The Utter Desperation of Global Warmists

By Alan Caruba

In the “glory years” of the global warming hoax, you had Al Gore picking up Oscars and Nobel Prizes (shared with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and government employees like James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies were picking up wads of cash as awards, speech fees, and grants.

The folks who conjured up the computer models featured in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports also did quite well for themselves, along with all the others who climbed on the gravy train of global warming grants.

And then in 1998 a cooling cycle set in. It was hard to hide because the weather satellite data was indisputable, but try to hide it they did. Even then, however, there was a handful of outspoken meteorologists and climatologists who were trying hard to get out the message that the perfectly natural warming cycle was over and had been replaced, thanks to—guess what?—a lower output of solar radiation by the SUN.

Still the warmists persisted, infiltrating school systems to frighten children, brainwashing students in colleges, and coercing the public through apocalyptic books, through magazine and newspaper articles, and on television and the Internet.

In 2009, the release of a huge cache of emails between the IPCC global warming perpetrators instantly became known as “Climategate” as the world learned that it was all a scam, a hoax, a fraud based on deliberately falsified computer models, and force fed to the public.

The desperation of the warmists was palpable.

In 2006, Grist, an eco-magazine, called for Nurenberg-style trials for skeptics. By 2007, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had called any doubts about global warming treason. “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.” Two years later in 2009, Kennedy called coal companies “criminal enterprises”, declaring that their CEO’s “should be in jail…for all of eternity.” In 2008 NASA’s Hansen was calling for trials of climate skeptics for “high crimes against humanity.”

Didn’t like the warmist’s bogus science? A former member of the Clinton administration, Joe Romm, defended a comment on his Climate Progress website that warned that a generation of brain-washed youth would see to it that skeptics would “be strangled in their beds.”

Today, another Clinton appointee, Carol Browner, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator is one of Obama’s “czars” and the unseen specter whispering in the ear of Lisa Jackson, the current EPA administrator. She is joined by John Holden, an Obama science advisor, and Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu.



Prof. Kari Norgaard

 If threats of jail and murder couldn’t shut up the skeptics, then Professor Kari Marie Norgaard, speaking at a warmist confab, “Planet Under Pressure”, put forth the notion that any science-based skepticism—based on actual, not fictional data—should be “recognized and treated” as some sort of aberrant behavior.

Doubt global warming? Well, you must be nuts!

Norgaard is a professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. As she put it, “Climate change poses a massive threat to our present social, economic and political order. From a sociological perspective, resistance to change is to be expected. People are individually and collectively habituated to the ways we act and think. That habituation must be recognized and simultaneously addressed at the individual, cultural and societal level—how we think the world works and how we think it should work.”

“Should work”? The Earth—the oceans, the clouds, and its entire eco-system—doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about how warmists and other weather crazies think it “should work.” All that intellectual claptrap adds up to a totalitarian belief that people who disagree with global warming should be jailed or killed.

And in true totalitarian fashion reminiscent of the Stalin era when people simply disappeared from public records and reports, on April 2nd Norgaard’s bio for Whitman College could no longer to be found on the its website. True to the eco-fascist approach, she had become a liability, a non-person for having revealed their plans for humanity.

Regular people who actually do something useful with their lives know that intellectuals like Norgaard hold them in utter contempt, but it is those who profess belief in global warming that should be regarded with grave and serious suspicion.

Those who use global warming, i.e., the assertion that carbon dioxide emissions should be restricted and controlled, are the true enemies of progress, of freedom, and of humanity.

In the twentieth century intellectuals foisted Communism on the world, thus ensuring that millions of Russians, Chinese, Cambodians and others would be killed for their dissent. Intellectuals are always the first to embrace every dictator and to excuse their methods.

The warmists are increasingly desperate as their dreams of global domination are falling apart.

In Europe and here in America all their schemes to replace the real production of electricity with solar panels and wind turbines are being rejected. Their plans for herding populations into cities and onto mass transit meet with resistance. Parents are objecting to their eco-curricula in schools. Al Gore has become a joke.

Consider this, if they were in charge, anyone who voiced dissent from their global warming-climate change lies would be in concentration camps, undergoing “re-education”, being “treated” with mind-altering drugs, or dead.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Greens Think You're Stupid

By Alan Caruba

Every day EcoWatch.org sends me an email that features links to several articles on issues they regard as urgent and important. If I had no knowledge of science or much else, I would be spending my days in a state of panic and that would be just fine with the EcoWatch folks.

In late February, one of the articles to which one could link was “Top Earth Scientists Warn of Global Ecological Emergency” that was the epitome of everything that is wrong with the environmental movement in general and the machinery of the United Nations whose goal is to be the single global government with which to rule the Earth. Towards this end, the UN has an Environmental Program whose most recent gift to humanity has been three decades of lies about “global warming.”

Now the UN has its eyes set on “transforming” the world’s economic system in general and the destruction of capitalism in particular. That is what the upcoming Rio+2- Earth Summit in June is all about. Why anyone would believe anything these people have to say defies explanation.

“Ecological Internet (EI) reiterates is declaration of a planetary ecological emergency, first issued two years ago. Since then abrupt climate change has revealed itself in all its fury. Habitat loss and extinction have intensified, food and water have become increasingly scarce, and human inequity and injustice have grown.”

This kind of Chicken Little blather is the very lifeblood of environmentalism.

If individuals and nations cannot be driven to pay dearly for “carbon credits” in order to emit carbon dioxide, than some new scheme must be devised and driven by the same scare tactics and campaigns that worked for global warming until it became apparent that it was a complete fraud and those who advanced it little more than criminals with PhDs.

Parenthetically, it is precisely the Big Lie of carbon dioxide as a “pollutant” that is at the heart of the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule-making that would destroy the nation’s manufacturing and energy production sectors.

Americans and others around the world are largely unaware of the massive propaganda machine, aided and abetted by the news media and even Hollywood, that works relentlessly to shape public perceptions and opinion.

In just four day’s time, EcoWatch emails provided twenty-four links to stories, some of which had the following headlines:

“Who’s Funding Climate Change Denial?”

“Overfishing leaves Swaths of Mediterranean Barren”

“Water Scarcity Impacts at Least 2.7 Billion People Each Year”

“As Fracking Boom Hits Ohio, Deceptive Industry Practices Squeeze Landowners”

“10 Ways Monsanto and Big Ag Are Trying to Kill You—And the Planet”

“School Lunchrooms Put Planet and Kids at Risk”

“7 Dangerous Lies About Plastic”

There are common environmentalist themes in just these few examples. All corporations are evil, but those seeking to provide sources of energy are more evil than, say, those providing farmers the means to grow more crops to feed more people. Anything that might improve the economy or enhance the lives of Americans is vigorously opposed.

The use of deliberate deception is a constant factor in environmental claims.

The assault on America’s children continues unabated, especially in their classrooms where they are routinely taught that humans are to blame for destroying entire eco-systems, the climate, and everything else.

The latest abuse of young minds is “The Lorax”, an animated film that one critic said “all but shouts its disdain for capitalism” as the Lorax proclaims “I speak for the trees.” Another critique concluded that the film “is relentless in propagandizing how the use of natural resources to create consumer products is inevitably catastrophic.”

