Well, not one month after the Howard government of Australia lost out to the Labor party of Kevin Rudd, we have this charming bit of heroism.  Apparently, the whales are in trouble!  Japan is going to hunt 1000 whales this year, including the humpback.  This just won't do, so:

...the Australian government will be casting a different eye over the activities of the Japanese whalers in Antarctica - it plans to send a former P&O cruise ship, now converted into an armed vessel, to the region to monitor the hunting.

Never mind that if a conflict does occur, it will be because a foreign vessel interfered with the national sovereignty of Japan and its harvesting.  Can't get around that just yet.

But whales are so beautiful, you might say.  That they are, but they are not as beautiful as a human life, no matter how Japanese.  Or greenie.

The crew is trained for polar conditions and they will use 'super-telephoto' lenses to record the whale slaughter.

In addition, the ship will have two .50-calibre machine guns manned by a customs boarding party should a clash of any kind with the Japanese vessels occur.

Australia's new Labour Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has accused the former John Howard government of doing nothing to save the endangered whales, adding that nobody took seriously Japan's claim that it was conducting scientific research.

The Hell you say, Kevin Rudd. 

Green Hanukkia' campaign sparks ire

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

"The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won't need another miracle," said Liad Ortar, the campaign's cofounder, who runs the Arkada environmental consulting firm and the Ynet Web site's environmental forum. "Global warming is a milestone in human evolution that requires us to rethink how we live our lives, and one of the main paradigms of that is religion and how it fits into the current situation."

Cofounder Tom Wegner, who heads the public relations firm Update Marketing Media, spread the campaign via mass e-mails and through social interaction Web sites like Facebook and Hook.co.il. He said no money had been invested in the campaign, but it had already raised awareness around the world and made people realize that they have to consider the environment this Hanukka.

Wegner said he did not consider the campaign anti-religious. The unlit candle could be the shamash, which is not required for the mitzva, he said. But he said he would encourage people who do not keep mitzvot not to light a hanukkia at all for environmental and educational reasons.

"We have many environmental traditions in Judaism like Tu Bishvat and Succot, but there are also traditions like Lag Ba'omer and Hanukka that made sense when they were instituted but are more problematic now in the days of global warming," Wegner said.

"There are many people who just light candles for the tradition and for their children," he said. "To tell a child on the eighth day that we are not lighting the last candle as a sacrifice for the environment is an act that is not only educational but also will prevent the release of a huge amount of carbon dioxide that would hurt the environment."

Shas MK Nissim Ze'ev said he was not convinced by the environmentalists' argument. He warned that the campaign would take away from the light of Torah that each and every candle symbolizes.

"The environmentalists should think about how much pollution is caused by one solitary diesel truck on the road," Ze'ev said. "They should be fighting the trucks instead of Judaism. This is so trivial, so anti-Jewish and so anti-religious that even the worst anti-Semites couldn't think of it. Just like the Helenists, they are trying to extinguish the flames of the Jewish soul."

United Torah Judaism MK Avraham Ravitz called the environmentalists "crazy people who are playing with the minds of innocent Jewish people." He said the campaign would only convince people who do not light candles anyway.

"They should encourage people to light one less cigarette instead," Ravitz said.

Rabbi Benny Lau of Jerusalem's Ramban Congregation, who is himself an environmental activist, praised the good intentions of the people behind the campaign. But he said the environmentalists should be trying to reach out to observant Jews instead of running campaigns that turn them away.

"People in the green movement who have an agenda have unfortunately made it anti-religious," Lau said. "This makes religious people think incorrectly that anything environmentalist is against them. The damage ends up being a thousand times the benefit. Tikkun olam [fixing the world] must be done by adding more light and not by adding more darkness."

To all the people who are legitimately concerned about global warming:  It's this kind of stuff that makes skeptics like myself wince.  I mean...Hanukkah candles?  This is exactly the kind of crap that makes me nervous.  Instead of focusing on actual problems, like the diesel trucks mentioned in the article, they want to use this time of concern as an opportunity to push ineffective, symbolic initiatives that don't address anything.  It's a symptom of hysteria, to focus on trivial details like this.

Man killed in water-rage attack in Australia

Thu Nov 1, 2007 12:42am EDT

 

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A man has been charged with murder in Australia after an elderly man who was watering his garden was bashed to death in an apparent case of suburban water-rage.

