• The Bolsheviks have discovered that truth does not matter so long as there is reiteration. They have no difficulty whatever in countering a fact by a lie which, if repeated often enough and loudly enough, becomes accepted by the people. (Winston Churchill, Brighton, October 4, 1947)
• “This study after a quick review does not inspired confidence. No dosimetry, no toxicology, no dose-response curves, no hard definition of "exposure", heavy reliance on anecdotal evidence…….As with natural radioactivity being pervasive in our environment, so too are the nominal 3500 natural pesticides in our environment too. Natural radioactivity has been part of the earthen environment for about 5 billion years and discovered by Bequerel 112 years ago. It’s past time when we began to learn about our environment. Every member of your audience next week will contain natural radioactivity, and if they were here or at most nuclear facilities we could easily measure them all! And so would their wives, husbands, children, dogs, cars, lawns, and shrubs, and the food and drink on their tables at the meeting, etc. And so would Ralph Nader and all of the loony greens. All living things plant and animal contain them. A lot of people would do anything to save the planet…….. except take a science class” - Mike Fox
• "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."- Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180). They must have had greenies back then too. RK
• The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming? - Jon Ray
• Now Greenies don't like tidal power, either, it might upset the fish, you know. So: Coal, nuclear and hydroelectric are positively EVIL; windmills are no good; tidal power is no good. There's just no such thing as a happy Greenie – Jon Ray
• Green is a mixture of blue and yellow. That is the only factual definition of green that will stand the test of time. After that; any other definition is a corruption of a perfectly nice color. Rich Kozlovich
• For me, the laws of physics are not subject to change by virtue of a public consensus or declarations of highly placed politicians and government science bureaucrats. - James A. Peden , atmospheric physicist
• Credibility has to be earned, and once it’s squandered may never be recovered. by James Lewis
• It is impossible to reason a person out of positions they have not been reasoned into. - Former astronaut Walter Cunningham regarding James Hansen.
• What is the mission of the environmentalists? To spread the truth! No matter how many lies it takes. Green activists will always be outraged about something. What outrages them on any given day will depend on the emotions they are feeling on any given day. However, if you really want to generate outrage green activists…prove them wrong…there is nothing like proving to someone that everything they stand for is blatant nonsense to create outrage. - Rich Kozlovich
• "With discussions of climate change and human impacts, it's sometimes a matter of, 'Do you accept what the science is telling you?' or 'What do you believe, almost as a matter of faith or religious belief?'" Chip Groat, acting dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas
• "Evidence shows human influence is not detectable. And natural effect is quite large," - S. Fred Singer, the founder of the Science & Environmental Policy Project
• "We're under attack by a lot of alarmists."- Dan Miller, a publisher at the Heartland Institute
• “The environmental movement I helped found has lost its objectivity, morality and humanity. The pain and suffering it is inflicting on families in developing countries must no longer be tolerated. Eco-Imperialism is the first book I’ve seen that tells the truth and lays it on the line. It’s a must-read for anyone who cares about people, progress and our planet.” – Patrick Moore, Greenpeace co-founder
• Journalists have generally given up on seeking to understand science, but instead look for the next scientist who will say something strange so that they have a “story”. – Stephen Murgatroyd
• "This is where I really have a problem with modern-day environmentalism; it confuses opinion with what we know to be true, and disguises what are really political agendas with environmental rhetoric. Patrick Moore
• We have all been lied to by a shameless confederation of scientists, their professional publications, their formal organizations, and politicians seeking to use this big scare to advance their careers and agendas. The problem for all of them is that the real science does not support global warming and never did. Real scientists, branded dissenters, skeptics, and deniers, held true to the principles of science, knowing that it would eventually end this vast and terrible hoax. - Alan Caruba
• In 1900, the world supported 56 billion human life years, notes climatologist John Christy: 1.6 billion people times a 35-year average life span. Today it supports 429 billion life years: 6.5 billion people times a 66-year average life span – and they live far better than anyone in history. - Paul Driessen
• When you dance with the Devil you won’t call the tune, you won’t choose the dance, you won’t lead, you can’t change partners and you may not be allowed to leave the dance. Rich Kozlovich
• Why are American fuel prices so high? Why are food and electricity prices on their way to doubling? Why are economic conditions chaotic? The reason is simple. Americans no longer possess the freedom to produce the goods and services required to maintain their former standard of living. Taxation – both direct and indirect through currency inflation – runaway government regulation and government-sponsored-and-encouraged litigation have reduced the productivity of Americans below that required to maintain their way of life. This tyranny – this economic slavery – has been produced entirely by the federal and state governments of the United States. - Arthur Robinson, Ph.D., energy expert and scientist.
• Langmuir's Laws of bad science
- 1 .The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.
- 2. The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability, or many measurements are necessary because of the low level of significance of the results.
- 3. There are claims of great accuracy.
- 4. Fantastic theories contrary to experience are suggested.
- 5. Criticisms are met by ad hoc excuses thought up on the spur of the moment.
- 6. The ratio of supporters to critics rises to somewhere near 50% and then falls gradually to zero.
• Americans give more to charity than any country in the world, and they are perfectly willing to help out, when there is a REAL crisis. They are not so crazy about supporting those who profit off of imaginary ones. - Dr. Roy Spenser
• Those who talk about climate change are the same ones who occupy the tenth circle of Hell for many Americans: Politicians, the Media, Scientists, Educators, Hippies, and Showbiz types. So it’s a moral imperative to be against what they’re for. - Dr. Roy Spenser
• Losing liberty over a theoretical threat is the main concern here (no one has ever been killed by manmade global warming. because there is no way to distinguish manmade warming from natural). - Dr. Roy Spenser
• "Think about the things that have improved our lives the most over the past century – medical advances, the transportation revolution, huge increases in consumer goods, dramatic improvements in housing, the computer revolution. The people who created these things – the doers – are not popular heroes. Our heroes are the talkers who complain about the doers." – Thomas Sowell
• “Make no mistake: Living green is really about someone else micro-regulating you -- downsizing your dreams and plugging each one of us into a brand new social order for which we never bargained.” - Steve Milloy
• When the corporate Neville Chamberlains ultimately forfeit their salaries, bonuses and their jobs thanks to their spineless leadership and the anti-capitalism cabal that now inhabits wine and cheese bars in the District of Columbia, I hope to be around to ask this simple question: “So, how’s that hope and change working out for you?” Nick Nichols
• Newspapers should think about the damage they are doing to many persons, particularly young kids, by spreading the exaggerated views of a human impact on climate .... As far as I can see the IPCC 'Global Temperature' is wrong. Temperature is fluctuating but it is still most places cooler than in the 1930s and 1940s ... it will take about 800 years before the water level has increased by one meter" Changes in solar irradiation have been the dominant causes of changes in climate. Volcanic eruptions can have caused some cooling events and greenhouse gases may have contributed to the increase in temperature over the last decades. However, the influence of solar variability has been the major forcing factor and will probably also remain so in the future.- Dr. Wibjorn Karlen Emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden.Every totalitarian regime needs its defining myth. With the Nazis, it was the “Aryan” fantasy of racial purity. With the USSR, it was the dictatorship of the proletariat. With secularised, semi-pagan Western societies in historic decline, it is global warming. - Peter Mullen
• Being insatiable curious is its own reward and its own punishment. Rich Kozlovich
• “The principle is a sound one — you don’t want to deceive your readers,” he said. “But I’m not all that convinced your readers are so deceivable. A lot of readers think we’re biased, and because we think we’re unbiased, we think they must be stupid. But they’re not. They’re just opinionated.” - Phil Bronstein, San Francisco Chronicle editor at large
• Why is it now everyone’s onboard for planet saving, nobody wants to vote for the green saviors? – Paul Taylor
• "...when it comes to light that the carbon scare was known to be bogus in 2008, the ALP (Australian Labor Party) is going to be regarded as criminally negligent or ideologically stupid..." - Dr. David Evans 18th July 2008, Consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office 1999 to 2005
• “Environmentalists-even mainstream environmentalists are less concerned about any crisis posed by global warming than they are eager to command human behaviour and restrict economic activity. Their true plans and ambitions: to stop economic development and return mankind centuries back. They are interested in their businesses and their profits made with the help of politicians”. - Vaclav Klaus, EU President
• "In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland).
