Journalists have uncritically welcomed the global environmental movement's claims of pollution, eco-disaster, the inevitable decline of First World societies - and global warming. Perhaps this is because without the Green scares, it would have been difficult for for journalists to produce scary headlines with which to sell more newspapers and attract television viewers....
Politicians are always willing to jump ahead of any parade, and the parade of global warming believers has been expanding under the careful cultivation of the alarmists and the scare headlines. Former US President Al Gore is not an unusual character in our political history.
What's new is that large parts of the scientific community have learned from the professional environmentalists and journalists how scares can generate funding and political power... Global warming in recent decades has generated at least $2 billion per year in research funding. This, in turn, has launched thousands of federally funded research projects, tens of thousands of PhD degrees and even more associate positions, and dozens of new professional journals to publish these results. A "solution" to the global warming problem might cause a Great Depression among the natural science facilities of the world's universities.
Avery & Singer, Unstoppable Global Warming.
If in the dark, if in crazy times, the electric worms disappearing in shivers up the spine, whole flocks of the disassembled - seeking what, he knew not. Oh craven days, oh happy larks, oh how we long for simpler times. To be utterly transported. To have the sun shining through clouds, to be taken away, sucked up in the narrative, whispering secrets to confidantes, to be saved, fundamentally, from one self.
He was surprised, repeatedly, by the gullibility of the masses. They believed the most astonishing lies. That family courts act in the best interests of children. That one in three women are the victims of domestic violence. That the nation is gripped by an obesity epidemic. That multiculturalism is an incontrovertible success. That jihad is not coming. That there is no such thing as "the white retreat". Oh spin us another one. Go talk to the remnant populations, see what these ancient pensioners, those embittered souls, really think of the strangers in their suburb.
But the knowledge class holds full sway. They peddle whatever they believe, the beliefs of the moment, and ridicule all not sophisticated enough to believe as they do. Global warming, mass hysteria, it's a classic study in the formation of belief. How did the public become so overwhelmingly convinced of what is in fact a fairly obtuse scientific argument, with little or no proof, no consensus. That's one of the things that fascinates me the most: that there is no common ground between the sceptics and the alarmists. And the sceptics are out of vogue.
No one wants to be different. No one wants to stand out from the crowd, to be ridiculed for unfashionable beliefs, to be labelled as a holocaust denier or a paedophile priest, to march through the vast libraries that make up our culture and sing most glorious song, we are the army, we are the faith, we are as one. The human accidents, the relics cast on to the side of the road, cast out from the pack, are as nothing in the great flow of history.
Global warming was a gift for politicians right from the beginning. All they had to do was open their mouth and express concern and they went straight to the top of the moral ladder. They were good concerned people with the best interests of the planet at heart. They were doing good work, saving humanity, fighting the forces of nature, holding back the tide like King Canut - or whoever it was.
Our race memories go back a long way, to a time of simple villages, pre the era of mass media. Time, back then back when, operated in a different way, at a different pace. Days could pass without any knowledge of the outside world, or any desire for knowledge of greater things. Intellectual debate was the domain of the rich. High art was indeed very rare and very beautiful. Now any one can blog. Any one can argue. Anyone can download our culture's greatest art works in seconds, find the most obscure books, plug into the most esoteric debates. Now the calamities of daily life clutter our waking thoughts, Big Brother watches over us with commercial trash at is heart, greed and triviality, garbage, make up its soul.
We're blessed with rich and complex lives, even the most ordinary of us. We can see the tsunamis wreck havoc across Asia. We can watch the World Towers collapse in dust and smoke, watch with wonder the planes slicing into their sides. We can join debates about Islam and we can accept that there is no excuse for ignorance any more. Knowledge is only a click away. Make us warm, make us feel, embrace our good intents and smile your crooked smile: care for our misshapen souls.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/may/30/climate-concern-ripped-as-religion/
David R. Sands THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Friday, May 30, 2008
Environmentalism, says Czech President Vaclav Klaus, is the new communism, a system of elite command-and-control that kills prosperity and should similarly be condemned to the ash heap of history.
The provocative Mr. Klaus, an economist by training and former prime minister, said in an interview that today's global warming activists are the direct descendants of the old Marxists who trampled on individual freedoms and undermined free markets in pursuit of a greater good.
"I understand that global warming is a religion conceived to suppress human freedom," he told editors and reporters at The Washington Times. "It is used to justify an enormous scope for government intervention vis-a-vis the markets and personal freedom."
The 66-year-old Mr. Klaus was in Washington this week for talks with senior U.S. officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, and to tout his new book, "Blue Planet in Green Shackles," about the dangers to life, liberty and prosperity posed by the modern environmental movement.
