A Call To Arms

[JohnRgt 0]

I just got this email:

To ALL of You Who Value Your Liberty and Your Life,

This is a CALL TO ACTION.

In July the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [ANPR] : Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act,” which details their plan to force Americans to reduce emissions of CO2 and other so-called “greenhouse gases.” This follows on an Executive Order signed by President Bush, which was made possible by a U.S. Supreme Court decisions ruling that CO2 is a “pollutant.” (!)

This plan will strip the American people of their freedom, and place them under the control of a single, all-powerful, federal agency. Industrial permits, furnace regulations, auto emissions testing, building permits, transportation, your home’s temperature, and food production—all will fall under the boot of the EPA. Environmentalists will use lawsuits to pressure the EPA to tighten an ever-shrinking noose around the neck of every American.

This EPA “Proposed Rulemaking” would after November 11, 2008 force Mandatory, 70 percent reductions in CO2 emissions by 2050 which means Mandatory, 70 percent reductions of energy usage by 2050. This action would be destructive of, at first, your freedom and prosperity, but ultimately would endanger your life.

The EPA is inviting public comment on this plan. John Lewis and I have submitted our own objections. To see these objections--along with instructions for how to register your own comments--go to this website:

http://www.classicalideals.com/EPA_Ruination.htm

Do it before November 11, the deadline for public comment.

IMPORTANT!!----Identify your comments as: Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2008-0318

Our comments to the EPA objecting categorically to their ANPR appear in two separate documents:

First, a Cover Letter (3 pages):

http://www.classicalideals.com/EPA-AnprCom...overLetter.html

Second, our reasons for the objections (33 pages):

http://www.classicalideals.com/EPA-AnprComments.html

Our objections in this second document, “Comments to the EPA,” are focused on six major grounds (moral, natural historical, scientific, logical, technological, political) and each appears as a separate Comment section (one to six) with supporting evidence and arguments. I do not believe that anyone else is objecting to this EPA Rulemaking on moral and political grounds as we are.

I already sent this notice to numbers of organizations that are active in refuting the scientific ignorance of the man-made global warming advocates. I urge you to work with us to “Save American Liberty ,” from the marauders marching under the banner of “Save the Planet.”

Please choose to either send a comment to the EPA supporting our “Comments to the EPA” or generate and send in your own comments on this freedom-destroying Rulemaking.

The EPA invites public comment—until November 11, 2008. That is the deadline for opposing this horrific, tyrannical plan.

Read this, and act! Please spread the word. Send this website far and wide, put it on the blogosphere, copy it in whole or in part, and write a letter to the EPA and to any media you can reach!

Paul Saunders

Bethlehem, PA

Retired Chemical Engineer (Semiconductor and Opto-electronic processing)

Dr. John David Lewis

Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science, Duke University

Author, Solon the Thinker and Early Greek Lawgivers

www.classicalideals.com

esse quam videri

[ewv 0]

What contact information was given for the authors of the alert?

[Jack Wakeland 0]

In July the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an “Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking [ANPR] : Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act,” which details their plan to force Americans to reduce emissions of CO2 and other so-called “greenhouse gases.” This follows on an Executive Order signed by President Bush, which was made possible by a U.S. Supreme Court decisions ruling that CO2 is a “pollutant.”...

...This EPA “Proposed Rulemaking” would after November 11, 2008 force Mandatory, 70 percent reductions in CO2 emissions by 2050 which means Mandatory, 70 percent reductions of energy usage by 2050. This action would be destructive of, at first, your freedom and prosperity, but ultimately would endanger your life.

The EPA has chose this moment, when America is totally focused on the final eight weeks of the presidential campaign, to introduce the most sweeping regulation ever proposed in America? The EPA has chosen this season between two sessions of Congress and two presidencies to establish a regime to choke industrial revolution?

This is an enabling act for environmentalist dictatorship.

But the evil of this act is not limited to the destruction of liberty. It goes way beyond that. At the very least, this dictatorial act proposes to end economic growth for two generations. If substitutes for fossil fuel cannot be developed (and developed at gunpoint) quickly enough this dictatorial act proposes America have its second Great Depression...and that the Great Depression never end. Our government is attempting to impose an environmentalist version of Mao Tse Tung's Great Leap Forward.

This is a life-threatening act.

[Carlos 0]

Dear lord, if CO2 is a pollutant then O2 is chlorine gas.

