Soapbox Salinger sacked [updated]

NIWA has sacked Jim Salinger. Described by some as “New Zealand's most prominent climate scientist,” by others as "New Zealand's most prominent climate alarmist," and still more as “the voice of global warming in New Zealand,” his sacking does not unfortunately presage any sort of change of direction for New Zealand’s most prominent global warming promoters. NIWA is still wall-to-wall warmist – but when both Greenpeace and Jeanette Fitzsimplesimons are upset at his sacking, it’s reason enough to celebrate.

As Anthony Watts does:

Now if NASA could just get the stones to do this for Jim Hansen . . .

Said Salinger himself in response to the sacking: “As scientists we’re all a bit eccentric and we all might slightly break protocol, but it’s not going to destroy NIWA.” For “break protocol,” read “use his job as a political soapbox.”

For your interest, here is some of the “wisdom” Salinger has dispensed on behalf of his former employer:

• At a convention of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling in New Zealand, Jim Salinger told the crowd that climate change will likely cause a decline in the production of malting barley in New Zealand and particularly Australia, and that, "It will mean either there will be pubs without beer or the cost of beer will go up."
• "Regional warming" is killing NZ’s glaciers, said Salinger in November 2007. Yet according to Salinger's own organisation, New Zealand's average temperate the previous month was 0.5 degrees Celsius below average, New Zealand experienced no warming over the last century, and the “regional” warming over the Southern Hemisphere for the last 30 years showed "a warming trend" of around 0.00 °C per decade.
• In April 2007, comments from Salinger over over Northland's flooding showed that the Government's National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (NIWA) should be shut down, said Augie Auer. "So simplistic, it's silly" was how Dr Auer described the statement.
  "As an explanation of the cause and consequences of last week's Northland rains," said Dr Auer, "Dr Salinger's statement ... is as unscientific as it is incorrect. "
• In February this year, Salinger was quoted in the Herald on Auckland’s so called “hottest day ever” -- “the highest since official NIWA records began in September 1868” said the Herald – a remarkable judgement based on one outlying reading in Whenuapai, a station which only existed from 1945 to 1993 and from 2005 to now. (See discussion here at NZ’S Weather Forum.) This interview was among those cited as a reason for Salinger’s sacking.

UPDATE: Commenter Falufulu Fisi suggests a related link:

Anyway, here is a YouTube grilling of warmist messiah Al Gore by a Republican Congresswoman on cap-and-trade system to curb greenhouse gases during a congressional hearing recently which just been posted at TechCrunch. Watch Al Gore being frustrated by the questions put forward to him the the Congresswoman.

This was yet another occasion when the Goracle -- who has a policy of never debate, only obfuscate --  managed to once again sidestep the challenge of former Thatcher Science Advisor and Free Radical contributor Christopher Monckton, Gore’s Democrats refusing to allow  Monckton to testify alongside Gore. [Michael Savage interviews Monckton here.]

And even CNN has taken to mocking Gore these days, pointing out the irony in Gore trying to draw parallels with global warming activism now and civil righs activism in the 60s – there was some irony in that remark, being that Gore's father was a longtime senator from Tennessee that voted against civil rights legislation, said Dobbs – who “also noted during the segment prior Earth Day prognostications, all of which didn't quite come true.” Newsbusters reports:

    "Well, Earth Day, this week, and here are some words of doom and gloom from leading scientists, academics and authors on our climate and environment associated with Earth Day," Dobbs said. "Journalists Peter Collier wrote, ‘One to two million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.' Biologist Paul Ehrlich claimed that most people are going to die in ‘the greatest cataclysm of mankind.' Harvard biologist George Wall said, ‘If we don't take act now, civilization will end between 15 or 30 years.' And ecologist Kenneth Watt claiming that in 15 years, ‘Air pollution will reduce the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one- half.' I want to point out if I may that each and every one of those quotes were from the first Earth Day in 1970, nearly 40 years ago."
    The CNN segment highlighted a ClimateDepot.com report that global warming skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton was denied the opportunity to testify before the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment.
    "The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face," Monckton told the online magazine Climate Depot," CNN correspondent Lisa Sylvester said.
    And as Climate Depot's Marc Morano explained - most Gore's doom-and-gloom forecasts are to occur in the distant future.
    "If you look at Gore's testimony today, he was talking about what could, might and may happen 50 to 100 years from now," Morano said to CNN. "He was not talking about reality."

