Archive for the ‘Global Warming’ Category
By Alan Caruba
After a while, one grows accustomed to the environmental rants that appear in The New York Times. This newspaper, so often pointed to as an exemplar of the highest standards of journalism, has been repeatedly revealed to employ fantasists for whom truth and facts are mere impediments to the advancement of their obsessions and agendas.
A perfect example of this is the January 27th rant, “Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler” by Mark Bittman, identified as the author of “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” along with the disclaimer that “He is not a vegetarian.” He writes for the “Dining in and Dining Out” section. If it looks like a vegetarian, walks like a vegetarian, and quacks like a vegetarian, it probably is a vegetarian.
His commentary is a cornucopia of assertions and cherry-picked facts that beg to be rebutted, but I shall choose just a few, starting where he started. “Like oil, meat is subsidized by the federal government.” By subsidized, the reader is asked to assume that the raising, packaging, and distribution of meat products depends on government subsidies to exist and that the oil industry does as well. Unlike the European Union, those engaged in either industry in the United States are expected to make a profit on their own without such dependence. It’s called capitalism.
“Finally—like oil—meat is something people are encourage to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible.” Visible to whom? Do supermarket sections offering abundant choices of meat products suggest anything other than the fact that people want meat as part of their diet? Does anyone really give any thought to how it got there?
The only people recommending we eat less meat are vegetarians. Read the rest of this entry »
By Alan Caruba
News of a January 31 “teach-in” on more than 1,000 college campuses nationwide strikes me of just one more example of the growing desperation of the environmental movement that has bet its credibility and influence on global warming.
Mark your calendar for any news about a March 2-4 conference in New York that is expected to draw between 400 and 500 global warming skeptics, i.e., scientists, economists, and policy experts. I suspect that print and broadcast journalists will do their best to ignore this event in what is arguably the media capitol of the nation, if not the world.
Organized by the Heartland Institute and co-sponsored by the International Climate Science Coalition, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, and the Science & Environmental Policy Project, it should put to rest the very core of the “teach-in”, the notion that there is a consensus among the world’s scientists that global warming is happening or about to happen.
In one way, even the Greens are right. There is global warming and the reason is that it is a perfectly natural phenomenon based entirely on the activity of the Sun. No one disputes that the Earth has warmed about one degree Fahrenheit since the end of the last mini-ice age around 1850. And, as Martha Stewart would say, that’s a good thing.
What is not happening is a huge warming that is melting all the ice at the North and South Poles, causing hurricanes, or any of the several hundred other things attributed to global warming. It is definitely not something that human activity is causing or can “control” in any fashion. Try controlling the Sun, the oceans, clouds, volcanoes, et cetera!
As for the dreaded carbon dioxide, it represents 0.038% of the earth's atmosphere.
By Alan Caruba
I wonder if the folks at the Kansas Department of Health and Environment think that electricity is made by fairies who live in the garden or that an army of elves produce it?
On October 19, a Washington Post article was headlined “Power Plant Rejected Over Carbon Dioxide for First Time.” Let’s hope it is the last time or those of us around the nation who depend on coal to produce over 50% of the electricity we use are in big trouble.
Roderick L. Bremby, Secretary of the Kansas DHE, said, “it would be irresponsible to ignore emerging information about the contribution of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to climate change and the potential harm to our environment and health if we do nothing.” So the KDHE killed a proposal by Sunflower Electric Power, a rural electrical cooperative, to build a pair of big, 700-megawatt, coal-fired plants in Halcomb.
Someone needs to tell Secretary Bremby that greenhouse gases consist of 95% water vapor in the earth’s atmosphere. Or that not a single blade of wheat or corn would grow in Kansas were it not for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Someone needs to tell Secretary Bremby and his fellow global warming simpletons that, between 1970 and 2004, the population of the United States grew by 40%, its Gross Domestic Product by 18%, and electricity consumption by 115%. During that same time period, the aggregate air pollution of the U.S. was cut in half due to advances in pollution control technologies.
The United States Department of Energy predicts that overall electricity demand will grow by 45% between now and 2030.
