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31 August, 2004

JUSTICE: MARXIST GREENIE DIES OF MOSQUITO BITE

He would almost certainly still be alive today if DDT were still in use -- as would the millions who have died of malaria in the third world

Many are remembering Walt Contreras Sheasby, the Southern California socialist organizer, Green Party member and advocate for the underdog, for his scholarship and his dogged devotion to the cause of human rights. The 62-year-old Sheasby, a former resident of Sierra Madre, died Aug. 19, spending mearly 10 days in Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Fontana after first suffering from the effects of the mosquito-borne West Nile Virus, according to Robert Shaw, a spokesperson for the San Bernardino County Coroner's Office....

Sheasby and Kovel, the author of numerous books on nature and capitalism who ran for president from the Green Party's left against Ralph Nader in 2000, both considered themselves "Red/ Greens" for their work with that party and their political leanings toward socialism.....

Others, like readers of this paper, may remember when a clearly agitated Sheasby, a four-time Green Party candidate for public office since 1992, responded impatiently to a story written about him by former Weekly reporter Erica Zeitlin. Sheasby, it seemed, became irritated the more Zeitlin pressed for details on a Marxist study group that Sheasby was heading up in the Pasadena area. But finally, he lost his cool and lit into Zeitlin, who ultimately left the Weekly about a year later to work for an anti-sweat shop campaign spearheaded by former state Sen. Tom Hayden. "If you're asking these questions because you're interested in writing a titillating article that panders to anti-Marxist sentiments, then you can just write some other article," Sheasby snapped.

To all of this, Zeitlin and co-writer Jaymee R. Cuti wrote back via email advising Sheasby to "chill out, comrade," a recommendation that apparently didn't go over very well. Two weeks later Sheasby wrote back, quoting Marx directly on the role of journalists....

More here.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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30 August, 2004

THE PLANKTON PANIC

Oh Dear! One has to laugh. There was a HUGE panic among Greenie scientists last year about North Sea plankton. This was one headline: "North Sea Facing Collapse Of Its Ecosystem. Fish Stocks And Sea Bird Numbers Plummet As Soaring Water Temperatures Kill Off Vital Plankton".

The latest article, however, is a lot more cautious -- as well it should be. Generally speaking, warmer temperatures are associated with more species diversity and greater plant growth (including greater algal growth) -- which in turn boosts populations of everything that eats plants or eats plant eaters. Warming of a sea should therefore be associated with a change in the mix of fish species but with more fish overall. And during the mediaeval warm period, the North Sea was said to be teeming with herring -- a very much sought-after fish. So the latest headline is simply: "Plankton respond to warmer seas".

And it is not now even certain that there has been any change in the plankton population. Just one excerpt from what the various scientific commenters had to say:

"Thorsten Blenckner, at the University of Uppsala, said that setting these results in a global context must be approached cautiously. "First, plankton were sampled from a fixed depth of approximately 10 meters," Blenckner, who was not involved in the study, told The Scientist. "However, the warmer upper layer might change more as a consequence of climate change, leading to differences in the way plankton distribute themselves in the water column."

"Second, fishing practices over the duration of the study period have changed markedly, which might have altered the species composition anyway, even without climatic effects." Still, Blenckner said, "the study certainly suggests a tendency towards phenological change, but more work must be done to determine how widespread the effects are."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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29 August, 2004

WACKY GREEN JUDGES

"In 1983, Dr. Fred Purcell and his brother purchased an interest in 216 acres in Travis County near Austin, Texas, which lie within 1,200 acres, which sit at the intersection of two major highways in a rapidly growing commercial and residential area. The Purcells' property, on which they installed water and wastewater gravity lines, force mains, lift stations, and other utilities, contains a number of caves. In 1988 and 1993, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) declared six invertebrate species that live in the caves "endangered" under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). These cave bugs (arachnids, arachnids, and insects, some with eyes, some eyeless) range in length from 1.4 mm to 8 mm. Importantly, the cave bugs are found only in parts of Texas' Travis and Williamson Counties. Plus, there is no commercial market for them; nor do people travel to Texas to see them.

In 1989, the FWS told the Purcells that development of their property would violate the ESA because it would constitute a "take" of cave bugs. In 1990, in an effort to alleviate the FWS's concerns, the Purcells deeded six acres, containing caves and sinkholes in which the cave bugs were known to live, to a non-profit environmental organization. But then, in 1993, after Dr. Purcell cleared brush from his property, the FWS told him that he was under criminal investigation for "taking" endangered species. In 1998, after years of stonewalling, which drew a rebuke from a federal judge, the FWS barred the Purcells from using their property.

In 1999, the Purcells and their partners sued... In 2003, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld the lower court's decision, ruling that, because "takes" of cave bugs threaten the "interdependent web" of all species, the cave bug's habitat may be regulated....

On May 27, 2004, the Purcells and their partners asked the Supreme Court to hear their case and to announce, whether, in interpreting the Commerce Clause consistent with the vision of the Founding Fathers in the Court's 1995 Lopez ruling, the Court really meant it. On August 6, the United States will respond. The Commerce Clause implications are quite serious given that half of all ESA-listed species exist only in one state and occur only on private land...."

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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28 August, 2004

The Frankenfood Myth

Some book review excerpts:

In this provocative and meticulously researched book, Henry Miller and Gregory Conko trace the origins of gene-splicing, its applications, and the backlash from consumer groups and government agencies against so-called “Frankenfoods”—from America to Zimbabwe. They explain how a “happy conspiracy” of anti-technology activism, bureaucratic overreach, and industry maneuvering has resulted in a regulatory framework that squanders advances in biotechnology and denies farmers and consumers in the U.S. and abroad the benefits of this safe and environmentally beneficial tool.

The authors go on to suggest a way to emerge from this morass, which stems in no small part from a cynical lobbying strategy by the very biotechnology companies that now find themselves so heavily regulated and frequently attacked. They propose a variety of business and policy reforms that can unlock the potential of this cutting-edge science, while ensuring appropriate safeguards and moving environmentally friendly products into the hands of farmers and consumers.



“Misguided public policies have seriously restricted research on, and applications of, genetic engineering in agriculture. Miller and Conko analyze why and how this has occurred. They point out the danger that the present unwarranted regulatory oppression will become the norm, and they make a strong case for drastic change in present policies. Their call for policies based on realistic risk-benefit considerations needs to be heard loudly by those responsible for the present fiasco.”



“People are starving because frightened, ignorant, self-centered people coined the word ‘Frankenfood.’ Genetically engineered crops could save millions of lives, if regulators and misguided activists would just get out of the way. Scientists have done their part; they created the technology to feed a lot of starving people. Miller and Conko are doing their part; they’ve written a book that will change the debate over biotechnology and how it’s regulated. Miller and Conko describe biotech’s potential to both alleviate human suffering and improve environmental stewardship, and they offer science-based models for regulation. It’s time for the rest of us to do our part – read the book, fight the power, and feed the people. The hard work is done; all we have left to do is get policy-makers to do the right thing.”



“Henry Miller and Gregory Conko have accurately and lucidly portrayed the current distortion in policymaking toward the new biotechnology. They describe how demagoguery by well-funded, well-organized opponents has capitalized on fears and uncertainties toward gene-spliced crops; how these attacks stifle thoughtful, deliberative policy-making; and how they are slowing the progress of a powerful new tool. Miller and Conko brilliantly expose the peril of allowing the precautionary principle to drive risk analysis and policymaking. Their thorough and articulate deconstruction of the precautionary principle should serve as a guide to developing regulatory policy, not only for biotechnology, but for any new idea or technology.”

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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27 August, 2004

Endangered Species Act sparks battle: "The Endangered Species Act has left Native Americans and environmentalists pitted against farmers and ranch families 30 years after it was passed. Nowhere is that conflict more apparent than in Klamath Falls, OR, where in 2001 federal officials shut off irrigation water to protect endangered fish. 'How did 2001 affect me? My farm, how do you say, went 'bye bye,' said former farmer Venacio Hernandez. Environmentalists consider the act a success because it protected threatened species by stopping development and saving habitat. The act was passed to protect 100 species but it now protects more than 1,300, sealing off millions of acres from development. 'There has to be balance. If we continue down this road -- doing away with the ESA to solve this problem -- we are deceiving ourselves,' said Allen Foreman of Klamath Tribes"



No choice for the poor: "Affluent societies expend countless hours on 'fluff' choices while ignoring places in the world where choices are very different and truly tough. In third world countries, people choose between food or malaria medicine because they can't have both. During drought, poor farmers must choose between feeding their kids today, or feeding the family cow for milk tomorrow. ... Green do-gooders invade third-world countries to 'help' them avoid the 'bad choices' we Americans made -- those awful choices that led to abundant food, advanced medical care and unprecedented wealth -- the same wealth that paid for their airfare."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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26 August, 2004

SCIENCE CONTRADICTS THE U.N. ON GLOBAL WARMING (SURPRISE!)

"How many times have we heard from Al Gore and assorted European politicians that 'the science is settled' on global warming? In other words, it's 'time for action.' Climate change is, as recently stated by Hans Blix, former U.N. Chief for weapons detection in Iraq, the most important issue of our time, far more dangerous than people flying fuel-laden aircraft into skyscrapers or possibly detonating backpack nukes in Baltimore Harbor.

Well, the science may now be settled, but not in the way Gore and Blix would have us believe. Three bombshell papers have just hit the refereed literature that knock the stuffing out of Blix's position and that of the United Nations and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC claims to have carefully corrected the temperature records for the well-known problem of local ("urban," as opposed to global) warming. But this has always troubled serious scientists, because the way the U.N. checks for artificial warming makes it virtually impossible to detect in recent decades -- the same period in which our cities have undergone the most growth and sprawl.