Performance art

A bit of "performance art" tonight.  A little bit of something to get ready for Exploit the Earth Day.

Take a desert.

Add snow.  Enough snow for a whole ski dome, and enough cooling ot keep it that way.

Add then a car -- a Formula 1 car -- and this is what you get.

Like I said, performance art.  Cool, huh.  ;^)

[Hat tip Tim Blair]

Exploit the Earth, or be square [update 3]

I hear it’s Earth Day some time this week.  Don’t worry.  Give it no mind (which is all its supporters are able to do) and CELEBRATE EXPLOIT THE EARTH DAY INSTEAD!!

Be there or be square.

Craig Biddle of the Objective Standard reckons that “because environmentalism is an anti-human ideology, on April 22 those who care about human life should not celebrate Earth Day; they should celebrate Exploit-the-Earth Day.”

    Exploiting the Earth—using the raw materials of nature for one’s life-serving purposes—is a basic requirement of human life. Either man takes the Earth’s raw materials—such as trees, petroleum, aluminum, and atoms—and transforms them into the requirements of his life, or he dies. . . According to environmentalism, however, man should not use nature for his needs; he should keep his hands off “the goods”; he should leave nature alone, come what may. Environmentalism is not concerned with human health and wellbeing—neither ours nor that of generations to come. If it were, it would advocate the one social system that ensures that the Earth and its elements are used in the most productive, life-serving manner possible: capitalism.
    Capitalism is the only social system that recognizes and protects each individual’s right to act in accordance with his basic means of living: the judgment of his mind. Environmentalism, of course, does not and cannot advocate capitalism, because if people are free to act on their judgment, they will strive to produce and prosper; they will transform the raw materials of nature into the requirements of human life; they will exploit the Earth and live. . .
    It comes down to this: Each of us has a choice to make. Will I recognize that man’s life is the standard of moral value—that the good is that which sustains and furthers human life—and thus that people have a moral right to use the Earth and its elements for their life-serving needs? Or will I accept that nature has “intrinsic” value—value in and of itself, value apart from and irrespective of human needs—and thus that people have no right to exist?
    There is no middle ground here. Either human life is the standard of moral value, or it is not. Either nature has intrinsic value, or it does not.
    On April 22, make clear where you stand. Don’t celebrate Earth Day; celebrate Exploit-the-Earth Day—and let your friends, family, and associates know why.

Here’s what Capitalism Magazine has put together for Exploit the Earth Day – more than enough for a wild party:

THE DANGER OF ENVIRONMENTALISM
Environmentalism's goal is not the advancement of human health, human happiness, and human life; rather, it is a subhuman world where "nature" is worshipped like the totem of some primitive religion.
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=5167
ON APRIL 22, CELEBRATE EXPLOIT-THE-EARTH DAY
Because Earth Day is intended to further the cause of environmentalism--and because environmentalism is an anti-human ideology--on April 22, those who care about human life should not celebrate Earth Day; they should celebrate Exploit-the-Earth Day.
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=5165
THE EARTH IS MANKIND'S GARDEN
There is an alternative to the environmentalist argument.
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=4206
ENVIRONMENTALISM VS CREATIVITY
For decades environmentalists have cried that man should adopt an "alternative" form of energy. But in this freest country on earth, exactly how have they exercised their liberty to try and make their dream come true?
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=4901
THE GREEN ENERGY FANTASY
Green energy policies would hobble the economy.
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=5439
GLOBAL WARMING ROPE-A-DOPE
Atmospheric scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said, "It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming."
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=5382
A CAVALCADE OF COLLECTIVISM: LEGISLATED SLAVERY, CREEPING CENSORSHIP AND THE CONFISCATION OF OFFSHORE WEALTH
So many thing are happening now that, as I take time off to participate in the Tea Party in Newport News, Virginia on April 15, I have decided to devote just brief commentary on a selection of events.
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=5502
BROKEN WINDOWS, BROKEN PRINCIPLES
In spending its way to economic recovery, the government boldly casts principles aside.
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=5501
IT'S TIME TO NATIONALIZE GROCERY STORES ;)
The heart of the problem: corporate greed in the form of grocery stores and restaurants operating on a for-profit basis.
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=5499
MAGIC NUMBERS IN POLITICS
Words are not the only things that enable political rhetoric to magically transform reality. Numbers can be used just as creatively-- and many voters are even more gullible about statistics than they are about words, apparently because statistics seem more objective.
--> http://www.CapMag.com/article.asp?ID=5500

