Environmental Brainwashing Of Children

When one hears the question "How can anyone be so stupid as to believe Al Gore and the idea that mankind is causing global warming and climate change?" , we are rightly puzzled as to how this can be.  Well, I think the following article helps explain why.  It is not because anyone is "stupid".  It is because our children and grandchildren (almost two generations) have been fed an endless series of distortions, myths, and outright lies about nature, Earth history, and our environment.  We see evidence of this and its consequences all around us.

This does not give me good feelings about our public education system.  Do teachers THINK about what they are teaching, or do they just read a script dictated by others?  This is comparable to our unknowing, inexperienced but charming President, reading from his teleprompter.  Do teachers have any control over what they teach?  I thought that is why teachers teach, because they are "educated", not merely puppets repeating what someone in our government says they should say.  How can they go to work everyday if they know they are being used to deceive and manipulate?  To put it mildly, that is not very intellectually honest.  Maybe teachers are not taught very well.
Peter



The Environmental Terrorizing of Children

Written by Alan Caruba, Warning Signs | April 09 2012

In many ways, the worst aspect of environmentalism is why Greens not only feel free to terrorize children with doomsday scenarios, but feel compelled to do so.

I have been reviewing books for some fifty years and with the publication of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” in 1962 and books such as Paul Ehrlich’s “Population Bomb” have been offering scenarios intended to move people and governments to take action that, in retrospect, were based on bad “science” and absurd doomsday predictions.

If you were fooled by global warming, they are counting on you to be fooled again by "sustainability", their reworking of Marx’s communism in the form of a grandiose scheme to control all of the Earth’s bounty. In June the United Nations will hold a Rio+20 conference that will declare that governments exist to ensure "sustainable well-being and happiness." The Declaration of Independence offers the opportunity to pursue happiness. It does not guarantee it, nor does it suggest that it is government's job to provide it.

A key element of the Green’s endless indoctrination schemes has been to reach children, the most vulnerable among us and for this reason our schools have been turned into Green prisons where their version of the Earth is pumped into the minds of children here and around the world.

Their primary teaching tool is fear. Fear that the oceans will rise and wipe out entire cities. Fear that the rainforests are disappearing. Fear that entire species are being destroyed by the hand of man. Fear that the use of any kind of fuel, coal, natural gas, and oil is despoiling the planet.

I have reviewed books for some fifty years at this point and I could not put a number on the books for children that hammer home these and other terrifying themes. One crossed my desk the other day, “Our House is Round: A Kid’s Book About Why Protecting Our Earth Matters” by Yolanda Kondonassis and illustrated by Joan Brush. It has been called “the perfect children’s introduction to environmental issues” by Fred Krupp, the president of the Environmental Defense Fund.
The author is not a biologist, a geologist, a meteorologist, or any other kind of scientist. She is a Grammy-nominated classical harpist. A harpist!

“Our Earth has gotten messy. What should we do?” she asks her young reader. What does she mean by “messy”? Her answer is that “cars, trucks, and factories make pollution, a kind of dirty gas or liquid that goes out into the air and into our rivers, lakes, and oceans.” This book is written for children age five to nine!

Imagine now what it must be like to be that age and be told that the air is polluted and the water is as well. This verges on child abuse.

“Pollution goes up into the sky and forms a blanket of gas that holds heat within Earth’s atmosphere. That makes our whole Earth warmer and leads to unclean air for breathing, melting polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and extreme weather patterns. Scientists call this warming of our Earth’s temperature CLIMATE CHANGE.”

It is a LIE. The Earth has been cooling for fifteen years.

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a gas as vital to all life on Earth as oxygen is to the life of living creatures. Without it, not a single blade of grass or tree or the vegetation we call “crops” would not grow. Livestock and wildlife depend on that vegetation. If you are age five to nine, you likely are unaware of this.

This book and all the others that incorporate these lies are a form of psychological terror.
The same week I received “Our House is Round”, I also received “The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea” and “Earth-Friendly Buildings, Bridges, and More.” You could stack all the environmentally-themed children’s books I’ve seen and it would reach up several stories.

They are a corruption of geophysical and biological science. They have nothing to do with “saving the planet” and everything to do with distorting children’s understanding of the real world.
It does not matter that the Ms. Kondonassis thinks she is serving humanity. The great lie of communism is that it will create a collectivist utopia. In reality it has always depended on terror to maintain itself and it has failed wherever it has been tried. Environmentalism is its latest permutation.
It is the same reason that communism derides religion for its emphasis on life and morality.


I have devoted my life to freedom of the press, freedom to publish, freedom to speak out, and to urge participation in the life of the greatest nation on Earth, but some books like “Our House Is Round” are the worst kind of mental pollution.

Environmentalism, like all tyrannies, begins by indoctrinating children.
Editor's Note: In 1974 Alan Caruba was a founding member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Source

Global Warming Science Consensus? Not At All

At some point it seems the only scientists who will remain believers in man-caused global warming will be those who make their living promoting the concept. What will it take for politicians salivating over the opportunity to raise tax revenue from "carbon emissions" to realize they are wrong? When will the public wake up to the hoax that is man-caused global warming, and let their political leaders know they are not buying into the scam? Let us hope it is soon, before even more harm is done.
Peter

AND FINALLY: HOW MANY SCIENTISTS DOES IT TAKE TO OVERTURN A SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS?
Financial Post, 17 May 2008http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/17/32-000-deniers.aspx
By Lawrence Solomon
Question: How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming? The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming. The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as - and was - the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations - virtually every nation in the world - including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world's environmental groups came too - they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the publics of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.

