New on the Web: Alan Caruba, who runs The National Anxiety Center, reminds us of the hype surrounding the Global Warming issue. More examples below.
************************

Steve Milloy's junkscience.com celebrated its 10th anniversary on April 1, 2006. To mark the event, he spotlights 10 junk science stories of the last 10 years (Item #1)

Does Kyoto make economic sense? Not by a long shot, according to Alister McFarquhar in Adam Smith Institute Blog. "The politicization of the scientific establishment and once reputable journals merits real alarm" (Item #2).

The real meaning of "Green ideas sleep furiously"? See Item #3.

In the Financial Post (Toronto), 60 climate experts implore Canada's prime minister to forget about Kyoto. With comments from London and Vancouver (Item #4).
Australian geologist Bob Carter gives similar advice (Item #5)

NASA's James Hansen et al now predict [Draft March 29, 2006 online <ftp://ftp.giss.nasa.gov/outgoing/JEH/bams_29mar20062_all.pdf> ] "a potential super-El Nino and global temperature … to reach record, perhaps dangerous, levels." ".. the Earth is now warmer than at any time in the Holocene…" etc, etc.
But since their evidence is "the global pattern of warmth in the first half-decade of the 21st century," I might point out that the global climate has shown a cooling trend since 1998 (see below).
More important, real experts on El Nino strongly disagree with Hansen (Item #6).
=================
Global Climate is Cooling, not Warming.

Did you know that the official temperature record of NOAA's National Climate Data Center shows a global cooling trend over the past seven years in spite of rapid increases in levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases? You might ask: How is this possible? Doesn't everyone agree that the climate is warming?

The answer is: It all depends on how you define the trend. When you start in 1998, a peak warm year, you will get a cooling trend.

But is this fair? That's the whole point of this exercise. The widely announced loss of Antarctic ice (seen by the GRACE satellite, as published in Science 24 March, 2006) is based on only three years of data. And even if this trend is sustained, it translates into a sea-level rise of only 0.4 mm (less than 0.02 inch) per year.
Isn't science wonderful?
***************************

Commentary on Global Warming politics by Richard Lindzen in WSJ (Item #7) has created a great stir and produced predictable cheap ad hominem attacks. These don't compare, however, with the attack on the distinguished senior scientist Frederick Seitz in - of all places -Vanity Fair. For a proper response , see
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=041406F

Fred Gielow www.youdontsay.org reveals Secrets of Environmentalists (Item #8).
***********************

From our readers:
Ah, now cute and fuzzy walrus cubs come into play for the global warming alarm! Who can resist them? Never mind that Marc Kaufman's "Warming Arctic is Taking a Toll" (WashPost 4/15/06) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401368.html?referrer=email&referrer=email is a shameless bundle of argumentum ad misericordiam, non causa pro causa, and inductive fallacy. It treats sheer speculation as to why the nine cubs were swimming in deep water without their mothers as if it were scientific fact. It assumes human rather (or more) than natural causes for their plight. It involves the grossest faulty induction from insufficient, statistically unrepresentative data. But who cares about logic, evidence, and good science when we have a cause to promote?

And a final reminder:
SAVE THE EARTH. IT'S THE ONLY PLANET WITH CHOCOLATE.
A Happy Easter to all!
******************
******************************************

1. Top Ten Junk Science Stories of the Past Decade
Steve Milloy, April 06, 2006

My web site JunkScience.com celebrated its 10th anniversary on April 1, 2006. To mark the event, this column spotlights 10 big junk science stories of the last 10 years. In no particular order, they are:

1. The most toxic manmade chemical? That's what some called dioxin, a by-product of natural and industrial combustion processes and the "contaminant of concern" in the Vietnam-era defoliant known as Agent Orange. Billions of dollars have been spent studying and regulating dioxin, but debunking the scare only cost a few thousand dollars.
Keying off Ben & Jerry's claim on its ice cream packages that "there is no safe exposure to dioxin," we tested Ben & Jerry's ice cream and found that a single serving contained about 200 times the dioxin that the Environmental Protection Agency says is "safe" - and who's afraid of Ben & Jerry's? Read more…

2. Dial "F" for Fear. Since the 1993 Larry King Live broadcast featuring a man suing a cell phone maker claiming his wife died from a cell phone-induced brain cancer, many cell phone users have worried about phone safety. But studies failed to identify any risk.
The final blow to the scare came in 2002 when notorious trial lawyer Peter Angelos' $800 million lawsuit - alleging a Maryland physician's brain cancer was caused by cell phone use - was dismissed (like the 1993 suit) for lack of evidence. Read more…

3. Powerline scare unplugged. Fears that electric and magnetic fields (EMFs) created by power lines and appliances caused cancer started in 1978. Parents worried about power lines over schools. Consumers worried about electric blankets. Power companies worried about burying power lines. The National Academy of Sciences finally unplugged the scare in October 1996, concluding that no evidence showed EMFs presented a health hazard. Read more…

4. Hormone Hysterics. Tulane University researchers published a 1996 study claiming that combinations of manmade chemicals (pesticides and PCBs) disrupted normal hormonal processes, causing everything from cancer to infertility to attention deficit disorder.
Media, regulators and environmentalists hailed the study as "astonishing." Indeed it was as it turned out to be fraud, according to an October 2001 report by federal investigators. Though the study was retracted from publication, the law it spawned wasn't and continues to be enforced by the EPA. Read more…