[Carlos 0]

Depending on who you ask, water vapor is anywhere from 60%-90% of the greenhouse effect, with CO2 making up the remainder. Based on isotope analysis, manmade CO2 can only account for about 4% of CO2 in the atmosphere. Countless experiments over the past 50 years or so have pinned a CO2 residence time in the atmosphere at about 5-10 years (AGW proponents will make up a new definition of residence time for CO2 and say it is 100-250 years!), with two recent experiments both giving values of 5.8 years. The ocean is capable of absorbing massive amounts of CO2, then through chemical reactions with Calcium able to lock up the CO2 in Calcium Carbonate which sinks to the bottom of the ocean.

CO2 is such a weak greenhouse gas that the solar forcing from a 100% increase in CO2 levels could be offset by a 2% increase in low cloud cover. Environmentalists can only arrive at scary computer model predictions by assuming a large positive feedback from water vapor. This assumption is completely uncertain, because literally no one can correctly predict/model global cloud formation, and the Earth as a system has to be dominated by large negative feedback mechanisms.

It is absolute insanity that the "oxygen of plants", the most fundamental gas of life, is being demonized by Viro's. Ironically, when O2 first appeared on Earth, it caused mass extinctions! (oxygen was probably toxic to nearly all primitive life)

[piz 0]

What contact information was given for the authors of the alert?

I personally know Paul Saunders. He's very knowledgeable and active in advocating the truth of the global warming/climate change scam. If anyone would like to contact him directly, I'll provide his email address in a PM.

[ruveyn ben yosef 0]

What contact information was given for the authors of the alert?

I personally know Paul Saunders. He's very knowledgeable and active in advocating the truth of the global warming/climate change scam. If anyone would like to contact him directly, I'll provide his email address in a PM.

I assume you mean the Anthropic Global Warming Scam. The Earth has warmed and it has cooled. Greenland used to be .. well... green. Mostly because of variations in the Sun's output and variations in its orbit. Also cosmic ray interaction on the upper atmosphere has effects on cloud formation and therefore on mean atmospheric temperature.

See:

http://www.amazon.com/Chilling-Stars-Theor...0226&sr=1-1

ruveyn

[Jack Wakeland 0]

What contact information was given for the authors of the alert?

I personally know Paul Saunders. He's very knowledgeable and active in advocating the truth of the global warming/climate change scam. If anyone would like to contact him directly, I'll provide his email address in a PM.

I assume you mean the Anthropic Global Warming Scam. The Earth has warmed and it has cooled. Greenland used to be .. well... green. Mostly because of variations in the Sun's output and variations in its orbit. Also cosmic ray interaction on the upper atmosphere has effects on cloud formation and therefore on mean atmospheric temperature.

See:

http://www.amazon.com/Chilling-Stars-Theor...0226&sr=1-1

ruveyn

I appreciate your reference to Henrik Svensmark's "The Chilling Stars." This book outlines a powerful theory of cloud formation. Dr. Svensmark's discovery is that cosmic rays, within a specific energy band, generate the vast numbers of microdroplets of electrically-charged H2SO3 and H2SO4 in the lower atmosphere that cause sun-reflecting clouds to form. He has observed dramatic increases charged micro-droplets of acid in the laboratory and he has seen it in data reported in airborne H2SO3, H2SO4 microdroplet surveys over the ocean. Experiments are scheduled for the CERN particle accelerator to further examine the precise mechanics of the collisions of cosmic rays with atmospheric molecules by which charged mircodroplets of H2SO3 and H2SO4 are formed.

For decades meteorologists have been chasing after the source of these microdroplets and planetary chemsists have been chasing the SO3 emissions over the oceans that provide the material for most of these droplets (because most of the earth's surface is covered by oceans). They've been interested because these electrically charged micro droplets of H2SO3 and H2SO4 -- many of which are only dozens or hundreds of molecules in size -- are the nucleation sites for atmospheric water droplets that makeup clouds.

Henrik Svensmark discovered that cosmic rays create these charged micro droplets, that differences in the annual flux of cosmic rays within the frequency range that generates lower atmospheric clouds correlate directly with changes in the global atmosphere and ocean temperatures, that major atronomical collisions that have occured two or three times over the past billion years (and produce vast fluxes of cosmic rays) can be correlated to paleontological evidence of major shocks to the earth's climate, that decadal sun spot cycles (which alters the fraction of the cosmic rays within the right energy band that get deflected away from the solar system) correlate to decadal warming and cooling of the earth's atmosphere, that early rennaissance observations of sun spots are correlated with centuries-long warming and cooling cyles (the end of the medieval warm period and the little ice age), and that changes in isotopic concentrations of atmopheric gasses trapped in polar ice which are correlated to consmic ray flux can be correlated to mellenial changes in the earth's atmospheric temperature.