In sum, environmentalists, the vast matrix of eco-organizations, and the United Nations, all think you’re stupid. They are counting on it, but they are taking no chances as they overwhelm the news media, motion pictures, the Internet, and every other form of communication with their message that we must abandon common sense for their brand of Green slavery.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Media Hypes BPA Ban, Endangers Everyone's Health

By Alan Caruba

A direct threat to the health of millions worldwide is being hyped by the media, continuing the anti-science, anti-fact, and pro-illness agenda of environmental organizations to ban BPA, a chemical that protects against food-borne disease and increases the safe use of all plastic containers.

From January through June 2011, I wrote and posted a six-part series called “The BPA File” that anyone can read on the blog I created for the series. Thoroughly research and documented, it was written because of my concern that this particular effort to ban the chemical would, like the ban on DDT, cause millions to die.

On February 16, Matthew Glans, the Midwest Director of The Heartland Institute’s Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, posted a commentary on its “Somewhat Reasonable” blog, “Media Biggest Proponent for BPA Ban.” My research files are filled with hundreds of examples of this and one need only Google “BPA” to find thousands of references to the chemical with the single theme of banning it.

As Glans points out and my series confirms, “Chemical BPA is a chemical used in plastics for many consumer products. Amongst other uses, BPA (is) most commonly used in hardened plastics and as part of the safety liner for food and beverage cans.”  (Emphasis added)

BPA is an acronym for Bisphenol-A and it has been in use for more than six decades, tested hundreds of times, and never found to post a threat to health, but rather as an essential packaging element to protect it.

Glans quotes an article by Business and Media Institute’s Julia Seymour who wrote that the “Fear of chemicals and ‘toxins’ is rampant among the so-called ‘environmental’ left. Unfortunately, that phobia infects national media coverage as well. For more than a decade, the Left has been on the attack against BPA, a product that is commonly found in plastics and other products.”

Ms. Seymour noted that “The Food and Drug Administration has a deadline of March 31 to respond to a petition by the National Resources Defense Council—an environmental group—that seeks to ban BPA. NRDC argues that the FDA should ban BPA on the basis that it causes harm to humans.”

If you read my BPA series, you will learn that BPA has been tested here and in other nations and has been found to pose no health threat whatever.

“Meanwhile,” said Ms. Seymour, “the media have exaggerated the threat of BPA for years. On the Feb. 25, 2010, CBS ‘Early Show’ broadcast, Katie Lee crossed the line from hype into outright falsehood when she said of BPA: ‘And that’s been shown to cause liver disease, heart failure, all sorts of things.”

“The Business & Media Institute analyzed ABC, CBS, and NBC reports as well as The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal that discussed BPA from Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2011.”

Incredibly, Canada, Japan, Denmark and France have banned the use of BPA for several products, including baby bottles. To date, “the FDA has been unwilling to declare BPA unsafe.” There’s a reason for that. Its history and the many tests of BPA have found it to be entirely safe.

Let’s understand a fundamental determination of what is toxic or not. As Paracelsus (1492-1541) said long ago, “All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison.”

If you take too much aspirin, too many sleeping pills, too many pain-killers, too many of any medication, it will likely kill you. This is why directions for their use are printed on every bottle. Substances like arsenic can be found in potatoes, but the amount of arsenic is so low that its ingestion poses no threat whatever. Moreover, our bodies possess organs that clean such substances from our bodies and evacuate them every single day.

The real toxins are the lies the media prints and broadcasts without researching the claims of environmental organizations that thrive on the income such scare campaigns generate and whose fundamental agenda is the reduction of the world’s population “to save the Earth.”

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Greener Than Thou

By Alan Caruba

The most obnoxious and hypocritical people are those who are always preaching a “greener” way of life, insisting that anything that constitutes our modern lifestyles is destroying the Earth and depleting its natural resources. Never mind that we depend upon oil, natural gas, coal, and a host of minerals and chemicals for that lifestyle, the absence of which caused people in earlier eras to live shorter, far more unpleasant lives.

Oil, other than ust an energy source is also a component in countless products, starting with plastic, and is so vital to modern life that its value goes far beyond just being able to drive our cars to visit grandma.

Greener than thou has replaced holier than thou ever since Rachel Carson penned her pernicious and seriously flawed attack on DDT and other chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in 1962. The result has been the needless deaths of millions from malaria in Africa and subtropical nations after the U.S. banned DDT and other nations followed suit. If there was a comparable pesticide available today, the U.S. would not be suffering a biblical plague of bed bugs.

A bone fide environmentalist, David Owen, has written a book that quite literally filets environmentalism, “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.” ($14.00, Riverhead Press, softcover).

Owen, who has authored 14 previous books, examines the way environmentalism frequently makes no sense at all. This is not to be confused with conservation, the earlier movement that led to the preservation of some of the nation’s natural wonders.

To live an environmentally acceptable way of life is the same as striving to be a saint, avoiding “sin” in order to secure a place in heaven. It is not only virtually impossible, but to be human is to consume what Nature provides. If you think about, all of Earth's creatures are consumers, depending on where they are on the food chain.

For example, when environmentalists convinced Congress to reduce the amount of water in toilet tanks, the only thing they accomplished was to require that the newer, smaller tanks had be flushed twice to rid he toilet of feces and urine, i.e., more use of water, not less. The EPA has just issued a ruling they claim is necessary to reduce mercury emissions despite the fact that your average volcanic eruption puts more into the atmosphere than any human imposed restrictions could ever achieve. Congress, however, passed a law banning 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, thus requiring people to purchase mercury-filled ones that, if broken, require a hazmat team to clean up after.

Environmentalism is essentially irrational.

It believes that humans actually have anything to do with “saving the Earth” when the natural forces of the Earth are so far beyond any “control” that it routinely reminds us of this fact. We have zero impact on the climate and, as for carbon dioxide, the villain of all “global warming” claims, humans exhale about six pounds of it every day. And there are seven billion of us. Even so, it constitutes barely 0.033 percent of the atmosphere.

Owen begins by posing the question, “How do we truly begin to think about less—less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress—when our sense of economic, cultural, and personal well-being is based on more?”

The real question at the heart of all environmentalism is what do we do when there are seven billion humans using the resources of the Earth and the real answer for environmentalists is how do we reduce the Earth’s population and how do they grow rich in the process? That is what lies at the heart of all the “solutions” put forth by the United Nations environmental program; an enemy of the human race if there ever was one.

What environmentalists want is “a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior in our relationship with energy and consumption.” The next time you hear anyone call for a “transformation” know also that they are a charlatan seeking control over your life.

The environmental assumption is that the Earth is running out of the sources of energy and that consumption is bad. Both are equally wrong because the Earth is not running out of the sources of energy and consumption is what humans and all other species on Earth do every day.

Owen believes that humans are “the world’s main emitter of manmade greenhouse gases” and this is utterly false. The so-called greenhouse gases are the ones in the atmosphere that not only keep the Sun from turning the Earth into a desiccated version of Mars or the Moon, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it is responsible for every single element of vegetation upon which all life depends.

Owen and many environmentalists would prefer that all of humanity live packed side-by-side in crowded cities, using mass transit or bicycling to work to save the Earth, but anyone who gives two thoughts to the amount of energy consumed to maintain a city knows this too is yet another idiotic environmental conceit.

Indeed, Owen notes that “There are many downsides to density, including the fact that squeezing people and their destinations close together makes diseases, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too.”

That, says Owen, is a conundrum. Indeed, his book is filled with environmental conundrums that he tries to resolve while overtly and inadvertently exposing the idiocy of environmentalism.