Enjoy!

UPDATE 1:  Increasing numbers of Americans are seeing through the global warming scam. Details here.

UPDATE 2: Tim Blair comments on Americans increasingly seeing the light:

Degrees in global warmenology are now available from the University of the Sunshine Coast.

UPDATE. Warmening degrees may not be worth much in the US, where doubt continues to grow: 

Just one-out-of-three voters (34%) now believe global warming is caused by human activity, the lowest finding yet in Rasmussen Reports national surveying. However, a plurality (48%) of the Political Class believes humans are to blame. 

The political class is always the last to catch on.

UPDATE 3:  From the Mises Economics Blog, and just in time for Exploit the Earth Day, comes  "Economic Calculation in the Environmentalist Commonwealth," under review at the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. The abstract:

Do environmental initiatives like carbon accounting provide a viable alternative to monetary calculation based on profit and loss? Economic insights about calculation and imputation suggest that they do not provide a reliable, rational guide to action. Non-monetary calculation of the environmental effects of action runs into the same problems of in natura calculation and commonly-owned means of production. The information needed for rational economizing does not exist when we forsake the price mechanism. A legal regime based on strict private property rights solves environmental problems. Relaxed restrictions on property rights can generate environmental benefits and reduce our contribution to environmental degradation. Examples include the elimination of restrictions on housing markets and privatization of municipal recycling and garbage collection.

Bonus point -- in fact, a free full-colour digital copy of The Free Radical magazine -- for any reader who can name the hat tip in the title.

Minds beat stomachs

Most of you will know of the famous Paul Erhlich v Julian Simon bet.   For a decade beginning in 1968, Ehrlich insisted the population is exploding, resources are running out, and we're all gonna die. Our time is up, he reckoned:

• The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.
  —Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (Ballantine Books 1968)
• I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
  —Paul Ehrlich in (1969)
• In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.
  —Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)
• Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.
  —Paul Ehrlich in (1976)

Ehrlich was taken seriously at the time, and his arguments are taken seriously still by Russel Norman and the Greens.  Economist Julian Simon was one of the few at the time to call Ehrlich's bluff. Simon maintained that more people meant more opportunities, not less, the reason being (as Owen McShane summarises) "that minds outperform stomachs" -- as we get more minds with access to more knowledge and producing more and more innovations, then minds win by an ever growing margin. 

Ehrlich was so outraged by Simon's argument that in 1980 (by which time the paucity of dead fish should already have told him something) he accepted a bet with him.  Simon invited Ehrlich to choose a basket of goods that he insisted would rise in value by 1990 due to their increasing scarcity. Wikipedia summarises:

The essence of Simon's position in the bet was that, despite the population growth that was sure to occur during the 1980s, the effective supply of natural resources would increase during this decade because human beings would figure out how to find, extract and use such resources more efficiently.

And the surest measure of this increased supply would be lower inflation-adjusted prices of resources.

Convinced that higher population is a curse, Ehrlich accepted the $1,000 bet. He chose (for Simon gave Ehrlich the choice of which resources to bet on) a bundle of copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten and bet Simon that the real price of this bundle of resources would be higher in 1990 than in 1980.

In 1990 the prices in September of that year were compared to the prices of these resources in September 1980. Simon won convincingly. The real price of each of these five resources had fallen over the course of that decade, indicating that their supplies had grown even though human population had also grown by more than 800 million during that same time.