His cosmic-ray / cloud-formation theory explains atmospheric temperture changes on every time scale against which it has been tested: on the annual timescale, on the decadal timescale, on the tricentennial timescale, on the millenial timescale, and on the time scale of paleontological epochs (100s of millions of years).

The theory works on all time scales.

Henrik Svensmark has discovered the primary thermostat of the earth.

Henrik Svensmark's theory even explains the "Antarctic anomoly" -- ice cores around the world show that, for over 30,000 years, when arctic ice and glaciers across the northern and southern hemisphere recede, Antarctic ice accumulates...and vice versa.

Are there other, secondary thermostats? Surely there are. (e.g., atronomical changes in our sun's output as it ages...it is getting hotter and hotter, the precession of the earth's spin and irregularities in its orbit, and -- of course -- atmospheric chemistry...the green house effect of water, methane and CO2). But none is correlated to global climatic temperature change with one tenth of the strength or one tenth of the reliability, across all time scales, that Dr. Svensmark's cosmic-ray / cloud-formation discovery.

I read Paul Saunders's scientific brief. It is superb. He outlines the absolute non-existence of any evidence that CO2 is guilty.

But the science on the isssue of CO2's role in changing the climate is even more clear cut. Not only is there no scientific evidence of any kind that the earth's climate is getting hotter and being driven out of control by rising CO2 concentration, there is newly discovered scientific evidence that proves that the earth's temperature is being driven by cosmic rays and there is newly discovered scientific evidence that the climate is well under control. There is newly discovered evidence that proves that substantial reductions in solar activity over the past ten years have cooled the earth 0.3C.

We not only know that CO2 is innocent, we know -- with the certainty of Perry Mason winning a confession on the witness stand -- which party "did it."

It is a very peculiar -- even tragic -- situation that Dr. Svensmark made his momentus discoveries about what is the primary driver of the earth's climate (he made the discoveries in approx. 2002 - 2006) at the exact moment in the culture of Western Civilization when it has become almost impossible to rationally discuss the earth's climate. He made his discoveries at the moment when the entire Western World is on the brink of committing industrial suicide over the supposed horrors of too much CO2.

[Jack Wakeland 0]

The EPA's proposal for a 70% reduction in CO2 over the next 41 years moves the election off the front pages for me. Who wins the election -- a topic that has occupied my thoughts recently -- is a very very small story in comparison to the birth of this regulatory monster.

The proposed EPA rule is a threat to life and liberty on such a large scale that it is difficult even for those fully "intiated" on the misenthropic evil of environmentalism to fully grasp it. It is an Enabling Act for environmentalist dictatorship. The fact that we Objectivists long expected and long feared the birth of this civilization-destroying monster, does not mean we should greet its actual arrival with philosophical equanimity, saying "we told you so." On the contrary, this is the beginning of a political emergency of the first order -- an emergency that is very unlikely to end well.

Please allow me to dwell on this issue at some length.

Early in the spring this year, at the American Power Conference, the CEO of a major nuclear power producer (one that operates over a dozen plants) told attendees that the economics of nuclear power had become problematic.

Price increases for construction commodities (structural steel, stainless steel pipe, portland cement, nuclear components, copper wire have gone up anywhere from 20 to 500% over the past two years) have driven the projected cost of new nuclear construction up from $2000 per kW of installed capacity to $300 - $4500 kW.

In the late spring and early summer the chatter from this energy companies headquarters over government-guaranteed loans for nuclear construction became louder and louder. By the middle of July, all of the company's executives agreed that the future of their new nuclear building program depended entirely upon a successful application to get a federal guaranteed loan for "alternative energy" for the first power plant. But the problem they faced was that the existing plan to build their first new units could not be completed before the end of 2017. This would place their new untis in 6th and 7th or 10th and 11th in place in the line of federal loan supplicants. And there was 'only' about $25 billion in the federal guaranteed loan pot. Regardless of their ability to skip several places ahead in the line of loan supplicants by exploiting their connections through the leadership of the building trades unions (the energy company runs an all-union-labor, closed-shop operation) to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, there would still be nothing left in the federal financing pot even once they got to it.

Suddenly in August, all chatter about the "alternative energy" loan guarantee melted away. Executives began calmly going over schedules for that would place their new units in operation in 2017, 2019, and 2020. Some talk of Japanese financing through revised pro-nuclear-energy-development rules in one of their government's giant Third World development banks went around. (The Japanese dominate the international and the American markets in the manufacture of nuclear reactors and steam generators, so the new government development bank rules were developed to benefit the Japanese firms who are in the business.) But talk among the middle managers company about the benefits of Japanese financing was about it just being icing on their cake. The issue of the costs of construction and financing had become a side issue. All talk had shifted towards the engineering and construction issues of which technology, which construction partners, which sequence of building might be best.