By Ken Marrero
It is impossible anymore to go anywhere without being followed by the Global Warming gremlin. It’s on the Radio and TV. It’s in the papers and the magazines. The folks on the Left are agonizing over the destruction being visited upon our planet by the heartless, soulless minions of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy driving from rubber chicken fund-raiser to rubber chicken fund-raiser to support the US occupation of Iraq in their SUVs. The glaciers are shrinking; the oceans are rising, tempers are flaring and those who got in on the ground floor of carbon offsets are smiling.
They savage Capitalists and Corporate CEOs who care only about the bottom line and ignore their responsibilities as citizens of the world. They bemoan the expenditure of money for dividends, stock splits, IPOs and the other vagaries of the sordid realm of filthy luchre. They yearn for Captains of Industry with feelings in their portfolios and who have banned animal testing along with freon from their bag of tricks.
They ask penetrating questions like "But why can’t businesses and governments pledge a percentage of their obscene profits, squeezed from the toil and sweat and sacrifice of the noble laborer, to better the lives of the masses? Wouldn’t it be good for them to make better consumers out of the people that work for them? Why must corporations always take and take and take? Why can’t they give back every now and then?
Here’s why!
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — In a makeshift laboratory equipped with little more than a battered chair and a cheap kitchen scale, inventor Rene Nunez Suarez displays the contraption that has become his life’s obsession.
It’s a stainless-steel cooker that uses about 95 percent less fuel than conventional wood stoves, with minimal pollution. It would seem a can’t-miss technology in a country where millions still cook with wood and most forests have been destroyed.
The device has garnered Nunez a prestigious environmental prize. It has earned him a U.S. patent. And it has won fans among some Salvadoran peasants who no longer spend a good chunk of their days hunting for firewood and then inhaling cooking smoke.
It has also wrecked Nunez’s marriage, alienated two of his three children and swallowed his life savings. At 61, he lives with his mother to save on rent and drives a 1990 Kia.
Compact Florescence Light (CFL) bulbs, also known as the green bulbs, are being touted as the best for the health of our planet earth. Each CFL bulb contains 6 to 8 milligrams of toxic mercury. But, the health of man is being totally disregarded in order to reduce the energy output that produces the so-called greenhouse gases.
The UK will be the first European country to completely outlaw the incandescent bulbs by 2011. But heath concerns are being raised by the Migraine Action Association (MAA).
The MAA is calling on the Government to avoid a complete ban on old-style bulbs, by providing an opt-out for people with health problems.
Last year it was claimed that the "green" bulbs can cause people with epilepsy to experience symptoms similar to the early stages of a fit.
There have also been complaints from people with lupus, a chronic immune disease that causes pain and extreme tiredness. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)
The US Congress has also passed legislation outlawing the the incandescent bulbs by 2014. But again the UK Environmental Agency has issue a serious health warning that everyone should vacate the room if one of the CFL bulbs are broken. According to the warning by the UK Environmental Agency:
Users who break a bulb should vacate the room for at least 15 minutes, the new guidelines say. The debris should not be removed with a vacuum cleaner, which could put toxic dust into the air, but with rubber gloves. The broken glass and all residue is to be placed into a sealed plastic bag and taken to a local official recycling site for proper disposal. (Source: WND.com)
But there is a underlying issue on the disposal of the CFL bulbs-increased taxes!
The most-immediate hazard from the CFL bulbs may be to Brits' pocketbooks. It costs about $1,300 to properly dispose of one municipal recycling bin full of bulbs – a figure that is sure to increase residents' tax bills. (Source: WND.com)
By Alan Caruba
The United Nations conference in Bali, attended by some 10,000 participants and observers, is likely to make future generations conclude that ours was deranged to be discussing how humans could have any affect whatever on the climate. They will, in retrospect, agree that the global warming theory was a lie whose agenda was to retard anything that might extend and enhance life on earth.
The Protocol is based entirely on a lie that predicts dramatic and imminent global warming. Global warmers insist that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced, but carbon dioxide does not cause climate change. Climatologists will tell you that any rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not precede, but follows warming cycles.
The science is well known, but hucksters like the odious Al Gore and those behind the original Kyoto Protocol, with the media as accessories, have created a climate of crisis.
It’s a very good thing that our Senate voted unanimously in 1997 against binding America to the United Nations Kyoto Protocol on Climate Control and that both the Clinton and Bush Administrations refused to act on the proposed limits. The reason for the Senate resolution was to avoid “serious harm to the economy of the United States.”