Simply put, farmers are the world’s natural environmentalists, relying on the weather—which they cannot control—and the stewardship of their land to feed themselves and others. They must, however, have a means to move their crops to places where other humans can acquire them and that requires a massive system of transportation which, in turn, requires the affordable use of energy.

Environmentalism’s goals, clean air and water, are laudable, but a massive governmental bureaucracy to require that people use less energy and consume less is not.

Time and time again we see examples of environmentalism that only manage to kill people, whether it is the banning of beneficial chemicals or the use of the least efficient forms of electrical power, wind and solar energy.

The least reported story out of Europe these days is the extreme cold that is literally killing people because it puts the lie to all the environmental “solutions” advanced since the 1960s. Environmentalism has been decried as a religion and, for those who want to deny a greater power, Nature or God, it remains their holy grail.

© Alan Caruba, 2012.

Little Green Morons

By Alan Caruba

Michael Brune, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, holds degrees in economics and finance from West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Coming Clean—Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal”, published in 2008 by the Sierra Club.

Recently, Brune bragged that he and the board had turned “away millions of dollars”, noting that “It sounds crazy” and explaining why. In 2010 Brune learned that, “beginning in 2007 the Sierra Club had received more than $26 million from individuals or subsidiaries of Chesapeake Energy, one of the country’s largest natural gas companies.”

This may come as a surprise to many, but a lot of energy companies and manufacturers who use a lot of energy give a lot of money to the Sierra Club. If this “sounds crazy”, it is because, presumably the Sierra Club is in business to put them out of business. In fact, Chesapeake Energy’s donations were for the Club’s “Beyond Coal” campaign, an energy competitor to Chesapeake.

The fact that the Club’s Executive Director could brag about turning away millions in donations suggests that he wasn’t paying attention in college while studying economics and finance---or that like so many environmentalists, he is a moron. Or just a hypocrite. Time magazine revealed the actual story in its February 2nd edition. The Sierra Club was shilling for Chesapeake Energy.

And, yes, the corporations that give millions to the Sierra Club or give in to its demands are morons, too. In his previous job at the Rainforest Action Network, for seven years Brune led assaults on Home Depot, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Kinko’s Boise and Lowe’s. To put it another way, to hell with corporate jobs, dividends to investors, and profits with which to grow. Saving the rainforest came first. Cutting down a tree does not mean another one will not grow in the same place.

And now, at the Sierra Club, apparently the new battle is against natural gas. Can it get any more stupid? Like millions of Americans, my home of more than sixty years was heated by gas and the kitchen stove used gas. It was cheaper and cleaner than coal. As this is being written vast new reserves of natural gas are being found all over the nation, but as far as the Sierra Club is concerned, drilling for it poses risks “to our air, water, climate, and people in their communities.” Short of putting your head in the oven and turning on the gas, there are no significant risks and haven’t been any in the sixty years or so that “fracking” has been used to access natural gas.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is set to become a net exporter of liquefied natural gas by 2016 according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration. It expects a cumulative increase in U.S. natural gas production through 2036.

To suggest otherwise is a form of environmental dementia reflected in their fear and hatred of every form of energy, be it oil,  coal, natural gas, or nuclear. To quote Brune, if it “sounds crazy”, it probably is.

If you want to know what’s crazy, it’s the Ohio Environmental Council praising First Energy Corporation “for its plan to permanently close six coal-fired plants.” Yippee! Who needs plants that have the capacity to generate 2,700 megawatts of electricity—enough to power more than 600,000 homes? Who needs the jobs and revenue they also generate? And who needs the electricity? First Energy has read the writing on the wall that says the Environmental Protection Agency is determined to close down every coal-fired plant in America, even if they currently produce FIFTY PERCENT OF ALL THE ELECTRICITY!

Just how stupid, how moronic are environmentalists?

One way to answer is to look at the Obama administration’s track record when it comes to “green energy.”

Recently the President was seen leaving an event promoting clean energy in a motorcade of twenty-two (22) gas-guzzling vehicles. Well, do as Obama says, not as Obama does.

After three years of the most astonishingly stupid and wasteful green energy policies inflicted on Americans, it is hard keeping score of the various beneficiaries of government largess that are going bankrupt.

The most famous at this point is Solyndra that went belly up taking a half billion in loan guarantees—taxpayer funded—with it. Beacon Power, a green energy storage plant, filed for bankruptcy last fall took with it $43 million of more Department of Energy loan guarantees. Ener1, touted during a visit by Vice President Joe Biden—who inadvertently called it “Enron1”—filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The electric car battery maker had received a $118 million grant from the Obama administration.

Since then, Evergreen Energy, a manufacturer of batteries for electric cars and recipient of “stimulus” funds also filed for bankruptcy. Amonix, Inc., a manufacturer of solar panels that had received $5.9 million in “stimulus” was stimulated to cut two thirds of its workforce, some 200 employees, barely seven months after opening a factory in Nevada.

The Obama administration has been hot for electric cars and hybrids. They are costly and you would have to drive one for a decade or two to amortize the sticker price with fuel savings. They have proved to be a big money-loser for auto manufacturers. At this point, only about 3% of all the cars sold in America are electric or gas-electric hybrids.

There’s more, but I won’t bore you with the trail of bad government loan guarantees and grants, more wasted “stimulus” millions.

The lesson here is that any organization, government agency, or company claiming to be “green” is composed of morons, charlatans or a combination of both.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Why the End is Always Near, but Never Arrives

By Alan Caruba

If you were to depend on the Huffington Post for your knowledge of the world, you would remain appallingly ignorant. As a leading website for liberal news and views, it is a platform for sheer nonsense and the wonder of it all is that so much is produced on a daily basis.

Take, for example, the June 20 post “State of the Ocean: ‘Shocking’ Report Warns of Mass Extinction from Current Rate of Marine Distress.” I doubt that most HP readers have a clue how vast the oceans of the world are. They compose the majority of the Earth’s surface, some 70 percent, and contain 97 percent of the world’s water.

According to its website, the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) gathered at the University of Oxford, for “A high-level international workshop”, described as “the first inter-disciplinary international meeting of marine scientists of its kind… designed to consider the cumulative impact of multiple stressors on the ocean, including warming, acidification, and over-fishing.”

“The 27 participants from 18 organizations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats - and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.”

Please, someone, please tell me the last time an international group of scientists did not get together and then announce to the world that some horrid future awaited everyone?

According to the IPSO geniuses, “We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children’s and generations beyond that.” The scientific panel concluded “that the degeneration in the oceans is happening much faster than has been predicted” and, therefore, all the coral reefs “could be gone by 2050.”

Why is it that every one of these apocalyptic groups always predict something “could be”, “might be”, “is expected to”, and a whole raft of wishy-washy terms that add up to “We don’t know, but we want to scare the crap out of you just the same”?

Implicit in this latest prediction is that human actions are responsible for whatever they claim is happening to the oceans. Never mind all the other creatures on Earth, gazillions of insects, millions of birds and all manner of mammals, not to mention all the fish, it is always humans despoiling the Earth.

Have we not lived with this tiresome nonsense since the early days of the environmental movement and, in particular, the creation of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? A recent editorial in The Washington Times exposed the way the latest IPCC pronouncement that “the entire world will soon depend on renewable energy” was lifted from a paper whose primary authors were from Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council!

