Google is jumping on the global warming bandwagon with its support of ‘Earth Hour’.

Earth Hour Coverage Should be grounded

…all four big global temperature tracking outlets, including Britain’s Hadley Centre, now say global temperatures over the past year have dropped sharply.

NASA adds that the oceans have also cooled for the past few years.

But it doesn’t stop them from ‘raising awareness’ to the global warming lie, now does it.?

Here’s an update to the Navy and sonar training fiasco.

A federal judge in Los Angeles on Monday rejected the Bush administration’s attempt to exempt Navy sonar training from key environmental laws, saying that there’s no real emergency to justify overruling court-ordered protections for whales and dolphins.

This is disaster in the making.

The January order requires the Navy to shut down sonar when whales or other marine mammals are within 2,200 yard of a vessel and forbids the use of submarine-detecting sonar in areas where whales are abundant.

The Navy maintains that the lives of its sailors depend on being properly trained to detect vessels operated by China, Iran, North Korea and other potentially hostile nations.

From CNN.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — A federal judge has thrown out a class action lawsuit against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the failure of levees in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.

So when is the suit going to be filed against the Environmentalists for preventing the Army Corps of Engineers from upgrading the levees?

NRO: Greens Vs. Levees

a suit filed by environmental groups at the U.S. District Court in New Orleans claimed the Corps had not looked at “the impact on bottomland hardwood wetlands.” The lawsuit stated, “Bottomland hardwood forests must be protected and restored if the Louisiana black bear is to survive as a species, and if we are to ensure continued support for source population of all birds breeding in the lower Mississippi River valley.” In addition to the Sierra Club, other parties to the suit were the group American Rivers, the Mississippi River Basin Alliance, and the Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi Wildlife Federations.

It would seem to me that those environmentalists should be held responsible for the devastation after Katrina and the failure of the levees.

The lawsuit was settled in 1997 with the Corps agreeing to hold off on some work while doing an additional two-year environmental impact study. Whether this delay directly affected the levees that broke in New Orleans is difficult to ascertain.

But not that difficult to visualize. Ignoring the problem and pretending it will go away isn’t really a strategy. There are consequences to the choices we make in this world, despite leftists’ blindness of that fact.

But it is just one illustration of a destructive river-management philosophy that took hold in the ‘90s, influenced the Clinton administration, and had serious policy consequences. Put simply, it’s impossible to understand the delays in building levees without being aware of the opposition of the environmental groups to dams, levees, and anything that interfered with the “natural” river flow. The group American Rivers, which leads coalitions of eco-groups on river policy, has for years actually called its campaign, “Rivers Unplugged.”

Not addressing the levee problem had a direct impact on New Orleans after Katrina.

If we bring back wetlands and swamps, we’ll have a terrible mosquito problem. And then we’ll be fighting again about the use of DDT.

From Reuters.

At first I thought this headline was a joke or a satire. I imagined a dandelion or a sunflower spitting seeds at cows in a field that were deemed unfit mothers. Feminist cows who decided not to have little cows so they could pursue their careers or something.

And when I got into the article it was still hard to tell what it was, because they were talking about waterboarding cows and making them get up to walk to the slaughterhouse.

I’ve heard about how they treat chickens…so this isn’t coming as much of a surprise…from a PETA-like perspective.

Except for the fact that we’re being TOLD that we’re eating healthy beef…and now it’s coming out that we’re probably eating tainted sick beef from sick cows …which leads me to believe that there’s probably some of that mad cow disease out there and the government is - as usual - lying to us.

Oh wait, this is for elderly people, needy families and school lunches! Well, it’s probably okay then.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Humane Society said on Wednesday a California slaughterhouse was using a range of torture including waterboarding to prod unfit animals into the slaughterhouse so they could be processed into food that may have ultimately ended up in school lunch programs.

That’s a weird sentence.

The Humane Society displayed a video from its own undercover investigation that it said showed abuse by workers at the Hallmark Meat Packing Co of Chino, California. However, the name of the plant was not visible in the video.

The video showed workers kicking cows, ramming them with forklift blades, applying electric shocks and even using a hose to simulate the feeling of drowning so the animals would revive long enough to pass federal inspection.

What kind of inspection is that? Do they keep the inspectors in a closed office with no windows until the cow stumbles to its feet, or is the ‘inspector’ helping? I can’t figure out how this works.

“The attempt was to make them so distressed and to cause them so much suffering that these animals would get up and walk into the slaughterhouse,” Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States, told reporters, [sic]

With the way greens feel about animals, it’s just hard to tell what’s going on here.

This is one of the weirdest damned articles I’ve ever read.

He said the plant’s use of injured and sick cows was not an isolated incident in the United States and he called on the USDA to tighten regulations regarding the ban on processing of “downer” cows.

Give us more government! Government is our savior!

SHEESH.

Trackposted to The Virtuous Republic, Rosemary’s Thoughts, The Random Yak, third world county, Right Truth, Shadowscope, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, Big Dog’s Weblog, A Newt One, Conservative Cat, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

I couldn’t find a lot about this, but after ordering a couple of books, I have more information. My husband and I are both poring over these books to counter the environazi hysteria that’s taken over; even in our office buildings from blind people who are just willing to accept what’s fed to them by the hysterical MSM.

xformed over at The Wide Awakes who’s actually worked in the field of ‘recycling’ and has some familiarity with science, lol, who filled us all in.

So, a couple of scientists (ones who “get it”) (Frank Keppler and Thomas Roeckmann) do some research: “Plants, Methane and Global Warming.” Here’s a summary sidebar quoted (page 54):

Overview/Nature’s Surprise

* The established view [ed - The wackadoos try to tell others what is true in the face of other evidence] has been that methane (natural gas) is produced by microbes that thrive without oxygen, but experiments [ed - the “study” real scientists do] by the authors’ team unexpectedly [ed - sounds like many discoveries of not too arrogant humans] revealed that living plants [ed - not animals, and not humans] also manufacture this potent [ed - that’s a really industrial strength word] greenhouse gas.