So over the decade of 1980-1990, Ehrlich was proved comprehensively wrong -- which in the way of such people hasn't stopped him mouthing off since. (On the release of Bjorn Lomborg's book Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World in 2001, Ehrlich ranted, "If Lomborg had done some arithmetic, he could have . . . spared us a book as thick as a brick and almost as intelligent." And if Ehrlich had spared us his comment, he might have spared us forming for ourselves the fairly obvious conclusion about himself...)

There are some who still insist the result of the bet was just bad luck.  That the decade chosen was unfortunate. That concern has now been summarily dismissed by economist Don Boudreaux, who wondered recently what would happen if the same bet had happened over the decade from 1990-2000.

As Mark Perry summarises, the result would have been the same:

Simon would have won again (see chart below), since all of the metals declined in real price except for tungsten, and the average price decline of the 5-commodity group was -19%.

Case closed.  Again.  Minds still beat stomachs.  Always will.

                                     

Worldwide Religio-Enviro-Babble

What do you get when you mix faith and pseudo-science? The answer seems to be "laughable nonsense." Religionists -- mainstream religionists that is -- are up in arms about the global warming religion, and all are equally unhinged.

You'll recall Garth George's arrant nonsense on the subject: that he knew global warming couldn't be happening because God had "sent" a rainbow after Noah's flood to show he was "keeping his promise."

To that foolishness you can now add "the diverse 50m-strong conservative evangelical churches" of the US, many of whose leaders, says The Guardian, "say they are still not convinced that global warming is human-induced and have argued that the collapse of the world is inevitable and will herald the second coming of Christ." Opposing them are younger leaders who are "redefining environmentalism as 'creation care'," and now joining them is none other than the Pope, that guardian of all that is scientific, who declares that "abuse of the environment is against God's will, and we must all "respect creation" while "focusing on the needs of sustainable development." The story of all this religio-enviro-babble is here.

This is what happens when you abandon reason, and rely instead on superstition. But how do you decide who's right about your god's wishes when you all claim a direct line to your own imaginary friend? And how do you understand or deal with your differences on the the scientific evidence when the only means of 'knowledge' you respect is not evidential, but that so-called shortcut to knowledge that is actually a short-circuit: that enemy of reason that is faith?

UPDATE 1: A big surprise: the polar bears' picnic, The Daily Telegraph
This short report from the foot of Christopher Brooker's column is worth republishing in full:

When [Tony Blair's Environment Secretary] David Miliband sends every school in the country a copy of Al Gore's ... film An Inconvenient Truth, to alert our children to the horrors of global warming, he had better instruct teachers to avert their charges' gaze from the drama making front-page news in Canada.

The May blossom may be out three weeks early in England, but for three weeks off the coast of Newfoundland, a fleet of seal boats - bent on culling the seals that are a major threat to Canada's fish stocks - have been trapped in the worst ice for decades. Thanks to global warming, it has been so cold that about 40 are frozen in, and not a few, as their crews are winched to safety by helicopter, will have to be abandoned.

As the pupils watch Al Gore's heart-rending sequence on the plight of the polar bears, doomed by the vanishing Arctic ice, their gaze will also have to be averted from the latest study by the US National Biological Service, which finds that polar bears in Alaska are increasing in numbers to the limit that their environment can sustain.

This confirms last year's report by Mitchell Taylor that, of the 13 polar bear groups in eastern Canada, 11 are increasing in numbers, only two declining - one of these, on west Hudson Bay, being the one the global warming doomsayers concentrate on.

It is clearly vital that our schoolchildren's ability to think for themselves should not be undermined by alerting them to such inconvenient truths.

Guess that old Inuit wisdom was right, huh?

UPDATE 2: Lewis Black on the Daily Show extracts the urine out of fucking Earth Day and all those polluting emissions from fatuous shit-eating fucking celebrities. As Kenny says hopefully at SOLO, "When the Green lobby is ridiculed by the liberal media, there is still hope that environmental statism can be stopped."

Is going green bad for business?