The IPCC has managed to destroy the integrity and the trust in science that has taken centuries to be built. Its constant flogging of the bogus global warming fraud has caused everyone except the Green Kool-Aid drinkers to conclude that scientists cannot be trusted.

Many can’t. Over the years, they have been seduced by billions in government funds for research that always seems to confirm whatever the political agenda is at the time. Galileo was put under house arrest by the Vatican because his findings conflicted with the teaching of the Church at that time. Now governments just buy scientists by the boatload. In addition, the scientists working for government agencies such as NASA know where their paycheck comes from.

A caveat, please. I am privileged to know quite a few scientists as the result of spending the last thirty years debunking global warming. A relative handful of very brave men and women risked their academic and professional careers to dispute the IPCC and other charlatans. From June 30-to-July 1, the Heartland Institute will convene its sixth international conference devoted to the truth about "global warming", i.e., that it is a massive lie. So, yes, there are many good scientists and interested parties who fought the good fight.

Compounding the problem here in the U.S., the nation’s schools have been totally co-opted by the Green agenda and whatever passes for science is mostly some version of the Gaia religion spoon-fed to the kiddies in pre-school, kindergarten, and up to graduation. The process continues at most colleges and university. The result is a generation or two of enviro-robots for whom science is little more than propaganda.

So, like the marine prognosticators, be polite, listen to their ravings, and ignore them. Be serene and secure in the knowledge that the sun, the oceans, the clouds, the volcanoes, and other factors affecting the Earth are immune to any but the ancient cycles that were known by Chinese, Mayan and druid astronomers long, long ago.

That is why the end is always near, but thankfully never seems to arrive.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Germany's Nuclear Panic

By Alan Caruba

The likelihood of a major earthquake in Germany is slim. The possibility that it would be followed by a catastrophic tsunami is unlikely. These are the events that caused the failure of the Fukushima plant in Japan, but that has not deterred Germany from its recent announcement that it would close all 17 of its nuclear reactors by 2022.

This is pure panic and not something one would expect from Germans who have always excelled at the development and use of new technologies. Other than Japan that has good reason to close Fukushima and reconsider its use of nuclear energy, few other nations have indicated any change in their policies regarding it.

The world is in desperate need of real grownups to run its various nations and, instead, the only growth industry to which one can reliably point is stupidity.

The endless blather about “alternative” or “renewable” energy sources has led to the waste of billions on wind and solar power, neither of which would exist if governments did not lavish subsidies or issue mandates for its unpredictable and unproductive delivery of electricity.

Germany has long had a Green Party and its Chancellor, Angela Merkel, heads of Social Democrat-Green coalition. In general, environmentalists worldwide hate the generation of energy by any source, but particularly if it is nuclear or coal. Ironically, by shutting its nuclear plants, Germany will have to use coal, dubbed “dirty” by mindless opponents of anything that might let you turn on a light bulb.

If you Google “nuclear energy” you will learn that nuclear power provides about six percent of the world’s energy and an estimated fifteen percent of its electricity. The U.S., France, and Japan account for about fifty percent of the electricity generated by nuclear power.

There have been nuclear and radiation accidents. Fukushima was the result of unprecedented geological events, something no amount of planning and caution can prevent. The 1986 Chernobyl disaster was largely the result of its staff manually overriding its safety control systems. The Three-Mile Island accident in 1979 did not endanger anyone. It coincided with a film “The China Syndrome” that had no basis in fact.

Simply stated, nuclear power plants are not atomic bombs that go off when a “meltdown” occurs. Under normal circumstances plants can be shut down in the event of a malfunction.

Germany’s over-reaction to the Fukushima accident has nothing to do with reality, science, economics or any other sensible response. Nuclear power provides about 23% of its electrical energy and, despite that, Germany’s electricity prices have “more than doubled in the past decade” according to a Wall Street Journal report. The decision to phase out nuclear power will affect Germany’s ability to remain competitive in the global marketplace, particularly as regards its heavy industries that require large amounts of electricity.

The decision was part environmental, part political. It is entirely idiotic as is always the case when these two factors come together. To no one’s surprise, one of its largest utilities, E.ON, announced it would sue the pants off the government to compensate for its financial losses. Others are likely to join it.

Environmentalism in all its many forms is opposed to any and all forms of energy generation and use with the exception of wind, solar, and the so-called biofuels. Here in the U.S. Greens have fought any expansion of the use of coal, despite the fact that just over half of all electricity generated depends on it. The Obama administration has waged a public war on the extraction, refining, and use of oil. Nuclear power generates about twenty percent of the electricity in the U.S.

It is the growth of government that lies at the heart of so many of the problems the West has encountered. Coupled with the environmental movement’s insanity, we get bans on the incandescent light bulb, insane requirements for increased mileage from a gallon of gasoline that is required to include ethanol, a chemical element that actually reduces mileage!

We have all just escaped the ravages of a massive, global campaign to convince everyone that the Earth was rapidly heating as the result of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is still insisting that it be regulated as a “pollutant” even though all life on Earth depends upon it as the “food” that generates every piece of vegetation, crops, forests, and beautiful flowers.

It is stupid to shut down perfectly good nuclear plants as Germany plans to do. It is stupid to insist on covering areas the size of several states to generate solar energy or spoil the landscape with wind turbines that kill hundreds of thousands of birds and bats every year while, combined with solar, contribute barely three percent to our electrical supply.

Ordinary people know that stupid people are in charge of making decisions like Germany’s nuclear energy panic or the moratorium on drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ordinary people understand the need for more energy based on traditional sources.

Ordinary Americans know it is stupid to require an environmental impact study in order to shoot off some fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Ordinary Americans know that there are some very bad, even evil, decisions being made that will undermine our future.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Earth Day Predictions of 1970.

I do not know the author who compiled these quotes, but they are a good reason why they were wrong in 1970 when Earth Day was established and continue to be wrong today, Earth Day 2011.

"For the next 24 hours, the media will assault us with tales of imminent disaster that always accompany the annual Earth Day Doom & Gloom Extravaganza.

Ignore them. They’ll be wrong. We’re confident in saying that because they’ve always been wrong. And always will be.

Need proof? Here are some of the hilarious, spectacularly wrong predictions made on the occasion of Earth Day 1970.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.”
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
• New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Stanford's Paul Ehrlich announces that the sky is falling.

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.”
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.”
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Keep these predictions in mind when you hear the same predictions made today. They’ve been making the same predictions for 39 years. And they’re going to continue making them until…well…forever.

Here we are, 39 years later and the economy sucks, but the ecology’s fine. In fact this planet is doing a lot better than the planet on which those green lunatics live."

http://www.ihatethemedia.com/earth-day-predictions-of-1970-the-reason-you-should-not-believe-earth-day-predictions-of-2009

Earth Day and Environmental Insanity

By Alan Caruba

Anyone who has been paying any attention to the environmental movement has got to have concluded it is insane.

• While the United States stands poised on defaulting on its ever-growing debt—the highest in the nation’s history;

• While wars and insurrections are waged in the Middle East, across northern Africa, and in the Ivory Coast;

• While Japan struggles to deal with a major earthquake and nuclear plant meltdown;

• While Islam wages terrorism worldwide, and

• While European nations attempt to deal with their own financial crisis, the environmentalists—Greens—engage in the most absurd frauds and nonsense since the Dark Ages.

In news from the United Nations—a misnomer if ever there was one—Bolivia is proposing a UN treaty that will give “Mother Earth” the same rights as accorded to human beings. It has just passed a domestic law that grants these rights to bugs, trees, and all other natural things in its own country.