5. Secret Science? EPA air pollution rules issued in 1997 governing airborne particulate matter (soot) are estimated to cost $10 billion annually. The EPA claimed soot in ambient air causes tens of thousands of premature deaths every year.
Congress asked the EPA to disclose the scientific data underlying the claims. EPA refused. A subsequently enacted law requiring that taxpayer-funded scientific data used to support regulation be made available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act has yet to be enforced. The EPA is preparing to make those very same rules even more stringent. Read more…

6. Obesity statistics lose weight. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention added to our bodyweight panic in 2004 by announcing that obesity kills 400,000 people annually, a number approaching the death toll attributed to smoking (440,000). Criticism of the estimate from CDC's own statisticians caused the agency in 2005 to back-off the estimate - adjusting it downward by 93 percent to 25,814 annual deaths. Read more…

7. 'Ear-ie' biotech scare. "Who plays God in the 21st century?" captioned an Oct. 11, 1999 full-page ad in the New York Times attacking genetic engineering. Placed by a coalition including Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, the ad featured a photo of a shaved laboratory mouse with what looks like a human ear attached to its back.
The caption stated, "This is an actual photo of a genetically engineered mouse with a human ear on its back." As it turned out, it wasn't a real ear and it had nothing to do with genetic engineering. A template in the shape of a human ear was seeded with human cartilage cells and surgically implanted on the back of a mouse. The cartilage cells grew into the ear-like structure. The technology's purpose is to help children who are either born without ears or who lose their ears through injury. Read more…

8. PETA: Milk drinking makes for future felons. With its web site repeatedly alluding to acts of animal cruelty committed in childhood as being predictors of adult criminality, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sponsored an in-school curricula teaching children that eating meat and drinking milk constitutes "animal cruelty."
PETA's "Milk-Stealing Ming," for example, was depicted with his mouth attached to an unhappy cow's udder, alongside a "wanted poster" describing his crimes and exclaiming, "cows make milk for their babies, not for maniacs like Ming." Read more…

9. Choking on chips. Swedish scientists alarmed us in April 2002 that cooking high-carbohydrate foods - like potatoes and bread - formed acrylamide, a substance linked with cancer in lab animals. But even if lab animals were reasonable predictors of cancer risk in humans - a notion yet to be validated - someone of average bodyweight would have to eat 35,000 potato chips (about 62.5 pounds) per day for life to get an equivalent dose of acrylamide as the lab animals. Read more…

10. The Mother of all junk science controversies. The most important junk science story of the last 10 years is global warming. Though climate varies naturally and ongoing climate change is within that natural variation, the global warming lobby seems bent on railroading us into economy-killing regulation.
The Kyoto Protocol is being ignored by its EU signatories. Global warmers admit that the drastic and impossible step of halting all greenhouse gas emissions would have no impact on climate. Sky-high energy prices threaten our economy. Yet many yearn for global warming regulation. Read more…
Many other important junk science stories could have been mentioned here, but this column is too long already. When I launched JunkScience.com, I never imagined there'd still be a need for it in 2006. After 10 years in the junk science trenches, however, I suppose it's possible that we'll be raising our champagne glasses again in 2016.

----------------------------------------------
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk science expert, an advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
*******************************

2. Does Kyoto make economic sense?
25 March 2006
http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/

By Dr Alister McFarquhar in: Environment
o
An impressive array of distinguished economists, statisticians and resource administrators have delivered a damning critique of the much trailered Stern Review on the economics of climate. Byatt et al. 15 March 2006 [courtesy CCNet subscription - http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Stern-Response-03-06.htm]

They confirm what ASI Blog has been saying for some years. As Sir Nicholas says, "the science... actually shapes all the economics that follows." But although Stern says that there is a consensus among climate scientists, he offers no survey evidence. The Lavoisier Group in Australia notes, well sourced, that the Stern Oxonia papers contain:

'serious gaps and errors'; and it goes on to say that '"The science" of climate change prediction is still in its infancy, and the account of it given in these documents is questionable, misleading and biased'

The Byatt critique must be disingenuous in failing to note that climate science in support of Kyoto is completely politicized. It is ably led by our Chief Scientific Officer, Sir David King, and citing widely discredited IPCC climate reports is a 'consensus' which is confuted daily as Kyoto proves costly and ineffective.

As Distinguished Professor Lindzen says (PDF):

"there is widespread and even rigorous scientific agreement that complete adherence to the Kyoto Agreement would have no discernible impact on climate. This clearly is of no importance to the thousands of negotiators, diplomats, regulators, general purpose bureaucrats and advocates attached to this issue."

The Stern Review will prolong their survival by pretending the science is settled and it is all a matter of risk and cost - as if either could be assessed with any confidence. This is an old dodge. Get the political problem of choice redefined as a technical problem comprehensible only to experts who will support the party line, either confirming human CO2 as the culprit, or escaping from past errors by advancing risk and cost as reasons for a rethink. Tony Blair is already well down the latter path.