• To be green is to be irrational and misanthropic. Rich Kozlovich
• Show me someone who does not read books and I will show you someone lost in the fog of propaganda, manipulation, and the lies that pass for the news of the day. Books can tell you who you are, what you believe, and why. They always leave you changed in some fashion.- Alan Caruba
• "We're an advocacy group and we don't hold ourselves out as scientific researchers. We don't do peer reviewed science. Everybody knows that." - Linda Greer, National Resources Defense Council’s Director, Health and Environment Program
• “The reason universities are so full of knowledge is students come with so much and they leave with so little.” Marshall McLuhan
• The problem is that most companies go through a life cycle: They start small, become big, decline and eventually cease to exist. Of the 100 largest companies in 1900, 17 existed in the same form by 2000 and three remained among the 100 largest. - Eli Lehrer
• Like other occult techniques of divination, the statistical method has a private jargon deliberately contrived to obscure its methods from non-practitioners. -G. O. Ashley
• Climate change is not a scientific problem that found political support; this is about eco-activists and politicians who found a scientific issue they feel can leverage them into power and control. The environment is a great way to advance a political agenda that favors central planning and an intrusive government. What better way to control someone’s property than to subordinate one’s private property rights to environmental concerns. Dr. Jay Lehr
• If the congressional, administration and activist conspirators behind this massive deceit were in the private sector – peddling bogus drugs, rather than bogus science – they’d quickly become convicts. Instead of jail time, though, they’ll probably get bonus checks. – Paul Driessen
• We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depths of our answers. - Carl Sagan
• The sun, for example, is by far the biggest driver of the earth’s climate. But the intensity of solar radiation from the sun varies over time in ways that can’t be accurately modeled. Another example, water vapor is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. [The media now calls CO2 a "pollutant". If CO2 is a "pollutant" then water vapor is also a "pollutant" – that's absurd, but I digress. Some scientists believe clouds amplify human CO2 forcing, others believe precipitation acts as the earth’s thermostat. But scientists do not agree on how to model clouds, precipitation, and evaporation, thus there’s no consensus on this fundamental issue. - Keith O. Rattie, CEO of Questar, a Utah gas company
• "The whole field of endocrine disruption is a conclusion in search of data." - Gail Charnley, former president of the Society for Risk Analysis
• If you’d asked any scientist or doctor 30 years ago where stomach ulcers come from, they would all have given the same answer: obviously it comes from the acid brought on by too much stress. All of them apart from two scientists who were pilloried for their crazy, whacko theory that it was caused by a bacteria. In 2005 they won the Nobel prize. The “consensus” was wrong. - Professor Ian Plimer,
• The moral relativist, by definition, is bereft of moral clarity. The only thing immoral is to reckon there are things immoral. The only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth. No fixed right or wrong; no black or white; only shades of gray. - J. Matt Barber
• “…..our examples lead to an inevitable conclusion: since the climate system is complex, occasionally chaotic, dominated by abrupt changes and driven by competing feedbacks with largely unknown thresholds, climate prediction is difficult, if not impracticable” and “Hence, it appears that one should not rely on prediction as the primary policy approach to assess the potential impact of future regional and global climate change. We argue instead that integrated assessments within the framework of vulnerability …offer the best solution, whereby risk assessment and disaster prevention become the alternative to prediction.” - Roger Pielke Sr.,
• There is one good thing about the lunatic "global warming" catechism now taught our youth in the mandatory government youth propaganda camps: When they are finally forced to admit that the globe has been cooling again, not warming, for the past decade, yet proceed to demand precisely the same remedies for "global cooling" (which they will cleverly dub "climate change") as they did for "global warming" -- that is to say higher electric bills, more government controls, taxes sufficient to cripple our industrial economy and generally lower our standard of living in keeping with the world socialist doctrine that America and particularly the "capitalist rich" must be "punished" and "made to sacrifice" in penitence for our former prosperity -- there is finally a decent chance they'll simply be laughed out of town. - Vin Suprynowicz
• Forbush decreases confirm Svensmark's cosmoclimatology. It's been known for over a century that sunspot activity correlates with weather changes on earth but nobody could explain why. In typical Greenie fashion, Warmists said that because they could not explain the correlation, therefore it does not exist. Svensmark has now however explained the correlation at length. Will the Warmists take notice? Don't hold your breath. Jon Ray SOURCE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
• Recently I was foolish enough to try to reason with an environmentalist. But it became obvious that he had his mind made up and didn't want to hear any evidence to the contrary. The Pope is more likely to have read Karl Marx than an environmentalist is to have read even a single book that criticized environmentalism. – Thomas Sowell
• Pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools -- guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus -- THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn't a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! Richard Feynman
• Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us. Ludwig von Mises
• The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. (H. L. Mencken)
• Opposing this new authoritarian collectivist green offensive is "The Battle of Our Times". Viv Forbes
• Let all who are here remember that we are on the stage of history, and that whatever our station may be, and whatever part we have to play, great or small, our conduct is liable to be scrutinized, not only by history, but by our own descendants. (Winston Churchill)
• I have said more than once that history never repeats itself: what happens is that people keep forgetting it. - Gerard Jackson is Brookesnews' economics editor
• You can't build a peaceful world on empty stomachs and human misery. — Dr. Norman Ernest Borlaug (1914-2009)
• "It ain’t what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's the things you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain
• “Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.”- Vaclav Klaus, President of Czech Republic
• “It's a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and a quart of dog feces and mix 'em together the result will taste more like the latter than the former.” Mark Steyn
• Everything we are told, everything we see on the news and everything that we read should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality. RK
• For me, pragmatism is not enough. Nor is that fashionable word "consensus." To me consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects—the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner "I stand for consensus"? – Margaret Thatcher in a 1981 speech:
• Empiricism - empiricists restrict their task to something quite akin to science. They look for order and regularity in discourse and try to clear up what people are saying and implying when they say certain kinds of things.
• Existentialism - a philosophical attitude associated esp. with Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, and Sartre, and opposed to rationalism and empiricism, that stresses the individual's unique position as a self-determining agent responsible for the authenticity of his or her choices. There is no right and there is no wrong.
• Conclusions - Treatment options for cutaneous and systemic reactions from bed bug bites have not been evaluated in clinical trials and there is no evidence that outcomes differ significantly from those receiving no treatment. Evidence for disease transmission by bed bugs is lacking. Pest control and eradication is challenging due to insecticide resistance, lack of effective products, and health concerns about spraying mattresses with pesticides.
- Consequences of Their Bites - Bed Bugs (Cimex lectularius) and Clinical - JAMA. 2009;301(13):1358-1366 2009.405) - Jerome Goddard; Richard deShazo
• “The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false.” --Paul Johnson
• Conservatives are not perfect; we simply ascribe to better ideas and truer values. - R.J. Moeller
• The EPA's muddled machinations should not come as a surprise, because the agency long has been a haven for scientifically insupportable policies perpetrated by anti-technology ideologues in career and appointed positions. It has a sordid history of incompetence, duplicity, and pandering to the most extreme factions of the environmental movement, all of which appears to be accelerating.” – HENRY MILLER AND GILBERT ROSS
• The environmental movement has become so radical as to be an easily identified hazard to American life, and the EPA is not on my list of favorite agencies. - Nancy Brown, Township Trustee in Clark County, Ohio
• Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CRU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”.
• It is time to clean out the climate cesspool, and bring integrity, transparency and accountability back to science, law and public policy. Paul Driessen | Author Biography
• The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all. - Michael Schrage
• Fortunate is the person who can look back at his or her life and say, "I would do it all again, the same way." My dad once said that to me. Most of us mortals have made mistakes, sometimes too many to count. Some mistakes have to do with career. Some have to do with money. Some have to do with other poor decisions and poor choices – reconsidered, of course, with the benefit of hindsight. But the ones that cause the most regret and the most pain have to do with the treatment of other people – especially those who loved and trusted us. We finally discover the value and worth of what we once had and failed to appreciate. - Larry Elder
• Chemicals are remarkably consistent in their behaviour: They don’t “care” what product they are in. If the dose is sufficient to cause an effect, it will occur. Chemicals can interact with other chemicals, particularly those which strongly modify normal physiological processes, but it doesn’t change the fact that the dose is all-important. Some readers will ask: “What about cumulative effects?” These indeed can occur, but again, “dose” is the most critical variable; and risk assessors do evaluate cumulative effects when reviewing the hazards of chemicals. - Geoff Granville is president of GCGranville Consulting Corp. in Calgary
• "The climate modelers see from satellite data that warm years have fewer clouds, then assume that the warm years, rather than the other way around?' It turns out they didn't know. They couldn't answer that question." - Dr. Roy Spencer from The University of Alabama the warmth caused the clouds to dissipate. If this is true, it would be positive feedback and could lead to strong global warming. This is the way their models are programmed to behave. "My question to them was, 'How do you know it wasn't fewer clouds that caused
• Pompous fools drive me up the wall. Ordinary fools are all right; you can talk to them, and try to help them out. But pompous fools -- guys who are fools and are covering it all over and impressing people as to how wonderful they are with all this hocus pocus -- THAT, I CANNOT STAND! An ordinary fool isn't a faker; an honest fool is all right. But a dishonest fool is terrible! Richard Feynman
• Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us. Ludwig von Mises
• The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. (H. L. Mencken)
• Opposing this new authoritarian collectivist green offensive is "The Battle of Our Times". Viv Forbes
• Let all who are here remember that we are on the stage of history, and that whatever our station may be, and whatever part we have to play, great or small, our conduct is liable to be scrutinized, not only by history, but by our own descendants.
_
Monday, December 28, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
Green Notes 2008 Quotes
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. "It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State." ~ Dr. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda
The Tennessee Valley Authority is often cited as an example of enlightened state intervention made necessary by market failure. What is not well known is that in 1921 Henry Ford laid out a similar plan for the area. Ford's proposal was frustrated by Senator George Norris — a Teddy Roosevelt Republican — who thought the project too important to be allowed to fall into the hands of private enterprise. In 1924 Ford was forced to withdraw his proposal. - Gerard Jackson, Brookes news' economics editor
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. - Adam Smith, over 200 years ago
A reporter asked a KGB head shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism. "How was is that you were able to have total control over all those millions of people?" The KGB head drew a long drag on his cigarette and said, "It was simple you keep the people ignorant, an ignorant man doesn't question authority, he fears it, and obeys it without question." Somebody named Melvin
”Giving people access to cheap, inexhaustible supplies of energy, is like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.” Paul Erhlich
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind. —G.K. Chesterton
Not only can you have environment as well as economy but you must have a booming economy to support environmentalism. The reverse, however, does not hold and a dud economy makes environmentalism totally unaffordable. Editor, Junkscience
The environmental activist is happy with his emotionally-dominated life and nothing will be allowed to interfere with his emotionally-dominated conclusions. Paraphrased quote from John Jay Ray.
