The old aspartame scare again

So many studies showed no cause for concern among humans that I thought this scare had died out.

The evidence offered by the aptly-named Prof Millstone below is laughable.  He says some people have come to him saying that they have problems that they BELIEVE to be related to Aspartame consumption. What a scientific absurdity.  Some people believe that the earth is flat too.

He also says that a roughly equal number of studies showed harm and no harm.  He implies that all the studies concerned were of equal quality.  I have looked at some of the studies that claim to incriminate Aspartame.  The regulators rejected them for good reason.  You get things like very high doses on RATS being harmful (Soffritti) and human studies (Walton) with a non-random sample of 40 clinically depressed people given high doses outside the normal combination with food.  Complete junk

Underlying the scare is the familiar Greenie hostility to anything that is modern and not "natural"


British experts have cast doubt on the safety of an artificial sweetener used in thousands of products including big brand diet soft drinks from Coca-Cola and Pepsi.

Academics at the University of Sussex claim that an EU food watchdog assessment giving a clean bill of health to aspartame, a calorie-free sugar alternative, was seriously flawed.

Professor Erik Millstone, who has been a long-time critic of the additive, argues that there are many scientific studies that raise legitimate safety questions together with circumstantial evidence of neurological harm.

As a result, he is calling for the suspension of authorisation to sell or use aspartame in the EU pending an independent investigation.

He argues that anything from 2-10 per cent of consumers suffer neurological effects, ranging from blurred vision to headaches and, in a small number of worst cases, seizures. 'I have had about 250 people come to me saying they think aspartame caused a problem,' he said.

'I would describe it as strong circumstantial evidence that they have had neurological symptoms and have eventually come to the conclusion aspartame was responsible.'

Prof Millstone has previously been criticised by the makers of aspartame, who have questioned his expertise, accused him of ignoring scientific evidence and suggested he is obsessed.

Aspartame is roughly 200 times sweeter than table sugar and has been used as a calorie-free alternative in more than 6,000 consumer foods and drinks, including Diet Coke, Coke Zero and Pepsi Max.

It is sold worldwide under the trade names NutraSweet, Candarel and Equal.

A research paper by Prof Millstone and Dr Elisabeth Dawson details what it says are serious flaws in the way the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) assessed research on aspartame in 2013 and declared it safe. The academics argue that – since 1974 – scientists have warned of the risks of brain damage, liver and lung cancer, and brain lesions.

They also point to an EU-funded project published in 2010, which found that pregnant women who consume a high number of fizzy drinks containing artificial sweeteners appeared to be at greater risk of having a premature baby.

The study, published in the Archives of Public Health, says an EFSA panel discounted the results of 73 studies that indicated aspartame could be harmful, but treated 84 per cent of studies providing no evidence of harm as useful and reliable.

Gavin Partington, director-general at the British Soft Drinks Association, said: 'The author of this study is a committed critic of aspartame, despite the substantial body of scientific research that undermines his claims.

According to all leading health authorities in the world, as well as Cancer Research UK and Diabetes UK, low- and no-calorie sweeteners are safe.

'A study on behalf of the UK Food Standards Agency found no negative health links related to consumption of aspartame.'

The EFSA stood by its decision to authorise aspartame. It said: 'EFSA's opinion represents one of the most comprehensive risk assessments of aspartame undertaken.

After a review of all available scientific data and consumption information, EFSA concluded that aspartame [is] safe for human consumption at current levels of exposure.'

The International Sweeteners Association, which speaks for manufacturers, said: 'The EFSA scientific opinion on aspartame concluded that aspartame is not a safety concern.'

SOURCE





Trump rule an improvement but still flawed

There has been a barrage of attacks against the Trump administration for replacing the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) with the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule. Last week, for example, the American Public Health Association and the American Lung Association announced that attorneys representing them from the Clean Air Task Force are filing a lawsuit challenging the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for repealing the CPP and bringing in ACE in its place. The three organizations issued a press release in which they asserted, “EPA’s decision to repeal the Clean Power Plan and replace it with the ACE rule continues to disregard the vast health consequences of climate change and puts more lives at risk.”

That is nonsense, of course. But that didn’t stop other groups from taking a similar stance. Carter Roberts, President & CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, said, “This rule [ACE] enables dirty power plants to keep polluting – grounding federal energy policy firmly in past and saddling future generations with the costs of unchecked climate change.” Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club said, “This is an immoral and an illegal attack on clean air, clean energy, and the health of the public, and it shows just how heartless the Trump administration is when it comes to appeasing its polluter allies.”

If Trump administration advisors thought they could appease their opponents by bringing in a rule focused on the useless, and ultimately dangerous goal of limiting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, they were sorely mistaken. But, as long as they did not contest the scientifically flawed idea that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant that must be controlled, they really had no choice but to bring in some form of  CO2 reduction regulation.

As long as the the Supreme Court allowed EPA to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant thereby leading to what is known as the  Endangerment Finding [EF]  the the courts will order them to come up with plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. So the administration decided not to question it and came up with ACE as an improvement over CPP.

Regardless this was a big mistake for our nation. There is ample evidence that mankind is not causing catastrophic climate change. In any case human societies have thrived during warmer periods in the past relative to colder periods.”

It is hard to believe that the attacks that would ensue against the Trump Administration for opening the Green House Gas Endangerment Findingto re-examination would be any more severe than what they are already being subjected to for proposing the ACE rule. So, what was the advantage of bringing in a weaker version of Obama’s misguided CPP? If you are going to infuriate your opponents to the extent that they will take out lawsuits against you and publicly label you “the worst president in U.S. history for protecting the air and our climate,” as Brune did after Trump’s environment speech on July 8, you might as well do what you really wanted to instead of taking half measures. ACE is a bad idea  because it places the administration on the side of carbon dioxide being  a pollutant that needs to be regulated.

We have attempted here to explain what everyone is reading and hearing and seeing today as to the Leftist explosion over the Trump Administration’s efforts to undue the war proclaimed on the coal industry during the Obama Administration years.  They created rules for the burning of coal intended to openly end the use of coal in America, regardless of the fact what there are no longer emissions coming from these plants which can either harm human health, our environment or alter our planet’s temperature.

The intent of the Obama rules were to not only end the use of coal but to lead to the next step of ending the use of all fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas. Then their goal is to convert to the impossible task of running our nation on wind and solar power.  That  can not be done without at least tripling our energy costs and still requiring 100% back up of wind and solar by fossil fuel power plants when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. Their energy can never be stored. A years production of the biggest battery factory in America can only produce 3 minutes of the nation’s electric power requirements.

Every group involved directly or  indirectly in the lawsuits being filed against EPA are liberal, progressive, leftist socialist organization bent on turning America away from capitalism and toward socialism where your entire life is run by your government.

It’s time for the Trump administration to call a spade a spade. They should clearly explain that CO2 endangers no one and order that the EF be reopened. And, when the re-examination inevitably reveals that effectively classifying CO2 as a pollutant was a mistake, they should not be quiet about it. Instead they must follow Winston Churchill’s advice. “If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time—a tremendous whack.”

SOURCE






Trump-appointed World Bank head to continue anti-fossil-fuel policies

People hoping for a long-overdue breath of fresh air to blow through the World Bank’s musty halls in Washington in the wake of President Trump’s selection of a new director appear to be in for a disappointment.

The World Bank’s new chief, former Treasury and State Department official David Malpass, is showing every indication that he’s prepared to rubber-stamp the bank’s lending policies, many of which promise to harm the very people they are supposed to help.

Malpass and his colleagues at the bank oversee the disbursement of $65 billion a year in loans to an assortment of development projects in poorer countries, which, it is worth noting, includes rising global power China. In keeping with political fashion, the World Bank in December 2018 launched its own Climate Change Action Plan, pledging to dole out $200 billion in loans by 2025 to help countries battle global warming. As the bank’s website explains:

Climate change is an acute threat to global development and efforts to end poverty. Without urgent action, climate change impacts could push an addition 100 million people into poverty by 2030.

Helping the Poor?

The bank got the climate-change ball rolling when, in July 2015, it announced it would no longer provide financing for coal-fired power plants in developing countries. And if that means leaving hundreds of millions of people who currently have no access to electricity to the tender mercies of expensive, intermittent, but World Bank-approved wind and solar power to cover their future energy needs, so be it.

None of this seems to bother Malpass, including the $200 billion earmarked for the bank’s Climate Change Action Plan.

“We are committed to the Climate Change Action Plan,” Malpass told the Washington Post (June 30) “That’s a good number. That’s a beneficial number.”

Even though the Trump administration is trying to revitalize the struggling U.S. coal industry by promoting the export of American coal and clean-coal technologies, Malpass has no plans revise to World Bank lending policies accordingly. “There aren’t any plans to change policy in that area,” he assured the Post.

What’s more, the bank’s notoriously bloated, and well-paid bureaucracy will remain in place under Malpass. Needless to say, the preservation of the status quo has sent a sigh of relief through the global “development community.”

A Global Empire

Created in 1944, the World Bank is one of several globalist institutions like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and scores of other agencies that have “withstood the test of time” while creating lucrative jobs and enticing contracts to hordes of bureaucrats and development “experts” – all at taxpayers’ expense. The bank has 130 offices worldwide, and its posh Washington headquarters, a couple of blocks from the White House, is a monument to excess and waste.