Is going green bad for business? Yes, says Peter Schwartz from the Ayn Rand Institute in this video interview on CNBC ahead of Earth Day. "'Going green' is cowardly appeasement," says Schwartz bluntly.

You're trying to mollify an ideology that is opposed to your fundamental values. Environmentalism does not want to protect nature for man, it wants to protect nature from man... Environmentalists want to sacrifice man for nature, and to nature... Appeasing environmentalism is self-destructive for businessmen.

The video link is here: Going Green:Bad for Business. Can the invisible hand of the market deliver a 'sustainable nation'? I answered that one myself a few weeks back.

DEBATE: "Global warming is not a crisis"

A high profile New York debate last Wednesday night between warmists and skeptics saw the warmists routed, say reports on the debate in Scientific American, Newsday, and on a cock-a-hoop Senate Environment and Public Works blog. Said Newsday's Ellis Henican, 'The Climate's Just Perfect for a Debate':

This issue will never be resolved in one brainy evening, even one as pointed and personal as this. In the previous five IQ2 U.S. debates, there hadn't been all that much mind-changing in the room. But this time, there was. Before the debate, not-a-crisis got 30 percent of the vote. After, the number rose to 46 percent. The is-a-crisis tally dropped from 57 to 42. The undecideds dipped slightly, from 13 to 12.

Oddly enough, one of the warmist participants' blog accounts is more subdued than the other accounts. "So are such debates worthwhile? On balance, I'd probably answer no," concluded Real Climate blogger and NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt, voted by the audience to be on the losing side on Wednesday.

Arguing for the motion, that global warming is not a crisis, were author Michael Crichton, British biogeographer Philip Stott, and MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen. Ranged against them were warmist scientists Brenda Ekwurzel, Richard C.J. Somerville, and our friend Mr Schmidt. Notes the Senate EPW blog, who look forward to Al Gore appearing before them next week to testify on global warming:

Before the start of the nearly two hour debate the audience polled 57.3% to 29.9% in favor of believing that Global Warming was a “crisis”, but following the debate the numbers completely flipped to 46.2% to 42.2% in favor of the skeptical point of view...

After the stunning victory, one of the scientists on the side promoting the belief in a climate "crisis" appeared to concede defeat by noting his debate team was ‘pretty dull" and at "a sharp disadvantage" against the skeptics. ScientificAmerican.com’s blog agreed, saying the believers in a man-made climate catastrophe “seemed underarmed for the debate and, not surprising, it swung ag ainst them."

The New York City audience laughed as Gore became the butt of humor during the debate.

"What we see in this is an enormous danger for politicians in terms of their hypocrisy. I’m not going to say anything about Al Gore and his house. But it is a very serious point," quipped University of London emeritus professor Philip Stott to laughter from the audience.

The audience also applauded a call by novelist Michael Crichton to stop the hypocrisy of environmentalists and Hollywood liberals by enacting a ban on private jet travel.

"Let’s have the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), the Sierra Club and Greenpeace make it a rule that all of their members, cannot fly on private jets. They must get their houses off the [power] grid. They must live in the way that they’re telling everyone else to live. And if they won’t do that, why should we? And why should we take them seriously?" Crichton said to applause audience.

The ScientificAmerican.com’s blog also declared the global warming skeptics the clear winner of the debate in a March 15 post titled: "Debate Skills? Advantage: Climate Contrarians."

"The proponents [of a climate crisis] seemed underarmed for the debate and, not surprisingly, it swung against them, particularly when Schmidt made the fatal debating error of dismissing the ability of the audience to judge the scientific nuances," ScientificAmerican.com’s David Biello wrote. The advocates of climate alarmism "were faced with the folksy anecdotes of Crichton and the oratorical fire of Stott," Biello wrote at ScientificAmerican.com. Biello concluded, "…the audience responded to Crichton's satirical call for a ban on private jets more than Ekwurzel's vague we need to throw ‘everything we can at the climate crisis.’

By the final vote, 46 percent of the audience had been convinced that global warming was indeed not a crisis, while just 42 percent persisted in their opinion that it was." Biello also criticized climate "crisis" advocate Richard Somerville as "perplexed" and "hardly inspiring."

