17 replies to this topic

[Rogerdodger]

I'm kinda slow but I finally saw King Kong and thought of Michael Crichton's speech quoted above. The trip to Skull Island with it's man eating natives, hugh worms, crickets, spiders and of course one really big gorilla gave me an idea of what "paradise" might really be like. And now I understand my wife's view of camping.

[Rogerdodger]

Tuesday, 7 February 2006, BBC News
Science team finds 'lost world'
An international team of scientists says it has found a "lost world" in the Indonesian jungle that is home to dozens of new animal and plant species. "It's as close to the Garden of Eden as you're going to find on Earth," said Bruce Beehler, co-leader of the group.

The team recorded new butterflies, frogs, and a series of remarkable plants that included five new palms and a giant rhododendron flower.

The survey also found a honeyeater bird that was previously unknown to science.


A summary of the team's main discoveries:

• A new species of honeyeater, the first new bird species discovered on the island of New Guinea since 1939
• The formerly unknown breeding grounds of a "lost" bird of paradise - the six-wired bird of paradise (Parotia berlepschi)
• First photographs of the golden-fronted bowerbird displaying at its bower.
• A new large mammal for Indonesia, the golden-mantled tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus pulcherrimus)
• More than 20 new species of frogs, including a tiny microhylid frog less than 14mm long
• A series of previously undescribed plant species, including five new species of palms
• A remarkable white-flowered rhododendron with flower about 15cm across
• Four new butterfly species.

King Kong has eluded researchers so far.


Editorial:
Governmental officials were thrilled with the finding.
Using new eminent domain laws patterened after the United States Supreme Court ruling, a hugh parking lot is planned for the area.

[Rogerdodger]

I grew up hearing about the coming ICE AGE.
A few years ago "they" changed their minds and predicted warming.
Do you see why I'm skeptical of the accepted wisdom of the day?
Now I read the global warming ended in 1998!

There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998!
http://www.telegraph...09/ixworld.html
By Prof. Bob Carter
(a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland, engaged in paleoclimate research)
(Filed: 04/09/2006)

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society's continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period". Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

Does something not strike you as odd here? That industrial carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of earth's recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn't seem at all odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long appreciated - ever since the early 1990s, when the global warming bandwagon first started to roll behind the gravy train of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that such short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin. Yet the public appears to be largely convinced otherwise. How is this possible?

Since the early 1990s, the columns of many leading newspapers and magazines, worldwide, have carried an increasing stream of alarmist letters and articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as "if", "might", "could", "probably", "perhaps", "expected", "projected" or "modelled" - and many involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and principles, that they are akin to nonsense.

The problem here is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike. Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely reported.

Marketed under the imprimatur of the IPCC, the bladder-trembling and now infamous hockey-stick diagram that shows accelerating warming during the 20th century - a statistical construct by scientist Michael Mann and co-workers from mostly tree ring records - has been a seminal image of the climate scaremongering campaign. Thanks to the work of a Canadian statistician, Stephen McIntyre, and others, this graph is now known to be deeply flawed.

There are other reasons, too, why the public hears so little in detail from those scientists who approach climate change issues rationally, the so-called climate sceptics. Most are to do with intimidation against speaking out, which operates intensely on several parallel fronts.

First, most government scientists are gagged from making public comment on contentious issues, their employing organisations instead making use of public relations experts to craft carefully tailored, frisbee-science press releases. Second, scientists are under intense pressure to conform with the prevailing paradigm of climate alarmism if they wish to receive funding for their research. Third, members of the Establishment have spoken declamatory words on the issue, and the kingdom's subjects are expected to listen.

On the alarmist campaign trail, the UK's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, is thus reported as saying that global warming is so bad that Antarctica is likely to be the world's only habitable continent by the end of this century. Warming devotee and former Chairman of Shell, Lord [Ron] Oxburgh, reportedly agrees with another rash statement of King's, that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism. And goodly Archbishop Rowan Williams, who self-evidently understands little about the science, has warned of "millions, billions" of deaths as a result of global warming and threatened Mr Blair with the wrath of the climate God unless he acts. By betraying the public's trust in their positions of influence, so do the great and good become the small and silly.