The surface temperature record shows a warming rate of about 0.17?C (0.31?F) per decade since 1979. However, there are two other records, one from satellites, and one from weather balloons that tell a different story. Neither annual satellite nor balloon trends differ significantly from zero since the start of the satellite record in 1979. These records reflect temperatures in what is called the lower atmosphere, or the region between roughly 5,000 and 30,000 feet.

Four years ago, a distinguished panel of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that a real disparity exists between the reported surface warming and the temperature trends measured in the atmosphere above. Since then, many investigators have tried to explain the cause of the disparity while others have denied its existence.

So, which record is right, the U.N. surface record showing the larger warming or the other two? There's another record, from seven feet above the ground, derived from balloon data that has recently been released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In two research papers in the July 9 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, two of us (Douglass and Singer) compared it for correspondence with the surface record and the lower atmosphere histories. The odd-record-out turns out to be the U.N.'s hot surface history.

This is a double kill, both on the U.N.'s temperature records and its vaunted climate models. That's because the models generally predict an increased warming rate with height (outside of local polar regions). Neither the satellite nor the balloon records can find it. When this was noted in the first satellite paper published in 1990, some scientists objected that the record, which began in 1979, was too short. Now we have a quarter-century of concurrent balloon and satellite data, both screaming that the UN's climate models have failed, as well as indicating that its surface record is simply too hot."

More here:



GREEN OR TERRACOTTA?

"I'm indebted to Prof Parth Shah from New Delhi, for explaining to me that I'm a Terracotta.

If you're a green, you believe in wildlife (without humans) and wilderness, you want to change attitudes, you believe in communal ownership.

If you're a Teracotta - a material which comes from the earth, but only through the medium of human agency, you believe that humans are part of the world ecology, that you want to see wise use of environmental resources rather than mere wilderness, that you want to change incentives (rather than the minds of politicians) and that private ownership and property rights are probably the best way to protect scarce things, like the environment. Makes sense to me."

(From the Adam Smith blog.)

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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25 August, 2004

THE SYMBIOSIS BETWEEN GREENIES, THE MEDIA AND GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRATS

Some excerpts from Kary Mullis, Nobel prizewinner for chemistry

"Who are these people who make comfortable salaries arranging scientific symposia and stories for the media? They aren't politicians. Politicians don't know anything about scientific things. They just want to look like they do. Somebody has to advise them. Who are those advisors? It's an important question because those people--who are always having to come up with the imminent disasters that can be prevented by governmental projects, sponsored by informed and well meaning politicians-are manipulating you. They are parasites with degrees in economics or sociology who couldn't get a good job in the legitimate advertising industry. They are responsible for a lot of the things that you accept year after year as your problems. The problems they imagine for you are as imaginary as the commercials during Seinfeld about some Australian outback macho guy, with a Hollywood model by his side, driving a four-wheel-drive vehicle, with pathetic halfwits in pursuit due to a misunderstanding about the relative merits of the vehicles.

Who pays these experts? Is it the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the United Nations is supporting with our money? Or is it the Environmental Protection Agency, which you were bitching about today because your company was having to close down one of its plants due to some fish that might go extinct, and you might get transferred in the shuffle? Is it the Tropical Oceans and Global Atmosphere Group? Is it the Arctic Climate System Study? Is it the Marlowe Walker Eternity Endowment? Is it the World Ocean Circulation Experiment? Is it the World Bank's Global Environment Facility? Is it Greenpeace? The Sierra Club? You are too tired from your day at work to try to figure it out. That's what James Buchanan predicted. But the sun never sets on the British Empire or bureaucrats--environmentalists, as many of them are called today. Sleep soundly. Your planet is in well-fed hands."

The walls of the ivory tower of science collapsed when bureaucrats realized that there were jobs to be had and money to be made in the administration and promotion of science. Governments began making big investments just prior to World War II. Scientists and engineers invented new firearms, sharper things, better engines, harder things, airplanes that could fly faster, radar to detect them, antiaircraft guns to shoot them down, antibiotics for the pilots who got shot down, amphetamines to keep everybody awake long hours, daylight savings time to lengthen the hours, and finally one big bomb that in a shocking finale brought World War II to a breathtaking and hideous end.

Very little experimental verification has been done to support important societal issues in the closing years of this century. Nor does it have to be done before public policy decisions are made. It only needs to be convincing to the misinformed voter. Some of the big truths voters have accepted have little or no scientific basis. And these include the belief that AIDS is caused by human immunodeficiency virus, the belief that fossil fuel emissions are causing global warming, and the belief that the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere has created a hole in the ozone layer. The illusions go even deeper into our everyday lives when they follow us to the grocery store.

People believe these things, and a slew of others, not because they have seen proof but because they are ingenuous: they have faith. These issues don't have to be on faith. They are not transcendental. Some of them are hard to investigate, because you can't do experiments easily with people's daily lives, but they can be investigated, then confirmed or dismissed. If not, scientists should not be talking about them. Newton would not have allowed someone to carry on about saturated fats and heart attacks inside the Royal Society because like so much of the nutritional garbage that we are assaulted with daily, it is all conjectural, awaiting further study that will probably not be done.

Scientists who speak out strongly about future ecological disaster and promote the notion that humans are responsible for any changes going on are highly suspect. Turn off the TV. Read your elementary science textbooks. You need to know what they are up to. It's every man for himself as usual, and you are on your own. Thank your lucky stars that they didn't bother to change their clothes or their habits. They still wear priestly white robes and they don't do heavy labor. It makes them easier to spot."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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24 August, 2004

DETECTING CLIMATE CHANGE IN CURRENT WEATHER IS DUMB

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is generally in favour of the global warming theory. It gets them funding. But they are good enough scientists to point out that current weather proves nothing. Strange weather goes back a lot further than what global warming theory would require. Just a few excerpts:

"Australians don't need to have read Dorothea Mackellar's My Country to know that they live on a continent of drought, flooding rains and many other spectacularly savage climatic events. Now staff at the Bureau of Meteorology have captured it all in Drought, Dust and Deluge: A Century of Climate Extremes in Australia.

"We live today in a time of speculation and concern about the possible impacts of global warming," writes the bureau's director, Geoff Love, in the foreword to the new book. "In particular, there is increasing speculation that some weather and climate extremes are becoming more frequent. In speculating about the future, however, it is instructive to consider the past. In order to fully appreciate the significance of what the future might hold, we should be aware that the climate, particularly its extremes, is neither steady, nor necessarily undergoing a constant trend."

Flooding is, overall, Australia's costliest form of natural disaster with average losses estimated at $400 million a year, the bureau says. In 1972, a thunderstorm dumped a record 78.5 millimetres on Melbourne's CBD in one hour - 100,000 tonnes of water over one square kilometre. The resulting flash flood inundated shops and put the trains out of action.....

The world record for the longest sequence of days with maximum temperatures equal to or above 100 Fahrenheit (37.8C) was set in Western Australia's Marble Bar in 1923-24 - 160 days. The highest temperature recorded in Australia using standard observing techniques was 50.7C at Oodnadatta in South Australia in 1960 and Sydney's CBD record of 45.3C was in 1939.

Heatwaves have accounted for more deaths in Australia than any other climatic event, the bureau notes. The 1939 scorcher killed 438 people in South Australia, Victoria and NSW.

Drought is the most economically costly climatic extreme. The modern nation was born in the midst of the 1895-1902 "Federation Drought". It was so bad that the NSW Government declared February 26, 1902, a day of "humility and prayer", such was the concern about Sydney's water supply.

Many scientists, including the controversial Tim Flannery, are adamant that the warming of the globe has resulted in more extreme weather such as cyclones and heat waves. There is a strongly held view that the "drought" is actually the start of a long-term climatic shift towards hotter, drier conditions....

As for things like storms, more data is needed to determine if they are becoming more destructive or more frequent. "Theoretically, there should be more storms with global warming because the atmosphere can hold more moisture," Collins said. Similarly, the idea that the dry spell is a result of global warming rather than another El Nino cycle is "quite possible", but will require years more data to be sure."

More here



AND A BRITISH EXPERT AGREES

"Hurricane Charley lashed the coast of Florida over the weekend, causing at least 19 deaths and billions of dollars of damage. The biggest swarm of locusts in a decade is currently devouring crops in West Africa. News reports show us dramatic photos of the village of Boscastle in Cornwall, England, looking like a town swept into the sea after yesterday's floods. The rest of the UK has tropical storm Bonnie, which killed three people in America, to look forward to (though by the time it reaches us it will only be 'high winds and rain'). And there have been 'extreme weather conditions' in Australia, China and Utah over the past week, too.

Bad weather stories have dominated the headlines. Some claim the strange weather systems are a spin-off of global warming, proof, according to one commentator, 'that our overheating planet is going to have ever more "extreme weather" episodes'. Others warn of worse to come. According to John Powell, deputy executive director of the World Food Programme, tens of millions of the world's poorest people are threatened by 'an unprecedented wave of freak and extreme weather' . Has Mother Nature lost the plot?

Dr Mark Saunders, a weather expert at University College London (UCL), says we need to cool down. 'I don't think the weather we have seen is particularly unusual, to be honest. Somewhere in the world you will always get extreme weather events - whether it's a storm, a flood, or a drought. There are always people being affected by extreme weather. There is no study to my knowledge which shows that more people are being affected now, or that more people will be affected by freak weather this year than in previous years.'

