15 June 2009 @ 9:04AM >> London’s Telegraph reports:

For the second time in little over a year, it looks as though the world may be heading for a serious food crisis, thanks to our old friend “climate change”. In many parts of the world recently the weather has not been too brilliant for farmers. After a fearsomely cold winter, June brought heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week, it was -4°C. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.

There was midsummer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia. At least in the southern hemisphere it is winter, but snowfalls in New Zealand and Australia have been abnormal. There have been frosts in Brazil, elsewhere in South America they have had prolonged droughts, while in China they have had to cope with abnormal rain and freak hailstorms, which in one province killed 20 people.

[...]

There are obviously various reasons for this concern as to whether the world can continue to feed itself, but one of them is undoubtedly the downturn in world temperatures, which has brought more cold and snow since 2007 than we have known for decades.

[...]

It is now more than 200 years since the great astronomer William Herschel observed a correlation between wheat prices and sunspots. When the latter were few in number, he noted, the climate turned colder and drier, crop yields fell and wheat prices rose. In the past two years, sunspot activity has dropped to its lowest point for a century. One of our biggest worries is that our politicians are so fixated on the idea that [carbon dioxide] is causing global warming that most of them haven’t noticed that the problem may be that the world is not warming but cooling, with all the implications that has for whether we get enough to eat.

It is appropriate that another contributory factor to the world’s food shortage should be the millions of acres of farmland now being switched from food crops to biofuels, to stop the world warming, Last year even the experts of the European Commission admitted that, to meet the EU’s biofuel targets, we will eventually need almost all the food-growing land in Europe. But that didn’t persuade them to change their policy.

15 January 2009 @ 9:26AM >> We’re all doomed!

Back in the 1970s, scientists were predicting global cooling, including at least one prominent scientist who later became a global warming alarmist.

Then, in the mid-1980s, we were all told to fear “acid rain,” which was the big looming environmental disaster of the time. Funny, we don’t seem to hear about acid rain anymore.

The scare-mongers then shifted focus to “the greenhouse effect” which eventually became known as “global warming,” a term that has fallen out of favor lately because the warming predictions haven’t been coming true in recent years.

So, after some embarrassing blunders with faulty data, global warming has been re-branded as “climate change.” That way, any time there’s a change in temperature, they can claim it as evidence supporting their beliefs. (Of course, since the dawn of Earth’s history, continual change has been the only constant with respect to the climate. So, by definition, anyone predicting the climate will change is always going to be proven correct eventually.)

Now it turns out that sea ice levels have risen to the highest point since 1979, after one of the coolest years in recent memory. Pravda, a preferred news outlet of radical environmentalists during the Soviet era, is even declaring that “[t]he earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science.”

While some people now claim they knew all along that the La Ni~na ocean cycle would cause temporary cooling, during the early years of global warming alarm, I can’t recall anyone saying, “in a few years, the temperature will cool because of a well-known oceanic phenomenon.” I can’t find a single Al Gore chart predicting a temporary lowering of the temperature for the latter part of this decade. Nope, the original predictions were for temperatures to keep going up, up, up.

But if we’re now supposedly on the brink of an ice age, then maybe environmental alarmism is just like women’s fashion, and we’re once again at the beginning of the hype cycle, right where we were back in the ’70s.

Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back.

19 November 2008 @ 9:02AM >> London’s Telegraph reports on the latest developments in global warming, sorry, climate change:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Meanwhile, on the subject of global warming climate change:

A new Irish film claims that climate change guru Al Gore is an alarmist and that those who think they are saving the planet are only hurting the poor

IF THE ADVANCE publicity is anything to go by, Not Evil Just Wrong will do for Al Gore what Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 did for George W Bush.

“This is the film Al Gore and Hollywood don’t want you to see,” declares the website for the latest work by film-makers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer. The site even features a big picture of Gore, with his lips in the photograph seemingly digitally enhanced to make them look like Heath Ledger’s Joker from the latest Batman film.