When science gets rich it becomes political. - Freeman Dyson
The entire IPCC process is but obfuscation by the secular and atheist Left. It has allowed the Left to conflate the vanity of secular opinion with scientific and/or moral truth. Gregory Young
History has a relentless repetition to it. Alan Caruba
As has become routine, the strength of the science is inversely related to the amount of media coverage. When hundreds of news outlets around the world report on a single study, of the hundreds released each day, all saying exactly the same thing, you can be sure someone issued a press release. Sure enough, this paper came with a press release, too. Marketing departments issue press releases. (Junkfood Science)
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate and tireless minority keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." Samuel Adams
“Economic storm clouds and a lukewarm reception to the Liberals’ Green Shift plan will likely shelve a national carbon tax for now, experts say. Economists and environmental groups say it’s unlikely future governments would adopt the policy.“ [see: ‘Carbon tax likely shelved for now: experts’, The Canadian Press, October 14]
Events shape our lives, even distant and dark ones. From the time I was a wee little one, I have stopped my fear of dark places. I pick up my torch and journey alone through darkened corridors leading down into bottomless caverns of events past. I stumble upon the remnants of an intricate puzzle, which I bring back with me, and in the quiet of my dreams, are assembled before me. - James Marusek
The problem is that most news is the same news. Only the names change. There is, of course, the constant issue of bias in the reporting of the news, but quite possibly the most serious problem facing the news media and those of us who consume their offerings is the way our attention span is somewhere between that of fungus and algae. Alan Caruba
What's wrong is the assumption contemporary "environmentalism" is a legitimate perspective, which is false. What passes for "environmentalism" has degenerated to pure misanthropy and must never be entertained. Editor, Junkscience
We waste incredible amounts of time on largely meaningless matters. Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the UN.
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful. — C.S. Lewis
Greenies will never be happy because what they want is self-contradictory: A return to a primitive past plus all the comforts of modern life. - Jon Ray
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding. - Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
United Nations agencies continue to urge policies that do nothing for the alleviation of hunger, but instead further an agenda for the socialist redistribution of wealth common to communist regimes. U.N. agencies have consistently sought to thwart the development of gene-slicing technology to enhance crop production along with the banning of pesticides and herbicides to protect crops, animals and humans. Its ban on DDT has been called “tantamount to withholding antibodies from patients with infections; it is mass murder, and the U.N. is a co-conspirator in the deadly campaign against the chemical’s use.” Its charge that the Earth is warming when it is, in fact, cooling, is a pure deceit. Alan Caruba
A scientist’s prayer: “Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man's destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Nature be published before the destruction takes place.” – --Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
"The man who is prepared has his battle half fought." - Miguel D. Cervantes
Some of us have been joking among ourselves that once natural cyclical cooling started, the global warming alarmists would blame it all on CO2. Well here we are - it has happened. "Conservation group WWF has blamed climate change for the coldest August in Sydney for more than 60 years." Could it be that the alarmists have known for years that warming has stopped, and is this why they changed their mantra from "stop global warming" to "stop climate change"? Scientifically, their AGW theory cannot support CO2 as the primary driver of both warming and cooling - this hypothesis is nonsense. The only logical scientific conclusion, given the data, is that warming and cooling are overwhelmingly natural cycles, and the impact of human-made CO2 on these cycles is negligible. –Allan MacRae
Ignorance is the natural state because we all start out our lives ignorant. And for all of our lives we will remain ignorant about a great many things. Because there is so much to learn about so many subjects, a degree of ignorance is understandable. Ignorance simply means that we don’t know. That is fixable! By learning about things, many things, we can reduce our level of ignorance continually, but never totally! However, if we choose to remain ignorant, that is stupidity. It is the stupidity that I hate. RK
"CO2 causes global warming like wet roads cause rain".- Viv Forbes
Prediction is very difficult…especially about the future. - Niels Bohr, Danish physicist (1885 - 1962)
The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the 20th century. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people -- and there are many in today's world -- elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today -- and tomorrow, you'll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.) From Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Literature Prize lecture in 1970:
CO2 is a greenhouse gas: it makes up just .04% of the atmosphere, only 1-30th of that is manmade, and if you include water vapor, is less than .1% of the greenhouse effect. Human CO2 is insignificant. Hardly worth taxing people over, or fretting about! Colin, Newark, United States
Being green is easy! When I shower, I exhale directly into the water stream, and a substantial part of my carbon output goes directly down the drain--trapped in the plumbing for ages I hope. I think that it is actually a little cooler around here already! M Park, Glenview, USA
"The politicians have not been entirely honest about the cost of our renewables commitment, and so the public don't really know what's coming their way." - Paul Golby, the head of E.ON UK, the British arm of Europe's biggest supplier of wind power.
The rules for being right.
JunkScience.com announces that the major professional society for U.S. physicists has declared that there is no scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming. The American Physical Society announced in the July issue of its journal Physics & Society that it would begin on its pages a debate on the central issue of the global warming controversy -- that is, does manmade CO2 drive global climate. "This is the death knell for the falsehood spread by Al Gore and other global warming alarmists that there is any sort of consensus of scientists supporting the notion of catastrophic manmade global warming," said JunkScience.com publisher, Steve Milloy. "We are elated that we survived to see the truth emerge and that we helped bring this sea change about," STATEMENT OF STEVE MILLOY, PUBLISHER, JUNKSCIENCE.COM:
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. -- Thomas H. Huxley
Science ... warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. -- Thomas H. Huxley
Environmentalism is a luxury, and like all such, is best taken in moderation. The environment requires protection, but that's all. Primitive pantheism has no place in this millennium. Nature is not an utterly benign continuum, and human beings are not a disease. Pseudo-religious environmentalism has long outlived its welcome. It's time to bring down the curtain. - By J.R. Dunn
It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. - C.S Lewis
The sun heats the earth.
The earth heats the atmosphere
After the sun sets, the atmosphere cools back down.
"If we were to have 96 continuous hours without sunlight, temperatures would likely be below freezing over all the world's land masses. The warmest place you could find would be to take a swim in the nearest ocean. There is no physical process in the atmosphere which "traps" heat. The so-called "greenhouse effect" is a myth." - Jim Peden
It's all so confusing. Liberals tell us that we mustn't develop energy resources because of the impact on the polar bear -- even though polar bear numbers are on the increase. We shouldn't develop oil resources in ANWR because it is a pristine wilderness. We shouldn't develop offshore oil resources because 40 years ago there was oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel. Anyway there's no point in developing oil and gas resources because it won't make any difference to the price of gasoline. Anyway we are running out of oil and gas so there isn't any point in developing any more oil and gas resources. We shouldn't mine coal because coal creates global warming. We shouldn't develop nuclear power because Jane Fonda once made a scary movie about it. We should develop solar and wind power, “renewables”, even though both are extremely expensive right now. But we shouldn't build wind farms where Ted Kennedy could see the wind turbines from his window. And now with a straight face liberals say we'll have to starve the people in order to save the planet. Now who's in denial? - Christopher Chantrill
Truth may enter the world by many doors, but she is never escorted by force. - REX MURPHY
Scarcity is not inevitable. Often it is a political choice, the result of concessions to powerful special interests who have a pecuniary interest in high prices, artificial scarcity, and fomenting fear. The precious bird of environmentalism has been flying for too long with only one wing, the left one. Read on, and learn a little more about how easy it might be to know abundance. - Ed "Redwood" Ring
Carbon is the building block for all life on earth. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere sustains all life. Carbon provides all of the food and most of the energy for the human race. To be anti-carbon is to be anti-life and anti-human. - Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition.
Man has always had a healthy desire for knowledge, and it is the feeding of this hunger that ennobles journalism. Hearst and Pulitzer were acutely aware that man has a less healthy but no less voracious desire to believe that he has knowledge, particularly knowledge of something sensational. It is the feeding of this hunger that irreparably disgraced journalism, and a century later now threatens to do the same to science. – James Kerian
My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth. - John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel is an American news weathercaster and presently works as an on-camera weathercaster at KUSE-TV in San Diego.
At some point, something has to give, and it will either be the US economy, or Greenism, the obsessive-compulsive Environmentalist Personality Disorder that will sacrifice the jobs, fortunes, futures, and lives, of three hundred million Americans, in slavish homage to the myth that burning "fossil fuels" is causing climate change, and that by reducing our "carbon footprint" we can end climate change. Nothing is further from the truth. The climate has been changing as long as there has been a climate, long before we could have had anything to do with it. - Raymond S. Kraft
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog." - G. K. Chesterton Broadcast talk 6-11-35
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences." -C.S. Lewis"
The climate system is particularly challenging since it is known that components in the system are inherently chaotic; there are feedbacks that could potentially switch sign, and there are central processes that affect the system in a complicated, non-linear manner. These complex, chaotic, non-linear dynamics are an inherent aspect of the climate system. ... We simply do not fully understand the causes of climate drift in coupled models." - IPCC
In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. ~ George Orwell
If the organic community wants consumers to embrace their products, they need to be affordable, not a self-proclaimed panacea to the ills of a modern, indulgent society. --Julie Gilbert, a Brisbane dietitian, in the Courier Mail.
