To Badger Hunters Everywhere: We Will Rock You

You can’t get a creature much cuter than a badger.  And an English badger is a cut above the rest.   Celebrated and anthropomorphized in the works of C.S. Lewis, Kenneth Grahame, Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl, the badger is about as British an animal as you might want, even if every continent sports its own variety.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then, that a new movement has arisen in England and Wales to defend the badger from unwanted culling.   Led by Brian May,  guitarist of the legendary U.K. rock band Queen, this movement calls for an end to a government  mandated program of curtailing badger populations, which is now proposed for the highlands of Wales.  The reason?   Badgers, who carry tuberculosis without harm to themselves, urinate and salivate on cattle grazing fields causing Welsh cattle to ingest contaminated grass.  The contraction of bovine TB is fatal to the cattle, necessitating trips to the slaughterhouse.  In the past several years, thousands of heads of  Welsh cattle have been  put down once seized with the disease.

The solution would seem to be a no brainer, right?  Get rid of the badgers.  That might have been appropriate in the 1980s when a devastating source of trichinellosis affected Russian badgers and cattle and later bovine TB which affected English farms.  The answer of English authorities then was a program of gassing which effectively ended the plague.

But that was so 1980s.   Since then there has been a widespread growth of English acceptance of the value of the badger and over 60 associations have  sprung up around the country to lobby for their protection.  Spurred by these groups,  the 1992 Protection of Badgers Act made it an offense to kill, injure or take a badger, or to damage or interfere with its lair ( known as a sett) unless a license is obtained from a statutory authority.  An exemption that allowed fox hunters to loosely block setts to prevent chased foxes escaping into them, was brought to an end with the passage of the 2004 Hunting Act.

Desperate to save their farms from increasing danger, the Welsh farmers are urging  a new cull of 1,000 head of badgers to eliminate the threat.  Mr. May is having none of it.  An animal lover who maintains a menagerie for sick animals at his 19th Century mansion,  May insists that the animals be inoculated rather than killed.  The farmers argue the difficulties involved in such inoculation ( for instance, it is not as if the badgers will line up at the local veterinarian for their shot).

The dispute is emblematic of a struggle being waged across the Western world between animal liberationists and those whose livelihood is dependent on animal  husbandry.   As I wrote in last week’s piece,  How Would You Like Your Eggs?, people like the Welsh farmers win little sympathy from activists who believe that the world’s priorities rest with conserving the animal kingdom whatever the cost to human beings.    And so rich rock stars like May will pump hundreds of thousands of pounds of their own money into animal rights campaigns in an effort to harness support for  their pet projects, indifferent to how this might affect the livelihoods of thousands of farmers.

The outrage of  the farmers is palpable.    In a recent  Wall Street Journal article Brian Walters, the vice-president of the Farmer’s Union of Wales stated:

” It is completely galling for those who have to live with the misery and financial losses caused by TB to see a millionaire rock star dropping in to talk about the proposed cullwhen he has no idea of the desperate need to control this disease.”

Christianne Glossop, chief veterinary officer of Wales added before the hearings :

” By Day Two,  Brian May had gone back to wherever he lives in the English home counties and here we are in Wales, and we still have TB.”

May, himself, is unapologetic.  In the same Wall Street Journal article he is quoted as expressing astonishment at the furor:

” Why do we as a species think we have the right to exterminate another animal species?”

In those few words May encapsulates the nub of the dispute.   The rampant and growing belief that humans are like all other animals on earth, with no greater claim to use of the earth’s resources,  is in direct conflict with the notion of human exceptionalism – that human destiny is to control the planet and utilize its resources for the benefit of mankind.  The former kind of thinking can only lead to a further collapse in moral values, to an attack on the protection and valuation of human life and the diminution of the  willingness to make environmental compromises in the event of an environmental crisis which affects the health and welfare of human beings.

No one , of course, is talking about exterminating badgers.  But the animal liberationists among us know a crusade when they see one, and will stop at nothing, even the destruction of a local farm economy, to enforce their world view on their fellow countrymen. We will rock you, indeed.

When the U.N. Comes Knocking

News that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon was in Los Angeles this week to expand the U.N.’s  Global Creative Forum, brought a smile to my lips.

Afterall,  the attempt to enlist Hollywood actors and directors in propping up a battered  image is a time honored effort of governments, reaching back to the Roosevelt Administration’s courting of the studios during the Second World War.

In this case, no one could complain about the suitability of the couple.  The marriage of  the U.N. and Hollywood – an institution which trafficks in lies and obfuscation paired with an industry that trades in fabrication and verisimultude, might be a match made in heaven.

Hmmm……. champagne all around. 

It not hard to imagine all the stars lapping up Ban Ki Moon’s importunings about those great U.N. liberal causes — peace-keeping, international development, human rights and the empowerment of  women.

The fact that the U.N,  in all these endeavors, is a failure and in fact often exacerabtes the problems it seeks to redress will never be admitted by Ban Ki Moon or any of his lieutentants.  No mention will be made to the assembled Hollywood glitterati about the myriad accounts of rape by U.N.peace keepers;  the still unresolved issues of the oil-for-food scandal (one of the greatest financial crimes in history);  the profoundly disturbing absence of oversight or accountability for the millions the U.N. squanders, nor the antisemitism that is so rampant within U.N. headquarters that it makes Mel Gibson’s vitriolic blabberings sound like a boy scout oath. 

Nor will many of the Hollywood Jews there pay much attention to the fact that the United Nations has adopted as a core platform the demonization of Israel and demonstrates consistent support for those who call for the country’s liquidation.