Indeed, says Saunders, when it comes to the most violent form of extreme weather - hurricanes - there has been a downward shift in recent years. Hurricanes are Saunders' main area of expertise. He is Lead Scientist at the Tropical Storm Risk Centre in the Department of Space and Climate Physics at UCL, a leading authority on predicting and tracking storms. Hurricane Charley may have been one of the most destructive in recent years, killing 19 and leaving 800,000 homes and businesses without electricity - but Charley cannot be seen as evidence of a rise in extreme weather episodes, says Saunders. 'The past four years have been unusually quiet for hurricanes.'

'We knew this would be an "active" year, we predicted that. Around eight hurricanes are predicted to strike America this year. But we have to remember that Charley is really the first main hurricane event for several years. Overall, the losses from hurricanes have been running at about 80 per cent below average since 2000".

More here.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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23 August, 2004

THE DUST STORM MENACE: GLOBAL COOLING!

This article from "New Scientist" is highly amusing -- because it such a mixture of fact and fiction. The claim that the Greenland icecap is melting is pure fiction, for instance. And we can discount the "explanation" for the African dust-storms. Putting the prime blame on a few SUV's instead of desertification due to chronic overgrazing is laughable. But the claim that dust-storms fertilize plankton which then absorb lots of that wicked carbon dioxide that Greenies hate is reasonable enough. So if that is causing the oceans to cool down and oceans are 70% of the earth's surface, where does that leave global warming? We seem to have a case here of Greenies being at war with one-another. Excerpts:

"Dust storms are increasing globally with far-reaching consequences for the environment and human health, scientists are warning. Up to three billion tonnes of dust is blown around the world annually, says Andrew Goudie at the University of Oxford, UK. Dust storms originating in Saharan Africa have increased ten-fold over the past 50 years, threatening human health and coral reefs thousands of miles away, and contributing to climate change, he warns.

The problem is far worse than previously believed, he says after studying 50-years-worth of global satellite imagery. A major cause, he says, is the increasing use of four-wheel drive vehicles to replace camels to cross the deserts. "Toyota-isation" - a term Goudie coined to describe the constant desert journeys made by Toyota Land Cruisers - is scarring the desert's protective surface layer, releasing dust into passing winds. "If I had my way, I would ban them from driving off-road," he said.....

Deforestation, overgrazing, and the shrinking of lakes, such as Lake Chad and the Aral Sea, have also contributed to the problem. Dust storms, measuring an average 200 kilometres across and carrying up to 100 tonnes of dust, are carried as far away as Greenland or the US by winds at the base of storms. The effects have been wide-ranging - coral reefs 3000 km away in the Caribbean have been destroyed by Saharan dust. Ice caps in Greenland are melting, causing raised sea levels, because the dark dust deposited there absorbs heat from the sun rather than reflecting it in the way pure ice does....

Dust storms will increasingly effect climate change, although experts are unsure exactly how. Airborne dust reflects sunlight back, while also insulating the earth's heat. In a vicious cycle, particles landing in the seas encourage plankton growth, which absorb carbon dioxide - a major greenhouse gas - and so cool the ocean surface...."



Kyoto global warming treaty proving unworkable: "Recent developments in Japan, Russia, and Canada suggest the international Kyoto Protocol is doomed to failure ... with or without U.S. participation. In Japan and Canada, both of which came very close to rejecting the treaty, meeting emission reduction targets is proving extremely difficult. Canadian conservatives are pledging to pull the nation out of Kyoto if they attain victory in future national elections. In Russia, government officials continue to publicly deride the lack of scientific and economic justification for the treaty."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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22 August, 2004

GREENIES THREATEN THE WINE INDUSTRY

"California is under attack by parasites, of both the six-legged and two-legged variety. The former are glassy-winged sharpshooters, leaf-hopping insects that are among the state's most insidious agricultural pests. They carry Pierce's disease, a lethal bacterial infection of grapevines and other major crops, for which there is no cure. The two-legged parasites are the activists and regulators who are making safe, effective new agricultural technologies unavailable in California....

The meager weapons currently available to attack the sharpshooter are part of a state-federal program that pays for the inspection of plants shipped from areas known to be infested by glassy-winged sharpshooters and for the testing of potential chemical and biological control agents. In the long run, however, detection and control are doomed to fail. As acknowledged by Dale Brown, president of the Napa Valley Grape Growers Association, "Genetic resistance is where we want to go."

There are several ways to introduce or enhance the resistance to Pierce's disease in new variants, or varieties, of grapevines. One logical approach is to transfer genes that confer resistance into California's grapes from distantly related, non-commercial grapes that possess natural immunity. But conventional grape breeding is a notoriously slow and uncertain process, and attempts to use the more sophisticated and efficient gene-splicing techniques have run afoul of EPA and local regulatory policies.....

The EPA discriminates against gene-spliced varieties, by regulating even more stringently than chemical pesticides any plant that has been modified with gene-splicing techniques to enhance its pest- or disease-resistance. This policy, which has been attacked repeatedly by the scientific community as unscientific and irrational, has badly damaged agricultural research and development. It flouts the widespread scientific consensus that gene-splicing is more precise, circumscribed and predictable than other techniques. New gene-spliced varieties can not only increase yields, make better use of existing farmland and conserve water, but -- especially for grains and nuts -- are a potential boon to public health, because the harvest will have lower levels of contamination with toxic fungi and insect parts than conventional varieties. Moreover, by reducing the need for spraying crops with chemical pesticides, they are environmentally and occupationally friendly.

Agbiotech's potential is proven. A decade ago, an epidemic of papaya ringspot virus had virtually destroyed Hawaii's $64 million a year papaya crop, but by 1998 biotech researchers provided virus-resistant varieties that have preserved the industry. Yet, the EPA holds gene-spliced plants to an inappropriate, extraordinary standard, requiring hugely expensive testing as though these plants were highly toxic chemicals. In effect, these policies impose a hugely punitive tax on a superior, and badly needed, technology."

More here



Anti-biotech bills find little traction in state legislatures: "Despite recent high-profile measures in California counties and in the Vermont legislature to ban or heavily regulate genetically enhanced crops, most state legislatures are following the federal government's lead in rebuffing the opponents of biotechnology. In 2002, 130 bills and resolutions addressing biotechnology were introduced in state legislatures, according to a May 2004 study conducted by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology. Fifty of the 130 measures were in support of biotechnology."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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21 August, 2004

AN INTERESTING THEORY ABOUT GREENIE SCARES FROM A READER:

"I remember when I was a teenager in the 80's we were all doomed soon because we were going to run out of oil. Part of this fear was probably inspired by OPEC at the time but the argument wasnt that OPEC was making the oil disappear, we were just running out, according to scientists.

Then I remember following global warming in magazines like Omni and Discover in the late eighties and we were all doomed. Lately reading about how they keep finding more and more oil it occurred to me that the fear of running out of oil disappeared around the same time global warming became a looming disaster. At least this is what it looked like in the popular media.

This can't be a coincidence. It's my guess that when the environmentalists could no longer scare us with empty tanks, and scientists could no longer tap this fear for alternate energy resources, and Democrats could no longer blame Republicans and big oil for this nearing economic disaster, a new cause took its place. It probably wasnt planned but just happened automatically.

Now occasionally I see the oil shortage scare popping up, and this happened at the same time global warning theories are starting to crumble. But I believe something fascinating is going to happen soon. Not too long ago we banned CFCs because of the hole in the ozone, even if many scientists thought this might be a natural cycle. After they turned off the CFCs the hole in the ozone still got bigger. The scientists were a little puzzled but I actually saw some blame it on global warming!!! But then the hole got smaller and they are now claiming we saved all life on earth despite depriving poor countries of cheap refrigeration that the developed countries benefited from for so long.

I believe that soon, both the global warming theories and the oil shortage theories will crumble simultaneously and finally under overwhelming evidence and this will horrify Greenies everywhere, and terrify underfunded scientists everwhere, as the world grows richer guiltlessly buring the seemingly endless supply of fossil fuels...

And then a miracle happens! Natural cycles will cause the hole in the ozone to grow bigger again, and a link will be found between burning fossil fuels and the depletion of ozone. It will be some crazy chemical reaction like carbon monoxide or acid rain reacts with salt water and it releases bromine that floats up and destroys ozone".

The ozone hole does indeed fluctuate but it probably fluctuates too wildly to be of any further use to the Greenies. As is reported here, the hole was at its biggest in 2000 -- well after CFCs had been banned. Even more interesting, however was that in 2002 the hole shrank so much that it disappeared -- being replaced by two much smaller holes. Then in 2003 it was back at its second largest size ever. Extreme changes like that clearly indicate random natural fluctuation rather than systematic influence from ozone or anything else man-made. Even Greenies would not like a theory that could be turned on its ear in 12 month's time.



GREENIES RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW

Another way Greenie measures kill

"The U.S. Senate will devote most of March to debating a $35-billion energy package that supposedly will protect Americans from both greedy sheikhs and global warming. But if enacted as proposed, the measure actually would result in a good deal of American blood needlessly spilled on U.S. highways.

At the heart of the proposal is a dramatic tightening of automotive fuel economy standards fleet-wide to 35 miles per gallon by 2013. Current standards require passenger cars to average 27.5 mpg and light trucks 20 mpg. But the vehicle downsizing necessary to meet such a standard would jeopardize the safety of American motorists far more than any threat posed by an oil embargo or melted ice caps. For all the fury against trading blood for oil in foreign policy, the fuel economy chorus largely disregards the lives lost to satisfy mileage requirements.....

