large faction of the [Green] party, a mother-earth issue onto which they have parasited their real agenda. That's why Brown and several hectorers on the Green Senate tickets spent so much time talking about everything but the environment during the election campaign. They couldn't help themselves. They fought the election on the Iraq war. Why? Because while many Greens are dedicated environmentalists, the party is basically a branding exercise, a new package around an old product that most political consumers will never buy.
Take Lee Rhiannon, a Greens member of the upper house in NSW. Her mother was Freda Brown, for many years the head of the Union of Australian Women, a communist front in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Rhiannon also started in politics through a communist front, the Eureka Youth League. She came to notice during a campaign in support of the Moscow Olympics in 1980, working for another communist-dominated organisation, the Seamans Union of Australia, which raised funds, of questionable origin, to help send a remnant Australian team to Moscow in defiance of the federal government's boycott.
Or take Sylvia Hale, another Green in the NSW upper house. Her political career began as a Trotskyite at Sydney University in the mid-'60s, where she and Hall Greenland ran a front called the ALP Club, which had nothing to do with the ALP. She later morphed into the Greens and was elected to Parliament last year.
Garrett learnt the hard way about how Trots operate when he made his first tilt at parliament 20 years ago as a Senate candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party. He thought he could control the Trots, but the Socialist Workers Party took over the NDP and Garrett was gone by 1985. Like most hosts invaded by the Trot virus, the party died.
There are many reasons why Garrett didn't join the Greens, but given the party's power structure there was no guarantee he could parachute into the No.1 spot on the Senate ticket in NSW. It was also obvious that the excessive influence of the post-Trots meant the party was dominated by a brand of politics that was self-ghettoising.
This should have been the breakthrough year for the Greens. The Democrats were disintegrating. Iraq had gone bad. Drought and climate change were ravaging the environment. Labor had abandoned the left. Yet the Greens got 7.4 per cent of the Senate vote and 732,000 votes, an increase of 163,000, but a very modest harvest considering the 1.2 million votes for progressive parties three years earlier. And they did not win control of the Senate.
The progressive vote sank this year. Down the Dunnybowl. And Peter Garrett walked into Parliament, knowing the environmental crisis was too important to be left to the Greens.
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.
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.
*****************************************
Monday, December 13, 2004
SOME "NON-POLITICAL" POSEURS
There is an allegedly "non-political" climate science site here whose authors nonetheless seems thoroughly committed to the "anthropogenic" theory of recent global warming. So are we to conclude therefore that the "anthropogenic" account is what unbiased science supports? Sadly, No. The arguments put forward in various posts on the site are far from careful and dispassionate. For instance, in this post aimed at defending the ACIA study from criticism by Stephen Milloy, the author immediately does the classical Leftist denigration strategy of referring to Stephen Milloy as an "industry lobbyist". I thought he was an independent journalist myself. But in any case, I could with equal justice refer to most of the global warmers as "research-grant-dependant academics" -- implying that they depend on scaring people to get their livelihood. And I do exactly that when I am looking at climate science as a whole. But I never depend on aspersions to make or examine an individual argument. So on balance I suspect that it is our "non-political" author rather than Milloy who is biased. If the author were interested only in the science of the matter, he would not have felt any need to cast personal aspersions on Milloy. And if he had a strong argument, he would not need to bolster it by ad hominem attacks.
And he doesn't have a strong argument. He accuses Milloy of "cherry picking" the ACIA data and then does exactly the same himself to Milloy's data. He completely fails to mention the banner argument Milloy makes -- that the ACIA claims about a dwindling polar bear population are totally contrary to heaps of other evidence on the subject. That good old selective attention to only that data which suits him: Another of the stigmata of Leftist thinking!
And his basis for rejecting Milloy's point about recent Arctic warming being similar to a much earlier Arctic warming episode seems to involve a circular argument if he is claiming that the ACIA study adds to evidence of global warming. He says that the recent Arctic warming is different from the earlier episode because "The recent warming, in contrast, encompasses the entire planet". So he seems seem to be assuming what he has to prove.
And that sort of thing seems to be a strategy in several places elsewhere on the site. If any particular datum is challenged, the reply seems to be something like: "Yes. That data may have problems but we have other data that says the same thing." Such a reply is all very well but it gives no more than a temporary reprieve. It depends for its persuasive power on the other data being impeccable, so simply moves the need for enquiry elsewhere. And a lot of "maybes" or findings that "can be interpreted as..." do not add up to anything like a certainty. And "models" are, of course, just pretentious guesswork.
And as far as I can see, our particular author's assertion that "The recent warming, in contrast, encompasses the entire planet" is false anyway. As he himself later notes, several large polar areas -- such as Greenland and at least a large part of the Antarctic -- are getting cooler. And even within the Arctic itself temperature change is very uneven. There may be some AVERAGE warming globally but "warming that encompasses the entire planet" is certainly not a description of what is going on. And the satellite data even undermine the claim of average warming -- indicating no global warming at all. So proper scientific care and skepticism are notably absent in the post concerned. Impartiality is certainly out to lunch most of the time.
Some caution does seem to reassert itself in their closing paragraph, however. The author admits that local changes such as those in the Arctic do not permit global inferences: "For this reason, an anthropogenic warming trend can only be clearly identified in hemispheric or global averages or in pattern studies. It can neither be demonstrated nor debunked by looking at individual local time series". So when it finally gets cautious, an article that purported to debunk Milloy and support the ACIA study ends up agreeing with Milloy in his view that the ACIA findings are no proof of anything much. What a mess! I have certainly crossed that deceptive site off my "keep track of" list.
MICHAEL CRICHTON ON ENVIRONMENTALISM AS A RELIGION
Some excerpts:
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let's examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
But let's return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn't ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn't fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don't get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there---though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism. First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth---that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better. That's not a good future for the human race. That's our past. So it's time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
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.
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.
*****************************************
There is an allegedly "non-political" climate science site here whose authors nonetheless seems thoroughly committed to the "anthropogenic" theory of recent global warming. So are we to conclude therefore that the "anthropogenic" account is what unbiased science supports? Sadly, No. The arguments put forward in various posts on the site are far from careful and dispassionate. For instance, in this post aimed at defending the ACIA study from criticism by Stephen Milloy, the author immediately does the classical Leftist denigration strategy of referring to Stephen Milloy as an "industry lobbyist". I thought he was an independent journalist myself. But in any case, I could with equal justice refer to most of the global warmers as "research-grant-dependant academics" -- implying that they depend on scaring people to get their livelihood. And I do exactly that when I am looking at climate science as a whole. But I never depend on aspersions to make or examine an individual argument. So on balance I suspect that it is our "non-political" author rather than Milloy who is biased. If the author were interested only in the science of the matter, he would not have felt any need to cast personal aspersions on Milloy. And if he had a strong argument, he would not need to bolster it by ad hominem attacks.