Some money quotes from the winning team:

LINDZEN: "Now, much of the current alarm, I would suggest, is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate."

"The real signature of greenhouse warming is not surface temperature but temperature in the middle of the troposphere, about five kilometers. And that is going up even slower than the temperature at the surface."

CHRICHTON: "I mean, haven’t we actually raised temperatures so much that we, as stewards of the planet, have to act? These are the questions that friends of mine ask as they are getting on board their private jets to fly to their second and third homes.

"Everyday 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty. There are, a third of the planet doesn’t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water. We have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this? It seems that we don’t. It seems that we would rather look a hundred years into the future than pay attention to what’s going on now. I think that's unacceptable. I think that’s really a disgrace."

STOTT: "The first Earth Day in America claimed the following, that because of global cooling, the population of America would have collapsed to 22 million by the year 2000. And of the average calorie intake of the average American would be wait for this, 2,400 calories, would good it were. [LAUGHTER] It’s nonsense and very dangerous. And what we have fundamentally forgotten is simple primary school science. Climate always changes."

"Angela Merkel the German chancellor, my own good prime minister (Tony Blair) for whom I voted -- let me emphasize, arguing in public two weeks ago as to who in Annie get the gun style could produce the best temperature. ‘I could do two degrees C said Angela.’ ‘No, I could only do three said Tony.’ [LAUGHTER] Stand back a minute, those are politicians, telling you that they can control climate to a degree Celsius.”

“And can I remind everybody that IPCC that we keep talking about, very honestly admits that we know very little about 80% of the factors behind climate change. Well let’s use an engineer; I don’t think I’d want to cross Brooklyn Bridge if it were built by an engineer who only understood 80% of the forces on that bridge."

The full transcript for the debate can be found here, at the debate organiser's website. A debate podcast should be available here early Thursday morning, NZ time.

UPDATE 1: More comments on the debate, this one from an audience member:

I attended it, and must say that the characterization recently distributed which described Crichton, Stott, et. al. as being "humorous" and "entertaining" is false. They were cogent and salient and stuck to the facts (though Stott indeed has an engaging preachy style). Lindzen of course was dry and direct with no attempts at humor. Crichton did talk about enviros and their jets etc., but he talked much more about science, epistemology, his own conversion to skepticism, and the need to prioritize enviro/social ills. It was the other side that attempted (unsuccessfully) to be entertaining and wax poetically, by describing earth as a human-body-like organism, and by characterizing global warming investigation as an episode from "CSI." The bloggers were right about who won, but wrong about how and why they won.

UPDATE 2: Another site to get the podcast of the debate, when it appears.

UPDATE 3: The co-debunker of the 'Hockey Stick,' Steve McIntyre, has excerpts from the transcript showing Real Climate's Gavin Schmidt to be, well, a real plonker. He starts with a patronising CSI reference; gets the audience groaning by telling them they're too dim to understand all the science; then Richard Lindzen spots him making up quotes; and later, in the question period where the influence of cosmic rays is being debated, he offers this powerful rejoinder to the studies suggesting their possible impact:

GAVIN SCHMIDT - ….So any change that there might have been because of cosmic ray impacts on climate, can‘t possibly have an impact on what‘s been going on in the last changes.
PHILIP STOTT: But the most famous astrophysicist working on it say that it has.
GAVIN SCHMIDT Uh, he is drunk.

Posting on his blog he says he was "misquoted." Possibly believable if he hadn't already shown himself to be such a pretentious twat.

RELATED: Global Warming, Science

Doom, gloom and fume

A while back I was challenged to post anything showing that there were man-hating environmentalists about in the mainstream of environmental thought. So I did. [See this post: 'QUOTE: "The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing..."']

Today I figured readers might like to see some, just some, of the fatuous environmental predictions made by worry-worts and misanthropic headline-hunting doomsayers.

