Good article on Green gone too far

The full thing can be found here. It starts like this, but wait 'till you get to the criticisms!

I believe people should be environmentally conscious. I believe people should make every rational effort to protect and preserve our planet's environment, conserve non-renewable resources, discover and use energy sources and raw materials that minimise pollution, and which are renewable or recyclable. That's just common sense.

But what I'm finding increasingly annoying are "Green" busy-bodies whose remonstrations are so irrational that they risk turning the average person off being 'green' at all. A case in point.

The current issue of Gay Times has a feature where three well-known personalities are subjected to a "Green Audit". While writer Julia Hailes - author of The New Green Consumer Guide - makes a few sensible recommendations, the overall impression is that she'd prefer it if we all returned to stone age living (and pre the discovery of fire, at that!).

She visited the homes of Paul O'Grady, Peter Tatchell, and Kristian Digby. Her suggestions for improvement generally made me laugh out loud, as I expect they would most people. That is not the desired effect, I'm quite sure...

Does the Czech Republic president make sense on global warming?

Dunno, but he sure gives a lot of food for thought, that's for sure. Interesting comments about propaganda...

It's funny how every media organization and their mother in the UK suddenly decided that they needed a green section / segment / discussion in their organization about 6-8 months ago.

But I'm sure that was just a natural and organic process, not one orchestrated by the end-owners of the vast multinational news organizations such as Newscorp (who, by the way, around the same time mandated that all of their subsidiaries must become 'green', 'carbon neutral', etc.).

The question we have to ask ourselves is why? Is it to take attention away from developing nuclear power, for example, which is the cheapest and can theoretically be the most environmentally friendly source of power? Why is there no campaign supporting that hypothesis? Possible answer: because the big boys don't want that...oil needs to remain the natural resource of the world for some time to come until all the profit is squeezed out of it...?

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, argues in the Financial Times that ambitious environmentalism is the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity.

Mr Klaus writes that “global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem” and the issue “is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.”

Brits planning 'eco-towns' comprised of ugly, low-carbon eco-homes

Disgusting. Only in England.

Mmm...gray water - now that sounds healthy...

This green revolution is so weird. Unified MSM support within 6 months bombarding the world that we all need to change right now or else (you pay more taxes, etc.). I wonder if it's another attempt to take focus off of developing nuclear power seriously to secure oil as the supreme fossil fuel for another 10 or so years. And the sheep move in the direction that the wind (of the media blows)...anyway, the article is here - Hot Air's take is below.

Like Michael Barone says, global warming is the left’s counterpart to the war on terror. With the Blair era winding down in Britain, they’re starting to transition from one war to the other.

And they intend to win it.

Bush turns the table on Kyoto and the Europeans

As most of you have probably read in the press over the past few days, Bush has finally come up with his own plan for the environment. To the displeasure of the Europeans, it goes against the Kyoto Protocol, and targets the top 15 greenhouse-gas emitters (countries like China and India), which is a big point. As the editors at the NRO point out in their recent article, one of the obvious (yet unspoken points) about the Kyoto Protocol was to weaken the US economy, but this may redefine and broaden the debate...one can hope. Good for Bush on this one - too bad he can't be this strong on more pressing matters, such as the current Iranian regime. The NRO article begins like this.

From the early days of the Kyoto Protocol, one of the not-so-hidden agendas of the Europeans was to use climate-change agreements to hobble the American economy, so much so that even the Clinton administration felt compelled to push back. Now, with President Bush politically weak and relentless fearmongering over climate “catastrophe,” this week’s G-8 meeting has been shaping up as another attempted mugging of Uncle Sam. Tony Blair is triumphant in his pronouncements that “there’s a change in mood in America,” making possible “a new binding international agreement to come into effect when the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 . . . one which is more radical than Kyoto and more comprehensive.”

