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Global Irony Outbreak

From the Drudge Report:

HOUSE HEARING ON 'WARMING OF THE PLANET' CANCELED AFTER ICE STORM
HEARING NOTICE
Tue Feb 13 2007 19:31:25 ET

The Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality hearing scheduled for Wednesday, February 14, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building has been postponed due to inclement [colder than normal, with record-setting snows across much of the country] weather. The hearing is entitled "Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?" [Gas emissions from this hearing certainly will.]

The hearing will be rescheduled to a date and time to be announced later. [How about 20-30 years from now with a re-showing of An Inconvenient Truth? By then AIT will no doubt be a campy classic-cult film along the lines of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.]

Warming advocates are quick to cite projected death statistics from hot weather in Europe. What should not to be lost here is the fact that cold weather is the direct cause of many more deaths than hot weather. Even if the planet is gradually warming, there is a reasonable case to be made that the results (more temperate weather, more available farmland, improved crop yields, etc.) will actually be more beneficial than harmful for humans.

Freshly Squeezed

On these dates in California history....

August 30, 2006: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger announces California will become the first state to impose a cap on all greenhouse gas emissions, including those from industrial plants, under a landmark deal reached with legislative Democrats.

January 16, 2007: Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tours orange grove in Fresno to survey damage caused by a wave of icy weather that damaged nearly three quarters of California's citrus crop.




"So, let's say these are the balls of California businessmen - here's what we're going to do....."

"And when they came for me..."

Government officials calling for suppression of dissent is not new. We've seen it happen over and over again in totalitarian states and theocracies throughout the world.

However, it appears we've turned some sort of horrific corner here in the U.S. since Senators John D. Rockefeller IV (D-Moron-WV) and Olympia Snowe (R-Idiot-VT) feel confident enough to send an open letter to ExxonMobil demanding the company end its support for climate change skeptics.

The entire letter is a disgusting attempt to suppress any debate on the issue. The letter's penultimate paragraph is particularly repulsive:

"In light of the adverse impacts still resulting from your corporations activities, we must request that ExxonMobil end any further financial assistance or other support to groups or individuals whose public advocacy has contributed to the small, but unfortunately effective, climate change denial myth. Further, we believe ExxonMobil should take additional steps to improve the public debate, and consequently the reputation of the United States. We would recommend that ExxonMobil publicly acknowledge both the reality of climate change and the role of humans in causing or exacerbating it. Second, ExxonMobil should repudiate its climate change denial campaign and make public its funding history. Finally, we believe that there would be a benefit to the United States if one of the world's largest carbon emitters headquartered here devoted at least some of the money it has invested in climate change denial pseudo-science to global remediation efforts. We believe this would be especially important in the developing world, where the disastrous effects of global climate change are likely to have their most immediate and calamitous impacts."

Full text of the letter can be found at either the Wall Street Journal site or Senator Snowe's site:
http://opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110009337

http://tinyurl.com/w887p

Regardless of where one stands on the climate change debate, we should all be disturbed by the fact that this is not the ranting of some half-baked, anarchist street protester, but rather a calculated, written and explicit threat against private citizens by two United States senators.

The Wall Street Journal has an op-ed that condemns the Senators' letter but which, in my opinion, lacks any tone of real outrage.

WSJ editorial at:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009338

More to the point is a press release from the Ayn Rand Institute condemning the letter for what it is: an egregious attack on free speech. The Institute rightly denounces the Rockefeller/Snowe letter in no uncertain terms.

"Observe that the senators do not offer a single fact intended to convince ExxonMobil of the truth of their position. Their message is not 'agree with us because,' but 'agree with us or else.' That is a message appropriate to a dictator, not to the representatives of a free nation.

"Defenders of free speech must stand up against this vicious attempt to intimidate ExxonMobil into embracing the global warming cause, and declare that the government has no business telling Americans what they should think or say."

Full text of the ARI press release:
http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=13691&news_iv_ctrl=1221

Censorship of this sort is a more dangerous and immediate threat than any projected climate catastrophe.

Global Warming Is More B.S. Than We Thought

A 400-page U.N. report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow, states that cow "emissions" are more damaging to the planet than "cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together."