None of it will matter.  Because for many in Hollywood, the U.N. represents an unassailable ideal of global governance which will occasion the  universal application of social justice.   Its a concept that will always resist the interference of reality amongst liberals.

So perhaps we should expect more movies and television shows in the near future extolling the U.N’s virtues.  Nothing too troubling as the Rwandan peace keeping mission that stood by idly and watched 800,000 as Tutsis were slaughtered in that country in 1994 or  how, a few  years later, thousands of innocent men and women in Srbebenica were sacrificed because of a craven absence of political will.

Reminding Ban Ki Moon about these minor failings might, afterall,  be a trifle too indelicate and impolite at the first date of a couple whose interests parallel one another so beautifully.

The Rise of the Watermelon Activists

It was a startling fact to learn.   Watermelon, one of the most popular fruits on our planet, is 92% water.   Those big, oblong cylinders are then, surprisingly enough, actually more barrels of H2O than they are a food stuff.  

How looks can deceive.

There are many kinds of watermelon – nearly 1200, in fact – but whenever we think of one it is usually the Carolina Cross variety-  very green on the outside and very red on the inside –  that pops into our imagination. 

I thought about that color contrast at AFA’s recent Los Angeles seminar  The  Green Movement: From Common Sense and Compromise to Coercion and Control, held  in Los Angeles on Sunday, February 21.  After the day was over I actually had an entirely different view of watermelons. 

The seminar presented five speakers, who, one after the other, described the green movement and its operating philosophy of sustainability as a rehash of the same communist principles and ideas, effectively discredited  in the West for over a generation.  

Steve Milloy,  the author of Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them, opened the seminar with a sweeping history of the environmental lobby and how it has always masqueraded as a benign, non-ideological movement, when in fact its focus is on the acquisition of  political power and the control of our most vital institutions, in order to impose a new form of  social and political order on society. 

Claudia Rosett, a journalist and fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington D.C.  followed with a bracing commentary on the United Nations and its use of international environmental policy to penetrate sovereign jurisdiction of Western nations.  She pointed out the life long quest of  U.N. potentates such as Canadian industrialist Maurice Strong to impose a new order on humanity, one in which the rights of the environment are elevated above human rights and national law is superceded by international jurisdiction.   

Michael Shaw, the President of Freedom Advocates, presented an eye-opening examination of the way the Green movement’s philosophy of sustainability has penetrated into the very heart of our society, with local councils and even homeowners associations adopting the tenets of Agenda 21  (see my own article about this U.N. document  here).  Shaw presented damning evidence of the way ICLEI – the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, the U.N.’s vehicle for Agenda 21, uses its extensive influence in American townships through its  plans for  social engineering and behavior modification, to bring individuals in line with its environmental objectives. 

More important than this though, Shaw demonstrated how ICLEI’s focus on land usage is an attempt to impose a regime of land redistribution in the name of environmental protection.  It promotes a modern form of  collectivization wherein citizens will be told where and how they will live.  (You can get more an idea about this by visiting the ICLEI site  here)  

 It is also ICLEI’s job to implement United Nation’s policies that restructure our representative form of government through global and regional development.  Policies and programs take control from our representative government and put that control into the hands of regional, non-elected boards.  It  threatens, according to Shaw, a soviet-styled system that is based on regionalism.   

Ashley Thorne,  the Director of Communications at the National Association of Scholars, followed with a convincing presentation of the way the  philosophy of sustainability is being indoctrinated into our students all over the country.    Several universities, such as the University of Delaware, maintain compulsory sustainability training for freshmen and there are  schools which make a course in sustainability mandatory.  Nearly 650 college professors have signed on to the ACUPP ( American College and University President’s Climate Commitment) which is a document calling upon University presidents to impose stringent sustainability restrictions upon their campuses and to institute more courses in sustainable growth. 

Ms. Thorne pointed out how the United States government became complicit with this  movement when Congress passed all provisions of the Higher Education Sustainability Act (HESA) as part of the new Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HR 4137) in July, 2008.  This Act creates pioneering “University Sustainability Grants” which will offer funds to institutions of higher education to develop, implement and evaluate sustainability curricula, practices, and academic programs. 

Holly Swanson , the author of Set Up and Sold Out: Find Out What Green Really Means and the Director of Operation Greenout! in Oregon,  concluded the day with a presentation on the role of the Greens in fostering political change.   She drew a direct line between the writings and pronouncements of former communist leaders both nationally and internationally and Green Movement political action today.   From Gus Hall, the former Chairman of the Communist Party of the United States (“ The fact is , the bigger the stake people have in the struggle for a more livable world, the greaterthe  fighters they will be in the struggle to save humanity from extinction” ) to Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Secretary-General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, who has acknowledged creating Green Cross International in the early 1990s in order promote communist ambitions, the Green movement has been infused with ideological energy from the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Many of the stalwart members of the Communist party  have become enthusiastic boosters of the Green movement and the connection between the two camps is unassailable.    

You could not have heard five more compelling speakers address a subject that 99% of Americans know almost nothing about.   Even those of us who have feared the growth of the environmental movement and its outlandish attempts to impose its orthodoxies on our lifestyle, were shocked to discover how the philosophy of sustainability has penetrated our local governmental institutions, our universities and our national thinking.  In a workshop following the presentations, I was dismayed to hear of political leaders whom we thought could be recruited to help fight this rising tide, being dismissed as already in the environmentalists’ camp.  

I was also not too happy to hear that even most of the conservative movement,  besides a few stray voices, have accepted sustainability doctrine.  That is certainly the case in the U.K. , where opposition leader David Cameron has made a point of declaring himself an environmentalist and a supporter of sustainable development. 