His Washington meetings included discussions on a pact to situate key parts of a U.S. missile defense shield in the Czech Republic. A top Bush administration priority, the system is designed to defend against attacks from rogue states such as Iran.
http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:B5abXFPvwSgJ:epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm%3FFuseAction%3DFiles.View%26FileStore_id%3D56dd129d-e40a-4bad-abd9-68c808e8809e+journalists+have+uncritically+welcomed+the+global+environmental+movement's+claims&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=au
Dr. R. K. Pachauri
Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IPCC Secretariat
c/o World Meteorological Organization
bis Avenue de la Paix
C.P. 00
CH- Geneva
Switzerland
Dear Dr. Pachauri:
When I became Chairman of the United States Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works,
one of my top three priorities was to improve the quality of environmental science used in public policy-
making by removing politics from science. I have convened hearings on this subject and, more specifi-
cally, the issue of global warming science. The more I have researched the issue, the more convinced
I have become that climate science is being co-opted by those who care more deeply about promoting
Page 37
doomsday scenarios to further their own, broader agendas than they do about scientific integrity. I am
committed to returning integrity to the scientific process so that the focus is on objective scientific in-
quiry and assessment and not on influencing public opinion to support political goals.
On November th, 00 , I addressed my colleagues in the United States Senate to express the impor-
tance of returning integrity to the processes that govern the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC). Over the last decade, a number of flaws and even abuses in those processes
designed to influence public opinion have become evident.
My concern was further heightened by comments you made yesterday in Montreal at a forum titled “Ar-
riving at a post- 0 Climate Change Settlement: Technology Options & Cooperative Opportunities.” In
your formal commentary concerning a public opinion survey on climate change, you stated:
In the fourth assessment, we will conduct an extensive outreach effort. If facts are highlighted, not exag-
gerated… then it will help in changing public perception.
Such an effort, and such an attitude, is in direct conflict with an objective assessment of the science, free
of political goals. Selective presentations of facts, whether accurate or not, skew the public’s understand-
ing of the issue by eliminating contrary findings and potentially considerable uncertainty about their
accuracy. Moreover, the IPCC has a history of failing your one condition – that findings not be exagger-
ated – as I detailed for my Senate colleagues. To be direct, the IPCC is no longer an institution that can
be credibly relied upon in setting public policy. As the IPCC nears conclusion of its work on the fourth
assessment report, I wish to share with you, in the enclosed speech, the concerns I expressed on the floor
of the Senate last month as well as offer solutions that I believe, if adopted, would help the IPCC regain
its scientific credibility.
My primary concerns lie with how certain scientific conclusions are selected or excluded from the
IPCC’s consideration and presentation, and how the science has been manipulated in order to reach a
predetermined conclusion. These problems must be remedied in order for the IPCC to present a fair and
impartial conclusion as to the current state of climate science.
James M. Inhofe
United States Senate
Chairman
Committee on Environment and Public Works
http://www.accesstoenergy.com/view/atearchive/s76a5513.htm
The 11th¾century English (Danish-Viking) King Canut replaced direct plunder by a more efficiently administered and ruinous tax (Danegeld) imposed on the peasantry. He is also remembered for having the sea whipped with chains after it sank some of his ships in a storm. I propose that he be canonized for both deeds as the patron saint of the Holy Church of Watermelons [AtE Feb 90].
That a handful of troopers could affect as gargantuan a mass, volume and energy as Britain's coastal waters indicates a mega-lomania unparalleled until the end of our century. The Green eco-megalomaniacs, who generally believe that man is an offensive blemish on nature, also believe in the mystic powers of this tiny creature for controlling the titanic natural forces unleashed in the atmosphere. Such silliness is surprising in Canut, who had a passable education; it is more readily understood in the graduates of Harvard, Dartmouth, and Berkeley.
As the High Holy Holiday of Earth Day approaches, and as the politicians meet at international conferences to decide who is to perform what dance to gain favor with the Green Church, take a look at how much CO2 production they might at best control¾ even if they had the totalitarian power of Bush's buddy Butcher Deng or of Honorary Citizen of Texas and receiver of the keys to the City of Washington, D.C., Nicolae Ceausescu (see Rathole in Fort Freedom).
The upper layers of the sea act both as absorber and releaser of CO2; the same is true of vegetation, which absorbs it in photosyn-thesis (day) and releases it in respiration (night). These two com-prise 96% (!) of the CO2 sources on the earth. The approximate CO2 production and elimination is given in an IAEA publication (1) based on US EPA and Dutch government figures:
Sources, natural: ocean, 376-390 megatons/year (60% of all sources); land masses, 32-440 Mt/y (36%).
Sources, man-made: fossil fuel use, 16-20 Mt/y (3%); land use conversion (deforestation), 0-10 Mt/y (1%).
Sinks: ocean uptake 389-396 Mt/y (64%); land primary produc-tion (of oxygen) 183-257 (36%).
So George Canut Bush, Margaret Canut Thatcher and the other followers of their patron saint have a tiny fraction of their countries' individual contributions to a total of 4% for the entire globe to play with in order to forestall an utterly unproven danger. And play they will, always in Canute style: more taxes, more regulations, more utterly wasted bribes to the Third World (to stop deforestation), and more CO2 in the lecture halls and from the printing presses.
Photographs taken at Windermere Dam outside Lithgow, NSW, Australia.
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