• Britain's industrial growth will come to a halt because its coal reserves are running out “… it is useless to think of substituting any other kind of fuel for coal... some day our coal seams [may] be found emptied to the bottom, and swept clean like a coal-cellar. Our fires and furnaces ... suddenly extinguished, and cold and darkness ... left to reign over a depopulated country."
  --Economist William Stanley Jevons, writing in 1865
• Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions....By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.
  --Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University. Spring 1970 issue of ‘The Living Wilderness.’
• …some scientists estimate that the world's known supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminium will be used up within your lifetime.
  --1990s school textbook The United States and Its People, quoted by Ronald Bailey in testimony to US House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, Feb 4, 2004
• The period of global food security is over. As the demand for food continues to press against supply, inevitably real food prices will rise. The question no longer seems to be whether they will rise, but how much.
  --Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, 1981
• The world's farmers can no longer be counted on to feed the projected additions to the world's population.
  -- Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, State of the World Report, 1994
• The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.
  —Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)
• The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.
  —Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (Ballantine Books 1968)
• I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.
  —Paul Ehrlich in (1969)
• In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.
  —Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day (1970)
• Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity…in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion.
  —Paul Ehrlich in (1976)
• There are ominous signs that the earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production—with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon… The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it… This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.
  --Science writer Peter Gwynne writing in ‘The Cooling World,’ ‘Newsweek’ magazine, April 28, 1975
• 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 in his book The Cooling, 1976 (which was endorsed by US Senator Claiborne Pell and current Bush adviser on global warming Stephen Schneider)
• If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. … This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.
  —Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, speaking on Earth Day 1970. Watt is Editor in Chief, Encyclopedia of Human Ecology Advisory Board Member, Center for the Study of CO2 and Climate Change
• Indeed, when we wake up 20 years from now and find that the Atlantic Ocean is just outside Washington, D.C., because the polar icecaps are melting, we may look back at this pivotal election.
  --New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, writing in NY Times, Dec 8, 2000.
• Frostban -- a harmless bacteria genetically engineered to protect plants from freezing temperatures -- "could irreversibly affect worldwide climate and precipitation patterns over a long, long period of time.
  -- Founder and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Jeremy Rifkin, 1986
• The economic impact of BIV (Bovine Immunodeficiency Virus) on the beef and dairy industries is likely to be devastating in the years to come.
  --Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef 1992
• Biotech crops will "run amok"; they will create "super bugs"; they will lead to farmers using "greater quantities of herbicides."
  --Jeremy Rifkin, 1999 Boston Globe
• The use of biotechnology might "risk a fatal interruption of millions of years of evolutionary development? Might not the artificial creation of life spell the end of the natural world? ... cause irreversible damage to the biosphere, making genetic pollution an even greater threat to the planet than nuclear or petrochemical pollution?”
  -- Jeremy Rifkin, The Biotech Century 1999
• Current estimates that a flu pandemic could infect 20% of the world's population and cause 7.5 million deaths are "among the more optimistic predictions of how the next pandemic might unfold.”
  --Osterhaus et al. Nature May 2005
• The next flu pandemic could kill as many as 150 million people.
  --Dr. David Nabarro. WHO spokesman Sept 2005.
• As many as 142 million people around the world could die if bird flu turns into a "worst case" influenza pandemic and global economic losses could run to $4.4 trillion - the equivalent of wiping out the entire Japanese economy for a year.
  --Report entitled Global Macroeconomic Consequences of Pandemic Influenza, from the Lowy Institute in Australia. Feb 2006.

UPDATE: If you've read this and asked yourself, "Where's the misanthropy?" as some commenters have, you might like to now read (or re-read) the post linked above, which is a differently focussed list of related quotes: <'QUOTE: "The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable, but a good thing..."'
RELATED: <Environment, Conservation, Ethics, Quotes

What's your footprint?

Oh dear. The Environment Ministry's online ecological footprint calculator has decided it would need 3.5 globes to sustain my lifestyle if everyone lived as I do, but otherwise is not so complimentary. The Ministry Sustain-O-Meter has declared, "You live a reasonably sustainable lifestyle by New Zealand standards." I hang my head in shame.

Here's the full, dripping wet, rationally unsustainable declaration:

You live a reasonably sustainable lifestyle by New Zealand standards. However, by world standards your lifestyle is not sustainable. If everyone on the globe used as much land as you do, 3.5 globes would be needed to support the world's current population.