According to the Bolivian proposal, humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” the Earth in ways that threaten the “well-being and existence of many beings” such as malaria-bearing mosquitoes, lice and ticks that spread disease, trees that provide timber for shelter and countless other uses, venomous snakes, and every other creature upon which we depend for food---beef, chickens, and fish, to name just three.

The Bolivian law, if successful, will end the extraction of all natural resources in that nation, thus effectively plunging it into insolvency. That is a definition of insanity. It is also a description of the United States of America where access to its vast reserves of coal, natural gas, and oil is being systematically denied by the government.

This is occurring as the Environmental Protection Agency continues its effort to declare carbon dioxide (CO2) a “pollutant” that must be regulated, despite the fact that is vital to all life on Earth.

In America, there has been a resurgence of bed bugs, formerly controlled by DDT. The EPA recently awarded $550,000 in grants to the University of Missouri, Texas A&M University, the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Rutgers University, and the Michigan Department of Community Health, for bed bug “education, outreach, and environmental justice departments.” So, instead of authorizing the use of a pesticide to rid us all of bed bugs, it wants to “educate” us to live with them. That’s insane.

The U.S. Forest Service scientists will hire field crews “to gather information on the conditions of forests from approximately 1,000 sites in five western states, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, “for a comprehensive study on the health of trees in urban areas.” No mention of the millions this will waste, but it is heralded as part of Obama’s “America’s Great Outdoors Initiative.”

At the same time, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has just announced that the department will spend $1 million in “cost-sharing funding for children’s programs in 18 States and Puerto Rico, furthering USDA’s commitment to connect young people around the country with America’s great outdoors.” Why?

A rational nation that’s $14 trillion in debt, borrowing 40 cents of every dollar it spends, would not do such things, but the United States does while its President calls for higher taxes. And why not? The Obama administration spent up to $200 million to promote Obamacare. While that was happening, 26 States joined in demanding its repeal and a U.S. federal court judge declared it unconstitutional.

As the nation struggles to reverse an unsustainable trend toward financial doom, Greens are trumpeting an “Extended Producer Responsibility” program to achieve “waste reduction and increased recycling” that would make manufacturers “liable for the cost of recycling TVs and other electronics at the end of their useful lives” and alter the way they package goods. This is not the manufacturer’s responsibility and will increase the cost of everything everyone purchases.

On Earth Day, everyone will be exhorted to engage in “A billion acts of Green” and to purchase “Green” products, all of which cost more than everything else one purchases in the normal course of everyday life.

We are only now recovering from the greatest fraud of the modern era, “global warming.” The United States wasted an estimated $50 billion on so-called scientific research, all of which existed for the purpose of advancing this hoax. It is rarely mentioned any more except for its fraudulent new name, “climate change.”

As we approach April 22nd, designated “Earth Day”, it would be well to recall that it is the birthday of Vladimir Illich Lenin, a devotee of Karl Marx and a man who plunged Russia into more than seventy years of Communism until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Environmentalism, worldwide and in the United States of America, is devoted to the collapse of every scientific and technological advance of the past century, along with the capitalist system that made them possible.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Obsessed with Food

By Alan Caruba

“If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny.” -- Thomas Jefferson

My late Mother, Rebecca, taught the art of gourmet cooking in New Jersey adult schools for over thirty years. When the troops came back from the war in Europe, they had been introduced to its cuisine and they encouraged their wives to prepare it.

Mother studied cookbooks like scholars study ancient manuscripts. She would author two cookbooks and the title of one perfectly captured her outlook, ‘Cooking with Wine and High Spirits.’ “There are people who just eat to live,” she would say, “and those who live to eat”, meaning people who loved good food, lovingly prepared.

Neither I, nor my Father or Mother ever got fat. We ate well and enjoyed wine with our meals, but we were never over-weight in any fashion although, as we got passed our fifties, both my Dad and I did acquire the paunch typical of older men.

In the best book ever written on the subject, “Fat: It’s Not What You Think”, by Connie Leas (Prometheus Books, 2008), she noted that ”It’s the male sex hormone, testosterone, that’s responsible for this selected buildup of fat in (men’s) abdominal region.” And, listen up girls, “An adult woman has about twice as much body fat as the average man” and this is likely due to natural selection over the millennia.

“The fat you carry around has useful functions,” wrote Leas. “It stores energy for future use, produces important chemicals, builds cell membranes and neural structures, provides padding, insulates against cold, supplies fuel, and supports your immune system. Fat can be your friend!”

I’m not talking about obesity here. I am talking about carrying a comfortable amount of weight that is not dictated by self-appointed arbiters. Your body size is determined by your DNA, your genes, your inheritance from prior generations. After that, it’s up to you to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Something is very wrong when the government, local, country, state or federal, passes laws regarding what you can and cannot eat, whether dining out or at home.

Perhaps, because we live in a society that provides an abundance of foods and an abundance of choices among foods, that accounts for why our society is so obsessed with eating and obsessed with weight.

Just count how many food-related or diet-related commercials you watch on television every day. Consider, too, the many channels and programs devoted to the topics of food and dieting. Then add in all the magazines, food columns, and blogs devoted to cooking.

Lynne Finnerty, the editor of the American Farm Bureau Federation newspaper, recently took note of “Health officials (that) are sounding alarms about our obesity epidemic. Maybe the issue isn’t the food itself,” said Finnerty, “but our preoccupation with it. Maybe it’s just up to us, as it’s always been, to decide how much is enough.” I agree!

It should come as no surprise that the same scoundrels who propagated the global warming hoax in order to get rich selling “carbon credits” and mandating that utilities use wind and solar energy, are also involved in trying to determine everyone’s dietary choices.

Tom DeWeese, founder of the American Policy Center, recently connected the dots of the United Nations’ Agenda 21 “sustainable development” hogwash with its endless efforts to control every aspect of the Earth’s population. Noting its emphasis on vegetarianism, DeWeese cited research by Dr. William Campbell Douglas who writes a blog called the Daily Dose.

Douglas wrote, “When researchers studied 300 vegetarian patients at Hiranandani Hospital (India) for a year, they were stunned to find that 70% of them were either suffering from heart disease or were at high risk of heart attacks.” Nearly all were badly deficient in vitamin B12, an essential nutrient found in meat.

DeWeese warned against Wal-Mart’s aggressive goals for allegedly improving ways that food is grown and transported across the globe. “In other words, Wal-Mart is now going to enforce sustainable farm policy on all of the suppliers and customers, just as Whole Foods. This is not free markets, it is huge global corporations playing footsy with radical environmental groups and pretending it’s for the common good.”

A history professor of mine used to say, “No government is more than two weeks away from being brought down if it cannot feed its citizens.” In the last century, however, both the Russian and the Chinese communists were responsible for the deaths of millions from famines, some deliberate, some avoidable.

On January 5, Bloomberg News, citing the United Nations reported that “World food prices rose to a record in December on higher sugar, grain and oilseed costs… exceeding levels reached in 2008 that sparked deadly riots from Haiti to Egypt.” Some of those riots were the direct result of redirecting massive amounts of corn from livestock feed and in food production to the mandated production of ethanol to be mixed with gas.

The global cycle of colder weather that began in the late 1990s will account for fewer crops just as it did during the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. It had profound affects on history over the course of five hundred years, bringing down monarchies and ending serfdom in Europe.