In many respects, Malpass should feel right at home in the bank’s extravagance and recklessness with other people’s money. He was chief economist for Bear Stearns from 1993 to 2008. As a result of the global financial crisis and at the prodding of the Federal Reserve Bank and the U.S. Treasury Department, collapsing Bear Stearns was sold to JP Morgan Chase in March 2008 for 6% of its market value twelve months prior to the sale.

SOURCE





Having kids won’t kill the planet

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past six months, you might have noticed that climate-change activism is all the rage. Protesters from Extinction Rebellion are regularly blocking roads, schoolchildren are forever going on strike (apart from when they’re on summer holidays), and every politician with a half-decent PR team is saying Something Must Be Done about our impact on the planet.

While many climate-change activists take these political issues personally – their placards often express concerns about ‘my’ future – some environmentalists have decided to make a very personal decision to combat climate change. The ‘BirthStrike’ movement, an idea spawned by Extinction Rebellion supporter Blythe Pepino, is a group of men and women who have decided ‘not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis and the current inaction of governing forces in the face of this existential threat’. BirthStrike’s website is headed with a picture of a woman’s belly daubed in the XR symbol of Extinction Rebellion. The message is clear: if you want to save the planet from destructive humans, stop giving birth to them.

So-called antinatalists — people who argue for reducing the world’s population — have been around for centuries. But it is important to note that BirthStrike is not calling for the kind of misanthropic measures associated with past population-control campaigns (particularly one-child and two-child policies). Its manifesto clearly states that it ‘disagrees with prioritising population control over system change in regards to tackling the environmental crisis’ and is against ‘any enforced population-control measures’. It ‘recognises the colonial violence of such measures having been proposed in the past and present’.

But while BirthStrike makes these important caveats, there are many other initiatives aimed at limiting childbirth that are gaining traction. This Thursday was World Population Day, which was established by the UN to raise awareness of population growth, presumably to commemorate the tragedy that any of us were ever born. This year, the UN marked the occasion by announcing its support for ‘Thriving Together’, a campaign which aims to reduce population growth, an issue which mostly concerns poor and middle-income countries, particularly in Africa. The campaign is led by family-planning charity the Margaret Pyke Trust and is supported by numerous antinatal NGOs like Population Matters and celebrities including Sir David Attenborough and Dr Jane Goodall.

Access to contraception and family planning is vital in all parts of the world, including the ‘poor rural communities in developing nations’ targeted by Thriving Together. But the campaign is not motivated by a desire to promote women’s bodily autonomy. Rather, it believes that ‘family-planning provision is [often] the most important way to respond to conservation challenges’ and that ‘reducing population growth’ can ‘arrest the huge losses of biodiversity’. In short, Thriving Together is prioritising beetles over black people. There is something deeply unpleasant about white environmentalists like Dr Jane Goodall and Sir David Attenborough fronting these campaigns to strongly discourage women in developing countries from giving birth to ‘too many’ children.

Putting aside the ‘colonial violence’ of some population-control organisations, the move to make women’s fertility an environmental issue is deeply worrying. It speaks to a very personalised and atomised view of politics. The most private decision a woman can make – whether or not to have children – should not be made to carry such momentous political weight.

Women’s bodily autonomy is in serious trouble in the current climate. In places like Northern Ireland, Poland and Texas, women can be punished for accessing abortion services. Meanwhile, environmentalist campaigns that hold childbirth responsible for the state of the planet cannot help but make women feel guilty for choosing to keep a pregnancy.

The ideas behind the BirthStrike movement also have some celebrity backing. Miley Cyrus, pop singer and outspoken ‘hippie’, has claimed that millennials ‘don’t want to reproduce because we know that the Earth can’t handle it’. Pop stars might have a reputation for self-absorption, but movements like BirthStrike highlight the narcissism of millennial climate activism. These activists seem to be engaging in a form of semi-religious martyrdom, making the ultimate sacrifice of not having children in order to ‘save the world’.

A woman’s personal decision about pregnancy and birth should be nobody’s business but her own. Any attempt to connect women’s fertility and the planet – no matter how carefully worded – will always end up putting women’s wombs on the political frontline. We should be campaigning to depoliticise every aspect of pregnancy – from testing to contraception, abortion and childbirth. We should certainly not reframe pregnancy in terms of our responsibility to the planet.

Besides, if we truly want to save the planet, we’ll need more human beings – more brains, more brawn and more human ingenuity – to do it.

SOURCE





Green Killing Machines & The Silence Of The Greens

Failure to protect nature and wildlife shames green organisations

Environmental organisations like the RSPB and the Campaign to Protect Rural England are betraying their members by failing to speak out about the devastation caused by the expansion of renewable energy projects all over the countryside. That’s according to a new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which examines renewables’ impact on the natural world.

According to the author, Andrew Montford, nature is already being hit hard by decarbonisation plans:

“The dirty secret of renewable energy is that it requires huge areas of our countryside and this is going to get a lot worse in the future. Wind turbines already kill huge numbers of birds and bats, and yet the RSPB barely opposes a development. Wind and solar power plants scar our landscapes and yet the CPRE say nothing either. ”

And this situation is going to get a lot worse. Net zero carbon emissions will mean a vast expansion of wind and solar farms together with massive expansion of biofuel crops cultivation causing wholesale devastation of the UK’s landscape and wildlife.

As Montford explains:

“The huge wind turbines that are envisaged for the future are going to be hundreds of metres tall, and there are going to tens of thousands of them. Birds won’t stand a chance.”

SOURCE   PDF here

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Things Keep Getting Worse For The Fake "Science" Of Human-Caused Global Warming

If you follow closely the subject of hypothesized human-caused global warming, you probably regularly experience, as I do, a strong sense of cognitive dissonance.  On the one hand, you read dozens of pieces from seemingly authoritative media sources, as well as from important political officeholders, declaring that the causal relationship between human CO2 emissions and rapidly rising global temperatures is definitive; declaring that “the science is settled”; and further declaring that impending further increases in temperatures over the next decade or several decades are an “existential crisis” that must be addressed immediately through complete transformation of our economy at enormous cost. 

On the other hand, you studied the scientific method back in high school, and you can’t help asking yourself the basic questions that that method entails: 

What is the falsifiable hypothesis that is claimed to have been empirically validated?  You can’t find it! 

What was the null hypothesis, and what about the data caused the null hypothesis to be rejected?  You can’t find that either! 

Where can you get access to the methodology (computer code) and the full data set that was used in the hypothesis validation process; and are those sufficient to fully replicate the results?  You can’t find these things either! 

You learn that there have been major after-the-fact adjustments to the principal data sets that are used to claim rapidly warming global temperatures and to justify press releases claiming that a given year or month was the “hottest ever.”  You look to see if you can find details supporting the data alterations, and you learn that such details are not available, as if they are some kind of top secret from the Soviet Union.  (You can read my 23-part series on this subject at this link.) 

What’s going on here?  If this is “science,” it’s some kind of “science” that turns the scientific method that you thought you understood on its head.  I have previously covered multiple instances of real scientists attempting to apply the actual scientific method to the human-caused global warming hypothesis.

 For example, I had a post on September 19, 2016 titled “The ‘Science’ Underlying Climate Alarmism Turns Up Missing.”  That post reported on a scientific paper then just out from a group of scientists led by James Wallace that concluded that the so-called “Tropical Hot Spot” (a pattern of temperatures in the tropical lower troposphere) could not be found in the temperature data, thus invalidating the basis on which the U.S. EPA had concluded that CO2-induced greenhouse warming was occurring.  Another post on May 14, 2018 titled “More On The ‘Science’ Behind The Global Warming Scare” reported on another paper with Wallace as lead author that tested whether any statistically-significant relationship could be shown between the time series line of world temperatures (as measured by UAH) and the time series line of atmospheric CO2.  Conclusion: “[I]ncreasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations did not have a statistically significant impact on the UAH TLT 6.0 temperature data set over the period 1979 to 2016.”

You might think that serious papers like these that seem to have invalidated the very foundations of the global warming scare would draw equally-serious rebuttals from some high-ranking people who back the global warming hypothesis.  Perhaps they would point out important data that were not considered, or would demonstrate a flaw in the methodology.  But you would be wrong.  Instead, these and other comparable papers are simply ignored.  In lieu of any rebuttal, we get endless repetition of the mantra that “the science is settled.”

The past few months bring two new and important papers into the mix.  The first, from the January-February 2019 issueof a Russian science journal, is O.M. Povrovsky, “Cloud Changes in the Period of Global Warming:  the Results of the International Satellite Project.”  The second, with a date of June 29, 2019, is J. Kauppinen and P. Malmi, “No Experimental Evidence for the Significant Anthropogenic Global Warming.”   

Some background will be helpful.  Since about 2007, there has been a notable counter-theory to the hypothesis of human-caused global warming.  The counter-theory is that fluctuations in world temperatures over the past several decades have been caused more by fluctuations in the cloud cover of the earth than by increases in greenhouse gases like CO2.  This counter-theory is often called the “Svensmark hypothesis,” after Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, who proposed it.  The basic idea is that heavy clouds act like an umbrella and prevent sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface, thus resulting in cooler temperatures.  The hypothesis then ties world temperatures to solar activity through the intermediation of cosmic rays.  The hypothesis proposes this mechanism:  Cosmic rays are a factor in ionization of the atmosphere, which enhances cloud formation.  Strong solar irradiation produces a more powerful “solar wind,” which disperses the cosmic rays, leading to fewer clouds on the earth, and hence warmer temperatures.  Conversely, lower solar irradiation allows more cosmic rays to penetrate the atmosphere, forming more clouds and resulting in cooler temperatures. 