Why? (I didn't know why until I read about it in this thread last night.)

As of July the EPA's announced a draft rule for reducing CO2 emissions by 70% by 2050. That changed everything. Unlike congressional proposals to reduce CO2 emissions by 55%, 65% and 85% (or al Gore's Great Leap Forward: reduce by 90% by 2020), the EPA's proposed rule cannot get bogged down in White House and Congressional wrangling over non-essentials. It cannot get bogged down over fears of how it will reduce America's international competativeness. For all practical purposes, the EPA's proposed rule cannot be stopped. A bow wave of cultural-political opposition so high that it swamps the foredeck is required before the steam ships of regulation are slowed. And, on the issue of global warming, there will be no bow wave until after the carbon cap recession of 2014 - 2020 really takes hold over the nations of the Western World.

Under the EPA's proposed rules for reducing CO2 emissions, all economic considerations are removed from the competition among different technologies for large-scale electrical power production. Nuclear power is the only power technology left standing.

The problem the nation faces after zeroing out all other large-scale technologies is that there is no way to scale nuclear power plant construction activities up to the level necessary to sustain geometric growth in industrial production over the next 40 years. We don't even know if there is enough uranium on the earth. So all new industrial production capacity (and a large chunk of existing industiral production capacity) will have to be moved offshore to nations that don't have carbon caps: China, India, the Pacific Rim, and other developing countries.

But carbon caps create a problem for the importation of goods from China, India and the Pacific Rim: the costs of shipping products from overseas will escalate two-fold, four-fold, eight-fold, twenty-fold as the consumption of oil for transportation becomes progressively more heavily taxed by the regulatory requirement to buy more and more expensive CO2 emissions allowances.

Because of the U.S. EPA's new rule, competition among the nations of the industrialized world for who can pay the greatest level of taxes on the CO2 emissions "trading" floor will grow more intense. Because the U.S. will soon beginin its CO2 reductions, the European Union will become less reluctant to slit its industrial wrists when it moves from the 20% reduction by 2020 program it has just entered into a 30% reduction program. Energy self-mutilation by one nation will help other nations to go through with their own acts of energy self-mutilation.

What would life be like in America if the EPA rule for 70% went all of the way through to its conclusion?

Soviet Communism painted on a cultural-aesthetic canvas on a continental scale. It gave us bread lines and public housing projects and rusty factories and bakelite appliances -- never ending economic stagnation, purposelessness, and despair amid a well-educated population, relieved only by one blind-drunk vodka party a month (all that people could afford).

If it progresses without effective opposition, the EPA's 70% rule will paint its own history. The first thing that was targeted (in last year's 35 mpg rule) was the SUV, the fast luxury car, and the sports car. (By 2020 most cars will look like mail boxes on wheels, but there won't be any traffic jams because gasoline will be $10 a gallon.) The next thing that was targeted (spectacularly in the environmentalist's takeover of TXU) was new coal power plant construction. As of July 2008, the proposed EPA rule effectively stoped all new coal power plant projects from proceeding to construction. (Some plants currently under construction will be cancelled.) Some of the next things that will be targeted are beef production, construction materials, and the registration and restriction of commuter traffic. And, finally, as the 40% and 50% phases of CO2 reduction are implemented, preventing the Western World from falling into the lowest of levels of abject poverty in the Third World, a one-child-per-couple policy will need to be implemented. To get to 70%, a zero-child-per-couple policy will have to be implemented on the majority of the population.

If you want to see what the economic conditions and the life-style of the (formerly) industrialized Western World would look like, take a look the 2006 movie "The Children of Men." Even though the premise of this sci-fi flick is that all of the world's women have become sterile -- with its urban crowding, abandoned farms (complete with rotting livestock), industrial recycled building materials, tiny cars that go only 50 mph and won't start, police roaming about in steel-caged riot vans dressed in full riot gear and ballistic body armor...and an ever-present and overwhelming sense that these are the last days of mankind (complete with a universally-felt psychological depression with spontaneous acts of mass mourning over the death of mankind) -- this movie is a perfect depiction of what a 70% CO2-reduction world would look like. It is a perfect picture of the continent-wide collapse that would be painted by the EPA's proposed environmentalist dictatorship for the United States of America.