Modern farming technologies, genetically modified crops, and other advances such as fertilization and the proper application of pesticides and herbicides ensures that a mere two percent of the U.S. population feeds the rest of us and still has plenty for export. Food exports in 2011 are expected to generate $113 billion.

The Greens and their counterparts who pretend to represent consumers spread endless lies about agricultural methods, chemicals used to safeguard and preserve the shelf-life of foods, as well as the foods we choose to eat. They destroy production by getting water shut off to farming areas by claiming some specie is endangered. They threaten the freedom we savor along with a delicious meal.

Everywhere petty politicians seek to pass laws regarding where one can dine, what can be on the menu, and how it must be prepared. Those who dine at home find packaging loaded with food warnings. It is deliberate and it is baseless.

These busybodies, nags and harridans should be driven from the marketplace with torches and pitchforks.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Eco-Insanity and ANWR

By Alan Caruba

The abject desperation and evil intentions of so-called environmentalists can be seen in the call to turn the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) into a national monument on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its designation.

This would provide ANWR with the same status as the Statue of Liberty—only there aren't billion of barrels of oil under the Statue, nor at George Washington’s birthplace in Virginia.

The idea of conferring national monument status on ANWR is so stupid that it should be laughed out of existence, but unfortunately we have a President who is so intent on denying Americans access to the vast treasure trove of energy resources—oil, coal, and natural gas—that common sense has nothing to do with his decisions.

Reporting from Anchorage, Alaska, for the Associated Press, Mary Pemberton noted that “National monument status could be an estimated 11 billion barrels of recoverable oil beyond the grasp of oil companies forever.” And that means beyond the use of Americans for the countless uses of oil that they depend upon every day for transportation, heating, lubrication, and the manufacture of thousands of products.

The usual nitwits have sent letters to the President, a combination of 80 members of Congress, 170 unidentified “scientists”, some 300 businesses and organizations (that might benefit if oil was in short supply), and 22 religious organizations. Nobody in Alaska supports this idiocy.

There are some well-known facts worth considering.

Alaska comprises 378 million acres.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuse consists of 19.5 million acres.

The area in question where the drilling would occur involves only 1.5 million acres and, of that, only about 2,000 acres would be utilized.

By comparison, Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. takes up an area that is five times as big, fully 11,000 acres.

The area designated for drilling is far from a “pristine” wonderland. While there are parts of Alaska that are breathtakingly beautiful, ANWR is a perfect definition for “when Hell freezes over.”

After visiting Alaska in 2001, Jonah Goldberg, a nationally syndicated columnist, wrote in 2001 that the more beautiful parts of Alaska are far from ANWR and, in particular, “The oil is on the coastal plain at the very top of ANWR on the coast of the Arctic Ocean. And it ain’t beautiful.” The greatest population of wildlife there are trillions of mosquitoes.

“Winter on the coastal plan lasts for nine months,” noted Goldberg. “Total darkness reigns for 58 straight days. The temperatures drop to 70 degrees below zero without wind chill.”

Far from being a tourist’s mecca, ANWR said Goldberg “is a colossal fetid petri dish for some of the worst flying pestilence you can imagine.” In addition to the mosquitoes, there are nostril flies that infest caribou and parasitic warble flies that make life on the plain a hell for its local fauna. The caribou, by the way, had in 2001 increased their population “fivefold since oil exploration began decades ago in nearby Prudhoe Bay.”

The area of ANWR where the oil is known to exist is a vast frozen tundra. Not the ecological treasure the environmentalists are always braying about. Oil drilling would require roads, drill pads, and pipelines. The 2,000 acres involved is 1/20th the size of Washington, D.C. It’s the equivalent to twenty of the buildings where Boeing manufacturers its 747s.

If you flew over, it would be a tiny speck in a huge frozen wasteland. And it would provide about two million barrels of oil a day that we would not need to import from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

An Arctic wilderness is not a national monument and it is an obscenity to even consider such a designation.

Editor's Note: For more information, visit http://www.anwr.org/

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The EPA's Long War on Chemicals

By Alan Caruba

One of the shows I enjoy watching on the Science Channel is “How It’s Made.” All manner of things we use to enhance our lives start out as raw materials and the process of manufacture is a miracle of transformation.

Virtually all forms of manufacturing require some chemical element, often several. Given the indispensability of chemicals in society and commerce, does it strike anyone as odd that, if you were born after 1960, there’s a high likelihood that you grew up being told that “chemicals” are bad?

In 1962 Rachel Carson kicked off this bizarre notion with her bestselling book, “Silent Spring” and environmental groups have maintained a steady drumbeat of scare campaigns to drive home the message that chemicals are dangerous. However, it is rarely noted that most of the claims she made in her iconic book have long since been disproved by science.

One branch of science is called toxicology. Among its most honored truths, attributed to Paracelsus (1493-1541) is that “All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.” This has been shortened to the statement that “The dose makes the poison.” The truth of this is obvious to most people and perhaps best illustrated vaccines. By introducing a minute element of a disease into our bodies, our immune systems can build resistance to it.

But problems arise when an ill-informed media latches on to the latest junk science craze and splashes misleading stories across newspapers and TV. Missing from virtually all of these stories are key facts – that a bunch of laboratory rats have been exposed to some chemical in doses far higher than would normally occur, for instance, or in ways that would never happen in real life, and then calling it a threat. But humans are not rats and this kind of sloppy science and extrapolation comes with serious issues of data interpretation.

This is one way in which the Environmental Protection Agency’s long war on chemicals is perpetuated. Much of the EPA’s abuse of power comes in the form of chemical action plans, which involve little oversight, even less transparency and little-to-no public accountability. However their power to over-regulate, remove valuable products from the market, and hobble commerce is almost unparalleled.

Currently in the EPA’s chemical action plan crosshairs are siloxanes, a type of silicone which, in turn, comes mostly from sand. Siloxanes are inert, non-allergenic, odorless and colorless. They’ve been safely used for decades in thousands of consumer and industrial products – everything from medical cream and sunscreen to automobile tires, high-efficiency insulation and spacecraft.

There are a wide variety of siloxanes, but the EPA isn’t saying which ones have been targeted making it almost impossible for outside parties to provide any sort of meaningful input to the process. If you wanted to stack the deck against something, that would be a great way to do it.

Another aspect of this latest EPA caper is that the agency draws much of its power from the Toxic Substances Control Act, otherwise known as TSCA. But TSCA is in the process of a congressional overhaul which will probably spill over into next year when a new and possibly Republican-controlled Congress returns in January. Why would EPA want to rush through a chemical action plan for siloxanes when it knows that Congress is still working on TSCA reform?

An unduly harsh chemical action plan for siloxanes could have devastating effects on our limping economic recovery. There is no single substitute for siloxanes that performs as well so industry would be faced with costly reformulations for their products and their manufacturing processes. If a particular business found this too expensive, they’d have to shut down, throwing more Americans out of work. If they can afford it, those costs would undoubtedly be passed along to consumers. And for what? No amount of research has shown any environmental benefit to banning siloxanes.

Since its establishment by an executive order in 1970, the EPA has become the master of misinformation and disinformation intended to drive all manner of beneficial chemicals out of the marketplace and to maintain a level of public fear concerning anything that involves chemicals. Siloxanes and the people who depend on them are merely in line to become the latest victims of the EPA.