I have no position on whether this hypothesis is “right.”  However, prior to the collection of data, it is a plausible hypothesis — equally as plausible as the hypothesis that increasing temperatures are mainly caused by human-emitted greenhouse gases.  Accepting the human-caused warming hypothesis as proved requires rejecting the alternative Svensmark hypothesis (as well as all other plausible null hypotheses; but let’s stick with Svensmark for now).

Which brings us to the Povrovsky and Kauppinen, et al., papers.  Povrovsky did something that somebody should have long since done by now, which is to collect month-by-month satellite cloud-cover data for the earth for the period 1983-2009, and plot it on a graph, and then compare that graph to the month-by-month temperature graphs.  What is the correlation of the two?  From Povlovsky:

[T]he correlation coefficient between the global cloud series on the one hand and the global air and ocean surface temperature series on the other hand reaches values (–0.84) — (–0.86). . . .  Since the tropics are dominated by water areas, this fact suggests that the increasing influx of solar radiation primarily entails an increase in the temperature of the ocean surface (TPO). Not surprisingly, the cloud cover values themselves and their temporal trends are close to global characteristics. Thus, changes in cloud cover over three decades during global warming can explain not only the linear trend of global temperature, but also some interannual variability. 

Kauppinen, et al., pick up where Povrovsky leaves off.  They provide the following graph, comparing the satellite-based cloud data to temperature data for the 1983-2008 period:

Kauppinen-and-Malmi-2019-cloud-temperature-correlation.jpg
The relationship between more clouds and lower temperatures, and between fewer clouds and higher temperatures, is obvious to the eye.  Conclusions (from the abstract of the article):

The IPCC climate sensitivity is about one order of magnitude too high, because a strong negative feedback of the clouds is missing in climate models. If we pay attention to the fact that only a small part of the increased CO2 concentration is anthropogenic, we have to recognize that the anthropogenic climate change does not exist in practice. The major part of the extra CO2 is emitted from oceans [6], according to Henry‘s law. The low clouds practically control the global average temperature. During the last hundred years the temperature is increased about 0.1°C because of CO2. The human contribution was about 0.01°C.  We have proven that the GCM-models used in IPCC report AR5 cannot compute correctly the natural component included in the observed global temperature.

Note that I have not independently verified or replicated the work of either Povlovsky or Kauppinen.  There could well be flaws in their work, either in the data or in the methodology.  The work is now open for all to challenge.

However, both Povlovsky and Kauppinen are doing the fundamental work of science, which is to take a leading contender for an alternative causation hypothesis, and then see which of the two hypotheses is more consistent with the data.  That approach stands in stark contrast to the alternative way of going about things, which I call “fake science,” as exemplified by the IPCC.  That method is only to look at your preferred hypothesis, and dismiss all plausible alternatives with the back of your hand, without ever checking whether one of them might better fit the actual data.  Here is something called “Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report,” which is the IPCC’s most recent detailed pontification on the subject of what causes climate warming.  At page 44 they have their only consideration of what they call “natural radiative forcings”:

Changes in solar irradiance and volcanic aerosols cause natu- ral radiative forcing (Figure 1.4). The radiative forcing from strato- spheric volcanic aerosols can have a large cooling effect on the climate system for some years after major volcanic eruptions. Changes in total solar irradiance are calculated to have contributed only around 2% of the total radiative forcing in 2011, relative to 1750. {WGI SPM C, Figure SPM.5, 8.4}

That’s it.  How about dealing with the Svensmark hypothesis, guys?  Or cloud cover?  Or the effect of CO2 out-gassing from the oceans?  They can’t be bothered.  They already have their pre-determined conclusion.  Meanwhile here in New York, we plow ahead with plans to reconstruct all buildings, build thousands of new wind turbines, ban airplanes, block pipelines, and on and on.  Madness.

SOURCE 






“Join The Skeptical Movement” …Hip German Youths Push Back On Climate Hysteria, Post Skeptic Videos, Go Viral!

What follows today is really quite cool, and highly encouraging in a country known for lockstep thought.

Over the past months we’ve seen great media hype in Germany surrounding climate alarmist youngsters like Greta, FFF and more recently Rezo, who have played major roles in stirring up a lot of climate hysteria, all aided and abetted by the established media.

But apparently in Germany there are a few young, hip persons pushing back on all the climate hype and hysteria with their own videos that have since gone viral.

“Join the Skeptical Movement”

The latest video comes from young German teen Naomi Seibt, who has decided to think for herself and check what’s really behind the climate “science” and hysteria.

Since she uploaded what she calls her “most elaborate project to date” on July 1st, her video — dubbed “Climate change – All hot air? — has been viewed more than 75,000 times and gotten over 8000 thumbs up.

YouTube takes Naomi down – temporarily

She writes at YouTube: “If you want to join the skeptical movement, please share this video.”

In her video Naomi explains how many large factors are at play in the climate system, how the UN IPCC is playing it loose with the facts and that politicians are attempting to use the issue to gain control over every aspect of our individual lives. The 18-year demonstrates an impressive knowledge on the subject, rarely seen among today’s youth.

Naomi’s success apparently has taken the climate activists by surprise and caused them to panic. Die kalte Sonne here reports how YouTube actually took down her video, before reinstating it.

JasonHD: “Manipulations and untruths”
Another spectacularly successful climate hysteria skeptical video was recently produced by German JasonHD on May 24th. In it he takes down climate alarmist and leftist political agitator Rezo (mentioned above) point by point.

JasonHD dismantles the “manipulations and untruths concerning climate change”.

So far JasonHD’s thoughtful video has racked up 190,000 views.

Rapper: “Climate Change – Climate Lies, Climate Swindle”
One of the earlier pioneers of German youth climate-hysteria pushback is Austrian rapper Kilez More, who already in 2011 uploaded his rap song “Climate Change – Climate Lies, Climate Swindle” song on YouTube.

As of today it’s been viewed some 209,000 times.

We need to get these young leaders at the climate conferences in place of the usual old, crusty figures. They’re well connected and are reaching their generation.

SOURCE 






Media Requests for EPA Records Soar Under Trump

Major news outlets, seemingly more prone to investigative reporting in the Trump era, are much more aggressive in seeking records from the Environmental Protection Agency than they were in the final years of the Obama administration, The Daily Signal has learned.

ABC News, CBS News, the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico are among 20 news organizations showing a large increase in Freedom of Information Act requests, according to EPA numbers obtained by The Daily Signal.

The 20 media outlets include not only news organizations with liberal perspectives but some, such as CNN, BuzzFeed, Mother Jones, and Huffington Post, that freely mix news coverage and left-leaning opinion.

According to the data, the biggest percentage increase in FOIA requests to the EPA by the 20 media outlets occurred between 2016, Barack Obama’s last year as president and 2017, Donald Trump’s first year as president.

The organizations made a total of 626 FOIA requests to the EPA in 2017, more than doubling the 249 requests in 2016.

Dating to 1967, the federal Freedom of Information Act  requires disclosure, upon written request and with exceptions, of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the U.S. government. Such requests—whether by a media outlet, other organization, or an ordinary member of the public—have come to be known as FOIAs, after the law’s acronym.

The Washington Post, which added the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to its home page after Trump’s election, submitted just one FOIA to Obama’s EPA in 2014 and none in 2013, 2015, or 2016.

But during the first two years of the Trump administration, the Post submitted 43 FOIA requests to the environmental agency, jumping from nine in 2017 to 34 in 2018.

“Based on The Washington Post’s failure to seek transparency during the Obama administration, it is clear that if democracy does die in darkness, then it died during Obama’s eight years in office,” Rick Manning, the president of Americans for Limited Government, a nonprofit based in Fairfax, Virginia, said in an interview.

“It is not surprising at all to find that Obama’s collaborators in the media showed zero curiosity about the inner workings of Obama’s regulatory regime,” Manning said.

With 2019 only half over, the 20 media outlets have submitted a total of 341 FOIAs to Trump’s EPA, more than the full-year requests to Obama’s EPA in any single year between 2013 and 2016.

The FOIA numbers The Daily Signal obtained from the EPA don’t go back further than 2013, the first year of Obama’s second term.

Here’s a look at what else the FOIA numbers at the EPA show:

The New York Times submitted 59 requests in 2017 and 36 in 2018, up from two in 2016. Politico filed 45 requests in 2017 and 125 requests in 2018, up from five in 2016. 

CBS News submitted 13 requests in 2017 and five in 2018, up from two in 2016. The Associated Press made 23 requests in 2017 and 19 in 2018, up from three in 2016.

ABC News filed 22 requests in 2017 and 10 the next year, compared with three in 2016. BuzzFeed submitted 20 requests in 2017 and 18 in 2018, up from three in 2016.

CNN made 19 requests in 2017 and 28 last year, compared with nine in 2016. The Los Angeles Times submitted seven requests in 2017 and four in 2018, up from one in 2016.

Manning said his organization, Americans for Limited Government, continues to “aggressively FOIA” agencies of the Trump administration, to acquire information denied to him and his team by Obama administration officials.