In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that the conference would unleash, 47 scientists signed a "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," decrying "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action." To a scientist in search of truth, 47 is an impressive number, especially if those 47 dissenters include many of the world's most eminent scientists. To the environmentalists, politicians, press at Rio, their own overwhelming numbers made the 47 seem irrelevant.

Knowing this, a larger petition effort was undertaken, known as the Heidelberg Appeal, and released to the public at the Earth Summit. By the summit's end, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders had signed the appeal. These scientists - mere hundreds - also mattered for nought in the face of the tens of thousands assembled at Rio. The Heidelberg Appeal was blown away and never obtained prominence, even though the organizers persisted over the years to ultimately obtain some 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners.

The earnest effort to demonstrate the absence of a consensus continued with the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change - an attempt to counter the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Its 150-odd signatories also counted for nought. As did the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship in 2000, signed by more than 1,500 clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics and policy experts concerned about the harm that Kyoto could inflict on the world's poor.

Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's Petition Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because "increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

"The petition drew media attention, but little of it was for revealing to the world that an extraordinary number of scientists hold views on global warming diametrically opposite to those they are expected to hold. Instead, the press focussed on presumed flaws that critics found in the petition. Some claimed the petition was riddled with duplicate names. They were no duplicates, just different scientists with the same name. Some claimed the petition had phonies. There was only one phony: Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, planted by a Greenpeace organization to discredit the petition and soon removed. Other names that seemed to be phony - such as Michael Fox, the actor, and Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer in a TV series - were actually bona fide scientists, properly credentialled.

Like the Heidelberg Appeal, the Oregon petition was blown away. But now it is blowing back. Original signatories to the petition and others, outraged at Kyoto's corruption of science, wrote to the Oregon Institute and its director, Arthur Robinson, asking that the petition be brought back. "E-mails started coming in every day," he explained. "And they kept coming. " The writers were outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends. "We decided to do the survey again."Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science, a who's who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto was a danger to humanity.

The response rate was extraordinary, "much, much higher than anyone expected, much higher than you'd ordinarily expect," he explained. He's processed more than 31,000 at this point, more than 9,000 of them with PhDs, and has another 1,000 or so to go - most of them are already posted on a Web site at petitionproject.org. Why go to this immense effort all over again, when the press might well ignore the tens of thousands of scientists who are standing up against global warming alarmism? "I hope the general public will become aware that there is no consensus on global warming," he says, "and I hope that scientists who have been reluctant to speak up will now do so, knowing that they aren't alone."At one level, Robinson, a PhD scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn't be done by poll, he explains. "The numbers shouldn't matter. But if they want warm bodies, we have them." Some 32,000 scientists is more than the number of environmentalists that descended on Rio in 1992.

Is this enough to establish that the science is not settled on global warming? The press conference releasing these names occurs on Monday at the National Press Club in Washington.
Copyright 2008, Financial Post

Global Warming And Consensus Science: Dangerous And Wrong

The following article explains why the usage of the concept of consensus is wrong and dangerous as it applies to global warming and climate change. (I apologize for the strange formatting, I couldn't fix it.)
Peter


Benny Peiser is a social anthropologist with particular research interest in human and cultural evolution. His research focuses on the effects of environmental change and catastrophic events on contemporary thought and societal evolution.
Benny is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and a member of Spaceguard UK. He has written extensively on neo-catastrophism and the potential risk posed by near-Earth objects. He is the editor of CCNet, an electronic science and science policy network with more than 5,000 subscribers from around the world. It is in this capacity that a 10km-wide asteroid, Minor Planet (7107) Peiser, was named in his honour by the International Astronomical Union. Wonderfully, in 2002, a second asteroid was named after Benny’s youngest daughter, Minor Planet (11956) Tamarakate.
He is a member of the editorial board of Energy & Environment and a scientific advisor to the Lifeboat Foundation.

source:

THE DANGERS OF CONSENSUS SCIENCE

National Post, 17 May 2005
http://www.canada.com/national/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=b93c1368-27b7-4f55-a60e-5b5d1b1ff38b

By Benny Peiser

Six eminent researchers from the Russian Academy of Science and the Israel
Space Agency have just published a startling paper in one of the world's
leading space science journals. The team of solar physicists claims to have
come up with compelling evidence that changes in cosmic ray intensity and
variations in solar activity have been driving much of the Earth's climate.
They even provide a testable hypothesis, predicting that amplified cosmic
ray intensity will lead to an increase of the global cloud cover which,
according to their calculations, will result in "some small global cooling
over the next couple of years."

I remain decidedly skeptical of such long-term climate predictions.
Nevertheless, it is quite remarkable that the global mean temperature, as
recorded by NASA's global Land-Ocean Temperature Index, has actually dropped
slightly during the last couple of years -- notwithstanding increased levels
of CO2 emissions. Two more years of cooling and we may even see the
reappearance of a new Ice Age scare.

Whatever one may think of these odd developments, the idea that the sun is
the principal driver of terrestrial climate has been gaining ground in
recent years. Last month, Jan Veizer, one of Canada's top Earth scientists,
published a comprehensive review of recent findings and concluded that
"empirical observations on all time scales point to celestial phenomena as
the principal driver of climate, with greenhouse gases acting only as
potential amplifiers."

What the Russian, Israeli and Canadian researchers have in common is that
they allocate much of the climate change to solar variability rather than
human causes. They also publish their papers in some of the world's leading
scientific journals. So why is it that a recent study published in the
leading U.S. journal Science categorically claims that skeptical papers
don't exist in the peer-reviewed literature?