There is more to the observations, but you get the point: methane gas isn’t a pollutant, it’s something that’s produced in nature. DUH! Just like CO2; the two of them are produced when vegetation rots, for one thing. And the natural response to that is; vegetation grows because it feeds on those gases. Then xformed asks today’s million dollar question:

If the understanding of plants making methane is a newly acquired knowledge point, how can it be summarily dismissed as having no effect on the “current” conditions?

Because that’s the way it’s done today, that’s how. Because if it doesn’t fit into their preconceived notion, you just throw out that data.

Like the El Nino effect, the Sun, and any other effect on temperatures that ruin the dramatic claim that we’re causing ‘warming’. They had to inflate man’s contribution to ‘warming’ in order to compel us to take action, and they did so by manipulating the models and the math. Remember those? Thrown into the memory hole, along with the middle ages temperatures which screwed up their hockey stick.

And if all that doesn’t give you pause about this laughable idea, there’s this at the end of xformed’s post at TWA “Well Isn’t This Interesting?“:

Dateline 2/13/2007, Washington, DC: HOUSE HEARING ON ‘WARMING OF THE PLANET’ CANCELED AFTER SNOW/ICE STORM (H/T: Drudge Report)

You just can’t make this stuff up.

John McCain’s ‘Global Warming’ Hearings Blasted by Climatologist

McCain raps Bush on global warming

The turning point on global warming-By John McCain and Joe Lieberman

THERE IS NOW a broad consensus in this country, and indeed in the world, that global warming is happening, that it is a serious problem, and that humans are causing it.

There is no consensus in the scientific community, that’s a lie. There is no consensus among dissenting scientists in touch with the scientific method!

Climatologists Blast McCain’s Hearings on ‘Global Warming’

But…McCain was also on the Senate Committee to oversee the POW/MIA issue from the Vietnam Era. He and Senator Kerry successfully buried the issue in order to normalize relations with Vietnam - for trade. And the families who’ve been waiting over 20 years to find out what happened to their loved ones, will probably never find out now. McCain is an embarrassment to America…McCain Feingold was a mistake. He’s made so many blunders it’s a wonder he’s still in front of the public eye–and still holds a seat in the Senate–not to mention running for President.

It’s just as bad as watching Hitlery parading around crying with her plants in the audience to draw attention to how much of a Christian she is, etc.-

I really don’t have time to get into the rest of this–but I’ll take this one idiotic comment from the many hysterical comments from the man in the bathtub–since he’s completely off his rocker in terms of self control at this point. He quotes me:

The peppered moth doesn’t even sit on tree trunks; they were placed there for a photo op.

Trofim Lysenko’s ghost from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub says here: Well, that’s wrong. Think about this hard: A tree has bark and leaves. Do the moths rest on leaves? Almost never. What’s left?

Ok, Lysenko, here are the facts:

The fairytale of England’s famous peppered moths (Biston betularia) goes like this.

The moth comes in light and dark (melanic) forms. The assumption was that pollution from the Industrial Revolution darkened the tree trunks, mostly by killing the light-coloured covering lichen (plus darkening it with soot).

The lighter moths, which were well-camouflaged against the light background, now ‘stood out,’ and so the birds ate them at a higher ratio to the dark-colored moths, so the proportion of dark moths increased dramatically. Later, as pollution was cleaned up, the light moth became predominant again.

H.B. Kettlewell, who performed these classic experiments, said that if Darwin had seen this, ‘He would have witnessed the consummation and confirmation of his life’s work.’

This is a far-fetched and exaggerated claim, LOL…(but so was Rachel Carson’s claim that the American Robin was on the verge of extinction, that swallows were decreasing, or that DDT causes cancer, or Wurster’s claims about DDT’s magnifying effect in the food chain in the oceans, Erlich’s claims and apocalyptic predictions about the population explosion, Gore’s claims about CO₂, previous environmental hysteria over an upcoming ice age, the hockey stick, etc. This list is getting pretty long.) The textbook story of the peppered moths achieves little more than pointing out gene frequency shifting back and forth, within a single species. This shifting doesn’t add the sort of complex design information necessary for primordial soup-to-man evolution.

The other problem with it is that peppered moths don’t even rest on tree trunks during the day. Kettlewell attracted the moths into traps either with light, or with female pheromones—in each case, they only flew at night. Now think about that; this makes total sense. When do you see any moths flying? When you’re ducking into a well-lit building at night and trying to avoid the moths attracted to it. They’re attracted to streetlights or streetlamps at night. They fly to the interior light when you open your car door when it’s dark out. They are nocturnal, and active mostly at night. The question is, where are all these moths (Biston betularia) during the daytime?

Cyril Clarke, a British biologist who investigated the peppered moth, wrote:

‘But the problem is that we do not know the resting sites of the moth during the day time. … In 25 years we have found only two betularia on the tree trunks or walls adjacent to our traps (one on an appropriate background and one not), and none elsewhere.’

The moths filmed being eaten by birds were laboratory-bred, which Kettlewell placed on the tree trunks; they were so languid, that he had to warm them up on the hood of his car.

What about the infamous still photos of the moths on the tree trunks? One paper described how it was done—dead moths were glued to the tree. University of Massachusetts biologist Theodore Sargent helped glue moths onto trees for a NOVA documentary. He says textbooks and films have featured ‘a lot of fraudulent photographs.’

Kettlewell assumed (1) that the main defect of his release method was an unnaturally high density of moths, affecting merely the tempo of predation; and (2) that he could disregard the observation that many moths would have preferred to take up positions higher in the trees. Before the 1980’s most investigators shared Kettlewell’s second assumption, and many of them found it convenient to conduct predation experiments using dead specimens glued or pinned to tree trunks (e.g., Clarke and Sheppard 1966, Bishop 1972, Lees and Creed 1975, Bishop and Cook 1975, Steward 1977b, Murray et al. 1980). (Wells)

There is a very poor correlation between the lichen covering and respective moth populations. When one group of researchers glued dead moths onto trunks in an unpolluted forest, the birds took more of the dark (less camouflaged) ones, as expected. But their traps captured four times as many dark moths as light ones—the opposite of textbook predictions.