Australia is in its sixth year of severe drought and most towns and cities have imposed strict limits on household water use, prompting a rise in suburban arguments and neighbors informing authorities about those who waste water.

In the latest incident, police said 66-year-old Ken Proctor was using a hose to water the front lawn of his suburban Sydney home when a man walking past made a remark about water waste.

Proctor then turned the hose on the passer by, prompting a fight. He was knocked the ground and was punched and kicked. He was treated by ambulance officers, but died later in hospital.

Authorities said Proctor was not in breach of water restrictions, as he was using a hand-held hose and was watering his lawn on his allocated day. A 36-year-old man charged with Proctor's murder appeared briefly in a Sydney court on Thursday. He was denied bail and will remain in jail until his next court appearance on November 15.

Most of Australia, apart from parts of the island state of Tasmania and towns in the tropical north, have banned garden sprinklers, made it illegal to hose down cars and pavements, and allow gardens only to be watered on set days.

No I haven't read Al Gore's book. 

It occurs to me that the debate over global warming and climate change breaks down along fairly ideological lines.  Apart from the obvious conservative-liberal split, I have come to think of people as having one of the following attitudes as it pertains to the environment, planet, and relevant issues:

• Custodial - meaning that the primary role of humans in the environment should be as caretakers and guardians of endangered animals, plants, ecosystems, and habitats.  These people are generally alarmed and saddened when a species goes extinct, or there is a prospect of gradual change in our climate.  Or when they seize upon so-called evidence that change in the climate has already occurred.  They may be whiny and obnoxious, but without their efforts we would not have places like our national parks.
  
• Development - meaning that the planet and its resources lay open to our use, and that we should make the most of that fact.  Cut down forests and build houses for people.  Raise animals and slaughter them for food.  Engage in mining operations and gather materials to develop technologies that make human life easier, better, or more productive.  These people are generally portrayed as villains on the show Captain Planet.  They may draw too deep from the well at times, going from legitimate use to exploitation.  But the attitude is necessary to make the sort of progress we've seen in the last century.

Contrast the two.  On the one hand you have Custodians who might put everything in test tubes and never let another Amazonian parasite go extinct, or halt forestry efforts to save owls who are displaced anyway when their owl-homes burn due to overgrowth.  Then you have Developers who might turn our planet into one of those weird sci-fi factory worlds or who would build condos on Indian burial grounds or something.
Both perspectives have their legitimate points.  My sympathies lie mostly with the Developers.  They have a much tougher time pleading their case due to its pragmatic nature.  Custodians only have to flash a picture of a panda cub or get a celebrity to chain themselves to a tree to convince people to support them.
What I feel we're seeing now is a clash between those who are very alarmed at the changes in our planet, and those who are rather laconic about the whole thing.  The "alarmists" feel a sense of righteous indignation at anyone who refuses to jump on the wagon.  These people cry out that we have to save the planet now, now, now!  They lack perspective.  Meanwhile, the folks who aren't so upset about it bristle at the notion that they are somehow equivalent to Holocaust-deniers.  They dismiss the arguments of the scientific community because if they disagree they are lumped in with gentleman like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Is there a middle ground?  I think so.  We can be stewards of the environment without trying to put it into stasis.  We can adapt to changes in the environment, develop resources and maintain our standard of living while at the same time take good care of what we have.

Global climate change is certainly a challenging issue for future generations and for us today.  But I maintain that we are smart enough to confront it without dramatizing it, without panicking, and without punishing ourselves in a misguided attempt to "save" the planet.  It's all a matter of perspective.

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The global-warming hucksters

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Posted: October 23, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

The scaremongers are not always wrong. The Trojans should have listened to Cassandra. But history shows that the scaremongers are usually wrong.

Parson Malthus predicted mass starvation 250 years ago, as the population was growing geometrically, doubling each generation, while agricultural production was going arithmetically, by 2 percent or so a year. But today, with perhaps 1 percent of our population in full-time food production, we are the best-fed and fattest 300 million people on Earth.

Karl Marx was proven dead wrong about the immiseration of the masses under capitalism and the coming revolution in the industrial West, though they still have hopes at Harvard.

Neville Chute's "On the Beach" proved as fictional as "Dr. Strangelove" and "Seven Days in May." Paul Ehrlich's "Population Bomb" never exploded. It fizzled when the Birth Dearth followed the Baby Boom.