According to an essay by Naomi Oreskes, published by Science in December,
2004, there is unanimous "scientific consensus" on the anthropogenic causes
of recent global warming. Oreskes, a professor of history, claims to have
analyzed 928 abstracts on global climate change, of which 75% either
explicitly or implicitly accept the view that most of the recent warming
trend is man-made. When I checked the same set of abstracts [plus an
additional two hundred found in the same ISI data bank], I discovered that just
over a dozen explicitly endorse the "consensus," while the vast majority of
abstracts does not mention anthropogenic global warming. Oreskes
even claims that this universal agreement had not been questioned once in
any of the papers since 1993 and concludes: "This analysis shows that
scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree with IPCC, the
National Academy of Sciences and the public statements of their professional
societies. Politicians, economists, journalists and others may have the
impression of confusion, disagreement or discord among climate scientists,
but that impression is incorrect."

What happened to the countless research papers that show global temperatures
were similar or even higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the
Medieval Warm Period, when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than
today; that solar variability is a key driver of recent climate change, and
that climate modeling is highly uncertain? An unbiased analysis of the
peer-reviewed literature on global warming will find hundreds of papers
(many of them written by the world's leading experts in the field) that have
raised serious reservations and outright rejection of the concept of a
"scientific consensus on climate change." The truth is, there is no such
thing.

In fact, the explicit and implicit rejection of the "consensus" is not
restricted to individual scientists. It also includes distinguished
scientific organizations such as the Russian Academy of Science and the U.S.
Association of State Climatologists, both of which are highly skeptical of
the whole idea. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists formally
rejects the view that anthropogenic factors are the main trigger of global
warming, emphasizing: "The Earth's climate is constantly changing owing to
natural variability in Earth processes. Natural climate variability over
recent geological time is greater than reasonable estimates of potential
human-induced greenhouse gas changes. Because no tool is available to test
the supposition of human-induced climate change and the range of natural
variability is so great, there is no discernible human influence on global
climate at this time."

In the meantime, activists, campaigners and a number of scientific
organizations routinely cited Oreskes' essay as final confirmation that the
science of climate change is settled once and for all. In a worrying sign of
attempted press containment, Britain's Royal Society has even employed her
study to call upon the British media to curtail reporting about the
scientific controversy altogether.

Yet the scientific community is far from any global warming consensus, as
was revealed by a recent survey among some 500 international climate
researchers. The survey, conducted by Professors Dennis Bray and Hans von
Storch of the German Institute for Coastal Research, found that "a quarter
of respondents still question whether human activity is responsible for the
most recent climatic changes." Remarkably, a research paper about their
survey and some of its key results were submitted to Science in August,
2004. Yet shortly after the paper was rejected, the journal published
Oreskes' study, which claimed a universal consensus among climate
researchers.

The decision to publish Oreskes' claim of general agreement (just days
before an important UN conference on global warming, COP-10) was apparently
made while the editors of Science were sitting on a paper that showed quite
clearly the opposite. It would appear that the editors of Science knowingly
misled the public and the world's media. In my view, such unethical
behaviour constitutes a grave contravention, if not a corruption of
scientific procedure. This form of unacceptable misconduct is much worse
than the editors' refusal to publish the numerous letters and rebuttals
regarding Oreskes' flawed study.

The stifling of dissent and the curtailing of scientific skepticism is
bringing climate research into disrepute. Science is supposed to work by
critical evaluation, open-mindedness and self-correction. There is a fear
among climate alarmists that the very existence of scientific skepticism and
doubts about their gloomy predictions will be used by politicians to delay
action. But if political considerations dictate what gets published, it's
all over for science.

Benny Peiser is a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University.

Copyright 2005, National Post

NOTE: In my analysis, I used the same ISI data base and the same key words
as Oreskes but used all documents listed therein. While Oreskes did not specify here
methodology in her SCIENCE essay, it would appear that she excluded the abstracts in
the “Social Sciences Citation Index” and “Arts & Humanities Citation Index”. She also
seems to have limited her search to “Articles", while I included “all document types”.
These differences may explain the discrepancy between the 928 documents analysed by
Oreskes and the 1117 documents I analysed, although her figures don’t add up. Some
critics have claimed that these differences essentially undermine my main case while
they validate Oreskes'. These commentator, however, ignore the more important flaw
I discerned: Only 13 abstracts explicitly endorse what Oreskes has called the 'consensus
view', while a majority of abstracts does not include any direct or indirect reference to
anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change. BJP, 26/08/05

Oh I love Nevada.....and Lake Lahontan, and the Truth

This is what Nevada looked like just a few thousand years ago.......before "global warming".....not computer modeling, not IPCC......just factual observation and measurements. Where did all that water, and all those lakes go?

The following article is entertaining.....with an under-current of truth.....Imagine a lake this size and more, dried up and gone since the last Ice Age.....not computer modeling, fact, not myth.....Enjoy.
Peter

source:

The following comes from Nevada.........

Our global warming 'Animal Farm'
January 9, 2008, 12:05 AM
By Ed Iverson
In one of his incomparable essays, C. S. Lewis criticized man's often insolent determination to control the forces of nature. He remarked that man's control of nature was frequently nothing more than man's control over other men - with nature as the instrument.

Nothing explains the mad obsession with global warming quite so pointedly. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the global warming panic has little to do with temperature change and everything to do with man's control of other men with climate as the instrument.