University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne agrees that the peppered moth story, which was ‘the prize horse in our stable,’ has to be thrown out.

This realization gave him the same feeling as when he found out that Santa Claus was not real.

When biologists looked beyond Birmingham and Dorset, where Kettlewell had conducted his experiments, they found discrepancies between Kettlewell’s theory and the actual geographical distribution of melanic moths. For example, if melanic moths in polluted woodlands enjoyed as much of a selective advantage as Kettlewell’s experiments seemed to indicate, then they should have completely replaced typicals in heavily polluted areas such as Manchester (Bishop and Cook 1980, Mani 1990). This never happened, however, indicating that factors other than selective predation must be affecting melanic frequencies. Some investigators attributed the discrepancy to heterozygote advantage (Clarke and Sheppard 1966, Lees and Creed 1975), but it has since been established that there is no evidence for this (Creed et al. 1980, Lees 1981, Mani 1982, Cook et al. 1986). (Wells, 1999)

Regrettably, students have been indoctrinated with fraudulent ‘proof’ of evolution, just as the 30-year period of Lysenko’s biologists suggests from their failed experiments (like the 50-liter milk a day producing cows that never materialized). But fervently feverishly and blindly clinging to the Lysenkoist ideology seems to me to be an example of what Ed at Millard Fillmore’s bathtub himself said in reference to me–‘you can’t parody scientific illiteracy’.–But what he’s revealing is the blind faith that Darwinists have in their pseudoscience and their victorian-age myth.

I’ll have much more on this as soon as time permits, but real science has exposed Piltdown Man’s skull as the careful dying of an oragutan’s skull and that of a human’s to appear as one-and-the-same, vestigial organs have functions, which is why they are no longer performing tonsillectomies like they once did as an example, haeckel’s embryos are frauds, there is no evidence in biology, genetics, the fossil record or taxonomy for evolution. Science has advanced, but the victorian-age religionists of the myth continue propping the already debunked propaganda as facts.

It doesn’t hold up under scrutiny with an open mind; which is what real scientific inquiry requires.

1. Kettlewell, H. (1959), ‘Darwin’s missing evidence’ in Evolution and the fossil record, readings from Scientific American, W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, p. 23, 1978.
2. Clarke, C.A. & G.S. Mani & G. Wynne, Evolution in reverse: clean air and the peppered moth, Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 26:189–199, 1985; quote on p. 197.
3. Calgary Herald, p. D3, 21 March 1999.
4. Lees,D.R. & Creed, E.R. Industrial melanism in Biston betularia: the role of selective predation, Journal of Animal Ecology 44:67–83, 1975.
5. Coyne, Nature 396(6706):35–36.
6. The Washington Times, p. D8, 17 January 1999.
7. Lees, D.R. & Creed, E.R. ref. 4.
8. Unfettered by evolutionary fantasies, researchers can now look for the real causes of these population shifts. Could the dark moth variation actually have a function, like absorbing more warmth? Could it reflect conditions in the caterpillar stage? In a different nocturnal moth species, Sargent has found that the plants eaten by the larvae may induce or repress the expression of such ‘melanism’ in adult moths (see Sargent T.R. et al. in M.K. Hecht et al, Evolutionary Biology 30:299–322, Plenum Press, New York, 1998).
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WSJ’s article, “Not so Hot” spells it out.

The latest twist in the global warming saga is the revision in data at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, indicating that the warmest year on record for the U.S. was not 1998, but rather 1934 (by 0.02 of a degree Celsius).

Canadian and amateur climate researcher Stephen McIntyre discovered that NASA made a technical error in standardizing the weather air temperature data post-2000. These temperature mistakes were only for the U.S.; their net effect was to lower the average temperature reading from 2000-2006 by 0.15C.

The new data undermine another frightful talking point from environmentalists, which is that six of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1990. Wrong. NASA now says six of the 10 warmest years were in the 1930s and 1940s, and that was before the bulk of industrial CO2 emissions were released into the atmosphere.

Of course a lot of us have been hip to this for quite some time, but the liberals are still clutching to their faith of the Church of Global Warming with the hopes they can just shove it down our throats. This Hansen fellow is a real piece of work:

James Hansen, NASA’s ubiquitous climate scientist and a man who has charged that the Bush Administration is censoring him on global warming, has been unapologetic about NASA’s screw up. He claims that global warming skeptics – “court jesters,” he calls them — are exploiting this incident to “confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change.”

So let’s get this straight: Mr. Hansen’s agency makes a mistake in a way that exaggerates the extent of warming, and this is all part of a conspiracy by “skeptics”? It’s a wonder there aren’t more of them.

This is interesting, passed on to me by Rotty through email, since he knows I always enjoy a good row.

The standoff begins with the Devil’s Kitchen, pointing to a post by Tom Nelson at Climate Resistance who took on the quest for the holy grail; the qualifications of the IPCC “climate experts” whose “science” we aren’t allowed to question. This, because the “debate is over” and the “science is settled”, despite the 400 dissenters that showed up in Bali. The truth of the matter is, The Church of Global Warming doesn’t want to hear any other opinions, which is not science. Science is supposed to be open to honest testing of a hypothesis. The only why you get a real answer is if you’re open to finding out what the truth is. This isn’t the case in terms of the global warming freaks.

So we downloaded IPCC WGII’s latest report on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. There were 380 contributors to the report [PDF of contributors].

*snip*

..so we focused on the contributors who operate in the UK. Of the 51 UK contributors to the report, there were 5 economists, 3 epidemiologists, 5 who were either zoologists, entomologists, or biologists. 5 worked in civil engineering or risk management / insurance. 7 had specialisms in physical geography (we gave the benefit of the doubt to some academics whose profiles weren’t clear about whether they are physical or human geographers). And just 10 have specialisms in geophysics, climate science or modelling, or hydrology. But there were 15 who could only be described as social scientists. If we take the view that economics is a social science, that makes 20 social scientists. This gives the lie to Dessler’s claim that IPCC contributors are analogous to medical doctors.

