The Wisdom of George Will

George Will presents the thoughts of Robert B. Laughlin, co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics, who wrote an article in The american Scholar titled "What the Earth Knows" and supports his hypothesis:

"What humans do to, and ostensibly for, the earth does not matter in the long run, and the long run is what matters to the earth. We must, Laughlin says, think about the earth’s past in terms of geologic time."

The closing paragraph:

"Six million years ago the Mediterranean dried up. Ninety million years ago there were alligators in the Arctic. Three hundred million years ago Northern Europe was a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. “One thing we know for sure,” Laughlin says about these convulsions, “is that people weren’t involved.”"


An interesting read for all my green friends!

RATIONALITY

Neil Reynolds in a Globe and Mail column explains the facts presented in The American Scholar Magazine this summer by Professor Robert Laughlin, a physicist at Stanford.

Calm and factual, which is what we need! Please read if you are concerned about global warming.

It reminds me of an exercise I did a few years ago that relieved my concern. It is not scientific, but I think adds a little wisdom to the discussion.

The world population is 6 billion. I thought that is a lot of people, no doubt, and it will be double that in not that many years, so maybe there is need for concern.

To effect the climate of the earth these 6 billion - heading for 12 billion - must have a significant impact, so I could get a feel for this by calculating how much of the surface of the earth man touches directly - 6 or 12 billion is a BIG number!

So I said let's allow 1 square yard - 3' x 3' - for each person, and have them stand shoulder to shoulder just to see the physical size of this "direct human footprint" on the earth.

The result: the entire population of the earth would fit in 1/2 of San Diego County, California, where this is being written. When it doubles to 12 billion, they will still all comfortably fit in the county!

Think what a small area this is in relation to the earths entire surface!

I know, this is not our entire "footprint", but let's assume each person effects the atmosphere 100 times his "personal footprint". Correlating with area this would still fit inside the four Southwestern states - California, Nevada, Arizona and Utah.

Still a minute part of the earths surface, and I find it difficult to believe we could have any effect on climate with all of the other forces in the universe.

Food for thought!

"THE BIG GREEN LIE EXPOSED" - 2

Walter Russell Mead writes on the problems with the green movement. An earlier post quoted one historical analogy - prohibition - and below is another quite appropriate analogy:


"The green movement’s strategic failure is also reminiscent of the Peace Movement of the 1920s. Chuckleheaded do-gooders correctly recognized the problem of war. In the conditions of the twentieth century, great power wars like World War One were radically unacceptable. Unless war could be stopped, scores of millions might brutally die. Whole nations would be devastated; millions of children would starve. Given the rise of aircraft, great cultural monuments would be destroyed as the world’s greatest cities were razed to the ground. New and more terrible weapons would be developed under wartime conditions, weapons that potentially could lead to the destruction of all human civilization or even of life on earth.

Again, the Peace Movement of the 1920s was completely right about this — we know to our sorrow today just how right they were. Yet the strategies they proposed — a treaty to ‘outlaw war’ in the 1920s, and appeasement of dictators and revisionist powers in the 193os — were utter disasters and made World War Two inevitable. The Nuclear Freeze movement in the 1980s repeated the mistake: confusing the identification of a problem (nuclear weapons) with a workable policy solution (a unilateral western freeze on nuclear weapons deployment that would have given the Soviets superiority in Europe). There are fewer nuclear weapons today than would have existed had the Nuclear Freeze people had their way; there almost certainly would have been fewer wars and fewer war deaths if the policy recommendations of the pre-World War Two peace movements had been greeted with the obloquy and contempt they deserved.

You can diagnose a disease but have no clue how to treat it. You can be an excellent climate scientist and a wretched social engineer. You can want to do good and end up furthering exactly the evils you most deplore.

That is where most of the organized green groups stand today."


Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it! (Wish I had said that first!!)