Kevin Dayaratna, a senior statistician and research programmer with The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in an email that FOIA requests to government agencies such as the EPA are critical to the cause of openness and transparency regardless of who is in power, because executive agencies need to be kept in check.

“The work the EPA does definitely deserves public scrutiny,” Dayaratna said. “Several years ago, I found a mistake in the EPA’s social cost of carbon models used to guide regulatory policy that resulted in overestimates of the Obama administration’s stated results. It is imperative that the public keep an eye on work done by the EPA and other organizations that, if not done properly, can deceive the public and mislead policymakers.”

Dayaratna said public frustration with the lack of government openness during the Obama years may have been a contributing factor to Trump’s election:

I think one reason Trump was elected is that the public saw that the EPA and other agencies were not being completely transparent. So, the American people elected an outsider to shake up Washington. A number of government [computer-based] models have essentially been treated as a black box for years, when they should have been made open and available for public scrutiny.

In addition to The Washington Post, other media outlets that submitted zero FOIA requests during the Obama years include Mother Jones in 2014 and 2015, ABC News in 2015, and the Los Angeles Times in 2015.

The Daily Beast and MSNBC didn’t submit any FOIA requests between 2013 and 2016, according to the data. But The Daily Beast has submitted five requests to Trump’s EPA, while MSNBC has submitted three.

Tim Graham, director of media analysis for the Media Research Center, told The Daily Signal in an email that the disparity in FOIA requests to the EPA between the current and previous administrations provide insight into the media’s tight relationship with environmental advocacy groups. 

“These facts are shocking if you assume the media are fair and balanced, and not allied with one party or another,” Graham said.

“These facts are not shocking if you assume the media are strongly allied with the Sierra Club and the Democrats in Congress. Obama’s EPA are the ‘good guys.’ Trump’s EPA are the polluters. This underlines that when the Old Media stands on a soapbox and boasts about holding people accountable, you can add an asterisk for ‘people we don’t like.’”

The Daily Signal sought comment Monday from all 20 of the news organizations about their FOIAs to the EPA, but only BuzzFeed, Reuters, and The Washington Post responded as of publication time.

Reuters declined to comment. The Washington Post replied that it would need more time to confirm the numbers.

BuzzFeed said in an email response that the increase in FOIAs to the EPA “probably” could be attributed to its addition of a science desk and hiring of two reporters with experience in submitting FOIAs.

SOURCE 





David Attenborough: upper-class warrior

Rich environmentalists would happily make life more difficult for the poor.

If you are British and have watched television at any point in the past 50 years, you know who David Attenborough is and you know what David Attenborough does. Many people find it impossible to imagine a nature documentary without hearing his slightly urgent, curiously authoritative whisper – always expected, always reassuring. When you think of David Attenborough, you think of blue whales bursting out of the waves, gazelles being tackled in slow motion by a lioness, or huddled penguins moodily enduring a blizzard. For more decades than I have been breathing, Attenborough has been educating and enthralling us in equal measure with the wonders of nature and the precariousness and beauty of life.

But even as his constant presence on our screens turned him into a national treasure, few of us knew who Sir David was, or what he thought about anything (besides his devotion to the great outdoors). Like many others, I always thought he was a cuddly, genial figure with a nice mellow voice, who liked sitting next to gorillas. I am less in awe than other people about his televisual longevity. I think that making essentially the same nature documentary roughly 10,000 times is not an automatic qualification for sainthood. But I’m as ready as the next man to sit down for a relaxing bit of lion watching. So I’m grateful for Sir David’s efforts.

But the sad truth is that, in his twilight years, a new figure has emerged, a new light has been cast on the Attenborough legacy. He recently made a Corbynesque appearance at Glastonbury, tottering out from backstage to deliver a short, sharp lecture on climate change, the sad fate of polar bears, and the naughtiness of plastic. The Glastonbury audience listened carefully, of course. Sir David lavished praise on the audience for not buying any of the plastic that was not available to buy this year, and the audience roared with approval. It was an ecologically conscious version of ‘what a great crowd you are’, including a tactful failure to mention the several hundred tonnes of discarded trash that the Glasto crowd leaves behind each year.

Like Jeremy Corbyn or Channel 4’s scrupulously impartial Jon ‘fuck the Tories’ Snow, Attenborough has shown himself to be another elderly, middle-class man suffering under the delusion that he is an 18-year-old student radical. And Glastonbury was not an isolated incident, either. Anything a 16-year-old Swedish girl can do, Sir David has obviously decided, he can do, too. Forget the splendours of nature, huddling down close to a termite mound in South Africa, or watching a crocodile barrel roll its next meal in the Zambezi – Attenborough’s attention is now fixed firmly on the human zoo of politics.

In a recent appearance before parliament’s Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, he compared changing attitudes to plastic to changing attitudes to slavery. He also complained that air travel was ‘extraordinarily cheap’. He called for prices to be hiked, conceding that this would hit the poor hardest. At the same time, he admitted that he himself travels by air ‘frequently’. The best way to ‘restrict’ air travel would be ‘economically’, he argued. So a man who has clocked up more air miles than the average African dictator is deeply concerned that your once-a-year package holiday to Spain is destroying the planet. If Attenborough had his way, a certain class of people (by coincidence, his class) would be allowed to jet around the world enjoying themselves, while others would be restricted from doing so.

Attenborough also seems to think that the British people must bear the greatest cost of green policies because our ancestors developed, discovered and invented more rapidly than those in other parts of the world. Britain ‘started the problem’, said Sir David, to parliament. ‘It was the Industrial Revolution that started here, based on burning coal.’ For Attenborough, the Industrial Revolution was a crime for which people who were not alive at the time must be condemned.

While Sir David observes lions, whales and penguins with a certain geniality, he doesn’t seem to extend the same warmth to his fellow man, especially the poor and working class. Like much of the liberal elite, he sees us as a species to be studied, guided, ruled, prodded and nannied.

And isn’t it revealing, when we consider the class Sir David represents compared with the class that will bear the burden of environmentalist measures? The rich will not struggle to pay more expensive airfares. They will not lose their weeks in the sun. They will not lose the industrial or manufacturing jobs that will be sacrificed to climate-change activism. They will not suffer. But we will.

SOURCE 





Wind farm bird kills ‘should be revealed’

Wind farms should be forced to detail eagle, bird and bat deaths and other environmental impacts on a public online register and face tougher controls on the use of independent experts, Australia’s Wind Farm Commissioner has said.

In response to concerns about the impact of wildlife, Commissioner Andrew Dyer said his recommendations for tougher noise monitoring controls should be extended to environmental harm.

Former Greens leader Bob Brown has objected to a wind farm development in Tasmania because of its visual impact and potential to kill eagles and shore birds. Other wind farm projects have killed many birds, particularly raptors.

A spokesman for Dr Brown said he did not wish to comment, and the office of federal Greens leader Richard Di Natale did not respond to questions.

Wind industry enthusiasts have said more birds are killed by tall buildings, cars and cats.

The use of independent ­experts to estimate the impact of wind farms on animals has been controversial, with accusations of poor data-handling and the ­deletion of nesting and sighting records.

Wind farm developments engage­ experts to estimate the ­potential impact on wildlife. Post-construction monitoring of existing wind farm developments has often shown that the impact on bird life has been worse than ­anticipated.

Despite strict guidelines on how bird and animal losses should be offset, critics argue that little has been done to force wind farm companies to act.

Mr Dyer said his recommend­ations for tougher reporting and reviews of noise issues should also apply to birds.

“Different independent experts should be used before and after projects are commissioned and findings should be properly audited,” he said.

In his latest annual report, the commissioner said the design and approval of a proposed wind farm relies heavily on third-party consultants to prepare a range of ­reports, including assessments ­related to noise, visual amenity, shadow flicker, aviation impact and various environmental ­assessments.

Many of the assessment ­reports rely on complex calculations or results from predictive computer modelling.

Once the wind farm is built, experts are often re-engaged to carry out post-construction ­assessments.

These assessment reports use data from the wind farm, but still rely on assumptions and modelling to analyse the collected data.

“It is very common practice that experts engaged to perform the design assessments and ­reports during the planning phase are the same experts engaged by the developer to perform the post-construction assessments,” Mr Dyer said.

“There is certainly scope for a much better separation between the experts used for the predictive assessments used in the design, versus the experts used for the post-construction assessments of a wind farm, along with the ­addition of audits of the expert­’s work.”

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Putting a Cap on Heat Hysteria

Joe Bastardi
   
It’s summer, it’s hot, and the climate-change agenda is turning up the heat on the weaponization of weather. So I thought some perspective may be in order.

No question the last three Julys have been warmer than average for a large area of the nation. But for perspective, the three Julys before that were quite cool in the U.S.


The 2015-16 Super El Niño, with its input of massive amounts of water vapor, changed all that. How can we tell it’s water vapor and not CO2? Because nighttime lows (mins) are beating out daytime highs (maxes) in relation to averages. The moisture in the air when the air is stable at night effectively keeps temperatures up (as do Urban Heat Islands).

However, because there is not enough corresponding warming aloft, more clouds form during the day from convective processes as it heats up, leading to more rain and holding maxes down. There is a perfectly natural explanation for why it’s become so wet.

The average for maxes is not as strong for most. West Texas is quite dry, so it’s the exception to the rule. The drier it is, the hotter it can get during the day. But in the area where dew points are higher relative to the rest of the country, you can see the difference (the Southeast, for instance).