The website goes on to say that their latest film - which takes on what are described as global warming alarmists - is “the most controversial documentary of the year”. Indeed, it could very well be the most controversial. And Al Gore and Hollywood may well not want you to see it. And in that respect, Gore and co are actually succeeding for the moment. Because there is no completed film. Not yet anyway.

McElhinney and McAleer have raised almost $1 million (EUR799,000) but need a total of $4.5m (EUR3.6m) to allow for a full cinema release. They say they were acutely disappointed at being turned down for funding by the Irish Film Board, especially its conclusion that it was “repetitive and creatively thin”.

Instead, they have gone onto the internet hoping to solicit donations in the style of Barack Obama. The finished product will be around 90 minutes long. Both film-makers rebut the Film Board’s criticism by pointing out that a near-complete version of the film has been chosen in the audience category at the Amsterdam Film Festival later this month.

I saw the couple’s previous release, Mine Your Own Business and found it quite illuminating.

I hope they’re successful in their fundraising efforts. I may try to raise money online to finance future film projects, and I’d like to see it work.

1 October 2008 @ 8:21AM >> The current status of global warming:

[S]cientists involved in NASA’s Ulysses project reported that the intensity of the sun’s solar wind was at its lowest point since the beginning of the space age - one more indication that the sun, the biggest source of energy affecting the Earth, is getting quiet.

The weaker solar wind appears to be due to changes in the sun’s magnetic field, but the cause is unknown. Sunspots, which normally fluctuate in 11-year cycles, are at a virtual standstill. In August, the sun created no visible spots. The last time that happened: June 1913.

The results of the Ulysses spacecraft’s mission, according to Jet Propulsion Laboratory project scientist Ed Smith, show that “we are in a period of minimal activity that has stretched on longer than anyone anticipated.”

The consequences for Earth are enormous. The lack of increased activity could signal the start of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event that occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century. It leads to extended periods of severe cooling such as what happened during the Little Ice Age.

It may already be happening. The four major agencies tracking Earth’s temperature, including NASA’s Goddard Institute, report that the Earth cooled 0.7 degree Celsius in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the Earth was in 1930.

Way back in the 1970s, scientists predicted the climate would cool. We should have listened.

18 July 2008 @ 9:10AM >> With the cult-like hype around all things “green” these days, it seems like everyone is hopping on the bandwagon.

Sensing a marketing opportunity, companies are embracing the new culture of conspicuous planet-saving.

This week, a gift from a relative arrived in which Macy’s placed a postcard-sized note explaining that the package was shipped with “Earth-loving packing material” designed to “protect our environment.” Aside from the small matter of unnecessarily using the Earth’s resources to explain to me how Macy’s is saving the Earth’s resources, there was something rather comedic about the company’s presentation.

The gift arrived in a box over 2 feet tall. Width and length-wise, the box was 19 inches. It was a pretty big box, so when I picked it up, I expected something heavy. I was a bit surprised to discover how light it was, at least until I opened it up.

You see, the self-congratulatorily eco-friendly Macy’s filled this huge box with an item that was only one inch tall, 10 inches wide, and 15 inches deep. This wasn’t exactly a fragile item, either; it was essentially a block of wood. Macy’s could have put a stamp right on the item itself with no packaging and sent it out without much chance of damage.

So, the one inch tall item had 25x as much vertical space as necessary, along with an extra 9 inches of padding in one dimension and an extra 4 inches in another. Several dozen more of the shipped item could have fit in the box comfortably.

But after realizing the extent of the wasted space, I was quite relieved to pull the card out of the box telling me how environmentally friendly it all was.

20 May 2008 @ 8:52AM >> In yesterday’s, “The Coming Nanny State Fat Camp,” I mentioned two excuses Nanny Statists will use to get government to restrict people’s food intake and force them to exercise.

If this comment is any clue, those Nanny Statists have a friend in Barack Obama:

“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,” Obama said.

“That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen,” he added.

Millions around the globe have starved to death in recent years thanks to petty dictators and corrupt governments. But to Senator Obama, “leadership” means letting the rest of the world know that he blames the United States first.

America exports more food that any other nation on Earth, yet accounts for less than 5% of the world’s population.

When it comes to our net contribution to the world’s food supply, we are not the planet’s biggest problem.