President Bush’s announcement last week that he will convene a conference of the Big 15 greenhouse-gas emitters is a fair bid to turn the tables on the Europeans and slam the door on Son of Kyoto. As the New York Times put it: “For six years, Europeans have pleaded with President Bush to seize the initiative in the campaign against global warming. Now that he has, many [in Europe] are even more frustrated.”

Bush has firmly rejected hard emissions caps and international tradable-emissions schemes (cap and trade). In his recent remarks, he emphasized that emerging nations such as China and India should be able to set their own emissions goals relative to their economic circumstances, and press above all for technology transfer. Translation: Any realistic greenhouse-gas-emissions program will have to recognize that developing nations such as China and India must grow. This is true also of the U.S., whose economy continues to expand even as Europe stagnates. At least for the intermediate term, the emissions of such nations will grow too. By proposing to convene the Big 15 emitters under U.S. leadership, Bush threatens to eclipse the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which brought us Kyoto. Not bad for a day’s work.

Keep a sharp eye on global warming zealots

Some good (if not obvious) points are made in this article. Some excerpts are below.

Also, have a look at this article from ABC News - "Scientists Surprised by NASA Chief's Climate Comments" - to see that not every scientist believes the same thing, despite what the MSM and the likes of the Goracle try to portray.

Whether or not blind faith in manmade, catastrophic global warming has become a new religion, many of its adherents, ironically, embrace it with the same type of unquestioning zeal they sloppily attribute to and summarily condemn in Christians.

Case in point: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, after leading a congressional delegation to Greenland, declared that she and her fellow travelers saw "firsthand evidence that climate change is a reality, there is just no denying it."

Pelosi is also sure the "global warming" is caused by human beings. She said, "It wasn't caused by the people of Greenland; it was caused by the behavior of the rest of the world."

Well, that settles it then....

...In the Jimmy Carter spirit of bashing the president and the United States on foreign soil in front of foreign leaders who are emboldened by American self-flagellation, Pelosi subtly criticized President Bush for failing to endorse Kyoto. Once again, she sided with a foreign government over her own.

Pelosi said, "We hope that we can all assume our responsibilities with great respect and that our administration will be open to listening to why it is important to go forward perhaps in a different way than we have proceeded in the past." In other words, the president should get off his selfish, imperialistic, unilateralist duff and join European nations in their quest to bankrupt themselves in furtherance of a highly dubious (and debatable — yes, debatable) cause.

Before Pelosi condemns President Bush too fiercely on this subject, she should be reminded that Democrats, along with Republicans, passed a unanimous Senate resolution (95-0) in 1997 opposing the United States's participation in Kyoto absent certain conditions.

First, it must apply to developing nations; and second, it must not result in serious harm to the U.S. economy. Moreover, President Clinton never sent it to the Senate for ratification.

What about the environmental track record of Germany and other European nations that signed the Kyoto treaty and, along with double agent Nancy Pelosi, are scolding the United States for destroying the world?

Again, the facts are not Speaker Pelosi's friends....

The Goracle Assaults Reason

Al Gore's Insolent Assault on Reason
By Robert Tracinski

Early coverage of Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason, has focused on
the fact that the book is largely an assault on the Bush administration. But they have glossed over the most significant and alarming theme that Al Gore has taken up: his alleged defense of "reason" includes a justification for government controls over political speech.

UK moves towards 'carbon footprint' rating on all product labels

One word: scary. Here's what Hot Air had to say about this.

Some goods already carry the label but it’s only a few and participation is strictly voluntary at the moment. Now the government’s stepping in to standardize measurements and extend the plan to all manufacturers. Is it too much to dream that in a few years, when the hysteria’s reached a crescendo, some wise old progressive soul might float the idea of … “carbon rationing”? 100 credits a week; just present your card when you go to pay and the cashier will deduct the appropriate amount.

Won’t that be nice.

Newt's Green Conservatism

See, not all conservatives want to destory the Earth's environment...Newt speaks:

For the last 36 years, I have watched the pro-regulation, pro-litigation, pro-taxation liberals label themselves as the only Americans who care about the environment.

