Sunday, September 12, 2004

 

GREAT STUFF: COULD BE GOOD FOR FOR OVERTURNING GREENIE NONSENSE

"As the in-house newsletter of the nation's political and bureaucratic establishment, it's not surprising that The Washington Post would run a hit piece on the Data Quality Act late last month.

The act, passed with little fanfare as part of a 2000 appropriations bill, gives the regulated a fighting chance to challenge the quality of the science used by the government in formulating the rules it imposes on the rest of us.

The law not only has the potential to overturn government regulations that are based on immature or slipshod science, but to finally bring some semblance of parity to the endless struggle between the regulators and regulated.

But Washington doesn't like to play fair, or to be challenged on its supposed expertise on everything under the sun. The political process is increasingly driven by a sense of crisis that only sensationalized science can generate. And that makes the act a prime target of the regulate-first, worry-about-the-science-later crowd.

The Post portrayed the law as the "nemesis of regulation" and fretted about its use by "industry" to challenge federal rulemakers on the scientific merits. The story warned ominously that the law, under President Bush, "has become a potent tool for companies seeking to beat back regulation" - though a careful read suggests otherwise. All this could only be viewed as worrisome by those who assume that all government regulations are, ipso facto, beneficial, cost-effective and justified by science.

But we don't share those assumptions. Regulations are routinely handed down from on high based on questionable, immature and incomplete science, thanks to something called "the precautionary principle," which licenses the government to act on the mere suspicion that something might be harmful to human health. Whether these potentially costly actions are scientifically justified is a question frequently put off for another day, and then promptly forgotten, while the regulations live on in perpetuity. And where is it written that individuals, businesses and industries shouldn't be permitted to fight back?

Dr. John Graham, who heads the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs inside the Office of Management and Budget, sees the Data Quality Act as a tool for holding regulators to a higher scientific standard. It's helpful not just to industry, he points out, but to a "wide diversity" of individuals and interests that might have reason to challenge the quality of government science.

Among those who have stepped forward to take advantage of the law are the American Chemistry Council, which challenged the science used by the Consumer Product Safety Commission in banning the use of arsenic-treated lumber in playground equipment. Sugar interests and the Salt Institute challenged the validity of federal dietary recommendations aimed at curtailing the public's consumption of these products. And the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers challenged the government's rankings of clothes dryers according to their alleged susceptibility to lint fires. Some of these petitions might seem frivolous and self-serving - unless your own livelihood or the survival of your company are threatened by actions based on dubious science.

Critics of the Bush administration routinely accuse it of "politicizing" science, and they point to the Data Quality Act as a case in point. But the corruption of science for political purposes has been going on for decades. Some of the administration's shrillest critics are most at fault for twisting the data to suit their agendas. And this White House has done more than any in recent history to insist on higher scientific standards before costly and consequential regulations are imposed on Americans".

Source

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

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

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posted by john ray 8:56 AM

Saturday, September 11, 2004

 
GREENIES AS PRAISE-SEEKERS

"Research undertaken for the UK supermarket chain Sainsbury's suggests that more younger people - and younger women in particular - are buying organic. However, these purchases often had little to do with saving the planet. As a Sainsbury's press release reported: '[T]he core reasons to buy organic food are personal - people believe it tastes better and is better for you. Over three quarters of the participants claimed that eating organic food made them feel good in themselves and evoked a sense of optimism because the food was seen as healthier.'

There's little real evidence that organic food is any healthier than the non-organic variety. That 'feelgood factor' has as much to do with the statement people are making by buying organic. People just seem to know that organic is better, even if they are unlikely to be able to justify why.

The act of buying organic is far more important than the act of consuming organic because it makes a statement about your awareness of the world around you - and you expect to feel the warmth of other people's approval in return.

Sticking a bunch of organic bananas in your shopping trolley is not the only means by which you can seek such approval. The same thing can be seen in the market for the new range of fuel-efficient hybrid cars - cars that use electric motors in addition to petrol engines to improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions - in particular, the Toyota Prius. Fans of the Prius include Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, while the brains behind Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have used their Prius purchases to deflect any suggestion that they are becoming fat cats.