And he doesn't have a strong argument. He accuses Milloy of "cherry picking" the ACIA data and then does exactly the same himself to Milloy's data. He completely fails to mention the banner argument Milloy makes -- that the ACIA claims about a dwindling polar bear population are totally contrary to heaps of other evidence on the subject. That good old selective attention to only that data which suits him: Another of the stigmata of Leftist thinking!
And his basis for rejecting Milloy's point about recent Arctic warming being similar to a much earlier Arctic warming episode seems to involve a circular argument if he is claiming that the ACIA study adds to evidence of global warming. He says that the recent Arctic warming is different from the earlier episode because "The recent warming, in contrast, encompasses the entire planet". So he seems seem to be assuming what he has to prove.
And that sort of thing seems to be a strategy in several places elsewhere on the site. If any particular datum is challenged, the reply seems to be something like: "Yes. That data may have problems but we have other data that says the same thing." Such a reply is all very well but it gives no more than a temporary reprieve. It depends for its persuasive power on the other data being impeccable, so simply moves the need for enquiry elsewhere. And a lot of "maybes" or findings that "can be interpreted as..." do not add up to anything like a certainty. And "models" are, of course, just pretentious guesswork.
And as far as I can see, our particular author's assertion that "The recent warming, in contrast, encompasses the entire planet" is false anyway. As he himself later notes, several large polar areas -- such as Greenland and at least a large part of the Antarctic -- are getting cooler. And even within the Arctic itself temperature change is very uneven. There may be some AVERAGE warming globally but "warming that encompasses the entire planet" is certainly not a description of what is going on. And the satellite data even undermine the claim of average warming -- indicating no global warming at all. So proper scientific care and skepticism are notably absent in the post concerned. Impartiality is certainly out to lunch most of the time.
Some caution does seem to reassert itself in their closing paragraph, however. The author admits that local changes such as those in the Arctic do not permit global inferences: "For this reason, an anthropogenic warming trend can only be clearly identified in hemispheric or global averages or in pattern studies. It can neither be demonstrated nor debunked by looking at individual local time series". So when it finally gets cautious, an article that purported to debunk Milloy and support the ACIA study ends up agreeing with Milloy in his view that the ACIA findings are no proof of anything much. What a mess! I have certainly crossed that deceptive site off my "keep track of" list.
MICHAEL CRICHTON ON ENVIRONMENTALISM AS A RELIGION
Some excerpts:
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people---the best people, the most enlightened people---do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let's examine some of those beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
But let's return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn't ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn't fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don't get down on our knees and conserve every day?
Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of environmentalism have been yelling about population for fifty years, over the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11 billion (which was the UN estimate around 1990) to now 9 billion, and soon, perhaps less. There are some who think that world population will peak in 2050 and then start to decline. There are some who predict we will have fewer people in 2100 than we do today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say halleluiah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They were never there---though they still appear, in the future. As mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction wrong; they're human. So what. Unfortunately, it's not just one prediction. It's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We are running out of all natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.
So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn.
I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time. They said that when the UN IPCC reports stated alternative technologies existed that could control greenhouse gases, the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles not in whacko magazines, but in the most prestigeous science journals, such as Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not dependant on facts, but rather are matters of faith. Unshakeable belief.
There are two reasons why I think we all need to get rid of the religion of environmentalism. First, we need an environmental movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party or another is to miss the cold truth---that there is very little difference between the parties, except a difference in pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard Nixon. And never forget which president sold federal oil leases, allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex, evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed. Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our fifty-year effort at forest-fire suppression is a well-intentioned disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple answer: we must institute far more stringent requirements for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't true. It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of an underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all---what more and more groups are doing is putting out is lies, pure and simple. Falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this day. At this moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. In the wake of Carol Browner, it is probably better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost. We will enter the Internet version of the dark ages, an era of shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't know any better. That's not a good future for the human race. That's our past. So it's time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy decisions firmly on that.
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.
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.
*****************************************
Sunday, December 12, 2004
CRICHTON RUFFLES THE FEATHERS
Brilliant science fiction novelist Michael Crichton is really ruffling the feathers of our intellectual establishment. There is an article in Slate that pulls out all stops in an attempt to denigrate him and his latest novel. Why? Because Crichton casts Greenies as villains and documents at great length the shoddy "science" behind the global warming myth. What they really hate, of course, is that Crichton's great popularity and authoritativeness will bring the Greenie fraud to the attention of millions of people.
Wittingshire has the following apt comment on the matter:
GLOBAL WARMING SHOULD BE GOOD FOR CORAL
Greenies are always agonizing about the claimed imminent "death" of coral reefs
"Coral reefs could be growing 35 per cent faster by the next century because of global warming, it was claimed yesterday. A new study suggests the effects of warmer waters might offset damage caused by greenhouse gases as higher amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide reduce the levels of calcium and carbonate in seawater needed to make corals.
A team from the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, modelled interactions between the atmosphere, oceans and ice. They calculated the sea’s surface temperature and the levels of calcium carbonate in the water up to 2100 before estimating how these changes would affect the formation of corals. They found that warmer water would increase the rate of coral calcification, outweighing the detrimental effect of lower calcium carbonate levels. By 2100, corals would be growing 35 per cent faster than they do today, they predicted.
But the finding, reported in New Scientist magazine, is rejected by other scientists, who argue that the Australian team did not consider bleaching, which occurs when warmer waters cause corals to expel the algae that live within them and on which they depend for survival."
If this "bleaching" is a problem, isn't it odd that corals live in waters that range widely in temperature? The water gets very warm in shallow tropical seas. How come the corals don't all die there? They in fact flourish there, of course
Source
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Brilliant science fiction novelist Michael Crichton is really ruffling the feathers of our intellectual establishment. There is an article in Slate that pulls out all stops in an attempt to denigrate him and his latest novel. Why? Because Crichton casts Greenies as villains and documents at great length the shoddy "science" behind the global warming myth. What they really hate, of course, is that Crichton's great popularity and authoritativeness will bring the Greenie fraud to the attention of millions of people.
Wittingshire has the following apt comment on the matter:
Michael Crichton threw Today Show's Matt Lauer into a metaphysical crisis Tuesday.
Over a novel?
Crichton began his career as a scientist/physician and, according to the press release for his new novel, "STATE OF FEAR raises critical questions about the facts we believe in, without question, on the strength of esteemed experts and the media."
The rhetorical gimmick works like this: "All scientists agree, so shut up and fall into line." In a speech last year at Caltech, Crichton showed how scientists repeatedly used this bullying tactic to prop up theories that were later debunked: "Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. . . . The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus."