Eco-activists in general…..betray their radical urban roots…………with little knowledge of the outdoors, the ocean, the atmosphere, the solar system and science in general. Yet they have no fear of pronouncing on and denouncing subjects that are beyond their ken. Rather than seek meaningful solutions, they always resort to "object! object! object!" to whatever is proposed even on the flimsiest of grounds, even if it contradicts their previous objections. Keep this in mind the next time radical environmentalists protest an industrial project in your region. – Unknown
I do have to agree with them about one thing. The danger and cost to human society from climate change will be catastrophic and is, apparently, unavoidable……..The danger is not from a catastrophe arising from soaring temperatures and human misery that alarmists claim will follow (a highly debatable proposition). The catastrophe that seems unstoppable is the human misery that will unquestionably arise from the massive costs of soaring imprudent government regulation of CO2 emissions in the form of Gore-enriching "cap and trade" schemes that will, in the end, provide no discernable impact on global climate. - Bob Webster, WEB Commentary
Willie Nelson had it right--- on the golf course he built and owned he was asked; what is par? His answer was; "Whatever I say it is." we need to learn some of the activists fighting techniques--- don't apologize for not being green enough by someone else's made-up standard--- define our own standard, proclaim ourselves great (and getting even better) then go toe-to-toe with them in the public arena if that is the best choice--- or let them slink away to dry-up on their own, because they are foolish and/or irrelevant, in other cases. -- Frank Gasperini
The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.”-- Winston Churchill
What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, forget what “the stars foretell”, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!-Robert Heinlein, 1907-1988
Dunn’s First Law. With enough idiots, you don't need a conspiracy.
It took only about 60 years for highly organized anarchists, professional pests and unemployable buffoons disguised as protesters to turn the developed world into a "Cuckoo's Nest". The odd thing about the developed world, and it’s most ardent haters, is that many of those who hate development the most keep living in the midst of it. The developed world is the choice of activists everywhere. In actuality, the avoidance of living in countries that have little or no development is a sign of some modicum of intelligence. Perhaps there is hope for these thugs after all. –Paraphrased from an unknown source, Rich Kozlovich
When the US National Assessment compared the results of two top-tier computer models for various regions of the United States, the models frequently generated precisely opposite rainfall scenarios, University of Alabama at Huntsville climatologist John Christy points out. Depending on which model was used, the Dakotas and Rio Grande valley would supposedly become complete deserts or huge swamps; the Southeastern US would become a jungle or semi-arid grassland.—Paul Driessen on the reliability of climate computer models.
Almost nothing about the claims and demands of environmentalists make sense, unless you look behind the curtain and discover that most of them involve destroying the U.S. economy.—Alan Caruba
Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, said, "But I later learned that the environmental movement is not always guided by science. As we celebrate Earth Day, this is a good lesson to keep in mind." --the Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2008.
Too many mindlessly follow green initiatives and bask in how good it feels -- without recognizing the unintended consequences. Magicians Penn and Teller have a video posted on YouTube in which hundreds of naive greens at a rally happily sign a petition to ban a "chemical found in reservoirs and lakes" and used in pesticides and nuclear energy that is finding its way into grocery stores and baby food. The chemical the people signing the petition want banned? Dihydrogen monoxide -- water. –Jeff Stier
We [dissenting scientists] discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we’ve seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.-- John Christy
For those scientists who value their scientific reputations, I would advise that they distance themselves from politically-motivated claims of a ’scientific consensus’ on the causes of global warming — before it is too late. Don’t let five Norwegians on the Nobel Prize committee be the arbiters of what is good science.-- Dr. Roy W. Spencer–a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E).
One of the more unpleasant characteristics of the adherents of the ‘Global Warming’ religion is their blood lust for heretics and sinners. They seek out with the most vitriolic language those who deny ‘The Faith’, or who fail to obey the minutiae of their daily imprimaturs. They must have witches to hang, to burn, and to drown. In the words of Bruno Latour: “Nous n’avons jamais été modernes” (We Have Never Been Modern, RK).
It seems the parents who reject vaccines have it all figured out: they've done their 'research' and claim to 'understand' the risks and benefits of exempting their children from vaccines. One question remains: Whom will they sue when their children die of preventable diseases? Themselves"--Carl Baum, pediatrician and director of Center for Children's Environmental Toxicology at Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital
So, what is the point of all this? The point is a simple one. It is that anthropogenic global warming, now spun to climate change, has not a scintilla of authentic scientific evidence to support it. Likewise, there is not a scintilla of authentic scientific evidence to support the plethora of catastrophic phantasmagoria which the likes of David King and Al Gore are determined to promote as fact. In other words, King, himself a distinguished chemist if not scientist, is content not simply to watch the corruption of scientific method, and therefore the scientific endeavour generally, but to act as an enthusiastic participant. This issue, we are admonished ad nauseam, is the defining challenge to the species in the 21st century. R.C.E. Wyndham
This is the fifth time that the world is said to be running out of oil," says CERA Chairman Daniel Yergin. "Each time -- whether it was the 'gasoline famine' at the end of WWI or the 'permanent shortage' of the 1970s -- technology and the opening of new frontier areas has banished the specter of decline. There's no reason to think that technology is finished this time.
What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, forget what “the stars foretell”, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!-Robert Heinlein, 1907-1988
The IPCC has been in existence for 20 years. Yet there is still no scientifically believable evidence of the claimed adverse consequences of human activities. In South Africa alone there have been no floods or droughts during this period that exceeded the historical maxima. Claims of increased desertification and loss of our unique plant and animal species are demonstrably false. Sea levels are not rising along our coasts. Yet as a result of rising populations African nations are increasingly vulnerable to natural climatic extremes. Blaming these extremes on human activities and proclaiming that they are therefore avoidable is false and misleading. This in turn can lead to increasing political instability in African countries when disasters occur and governments are blamed for doing nothing to avoid them…Robert Bryce
Earlier that morning, the president of the Czech Republic, Hon. Vaclav Klaus, received a standing ovation when he declared Europe's emission reduction goals impossible to meet without lowering populations or creating widespread poverty. So, they're wrong on the science. They're wrong on the solutions. And, implementing their wrong solutions will impede freedom, retard growth and, ultimately, destroy economies. All while changing global mean temperatures not one single degree. Not one. As I hopped on the train headed for home, it struck me -- I may well have just left the only place on Earth where walked, however briefly, more sane-thinkers on the subject than not. The chill the thought sent up my spine is not completely gone….Marc Sheppard at the NYC Climate Conference
People only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues. George Will
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. Winston Churchill
Capitalism delivered more people out of the mud and misery than any system ever and continues to do that. John Stossel
America is gripped by a form of life-threatening insanity perpetrated by the Greens and legislated by politicians who haven’t a clue about the ways they are wrecking our economy in the name of global warming.” Alan Caruba
……….climate models are being developed with very little ability to test out of sample. Furthermore, the climate science bandwagon has come about solely because of supposed anthropogenic climate change, which means that their funding is intrinsically tied to climate change happening and being man-made. A more self-interested group I could not find anywhere, even looking at the researchers who were paid by big tobacco companies to tell us cigarettes are safe…….John Atkinson
Can anyone out there provide me with any empirical data in support of the theory that humans control climate warming? No, don't tell me that climate is changing - we geologists absolutely know that climate changes all the time, in both directions, and at many scales of time and intensity………From Lee C. Gerhard [leeg@sunflower.com], Senior Scientist Emeritus, Kansas Geological Survey, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
Fallacies are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical – but with something missing. Their plausibility gains them political support. Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing of ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters. Another phrase often heard in the wake of these disasters is, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.” That is why it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment-Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies.
Intelligence is a necessary part of a scientist's innate equipment, but intelligence alone is insufficient. Insight and character count too, for without them a scientist lacks judgment, the absence of which will eventuate in self-deception. Bad character leads to worse, until it undermines and defeats intelligence”.……..Unknown
This cancerous abuse of science will continue to discredit the science establishment in the United States and around the world. And it should. It is utterly mendacious and abusive of real science………..James Lewis
Today people worship actors, but former times saw them as lowlifes, as unstable people driven to pretense and false dealings. In other words, as hypocrites. It's heresy to say so but former times might have had a point………Jon Ray
The recent cold snap in America's midwest area proves that global warming is real," ……"People don't understand that global warming takes many forms, including global cooling, an important part of global warming.…..The Spoof.
"Antarctica is the last bastion of a pristine environment compared to the rest of the world." Dana Bergstrom
Why is it that the greenies keep calling barren wastelands “pristine environments”? Is it because it is largely untouched by man? Maybe that’s the problem; then it wouldn’t be barren or a wasteland. Rich Kozlovich
Exterminators believe all of what they see. Greenies see all of what they believe. Rich Kozlovich
First they demanded that we get rid of DDT and we did not speak out because we believed. Then they demanded that we get rid of Chlordane and we did not speak out because we believed. Then they demanded that we get rid of Dursban, Ficam and pyrethroids; but by then it didn’t matter that we no longer believed. Rich Kozlovich, paraphrased from an unknown source.