A recent article in the Washington Post noted that sales of Honda's Civic hybrid have been much weaker than for the Prius, even though the Civic's technology is similar and it is almost as fuel-efficient as the Prius. What's the difference? 'The Prius is a fashion statement', said Art Spinella, a consultant with CNW Marketing Research, who surveys car-buying trends. 'It looks different. Other people know the driver is driving a hybrid vehicle. It clearly makes a bigger statement about the person than does the Civic, which basically looks like a Civic.'

Spinella added that hybrid buyers in focus groups gravitate to the Prius 'because of its unique design and will candidly admit they expect to receive some acclaim from friends, relatives, co-workers for their concern about the environment and/or fuel efficiency'. Green is the new black, it seems.

Being 'ethical' or 'aware' is now part of the zeitgeist. It is both a fashion statement (look at me, I'm ethical) and a moral statement (if you're not ethical like me, you're a lout).

This is also the way with recycling. There is little financial incentive for recycling, and recycling is generally, with a few exceptions, more expensive than dumping and making new goods from virgin materials. Yet there is a growing campaign for recycling, particularly promoted by local government - and more people are taking it up. The 'black box' outside your house is becoming a symbol of virtue, to reassure yourself that you are doing your bit.

More here.




Crooked Greenies: "In another setback for government land acquisition advocates, a California conservancy group, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, was recently caught mismanaging millions of dollars in voter-approved bond money that was supposed to be spent on acquiring and restoring parkland. According to the Los Angeles Times on June 6, California Department of Finance auditors issued a report on March 24 documenting that the conservancy group 'does not adequately manage, control, or oversee' $115 million in bond funds given it by the state."

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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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posted by john ray 8:09 AM

Friday, September 10, 2004

 
MORE ON THE GREENIE RELIGION

A letter from Leonard Colquhoun of Invermay, Tasmania, printed in "The Weekend Australian on Sept., 4th, 2004

Greg Sheridan's article ("Opinion", 2 Sept.) has done us all a service: the Greens have undergone a dangerous metamorphosis. Once an ecological movement worried about misuse of nature, Bob Brown's party has begun to develop the kinds of fascist attitudes that characterised the European totalitarians of the 20th century and which are now to be found in Islamist fundamentalism.

Two features stand out.

One is a gnostic approach to just about everything: we Greens are the ones who have the knowledge, we know what's good for the world, and you will do as we say because the truth is with us, and only us. It is a Gaiaist version of the Roman Catholic Church's dictum: extra ecclesiam nulla salvatio.

The second is that maxim followed by the medieval popes, 17th-century Puritans, French revolutionary fanatics, by the respective commissars of Nazism and Soviet communism, and now by al-Qa'ida and other fundamentalists: the end justifies the means. The actions of the chosen are above the law and beyond conventional morality.

Granted, Brown is yet to preside over an auto-da-fe or issue a fatwa, but his party is yet to demonstrate it actually knows what is meant by compromise, an attitude without which a civil, secular liberal society is impossible, and without which parliamentary government cannot function.

Voters need to be aware that when the Greens claim they are not just another political party, that claim has to be taken seriously.




MERCURY PARANOIA

"What's actually going on is that the EPA has announced a proposed regulation -- due to go into effect next spring that would require power generators to reduce mercury emissions from smokestacks for the first time. The power generators have agreed to shoot for a 70 percent reduction. Environmental extremists are insisting that should be upped to more than a 90 percent reduction, no matter what it costs. Wait, it gets better: How much would mercury in your body -- or your kids' bodies -- be reduced if we shut down every coal-fired power plant in America forever, reducing our electrical output by 50 percent and throwing us back into a new Dark Age? Less than 1 percent."

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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posted by john ray 9:48 AM

Thursday, September 09, 2004

 
GENETICALLY MODIFIED FRAUD

U.K. government "research" violates the most basic principles of social science

"The 'GM Nation' report concluded that the general public is overwhelmingly against GM technology, with feelings ranging from 'suspicion and scepticism, to hostility and rejection'; there are, it was said, 'many more people who are cautious, suspicious or outrightly hostile about GM crops than there are supportive towards them'. These conclusions were based on quantitative questionnaires answered by 36,500 people, as well as by additional comments received. (About half of the responses came by mail, and half using the 'GM Nation?' website.) Such a large sample certainly looks impressive, considering that a lot of social science and market research draws conclusions on the basis of samples of only a few hundred people.