Fortunately, Americans have heeded their own experiences rather than the tired rhetoric of the auto-bashers. Indeed, small trucks comprise nearly half the vehicles on the road today, and most motorists instinctively know what empirical research and the laws of physics confirm: larger vehicles are safer than small ones.

But stricter CAFE standards would require further downsizing of the nation's fleet. A 10-percent reduction in weight, for example, increases mileage by 8 percent on average, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. However, reducing vehicle weight by 500 pounds also increases crash fatalities between 14 percent and 27 percent annually (2,000 to 4,000 additional deaths), according to research by Harvard University and the Brookings Institution. And the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has found that cars with a curb weight under 2,500 pounds account for two-and-a-half times as many crash fatalities as sport utility vehicles weighing 5,000 pounds or more....

Driving habits largely beyond the reach of government intervention are the primary cause of most traffic fatalities. Nearly two-thirds of those killed in crashes were unbuckled, and 40 percent of all traffic deaths were alcohol related.

As to the notion that SUVs are major contributors to global warming, Robert Crandall of the Brookings Institution has shown that emissions from all new vehicles amount to around 2 percent of all CO2 emissions in the U.S. "Changing truck fuel standards is an inefficient way to address global warming," he says.

Congress has been fully apprised of CAFE's inherent dangers. In the upcoming Senate debate, then, lawmakers need only decide whether to score political points or save American lives.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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20 August, 2004

ENVIRONMENTALISM KILLING MILLIONS IN POOR COUNTRIES

On Friday the science journal Nature published a series of papers on malaria and its control. Focusing on this preventable and curable disease is crucial and timely; malaria is the biggest killer of children in Africa accounting for over 1 million deaths world wide each year. Furthermore, we are now at the halfway point through the World Health Organization's (WHO) Roll Back Malaria program which can only be described as an unmitigated failure. Unless urgent and far reaching reforms are made to Roll Back Malaria and its partner organizations, malaria's death toll will continue unabated. One partner, UNICEF, the UN children's agency, is even sending a pianist instead of urgently needed nets and drugs

The WHO, World Bank, the US aid agency, USAID, and UNICEF launched Roll Back Malaria in 1998. Their aim was to halve malaria deaths by 2010. So far malaria deaths have risen by 12%.

Some countries are getting malaria control right though. Mozambique, Swaziland and South Africa have successfully driven the incidence of the disease to almost all time lows. Zambia, one of the world's poorest countries is also witnessing increased success against the disease. The common thread among these countries is that they are rolling out highly successful new combination drug therapies and are running insecticide spraying programmes to kill adult mosquitoes that rest indoors. Crucially, these malaria control programs are funded not by UN bodies or established donor agencies but by the relatively new Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM) and the private sector.

Unlike GFATM, the Roll Back Malaria partners are unwilling to fund interventions that work but upset environmentalists, such as indoor insecticide spraying. They are also not living up to their own funding requirements. One article in Nature points out that the funding the Roll Back Malaria partners promised to control the disease has not been delivered. In April 2000 the World Bank promised to pledge between $300 and $500 million to combat malaria. So far, the Bank claims to have authorized loans of between $100 and $150 million. Yet if malaria is to be successfully controlled, at least $5 billion needs to be devoted to prevention and treatment programmes every year.

During the 1950s and 60s, USAID funded the WHO's malaria eradication program. Although this program was prematurely terminated, US taxpayer funding was responsible for saving millions of lives; were that only true now. Like the World Bank, USAID's funding is inadequate; as importantly, it ignores what malarial countries actually need. USAID claims that it spends 34% of its $65.6 million malaria budget on disease treatment, but admits that it actually doesn't buy any drugs. With drug resistance rising, changing over to new effective therapies is essential. USAID's refusal to provide funds for those drugs is tantamount to a death sentence for anyone unfortunate enough to be infected with malaria.

Many African countries want to increase indoor spraying with insecticides, yet here, too, USAID's policy is failing since the agency prefers to focus its prevention strategies on insecticide-treated nets.

More here



CLIMATE SCIENCE VERSUS THE GLOBAL WARMING RELIGION

Excerpts from an article by Philip Stott -- professor emeritus of biogeography in the University of London:

"In any discussion of climate change, it is essential to distinguish between the complex science of climate and the myth - in the sense of Roland Barthes, or the 'hybrid', following Bruno Latour - of 'global warming'. The latter is a politico-pseudoscientific construct, developed since the late 1980s, in which the human emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, is unquestioningly taken as the prime driver of a new and dramatic type of climate change that will result in a significant warming during the next 100 years and lead to catastrophe for both humanity and the Earth.

This, in turn, has morphed since 1992 and the Rio Conference on the environment into a legitimising myth for a gamut of interconnected political agendas - above all for a range of European sensibilities with regards to America, oil, the car, transport, economic growth, trade, and international corporations. The language employed tends to be authoritarian and religious in character, involving the use of what the physicist PH Borcherds has termed the 'hysterical subjunctive'. Indeed, for many, the myth has become an article of a secular faith that exhibits all the characteristics of a premodern religion, above all demanding sacrifice to the Earth.

By contrast, the science of climate change starts from the principle that we are concerned with the most complex, non-linear, chaotic system known, and that it is distinctly unlikely that climate change can be predicted by reference to a single factor, however politically convenient that factor....

First, is the climate changing? The answer has to be: 'Of course it is.' Evidence throughout geological time indicates climate change at all scales and all times. Climate change is the norm, not the exception, and at any moment the Earth is either warming or cooling. If climate were ever to become stable, it would be a scientifically exciting phenomenon. To declare that 'the climate is changing' is therefore a truism. By contrast, the global warming myth harks back to a lost Golden Age of climate stability, or, to employ a more modern term, climate 'sustainability'. Sadly, the idea of a sustainable climate is an oxymoron. The fact that we have rediscovered climate change at the turn of the Millennium tells us more about ourselves, and about our devices and desires, than about climate. Opponents of global warming are often snidely referred to as 'climate change deniers'; precisely the opposite is true. Those who question the myth of global warming are passionate believers in climate change - it is the global warmers who deny that climate change is the norm".

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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19 August, 2004

THE DYING SCREAM OF THE WIND-FARM ADVOCATES

This headline in The Guardian tells us how desperate the windmill-lovers are getting now that even many Greenies now don't like windmills: "Behind the rural nimbyism of the protests against wind farms is the sinister presence of the nuclear lobby"

Ah! The arch-demon has been called up out of hell -- "the nuclear lobby". Kneejerk Leftist horror is now to be expected. Windfarm opponents like far-Left "Senator Ted Kennedy in the USA and noted environmentalist David Bellamy in the UK would however be pretty amazed to hear themselves identified as pro-nuclear campaigners.

The whole article is an amusing piece of Soviet-style propaganda that is almost self-fisking. But if you want your fisking done for you, Envirospin does an excellent job of it.



GLOBAL WARMING MANIACS

Policy-makers from Mars

"According to a new study appearing in the August 13 issue of the journal Science, "We already have the technology we need to take the world off the path toward dramatic climate change." But a cursory glance at the advance summary reveals that the study, conducted by Princeton Environmental Institute's Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI), is completely out of touch with economic, political, and environmental reality.

The forthcoming study claims that each of 15 recommended strategies could eliminate up to 1 billion tons annually of carbon emissions by 2054, though by not considering their costs the authors make their recommendations useless as public policy proposals. "The study basically says that if you coerce everybody to use a lot less energy and don't care about the cost, you can significantly reduce emissions," said Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis. "We needed Princeton University to tell us that?".....

CMI Strategy 9 is to add double the current global nuclear capacity to replace coal-based electricity. "This proposal should go over big with the no-nukes environmental establishment."

CMI Strategy 10 is to increase wind capacity by 50 times relative to today, for a total of 2 million large windmills. "The word boondoggle was invented for just such proposals, and in case CMI has not heard, there's a growing grassroots backlash against wind farms."

CMI Strategy 13 is to increase ethanol production 50 times by creating biomass plantations with an area equal to 1/6th of world cropland. This strategy is a prescription for decimating millions of acres of forest and other wildlife habitat. "I thought environmentalists liked trees and wildlife, but I guess these days anyone can qualify as long as they embrace the Kyoto agenda of climate alarmism and energy rationing."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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18 August, 2004

THE ASBESTOS FRAUD

"It is, arguably, the biggest racket in American history - asbestos litigation. It is bigger than bootlegging during the Prohibition era. Bigger than cocaine trafficking during the drug-addled 1970s. Bigger than securities fraud during the get-rich-quick 1990s.

That's why a new, underreported study published in the latest issue of Academic Radiology ought to be read by judges presiding over asbestos-related lawsuits, and by lawmakers on Capitol Hill debating the merits of asbestos litigation reform. In the study, an independent panel of doctors reviewed 492 chest X-rays entered as evidence by trial lawyers in asbestos lawsuits. The panel found that fewer than 5 percent of the X-rays revealed possible asbestos-related lung damage.

Yet, the doctors who were paid by trial lawyers to act as "expert" witnesses in the asbestos lawsuits, the doctors who originally read the X-rays, concluded that 96 percent showed asbestos-related abnormalities. "It was astonishing," Dr. Joseph. N. Gitlin, the lead author of the study, an associate professor of radiology at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, told The New York Times.

The gross disparity in the findings of the panel of doctors who conducted the independent study and the doctors who sold their "expert" testimony to asbestos trial lawyers cannot be attributed to mere differences in interpretation of the X-rays.

