http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=092206E
How does the Royal Society explain scientists who do not buy into the global warming gloom-and-doom hype who have taken no money, directly or indirectly, from oil or coal companies? I wrote and spoke on my views as a so-called "skeptic" for over ten years for no fee. I have never been asked to write about something that I didn't believe in, and I know others who avoid any financial connection with non-governmental sources, if only to avoid any potential ad hominem accusations.
It should come as no surprise that there is no shortage of environmentalist exaggeration and half-truth that also "misleads people about climate change". After all, professional environmentalists and climate scientists might lose their jobs if the global warming problem was to ever go away.
As a result, everyone in the global warming debate is biased. People can expect that corporations will emphasize research that supports their opinions and goals, while environmental lobbying groups will do the same. Everyone has financial motives, and government-funded scientists and environmentalists acting as if they own the moral high ground is an increasingly tiresome pose.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/suprynowicz/suprynowicz60.html
The skeptics now include the 85 climate experts who signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration; the 4,000 scientists from around the world (including 70 Nobel laureates) who signed the Heidelberg Appeal, and the 17,000 American scientists who signed the Oregon Petition.
Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg, who bought the sky-is-falling scenario until he bothered to check some of the numbers, which led him to do his own research, at which point he wrote the book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and became the Man The Greens Love to Hate, reminded the folks at Techcentralstation.com last Nov. 30 that most economists believe the projected level of warming would either have no effect or be beneficial.
Cold weather kills people, Lomborg reminded us. "It is estimated that climate change by about 2050 will mean about 800,000 fewer deaths." And that’s before we even get around to increased food production. (If you want a real climate catastrophe, let’s talk about the next Ice Age, which is due relatively soon.)
What’s more, scientists at Ohio State University announced Feb. 12 that Antarctic "temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models." In fact, they went down.
So why would one get the sense from the daily barrage of electronic news that "all experts now agree" the earth is heating catastrophically, and that mankind’s use of fossil fuels is at fault?
First, pay attention to the wording. Just as many who want American taxpayers to provide welfare schooling and welfare health care for everyone who can walk here from Mexico and points south blithely lie and say their opponents "oppose immigration" – rather than acknowledging the debate is about "illegal immigration" – so are those who aim to cripple the industrial economies of the Western world careful to ridicule those who "deny global warming," instead of acknowledging that most skeptics agree there is indeed some minor warming going on, only objecting to the notion that this is a crisis and that mankind’s activities are primarily "at fault" – along with the corollary nutty prescription that destroying every power plant and automobile in America and Western Europe would make much difference.
As demonstrated in the book "Unstoppable Global Warming – Every 1,500 Years," by S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, based on the climate cycle discovered by Dansgaar, Oeschger, and Lorius (who received the Tyler Prize – the "environmental Nobel" – in 1996), those who attribute the bulk of the warming cycle to man’s modern technology willfully ignore the similar fluctuations known to history as the medieval warming period (when Greenland supported Viking farms), the Roman warming period, and the Holocene Climatic Optimum, when SUVs and coal-fired electric plants were notably thin on the ground.
But the second reason a casual viewer could conclude the skeptics have disappeared is that "Spreading the global warming gospel with unified voice are 12,000 environmental groups controlling about $20 billion in assets," the Tucson-based Doctors for Disaster Preparedness reported last month. In comparison, "Truth seekers have at most a few million, lack the support of the press or Hollywood, and are generally shut out of government-funded schools and universities."
Which is where the foulest and most inexcusable abuses occur, of course.
In direct contravention of the First Amendment guarantee that our tax dollars will never be spent to impose any "establishment of religion," our children are in fact being spoon-fed the Green doctrine of global warming – memory bytes in doggerel and song – when they’re far too young to bring any critical faculties to bear on this hypothesis.
And some critical perspective sure is needed.
The masses succumbed to propaganda and hysteria. Force moved. And darkness shifted on the face of the earth, know not, know nothing, we shall be bemused. It was not possible to find a single source of coherence. The scientists can't agree, the politicians can't agree. The Opposition, like a beaten, humiliated dog, mouths platitudes of agreement while behind their hands sniggering about the Y2K bug. They all reiterate the mantra of climate change, the religious movement that has gripped the country, and daren't admit they are not true believers. Our previous Prime Minister, that figure so many loved to hate, was accused of being a climate change sceptic.
Oh woh, what an evil thing to be, a sceptic, an inquiring mind. And so, instead of having the gumption of standing up and explaining himself, of saying that far from being the great moral challenge of the age, as the then Opposition leader now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was claiming, of leading the people into the light filled shallows of reason, with warmth and sun and children splashing in the shallows, the sharp depths out of reach, he prevaricated and shadow boxed. Real moral courage would have involved standing up to the propaganda, questioning belief, encouraging debate, but now the country has been railroaded into false time tables and bull dozed into drastic actions which no other country on earth, bar New Zealand, has been foolish enough to follow.