GLOBAL WARMING SHOULD BE GOOD FOR CORAL
Greenies are always agonizing about the claimed imminent "death" of coral reefs
"Coral reefs could be growing 35 per cent faster by the next century because of global warming, it was claimed yesterday. A new study suggests the effects of warmer waters might offset damage caused by greenhouse gases as higher amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide reduce the levels of calcium and carbonate in seawater needed to make corals.
A team from the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, modelled interactions between the atmosphere, oceans and ice. They calculated the sea’s surface temperature and the levels of calcium carbonate in the water up to 2100 before estimating how these changes would affect the formation of corals. They found that warmer water would increase the rate of coral calcification, outweighing the detrimental effect of lower calcium carbonate levels. By 2100, corals would be growing 35 per cent faster than they do today, they predicted.
But the finding, reported in New Scientist magazine, is rejected by other scientists, who argue that the Australian team did not consider bleaching, which occurs when warmer waters cause corals to expel the algae that live within them and on which they depend for survival."
If this "bleaching" is a problem, isn't it odd that corals live in waters that range widely in temperature? The water gets very warm in shallow tropical seas. How come the corals don't all die there? They in fact flourish there, of course
Source
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Saturday, December 11, 2004
TONY BLAIR'S CLIMATE MACHINATIONS
Don't hold your breath. This notion of a new deal on climate change is something that Tony Blair has cooked up, with a fair degree of passion, but not yet much claim to reality. The plan has two roots, it seems. The first is the Prime Minister's desire to set his mark during 2005 on Britain's presidency of the G8 - the club of industrialised nations, which indulgently includes Russia. Long ago he earmarked Africa (including Aids) and global warming for the top of his agenda, Washington has acknowledged. "Wouldn't you think he could stick to solving the Middle East and Northern Ireland?" one US official said, with a gibe at yesterday's collapse of a Belfast deal.
The second reason is to solidify Britain's ties with the US, but here he is on shakier ground. "The thing is, the British (team) hasn't yet explained to us why we should really care," said one official close to a senator familiar with the talks. The plan was formed in the first few days of November, after President Bush had been re-elected but before the Prime Minister went to Washington.
The British pitch was tried out first on a visiting team from Congress. "Look how badly the US has suffered internationally from snubbing the Kyoto Protocol. Why don't we try to see if there is some deal the US could sign up to, which would show how it is making strenuous efforts to cut carbon emissions?" That was the thrust of it. It didn't get a very warm response. The congressional team was keen to impress on the Brits that the US's refusal to sign up to Kyoto was not a casual oversight, which would not have been made if the US had foreseen the brickbats that it would receive. The members of Congress did not need European lectures about the "cost" to the US's reputation abroad. Come to that, even if lectures were delivered, they did not much care. The real point, said the team, newly assertive given the strong Republican majority on Capitol Hill, was that Congress would never pass anything resembling Kyoto, even if a president, bewitched by the will-o'-the-wisp of foreign adulation, was crazy enough to put his name to it. Any pledge to cut carbon emissions would cut American jobs. It would give an unjustified boost to developing countries that were not subject to pollution curbs - meaning China and India.
This position, which happens to be exactly in line with the White House's position, has been very convenient for the Bush Administration. It means that Bush does not need to take the blame for the US's stubbornness; he can hide behind the vocal bulk of Congress, even if that is a subtlety lost on activists outside the US.
When Blair arrived in Washington, a few days later, his team presented a more nuanced version of the pitch to Bush's team. Britain could help the US to repair relations with Europe on this front, they argued. It could help the rest of the world to understand that the US was, indeed, working hard to reduce emissions and did take global warming seriously, even if it was not in the Kyoto club.
So what might a non-Kyoto deal on global warming look like? The Blair team have worked hard to fill in this enormous blank. It might include a statement about technologies that could help to combat the emission of greenhouse gases. Yet this could cause problems for Blair, as one of the technologies most able to do so is nuclear power, a subject on which Blair's Government has been energetically non-committal. It might also include an agreement on scientific evidence about global warming, although this, from the US point of view, is controversial. The Bush Administration has not wanted to commit itself to a public statement that science unambiguously determines global warming to be a threat.
Nor has the Blair team yet found a way around the US's main concern: that any deal should bring China and India firmly under its umbrella, in a way that Kyoto does not. Kyoto allows them the forgiving status of "industrialising" countries, although their manufacturing boom - and their share of the world's emissions - makes this look out of date. Nothing that Britain has come up with appears to resemble a plan that would appeal both to the US and to China and India. Yet Blair's support of Bush has bought him at least civility from Washington. During Britain's presidency of the G8, polite evasion seems to be the most likely American response to his bright new idea.
Source
Kyoto Protocol is just lots of hot air
Some wisdom from Russia
ACCORDING to the Kyoto protocol proponents, Australia and the US are the rogue nations. But in the eyes of the absolute majority of the world, they are reasonable and smart. After all, Australia and the US -- along with nine developed countries and 167 other nations -- are refusing to undertake legal obligations in restricting their greenhouse gas emissions. The fact is the Kyoto protocol that will be a global treaty within months is based on fraudulent science. Assertions that global temperatures are higher today than any time in the past are completely false. Fluctuations in climate patterns have existed for millions of years -- for all earth history.
Global temperatures were higher in the Roman times when grapes were grown on British islands and Hannibal's elephants walked through the Alps into Italy. They were higher in the medieval period when the Vikings found and colonised the island that they have called Greenland and when Norwegians grew grain on the fields that are 300m in altitude higher than it is possible to do today.
Temperature variations in the course of the earth's history have been much greater than the increase of 0.6 degrees Celsius estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the last century. In the past, the earth's climate was warmer, the global temperature rose faster, sea level was higher, floods were more severe, droughts lasted longer and hurricanes were more devastating than they were in the 20th century. Moreover, the best available temperature data from satellites show negligible temperature changes over the past several decades.
As pointed out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Richard Lindzen, perhaps the world's most respected atmospheric physicist, if global warming were to occur it would be accompanied by reduced rather than increased numbers of severe weather patterns. Pseudo-scientific fabrications cost humankind a lot. Y2K cost consumers worldwide $700 billion. But once December 31, 2000, passed, the hysteria behind Y2K evaporated. The nonsense of global warming triggered by the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels hypothesis could cost the world economy much more.
The Kyoto treaty means a heavy price in terms of economic growth. Tentative early evidence of this can be seen by examining growth rates of those nations that have and have not enforced restrictions on their emissions. Since 1997, the 17 pro-Kyoto developed nations (15 EU countries, Canada and Japan) have had slower economic growth rates than the 11 non-Kyoto nations (including Australia and the US) -- 1.9 per cent annually compared with 3.3 per cent. There is no way to cheat economic laws -- increase in wealth creation requires more energy.