But the large size of the sample does not overcome one glaring problem with it. It is, as even its authors concede, a self-selected sample, and therefore is almost certainly not random. As a self-selected sample, it is probably comprised mostly of those with strong opinions on the subject. After all, if you don't give a damn, why would you go to the trouble of writing a letter to a survey unit telling them that you don't give a damn? The fact that tens of thousands of the sort of people who get worked up about GM wrote in to say that they get worked up about it tells us nothing much about the rest of the population, especially when one considers that none of the 'GM Nation?' budget was spent on advertising, and so most of the people who knew about it (before the results hit the headlines) were the activists.

After all, 36,500 people amounts to roughly one out of every 2,000 people in Britain, and you'd hardly have to ask 2,000 people before you got someone who was strongly against GM. Environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth mounted concerted campaigns to get their members to take part in 'GM Nation?' (and newspapers reported complaints that the public meetings held as part of the process were overwhelmed by anti-GM activists).

Consider that over a million people in Britain took to the streets against the Iraq war, but proper surveys showed us that there was not an overwhelming majority of people against the war. A survey about war attitudes that only asked people on these marches wouldn't be taken seriously - but the 'GM Nation?' survey amounted to little more than that. So we have no right to take these results to represent the general population. No decent scientific journal would take these results seriously, and there is no reason why anyone else should either".

More here. The author of the article from which the above is excerpted also has a blog

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

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

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posted by john ray 7:57 AM

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

 
THE GREENIE ANSWER TO BARBARISM: STUFFED TOYS

Cloud cuckoo land is where they live

"Australia should send 400 personalised stuffed koalas to the grieving families of the Beslan school massacre, Greens leader Bob Brown has proposed. He has also argued that the Russian Government should bow to Chechen demands for independence - a suggestion that prompted an angry reaction from the Government and concern from Russian representatives.

In a radio discussion aired in Sydney on Monday night, Senator Brown startled his co-panellists, Tourism Minister Joe Hockey and shadow employment spokesman Anthony Albanese, by proposing that stuffed koalas might cheer the families of the Beslan dead. "We could send 400 koalas over there, you know, the fluffy toy koalas, with the name of each (victim), and deliver it to each of those open doors where the families are," he said.

Mr Hockey said last night that the comments were "just bizarre - grossly insensitive, bizarre and beyond belief". Senator Brown also said he believed Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin should begin moves to give the Chechen people their independence, the outcome the terrorists are seeking. While the attacks were "disgusting and inhuman", he said, the Chechen people could not be blamed for the terrorist activities of a minority, and the Russian Government should ask the United Nations to assist with a transition to independence. "He (Mr Putin) has to look seriously at them (Chechens) taking a form of their own government," Senator Brown said.

A Russian embassy spokesman said giving Chechens independence was "not a good idea". He said the region was given de facto independence 10 years ago but it did not work. "Soon they were attacking neighbours and producing drugs; they had this chance."

The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church in Australia, Archbishop Hilarion, agreed that providing limited independence had been unsuccessful and rejected the suggestion of a new deal.......

Mr Hockey accused Senator Brown of advocating a surrender to terrorists. "Giving in to these terrorists is offensive and unacceptable," he said. "This illustrates everything that the Greens are: totally divorced from reality. They do not understand the consequences of their actions.""

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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posted by john ray 8:11 AM

Tuesday, September 07, 2004

 
THE OTHER GREENIE AGENDAS

Christopher Pearson comments on the policies of the high-profile leader of the Australian Green party -- Bob Brown

"When the political history of the Greens comes to be written, Brown is unlikely to find it comfortable reading. He is, more than anyone else, to blame for the party's ideological baggage. A more prudent observer of the international Green movement would have steered clear of fundamentalist positions in favour of a broad church when it came to formulating social policy. A less reactive politician would have cared more about coherence and plausibility.

For example, they would have avoided arguing in the same breath for an open-door approach to asylum-seekers and reducing the population by 2 million. Brown got himself into this particular mess by trying to corner the markets in both compassion and radical commitment to "a sustainable Australia".

However, he is untroubled by contradictory stances. It's plain that getting media attention is all that matters and almost his entire stock-in-trade consists in striking postures to appeal to one or other of his various constituencies. Brown's defenders argue that his leadership is best judged by concentrating on Green as a political brand with growing support, bearing in mind that he had to differentiate himself from the wishy-washy Australian Democrats....