Ethanol – An alcohol based fuel produced from organic materials used as a gasoline alternative that has become an obsession that nobody wants. It can't be transported safely and uses up a gigantic amounts of fresh water. It is corrosive, ruins pipes and gives you very little gas mileage. Extensive use of it is a direct cause of soaring food prices worldwide. To grow crops for its production requires the use of large tracts of land which, according to greenies in the past, would negatively impact wildlife (endangered species) and eliminate forests. It is also unaffordable unless subsidized by the government. Another brilliant obsession from the environmental movement; which they are now protesting! Partial quote from Robert Bryce and paraphrased by Rich Kozlovich
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The Tennessee Valley Authority is often cited as an example of enlightened state intervention made necessary by market failure. What is not well known is that in 1921 Henry Ford laid out a similar plan for the area. Ford's proposal was frustrated by Senator George Norris — a Teddy Roosevelt Republican — who thought the project too important to be allowed to fall into the hands of private enterprise. In 1924 Ford was forced to withdraw his proposal. - Gerard Jackson, Brookes news' economics editor
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. - Adam Smith, over 200 years ago
A reporter asked a KGB head shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Communism. "How was is that you were able to have total control over all those millions of people?" The KGB head drew a long drag on his cigarette and said, "It was simple you keep the people ignorant, an ignorant man doesn't question authority, he fears it, and obeys it without question." Somebody named Melvin
”Giving people access to cheap, inexhaustible supplies of energy, is like giving a machine gun to an idiot child.” Paul Erhlich
The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind. —G.K. Chesterton
Not only can you have environment as well as economy but you must have a booming economy to support environmentalism. The reverse, however, does not hold and a dud economy makes environmentalism totally unaffordable. Editor, Junkscience
The environmental activist is happy with his emotionally-dominated life and nothing will be allowed to interfere with his emotionally-dominated conclusions. Paraphrased quote from John Jay Ray.
When science gets rich it becomes political. - Freeman Dyson
The entire IPCC process is but obfuscation by the secular and atheist Left. It has allowed the Left to conflate the vanity of secular opinion with scientific and/or moral truth. Gregory Young
History has a relentless repetition to it. Alan Caruba
As has become routine, the strength of the science is inversely related to the amount of media coverage. When hundreds of news outlets around the world report on a single study, of the hundreds released each day, all saying exactly the same thing, you can be sure someone issued a press release. Sure enough, this paper came with a press release, too. Marketing departments issue press releases. (Junkfood Science)
"It does not take a majority to prevail, but rather an irate and tireless minority keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men." Samuel Adams
“Economic storm clouds and a lukewarm reception to the Liberals’ Green Shift plan will likely shelve a national carbon tax for now, experts say. Economists and environmental groups say it’s unlikely future governments would adopt the policy.“ [see: ‘Carbon tax likely shelved for now: experts’, The Canadian Press, October 14]
Events shape our lives, even distant and dark ones. From the time I was a wee little one, I have stopped my fear of dark places. I pick up my torch and journey alone through darkened corridors leading down into bottomless caverns of events past. I stumble upon the remnants of an intricate puzzle, which I bring back with me, and in the quiet of my dreams, are assembled before me. - James Marusek
The problem is that most news is the same news. Only the names change. There is, of course, the constant issue of bias in the reporting of the news, but quite possibly the most serious problem facing the news media and those of us who consume their offerings is the way our attention span is somewhere between that of fungus and algae. Alan Caruba
What's wrong is the assumption contemporary "environmentalism" is a legitimate perspective, which is false. What passes for "environmentalism" has degenerated to pure misanthropy and must never be entertained. Editor, Junkscience
We waste incredible amounts of time on largely meaningless matters. Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the UN.
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful. — C.S. Lewis
Greenies will never be happy because what they want is self-contradictory: A return to a primitive past plus all the comforts of modern life. - Jon Ray
The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in the insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding. - Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
United Nations agencies continue to urge policies that do nothing for the alleviation of hunger, but instead further an agenda for the socialist redistribution of wealth common to communist regimes. U.N. agencies have consistently sought to thwart the development of gene-slicing technology to enhance crop production along with the banning of pesticides and herbicides to protect crops, animals and humans. Its ban on DDT has been called “tantamount to withholding antibodies from patients with infections; it is mass murder, and the U.N. is a co-conspirator in the deadly campaign against the chemical’s use.” Its charge that the Earth is warming when it is, in fact, cooling, is a pure deceit. Alan Caruba
A scientist’s prayer: “Lord, grant that my work increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man's destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Nature be published before the destruction takes place.” – --Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
"The man who is prepared has his battle half fought." - Miguel D. Cervantes
Some of us have been joking among ourselves that once natural cyclical cooling started, the global warming alarmists would blame it all on CO2. Well here we are - it has happened. "Conservation group WWF has blamed climate change for the coldest August in Sydney for more than 60 years." Could it be that the alarmists have known for years that warming has stopped, and is this why they changed their mantra from "stop global warming" to "stop climate change"? Scientifically, their AGW theory cannot support CO2 as the primary driver of both warming and cooling - this hypothesis is nonsense. The only logical scientific conclusion, given the data, is that warming and cooling are overwhelmingly natural cycles, and the impact of human-made CO2 on these cycles is negligible. –Allan MacRae
Ignorance is the natural state because we all start out our lives ignorant. And for all of our lives we will remain ignorant about a great many things. Because there is so much to learn about so many subjects, a degree of ignorance is understandable. Ignorance simply means that we don’t know. That is fixable! By learning about things, many things, we can reduce our level of ignorance continually, but never totally! However, if we choose to remain ignorant, that is stupidity. It is the stupidity that I hate. RK
"CO2 causes global warming like wet roads cause rain".- Viv Forbes
Prediction is very difficult…especially about the future. - Niels Bohr, Danish physicist (1885 - 1962)
The spirit of Munich has by no means retreated into the past; it was not merely a brief episode. I even venture to say that the spirit of Munich prevails in the 20th century. The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles. The spirit of Munich is a sickness of the will of successful people, it is the daily condition of those who have given themselves up to the thirst after prosperity at any price, to material well-being as the chief goal of earthly existence. Such people -- and there are many in today's world -- elect passivity and retreat, just so as their accustomed life might drag on a bit longer, just so as not to step over the threshold of hardship today -- and tomorrow, you'll see, it will all be all right. (But it will never be all right! The price of cowardice will only be evil; we shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices.) From Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Literature Prize lecture in 1970:
CO2 is a greenhouse gas: it makes up just .04% of the atmosphere, only 1-30th of that is manmade, and if you include water vapor, is less than .1% of the greenhouse effect. Human CO2 is insignificant. Hardly worth taxing people over, or fretting about! Colin, Newark, United States
Being green is easy! When I shower, I exhale directly into the water stream, and a substantial part of my carbon output goes directly down the drain--trapped in the plumbing for ages I hope. I think that it is actually a little cooler around here already! M Park, Glenview, USA
"The politicians have not been entirely honest about the cost of our renewables commitment, and so the public don't really know what's coming their way." - Paul Golby, the head of E.ON UK, the British arm of Europe's biggest supplier of wind power.
The rules for being right.
You must have the desire to be right.
You must be willing to take the time to be right.
You must be willing to put the effort into being right.
You must have the courage to say what is right.
You must have to fortitude to be right in order to stand against the conventional wisdom.
Heterodoxy is not for the faint of heart. – Rich Kozlovich
JunkScience.com announces that the major professional society for U.S. physicists has declared that there is no scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming. The American Physical Society announced in the July issue of its journal Physics & Society that it would begin on its pages a debate on the central issue of the global warming controversy -- that is, does manmade CO2 drive global climate. "This is the death knell for the falsehood spread by Al Gore and other global warming alarmists that there is any sort of consensus of scientists supporting the notion of catastrophic manmade global warming," said JunkScience.com publisher, Steve Milloy. "We are elated that we survived to see the truth emerge and that we helped bring this sea change about," STATEMENT OF STEVE MILLOY, PUBLISHER, JUNKSCIENCE.COM:
The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. -- Thomas H. Huxley
Science ... warns me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. -- Thomas H. Huxley
Environmentalism is a luxury, and like all such, is best taken in moderation. The environment requires protection, but that's all. Primitive pantheism has no place in this millennium. Nature is not an utterly benign continuum, and human beings are not a disease. Pseudo-religious environmentalism has long outlived its welcome. It's time to bring down the curtain. - By J.R. Dunn
It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. - C.S Lewis
The sun heats the earth.
The earth heats the atmosphere
After the sun sets, the atmosphere cools back down.
"If we were to have 96 continuous hours without sunlight, temperatures would likely be below freezing over all the world's land masses. The warmest place you could find would be to take a swim in the nearest ocean. There is no physical process in the atmosphere which "traps" heat. The so-called "greenhouse effect" is a myth." - Jim Peden
It's all so confusing. Liberals tell us that we mustn't develop energy resources because of the impact on the polar bear -- even though polar bear numbers are on the increase. We shouldn't develop oil resources in ANWR because it is a pristine wilderness. We shouldn't develop offshore oil resources because 40 years ago there was oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel. Anyway there's no point in developing oil and gas resources because it won't make any difference to the price of gasoline. Anyway we are running out of oil and gas so there isn't any point in developing any more oil and gas resources. We shouldn't mine coal because coal creates global warming. We shouldn't develop nuclear power because Jane Fonda once made a scary movie about it. We should develop solar and wind power, “renewables”, even though both are extremely expensive right now. But we shouldn't build wind farms where Ted Kennedy could see the wind turbines from his window. And now with a straight face liberals say we'll have to starve the people in order to save the planet. Now who's in denial? - Christopher Chantrill
Truth may enter the world by many doors, but she is never escorted by force. - REX MURPHY
Scarcity is not inevitable. Often it is a political choice, the result of concessions to powerful special interests who have a pecuniary interest in high prices, artificial scarcity, and fomenting fear. The precious bird of environmentalism has been flying for too long with only one wing, the left one. Read on, and learn a little more about how easy it might be to know abundance. - Ed "Redwood" Ring
Carbon is the building block for all life on earth. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere sustains all life. Carbon provides all of the food and most of the energy for the human race. To be anti-carbon is to be anti-life and anti-human. - Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition.