The global warming hoax is a dream come true for the global bullies intent on imposing their repressive regulatory regime upon a willing world of useful idiots. With an ozone hole here and a stranded polar bear there, here an oink there an oink, everywhere an oink, oink, Old Napoleon Gore had a farm; and pretty soon all the animals were explaining to themselves why the rules were constantly changing to advance the agenda of the swine who had assumed control in the house. The "chosen" go to Bali. The rest of us schmucks go meekly to our secure stalls in the barn. As the self-appointed dungeon masters softly close the iron gates, the plastic faces in Hollywood form a cheering chorus line. As we labor under increasingly onerous regulations, faint-hearted academics fearful of losing their grants gravely announce the absolute necessity of the new rules.

There are signs, however, that the tide is running out for popular support of Napoleon Gore's contrived crisis. The myth of scientific consensus is evaporating like the hazy aura of Clintonian inevitability. Even the New York Times is starting to dither and dissemble about the grimness of the emergency. A recent editorial openly questioned the data supporting the exaggerated claims of Napoleon Gore and the biased reporting of the "Squealer" media. According to an article recently run by Newsmax.com, New York Times columnist John Tierney "took a close look at the global warming debate and found that the climate change scenario being peddled by Mr. Gore and his legion of followers is anything but the settled scientific fact they claim."

In his column, Tierney noted that last January, weather experts in England confidently predicted that the buildup of greenhouse gases would make 2007 the "hottest year on record." Tierney then illustrated the fanatical commitment to global warming that we of the great unwashed see all the time. He wrote "even though the British scientists reported the global temperature average was not a new record (it was actually lower than any year since 2001) the BBC confidently proclaimed, '2007 Data Confirms Warming Trend.'"

Global warming is not a scientific fact. Shoot, global warming does not even rise to the level of scientific theory. In order to qualify as a scientific, a theory must in principle be falsifiable. There must be some conceivable means of disproving it. By rendering global warming bulletproof, devotees have transferred global warming to the unassailable regions of faith.

Examples of this sort of thing are everywhere. According to satellite imaging, ice in the Arctic has thinned. Good old Squealer (the sycophant media) trumpeted this as an indication that the entire planet was warming. However, when the same technology revealed that ice in the Antarctic increased to the highest level ever recorded, Squealer totally ignored the data.

Remember the hand wringing and chest beating indulged in by Napoleon after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita? A sure sign of the terrible hurricanes our overheated planet would generate in the coming years, he bellowed. He never mentioned the last two quiet seasons while accepting the Nobel Prize.

In a recent report to the a senate subcommittee, more than 400 climatologists cast doubt upon the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming is a threat to the planet. Many of the scientists were members of the IGPCC.

If it was about science, real scientists would welcome the minority report. Instead, dissenting scientists are ostracized and accused of industrial collusion. Now, here is the truth: Global warming has nothing to do with a verifiable warming of our planet. It has everything to do with man's control over other men with "science" as the tool.



Ed Iverson is a former Fallon (Nevada)resident.

Carbon Dioxide, It's Role in Atmospheric Heating....A Detailed Look

Here we are, getting down to the "nitty-gritty". The big question is, by adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere are we humans "cooking our own goose"? By that, I mean are we causing global warming and all of the crazy weather we see every night on the TV news? It seems there are differing opinions on the subject. It is complex, but I think we can understand, if we try. Certainly we must not rely on politicians and celebrities to tell us what to believe.

The following is one educated opinion.
Peter

from: http://forum.physorg.com/index.php?showtopic=7157

Greenhouse Gas Effect and Carbon Dioxide
This is a revised version of my previous post. When in energy balance, the Earth radiates from the top of the atmosphere at 235 Watts per square meter (1). Radiation from the greenhouse gases goes in all directions, and so, effectively, half is radiated out into space, and half is returned to the Earth’s surface and so helps to increase the surface temperature up to a value for which the radiated emission is twice that from the ToA to outer space. ie. the Earth’s surface radiates at 470 W.m^ -2.

Carbon dioxide has an absorption peak at almost 14 micrometres, but very little at longer wavelengths. The energy of a 14 micron infrared photon is 1.34×10^ -20 Joules. Therefore, the emission from the surface is about 3.5×10^22 photons/second per square metre. Given a relaxation time of 10 microseconds for the CO2 molecule to decay from its excited state, then a 1 second time interval can be considered as 10^5 periods of 10 microseconds each. Assuming an even distribution of emission across the area of 1m^2, and a uniform time rate of emission, then the number of photons emitted in each 10 microsecond period is 3.5×10^17 photons in 1m^2. In order to ensure 100% absorption of these photons, the 1m^2 area must be “covered” by sufficient molecules of CO2.

Now, the absorption cross section of a CO2 molecule for a 14 micron photon is about 5×10^ -22 m^2 per molecule, and so the number of molecules required to cover the area is 1.0 / 5×10^ -22, ie. 2×10^21 molecules per square metre. Now consider a vertical column of the Earth’s atmosphere based on a square of area 1 m^2.This air column has a mass of 1.01×10^4 Kg.m^ -2.The mass of the neutron (& proton) is approximately 1.67×10^ -27 Kg.So the mass of the nitrogen molecule is 4.68×10^ -26 Kg. Therefore, the number of N2 molecules in the column is approximately 2.15×10^29.Now, carbon dioxide is currently present at the level of about 380 ppm by volume, and so the number of CO2 molecules in our 1 m^2 column is about 8×10^25. Therefore, the 100% cover can be provided 8×10^25 / 2×10^21 times over, ie. 4×10^4 times.

