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31 July, 2004

EARTH'S TEMPERATURE IS A BIT UP AT THE MOMENT BUT THAT STARTED WAY BACK

"In a study of lichens of the subspecies Rhizocarpon geographicum found on avalanche boulder tongues in the eastern part of the Massif des Ecrins of the French Alps (45°00' S, 6°30' E), Jomelli and Pech (2004) make an important discovery that adds to the growing body of evidence which demonstrates that what climate alarmists call the unprecedented and CO2-induced warming of the 20th century was neither unprecedented nor driven by rising CO2 concentrations.

According to the findings of Jomelli and Pech, high-altitude avalanche activity during the Little Ice Age (LIA) reached an early maximum prior to 1650, after which it decreased until about 1730, whereupon it increased once again, reaching what was likely its greatest maximum about 1830. In support of these findings, Jomelli and Pech note that "a greater quantity of snow mobilized by avalanches during the LIA can be supported by the fact that the two periods, AD1600-1650 and 1830, during which the run-out distances [of the avalanches] were maximum at high elevation sites, have corresponded overall to the periods of maximum glacial advances for these last 500 years (Le Roy Ladurie, 1983; Reynaud, 2001)."....

In contrast to these observations, the infamous temperature history of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) -- which is cited by climate-alarmists as justification for the ungodly warming power they attribute to anthropogenic CO2 emissions -- post-Little Ice Age warming did not begin until about 1910. Consequently, it can be appreciated that (1) perhaps half of the warming experienced by the earth in recovering from what was likely the coldest part of the Little Ice Age occurred well before the Mann et al. temperature history indicates any warming at all, that (2) an even greater part of the total warming occurred before the air's CO2 concentration began increasing in earnest (approximately 1930, which is actually close to the time when warming peaked in the United States and many other parts of the world), and that (3) the lion's share of the warming of the past nearly two centuries must therefore owe its existence to something other than rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations."

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 July, 2004

PRO-GREEN BIAS AMONG JOURNALISTS

"In 1995, they told us that Yucca Mountain was going to explode in a nuclear firestorm. It won't. In 1998, they told us that nuclear-weapons installations were making people sick. They weren't. In 2000, they weren't concerned with arsenic in the water. In 2001, they were. This year, they have claimed that the Pentagon is worried about global warming and that phosphate mines are harming Floridians. "They" are journalists, and the issue is the environment. What makes this particular issue so susceptible to bad journalism?

At least part of the answer has to be politics. If you followed the controversy over arsenic in drinking water in 2001, you could be forgiven for thinking that the Bush administration was plotting to poison the reservoirs. Yet, in fact, the Environmental Protection Agency had simply chosen to revert to standards that were changed only in the last few days of the Clinton administration. The press had gone almost eight years without noticing that Carol Browner and the Clinton EPA were happy to allow these "dangerous" standards of arsenic in the water.

In other areas, too, the press deliberately changed its tune. In 1987, The Washington Post had editorialized in favor of oil exploration in the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve, saying, "That part of the Arctic coast is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life." By 2000, when George W. Bush had made drilling in ANWR part of his proposed energy policy, the Post became concerned about whether "the oil to be gained is worth the potential damage to this unique, wild, and biologically vital ecosystem." The New York Times similarly reversed its position on the issue between 1989 and 2001.

As strong environmentalism is one of the defining characteristics of the modern liberal, it should come as no surprise that the media lean toward environmentalism in their coverage of key issues.....

When journalists are happy enough to junk the well-established scientific tools that help us separate truth from fiction in favor of their own methods, there's a problem. Whether they are motivated by politics, sensationalism, or a strange mixture of ignorance and arrogance, journalists the world over are painting a misleading picture of the environment. Small wonder that the issue is of little importance to Americans. In a Gallup poll for "Earth Day" this year, they ranked it second-last in importance from a list of no fewer than twelve major political issues."

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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29 July, 2004

SOME UNCOMMON SENSE ABOUT RECYCLING

An excellent post from Madsen Pirie about recycling newsprint

"Why do people recycle newsprint when the practice is so bad for the environment? The collection and transportation of the stuff uses fossil fuels and causes atmospheric pollution. The treatment of the pulp leaches both bleach and chemical pollutants into the environment, and uses energy. Even at the end the resultant recycled paper is of lower quality.

Some people seem to suppose that by recycling paper they are saving trees, but the opposite is often true. Paper is mostly made from trees planted for the purpose, and it is young trees that soak up most of the carbon dioxide. If those trees are not planted, that carbon is not soaked up. Nor is it if they are not harvested and replaced.

Recycling paper may make people feel good, but gesture politics can be environmentally unfriendly. Should the planet as a whole pay so that a few can enjoy feeling good? Or should those who enjoy the gesture pay for the consequences of their actions?

No doubt some would argue for a paper recycling charge. A dollar a ton could be levied on those who recycle paper, and used to plant more young trees to undo the damage caused. (Maybe not.)"

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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 July, 2004

MORE ON THE ATLANTA OZONE FRAUD

Australian earth scientist Warwick Hughes has weighed in here on the fraud I reported below on 19th. The fraudulent Greenie claim was that reduced traffic during the Atlanta Olympic games reduced ozone in the air and hence asthma.

Warwick's findings in brief are that ozone fluctuations observed in other areas well away from Atlanta traffic mirrored those of Atlanta -- so traffic had no role in the matter. A few excerpts:

"All my ozone data analysis experience tells me that big city summer ozone peaks will be broadly influenced by daytime max temperature and meteorological factors such as wind; I would be sceptical that a slight decrease in vehicle emissions could dominate over these more important factors....

The graph below shows clearly that across a broad region of Georgia and Alabama the Olympic period happened to be characterized by the lowest ozone levels of the 1996 summer. So you would have to suspect that the lower ozone levels in Atlanta during the Olympics are also following this regional trend which is no doubt due to broad scale meteorological factors and nothing to do with traffic....

We decided to compare data from a central Atlanta station and a rural site 80 kms NW, Yorkville; taking ozone and nitrous oxide (NO) numbers for August 2001, a cooler year with lower ozone similar to 1996... It is strikingly obvious that Atlanta and Yorkville have broadly similar daily ozone peaks, some days Yorkville even exceeds Atlanta !!! This is despite much higher overall NO numbers in Atlanta, those car exhausts, with several very high peaks. Note the very high NO peaks do not shift the ozone peaks much, so it is hard to see a strong relationship between NO and ozone. So where does this leave the much trumpeted claim that a slight reduction in traffic during the Olympics could have caused lower ozone levels ? NO numbers for Yorkville are insignificant, just showing as the purple trace along the bottom of the graph. When will the EPA's start telling the truth about urban ozone?"

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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 July, 2004

GLOBAL WARMING IS RACIST!

The Black Caucus says it is so it must be so

"A new study released by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation suggests rising temperatures will kill more black citizens than whites in the U.S., while claiming African-Americans are less responsible than others for causing so-called "global warming." The research, conducted by the Oakland, Calif.-based group Redefining Progress, is being billed as the first-ever comprehensive examination of the health and economic impact of climate change on the black population. "We are long past the point where global warming is considered a myth," said U.S. Rep. William Jefferson, D-La., chairman of the CBCF. "We are seeing its effects all around us."

The new report for the CBCF has three main findings:

America's black population will be disproportionately burdened by the health effects of global warming;

Blacks are less responsible for contributing to global warming than other Americans; and

Policies designed to mitigate global warming can generate large health and economic benefits for blacks, depending on their implementation.

"Time and again, the world's leading atmospheric scientists have warned us about the devastating impact of climate change," said Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Texas. "We now have irrefutable proof of its impact on our economy, our way of life, our health and our children." The study alleges responsibility for the problem does not lie primarily with blacks, stating, "African-American households emit 20 percent less carbon dioxide than white households. Historically, this difference was even higher."...

"The most direct health effect of climate change will be intensifying heat waves that selectively impact poor and urban populations," according to the study, noting cities like New York, Detroit, Chicago and Philadelphia have large concentrations of blacks."

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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 July, 2004

GREENIE CLIMATE MODELS NOW PROVEN WRONG

"Every climate model that is run with increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases produces some degree of warming at earth's surface and even greater warming above the surface, especially in the atmospheric layer between 5,000 to 30,000 feet in altitude (the troposphere). Models calculate this warming to be especially strong in the tropical half of the planet and weaker in a very small region around both poles.

Observations of real world temperature trends in the lower atmosphere don't confirm these model results and instead show that, generally, warming trends decline with altitude.

Why is this important? The atmosphere is an integrated whole. Temperature aloft is an important determinant of temperature at the surface. If the models have the "upstairs" wrong but have it right "downstairs" in the area near the surface, they've been pretty lucky. Some might say, pretty "adjusted."

The discrepancy between models and observations is the crux of one of the major arguments against the models and over reliance on them to anticipate future climate. If the models can't accurately portray present observations, they cannot be relied upon to predict the future.

The hypothesis that models continue to get it wrong is strongly supported by results from a research effort led by The University of Rochester's David Douglass and published in a pair of articles in Geophysical Research Letters (online on July 9, 2004). Two other scientists involved in the effort were Patrick Michaels and Paul Knappenberger, chief editor and technical supervisor of World Climate Alerts"......

In sum, the results of research presented in Douglass's two papers provide strong evidence for three important points:

1) The discrepancy between temperature trends measured at the earth's surface and those measured in the earth's lower atmosphere is real.

2) A large part of this discrepancy likely is caused by local, non-climatic influences on surface thermometers not by stratospheric contamination of the lower tropospheric data.

3) Climate models that include observed changes to known climate forcing agents (both natural and anthropogenic) are unable to replicate the observed behavior of the temperatures in the lower atmosphere. Furthermore, if local, non-climatic influences are largely responsible for the surface temperature trends, then the climate models are getting the surface trends right for the wrong reasons - indicating their failure at that level as well.