MORE ON GREEN: MICHAEL CRICHTON EXPLAINS WHAT IS GOING ON IN SCIENCE

"Aliens Cause Global Warming: A Caltech Lecture by Michael Crichton" is a great summary and a must read for believers and skeptics of global warming. 12 printed pages and worth the time if you want to understand what is going on! (The lecture is from January 17, 2003, and nothing has changed!)

"THE BIG GREEN LIE EXPOSED"

Walter Russell Mead writes the best explanation I have read of the problem with today's green movement. An excerpt follows, summarizing his analysis of their activities by comparison with Prohibition:


"In sum, the mainstream press seems to be swinging around toward the views expressed on this blog: that the scandals may not discredit or even really affect the underlying scientific arguments about climate change but they do cast doubt on the perspicacity of the movement’s leadership — and that a fundamental rethink is called for.

Greens who feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of investigations following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other problems would reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of climate change were watching the wrong thing. The Big Green Lie (or Delusion, to be charitable) isn’t so much that climate change is happening and that it is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by human activity. The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.

The greens claim to be diagnosticians and therapists: that they can both name the disease and heal it. They are wrong. The attitudes and political vision of a group of NGO pressure groups may work when it comes to harassing Japanese whale ships in the Antarctic; this vision and these people come up short when set against the challenge of moderating the impact of human industrial activity on the earth’s climate system. Many leaders of today’s environmental movement are like the anti-alcohol activists before Prohibition who convinced Americans that the problem of alcohol abuse was real, destructive, and likely to get worse unless addressed. These farsighted activists were absolutely correct: with the introduction of the motorcar alcohol was more destructive than ever; with more than 500,000 alcohol related highway deaths between 1982 and 2008, more Americans have been killed on our roads as a result of drunk driving since 1915 than have died in our wars.

The problem is that the remedy proposed, Prohibition, not only failed to solve the problem — it made the problem of alcohol abuse worse, and it also reduced respect for the law and led to the rise of organized crime in the United States on an unprecedented scale.

The Prohibitionists were brilliantly, scientifically correct about the problem: they were foolishly and destructively blind about how to deal with it."


If you have time read his rather lengthy post. If not, I will be posting some interesting parts of it over the next day or two!

Energy Misinformation and Mythology from BHO

"Energy Pipedreams" by Robert Samuelson explains the misleading information given to us by our President in last weeks address on the BP oil spill.

A quick read to understand the intracacies of the fossil fuel availability problem.

My Green Friends: Please Read This!

From the WaPo - for whom I have great respect publishing this article - Robert Bryce puts perspective on misconceptions of our Green Friends. The first paragraph:


"Americans are being inundated with claims about renewable and alternative energy. Advocates for these technologies say that if we jettison fossil fuels, we'll breathe easier, stop global warming and revolutionize our economy. Yes, "green" energy has great emotional and political appeal. But before we wrap all our hopes -- and subsidies -- in it, let's take a hard look at some common misconceptions about what "green" means."


and on America:


"Over the past three decades, the United States has improved its energy efficiency as much as or more than other developed countries. According to data from the Energy Information Administration, average per capita energy consumption in the United States fell by 2.5 percent from 1980 through 2006. That reduction was greater than in any other developed country except Switzerland and Denmark, and the United States achieved it without participating in the Kyoto Protocol or creating an emissions trading system like the one employed in Europe. EIA data also show that the United States has been among the best at reducing the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per $1 of GDP and the amount of energy consumed per $1 of GDP."


and his conclusion:


"America's move toward a more service-based economy that is less dependent on heavy industry and manufacturing is driving this improvement. In addition, the proliferation of computer chips in everything from automobiles to programmable thermostats is wringing more useful work out of each unit of energy consumed. The United States will continue going green by simply allowing engineers and entrepreneurs to do what they do best: make products that are faster, cheaper and more efficient than the ones they made the year before."


Cap and Trade? Forget it - let the free market solve the energy problem. It will do a better job and not extract extra taxes from us for the power grab!

Read the column here.

"Blinded by Science"

George Will comments on our global warming theocrats!