What hope, then, is there?   The answer lies in education on a grass roots level. Adapting the model of the Tea Party movement, working with churches, synagogues, homeowners associations and local councils, reaching out to high schools and junior colleges, are all essential measures in encouraging the development of a broad based network of activists dedicated to combating this threat to freedom and property rights.

Americans need to begin to understand that ‘sustainable development’ is a mere pseudonym for centralized control over lives and property.  They need to visit the websites of the United Nations Agenda 21, ICLEI, Earth First and Eco-America to read the literature on the real plan of these latter day totalitarians for their future.   They must begin to appreciate that the “green”that this movement is trying to sell us, is in fact a deep red  – in color, in texture and in character. 

Only the color blind could mistake it for anything else.  

.

Prepare Ye for the Apocalypse: The Fundamentalist Left’s Vision of Your Future

Doomsday prognostications are big business these days.  In just the past four months, our movie theaters have offered several scenarios depicting the end of the world as we know it.   They include the block buster 2012,  the feature The Road,  the documentary, Collapse  and sci-fi thriller, The Book of Eli.  All have  projected, in one way or another,  a future so mercilessly bleak and human conduct so damnable, that there is almost nothing left to redeem.

The high prevalence of doomsayers during times of economic or social turmoil is nothing new to Western culture.   From Nostradmus (The Prophecies) to Malthus ( The Principle of Population) to Ehrlich ( The Population Bomb),  every generation seems to sprout a new crop of  nightmare scenarios in which man has neither the will nor the resources to support the continuation of the species.

Apocalyptic visions have usually been the stock in trade of  the religious right and indeed, among certain evangelical Christian and ultra Orthodox  Jewish communities, the Apocalypse may well be nigh, portending a world convulsed in mortal combat as the decisive battle of Gog and Magog ensues among the ruins of Western civilization.

But the left also has its doomsayers, given to febrile maunderings about the imminent destruction of the planet.  This is no more in evidence than what we see occuring in the environmental movement these days.  From predictions of  the catastrophic rise of sea levels, to population explosion and a world unable to feed itself, the sky- is -falling- crowd think they know something about the impending catastrophe(s)  about to overwhelm us and what you, as an individual, can do to stop it.

In Britain this week,  some of these views were given full public expression – and a government imprimatur – with the publication of Land Use Futures: Making the Most of Land inthe 21st Century. The report, commissioned as a part of the  UK government’s Foresight Project, is a  marvel in government scare-mongering, a view of a future in which households will be monitored for their use of energy, land usage will be strictly controlled by buereaucratic fiat and citizens will be told where and in what they can live. 

Taking catastrophic climate change as a given,  the report suggests that mass migrations will occur to the north as the southern regions  of the British Isles dry out;  a projected increase of the population by nine million by 2031 and an increase in the number of single-person households would result in unprecedented demand for land for development and put pressure on natural resources such as water.  According to the report, by 2050, hotter, drier summers could reduce river flows by 80 per cent.

The report’s researchers present a number of scenarios in which the British citizen is forced, then, to make some dramatic changes in his lifestyle.

For instance, in 2014, World leaders are gathered and informed that the climate change situation is far more worse than anyone imagined and that without draconian measures there will be nothing much left to save.

The Government responds by taking control of vast tracts of land and using it to grow wood and crops for biomass power stations. An agricultural productivity Bill requires farmers to increase yields per hectare but most have to sell up because they lack the resources to comply.

 This indeed starts to look like real life aping fiction – 2012 crossed with The Book of Eli  melding with Collapse.  

But fiction it certainly is.   As the entire climate catastrophe scenario unravels ( is there a day that goes by without another lie or fabrication from the climate change crowd not being exposed?)  so too has the population explosion myth.

Paul Ehrlich’s famous prediction  in the December 1967 edition of  the New Scientist ” that the world would experience famines sometime between 1970 and 1985 due to population growth outstripping resources”  was demonstrated to be completely inaccurate.    He said then  “the battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich also stated, “India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980,” or “be ever self-sufficient in food.”

No predictions this side of Nostradamus would ever prove so preposterous. 

In my own lifetime, the estimates for total world population has fallen from a height of 20 billion to 15 billion to 11 billion ( the U.N. estimate around 1990) to 9 billion.   In fact, according to the 2004 U.N. World Population Division Report, due to decreasing fertility rates, world population has been decelerating for the last half century or so and the projections show that it may actually decline after 2040.

India has also proven itself eminently capable of feeding its population and the stagggering rise in prosperity in that country over the past 25 years has put the lie to the claim that its 1 billion person population is unsustainable.  In September, 2009, the Indian Minister  for Agiruclture announced that in spite of its three year long drought, India, with the world’s second largest population, would not need to import food. He was followed by the prime minister Manmohan Singh, who announced:

“We had record production and procurement of foodgrains in both 2007/08 and 2008/09. We thus have adequate food stocks and there is no cause for concern or fear of shortages of foodgrains in the country as a whole.”

But the British government’s scientists nevertheless seem certain that the world’s future, and Britain’s in particular,  is unavoidably grim.  Their answer is for goverment to seize property and redistribute it in the name of energy efficency;  for humans to be constantly monitored  for their contribution to environmental degradation and to educate the population in the inquities of home ownership in favor of communal “stewardship” of shared natural resources.

For the authors of this report, the future of the  UK  is dependent on  making  “a significant cultural shift away from meeting present desires and towards protecting the needs of future generations.”

We have been called on for such self sacrifice before.   Almost every modern dictator has voiced similar admonitions to his countrymen.  Offered now with a smile and wrapped in a new environmental package, this lefitst vision of our future  is no less threatening to our lives and liberty than any of these other manifestations of ideology run amock.   Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mao might be proud. 