Such findings should give pause to anyone who relies on climate model output to inform their decision-making."

More here



"NATURAL" PRODUCTS CAN KILL YOU

Excerpt from an article in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" of July 25, 2004 -- not apparently online. The article was written by Daryl Passmore and appeared under the heading: "How that 'natural' pesticide harms us"

"Consumers had a mistaken notion that natural had to be better and safer, said Professor John Trumble... "In fact, these natural materials contain toxic chemicals that are often far more dangerous to humans and animals than the pesticides available from chemical companies". Hazards included skin diseases, exposure to carcinogens, mutagens, neurotoxins and substances known to cause organ failure.

The University of California insect expert will be one of the speakers at the International Congress on Entomology at the Brisbane Convention Centre from August 15 to 24. "Given the size of the market and an increasing interest in all things natural, it is not surprising that commercial products are being developed for a wide range of human and animal uses," he wrote in a paper for The American Entomologist. "Unfortunately, most natural products including those used for insect control are not always subject to rigorous testing." While some serious research was being done and some of the solutions worked as promised, he was alarmed by the lack of scientific work to back up many claims. "For a scientist, reading the new-age literature or some of the holistic writing is roughly equivalent of suddenly entering a parallel universe where the rules of physics and chemistry do not apply. Biology is replaced by mysticism," Professor Trumble said. "Plants contain many toxins ... Some of these toxins can cause significant human or animal health effects and many deaths have been reported."

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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 July, 2004

TOP AUSTRALIAN SCIENTIST KNOCKS GLOBAL WARMING

"A former head of the National Climate Centre has challenged forecasts of dramatically higher temperatures in the Murray Darling basin which underpin Victoria's radical water-reform policies. Victoria was using "unrealistic" CSIRO projections based on flawed international forecasts, according to consultant climatologist William Kininmonth. The scepticism comes as fractures emerge within the Bracks Government between those pushing for immediate action on greenhouse issues and those seeking to defend the state's manufacturing base.

Mr Kininmonth, who headed the Bureau of Meteorology's National Climate Centre between 1986 and 1998, said predictions of warming of two degrees in the Murray Darling basin within 25 years were unrealistic. The forecasts are the key scientific basis for Victoria's white paper on water reforms, released earlier this month, which are also likely to influence other Labor states.

Based on CSIRO models, the white paper says water supplies will decline in the Murray Darling basin because temperatures will rise by up to two degrees centigrade by 2030 and six degrees by 2070. Any such increase would be a dramatic shift in the pattern of temperatures rising in Australia.

The mean temperature has risen by 0.9 degrees in the past 100 years, according to work by the Bureau of Meteorology, and there was no agreement on whether that change was from natural or man-made influences. The CSIRO forecasts are based on those given by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which simulate a range of future scenarios.

Mr Kininmonth said the IPCC forecasts were flawed because the different models did not properly represent the radiation exchange between the atmosphere and the earth's surface. "(The IPCC and CSIRO forecasts) do not adequately reflect the dynamics of the atmosphere and the oceans. This leads to errors in the radiation physics," he said. "They are forecasting conditions which I don't believe are really achievable under these conditions."

More here

One of the journalists who wrote the article excerpted above also wrote another much longer article for a magazine section in the same issue of the same newspaper -- in which she interviewed not one but SIX of Australia's leading climate scientists about possible warming of the Australian climate. That article is also excerpted below. Note that NOT ONE of the six was prepared to assert that there was anything but natural temperature variation going on.



A change in the weather?

Extremes like a drought aren't reliable indicators of global warming, reports Michelle Gilchrist

"The official record of one of Australia's worst droughts is depressingly familiar. "The five years had been intermittently dry over most of the country ... very dry conditions set in across eastern Australia during the spring, and became entrenched over the following months," the Bureau of Meteorology reports. "The long drought and its severe climax had devastated stock numbers, and began focusing attention on planning for irrigation, especially in the three states through which the Murray River flows."

To rural Australians, these words are no surprise. But the report is an official history of the great drought, which lasted from 1896 to 1901 .... Mathematicians and meteorologists say extreme events give little useful information about long-term climate change ... "Statistically speaking, looking at extremes is not the right thing to do if you are concerned with long-term changes," says Kevin Judd, of the University of Western Australia. "Extremes don't tell you much. Nothing may have changed yet you might get some extreme [events] occurring." Using everyday weather - high and low temperatures, their mean or average over time - can provide more useful information in a much shorter period....

"We are really, in many ways, at the very early stage of understanding the variability of the weather system," says William Kininmonth, a former head of the Bureau of Meteorology's National Climate Centre. "We understand the overall annual weather cycle, and we know quite a lot about the seasons and some of their variability. But there are other subtle factors that we don't really know." Kininmonth says new technology compounds the confusion. "We have started to develop computer models and people believe such models can tell us the answer. But they are ... only simulations," he says.

Australia's former chief meteorologist John Zillman agrees that the study of longterm weather remains a nascent science. "The atmosphere is a tricky and complex creature." says Zillman. "The climate is hugely variable and every now and again we do get extremes that go way beyond the previous records we have in Australia." Queensland in 1994 recorded almost 8OOmm of rain in one month, with figures off the scale for Brisbane. "If we had, say, another 300 years of highly reliable rainfall records for Australia, say back until the 1500s, we would perhaps be able to say it falls within the range of natural variability," Zillman says. "But we don't have those records and we therefore cannot say things like that. The shortage of records limits us."

Those claiming weather patterns have changed beyond natural variation turn to work by Bureau of Meteorology researcher Neville Nicholls, who argues the 2002-03 drought is at least the worst since the 1950s. Last month Nicholls wrote that the previous drought was a triple whammy of high mean temperatures, high evaporation rates and very low rainfall figures. especially in the Murray/Darling Basin. In 2002, the mean daily temperature in that region was 0.7C higher than previous records; and more than 1C warmer than the droughts of 1982 and 1994. Importantly, though, the Nicholls paper does not say the 2002-03 drought is the worst on record; instead, it can only say that the weather appears to have changed during the past 50 years....

Average rainfall in the southwestern corner of Western Australia has dipped by 10 percent to 20 percent since the '70s, puzzling meteorologists and scientists. "With rainfall, more so than temperature, you get very large year to year variations and these shifts mean we need much longer records before you can unequivocally say we have had a significant shift", says Neil Plummer of the Bureau of Meteorology.

Kininmonth agrees the climate has changed but believes it is for natural, not man-made, reasons. "All of the evidence points to the fact that the globe has warmed slightly over the past 100 years. That's something almost everybody agrees on. Whether that's unusual or not is what becomes debatable."

Plummer says the rise in mean temperatures may be within normal variability but adds that it appears to be unusual... Climate-change sceptic Warwick Hughes questions that data, arguing that the bureau's long-term mean temperature trend is tweaked. "My belief is that a true Australian trend has less warming than they show and their time series should extend a few decades back to cover the warm spell in the late 19th century." he says. Hughes argues the mean temperature trends also disregard the recent effect of 'urban heat islands" - cities such as Sydney and Melbourne and even smaller places such as Canberra, which create their own heat and raise ground temperatures."

More here

It should be noted that Australia is a large country (roughly the same size as the United States) and is one of only four large Southern hemisphere land-masses. So if there is no warming going on in Australia, it would be most odd if there was warming going on in the Southern hemisphere generally. And in one of the other large Southern land-masses (Antarctica) significant cooling (as signified by recent thickening in the West Antarctic ice sheet) seems to be going on at the moment



RECORD SNOWFALLS IN AUSTRALIA

And to top it off, here is an excerpt from another Australian report that should help to make the Greenie's yoghurt go sour

"In the alpine village of Falls Creek, nestled amongst the snowgums in Victoria's high country, they call this gentle slope the Drover's Dream. But after some of the best early-season snowfalls ever recorded in the region, the mythical drover is not the only one fantasising about strapping on some skis.

With the mountains draped in powder and the sky a piercing blue, Ramona Bruland and Chris Hockey yesterday lapped up the idyllic conditions before the weekend onslaught of skiers and snowboarders. With an average snow depth of 101cm, Falls Creek, as with all Australian alpine resorts, is attracting record numbers of visitors.

Colin Hackworth, managing director of Australian Alpine Resorts, which runs Falls Creek and the neighbouring Mt Hotham resort, said the past three seasons - including 2004 - were some of the most successful in terms of numbers. "The good snow conditions are the driver. On this day last year we had a 40cm base of snow," Mr Hackworth said. "And it's true of all Australian resorts. There's not a rock to be seen. It's has never looked better."

And the broad smiles have not been confined to Victoria. At Thredbo in NSW, where snow falls are measured at the 1820m Spencers Creek station, the snow depth is 125.5cm. And there has been a 15 per cent rise on last year's record booking rate to match. "For early July, we've just seen the best falls in memory," a Thredbo spokeswoman said.

And at Perisher, where all 50 lifts are open, resort operators are boasting the same cover".

Also from an article in "The Australian" of 24 July, 2004. Apparently online to subscribers only. It is found under the heading "Snowfalls deliver a dream run at ski resorts" on P. 4 and was written by Drew Warne-Smith

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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 July, 2004

GREENIE RELIGIOUS DOGMATISM

"The scene was a scientific workshop set up to discuss the science of global warming. It took place in a non-Western country and was convened by the country's Academy of Sciences. Delegates came from all over the world. Yet the delegation from one major Western power behaved in a most undiplomatic fashion. The way the science was being presented was inconvenient to their political agenda, so they tried to get the scientists they disagreed with silenced. The organizers refused, so the delegation went to its government to exert political pressure. The organizers still refused, so the delegation disrupted the conference. When it became apparent they weren't going to get their way, they walked out.