Emphasis mine. HA! Just as in the case of Rachel Carson, the marine biologist, we’re supposed to ignore the real data for the purpose of kneeling at the environmental alter and sacrifice blood and treasure on the basis of lies. This also gives the lie to “climatologists’” claims in general about warming, that we’re not supposed to question the holy writ that comes from the IPCC panel, because they’re the ‘experts’.

We were surprised by the results. Was the prevalence of social scientists from the UK representative of the whole group? We decided to repeat the test for the contributors based in the USA.

Of the 70 US contributors, there were 7 economists, 13 social scientists, 3 epidemiologists, 10 biologists/ecologists, 5 engineers, 2 modellers/statisticians, 1 full-time activist (and 1 part time), 5 were in public health and policy, and 4 were unknowns. 17 worked in earth/atmospheric sciences. Again, we gave the benefit of the doubt to geographers where it wasn’t clear whether their specialism was physical, or human geography.

1 full-time activist and 1 part-time! This blows my mind and is an outrage! I’m certain that the same results would be achieved by going down the entire list, no matter where they’re originally from. This is propaganda masquerading as science!

In a follow-up post, Dessler has set about ‘Busting the ‘consensus busters” by ridiculing the qualifications of Inhofe’s 400 experts, starting with a certain Thomas Ring. In the comments section he justifies this approach:

I agree it would be quicker to simply note the qualified skeptics on the list (there are probably a few dozen), but, from a rhetorical point of view, I think pointing out these immensely unqualified members of the list is more effective.

Ring’s credentials include a degree from Case Western Reserve University in chemical engineering, still more impressive than the ones the IPCC panel has trotted out. This is even MORE amusing:

Well, we can all play that game… Included as contributors to WGII are Patricia Craig, Judith Cranage, Susan Mann, and Christopher Pfeiffer, all from Pennsylvania State University. It’s not that these people aren’t experts in their field - they probably are. Our problem with their inclusion on the list of Contributors to the IPCC WGII Fourth Assessment report is that their jobs are (in order) website-designer, administrative assistant (x2), and network administrator.

YIKES!

Also on the list is Peter Neofotis who appears to be a 2003 graduate of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology from Columbia. Are there many experts in anything who graduated in 2003? Would Dessler take his sick child to a doctor, who, according to our understanding of medical training, would have not yet qualified? Also at Columbia is Marta Vicarelli, who is a PhD candidate in ’sustainable development’. Can she be the amongst the world’s leading experts on sustainability? It seems hard to take the claim seriously. Or what about Gianna Palmer at Wesleyan University, who, as far as we can tell, will not graduate from university until 2010?

Dessler has inadvertently thrown a light on what the real problem is with the agenda-driven IPCC ‘climate’ reports.

And yet Dessler insists that

Inhofe’s list is chock full of people without any recent, relevant research on the problem. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s why they’re skeptics: people with the relevant experience are immediately persuaded by the evidence. This should be compared to the IPCC, which includes exclusively people with recent, relevant expertise on the problem.

There are, in fact, only about 7,000 climatologists in total, because climate was a stalled profession involving many different disciplines, and climate was considered to be something in constant flux. But still, those that are in Inhofe’s list are at least engineers, instead of administrative assistants, activists, web designers and students who aren’t destined to graduate until 2010, and so on.

Anything which can be thrown at the sceptics can be thrown at IPCC contributors.

That is not to say that social scientists and computer programmers have nothing to offer the world, or the IPCC process. They are crucial in fact. What it is to say, however, is that, when social scientists, computer programmers and administrative assistants comprise a significant proportion of IPCC contributors, the global warmer mantra that the IPCC represents the world’s top 2500 climate scientists is just plain old-fashioned not true.

It’s just a plain old-fashioned LIE, but it’s typical of the pipedreams of leftist environmentalists. Inhofe’s list is comprised of these notable characters:

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.

Ignoring these people, who are not students destined to graduated in 2010, and whose expertise in the area of science could definitely be greater than that of an administrative assistant, web designer and activists–Dessler concentrated on Thomas Ring, a chemical engineer by training. As if that is an example of someone who’s not ‘qualified’ in comparison with the IPCC nuts behind their exaggerated fictional reports!

DK at the Devil’s Kitchen concludes:

The IPCC are liars and as the whole anthropogenic climate change crap unravels—even on the Left—they cling ever more desperately to their outdated theories by propagating yet more obfuscations, half-truths and outright lies.

Wake up, people!—we are being lied to, and it is so that the political establishment can make complete slaves of us all.

Also see this article at the Wall Street Journal entitled “Not So Hot”.

From Steve Milloy:

Green has traditionally been the color of the deadly sin of envy. But this year, a trendy upstart mounted a serious challenge to envy’s claim.

Here are green hypocrisy’s top 10 poster children for 2007.

1. Al Gore’s Inconvenient Lifestyle. While the former veep and nouveau-$100 millionaire jets around the world squawking about the “planet having a fever” and demanding that we all lower our standard of living, his own personal electricity use is 20 times the national average, including an indoor pool costing $500/month to heat.

While Gore deflected criticism of his inconvenient electric bill during March congressional testimony by saying he purchased “green” electricity, the truth is, he didn’t start doing so until 2007.

2. Google’s Sky Pig. A photo-op of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin plugging-in a hybrid car was part of the search engine giant’s June announcement promising carbon neutrality by 2008. But how this PR-fluff squares with the so-called “Google party jet” — Page and Brin’s gargantuan personal Boeing 767, which burns about 1,550 gallons/hour — is any one’s guess.

3. RFK Jr. Tilts at Windmills. Outspoken global warming activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently railed against coal-produced electricity because “climate change is the most urgent threat to our collective survival.”

