Another "leading scientist" is off the reservation
By scottbomb Posted in Policy — Comments (29) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
As featured today on canada.com:
[You'll have to copy/paste it - I don't know how to make the whole link clickable. It was on Drudge today as well.]
What I find intriguing about this article is not so much the main subject, but this little snippet:
"Dr. Allegre's skepticism is noteworthy in several respects. For one, he is an exalted member of France's political establishment, a friend of former Socialist president Lionel Jospin, and, from 1997 to 2000, his minister of education, research and technology, charged with improving the quality of government research through closer co-operation with France's educational institutions."
So it's noteworthy because he's a socialist with close ties to politicians. In other words, it's noteworthy because he's "off the reservation"! It's noteworthy because as a socialist, he's putting his SCIENCE before his POLITICS! Here's more:
"But Dr. Allegre had allegiances to more than his socialist and environmental colleagues. He is, above all, a scientist of the first order...."
So appearently, one of the "world's leading scientists" has found his concience. I applaud Dr. Allegre for his honesty and bravery.
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
These are some excelent tutorials on HTML usage written by Neil Stevens. Rather than recreate it and claim credit, I'll just give credit where's it's deserved.
Oh and be sure to make use of the "Preview comment" button before posting. It'll save us all a lot of trouble.
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
Who will rid us of this meddlesome bug?
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
The people who are trying tooth-and-nail to frighten the world into taking five steps backward into the age of windmills and sundials are all benefiting from misleading publicity, deliberately-rigged "consensus" statements, and the views of people who can't predict the weather five days in advance, much less the climate over 1,000 years.
They are debasing their own profession for the purposes of political gain by doing so. And shamefully, some professors at our most prestigious Universities are helping them.
But it isn't just political gain -- it's a wealth transfer and taxation scheme of the highest order. The politicians have figured out that most people are inherently fearful and unskeptical, and they've deliberately tried to brand the skeptics as "heretics" and "Holocaust Deniers" and "war criminals" -- over events that have never occurred and are the subject of vigorous debate, even among their "consensus" group.
Take a look at this article from the Washington Post yesterday and think about how the author, from Yale University, uses the "businesses must pay" and "corporations must pay" meme to advance his case. In our economy, the words "businesses must pay" are a shorthand for "YOU must pay." And you will pay, very dearly, because of this nonsense.
- You will pay because people like Ted Turner will sell you "green solutions" that cost more than their "nongreen counterparts" and you will willingly do so because it is legally impossible to do otherwise.
- You will pay because people like Al Gore want to establish a monopoly money scheme in which the developed nations of the world trade real wealth in an artificial market for fictious "carbon credits."
- You will pay because the preferred "green alternatives" like terrestrial solar and windpower can only be economically competitive if the overall price of energy is raised so that they become "competitive."
- You will pay because the politicians at the United Nations have found another potent way to bleed the free world of wealth while enriching themselves and simultaneously portraying themselves as the Saviors of the World.
- You will pay because the real alternatives for power generation in this country were deliberately and consciously hobbled by Democrats like Jimmy Carter and Jane Fonda.
There are a lot of other reasons that you will pay, if you elect a Democrat to the Presidency before this nonsense runs its course -- those are just a few of them.
The politicians have figured out that most people are inherently fearful and unskeptical, and they've deliberately tried to brand the skeptics as "heretics" and "Holocaust Deniers" and "war criminals"
Do you have instances of politicians saying these things?
The publicity from Al Gore's latest movie, for one, serves as a useful example:
"The Most Terrifying Movie You Will Ever See."
But don't take my word for it, Pliny. You can also listen to noted climate scientist Roger Ebert, the most influential movie buff in America:
These facts are stated by Al Gore in the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." Forget he ever ran for office. Consider him a concerned man speaking out on the approaching crisis. "There is no controversy about these facts," he says in the film. "Out of 925 recent articles in peer-review scientific journals about global warming, there was no disagreement. Zero.
He stands on a stage before a vast screen, in front of an audience. The documentary is based on a speech he has been developing for six years, and is supported by dramatic visuals. He shows the famous photograph "Earthrise," taken from space by the first American astronauts. Then he shows a series of later space photographs, clearly indicating that glaciers and lakes are shrinking, snows are melting, shorelines are retreating.
...
Am I acting as an advocate in this review? Yes, I am. I believe that to be "impartial" and "balanced" on global warming means one must take a position like Gore's. There is no other view that can be defended. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, has said, "Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." I hope he takes his job seriously enough to see this film. I think he has a responsibility to do that."
As far as the "Holocaust Deniers" quote is concerned, it's there in black-and-white, in the Boston Globe. As are the other quotes, if you'd really like me to provide them.
In the interest of saving energy, Pliny, I'll save you the crucial step of looking up another source.
Gore is both serious and consistent on this point. In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, he wrote that “today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.” He repeatedly refers to the unfolding “ecological holocaust” and invokes Martin Niemoller’s famous quote (“When the Nazis came for the Communists, I remained silent; I was not a Communist. ... When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. ...”) to label himself and other environmentalists “the new resistance.”
...in Earth in the Balance, Gore said that the #1 ecological problem was the loss of the rain forest.
Now, 15 years later, the crisis is equally dire, except now the problem is AGW, which wasn't really on the radar back then.
Surely, there are few sciences that are more inherently uncertain than global climatology. There are vast, poorly understood processes at play; probably not all of them have even been identified. Proponents of AGW may be right, but they need to understand our skepticism.
The carbon-trading scheme that Gore envisions will allow "non-polluting" rainforest nations to sell their "carbon credits" to "polluting" nations such as the United States.