But rather than implore, say, North Korea to abandon the bankrupt ideology that’s led to numerous mass starvations, a President Obama would prefer to subject the food intake of our private citizens to the approval of other countries.

Now that the senator seems to be preening for the job of Counselor-in-Chief of the Nanny State Fat Camp, his wife’s odd comments from earlier in the year suddenly make more sense:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

5 May 2008 @ 9:20AM >> While food costs continue rise, the role of government is getting more attention:

With high food prices prompting grocery-store apologies to customers and raising fears of starvation in impoverished countries, Congress suddenly faces renewed pressure to cut subsidies to the wealthiest farmers and incentives for ethanol production.

The American farmer, long an untouchable political icon, has even become something of a political embarrassment on Capitol Hill, with President Bush earlier this week demanding an end to crop subsidies for “multimillionaire farmers.”

Congress just last year required that more ethanol be added to the gasoline supply. The mandate is now blamed for inflating the price of corn and other staples.

[...]

In Congress, some lawmakers are calling for changes in the nation’s commitment to ethanol as the biofuel of choice to replace oil. “This is a classic case of the law of unintended consequences. Congress surely did not intend to raise food prices by incentivizing ethanol, but that’s precisely what’s happened,” said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who introduced legislation this week that would end federal support for ethanol.

[...]

At the Santa Ana Food Market in Orange County, owner Ken Lau said he has had to raise his prices. Small tortillas that once sold for 69 cents for three dozen are now 99 cents. “We have lots of customers with low-paying jobs and they are struggling now just to make it,” he said. High food prices have inspired critics, including the president, to renew their attacks on subsidies for farmers. The nearly $300-billion, five-year farm bill, delayed for months, has become an easy target for opponents who cite a new outrage: Many farmers are making record incomes while consumers are shocked by dramatic price increases.

“They’re talking about continuing $25 billion in these subsidies over the next five years at a time of record commodity prices and food prices,” said Rep. Ron Kind, a Democrat from Wisconsin.

The Agriculture Department forecasts that the average farm household will earn more than $89,000 in 2008, up 6.3% from 2007. That’s a third higher than the average U.S. household income, which is projected to be $67,000.

Despite that, farm-bill negotiators are fighting to keep $5.2 billion in direct payments, which go to farmers regardless of how much they earn or whether they are growing a crop.

I wish I could get paid not to work. I guess I’m just in the wrong business.

1 May 2008 >> Get ready to start surrendering more of your rights to government. You knew the Nannycrats wouldn’t stop at smoking, fast food and foie gras. Now they’ve got their crosshairs zeroed in on that modern-day horror, the thing most of us dread and fear... you guessed it...

Plastic bags:

[Baltimore City Councilman James Kraft] equated using plastic bags with Nazi extermination tactics at a City Council meeting earlier this week.

“We don’t want to be criticized by future generations for not doing enough now as were those who dealt with the Germans then,” Kraft said.

So what follows? Should those who use plastic bags be charged with murder? Genocide?

No one can claim plastic bags help the environment. But he hurts his cause by outsizing their danger by orders of magnitude - especially when similar plans have failed throughout the rest of [Maryland].

Bills in both Anne Arundel County and the state legislature failed to make it into law in the past year. And studies show plastic bags are cheaper and require less energy to make than paper bags.

They are also much less environmentally-unfriendly than people like Councilman Kraft believe, according to the London Times:

Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.

The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.

[...]

Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, The Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals.

They “don’t figure” in the majority of cases where animals die from marine debris, said David Laist, the author of a seminal 1997 study on the subject. Most deaths were caused when creatures became caught up in waste produce. “Plastic bags don’t figure in entanglement,” he said. “The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands. Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag.”

[...]

The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.

Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags”.

The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the “typo” remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing “plastic bags” with “plastic debris”.

Oops.

Nevertheless, knowledge of this error will not quell the Nannies’ desires to meddle more.

Bored people seeking the tingle of power are drawn to becoming Nannies because they get to feel morally superior while also controlling the behavior of others. It’s a win-win.

So I predict, the campaign against plastic bags will continue.