Yet another example of arrogant America disrupting the world's attempts to solve the climate change program? No. The delegation in question was that of the United Kingdom, and the conference was that held last week in Moscow, hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The British delegation was led by Sir David King, chief scientific adviser to Her Majesty's government. Sir David has gone on record as saying that, "Global warming is worse than terrorism." ... The religious fervor with which Tony Blair's government is acting on this belief has many Britons unnerved. Dr. David Bellamy, one of the titans of the British environmental movement, wrote in the Daily Mail that he considers global warming alarmism "poppycock." Analysts predict a 40 percent rise in electricity prices as a result of the government's energy suppression policies. British manufacturers foresee having to put thousands out of work as they lose out in competitiveness to overseas suppliers. The Times's economics editor has written that the environmentalists pushing these policies "are like the medieval monks who favored self-flagellation as the road to virtue. For a Government to enshrine such thinking in policy is truly perverse."

In equally medieval fashion, adherents of the environmentalist religion have launched an inquisition against scientific views that they consider heretical. Hence, Sir David's outrageous behavior at the Moscow conference..... Sir David apparently walked out with his delegation in mid-answer to one question. Commenting on this display, Illarionov said, "It is not for us to give an assessment to what happened, but in our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government, and the reputation of the title 'Sir' has sustained heavy damage."

If Americans had behaved this way, the world would be full of stories charging America with arrogance, boorishness, and disdain for the spirit of free inquiry. Yet Sir David King continues on his way, the Torquemada of the global-warming inquisition."

More here

The Russian scientists of course think global warming is poppycock too -- even though they wish it was real! And there has never been anything wrong with Russian science. Russians have the brains even if they never seem to have good government



STATE GOVERNMENT A.G.'S TRY TO SET NATIONAL GLOBAL WARMING POLICIES

From the National Center for Public Policy Research:

"According to a press release announcing the events, "New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, New Jersey Attorney General Peter C. Harvey, Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch, Vermont Attorney General William H. Sorrell and the office of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will announce on July 21, 2004 the filing of a major lawsuit to curb global warming in the United States, in conjunction with the attorneys general of California, Iowa and Wisconsin.".....

According to a July 20 Associated Press article by Mark Johnson, "Eight states and New York City intend to sue five of the country's largest power producers to demand they cut carbon dioxide emissions, which are believed to be linked to global warming. The attorneys general from California, Connecticut, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, as well as New York City's corporation counsel, will file a public nuisance lawsuit Wednesday in federal court in Manhattan, according to a draft news release...

The states contend carbon dioxide emissions can be reduced by increasing efficiency at coal-burning plants, switching from coal to cleaner burning fuels, investing in energy conservation, and using clean energy sources such as wind and solar power.

Environmental policies properly are established by legislators voting in view of the public, not by lawyers in courtrooms. As the New York Attorney General's office describes it, "the Attorney General serves as the guardian of the legal rights of the citizens." What happened to the citizens' right to be governed by a legislature it selects?

"Global warming" -- the theory that behavior by human beings is causing the Earth to warm significantly -- is highly contested scientific issue, one on which many climate scientists disagree. Even those scientists who believe human behavior is causing the planet to warm disagree significantly about causes and degree.

Scientists furthermore differ on the impact global warming would have on the Earth. Some expect global warming would cause sea levels to rise. Others believe it could cause sea levels to lower -- as increased amounts of water vapor in the air result in more snow congregating at the still-frozen poles.

Some global warming debaters stress the possibility that global warming could hurt plants, while others note the beneficial effect of increased carbon dioxide levels on plant life (carbon dioxide is, roughly speaking, to plants what oxygen is to human beings).

Court decisions are blunt instruments and ill-suited for determining policies on such matters as global warming, where opinions are constantly undergoing change as new scientific knowledge is gained. The judicial branch, unlike the legislative, is not designed to accommodate the easy repeal or amendment of flawed policies."

I suspect this might be a blessing in disguise. As long as the courts are unbiased (a big ask) the result should be to show that the evidence for global warming does not stack up

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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 July, 2004

THE BEST DATA SHOW NO RECENT RISE AT ALL IN GLOBAL TEMPERATURE

And even crooked science cannot make it

Those awkward satellites: "A study of global temperature data in the May 5 issue of Nature claims to solve a discrepancy between surface-station temperature readings and global temperature readings taken from orbital satellites. Experts reviewing the Nature study, however, say it fails to impugn the satellite readings. Ever since the first temperature-reading satellite was launched in 1979, scientists have tried to explain the discrepancy between satellite and ground-based readings of global temperatures." Satellite readings have shown virtually no warming trend since 1979, while ground-based readings have registered significant warming.

According to scientific studies, the discrepancy results from an urban heat island effect. Concrete, factories, office buildings, and automobiles produce heat in and around cities, causing temperatures to be somewhat warmer than the surrounding region. Moderate warming trends at land-based weather stations, typically located at airports in and around growing cities, merely reflect the growing population of the nearby city, studies show.

The recent Nature study attempts to contest the urban heat island evidence and cast doubt on the satellite readings. To support their theory, the study's authors introduced a "fudge factor" that attempts to explain and dismiss a significant amount of documented atmospheric cooling. The fudge factor, say experts, is where the Nature authors go wrong.

"You can't subtract more signal than is there, but that's what they've done," said Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). The problem, said Spencer, is that the study's fudge factor removes more stratospheric cooling than actually appears in the data, thus creating a spurious warming signal.

"Simply put, this method overcorrects for stratospheric cooling," said Dr. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at UAH and director of the ESSC. "We tried this same technique in the early 1990s but it didn't work. "This kind of mistake would not get published with adequate peer review of manuscripts submitted for publication," observed Spencer.



TREE GETS GREENIE

Poetic justice?

"Blake Champlin, a Tulsa lawyer and environmental activist, died Monday at his home when a tree supporting a hammock fell and crushed him. Champlin, 45, died instantly, said Gerald Hilsher, an attorney with Shipley & Kellogg, Champlin's former law firm.

Champlin was a member of Sierra Club and Save the Illinois River, and the director of Keep Tulsa Beautiful. He also pushed for an agreement between Oklahoma and Arkansas on phosphorus limits in northeast Oklahoma waters, Hilsher said.

Champlin was a past director of the Oklahoma Society of Environmental Professionals and a past chairman of the Environmental Law Section of the Oklahoma Bar Association."

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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 July, 2004

HISTORY SHOWS UP GREENIE ECONOMIC ILLITERACY

A decade ago, a report from the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based environmental research group, set off a firestorm in Beijing. Chinese imports were rising after a series of lackluster harvests and Worldwatch predicted that China's demand would suck up a huge amount of the world's wheat and other grains, forcing up prices.

Does anybody make more wrong predictions than the Worldwatch Institute? It keeps predicting that we're going to run out of food, water, energy, and other resources, and we keep not running out. Yet every year journalists solemnly report its annual predictions. Anyway, China didn't suck up the world's wheat and prices didn't rise.

Free-market reforms in the late 1970s allowed a return to household farming. National wheat production began to soar as farmers were able to buy chemical fertilizers and new seed strains. The Chen family's harvests have increased seven-fold since China's market reforms.

Instead, starting with Deng Xiaoping's reforms after the death of Mao, Chinese agricultural production soared -- so much so that peasants began leaving the farms, going to the cities, looking for jobs, and setting up enterprises. Despite his Communist Party years, Deng may have done more good for more people than anybody else in history. Thanks to his reforms, over a billion people can now not only feed themselves but export food and shift labor to more productive uses.

The positive-sum character of trade is the very foundation of the liberal world order, the underpinning of expanding trade, international harmony, and peace. If one country's success was another's woe, then the socialists and nationalists would be right: World trade would be a war of all against all. Thankfully, they're wrong. The growing productivity of China, Russia, and India is wonderful news for their two billion citizens and good news for everyone else in the world economy as well.

More here



HYPOCRITICAL ALASKAN GREENIES

Do as I say, not as I do: "State environmental officials say the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise broke Alaska law by not filing an oil spill response plan or having a certificate of financial responsibility. The ship was ordered to anchor until both requirements are met, said Department of Environmental Conservation spokeswoman Lynda Giguere. An investigation is being conducted to decide whether a fine will be levied, she said."

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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 July, 2004

CAPITALISM HELPS THE ENVIRONMENT

The latest Robert Kennedy is a fairly hysterical environmentalist with a typically Greenie liking for exaggeration and prophecies of doom but some of his ancestral brains do show through. He is one of the few Greenies who recognize that competitive capitalism is good for the environment. He says that the problem lies with capitalists who rely not on open competition for what they get but rather on privileges that they get from government. Almost any economist would agree with that. In economists' terms, Kennedy is advocating full costing of "externalities" (roughly, harm that businesses do to the interests of people generally in the course of their activities) and believes that only government can enforce such costing (i.e. charge polluters for the harm done by their pollution) -- which is probably true in the world as we have it today. I think it is mostly clever talk, though. I get a strong impression that he would have a wildly higher estimate of the externalities than would be warranted by any reasonable evidence. Excerpt:

"The best thing that could happen to the environment is free-market capitalism. In a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. In a true free-market economy, you get efficiencies and efficiency means the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution. So in true free-market capitalism, you eliminate pollution and you properly value our natural resources so you won't cut them down. What polluters do is escape the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy -- a fat cat who's using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market....

Laissez-faire capitalism does not work, particularly in the commons. Individuals pursuing their own self-interest will devour the commons very quickly. That's the economic law -- the tragedy of the commons. You have to force companies to internalize costs. All of the federal environmental laws are designed to restore free-market capitalism in America in this regard.

I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketeer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market and I say, "We are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way you are internalizing your profit." That's what the federal environmental laws allow us to do: restore real property rights in America. You cannot get sustained environmental protection under any system but a democracy. There's a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny in various countries and the level of environmental degradation."

More here. (Via Tyler Cowen)



SOLAR OUTPUT IS VARIABLE

And so -- surprise, surprise -- is global temperature. Get the Sun to sign the Kyoto treaty!

"Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures. "The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."

To determine the Sun's role in global warming, Dr Solanki's research team measured magnetic zones on the Sun's surface known as sunspots, which are believed to intensify the Sun's energy output.

The team studied sunspot data going back several hundred years. They found that a dearth of sunspots signalled a cold period - which could last up to 50 years - but that over the past century their numbers had increased as the Earth's climate grew steadily warmer. The scientists also compared data from ice samples collected during an expedition to Greenland in 1991. The most recent samples contained the lowest recorded levels of beryllium 10 for more than 1,000 years. Beryllium 10 is a particle created by cosmic rays that decreases in the Earth's atmosphere as the magnetic energy from the Sun increases. Scientists can currently trace beryllium 10 levels back 1,150 years.

Dr Solanki does not know what is causing the Sun to burn brighter now or how long this cycle would last. He says that the increased solar brightness over the past 20 years has not been enough to cause the observed climate changes but believes that the impact of more intense sunshine on the ozone layer and on cloud cover could be affecting the climate more than the sunlight itself.

Dr Bill Burrows, a climatologist and a member of the Royal Meteorological Society, welcomed Dr Solanki's research. "While the established view remains that the sun cannot be responsible for all the climate changes we have seen in the past 50 years or so, this study is certainly significant," he said. "It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor."

Dr David Viner, the senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, said the research showed that the sun did have an effect on global warming. He added, however, that the study also showed that over the past 20 years the number of sunspots had remained roughly constant, while the Earth's temperature had continued to increase. This suggested that over the past 20 years, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation had begun to dominate "the natural factors involved in climate change", he said".

More here

The solar changes appear to have been slight in recent years but they show you cannot rule out solar variations as an influence on global temperature variations -- which is precisely what the Greenies do. So if there is any significant global warming going on, the Greenie claim that mankind caused it is sheer, unproven assertion

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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 July, 2004

A STRAIGHT-SHOOTING MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT

In Australia

"JOHN Howard's new Environment Minister, Ian Campbell, has signalled a hard-edged approach to his new portfolio, refusing to be captive to the demands of a "myopic" conservation movement. Senator Campbell wants to continue the Government's agenda linking the nation's future power needs to coal and oil, rejecting the global framework for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

In an interview with The Weekend Australian, he said that while he respected the environment movement, its focus was often too "myopic". "Those who have a myopic focus on one area tend to fail that area," Senator Campbell said. "You've got to put all of the issues into the broader context. We operate within real-world constraints."

He believes environmental leaders such as Greens senator Bob Brown fail to see the links between the economy and the environment and are failing the environment as a result. "You should be looking at the donut and not the hole," he said. Senator Campbell, who habitually recycles and composts, argues that the answer to environmental sustainability is in successful business. "Businesses that are successful are much better at upholding their environmental responsibilities," he said. "If a business is failing or operating in a bad economy they (will) ... cut corners and won't uphold their environmental responsibility."....

Senator Campbell said he would vigorously defend the Coalition's green credentials if the environment shaped up to be a big election issue.... I'm a practical hands-on sort of bloke who will want to get on and deliver good results."

More here



GLOBAL WARMING IN BRIEF:

"The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims that human activities are responsible for nearly all earth's recorded warming during the past two centuries. A widely circulated image that dramatically depicts these temperature trends resembles a hockey stick with three distinct parts: a flat "shaft" extending from A.D. 200 to 1900, a "blade" shooting up from A.D. 1900 to 2002, and a range of uncertainty in temperature estimates that envelops the shaft like a "sheath."

Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia updated the influential reconstruction of (Geophysical Research Letters, 2003) used in the IPCC's third assessment of climate change. However, researchers are calling into question all three components of the "hockey stick,"

Mann's research does not fit with the overwhelming evidence of widespread global warming and cooling within the previous two millennia, making his assertions -- and, consequently, the IPCC -- open to question"

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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19 July, 2004

THE ATLANTA MYTH: REDUCING TRAFFIC REDUCES ASTHMA

"The Summer Olympics came to Atlanta in July and August 1996, and some people are still talking about it, as I observed at a recent forum. Nothing about the events' winners and losers, of course, but about the environmental ramifications.

Cars stayed away from downtown in droves. Ridership on public transportation was reported up 250 percent. The media hailed the experiment in reducing traffic, pollution and asthma. Even the Department of Natural Resources' Environmental Protection Division saw it as a successful, if brief, solution to Atlanta's air pollution problem: The agency still has a separate Web page devoted to ozone readings during the Games.....

In fact, ozone did not decrease during the Olympics compared to the week before (July 12-18); the average of maximum daily levels was the same (58 ppb average of levels at Decatur, Tucker and Confederate Avenue). And average ozone was only 10 percent higher during the following 10 days. How far on either side could the Games have an effect on ozone?....

Even the basic premise fails. It was known in the fall of 1996 that traffic was not reduced. The conclusion of DNR was; "Data from DOT indicates that the actual total daily amount of traffic reduction was not that significant." Some feared an increase in traffic and air pollution, but as David Goldberg wrote for the Atlanta Constitution on Oct. 11, 1996, " . the surprise was that traffic levels during the Olympics were similar to those before the Games."

Although the JAMA paper lists traffic reduction during weekday one-hour morning peaks as 22.5 percent, it says weekday 24-hour total traffic was down only 2.8 percent. In the highly variable patterns of ozone and asthma, 2.8 percent less traffic for a few days would cause hardly a blip. If 2.8 percent less traffic could reduce asthma cases 40 percent or more, as reported in the JAMA article, 7 percent less would wipe out them out altogether."

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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18 July, 2004

WINDY NONSENSE

The Greenies have gone off wind power now but no-one has had the heart to tell the British government. Niall Ferguson is irate. Excerpts:

"My objection is not just that wind turbines are a much more expensive way of generating power than conventional power stations. We could all put up with bigger bills if it meant, in the cant phrase, saving the planet. The key problem is that wind power is so inefficient that it scarcely replaces conventional sources of energy at all.... wind varies: any energy supplier wanting to buy power from wind farms must also line up substitutes for those days when the wind is either too weak or too strong. Wind farms can stand in for other forms of power only when the wind is not too weak and not too strong, but just right. The rest of the time, the more reliable power stations have to step in. This means that the true cost of wind power includes the cost of providing back-up power to compensate for the wind turbines' intermittent output. And guess who picks up these extra costs? Step forward the consumer - not to mention the taxpayer.

The Department of Trade and Industry has decided that nearly three quarters of the additional "renewable" energy should come from wind turbines. To ensure that this happens, electricity suppliers are being forced by law to buy a rising proportion of their power from wind farms..... What this represents is a return to the planned economy in the name of environmentalism - a kind of Green Stalinism. The consequences are the familiar Soviet ones: centralised decision-making and localised devastation.

What is so absurd is that, no matter how many wind turbines we build, global dependence on fossil fuels will scarcely be diminished at all. Indeed, if we are not careful, we ourselves could end up relying even more on precisely the sources of power the Government claims it is against. Why? Because even as it has pumped money into the white elephants known as wind farms, the Government has been unthinkingly running down the one reliable source of CO2-free power. Over the next 20 years, all but one of Britain's 16 nuclear power stations will close.

More here



Junk law: "They all deserve a good spanking. 'They' are the state attorneys general (AGs) and other lawyers who will soon file briefs with the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia demanding, in effect, that the U.S. Government ration and restrict the American people's access to energy."

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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 July, 2004

Millennia of global warming

A new study suggests that cutting down trees over the last few thousand years has increased global warming BENEFICIALLY -- staving off a new ice age.

Scientific, economic, and political discussions about global warming caused by human activity have tended to focus on the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) by the burning of fossil fuels, a process that became significant only 200 years ago. But deforestation, the conversion of forest land to agricultural or pasture land, also increases CO2 as carbon stored in trees is released to the atmosphere. Indeed, a new study by William F. Ruddiman of the University of Virginia indicates that human agricultural and deforestation activities have been increasing greenhouse gases and inducing global warming for thousands of years (Climatic Change 2003, 61, 261; Nature 2004, 427, 582) and may have prevented the return of Ice Age climates.

Ruddiman's analysis begins with the well-accepted theory that the cyclical alternation of Ice Ages with brief interglacial periods, such as the present, is controlled by regular oscillations in Earth's orbit. The amount of sunlight received by the planet in summer and winter varies by as much as ñ10% as Earth's orbital eccentricity (ellipticity) changes, as the point in Earth's orbit nearest the sun moves around the orbit, and as Earth's axis wobbles (precesses). This 20% oscillation-a combination of 100,000-, 41,000-, and 23,000-year cycles-sets in motion changes in Earth's climate that amplify the variation in solar radiation. In the end, the oscillation determines the advance and disappearance of the giant ice sheets that have periodically covered much of the northern hemisphere for the last 2.75 million years.

Samples of atmospheric gases trapped in ice in Greenland and Siberia show that the levels of two greenhouse gases, CO2 and methane, closely track solar-radiation cycles, with the gases increasing as the radiation and temperature rise and declining when they fall. But this close correlation, valid over hundreds of thousands of years, breaks down in the most recent period.

Although solar radiation started to decline 10,000 years ago, CO2 in the atmosphere began to rise 8,000 years ago and methane started to rise 5,000 years ago, rather than falling as expected. The anomaly amounts to a rise of one-sixth in CO2 and nearly one half in methane over the levels that would be expected by the radiation cycle alone. After ruling out possible nonhuman causes for the rise in greenhouse gases, Ruddiman showed that deforestation, which began with the development of agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean some 8,000 years ago, could account for the observed rise of CO2. Deforestation during the last 8 millennia has resulted in clearing nearly 13 million square kilometers of land and the release of some 320 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. This is about twice the carbon released by the burning of fossil fuels. Also, beginning about 5,000 years ago, East Asian farmers began widespread rice farming with irrigated paddies, which would emit roughly enough methane, in Ruddiman's view, to account for the methane anomaly.

