Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
Destroying biodiversity
By Paul Driessen
Climate chaos is fading as a “central organizing principle for mankind.” However, the United Nations and radical greens have launched a new eco-scare.
The real threat to the planet, they now assert, is the impact of modern energy technologies and civilization on BIODIVERSITY. They intend to counter this new threat by controlling not just land and energy use, but all human activity.
To accept these claims, one would need to believe in the IPCC – and a UN system that will suddenly ensure honesty, transparency, and accountability for misfeasance, misrepresentation, and adverse impacts on people and wildlife. One would also have to ignore this critical fact.
The real threats to the world’s species are environmentalism, misguided environmental policies, and anti-technology zealotry.
The Soviet Union’s demise helped usher in manmade catastrophic global warming as the new “central organizing principle of civilization.” Now, global warming is giving way to a growing recognition that: climate change is primarily natural, cyclical and moderate; China, India and other countries will not sacrifice CO2-generating economic growth to prevent speculative climate crises; and carbon taxes strangle competitiveness, destroy jobs and send families into fuel poverty.
Posted in Global Warming Fraud Reflects Too Much Government Money and Power
Government so overwhelmingly funds a cause that it perverts it and makes it a government-supported industry whose purpose is to grow and feed itself like the rest of government. And it grows at the expense of all we hold dear – like freedom, individual rights, productivity – but most especially, truth. This article summarizes this process for the Global Warming fraud and the crisis-driven government-industry complex it has spawned.
Global Warming Fraud Reflects Too Much Government Money and Power
One insidious aspect of huge government is its ability to so overwhelmingly fund a cause that it perverts it. The perverted cause becomes a government-supported industry whose purpose is to grow and feed itself like the rest of government. Its power, control and money grow at the expense of all we hold dear – like freedom, individual rights, productivity – but most especially, truth.
This article summarizes essential points of this aspect for the Global Warming fraud and the crisis-driven government-industry complex it has spawned.
The Global Warming Crisis is only one of several government-sponsored crises that have cut deeply into the rights, social structure, and productivity of the U.S and its citizens. It shows the 4-stage progression to oppression that huge government helps create for the power, control and money it offers itself and its affiliates.
Let me state these steps then tie them to what tyranny the global warming hoax has led us.
4 Stage Progression of Government-Supported Crisis to Tyrannical Control Massive government funding leads through 4 stages to a government and crisis-based affiliated complex that exercises tyrannical control over citizens. These stages are:
Stop the CO2 Madness!
By Alan Caruba
When The New York Times publishes a story, as it did on February 19, regarding the next step in the Obama administration’s intention to destroy the U.S. economy, it’s a very good idea to pay attention.
“E.P.A. Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide” was the headline of John M. Broder’s article. “The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials.”
Those “top Obama administration officials” are unnamed and so too are the “scientists” claiming that the planet is “warming.” For the record, although you will never read this in The New York Times, the planet is NOT warming. It is COOLING. It has been cooling for a decade now and it is no secret to meteorologists who track the day to day temperatures or climatologists who study long term trends.
On March 8-10, more than 500 of those scientists who dispute the vast global warming hoax will meet in New York for a second international conference on climate change sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a non-profit, free market think tank.
Joining those scientists and others will be Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic and current president of the European Union. Also participating will be Jose Maria Aznar, the former prime minister of Spain, along with American astronaut, Dr. Jack Schmitt, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other leading scientists who have led the effort to shed the light of truth on the global warming hoax.
You can be sure of one thing. They will all continue to be attacked as crazies denying the “consensus” that Al Gore is always braying about. Science is not about “consensus”, it is about reproducible facts. All the “facts” about melting glaciers, dramatically rising sea levels, and other claims by the GW crowd have been refuted.
The claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the basis for the Kyoto Protocols to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have been demolished repeatedly but the mainstream press refuses to report this, nor the fact that the IPCC is a political, not scientific, entity designed to advance the global warming hoax. Many of the scientists initially enticed to participate have since resigned. The vast bulk, easily 80% or more of those cited as IPCC members are not scientists who deal with issues of climate.