15 February 2008 @ 8:55AM >> Global Warming has become so strong and so pervasive that even imaginary creatures are becoming extinct:

LEGENDARY Nessie hunter Robert Rines is giving up his search for the monster after 37 years.

The 85-year-old American will make one last trip in a bid to find the elusive beast.

After almost four decades of fruitless expeditions, he admitted: “Unfortunately, I’m running out of age.”

World War II veteran Robert has devoted almost half his life to scouring Loch Ness.

He started in 1971. The following year, he watched a 25ft-long hump with the texture of elephant skin gliding through the water.

His original trip was to help another monster hunter with sonar equipment and quickly identified large moving targets.

He was smitten and returned the next year, which is when, he says: “I had the misfortune of seeing one of these things with my own eyes.”

Since then, he has been obsessed with tracking down the creature with a staggering array of hi-tech equipment. It was this gear that took the famous “flipper” picture that year which created a stir around the world.

Despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming.

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen that many unicorns or leprechauns recently, either.

4 September 2007 @ 8:54AM >> Every time I post an article like this, I get e-mails pointing out that such stories are scientifically meaningless. Perhaps, but that doesn’t make them any less amusing:

A BRITISH yachtsman attempting the first solo Arctic sea passage across northern Russia was examining his options after heavier than expected ice blocked his route, his manager said.

Adrian Flanagan is discussing with Russian authorities the possibility of using a nuclear-powered icebreaker to lift his boat out of the water and carry it round the most icebound stretch of Russia’s Northern Sea Route.

“Basically it just means we’re putting plan B into operation so if the worst comes to the worst and there isn’t a break in the weather, we’ve got a plan,” Louise Flanagan, his manager and ex-wife said from Britain.

The 46-year-old entered the eastern end of the treacherous sea route that stretches from Asia to Europe across northern Russia in late July.

He had hoped that his 11m reinforced yacht would be able to get all the way to Europe due to lighter ice conditions observed in recent years, thought to be a result of global warming.

14 August 2007 >> “Red faces at NASA” :

In the United States, the calendar year 1998 ranked as the hottest of them all - until someone checked the math.

After a Toronto skeptic tipped NASA this month to one flaw in its climate calculations, the U.S. agency ordered a full data review.

Days later, it put out a revised list of all-time hottest years. The Dust Bowl year of 1934 now ranks as hottest ever in the U.S. - not 1998.

More significantly, the agency reduced the mean U.S. “temperature anomalies” for the years 2000 to 2006 by 0.15 degrees Celsius.

(Hat tip: Austin Hopper.)

14 May 2007 >> From Ann Althouse:

I keep reading about how hybrid cars and compact fluorescent lightbulbs can reduce the production of greenhouse gases, but I have yet to see an article about the savings that could be achieved if we were to stop delivery of newspapers and magazines and do all of our news reading on line.

13 March 2007 >> ...she still has this religion is that even extreme cold is taken as proof of warming.

11 March 2007 @ 12:47PM >> Czech President Vaclav Klaus on environmentalism:

Environmentalism is a religion that is based more on political ambitions than science, the president of the Czech Republic warned Friday.

Speaking at the Cato Institute, a public policy think-tank, President Vaclav Klaus said that environmentalists who clamor for policy change to combat global warming “only pretend” to be promoting environmental protection, and are actually being driven by a political agenda.

“Environmentalism should belong in the social sciences,” much like the idea of communism or other “-isms” such as feminism, Klaus said, adding that “environmentalism is a religion” that seeks to reorganize the world order as well as social behavior and value systems worldwide.

9 March 2007 @ 8:18AM >> When the weather doesn’t fit the script, you don’t hear about it so much.

27 February 2007 >> Despite the frequent attempts to claim otherwise, the scientific community does not unanimously believe in man-made global warming. And now, more than 17,000 scientists have signed a petition to that effect, stating:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

13 February 2007 @ 7:45AM >> Apparently, Al Gore is capable of singlehandedly combating global warming just by his mere presence.

A couple years ago, I gathered evidence of his ability to do this myself.