The gases released by deforestation and agriculture may have pushed back the onset of a new Ice Age. In the past, ice caps in North America started to form 5,000 years after solar radiation began dropping, which would mean some 3,000 to 6,000 years ago. Ruddiman estimates that the additional CO2 released by human activities would have elevated temperatures at high latitudes by the 2 øC needed to prevent glaciation. His estimates assumed that the deforestation alone affected climate through CO2 release, and ignored the effects of reduced cloud cover caused by fewer trees recycling water to the atmosphere.

"Although the conclusion that humans have been warming the climate for thousands of years seems startling, my colleagues have generally been quite supportive," Ruddiman reports. There have been disputes over the possible magnitude of the effect but general acceptance of its reality. For the present, the knowledge that deforestation has already caused substantial climatic modification serves as a warning because export-driven deforestation in tropical areas is now proceeding at a record pace. Although staving off the growth of Earth's ice sheets is certainly beneficial, melting them clearly would not be.

Source

The closing observation -- that the cutting down of trees may have gotten out of hand in recent years -- fails to take account of INCREASED forest cover in North America and Scandinavia in recent years

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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 July, 2004

BELLAMY AGAIN

I mentioned on 5th an article by distinguished botanist and environmentalist David Bellamy which rubbished the global warming scare. I have now tracked down a fuller version of the article. You can find it here or here (PDF). Some excerpts:

"Ah, ice ages ... those absolutely massive changes in global climate, that environmentalists don't like to talk about because they provide such strong evidence that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon. It was round about the end of the last ice age, some 13,000 years ago that a global warming process did undoubtedly begin.

Not because of all those Stone Age folk roasting mammoth meat on fossil fuel camp fires but because of something called 'Milankovitch Cycles', an entirely natural fact of planetary life that depends on the tilt of the Earth's axis and its orbit around the sun....

Up and down, up and down - that is how temperature and climate have always gone in the past and there is no proof that they are not still doing exactly the same now. In other wards, climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon, nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels.

In fact, a recent scientific paper, rather unenticingly titled 'Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentrations over the Last Glacial Termination,' proved it. It showed that increases in temperature are responsible for increased in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels not the other way around....

The real truth is that the main greenhouse gas - the one that has the most direct effect on land temperatures - is water vapour, 99 percent of which is entirely natural. If all the water vapour was removed from the atmosphere, the temperature of the planet would fall by 33 degrees Celsius. But remove all the carbon dioxide and the temperature might fall by just 0.3 percent. Although we wouldn't be around because without it there would be no green plants, no herbivorous farm animals and no food for us to eat.

It has been estimated that the cost of cutting fossil fuel emissions in line with the Kyoto Protocol would be £76 trillion. Little wonder then that world leaders are worried. So should we all be. If we signed up to these scaremongers, we could be about to waste a gargantuan amount of money on a problem that doesn’t exist - money that could be used in umpteen better ways, fighting world hunger, providing clean drinking water, developing alternative energy sources, improving our environment, creating jobs."

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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 July, 2004

GREEN BOLSHEVIKS

They're just as destructive as the Russian ones

"As his inauguration in March 1933 came to an end FDR found that his promises for economic recovery and for keeping us out of war had to take priority. He blasted full force with his New Deal and thus initiated the era of the alphabet soup agencies which were to cure our ills. He created an unfettered allotment of Frankenstein Departments which many to this day still plague us starting with the FCA, FCC, FDIC, FHA, FLA, MLB, NLB, NRA, NYA, PWA, WPA, SSB, TVA and over 40 others.

These agencies, spawned and ennobled by the American Bolsheviks over a period of years, have shredded our constitution and delivered telling blows to everything that we historically have held dear. The hundreds upon hundreds of cases throughout our nation have impinged upon our basic constitutional rights, especially in the last 15 years....

Here are a few: In California a landowner was bankrupted while in farming his land he interfered with the kangaroo rats. The fanatic concern for the snail darter, the spotted owl, the mousey desert shrew and the kangaroo rat at the expense of human productive energy is a sickness which falls parallel to the disease of socialism which is now running rampant in our country. In Michigan recently a landowner was harassed for the farming of so-called wetlands (commonly referred to as mosquito havens) which in the past both the courts and the army engineers had deemed as not wetlands. What these leeches representing government are trying to do has not been fully understood other than the landowner had been targeted and for some strange reason possibly being used as an example of government power. In Michigan the Dept. of Environmental Quality has made the call for a Midland dioxin cleanup upon the suspicion that dioxin levels may cause various illnesses. At risk are property values, homes, businesses and the livelihood of all Midland residents. There had been no study made of any potential health risks nor a shred of evidence that there is a problem of any kind. In Gross Ile, Michigan the Township has been temporarily thwarted in its attempts to confiscate a privately owned bridge. And now the EPA has decreed that a seven county area in Southeast Michigan is out of compliance with new clean air standards for fine particle pollution. SEMCOG, a regional planning partnership of local governmental units serving almost 5 million people, strongly disagree since their monitors claim otherwise. Seemingly nothing is available to stop these people from exercising their powers. They have happily assisted government in where, when and why people should smoke or not smoke; they have entered our bathrooms and told us how much water should be in the toilets and they are now in the process of determining our diets in compliance with the latest fads.

These legal felons imbued with orgiastic rites have subjected us to global warming; the ice age; the earth is now getting brighter; one third of the earth's surface is at risk to becoming desert; mercury emissions; earth day; the DDT fiasco; carbon dioxide emissions; tree thinning; asbestos scare; the combustion engine; ozone depletion; and whatever else will ensure them more money and power. Their agenda has evolved slowly and has become a mindset emboldened by the encouragement and the emotional bondage of the Bolsheviks in the Congress. Only the people themselves can stop this blatant tyranny. Possibly we need another Boston Tea Party".

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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14 July, 2004

GEOLOGY SPEAKS

And tells us we are in the middle of a warm period between ice ages. The last similar warm period ran for 28,000 years WITHOUT any nasty industry to create it.

"Despite the recent trend toward global warming, scientists have long wondered whether the Earth is nearing another ice age, an end to the 12,000-year temperate spell in which civilizations arose. Some have said such a transition is overdue, given that each of the three temperate intervals that immediately preceded the current one lasted only about 10,000 years. But now, in an eagerly awaited study, a group of climate and ice experts say they have new evidence that Earth is not even halfway through the current warm era. The evidence comes from the oldest layers of Antarctic ice ever sampled.

Some scientists earlier proposed similar hypotheses, basing them on the current configuration of Earth's orbit, which seems to set the metronome that ice ages dance to. Temperature patterns deciphered in sea-bottom sediments in recent years supported the theory.

But experts say the new ice data is by far the strongest corroborating evidence, revealing many similarities between today's atmospheric and temperature patterns and those of a prolonged warm interval, with a duration of 28,000 years, that reached its peak 430,000 years ago. The findings were described Thursday in the journal Nature by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. The evidence comes from a shaft of ice extracted over five years from Antarctica, composed of thousands of layers that were formed as each year's snowfall was compressed over time. The deepest ice retrieved comes from 10,000 feet, or 3,000 meters, deep and dates back 740,000 years. The relative abundance of certain forms of hydrogen in the ice reflects past air temperatures.

No ice core worldwide had reached back beyond 420,000 years, making this core the first to capture fully the conditions during that long warm period. Several independent researchers familiar with the project said the case that the current warm period would be prolonged was now strong."

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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 July, 2004

GETTING ATTENTION AT ANY PRICE

I regularly point out that Greenie motivation is best explained as attention-seeking behaviour rather than any desire to do anybody any good. The example below is a rather extreme case. It's attention-seeking behaviour of an extreme kind with only the slightest pretence of Greenie righteousness. Note that Norway does not have any rainforests:

"Controversial Kristopher Schau loves to shock his audience, and few knew what was in store for them as they went to his concert at the Quart music festival. In the middle of the concert, a young couple entered the stage. "How far are you willing to go to save the world?" asked the young man, and without much ado, the couple pulled off their clothes.

Cumshots provided the background music as the couple had intercourse right in front of the audience. A banner was raised on stage informing the audience that the couple was having sex to save the rainforest. After completing the intercourse, the couple received applause from the audience and disappeared.

The young couple, Tommy Hol Ellingsen, age 28, and Leona Johansson, age 21, are members of the environmental organization "Fuck for Forest." They have sex in public in order to put focus on the rainforest."

More here.



OPTIMISTS

"Trying to sell SUVs to environmentalists may be akin to pitching mink coats to animal-rights activists, but that's the approach Ford is taking with its soon-to-be-released Escape Hybrid SUV. So far, activists who strongly oppose gas-guzzling vehicles are giving a lukewarm reception to the first SUV designed to appeal to the green community.

Hybrid vehicles offer increased fuel efficiency by supplementing the gas engine with a battery-powered electric motor. But Ford's Escape will look just like its popular conventional-engine SUV when it goes on sale at dealerships in September, which could lead to a less-than-polite reception for its drivers on roadways and avenues."

More here. (Via Say Anything).

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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 July, 2004

DO GREENIE ACTIVISTS EVEN KNOW THE MEANING OF "INTEGRITY"?

Science "integrity" award a laugh again:

"I was much amused last year at this time when the junk science-fueled Center for Science in the Public Interest announced that the University of Pittsburgh's Herbert Needleman would be honored with CSPI's inaugural "Rachel Carson Award for Integrity in Science." The recently-announced honoree of the second annual "Integrity in Science" award is no less comical - Theo Colburn, co-author of the infamous 1996 book, "Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival." Her book's theme is that man-made chemicals are causing a myriad of diseases and conditions ranging from cancer to infertility to attention deficit disorder....