"The Crash of '79" never happened. Instead, we got Ronald Reagan and record prosperity. The Club of Rome notwithstanding, we did not run out of oil. The world did not end in Y2K, when we crossed the millennium, as some had prophesied. "Nuclear winter," where we were all going to freeze to death after the soot from Reagan's nuclear war blotted out the sun, didn't quite happen. Rather, the Soviet Empire gave up the ghost.

Is then global warming – a steady rise in the temperature of the Earth to where the polar ice caps melt, oceans rise 23 feet, cities sink into the sea and horrendous hurricanes devastate the land – an imminent and mortal danger?

Put me down as a disbeliever.

Like the panics of bygone eras, this one has the aspect of yet another re-enactment of the Big Con. The huckster arrives in town, tells all the rubes that disaster impends for them and their families, but says there may be one last chance they can be saved – but it will take a lot of money. And the folks should go about collecting it, right now.

This, it seems to me, is what the global-warming scare and scam are all about – frightening Americans into transferring sovereignty, power and wealth to a global political elite that claims it alone understands the crisis and it alone can save us from impending disaster.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, from which China and India were exempt, the United States was to reduce carbon emissions to 1990 levels, which could not be done without inducing a new Depression and reducing the standard of living of the American people. So, we ignored Kyoto – and how have we suffered? The Europeans who signed on also largely ignored it. How have they suffered?

We are told global warming was responsible for the hurricane summer of Katrina and Rita that devastated Texas, Mississippi and New Orleans. Yet Dr. William Gray, perhaps the nation's foremost expert on hurricanes, says he and his most experienced colleagues believe humans have little impact on global warming and global warming cannot explain the frequency or ferocity of hurricanes. After all, we had more hurricanes in the first half of the 20th century than in the last 50 years, as global warming was taking place.

"We're brainwashing our children," says Gray. "They're going to the Gore movie ('An Inconvenient Truth') and being fed all this. It's ridiculous. ... We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was."

Gray does concede that for a scholar to question global warming can put his next federal grant in mortal peril.

While modest warming has taken place, there is no conclusive evidence human beings are responsible, no conclusive evidence Earth's temperature is rising dangerously or will reach intolerable levels and no conclusive evidence that warming will do more harm than good.

The glaciers may be receding, but the polar bear population is growing, alarmingly in some Canadian Indian villages. Though more people on our planet of 6 billion may die of heat, estimates are that many more may be spared death from the cold. The Arctic ice cap may be shrinking, but that may mean year-round passage through northern Canadian waters from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the immense resources of the Arctic made more accessible to man. Why else did Vladimir Putin's boys make their dash to claim the pole?

The mammoth government we have today is a result of politicians rushing to solve "crises" by creating and empowering new federal agencies.

Whether it's hunger, poverty or homelessness, in the end, the poor are always with us, but now we have something else always with us: scores of thousands of federal bureaucrats and armies of academics to study the problem and assess the progress, with all their pay and benefits provided by our tax dollars.

Cal Coolidge said that when you see 10 troubles coming up the road toward you, sometimes the best thing to do is nothing, because nine of them will fall into the ditch before they get to you. And so it will be with global warming, if we don't sell out America to the hucksters who would save us.

Silent Alarmism
A centennial we could do without.

By Iain Murray

Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring, the 1962 book that launched the modern environmental movement, was born a century ago this week, and it is no wonder that green activists are celebrating her legacy. She practically invented the environmental alarmist strategy that has been so successful in pushing a radical environmental agenda. (I won’t go into Carson’s contribution to the ongoing malaria epidemic in many poor countries owing to her demonization of DDT; for more on that, see here, here, and here.) Her paradigm has been disastrous for rational political discourse. It is a template for bypassing debate and ignoring consequences. Here’s how it works

 First, identify your cause and the laws you want to see enacted. In the environmentalist’s blinkered view of the world, everything is connected linearly, not in the multifaceted manner of the real world. Therefore, in the greens’ view, the removal of a problem will not cause other, unforeseen, problems. For Carson, the problem was the impact of pesticides on bird life; the elimination of pesticides would solve that problem. No other considerations — such as the impact DDT restrictions had on malaria control — could be allowed to come into play. A modern example of this idea is the notion that fossil fuels can be removed from the energy supply to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions without adverse consequences.