So the carbon dioxide is grossly oversubscribed. This means that although the natural GHG effect works very well, the idea of anthropogenic “enhanced” greenhouse effect is totally non-viable as far as carbon dioxide is concerned, because there has long been far, far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than required, and so another 30% ( or several orders ) extra will have absolutely no effect. Reference(1)Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Clima...hsEnergyBalance
Aubrey E Banner, Sale, Cheshire, UK19th June 2006

Rachel Carson - Silent Spring - Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science - New York Times

Rachel Carson - Silent Spring - Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science - New York Times

This article is and should be very sobering for environmentalists and people of all colors and persuasions. It should also serve as a wake up call for everyone beating the drum over man-made carbon dioxide emissions, the "desperate" need to contain them, and the innumerable predicted crises over global warming and climate change.

This article vividly illustrates how nearly all of us have been misled about the dangers in our environment from "man-made" chemicals. I think most of us will be stunned if we grasp what we read here. I'm also sure there will be some disagreement.

It is very easy for the public to be influenced by emotionally evocative writing and now "documentary" film-making. This is particularly dangerous when "science", which many people blindly "trust", is used in areas which have great impact on our health and well-being. This is the sad legacy of Rachel Carson; she was a wonderful writer, but played loose and irresponsibly with science. Let this lesson be all the more reason why we must be cautious about what we are hearing now about the dire dangers of global warming.
Peter

Here is the article:

Findings
Fateful Voice of a Generation Still Drowns Out Real Science
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: June 5, 2007
For Rachel Carson admirers, it has not been a silent spring. They’ve been celebrating the centennial of her birthday with paeans to her saintliness. A new generation is reading her book in school — and mostly learning the wrong lesson from it.

If students are going to read “Silent Spring” in science classes, I wish it were paired with another work from that same year, 1962, titled “Chemicals and Pests.” It was a review of “Silent Spring” in the journal Science written by I. L. Baldwin, a professor of agricultural bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin.

He didn’t have Ms. Carson’s literary flair, but his science has held up much better. He didn’t make Ms. Carson’s fundamental mistake, which is evident in the opening sentence of her book:
“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings,” she wrote, extolling the peace that had reigned “since the first settlers raised their houses.” Lately, though, a “strange blight” had cast an “evil spell” that killed the flora and fauna, sickened humans and “silenced the rebirth of new life.”

This “Fable for Tomorrow,” as she called it, set the tone for the hodgepodge of science and junk science in the rest of the book. Nature was good; traditional agriculture was all right; modern pesticides were an unprecedented evil. It was a Disneyfied version of Eden.
Ms. Carson used dubious statistics and anecdotes (like the improbable story of a woman who instantly developed cancer after spraying her basement with DDT) to warn of a cancer epidemic that never came to pass. She rightly noted threats to some birds, like eagles and other raptors, but she wildly imagined a mass “biocide.” She warned that one of the most common American birds, the robin, was “on the verge of extinction” — an especially odd claim given the large numbers of robins recorded in Audubon bird counts before her book.

Ms. Carson’s many defenders, ecologists as well as other scientists, often excuse her errors by pointing to the primitive state of environmental and cancer research in her day. They argue that she got the big picture right: without her passion and pioneering work, people wouldn’t have recognized the perils of pesticides. But those arguments are hard to square with Dr. Baldwin’s review.
Dr. Baldwin led a committee at the National Academy of Sciences studying the impact of pesticides on wildlife. (Yes, scientists were worrying about pesticide dangers long before “Silent Spring.”) In his review, he praised Ms. Carsons’s literary skills and her desire to protect nature. But, he wrote, “Mankind has been engaged in the process of upsetting the balance of nature since the dawn of civilization.”

While Ms. Carson imagined life in harmony before DDT, Dr. Baldwin saw that civilization depended on farmers and doctors fighting “an unrelenting war” against insects, parasites and disease. He complained that “Silent Spring” was not a scientific balancing of costs and benefits but rather a “prosecuting attorney’s impassioned plea for action.”
Ms. Carson presented DDT as a dangerous human carcinogen, but Dr. Baldwin said the question was open and noted that most scientists “feel that the danger of damage is slight.” He acknowledged that pesticides were sometimes badly misused, but he also quoted an adage: “There are no harmless chemicals, only harmless use of chemicals.”

Ms. Carson, though, considered new chemicals to be inherently different. “For the first time in the history of the world,” she wrote, “every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.”
She briefly acknowledged that nature manufactured its own carcinogens, but she said they were “few in number and they belong to that ancient array of forces to which life has been accustomed from the beginning.” The new pesticides, by contrast, were “elixirs of death,” dangerous even in tiny quantities because humans had evolved “no protection” against them and there was “no ‘safe’ dose.”

She cited scary figures showing a recent rise in deaths from cancer, but she didn’t consider one of the chief causes: fewer people were dying at young ages from other diseases (including the malaria that persisted in the American South until DDT). When that longevity factor as well as the impact of smoking are removed, the cancer death rate was falling in the decade before “Silent Spring,” and it kept falling in the rest of the century.
Why weren’t all of the new poisons killing people? An important clue emerged in the 1980s when the biochemist Bruce Ames tested thousands of chemicals and found that natural compounds were as likely to be carcinogenic as synthetic ones. Dr. Ames found that 99.99 percent of the carcinogens in our diet were natural, which doesn’t mean that we are being poisoned by the natural pesticides in spinach and lettuce. We ingest most carcinogens, natural or synthetic, in such small quantities that they don’t hurt us. Dosage matters, not whether a chemical is natural, just as Dr. Baldwin realized.