But for me,  if the Apocalypse is indeed almost upon us, I think I could find better companions to ride out the storm than those four horsemen, thundering towards us from our very unhappy past.

Our Future in Plastics

There is a famous exchange in the 1967 film The Graduate where returning graduate student Benjamin Braddock  (played by Dustin Hoffman) attends a poolside party organized by his parents .   There a Babbit- like family friend, Mr. McGuire,  counsels him in a course he should take in his future career: 

“Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you – just one word.
Ben: Yes sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Ben: Yes I am.
Mr. McGuire: ‘Plastics.’
Ben: Exactly How do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
Ben: Yes I will.
Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That’s a deal.” 

McGuire’s words would actually prove to be quite prescient and wise.  The future did indeed belong to plastics and fortunes would be built on the transformation of everyday commodities into simply manufactured, easily disposable, plastic.  

But the ubiquity of plastic and its domination of our industry, has increasingly been regarded, at least  among certain sections of our society, as something not particularly beneficent at all.  Rather it has become the symbol of  rampant consumerism,  avaricious capitalism and the exploitative marketing practices.    

And over the past twenty years it has been presented by environmentalists as a threat far more sinister than even this:  the degradation of the environment and one of the leading causes leading to the death of the planet.    Countless articles, documentaries and feature films have been produced which denigrate plastic as the curse of the Western world and the one substance certain to choke our civilization to death.  

So it was with some interest that I greeted this piece in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times about  British  scion David De Rothschild and his determination to sail a boat made only of plastic bottles to the heart of the legendary Pacific garbage dump which allegedly contains hundreds of thousands of square miles of floating plastic waste. 

Naming his catamaran Plastiki, De Rothschild is seeking to draw world attention to the devastation wrought by non bio-degradable plastic in our oceans. Among his greatest offenders are supermarket shopping bags, nearly 20 billion  of which are used and disposed of annually around the world. 

But  what De Rothschild and many environmentlists like him do not tell you is that what plastic adds to  pollution, it more than makes up for in energy savings. 

For instance, when properly installed, plastic insulation can cut heat or cold loss in homes and businesses by up to 70%, making it substantially more efficient than traditional forms of insulation.  Wind and solar power would be impossible without the use of plastics. Special plastics are used in wind turbine covers and  solar panels are almost all made from plastic.  Cars are also lighter and use less energy because they carry at least 15% of their components in plastic. 

 On the pollution side of the equation, there also seems to be quite a bit of evidence for plastic’s preference over wood products. 

 Take the classic paper vs plastic argument.  According to Professor Bill Rathje from Stanford University, there is actually no evidence that a paper bag from a supermarket will biodegrade any more quickly than a plastic bag. 

Rathje  should know.   A fellow at the Archaeology Center of Stanford University ,  he is  the director of The Garbage Project, and a leading authority on what is in America’s garbage. 

“The answer is very simple and straight forward but not one that the paper-bag people like to hear,”  he says. “ In a dry landfill, paper bags don’t degrade any faster than plastic bags. And In a normal, well-run landfill, paper bags do not biodegrade any faster over at least 40 years than plastic. Since paper bags are much bulkier than plastic, they fill up more landfill space and they’re three to five times bulkier than plastic –  and you can see that yourself at the grocery. Landfills are closing down because they’re full. From that perspective, plastic is much better than paper.” 

Rathje’s project (conducted over thirty years)  made some startling discoveries.   In contrast to all of the concern directed at fast food packaging and disposable diapers, the archaeological data demonstrated that both items together accounted for less than 2 percent of landfill volume within refuse deposited over the last ten years. Even more surprising, because of industry-wide “light-weighting” — that is, making the same form of item but with less resin — plastic grocery bags had become thinner and more crushable to the point that 100 plastic bags consumed less space inside a landfill than 20 paper bags. If all three items at the center of public concern had been banned and were not replaced by anything, garbage archaeologists are certain that landfill managers would not notice the difference.

Of course, most paper comes from tree pulp, so the impact of paper bag production on forests is enormous. In 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans that year alone.

It also takes 91% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle a pound of paper, even if recycling rates of either type of disposable bag are extremely low, with only 10 to 15% of paper bags and 1 to 3% of plastic bags being recycled, according to the Wall Street Journal.

In addition, the majority of craft paper is made by heating wood chips under pressure at high temperatures in a chemical solution.  As evidenced by the unmistakable stench commonly associated with paper mills, the use of these toxic chemicals contributes to both air pollution, such as acid rain, and water pollution.   Millions of gallons of these chemicals pour into our waterways each year; the toxicity of the chemicals can be long-term and settles into the sediments, working its way through the food chain.

That all might be something De Rothschild could ponder as he crosses the Pacific in Plastiki. As the hellish Pacific storms lash his boat, he better hope  that the polymers and resins that have provided the strength of the plastic bottles that keep his boat buoyant, are truly as weather resistant and non-biodegradable as their reputation holds them to be.

 For that saving grace will be, ironically enough, all that stands between him and a very watery end for himself and his crew.

Ballad of a Thin Man

“You’ve been with the professors 
And they’ve all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have
Discussed lepers and crooks
You’ve been through all of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books
You’re very well read
It’s well known. 

But something is happening here

But you don’t know what it is

Do you, Mr. Jones?”

                                 –  Bob Dylan

 Poor Philip Jones.   To think that only a few months ago he was riding the crest of the Climate Change wave, certain that the adulation would continue to sweep him to a plateau of  glory as one of the planet’s saviors.   Now his career and scientific reputation are in about as much of a mess as the office in which he lost the vital research data upon which the world has written its own doomsday scenario.  

