Thursday, April 24, 2008

No Starvation For Biofuel!

Temperatures aren't rising, they're falling -- as CO2 rises!



Note even then, the scale of CO2 on the right doesn't start at zero, so what looks like a "tripling" in CO2 is really more like a 6% rise. But still there's obviously no correlation between temperature and CO2.

A roundup of stories about eco-vanity leading to people starving to death, such as this one:
And frankly, to hear people who are so wealthy that they’re clinically obese from excess food and leisure time yammering on about what kind of light-bulbs they use, while other people are literally starving to death… It’s beyond bizarre. It speaks to a frightening level of self-deception that seemingly intelligent folks engage in en masse.
More good points from that original story:
Most global warming activists don't really care about people being fed or preventing malaria. If that's what they were concerned about they would focus on that. Trying to address world hunger by worrying about CO2 levels is about as direct as trying to become a famous actor by waiting tables in a Hollywood restaurant, (actually that may be a little too pessimistic but you get the picture).

The "science" of global warming is nothing more than a cover for their irrational emotional needs. It's religion for people who are too cool to go to church. All that yearning, the need for something bigger, transcendent: Hey the planet's heating up and I've been placed here to save it!

When Al Gore says, "The Earth has a fever," no one calls him on his cartoon personification -- as if the Earth has a temperature it prefers.
...
To borrow a phrase, (as I have liberally in this post), from the brilliant statistician and eco-philosopher, Bjorn Lomborg, visualize the people living on Earth 100 years from now. Let's imagine that they can reach back in time and speak to us, give us some feedback on the world we'll be leaving them. What do you think they'd ask us to focus on? Where would they have us concentrate our scarce time and energy?

A world in which hunger and AIDS have been eradicated or a world where the sea level is 6 inches lower?

A world free of Jihad where everyone lives under some form of representative democracy, or a world that is 2.1 degrees cooler in the months between October and March?

A world with 10% more polar bear habitat or a world where even the poorest or the poor have clean water and a sanitary place to go to the bathroom?

These are our choices.
And in a scathing indictment of green vanity,
"No Blood for Oil” is a spurious rallying cry on the left, but apparently it is acceptable for the poor in the third world to starve so that American Eco-activists can feel self-righteous about driving “flex-fuel” vehicles. According to the WORLD BANK:

“almost all of the increase in global maize production from 2004 to 2007 (the period when grain prices rose sharply) went for biofuels production in the U.S."
Insanity!

By the way, speaking of the Greens, it was little noted that the center-right coalition party of Silvio Berlusconi, ousted in 2006 but coming back to power due to new elections earlier this month, takes control of both Houses of Parliamant in which ZERO seats were won by either the Socialist Party or the Left Rainbow Party, which is a coalition of communists and Greens.

The Greens (or Verdi) alone had 15 seats in 2006, but in 2008, their coalition
The Rainbow gained a disastrous 3.1% of the vote (down from 10.2%, combined result of the three parties in 2006 general election) and failed to gain any seats in the Italian Parliament. Since then the future of the federation is unclear as each party, or rather each faction of each of the parties, holds a different view about the defeat and the future of the left in Italy.
Now it's just time to back out of the Euro!

The Singing Revolution

The Singing Revolution is a limited-release documentary movie telling the story of how national unity through traditional singing led Estonia to free itself from the Soviet Union:
The Singing Revolution is the name given to the step-by-step process that led to the reestablishment of Estonian independence in 1991. This was a non-violent revolution that overthrew a very violent occupation.

It was called the Singing Revolution because of the role singing played in the protests of the mid-1980s. But singing had always been a major unifying force for Estonians while they endured fifty years of Soviet rule.
...
Music has been central to Estonian culture for centuries. Although Estonia is one of the smallest countries in the world, it nonetheless has one of the largest collections of folk songs.

But Estonians have historically used music as a political weapon as well. It is said that song was used in protest of the German invaders of the 13th century, and also in resistance to the Russian occupation under Peter the Great in the 18th century.

In the 19th century, Estonians started a song festival tradition called Laulupidu, where choirs from around the country come together to sing for days. 25,000 to 30,000 people sing on stage at the same time. But the founding of Laulupidu was as much an expression of the desire for self-determination and independence as about song.
...
“The young people, without any political party, and without any politicians, just came together ... not only tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands ... to gather and to sing and to give this nation a new spirit,” remarks Mart Laar, a Singing Revolution leader featured in the film and the first post-Soviet Prime Minister of Estonia. “This was the idea of the Singing Revolution.”