Man has always had a healthy desire for knowledge, and it is the feeding of this hunger that ennobles journalism. Hearst and Pulitzer were acutely aware that man has a less healthy but no less voracious desire to believe that he has knowledge, particularly knowledge of something sensational. It is the feeding of this hunger that irreparably disgraced journalism, and a century later now threatens to do the same to science. – James Kerian
My mission, in what is left of a long and exciting lifetime, is to stamp out this Global Warming silliness and let all of us get on with enjoying our lives and loving our planet, Earth. - John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel is an American news weathercaster and presently works as an on-camera weathercaster at KUSE-TV in San Diego.
At some point, something has to give, and it will either be the US economy, or Greenism, the obsessive-compulsive Environmentalist Personality Disorder that will sacrifice the jobs, fortunes, futures, and lives, of three hundred million Americans, in slavish homage to the myth that burning "fossil fuels" is causing climate change, and that by reducing our "carbon footprint" we can end climate change. Nothing is further from the truth. The climate has been changing as long as there has been a climate, long before we could have had anything to do with it. - Raymond S. Kraft
The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog." - G. K. Chesterton Broadcast talk 6-11-35
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences." -C.S. Lewis"
The climate system is particularly challenging since it is known that components in the system are inherently chaotic; there are feedbacks that could potentially switch sign, and there are central processes that affect the system in a complicated, non-linear manner. These complex, chaotic, non-linear dynamics are an inherent aspect of the climate system. ... We simply do not fully understand the causes of climate drift in coupled models." - IPCC
In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act. ~ George Orwell
If the organic community wants consumers to embrace their products, they need to be affordable, not a self-proclaimed panacea to the ills of a modern, indulgent society. --Julie Gilbert, a Brisbane dietitian, in the Courier Mail.
Eco-activists in general…..betray their radical urban roots…………with little knowledge of the outdoors, the ocean, the atmosphere, the solar system and science in general. Yet they have no fear of pronouncing on and denouncing subjects that are beyond their ken. Rather than seek meaningful solutions, they always resort to "object! object! object!" to whatever is proposed even on the flimsiest of grounds, even if it contradicts their previous objections. Keep this in mind the next time radical environmentalists protest an industrial project in your region. – Unknown
I do have to agree with them about one thing. The danger and cost to human society from climate change will be catastrophic and is, apparently, unavoidable……..The danger is not from a catastrophe arising from soaring temperatures and human misery that alarmists claim will follow (a highly debatable proposition). The catastrophe that seems unstoppable is the human misery that will unquestionably arise from the massive costs of soaring imprudent government regulation of CO2 emissions in the form of Gore-enriching "cap and trade" schemes that will, in the end, provide no discernable impact on global climate. - Bob Webster, WEB Commentary
Willie Nelson had it right--- on the golf course he built and owned he was asked; what is par? His answer was; "Whatever I say it is." we need to learn some of the activists fighting techniques--- don't apologize for not being green enough by someone else's made-up standard--- define our own standard, proclaim ourselves great (and getting even better) then go toe-to-toe with them in the public arena if that is the best choice--- or let them slink away to dry-up on their own, because they are foolish and/or irrelevant, in other cases. -- Frank Gasperini
The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.”-- Winston Churchill
What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, forget what “the stars foretell”, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!-Robert Heinlein, 1907-1988
Dunn’s First Law. With enough idiots, you don't need a conspiracy.
It took only about 60 years for highly organized anarchists, professional pests and unemployable buffoons disguised as protesters to turn the developed world into a "Cuckoo's Nest". The odd thing about the developed world, and it’s most ardent haters, is that many of those who hate development the most keep living in the midst of it. The developed world is the choice of activists everywhere. In actuality, the avoidance of living in countries that have little or no development is a sign of some modicum of intelligence. Perhaps there is hope for these thugs after all. –Paraphrased from an unknown source, Rich Kozlovich
When the US National Assessment compared the results of two top-tier computer models for various regions of the United States, the models frequently generated precisely opposite rainfall scenarios, University of Alabama at Huntsville climatologist John Christy points out. Depending on which model was used, the Dakotas and Rio Grande valley would supposedly become complete deserts or huge swamps; the Southeastern US would become a jungle or semi-arid grassland.—Paul Driessen on the reliability of climate computer models.
Almost nothing about the claims and demands of environmentalists make sense, unless you look behind the curtain and discover that most of them involve destroying the U.S. economy.—Alan Caruba
Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, said, "But I later learned that the environmental movement is not always guided by science. As we celebrate Earth Day, this is a good lesson to keep in mind." --the Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2008.
Too many mindlessly follow green initiatives and bask in how good it feels -- without recognizing the unintended consequences. Magicians Penn and Teller have a video posted on YouTube in which hundreds of naive greens at a rally happily sign a petition to ban a "chemical found in reservoirs and lakes" and used in pesticides and nuclear energy that is finding its way into grocery stores and baby food. The chemical the people signing the petition want banned? Dihydrogen monoxide -- water. –Jeff Stier
We [dissenting scientists] discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we’ve seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.-- John Christy
For those scientists who value their scientific reputations, I would advise that they distance themselves from politically-motivated claims of a ’scientific consensus’ on the causes of global warming — before it is too late. Don’t let five Norwegians on the Nobel Prize committee be the arbiters of what is good science.-- Dr. Roy W. Spencer–a principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E).
One of the more unpleasant characteristics of the adherents of the ‘Global Warming’ religion is their blood lust for heretics and sinners. They seek out with the most vitriolic language those who deny ‘The Faith’, or who fail to obey the minutiae of their daily imprimaturs. They must have witches to hang, to burn, and to drown. In the words of Bruno Latour: “Nous n’avons jamais été modernes” (We Have Never Been Modern, RK).
It seems the parents who reject vaccines have it all figured out: they've done their 'research' and claim to 'understand' the risks and benefits of exempting their children from vaccines. One question remains: Whom will they sue when their children die of preventable diseases? Themselves"--Carl Baum, pediatrician and director of Center for Children's Environmental Toxicology at Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital
So, what is the point of all this? The point is a simple one. It is that anthropogenic global warming, now spun to climate change, has not a scintilla of authentic scientific evidence to support it. Likewise, there is not a scintilla of authentic scientific evidence to support the plethora of catastrophic phantasmagoria which the likes of David King and Al Gore are determined to promote as fact. In other words, King, himself a distinguished chemist if not scientist, is content not simply to watch the corruption of scientific method, and therefore the scientific endeavour generally, but to act as an enthusiastic participant. This issue, we are admonished ad nauseam, is the defining challenge to the species in the 21st century. R.C.E. Wyndham
This is the fifth time that the world is said to be running out of oil," says CERA Chairman Daniel Yergin. "Each time -- whether it was the 'gasoline famine' at the end of WWI or the 'permanent shortage' of the 1970s -- technology and the opening of new frontier areas has banished the specter of decline. There's no reason to think that technology is finished this time.
What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, forget what “the stars foretell”, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history”—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!-Robert Heinlein, 1907-1988
The IPCC has been in existence for 20 years. Yet there is still no scientifically believable evidence of the claimed adverse consequences of human activities. In South Africa alone there have been no floods or droughts during this period that exceeded the historical maxima. Claims of increased desertification and loss of our unique plant and animal species are demonstrably false. Sea levels are not rising along our coasts. Yet as a result of rising populations African nations are increasingly vulnerable to natural climatic extremes. Blaming these extremes on human activities and proclaiming that they are therefore avoidable is false and misleading. This in turn can lead to increasing political instability in African countries when disasters occur and governments are blamed for doing nothing to avoid them…Robert Bryce
Earlier that morning, the president of the Czech Republic, Hon. Vaclav Klaus, received a standing ovation when he declared Europe's emission reduction goals impossible to meet without lowering populations or creating widespread poverty. So, they're wrong on the science. They're wrong on the solutions. And, implementing their wrong solutions will impede freedom, retard growth and, ultimately, destroy economies. All while changing global mean temperatures not one single degree. Not one. As I hopped on the train headed for home, it struck me -- I may well have just left the only place on Earth where walked, however briefly, more sane-thinkers on the subject than not. The chill the thought sent up my spine is not completely gone….Marc Sheppard at the NYC Climate Conference
People only insist that a debate stop when they are afraid of what might be learned if it continues. George Will
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last. Winston Churchill
Capitalism delivered more people out of the mud and misery than any system ever and continues to do that. John Stossel
America is gripped by a form of life-threatening insanity perpetrated by the Greens and legislated by politicians who haven’t a clue about the ways they are wrecking our economy in the name of global warming.” Alan Caruba
……….climate models are being developed with very little ability to test out of sample. Furthermore, the climate science bandwagon has come about solely because of supposed anthropogenic climate change, which means that their funding is intrinsically tied to climate change happening and being man-made. A more self-interested group I could not find anywhere, even looking at the researchers who were paid by big tobacco companies to tell us cigarettes are safe…….John Atkinson
Can anyone out there provide me with any empirical data in support of the theory that humans control climate warming? No, don't tell me that climate is changing - we geologists absolutely know that climate changes all the time, in both directions, and at many scales of time and intensity………From Lee C. Gerhard [leeg@sunflower.com], Senior Scientist Emeritus, Kansas Geological Survey, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
Fallacies are not simply crazy ideas. They are usually both plausible and logical – but with something missing. Their plausibility gains them political support. Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing of ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters. Another phrase often heard in the wake of these disasters is, ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.” That is why it pays to look deeper into things that look good on the surface at the moment-Thomas Sowell, Economic Facts and Fallacies.