Two simple graphs provide needed context, and exemplify the dynamic, fluctuating nature of climate change. The first is a temperature curve for the last six million years, which shows a three-million year period when it was several degrees warmer than today, followed by a three-million year cooling trend which was accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of the pervasive, higher frequency, cold and warm climate cycles. During the last three such warm (interglacial) periods, temperatures at high latitudes were as much as 5 degrees warmer than today's. The second graph shows the average global temperature over the last eight years, which has proved to be a period of stasis.

The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.

The British Government urgently needs to recast the sources from which it draws its climate advice. The shrill alarmism of its public advisers, and the often eco-fundamentalist policy initiatives that bubble up from the depths of the Civil Service, have all long since been detached from science reality. Intern-ationally, the IPCC is a deeply flawed organisation, as acknowledged in a recent House of Lords report, and the Kyoto Protocol has proved a costly flop. Clearly, the wrong horses have been backed.

As mooted recently by Tony Blair, perhaps the time has come for Britain to join instead the new Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6), whose six member countries are committed to the development of new technologies to improve environmental outcomes. There, at least, some real solutions are likely to emerge for improving energy efficiency and reducing pollution.

Informal discussions have already begun about a new AP6 audit body, designed to vet rigorously the science advice that the Partnership receives, including from the IPCC. Can Britain afford not to be there?

http://www.telegraph...09/ixworld.html

Edited by Rogerdodger, 10 April 2006 - 08:09 PM.

[Rogerdodger]

It seems that we like to overlook the bigggest health dangers, especially if we enjoy them.
Then we use psychological diversion to "strain out the nat and swallow the camel."
Or smoke the Camel in this instance.

SMOKING "MOTHER TO BE" WORRIES ABOUT ROAD CONSTRUCTION!



Note the timely words of Paul Simon below:
"...still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest."

Edited by Rogerdodger, 11 April 2006 - 11:22 AM.

[Rogerdodger]

Look at all of those nasty SUV's!
(You have to look very close.)

Edited by Rogerdodger, 02 June 2006 - 09:35 AM.

[stocks]

Well last week I heard some remarks that the author Michael Crichton made in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on September 15, 2003.
He questions some commenly held "truths" but I think he goes a long way to explain some human behavior and the desire to return to "the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden" as he calls it.

So grab a rib sit back and enjoy his off-beat view:

Michael Crichton

The tyranny of the organic mommy mafia

“Am I going to be an outcast?” A friend, who recently moved to an upscale neighborhood in Madison, Wis., called me last week to ask if she would be able to make mommy friends if she continued feeding her children — gasp! — non-organic food.

The organic foodies are not satisfied with controlling their own family’s dietary habits, they want to “evangelize,” says Julie Gunlock, author of “From Cupcakes to Chemicals: How the Culture of Alarmism Makes Us Afraid of Everything and How to Fight Back.”

The pressure on parents to use only organic food is, she says, an “outgrowth of helicopter parenting. People need to be in control of everything when it comes to their kids — even the way food is grown and treated.”



http://nypost.com/20...ic-mommy-mafia/

[Rogerdodger]

The greed of "Big Green" and it's utopian dream
You who hate greedy "Big Oil" seem more than willing to close your eyes to the fraud, waste and greed of "Big Green" and it's utopian dream.
And the burden of rising food costs carried by the poor and hungry are easily overlooked as once again you tell yourself "the end justifies the means".

Study: Fuels from corn waste not better than gas
A blow to corn-based biofuels
A $500,000 study paid for by the federal government and released Sunday in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change concludes that biofuels made with corn residue release 7 percent more greenhouse gases in the early years compared with conventional gasoline.
The study found that regardless of how much corn residue is taken off the field, the process contributes to global warming.
"I'm amazed it has not come out more solidly until now."
But an AP investigation last year found that the EPA's analysis of corn-based ethanol failed to predict the environmental consequences accurately.
"The study says it will be very hard to make a biofuel that has a better greenhouse gas impact than gasoline using corn residue."

Rising World Food Prices Spell Trouble for Biofuels

Meanwhile, politicians in both parties line their own pockets with GREEN from the green lobbyists.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 21 April 2014 - 09:04 AM.

[Lee48]

Environmental water problems? Nice clip here, "A River of Waste" runs thru it.
That's chicken sheet in north east OK, AK and NC was interesting. Grab your swim suit.