Colburn wrote that 80 percent of Florida's bald eagles were sterile in the mid-1950s, implying that man-made chemicals were to blame. What was her source for the estimate? How about a banker whose science credential was his claim to be an amateur bird watcher? Now that's authority.

Based on nothing more than bold-faced assertion, Colburn linked the decline of a particular otter population with a pesticide. Far more probable causes for the decline - overhunting or disease - were ignored.

The mid-1960s crash of a captive mink population near Lake Michigan was attributed by Colburn to the minks' diet, which included fish containing chemicals called polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs. But Colburn never scientifically linked the PCBs with the population crash while, once again, overlooking other possible explanations. In a subsequent unrelated passage in the book, however, she noted that it is, in fact, normal for animal populations, particularly those in captivity, to peak and then crash.

She wrote about observations of seagulls living in "lesbian relationships," which were attributed to chemicals without the slightest bit of credible evidence. Colburn also tried to promote the notion that man-made chemicals caused a decline in human sperm counts - a myth that has since been discredited by research questioning whether sperm counts have even declined.....

In the more than eight years since the publication of "Our Stolen Future" and untold millions, if not billions, of dollars spent researching Colburn's ideas, no credible science supports any of her allegations. In 1999, an expert panel of the National Academy of Science's National Research Council found no persuasive evidence that the trace levels of chemicals typically in the environment are disrupting hormonal processes in humans or wildlife.

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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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11 July, 2004

Better air vs. hot air

"According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the overall quality of our air has improved steadily on President Bush's watch. Specifically, concentrations of carbon monoxide have fallen by 15.5 percent, lead by 31.5 percent, nitrogen dioxide by 5 percent, sulfur dioxide by 11 percent, and particulate matter by more than 4 percent. The two pollutants that contribute to ozone formation, moreover, are at their lowest levels since 1970.

President Bush has advanced regulatory proposals to allow outmoded power plants, oil refineries and other industrial facilities to modernize, and thereby cut their emissions of harmful pollutants, and to require the overseers of our national forests to use proven forest management techniques to limit the number and extent of the devastating fires that have ravaged millions of acres of forest in recent years.

President Bush also has implemented the first-ever snowmobile emission standards, which would have the same effect as taking 30 million cars off the road. In May, his administration tackled pollution from heavy construction equipment by approving a rule that will reduce the pollution from sulfur in diesel fuel by 99 percent.

As an impressive environmental record, that's not bad, right?

Au contraire. The League of Conservation Voters reviewed this record and concluded that President Bush "is well on his way to compiling the worst environmental record in the history of our nation." Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry concurred, assessing these actions as "Abysmal. Worst record in modern history.""

More here



WHO CARES ABOUT THE POOR?

Not Greenies

"A gas tax capable of inducing consumers to switch to smaller cars would almost certainly have to be high enough to still raise overall driving costs. Hardest hit would be the working poor, some of whom would be priced off the roads entirely. These workers would be deprived of the expanded job opportunities that come with being able to drive to work and instead would be limited to the subset of jobs accessible by public transportation."

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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 July, 2004

A SILLY GREENIE TRACT

I never "fisk" anything on any of my sites but sometimes I am tempted. I reproduce below two of the opening paragraphs of a piece of Green/Left propaganda written by Andrew Simms as an article in the June 28th issue of New Statesman. The full article is no longer free online but I have saved a copy to disk and it is still at the moment available via the Google cache here. I will reproduce below it a comment from the Australian Libertarian site and then add a couple of comments of my own.

Simms writes:

"In the energy-supply industry, the inferior technology is a global economy increasingly addicted to fossil fuels. The result? We are hooked up to devastating climate change, and, because of the imminent divergence between peak oil production and rising energy demand, we face a lasting economic shock. Waiting in the wings, too, is a resurgent nuclear industry still grappling with unsolved problems of immortal waste, pollution, high costs and security demands that are both oppressive and vulnerable.

Energy economists are fond of saying that, with energy, there is no such thing as a free lunch. True, there are costs involved in tapping clean, renewable energy sources such as the sun, the tides and wind. But they are, in important senses, free. They are free of greenhouse-gas emissions, free from the threat of depletion, and free of the risks and authoritarianism associated with nuclear power. While there is no getting round the fact that it takes energy to make energy, the energy gain from renewables is much greater than other sources of power. The energy gain from coal, for example, can be as little as five times the energy expended, whereas a windfarm can generate 80 times the energy input."

Comment on the above from the Australian Libertarian site follows:

In a recent edition of New Statesman I read an article by Andrew Simms on the need for the government to force people to switch to renewable power. Apparently there are two problems with using fossil fuels which mean that we all need to hurry up and switch to renewable energy now - or else!

The first problem is that we're going to run out of fossil fuels soon. The second problem is that we're going to keep using the fossil fuels well into the future.

Huh? It may have occured to you, dear reader, that these concerns appear to contradict each other. But that is only because you're thinking like a rational person and not a green ideologue. Shame on you. You probably kill babies too.

The basic argument, as put forward by Mr Simms, was that energy requirements would continue to grow, and that this would be met largely through fossil fuels. However, the "dwindling supplies of oil" is going to cause a problem, with "energy prices on a sky-high trip that most developing countries may never recover from". But because people will continue to use fossil fuels, we are going to run head first into global warming. Or cooling. Or something.

Somebody with less faith in government and more faith in reality may quibble over the exact dangers of global warming and the liklihood of running out of oil any time soon. But there is a more fundamental error in the above logic that shows a scary inability to think these issues through. This error is that Simms has ignored behavioural change.

Elsewhere in his article Simms notes that the cost of renewable power has come down significantly and is now only a bit more expensive than fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources are expected to get even more competitive in the near future. So if we accept the argument that we'll run out of oil soon, then oil prices will increase and renewable energy will be relatively cheaper. People will naturally switch to renewable energy and the consumption of fossil fuels will decrease. No "sky-high" energy prices. No global melt-down. Simple economics.

If, however, people are going to continue to use fossil fuels into the future - resulting in the flooding of California (is this a benefit or cost?) - then this implies that oil prices will remain below the cost of renewable energy, which means we wouldn't be running out of oil.

Simms can't have it both ways. Either oil prices are going up (so we switch to renewables naturally under the free market) or they're not. It's not possible for us to suffer the costs associated both with high oil prices and low oil prices at the same time. Unfortunately for the green movement - the world isn't in as much trouble as they think.

Some further comments:

Simms plugs wind power but fails to mention that most Greens now oppose it because the windmills spoil the scenery and kill birds. And they need coal-fired backup anyway for when the wind is not blowing. So you have the huge cost of doubling all your generating capacity if you use wind. Thank goodness the Greenies have gone off the idea.

"Authoritarianism" as a danger from nuclear power is a new one on me but my first response is that using nuclear power is nowhere nearly as authoritarian as the Greenies trying to dictate to us how to live every detail of our lives.

Counter-intuitive though it at first seems, oil reserves are increasing, not decreasing. But even if we do run out of oil, industrial alcohol brewed from sugar costs at the moment only about double what gasoline costs. And most of the world already pays many times more than double what gasoline costs because of taxes on it. So a switch to alcohol as a motor fuel need only involve a slight cut in the overall government tax take for the motorist to notice no difference. And the motor fuel sold in many countries is already part-alcohol. See my post of May 20th.

And the only barriers to safe disposal of nuclear waste are legal ones thrown up by Greenies. And one of the last of those barriers has just been removed.

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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 July, 2004

NOW NATURAL GAS IS BAD

You can never please a Greenie. Without something to complain about they would lose their purpose in life

Natural gas battle shifts to imports: "Environmental activist groups, despite last year successfully calling for increased importation of foreign natural gas as an alternative to domestic drilling, are now engaging in a campaign to oppose natural gas imports. ... Having coerced the shift to natural gas, however, the activist groups now have embarked on a campaign to ban domestic natural gas drilling. Throwing up environmental arguments in opposition to virtually all new applications to drill for gas, the groups succeeded in creating a natural gas shortage severe enough by the summer of 2003 to capture the attention of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Congressional hearings."



GREENIES HATE ONE-ANOTHER TOO

The "red" Greenies show the usual mock-horror about ("racist") immigration limitation. But the Deep Greens REALLY hate people so want to keep anybody out that they can. The two groups recently fought for control of the Sierra Club and the reds seem to have won for now. Below is a report of part of the aftermath. Excerpt only:

"Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, needs to get out more. In the May-June 2004 issue of Sierra, the official publication of the Sierra Club, he penned an editorial entitled "The Virus of Hate." In it he discusses the tactics of various people "on the losing side" of the recent Sierra Club election, accusing them of having

"entered into an ugly alliance with individuals and groups whose motivations are clearly racist. As a result, earlier this year, I sadly opened a new file folder to deal with a virus-not a computer virus, but a very ancient human virus, one that now threatens to infect the Sierra Club: the virus of hate."

.....

But do not expect logic to slow down those who find the labels of racist and racism useful. The real hate is in the Carl Popes of this world who value political correctness above all else, and who see any honest discussion of racial/ethnic issues as anathema and as racist. Of course we all know why. If honest discussion of our major issues were to be the rule rather than the exception, their little pipe-dream world would collapse."

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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 July, 2004

WATER IN THE DESERT IS BAD?

Israel's hydrological genius (he finds water when no-one else can) speaks:

"If you compare the archaeology of civilisations with the evidence of past climates you find that almost all major historical change in the Middle East has been the result of big changes in climate. When the climate becomes cooler the deserts get wetter, the land blooms and civilisations flourish. People came from the north bringing copper around 4000 BC, bronze around 2500 BC and iron in 1000 BC. But in between there were periods of aridity and crisis when the civilisations collapsed.

Q: That sounds a bit deterministic. What's the evidence?