Meanwhile, Kennedy vigorously campaigns against a proposed Cape Cod wind farm that would generate CO2-free electricity because it would “impoverish the experience of millions of tourists and residents and fishing families who rely on the sound’s unspoiled bounties.” Unmentioned in Kennedy’s tirades, however, is the windmill’s unfortunate proximity to his family’s famed Hyannis Port compound.

4. The U.N.’s ‘Bali High’. Early December will witness 10,000 climateers descending upon the paradisiacal island resort of Bali for the 13th annual U.N. global warming meeting. The reason for much jet and limo travel — and other prodigious greenhouse gas generating activity associated with such a mega-conference — is relatively modest: setting the agenda and timeframe for a post-Kyoto treaty. Sure seems like something that could have been handled in a less carbon-intensive way — either by Internet and video conferencing or, if meeting is necessary, somewhere in North America or Europe where most key attendees are based.

5. Nancy Nukes Nukes. Supposedly concerned that “global warming and energy independence…have profound implications for our nation’s economic competitiveness, national security, environmental quality and public health,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi created the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to take the congressional lead on those issues.

So who did Speaker Pelosi pick to chair the committee? None other than long-time nuclear power opponent Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who appeared with anti-nuke celebrities Bonnie Raitt and Jackson Browne at an October Capitol Hill press conference to denounce legislation promoting the development of ultra-green nuclear power.

6. Every home a Superfund site? “Mercury is highly toxic to everyone, but particularly to children and developing fetuses,” says the activist group Environmental Defense, a long-time campaigner against mercury from power plant emissions and in automobile convenience lighting.

So it came as quite a surprise when the group began advocating that consumers bring the “highly toxic” mercury into their homes in the form of compact fluorescent light bulbs in order to reduce power plant CO2 emissions. CFLs are so hazardous, according to public health officials however, that special safety precautions must be taken for disposal or if the bulbs break.

7. Doesn’t everyone own a NASA scientist? In March 2007, NASA’s climate alarmist-in-chief James Hansen criticized “special interests” campaigning against climate regulation.

“By larding the campaign coffers of numerous politicians, the fossil fuel industry has succeeded in subverting the democratic principle…Until the public indicates sufficient interest, and puts pressure on political systems, special interests will continue to rule.”

Though Hansen poses as a humble civil servant, it recently came to light that his alarmist efforts have been bankrolled by leftist billionaire and MoveOn.org sugar-daddy George Soros. Doesn’t Soros qualify as a “special interest,” Dr. Hansen?

8. Like a Virgin’s Carbon Footprint. London’s Daily Mail reported (“What planet are they on?, July 7) on the climate consciousness of Madonna and other Live Earth performers.

“[T]he pop stars headlining the concerts are the absolute antithesis of the message they promote with Madonna leading the pack of the worst individual rock star polluters in the world… Madonna alone has an annual carbon footprint of 1,018 tons… the average Briton produces just 10 tons… [her] Confessions tour last year produced 440 tons of carbon pollution in just four months, simply in flights between venues.”

That’s one small footprint for the average Brit, but one giant footprint for celebrity-kind.

9. The NBC Poppycock. NBC-Universal kicked-off of its “Green is Universal” initiative by dimming the studio lights — but not two giant video screens and advertisements — during a break in the Nov. 4 Cowboys-Eagles game.

Candle-lit host Bob Costas then cut to video of Today show personalities Matt Lauer, Al Roker and Ann Curry reporting about climate change from the Arctic, Amazon and Antarctic, respectively. None gave even a nod to the energy-hogging effort required to send them and crews to do such pointless broadcasts from exotic locales.

10. California’s Hypocritenator. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared in June 2005 that, “California will be a leader in the fight against global warming…the time for action is now.”

But just two years later, the Los Angeles Times reported that state efforts had been derailed by the governor’s mismanagement and deceit. Schwarzenegger even fired the state’s chief regulator for refusing to limit the number of greenhouse gas regulations. Columnist Debra Saunders noted that, “Schwarzenegger boasts that he is a world leader in the fight against global warming — but his advocacy shouldn’t keep him from flying in private jets or driving a Hummer.”

The one thing these honorees all have in common is that their real-life actions belie their carefully crafted green public images. If they don’t take their commitment seriously, why should you?

One of the major complaints in Silent Spring was about DDT was its alleged effect on bird populations. The sky is falling! But this, like so many of the claims by environmentalists, needs to be more closely examined before anyone should react. Unfortunately, past experience shows us that Schneider wasn’t alone in his thought processes when he said:

[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.- Stephen Schneider (quoted in Our Fragile Earth by Jonathan Schell) ^{1 2}

I think this pretty well sums up the politicized science we’re facing today, and that hoodwinked us in the past.

A good example is when in 1965, in Hanover, New Hampshire, Charles F. Wurster sounded the alarm over a few dead robins, after some elm trees had been sprayed with DDT to save them from Dutch Elm Disease. ^{3 4} He claimed a 70% decline in the resident population of 12 robins. Of course, common sense might dictate that these 8 missing robins could very well have disappeared for some other reason. But from that sampling, he extrapolated a “70% decline” to a mortality rate of 350 to 400 birds in Hanover. Amazingly, this “study” launched Wurster’s career as an “expert” on the effect of DDT in nontarget species. ⁵ Wurster wrote in a 1969 article on DDT (Bioscience, Sept. 1969, Vol. 19): ⁶

“If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve, and probably retain in other environmental issues, a level of authority they have never had before. In a sense, then, much more is at stake than DDT.” ⁷

This is a telling admission as to what he was really after. The name Trofim Lysenko seems to keep coming back to me for some reason.

Brooding pairs of robins produce on average two broods of 4 to 5 offspring a year; so if 50% of the young survive to adulthood and there are 5 million robins in the United States, there would be an annual increase of 11 million robins. (This is a very low estimate; bird expert Roger Tory Peterson, said in 1963 that the American robin is probably “North America’s number one bird” in terms of numbers ⁸ ) Bird banders report that 25% of the young survive, ⁹ but that is still an increase of 5.5 million robins annually, and according to “Ask A Scientist” Zoo Archives, the lifespan of a Robin, once they make it past the first year, is 5 or 6 years; the oldest banded robin was about 13 years 11 months.¹⁰ So it’s no wonder Peterson said they’re America’s number one bird in terms of numbers!

