…blaming Al Gore for this?
Argentines Francisco Lotero, 56, and Miriam Coletti, 23, shot their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about global warming.
You know that if this had happened as a result of “right-wing” fear mongering (in this case, warm mongering), they’d be all over it.
I have to say that I was a little surprised to read that she didn’t consider baking soda first, because that’s what seemed obvious to me reading of her travails. But I assumed until reading the comments that it was so obvious that she hadn’t bothered to mention that attempt at a fix.
On a personal note, this past Christmas might have been the first season that I didn’t make Christmasholiday butter cookies using my mother’s half-century-old cookie gun, due to the continuing discombobulation of the move from Florida, and our trip to Colorado for house renovation.
Thoughts on the consequences of radical environmentalism, intended and unintended:
The motivation behind Silent Spring, the suppression of nuclear power, the global-warming scam, and other outbreaks of environmentalist lunacy is the worship of centralized power and authority. The author, Rachel Carson, didn’t set out to kill sixty million people – she was a fanatical believer in the newly formed religion of radical environmentalism, whose body count comes from callousness, rather than blood thirst. The core belief of the environmental religion is the fundamental uncleanliness of human beings. All forms of human activity are bad for the environment… most especially including the activity of large private corporations. Deaths in faraway Africa barely registered on the radar screen of the growing Green movement, especially when measured against the exhilarating triumph of getting a sinful pesticide banned, at substantial cost to an evil corporation.
Those who were initiated into the higher mysteries of environmentalism saw the reduction of the human population as a benefit, although they’re generally more circumspect about saying so in public these days. As quoted by Walter Williams, the founder of the Malthusian Club of Rome, Alexander King, wrote in 1990: “My own doubts came when DDT was introduced. In Guayana, within two years, it had almost eliminated malaria. So my chief quarrel with DDT, in hindsight, is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Another charming quote comes from Dr. Charles Wurster, a leading opponent of DDT, who said of malaria deaths: “People are the cause of all the problems. We have too many of them. We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”
Like the high priests of global warming, Rachel Carson knew what she was doing. She claimed DDT would actually destroy all life on Earth if its use continued – the “silent spring” of the title is a literal description of the epocalypse she forecast. She misused a quote from Albert Schweitzer about atomic warfare, implying the late doctor agreed with her crusade against pesticide by dedicating her book to him… when, in fact, Schweitzer viewed DDT as a “ray of hope” against disease-carrying insects. Some of the scientists attempting to debunk her hysteria went so far as to eat chunks of DDT to prove it was harmless, but she and her allies simply ignored them, making these skeptics the forerunners of today’s “global warming deniers” – absolutely correct and utterly vilified. William Ruckleshaus disregarded nine thousand pages of testimony when he imposed the DDT ban. Then as now, the science was settled… beneath a mass of politics and ideology.
These people are the greatest mass murderers in history. Why do we continue to give them so much power, both political and cultural?
[Update a few minutes later]
Apparently NASA is as scientifically corrupt as the CRU:
The emails show the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA, wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise. The emails show NASA making off with enormous sums of taxpayer funding doing precisely what they claim only a “skeptic” would do. The emails show NASA attempting to scrub their website of their own documents, and indeed they quietly pulled down numerous press releases grounded in the proven-wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in uncorrected form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial, after years of hysterically trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies.
As you examine the email excerpts below, as well as those which I will discuss in the upcoming three parts of this series, bear in mind that the contents of these emails were intended to prop up the argument for the biggest regulatory intervention in history: the restricting of carbon emissions from all human activity. NASA’s activist scientists leave no doubt in their emails that this was indeed their objective. Also, please note that these documents were responsive to a specific FOIA request from two years ago. Recent developments — combined with admissions contained in these documents — beg further requests, which have both been already filed and with more forthcoming.
Read the whole thing. As DocZero says, we need to dramatically change the risk/reward ratio for this kind of fraudulent behavior, particularly when it’s used as a basis for public policy.
[Update a few minutes later]
Recently, the president of the U.N. Foundation and former Sen. Tim Wirth said the manipulated evidence uncovered by the Climategate e-mail scandal was a mere “opening” to attack science that “has to be defended just like evolution has to be defended.”