Your strictly vegetarian diet considerably reduces your ecological footprint. Your food footprint is half the New Zealand average - ie 8,572 square metres smaller. As you no doubt know, your vegetarian diet is environmentally friendly as it takes less land and resources to supply your food needs.

Your use of vehicles is relatively high. This increases your personal ecological footprint to 317 square metres above the national average. The use of public transport could considerably reduce your ecological footprint.

Have a go yourself. [Hat tip Mr Hide, who scores an impressive 11.3 globes.] See if you can achieve either a more craven lifestyle than mine, or a more planet-raping one than his. (And see if you can work out the primary fallacy in the idea of a 'footprint' scored in such a way.)

And compare it to the Earth Day Footprint Quiz, which decides that "if everyone lived like me, I'd only need 1.5 globes to support me." Only a 233% difference between that and the Ministry's quiz -- clearly this isn't science so much as something that starts with a 'p.'

LINK: Ecological Footprint Calculator - Environment Ministry
Earth Day Footprint Quiz - Official Earth Day Do-Gooders

RELATED: Environment, Quiz, New Zealand

Save those whales...

You have to laugh. Hundreds of people trying to save the whales, and the whales just don't[ want to save themselves. Rescued whales return to shore is the headline, explaining that after rescuers pushed a pod of 100 whales out to sea from the Nelson beach where they were stranded, the whales turned back round and just headed on back to shore. Intelligent beasts, whales.

Which is a nice way to segue to George Carlin, don't you think. Think of it as a thought for summer:

Everybody's gonna save something now. Save the trees. Save the bees. Save the whales. Save those snails. And the greatest arrogance of all - save the planet. What? What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another. We're gonna save the fucking planet? I'm gettin' tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I'm tired of fucking Earth Day. I'm tired of these self righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths. People tryin' to make the world safe for their Volvos.

Besides, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. They don't care about the planet, not in the abstract they don't, not in the abstract they don't. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live, their own habitat. They're worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened, self interest doesn't impress me. Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet, nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Difference, difference. The planet is fine.

Compared to the people, the planet is doing great- been here 4 1/2 billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here 4 1/2 billion years. We've been here what, a hundred thousand, maybe two hundred thousand? And we've only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus 4 1/2 billion. And we have the conceit to think that somehow we're a threat? That somehow we're gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that's just a-floatin' around the Sun? The planet has been through a lot
worse than us, been through all kinds of things worse than us, been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drifts, solar flares, Sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles, hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages...

You wanna know how the planet's doing? Ask those people at Pompeii who are frozen into position, from volcanic ash, how the planet's doing. Wanna know if the planet's alright? Ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. How 'bout those people in Kilauea, Hawaii who build their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.

The planet will be here for a long, long, long time after we're gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself 'cause that's what it does. It's a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover. The Earth will be renewed, and if it's true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the Earth plus plastic. The Earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the Earth. The Earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. 'Could be the only reason the Earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself, didn't know how to make it, needed us.

'Could be the answer to our age old, egocentric, philosophical question: "Why are we here?" "Plastic, asshole."

Eat your Greens - after all, you're paying for them

In their battle for the religionist vote - with environmentalism being the new religion - the Green Party released their party list on Earth Day, which Bob Bidinotto suggests should be a religious holiday. Meanwhile, most of the world ignored Earth Day, as they do the Green Party list.

Not PC suggests you don't ignore the Green Party list however. As a taxpayer, why not peruse the list and see if you can spot anyone on it whose lifestyle and activism you aren't paying for.

And what about the environmentalist arguments behind Earth Day? Not PC agrees with Capitalist Magazine that the earth is mankind's garden:

There is an alternative to the environmentalist argument. It is one that says the Earth is man's garden and that man's mind as fully competent to meet the challenges of living in his garden, whatever those challenges may be. It is an argument that recognizes that the ultimate resource is not oil, coal, caribou or even the energy of the atom. It is an argument that recognizes that the ultimate resource is a free, unfettered human mind.

Message to Green Party: Leave us alone.