Global Warming lack of Credibility

In "Credibility is What's Really Melting" Mark Steyn clearly, and with humor, explains the "science" credibility gap. An important read for all you "believers".

The heart of the problem:

“Climate change” is not a story of climate change, which has been a fact of life throughout our planet’s history. It is a far more contemporary story about the corruption of science and “peer review” by hucksters, opportunists and global-government control-freaks. I can see what’s in it for Dr. Pachauri and professor Hasnain, and even for the lowly Environmental Correspondent enjoying a cozy sinecure at a time of newspaper cutbacks in everything from foreign bureaus to arts coverage.

But it’s hard to see what’s in it for Dan Gajewski of Ottawa [writer of a critical email to Mark Steyn] and the millions of kindred spirits who’ve signed on to this racket and are determined to stick with it. Don’t be the last off a collapsing bandwagon. The scientific “consensus” is melting way faster than the glaciers.

Why I Think Global Warming and Sustainability "are mostly bunk"!

In todays WSJ L. Gordon Crovitz writes "Technology Predictions Are Mostly Bunk", his view how technology improvements actually happen and the perception as documented by various quotations from the past. The key paragraphs:


'"Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments," said Roman engineer Julius Sextus Frontinus in 10 A.D. This end-of-progress view has been echoed many times, including by Charles Duell, commissioner for the U.S. Patent Office, who in 1899 said, "Everything that can be invented has already been invented."

It's worth recalling, especially in a gloomy year like the one drawing to an end, that the opposite is true: The more we invent, the more we invent. Knowledge grows on itself. '


You not only can't precict the future, but making decisions on technological predictions - either positive or negative - is a fools errand.

I particularly like this example: "No one will need more than 637kb of memory for a personal computer - 640K ought to be enough for anybody," Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1981.

Read the column, it is quite interesting!

P.S.: I am writing this on a Toshiba portable with 1 gig of RAM and 160 gig of disk drive!

A Logical Analysis That Makes it Difficult to Defend Global Warming Alarmists

Debra Saunders in "A Cool Wind Braces the Hot-Air Crowd" gives her view of the Global Warming controversy with a calm and logical inspection of their actions. An example:


"You may have read about the 1,200 limos and 140 private planes commissioned to transport COP-15 [Copenhagen] dignitaries in style. Critics love to point to the hypocrisy of world leaders -- such as Prince Charles and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown -- touching down in separate private planes to a conference ostensibly dedicated to curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

But it's the Flying High Lords of Greendom's air of unreality that concerns me. If world leaders truly believed that global warming will lead to famine, rising sea levels and melting of the North Pole ice -- along with countless deaths -- surely they would want to set an example by flying commercial."


It is obvious this is true, so if they don't believe greenhouse gases are a problem, why do they keep saying so? Could it be another agenda?

Read the entire column to keep this alarmism in check!

"What Copenhagen Exposed"

David Warren's column in the Ottawa Citizen is the finest and clearest explanation of what the Global Warming Cabal is, along with a suggestion of action to be taken by all of us. A rational look at Global Warming! The entire column is here because of its importance. I have highlighted the comments that impacted me. Comment if you wish!


"The farce in Copenhagen continues. As I have intimated before, I am not without hope for this "earth summit." I see more and more evidence that people -- "electorates" in all the western countries, where we do have elections, and can throw the bums out, which is about the only pleasure we have as "electors" -- have seen through this imposture completely. My column today cannot be the best one on this subject. For that, I must refer the same reader to the London Telegraph, and Gerald Warner's column from Friday. Rather than trying to improve upon it, let me quote his own "lead graf":

"When your attempt at recreating the Congress of Vienna with a third-rate cast of extras turns into a shambles, when the data with which you have tried to terrify the world is daily exposed as ever more phoney, when the blatant greed and self-interest of the participants has become obvious to all beholders, when those pesky polar bears just keep increasing and multiplying -- what do you do?"