Three admissions – that data for the vital “hockey stick” has gone missing in Jones’ mountain of disorganized office documents;   that there  has been no trackable global warming since 1995;  and that warming periods have happened before but not due to man-made changes  – constitute some of the most provocative developments in over thrity years of global warming advocacy. 

That is because Philip Jones is one of the world’s leading climatologists and his scientific studies regarded as so unimpeachbale  by the IPCC ( Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) – the U.N. body charged with determing whether man-made activity is causing global warming, that his work has rarely ever been challenged by his peers, and certainly not by acolytes such as Al Gore or many members of the media. 

Jones spilled forth all these revelations on Monday in an interview with the BBC.   Yet even more mind spinning was this astonishing admission: 

“Prof. Jones agreed that scientists on both sides of the debate could suffer sometimes from a “bunker mentality”.  He said “sceptics” who doubted his climate record should compile their own dataset from material publicly available in the US.”

Ahem…..debate?   Six months ago you could not get Mr. Jones, Mr. Gore or any member of the climate change chorus to admit that there was any debate at all.  In fact, most had gone on record declaring  that global warming science was settled and beyond dispute.

Yet “compiling their own dataset” was exactly what the most persistent climate skpetics, scientists such as Richard Lindzen, Edward Wegman, Fred Singer and Robert Carter, have been doing for decades.

For Jones, Gore and many of their supporters in the media however, these men were not skeptics at all but deniers, as pernicious and as notorious as other any deniers of historical fact, including the Holocaust:

Said Mr. Gore in 2006:

“Fifteen percent of the people believe the moon landing was staged on some movie lot and a somewhat smaller number believe the Earth is flat. They all get together on a Saturdy night and party with global warming deniers.

Scott Pelley, of CBS’ 60 Minutes, when asked by CBS reporter Brian Montopoli in March 2006, why he did not pause to acknowledge global warming skeptics, responded:

“ If I do an interview with Elie Wiesel am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

Newsweek joined that claque in August, 2007 with its famous cover story on global warming when Sharon Begley labelled these scientists:

   “ part of the denial machine, funded by the energy industry and organized by corrupt right wing lobbies.”

In the midst of the coldest winter in the northern hemisphere in in 130 years, with snow at one point blanketing 48 out of 50 states in the United States and rivers freezing in places they have not done so in 200 years, one would be hard put to understand any resistance to alternative ways of looking at global weather patterns.

For Philip Jones, that opportunity may have come a little too late.  But his acknowledgement that there might exist legitimate critiques of the science of global warming, is evidence that ‘something’ is certainly happening here, and that his chorus may soon be singing a very different tune.

Ballad of a thin man indeed.

A New Challenge to Climate Change

Is the climate change industry under seige? According to this latest piece from the Wall Street Journal  Climate Change Claim on Glaciers Under Fire that may be exactly the case.

In its 2007 report the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPPC) claimed that the Himalayan Glaciers, which feed the rivers that in turn feed much of South Asia, were very likely to disappear by the year 2035.

” The receding and thinning of the Glaciers can be attributed to the (sic) global warming due to anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.”     The report stated.

But that, apparently is not the case, as IPPC chief, Rajendra Pachuari stated this week when he acknowledged that the claim was ” pooorly substantiated”

“ The IPCC report stated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would likely shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers by 2035. The report cited a 2005 study by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. That study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain as saying Himalayan glaciers could disappear “within forty years.”

The  funny thing is that this is a self-correction – coming as it does directly from the mouth of the very organization that has been the most forceful proponent of man made global warming.

So  lets get this straight:   The data that operated as the basis of the IPCC report was based on a quote from a 2005 report by another environmental group which had relied on a 1999 quote from an Indian glaciologist.   Does that sound like sound scientific inquiry to you?  It doesn’t  to me and nor does the rest of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  The charter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is

“… to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy.”.

This makes it a high-profile single-focus organization whose existence depends on its own reports. In other words it has a vested interest in promoting claims that would guarantee its funding and justify its continued existence.

This alone would be reason enough to closely examine its procedures and claims but the situation is made worse by the involvement of governments. These governments not only fund the IPCC but apparently accept its claims without question and allocate funding for climate research on the basis of those findings, then repeat the process when the next IPCC Assessment Report draws on the findings of that government-sponsored research to support its hypothesis.

In case you have forgotten the IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and is the organization most lauded as having provided the world with the certainty of anthropogenic global warming.

But from the very beginings of its creation in 1988, the IPCC has been a political body first and a scientific body only second.

The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Its mission, to assess the risk of human-induced climate change  has turned it into a single minded attack machine for anyone who dissents from the conventional view of anthropogenic global warming.

But from its earliest years inthe 1990s, this flagship of the global warming armada developed a distinctly political purpose.  One of the more alarming revelations is that of the controversy which surrounded the IPCC’s second report, The Science of Climate Change in 1995.  According to insiders, the report had originally concluded that there was no evidence that human beings have had any influence on the climate. Yet the original version of the report was substantially edited with 15 different sections of Chapter 8 ( the chapter dealing with the extent of human influence) being amended to reflect the opposite point of view. The Executive Summary to the report, the only part that in practise most politicians ever read, clearly hewed to the accepted fact of human interference, contrary to the conclusions of the original manuscript.