Last week I dined with a scientist of approaching five decades professional acquaintance, FRS, Cambridge Head of House, and with countless unimpeachable distinctions. He dismissed my evidence of doubt over climate alarm and the IPCC as a Bush-led conspiracy driven by think tanks financed by US oil and corporate interests. This is a genuine if misguided consensus in Europe. The politicization of the scientific establishment and once reputable journals merits real alarm.
http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Stern-Response-03-06.htm
www.lavoisier.com.au

**********************

3. What You Get When You Mix Red And Green - A Bad Political Climate

Opinion , The Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2006
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=SXCBJ4ZQ2WIPVQFIQMGCFFWAVCBQUIV0?xml=/opinion/2006/04/01/do0102.xml&sSheet=/portal/2006/04/01/ixportal.html

By Charles Moore

In our student days, a few of us used to get together, rather self-consciously, to debate philosophical questions. One topic that interested us was how language could mean something and yet, at the same time, mean nothing. Thus, you could frame an English sentence in which the grammar was correct, and every word made sense, but the whole thing was nonsense.

A well-known example was the sentence "Green ideas sleep furiously". At that time the word "green" referred solely to the colour: "Green" meaning ecological came a bit later, so the sentence was perfectly meaningless.

Today, though, it has acquired significance. It seems to me an almost precise description of the mental attitudes of large parts of the Green movement. Tremendous rage is combined with tremendous lack of inquiry: Green ideas do indeed sleep furiously.

In New Zealand this week, in remarks which, in some respects, showed signs of mental life (and were therefore immediately attacked by Greens), Tony Blair began with the great piety of current Green thought. "In terms of the long-term future," he said, "there is no issue more important than climate change."

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, went further. He told the BBC's Today programme that we must support government "coercion" over enforcing "international protocols" and speed limits on motorways "if we want the global economy not to collapse and millions, billions of people to die".

The evidence for claims like the above is based on one or two generally accepted facts. One is that average temperatures since the 1860s have risen by 0.6 degrees centigrade. Another is that some of this change (though how much is disputed) is man-made.

Upon these rather modest foundations is erected a whole edifice of theory which purports to show not only that change is happening, but also that such change will be disastrous, and that life as we know it will be all but destroyed in the coming century unless we do something dramatic now.

I am not a scientist, so I do not know whether any of the arguments about climate change are sound, but then nor does Mr Blair or Dr Williams, although obviously they are more expensively briefed by experts than I am.

This article can therefore form no judgment on the relative importance of the factors in climate change. Is it true, for example, that the "albedo" of the surface of the Earth is a more vital factor than carbon emissions because of the way the Earth reflects incoming solar radiation? I don't know. What about the changing cycles of the Sun, the Milankovitch cycles of the Earth, volcanoes? Again, I don't know, and nor do they.

What one can ask, though, is why it is so important for so many people to believe that this disaster is coming upon us.

Once upon a time, pollution was something the Left almost approved of. New dams and factories and mines gave more power to the organised working class, and had to be rushed forward to replace the feudal societies which socialism overthrew. Worker control of the means of production was good; therefore production itself was good, and pollution was ignored on the 'you-can't-make-an-omelette-without-breaking-eggs' principle.

In the Eighties, it was Margaret Thatcher, of all people, who was attracted to the theory of global warming. She saw it as a justification for the development of nuclear power. Her experience with the oil crises of the 1970s and the coal strikes of the 1970s and 1980s made her keen to get away from fossil fuels.

But with the end of the Cold War, and therefore the collapse of heavy-industry-for-socialism, the Left began to find in Green issues a new unifying theme. If the workers were not going to get their hands on the means of production, the theory had to shift. Now those means themselves were wicked. Capitalist greed, especially American greed, was destroying the planet, they decided.

Once this wickedness was established, the Left could advance another of its causes - the need for the government to take control of the private and the international to squash the national. And the beauty of it is that everything can come under the rubric of "saving the planet". Whether it's speed limits or disposable nappies or second homes or cheap flights or old fridges or how many babies you have, you can be told not to do whatever it is you are doing. And if you complain, you can be marked out as a selfish pig, one who has what the archbishop calls a "lifestyle that doesn't consider those people who don't happen to share the present moment with us".

To those who like the idea that the state can control everything, it must have been a constant source of irritation that the weather could not be subject to five-year plans and government targets. If you accept climate change theories, it can be, indeed it must be. Without global governmental action, the doctrine teaches, we shall all perish.

At this point, the religious impulse forms an unholy - or rather, a holier-than-thou - alliance with the political. In every age, religions have tended to relate extremes of climate to sin. It was because the people were bad that God sent floods upon the earth, and it was because Noah was a just man that he was allowed to build the Ark, and put the leading representatives of creation into it.

Today, rising sea levels threaten to punish our greed and selfishness, say the Greens. Frightened by this sort of thing, rich men with uneasy consciences who, in the Middle Ages, would have endowed monasteries, today spend fortunes on sacrifices to the goddess Gaia. Johan Eliasch, whose success in life (selling sporting equipment) has been all to do with activity, movement, velocity, has just bought 400,000 acres of rainforest with the intention of doing nothing with it. The modern equivalent of the Ark is the Kyoto Conference.

If you do not accept this, you cannot be part of what in Genesis is called the covenant of the rainbow. You are Bad. Today's servile interviewer asked Dr Williams: "President Bush is a Christian; are his actions compatible with Christian ethics?" Dr Williams thought not.

Under this huge moral blackmail, the prudent politician, particularly the politician who does not have to make actual decisions, bows the knee. David Cameron sticks a solar panel on his roof, just as a New York mayoral candidate wears a shamrock on St Patrick's Day. It is presumably only because Mr Blair knows that he is leaving his job that he dares to point out that China, India and Brazil, which are not bound by the Kyoto targets, are committing sins of emission beside which our modest transgressions hardly trouble the scorer. (China has 30,000 coal mines and car sales are rising by 80 per cent a year.)