Did DDT actually affect the count of robins? Rachel Carson, claims on page 118 in Silent Spring that the robin “is on the verge of extinction”. The number of robins increased during the period of heavy DDT usage by 1237%. Here in Illinois, during that period, the population doubled. This is not even close to a “verge of extinction”.

Actual bird counts are listed in the table below. These figures compare pre-DDT counts with those at the height of DDT usage (1941-1960). No species was omitted that showed a reduction per observer. Total average all species bird count per observer was 1,480 in 1941, as compared to 5,860 in 1960. Decreased species, such as swans, geese, and ducks, we know were hunted. Bluebirds are known to be susceptible to cold winters in addition to being cavity nesters. (Rotting treetrunks are not readily available to them because dead tree removal is commonplace in areas where there are carefully pruned lawns and trees; e.g., where people are.)

The 257% increase in swallows contrasts with Silent Spring’s claim, which says on page 111,

“Swallows have been hard hit…. Our sky overhead was full of them only four years ago. Now we seldom see any.”

The “silence” in Silent Spring would have been broken by the loud chatter of black-birds, which increased by 3900%, squawks from annoying starlings, which increased 1069%, and cackling from grackles, which increased by 13,159%. An environmental biochemist complained in 2002 that “starlings thrive, 8 million of them, in Fresno County, California, which uses more pesticides than any other county in the United States.”¹¹

AUDUBON SOCIETY CHRISTMAS BIRD COUNT DATA 1941 (2,331 observers), compared with 1960, (8,928 observers)

Some of these species, such as the sparrow, starling and gull, my husband refers to as ‘flying rats’. They are a nuisance, as their nests clog drainage pipes and gutters, their fecal matter contaminate grain storage facilities, they damage crops and interfere with livestock production–particularly poultry. They also spread diseases like chlamydiosis, coccidiosis, erysipeloid, Newcastle’s, parathypoid, pullorum, salmonellosis, transmissible gastroenteritis, tuberculosis, various encephalitis viruses, vibriosis, and yersinosis, spread internal parasites such as acariasis, schistosomiasis, taeniasis, toxoplasmosis, and trichomoniasis, and spread household pests such as bed bugs, carpet beetles, clothes moths, fleas, lice, mites, and ticks.¹²

I have been unable to find numbers on the rock pigeon, which is one of the leading pests in urban areas.

These stark realities are completely omitted in the environmentalists’ fantasyworld.

Silent Spring doesn’t recognize that DDT saved millions of lives through eradicating mosquitoes carrying malaria, or that it saved lives during WWII from typhus carried by lice. Environmentalists have a blindness toward the other side of nature; which is far from benign.

There was no “silent spring”, DDT didn’t effect the birds; and the natural fragile earth wonderland she describes doesn’t exist, either.

1. (November 22, 1989) “Loads of Media Coverage“, Detroit News[back]
2. Schnell (October, 1989)”Our Fragile Earth,” Discover; 44.[back]
3. Doris H. Wurster, Charles F. Wurster, Jr., and Walter N. Strickland, 1965. “Bird Mortality Following DDT Spraying for Dutch Elm Disease,” Ecology (Summer), Vol. 46, pp. 488-499.[back]
4. Doris H. Wurster, Charles F. Wurster, Jr., and Walter N. Strickland, 1965. “Bird Mortality Following DDT Spraying for Dutch Elm Disease“, Science 2 April 1965: Vol. 148. no. 3666, pp. 90 - 91 DOI: 10.1126/science.148.3666.90[back]
5. Wurster, C. et al (1965) Bird Mortality after Spraying for Dutch Elm Disease with DDT Science 2 April 1965: Vol. 148. no. 3666, pp. 90 - 91 DOI: 10.1126/science.148.3666.90[back]
6. Charles F. Wurster, (September, 1969) DDT Goes to Trial in Madison BioScience, Vol. 19, No. 9, pp. 809-813 doi:10.2307/1294792[back]
7. Tren, R. & Bate, R. (2004). “South Africa’s War against Malaria: Lessons for the Developing World“. Cato Policy Analysis (513).[back]
8. Roger Tory Peterson, 1963. The Birds (New York: Life Nature Library).[back]
9. American Robin: Information and Much More. Answers.com[back]
10. American Robin Lifespan, “Ask a Scientist, Zoo Archives, NEWTON is an electronic community for Science, Math, and Computer Science K-12 Educators. Argonne National Laboratory, Division of Educational Programs, Harold Myron, Ph.D., Division Director. [back]
11. Jukes, T.E. (2002) Silent Spring and the Betrayal
    of Environmentalism, Jukes is a Biochemist and former professor in the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley.[back]
12. PREVENTION AND CONTROL OF WILDLIFE DAMAGE with permission from Scott E. Hygnstrom, Robert M. Timm, and Gary E. Larson, editors; (Cooperative Extension Division, Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources University of Nebraska-Lincoln, United States Department of Agriculture Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Animal Damage Control, Great Plains Agricultural Council Wildlife Committee).[back]

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970’s and 1980’s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.
- Paul Ehrlich - the first sentence of his 1968 “The Population Bomb”

Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles…the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979…the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980 due to cancer epidemics.
- Paul Ehrlich, 1969 in Ramparts. (If the context at the end of the article is read very, very carefully, this one can be seen as a warning - not a flat prediction. Note the precision of the “42 years”.)