CO2 is a natural result of the use of fossil fuels that still account for 80 per cent of energy consumed globally. Nuclear energy today is the only commercially viable alternative. But even if green activists and Euro-bureaucrats secretly desire a rapid expansion of nuclear energy, there are still objective limits to how fast hydrocarbons can be replaced. Therefore, limiting emissions means limiting energy consumption, limiting economic activity and limiting technological progress.
Even with Russia on board, the Kyoto treaty will do little to global CO2 emissions considering that 70 per cent of the world's CO2 is emitted by countries not subject to Kyoto restrictions. Moreover, this share is growing as China, India and other non-Kyoto developed and developing countries grow faster than pro-Kyoto ones. Countries around the world must choose what is more important for them -- stagnating, at best, living standards due to Kyoto sclerotic regulations or the rising well-being of billions of people without them.
The Kyoto protocol requires a supranational bureaucratic monster in charge of rationing emissions and, therefore, economic activities. The Kyoto-ist system of quota allocation, mandatory restrictions and harsh penalties will be a sort of international Gosplan, a system to rival the former Soviet Union's. This perhaps explains why it finds such ready support in some quarters. But that's why it should be a warning signal for those who value economic and political freedom.
Last May the Russian Academy of Sciences published its conclusion on Kyoto -- the protocol does not have scientific ground whatsoever. Nobody among Russian decision makers considers the Kyoto protocol either scientifically proven or economically beneficial for the country. The only reasons for Russia's decision to ratify were purely political. For 3 1/2 years, Russia was heavily lobbied by Europeans, Canadians, Japanese and international bureaucrats.
The message for Australians is clear: continued economic growth and rising living standards or make your future and the future of your children a victim of Kyoto-ism, one of the most aggressive, intrusive, destructive ideologies since the collapse of communism and fascism.
(The author, Andrei Illarionov, is chief economic adviser to the president of the Russian Federation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Russian authorities.)
Source
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Don't hold your breath. This notion of a new deal on climate change is something that Tony Blair has cooked up, with a fair degree of passion, but not yet much claim to reality. The plan has two roots, it seems. The first is the Prime Minister's desire to set his mark during 2005 on Britain's presidency of the G8 - the club of industrialised nations, which indulgently includes Russia. Long ago he earmarked Africa (including Aids) and global warming for the top of his agenda, Washington has acknowledged. "Wouldn't you think he could stick to solving the Middle East and Northern Ireland?" one US official said, with a gibe at yesterday's collapse of a Belfast deal.
The second reason is to solidify Britain's ties with the US, but here he is on shakier ground. "The thing is, the British (team) hasn't yet explained to us why we should really care," said one official close to a senator familiar with the talks. The plan was formed in the first few days of November, after President Bush had been re-elected but before the Prime Minister went to Washington.
The British pitch was tried out first on a visiting team from Congress. "Look how badly the US has suffered internationally from snubbing the Kyoto Protocol. Why don't we try to see if there is some deal the US could sign up to, which would show how it is making strenuous efforts to cut carbon emissions?" That was the thrust of it. It didn't get a very warm response. The congressional team was keen to impress on the Brits that the US's refusal to sign up to Kyoto was not a casual oversight, which would not have been made if the US had foreseen the brickbats that it would receive. The members of Congress did not need European lectures about the "cost" to the US's reputation abroad. Come to that, even if lectures were delivered, they did not much care. The real point, said the team, newly assertive given the strong Republican majority on Capitol Hill, was that Congress would never pass anything resembling Kyoto, even if a president, bewitched by the will-o'-the-wisp of foreign adulation, was crazy enough to put his name to it. Any pledge to cut carbon emissions would cut American jobs. It would give an unjustified boost to developing countries that were not subject to pollution curbs - meaning China and India.
This position, which happens to be exactly in line with the White House's position, has been very convenient for the Bush Administration. It means that Bush does not need to take the blame for the US's stubbornness; he can hide behind the vocal bulk of Congress, even if that is a subtlety lost on activists outside the US.
When Blair arrived in Washington, a few days later, his team presented a more nuanced version of the pitch to Bush's team. Britain could help the US to repair relations with Europe on this front, they argued. It could help the rest of the world to understand that the US was, indeed, working hard to reduce emissions and did take global warming seriously, even if it was not in the Kyoto club.
So what might a non-Kyoto deal on global warming look like? The Blair team have worked hard to fill in this enormous blank. It might include a statement about technologies that could help to combat the emission of greenhouse gases. Yet this could cause problems for Blair, as one of the technologies most able to do so is nuclear power, a subject on which Blair's Government has been energetically non-committal. It might also include an agreement on scientific evidence about global warming, although this, from the US point of view, is controversial. The Bush Administration has not wanted to commit itself to a public statement that science unambiguously determines global warming to be a threat.
Nor has the Blair team yet found a way around the US's main concern: that any deal should bring China and India firmly under its umbrella, in a way that Kyoto does not. Kyoto allows them the forgiving status of "industrialising" countries, although their manufacturing boom - and their share of the world's emissions - makes this look out of date. Nothing that Britain has come up with appears to resemble a plan that would appeal both to the US and to China and India. Yet Blair's support of Bush has bought him at least civility from Washington. During Britain's presidency of the G8, polite evasion seems to be the most likely American response to his bright new idea.
Source
Kyoto Protocol is just lots of hot air
Some wisdom from Russia
ACCORDING to the Kyoto protocol proponents, Australia and the US are the rogue nations. But in the eyes of the absolute majority of the world, they are reasonable and smart. After all, Australia and the US -- along with nine developed countries and 167 other nations -- are refusing to undertake legal obligations in restricting their greenhouse gas emissions. The fact is the Kyoto protocol that will be a global treaty within months is based on fraudulent science. Assertions that global temperatures are higher today than any time in the past are completely false. Fluctuations in climate patterns have existed for millions of years -- for all earth history.
Global temperatures were higher in the Roman times when grapes were grown on British islands and Hannibal's elephants walked through the Alps into Italy. They were higher in the medieval period when the Vikings found and colonised the island that they have called Greenland and when Norwegians grew grain on the fields that are 300m in altitude higher than it is possible to do today.
Temperature variations in the course of the earth's history have been much greater than the increase of 0.6 degrees Celsius estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the last century. In the past, the earth's climate was warmer, the global temperature rose faster, sea level was higher, floods were more severe, droughts lasted longer and hurricanes were more devastating than they were in the 20th century. Moreover, the best available temperature data from satellites show negligible temperature changes over the past several decades.