He goes on to examine a farce-within-the-farce, an attempt to "leak" -- through Greenpeace, no less -- an already much-circulated "secret document" from the usual UN press-releasers, suggesting global temperatures may rise "even higher" than the delegates are already shouting from under Copenhagen's blanket of snow. As Warner says, it was a crass trick, but, "the climate alarmists are no longer in a position to pick and choose their tactics."

But as I say, this gives me reason for hope. The environmentalists have taken the "global warming" imposture so far, have pushed it with claims so ridiculous, and are by now so well exposed, that some real good is being achieved.

The participants in Copenhagen may or may not succeed in burning through another trillion or five in borrowed money, to fuel new environmentalist bureaucracies. At the moment of writing, it appears even this accomplishment will be denied to them, for they are falling out among themselves, and Barack Obama's big galvanizing speech has impressed nobody.

But even if they are able to stitch up a plastic-surgical agreement, we may well be experiencing, in Copenhagen, the event that puts an end to environmental scare-mongering for a generation. The perpetrators of this scare-mongering (and I have listed so many earlier examples in previous columns) have finally overplayed their hand.

Strange to say, my delight in this is mixed. For the planet has real "environmental issues" that have gone unaddressed at Copenhagen, and will now be harder to address in light of the fallout.

The creation of new "carbon credit" schemes to reduce "greenhouse gas emissions" was not going to alleviate any of these problems. It was only going to line the pockets of some of the world's most corrupt bureaucrats and businessmen. Their pockets were already well-lined, and if they can't profit from Copenhagen deals, they will find other ways to be paid for useless services, and continue living like Al Gore. We needn't pray for them too earnestly.

But we do need to think about ways to reduce our actual "environmental footprints," strange as this must sound coming from me. We do have major pollution problems, coming out of China and through all the "third world" as massive populations are raised out of abject poverty, wherever old-fashioned capitalism is permitted.

For the most part, even the most primitive of "third world" dictators saw through the Copenhaggling immediately, and joined in only as a way to board the latest gravy train of western guilt money. This is by now a venerable suckering operation, that began the morning after each backward country became nominally independent. It has kept their politicians rich and their peoples poor.

We can't do anything about that, unless we are prepared to invade and occupy these countries. And given our reluctance to continue even in Afghanistan and Iraq against terrorists, I see no prospect of restoring the old imperialist order.
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But we can, in more than principle, move ahead of our imitators again, by setting a better example of how to live, one man and one woman at a time. We could -- I know this sounds a little idealistic, but bear with me -- try to export the best of our old Christian civilization, instead of the worst of our post-Christian one. For my reader may recall that civilization had nothing to do with conspicuous consumption, and put more of its money in cathedrals than into personal and corporate display. To say this would be "good for the environment" is an understatement: there is so much joyful life we could recover, by simply discarding what is not genuinely useful, and getting on with the root human task of salvation, through the advancement of the good, the beautiful, and the true."


This approach is not naivete. It is slowing down the alarmists using this as a tool of enrichment while we truly resolve the problem. The same approach is being used to solve the "imagined" HealthCare problem in our country and I am hopeful that it will not succeed. The real question is: When will we all wake up!

Along the same lines as the last post...

Ben Stein, earlier this week in The American Spectator" summarized his thoughts on the whole global warming fiasco, and he is very much in line with my beliefs, which many of you may find extreme.

I would suggest you read and think through his theories - even though they draw parallels with the dreaded subjects of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler - give it a chance!! - I believe there is merit to what he believes is driving global warming, with the possibility of the same result somewhere in the future.

No!! I'm not a kook! Think it through! And if you don't understand how Marx and Hitler came to power re-read some history.

But this article is a good primer. Read "What a Piece of Work" is man! Thought provoking!

Monbiot or "Moonbat"

I began reading George Monbiot after he denounced the Climategate data fixers, thinking a strong supporter and promoter of the man made global warming theory had "seen the light". His column in the Guardian today shows it was just a blip on his radar and did nothing to disuade him of the "truth" from these data fixers. This belief is a "religion"!

Read his proposed speech for BHO at the Copenhagen Earth Summit. It is an amazing piece and the arrogance of this Englishman is even more amazing.