Get it? Those unreasonable people who deny evolution — despite the overwhelming evidence — are the same brand of illiterate hoi polloi who won’t hand over their gas-powered lawn mowers on the word of an oracle weather model and haphazardly placed weather station.
In some ways, I’m even more infuriated by being lumped in with creationists than I am with being compared to a Holocaust denier. These people are intellectually bankrupt.
Acknowledging doubt about climate change:
A former head of the IPCC, the British scientist Robert Watson, notes, “The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact.”
Too many of the creators and guardians of the “consensus” desperately wanted to believe in it. As self-proclaimed defenders of science, they should have brushed up on their Enlightenment. “Doubt is not a pleasant mental state,” said Voltaire, “but certainty is a ridiculous one.” The latest revelations don’t disprove the warming of the 20th century or mean that carbon emissions played no role. But by highlighting the uncertainty of the paleoclimatic data and the models on which alarmism has been built, they constitute a shattering blow to the case for radical, immediate action.
And not a moment too soon, though fortunately, it coincided with an appropriate collapse of confidence in Washington wisdom in general. Unfortunately, it’s clear that many still desperately want to believe. That’s how religions work.
An amusing analysis of its utility, from a multi-personality viewpoint. Like a lot of pop psych, I’ve always thought it was a lot less useful than its proponents do.
[Via Geek Press]
Cancer killers? If so, consider Patricia and I are genocidal maniacs tonight.
And here I thought they were only good for heart health…
The entire world has been assured that the “science was settled” that the last decade had been the hottest in recorded times, and that it was unprecedented, and it was surely caused by our breathing and SUV driving, and that we had to dramatically increase the cost of energy, reduce our own income, and keep the Third World in poverty (or transfer vast amounts of our own wealth to them), because the head of the Climate Research Unit kept a messy office?
You know, I keep a messy office, too, but then, I’ve never tried to remake the entire world on the basis of my analyses. (Off planet is a different story…)
This really is an amazing story. As I’ve been saying, the people who have been skeptical have been the true scientists, and the warm mongers betrayers of science, for power and politics.
And where is Al Gore? In fact, where is the American press?
[Wee-hour update]
More from The Times:
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
You don’t say.
And why isn’t anyone reporting on this on this side of the Pond?
[Monday morning update]
The WaPo is finally showing up to the party. Still no sign of the Paper Formerly Known As The Paper Of Record, though.
[Monday evening update — I’m home from Colorado…]
Climaquiddick (I wish that people would quit calling it Climategate…) reminds Instapundit of the Michael Bellesiles scandal. Me too.
Bellesiles, for those who don’t remember, was a historian at Emory who wrote a book making some, er, counterintuitive claims about guns in early America — in short, that they were much rarer than generally thought, and frequently owned and controlled by the government. Constitutional law scholars who expressed doubts about this were told to shut up by historians, who cited the importance of “peer review” as a guarantor of accuracy, and who wrapped themselves in claims of professional expertise.
Unfortunately, it turned out that Bellesiles had made it up. His work was based on probate records, and when people tried to find them, it turned out that many didn’t exist (one data set he claimed to have used turned out, on review, to have been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake). It also turned out that Bellesiles hadn’t even visited some of the archives he claimed to have researched. When challenged to produce his data, he was unable to do so, and offered unpersuasive stories regarding why.
Well, on second thought, there are no parallels at all…
This seems like a pretty big story to me. Therefore, don’t expect to see it reported, at least on this side of the Pond. RIP, hockey stick.
Should we create them? It’s an interesting ethical dilemma.
Did a meteorite find drive the Inuit migration across Canada hundreds of years ago?
Nah, couldn’t be. Nothing that happens in space is relevant to what happens on earth.
For some reason, this reminds me of the global warming debate. Not to mention the difficulty that Alverez had in selling the dinosaur extinction theory.
[Update a few minutes later]
This is also an interesting example of how technology, or the desire for it, can influence human migration patterns. It may have some relevance to space policy…