Yes, this sort of environmental determinism isn't very popular. Historians and archaeologists put all the blame for historical catastrophes on human society. For instance, they blame the Sumerians in Mesopotamia for poisoning their soils with salt by over-irrigating them around 2000 BC. But we now know the climate became warmer and drier then, so they ran out of water to flush the soil clean. The Arabs were blamed for turning the Middle East into desert after the 7th century, when the real culprit was, climate. We can see this from the fact that lake levels fell all across the Middle East at the same times as civilisations failed. Also changes in oxygen isotopes in lake deposits and stalagmites show how the climate changed.

Q: Your views are controversial among environmentalists as well, aren't they?

Yes. I want to plant the deserts with trees, but I find environmentalists are like religious fundamentalists who don't want change. They cannot imagine another landscape from the one we have now. They say we should preserve the desert in the Negev. But we know that 2000 years ago it was wetter, and people farmed there. There were agricultural terraces and systems for channelling floods onto fields. So yes, I think we should plant the deserts with trees. The trees will soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Most deserts have fossil water beneath them that could be used. Again, people say we shouldn't use fossil water because it won't be replaced. But I say if fossil fuel created the problem, then it is not unreasonable to use fossil water to help solve it. This water will last for centuries. But the planners here agree with the environmentalists and want to leave the desert as it is."



THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC GOES POLITICAL

It's very sad the way the global warming myth has politicized lots of scientists. Drama beats facts hands down. It appears that The National Geographic is the latest publication to be corrupted by pseudo-science.



THE EVIL DHMO

I have mentioned this fun site before but here is an excerpt from their front page:

"Welcome to the web site for the Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division (DMRD), currently located in Newark, Delaware. The controversy surrounding dihydrogen monoxide has never been more widely debated, and the goal of this site is to provide an unbiased data clearinghouse and a forum for public discussion.

Explore our many Special Reports, including the DHMO FAQ, a definitive primer on the subject, plus reports on the environment, cancer, current research, and an insider expos, about the use of DHMO in the dairy industry".

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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 July, 2004

GREENS NOT RED ENOUGH

The far-Left "Counterpunch" site is disgusted with the U.S. Green Party. Why? Because the Greens don't want to hurt John Kerry's chances in the upcoming Presidential election. To "Counterpunch", Kerry is a far-Rightist as bad as Bush. Here is what they say about the Greens:

"Apparently, the Green Party has not only lost its mind, it's lost its entire central nervous system, including the spine--especially its spine. They've surrendered to the politics of fear. And once the white flag is raised there's little chance of recovering the ground you've given up".

I was of course pleased to see that they recognize Greenie politics as the politics of fear but how they arrived at that conclusion escapes me. But the whole article seems profoundly thought-disordered to me. If the Greens DID take votes away from Kerry, that would help Bush get elected. Is getting Bush elected what "Counterpunch" wants? It seems so. I cannot follow their reasoning at all. Not that I am surprised by that. It is also not surprising that, as far-Leftists, they seem to hate EVERYBODY -- with the possible exception of Ralph Nader.

More here. (Slow loading).



FORGOTTEN SCIENCE

The balance of scientific opinion seems to be that there probably HAS been a very slight increase in global temperature in recent years -- though there is also evidence of no change. But it is the CAUSE of any change that is the issue. Is it because mankind has suddenly started putting out a lot of pollutants in recent years -- as the Greenies claim? Given the DECLINE in heavily polluting activities like the once-widespread burning of coal, it seems very unlikely. But THAT is what the "Kyoto" enthusiasts have to prove: That mankind is the influence on global temperature change. And that is precisely what the Greenies CANNOT prove. Why? Because global temperature fluctuations have been going on as far back as we can see, long before modern technology existed, long before even the steam engine. And that NATURAL phenomena cause global temperature change has been known since at least the 1860s. Yes -- 1860s, not 1960s. One of the pioneers of research into global temperature change was Scotsman James Croll, born in 1821. Note this comment about him:

"Croll was the first to suggest that cyclical changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit, from elliptical (which is to say, slightly oval) to nearly circular to elliptical again, might explain the onset and retreat of ice ages. No-one had ever thought before to consider an astronomical explanation for variations in the Earth's weather. Thanks almost entirely to Croll's persuasive theory, people in Britain began to become more responsive to the notion that at some former time parts of the Earth had been in the grip of ice."

More on Croll 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 July, 2004

THE HUGE COSTS WE ALL PAY

Most people do not realize how much Greenie impositions cost us already

"Despite their rhetoric, the environmentalists who keep the movement going with countless organizations, by lobbying the government, and with a constant propaganda program, care little about a healthy, growing, successful economy. They say they do, but so much of what passes for environmentalism is actually a constant attack on the most basic elements of the nation’s economy.

Recently I saw a PBS documentary on the building of the Grand Coulee Dam that transformed the economy of the northwest, providing inexpensive electricity that stimulated the growth of business and the irrigation needed for agricultural expansion. I was struck by a comment by one of those who built the dam during the days of the Roosevelt administration. He said, if the Environmental Protection Agency had been around in the 1930s, the dam would never have been built.

This explains why there hasn’t been a new oil refinery built in the United States since the 1970s, why the electrical grid on which we depend has not been upgraded for decades, why there hasn’t been a new mining operation opened to get at our abundant resources of coal and other minerals, why the cost of natural gas continues to rise because we need more pipelines, and why this nation still hasn’t been able to tap an estimated sixteen billion barrels of crude oil in Alaska.

It explains why the cost of new and old housing continues to rise. The environmental restrictions on building new housing for a growing population have to be passed along to the buyers. Developers must assume the cost of various environmental impact studies. If an “endangered species” is found on the property, it can stall the project for years. Old homes often have to add the cost of radon reduction, asbestos removal or the removal of an old oil tank before they can be sold to new owners. The “risks” involved are virtually nonexistent."

More here



THOSE NAUGHTY POWERLINES AGAIN

Wayne Lusvardi writes:

"The July 5, 2004 issue of The San Francisco Chronicle has an article by reporter Ryan Kim "Power Line Route Raises Concern about Health" about a proposed Pacific Gas and Electric 27-mile long 230,000 volt electric transmission line near San Francisco. The article indicates how government environmental health services have been politicized to pander to the concerns of nearby homeowners along the preferred route. No less than the California Department of Health Services is reported to have surveyed published studies and concluded electromagnetic fields might cause increased risk of childhood leukemia, adult brain cancer, Lou Gehrig's disease and miscarriages, although it is reported there is no conclusive link.

The original article can be found on SFGate.com here. Professor John Moulder, PhD, Medical College of Wisconsin, has created a definitive site on the health effects of power lines. See here and here

It is interesting to note that those who are so concerned about radiation from power lines damaging human DNA seem nonchalant about the lack of a common dietary substance, folic acid, derived from most green leafy vegetables, a deficiency of which can create DNA damage that mimics radiation damage. Bruce Ames, the most eminent cancer scientist in the world, has reported the effects of folic acid deficiency on human DNA in the October 2001 issue of Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers and Prevention. See here and 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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5 July, 2004

Greenhouse fear 'a scam'

By JO KNOWSLEY

DISTINGUISHED botanist David Bellamy has branded fears about global warming as "the biggest scam to hit the world". The UK conservationist said there was no evidence that human actions had caused temperatures to rise around the globe. Dr Bellamy argued that global warming was the result of an entirely natural scientific pattern, and might even be a good thing.

He accused governments of needlessly wasting billions of dollars on measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Dr Bellamy also hit out at "scare tactics" used in the campaign. "It is scientifically proven that 99 per cent of the world's greenhouse emissions come from natural sources over which we have no control," Dr Bellamy said. "Yet millions are being spent which will have no effect whatsoever on global warming. "It is a scientific fact that it is increases in temperature which are responsible for increases in natural C02 (carbon dioxide) levels, not the other way around, as the public is repeatedly told."

The above article appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on July, 4, 2004. Prof. Bellamy is of course well-known for his nature shows on T.V. and his advocacy of many environmental causes



MORE CALIFORNIA DREAMING

"California's newly released regulatory initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new cars sold in that state represents the triumph of symbolism over substance. It's an ill-considered gesture that ought to annoy partisans on both sides of the global warming fence. How much will these new emission rules help in the fight against global warming? 'Not much' would be a charitable answer.

Back-of-the envelope calculations derived from computer simulations performed by climatologist Tom Wigley (who, by the way, supports aggressive action to address the threat of global warming) suggest that even if every state in the union adopted California's new program, global temperatures would drop by something less (actually, probably far less) than one-tenth of 1 degree Fahrenheit by 2050. What everyone in the scientific community understands but few want to discuss publicly is that stopping global warming - or even slowing it down appreciably - requires the near total abandonment of fossil fuels."

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 July, 2004

A GREAT 4TH JULY PRESENT

Wow! It looks like there has now been a major backdown by the authors of the original "Greenhouse" article. The crooked scientists behind the Greenhouse scare (Mann, Bradley and Hughes) have at last been forced to own up to fudging their data. The very foundation of the "greenhouse" scare has been kicked away. For those who can handle scientific text, here is the summary of what has just happened (MBH98 is the original "scientific" Greenhouse paper) by the scientists who forced the backdown:

"The Corrigendum in Nature today (July 1, 2004) by Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes is a clear admission that the disclosure of data and methods behind MBH98 was materially inaccurate. The text acknowledges extensive errors in the description of the data set. Even more important is the new online Supplementary Information (SI) site, which concedes for the first time that key steps in the computations behind MBH98 were left out of (and indeed conflict with) the description of methods in the original paper.

These items were published on the instruction of the Editorial Board of Nature in response to a Materials Complaint that we filed in November 2003. That our complaint was upheld and the Corrigendum was ordered represents a vindication of our view that, prior to our analysis, there had been no independent attempt to verify or replicate this influential but deeply flawed study, something which was forestalled, at least in part, by inadequate and inaccurate disclosure of data and methods.