The National Post gives their view of Copenhagen in "The Copenhagen PR Scam". Their estimate is the demands of the G-77 group of poor nations, a subset of UN members which includes China, India and Brazil, would cost each Canadian household C$3000.00 per year in taxes to transfer to these "poor" nations. Talk about destroying our economies!!

CAP AND TAX

Sometimes referred to as Cap and Trade is being pushed by the left for quite obvious reasons that you do not hear about from the MSM. A couple of columns today point this out nicely.

Kimberley Strassel in the WSJ - I know, their opinion columns are the one exception in the MSM - explains what the EPA is doing and how they have set Cap and Tax back by their actions. BHO et al want the power but do not know how to get it in our democracy! It appears to me they are "grasping at straws".

Charles Krauthammer explains "The Environmental Shakedown" of the West by the third world members of the U.N. With their allies - the extreme environmentalists of the West - they are trying everything they can. Their success will bring an end to the economic miracle we have enjoyed for a century.

Climategate! or The CRUtape Letters!: The Other Side

George Monbiot, a British supporter of Global Warming, who fortunately is fair enough to be critical of the scientists involved in Climategate but is still a believer, summarizes the other side in his Guardian column "The climate denial industry is out to dupe the public. And it's working".

It is a good summary of the thinking on the left - worth the read to keep all in perspective. I have only two comments.

• No one - I repeat, no one - believes that man has no effect on the Earth's weather. We are part of the eco-environment so we have an effect. The discussion is the degree - as most discussions are - and whether we should turn our societies upside down in a leftist generated hysteria which is pushed to gain them POWER! Mr. Monbiot does not address this question.
• His point about Industry hiding global warming is also hysteria. We live in a free market society where corporations protect their business and their stockholders as a first priority - think what you will of this but it is a fact - and therefore these industries will not "promote" what will hurt their business unless it is truly a "world crisis" (you may not want to believe this, but Exxon would really stop any activity if it could be "proven" that a world crisis would happen - please don't kid yourself about the morality of our industrial management class). The leftist ideologue position that this is a "cover-up" is silly!

Any comments?

Climategate! or The CRUtape Letters!

Global Warming believers should read both of the following articles to judge their belief as scientific fact or ideological fantasy.

Steven F. Hayward writes a lengthy article in The Weekly Standard which seems to me a good factual summary of what The CRUtape Letters show us. Worth the read. His opening paragrapgh summarizes the problem with the entire situation:

• "Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a "communications" problem, but after Al Gore's Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment."

George Will weighs in on the subject with "TheClimate-Change Travesty." A couple of important paragraphs:

• "The travesty is the intellectual arrogance of the authors of climate change models partially based on the problematic practice of reconstructing long-term prior climate changes. On such models we are supposed to wager trillions of dollars -- and substantially diminished freedom.
• 
  Some climate scientists compound their delusions of intellectual adequacy with messiah complexes. They seem to suppose themselves a small clerisy entrusted with the most urgent truth ever discovered. On it, and hence on them, the planet's fate depends. So some of them consider it virtuous to embroider facts, exaggerate certitudes, suppress inconvenient data, and manipulate the peer review process to suppress scholarly dissent and, above all, to declare that the debate is over."

Read and evaluate these two respected pundits to decide if you are saving the planet or being a useful idiot for another agenda.

Global Warming Supporting Scientists and MSM: the same tactics!

James Taranto in WSJ's Best of the Web Today writes on "Settled Science?" and "Redefining 'Consensus'" in the two lead stories of his daily column.

If you can read these and still believe in global warming science or the independence of our MSM, you are letting ideology fog your reasoning.

CLIMATEGATE!!!

Interesting article in the Daily Telegraph. If you are a global warming enthusiast it is an important read.

Climate Change

Kimberley Strassel explains a growing "change" in the worldwide "settled science" of global warming. Seems it is not so settled! But don't ask Al or BHO!

An interesting read and commentary on our strongest ally: Australia!