What we have here is prima facie evidence of medical fraud. Indeed, it is the unholy alliance between buckraking trial lawyers and unethical physicians that is driving the proliferation of asbestos lawsuits in this country.

Roughly 730,000 asbestos claims have been filed over the past four decades, including 200,000 that are currently pending in state and federal courts throughout the fair land. The total cost of asbestos litigation to American businesses has increased from $1 billion in 1982 to a whopping $70 billion in 2002, according to a study by the Rand Institute for Civil Justice."

More here.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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17 August, 2004

THE CURRENT HIGH OIL PRICES REFLECT INFRASTRUCTURE SHORTAGES, NOT OIL SHORTAGES

This article says that the current low supply of petroleum products and resultant high prices is not a political problem in the main oil-supplying countries but the result of a failure to drill new wells and build new refineries -- two things that have been greatly held up by Greenie histrionics. Excerpts:

This time the Saudis have not been able to come up with the oil. They claimed last week to have 1.3 million more barrels a day of available production, but there is widespread doubt they can produce that much now, or even after two new fields go on line later this year. Why not? The international energy business has been starved of major capital investment for two decades, since the price swoon of the early 1980s scared oil companies.....

Most oil market commentary still makes it sound as if high prices are a passing phenomenon. Each spike is attributed to the threat of a loss of Iraqi exports, or of Saudi instability, or of Yukos' problems in Russia, even though what is happening there seems unlikely to affect oil production, just to change who profits from it....

The problem is not a lack of oil in the world. The problem is getting the oil to refineries and then to market. The large, undeveloped resources are in West Africa, around the Caspian Sea and in Siberia, two of which have issues of political stability and the third with severe weather.....

It does not make much difference whether oil is pumped out of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge because a shortage of oil is not the biggest problem. "The real problem is the shortage of infrastructure to obtain and deliver the commodity," Currie said. "That seemed to go completely unnoticed until the last six months." Neither Europe nor the United States shows any indication of willingness to build new refineries.

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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16 August, 2004

TAXPAYERS FUND GREENIE POLITICKING

"Even though most environmental groups are determined to oust President Bush from office this November, those groups are benefiting from an unprecedented level of federal assistance, according to a Washington, D.C., research group. It's possible that some of that money is also being used in the campaign against a second Bush term, Capital Research Center (CRC) reported in an editorial, citing audits conducted by the White House Office of Management and Budget. The audits, according to CRC's David Healy, show that in the fiscal year 2004 budget, $143 million was channeled to environmental groups that disclose their finances. That's nearly twice as much as the $72 million that the groups got in fiscal year 1998.

Between 1999 and 2004, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation saw its federal awards increase nearly six-fold while its private donations were increasing at a much smaller rate. Nature Conservancy's federal grant money doubled between 1999 and 2004, even though the group has been plagued by scandal, Healy reported. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sierra Club and League of Conservation Voters (LCV) all received taxpayer dollars from the Bush administration, yet the groups have been working together to mount an anti-Bush "Environmental Accountability Fund," Healy wrote.

For example, according to Healy, the groups have organized "anti-Bush efforts in key battleground states. In New Mexico ... LCV is recruiting volunteers in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, while the Sierra Club has added two full-time campaign staffers, and NRDC has aired at least two radio spots."

The green groups are not shy about enlisting the help of famous Democrat politicians or liberal-minded celebrities either. Former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, who is associated with Audubon Society, was quoted by Healy as blasting the Bush administration's environmental policies. "I cannot remember, I cannot recite to you a single positive new policy or program sponsored by the current administration," Udall reportedly said....

But an expert on federal grants to non-profit organizations, who wished to remain anonymous, told CNSNews.com that property owners were "extremely unhappy" about environmental policy and with their perceived lack of influence on federal policy during a recent Interior meeting. "This kind of funding has turned around and is starting to bite [the Bush administration,]" the expert asserted.....

Robert Bidinotto, editor of Organization Trends and Foundation Watch, published by Capital Research Center, said that though federal grants may not be used directly for political activism such as Environmental Accountability Fund, the funds nevertheless helped the environmental groups launch political campaigns. "Grants, at the very minimum, boost these groups' size, visibility, influence, clout, cache; all of these things are directly transferable to activities such as Bush-bashing during the election year," he said. The result, Bidinotto said, is "that as the funding from the administration has been going up, so has the volume of [the environmental groups'] voices.""

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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15 August, 2004

ECONOMISTS AGAINST THE GREENIES

Economists say global warming is a minor problem compared to alternative things we could be spending money on:

"There's a scientific consensus, we're often told, that global warming is a problem-despite the opinion of qualified experts ranging from the Russian Academy of Sciences to the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT that it isn't. Yet, even if those worried scientists are right, science can't tell us whether acting to prevent further global warming is worth the trouble. For that, we have to look to economics. And in that field there is a growing consensus that global warming is the least of our problems.

This was underlined recently in Denmark, where The Economist and Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, brought together eight of the world's leading economists, including three Nobel laureates, for the "Copenhagen Consensus" project during the last week of May. From the beginning, the project clearly identified its mission: "The goal of the Copenhagen Consensus project was to set priorities among a series of proposals for confronting ten great global challenges." In other words, the point of the Consensus was to list the challenges facing the world, and their possible solutions, in order of value for money. The projects that would provide the greatest good for mankind for the least amount of money would top the list....

In fact, the panel ranked all three suggestions for action concerning global climate change-an "optimal carbon tax," a "value-at-risk carbon tax," and the Kyoto protocol-last on the Consensus's ranking of 17 project possibilities, and even termed these options "bad investments." ... The expert panel regarded all three proposals as having costs that were likely to exceed the benefits. The panel recognized that global warming must be addressed, but agreed that approaches based on too abrupt a shift toward lower emissions of carbon are needlessly expensive. ... The panel urged increased funding for research into more affordable carbon-abatement technologies.

This ranking backed up previous research that has shown that all the main suggestions for dealing with global warming-the Kyoto Protocol, reducing all greenhouse-gas emissions globally to 1990 levels, or limiting carbon-dioxide presence in the atmosphere to double the pre-industrial level-would lead to economic disaster, slapping the world with a cost that would far exceed the benefit. A widely accepted 1999 study, for instance, found the cost of the Kyoto Protocol to be $220 billion in 1990 dollars, while providing only $95 billion in benefits. We are better off doing nothing.

It is unfortunate that the world cannot currently alleviate all of its challenges. But it is important to understand that, with the world's limited resources, efficient spending is a critical aspect to accomplishing the greatest benefit globally. Wasting money on climate-change programs like the Kyoto Protocol is a misallocation of scarce resources that is at best negligent, and at worst reckless. As the Consensus agreed, the imposing costs of the reduction of greenhouse gases hinder any program attempting to reduce climate change. But programs such as those combating HIV/AIDS come at a comparatively low cost while offering incredibly large benefits".



GASOLINE MEDDLING BAD ECONOMICS TOO

Gasoline nonsense: "As recently as the early 1990s, the nation's gasoline supply was fungible. The same regular, mid-grade, and premium fuel was sold from coast to coast. But today, we have a bewildering variety of gasoline recipes in use across the country. Each of these specialized blends was designed to help clean the air, but the decade-old track record for the experiment in boutique fuels indicates that it has done more economic harm than environmental good."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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14 August, 2004

MR. FLIP DOES A FLOP

And what good would his latest idea do anyway?

"John Kerry took time in Nevada this week to criticize President Bush's decision to use Yucca Mountain as the national repository for nuclear waste. Kerry said the decision was based on politics, not science. Yet in 1999, Kerry encouraged speeding up the timing of making Yucca Mountain ready to accept nuclear waste.

HUMAN EVENTS has obtained a March 23, 1999, letter [see below] to then-Chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Frank Murkowski (R.-Alaska), signed by Kerry, calling for the acceleration of a nuclear waste acceptance schedule.

When the letter was sent to Murkowski, the Committee was working on legislation to advance the siting and construction of Yucca Mountain -- the site designated by Congress in 1987 as the only site the Department of Energy was allowed to study as a future permanent storage repository."



REVIEW OF A BOOK BY AUSTRALIA's CHIEF GREENIE

Excerpts:

"He makes a strong case for preserving the wilderness but does not try to justify this against the needs of people in the world who are starving. He himself highlights the disparity between the rich and the poor of the world but does not recognise that preserving the wilderness is a luxury only rich countries can afford.

During the devastating Canberra fires, Brown, who usually hogs the media, avoided TV like the plague because he knew that Green opposition to burn-offs was partly to blame for the disaster. In the book he acknowledges (p.54) the role of the high volume of flammable fuel but does not concede that it was in part due to Green opposition to fuel-reduction burns.....

It is surprising that Brown supports the discredited Paul Ehrlich whose dire predictions have not eventuated. India has not had a famine for over 20 years and while Brown decries the poverty of North Korea he does not seem to object to their wasteful expenditure on armaments, including nuclear technology.

Brown's call (p.65) for a "global parliament" is risible given the abject failure of the UN especially in curbing persecutors of Christians in the Sudan, Indonesia and China. What is the point of a world parliament if we do not have a world army or police to carry out the decisions of the parliament?

He is quite intemperate in claiming that the Vatican has called for a world of 40 billion people who, in his words, would have "just enough room to copulate", when the Pope has repeatedly taught that responsible parenthood is the ethical way to slow down the birth-rate without recourse to abortion and other anti-life practices.

Brown is satisfied that the Australian birthrate, which is below replacement, "has had a healthy fall". He is wrong in saying that immigration is "our main source of population growth". We receive 100,000 immigrants but we lose 40,000 by emigration while the number of births is almost 250,000.