But scientists like him were no match for Ms. Carson’s rhetoric. DDT became taboo even though there wasn’t evidence that it was carcinogenic (and subsequent studies repeatedly failed to prove harm to humans).
It’s often asserted that the severe restrictions on DDT and other pesticides were justified in rich countries like America simply to protect wildlife. But even that is debatable (see www.tierneylab.com), and in any case, the chemophobia inspired by Ms. Carson’s book has been harmful in various ways. The obsession with eliminating minute risks from synthetic chemicals has wasted vast sums of money: environmental experts complain that the billions spent cleaning up Superfund sites would be better spent on more serious dangers.

The human costs have been horrific in the poor countries where malaria returned after DDT spraying was abandoned. Malariologists have made a little headway recently in restoring this weapon against the disease, but they’ve had to fight against Ms. Carson’s disciples who still divide the world into good and bad chemicals, with DDT in their fearsome “dirty dozen.”
Ms. Carson didn’t urge an outright ban on DDT, but she tried to downplay its effectiveness against malaria and refused to acknowledge what it had accomplished. As Dr. Baldwin wrote, “No estimates are made of the countless lives that have been saved because of the destruction of insect vectors of disease.” He predicted correctly that people in poor countries would suffer from hunger and disease if they were denied the pesticides that had enabled wealthy nations to increase food production and eliminate scourges.

But Dr. Baldwin did make one mistake. After expressing the hope “that someone with Rachel Carson’s ability will write a companion volume dramatizing the improvements in human health and welfare derived from the use of pesticides,” he predicted that “such a story would be far more dramatic than the one told by Miss Carson in ‘Silent Spring.’ ”
That never happened, and I can’t imagine any writer turning such good news into a story more dramatic than Ms. Carson’s apocalypse in Eden. A best-seller titled “Happy Spring”? I don’t think so.

Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming

The issue of carbon dioxide emissions causing global warming and consequent destructive climate change is so important, this warrants publishing this article. It comes from: http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/about/position/globalwarming.jsp

I have mentioned this website before and it is very good, and I think highly reputable.
Peter


Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming: Where We Stand on the Issue
C. D. Idso and K. E. Idso
Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
There is little doubt the air's CO2 concentration has risen significantly since the inception of the Industrial Revolution; and there are few who do not attribute the CO2 increase to the increase in humanity's use of fossil fuels. There is also little doubt the earth has warmed slightly over the same period; but there is no compelling reason to believe that the rise in temperature was caused by the rise in CO2. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that future increases in the air's CO2 content will produce any global warming; for there are numerous problems with the popular hypothesis that links the two phenomena.

A weak short-term correlation between CO2 and temperature proves nothing about causation. Proponents of the notion that increases in the air's CO2 content lead to global warming point to the past century's weak correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and global air temperature as proof of their contention. However, they typically gloss over the fact that correlation does not imply causation, and that a hundred years is not enough time to establish the validity of such a relationship when it comes to earth's temperature history.

The observation that two things have risen together for a period of time says nothing about one trend being the cause of the other. To establish a causal relationship it must be demonstrated that the presumed cause precedes the presumed effect. Furthermore, this relationship should be demonstrable over several cycles of increases and decreases in both parameters. And even when these criteria are met, as in the case of solar/climate relationships, many people are unwilling to acknowledge that variations in the presumed cause truly produced the observed analogous variations in the presumed effect.

In thus considering the seven greatest temperature transitions of the past half-million years - three glacial terminations and four glacial inceptions - we note that increases and decreases in atmospheric CO2 concentration not only did not precede the changes in air temperature, they followed them, and by hundreds to thousands of years! There were also long periods of time when atmospheric CO2 remained unchanged, while air temperature dropped, as well as times when the air's CO2 content dropped, while air temperature remained unchanged or actually rose. Hence, the climate history of the past half-million years provides absolutely no evidence to suggest that the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 concentration will lead to significant global warming.

Strong negative climatic feedbacks prohibit catastrophic warming. Strong negative feedbacks play major roles in earth's climate system. If they did not, no life would exist on the planet, for some perturbation would long ago have sent the world careening into a state of cosmic cold or horrendous heat; and we know from the fossil record that neither of these extremes has ever occurred, even over billions of years, and in spite of a large increase in the luminosity of the sun throughout geologic time.

Consider, in this regard, the water vapor that would be added to the atmosphere by enhanced evaporation in a warmer world. The extra moisture would likely lead to the production of more and higher-water-content clouds, both of which consequences would tend to cool the planet by reflecting more solar radiation back to space.

A warmer world would also mean a warmer ocean, which would likely lead to an increase in the productivity of marine algae or phytoplankton. This phenomenon, in turn, would enhance the biotic production of certain sulfur-based substances that diffuse into the air, where they are oxidized and converted into particles that function as cloud condensation nuclei. The resulting increase in the number of cloud-forming particles would thus produce more and smaller cloud droplets, which are more reflective of incoming solar radiation; and this phenomenon would also tend to cool the planet.

All of these warming-induced cloud-related cooling effects are very powerful. It has been shown, for example, that the warming predicted to result from a doubling of the air's CO2 content may be totally countered by: (1) a mere 1% increase in the reflectivity of the planet, or (2) a 10% increase in the amount of the world's low-level clouds, or (3) a 15 to 20% reduction in the mean droplet radius of earth's boundary-layer clouds, or (4) a 20 to 25% increase in cloud liquid water content. In addition, it has been demonstrated that the warming-induced production of high-level clouds over the equatorial oceans almost totally nullifies that region's powerful water vapor greenhouse effect, which supplies much of the temperature increase in the CO2-induced global warming scenario.