As pointed out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Richard Lindzen, perhaps the world's most respected atmospheric physicist, if global warming were to occur it would be accompanied by reduced rather than increased numbers of severe weather patterns. Pseudo-scientific fabrications cost humankind a lot. Y2K cost consumers worldwide $700 billion. But once December 31, 2000, passed, the hysteria behind Y2K evaporated. The nonsense of global warming triggered by the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels hypothesis could cost the world economy much more.
The Kyoto treaty means a heavy price in terms of economic growth. Tentative early evidence of this can be seen by examining growth rates of those nations that have and have not enforced restrictions on their emissions. Since 1997, the 17 pro-Kyoto developed nations (15 EU countries, Canada and Japan) have had slower economic growth rates than the 11 non-Kyoto nations (including Australia and the US) -- 1.9 per cent annually compared with 3.3 per cent. There is no way to cheat economic laws -- increase in wealth creation requires more energy.
CO2 is a natural result of the use of fossil fuels that still account for 80 per cent of energy consumed globally. Nuclear energy today is the only commercially viable alternative. But even if green activists and Euro-bureaucrats secretly desire a rapid expansion of nuclear energy, there are still objective limits to how fast hydrocarbons can be replaced. Therefore, limiting emissions means limiting energy consumption, limiting economic activity and limiting technological progress.
Even with Russia on board, the Kyoto treaty will do little to global CO2 emissions considering that 70 per cent of the world's CO2 is emitted by countries not subject to Kyoto restrictions. Moreover, this share is growing as China, India and other non-Kyoto developed and developing countries grow faster than pro-Kyoto ones. Countries around the world must choose what is more important for them -- stagnating, at best, living standards due to Kyoto sclerotic regulations or the rising well-being of billions of people without them.
The Kyoto protocol requires a supranational bureaucratic monster in charge of rationing emissions and, therefore, economic activities. The Kyoto-ist system of quota allocation, mandatory restrictions and harsh penalties will be a sort of international Gosplan, a system to rival the former Soviet Union's. This perhaps explains why it finds such ready support in some quarters. But that's why it should be a warning signal for those who value economic and political freedom.
Last May the Russian Academy of Sciences published its conclusion on Kyoto -- the protocol does not have scientific ground whatsoever. Nobody among Russian decision makers considers the Kyoto protocol either scientifically proven or economically beneficial for the country. The only reasons for Russia's decision to ratify were purely political. For 3 1/2 years, Russia was heavily lobbied by Europeans, Canadians, Japanese and international bureaucrats.
The message for Australians is clear: continued economic growth and rising living standards or make your future and the future of your children a victim of Kyoto-ism, one of the most aggressive, intrusive, destructive ideologies since the collapse of communism and fascism.
(The author, Andrei Illarionov, is chief economic adviser to the president of the Russian Federation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Russian authorities.)
Source
***************************************
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.
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.
*****************************************
Friday, December 10, 2004
NOW GLOBAL WARMING IS RACIST!
Some comments by Rush Limbaugh
A new study from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation says that white people are more to blame for global warming. "A new study released by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation suggests that rising temperatures will kill more black citizens than white citizens in the US while claiming African-Americans are less responsible than others for causing so-called global warming." So now even global warming is a racist.... Headline used to be "Women and Minorities Hardest Hit." Now it's just blacks: "Blacks, Period, Hardest Hit."
"The research, conducted by the Oakland, California-based group Redefining Progress, is being billed as the first-ever comprehensive examination of the health and economic impact of climate change on the black population." William Jefferson, Democrat, Louisiana, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation -- this is not the Congressional Black Caucus. They have a foundation. It is the same guys, but they've got a foundation, and William Jefferson said, "We are long past the point where global warming is considered a myth." [sic]
Now, the new report for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation has three main findings. "One: America's black population will be disproportionately burdened by the health effects of global warming. Two: Blacks are less responsible for contributing to global warming than other Americans. Three: Policies designed to mitigate global warming can generate large health and economic benefits for blacks, depending on their implementation."
Well, now, given that this is the Congressional Black Caucus, and given that we know what their politics are, if they think policies designed to end or mitigate global warming will "generate large health and economic benefits for them," what is it they suggest be done? To them, "benefits" all come from the government. Benefits all come from taking from one group of citizens and giving to another.
So they assume that whatever plan we put into effect to fix global warming will include government getting bigger and redistributing benefits. Has this not always been what I said was the point of the environmentalist wackos in the first place, was to grow government? And so now you've got the Congressional Black Caucus getting in on it. Eddie Bernice Johnson, whose last foray into the public was to call for the UN to monitor U.S. elections in November, said, "Time and again, the world's leading atmospheric scientists have warned us about the devastating impact of climate change. We now have irrefutable proof [sic] on its impact on our economy, our way of life, our health, and our children."
"The report claims that more than 160,000 deaths annually can already be attributed to climate change across the world. That figure is likely to increase unless action is taken. More than 70% of blacks live in urban areas which are in violation of federal air pollution standards. Thus more blacks than whites would likely be affected by higher concentrations of toxins in the air."...
one more quote here from the study: "The most direct health effect of climate change will be intensifying heat waves that selectively..." So the heat waves know where they're going! Hang on a minute. "The heat waves that selectively impact poor and urban populations according to the study..." You see, I'm sitting here laughing about it, but this is the kind of stuff, this is no different than the (conspiracy theory) CIA invented AIDS to wipe out the black population. This is no different than some of these cockamamie hare-brain conspiracy theories. So now we're going to have probably P. Diddy and Whoopi Goldberg and whoever else starting national tours saying heat waves target blacks.
More here
HISTORY SHOWS CLIMATE TO BE VERY VARIABLE
"Blair reiterated in an interview with the BBC that "we do want agreement that this is a serious issue and that we need to make progress on it. And so my ambition for the G-8 next year is that we get into a proper dialogue. . In other words, to get a basic agreement of what the science tells us, and secondly then to start a process which will allow us to identify the means of combating it."
Agreement of the sort Blair has in mind might be difficult to come by. Just last month, for example, the underpinnings for Blair's claim that the temperature rise in the northern hemisphere in the last century was the most rapid in the last thousand years have been pretty much undermined -- in a study by a believer in anthropogenic warming.
As Andrew Revkin reported in The New York Times Oct. 5: "A new analysis has challenged the accuracy of a climate timeline showing that recent global warming is unmatched for a thousand years. That timeline, generated by stitching together hints of past temperatures embedded in tree rings, corals, ice layers and other sources, is one strut supporting the widely accepted view that the current warm spell is being caused mainly by accumulating heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe emissions."