That editorial hit job was almost certainly the work of IPPC’s first chairman, the alarmist Swedish professor Bert Bolin. But he did not get away scot free. Professor Frederick Seitz, the former chairman of the American Science Academy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal on June 12th, 1996 that  ” I have never before witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”

He proceeded to demand that the IPCC process be abandoned. From then on,the IPPC’s serial campaign of disinformation only grew more robust and continues today as the flagship of the global warming armada.In discussions with the AGW proponents climate skeptics have often been often told that their views should first be published in peer-reviewed journals before they can be taken into consideration. At first sight this seems a reasonable requirement. But on closer scrutiny this argument is open to criticism. It is a good tradition in science that anybody may criticise any scientific statement with good arguments, irrespective of his or her position or background. However, often the climate establishment does not respect this tradition. On the contrary, as a rule only insiders are allowed to participate in the discussion. In this way an official though flawed idea can survive for a very long time. This has happened many times before in the history of science.

This perhaps explains how an  orphan idea central to the global warming community is coddled and nurtured within the  walls of fortress of climate change and any attack upon it viciously thwarted as an an attack upon reason itself.

The fact that the IPPC is beginning to eat its own young, is a sign that that the tables have turned.  Watch out in the next 12 months as the fortress walls begin to crumble under reaction to  such attacks as ‘Climate Gate’ and the work of other dissenters which will gain much greater public traction.

It is about time the IPCC is challenged in this way.  And it will be a blessing to the millions of people in the West whose lives have already been adversely affected by perverse and inimical legislation based on spurious science.

The Winds of Nantucket

One of the more interesting aspects of liberal behavior is what happens when their direct interests are affected by a piece of legislation or even a local ordinance.  If their own lives will be discomfited in any way, they are none too ready to make the sacrifices they call upon the rest of us to make in the name of their progressive politics.

This is glaringly on display in the case of the Nantucket Wind Turbines project ( titled Cape Wind).  For nine long years,  Jim Gordon of Energy Management, Inc.  has been attempting to build a wind farm on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound, six miles offshore from Cape Cod.  The company has proposed building 130 wind turbines on the shoal  which will produce up to 420 megawatts of renewable energy.  In average winds, Cape Wind will provide three quarters of the Cape’s and  surrounding islands’ electricity needs.

A great idea, no?   I mean, what liberal could possibly resist the construction of a facility for  a renewable energy source which promises to at least partially alter this bluest of blue  liberal states’ dependence on fossil fuels?

Well the problem is that the turbines would be erected within eyesight of the Kennedy Family’s Hyannisport family compound on Cape Cod, transforming this much needed alternative energy project into a much feared eyesore.  No Kennedy naturally wants  to get up inthe morning  and have his or her Atlantic Ocean vista ruined by a series of ugly wind turbines spinning incessantly on the horizon.

Desperate to stave off the construction of the project, the Kennedys  and many of their super wealthy compadres on the Sound  have now enlisted  the local  Wampanoag tribes to declare the entirety of Nantucket Sound a “traditional cultural property.”  The Wampanoag tribes claim they have a religious duty to view the sun rise over a flat aquatic horizon.   Its too really too bad for the Wampanoag  that they are rarely seen lined up in the morning on the oceanside watching the sunrise.  Their claim has been treated with scorn by environmentalists and conservatives alike.

There is some reason to believe that the Wampanoag have been dragooned into service by the project’s main opposition group, the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound. The Alliance includes many local people but has been largely underwritten by wealthy homeowners from Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod who hate the idea of having 440-foot windmills on the horizon.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. , who is not only a scion of the famous Kennedy family but one of the most prominent environmental activists in the country, remains adamantly opposed to the project. He wrote in a New York Times editorial in 2005:

“All of us need periodically to experience wilderness to renew our spirits and reconnect ourselves to the common history of our nation, humanity and to God. The worst trap that environmentalists can fall into is the conviction that the only wilderness worth preserving is in the Rocky Mountains or Alaska. To the contrary, our most important wildernesses are those that are closest to our densest population centers, like Nantucket Sound.”

Since then he has come under withering attack from not only conservatives but environmental groups, bitterly disappointed by his hyposcrisy.   His uncle, the late Edward M. Kennedy, was no less of an opponent, said in April, 2006:

”We had an opportunity to right a wrong,” he said of the provision in the Coast Guard bill, he sponsored. ”The people who ought to be irate should  be the citizens of Massachusetts. I don’t shrink from my advocacy for them. I welcome it. I’m going to continue to make sure that . . . a wealthy developer is not going to ride roughshod over the state’s interests.”

His Senate bill to block the construction of the wind farm was never passed.

Much of the objections to the project from the locals – that it will harm tourism, fishing and will intefere with communications and with naval navigation, have been consistently rebutted by the project’s proponents, as well as numerous environmental groups.

So much for alternative energy advocacy.   I have no opinion on the efficiency of the wind farms nor their likely benefit in creating clean, renewable energy.  But I do have to admit  that its kind of interesting to see the global warming alarmists duking it out among themselves.   Their quest to save the planet from the depredations of man-made global warming, seems to have given way, at least in this instance, to bickering over scenic views.

WHAT IS ON YOUR AGENDA?