Now contrast this with three great heatwave years: 1934,1936, and 1966. Look at the maxes. Now look at the mins:

The maxes are much higher. Remember, “hot” is not 75°F instead of 70°F for a nighttime low. Even mins in the 80s don’t carry the same weight. Hot is when it is 106°F, like it was in July 1936 in New York City. So how did New York City reach 106°F then, but with this current super heatwave, it’s highly unlikely to occur again, despite there being even more widespread urbanization than we had in 1936?

One could say it’s a matter of semantics. But then why do some people use the term “hot” instead of “warm”? Besides, temperature is not a measure of feeling; it’s a metric that is based on heat. Here is the definition of it from Encyclopedia.com:

Heat is a form of energy — specifically, the energy that flows between two bodies because of differences in temperature. Therefore, the scientific definition of heat is different from, and more precise than, the everyday meaning. Physicists working in the area of thermodynamics study heat from a number of perspectives, including specific heat, or the amount of energy required to change the temperature of a substance, and calorimetry, the measurement of changes in heat as a result of physical or chemical changes. Thermodynamics helps us to understand such phenomena as the operation of engines and the gradual breakdown of complexity in physical systems — a phenomenon known as entropy.

It’s a form of energy. So to make temperatures higher takes even more energy. If there’s something capping that, it will show up in maxes, not mins.

The fact is, maxes are not going up, but mins are. So the mean is higher. But calling something like the month of June “hot” is absurd, because the planet’s average temperature was low enough that we would all be wearing sweaters. But again, those are feelings. What higher mins mean is that there is more energy available, but it becomes self-limiting at higher temperatures.

So where would water-vapor increases affect temperatures most visibly? We get more water vapor into the air via the oceans, since they have 99.9% of the heat capacity of the system. The increase in moisture, brought about by years of warm water surrounding the U.S. and the input of massive amounts of water vapor into the air by the Super El Niño, simply does not disappear. Remember, an extra gram of water vapor has little impact where it’s normally warm, but it does have an impact where it’s colder. It’s intuitive. What happens when you breathe out on a cold morning when the temperature is near the dew point? That’s not CO2 you see with each breath.

Of course, if I wanted to use the mentality of the people pushing the heat narrative, I could say, “Hey, you have your point if you say it’s warmer, especially at night. But is CO2 not also holding temperatures down during the day?”

If I was a propagandist, I would say CO2 is limiting how hot it can get.

We know that’s not the case, but I am saying that kind of mentality is being used. And yet we can see that what we’re observing is natural.

The “hottest year” missive is a grossly oversimplified distortion of what has perfectly natural causes and can be seen simply by looking at the details of temperatures. The daytime highs of recent Julys can’t hold a candle to what happened in the years shown above.

SOURCE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)




We Finally Know Why Florida's Coral Reefs Are Dying, and It's Not Just Climate Change

Since they admit that there has been no change in ocean temperature in the area, it's not climate change at all

Climate change is killing the world's coral reefs. But it's not the only factor turning them into white, dead husks. According to a new study, all the chemicals humans are dumping into the ocean are making it easier for the hotter weather to do its deadly work.

The research paper, published online Monday (July 15) in the journal Marine Biology, is based on data collected over three decades from the Looe Key Sanctuary Preservation Area in the Florida Keys. Coral coverage declined from 33% in 1984 to just 6% in 2008 in that sanctuary. Even as temperatures have trended upward globally, average local temperatures didn't change much during the study period. This allowed researchers to disentangle a number of different problems sickening (or "bleaching") the reef.

First, the researchers found, bleaching events — due to the loss of algae called zooxanthellae that give coral their color — did tend to occur once water temperatures had spiked above a threshold of 86.9 degrees Fahrenheit (30.5 degrees Celsius). Such a spike occurred 15 times in the period covered in the study (between 1984 and 2014)

Second, and significantly, the ratio of nitrogen and phosphorus in the water turned out to be a key factor in determining when and to what extent coral bleached. When Florida rains caused agricultural fertilizers containing nitrogen and phosphorous to run off into the ocean, coral death was more common. Those increased nutrients in the water caused algae blooms, which in turn seemed to predict mass coral deaths. Nitrogen, in particular, turned out to be the most important factor related to mass coral bleaching.

This study didn't examine the mechanism by which nitogren leads to bleaching, said Brian Lapointe, lead author of the paper and a researcher at the Harbor Branch of Florida Atlantic University. But other research by scientists studying the Great Barrier Reef has shown why and how it happens, he told Live Science.

As the nitrogen-phosphorous balance in the ocean gets out of whack, certain membranes in the coral start to break down. The coral can't get enough phosphorous, he said, leading to "phosphorous limitation and eventual starvation."

"It degrades the ability of these organisms to survive high light and high temperatures," Lapointe said. "It actually reduces their light and temperature thresholds."

A great deal of the effect of these added nutrients could be mitigated by improved water-treatment plants, the researchers noted. Most of the nitrogen in runoff doesn't pour right off the land into the sea during rainstorms, but instead passes through water-treatment plants that fail to remove the chemical.

In Dutch-controlled regions of the Caribbean, the researchers noted in a statement, improved sewage-treatment plants do pull nitrogen out of the water. And in those places, coral reefs are faring better than they are off the coast of Florida, the scientists pointed out.

Coral isn't just a necessary foundation of thriving marine ecosystems, the researchers said in their statement. Reefs also directly contribute $8.5 billion each year and 70,400 jobs to the Florida economy, according to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

"Citing climate change as the exclusive cause of coral reef demise worldwide misses the critical point that water quality plays a role, too," James Porter, an emeritus professor of ecology at the University of Georgia and a co-author of the paper, said in the statement. "While there is little that communities living near coral reefs can do to stop global warming, there is a lot they can do to reduce nitrogen runoff. Our study shows that the fight to preserve coral reefs requires local, not just global, action."

SOURCE




A Democratic Professor Explains What His Party Gets Wrong about Climate

By Caleb Rossiter

As the Republican-called witness at a recent hearing, I was denounced by the Democrats for denying a fossil-fueled "climate crisis" that, as their witnesses testified, results in violence against women, asthma and obesity in children, and deadly storms. But few actually questioned me. After all, "the debate is over."

So instead, the latest belle of my party's ball, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, left the dais to urge protestors outside to drown me out. She'd previously written Google and Facebook, asking them to block me and the CO2 Coalition of 50 unalarmed scientists I direct from speaking at conferences they sponsor.

At the hearing, I presented data from the United Nations contradicting the accepted wisdom that extreme weather is destroying the planet and is traceable directly to a man-made climate crisis. There are no such trends in rates of sea-level rise, hurricanes, floods, or droughts. One Democrat who stuck around to actually question me simply asserted that our coalition is funded by energy companies. I wish! Another wanted to know, "Do you believe in climate change or not?" When I asked him to define it, he cut me off with: "That answers it all...That gives us a hint where you're coming from."

Indeed it does. Where I'm coming from is academia, where defining the scientific terms we discuss is elemental.

The whole affair shows just how much has changed. A decade ago I'd been the one pummeling a Republican-called witness, a little-known pollster named Kellyanne Conway, in my role as counsel to a Democratic committee chairman. And the last time I'd been a witness, as director of a foreign policy group in 1994, I'd been called in by Democrats who were backing our "no arms to dictators" bill. But now I am a heretic for using scientific facts to dispute exaggerated talking points.

The reformed slave's hymn "Amazing Grace" talks about the hour he first believed. My downfall came from the hour I first didn't believe. It was in 2003, when I was teaching at American University and a student had written a term paper accepting these claims from a 2001 U.N. report: the recent four-tenths of a degree increase in global temperature was caused by carbon dioxide emissions; this rate and level of warming were unprecedented for 1,000 years; and carbon dioxide emissions would drive temperatures up six degrees by the year 2100.

As a good Democrat who knew nothing about global warming except that Vice President Al Gore said it was dangerous and driven by the use of fossil fuels, I was predisposed to believe all this. But rather than assess the quality of the report's evidence for its claims, my student had simply accepted the claims because of the credibility of U.N. scientists. "That settles it," she wrote. I scrawled a big red "F" across her paper and wrote, "No, that begins it." The first rule, indeed the purpose, of statistics is not to "appeal to authority" but to force any authority to prove claims like everybody else. I began to read the report, so I could grade her paper when she resubmitted it.

In the U.N.'s summary, I found a temperature chart from 1860 to 2000 based on thermometer readings, mostly from developed countries. Since so little of the earth's land and virtually none of its oceans had been comparably measured, the data were woefully incomplete, making it difficult to draw large-scale conclusions. Only since 1980 was there a reliable estimate, based on radiation readings from satellites. When the differences across time are smaller than the uncertainties and errors, as in this case, there is no justification for claiming "trends."

I could see the recent increase, from 1980 to 2000, but there was also a slightly larger increase from 1910 to 1945, with flat periods before and after. Another chart showed carbon dioxide's share of the atmosphere slowly increasing from 1860 to 1945 and then surging at four times that rate.