Instead, as the press gallery discovered last week, Brown's policy manifesto for the election panders to every feral obsession. Globalisation, free trade, corporations and the military-industrial complex were all cast as bogeymen, in the best traditions of Pauline Hanson.

What even she would have too much sense to propose were state-sanctioned distribution of ecstasy, heroin and marijuana, automatic entitlement to unemployment benefits, an end to the US alliance through banning nuclear-powered ships and a directly elected world parliament to supervise the UN. These are the building blocks of the Greens' nirvana.

When the gallery began to scrutinise his party's website last week, Brown was not prepared for searching questions. He could only put it down to a Murdoch cabal. Faced, almost as though for the first time, by a hard-nosed tabloid journalist armed with chapter and verse on Greens drugs policy, proposals for swaths of new taxes, including capital gains tax on some family homes and vague plans for state appropriation of farmlands to be returned to bush, he was reduced to indignant spluttering.

John Howard, fresh from offering Meg Lees a third-party endorsement of her "sensible and constructive role in the Senate", seized the opportunity. "The Greens are not just about the environment," he said. "They have a whole lot of other very, very kooky policies in relation to things like drugs and new taxes and whatever, which people never talk about because they try [to] portray themselves as a one-issue party of just being warm and fuzzy about the environment."

More here




And Greg Sheridan has more details

"This election will probably see the emergence of the Greens as Australia's most important third party. This will be a sad and a bad day for our political culture, for the Greens represent the triumph of extremism over moderation, of the paranoid style over commonsense, and the flight from that civic responsibility which characterises a mature polity.

The Greens are essentially left-wing Hansonites, simultaneously reactionaries and revolutionaries, who combine a hatred of modern society as it actually exists with a conspiracy-laden, fantastical view of how the world works. They offer nothing positive beyond dreamlike cliches and slogans, but their negative power is quite great. They can build nothing, they can damage much. But they may hold the balance of power in the Senate. It is conceivable, though not likely, they will hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives. Bob Brown, the canny, ruthless, manipulative politician who leads the Greens, says 1million Australians may vote for them.

It is hard to believe 1million Australians really support the anti-growth, anti-modern prejudices of the Greens. Many will just be lodging a protest vote, but it's sad that the vehicle of protest should be so disreputable... the ideology of the Greens rejects the very legitimacy of the modern economy and in many ways the modern Australian state. The rise of the Greens mirrors the rise of extremist third parties of Left and Right throughout western Europe. To some extent a similar process is under way in the US, with Brown and Hanson imperfect but rough analogues of Ralph Nader on the green Left and Patrick Buchanan on the xenophobic and isolationist Right.

The Greens' policies on the party's website are a mishmash of contradictory and incoherent generalised statements. Brown is smart enough to know that the Greens can only suffer from having intelligible or specific policies on the record. They seek to embody a sentiment of rage and frustration rather than to advance real policies....

There are several pages of policy on Israel and Palestine without one mention of the word terrorism, although suicide bombings are condemned along with Israeli government actions. All the concessions demanded of course are from Israel, and the Greens support imposing international sanctions on Israel to enforce these concessions.

The international economic stuff is quite seriously loopy, calling for the abolition of the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, unless impossible reforms are enacted, because these organisations "are major, all-powerful engines of globalisation that peddle a specific brand of market-obsessed globalisation which is destroying many economies, particularly those of poor countries".....

The Greens want to establish a "directly elected people's assembly" to act as a house of review at the UN. Of course, holding elections in North Korea, Syria or even China might be tricky.

The Greens would end the US alliance by banning the passage of nuclear-powered ships through our waters. On domestic economic policy they would impose death duties, raise every form of tax they mention, but simultaneously ensure full employment while cutting working hours but not pay. All this self-contradictory nonsense is literally an insult to our intelligence and, worse, a degradation of our politics."

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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posted by john ray 7:16 AM

Monday, September 06, 2004

 
GREENIE WIERDNESS -- Part 1

David Icke was the national spokesman for the UK Greens from 1988 to 1991. The guy is as mad as a cut snake and believes the world is secretly run by 9 ft alien reptilians who control the show from deep inside the hollow earth. There is an amazing amount on Icke here. Most of it is harmless New Age silliness, but the same kind of loony tunes ideas propelled some well known Germans, now mainly seen on The History Channel.