Second, create an apocalyptic scenario. The whole point of Carson’s Silent Spring, embodied in the title, was to paint a picture of a world without avian life — that is, a world without birdsong. This simple, evocative message horrified readers, shocking them on a visceral level. Environmentalist-stoked fears about “Frankenfoods” resulting from out-of-control biotechnology follow this model.

Third, claim there’s a threat to children. For those unmoved by fears of a birdless world, this should suffice. Carson said in her book that, “A quarter century ago, cancer in children was considered a medical rarity. Today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease.” Her statistics were misleading — the actual rate of cancer among children is unchanged since the 1900s, but cancer’s incidence relative to other diseases has increased as medical technology has vanquished many of those other diseases

Fourth, don the mantle of science and dismiss any evidence that contradicts your position. Carson used statistics and scientific data to provide a seemingly empirical basis for her alarmist claims. The spin continued even when the EPA’s own scientists concluded that, “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man. . . . DDT is not a mutagenic or teratogenic hazard to man. . . . The use of DDT under the regulations involved here [does] not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife.” Yet evidence doesn’t matter; the authority of claiming to represent science “proves” that action is needed. Even hotly disputed scientific claims, such as those concerning the effects of endocrine disruptors (substances that can disrupt the production of certain human hormones) on human health, can provide a seemingly invincible case when asserted in the right way.

Fifth, use the previous three steps to create a clamor that rules out rational debate. With a potential catastrophe, a threat to the innocent, and a ream of supposedly empirical data on your side, you have a recipe for urgent action — though one based on emotion and uncritical acceptance of assertion. Public policy is not (nor should it be) a rational process — emotion and acceptance of authority often drive it — so in recognition of that, modern democracies have created checks and balances. Yet, as the case of DDT shows, the alarmist model can often overcome these checks. If you can also destroy the credibility of your political opponents through ad hominem attacks, so much the better.

Finally, once your measures have been adopted, defend them ruthlessly. The alarmist model relies on its successes being unassailable. Critical examination threatens to reveal that measures advanced by alarmists may be unwarranted, ineffective and, in many cases, positively harmful. Once one such measure is repealed, people may think twice about passing more like it.

The world may finally be waking up to the unintended consequences of restrictions on pesticide use — though not in time to prevent millions of unnecessary deaths. The World Health Organization has called on environmentalists “to help save African babies as you are helping to save the environment” and endorsed increased use of DDT to fight malaria. Now people need to wake up to the harm caused to the political process by Rachel Carson’s other legacy, the paradigm of alarmism.

— Iain Murray is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

More proof that if you just look hard enough, you'll find someone much smarter than you who has articulated your thoughts in such a way that you only need point and grunt.  I was taught about Rachel Carson in elementary school, and she was portrayed as a hero in my textbook.  All the helpless birdies she saved!  Not a mention of the people dying from malaria though...Probably too much for a 2nd grader.
So, I am brought back to my main area of concern when it comes to environmental alarmism:  how will making radical changes impact our quality of life, and what is the long view?  In 100 years, will this whole global warming mess be viewed sort of like Y2K?  Stylish panicking.

Anyway, enjoy the article.  Before we start, I'm not claiming that liberals have a monopoly on alarmism.  Just discussing environmentalists.

SEVENTEEN WAYS TO BE A GOOD LIBERAL (with Scio's comments in purple)
 
 
1. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on
demand.  Consistency is important.  Capital punishment should be used judiciously, when there are no better options.  Also, the dignity of the human person must be maintained at all times.  But the same dignity should be shown to children in utero.
 
2. You have to believe that businesses create oppression and governments
create prosperity.
 
3. You have to believe that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are
more of a threat than nuclear weapons technology in the hands of Iran, China
and North Korea.
 
4. You have to believe that there was no art before federal funding.
 
5. You have to believe that global temperatures are less affected by
cyclical changes in the earth's climate and more affected by soccer moms
driving SUVs.  I have made the point many times that our footprint on this planet is much smaller than our hubris likes to admit.
  
7. You have to believe that the AIDS virus is spread by a lack of federal
funding.
 
8. You have to believe that the same teacher who can't teach 4th-graders how
to read is somehow qualified to teach those same kids about sex.  Yes!  Nobody ever quite makes this connection.
 
9. You have to believe that hunters don't care about nature, but PETA
activists do.
 
10. You have to believe that self-esteem is more important than actually
doing something to earn it.  I have strong feelings about this one.  I have always thought that people gave me too much praise for doing things that weren't overly exceptional.  Being a polite and well-mannered person (in public) shouldn't be exceptional, it should be expected.
 
