Posted on 01/22/2005 2:22:49 PM PST by wagglebee
Green activists have given "environmentalism" a bad name. Tsunami waters had barely receded before Tony Juniper, spokesman for Friends of the Earth, told the press that the tragedy was "... consistent with climate-change predictions." Hogwash! Climate-change predictions are all over the yard and all are based on computer models. None is supported by the actual scientific record. What is known is that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 100 parts per million during the last century, some of which is likely to be the result of using fossil fuel.
The BBC is touting a 2001 study by English scientist Gerry Stanhill that says the sun's radiation reaching the earth is diminishing as a result of particulate matter in fossil fuel emissions. Does this mean that fossil fuel emissions may actually cause the earth to cool? Or does this mean that the earth would be warming much faster were it not for the particulates?
The article goes on to say that "during the ice age, a similar rise in CO2 led to a temperature rise of six degrees Celsius."
What was that? A similar rise in carbon dioxide during the ice age? How can that be? There were no SUVs. There were no factories or power plants belching out columns of pollution. There weren't even any people around to breath out.
The fact is science cannot predict the weather accurately more than a few days in advance. Any prediction of what the climate may be 100 years from now is, at best, a SWAG (the "S" is for sophisticated; the rest you know).
Of course, facts rarely matter to green activists. Was it not the Natural Resources Defense Council that produced a "scientific" study on which CBS based its now-infamous alar report, which claimed the chemical was a deadly toxin? Well, after the report had aired, real scientists revealed that to match the dosage of alar fed to rats in the study, a human would have to eat 28,000 pounds of apples, each day, for 70 years, and that, when fed the equivalent of only 14,000 pounds of apples per day, the rats developed no tumors at all.
Louis J. Guillette told a congressional committee: "There is not a man in this room that is half the man his grandfather was," because a study conducted by Theo Colburn, a scientist for the World Wide Fund for Nature, said that man-made chlorine caused alligator penises to shrink.
To green activists, science is nothing more than a way to give credence to what otherwise would be ignored as an outlandish claim. If the science does not support the claim, they have no reluctance to fudge or alter the science. Consider the case of the federal employees who wanted to lock up portions of the Northwest so badly that they planted lynx hairs in a study area so the area would be designated as critical habitat.
In their quest to abuse science, green activists regularly demean and ridicule scientists whose work produces results that disagree with the outcome desired by the activists. Their ridicule, through willing media, has produced a chilling effect among scientists who would prefer to stay out of the negative spotlight.
These antics have become so numerous over such a long period of time that the word "environmentalist" has taken on a negative connotation. Focus groups conducted by expensive public-relations firms have led to recommendations that environmental organizations abandon the use of the word and to use the label "conservationist" instead.
Green activists created environmental organizations to increase the effectiveness of their efforts to clean up the environment. They did good work – in the beginning. The organizations, however, have long ago forgotten their original mission and are now dedicated to building their financial and political empires. Having achieved most of their original goals of cleaning up rivers and streams, reducing air pollution and the like, they needed bigger goals and scarier scenarios to keep people digging deeper and deeper into their pockets to fund the ever-expanding bureaucracies of the environmental organizations.
Global warming is the granddaddy of all scary scenarios. It cannot be proved, nor disproved, so whatever symptom a green activist chooses to blame on global warming is fair game. Whether it's a tsunami in Sumatra, a mudslide in California, 19 feet of snow in Tahoe or a heat wave in Europe – all of it is said to be caused by global warming. And everyone knows that humans – especially American humans – cause global warming. Such is the logic of green activists.
They are marxists intent upon destroying capitalism and freedom.
I'd like to know how global warming could cause an earthquake.
Henry Lamb bump!
Well you can't prove that it didn't!
True, but the scientific burden of proof suggests we avoid linking the two without some semblance of both correlation and causation.
Might as well have said, "...consistent with wild-eyed guesses" or "delusional visions" or "drug-induced paranoia".
Totally meaningless gobbledigook.
I challenge this assertion since my experience has been that it never enjoyed any respect at all, save for the first few weeks after the weak-willed discovered the word, and blanketted them in a certain cachet.
It has been the equivalent of science "moron" ever since.
I used to tear him apart in class.
One day he was rambling some green peace shtick, I start correcting him quoting Patrick Moore.
He got a little cocky with the line "Who's that? Some right wing anti-earth nutjob?
I (nicely) responded, that Patrick Moore was one of the founders of Green Peace, who has since left because he believes in real solutions for the enviornment, and is still active but no longer affialated with the movement. He was the guy who was often in the pictured holding a baby seal to protect it from being clubbed.
It shut him up for awhile.
Do you remember when the Sierra Club and other environmentalists were arguing that its better the trees in california all burn down, then cut down any of them for profit, even if it saves the forrests?
Years later I was overjoyed to learn that the Tasadays were a hoax developed by Ferdinand Marcos to get hundreds of millions of dollars from American and European leftists!
BTT!!!!!!
"Science" has lost its respect as the ultimate arbitrator. I have a friend and neighbor who has several PhDs and has taught range ecology at UC Davis and UC Berkley. He served on the large federal Sierra Nevada scientific study during the Babbitt years. I appointed him to our regional technical advisory committee for a federal fisheries task force. He was appalled at what passed for science. He said that the so called scientists no longer relied on empirical field research but manipulated 3rd and fourth generation citations from old, statisticaly unsound studies. Yet this garbage that passes for "science" is used in lawsuits and decisions that effect farmers, ranchers, loggers, and fishermen's livelihoods, families and communities.
I know when President Bush called in the NAS to review the Klamath that their hearings queried the "biologists" on the information used to list coho in 97 and it came down to the fact that they had absolutely no body of hard science upon which to base a listing. However, because the law says "best available science," very little information - if that was all that was available - could be used as a basis. We still have that listing, although it has been recently temporarily rendered uneforceable by Judge Hogan and Pacific Legal Foundation.
I have also seen the media battle by the Yuroks to try to hammer the Klamath Basin Farmers with responsibility for the so-called "fish kill." They twist and manipulated all kinds of reports and quotes to milk the media perception that water withdrawals hundreds of miles upstream cause a localized fish die-off. Judge Armstrong recently ruled the claim as baseless.
Science is so politicized that it has become like a hired gun or prostitute. I don't put my faith in anything that is said in the name of science anymore.
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