GREENIE WIERDNESS -- Part 2

Andrew Bolt writes:

"Thankfully, a few Greens supporters are now waking up to the extremism hidden in the Greens philosophy. Some are shocked to realise their party increasingly rejects civilisation and freedom and embraces the tyranny of tribalism -- the purity of the noble savage. See the results -- the Greens heckling George Bush, but demanding more aid for Saddam Hussein; vilifying Israel, but largely ignoring the Islamist terrorists trying to wipe it out.

This appalled singer Deborah Conway, who this month declared: "Usually I'm very passionate and sympathetic to the Greens, who actually asked me to stand for them in Victoria." But Conway is Jewish, and the Greens, she says, "have stunned me".

"I've always been considered Left. It's who I've been. Suddenly some of these people from the Left want to put me up against the wall and shoot me because I'm Jewish." She's not talking of the Greens' leaders, of course, but of fans of their policies....

Perhaps the man who is best able to tell us what the Greens' vision means for us is Peter Singer, philosopher, former Greens Senate candidate and co-author with Brown of The Greens. It is Singer who developed the key Greens belief -- that man is not at the pinnacle of creation, as Christians and Jews believe, but is just one of the animals, with no more rights than any other.

Human life is no longer sacred, but should be judged in a utilitarian way. Is that life a burden to someone? Is that being conscious enough to let live? And Singer judges with a merciless eye: "If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee . . .

"If we can put aside these emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby we can see that the grounds for not killing persons do not apply to newborn infants." Or even much older ones: "A three-year-old is a grey case," says Singer, author of Should the Baby Live?"

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 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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posted by john ray 4:57 AM

Sunday, September 05, 2004

 
SELF-INTEREST MAKES STRANGE ALLIES

But it is always the ordinary guy like you who pays

Tree farmer Kent Hinson says he is out on a limb when it comes to his pro-environment view. "Most foresters in general look at the environmentalists as an adversary, as a group that makes rules about how we should do our jobs," said Hinson, who owns about 200 acres of forestland near Dublin in central Georgia. "Me, I believe that foresters should be environmentalists first. I may be an odd forester, but we are both trying for the same thing."

Now that the Bush administration is planning to open roadless forests to commercial logging, more tree farmers are joining Hinson by reaching out to environmental groups to keep a glut of timber off the market.

Small farmers who have benefited from timber restrictions banning logging in the vast federal lands in the West do not stand to be awarded the massive contracts the timber, oil and gas goliaths will pursue. Instead, they fear the entry of more lumber in the logging market.

"It's bad for the environment and bad for the pocketbooks of the tree farmer," said Mark Woodall, who grows about 6,000 acres of trees near LaGrange in west Georgia.

The White House is rewriting a restriction ordered in the Clinton administration's final days that essentially protected almost 60 million acres of federal forestland from logging, mining and oil and gas development by prohibiting road construction.

More here.





Interesting email from a reader on the supposed global warming: "What do you think about the belief that any extra warming will end up causing more hurricanes and tornadoes, and dissipate itself into kinetic energy?

And what about the idea that burning fossil fuel liberates the carbon locked inside the earth to create wonderful, abundant LIFE; and that those who would like to keep it locked up can't stand to see a return to the bountiful life of previous geological periods?

Myself, I believe that if there is excess CO2 present, then rainfall in the deserts will be more likely to lock fresh water from the rains upon land, providing the necessary moisture for storms and such. I've been toying with the idea that perhaps wind currents aren't deterministic, but a result of the presence of deserts. By making the CO2, planting in the deserts, and making an effort to keep moisture from running back to the sea so quickly, we can alter the winds and perhaps change the environment for the better."

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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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posted by john ray 8:54 AM

Saturday, September 04, 2004

 
TWO GREENIE SCARES IN ONE

It was the "Summer of the Shark." In 2001, massive numbers of hapless swimmers were shredded up and down U.S. shores. Or so the media told us. Turns out there were 11 fewer U.S. shark attacks than the year before. The hysteria ended only in September, when the nation got some truly scary news.

But as 9/11 fades from memory, shark attack stories are back - with a twist. The media have combined them with another bit of nonsense it consistently promotes with the ominous name of "The Dead Zone." Shark attacks and a dead zone, oh my! Good thing it's all a fish story.

First, the "Dead Zone."