The study by Hans von Storch demonstrated that the famous "hockey stick study" showing stable average global temperatures over the last millennia until a steep rise in the last century was flawed, and that the climate varied a lot more than the hockey stick allowed.
This comports with actual history, and with some common sense.
Consider what the climate was likely like in the fabled time of King Arthur and the Round Table. The myth is believed to have its origins in the lives of a King Arthur in the 5th and 6th Centuries A.D. This Arthur lived in a time when there were vineyards in Britain. Indeed, one reason that Caesar went to Britain in the 1st Century B.C. was to take advantage of its far more equable climate compared with Gaul.
But then things turned bad. It wasn't just the death of the good king in the battle of Camlann (crooked river) around 537 A.D. that caused Britain to enter a dark age. It was, quite literally, that things went dark for a couple years after the massive eruption of Krakatau around 535 A.D. It led to catastrophic global cooling, with two years of unceasing winter that in turn led to starvation and pestilence, and possibly the war in which the real Arthur was killed and out of which the mythological one was born. At any rate, that's something to ponder.
A few hundred years later, though, around 800 A.D., the climate warmed appreciably in what became known as the Medieval Warm Period (PDF). It was during this time that the Vikings raided Britain and set up colonies in Greenland and, possibly, as far west as Nova Scotia or Virginia, if you believe stories of lost tribes.
But climate just never stays the same. And beginning in the 13th Century, a Little Ice Age (PDF) led to the Vikings' withdrawal from their far-flung settlements. The cold period featured terrible flooding from snow melts. It lasted until about the time Prince Albert first took Queen Victoria to Balmoral in 1852. With such a cold beginning, perhaps that's why Queen Elizabeth thinks things have gotten too hot for her estates".
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.
Comments? Email me or 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.
*****************************************
Some comments by Rush Limbaugh
A new study from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation says that white people are more to blame for global warming. "A new study released by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation suggests that rising temperatures will kill more black citizens than white citizens in the US while claiming African-Americans are less responsible than others for causing so-called global warming." So now even global warming is a racist.... Headline used to be "Women and Minorities Hardest Hit." Now it's just blacks: "Blacks, Period, Hardest Hit."
"The research, conducted by the Oakland, California-based group Redefining Progress, is being billed as the first-ever comprehensive examination of the health and economic impact of climate change on the black population." William Jefferson, Democrat, Louisiana, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation -- this is not the Congressional Black Caucus. They have a foundation. It is the same guys, but they've got a foundation, and William Jefferson said, "We are long past the point where global warming is considered a myth." [sic]
Now, the new report for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation has three main findings. "One: America's black population will be disproportionately burdened by the health effects of global warming. Two: Blacks are less responsible for contributing to global warming than other Americans. Three: Policies designed to mitigate global warming can generate large health and economic benefits for blacks, depending on their implementation."
Well, now, given that this is the Congressional Black Caucus, and given that we know what their politics are, if they think policies designed to end or mitigate global warming will "generate large health and economic benefits for them," what is it they suggest be done? To them, "benefits" all come from the government. Benefits all come from taking from one group of citizens and giving to another.
So they assume that whatever plan we put into effect to fix global warming will include government getting bigger and redistributing benefits. Has this not always been what I said was the point of the environmentalist wackos in the first place, was to grow government? And so now you've got the Congressional Black Caucus getting in on it. Eddie Bernice Johnson, whose last foray into the public was to call for the UN to monitor U.S. elections in November, said, "Time and again, the world's leading atmospheric scientists have warned us about the devastating impact of climate change. We now have irrefutable proof [sic] on its impact on our economy, our way of life, our health, and our children."
"The report claims that more than 160,000 deaths annually can already be attributed to climate change across the world. That figure is likely to increase unless action is taken. More than 70% of blacks live in urban areas which are in violation of federal air pollution standards. Thus more blacks than whites would likely be affected by higher concentrations of toxins in the air."...
one more quote here from the study: "The most direct health effect of climate change will be intensifying heat waves that selectively..." So the heat waves know where they're going! Hang on a minute. "The heat waves that selectively impact poor and urban populations according to the study..." You see, I'm sitting here laughing about it, but this is the kind of stuff, this is no different than the (conspiracy theory) CIA invented AIDS to wipe out the black population. This is no different than some of these cockamamie hare-brain conspiracy theories. So now we're going to have probably P. Diddy and Whoopi Goldberg and whoever else starting national tours saying heat waves target blacks.
More here
HISTORY SHOWS CLIMATE TO BE VERY VARIABLE
"Blair reiterated in an interview with the BBC that "we do want agreement that this is a serious issue and that we need to make progress on it. And so my ambition for the G-8 next year is that we get into a proper dialogue. . In other words, to get a basic agreement of what the science tells us, and secondly then to start a process which will allow us to identify the means of combating it."
Agreement of the sort Blair has in mind might be difficult to come by. Just last month, for example, the underpinnings for Blair's claim that the temperature rise in the northern hemisphere in the last century was the most rapid in the last thousand years have been pretty much undermined -- in a study by a believer in anthropogenic warming.
As Andrew Revkin reported in The New York Times Oct. 5: "A new analysis has challenged the accuracy of a climate timeline showing that recent global warming is unmatched for a thousand years. That timeline, generated by stitching together hints of past temperatures embedded in tree rings, corals, ice layers and other sources, is one strut supporting the widely accepted view that the current warm spell is being caused mainly by accumulating heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe emissions."
The study by Hans von Storch demonstrated that the famous "hockey stick study" showing stable average global temperatures over the last millennia until a steep rise in the last century was flawed, and that the climate varied a lot more than the hockey stick allowed.
This comports with actual history, and with some common sense.
Consider what the climate was likely like in the fabled time of King Arthur and the Round Table. The myth is believed to have its origins in the lives of a King Arthur in the 5th and 6th Centuries A.D. This Arthur lived in a time when there were vineyards in Britain. Indeed, one reason that Caesar went to Britain in the 1st Century B.C. was to take advantage of its far more equable climate compared with Gaul.
But then things turned bad. It wasn't just the death of the good king in the battle of Camlann (crooked river) around 537 A.D. that caused Britain to enter a dark age. It was, quite literally, that things went dark for a couple years after the massive eruption of Krakatau around 535 A.D. It led to catastrophic global cooling, with two years of unceasing winter that in turn led to starvation and pestilence, and possibly the war in which the real Arthur was killed and out of which the mythological one was born. At any rate, that's something to ponder.
A few hundred years later, though, around 800 A.D., the climate warmed appreciably in what became known as the Medieval Warm Period (PDF). It was during this time that the Vikings raided Britain and set up colonies in Greenland and, possibly, as far west as Nova Scotia or Virginia, if you believe stories of lost tribes.