It turns out that cow flatulence and manure emit more than one third of planet's methane, a greenhouse gas which warms the world 20 times faster than carbon dioxide.

Our path is clear. We need a Kyoto Protocol to set the cow population back to pre-1990 levels. I'm thinking a massive barbeque ought to do it. You know, one last party before we all burst into flames.

Turns out Gary Larson was on to the devastating impact of cows way before Al Gore.

This is an exciting development for climate change advocates as they can now join forces with the obesity epidemic and PETA activists in a move to ban greenhouse-gas-producing cows, leather coats and Outback Steakhouses.

This should take some of the heat off SUV owners and put it squarely where it belongs - on all those smug, milk drinkers.

Link to the story here:

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2062484.ece

P.S. - Glad to see the U.N. has gotten such a good handle on the whole world peace thing that they can take time to put out a 400 page report on cow shit. Thanks for the memories, Kofi.

In A Nutshell


DANGER! Potential common sense outbreak...

In an study published in Environmental Geology (Volume 50, Number 6 / August, 2006), L. F. Khilyuk and G. V. Chilingar two researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at USC, suggest that:

"identification and understanding of global forces of nature driving the Earth's climate is crucial for developing [an] adequate relationship between people and nature, and for developing and implementing a sound course of action aimed at survival and welfare of the human race.."

Khiluk and Chilingar have a couple of other interesting things to say in their peer-reviewed article...

"[We] identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth's climate: (1) solar radiation as a dominant external energy supplier to the Earth, (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities generating and consuming atmospheric gases at the interface of lithosphere and atmosphere."

The website CO2 Science (http://www.co2science.org) has as concise a summation as you can get so we'll go with it:

The take-home message of Khilyuk and Chilingar's analysis, as they describe it, is that "any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4-5 orders of magnitude greater than available human controls." What is more, they indicate that "application of these controls will lead to catastrophic economic consequences," noting that "since its inception in February 2005, the Kyoto Protocol has cost about $50 billion supposedly averting about 0.0005°C of warming by the year 2050," and that "the Kyoto Protocol is a good example of how to achieve the minimum results with the maximum efforts (and sacrifices)." This being the case, they conclude that "attempts to alter the occurring global climatic changes have to be abandoned as meaningless and harmful," and that in their place the "moral and professional obligation of all responsible scientists and politicians is to minimize potential human misery resulting from oncoming global climatic change," hopefully by more immediate, rational and cost-effective means.
-from the CO2 Science website

[MJ note: It's easy to miss the implication of the term "order of magnitude" as a scientific estimation. To say that natural forces are "4-5 orders of magnitude greater than human controls" is to say that they are 10,000 to 100,000 times greater. Or a really lot. Thanks, Wikipedia.]

We're not sure this is what Al Gore was referring to when he said, "The debate on global warming is over" but maybe it should have been.

Just as important as the quantitative research in this article is the identification of the real moral issue involved in global warming: the efficacy of human life on Earth. Most of the time, the global warming debate elevates "nature" to the status of that-which-is-to-be-worshiped. Far too often, we're told conditions must be right for mosquitoes, polar bears and frogs or we are somehow being "immoral."

Identifying "man" as the rightful object of any drive to improve conditions for living on Earth is a major step forward.

Ain't No Glacier Wide Enough: Supremes to Hear Global Warming Case

The U.S. Supreme Court announced this past Monday that it will enter the global warming debate and consider a lawsuit that aims to require the federal government to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.

Climate change activists were quick to point out that this is indicative of how serious an issue global warming is.

Not to put too fine a point on it ...but the Court also agreed to hear the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" case. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11767029/

If unsuccessful in their attempt before the nation's highest court, global warming lawyer's have vowed an appeal in the court watched by the nation's highest people.....

Stage Fright


There is a very comprehensive ...well, how should we put this ...uh, critique of Al Gore's sales presentation on global warming at the following link:
http://www.cei.org/pages/ait_response-book.cfm

The report does not address Gore's latest claim (shown here) that we will add 12 degrees C to the Earth's temperature over the next 20 years by focusing the spotlight on anyone but him.