It should be renamed the Ministry of Propaganda.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Cassandra Says It Will Get Very Cold

By Alan Caruba

In the Greek myth about Cassandra, she could foresee the future, but no one believed her warnings. Her name is believed to be derived from the words for beauty and the sun.

Any number of solar scientists and others are warning that the Earth is on the brink of a new Ice Age at worst, a mini ice age at best. Dr. Achim Brauer of the German Research Center for Geosciences in Potsdam has concluded that the next Ice Age will come on so swiftly that in barely a year much of the northern hemisphere will be incased in ice and snow.

The Little Ice Age from around 1300 to 1850 lasted long enough to transform European society and have a profound affect on the histories of America and France. In England, they went from growing grapes to skating on a completely frozen Thames.

All the signs are in place and throughout the northern hemisphere nations, their leaders prattle on about global warming, clean energy, endangered species, and all the other environmental foolishness without once casting an eye toward the source of all climate on Earth, the Sun!

While the warmists were trying to stir up hysteria over an Earth whose temperature was suppose to rise dramatically, Nature had other plans. For the past decade the magnetic field that triggers sunspots, magnetic storms on the face of the Sun, has been steadily declining and, with it, so has the overall temperature of planet Earth.

No matter what august figure blathers about climate change these days, they are either an ignorant fool or a charlatan seeking to enrich himself by one scheme or another. The situation for the warmists has become so dire that even the science advisor to the President, Dr. John Holdren, wants to change the terminology of global warming to “global climate disruption”, admitting the former is “a dangerous misnomer.”

It’s worse than that. It is a huge fraud, a hoax, a crime intended to deceive millions.

Okay, let’s all forget the millions of words and millions of dollars spent to convince us that “global warming” was such a sure thing that any scientist or reasonably intelligent person disputing it was labeled a denier, but the truth was that the data generated by the computer models to justify the claim was rigged!

My friend, Robert Felix, author of “Not by Fire, but by Ice”, and editor of IceAgeNow.com, probably knows more about ice ages than anyone on the planet. In his book, he says “Ice ages begin and end abruptly every 11,500 years.” Guess what? We are now 11,500 years since the last Ice Age ended!

While idiots run about claiming that humans actually have any affect whatever on the climate and thus the fate of the Earth, Felix reminds us that “the Earth is a violent and dangerous place to live. We’re beginning to realize that mass extinctions have been the rule, rather than the exception, for the 3.5 billion years that life has existed on this planet.”

On June 14 in an article published in the New Scientist by Stuart Clark, he raised the question of why and where the sunspots of gone. Noting that they ebb and flow in cycles lasting about eleven years, Stuart said, “But for the last two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged in nearly 100 years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise.”

Not everyone, though. Felix believes we are on the cusp of the next Ice Age and, frankly, so do I. “This is not the calm before the storm,” says Felix. “This is the storm.”

If we’re lucky, it may just be a new Little Ice Age, but it could be a new Ice Age and, if that’s the case, a lot of life on planet Earth is going to be severely disrupted for a very long, long time.

Even a brief ice age of several hundred years will increase the demand for the generation of energy to keep us warm. All of a sudden everyone including the environmentalist liars will be crying out for more coal, more oil, and more natural gas.

Cassandra is saying bundle up!

© Alan Caruba, 2010

No Science, Fake Science, and the Destruction of the Nation

By Alan Caruba

Any scientist who has not sold his soul to the environmental movement will tell you that the reason that greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), do not cause any warming is due to the fact that they have to conform to the laws of thermodynamics. The first law states that “energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only change form.”

Energy produced by coal, natural gas, oil, or nuclear is energy that has changed from one form of matter to another. The attack on these sources of energy is a direct attack on the economic success of America and it is one that is at a dangerous peak of activity generated by the Obama administration, primarily through the Environmental Protection Agency.

There is simply no such thing as “dirty energy.” The push for so-called clean or renewable energy is a fiction to advance the use of the two worst, most unpredictable and unreliable forms of energy, solar and wind. They exist solely because of government subsidies and mandates. They produce little over three percent of the energy used nationwide every day.

The September 12 edition of Bloomberg Businessweek addressed this in an article, “Lisa Jackson’s High-Wire Act on Carbon Controls.” What the article did not say was that, if the EPA gains the authority to control carbon dioxide, it will literally control all business and industrial activity in the nation as well as the lives of all Americans.

What the article did not say is that there is no scientific justification for controlling CO2 because it plays no role in the so-called “climate change”, the new language being used to avoid saying “global warming.” It should be evident to a kindergartner that humans not only do not affect the climate, but have no control over it.

The environmental movement that has devoted decades and millions to perpetrate the greatest science fraud in the history of mankind has backed away from “global warming” for the obvious reason that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for the past decade, the result of a reduction in solar activity, a dormant period that has a long history of preceding periods of cooling.

One of President Obama’s goals has been to secure legislation, known as “Cap-and-Trade” that would authorize a scheme by which “carbon credits” would be bought and sold by utilities and industry for the right to produce and use energy. It is part of the global warming fraud and its sole purpose is political power while enriching a few insiders betting on the expansion of alternative energy sources.

As the Business Week article noted, the EPA has been attempting to exert authority over CO2, but has been doing so "cautiously" to avoid evoking a public outcry against it. Thus, Lisa Jackson has offered a “tailored” approach “that exempts mom-and-pop dry cleaners and pizza parlors and initially regulates only power plants and oil refineries.”

The effect on oil refineries would drive up the cost of gasoline and every other oil derivatives.

Under the Clean Air Act, however, the EPA does not have this authority as CO2 is exempt from such action. Moreover, as noted, there is zero need to control CO2 as a threat to the environment because, without it, all life on Earth would not exist. It is CO2 that is the plant life equivalent of oxygen that maintains all animal life. The two are symbiotic and have been for billions of years.

Americans and people worldwide have been deluged with fake science based entirely on computer models whose results have been deliberately skewed to produce results that affirm CO2 as a primarily factor affecting the Earth’s climate. It is not.

As Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser has noted in his book, “Convenient Myths”, and in articles on the subject, “The atmosphere contains currently a bit less than 0.04% CO2. The rest is mainly oxygen (20%) and nitrogen (79%).” This represents an increase since the Industrial Age when the amount was an infinitesimal 0.03%.

If all the CO2 produced by power plants and the use of coal, oil, and natural gas was reduced to levels the EPA and environmental groups deem “safe” it would have zero affect on the atmosphere.

As Dr. Klaus noted, “Nearly all life on earth depends on the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere. Without any CO2, the Earth would be a barren place like the moon, or our neighboring planets, Venus and Mars.”

The EPA is lying to Americans using fake science. On July 29, 2010 it refused to “reconsider its greenhouse gas endangerment finding.” It avoided citing any of the scientists in its employ, instead it quoted the chief scientist of the Environmental Defense Fund, an organization that is entirely devoted to the global warming fraud. That so-called scientist, Dr. Steven Hamburg, said “The science behind EPA’s finding is strong. Now America needs to forge clean energy solutions that reduce the vast pollution discharged into our air.”

That is a lie. Indeed, more CO2 in the atmosphere would be extremely beneficial, aiding larger crop yields to feed Americans and others worldwide. It would improve the health and vitality of the planet’s forests. Ads on television touting “carbon sequestration” are part of the lie.

To sum up, Cap-and-Trade and any control of CO2 is in its simplest terms, a vehicle to destroy the nation’s economy.