His optimistic view of the world forces him to ignore the devastation caused by Hitler, Stalin and Mao while not giving the US any credit for financing the destruction of thousands of Russian nuclear warheads.....

He repeats the tired old claim that acre after acre of forest is being harvested but makes little estimate of the extensive replanting that is taking place. In Australia over one million trees are planted each year."

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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13 August, 2004

GREENIE PLANNERS GET A BLACK EYE FROM THE PUBLIC

And note the Greenie hypocrite who didn't want for himself what he advocated for others

Maple Lawn Farms and its picturesque rolling fields sit three miles south of Columbia and midway between the converging metropolitan areas of Baltimore and Washington....

To Maryland's state planners and leading environmental groups, the 508-acre site is ideally suited for "smart growth." Besides its convenient location, the property has access to water and sewer lines and lies within walking distance of three schools. They envision something like a town: a cluster of shops, offices, apartments and homes at a minimum density of about four to five homes per acre.

Yet it isn't going to turn out that way. As has often happened under Maryland's celebrated smart-growth program, which calls for building compactly in "smart-growth areas" such as Maple Lawn Farms to preserve land elsewhere, neighborhood protesters opposed the project for being too big and too dense. And contested projects like Maple Lawn Farms are a major reason that the innovative program enacted seven years ago has yet to make a significant dent in Maryland's sprawling building patterns..... When a specific development was proposed, vehement local opposition whittled the project down, first to 1,372 homes, then to 1,168 and finally to 1,116, or a density of 2.2 homes per acre, well below smart-growth norms.

Neighbors of the Howard County project contend that like other portions of metropolitan Washington, they're struggling with crowded roads and schools and want to preserve as much open space as they can in their neighborhoods.

"Each and every Fulton Manor homeowner spent a considerable amount of money to buy their property, build their dream home and raise their families in an idyllic country setting," John D. Morton, president of a nearby homeowners association, wrote in a typical plea to the county's Zoning Board during its deliberations on Maple Lawn Farms. "Today our dreams appear to be turning into a nightmare."

Planners say that reducing the size of Maple Lawn Farms will lead developers responding to a continuing demand for housing to build their projects in the fields and woods smart growth was designed to preserve. But even the former chairman of the Howard County chapter of the Sierra Club, which as a national organization advocates smart growth, objected to the Maple Lawn project. He lives about a mile away and said he preferred a development with fewer homes.

"My area has mostly five acre or larger lots," Dennis Luck said in testimony filed with the Zoning Board. "We expected to see the area population grow with like development."

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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12 August, 2004

IF THE CLIMATE GURUS CAN'T PREDICT 3 MONTHS AHEAD, HOW CAN WE BELIEVE THEIR PREDICTIONS FOR THE MORE DISTANT FUTURE?

That's what Australian scientist Warwick Hughes asks. Excerpt:

"The predictive skills of Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM): We have all heard our "climatmeisters" predicting how the world will be hotter decades into the future. Let's examine closely how good they are at predicting the real world climate just three months ahead. The BoM publishes monthly a three month rolling "Outlook" prediction of temperature and rainfall probability maps for Australia. A comparison of a series of 26 of the "outlook maps"(prediction) and the real world result demonstrates that the BoM modellers have problems in getting the outlook to resemble the observations. "

Click here to see graphics of how badly they get it wrong



11 August, 2004

AN HONEST SCIENTIST PASSES

Dr. J.G. Edwards dies but millions in the third world die from malaria every year because of a virtual ban on DDT.

"The removal of the unwarranted stigma from DDT and the saving of many future lives is now nearer at hand than it has been in the last 30 years thanks to the efforts of Dr. J. Gordon Edwards, who passed away on July 19 at the age of 85. Though Dr. Edwards is best known to the general public as the author of the now-classic 1961 book "A Climber's Guide to Glacier National Park," his work as an entomologist and professor at San Jose State University may prove to be his most important legacy.

Dr. Edwards led the opposition to environmental extremist efforts to ban DDT in the wake of Rachel Carson's infamous 1962 book "Silent Spring." The testimony of Dr. Edwards and others during Environmental Protection Agency hearings in 1971 on whether to ban the insecticide led to an EPA administrative law judge ruling that, "DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man. The uses of DDT under the regulations involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife."

Inexplicably - or so it seemed - DDT was nonetheless banned by EPA administrator William Ruckleshaus. Dr. Edwards investigated and uncovered disturbing statements and troubling connections between Ruckleshaus and anti-DDT environmental extremist groups. In a May 1971 speech before the Wisconsin Audubon Society, Ruckleshaus acknowledged being a member of the anti-DDT National Audubon Society and to have "streamlined" EPA procedures so that DDT could be banned even before the administrative hearings had been completed.....

Perhaps the most well-known allegation about DDT was that the insecticide supposedly caused declines in the populations of birds such as the bald eagle. Dr. Edwards knew this was wrong. He knew that these bird populations had declined decades before DDT had ever been used. More importantly, the bird populations were actually rebounding during the years of peak DDT use, according to bird counts".

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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10 August, 2004

THE EARTH IS NOW A LOT COLDER THAN IT WAS

More evidence that the earth experiences large natural temperature fluctuations

"Remnants of plants that could be several million years old have been discovered in samples of mud recovered from the bottom of Greenland's three-kilometre-deep (two-mile-deep) ice cap, the head of a group of international scientists said. "There is a big possibility that this material is several million years old -- from a time when trees covered Greenland," Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, who heads a team of international scientists involved in the North Greenland Ice-core Project, said in a statement. "The presence of plant material under the ice indicates that the Greenland ice sheet formed relatively fast, as a slowly growing glacier would have flushed or pushed these light particles away."

Dahl-Jensen, of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute, said the findings were important as they could shed light on the past climate and environment and could answer questions as to whether exotic life forms still exist under the ice. She said the remnants of plants were discovered in samples recovered from beneath the ice cap this summer. "Reaching bedrock, frozen reddish mud was recovered with several centimetre-sized fragments of organic material looking like pine needles or pieces of bark," Dahl-Jensen said.

The North Greenland Ice-core Project is an international project that involves participants from nine countries. It aims to understand the last ice age, which swept over much of the earth's northern hemisphere more than 100,000 years ago."

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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9 August, 2004

CLIMATOLOGY: THE CROOKED SCIENCE

"Two recent findings, one right next to Washington D.C., the other as far away as is possible to imagine, demonstrate the limits of what we can learn from scientific models. When researchers put together theories to predict what should happen, that's a model. When the model conflicts with reality, the model is flawed. Yet there are some scientists who don't accept that, which should give us pause to think about their claims.

We saw it in late July when the Washington Post reported that water samples from the major rivers pouring into the Chesapeake Bay showed no declines in the presence of two major pollutants since the mid-1980s. Yet the computer model that the Chesapeake Bay Program used to report progress in environmental cleanup estimated a 40-percent reduction in the pollutants. That model had been praised as the "Cadillac of watershed models" and "well-constructed and useful for prediction." The program has accepted the criticism and adjusted its model.

We also saw it in the recent discovery by astronomers of very old galaxies far out in space, in places where the current state-of-the-art models predict there should only be very young galaxies. The scientists have taken the news in their stride, admitting that much of what they thought happened in the early universe was wrong.

We see this sort of thing all the time in science. British scientists whose models at one time were predicting hundreds of thousands of human deaths as a result of "mad cow disease" now only predict another 40 or so. Even Stephen Hawking admitted this week that he was wrong on a theory about black holes he first formulated in the 1970s.

Scientists change their minds when data contradicts their models - except in one area, the relatively new scientific discipline known as climatology. If the climate models that predict massive rises in temperature over the next century are correct, the atmosphere should warm before the surface. But atmospheric data from both satellites and weather balloons show only a trifling rise in temperature over the past couple of decades, while the surface temperature has been rising steadily. In 2000, a National Research Council study confirmed the data's discrepancy with the model. The proper scientific response would be to reexamine the models and adjust them to fit reality. But that hasn't happened in climatology."

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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8 August, 2004

Acid rain 'has climate benefits'

"Acid rain, which has long been blamed for damaging forests and killing wildlife, has some positive effects in constraining global warming, say researchers.

Sulphur dioxide from industry can help cut the amount of the greenhouse gas methane emitted by peat bogs, according to scientists from the Open University, Nasa and Sweden. It does this by suppressing bugs that produce more methane as global temperatures rise.

A study in Scotland suggested that the global effect of acid rain from 1960 to 2030 could cut methane emissions to pre-industrial levels. But Dr Vincent Gauci, of the Open University, said increasing sulphur pollution was unwise because of acid rain's negative effects".

Source

See here for some of those other "negative" effects

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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7 August, 2004

STOP EVERYTHING! -- EVEN WIND POWER

Greenies don't want their scenery disturbed

"In ecologically minded New England, it was the gusty dream of energy officials and environmentalists: Windmills were going to help the region reduce its dependence on pollution-spewing power plants. But seven years after the region's first commercial wind farm was built, it is becoming clear that wind power faces a hard road here, partly because of environmentalists themselves. Last year was a near record year for commercial windmill installations nationwide, with enough built to power almost 500,000 residences, yet not one went on line in New England. Wind farms have gone up in Texas, California, and Wyoming, but in Massachusetts the only commercial wind farm is Searsburg's 11 turbines, which went up in 1997.