The U.N. report said that the first warming was mostly natural but the second was mostly from CO2. The picture was now pretty complicated. During periods of low carbon dioxide, we saw both strong temperature growth and no temperature growth. The same was true for periods of high CO2. This is, of course, not proof of a low correlation or a lack of causation. Life is not bivariate. Other variables and feedback can affect temperature as well. My students had learned to remove the effect of other variables statistically, using a computer modeling technique called multiple regression, so the true level of correlation can surface. If it's strong and the hypothesized cause precedes the effect in time, and you can't think of any other causal variables that should be removed, then you have a case for causation.

It turned out that computer models were indeed the basis for the U.N. claims about recent "detection" of a change in temperature, and "attribution" of the cause being CO2 emissions. But they weren't testable statistical models; they were mathematical exercises in curve-fitting - essentially, finding a model that fits your data. The modelers themselves called them projections rather than predictions.

These Global Climate Models randomly use thousands of input guesses until their output roughly tracks the chart of average temperatures. Then those final guesses are used to run the model forward to estimate how much warming industrial CO2 will cause in 100 years. But one of the input guesses is the warming effect of CO2, so the modelers control the final answer from the start!

The "proof" cited by the U.N. study was that the fit improved when CO2 emissions are included in the model along with a few well-known natural events, such as solar changes and volcanoes. I laughed out loud when I saw that. I could create a great fit with temperature for any series, from batting averages to the stock market, if I too could fiddle with thousands of parameters. The father of these models was Cold War military theorist John von Neumann, who wanted to see if we could cause drought in the Soviet Union. He failed, thank goodness. Von Neumann joked, "with four parameters I can draw an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

MIT atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen, a member of our coalition who was a U.S.-appointed representative on the U.N. panel but left when it became a propaganda tool, has called the U.N. logic "proof by lassitude." By this he means that just because you can't identify the combination of interactions and feedback that drives temperature doesn't mean there isn't one. Lindzen has pointed out that the modelers themselves build in feedback when it suits them. A full two-thirds of the modeled warming comes from a hypothesized response by the atmosphere to an initial warming from CO2.

The claim of a thousand-year high came from a temperature chart called "the hockey stick," generated by a backward-looking model that took a "new statistical approach" to the records of the widths of the rings of old trees. This one was pretty much all art and no science. The data conveniently wiped out a previous consensus that there had been a natural "medieval warming period" that exceeded today's temperature. The resulting graph was flat until the carbon dioxide era and then shot up by grafting on different data (though not the raw tree ring proxies, which actually went down).

On its face it was silly, and on careful reading it became even sillier. But what the U.N. and my student hadn't recognized was that even if true, the chart was irrelevant to whether our recent warming is mostly human or natural. Every 100,000 years, oscillations in the earth's orbit drive temperatures up and then down far more than the recent fluctuation.

The processes and feedback are poorly understood. A brief stable period within this massive, complex system that ends in correlation with a change in a single variable, carbon dioxide, is no more proof of causation that a strongly oscillating period ending with the same correlation.

When I asked my coalition's physicists, agronomists, geologists, and meteorologists to write about the hour they first didn't believe, it turned out they didn't have one. They always knew that CO2 was a minor warming gas, and never found the models' focus on it compelling. The last 30 years have not been kind to the models. The exaggerated media claims about their projections of warming and its catastrophic effects keep getting extended rather than realized.

Someday the climate science narrative will return to a place of reason. When it does, I'll be waiting there for my Democratic Party.

SOURCE





British school pushing ‘extinction rebellion’ propaganda to 7-year-olds

Voters in Kent will be pleased to discover that their hard-earned taxes have been going on promoting extremist group Extinction Rebellion to children as young as 7. Here’s Ramsgate Arts Primary School asking parents and teachers to take part in a “climate justice” printing session with their new art teacher, who will teach pupils how to decorate their clothes with slogans and symbols from a radical far-left doomsday cult hell-bent on the wholesale destruction of the global economy. Even the new eco-Gove would think twice before putting that in the National Curriculum…

“Our new art teacher Karen Vost will be printing Extinction Rebellion climate justice symbols and messages on clothes if you or your children would like to learn to print and learn more about climate change please pop along and meet Karen.”

An art teacher indoctrinating children into a radical cult making claims about human extinction too extreme for even climate scientists to support. All paid for by you…

SOURCE





Australian government could fund Peter Ridd’s fight against Greenie crooks at James Cook University

Quite aside from anything else the issue of legal costs is big  here.  JCU has already spent $630,00 on denying Dr Ridd justice and once they have to pay Ridd's legal costs that will rise to around one million.  And that is cheap compared to what a High Court appeal would cost.  But that is money that should have been used to fund research and teaching.  It is a fundamentally unjust use of taxpayer funds.  The government has a beef with JCU on those grounds alone.

And a High Court appeal would be sheer vindictiveness.  Once they have lost their case in a lower court, the prospect of a win in the High Court is dim.

The government should impose financial penalties if an appeal goes ahead.  It would be a misuse of funds that were allocated for research and teaching.  JCU will probably claim that the money comes out of administrative funds but if such funds were so flush the surplus could still have been diverted into a research grant, which would have been much more in keeping with the purposes of the university.

And what was Dr Ridd's offence, that has brought down so much rage on his head?  He made a cautious and scholarly comment about the validity of some measurements made by his colleagues.  The normal response to such an observation would be to go back and check the validity concerned.  That such a normal scholarly procedure was not folowed suggests that the measurements really were invalid and known to be invalid, implying that the damage to the Great Barrier Reef was  being exaggerated

In my own research career I was very careful about the validity of my measurements and reported it if a measure did not survive a validity check (e.g. here).  That's light years away from the practices at JCU so I congratulate Peter Ridd for raising the issue there

Attorney-General Christian Porter has told Coalition MPs that the Commonwealth could assist in supporting costs for sacked academic Peter Ridd to help him in his legal fight against James Cook University.

The Australian has been informed by multiple sources that Mr Porter left the door open for the Commonwealth to play a role in supporting Dr Ridd in today’s joint party room meeting and identified a scheme which could be used to assist the academic.

The internal discussion in the party room comes as JCU moves to appeal a Federal Court finding that the university’s sacking of the physics professor was unlawful, with several Coalition MPs voicing their concerns in today’s joint party room meeting at the appeal.

Sources told The Australian that Education Minister Dan Tehan told the joint party room meeting that he was concerned by the decision of JCU to appeal the April decision by judge Salvatore Vasta.

Dr Ridd is seeking financial compensation after he was sacked by JCU for publicly criticising the institution and one of its star scientists over claims about the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef.

Liberal MPs told The Australian that Mr Tehan said that he planned to meet with the JCU Vice Chancellor to raise his concerns directly and that Mr Porter viewed the appeal as significant and argued that it had the potential to change the landscape of academic freedom in a fundamental way.

In the party room meeting, Victorian Senator James Paterson asked Mr Porter whether the Commonwealth could do anything to contribute to Dr Ridd’s costs for the appeal, with the Attorney-General giving a loose commitment to see whether there was scope for the federal government to play a role.

This was confirmed by multiple Liberal MPs in the meeting. The Australian has contacted Mr Porter’s office for comment.

The Australian was also told that several Coalition MPs spoke to the issue including Sydney based MP Craig Kelly who initiated the discussion by saying he was concerned at how much money JCU would spend on the appeal.

The Australian has also been informed that George Christensen also said that, while JCU was important to his electorate of Dawson, he was increasingly concerned at the developments in relation to Dr Ridd.

Liberal sources said that North Queensland MP Warren Entsch raised concerns about the impact of the legal dispute on tourism and attitudes towards the Great Barrier Reef.

The Australian was also informed that new Queensland Senator Paul Scarr also criticised the JCU press release on the judgment, describing it as outrageous.

In April, Justice Vasta ruled JCU had erred in its interpretation of a clause in its enterprise agreement and deprived Dr Ridd of his right to express his academic opinion. Within hours of the judgment being released in April, JCU published a statement on its website criticising the ruling.

A spokesman for the Attorney-General told The Australian that Mr Porter had undertaken “to get a brief from his department on whether these are matters relevant to the Commonwealth Public Interest and Test Cases Scheme.”

The spokesman said that this scheme provided “financial assistance for cases of public importance, that settle an uncertain area or question of Commonwealth law, or that resolve a question of Commonwealth law that affects the rights of a disadvantaged section of the public.”

“It is notable that there has been no application to this Scheme in relation to this matter,” he said.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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

UK: Extinction Rebellion founder in race storm: Vile anti-Semitic posts found on Facebook page run by Left-winger behind climate change movement

Two founders of Extinction Rebellion were caught up in a race storm yesterday after virulently anti-Semitic messages were posted on a Facebook page linked to the movement.

The posts were among several examples of extremist material and sinister conspiracy theories on the page run by Left-winger Gail Bradbrook, one of the people behind XR.

When a supporter asked why fake news accusing the British Government of trying to poison former KGB man Sergei Skripal and his daughter was on the page, Ms Bradbrook replied: 'People are free to post information in the general subject area.'

The offensive posts included:

A link to a blogpost quoting from an infamous fake 19th Century Russian anti-Semitic tract Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

A meme of Guy Fawkes carrying a barrel of gunpowder outside Parliament, captioned 'Plan B', adding: 'Waving banners and asking nicely for them to stop is not working.'

A post expressing solidarity for Chris Williamson just a day after the Labour MP was first suspended by his party for alleged anti-Semitism.

A vile meme comparing Iain Duncan Smith to Adolf Hitler over the former Work and Pensions Secretary's treatment of the disabled.

