Environmentalist Wacko Update

Yes, we're back for more enviro-wacko-ness! Enjoy...

Big ice oopsie

The global warmists have yet another embarrassment on their hands.

The Catlin Arctic Survey was the brainchild of British explorer Pen Hadow who organized an expedition to trek to the North Pole to highlight how global warming was melting the Arctic ice cap. But his quest was thwarted when Mother Nature responded with fierce winds, bitter cold temperatures, and just plain lousy weather which destroyed ice measuring equipment and hampered resupply efforts, which at one point, left the team close to starvation.

While the Hadow team was struggling on the ground, a German expedition was measuring thicker than expected second year ice from the comfort of an aircraft with advanced monitoring equipment. They reported that this second year ice was up to four meters thick, rather than the two meters they expected.

Meanwhile, a Russian expedition simply drove to the North Pole in trucks which might be described as Humvees on steroids, with none of the discomforts the Catlin team experienced. But the Russians were more interested in oil than ice thickness. The Russians want to stake a claim to the oil rights in the Arctic Ocean while the Catlin team wants to save us from oil.

The team did not see any polar bears but did find bear tracks at one point. The team apparently brought a firearm along just in case, since their website refers to firearms training. Such a practice is common with Arctic explorations since polar bears are known to attack people. It was fortunate that the team did not have to shoot any polar bears they were presumably embarking on this expedition to save the bears.

Hit the link for all the details, but the bottom line is that the expedition to help the environment actually had a carbon footprint four times bigger than the Russian oil exploration team. Oh, and the Russians actually got something out of their trip, too.


L.A.'s big burn exposed

Los Angeles is trying to become the greenest city in the world, leading the way in energy conservation. But NBCLA has exposed one way the city is wasting energy, and your tax dollars. In some areas, the city has been leaving streetlights on all day long, needlessly burning electricity in broad daylight. Even worse, residents tell us they've been calling the city's 311 line for months, asking the city to turn off the lights during the day, all to no avail.

Remind you of anyone else...? [cough cough...Al Gore...cough cough]


Good thing it was 'eco-friendly'

How much packaging does it take to promote energy conservation?

Lots, evidently, if you’re Toronto’s Better Buildings Partnership.

The partnership, which provides incentives for energy conservation in new and existing large buildings, issued a one-page press release yesterday. But it wasn’t the release that was eye-catching.

It arrived in a large brown paper envelope, padded with plastic bubble wrap.

Inside the envelope was a cardboard box.

Inside the box, stuffed with tissue paper, was a green Lego toy, representing a building, with the Better Buildings Partnership logo on it.

Also in the box was a colour picture of the Lego toy; a piece of paper with the Better Buildings Partnership logo; and a one-page release about the Better Buildings Partnership.

Angela Gurley of Ketchum Public Relations, which handled the release, said the release was made as eco-friendly as possible.

“The paper itself – the actual one-page letter – was on recycled paper,” she said. “And we did make sure it was pushed down to one page, so it wasn’t utilizing multiple pieces of paper.”

You just can't make this stuff up...!


Global warming means global cooling...duh!

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 -4ºC. 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.

Obviously, the problem is global warming.

So, that's the kind of thing that prompts people like me to mock environmentalist wackos as being...well, wacko. When reality stands up and smacks you across the forehead with a baseball bat, you really should take notice.

While most people have a genuine desire to care for the environment (which is good), those who hold the reigns of power are not so benevolent. Otherwise, they wouldn't do things like this:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has obtained an EPA study of the "endangerment" to human well-being ostensibly caused by carbon dioxide emissions, together with a set of EPA emails indicating that the study, which concludes that carbon dioxide is not a significant cause of climate change, was suppressed by the EPA for political reasons.

You can read the comments that the CEI submitted to the EPA on EPA's proposed endangerment finding here, along with the emails. The censored report, by Alan Carlin and John Davidson, is here.

In their report, Carlin and Davidson point out that the EPA has not done its own evaluation of the global warming theory. Rather, it has relied on analyses by others, mostly the U.N.'s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. That report, however, was a political document, not a scientific one. Knowing that current scientific research disproves the anthropogenic global warming theory, the U.N. ordered that no recent research be considered in the IPCC report. This is a scandal of which too few people are aware. As science, the U.N. report is a bad joke.

Watch for yourself:

Powerline offers this conclusion, which is truly the bottom line:

Global warming zealots are a bit like Iran's mullahs. They are fanatically devoted to a series of false propositions. Unable to win an open scientific debate, they consistently resort to bullying and brute force to suppress their opposition. Once again, we see the Obama administration taking the lead in this regard, putting political ideology above scientific truth and demanding that all others do likewise.

Like I said: wackos.

There's my two cents.