The word “agenda”  has left behind it something of a troubled etymological trail. Once defined as a list of things to be done or considered, ‘agenda’ today, has come to represent something more covert and sinister involving ulterior motives and driven by considerations hidden from the usual realm of common experience. The promulgation of the U.N’s Agenda 21 might have had something to do with that change in definition.  Agenda 21  was  a program first disseminated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit), held in Rio de Janeiro on June 14, 1992, where 178 governments voted to adopt it.  The program laid out what the gathered representatives of the world governments agreed needed to be done to reduce wasteful and inefficient consumption patterns in some parts of the world while encouraging increased but sustainable development in others.  In a 40 chapter document, Agenda 21 outlined its plan for the control of the Earth and its resources, offering no less than the complete recalibration of human society and a re-structured approach to managing over-population, over-consumption and the Earth’s life-supporting capacity. This, in turn , was built on the premises of General Assembly Resolution 44/228 of 22 December 1989, which was adopted when the nations of the world called for the commission of  the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, and on the acceptance of the need to take a balanced and integrated approach to environmental and development questions. Yet over the past 17 years the implementation and the influence of the Agenda has been neither balanced nor integrated.  Rather it has been used as a tool of an elite multinational bureaucracy to undermine national sovereignty, suppress individual rights, increase restrictions on indivudal mobility , squlech opportunity and raise the needs of the environment above that of humanity. With the stamp of a supposedly multilateral consensus, the Agenda  is now spreading throughout the world under the mantle of the Education for Sustainability Movement.  This movement, through a variety of plans and designs,  calls for an end to the structure of western civilization as we know it.    The elimination of private property, the restructuring of the family unit, the negation of national sovereignty,  a proscription on growth, increasing restrictions on mobility and access to opportunity and the control of human procreation  – are all matters addressed by the sustainability movement. Moreover, it addresses a host of features of modern society which it deems unsustainable. What are they? According to the Global Biodiversity Assessment Report, a publication of the United Nations Environment Program ( UNEP) and as reported by Freedom Advocates,  they include golf courses, ski runs, scuba diving, synthetic drugs, railroads, paved roads, consumerism, fish ponds, modern hunting  and irrigation.  All are, in one way or another, prohibited by the sustainability agenda in the interests of an earth which will be protected from the hand of human degradation. There can be few doubts of the rapid spread of  this environmental dogma throughout educated elites of the Western world. In Britain this month, sustainability and environmentalism was ruled by a UK judge a “protected religious belief” Over 650 Presidents of Colleges in the United States have signed on  to the Education for Sustainability Movement, signing the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment created by the advocacy group Second Nature and supported by several other groups. Other college administrators are creating sustainability programs in the residence life, student activities, and buildings and grounds. UNESCO has called the decade of 2005-2015 The Decade of Sustainable Development. The United States itself bought into this when the Congress passed all provisions of the Higher Education Sustainability Act (HESA) as part of the new Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (HR 4137) in July 2008  which has created pioneering “University Sustainability Grants”  offering competitive grants to institutions and associations of higher education to develop, implement and evaluate sustainability curricula, practices, and academic programs. California State University in Chico held its fifth annual  This Way to Sustainability Conference earlier this month, – the largest  international conference yet on sustainable development with over 100 speakers and 1,000 participants on subjects ranging from “ Tools for Leadership and Change” to “ Happiness.” (If anyone needs an idea of the extent to which the sustainability movement is seeking influence in education, go no further than viewing the 100 “ Green” courses” offered by the same university  at  (http://cypress.csuchico.edu/APO/Course_net1/GreenCourses.aspx) The sustainability movement is also inordinately pagan in its practices and outlook. In 1992, Maurice Strong, the Secretary-General of the Earth Conference, hinted at the overtly religious agenda proposed for a future Earth Charter, when in his opening address to the Rio delegates he said, “It is the responsibility of each human being today to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light…….We must therefore transform our attitudes and adopt a renewed respect for the superior laws of Divine Nature.”  Strong finished with unanimous applause from the crowd. In anticipation of the conference, his wife, Hanne Strong, held a three-week vigil with Wisdomkeepers, a group of “global transformationalists.” Through round-the-clock sacred fire, drumbeat, and meditation, the group helped hold the “energy pattern” for the duration of the summit. As if to prove the wild eyed ambition of  this New Age millenarianism, authors of the Earth Charter, an environmental manifesto promulgated at a UNESCO meeting held in Paris in March, 2000 commissioned the building of The Ark of Hope ,  a latter day replica of the Ark of the Covenant as a place of refuge for the Earth Charter document.The Ark was later brought on foot to New York City from Vermont (just as the Ancient Israelites had once carried their Ark) and exhibited at the United Nations. Is it any wonder that Strong would  commentafter the promulgation of the Earth Charter:  “The real goal of the Earth Charter is that it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments.”   Or that Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the  world’s leading proponents of sustainability  could state: “ Do not do unto the environment of others what you do not want done to your own environment….My hope is that this Charter will be a kind of Ten Commandments, a ‘Sermon on the Mount’, that provides a guide for human behavior toward the environment in the next century.” There is little doubt this drive towards sustainability is part and parcel of the general environmental movement – embraced by such seemingly benign NGOs as the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation and even  our own National Parks Service.  These institutions, over the past twenty years, have become wholly radicalized by environmental elites who view themselves as the guardians of  an earth pledged to protect us against human environmental degradation.  But because sustainability presents itself under the mask of environmentalism, few people question its underlying motives. They fail to understand that their “Green movement,” so apparently in keeping with responsible management of our planet and its resources, has morphed into a pseudo-religion, with its own definition of heretics and apostates and supported by communists, anarchists and New Age acolytes who, locked in an unholy alliance, want to change our lives. The movement, however, is not marching forward without its watchdogs and robust critics.  Holly Swanson, founding director of an Oregon-based organization called Operation Green Out that works “to get Green politics out in the open and out of the classroom,” and the author of Set Up and Sold Out:  What Green Really Means is a brilliant advocate within the anti-sustainability movement.  The National Association of Scholar’s Ashley Thorne reports regularly on the NAS’ website on developments in sustainability education. Today, environmentalists, academics, celebrities and even multi-national corporations are touting “going green” as synonymous with social responsibility. Yet as we enter the second decade of this century, we would be well advised to take a cynical view of this movement and understand that the “Green” they are endorsing, rarely represents the drive for environmental excellence.  Instead it is an attempt to impose a revolutionary social order upon humanity, inspiring a new form of religion observance and seeking to elevate the importance of environmental concerns well above humans needs. If you value the life you live today, then you better understand all of this – no matter what’s on your own agenda.