This is only the first step in resolving the dispute we initiated last fall. The Corrigendum and the SI contain the gratuitous claim that the errors, omissions and misrepresentations in MBH98 do not affect their results. If this were true, then a simple constructive proof could have been provided, showing before and after calculations. This is conspicuously missing from the Corrigendum and the new SI. We have done the calculations and can assert categorically that the claim is false. We have made a journal submission to this effect and will explain the matter fully when that paper is published."

More here.



GREENIE CONFUSION

"The Green Party rejected the independent campaign of Ralph Nader at its convention last weekend. Instead, the Greens nominated a little-known attorney and activist from California, David Cobb, as their presidential candidate. ... the contrast between Cobb and Nader-Camejo ... was stark. The most important issue is that Cobb and his supporters represent a so-called 'safe-states' strategy. The idea is that the Green Party presidential candidate should help defeat George Bush in the November election by not running an all-out campaign in 'battleground states' where the Greens could do well enough to tip the balance to Bush -- as Nader is accused of doing in the 2000 election. ... Supporters of Nader and Camejo at the convention rejected this argument. 'We're the Green Party,' Gloria Mattera, co-chair of the New York state Green Party, told a Nader-Camejo rally. 'It's not our job to elect a pro-war Democrat into the White House.'"

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 July, 2004

GREENIE DOMINO STRATEGY

"Exactly 50 years ago, the idea of the "domino theory" first found its way into popular discourse in the context of Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. While it sounds a bit like a Cold War relic today, the phrase remains useful to explain certain events. Consider the activist Rainforest Action Network's (RAN) recently concluded four-year campaign against Citigroup, one of America's most respected financial institutions.

In 2000, RAN accused Citigroup of loaning money to economic development projects that were purportedly destroying the world's "remaining old growth forests" and "accelerat[ing] climate change." When Citigroup disputed the charges, RAN strategists went to work. Over the next four years, RAN staged dozens of anti-Citigroup stunts, including student rallies and boycotts, anti-Citigroup TV ads, and street protests. RAN activists also hung banners in front of Citigroup's New York headquarters and demanded that Citigroup not make loans to economic development projects in undeveloped regions of the world, to ensure that they remain pristine.

Last January, Citigroup gave in— it sued for peace. In exchange for an end to RAN's campaign, Citigroup promised to "promote higher environmental standards through its business practices," particularly in the areas of "endangered ecosystems, illegal logging, ecologically sustainable development, and climate change." Translation: Citigroup will no longer help finance projects that environmentalists don't like. It will help NGOs start drawing what an activist once referred to as "green lines" around poor countries, setting them off-limits for conventional forms of intense development.

Now, having browbeaten Citigroup into accepting their agenda, will RAN activists put away their banners and protest signs, and retire from the field? Hardly. According to an article in the April issue of Peacework, the protest Left's self-declared "trade journal," RAN's Citigroup campaign is merely one battle in a very ambitious long-term campaign to turn businesses into instruments of green social engineering. Citigroup, you might say, was just the first domino."

More here:



ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC ATTACK ON GREENIE MYTHS

There are still plenty of real scientists around who are prepared to blow the whistle on Green nonsense. I have just put up here a review of the latest debunking book. Excerpt:

"Remember the science news story that bird eggs would not survive in the wild because of spraying DDT? Jack W. Dini, a materials engineer with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, exposes this and many other frauds and half-truths as nothing more than non-scientific myth in his book Challenging Environmental Mythology: Wrestling Zeus (2003). Dini writes that public environmental policy has turned into a movement of mythological proportions that believes it is impervious to scientific examination or criticism. Dini shows that much of what we have been led to believe is true about environmental conditions is actually myth."

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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 July, 2004

GREENS ARE TOO MUCH EVEN FOR THE LEFT SOMETIMES

A confused Leftist writes:

"'It is in our interest,' the politician said last week, 'to bring the eight to 12 undocumented immigrants out of the shadows and become citizens of this great nation.'

'We have to control our immigration,' said the other politician. 'We have to limit the number of people who come to this country illegally ? . I don't like the idea of legalization because then the question is how do you prevent the next wave and the next?'

The first quote is from Republican Senator John McCain, speaking before La Raza, the Latino civil-rights group.... And the second quote? That was from Mr. Progressive himself, Ralph Nader, speaking to Pat Buchanan in an interview for Buchanan's magazine, The American Conservative."

So while the largely conservative McCain was making a gesture against a right-wing ballot measure, the supposedly progressive Nader was getting palsy-walsy with someone who is about as far to the right as you can go in American politics and still get on television. And while Nader did emphasize his disagreement with Buchanan on the level of public benefits that immigrants should receive, he conveyed, albeit in a convoluted way, that he and Pat were seeing very much eye to eye -- against amnesty for undocumented aliens, for example. This is the man who lectures the Democratic Party about its lack of principles?"

Nader once stood for the Greens and the Greens hate people. Greenies want to REDUCE the population, not increase it. So being anti-immigration is respectable policy among the Greens



BUT THESE GREENS ARE RED!

The Green Cobb: "On the heels of an exciting win at the much anticipated Green Party presidential nominating convention last weekend, Texas attorney David Cobb said he plans to live up to every expectation party delegates have of him. For Cobb, that doesn't mean just being a third party alternative to George W. Bush or John Kerry, or serving as a grassroots messenger to American voters. Cobb said he will be the anti-war candidate who represents voters who opposed the invasion of Iraq and support the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. 'The war is going to be one of the absolutely central issues in this campaign,' Cobb told FOXNews.com. 'I am a peace candidate, and we are running unflinchingly on that message.' Greens say that despite Kerry's blustering on Iraq, the Massachusetts senator still voted to authorize the war and President Bush's broader War on Terror."

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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 July, 2004

THE KYOTO SAGA LINGERS

Russia's Kyoto decision still up in the air:

"On May 21, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced to the world that, in order to gain European Union (EU) backing for Russia's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), he would 'speed up movement towards ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.' Many have interpreted this to mean the internal debate in Russia over what to do about Kyoto is over....

As the Los Angeles Times was careful to point out, "Putin stopped short of pledging a positive vote on ratification, cautioning that his government still had concerns about the 'obligations' imposed by the treaty. He also said it was still 'not 100% certain' parliament would endorse the Kyoto treaty." None of this should come as a surprise, as this is the same line his government has followed since it stepped back from the treaty in October last year....

Professor Oleg Sorokhtin from the RAS's Institute of Oceanography was quoted by the Russian news agency TASS as saying, "The Kyoto Protocol is not needed at all, as even considerable emissions of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have almost no effect on the Earth's temperature but contribute to agricultural productivity and to the restoration of forest resources."....

With scientific backing for his advisors' concern about the effects of the protocol and the opposition of the Duma, it would seem President Putin left enough get-out clauses in his May 21 announcement to ensure Russia does not have to go through with ratification. Indeed, the announcement that the Academy of Sciences is to make a further report suggests this was anticipated."



GREENIE HERO DISSES THE GREENIES

James Lovelock of 'Gaia' fame says the Greenie dislike of science makes them impotent, foolish and irrelevant -- to summarize:

"European politicians appear to accept the near inevitability of global warming but, oddly, turn to the green movement and its lobbies for guidance, more than to scientists. I see myself as a green but I speak as a scientist. Despite their good intentions, the majority of the greens are more concerned about the trivial risks from chemicals and radiation than about the serious risk of adverse global changes; consequently, their advice to governments is flawed.... The error of the modern green movement is its self-indulgence, its hypochondriac obsession with personal hazards to health such as pesticide residues and other unwanted chemicals in foodstuff, nuclear radiation and genetic manipulation. Greens foster the illusion that if the planet were farmed organically all would be well....

Renewable energy might be a good idea in the long term, and is a showy way for politicians to prove that they are doing something, but it is already too late to expect it to play a significant role; global warming is already happening and is likely to intensify. To supplement the feeble energy supplies from renewables by lashings of natural gas is a risky option, particularly for Britain. The European encouragement of subsidised renewable energy might be justified were there no alternative tried and tested energy source - but there is: clean and safe nuclear energy. The objections to it are unscientific and perverse, but the green lobbies have preached against it until some European governments have been forced to act against the public good and allow it to be phased out....

Moreover, the economist Shimon Awerbuch reminded us that the magical appearance of a clean, safe and economic source of energy would do little to stop the burning of fossil fuels, such is the human tendency to over-consume. Indeed, the spread of wind turbines in Germany has been accompanied by an increase in coal combustion, the dirtiest of all fuels. The earth system, Gaia, functions because within it are powerful restraints to growth, as we will discover. We have to make our own restraints if we are to avoid those the Earth will apply. Perhaps the unreasoning fear of nuclear energy at least implies some built-in restraint.

So what will happen and what should we do? There are three main alternatives. The first is laissez faire: continue to enjoy a warmer 21st century, and make cosmetic attempts to hide global warming. I suspect that this is what will happen in much of the world. Second is the deep green way: eat nothing but organic food, use nothing but renewable energy and raw materials. These policies might restore the Earth to health but at the cost of a massive reduction in the numbers of people and possibly the loss of some civilisations. There may be a third, less unpleasant, way: the high-tech road. It would require us to take global change seriously and lessen the footprint of humans on the Earth. First, and most important, it would mean no more natural habitat destruction. To attempt to farm the whole Earth to feed people makes us like sailors who burned the timbers and rigging of their ship to keep warm. Then we must embrace science and engineering; we need their skills and inventions to lessen our impact on the Earth. If more food comes from less land by genetic engineering then use it; better still, if food can be synthesised by the chemical and biochemical industries from carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen, then let's make it and give Earth a rest. We need a portfolio of energy sources, with nuclear playing a big part, at least until fusion power is an option, and we must stop fretting over the minute risks of cancer from chemicals or radiation. In Britain, one quarter of us will die of cancer anyway, mainly because we breathe air laden with that pervasive carcinogen, oxygen......

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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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