Most of these important negative feedbacks are not adequately represented in state-of-the-art climate models. What is more, many related (and totally ignored!) phenomena are set in motion when the land surfaces of the globe warm. In response to the increase in temperature between 25°N latitude and the equator, for example, the soil-to-air flux of various sulfur gases rises by a factor of 25, as a consequence of warmth-induced increases in soil microbial activity; and this phenomenon can lead to the production of more cloud condensation nuclei just as biological processes over the sea do. Clearly, therefore, any number of combinations of these several negative feedbacks could easily thwart the impetus for warming provided by future increases in the air's CO2 content.

Growth-enhancing effects of CO2 create an impetus for cooling. Carbon dioxide is a powerful aerial fertilizer, directly enhancing the growth of almost all terrestrial plants and many aquatic plants as its atmospheric concentration rises. And just as increased algal productivity at sea increases the emission of sulfur gases to the atmosphere, ultimately leading to more and brighter clouds over the world's oceans, so too do CO2-induced increases in terrestrial plant productivity lead to enhanced emissions of various sulfur gases over land, where they likewise ultimately cool the planet. In addition, many non-sulfur-based biogenic materials of the terrestrial environment play major roles as water- and ice-nucleating aerosols; and the airborne presence of these materials should also be enhanced by rising levels of atmospheric CO2.

Hence, it is possible that incorporation of this multifaceted CO2-induced cooling effect into the suite of equations that comprise the current generation of global climate models might actually tip the climatic scales in favor of global cooling in the face of continued growth of anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

There is no evidence for warming-induced increases in extreme weather. Proponents of the CO2-induced global warming hypothesis often predict that extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and hurricanes will become more numerous and/or extreme in a warmer world; however, there is no evidence to support this claim. In fact, many studies have revealed that the numbers and intensities of extreme weather events have remained relatively constant over the last century of modest global warming or have actually declined.

Costs of damages from these phenomena, however, have risen dramatically; but this phenomenon has been demonstrated to be the result of evolving societal, demographic and economic factors.

Elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 are a boon to the biosphere. In lieu of global warming, a little of which would in all probability be good for the planet, where do the above considerations leave us? Simply with the biospheric benefits that come from the aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment: enhanced plant growth, increased plant water use efficiency, greater food production for both people and animals, plus a host of other biological benefits too numerous to describe in this short statement.

And these benefits are not mere predictions. They are real. Already, in fact, they are evident in long-term tree-ring records, which reveal a history of increasing forest growth rates that have closely paralleled the progression of the Industrial Revolution. They can also be seen in the slow but inexorable spreading of woody plants into areas where only grasses grew before. In fact, the atmosphere itself bears witness to the increasing prowess of the entire biosphere in the yearly expanding amplitude of the its seasonal CO2 cycle. This oscillatory "breath of the biosphere" - its inhalation of CO2, produced by spring and summer terrestrial plant growth, and its exhalation of CO2, produced by fall and winter biomass decomposition - has been documented to be growing greater and greater each year in response to the ever-increasing growth stimulation provided by the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content.

Atmospheric CO2 enrichment brings growth and prosperity to man and nature alike. This, then, is what we truly believe will be the result of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content: a reinvigorated biosphere characteristic of those prior periods of earth's history when the air's CO2 concentration was much higher than it is today, coupled with a climate not much different from that of the present. Are we right? Only time will tell. But one thing is certain now: there is much more real-world evidence for the encouraging scenario we paint here than for the doom-and-gloom predictions of apocalypse that are preached by those who blindly follow the manifestly less-than-adequate prognostications of imperfect climate models.

Our policy prescription relative to anthropogenic CO2 emissions is thus to leave well enough alone and let nature and humanity take their inextricably intertwined course. All indications are that both will be well served by the ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2.

Supporting references. This brief was written in 1998. References to the voluminous scientific literature that supports the many factual statements of this position paper may be found on our website - www.co2science.org - which we update weekly.
-->
-->

-->
Turn to CO2 Science for all your greenhouse gas reporting needs.Is carbon dioxide a harmful air pollutant, or is it an amazingly effective aerial fertilizer?Explore the positive side of the issue in two half-hour documentaries -- The Greening of Planet Earth and The Greening of Planet Earth

If Gore and Company Are Wrong About Global Warming, So What?

Here is an intelligent discussion about the real cost of trying to control global warming. Politicians have skipped over the scientific debate over global warming, which is far from being settled. The United Nation's IPCC report says says there is a "consensus among scientists", about the causes of global warming. I've provided ample evidence (here on this blog) from the most prominent climate scientists in the world to prove the IPCC report is at best wrong, and a worst an outright lie.

So here we have it, politicians are making decisions costing billions upon billions of dollars, based on inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical science based on computer modeling. Even though our best scientists can show there is little if any evidence that man-caused carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming. Politicians don't care about the science. Why is everyone jumping on this bandwagon, when it's basic premise is wrong? Why.......because there is big, big money to be made. Money equals power, power equals control. I think it is as simple as that.
Peter


Here is the discussion between two thoughtful and well-informed people. It is from: http://www.townhall.com/


If They're Wrong About Gore-bal Warming, So What?

Dear Larry,
I'm a Democrat, and I enjoy your work. And I get veryfrustrated by those on the left who whine and are thin on the facts. This brings me to my reason for this letter: Global warming. The global warming debate is unique to humanity. If those who advocate "wait and convince more scientists"are wrong, following their advice may affect hundreds of millions of people, with possibly many killed by famine and flooding. On the other hand, if the people who advocate doing something now are wrong, the worst is mostly economic. That's a price I'm more than willing to pay to hedge my bets to protect the millions of lives at risk, as well as the ecosystems and animal species facing extinction. Following the advice of the vast majority of the world's atmospheric scientists sounds like a bet all humans should take. -- Mr. Ph.D.