[ewv 0]

The EPA's proposal for a 70% reduction in CO2 over the next 41 years moves the election off the front pages for me. Who wins the election -- a topic that has occupied my thoughts recently -- is a very very small story in comparison to the birth of this regulatory monster..

On the contrary, it illustrates the importance of the election. Federal statutes are filled with ambiguous and sweeping powers for regulatory monsters. How the Federal agencies interpret and impose them through their rules depends on who is in the White House controlling the Executive Branch of government. It is increasingly difficult to hold back the viro activists entrenched in the civil service, but it does make a difference. These new EPA regulations would have come much sooner under Gore or Kerry, and are only now moving ahead because the viros got the Supreme Court to stop the Bush administration from blocking them. McCain would be no Bush in holding such things back, but he is still under the influence of his fellow Republicans. There are no limits on what Obama would do.

[Jack Wakeland 0]

I would amend one comment that I put forward about the ultimate consequences of the EPA 70% in 40 years rule. If environmentalists do not stop "clean-"coal power plants (plants that produce pure oxygen, burn coal with the stoichiometry of a rocket motor, compress the CO2 exhaust and push it through hundreds of miles of piping to up-side-down natural gas wells that pump it underground), there is a possibility that a technology of coal power production could be developed (at great expense) in conformance with the environmentalist's newest (and nearly total) barrier against the production of man-made power.

And, therefore, it is possible that plug-in electric cars and trucks powered by "clean-"coal power plants will make available to ship and rail transport the few liquid hydrocarbon fuels that the regulations will allow to be burned in atmospheric combustion cycles.

(And air transport? Well if there isn't a whole set of exemptions that almost totally shields the airlines from CO2 reduction regulations, we can kiss all air travel goodbye. Like characters watching wall-screens in "Fahrenheit 451", we'll have to content ourselves with "virtual" trips on-line displayed on our new big-screen 1080P T.V.s.)

Thus, it is not realistic to project one-child-per-couple and zero-child-per-couple policies to control population will necessarily be a consequence of the rule, if it were carried out to its conclusion.

But I do not see how a world with a 70% reduction in hydrocarbon fuel consumption imposed over the next 40 years can produce the power necessary to support geometric economic growth. On the contrary, the energy businessmen of the world should be trying to figure out how to increase the productive uses of hydrocarbon fuels 20-fold over the next 40 years.

To give you an idea of how desperate the situation is under the EPA's new rule, the executives of the large nuclear power company I mentioned earlier spent several days last week entertaining proposals to support the development of a new concept for a laser-fusion power plant. When environmentalists push rational men towards the sci-fi world of "The Children of Men" reasonable but un-philosophical men try to bend the world towards a Buck Rogers sci-fi world.

At this point, however, in 2008, both views of our energy future -- the environmentalist view that mankind should adjust to shrinking world of mass economic stagnation and the conservative's un-philosophical view that does not question environmentalism but projects new technology as the answer that will permit continued growth under its political dictatorship -- both views are science fiction.

Instead some one needs to defend our lives against the threat now posed be the EPA Administrator and civil service employees inside the EPA who came up with the idea that a Supreme Court ruling gives them the authority to regulate CO2....and, thereby, ruin the lives of everyone in America.

[Jack Wakeland 0]

The EPA's proposal for a 70% reduction in CO2 over the next 41 years moves the election off the front pages for me. Who wins the election -- a topic that has occupied my thoughts recently -- is a very very small story in comparison to the birth of this regulatory monster..

On the contrary, it illustrates the importance of the election. Federal statutes are filled with ambiguous and sweeping powers for regulatory monsters. How the Federal agencies interpret and impose them through their rules depends on who is in the White House controlling the Executive Branch of government. It is increasingly difficult to hold back the viro activists entrenched in the civil service, but it does make a difference. These new EPA regulations would have come much sooner under Gore or Kerry, and are only now moving ahead because the viros got the Supreme Court to stop the Bush administration from blocking them. McCain would be no Bush in holding such things back, but he is still under the influence of his fellow Republicans. There are no limits on what Obama would do.

You are absolutely correct.

My comment about who wins the election was the product of my total dismay that the Bush Administration has decided to aggressively exceed its statuatory, legal, and regulatory authority in order to promlugate a vast new regulatory structure that will chock off any growth in the production of man-made power.

There can be little doubt that Mr. Bush and his advisors have decided that someone is going to stop growth in the one industry that is at the root of all production that occurs above the level of agriculture -- if the continued growth of the industrial revolution is to be fundamentally throttled -- it should be done by their hand so that it is done on the least unfavorable terms.