Which means that Americans -- you and me -- will be paying South America to maintain their rain forests with real, American dollars. It's a wealth-transfer mechanism. If you run a business that needs more "carbon" you will pay more in taxes or through a trading scheme to buy the "credits" from someone who has them. And the places that "have" them are the nations that aren't industrialized and the ones that Al Gore wants to preserve, with your money.
That's how it's going to work. It's Al Gore's version of "market-based economic social justice."
Gore hasn't given up on that, in fact, it's a central part of his plan.
In order to convince people to buy into his monopoly money wealth-transfer game, though, Gore realizes that he needs to have a bigger issue than just saving the rainforests, which lots of people (including me) already contribute to:
He needs to posit -- and have affirmed by Hollywood -- a global catastrophe that will happen within our lifetimes if we don't. That's why there's an arbitrary "10 year" tipping point before which the world can be saved if we just listen to him, or lost irretrievably if we dont, and that's why Greenpeace is using sociopathic 11-year-olds in their public-service announcements.
The only real fly in the ointment is...
Well, actually there are two of them. The first one is that global warming is a hoax, and the second one is that once people in "carbon credit" places have that money, they're going to want the same kinds of wealth and accroutrements and standard of living that everyone in the United States wanted before Al Gore decided to make them poorer.
Which means that the reality is that we should preserve the rain forests, not by capping and trading carbon, but by VASTLY increasing the central power generation capacities of this country and others, through fission, fusion, and exoatmospheric solar (and perhaps also geothermal).
The real roadblock is that the big oil oligopolies don't want to see us develop fusion power. It will make electricity too cheap to meter, and they'll have to go and do something else. On that point I agree with the anti-oil folks.
GW probably not, but it gets into matters of timeframe. The G gw is for global warming. For much of the world, we just don't have good temperature measurements over the time periods in question.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I mean it in the sense that it has become commonly construed in popular culture, which is: "Anthropogenic Global Warming"
Sometimes I should pull the corncob out. But lets face it, you say that and the next thing you know you are being misrepresented on instaputz.com.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Vladimir, I haven't read "Earth in the Balance" but I agree with you that the extracts from the quote of Jonah Goldberg may be referring to other ecological issues.
AGW was definitely on the radar in 1992, though. That was the year of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change , which President GHW Bush sent to the Senate for ratification.
Since before Carl Sagan devoted passages to it in his book, "Cosmos" in which he also described the perils of nuclear winter. Personally, I think Sagan was a brilliant guy but a little bit of a partisan, also. In COSMOS he also mentions how Socialism is something that is eschewed in the United States, and Carl Sagan was unabashadely a Socialist. As intelligent as he was, he vehemently opposed Ronald Reagan's military build-up which hastened the end of the Soviet Union, and he did so in a very dramatic speech at Harvard University.
The issue of AGW has been simmering on the backburner for a long time. Once it was clear that the Population Bomb wasn't going to pan out to destroy humanity, it was time to find the next disaster to freak people out and scare them into listening to people like Al Gore.
The AGW promoters have siezed on the general public's ignorance to push them in this direction based on a patchwork of "theories" and a cobbled-together "consensus" that has now crossed the line into a religious crusade.
As a scientist, Pliny, you should be one of the people trying to make this kind of idiocy stop. Instead you're promoting it. To hell with you.
Ellen Goodman is not a politician. And I suspect your "war criminals" quote comes from a journalist writing in an eco magazine called "The Grist".
It's not just a quibble. I think the build-up of feeling that AGW sceptics are being persecuted by powerful forces is excessive, and is a distraction. But I would be concerned if powerful politicians were making statements of the kind you mention.
I mean, aside from being on the Board of Directors of Apple Computer and partnering with Google, it is fairly widely acknowledged that Al Gore is, in fact, a politician, isn't it?
which of these quotes is his? I note your earlier extract from Jonah Goldberg - I don't have Gore's 1992 book, and couldn't make much sense of the fragments JG quoted, but they didn't seem to be referring to sceptics - if anything, they are made to appear as an overwrought notion that AGW affirmers were being persecuted.
I have to say, you're really quite good at it. I've always wondered who was paying you to talk trash here at RedState. The quote by JG in the article, especially taken in context, which you're not doing, is fairly impossible to misconstrue.
I'm not going to try to convince you, since it's obviously impossible. But for everyone else who wants to read about some of the rhetoric, you can read this.
Or you can believe Pliny.
Has repeated Al Gore's "Global Warming Deniers" sentiment, here. Replete with the eco-moralistic religious overtones. And the WaPo is hardly a hostile publication when it comes to Al Gore's views.
I think I have a link to it on my links blog but I can't see it anymore.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Sen. Rockefeller and Sen. Snowe - Letter to Exxon Mobil
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“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.” – Ronald Reagan
That our Yale Professor leaves out of his editorial is that businesses already have a powerful, built-in motivation for achieving the most efficient and economically use of their capital equipment by purchasing environmentally "friendly" machinery. But more on that later.
So I will and let's make it very simple: businesses already have a powerful built-in incentive for reducing the price of the energy they consume in the course of producing their goods: the profit motive. Nobody that I've ever known in business wants to keep an inefficient machine longer than they have to -- they constantly want to improve their physical plant and its efficiency. And that is taken care of by the market, not by Al Gore and a couple of Yale professors who believe that "businesses must pay."
Businesses already *do* pay, each time they upgrade their equipment with better machinery.
Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.
to continue to reconcile the data to what he theorized. He may not have been ultimately right about GLobal Warming, but he deserves a ton of credit for following his data, rather than his ego. I give the man full props!
Kyoto Now! (Because only pollution from the US hurts the planet)