If global warming is man-made, maybe the solution is simply to clone Al Gore and to place the clones strategically around the planet.

18 January 2007 @ 9:02AM >> On July 27, 1997, the Senate voted by a margin of 95-0 that the United States would not sign a treaty structured like the Kyoto Protocol. That treaty, which proponents claimed would improve the environment, had harsher economic penalties for the United States than it did for countries like China, even though 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China.

As a result of the Senate’s lopsided vote, President Clinton never bothered to submit the Kyoto Protocol for ratification. So it seems a bit strange that the Associated Press would claim:

The United States is no longer bound by Kyoto, which the Bush administration rejected after taking office in 2001.

First of all, the United States was never bound by Kyoto. And the reason the U.S. was never bound by Kyoto is because the treaty was never ratified. President Clinton never even submitted it for ratification. Why didn’t he? Because every Senator—Republican and Democrat alike—who voted on the 1997 resolution made it clear that they would oppose ratifying Kyoto.

All of this took place years before President Bush was in office, but it seems that AP is more concerned with blaming Bush than getting its facts straight.

(Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.)

8 January 2007 >> Mine Your Own Business is a soon-to-be-released film documenting the detrimental effects that trendy environmentalists can have on underprivileged communities throughout the world. Not every society has yet been fortunate enough to reap the economic benefits of the industrial revolution, and some activists want to keep it that way, preferring to impose impoverishment on other cultures in the name of quaintness.

You can view the trailer for Mine Your Own Business on YouTube or read more about the film here.

The film debuts in New York on Friday, January 19th and in Washington, D.C. on January 24th. Both screenings start at 7PM. If you wish to attend either screening, you can sign up here.

Disclosure: Mine Your Own Business was created with the assistance of the Moving Picture Institute, which was also instrumental in enabling the completion of another soon-to-be-released film, Indoctrinate U.

26 April 2006 @ 9:58AM >> When it came to the economy, there used to be two distinct political parties in America. Democrats generally favored larger government, more controls over the economy, and higher taxes. Republicans preferred smaller government, a more free economy, and lower taxes. But in the dozen years since the Republicans gained control over Congress, they have inexplicably begun to morph into the party that they displaced.

Government spending under the Republican Congress is out of control, and the high price of gas is causing Republicans to dust off socialist terminology like “price gouging” and “obscene profits.” The one remaining difference between the parties seems to be on tax policy—Republicans still tend to favor lower taxes—but given the Republicans’ abandonment of their other principles, I wonder how long that will be the case.

James K. Glassman chides President Bush for jumping on the “bash big oil” bandwagon:

He started his speech by, once again, criticizing Americans for their “addiction to oil.” He used the same obnoxious phrase in his State of the Union Address.

[...]

The President — and I am not even mentioning the claptrap one hears from Speaker Denny Hastert, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter — is now using the lexicon of extreme environmentalists and statists. Again, he knows better.

After talking about addiction, the President said he was going to crack down on price gouging — that old bugaboo. He said he had asked the Justice and Energy departments to find out whether the rising price of gas was partly the result of manipulation. This is absurd. The gasoline market is broad, fragmented and highly competitive. Price gouging has been studied many times, to no effect. Gas prices are rising because crude oil prices are rising.

[...]

President Bush lived and worked in the oil patch. He knows very well that oil is a commodity whose price moves up and down with global changes in supply and demand — movements that we can’t affect all that much. What we can do is remove political obstacles to a well-functioning market. Such steps would increase supply and lower prices. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The rising oil price is affected by geopolitical threats, but it is mainly the result of increased demand, which itself is the result of rising standards of living — which are a lot better than the alternative.

Glassman also explains many of the reasons that the price of gas is so high today: increased demand from developing countries like India and China, belligerent talk from Iran and general uncertainty on the world stage, and a political climate in America that makes it impossible to increase production capacity.

Did you know, for example, that a new oil refinery hasn’t been built in the United States in the past 30 years? Or that environmentalists have blocked new oil drilling virtually everywhere in the country? And since oil isn’t an option, what about nuclear power? Nope, environmentalists have blocked that, too. Even wind farms are out of vogue; the great environmentalist Kennedy clan is trying to kill a wind farm project in the Nantucket Sound that might have marred the view from their Hyannisport compound. In other words, many of the people using the high price of gas to push for government intervention in the economy are the very people who created the energy supply shortfall in the first place.