"I hoped way back when because of the stronger environmental consciousness here it would be an easier place to locate" turbines, said Tom Gray, deputy executive director of the American Wind Energy Association. "The irony I did not foresee is that it would be more difficult." At least eight proposed windmill farms in New England are meeting sharp opposition. While much of the resistance is coming from neighbors, environmental concerns are also holding up some plans, including one that would add 20 to 30 turbines to an existing wind farm on a mountain ridge here.

For environmentalists, the conflict between green power and green land has produced a moral quandary. In the search for the open, windblown spots that make the best sites for turbines, developers are finding that much of the region's land is already spoken for as conservation land, preserved vistas, or the home of protected species. "Two totally separate good things are in tension with each other," said Seth Kaplan of the Conservation Law Foundation, a regional environmental group that is part of a collaborative trying to forge a compromise on the Searsburg expansion.

The most contentious wind farm plan, the 130-turbine proposal in Nantucket Sound, is far enough offshore to enjoy the quiet support of several regional environmental groups, though fishermen and shoreline property owners largely oppose it. But inland, where most wind farms are proposed, the conflict among environmentalists is becoming acute, as wind farms are proposed in places or near species these groups fought so hard to protect over the years....

And in Vermont's remote Northeast Kingdom, an East Haven wind farm proposal is bumping into conservationists' visions of untouched forest tracts and mountain ridges.....



AND ANOTHER THE REASON WHY WINDMILLS HAVE WILTED:

"The universal rationale for this massive public commitment to wind power is that it is environmentally benign. But wind power has at least one major environmental problem -- the massive destruction of bird populations -- that has begun to draw serious concern from mainstream environmentalists.

Wind blades have killed thousands of birds in the United States and abroad in the last decade, including endangered species, which is a federal offense subject to criminal prosecution. While bird kills are not considered a problem by everyone, it is a problem for some environmental groups who lobbied to put the laws on the books, made cost assessments for dead birds and other wildlife pursuant to the Valdez accident, and vilify petroleum extraction activity on the North Slope of Alaska as hazardous to wildlife. While such groups as the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society have criticized wind power's effects on birds, many eco-energy planners have ignored the problem in their devotion to wind power.

There have been numerous mentions of the "avian mortality" problem in the wind power literature (the Sierra Club labeled wind towers "the Cuisinarts of the air"). An article in the March 29-April 4, 1995, issue of SF Weekly was particularly telling. The cover story in the San Francisco newspaper was no less than an expose, written not by a free-market critic but by an author sympathetic with the environmentalist agenda.....

Explained one study: "Wind farms have been documented to act as both bait and executioner -- rodents taking shelter at the base of turbines multiply with the protection from raptors, while in turn their greater numbers attract more raptors to the farm." "How many dead birds equal a dead fish equals an oil spill?" Ten thousand cumulative bird deaths from 1,731 MW of installed U.S. capacity is the equivalent of 4.4 million bird deaths across the entire capacity of the United States electric market (approximately 770 gigawatts). A 20 percent share of U.S. capacity, a figure that the American Wind Energy Association put forward some years ago in congressional hearings (see above), would equate to 880,000 cumulative bird deaths. Calculated on an average operating basis, the number would rise severalfold. Not every potential wind farm would be an Altamont Pass, which was sited to be near existing transmission systems with little thought as to bird activity, but the mortality-per-megawatt ratio of existing capacity should give pause.

A 1992 study commissioned by the California Energy Commission (CEC) "conservatively" estimated that 39 golden eagles were being killed at Altamont Pass each year, a significant figure given a total population of 500 breeding pairs. On a percentage basis, the mortality rate per year at Altamont Pass under that estimate is eight times greater than the bald eagle kill from the Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989.

American kestrels and red-tailed hawks were also considered to be at risk from Altamont Pass, according to the CEC study. While these facts could be ignored by the prowind power community, the National Audubon Society's call for a moratorium on wind power projects in bird-sensitive areas (a position spearheaded by Audubon's San Francisco chapter) cannot."

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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6 August, 2004

"THERE'S TOO MANY PEOPLE ANYWAY"

Greenies don't even pretend to be "caring"

A cry of pain from Bangladesh: "Socialists once believed that planned development and distribution would erase poverty. They did not. We are done with those collectivist intellectuals, although socialism has resurfaced in ideological environmentalism through opposition to industrialization, free trade, and genetically modified seeds that feed growing populations. The leftwing environmentalists are deeply worried that the planet would not be able to sustain an overpopulation with depleted resources, environmental damage, and climate change.

In Bangladesh, through resourceful NGOs, such ideas are widespread. We often hear intellectuals and development experts opposing genetically modified food under their "precautionary principle" or opposing oil exports, presumably for a fear of pollution.

Genetically modified seeds could be used in the mongia regions of Rangpur to stave off famines, but our hands are tied. These seeds grow in adverse and dry conditions, as in Rangpur, but we cannot disappoint the NGO wallahs or their international donors by using the seeds to meet hunger. Nor can DDT be used to eradicate mosquitoes and save lives from encephalitis, malaria, and dengue.

This international assortment of mathematical and macro economists, Malthusian doomsday environmentalists, nervous climatologists, UN officials, and consultants to governments would not tolerate free markets or reduced economic interventions by the government. To them, more freedom would mean a rapid acceleration of the economy and industrialization, or simply more motor cars on the road that may add to global warming.

These unfounded fears by environmentalists, who wish to decide how the Third World should be run, add to the tremendous pressure on the Bangladeshi government to remain the sole leader and arbiter of the economy. The government is surrounded and influenced by pressure groups to enact policies that are obliquely anti-free trade, anti-globalization, anti-"sweatshop," anti-genetically modified crops, and so on....

Our economy fails to grow. A poor economy burns less fossil fuel, and there is no capital inflow to exploit natural resources. This pleases the ideological environmentalists. But what does it do for the world's poor?....

But there is an answer: The private sector must be freed of all government control and subject only to the basic laws of the country. These laws must reflect personal freedom, property rights, and limited government. Let the people freely choose their service providers and allow job seekers to choose their employers.

However, such a scenario would be a major setback for the NGOs. They will wrestle to save Mother Earth by arguing that market freedom is dangerous and must be regulated and controlled. Political dictators, authorities, and colonial settlers have always believed freedom is dangerous, and we now see the economic authorities deny freedom for the same unfounded reason. Poverty in Bangladesh persists because of the wrong ideology. The government alone is not to be blamed. It is the prevailing intellectual climate"....

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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5 August, 2004

SOME OF LAST YEAR'S NASTY FINDINGS:

Look what happens when you actually MEASURE things instead of just making arbitrary "models" of them

"It turns out there's a silver lining to the cloud of smog that drapes large cities around the world, as an international team of atmospheric scientists conclude pollution protects the planet from "global warming." The revelation, reported by New Scientist, came out of a workshop in Dahlem, Berlin, earlier this month that was attended by the likes of Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, the former chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.

"It looks like the warming today may be only about a quarter of what we would have got without aerosols," Crutzen told New Scientist. "You could say the cooling has done us a big favor."... According to New Scientist, IPCC scientists have long suspected aerosols, particles from burning rainforests, crop waste and fossil fuels that block sunlight counteract the warming effect of carbon dioxide emissions by about 25 percent. Now the news out of the Berlin workshop is the aerosols thwart 75 percent of the warming effect. That would mean they prevented the planet from becoming almost two degrees warmer than it is now.

Scientists examined direct measurements of the cooling effect of aerosols reported in the May issue of Science by Theodore Anderson of the University of Washington in Seattle. Earlier calculations only had been inferred from "missing" global warming predicted by climate models....

Then in January 2002, the journal Science published the findings of scientists who had been measuring the vast West Antarctic ice sheet. The researchers found that the ice sheet is growing thicker, not melting. The journal Nature published similar findings by scientist Peter Doran and his colleagues at the University of Illinois. Rather than using the U.N.'s computer models, the researchers took actual temperature readings and discovered temperatures in the Antarctic have been getting slightly colder - not warmer - for the last 30 years.

Last September, U.S. scientists based at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station announced that, finally, they have been able to measure the temperature of the atmosphere 18 to 68 miles over the pole. They found it to be 68 to 86 degrees Fahrenheit colder than the computer models used to predict global warming showed...

"Spending any money at all to curb CO2 emissions is a complete waste of time," Dr. Arthur Robinson, professor of chemistry at the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, told WorldNetDaily last year amid hype over the U.N.-U.S. diplomatic row over the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty that seeks global regulation of emissions. There is absolutely not a shred of evidence that humans are causing any change in the climate by generating CO2," he said.

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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4 August, 2004

DRILLING FOR OIL IN ALASKA

Jonah Goldberg has been there recently:

"The oil is on the coastal plain at the very top of ANWR on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. And that ain't beautiful. Believe me. Winter on the coastal plain lasts for nine months. Total darkness reigns for 58 straight days. The temperatures drop to 70 degrees below zero without wind chill. This is the time of year when the oil companies would do almost all of their work; when nary a caribou nor any other creature would be dumb enough to venture out on to the frozen tundra for long.

Regardless, ANWR's summer is no picnic either. The coastal plain is covered in a thick brick of ice for much of the year. When it melts, it creates, well, puddles. Lots and lots of puddles - and mud. This provides the lebensraum that mosquitoes and other flying critters need to stretch their wings. In short, the section that Lieberman claims as one of "G-d's most awesome creations" is a colossal fetid petri dish for some of the worst flying pestilence you can imagine. Every moment I was outside, the mosquitoes swarmed around me like John McCain near a TV camera.