The IPCC’s claims have been based entirely on computer models. This in itself should have raised flags long ago. These models, as Hans Schreuder, an analytical chemist, has pointed out, “regard the earth as a flat disk bathed in a constant 24 hour haze of sunlight, without north and south poles, without clouds, and without any relationship to the real planet we live on.”
The claim that rising levels of carbon dioxide are responsible for a global warming that is not happening is entirely without scientific merit and, if for no other reason, should not be the basis for implementing EPA regulation of so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions under the Clean Air Act.
While it is true that there has been an increase in CO2 since the end of the last mini-ice age that lasted from 1500 to 1850, there is no research that demonstrates CO2 and an increase in the Earth’s temperature has any relationship. What warming occurred was entirely natural. Indeed, CO2, at less than 400 parts per million by volume, cannot influence atmospheric temperature or climate in any measurable way.
CO2 represents just 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere. The dominant factors in the Earth overall temperature are the Sun, the oceans, and even clouds.
If the U.S. weather service climate models are unable to predict changes in the weather by more than a week’s time, why would anyone believe that the IPCC’s models could predict it twenty, fifty or a hundred years from now?
Despite this, the EPA is tasked to impose regulations on CO2 emissions that would wreck the economy by requiring a “cap-and-trade” of “carbon credits” that would impact every single business and industrial activity. The European Union tried this and it has proved a massive failure and a huge drag on its economy.
Carbon dioxide is not a “pollutant” as the Supreme Court has ruled. How can the Earth’s second most vital gas, other than oxygen, be a pollutant? Not one single piece of vegetation on Earth could exist without CO2. Without vegetation, no animal life including our own could exist on Earth.
The notion that the EPA would regulate it is preposterous. It is absurd. It is criminal. It is immoral. It has no basis whatever in the actual science of the world’s climate. It is based on a massive, global hoax masterminded by the United Nations and carried out by charlatans such as Al Gore and NASA’s James Hansen.
It is, however, the vehicle for the political control of the world’s economy that would fulfill the United Nation’s global government schemes and, if enacted here in America, would mark the destruction of an economy that is the engine of the world’s economy, despite its current difficulties.
The Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years. The assertion that human beings and/or industrial activity have any effect on its atmosphere is an instrument of fascism.
Alan Caruba writes a daily blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. Every week, he posts a column on the website of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com.
Promoting Alternative Energy for the Right Reasons
By Nancy Salvato
Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich are featured together in a television commercial which focuses on how conservatives and liberals can come together to find solutions for problems caused by climate change. Mr. Gingrich’s explanation for joining this $300 million dollar advertising campaign is to force conservatives into debating liberals about the ways our country should best promote alternative energy sources. This in itself is a fine idea because I don’t know any person who wants our country to continue relying on oil for fuel. Most would agree that cleaner sources of energy are preferable.
While there should be robust debate about how best to pursue alternative energy, I believe this ad is misleading because it presents these two political adversaries as working together to find solutions to the problem of climate change in and of itself, as if there is a scientific consensus that climate change truly poses the problems outlined in Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. Speaking of Al Gore, he is the person who is funding this effort and hired the advertising agency known for their caveman and talking lizard/Geico ads to produce these commercials.
Certainly, Gore has become a master of hyperbole in order to draw attention to his cause. While becoming a great promoter, he has done a great disservice to true science. The global warming argument is based on two assumptions. The first is that it’s caused by man and that we can stop it. While we may contribute to global warming, it is difficult to conclude that our activities can substantially affect the changes in temperature. The second assumption is that global warming is inherently bad. We cannot ignore dramatic climate shifts that have occurred in the past and declare that all climate changes are due to human activity and bad.
A true scientific investigation begins with a hypothesis, or assumption. Scientific findings are not based on one. Here’s why.
Have you ever held a ball in front of a dog and moved it up and down and sideways so that the dog moves its head in the same direction? Now, have you ever asked the dog yes and no questions while doing this so that it appears as if the dog is answering yes or no to your question? It would be wrong to believe the dog is really thinking about what you are saying. The dog is simply following your hand. This can be proved because if you asked the dog the same questions without moving your hand, you’ll find that the yes and no movement will stop. You have in effect stopped one variable, moving your hand, in order to determine whether it is your questions or hand movement that influences the dog. This is how scientists try to find out the answers to why some things happen.
