Tuesday, November 08, 2005

GLOBAL WARMING CAUSED BY THE RECENT REDUCTION IN PIRACY?

A good bit of satire below:

You may be interested to know that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of Pirates since the 1800s. For your interest, I have included a graph of the approximate number of pirates versus the average global temperature over the last 200 years. As you can see, there is a statistically significant inverse relationship between pirates and global temperature.



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THE HYOCRITICAL GREENIES OF GOOGLE

The two founders of Google, the multi-billion dollar internet search engine company that has become a verb, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, are known for their left-wing sympathies, to say the least. A while back the company announced they were going start giving tens of millions of dollars to liberal organizations to help advance their causes, everything from groups that promote "progressive" policies to organizations that protect the environment.

Like many liberal billionaires, they don't live up to their own standards. It seems they decided Google needed a corporate jet, so they bought one. If that were all there was to the story, I don't think anyone would think it odd. Google is a huge company with lots of money, I'd be surprised if they didn't have a jet. But it's not the fact that they have a jet that's funny, it's the type of jet they have chosen to buy.

The environmentally friendly, left-wing sympathetic company bought a 767! That's right, they bought a plane designed to carry 180 people. But they have no need for a plane that carries 180 people, so they are refurbishing it. Once their remodeling is done it will carry 50 people. It will still be a giant plane that burns tons of fuel, but it will do it for a lot less people. It makes me wonder what they are going to put inside of it that will fill the space normally taken up by 130 people.Swing sets? Trees to hug?

I don't begrudge them their success, they did it, they earned it, they can buy whatever kind of plane they want to buy, and as many of them as they want to buy. I take issue with the fact they are giving a ton of money to groups that oppose what they are doing, but would never protest them. They support organizations that want to tell us how to live, tax us into serfdom, tell us what do drive, etc., but they won't live up to their ideals.

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PANDERING TO THE GREENS IN AUSTRALIA

"I have grown used to federal environment ministers becoming the captives of their department. Robert Hill was also a sucker for catastrophist science. Even John Howard now pays lip service to the idea that, somehow, man-made carbon dioxide is a problem. For a sceptical conservative, these are discouraging signs of the times. It is (just) understandable that a Liberal prime minister fighting on several fronts at once should refuse to buy into an argument he doesn't expect to win in the short term, during his time in office. Displaced millennial anxiety is hard to counter with mere rational argument. However, Howard has gone a step further and decided on a policy of appeasement. I had hoped that, having handled the Kyoto Protocol debate so sensibly, he'd continue to take a stand on the underlying principle and also avoid wasting public money on tokenistic projects. He has failed on both counts.

I cannot bring myself to believe that Howard is a born-again catastrophist because it's just not in his nature. Spending $1.8 billion on an issue his advisers must have warned him is a chimera is something of which he was once constitutionally incapable. But after Campbell's boast about all the serious money he was devoting to greenhouse gases, I went to his website and checked.

There I found his modest "Saving the Climate Factsheet". Some of the expenditure was on more or less respectable solar projects and other marginal forms of renewable energy. More than $40 million went to catastrophist research and various kinds of rent-seeking alternative enterprises. Some $522 million has been allocated to a Low Emission Technology Demonstration Fund.

Let us take a charitable view and say that perhaps $800 million of the money notionally covered by the rubric of saving the climate was defensible on other grounds. What about the rest of those vast new budgets; for example, the expenditure on developing technologies for carbon sequestration? William Kininmonth, arguably Australia's leading climatologist, says that: "Any project that sets out to reduce CO2 emissions for its own sake is a complete waste of money."

There was a time Howard believed in frugality in public spending. I suppose that, after nearly 10 years in Kirribilli House, $1billion may have come to seem neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps it can be rationalised away as the price of conciliating some at least of the so-called doctors' wives and hanging on to a few marginal seats. As the Protestant Henry of Navarre said when he claimed the throne of France: "Paris is worth a mass." But even if a policy of such brazen expediency can be excused, can the same be said of Campbell? .....

If Campbell, or anyone else in the Howard Government for that matter, is interested in a conservative approach to the issues of climate change and greenhouse gases, they would do well to read Britain's recent cross-party House of Lords committee report. The peers found that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-backed emissions watchdog, is tainted by "political interference". It also found that policy-makers were too focused on mitigating climate change rather than adapting to it, according to The Scotsman.

Lord Lawson, a former Tory chancellor of the exchequer and committee member, was especially critical of the way Kyoto targets for greenhouse gas emissions had been "subcontracted" to the IPCC, which he described as "very, very flawed". He said that "an issue so central to Britain's economy should be decided by the Government. I can tell you that I was astonished when the Treasury witness said that the Treasury really wasn't involved in any serious way at all. When I was chancellor, it would have been unthinkable on a matter as important as economic affairs - important in public expenditure terms - that the Treasury was not making a very thorough analysis of the issue."

During the House of Lords debate, the non-scientific component of climate-change prediction was questioned in a more sustained way than we're generally accustomed to. Lord Taverne, a former Labour MP, asked: "Does the minister agree that forecasts of global warming depend not only on scientific forecasts but on economic forecasts? Is the department aware that some extremely pertinent criticisms have been made of the special report and emissions scenarios by two very distinguished economists: Ian Castles, the former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and David Henderson, the former head of the economics division of the OECD? They point out that the measure used - the market exchange rate - is quite inappropriate for measuring the difference between rich and poor countries: it exaggerates them. Some questionable assumptions are also made about the rate of closure of the gap between rich and poor nations. As that will affect policy and is very important in relation to future policy, will the minister urge her colleagues at the Treasury to get involved in the process of economic forecasting? At the moment something is very wrong."

The minister, Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton, professed herself satisfied with the process, then Lord Lawson intervened again. "Under the flawed proceedings of the IPCC, even the lowest emission scenario, which leads to the lowest extent of projected global warming, is based on a rate of growth of the developing countries in the coming century that is far faster than has ever been known. "As a result, by the end of the century under its projections, the average income of Algerians, South Africans and North Koreans will be higher than that of citizens of the United States. Is the noble baroness really content that this very important matter on which major policy and public expenditure decisions have to be taken should be left to what is little more than an environmentalist closed shop that is unsullied by any acquaintance with economics, statistics or, indeed, economic history?"

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists


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