Mother of two and practising Pagan Ms Bradbrook, 47, is an administrator of the Facebook group Compassionate Revolutionaries.

She is also a director of Compassionate Revolution, a non-profit company which holds the XR bank account.

Her partner Simon Bramwell, a co-founder of XR, is an administrator of the Facebook group.

The news came as XR blocked roads in several major cities last week.

Activists were forced to apologise after blocking the M32 in Bristol and preventing a man from reaching his dying father in hospital.

Ms Bradbrook said: 'I'm horrified to have been alerted to anti-Semitism showing up in a Facebook group I'm associated with. As a busy mum I don't have time to monitor everything. As soon as I heard I immediately closed the page to further posts.'

In a report by the Policy Exchange think-tank, called Extremism Rebellion, anti-terror expert Richard Walton said the eco-friendly image of XR concealed an anarchic organisation whose leaders planned to overthrow capitalism – and even parliamentary democracy itself – by illegal means.

Ms Bradbrook said: 'We are absolutely non-violent in responding to profound existential threat.'

SOURCE 





Berkeley Approves $273,341 Salary for New Czar to Enforce Nation’s 1st Natural Gas Ban

The Berkeley, California City Council has authorized paying a $273,341 annual salary to a new position dedicated to implementing the nation’s first ban on natural gas in new buildings.

On Tuesday, the council approved an ordinance proposed by Councilmember Kate Harrison, effective January 1, 2020, on any new buildings, requiring all new buildings built to have electric infrastructure and banning natural gas energy:

RECOMMENDATION

1. Adopt an ordinance adding a new Chapter 12.80 to the Berkeley Municipal Code (BMC) prohibiting natural gas infrastructure in new buildings with an effective date of January 1, 2020.

2. Refer to the November 2019 budget process for consideration of allocating up to $273,341 per year from excess equity to fund a two-year position in the Building & Safety Division of the Department of Planning and Development. The staff person will assist with implementing the gas prohibition ordinance and reach codes, and perform other duties as specified in the Financial Implications section of this item.

The initial version of the proposal called for creation of a “career” (permanent) position, which was revised to a two-year job before passage. Under “Financial Implications,” the council explains the position’s duties:

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

Staff time will be necessary to implement the new permit regulations.

Staff estimates that the total annual staff cost for a two-year position to implement a gas prohibition ordinance and reach codes would be $273,341 per year, funded from excess equity. The position would be in the Building & Safety Division of the Department of Planning and Development.

The staff person would also:

Assist the City of Berkeley in advancing its leadership in electrifying buildings;

Assist in development of future code amendments would be the lead staff for managing implementation of new energy-related ordinances and codes, including the Deep Green Building Standards;

Provide training to staff and assistance and consultation to applicants; and,

Assist property owners with incentives (e.g., anything offered under the Pathways to Green Buildings plan, the electrification transfer tax subsidy ordinance).

Mayor Jesse Arreguín warned of the “cataclysmic impacts” of climate change in his endorsement of the ordinance at the council’s meeting, The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

“I’m really proud to be on this City Council to adopt this groundbreaking ordinance. ... We know that the climate crisis is deepening and is having cataclysmic impacts.”

One section of the proposal describes the “The Climate Emergency” the natural gas ban seeks to address:

F. The Climate Emergency

In June 2018, the Berkeley City Council declared a city-wide Climate Emergency, aimed at reviewing the City’s greenhouse gas emission reduction strategies, commitments and progress in light of recent political, scientific and climatic developments.16 In 2018, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested that to keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius, governments must initiate a dramatic 45% cut in global carbon emissions from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach global ‘net zero’ around 2050. The time for incremental emissions reduction strategies is over—policymakers must begin implementing “far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

SOURCE 





Voters Reject Green Campaigners’ Extreme Climate Policies

Bjorn Lomborg

All over the world voters prefer parties whose energy policy focuses on driving down power prices instead of making energy ever more expensive.

The renowned naturalist and climate change campaigner Sir David Attenborough believes governments should face a reckoning for their failure to tackle global warming. Speaking recently about the US and Australia, he expressed a hope that the electorate would vote out governments who are not taking the climate seriously enough. The problem for Sir David and other campaigners is that, far from punishing politicians who pledge to scrap expensive climate policies, voters in Australia just backed them.

The Australian election was dubbed the “climate change election”. Pundits expected the climate-concerned Labor Party to cruise to an easy win, but didn’t count on a voter backlash against their drastic plans. One model estimated that the party’s planned 45 percent slash in carbon emissions would set the economy back by 264 billion Australian dollars (£149 billion) and claim some 167,000 jobs. Voters duly re-elected right-of-centre Coalition parties whose energy policy focused on driving down power prices and beefing up supply.

Australians are far from alone in saying no to expensive green schemes. Americans elected Donald Trump in part because of his promise to boost manufacturing and fossil fuel industries by repealing environmental regulations he blamed for hurting blue-collar jobs. But even in Democrat states, voters dislike the measures being pushed by climate campaigners.

Last September, Colorado voters rejected an effort to sharply limit oil drilling on non federal land, while Arizona citizens rejected an attempt to accelerate the shift to renewable energy. If voted through, the initiative would have amended the state’s constitution to require renewable energy for 50 per cent of power generation by 2035 – a massive jump from 6 per cent today.

Huge amounts of money were poured in, including more than $20 million from climate campaigner and billionaire Tom Steyer, but even that wasn’t enough. In Democrat-dominated Washington, voters rejected a measure to become the first state to tax carbon emissions.

In Brazil, the Philippines and several eastern European nations, voters have embraced populist leaders who reject expensive climate policies. In Paris, the gilets jaunes took to the streets to protest against moves to push up fuel prices.

None of this means that voters don’t want global warming solved. A recent poll shows that two-thirds of Americans, for example, support “aggressive action” on climate change. But if you ask them what they are willing to pay, two-thirds won’t even pay $100 in annual climate taxes.

People are saying that climate change is one of the many problems facing us today, and the solution needs to be appropriate. This sentiment lines up with scientific reality.  According to the UN Climate Panel, the impact of global warming by the 2070s will be the equivalent of a 0.2-2 per cent loss in average income.

To solve a problem worth about the same amount as a single recession, some politicians and campaigners have gone far overboard. The New Zealand government’s aim for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 would, according to a government-commissioned report, cost 16 per cent of GDP. The British Government’s own net-zero policy would, the Chancellor warned, cost more than £1 trillion.

What’s more, these policies – which will hit the poorest in society hardest – will have almost no impact on the planet’s climate even in a hundred years unless we can ensure that emerging giants China and India also cut emissions.

SOURCE 




Government is a great servant but horrid master

Today bigger, supremely powerful global governments are justified by environmental claims

Jeffrey Foss

Through the ages, the suffering, destruction and murder perpetrated by governments like those of Caligula, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and their ilk reduces the evil of common criminals like Al Capone, Daniel Ortega, Bernie Madoff and El Chapo to the scale of breaking wind at Sunday dinner.

There is a historical lesson here for any of us who would entrust our sustenance, security and happiness to government. History teaches us that when governments go bad, they can really stink – enough to make us ashamed of our very species. But the more we entrust to government, the bigger it gets; and the bigger it gets, the more likely it is to become our ill-odored, malignant master, instead of our servant or helper. 

Governing is all about power, of course. Otherwise the governed would not obey, and anarchy would ensue, assuming it wasn’t there already. Thus the first power of government must be the appropriation of violence (such as imprisonment, torture and execution) unto itself for its sole use. All other forms of violence are outlawed.

If you or I kill someone, that is murder, which is illegal. But when government kills someone, it is execution or warfare, which is perfectly – and ever so conveniently – legal. If we take money from someone by force or stealth, that’s theft, But when government does likewise, it’s taxation, fees or fines. If I break into your house, I do not pass Go, I do not collect $200, I go straight to jail. If government breaks into my house, they get the police (or even a SWAT team) to do it.

All governments are born in sin: the appropriation of overwhelming power. Power doesn’t immediately or necessarily entail evil, of course. Power can be used for good. But misuse of power is as seductive as Delilah sitting at the side of the bed.

So government must be controlled, like the powerful beast it is, by putting a ring though its nose. The genius of democracy is that it ties that ring by millions of strings to the hands of ordinary people like you and me, by our votes. By pulling together we can control the beast – unless we let it get too dang big, or we get divided into one faction that wants small, controllable government and another that wants free stuff and payment for not working, courtesy of legalized government theft and violence against others.

So our first rule must be to vote for less government, not more. Note well that, by a cruel irony of fate, the so-called Democratic Party, which advertises itself as the champion of the powerless, is for ever-bigger government. Note also that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln that freed the slaves, is for less.   

To be clear as blue skies, I am not arguing against government. Far from it. Government is necessary. Good government is a wonderful servant: it lubricates our cooperation while putting a lid on our violence as we procure food, clothing, shelter, safety and (if we engage in the proper pursuits) happiness.

If you take a look at what’s around you, you made or created little or nothing. Others made it for you, just as you make things for them, in a system of cooperation involving money, banks, sales, purchases, property, mutual benefit and so on. This system gives us virtually everything we have.

History and observation teach that democratic governments linked to economic freedom have excelled in helping us produce the plenty we now enjoy. Our form of democratic, republican government, relative to every other form that has ever existed, is best at serving the people.