This is typical of the go-along ideological defeatism practiced by conventional middle-of-the-road conservatives.

Of the four people on the presidential tickets, only one, Sarah Palin, rejects the idea that global warming is happening, that global warming is out of control, that rising CO2 concentrations cause global warming, that geometric growth in industrial CO2 emissions has begun to cause out-of-control global warming, and that there is a level of scientific proof that cannot be questioned that man's emissions of CO2 will destroy the earth's climate.

In addition there is one other of the four candidates, John McCain, who is capable of second-guessing his belief in the global warming shibboleth. He has already questioned...and reversed...his long-standing opposition to offshore oil drilling because of the harm that that drilling ban may have on American's economic future. All it took for him to reverse himself was a quadrupling of average annual oil prices from $25 to $100 a barrel.

When the EPAs 70% in 40 years CO2 restriction promises to quadruple the prices of electricity within 10 years -- a threat which will become very obvious by the end of John McCain's first term in office (assuming that he wins) -- we can expect that he will question his new-found belief in global warming.

Above all else, the United States of America could use an executive that will be able to hear and accept the scientific evidence from the cosmic-ray / cloud-nucleation experiements at CERN. We could use an executive that will be able to hear the mounting evidence for Henrik Svensmark's discoveries in climatology. We could use an executive that is capable of rejecting the whole man-made-CO2-catstrophic-global-warming myth -- even if it is only in small increments in the intellectually-cowardly fashion which we can expect from conventional conservatives.

That is -- of course -- assuming that a president John McCain does not, in a flourish of "honorable" bi-partisanship appoint such a large fraction of environmentalists, liberal Democrats, RINO Republicans to his cabinet and his inner council that no conventional conservative voices (including Sarah Palin's) are heard.

[Carlos 0]

Just to post it again, here is a great website to check on occasionally for simple articles that blast AGW hysteria to smithereens, as well as to provide other interesting stories to give greater context to what is happening in the world of politics, academia, etc., that is pertinent to the topic of climate change:

http://icecap.us/

[Carlos 0]

Just to post it again, here is a great website to check on occasionally for simple articles that blast AGW hysteria to smithereens, as well as to provide other interesting stories to give greater context to what is happening in the world of politics, academia, etc., that is pertinent to the topic of climate change:

http://icecap.us/

As a quick example, I discovered this alarming news story from their website:

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/...erdict-20080910

Here is a pdf file from their site showing pictures of "Rare late winter snowfall in Southern Brazil":

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Rarelatewi...allinBrazil.pdf

[Jack Wakeland 0]

Just to post it again, here is a great website to check on occasionally for simple articles that blast AGW hysteria to smithereens, as well as to provide other interesting stories to give greater context to what is happening in the world of politics, academia, etc., that is pertinent to the topic of climate change:

http://icecap.us/

Thanks for posting this. ICECAP (International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project) looks like a superb operation. It's a website I'll be monitoring from now on.

One intersting thing that creeps into a few stories covered on this weblog is that Great Britain is home to large numbers of global-warming non-believers from all walks of life -- climate scientists, teachers, laymen, and politicians. Rob Tracinski has noted the existence of this deep well of pro-science culture in Britain in one story on global warming that he covered recently in TIA Daily.

Is Britain's excellent primary education system (at least up until to the year 2000) the reason why? Are Briton's better aculturated to science as a part of their universal childhood education? Better than any other country on earth?

Back in the 1970s it was free-market Tory "Thatcherism" that first began to eat away at the politically dominant view of man's nature: that man's nature is socially determined, determined by his upbrining, his peers, the material factors of his everyday life, and his mode of production.

Back in the late '50s and early '60s, Ayn Rand's ideas failed to directly ignite pro-capitalist sentiment in America. Instead we got a brief and failed resurgence of pro-liberty thinking via the religious conservatism of Barry Goldwater and then an audio playback of Ayn Rand's political statements by subjectivist Libertarians.

It wasn't until Thatcherism caught on in Great Britian that it became acceptable to preach (semi-)non-Kensian economics at the University, in the political think tanks, and in the leadership of the Republican Party...which, through the person of Ronald Reagan adopted British Thatcherism with an Amerian accent. The Thatcherist role was particluarly important in the creation of the economically libertarian wing of the Republican Party. Without the influence of the American economists and free-market advocates who were partially inspired by Thatcher (and partly inspired by Ayn Rand), America's turn to the Right and Ronald Reagan's Presidency probably would have been much more religous-conservative than it was free-market-conservative.