If I am right, the politics of climate change are bad. They attract the self-righteous and the self-flagellating, the controlling, the life-denying, the people who don't like people, the people who, like Private Fraser in Dad's Army, think we're "all DOOMED". And when I listen to many of the scientists who join in the argument, I often hear in what they say not the voice of science itself, but of the bad politics, thinly disguised by a white coat.

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006.
******************************

4. Open Kyoto to debate

Sixty scientists call on Harper to revisit the science of global warming
Special to the Financial Post
Thursday, April 06, 2006

An open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper:

Dear Prime Minister:
As accredited experts in climate and related scientific disciplines, we are writing to propose that balanced, comprehensive public-consultation sessions be held so as to examine the scientific foundation of the federal government's climate-change plans. This would be entirely consistent with your recent commitment to conduct a review of the Kyoto Protocol. Although many of us made the same suggestion to then-prime ministers Martin and Chretien, neither responded, and, to date, no formal, independent climate-science review has been conducted in Canada. Much of the billions of dollars earmarked for implementation of the protocol in Canada will be squandered without a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science.
Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada's climate policies are based. Even if the climate models were realistic, the environmental impact of Canada delaying implementation of Kyoto or other greenhouse-gas reduction schemes, pending completion of consultations, would be insignificant. Directing your government to convene balanced, open hearings as soon as possible would be a most prudent and responsible course of action.
While the confident pronouncements of scientifically unqualified environmental groups may provide for sensational headlines, they are no basis for mature policy formulation. The study of global climate change is, as you have said, an "emerging science," one that is perhaps the most complex ever tackled. It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth's climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.
We appreciate the difficulty any government has formulating sensible science-based policy when the loudest voices always seem to be pushing in the opposite direction. However, by convening open, unbiased consultations, Canadians will be permitted to hear from experts on both sides of the debate in the climate-science community. When the public comes to understand that there is no "consensus" among climate scientists about the relative importance of the various causes of global climate change, the government will be in a far better position to develop plans that reflect reality and so benefit both the environment and the economy.
"Climate change is real" is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural "noise." The new Canadian government's commitment to reducing air, land and water pollution is commendable, but allocating funds to "stopping climate change" would be irrational. We need to continue intensive research into the real causes of climate change and help our most vulnerable citizens adapt to whatever nature throws at us next.
We believe the Canadian public and government decision-makers need and deserve to hear the whole story concerning this very complex issue. It was only 30 years ago that many of today's global-warming alarmists were telling us that the world was in the midst of a global-cooling catastrophe. But the science continued to evolve, and still does, even though so many choose to ignore it when it does not fit with predetermined political agendas.
We hope that you will examine our proposal carefully and we stand willing and able to furnish you with more information on this crucially important topic.
CC: The Honourable Rona Ambrose, Minister of the Environment, and the Honourable Gary Lunn, Minister of Natural Resources
- - -
Sincerely,

Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor, isotope hydrogeology and paleoclimatology, Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
Dr. Tad Murty, former senior research scientist, Dept. of Fisheries and Oceans, former director of Australia's National Tidal Facility and professor of earth sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide; currently adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
Dr. R. Timothy Patterson, professor, Dept. of Earth Sciences (paleoclimatology), Carleton University, Ottawa
Dr. Fred Michel, director, Institute of Environmental Science and associate professor, Dept. of Earth Sciences, Carleton University, Ottawa
Dr. Madhav Khandekar, former research scientist, Environment Canada. Member of editorial board of Climate Research and Natural Hazards
Dr. Paul Copper, FRSC, professor emeritus, Dept. of Earth Sciences, Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ont.
Dr. Ross McKitrick, associate professor, Dept. of Economics, University of Guelph, Ont.
Dr. Tim Ball, former professor of climatology, University of Winnipeg; environmental consultant
Dr. Andreas Prokoph, adjunct professor of earth sciences, University of Ottawa; consultant in statistics and geology
Mr. David Nowell, M.Sc. (Meteorology), fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, Canadian member and past chairman of the NATO Meteorological Group, Ottawa
Dr. Christopher Essex, professor of applied mathematics and associate director of the Program in Theoretical Physics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ont.
Dr. Gordon E. Swaters, professor of applied mathematics, Dept. of Mathematical Sciences, and member, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Research Group, University of Alberta
Dr. L. Graham Smith, associate professor, Dept. of Geography, University of Western Ontario, London, Ont.
Dr. G. Cornelis van Kooten, professor and Canada Research Chair in environmental studies and climate change, Dept. of Economics, University of Victoria
Dr. Petr Chylek, adjunct professor, Dept. of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax
Dr./Cdr. M. R. Morgan, FRMS, climate consultant, former meteorology advisor to the World Meteorological Organization. Previously research scientist in climatology at University of Exeter, U.K.
Dr. Keith D. Hage, climate consultant and professor emeritus of Meteorology, University of Alberta
Dr. David E. Wojick, P.Eng., energy consultant, Star Tannery, Va., and Sioux Lookout, Ont.
Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, principal consultant, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, B.C.
Dr. Douglas Leahey, meteorologist and air-quality consultant, Calgary
Paavo Siitam, M.Sc., agronomist, chemist, Cobourg, Ont.
Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist, associate professor, The University of Auckland, N.Z.
Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, emeritus professor of physics, Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, N.J.
Mr. George Taylor, Dept. of Meteorology, Oregon State University; Oregon State climatologist; past president, American Association of State Climatologists
Dr. Ian Plimer, professor of geology, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Adelaide; emeritus professor of earth sciences, University of Melbourne, Australia
Dr. R.M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia
Mr. William Kininmonth, Australasian Climate Research, former Head National Climate Centre, Australian Bureau of Meteorology; former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology, Scientific and Technical Review
Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, former director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute
Dr. Gerrit J. van der Lingen, geologist/paleoclimatologist, Climate Change Consultant, Geoscience Research and Investigations, New Zealand
Dr. Patrick J. Michaels, professor of environmental sciences, University of Virginia
Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, emeritus professor of paleogeophysics & geodynamics, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, Calif.
Dr. Roy W. Spencer, principal research scientist, Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama, Huntsville
Dr. Al Pekarek, associate professor of geology, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Dept., St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minn.
Dr. Marcel Leroux, professor emeritus of climatology, University of Lyon, France; former director of Laboratory of Climatology, Risks and Environment, CNRS
Dr. Paul Reiter, professor, Institut Pasteur, Unit of Insects and Infectious Diseases, Paris, France. Expert reviewer, IPCC Working group II, chapter 8 (human health)
Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, physicist and chairman, Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, Warsaw, Poland
Dr. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, reader, Dept. of Geography, University of Hull, U.K.; editor, Energy & Environment
Dr. Hans H.J. Labohm, former advisor to the executive board, Clingendael Institute (The Netherlands Institute of International Relations) and an economist who has focused on climate change
Dr. Lee C. Gerhard, senior scientist emeritus, University of Kansas, past director and state geologist, Kansas Geological Survey
Dr. Asmunn Moene, past head of the Forecasting Centre, Meteorological Institute, Norway
Dr. August H. Auer, past professor of atmospheric science, University of Wyoming; previously chief meteorologist, Meteorological Service (MetService) of New Zealand
Dr. Vincent Gray, expert reviewer for the IPCC and author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of 'Climate Change 2001,' Wellington, N.Z.
Dr. Howard Hayden, emeritus professor of physics, University of Connecticut
Dr Benny Peiser, professor of social anthropology, Faculty of Science, Liverpool John Moores University, U.K.
Dr. Jack Barrett, chemist and spectroscopist, formerly with Imperial College London, U.K.
Dr. William J.R. Alexander, professor emeritus, Dept. of Civil and Biosystems Engineering, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Member, United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, 1994-2000
Dr. S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences, University of Virginia; former director, U.S. Weather Satellite Service
Dr. Harry N.A. Priem, emeritus professor of planetary geology and isotope geophysics, Utrecht University; former director of the Netherlands Institute for Isotope Geosciences; past president of the Royal Netherlands Geological & Mining Society
Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh, E.G. Bailey professor of energy conversion, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, The Ohio State University
Dr. Sallie Baliunas, astrophysicist and climate researcher, Boston, Mass.
Douglas Hoyt, senior scientist at Raytheon (retired) and co-author of the book The Role of the Sun in Climate Change; previously with NCAR, NOAA, and the World Radiation Center, Davos, Switzerland
Dipl.-Ing. Peter Dietze, independent energy advisor and scientific climate and carbon modeller, official IPCC reviewer, Bavaria, Germany
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, senior marine researcher (retired), Geological Survey of Finland, former professor in marine geology, University of Helsinki, Finland
Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden
Dr. Hugh W. Ellsaesser, physicist/meteorologist, previously with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Calif.; atmospheric consultant.
Dr. Art Robinson, founder, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, Cave Junction, Ore.
Dr. Arthur Rorsch, emeritus professor of molecular genetics, Leiden University, The Netherlands; past board member, Netherlands organization for applied research (TNO) in environmental, food and public health
Dr. Alister McFarquhar, Downing College, Cambridge, U.K.; international economist
Dr. Richard S. Courtney, climate and atmospheric science consultant, IPCC expert reviewer, U.K.
=======================

Kyoto is pointless, say 60 leading scientists
By Philip Sherwell
(Filed: 09/04/2006)

Canada's new Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, has been urged by
more than 60 leading international climate change experts to review the
global warming policies he inherited from his centre-Left predecessor.

In an open letter that includes five British scientists among the
signatories, the experts praise his recent commitment to review the
controversial Kyoto protocol on reducing emissions harmful to the
environment.

"Much of the billions of dollars earmarked for implementation of the
protocol in Canada will be squandered without a proper assessment of recent
developments in climate science," they wrote in the Canadian Financial Post
last week.

They emphasised that the study of global climate change is, in Mr Harper's
own words, an "emerging science" and added: "If, back in the mid 1990s, we
knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not
exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary." Despite claims
to the contrary, there is no consensus among climate scientists on the
relative importance of the various causes of global climate change, they
wrote.

"'Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by
activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and
humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified.

"Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human
impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise'."

The letter is the latest effort by climate change sceptics to counter claims
that there is a consensus that human activity is causing global warming.

C Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2006.
=============

Michael Campbell in the Vancouver Sun
8 April 2006

I guess the 60 climate experts who wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper this week imploring him to "examine the scientific foundation of the federal government's climate-change plans" hadn't read Time magazine's declaration in last week's special edition that "the debate over climate change is over."