Their left-wing machine would have you believe that to care about clean air and water, biodiversity and the future of the Earth, you have to both buy in to their catastrophic scenarios and sign on to their command-and-control bureaucratic liberal agenda as the only approach to solving environmental challenges. Their future involves dramatic increases in government power and draconian policies that will devastate our economy.

The time has come to define a fundamentally different approach to a healthy environment and a healthy economy. The time has come for the development of "Green Conservatism" as an alternative to big bureaucracy and big litigation liberal environmentalism.

So what is Green Conservatism?

Green Conservatives favor clean air and clean water.

Green Conservatives understand biodiversity as a positive good.

Green Conservatives believe that economic growth and environmental health are compatible in both the developed and developing worlds.

Green Conservatives favor minimizing carbon loading in the atmosphere as a positive public value. And while we don't buy into the doomsday scenarios currently being peddled by the left, we believe there is sufficient scientific evidence to tell us that carbon loading is occurring. But as to what we can and should do about it, there is still a lot to learn.

And lastly, Green Conservatives believe in energy independence. A new generation of clean energy will enable us to achieve three simultaneous conservative goals: To be liberated from dependence on dangerous dictatorships; to be effective in worldwide economic competition; and to provide for a much cleaner and healthier future.

Goracle’s book replaces Bible in green spa

It just doesn't get any more ridiculous than this folks (well, let's hope not!).

Some counter-punches against the Goracle

See Phillip Brennan's article over on NewsMax. Some of the main points are:

• World Climate report Jan 15 - Five of the seven sea ice in [Hudson Bay] stations show either significant trends of increasing maximum ice thickness, earlier occurrence of the maximum thickness, or both.
• "Anchorage on track to set record for coldest March," according to the Anchorage Daily News. As Alaskans continue to endure frigid weather and blustery wind, March is headed to being one of the coldest on record, weather experts say
• Fairbanks had the coldest mid-February to mid-March since weather records began in Fairbanks back in 1904, according to the National Weather Service.
• That frigid weather didn't remain static up north — it moved south into the northern U.S. On March 9, for example there were record lows at Island Pond, Vt., where it was an incredible -34 degrees below zero, -31 degrees below zero in Sutton, Vt., and Whitefield, N.H. It hit -29 degrees in Saranac Lake, N.Y., -18 degrees in Glens Falls, N.Y., and -11 degrees below zero in Bangor, Maine. Kinda cold up there, eh, Al? I hate to be repetitive, but it should be axiomatic by now that the Arctic region is the Northern Hemisphere's refrigerator. It sends cold air south. If, as Al Gore insists, the refrigerator is losing its coolant, how can it continue to send bitterly frigid cold fronts southward? If the freon leaks out of your kitchen refrigerator it will stop doing its job of keeping its contents cold. That's just plain common sense, an asset obviously lacking in the fevered minds of the global warming fanatics. Much of the so-called evidence that the planet is warming is also evidence of the opposite — that it is also cooling.

Monday's post on the Goracle

A few good videos on the Goracle.

Consensus is reached: Gore's global warming alarmism is overblown

Oh, really? Gee, there's a surprise.

After a year of concentrated effort that includes a multimillion-dollar p.r. campaign on top of An Inconvenient Truth and slavish media coverage parroting the climate-alarmist line, recent polls show that public opinion has barely budged. Only about a third of Americans, according to a recent Gallup survey, are agitated about climate change, and even people who say the environment is their most important issue rank climate change behind air and water quality in importance.

Meanwhile a backlash in the scientific community has begun. Last week, New York Times veteran science reporter William Broad filed a devastating article about scientists who are "alarmed" at Gore's alarmism; Gore's account of global warming goes far beyond the evidence. The dissents from Gore's extremism, Broad explained, "come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists" who have "no political ax to grind." It appears Gore refused to be interviewed directly for the article; he responded to e-mail questions only.