Every year during the summer an oxygen-depleted area forms in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi River Basin empties. This depletion is called hypoxia. The zone waxes and wanes annually. If it's larger than the year before, the media make sure you know it. If it's smaller, they make sure you think it's grown larger. Thus CNN.com's recent headline: "'Dead Zone' Spreads across Gulf of Mexico." Nowhere does it say it spread considerably less than previously.

Now, since nature herself would never do anything bad - aside from earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanic explosions, and minor stuff like that - we know the Dead Zone MUST be man-made. The most-often fingered culprit is fertilizer run-off from farms that goes into Mississippi basin rivers, creating algae blooms that soak up virtually all the oxygen within the zone.

And the sharks?

Well, the Dead Zone is to Louisiana marine biologist Nancy Rabalais what the Redcoats were to Paul Revere. But for the one, nobody would have heard of the other. Rabalais originally publicized the hypoxic area, she measures it, and she crusades against the horrible farmers and fertilizer companies she claims create it.

And the environmentalists love her for it, giving her accolades and cash awards that would send most people into a feeding frenzy. This includes the San Diego Foundation's 1999 Blasker Award, complete with check for $250,000. (The 2002 winner got only $47,000, but he was merely working on bioterror defenses against anthrax.)

Imagine Rabalais' panic then, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which had given her its 1999 NOAA Environmental Heroes Award, announced the zone this summer will remain "about the same size as it has been since 1990." (Actually, it's only about two-thirds the size this year as in 2002.)

So panic led to gimmick. Playing off a small shark scare in Texas, Rabalais told reporters: "The higher number of sharks in shallow waters may very likely be due to the low oxygen being close to the shore at the time of the attacks." So the Dead Zone no longer threatens just mollusks; it now threatens man.

Except that "Sharks are not more numerous or more aggressive than usual," according to Tom Harvey, spokesman for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in Austin. He told a local TV station, "They are not 'coming in' to shore more than usual. We've had two attacks within a week or so, and that is unusual, but what we're seeing is probably more of a media frenzy than a shark feeding frenzy."

Further, why would this year's much smaller hypoxic zone be triggering shark movements that previous much larger zones did not? Such logic escaped CNN, Reuters, BBC, and other media outlets that eagerly swam with the Rabalais story.

But while Rabalais' shark theory has no teeth, neither does her Dead Zone cause celebre, for a variety of reasons. One is that hypoxic zones occur all over the world in places where there is no fertilizer run-off. "There are millions of square miles of ocean that are naturally hypoxic," Derek Winstanley, chief of the Illinois State Water Survey in Champaign told me

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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posted by john ray 9:12 AM

Friday, September 03, 2004

 
HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE

More on global warming as a religion

"Global warming has been put under the spotlight as the principal cause of the locust swarms. Last summer's heat is said to have dried out grain fields, providing the locusts with ideal conditions to lay eggs. Meanwhile, this year's rains have increased breeding by traveling locusts. It seems that both hot and cold weather can be attributed to global warming.....

Many responses to the swarms of locusts and other extreme conditions have been reminiscent of biblical, pre-scientific times. Most media commentators report weather-related events without recourse to the science of climate change. They employ the language of global warming to "explain" problems in a manner common to pre-modern superstition. Even the prestigious New Scientist journal ran an article this month with the following doomsday scenario on Europe's future:

"European winters will disappear by 2080 and extreme weather will become more common unless global warming across the continent is slowed."

This article followed the release of a report by the European Environment Agency (EEA), launched on 19 August. The report painted a particularly bleak future for Europe. It stated that freak weather conditions, such as the floods of 2001 that killed 80 people and the 2003 heat wave that led to an estimated 20,000 deaths, are likely to become more frequent and extreme.

The EEA report predicted further temperature rises due to emissions of greenhouse gases. "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities," stated the report. Yet there is considerable scientific uncertainty about whether temperature rises are due to the sun, greenhouse gases or other causes.

Nevertheless, the EEA report does not hold back from insisting that emissions of greenhouse gases and human activities should be restrained. "Europe has to continue to lead worldwide efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Jacqueline McGlade, executive director of the EEA. This means reducing economic growth, especially in the transport sector, agriculture and energy production. However, "even if society substantially reduces its emissions of greenhouse gases over the coming decades, the climate system would continue to change over the coming centuries," as the EEA report points out.