Intelligence is a necessary part of a scientist's innate equipment, but intelligence alone is insufficient. Insight and character count too, for without them a scientist lacks judgment, the absence of which will eventuate in self-deception. Bad character leads to worse, until it undermines and defeats intelligence”.……..Unknown
This cancerous abuse of science will continue to discredit the science establishment in the United States and around the world. And it should. It is utterly mendacious and abusive of real science………..James Lewis
Today people worship actors, but former times saw them as lowlifes, as unstable people driven to pretense and false dealings. In other words, as hypocrites. It's heresy to say so but former times might have had a point………Jon Ray
The recent cold snap in America's midwest area proves that global warming is real," ……"People don't understand that global warming takes many forms, including global cooling, an important part of global warming.…..The Spoof.
"Antarctica is the last bastion of a pristine environment compared to the rest of the world." Dana Bergstrom
Why is it that the greenies keep calling barren wastelands “pristine environments”? Is it because it is largely untouched by man? Maybe that’s the problem; then it wouldn’t be barren or a wasteland. Rich Kozlovich
Exterminators believe all of what they see. Greenies see all of what they believe. Rich Kozlovich
First they demanded that we get rid of DDT and we did not speak out because we believed. Then they demanded that we get rid of Chlordane and we did not speak out because we believed. Then they demanded that we get rid of Dursban, Ficam and pyrethroids; but by then it didn’t matter that we no longer believed. Rich Kozlovich, paraphrased from an unknown source.
Ethanol – An alcohol based fuel produced from organic materials used as a gasoline alternative that has become an obsession that nobody wants. It can't be transported safely and uses up a gigantic amounts of fresh water. It is corrosive, ruins pipes and gives you very little gas mileage. Extensive use of it is a direct cause of soaring food prices worldwide. To grow crops for its production requires the use of large tracts of land which, according to greenies in the past, would negatively impact wildlife (endangered species) and eliminate forests. It is also unaffordable unless subsidized by the government. Another brilliant obsession from the environmental movement; which they are now protesting! Partial quote from Robert Bryce and paraphrased by Rich Kozlovich
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Green Notes 2007 quotes
Armored from head to toe with the “invincibility of ignorance” the “momentum of the misinformed” is overwhelming because the informed are so colossally outnumbered.—Paraphrased from a quote from the American Council on Science and Health
"A new scientific McCarthyism is alive and well in America today." --ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan
The idea behind giving professors lifetime tenure is that this will enable them to speak out freely. But it would be hard to name any other occupation with a more cowardly record than academics, who have been giving in to politically correct campus bullies ever since the 1960s.—Thomas Sowell
“…..the vast majority of journalists are not that hot on history, especially where it’s in conflict with their political prejudices.” Gerard Jackson
Furthermore, if America was culturally rational, a snake oil salesman like Al Gore would be publicly mocked, horsewhipped or sued into oblivion as an utter fraud for his massive global warming scam perpetuated against the American people. However, these are perilous and perverse times we live in today where good is considered evil and evil touted as good, virtuous and laudatory; ---- Ellis Washington.
The precautionary principle, popular in Europe, is the idea that no new thing should be permitted until it has been proved harmless. Sounds good, except as Ron Bailey of Reason writes, it basically means, "Don't ever do anything for the first time." John Stossel
Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, says that you are a virus infecting planet Earth: “Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.” How radical? Watson thinks that the parasitical human population should be reduced to less than a billion, and those chosen to survive should inhabit colonies of twenty thousand or less, with uninterrupted wild areas separating them. They will all be vegans or vegetarians, of course, and reproduction will be limited to those who are responsible enough, in Watson's judgement, to handle parenthood…JAWA REPORT
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.… [T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” C. S. Lewis
The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. Jon Ray
Back in Venezuela, Gabaldón reviewed his problem. Half of his countrymen suffered from malaria at one time or another. It broke the spirit as well as the body. "People with malaria just don't care," says Gabaldón. "They don't even care if you treat them." As a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in protozoology, Gabaldón had learned that the chronic malarial "lose even the desire to procreate." Gabaldón decided to go all out for DDT. "Men in Green"
There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious commitments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving". -Jon Ray.
What alternatives do you offer? What hard evidence do you have? How much will it cost? Thomas Sowell
“It is a very human tendency to blame someone for the vagaries of the weather. A run of bad summers in the 1950s was blamed on nuclear bomb tests, the rains during the First World War were blamed on artillery going off on the Western Front and two centuries ago it was the battles of the Napoleonic Wars that were blamed for upsetting nature. And now it's global warming”…………Paul Simons, The Times, July 23, 2007
“If you make a deal with the devil you are the junior partner.” Armey’s Axiom
Would it be considered “piling on” to remind Congress that last year’s hurricane season predictions — that is, a 95 percent chance of a very active season — turned out to be a total bust? If hurricane experts armed with supercomputers can’t predict a regional storm season six months into the future, why would anyone think that they can project global climate trends for the next 100 years?”......Steve Milloy
Simply put: There is no climate policy that could curb greenhouse gases enough to slow global warming to any appreciable degree without ruining the global economy…..Max Borders
Malaria was actually a natural population control, and DDT has caused a massive population explosion in some places where it has eradicated malaria. More fundamentally, why should humans get priority over other forms of life? . . . I don't see any respect for mosquitoes in these posts."…. Jeff Hoffman, environmental attorney, wrote on grist.org
There are many other advantages that the activists have that allow them to get their point of view into the media, often to the exclusion of any contrary perspective. To put it bluntly, even in countries with high levels of education, there is too often a high degree of scientific illiteracy. Given various trends in academia such as postmodernism (which may now be ebbing), being highly educated can still entail a condition of extreme scientific illiteracy or what Thorstein Veblen called "trained incapacity." All these give the skillful activist speaker the opportunity to appear to score points against a scientist in a debate. By Thomas R. DeGregori
….scientific uncertainty, which so often occupies a central place in environmental controversies, can be understood not as a lack of scientific understanding but as the lack of coherence among competing scientific understandings."….. Roger Pielke Jr.
The goal of the environmental movement is to get out the truth and they don’t care how many lies they have to tell to do it.…(Me, and I think I plagiarized it.)
Dr. Elwell: Do you deny that at that time, your patients were under the impression that you were a butcher, and not a doctor?
Dr. Praetorius: Do you prefer the impression given to their patients by so many of our colleagues that they are doctors, and not butchers? From the movie, People Will Talk
"Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as 'disease' (e.g., malaria) and 'pests' (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere." ……Earth First founder Dave Foreman
As for the "science" you read about in the mainstream media these days, the rule of thumb is caveat emptor: buyer beware….Alan Caruba
The global warming contingent loves to don the Mantle of Science as the reason to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But its backup argument is: It's OK if we're wrong, because we mean well…… If the alarmists are right, the whole world will have to change and it will be onerous. If the global warming alarmists are wrong, much of the sacrifices they demand will have been for nothing.…Debra J. Saunders
Global warming 'is good and is not our fault'….Jon Ray
One of the big pieces of the psychobabble industry is the promotion of "self esteem" at the expense of self control and personal responsibility. But, contrary to popular myth, self esteem is not the holy grail of psychological health. In fact, it is not necessarily even good for you, and most bullies, tyrants and other dysfunctional people fairly ooze self esteem...Pat Santy AKA Dr. Sanity.
Environmental alarmism should be taken for what it is-a natural tendency of some portion of the public to latch onto the worst, and most unlikely, potential outcome. Alarmism should not be used as the basis for policy. Where a real problem exists, solutions should be based on reality, not hysteria." .....Dr. Amy Leigh Kaleita
“It cannot be stated often enough that our universities generally are run by fools who are breeding a generation of fools. There are, of course, many exceptions, but these exceptions have little impact on the deconstruction of civilization and the breeding of anti-intellectuals taking place at our universities”….Dennis Prager.