Instead of debate, Time (and many other media heavyweights including ABC, USA Today and CNN) is advising us to "Be Worried, Be Very Worried."

Personally, I am worried. Like the 60 scientists who signed the letter to Mr. Harper, I am worried that, "much of the billions of dollars earmarked for implementation of the [Kyoto] Protocol in Canada will be squandered without a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science."

That fear is well-founded, given that our own bureaucrats admitted that the $4 billion spent between 1998 and 2003 on climate change and our plan to meet our commitments outlined in the Kyoto accord was wasted.

Before you think of adding to the 327 hate mails I've received for stating on numerous occasions that Kyoto was a farce, consider that a couple of weeks ago Tom Axworthy, co-chair of a Liberal party renewal commission, summed up the government's climate-change plan by saying it was difficult to understand, but that didn't matter because his party's Kyoto plan "wasn't real anyways."

Last September, one of Kyoto's main proponents, Tony Blair, declared that for all practical purposes the accord was dead because "no country was going to cut its growth." The Canadian record lends credence to that observation given that, despite all the rhetoric to the contrary, we are 30-per-cent away from meeting our Kyoto commitments.

By exempting both the auto and petroleum industries from its Kyoto plans, the government was clearly not interested in implementing a plan that the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation estimated would cost the average Canadian household $3,000 a year for what even proponents of Kyoto admit would yield little progress.

I have no idea whether I should file my concerns over global warming beside my Y2K survival kit, my SARS epidemic face mask, and my avian flu pamphlet. But I do know that there is no scientific consensus as to humanity's impact on climate change. I don't need to be a climate expert to notice the thousands of signatories from the scientific community who declared in the Oregon Petition that "there is no convincing evidence" of the impact of human activities on climate change.

Last year, I noted that the vice-president of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Yury Izrael, was quoted in the online Media Monitor that "there is no proven link between human activity and global warming." I'm also aware that the data behind the famous hockey-stick graph used by so many global warming proponents has now been shown to be deeply flawed, and more importantly was never properly checked by members of the peer-review panels.

I admit that I smiled last week when I read syndicated columnist George Will's reminder that in 1975 the New York Times declared that "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" as he recited the conventional wisdom of the time.

It's hardly a surprise -- given that I've been skeptical of the one-sided coverage the topic has received -- that I would welcome the federal government "convening open, unbiased consultations [so that] Canadians will be permitted to hear from experts on both sides of the debate," as the 60 signatories of the open letter to Mr. Harper suggest, before billions of dollars more are wasted.

Michael Campbell's Money Talks radio show can be heard on CKNW 980 on Saturdays from 8:30 to 10 a.m.
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5. There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998
by Bob Carter
Sunday Telegraph (UK), April 9, 2006 |

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

Does something not strike you as odd here? That industrial carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of earth's recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn't seem at all odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long appreciated - ever since the early 1990s, when the global warming bandwagon first started to roll behind the gravy train of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that such short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin. Yet the public appears to be largely convinced otherwise. How is this possible?

Since the early 1990s, the columns of many leading newspapers and magazines, worldwide, have carried an increasing stream of alarmist letters and articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as "if", "might", "could", "probably", "perhaps", "expected", "projected" or "modelled" - and many involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and principles, that they are akin to nonsense.

The problem here is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike. Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely reported.

Marketed under the imprimatur of the IPCC, the bladder-trembling and now infamous hockey-stick diagram that shows accelerating warming during the 20th century - a statistical construct by scientist Michael Mann and co-workers from mostly tree ring records - has been a seminal image of the climate scaremongering campaign. Thanks to the work of a Canadian statistician, Stephen McIntyre, and others, this graph is now known to be deeply flawed.

There are other reasons, too, why the public hears so little in detail from those scientists who approach climate change issues rationally, the so-called climate sceptics. Most are to do with intimidation against speaking out, which operates intensely on several parallel fronts.

First, most government scientists are gagged from making public comment on contentious issues, their employing organisations instead making use of public relations experts to craft carefully tailored, frisbee-science press releases. Second, scientists are under intense pressure to conform with the prevailing paradigm of climate alarmism if they wish to receive funding for their research. Third, members of the Establishment have spoken declamatory words on the issue, and the kingdom's subjects are expected to listen.

On the alarmist campaign trail, the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, is thus reported as saying that global warming is so bad that Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century. Warming devotee and former Chairman of Shell, Lord [Ron] Oxburgh, reportedly agrees with another rash statement of King's, that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism. And goodly Archbishop Rowan Williams, who self-evidently understands little about the science, has warned of "millions, billions" of deaths as a result of global warming and threatened Mr Blair with the wrath of the climate God unless he acts. By betraying the public's trust in their positions of influence, so do the great and good become the small and silly.

Two simple graphs provide needed context, and exemplify the dynamic, fluctuating nature of climate change. The first is a temperature curve for the last six million years, which shows a three-million year period when it was several degrees warmer than today, followed by a three-million year cooling trend which was accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of the pervasive, higher frequency, cold and warm climate cycles. During the last three such warm (interglacial) periods, temperatures at high latitudes were as much as 5 degrees warmer than today's. The second graph shows the average global temperature over the last eight years, which has proved to be a period of stasis.

The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.