But that doesn’t let the Republicans off the hook. In fact, it makes it more important to take them to task for their irresponsible economic rhetoric. I expect Democrats to employ socialist arguments; it’s what they do. But when Republicans join them, it makes me wonder what the point of voting Republican is. I doubt I’m alone in feeling this way, and if so, the Republicans have a reason to worry about the election in November. They are supposed to be the party that understands basic economic laws like supply and demand. Maybe a good old-fashioned electoral ass-whoopin’ is what the Republicans need to remind them of that.

7 February 2006 @ 2:33PM >> Maybe we can accelerate global warming in time to counteract this coming disaster.

(It’s like deja vu all over again!)

5 January 2006 @ 5:25PM >> The Kelo v. New London decision gave government vastly expanded powers to take your land. But there are other, sneakier ways for the government to seize control of what’s yours:

What do you call it when government takes away the use of private property, but leaves the title in the name of the property owner? The Constitution makes no provision for this function of government, but government is exercising this function with increasing regularity and severity.

[...]

White County, Georgia, is about to adopt a resolution for the “protection of mountains and hillsides,” which will severely restrict how private landowners may use their land. If any owner’s land happens to slope as much as 25 percent, the owner may not use it at all, unless the lot is at least 1.5 acres. Then, he may disturb no more than 30 percent. If he wishes to build a home with a driveway, the total “impervious” area may not exceed 20 percent of the land.

This resolution in White County will empower government to take away the use of 70 percent of the land of a private owner. The owner must continue to pay taxes on 100 percent of the property, but may use only 30 percent.

9 December 2005 @ 9:11AM >> At a recent conference on climate change, reporter Richard Ingham of Agence France-Presse apparently became rather agitated when speaking to one of the attendees. In this badgering exchange with Peyton Knight of the National Center for Public Policy Research, the reporter reveals that he has absolutely no prejudices about the topic he’s been assigned to cover:

“Who funds you?” [the reporter] angrily demanded.

I explained that individual donations make up the vast majority of our funding.

“What individuals?” he pressed.

I explained that our supporters are mostly individual Americans who believe in our mission.

Clearly disappointed that our main funding source wasn’t industry, the AFP representative moved on to another line of questioning.

“I see here that you do research. Just what kind of research do you do?” he asked, growing more hostile.

I pointed to the press release in his hand, specifically the bold portion at the top that quite clearly reveals the name of our organization — i.e. The National Center for PUBLIC POLICY Research.

Furious now, he demanded to know The National Center’s stance on global warming. I began to explain to him that it is our view that mankind is not causing the planet to get appreciably warmer. Before I could delve into any specifics, he cut me off, shouting: “Why?! Because it isn’t in the Bible?! It isn’t in Genesis?!”

He then stormed off. He was probably in a hurry to file an honest, unbiased account about the conference... or maybe not.

20 September 2005 >> Polar ice caps on Mars are melting, reports Space.com:

[NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft] observed a gradual evaporation of carbon dioxide ice in one of Mars’ polar caps, pointing to a slowly changing Mars climate.

“They way these polar pits are retreating is absolutely astounding,” [geologist Jack] Mustard said.

But like the rockfalls, researchers were unable to account for the gradual climate change.

“Why is Mars warmer today that it was in the past, we really have no way of knowing why,” [scientist Michael] Malin said.

Let’s see:

1. Earth getting warmer.
2. Mars getting warmer.
3. Increased solar activity.

Gotta be those fossil fuels.

15 September 2005 @ 11:01AM >> Have you ever noticed how faddish science can be? It always seems like some food that we were told to eat more of ten years ago now turns out will kill us. It’s not just limited to dietary concerns; it happens with earth science as well. Did you know that just ten years before people started panicking about global warming, scientists were convinced the biggest environmental threat was global cooling?