To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem.
- Lamont Cole (as quoted by Elizabeth Whelan in her book Toxic Terror)

I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds.
- Paul Watson, founder of Greenpeace (quoted in Access to Energy, Vol. 10, No. 4, Dec 1982)

The planet is about to break out with fever, indeed it may already have, and we [human beings] are the disease. We should be at war with ourselves and our lifestyles.
- Thomas Lovejoy, tropical biologist and assistant secretary to the Smithsonian Institution (quoted by David Brooks in The Wall Street Journal article, “Journalists and Others for Saving the Planet, 1989)

[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.
- Stephen Schneider (quoted in Our Fragile Earth by Jonathan Schell)

The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state.
- Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth” concept (as quoted by William Tucker in Progress and Privilege, 1982)

The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.
- Nigel Calder, International Wildlife, June 1975

“The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialisation, mechanisation, urbanisation and exploding population.”
- Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, 1971

An increase by only a factor of 4 in the global aerosol background concentration may be sufficient to reduce the surface temperature by as much as 3.5 deg. K. If sustained over a period of several years, such a temperature decrease over the whole globe is believed to be sufficient to trigger an ice age. - S.I Rasool and S.H. Schneider
Science, v173, p138, 9/7/1971.

“This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century”
- Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

“This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000.”
- Lowell Ponte “The Cooling”, 1976

————————————————————————

In hindsight, those proclamations all seem laughable and ludicrous. But of course at the time, the latte sipping cofeehouse commies were completely serious, just as they’re serious today about global warming.

Michael Duffey at the Sydney Morning Herald interviewed Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, on the radio and asked why he quit the organisation. He said:

“I left in the mid-’80s when the policy started to drift away from science and logic into these kind of zero-tolerance positions that I believe are based more on sensation and fund-raising around scare tactics. Look at the campaign against genetically modified crops and the whole ‘Frankenstein food’ … these are scare words that are attached to what is actually one of the most important advances to genetic science in history … for example, taking a gene from corn and creating the ‘golden rice’ which could eliminate blindness in half a million kids every year in Asia and Africa, and could eliminate chronic vitamin A deficiency in over 200 million people in the rice-eating countries.”

Moore, who has an honours degree in forest biology and a PhD in ecology, says he left Greenpeace when

“I was an international director, one of five. My fellow international directors had no science education. Most of them were political activists or entrepreneur environmentalists, for want of a better word, and they decided we should start a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. I said, ‘Chlorine is one of the elements in the periodic table. I don’t think that’s in our jurisdiction.’ And they said, ‘No, this is a good campaign. Chlorine is the devil’s element, and it works really well for fund-raising and media and everything.’

So it’s not really about science with these people.

Having established how wrong the environmental movement has been in the past, we’re supposed to blindly follow them, lemming-like over the cliff some more, as they make more apocalyptic pronouncements. I’d like to point out what Luboš Motl at the Reference frame observed about the similarities between the communist ideology and the environmentalist ideology, and their tactics.

Those readers who haven’t lived in a totalitarian system may have problems to understand why the rest of us finds the structure of the environmentalist propaganda almost identical to the structure of the communist propaganda. To fix this problem, let me translate the official response to Charter 77, the pro-democracy statement penned by Václav Havel. You can compare it e.g. with DeSmogBlog’s new defamatory pages against 61 of the “climate change deniers”.

Here are Motl’s common features of the propagandistic algorithms of both ideologies:

• They try to convey the message that the opposition doesn’t exist
• If the opposition exists, it is composed of unsuccessful or dead bodies who have been defeated decades ago
• The members of the opposition are painted as being controlled by others, usually by demonized sources of power, with hints of corruption; a connection - even indirect connection - with these ultimate “sources of evil” is presented as a complete proof of wrongness
• Opposition gets badges that are meant to be derogatory - capitalist, Zionist, deniers, renegades, contrarians, reactionary, burgeoisie, oil-funded etc.
• Opposition is presented as being against all the people - and all the people should agree and do agree with that; statements that everyone agrees and everyone keeps on supporting the official position are repeated all the time
• The opposition members are criticized for their very existence and for the tiniest deviations from the official ideology, to assure everyone else that one simply can’t join them if he wants to survive
• Opposition is claimed to misinterpret words and facts even though it is pretty obvious that it is the official party who is doing that
• The opposing individuals are deconstructed one by one by carefully crafted ad hominem attacks
• The propaganda openly states that a debate or a dialogue itself is unacceptable and no details of the opponents’ opinions are ever analyzed
• Whenever it’s possible, the opponents must be fired or otherwise harassed; a penetrating analysis of skeptics’ personal lives and attempts to find anything questionable - even if it is completely unrelated to the dispute - is a standard tool of the propaganda

It must be really depressing to be a self-loathing environmentalist; partly because they promote the deaths of innocent poor people in order to escape imaginary goblins.

No error will be changed into truth by constantly believing, nor by persistently declaring it as truth. ~ Karl Mobius

Biology in the Soviet Union during the Stalinist era is instructive in showing how an entire scientific discipline can be distorted by ideological extremism. The Russian agronomist Trofim Lysenko reformed the entire field of Soviet biology, based purely on his communist zeal. This rid the field of Soviet biology of those “dangerous” Western concepts. Lysenko was a mediocre researcher but an ambitious and shrewd politician. He succeeded, eventually, with the personal support of Stalin, to alter the whole structure of biological thinking and his followers dominated the field for some 30 odd years.

Lysenko threw out the laws of genetics and embryology and reinterpreted Darwin’s teachings to fit within the framework of the ‘new creative biology’. Ideological zeal took precedence over devotion to science and those who failed to conform to the new biology were suppressed as enemies of truth. Those who didn’t yield to the new ideology, were permanently silenced. Vavilov, one of the world’s greatest geneticists and at one time, the president of the Soviet Agricultural Academy, died in a concentration camp. It didn’t matter if the Lysenkoist biologists manipulated their data or the results of their experiments, since minor falsifications would support the ideological cause, which represented a higher level of truth than reporting facts.

I’m surprised the environmentalists didn’t go further in Bali to silence the 400 dissenting scientists, but this seems to be the direction we’re headed in.