The British Government urgently needs to recast the sources from which it draws its climate advice. The shrill alarmism of its public advisers, and the often eco-fundamentalist policy initiatives that bubble up from the depths of the Civil Service, have all long since been detached from science reality. Internationally, the IPCC is a deeply flawed organisation, as acknowledged in a recent House of Lords report, and the Kyoto Protocol has proved a costly flop. Clearly, the wrong horses have been backed.

As mooted recently by Tony Blair, perhaps the time has come for Britain to join instead the new Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6), whose six member countries are committed to the development of new technologies to improve environmental outcomes. There, at least, some real solutions are likely to emerge for improving energy efficiency and reducing pollution.

Informal discussions have already begun about a new AP6 audit body, designed to vet rigorously the science advice that the Partnership receives, including from the IPCC. Can Britain afford not to be there?

Prof Bob Carter is a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland, engaged in paleoclimate research
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6. Scientist Forecasts 'Super El Nino'
Albuquerque Journal, 8 April 2006
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/metro/449795metro04-08-06.htm
By John Fleck

One of the country's leading climate scientists says there is "a good chance" for a "super El Nino" next winter, a powerful warming in the Pacific Ocean linked to wet winters in the Southwest.

In a draft paper circulated to colleagues, NASA climate researcher James Hansen blames global warming for increasing the chance of extreme El Ninos.

When they happen, such extreme El Ninos can wreak weather havoc worldwide, from deep drought in Australia to flooding in California.

Hansen's new paper drew a flurry of attention among scientists because of his standing as one of the nation's most prominent climate scientists. But the most common reaction was caution.

"The graveyard is filled with missed El Nino forecasts," said Mickey Glantz at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.

Scientists also questioned Hansen's El Nino-global warming link, noting researchers' predictions on the subject vary widely. "There is no consensus," said University of New Mexico climate researcher Dave Gutzler.

One of the strongest reactions came from Mark Cane, at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. "I strongly believe that most of what Jim Hansen writes about El Nino there is incorrect," Cane said in a phone interview Friday.

Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, sent a March 29 e-mail to a list of colleagues describing "a draft paper that I intend to submit for publication within a few days" and including a link to the paper on a public Web site. University of Colorado science policy researcher Roger Pielke Jr. made it public late Thursday afternoon on his blog.

Hansen could not be reached for comment Friday.

El Nino and its counterpart, La Nina, act like a global climate seesaw, tipping back and forth every few years as temperatures and winds across the equatorial Pacific shift.

When the seesaw tips to the warm side- El Nino- New Mexico and the Southwest generally have wet winters. When the seesaw tips to the cool side- La Nina, which we are experiencing now- things here tend to be dry.

Similar patterns of extreme wet weather or drought follow La Nina and El Nino over large parts of the globe, which makes forecasting the phenomena of critical importance.

"Predicting El Nino ... both on the seasonal time scale and for the next century is a key societal need," French climate researcher Eric Guilyardi recently wrote.

In his draft paper, Hansen argues that ocean conditions now, including a significant warming off the coast of Peru, are similar to those that preceded the extreme El Nino in the winter 1997-98- the strongest in the 20th century.

The 1997-98 event brought, in Cane's words, "worldwide notoriety" to El Nino, including a famous "Saturday Night Live" sketch in which the late Chris Farley played a bombastic professional wrestler known as "El Nino."

In the United States, California felt the brunt of El Nino's wrath, suffering massive flooding. New Mexico received above-average precipitation.

Hansen's prediction is at odds with a forecast issued Thursday by the federal government's Climate Prediction Center, which noted significant uncertainty in the computer climate models used to forecast what will happen next winter. None of the 20 models surveyed by federal forecasters are predicting as strong an El Nino as Hansen suggests.

Gutzler urged patience, saying that there is no need for a 2006-07 El Nino forecast now anyway, and by September the forecast will be more clear. "Let's wait till the end of summer," he said.
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7. Climate of Fear
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB114480355145823597.html
COMMENTARY by RICHARD LINDZEN
WSJ, April 12, 2006; Page A14

There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?

The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policy makers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes. After all, who puts money into science -- whether for AIDS, or space, or climate -- where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today. It can also be seen in heightened spending on solar, wind, hydrogen, ethanol and clean coal technologies, as well as on other energy-investment decisions.

But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.

To understand the misconceptions perpetuated about climate science and the climate of intimidation, one needs to grasp some of the complex underlying scientific issues. First, let's start where there is agreement. The public, press and policy makers have been repeatedly told that three claims have widespread scientific support: Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred. In fact, those who make the most outlandish claims of alarm are actually demonstrating skepticism of the very science they say supports them. It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming.

If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion. Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less -- hardly a case for more storminess with global warming.

So how is it that we don't have more scientists speaking up about this junk science? It's my belief that many scientists have been cowed not merely by money but by fear. An example: Earlier this year, Texas Rep. Joe Barton issued letters to paleoclimatologist Michael Mann and some of his co-authors seeking the details behind a taxpayer-funded analysis that claimed the 1990s were likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year in the last millennium. Mr. Barton's concern was based on the fact that the IPCC had singled out Mr. Mann's work as a means to encourage policy makers to take action. And they did so before his work could be replicated and tested -- a task made difficult because Mr. Mann, a key IPCC author, had refused to release the details for analysis. The scientific community's defense of Mr. Mann was, nonetheless, immediate and harsh. The president of the National Academy of Sciences -- as well as the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union -- formally protested, saying that Rep. Barton's singling out of a scientist's work smacked of intimidation.

All of which starkly contrasts to the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Senator Al Gore. In 1992, he ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists -- a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libelously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.

Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.

And then there are the peculiar standards in place in scientific journals for articles submitted by those who raise questions about accepted climate wisdom. At Science and Nature, such papers are commonly refused without review as being without interest. However, even when such papers are published, standards shift. When I, with some colleagues at NASA, attempted to determine how clouds behave under varying temperatures, we discovered what we called an "Iris Effect," wherein upper-level cirrus clouds contracted with increased temperature, providing a very strong negative climate feedback sufficient to greatly reduce the response to increasing CO2. Normally, criticism of papers appears in the form of letters to the journal to which the original authors can respond immediately. However, in this case (and others) a flurry of hastily prepared papers appeared, claiming errors in our study, with our responses delayed months and longer. The delay permitted our paper to be commonly referred to as "discredited." Indeed, there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In
2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming -- not whether it would actually happen.

Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers.
--------------------------
Mr. Lindzen is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.
=============

Professor claims intimidation for scientists who don't support global warming theory

By Gretchen Randall, April 13, 2006

Issue: Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says in a piece in Opinion Journal April 12, 2006 that scientists who disagree with the alarmists predicting catastrophic global warming risk loss of grants and being discredited in the media. He says papers which question "accepted climate wisdom" are often refused at scientific journals such as Science and Nature as "being without interest."

Lindzen also claims that scientists who "dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse."

One result of the alarmism about global climate change, according to Lindzen, is increased funding for science research. He says, "After all, who puts money into science, , , where there is nothing really alarming?" Federal spending on climate research has risen to $1.7 billion today from a "few hundred million dollars pre-1990."

Comment 1: "Indeed there is a strange reluctance to actually find out how climate really behaves. In 2003, when the draft of the U.S. National Climate Plan urged a high priority for improving our knowledge of climate sensitivity, the National Research Council instead urged support to look at the impacts of the warming not whether it would actually happen."

Comment 2: Alarmism is also what environmental groups use with great success to fund their programs. That's why you see ads asking for help in saving a particular "endangered" animal.

Comment 3: "Alarm rather than genuine scientific curiosity, it appears, is essential to maintaining funding. And only the most senior scientists today can stand up against this alarmist gale, and defy the iron triangle of climate scientists, advocates and policymakers."

Background and links: In his article, Lindzen names scientists who have lost grants or their jobs for "questioning climate alarmism." Read ""Climate of Fear" at: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220 or
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/library/co2weekly/20060414_01/20060414_04.html
==========================

Laurie David's screed on Richard Lindzen
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laurie-david/richard-lindzen-global-w_b_19010.html

Laurie David (author of the piece on Huffington's website) has a potential conflict of interest as co-producer of Mr. Gore's upcoming movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
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8. Environmentalism secrets
By Fred Gielow,April 1, 2006

If you think environmentalism is all about saving the Earth, protecting the whales, stopping pollution, and the like, here's some news. It's not! Listen to what environmental advocates themselves have to say:
·

"I think if we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don't think it's possible under capitalism."
Judi Bari, Earth First! member.[Environmentalism equals replacing capitalism with socialism.]

"The environmentalist's dream is an egalitarian society, based on rejection of economic growth, a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equally."
Aaron Wildavsky, political scientist and professor.
[Environmentalism equals making everybody equal; that is, it's communism.]
·

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits... [C]limate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world."
Christine Stewart, Canadian Environment Minister.
[Environmentalism equals changing the world.]

· "We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists, and their projects... We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to wilderness millions of tens of millions of acres of presently settled land."
David Foreman, EarthFirst! member.
[Environmentalism equals a return to primitive living.]

· "We've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
Timothy Wirth, Clinton Administration U.S. Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, and one of a number of politicians (including Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank, Al Gore, John Kerry, Christopher Shays, and others) who were designated as "Green Leadership for the '90s."
[Environmentalism equals changing policy by claiming - even without substantiation - it's necessary to save the world's environment.]

· "[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios [about global warming and destruction of the environment], make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts one might have... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
Stephen Schneider, Stanford University environmentalist.
[Environmentalism equals lies "if necessary."]

· "We routinely wrote scare stories about the hazards of chemicals, employing words like "cancer," and "birth defects" to splash a little cold water in reporters' faces... Our press reports were more or less true... Few handouts, however, can be completely honest, and ours were no exception... We were out to whip the public into a frenzy about the environment."
Jim Sibbison, former EPA press officer.
[Environmentalism equals government-sponsored deception.]

· "Not only do journalists not have a responsibility to report what skeptical scientists have to say about global warming, they have a responsibility not to report what these scientists say."
Ross Gelbspan, former editor of The Boston Globe.
[Environmentalism equals silencing debate, and stifling contrary opinions.]

"I would freely admit that on [global warming] we have crossed the boundary from news reporting to advocacy."
Charles Alexander, Time magazine science editor.
[Environmentalism equals indoctrination.]

Writer John Meredith summarizes:
"The radical environmental movement is destroying America. It is turning our society, once based on individual freedom and responsibility, into little more than mindless followers of regulations established at the whim of unelected special-interest groups."

Walter Williams has the last word:
"While the Soviet Union has collapsed, communism is not dead. It has [been] repackaged under a new name: Environmentalism. Communism is about extensive government regulation and control by elites, and so is environmentalism."
----------------------------------------
Fred Gielow is the author of "You Don't Say," : www.youdontsay.org.
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