The British played a very important role in the reopening of (some) liberty in the United States during America's turn to the right in the 1980s...perhaps almost as important as Ayn Rand's influence.

On the issue of the environmentalist dictatorship that is being laid out to solve the non-existant global warming crisis, will Great Britain's rational thinkers play such a role again?

[ruveyn ben yosef 0]

On the issue of the environmentalist dictatorship that is being laid out to solve the non-existant global warming crisis, will Great Britain's rational thinkers play such a role again?

It would seem Ecological Correctness has become the New Shiboleth.

I think some Brits have been of help. A long line of British Empiricists starting with Hobbes onward have done their bit to preserve sanity and save us from the a priorists.

And I think the U.S. really needs some saving. Do you know that sixty percent of the people in the U.S. think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old? And that includes the women who may one be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

I weep for the Republic.

ruveyn

[PhilO 0]

And I think the U.S. really needs some saving. Do you know that sixty percent of the people in the U.S. think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old? And that includes the women who may one be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

I weep for the Republic.

A few percent of humanity pushed forward and led the rest out of the caves and into the sky and skyscrapers, and fantastically complex machines with billions of transistors that can be bought with the productiveness of any civilized individual, that permit the Forum and countless other forms of global communication. One human finally formulated a philosophy worthy of real humans. I don't think what is currently dubbed humanity is done evolving, and I think that the future will be a lot brighter when average intelligence is 50 or 100 IQ points above the present values (and that is certainly genetically influenced), beings who will readily grasp and eagerly embrace a rational philosophy invented by their peer.

[ewv 0]

I think some Brits have been of help. A long line of British Empiricists starting with Hobbes onward have done their bit to preserve sanity and save us from the a priorists.

The Empriricists like the rabid statist Hobbes were a false alternative, not saviors. I think Jack was hoping for modern scientists and other rational people.

And I think the U.S. really needs some saving. Do you know that sixty percent of the people in the U.S. think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old? And that includes the women who may one be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

What is that based on and what difference does it make? For those who haven't studied the history of the earth, 10,000 years probably sounds like a pretty big number well beyond known human history and for all practical purposes virtually indistinguishable from anything else big. Why does it matter if someone memorizes the estimated age of the earth to answer polls but still doesn't understand how scientists calculated it? What good would it do them and what does it have to do with what they do need to know and think about that is relevant to their lives? What does it have to with the topic of the thread, which is the ongoing political process of another increase in bureaucratic power by the EPA?

[RayK 0]

And I think the U.S. really needs some saving. Do you know that sixty percent of the people in the U.S. think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old? And that includes the women who may one be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.

I weep for the Republic.

A few percent of humanity pushed forward and led the rest out of the caves and into the sky and skyscrapers, and fantastically complex machines with billions of transistors that can be bought with the productiveness of any civilized individual, that permit the Forum and countless other forms of global communication. One human finally formulated a philosophy worthy of real humans. I don't think what is currently dubbed humanity is done evolving, and I think that the future will be a lot brighter when average intelligence is 50 or 100 IQ points above the present values (and that is certainly genetically influenced), beings who will readily grasp and eagerly embrace a rational philosophy invented by their peer.

Phil, sometimes your writing is like poetry.

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Capitalism Magazine just published the first of seven installments of a series written by Dr Lewis and Paul Saunders.

EPA Fascism versus America (1 of 7)

Despite this scientific disagreement, and despite the lack of strong evidence, politicians, lobbyists, and environmentalist advocates have fostered the illusion that human responsibility for global warming is a settled issue. The task now, they claim, is solely to implement the laws required to atone for that responsibility. This anti-freedom political consensus is the real danger we face, because the remedies they have assembled against this illusion will have disastrous consequences for billions of people.

This danger is not hypothetical. The governmental actions being planned now are on a scale commensurate with socialist planned economies, and would place the very heart of industrial society—the motive power that keeps its industry beating—under the control of a labyrinthine maze of all-powerful government bureaucracies. Should these proposals be adopted, Americans will face federal controls over minutiae of daily life on a level previously thought intolerable.

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EPA Fascism versus America (2 of 7)

But the major impetus behind the man-made global warming scare—and the resultant political proposals—is rooted in something other than the rational identification of a genuine problem. It is erroneous moral ideas that are leading us to political disaster.

The fundamental moral issue is this: do human beings have a right to exist, and to live their own lives in pursuit of their values? Or, must human beings live only with the permission of a higher authority? Is the purpose of a government to protect each individual’s rights? Or is the government’s purpose to issue permissions to exist and to act?