This backlash has been quietly building for a while. In November, Mike Hulme, director of Britain's Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, expressed his unease about climate alarmism to the BBC:

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric. It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the [catastrophe] skeptics. How the wheel turns. Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions? To state that climate change will be 'catastrophic' hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science.

Hehe - Gore made $500K from toxic mines

This guy is a living contradiction. Just thought I'd post this little 'gem'. Hehe.

It's snowing in March - Stop Global Warming Now!

UK: Warning to homeowners as the green vision is unveiled

My goodness, this is getting to be too much - The Daily Mail reports.

Homeowners who refuse to make their properties energy efficient will face financial penalties under drastic government plans to transform Britain into the world's first 'green' economy.

Ministers yesterday promised deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that they warned would mean everyone in the country having to 'live, work and travel differently'.

Gore Planet blog on NRO

This is great - a dedicated blog on NRO discussing the ridiculousness of this idiot and some his questionable theories.

Enjoy:

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/

Though must go Green or pay the consequences - C&F

The great global warming swindle

Did anyone catch this interesting program on Channel 4 (in the UK)? I haven't seen it - is there a video available on the net? Many thanks. The synopsis is below fyi.

In a polemical and thought-provoking documentary, film-maker Martin Durkin argues that the theory of man-made global warming has become such a powerful political force that other explanations for climate change are not being properly aired.

The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that a 'greenhouse effect' of carbon dioxide released by human activity is the cause of rising global temperatures.

Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun's radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.

The film argues that the earth's climate is always changing, and that rapid warmings and coolings took place long before the burning of fossil fuels. It argues that the present single-minded focus on reducing carbon emissions not only may have little impact on climate change, it may also have the unintended consequence of stifling development in the third world, prolonging endemic poverty and disease.

The film features an impressive roll-call of experts, including nine professors – experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, environmental science, biogeography and paleoclimatology – from such reputable institutions as MIT, NASA, the International Arctic Research Centre, the Institut Pasteur, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Winnipeg, Alabama and Virginia.

The film hears from scientists who dispute the link between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures.

Roger L. Simon on Al Gore's hypocrisy

Good post - I've copied all of it below.

Al Gore must be pretty embarrassed this evening seeing the headline at the top of the Drudge Report: POWER: GORE MANSION USES 20X AVERAGE HOUSEHOLD; CONSUMPTION INCREASE AFTER 'TRUTH'. You almost feel sorry for the guy. He can't catch a break the day after he wins an Oscar. (Okay, it was a gift. The movie as film was tenth-rate. But he did win.)

But there's a deeper question beneath all this. Does hypocrisy count? Does it matter than Hollywood stars parade around in Priuses while keeping private planes and multiple homes that burn up who-knows-how much energy (in many cases enough to dwarf Al's)? Is it just that these people mouth off that raises our eyebrows or should they actually practice what they preach ?

Now I don't have a particularly Green Lifestyle, although I am thinking of buying a hybrid for my next car (primarily because I can't stand to stick another dollar in the Saudi gas pump) and the next time I build something I'll probably pay more attention to good window sealing (the code will probably make me do that anyway). But what's with Gore? How could he be so thoughtless and, yes, arrogant to go out there banging the drum for his film at the very time, according to public records, he increased his already sizable personal energy consumption. How embarrassing and how terrible for his cause. Maybe he doesn't really care about it at bottom - maybe it's all about him.

In the movie business you see a lot of that, a kind of narcissistic politics in which how you appear is so much more important than what you really are. It's as if there were two people - the private one bossing around the staffs while burning up more fuel than the Sultan of Brunei and the public one wagging a finger at the rest of us. Gore seems to have fit in well with these folks. In the long run, I suspect that doesn't augur well for the environment.

Gal Aore

Otherwise known as Al Gore. This fool is up for an honorary degree in the field of climate change, something on which he has no academic credentials. I guess this is not as bad as Khatami being given an award by St. Andrew's University in the UK, but it's not very good. For more on Gore's supposed (environ)mentalism, see the below video.