The key message behind the secular religion of global warming is that sacrifices are demanded for the Earth, despite the absence of scientific evidence that these will save us from extreme weather. Only our own actions can help limit the impact of climate change. If southern Italian farmers had dug up the areas where locust eggs were buried last year, the current swarms could have been averted. And hurricane disasters and flooding can only be limited by building up our own defenses. Human activities are the solution to the problems of climate change, not the cause".

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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posted by john ray 8:59 AM

Thursday, September 02, 2004

 
Sea levels no threat to Islands, says scientist

So sad for the Greenies

Low-lying Pacific nations are in no danger of disappearing under the sea, says an Australian oceanographer who has analysed over 10 years of fluctuating sea levels in the region. Dr Than Aung presented the latest data on sea-level records in the Pacific at a gathering of scientists and researchers in New Caledonia this week.

Aung, who teaches at the University of South Pacific, told the New Zealand Herald yesterday that the fears of small nations like Kiribati and Tuvalu disappearing under the ocean were exaggerated. "We have never believed that these islands will go under water. People will live there for thousands of years yet."

But Aung said that countries like Tuvalu did not seem to want to hear that, as they would rather blame Western countries for their perceived predicament. He predicted Tuvalu would be particularly loud in its complaints in 2006, when its highest levels of tides were due in February, March and April of that year. "It has nothing to do with climate change."

Aung said data had been collected for 136 months in a project managed by Australian Marine Science and Technology Ltd, which showed sea levels had both risen and fallen across the Pacific in that time.

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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posted by john ray 7:04 AM

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

 
ANOTHER GREENIE JUDGE

Greenies hate dams

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation violated state and federal law by diverting most of the water from the San Joaquin River to agriculture for more than 50 years, a federal judge in Sacramento ruled Friday. U.S. District Judge Lawrence K. Karlton found, in effect, the bureau reduced the river to a pathetic remnant of its glorious past.

The specific question before Karlton was whether the agency is legally liable for the decimation of Chinook salmon and other types of fish that were native to the upper reaches of the river before construction of Friant Dam in the early 1940s. Karlton's answer is a resounding yes. "The bureau, by its own admission, releases no water" for preservation of native fish, the judge wrote. "Failure to release water from Friant Dam has rendered many miles of fish habitat unusable, especially in the stretch between the dam and the river's confluence with the Merced (River), and has also adversely affected water quality along the whole course of the river."

"We're very disappointed," said Ron Jacobsma, manager of the Friant Water Users Authority, which represents 22 of the 28 bureau contractors along the Friant-Kern Canal that serves thousands of farmers in Fresno, Tulare, Kern and Madera counties. "Any more downstream releases will really tighten the screws on farmers already scrambling to cope with an ever-decreasing supply of water." The authority delivered 1 million acre-feet of water this year, down from 1.4 million last year....

In January, the judge will hear arguments on other issues raised in the 16-year-old lawsuit. He will later tackle the question of whether to take water away from agriculture. He noted in Friday's order that any remedy will have to be compatible with the bureau's mandate under the law governing the Central Valley Project. "Farmers throughout the valley have dedicated their lives and fortunes to making the desert bloom," Karlton wrote. "They did so in reliance on the availability of CVP water. That reality most likely should be taken into account when the court comes to address a remedy."....

The river's fall-run Chinook salmon were reported extinct in 1949. Spring-run Chinook disappeared after unsuccessful rescue attempts in 1949 and 1950.

More here.




GREENIE "ERRORS"

One of the "sister" ("brother"?) sites to this one is "Bizarre Science", run by the hard-working Aaron Oakley. A recent post there is amusing. Aaron pointed out that the high priests of global warming (the IPCC) had issued a map of global temperatures which showed "warming" spots in red -- but which also showed "no change" in red! They were of course caught out in their little trick and subsequently issued a less misleading version of their map. That the IPCC would even think of doing what they did let alone actually do it shows how desperately partisan they are. But in the "comments" section attached to the post, Green/Left blogger Tim Lambert says the initial colour choice was just an "error"! You can deliberately choose a colour for something by mistake? Poor Tim. I used to have some respect for his honesty but not now. He has in the past shown some respect for the facts but he clearly reveals himself there as concerned only to come to the conclusions that he wants to come to.

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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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posted by john ray 9:11 AM