This is the true evil. The people who perpetuate it will never suffer themselves. Al Gore's giant plane will still wait on tarmacs, burning more fossil fuels in a single day than most of us would burn in a lifetime. The Rudd family won't let go of their millions of dollars of economic activities, while encouraging the rest of the country to turn off the lights and live a simple life, tread lightly. Footprints fading almost before they are made. The blizzard of propaganda a disgrace to reason, to the darkness of the modern soul. Tell me they really care. Or they've adopted a religion which makes the population even more manageable, emasculated, beaten into poverty.
So little is damaged, so little is done. We feel for the shadows and mark strangers out from the rest. We pillory those with which we disagree. Matthew, an environment writer who makes more sense than anyone, gets pilloried for not being a believer. They slap each other on the back. Their pack, their pack mentality, as they settle comfortable into town halls, applauding at all the right moments. A 16th century heretic, a constant phase... Will there to be no end to these mass movements, to our own suicidal self destruction, to the depth of our own idiocy?
All attempts to fit in had failed. I want to believe, he said, but he didn't not really; swallowed up in the sea of voices, condemned to march with a million others. Care for the planet had replaced care for each other. They had hoovered every last cent of us; and swished by in their limousines, flew from one important engagement to the other, always presentable, always filled with self importance. The average bloke was left far behind. Consternation was not our goal. As a species we sought peace, comfort, a sense of belonging. No one wanted to be out on a limb, unloved, unwanted, ridiculed, beaten over the head for being different.
The staggered lurch had always kept him separate, and now, in a different era, he was a fading soldier of a different time expected to be eccentric. They tolerated him for his gifts. They laughed and told stories behind his back; at comfortable dinner parties, on the streets of Europe. It's not all about you, God said, and he shuddered at the thought of Joyce dying and the world collapsing, the economy disintegrating, the new depression stealing through the country. Australia became a nation of welfare clients and disability pensions, carers and the disabled, the unemployed and the elderly, millions upon millions of people beholden to Centrelink and its billions in government payments. What was the point of standing out from the crowd? Did it bring you happiness, friends, acceptance?
It brought the jerky walk and the stilted talk, the mumbling eccentricity and the sneers of contempt, it brought the shakes of the head and the glowering glares from the thought police, it brought social rejection and religious condemnation, it brought, if he had been a different soul, insanity and longing. Instead he smiled his crooked smile and kept on walking, forever the outcast, a conscience only in name.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/news/stories/200807/s2297095.htm?tab=latest
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to offer his personal condolences for a suicide attack that targettted the Indian embassy in Kabul.
Mr Karzai blamed the bombing on the "enemies" of the strong friendship with India.
Both men reiterated their countries enduring friendship and Mr Singh said the terrorist attack would not deter India helping Afghanistan.
India has been one of the strongest allies of Afghanistan since the 2001 ouster of the hardline Taliban regime, providing essential resources for reconstruction including for roads, electricity and other infrastructure.
41 people were killed and a 140 others injured when a suicide bomber rammed his car into the gates of the Indian embassy.
Two Indian diplomats and two Indian guards were among the dead.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/stations-of-the-very-cross/2008/07/07/1215282747266.html
A RAIL strike at the height of World Youth Day celebrations threatens to clog Sydney roads, prevent many of the 200,000 pilgrims from seeing the Pope and force hundreds of thousands of people to miss work.
The Premier, Morris Iemma, insisted yesterday he would not bow to "industrial terror" as the transport union pressed its claim for a 5 per cent pay rise by calling a strike for Thursday week - the busiest day of the Catholic celebrations when the Pope will visit the centre of Sydney.
While the industrial court could today order the union to defer the strike, RailCorp's acting chief executive, Rob Mason, said: "Clearly we have to do the contingency planning of having no trains."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/im-offended-by-rudd-says-girl/2008/07/07/1215282747275.html
THE girl at the centre of the latest controversy over child nudity in art said yesterday that she was "really, really offended" at comments by the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, that he "cannot stand" the naked image of her, aged six, on the cover of an art magazine.
At the same time the Opposition leader, Brendan Nelson, described the use of her picture as "a two-fingered salute to the rest of society".
Olympia Nelson, now 11, appears naked on the cover of Art Monthly Australia in a photo taken when she was six by her mother, Polixeni Papapetrou, a Melbourne photographer.
Speaking to the media outside her home yesterday alongside her father, the art critic Robert Nelson, Olympia said she was "really really offended" at Mr Rudd's comments that he could not stand the image of her.
But the federal Minister for Families, Jenny Macklin, joined the chorus condemning the pictures yesterday, saying children were being sexualised in ways that robbed them of a childhood.
Redfern Station, Sydney, Australia, 2008.
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