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EPA Fascism versus America (3 of 7)

The heavy line shows average temperatures, the thin line shows a rough average of atmospheric CO2 concentrations:

Overall, the average global temperature has moved up and down between 54°F to 72°F, while atmospheric CO2 concentrations dropped from about 5000 to under 300ppm. If man-made global warming theory is correct, the Earth should have been blistering hot when CO2 was 16 times higher than today, and temperatures should have fallen when CO2 levels moved below 1000ppm. Even if other factors mitigated extreme temperature changes, there should be some correlation between temperatures and CO2. The Earth’s temperatures, however, varied independently of the CO2. The Earth was an average of 72°F—far higher than today—when CO2 was both 5000ppm and under 750ppm.

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EPA Fascism versus America (4 of 7)

The most accomplished, senior, and expert scientists in climatology and related fields have gone on record to state that human action is NOT changing the climate. Many of them have paid a professional price for their candor. Their voices are unacknowledged in the press, and have carried almost no weight in the political deliberations.

Claims by the advocates of man-made global warming that a scientific “consensus” exists are false. These claims reveal the dishonesty of the advocates of man-made global warming and reveal their political motivations. If they refuse to admit that their own colleagues who do not agree with them even exist, why should we accept that they are accurate in their scientific conclusions?

Further, as Brit Hume once put it:

Scientific consensus is what you get when you don't have scientific proof.

The list of the scientists who have suffered professionally for their unwillingness to follow the doctrine of man-made global warming hearkens back to the days when Church doctrine was the standard of truth.[12] Richard Lindzen has written that as far back as 1992, Senator Al Gore “ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting climate alarmism.” Since then, scientists “who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks, or worse.”

Among those named by Lindzen are Henk Tennekes, dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning man-made global warming, and Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, for daring to question man-made global warming. Also facing the loss of funds was Danish astrophysicist Dr. Henrik Svensmark, who turned to the Carlsberg Foundation, a private foundation that ignored a senior Danish government scientist’s letter urging them to revoke his funding. Despite attempts to disparage his work, Svensmark won the Knud Hǿjgaard Anniversary Research Prize and the Energy-E2 Research Prize for his work on solar phenomena.

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EPA Fascism versus America (5 of 7)

20th century pundits wavered between premonitions of cold and heat. The New York Times, September 18, 1924, headlined “[Arctic explorer Donald] MacMillan Reports Signs of a New Ice Age.” On March 27, 1933, the bogeyman was a heat wave: “America in Longest Warm Spell since 1776; Temperature Line Records a New 25-Year Rise.” By May 21, 1975, the ice had returned: “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevitable,” until Dec 27, 2005, when “Past Hot Times Hold Few Reasons to Relax About New Warming.”Talk of a new ice age has returned in 2008, with meteorologists reporting that this winter ranks among the coldest on record. Gilles Langis, senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service, reported in the spring of 2008 that arctic ice is in places 10 to 20 cm [4 to 8 inches] thicker than the previous year.

Similar scares have come and gone. It is a good thing we did not draft laws to enforce the tenets of the Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows in 1972, Paul Ehrlich’s population bomb in 1968, and the “Club of Rome,” each of which reincarnated the collapse of capitalism predicted by Marx, the starvation promised by Malthus, and the biblical Battle of Armageddon.

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EPA Fascism versus America (6 of 7)

In the production of electricity there are no practical alternatives to fossil fuels today, except nuclear fission. Solar and wind have two inherent problems that limit them as adjuncts to coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power. First, they are literally subject to the shifting winds and clouds of nature, and cannot provide the uninterrupted power that a stable electric grid requires. Second, the energy they gather is diffuse. There is a lot of it, but it is spread too wide and thin to be easily gathered.[2] There is a reason why Home Depot sells gasoline electric generators, but does not sell home solar kits: solar is not cost-effective for anyone involved.

Thanks to human intelligence and action, the quantity of proven fossil fuel reserves has grown exponentially over the past two decades. There are now enough such reserves to last us for centuries, until intelligence and action can create new forms of energy, and investors can take the risks needed to produce and market them. To destroy the fossil fuels industry now—amd the freedom that made it possible—will make it impossible for those achievements to be born.

We cannot leave a free and prosperous nation to our children by granting dictatorial powers to a federal agency.

This is nowhere better illustrated than in the efforts of many environmental groups to prevent the use of biotechnology in Africa, which consigns millions of struggling farmers to slow starvation using antiquated agricultural practices. The Friends of the Earth are no friends of starving Africans when they oppose genetically-modified seeds because the crops “may have the potential to grow” in wild areas where Africans cannot now grow food.