The myth has been perpetuated that wildlife on the "American Serengeti" is more fragile than a butterfly's wings, especially for the exalted caribou. But, in next-door Prudhoe Bay, the number of caribou has increased fivefold since oil exploration began decades ago. One explanation for the caribou's success in Prudhoe is that the infrastructure gives the caribou an opportunity to hide from the trillions of mosquitoes, as well as the nostril flies (yes, they lay their eggs in the caribou's nose) and parasitic warble flies that make life a living hell for the animals.

Opponents of drilling in ANWR succeed by appealing to the imaginations of guilty liberal environmentalists. So they compare ANWR to places we humans go and enjoy, like Central Park, Yosemite and other of G-d's "most awesome creations." If you don't want to drill for oil in ANWR that's fine. But don't slander G-d by saying this giant mosquito pool is among his finest works."

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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3 August, 2004

THE ANTI-GM SUPERSTITION

A molecular biologist speaks

Anti-GM activists have claimed that GM transgenes are unstable and will escape and contaminate the environment; that GM causes cancer; and that GM transgenes can enter our cells or our gut bacteria. But there is no evidence that GM transgenes cause cancer, or that they are particularly unstable or liable to escape. All cultivated crops can cross with wild relatives; there is no particular risk with GM crops. GM transgenes are no more likely to enter bacterial cells or human cells than any other DNA we eat in our food - and if they do, they don't tend to survive.

It is also often claimed that only large multinational companies desire GM. But many people in the developing world are trying to develop and take advantage of these technologies. When I published my work on engineering GM plants that resist virus infection, a group of scientists in Pakistan invited me to collaborate with them to solve the problem of a serious endemic viral pathogen that was causing them to suffer 30 per cent yield losses in their cotton crop. Cotton and the associated textile industry bring 60 per cent of foreign exchange earnings to Pakistan, and so this loss to viral pathogens represents an annual loss of about US$500million. Using public sector funding, the scientists have recently demonstrated in field trials that GM cotton is resistant to vial infection.

So where is the evidence that the current generation of GM crops are beneficial for neither people nor planet? Modern agriculture can certainly damage the environment: over the past 50 years, the need to increase food production has resulted in the loss of one-fifth of the world's topsoil, one-fifth of its agricultural land and one-third of its forests. One solution is to develop new technologies to make agriculture more efficient. Greater efficiency means less agricultural land is required, and so more land can be left wild.

Current varieties of GM crops include those that are insect-resistant and those that are herbicide tolerant. Both require lower inputs, such as spraying, and so are particularly suited to small-scale farmers in the developing world.

Modern agriculture involves the use of powerful toxic pesticides - including copper, often used by organic farmers - which enter the groundwater and can damage the environment and human water supply. Spraying pesticides requires expensive equipment and protective clothing, and can also damage the health of farmers who have to spray them. Insect-resistant GM technology here offers a biological solution that organic farmers should embrace: the Bt crop varieties, for example, express a natural insecticide that organic farmers have sprayed on their crops for many decades. Rather than using inefficient spraying, the plant is armed against its specific insect pests - for example, in maize, the corn-borer, which leads to infestation by fungal pathogens that produce mycotoxins.

Meanwhile, GM crops designed for herbicide resistance can be sprayed with a safe biodegradable herbicide. Less spraying is required, again reducing equipment and labour inputs. Another benefit is that agricultural land doesn't require such extensive tilling, which reduces soil erosion and allows more humus to accumulate in the soil.

This is just the beginning. The future holds promise for new GM crop varieties with increased tolerance of drought, heat and cold; with improved disease resistance or nutritional value; or as production systems for pharmaceutical compounds (such as edible vaccines for the developing world) and renewable industrial compounds (such as biodegradable plastics). That's why GM technology is of benefit to both people and the planet.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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2 August, 2004

THE "SUPERFUND" FRAUD

"Almost one in 10 of the nation's 1,230 Superfund toxic waste sites have not yet been cleaned up enough to guarantee that people and drinking water supplies won't become contaminated," reported the Associated Press this week. "Environmentalists said Tuesday those figures show the Bush administration is failing to protect public health, and Congress and the White House should reinstate a special tax to help fund the Superfund program," the AP continued.

But this election-year attack on President Bush by environmental extremists rings hollow - something that becomes clear once the dirty secrets of the Superfund program are revealed. Superfund is the federal program providing for the cleanup of so-called "toxic waste sites." The law was hastily passed after the 1980 elections by a lame-duck Congress and signed into law by a lame-duck President Carter. And all that lame-ness became part-and-parcel of the Superfund program.

Cleanups of Superfund sites were commenced regardless of actual risks to local residents and environment, and regardless of cost.... Sites originally selected to be cleaned up, the so-called National Priorities List, were not selected on the basis of threat to the local community or environment, but on the basis of spreading the wealth. The National Priorities List was established so that every state could have a Superfund site - no doubt because the cleanup program was more about local jobs than environmental protection....

And so we come to the most important but least known of Superfund's "dirty" secrets - there has never been a single shred of evidence and not a single documented case of anyone ever becoming ill, getting cancer, or dying because of contaminants at a Superfund site. That is based on my personal review of, and subsequent testimony to Congress in 1995 about, the records of over 1,300 Superfund site histories prepared by the EPA. I have not seen any evidence or heard of any credible claim since that time that would change that fact....

Even at the headline-grabbing Love Canal site or the Woburn, Mass., site featured in the John Travolta-movie "A Civil Action," multiple studies have subsequently been unable to link the sites with any actual health effects in local populations.

Another dirty secret of the Superfund program is that, while there is no evidence that anyone has been harmed by the contamination at Superfund sites, perhaps thousands of workers and others have been killed or injured as a result of construction and traffic accidents related to cleanups".

More here.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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1 August, 2004

GOOD NEWS ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT IS NO NEWS

"Much good news about contentious environmental issues is regularly kept quiet by regulatory agencies, activist groups, and the media. Why this is so is the question we have continually asked ourselves after closely examining the most recent scientific research behind three of the most important contemporary environmental debates in the United States: the health of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, global warming, and the impact of hog farming on water quality in coastal North Carolina.

The good news is that there is plenty of good news. The bad news is that hardly anyone is reporting or discussing it, so that the public continues to believe in environmental crises that are nonexistent. Because such crises often result in new laws, policies, and regulations-and thus have widespread and lasting effects on our communities and economy-we ignore the blackout on good news at our peril.

Salmon

In August of this year, President Bush visited the Ice Harbor power dam on the Snake River to celebrate the strong Northwest salmon runs of the last two years. Salmon numbers in the Columbia River Basin have lately been the highest in four decades. Salmon fishermen in northern California celebrated the Fourth of July (and record salmon hauls) by giving their fellow citizens free salmon.

Environmentalists, however, were horrified by the presidential visit. They have been trying to get the Ice Harbor dam (and three others) breached. They have said the dams caused the recent decline in the Northwest salmon population, and that despite the recent recovery, the dams must still be breached to protect the long-term stocks of a fish that is second only to the American eagle as an environmental icon.....

Last May, however, a federal judge ruled that the federal plan for salmon recovery was inadequate, because it did not include breaching the dams. Neither the National Marine Fisheries Service (which designed the plan), nor any of the seventeen environmental groups suing to get the dams breached, mentioned the twenty-five-year salmon cycle to the judge. The Fisheries Service did not want to lose its funding for salmon recovery, and the eco-groups did not want the judge to know that the dams were basically irrelevant to salmon numbers.

This long-known natural cycle has been kept secret for years now. We first reported it in 1999, in a column that went to more than four hundred Knight-Ridder-Tribune newspapers, and was published by perhaps a dozen of them. Respected researchers such as Nathan Mantua and Stephen Hare of the University of Washington, and Ted Strub and Harold Batchelder of Oregon State University, have been writing about salmon co-variance for more than five years in respected journals such as Oceanography and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Climate change

On November 16, 2001, the journal Science published an elegant research report, done by unimpeachable scientists, recounting the earth's temperature history for the past 12,000 years. The report directly linked Earth's changing climate to the variable behavior of the sun. Dr. Gerard Bond and a team from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York (and affiliated with Columbia University) compiled the report titled, "Persistent solar influence on North Atlantic climate during the Holocene."

Science gave it star treatment. The magazine's Richard Kerr wrote, in that issue, Paleo-oceanographer Gerard Bond and his colleagues report that the climate of the northern North Atlantic has warmed and cooled nine times in the past 12,000 years in step with the waxing and waning of the sun. "It really looks like the sun has mattered to climate," says glaciologist Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University, University Park. "The Bond et al. data are sufficiently convincing that [solar variability] is now the leading hypothesis" to explain the roughly 1,500-year oscillation of the climate seen since the last ice age, including the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century, says Alley. . . .

The research implies that global warming has nothing to do with the activities of mankind. This scientific bombshell was almost totally ignored by the media, despite the favorable comments in Science, which journalists watch carefully for news. In fact, an Internet search revealed that not a single publication other than Science and American Outlook reported the Bond research.

Why the selective reporting?

These instances amply demonstrate that the public is too often given only one-sided, simplistic, pessimistic versions of environmental realities by the news media and even by our government agencies and researchers. The reasons why are fairly simple and obvious: money and power. For the news media, bad news sells. It doesn't take a genius to know that a newspaper with a scary headline will sell far more copies than the paper declaring, "Nothing Bad Happened Yesterday, Tomorrow Looks Great!" It is a basic fact of human nature.

For our regulatory watchdog agencies, bad news means huge increases in research and staff funding. The amount of dollars spent on climate change research and watchdogging is billions higher today than before the threat of human-caused climate change was postulated. Likewise for environmental groups, whose donations and memberships skyrocket with these crisis campaigns".

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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