But government can also be a horrible master. The reason people outside the developed democracies do not enjoy the health, wealth and happiness we have is that their governments suffer from the disease universally endemic to government: serving itself to achieve its own goals.

It is no accident that the government atrocities of Stalin, Mao and their ilk were inflicted on their own citizens. These leftist governments gained and sustained power by claiming they cared deeply about the people and pretending the vice of envy is really a virtue. They thereby instigated hatred of the rich by the poor, hatred of the successful by the unsuccessful, hatred of the happy by the discontented. Weakened by internal conflict, the people were readily conned into domestic and foreign wars both hot and cold, and into bizarre economic experiments. Over 100,000,000 were starved, murdered or worked to death.

By yet another cruel irony of fate, the poor were the main victims. Stalin, for instance, reorganized millions of previously successful farmers into communes, and then starved them to death when they were bold enough to protest that farming itself was being destroyed. Those citizens he permitted to live did so in despicable poverty and fear, while Stalin himself spent his days in the palaces of the Czars, the very people he reviled, strutting about like a toy soldier, grinning like the cat that ate the canary.

Today we are told even vastly bigger government is needed – at a global level – to protect planet and civilization from the ravages of fossil fuels, runaway climate change and big evil corporations.

We already see this eco-imperialism imposed on billions of people, who are told they develop as they wish, use fossil fuels or improve their health and living standards more than a trifling bit. As the globalist ruling elites gain ever more power, they are demanding that citizens of already developed countries reduce their living standards, stop driving cars and flying airplanes, and eat insects and organic vegetables instead of meat or conventional foods. Of course, like Stalin, the ruling classes would exempt themselves from the diktats and penalties they impose on the masses.

Let there be no doubt: history teaches there are two keys to the levels of health, wealth and happiness that we humans have so far achieved. The first is democracy: putting government under our control. The second is freedom to make our own economic choices, to work for whom we choose, to own property, and to start businesses if we like, without being smothered by endless regulations, paperwork and taxes.

But keeping government under control isn’t easy. Government power stealthily increases, even in democracies. As Figure 1 shows, the growth of US government has been relentless, creeping and sneaky since the halcyon days when the Original Colonies first cut off the chains of monarchy.

The graph shows that government’s share of all the money made in the country has steadily increased from about 3% in 1790 to over 40% today. Who can doubt that government had less power in 1790 than it does now? Or that the people rebelled over far less odious usurpations than they face today?

Those who lean left preach that there are good reasons for us to envy and revile the rich – indeed, anyone in the arbitrarily designated 1% of top earners. But by a stroke of unparalleled self-deception they refuse to see that this same logic applies with its ultimate force to big-spending, big-taxing, big-borrowing, big-leftist government itself.

So if you are tempted by some politician’s promise to play Robin Hood for you, you are being fooled. Politicians may pretend to be Robin, but under their disguise of forest green you will always find the evil Sherriff of Nottingham and his taxman. And what honor is there in getting someone to steal for you?

It is wrong for any of us to envy, revile or hate the rich simply because they are rich. We should instead rejoice in the success of law-abiding people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Stewart Butterfield (my former student, Canadian entrepreneur and midwife of Flickr and Slack). They are beacons of hope.

Those decent people among us who legally acquire a few millions or billions of dollars to pose against the many trillions of dollars taken from us by government are like those 1776 colonists, who rose up against King George III, wrote a Declaration of Independence and Constitution that set down their inspirations, aspirations, and belief in God, unalienable natural rights, and small government with limited powers, intentions and instruments of taxation and suppression.

They show us that we too can get ahead, be free and prosper with limited government that understands its proper role.

Via email. Dr. Jeffrey Foss is a philosopher of science, Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada, and author of Beyond Environmentalism: A Philosophy of Nature

                                                                                                 


Bill to reinstate Obama pesticide ban ignores science

House legislation to ban neonicotinoids in wildlife refuges would hurt bees and wildlife

Paul Driessen

The battle over neonicotinoid pesticides rages on. In response to one of many collusive sue-and-settle lawsuits between environmentalist groups and Obama environmental officials, in 2014 the Department of the Interior’s Fish & Wildlife Service banned neonic use in wildlife refuges.

Following a careful review of extensive scientific studies, the Trump Interior Department concluded that neonics are safe for humans, bees, other wildlife and the environment. In August 2018 it reversed the ban.

Last month, Rep. Nydia M. Velázquez (D-NY) introduced HB2854, to reinstate the ban via legislation. She and 21 cosponsors (all Democrats) say neonics threaten biodiversity, bees and other wildlife in the nation’s refuges. Anti-pesticide groups have rallied behind the bill.

Their efforts are misguided and based on bad, outdated or even dishonest information.

Neonicotinoids are the world’s most widely used insecticide class. As I have noted in previous articles (here, here and here, for example), these systemic, advanced-technology insecticides are sprayed on many fruits and vegetables. But some 90% of them are used as seed coatings for corn, wheat, canola, soybeans, cotton and similar crops. Either way, they are absorbed into plant tissues as crops grow.

Neonics protect plants against insect damage by effectively targeting only pests that actually feed on the crops, particularly during early growth stages. Since they don’t wash off, they reduce the need for multiple sprays with insecticides that truly can harm bees, birds, other animals and non-pest insects.

Moreover, because neonics from coated seeds have largely dissipated from plant tissues by the time mature plants flower, they are barely detectable in pollen and nectar. That explains why extensive studies have found that neonic residues are well below levels that actually can adversely affect bee development or reproduction under real-world (non-laboratory) conditions.

It also helps explain why annual surveys and studies continue to show steady beehive and honeybee population increases since the infamous “colony collapse disorder” and “bee-pocalypse crisis” of a few years ago.

While over-winter and summer losses are still troublesome in places, they now occur overwhelmingly in hobbyist hives. Professional beekeepers, who handle the vast majority of US bees and hives, have learned how to control what was really, or primarily, behind the worrisome honeybee losses: Varroa destructor mites that arrived in the USA in 1987.

Bee larvae hatch with Varroa mites already attached to them, and these tiny parasites suck the hemolymph blood-equivalent out of bees, attack bee fat body organs, compromise their immune systems, and provide pathways for other viruses, diseases and fungal pathogens into bees and colonies.

The destructive mites infected hive after hive. What were once nuisance infections became devastating epidemics, and sometimes efforts to control the mites and diseases further damaged hives. Maintaining healthy hives became much more complicated and difficult, especially when multiple pathogens invaded.

As disease control efforts improved, hive counts and honeybee populations climbed. They are now at or near 20-year highs in North America and every other continent.

As to claims that neonics should be banned from wildlife refuges, a 2015 international study of wild bees published in Entomology Today found that most wild bees never even come into contact with crops or the neonics that supposedly threaten them.

The same study also determined that only 2% of wild bees are much involved in crop pollination, and thus become exposed to these pesticides. Yet they are among the healthiest bee species.

Many US Wildlife Refuges were established along migratory bird flyways to provide food for waterfowl. But some can provide sufficient food only through cooperative agreements that let local farmers plant corn, wheat and certain other crops on refuge lands in exchange for leaving some of their crops unharvested, to supplement natural animal food on the refuge.

Some of those farmers do use neonic-coated seeds, preferring that to more traditional insecticides which must be sprayed several times during the growing season, potentially harming bees and other non-target insects or even birds and other wildlife.

Even organic farmers employ crop protecting insecticides that are highly toxic to bees, including rotenone, copper sulfate, spinosad, hydrogen peroxide, azidirachtin and citronella oil, Risk Monger Dr. David Zaruk points out.

Other organic farm chemicals are very toxic to humans. Boron fertilizer and copper sulfate fungicide can affect human brains, livers and hearts. Pyrethrins are powerful neurotoxins that can cause leukemia.

Lime sulfur mildew and insect killer causes irreversible eye damage, and can be fatal if inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the skin. Rotenone is a highly toxic and can enhance the onset of Parkinson’s disease. Nicotine sulfate is an organic neurotoxin that interferes with nerve-muscle transmissions, causes abnormalities in lab animal offspring, and can lead to increased blood pressure levels, irregular heart-rates and even death in organic gardeners.

They may be “natural” or “organic,” but they’re still powerful and potentially harmful. And in sharp contrast to neonics and other synthetic pesticides, most Big Organic chemicals have not been tested for residue levels or toxicity, Zaruk notes.

Members of Congress should applaud neonic use – instead of condemning it or trying to ban it from refuges – or from all modern agriculture, as some seek to do.

They should focus greater attention on Varroa mites (and Nosema ceranae parasites), and on programs and technologies that really do pose a threat to endangered whooping cranes, other threatened birds, and bats: the proliferation of wind turbines along migratory flyways and close to many wildlife refuges.

They should investigate (and defund) the latest fad among allied radical environmentalist groups – and even some government agencies, like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Agro-ecology has become a hardcore political movement that rejects and seeks to ban biotech (GMO) and patented hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers, neonics and other pesticides, and even tractors and other mechanized equipment.

Agro-ecology thus perpetuates primitive backbreaking agriculture, poverty, malnutrition and needless death in poor countries – while hypocritically claiming to safeguard ecological values and “social justice.”

Before they introduce legislation, legislators should read reputable scientific studies, rely less on pressure group press releases, and avoid associating with organizations that stridently oppose all manner of modern technologies in the name of protecting bees and other wildlife, indigenous people and human rights.

Via email

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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