This article by Peter Gwynne—published on April 28, 1975 in Newsweek—tries to stir up a panic about the impending “little ice age”. More >>

4 June 2004 >> This is what happens when one ideology dominates an entire industry:

Despite the miserable propaganda failure the movie will be, Bush-hating liberals will still love it — there are plenty of partisan potshots to keep them happy (I’d recommend conservatives sit this one out).

The most obvious (liberals have never been ones for subtlety) is the valiant, prescient hero’s nemesis, who just happens to be a Dick Cheney look-alike VP who tells the president what to do and who has this bizarre concern for the actual economic effect of the “Kyoto Accord” (those money-grubbing conservatives...).

The filmmakers also let us feast on criticism of U.S. immigration policy, repentance for arrogance toward the Third World, the end of western civilization as we know it, and a presidential mea culpa. All in all, an arrogant America humbled.

No, the author isn’t writing about Fahrenheit 9/11, he’s reviewing The Day After Tomorrow. Perhaps the most interesting quote in the article has nothing to do with the film itself; it’s from a 1989 Discover Magazine interview with atmospheric scientist Stephen Schneider:

On the one hand, as scientists, we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but... On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place... To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

Considering that liberals from Al Gore on down have seized upon this film to promote their political message, they’re doing exactly what Schneider advocated.

The key quote in Schneider’s statement is, “we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

Isn’t that what Gore and his ilk have been accusing President Bush of doing with Iraq?

27 April 2004 @ 4:54PM >> One of the co-founders of Greenpeace has an article in the San Francisco Chronicle detailing some of the damage caused by the extremist take-over of the environmental movement:

For example, today’s eco-activists boast that they have blocked more than 200 hydroelectric projects in the developing world over the past two decades. It is true that hydro power has a large ecological footprint, creating lakes and filling valleys. But it is a renewable energy that makes it possible to read after the sun goes down, boosting literacy in poor areas. It provides controlled irrigation for better crop yields and mitigates flooding and the loss of life and property damage.

Moreover, green groups have zero-tolerance policies when it comes to genetically modified crops. This includes the genetically modified “golden rice” that could help prevent blindness in Asian and African children (as many as 500,000 go blind every year, according to the National Institutes of Health) plus hundreds of millions of others who suffer from vitamin A deficiency. Because of activist opposition to GM crops, it will be at least five years before golden rice can be planted in many parts of the developing world. That means another 2.5 million kids could go blind even though no human or natural risk is associated with planting this crop.

The article concludes:

Until the environmental movement comes to terms with the harm it has fostered in addition to the victories it has achieved, there will be no reason to celebrate Earth Day for millions of people around the globe.

What would America be like if these environmentalists had been around in, say, 1850? Probably much like the third world today.

23 April 2004 @ 8:03PM >> How often do you hear about some dangerous food that will take years off your life if you consume too much of it? How often does it turn out to be something that, ten years prior, we were told we should eat more of? As children, we were told to drink our milk. Now Atkins advises against it.

The moral of the story is, scientists aren’t always right. Bandwagons roll through the scientific community just like any other.

Recently, I discovered this Newsweek article from 1975 that warned of “ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change” and that—get this—the changing patterns were caused by global cooling that could bring about a “little ice age”:

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

Some of the scientists even proposed solutions to the “grim reality” of global cooling that we’re now told will happen naturally as the result of global warming, “such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers [...]”

A generation ago, scientists warned us against global cooling. Now they’re ringing the alarm bells about global warming. Think about that next time the media hypes The Next Great Crisis.

19 January 2004 >> On January 15th, New Yorkers awoke to single-digit temperatures and a few inches of new snowfall. In what has since become known as “the Gore effect,” former Vice President Al Gore chose that day to give a speech on global warming. The speech was sponsored by MoveOn.org, a website-turned-political-action-committee that recently gained notoriety by hosting two political ads equating President Bush with Adolf Hitler. Although such comparisons were common at anti-war rallies, I still wasn’t sure whether this mindset was now infecting the Democratic base—the sort of folks who’d brave the cold to hear Al Gore speak. To find out, I spent a few shivering hours outside the Beacon. Video >>