You won’t read that in the BusinessWeek article, but it is a truth that cannot be denied and it is a battle for the future of the nation that must be won against this administration, against the EPA, and against the environmental organizations that have devoted themselves to this purpose.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Two Crazy Greens

By Alan Caruba

For a few hours on Wednesday the nation’s attention was on James J. Lee who took hostages at the Discovery Communications headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland. Negotiations failed to sway him from his mission or free his hostages. Lee was a Green zealot and police were left with no alternative than to shoot Lee dead.

Every movement has its crazies, but not every movement is as crazy as the one that calls itself “environmental.” Almost entirely devoid of any real scientific justification, the Greens have devoted decades to literally inventing one bogus crisis after another, culminating with “global warming.”

At the heart of the Green philosophy is the belief that the Earth’s problems are all caused by human beings.

“Humanity are the most destructive, filthy, pollutive creatures around and are wrecking what’s left of the planet with their false morals and breeding culture,” Lee wrote in an eleven-point Internet communiqué.

“Saving the Planet means…decreasing the Human population. That means stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies”, said Lee. “The planet does not need humans.”

We can dismiss Lee as a lunatic, but what are we to do regarding Dr. John P. Holdren, the top science advisor to President Obama?

In a new book, “Control Freaks”, Terence P. Jeffrey, the Editor-in-Chief of CNSnews.com, devotes several pages to Dr. Holdren, along with his colleague, Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich, the author of the 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb.” Both academics have collaborated over the years and both share a contempt for humanity that can only come from fevered, delusional minds devoted to intellectual theories.

In a paper published in 1973 by the California Institute of Technology, Dr. Holdren asked “Is even the present U.S. population of 210 million too large? Should there be zero economic growth as well as zero population growth?” Together with Dr. Ehrlich, he later wrote, “Halting population growth must be done, but that alone would not be enough. Stabilizing or reducing the per capita resources in the United States is necessary, but not sufficient.”

The famous six degrees of separation between James J. Lee and Dr. Holdren is glaringly obvious. Lee’s manifesto said that finding “solutions for Global Warming, Automotive pollution, International Trade, factory pollution, and the whole blasted human economy” was the only way to save the planet.

Tell me that there is a whit of difference between Dr. Holdren’s and Lee’s “solutions”. Tell me there's any difference between Dr. Holdren’s and Dr. Ehrlich’s view that “What is actually required is nothing less than a transformation of human society” and the transformation that Obama has been imposing on the United States of America?

Jeffrey reports that “This transformation would start with population control, which might eventually require involuntary measures if voluntary ones failed.” Dr. Holdren recommended that “Several coercive proposals deserve discussion, mainly because societies may ultimately have to resort to them unless current trends in birth rates are rapidly reversed by other means.”

“Political pressure must be applied immediately to induce the United States government to assume its responsibility to hold the growth of the American population,” wrote Dr. Holdren.

Dr. Holdren is no fan of the human race in general and those enjoying citizenship in the United States in particular, given his lack of regard for free speech. Both he and Dr. Ehrlich at one point advocated making it “illegal for any utility to advertise in such a way as to promote greater demand for power.”

What better way to reduce available electrical power than to advocate switching to wind and solar energy which together barely represent one percent of the electricity generated daily? Neither is dependable and neither can ever meet the needs of the nation.

What better way than to oppose the use of coal for plants that generate just over fifty percent of the nation’s electrical power or to keep a multi-billion dollar repository for spent nuclear waste closed?

What better way to kill millions of people who fall victim to a disease like Malaria than to ban DDT, the most effective way of eliminating mosquitoes from transmitting it?

What better way to embolden a nuclear attack on the nation, killing millions, than to advocate treaties to reduce our nuclear deterrent?

There are no environmental solutions except those similar to the Nazi “final solution” that killed six million of Europe’s Jews and five million other presumed enemies of the state in Germany. Those in charge of Germany in the 1930s were dedicated environmentalists.

So, James J. Lee is one less environmentalist thanks to a SWAT team, but what are we to do about Dr. John P. Holdren and the host of other environmental crazies seeking to eliminate humans from planet Earth?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Big Green Lies are Imploding

By Alan Caruba

As World War Two wound down, in 1945 Italian partisans found Benito Mussolini and his girlfriend trying to flee to Switzerland. They shot both of them and then hung them by their heels in the Piazza Loreto in Milan. He had led the National Fascist Party and had been the 40th prime minister from 1922 until being deposed, jailed, and rescued by his pal Adolf Hitler.

I was reminded of this when I read a list of 1970 Earth Day predictions because, sooner or later, lies implode and the liars must be held accountable.

“We have about five more years at the outside to do something”, said Kenneth Watt, an ecologist, when asked about global warming.

“Civilizations will end within 15 to 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” said George Wald, a Harvard biologist.

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” said Barry Commoner, a Washington University biologist.

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years,” predicted Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and author, none of whose predictions ever came true.

It’s been 40 years since the first Earth Day.

This, of course, brings us to the greatest serial liar of our era, former vice president Al Gore, author of “Earth in the Balance”, the star of “An Inconvenient Truth”, Nobel Prize winner, Oscar winner, and surely worthy of being metaphorically hung by his heels for general repudiation, disdain, and ignominy.

Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com and the GreenHellBlog, reported that Al Gore told a conference call of supporters that the battle to enact a Cap-and-Trade bill, imposing limits on so-called greenhouse gases, and creating “carbon credits” to be bought like medieval indulgences for the remission of sin, that “The federal government has failed us.”

No, what failed was the long, relentless and utterly mendacious campaign to convince people that global warming was an actual event and a genuine threat to the Earth. It never was because it was utter fiction. Well, the part about massive increases in the Earth’s overall temperature was. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old and has gone through a succession of ice ages and warming periods since it began.

To demonstrate how deranged Gore is, he actually blamed a “biased right-wing media…bolstered by professional deniers.” There is The Wall Street Journal and Fox News whose reporting reflects a conservative philosophy and outlook, but the rest of the mainstream media has been so demonstrably left-wing there was little else available to the public until the advent of cable television and the Internet. And they all lied about global warming.

In November 2009 the release of thousands of emails between the small band of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “scientists” revealed they were a cabal of data fabricators who were by then increasingly alarmed that global warming wasn’t happening despite their best efforts to deceive the entire world. The event was dubbed “Climategate.”

Now we learn that a U.S. funded agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has become mired in a new scandal involving numbers for the Great Lakes region that misrepresent average temperatures there. The latest word as of Wednesday, August 11, is that NOAA has removed an entire NOAA-16 satellite data set from its website--leading some to wonder if a decade’s worth of North American data will be discredited.

In sum, do not trust NOAA and most definitely, do not trust the Environmental Protection Agency that is desperately trying to get authorization to regulate carbon dioxide on the grounds that it is causing global warming. This isn’t just a rogue agency. The EPA has the look of a criminal enterprise bent on destroying the U.S. economy.

There is NO global warming and hasn’t been any for a decade as the Earth has been cooling thanks to a predictable lack of sunspot activity known to affect the overall planetary temperatures.

The Green lies are imploding. In the midst of a very ugly recession, the nation’s governors can do us all a favor by ending all funding to the various “environmental” programs tied to the global warming fraud.

The next Congress, if power is transferred to the Republican Party, should begin to trim the budget of billions of bogus “climate” and related “environmental” related programs.

It’s time to send the liars packing. It’s time to regain our fiscal and environmental sanity.

© Alan Caruba, 2010