Eating Food Will Kill You
By Alan Caruba
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.
I say this as the son of a woman who taught the art of haute cuisine for over three decades and authored several cookbooks. That poor woman died at age 98 and I am convinced it was all that fabulous food that killed her. Ridiculous? YES!
These thoughts were occasioned by word that two groups, the World Cancer Research Fund International, based in the United Kingdom, and the American Institute for Cancer Research, will likely announce that eating meat will give you some form of cancer at a press conference scheduled the same day as Halloween. Boo!
In mid-October The New York Times ran an article, “U.S. Cancer Death Rates Are Found to Be Falling.” It cited a decline “by an average of 2.1 percent a year…a near doubling of decreases that began in 1993, researchers (from the American Cancer Institute) are reporting.” Now this is, of course, good news. The bad news is that smoking appears to be a significant cause of cancer. In the U.S. cancer remains the second leading cause of death after heart disease, with 559,650 deaths expected every year.
Bear in mind that at least 10,000 Americans on the average die every day from something, not infrequently just old age and the infirmities associated with it. If you live beyond age 85 or into your 90s, the odds of dying from something are pretty good.
So why is it that meat is so often singled out as lethal? Well, for one thing, there are any number of vegetarian groups that, like some weird religious cult, flood the Internet and other media with fulminations against eating meat of any kind.
A Google search for “Meat + Health” will turn up links to literally thousands of studies that proclaim that eating meat will cause breast, prostrate, colon, and other forms of cancers. That said, if you search all the studies, you will also find those that confirm that meat is as healthy a part of diet as anything else. For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (USDA) 2005 Food Guide and its Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension Eating Plan recommend two to three servings a week of lean meat.
Secularists Won’t Be Appeased By New Stem-Cell Breakthrough
By Robert E. Meyer
Recently there has been a celebrated news release, detailing a new breakthrough in stem-cell research, which may make the existing moral controversy over the use of embryonic stem-cells moot.
While it’s still too early to tell if this new procedure using adult stem-cells from skin will produce the anticipated results, I have a feeling those perched exclusively in the embryonic stem-cell research camp, will be left unsatisfied.
The reason for my hunch is the way the stem-cell controversy has been misrepresented all along.
The fact that many religious leaders are tentatively, but enthusiastically, endorsing this new advance, refutes the charge that persons of strong religious convictions are Luddites trying to stifle scientific progress. This is an absurd canard that refuses to die a natural and merciful death.
A second false claim, is that the Bush administration sold out to the "religious-right," when the president banned government funding of embryonic stem-cell research several years ago.
Bush actually took the middle ground of compromise. Bush did not ban embryonic stem-cell research that was privately funded, nor prohibit continued research on the stem-cell lines already existing. To do so would have been the more socially conservative position. Bush’s "concessions" were viewed by some as his lack conservative conviction.
Of course, many will argue that embryos are routinely discarded as a byproduct of fertility treatments. I am personally opposed to that aspect of fertility procedures. Yet, the point of criticizing Bush because of that situation is irrelevant, because the government does not fund in vitro fertilization therapy. Thus, Bush is perfectly consistent in his approach, even if he is found to be wrong in his ultimate conclusions.
The Year the Global Warming Hoax Died
By Alan Caruba
When did the global warming hoax die? Historians are likely to pinpoint 2007. It will take another decade to insure it cannot be revived, but the avalanche of scientific studies and the cumulative impact of scientists who have publicly joined those who debunked the lies on which it has been based will be noted as the tipping point.
It took some forty years to unmask the Piltdown Man hoax that began in 1912 alleging that the skull of an ancient ancestor of man had been found in England. Any number of British anthropologists unwittingly contributed to the hoax by confirming the authenticity of the skull until it was found that the jaw of an orangutan had been cunningly attached. The unmasking of “global warming” has taken less than half that time.