A GRAND OASIS IN THE VASTNESS OF SPACE

 

Perhaps it is an outworn cliché, but it still holds true: everyone remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing at the moment.  I was a 5th grade schoolchild in Melbourne, Australia, sitting in a tiny classroom with 20 other children as the voice, crinkled with static, rumbled from the television set and across the room.   We sat transfixed knowing, without any real prompting from our teacher, that we were watching a major historical event, quite unlike any other we were likely to witness in our lifetime.  

Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon and his resonant words “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” still impresses me as a mark of extraordinary human daring and technological wonder.  Perhaps it all seems rather commonplace now, but in the 1950s the idea that man would travel in space or would be able to place a foot on an extra-terrestrial surface seemed as remote as the idea as the ability to travel through time. But in the eight years that passed between Yuri Gagarin’s epochal orbit of the Earth in April, 1961 and the Apollo 11 moon mission of July, 1969, our entire perspective on what applied human intelligence coupled with unfettered determination could achieve, was greatly expanded.  Suddenly we were aware that the cosmos was not some inky, impenetrable blackness that could not be understood, but a vast panorama of possibilities for exploration, study and adventure.  

The conversation which followed on that wet winter’s day (remember this was Melbourne, Australia) revolved around not what we had just seen, but on the next step humanity would take in its exploration of space.   A mission to Mars or Venus seemed inevitable and for the next two hours we debated with one another about the new civilizations that would soon be discovered and the possibilities for travel toward them. 

Our generation was to be flatly disappointed in its expectations.   In fact, despite several more lunar landings in the five yeas that followed, the NASA program, at least from a relatively uninformed adolescent perspective, seemed to slow down and that its greatest implied quest – of finding other forms of intelligent life in the universe, had become just a passing interest, not its fundamental mission.   As the years passed, the space shuttle program, the unmanned explorations of Venus and Mars and the Mariner, Venera, Viking and Voyager expeditions sent to explore the outer reaches of our solar system, might have all been historic programs, yet they seemed to pale in comparison to the tactile act of placing a human foot on the surface of an extra- terrestrial sphere.

Why was this?  Because, gazing for millennia into the vast night sky, we humans have longed to be reassured that we are not alone.  The conviction that there must be other forms of complex life or intelligent beings in the universe has embedded itself in the human imagination and become an obsession.  It has also led, sadly, to a dismissal of the notion of Earth’s uniqueness.   From the time of the first modern astronomical discoveries in the 16th Century, most scientists have supposed that our solar system is rather ordinary and that the emergence of life somewhere other than Earth is almost certain given the vast size and age of the Universe.  The discoveries of other planets, the realization that our sun is one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, which is, in itself, one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in a very large and very ancient universe, is indeed humbling and can leave us with an extreme sense of isolation.  This has led many to cast the Earth as an inconsequential planet, lacking any unique purpose or place in the universe’s general order.  This “Principle of Mediocrity,” popularized by the late Carl Sagan, has been adopted with gusto by many scientists today who also espouse, not unsurprisingly, a denial of the existence of a Creator or of a higher intelligence involved in the design of the Universe.

Yet since those formative years I have come to understand some important things about the Earth’s place in the universe that I could not have appreciated as a child.   For instance, the mere presence of other planets and Earth’s position in the inner solar system reduces the number of asteroids and comets that could likely hit earth, giving us a level of safety not enjoyed by planets in the outer solar system.   Earth has a transparent atmosphere that provides a platform to study and explore the universe, an ability that would be unknown to most other planets that have gaseous, opaque atmospheres; that its position in the Milky Way puts it at the greatest of advantages for the development of life – not too close to the sun which would make it too hot and not too distant, which would make it  uncompromisingly cold; that the conditions for the existence of complex life are exceedingly rare and that the probability of all those conditions coalescing at the same time and place is infinitely improbable;  that carbon and water are the two most important ingredients necessary for the creation of life and the fact that they cannot be detected on any other planet in the combinations necessary for life is extremely perplexing.

Today it is possible to look up at the night sky, possessed of the knowledge of both the immensity of the cosmos and the incomprehensible distances across which it stretches – and feel crushed by our seeming insignificance.

 But isn’t there another way to look at this existential dilemma? 

Could it be that the universe came into existence not as a random accident but for both the Earth’s and humanity’s benefit?  Is there perhaps a purpose and order to the universe that we have been actually programmed to discover?  Jim Lovell, aboard Apollo 8, the first manned mission to orbit the moon, sensed this.   Gazing out the window of his spacecraft and watching the Earth “rise” above the Moon’s horizon, he exclaimed: “the Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space!” 

The idea of an oasis, feeding and watering the universe, is a profound understanding of life that not only gives us confidence in exploring space but also in a sense of purpose that the current proponents of the Principle of Mediocrity can neither fathom nor appreciate. If the universe is truly as dead and barren as the surface of the Moon, have we, in fact, been created in order to seed it with life? 

As a boy I could not imagine that forty years after Neil Armstrong’s famous walk, we would be no closer to the discovery of intelligent life in the cosmos than we had been in 1969.  But science itself, coupled with the ingenuity of the human mind, may have provided us with something far richer and more significant than any such discovery could afford:  the overpowering acceptance of our uniqueness and purpose.  And it this realization which has provided me with a deep appreciation of this tiny blue dot in the “big vastness of space” and makes me feel not alone, but glad to be alive.