A November 30 Bloomberg News article by Kristian Rix and Mathew Carr reported that Japan, Spain, and Italy face as much as $33 billion in fines as the result of having agreed to reduce so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions and failed. Read the rest of this entry »
By Alan Caruba
“A petition seeking Endangered Species Act protection for a rare loon that breeds in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve has been accepted for review by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service” noted a May 29, 2007 Associated Press article. “Conservationists hope an eventual listing of the yellow-billed loon will curb petroleum development in the 23-million acre reserve that covers much of Alaska’s North Slope.”
So, at a time when a $100 barrel of oil makes economies around the world quiver, the “conservationists” are more interested in a yellow-billed loon than in your ability to drive to work, pick up the kids at school, or just go anywhere in your car. Thank you, environmentalists everywhere, thank you for being so obscenely oblivious to reality.
However, yellow-billed loons are not sufficiently illustrative of alleged dangers to species in the frozen North. Polar bears, however, are. Polar bears are the poster children of global warming and we all “know” that all the ice is melting in the Arctic, the bears are drowning or just damn well running out of food because “human activity” is affecting an environment in which they have lived and thrived for millennia.
If you believe such nonsense, let me first remind you that the scientific name for polar bears is “Ursus maritimus”, bespeaking their distinctive ability to swim anywhere they want. Read the rest of this entry »
By Alan Caruba
New technology drives out old technology. As often as not, its impact is not known until many years after its introduction. Meanwhile, we live our lives day to day.
This is what is happening to the business of publishing newspapers and magazines, places where, traditionally, writers have earned a living. In an article in the summer edition of the newsletter of The National Association of Science Writers, the headline read “Reporting withers while information explodes.” The author, Stuart F. Brown, like easily 85% or more of the NASW membership, myself included, is a freelance writer.
“As the number of readers who turn to the Internet for their news has boomed, the business equation in publishing has pretty much collapsed,” said Brown. “So we find ourselves in the curious situation of living in a society that increasingly runs on technology and information—while witnessing the withering of the original reporting that tells us what’s going on.”
It’s worse than a “curious situation.” A society dependent on technology and science really needs to understand it in some fashion and most Americans haven’t a clue. This leaves them vulnerable to a lot of bad or “junk” science news. In the past, there were fulltime science writers on the staffs of the nation’s newspapers who made the phone calls, did the interviews, collected the data, and explained it to us.
By Alan Caruba
In March of 1857, in the famed Dred Scott decision, the United States Supreme Court declared that all blacks, slaves as well as free, were not and could never become citizens of the United States. It also declared that the 1820 Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, thus permitting slavery in all territories and future, new States. By 1861 the United States was fighting a Civil War.
Sometimes the Supreme Court makes spectacularly bad decisions and this was manifest on April 2 when five of its nine members yielded to the specious argument by twelve States and several environmental organizations that the science of “global warming” was so conclusive that it could declare that carbon dioxide (CO2) should be regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as “a pollutant.”
CO2 is not a pollutant. It exists in the earth’s atmosphere and every blade of grass and every great tree is utterly dependent upon it. In that regard, other than the oxygen on which all living creatures depend, CO2 is the second most essential gas for its ability to harness the energy of the sun and, through photosynthesis, maintain every form of vegetation on earth.
by Daniel Clark
The latest point of emphasis in the global warming movement is that cattle farming endangers the planet by producing too much methane. So now, steaks and hamburgers are classified as instruments of destruction, along with large vehicles, lawn mowers, and charcoal grills. It can't be much longer before cowboy movies, cigars and hockey are held to be enemies of the earth as well.
This has got to be the most blatant assault on guyhood since ABC moved Coach to the same night as Roseanne, and turned Hayden Fox into Phil Donahue. It's a wonder that liberals don't cut to the chase, by simply claiming that global warming is caused by testosterone. Then, they could make public school nurses siphon the offending fluid from the boys during health class.
Many environmentalists believe that the earth is a living organism, personified by the Greek goddess Gaia. Conveniently, it turns out that Gaia is a shrew, who demands that her men be reduced to henpecked, metrosexual noodles. Manliness makes Gaia angry, and we wouldn't like her when she's angry, because she'll turn into a green monster and start smashing everything to bits. Hell hath no fury like an earth goddess exposed to excessive cattle-produced methane emissions.