But climate just never stays the same. And beginning in the 13th Century, a Little Ice Age (PDF) led to the Vikings' withdrawal from their far-flung settlements. The cold period featured terrible flooding from snow melts. It lasted until about the time Prince Albert first took Queen Victoria to Balmoral in 1852. With such a cold beginning, perhaps that's why Queen Elizabeth thinks things have gotten too hot for her estates".
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.
Comments? Email me or 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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Thursday, December 09, 2004
Suit to de-list endangered species
Bob Briggs' wife's family has owned about 1,000 acres of redwood forest off Waddell Creek since 1913. He doesn't clearcut, and logs about once a decade. He pays the property taxes on the Rancho del Oso land with money from the wood and an organic farm. "If I couldn't farm my property here, if I couldn't harvest my timber from time to time, I would not be in an economic position to keep this land," Briggs said. But coho salmon and steelhead spawn in the creek, so Briggs, 80, said he faces a growing number of restrictions on what he can do with his property, located about seven miles north of Davenport. For example, he said, it took two years and a consultant for him to get a permit to clear a log jam that diverted water over his fields.
Many in the Central Coast Forest Association - a group of about 200 people who own small woodland swaths of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties - share his frustrations, Briggs said. So they have teamed up with a Sacramento law firm and others to challenge the Endangered Species Act listings of salmon and steelhead in California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. "All of these regulations and restrictions are not about fish, they're about the government controlling land use," said Briggs, spokesman for the Central Coast group.
The Pacific Legal Foundation recently filed an intent to sue the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, a federal agency responsible for protecting and preserving marine resources. The letter asserts coho salmon and steelhead bred in the wild are genetically identical to those raised in hatcheries, said Russ Brooks, managing attorney for the foundation. Because there is no difference, the filing contends, counters should include both in their tallies and remove the fish from the threatened and endangered species lists. Coho salmon and steelhead spawn in streams and rivers and both are listed as threatened in Santa Cruz County. They also are threatened or endangered around the Pacific Northwest.
In a related development, the Bush administration on Tuesday proposed cutting the federally designated habitat critical to the recovery of threatened and endangered salmon by more than 80 percent in the Northwest and 50 percent in California, focusing protection on rivers where the fish now thrive. Briggs said he looks forward to the relaxed land restrictions his group's lawsuit could provide.
Scientists argue hatchery fish aren't as strong as wild fish. They compete with them for food and threaten the gene pool. Fishermen say the difference between catching a wild and hatchery fish is like that between a wild turkey and a Butterball. But Brooks said the listings are not about fish. Instead, they are a tool to block logging and development.
Source
MORE DISHONESTY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
A Science Magazine essay claiming there is a "scientific consensus" about human-caused "global warming" was ridiculed Monday by a British scientist, who compared such a "consensus" to the near-unanimous elections that existed in the old Soviet Union. On Monday, Benny Peiser, a United Kingdom social anthropologist, called the Dec. 3 essay, "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," a "disturbing" study. "A one-hundred-percent record of 'scientific consensus' on anthropogenic climate change would be a sensational finding indeed. In fact, such a total result would be even more remarkable than any 'consensus' ever achieved in Soviet-style elections," Peiser noted sarcastically.
The Science Magazine essay analyzed 928 abstracts containing the keyword "climate change," all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003. The essay found that not a single one of the studies showed climate change to be naturally occurring. The essay was written by University of California professor Naomi Oreskes, a member of the University's Department of History and Science Studies Program. According to Oreskes, "None of these (928) papers argued that [current climate change is natural]. This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with [United Nations] IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies," Oreskes wrote. "Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect," she added. "The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic (human caused) climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen," concluded Oreskes.
But Peiser, a senior lecturer in Social Anthropology & Sport Sociology at Liverpool John Moores University and the editor of of CCNet (Cambridge Conference Network) webzine, labeled Oreskes' essay a "disturbing article. Whatever happened to the countless research papers published in the last ten years in peer-reviewed journals that show that temperatures were generally higher during the Medieval Warm Period than today, that solar variability is most likely to be the key driver of any significant climate change and that the methods used in climate modeling are highly questionable?" Peiser asked. "Given the countless papers published in the peer-reviewed literature over the last ten years that implicitly or explicitly disagree with the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, one can only conclude that all of these were simply excluded from the [Science Magazine] review. That's how it arrived at a 100 percent consensus!" he added.
According to Peiser, Oreskes' assertion that there is a 100 percent consensus about the issue is not backed by science. "Even [former Soviet dictator Joseph] Stalin himself did not take consensus politics to such extremes," Peiser explained. "In the Soviet Union the official 'participation rate' was never higher than 98-99 percent. So how did the results published in Science achieve a 100 percent level of conformity? Regrettably, the article does not include any reference to the [unpublished?] study itself, let alone the methodology on which the research was based. This makes it difficult to check how Oreskes arrived at the truly miraculous results," he added.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free market environmental group Competitive Enterprise Institute, also criticized the idea that there is a "scientific consensus" on "global warming." "Publishing such an easily debunked falsehood in an erstwhile reputable, peer-review publication (Science Magazine) demonstrates either a new low in desperation or a new generation believing there are no checks and therefore no limits," Horner told CNSNews.com. After all, past nonsense brought increasing taxpayer funding for decades. What would make them think they can't just make things up?" Horner added.
Iain Murray, a senior fellow in International Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote a letter to the editor of Science Magazine questioning why the study was even published. "I was surprised to see Science publish an article crowing over the existence of a scientific consensus on global warming and then advancing the non-sequitur that political action is therefore needed. Neither is a point worthy of consideration in an objective, scientific journal," Murray wrote in his letter to the editor, dated Dec. 6. "...the message of the article -- that politicians must act on the basis of the science -- is clearly a political point rather than a scientific one," Murray continued. "...the argument advanced by the author that 'our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it' is barely economically literate and has no place in a scientific journal," he added.
Source
The above story reminds me of this piece of "research" reported in an eminent psychology journal. Although the authors of that study express some pride that they "cast a wide net" in looking for articles to include in their summary, they in fact leave out practically everything that does not suit them. They look only at articles that they like. It is NOT in any way a comprehensive, objective survey of the literature on the subject. For instance, how many of my 200+ published academic journal articles on the subject did they cite? Just two. So just in ignoring the great bulk of my articles on the subject they ignored half the relevant literature. But Leftists always have been good at ignoring evidence. So they concluded that their Leftist approach to the study of politics "has withstood the relentless tests of time and empirical scrutiny" and go on to cite 13 articles that support their approach as evidence for that assertion. If they had been fair and objective, they could also have quoted 100 articles of mine that upset that assertion. But in good Leftist fashion it is only people who support their views that they cite. Any science with Leftist involvement swiftly degenerates into bunk. More on that 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.