The Soviet Lysenko experience (in terms of falsifying results) also seems to have repeated itself with the IPCC panels’ hockey stick graph in addition to numerous other errors like the more recent 20-fold exaggeration of the climatic effects of rising CO₂ Concentrations, and 10-fold exaggeration of melting ice sheets on sea level rise.

Rotty flipped me a link to Monckton’s hilarious recounting of his experience in Bali. Even for those who don’t understand British humour, this post is hilarious.

“Back at the Poxy, the only time the zombies used to show any animation was when Baron Samedi came on set. They would set up an eerie, unpleasant keening, and would jerk chaotically in their frenzied excitement. So it was in Bali when, on the eve of the closing Friday, not so much Baron Samedi as Baron Thursdi, Al Gore private-jetted and motorcaded in with his vast retinue to receive the plaudits of the faithful, and to hell with the carbon footprint. Gore did what I had been taught never to do. He attacked his own country for withstanding the voodoo cult. The zombies loved it. The keening and screeching and jerking were exactly as I had remembered them.”

I’ve been following Monckton’s interest, partly because some of the screeching and jerking has been going on in my comments section. Part of it has been aimed at Lord Monckton himself, revealing an ignorance of British government, their institutions, and how they work.

Rotty’s explanation on Monckton is here, which explains the argumentum ad hominem aimed at Lord Monckton, but read how Monckton himself explains it:

Here’s a question. If the science behind the scare is as certain as the zombies say, why are they so terrified of a few doubters? Google me and you’ll find hundreds of enviro-loony websites, such as Wikipedia, now an international music-hall joke for inaccuracy, that call me a fraud (for writing about climate science when I’m not a climate scientist), a plagiarist (for citing learned papers rather than making up scare stories), and a liar (for saying I’m a member of the House of Lords when – er – I’m a member of the House of Lords, though, being merely hereditary, I don’t have a seat there).

One of these bedwetting sites even has a “Monckton Watch” page, with a hilarious collection of colourful stories, including the story of how I told the stallholder that much of the southern hemisphere was cooling. No mention that the location of the BBC’s favourite glacier has indeed been cooling. And, of course, no mention of the elephant in the room – that a national weather bureau had flagrantly exaggerated the Holy Book’s official ramblings about Greenland on its silly, taxpayer-funded poster.

You’ll find precious little science on the zombie websites. They specialize in global whingeing ad hominem, rather than scientific argument ad rem. The frenetic personal assaults have become so self-evidently ludicrous that I’m getting an increasing number of emails from people who have first heard of my work from the Kool-Aid slurpers and have gone on to find, to their surprise, that the peer-reviewed science to which my climate papers politely draw attention does suggest that the Holy Books have exaggerated both the influence of Siotu over temperature and the consequences of warmer weather.

Monckton is brilliant, and it’s unfortunate that there aren’t more people like him that can so easily parse through the inaccuracies told by the IPCC panel, and translate them into regular language for the ordinary person to understand.

Yet another stupid claim of the Rachel Carson worshippers has been exposed: Some claim it was banned not because of environmental politics, but because DDT had been rendered ineffective through overuse. This is myopic thinking that equates the killing ineffectiveness with DDT’s effectiveness overall.

In an August 16th article at the Wall Street Journal ¹, a study published in the public health journal, PLoS ONE (which I’m assuming is the one entitled A New Classification System for the Actions of IRS Chemicals Traditionally Used For Malaria Control 2) was mentioned that demonstrated that DDT-resistant mosquitos still avoid the areas that were sprayed with DDT, reducing the risk of malaria infection by 73%.

Science and society label almost any chemical used against insects as an “insecticide.” By definition, an insecticide (insect-icide or insect-icidal) is a chemical that kills insects. This single term is not adequate for meaningful discourse about chemicals, chemical actions, insect responses to chemicals, and the different ways in which chemicals are used. However, this single response is the foundation for the old paradigm that classifies chemicals sprayed on house walls for malaria control based solely on their killing action. A new paradigm is needed to take into account the behavioral actions of these chemicals in disrupting man-vector contact and thereby breaking disease transmission. The fact that repellent and irritant actions were first documented more than 60 years ago ³ but given no importance, illustrates how lack of appropriate labels and a conceptual framework of multiple chemical actions can work against knowledge and understanding. Today, any discussions about insecticides for malaria control operate under a de facto assumption that the chemical is toxic and it’s only important function is to kill mosquitoes. As will be shown by research presented here, this assumption is wrong.

Emphasis mine.

In compliance with their reprint agreement, this article was written by John P. Grieco⁴, Nicole L. Achee ⁵ , Theeraphap Chareonviriyaphap ⁶, Wannapa Suwonkerd ⁷, Kamal Chauhan ⁸, Michael R. Sardelis ⁹, Donald R. Roberts ¹⁰

The WSJ further notes:

Repeated studies have shown DDT to be safe for people and nature when sprayed indoors, yet other supposedly greener pesticides like alphacypermethrin have been touted as viable alternatives. Nevertheless, the latest research shows that DDT continues to be the most effective tool we have, as well as among the cheapest. “To date,” conclude the authors, “a truly efficacious DDT replacement has not been found.” Opponents of DDT are only ensuring more misery and death.

1. (August 16, 2007) The Uses of DDT, Wallstreet Journal[back]
2. Grieco JP, Achee NL, Chareonviriyaphap T, Suwonkerd W, Chauhan K, et al. (2007) A New Classification System for the Actions of IRS Chemicals Traditionally Used For Malaria Control. PLoS ONE 2(8): e716. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000716[back]
3. Kennedy JS (1947) The excitant and repellent effects on mosquitoes of sublethal contacts with DDT. Bull Entomol Res 37: 593–607. Find this article online[back]
4. Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America[back]
5. Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America[back]
6. Department of Entomology, Kasetsart University, Bangkok, Thailand,[back]
7. Office of Disease Prevention and Control, Ministry of Public Health, Chiang Mai, Thailand[back]
8. Chemicals Affecting Insect Behavior Laboratory, United States Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, Maryland, United States of America[back]
9. Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America[back]
10. Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, Maryland, United States of America[back]