A peace prize for people fomenting conflict between the developed and developing world, inciting class conflict between the have and have nots? For causing food shortages (and likely greater conflict) through panicked conversion of food crops to biofuels to avoid a phantom menace? And the 'science' part? That has degenerated to the point where computer-generated gibberish is confused with real data. What a sad state...Steve Milloy
Substantially greater investments in infrastructure -- roads, electrical power, water resources --underlie all other efforts in rural and agricultural development. Unless infrastructure is improved, there is little hope for real progress in reversing the alarming food insecurity trends or in making agriculture an engine of economic growth…. Norman Borlaug
It is now a proven fact that eating food - any kind of food - will kill you. No one who has eaten food in the past is alive today, and everyone currently eating food will die. Therefore, those noble people who seek to save us from eating every kind of food that the earth provides should be hailed and saluted for their efforts to keep us alive..….Alan Caruba
An industry can survive those who are foolish and careless. It can survive the overly ambitious, but it cannot survive those who attack an industry and what it stands for from within. The activists are more to be desired because they present themselves as the enemy at the gate. Although they may use deceit and cunning they are known because they carry their banner openly. No matter how formidable they may be they cannot be as serious a threat as those who wear the garments, speak the language and share the customs of those within an organization while secretly working that which is harmful They rot the heart of an industry, undermine the pillars of support and infect the industry with their treason to the point that those who see clearly and understand what is really going on are left standing alone. That industry will no longer be able to resist those who would destroy it. Can any crime be feared more? Paraphrased from a quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
“The environmental movement in fact stands out as the true Flat Earth Society, constantly looking to build fences to save us others, the mindless masses, from falling off the edge.” Jon Ray
Traditional wisdom is the slow accumulation of "what has worked" in a given society. Conventional wisdom may be nothing more than the philosophical flavor of the day. Traditional wisdom is a valuable legacy that can only be lost or discarded for conventional wisdom at considerable peril.……Paraphrased comments of Jon Ray, Thomas Sowell and Me.
What weird critters watermelons are………Junkscience
Further, we are not impressed either by the "players" who are swearing that, no, no THIS time the sky is REALLY falling, nor by their tactics. Their longstanding ideology -- anti-Americanism, socialism, communism and the like fosters no great confidence in their latest hysteria either……. Evan Sayet explaining to the Brits why Americans aren’t in love with Kyoto and the climate change crowed.
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"A new scientific McCarthyism is alive and well in America today." --ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan
The idea behind giving professors lifetime tenure is that this will enable them to speak out freely. But it would be hard to name any other occupation with a more cowardly record than academics, who have been giving in to politically correct campus bullies ever since the 1960s.—Thomas Sowell
“…..the vast majority of journalists are not that hot on history, especially where it’s in conflict with their political prejudices.” Gerard Jackson
Furthermore, if America was culturally rational, a snake oil salesman like Al Gore would be publicly mocked, horsewhipped or sued into oblivion as an utter fraud for his massive global warming scam perpetuated against the American people. However, these are perilous and perverse times we live in today where good is considered evil and evil touted as good, virtuous and laudatory; ---- Ellis Washington.
The precautionary principle, popular in Europe, is the idea that no new thing should be permitted until it has been proved harmless. Sounds good, except as Ron Bailey of Reason writes, it basically means, "Don't ever do anything for the first time." John Stossel
Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, says that you are a virus infecting planet Earth: “Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.” How radical? Watson thinks that the parasitical human population should be reduced to less than a billion, and those chosen to survive should inhabit colonies of twenty thousand or less, with uninterrupted wild areas separating them. They will all be vegans or vegetarians, of course, and reproduction will be limited to those who are responsible enough, in Watson's judgement, to handle parenthood…JAWA REPORT
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.… [T]hose who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” C. S. Lewis
The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. Jon Ray
Back in Venezuela, Gabaldón reviewed his problem. Half of his countrymen suffered from malaria at one time or another. It broke the spirit as well as the body. "People with malaria just don't care," says Gabaldón. "They don't even care if you treat them." As a Rockefeller Foundation fellow in protozoology, Gabaldón had learned that the chronic malarial "lose even the desire to procreate." Gabaldón decided to go all out for DDT. "Men in Green"
There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious commitments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving". -Jon Ray.
What alternatives do you offer? What hard evidence do you have? How much will it cost? Thomas Sowell
“It is a very human tendency to blame someone for the vagaries of the weather. A run of bad summers in the 1950s was blamed on nuclear bomb tests, the rains during the First World War were blamed on artillery going off on the Western Front and two centuries ago it was the battles of the Napoleonic Wars that were blamed for upsetting nature. And now it's global warming”…………Paul Simons, The Times, July 23, 2007
“If you make a deal with the devil you are the junior partner.” Armey’s Axiom
Would it be considered “piling on” to remind Congress that last year’s hurricane season predictions — that is, a 95 percent chance of a very active season — turned out to be a total bust? If hurricane experts armed with supercomputers can’t predict a regional storm season six months into the future, why would anyone think that they can project global climate trends for the next 100 years?”......Steve Milloy
Simply put: There is no climate policy that could curb greenhouse gases enough to slow global warming to any appreciable degree without ruining the global economy…..Max Borders
Malaria was actually a natural population control, and DDT has caused a massive population explosion in some places where it has eradicated malaria. More fundamentally, why should humans get priority over other forms of life? . . . I don't see any respect for mosquitoes in these posts."…. Jeff Hoffman, environmental attorney, wrote on grist.org
There are many other advantages that the activists have that allow them to get their point of view into the media, often to the exclusion of any contrary perspective. To put it bluntly, even in countries with high levels of education, there is too often a high degree of scientific illiteracy. Given various trends in academia such as postmodernism (which may now be ebbing), being highly educated can still entail a condition of extreme scientific illiteracy or what Thorstein Veblen called "trained incapacity." All these give the skillful activist speaker the opportunity to appear to score points against a scientist in a debate. By Thomas R. DeGregori
….scientific uncertainty, which so often occupies a central place in environmental controversies, can be understood not as a lack of scientific understanding but as the lack of coherence among competing scientific understandings."….. Roger Pielke Jr.
The goal of the environmental movement is to get out the truth and they don’t care how many lies they have to tell to do it.…(Me, and I think I plagiarized it.)
Dr. Elwell: Do you deny that at that time, your patients were under the impression that you were a butcher, and not a doctor?
Dr. Praetorius: Do you prefer the impression given to their patients by so many of our colleagues that they are doctors, and not butchers? From the movie, People Will Talk
"Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as 'disease' (e.g., malaria) and 'pests' (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere." ……Earth First founder Dave Foreman
As for the "science" you read about in the mainstream media these days, the rule of thumb is caveat emptor: buyer beware….Alan Caruba
The global warming contingent loves to don the Mantle of Science as the reason to curb greenhouse gas emissions. But its backup argument is: It's OK if we're wrong, because we mean well…… If the alarmists are right, the whole world will have to change and it will be onerous. If the global warming alarmists are wrong, much of the sacrifices they demand will have been for nothing.…Debra J. Saunders
Global warming 'is good and is not our fault'….Jon Ray
One of the big pieces of the psychobabble industry is the promotion of "self esteem" at the expense of self control and personal responsibility. But, contrary to popular myth, self esteem is not the holy grail of psychological health. In fact, it is not necessarily even good for you, and most bullies, tyrants and other dysfunctional people fairly ooze self esteem...Pat Santy AKA Dr. Sanity.
Environmental alarmism should be taken for what it is-a natural tendency of some portion of the public to latch onto the worst, and most unlikely, potential outcome. Alarmism should not be used as the basis for policy. Where a real problem exists, solutions should be based on reality, not hysteria." .....Dr. Amy Leigh Kaleita
“It cannot be stated often enough that our universities generally are run by fools who are breeding a generation of fools. There are, of course, many exceptions, but these exceptions have little impact on the deconstruction of civilization and the breeding of anti-intellectuals taking place at our universities”….Dennis Prager.
A peace prize for people fomenting conflict between the developed and developing world, inciting class conflict between the have and have nots? For causing food shortages (and likely greater conflict) through panicked conversion of food crops to biofuels to avoid a phantom menace? And the 'science' part? That has degenerated to the point where computer-generated gibberish is confused with real data. What a sad state...Steve Milloy
Substantially greater investments in infrastructure -- roads, electrical power, water resources --underlie all other efforts in rural and agricultural development. Unless infrastructure is improved, there is little hope for real progress in reversing the alarming food insecurity trends or in making agriculture an engine of economic growth…. Norman Borlaug
It is now a proven fact that eating food - any kind of food - will kill you. No one who has eaten food in the past is alive today, and everyone currently eating food will die. Therefore, those noble people who seek to save us from eating every kind of food that the earth provides should be hailed and saluted for their efforts to keep us alive..….Alan Caruba
An industry can survive those who are foolish and careless. It can survive the overly ambitious, but it cannot survive those who attack an industry and what it stands for from within. The activists are more to be desired because they present themselves as the enemy at the gate. Although they may use deceit and cunning they are known because they carry their banner openly. No matter how formidable they may be they cannot be as serious a threat as those who wear the garments, speak the language and share the customs of those within an organization while secretly working that which is harmful They rot the heart of an industry, undermine the pillars of support and infect the industry with their treason to the point that those who see clearly and understand what is really going on are left standing alone. That industry will no longer be able to resist those who would destroy it. Can any crime be feared more? Paraphrased from a quote by Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
“The environmental movement in fact stands out as the true Flat Earth Society, constantly looking to build fences to save us others, the mindless masses, from falling off the edge.” Jon Ray
Traditional wisdom is the slow accumulation of "what has worked" in a given society. Conventional wisdom may be nothing more than the philosophical flavor of the day. Traditional wisdom is a valuable legacy that can only be lost or discarded for conventional wisdom at considerable peril.……Paraphrased comments of Jon Ray, Thomas Sowell and Me.
What weird critters watermelons are………Junkscience
Further, we are not impressed either by the "players" who are swearing that, no, no THIS time the sky is REALLY falling, nor by their tactics. Their longstanding ideology -- anti-Americanism, socialism, communism and the like fosters no great confidence in their latest hysteria either……. Evan Sayet explaining to the Brits why Americans aren’t in love with Kyoto and the climate change crowed.
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