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.
*****************************************
Bob Briggs' wife's family has owned about 1,000 acres of redwood forest off Waddell Creek since 1913. He doesn't clearcut, and logs about once a decade. He pays the property taxes on the Rancho del Oso land with money from the wood and an organic farm. "If I couldn't farm my property here, if I couldn't harvest my timber from time to time, I would not be in an economic position to keep this land," Briggs said. But coho salmon and steelhead spawn in the creek, so Briggs, 80, said he faces a growing number of restrictions on what he can do with his property, located about seven miles north of Davenport. For example, he said, it took two years and a consultant for him to get a permit to clear a log jam that diverted water over his fields.
Many in the Central Coast Forest Association - a group of about 200 people who own small woodland swaths of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties - share his frustrations, Briggs said. So they have teamed up with a Sacramento law firm and others to challenge the Endangered Species Act listings of salmon and steelhead in California, Oregon, Washington and Idaho. "All of these regulations and restrictions are not about fish, they're about the government controlling land use," said Briggs, spokesman for the Central Coast group.
The Pacific Legal Foundation recently filed an intent to sue the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries, a federal agency responsible for protecting and preserving marine resources. The letter asserts coho salmon and steelhead bred in the wild are genetically identical to those raised in hatcheries, said Russ Brooks, managing attorney for the foundation. Because there is no difference, the filing contends, counters should include both in their tallies and remove the fish from the threatened and endangered species lists. Coho salmon and steelhead spawn in streams and rivers and both are listed as threatened in Santa Cruz County. They also are threatened or endangered around the Pacific Northwest.
In a related development, the Bush administration on Tuesday proposed cutting the federally designated habitat critical to the recovery of threatened and endangered salmon by more than 80 percent in the Northwest and 50 percent in California, focusing protection on rivers where the fish now thrive. Briggs said he looks forward to the relaxed land restrictions his group's lawsuit could provide.
Scientists argue hatchery fish aren't as strong as wild fish. They compete with them for food and threaten the gene pool. Fishermen say the difference between catching a wild and hatchery fish is like that between a wild turkey and a Butterball. But Brooks said the listings are not about fish. Instead, they are a tool to block logging and development.
Source
MORE DISHONESTY ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
A Science Magazine essay claiming there is a "scientific consensus" about human-caused "global warming" was ridiculed Monday by a British scientist, who compared such a "consensus" to the near-unanimous elections that existed in the old Soviet Union. On Monday, Benny Peiser, a United Kingdom social anthropologist, called the Dec. 3 essay, "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," a "disturbing" study. "A one-hundred-percent record of 'scientific consensus' on anthropogenic climate change would be a sensational finding indeed. In fact, such a total result would be even more remarkable than any 'consensus' ever achieved in Soviet-style elections," Peiser noted sarcastically.
The Science Magazine essay analyzed 928 abstracts containing the keyword "climate change," all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003. The essay found that not a single one of the studies showed climate change to be naturally occurring. The essay was written by University of California professor Naomi Oreskes, a member of the University's Department of History and Science Studies Program. According to Oreskes, "None of these (928) papers argued that [current climate change is natural]. This analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with [United Nations] IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their professional societies," Oreskes wrote. "Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists, but that impression is incorrect," she added. "The question of what to do about climate change is also still open. But there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic (human caused) climate change. Climate scientists have repeatedly tried to make this clear. It is time for the rest of us to listen," concluded Oreskes.
But Peiser, a senior lecturer in Social Anthropology & Sport Sociology at Liverpool John Moores University and the editor of of CCNet (Cambridge Conference Network) webzine, labeled Oreskes' essay a "disturbing article. Whatever happened to the countless research papers published in the last ten years in peer-reviewed journals that show that temperatures were generally higher during the Medieval Warm Period than today, that solar variability is most likely to be the key driver of any significant climate change and that the methods used in climate modeling are highly questionable?" Peiser asked. "Given the countless papers published in the peer-reviewed literature over the last ten years that implicitly or explicitly disagree with the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, one can only conclude that all of these were simply excluded from the [Science Magazine] review. That's how it arrived at a 100 percent consensus!" he added.
According to Peiser, Oreskes' assertion that there is a 100 percent consensus about the issue is not backed by science. "Even [former Soviet dictator Joseph] Stalin himself did not take consensus politics to such extremes," Peiser explained. "In the Soviet Union the official 'participation rate' was never higher than 98-99 percent. So how did the results published in Science achieve a 100 percent level of conformity? Regrettably, the article does not include any reference to the [unpublished?] study itself, let alone the methodology on which the research was based. This makes it difficult to check how Oreskes arrived at the truly miraculous results," he added.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the free market environmental group Competitive Enterprise Institute, also criticized the idea that there is a "scientific consensus" on "global warming." "Publishing such an easily debunked falsehood in an erstwhile reputable, peer-review publication (Science Magazine) demonstrates either a new low in desperation or a new generation believing there are no checks and therefore no limits," Horner told CNSNews.com. After all, past nonsense brought increasing taxpayer funding for decades. What would make them think they can't just make things up?" Horner added.
Iain Murray, a senior fellow in International Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wrote a letter to the editor of Science Magazine questioning why the study was even published. "I was surprised to see Science publish an article crowing over the existence of a scientific consensus on global warming and then advancing the non-sequitur that political action is therefore needed. Neither is a point worthy of consideration in an objective, scientific journal," Murray wrote in his letter to the editor, dated Dec. 6. "...the message of the article -- that politicians must act on the basis of the science -- is clearly a political point rather than a scientific one," Murray continued. "...the argument advanced by the author that 'our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it' is barely economically literate and has no place in a scientific journal," he added.
Source
The above story reminds me of this piece of "research" reported in an eminent psychology journal. Although the authors of that study express some pride that they "cast a wide net" in looking for articles to include in their summary, they in fact leave out practically everything that does not suit them. They look only at articles that they like. It is NOT in any way a comprehensive, objective survey of the literature on the subject. For instance, how many of my 200+ published academic journal articles on the subject did they cite? Just two. So just in ignoring the great bulk of my articles on the subject they ignored half the relevant literature. But Leftists always have been good at ignoring evidence. So they concluded that their Leftist approach to the study of politics "has withstood the relentless tests of time and empirical scrutiny" and go on to cite 13 articles that support their approach as evidence for that assertion. If they had been fair and objective, they could also have quoted 100 articles of mine that upset that assertion. But in good Leftist fashion it is only people who support their views that they cite. Any science with Leftist involvement swiftly degenerates into bunk. More on that 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.
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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Jim Hansen and his twin