James Tusty and Maureen Castle Tusty’s "The Singing Revolution" tells the moving story of how the Estonian people peacefully regained their freedom--and helped topple an empire along the way.
The reviewer from the New York Times says,
Imagine the scene in 'Casablanca' in which the French patrons sing 'La Marseillaise' in defiance of the Germans, then multiply its power by a factor of thousands, and you've only begun to imagine the force of 'The Singing Revolution'.
I haven't seen it, but it sounds good!

Petition for a screening in a theater near you here.

Icecap

ICECAP, theInternational Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project,
is the portal to all things climate for elected officials and staffers, journalists, scientists, educators and the public. It provides access to a new and growing global society of respected scientists and journalists that are not deniers that our climate is dynamic (the only constant in nature is change) and that man plays a role in climate change through urbanization, land use changes and the introduction of greenhouse gases and aerosols, but who also believe that natural cycles such as those in the sun and oceans are also important contributors to the global changes in our climate and weather. We worry the sole focus on greenhouse gases and the unwise reliance on imperfect climate models while ignoring real data may leave civilization unprepared for a sudden climate shift that history tells us will occur again, very possibly soon. [i.e., rapid Global Cooling! --ed.]
...
We spotlight new findings in peer-review papers and reports and rapidly respond to fallacies or exaggerations in papers, stories or programs and any misinformation efforts by the media, politicians and advocacy groups.

ICECAP is not funded by large corporations that might benefit from the status quo but by private investors who believe in the need for free exchange of ideas on this and other important issues of the day. Our working group is comprised of members from all ends of the political spectrum. This is not about politics but about science.
The tide is turning as scientists speak out.

For example, Scientist Who voted for Gore in 2000 Now Debunks warming Fears:
We’ve been warming up about a degree per century since the Little Ice Age in about 1600. We’ve been warming for 400 years, long before human-generated CO2 could have anything to do with the climate. If we project the previous century into the coming one, my projection is that we will have about a half-a-degree of cooling from 2007 (plus or minus three to five years) to about 2040. Then it will start getting warmer as we enter the next warm cycle, followed by cooling again.

For a number of interviews, especially in the national news media, they ask ‘Are you a Republican?’ and I say ‘No, I'm not, as a matter of fact, I voted for Al Gore. I don't want to pick on him because he's not a scientist.’ The nonsense he spews comes from the IPCC [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], so in a sense I don’t condemn him as much as I do the so-called climatologists like [James] Hansen, who says things that are idiotic. They’re the ones giving him all this stuff.

Al Gore makes a hundred-million dollars? He has five-billion in his slush fund? Look at [U.S. Senator] Barbara Boxer, she sponsored a bill for carbon cap and trade [Sanders/Boxer Global Warming Bill S.309]. Who will benefit from hundreds of billions of dollars for administering a scheme like that? The other thing is research funding. The U.S. spends about two-billion dollars a year on research. Right now, if you submit anything that says CO2 is not the bad guy, you won't have a chance of getting funding. It all goes to the CO2 people who build little fiefdoms; they have grant money coming out of their ears. They mimic Al Gore and say the debate is over. The last I heard, the U.S. plans to increase its research spending to 3.5 billion dollars, virtually all of which goes into CO2 research.

The last part of this equation is the news media and money being made by people like National Geographic who recently put out a show called Six Degrees of Global Warming [Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, by Mark Lynas] and how many people watched that and watched the ads that went with it? How much money did they make doing it? How much money would they have made if they’d said ‘Oh, it’s not CO2, it’s solar?’ Doom and gloom is easy to sell.
Also,
Hundreds Sign Climate Realist Declaration - “Global Warming is not a Global Crisis”

International Climate Science Coalition

The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) today released the names of over 500 endorsers of the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change that calls on world leaders to “reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth"." All taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) should “be abandoned forthwith”, declaration signatories conclude.
Here is a list of 150 Manhattan Declaration endorsers who are climate science specialists or scientists in closely related fields.

One of the signers is Freeman J. Dyson, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A., which puts stamp of seriousness on it.