11. You have to believe the NRA is bad because it supports certain parts of
the Constitution, while the ACLU is good because it supports certain parts
of the Constitution.
 
12. You have to believe that taxes are too low, but ATM fees are too high.
 
13. You have to believe that Margaret Sanger and Gloria Steinem are more
important to American history than Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or
Abraham Lincoln.
 
14. You have to believe that standardized tests are racist, but racial
quotas and set-asides are not.
 
15. You have to believe that the only reason socialism hasn't worked
anywhere it's been tried is because the right people haven't been in charge.  This is probably true.  The only way that Socialism might work is in small groups with no cohesive identity beyond the village level.  When Hilldawg said it takes a village, she was setting a threshold for maximum occupancy in a socialist system.
 
16. You have to believe that homosexual parades displaying drag queens and
transvestites should be constitutionally protected, and manger scenes at
Christmas should be illegal.  Game, set, match.  The solution to this problem is that nobody does anything with public funds, licensing, or facilities whatsoever.  No parades, no art, no manger scenes, no music, no debates, no county fairs.  I'm willing to tolerate (not condone, mind you) public homosexual lechery if their hounds at the ACLU will let me set up an Infant Jesus by city hall in my primarily Christian town.
 
17. You have to believe that this message is a part of a vast, right-wing
conspiracy.

Are you laughing yet?

Just wondering what your thoughts are on the global warming issue. Have you seen the Al Gore movie? Any thoughts on the current debate on climate science?

Many thanks,
April
Vancouver

Oh, great, here comes the hornet's nest!

As a native of upstate New York, whose dramatic landscape was carved by the receding North American glacier 10,000 years ago, I have been contemplating the principle of climate change since I was a child. Niagara Falls, as well as the even bigger dry escarpment of Clark Reservation near Syracuse, is a memento left by the glacier. So is nearby Green Lakes State Park, with its mysteriously deep glacial pools. When I was 10, I lived with my family at the foot of a drumlin -- a long, undulating hill of moraine formed by eddies of the ancient glacier melt.

Geology and meteorology are fields that have always interested me and that I might well have entered, had I not been more attracted to art and culture. (My geology professor in college, in fact, asked me to consider geology as a career.) To conflate vast time frames with volatile daily change is a sublime exercise, bordering on the metaphysical.

However, I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area. Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse. From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.

Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida -- as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done.

Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent? Our eyes are simply too slow to see the shift of tectonic plates that has raised the Himalayas and is dangling Los Angeles over an unstable fault. I began "Sexual Personae" (parodying the New Testament): "In the beginning was nature." And nature will survive us all. Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe.

I voted for Ralph Nader for president in the 2000 election because I feel that the United States needs a strong Green Party. However, when I tried to watch Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" on cable TV recently, I wasn't able to get past the first 10 minutes. I was snorting with disgust at its manipulations and distortions and laughing at Gore's lugubrious sentimentality, which was painfully revelatory of his indecisive, self-thwarting character. When Gore told a congressional hearing last month that there is a universal consensus among scientists about global warming -- which is blatantly untrue -- he forfeited his own credibility.

Environmentalism is a noble cause. It is damaged by propaganda and half-truths. Every industrialized society needs heightened consciousness about its past, present and future effects on the biosphere. Though I am a libertarian, I am a strong supporter of vigilant scrutiny and regulation of industry by local, state and federal agencies. But there must be a balance with the equally vital need for economic development, especially in the Third World.

Here's a terrible episode from my region that made the news just last year. A bankrupt thermometer factory in Franklin Township, N.J., vacated its building in 1994 but ignored a directive to clean the premises of residual mercury toxins. There was a total failure of oversight and follow-through at the state and local levels. The result: In 2004, a daycare center opened in the renovated building and for two years subjected children and pregnant women to a dangerously high level of mercury vapors from the contaminated site.

The degree of permanent health effects on those children is still unknown. This kind of outrageous negligence should not be tolerated in a civilized nation.

Sounds pretty sensible for a Democrat.  I even laughed at her sad assessment of organized religion.  I agree with her on environmentalism and having a proper balance between it and economic development.  I must be coming down with a cold...

But it's what I've been saying ever since the country lost it on global warming:  Our ecological footprint is not so large as we would like to think, nor is our ability to control any aspect of the planet's weather/natural occurrences.  It is hubris to think otherwise.