The hoax has mainly been a creation of the United Nations Environmental Program and took off in earnest with the 1992 Earth Summit. It culminated in 1997 with the Kyoto Climate Control Protocol, an agreement to reduce the generation of carbon dioxide, a
“greenhouse” gas (CO2) said to be the cause of an accelerated warming of the earth. By 2005, 140 nations had ratified the pact, agreeing to reduce CO2 emissions. Notably exempt from the pact were nations such as China and India. Few, if any, nations have ever met the limits that require reductions in CO2 production, attributed to the use of so-called “fossil fuels” such as oil, natural gas, and coal.
ABC Reschedules Debate About God
New York, May 2, 2007 – Actor Kirk Cameron and best-selling author Ray Comfort will square off with two atheists in New York on Saturday, May 5. ABC originally planned to stream the 90-minute debate LIVE on their website, but decided to reschedule the broadcast to capture a larger audience. They will broadcast the entire debate on ABC.com on Wednesday, May 9 at 1:00 p.m. EST.
Comfort-who claims he can prove the existence of God, scientifically, without mentioning faith or the Bible-stated, "The network originally offered me only four minutes to present my case. After speaking with Kirk and conferring with the atheists, they settled on 13 minutes. I'm ecstatic. I can prove the existence of God in that amount of time.
"We are very grateful to ABC for taking this courageous step," Comfort continued. "As far as we know, nothing like this has ever been done before. ABC's website is already the 7th most visited news site, with 19 million visitors every month. But with more than 177 million people in the U.S. who call themselves Christians, we are sure that it will draw an even larger viewing audience. Is there actually evidence for God? That's the most important question any of us will ever consider."
Cameron added, "We are excited that the network has decided to do this, because we have something very relevant to present. Most people think that belief in God is simply a matter of blind faith, and that His existence can't be proven. We will not only prove that God exists, but as an ex-atheist I'll show that the issue keeping so many people from believing in God-Darwinian evolution-is completely unscientific. It's a fairy-tale for grownups."
The debate came about after ABC ran a story in January about hundreds of atheists videotaping themselves blaspheming the Holy Spirit.
"But," Comfort continued, "there is something more sinister here than a few people not believing in God. Why would so many be so bitter against Christianity in particular? Why aren't they making videos that blaspheme Buddha or Mohammed or Ghandi? We made our own video clip and posted it on www.Hollywoodblasphemy.com to expose why.
As of May 2 there is still an opportunity for people to join in the debate, by submitting questions that will be passed on to the panelists. ABC will limit the live audience to 100 people, evenly divided between atheists and believers. The debate will be moderated by Martin Bashir, and on May 9 a shortened version of the debate will be aired on Nightline.
For further information, contact mark@livingwaters.com
Global Warming? Journalism? Don’t Make Me Laugh!
By Alan Caruba
As a very young man, fresh out of college and the army in the mid-1960’s, I found myself employed as a rookie reporter on a weekly newspaper in New Jersey. I had never taken a course in journalism in my life, but I could write. The managing editor of the newspaper group that serviced a number of communities taught me all I ever needed to know about journalism. He taught me to be skeptical of everything and everyone.
Not distrustful. Skeptical. People will tell you the truth they believe or want you to believe. They may be wrong. Or they may be deceitful. There’s a difference. However, when error and deceit combine, there is a purpose, an agenda, and it exists, as often as not, to acquire wealth and power despite the harm it will leave in its wake.
Global Warming: Just Another Liberal Orthodoxy
by Christopher Adamo
An astounding range of absurd ideas have been incorporated into the "mainstream" of modern America, based not on any inherent merit, but rather on the benefits to liberalism that can be derived from them. So much of today’s "conventional wisdom" represents neither convention nor wisdom, but instead results from a fundamentally leftist worldview, combined with a truly juvenile dosage of wishful thinking.
Consider, a few such pillars of the liberal faith, and more specifically how fragile they quickly become when placed under the hot lights of honest scrutiny.
As the American culture continues to crumble, we are incessantly reminded that "our diversity is our strength." Tell that to the people of the Balkans where, prior to U.S. intervention, centuries old feuds and tribalism had rendered the region little more than a wasteland of unending bloodshed between bickering "warlords."