Dear Mr. Ph.D.,
Progress! At least you do not say, as does Al Gore, that the debate about global warming in the scientific community "is over." Nor do you assert, as does CBS's Katie Couric, that "all the experts agree." The debate is not over, nor do all experts agree. You suggest that if the scientists are wrong, the worst case comes down to a few lost bucks. No, the worst case results in lots of lost bucks, retarded economic growth, lost jobs and weakened worker pensions, all while making nations, especially Third World countries, less prosperous and thus less capable of adapting to whatever damage might occur as a result of global warming.

The Kyoto Accords cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and figure to increase the gap between the rich and the poor. More will starve, with countries becoming less financially capable of dealing with diseases like malaria, HIV/AIDS, etc. Funds directed toward combating global warming mean less money for immediate crises like those mentioned. This can result in greater political instability and tyranny, with more failed states receptive to the Islamo-fascist lie that rich nations become so "at the expense of poor ones."

Furthermore, many scientists and economists see a small-benefit to high-cost ratio, again therefore diverting money otherwise spent on improved technologies that could wean us away from environmentally polluting energy sources, some of which come from hostile, politically unstable nations. This means less money for R&D on wind, solar, nuclear and other non-fossil fuel alternatives. Life involves trade-offs. You underestimate the cost side while overestimating the benefit side.

"Environmentalists" like Rachel Carson, author of"Silent Spring," helped to create the hysteria that eliminated DDT. The result? The return of malaria and needless deaths. Kyoto already fails to meet its objectives in European countries that ratified the accords. Non-signatories like India and China, on the other hand, will soon become the biggest CO2 emission polluters.

Neither nation has or will likely sign on to Kyoto. Thus any benefits -- and again many scientists expect only negligible, if any, post-Kyoto benefits -- will be offset by polluting nations like India and China. Why does government need to mandate our way "out of this"? The Toyota Prius caught the public's fancy less because of government inducements and government R&D, and more because the company provided a product that consumers wanted. Understand this: the more prosperous a nation, the more its citizens can afford to demand"clean" means of production. Poor nations face bigger concerns -- like feeding their population, and providing housing and other basic services. Right now, neither India nor China can afford the luxury of"green" policies before things like food, housing and clothing.

The environment, like people, adapts. Entrepreneurs, right now, pour billions into "alternative"technologies as the costs of fossil fuels -- both financial and political -- go up, while the price of"clean" fuels go down. These things take time. Even some United Nations IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scientists say it's too late to reverse global warming. If so, oh well. Still others expect the "damage" to materialize centuries down the road, giving us plenty of time to change or adapt. Why does speculating about things like global warming replace direct and immediate threats? Iran, for example, seeks a bomb. If they use it -- and they threaten to -- imagine the environmental damage to the planet, to say nothing about the genocide-like loss of human life. But where is the urgency? Soon baby boomers will join the ranks of those on Social Security and Medicare, thus requiring younger workers to substantially increase their payroll taxes in order to allow boomers the same benefits enjoyed by their parents and grandparents. Where's the urgency? Policy-makers face immediate, predictable and foreseeable -- and especially in the case of Iran --serious around-the-corner issues. Yet we divert time,money and energy fretting about hypothetical"calamities" of global warming rather than dealing with real world/real time threats. You've gambled on global warming. I just hope we're alive to place a bet. -- Larry

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/column.aspx?UrlTitle=if_theyre_wrong_about_gore-bal_warming,_so_what&ns=LarryElder&dt=03/15/2007&page=full&comments=true

The Debate About Global Warming is Not Over

Here is a very thoughtful email to me that deserves a careful response. Help me out here folks. First, is nothing in "The Wall Street Journal" to be believed because it is not a leftist and "environmentally friendly" publication? And I'm not implying that scientists are "corrupted" individuals, only that scientists tend to reach the conclusions desired by those paying their rent. That is only human nature.

And finally, there is that FEAR factor again. If I'm wrong, and global warming is caused by man, then we're "toast". This fear, that cannot even come close to being substantiated, except by how you FEEL on a really, really hot miserable day in August when the air conditioning isn't working, is not at all scientific. Is this fear great enough to spend billions and billions of dollars on? Enough fear to destroy countries economies? Is it enough to take money away from more desperate and sensible and documented projects. I don't think so, do you?

Hi Pete, The article from Mr. Linzen from MIT kind of rambles on with out
much clear standup opposing data that would help in any argument. That is
what is missing in the whole debate. Who is distorting info and data and
who is using it for whatever personal or political means. Dr. Linzen's
article is in the Wall Street Journal so it is not going to be left leaning or
environmentally friendly.

To me it is an enormous argument
that should be brought to the forefront and battled out. Let people hear
opposing arguments. Not ones that are sponsored by one interest group or
the other. I do not think most scientists are corrupted individuals
otherwise they would have gone into the private sector. Where it is really
nasty. I know.

The seas are rising, the earth is
heating up, however slowly, the ozone is increasing in size, the oceans are
warming however slightly, tropical fish are moving into Capo Vaticano.
This could all be normal happenings but in my short life I have observed
change. In 200 years what will it be like. Who cares, right.

I think it is a good argument.

To me it is like
the creationists vs the atheist non believers, it is good banter.

If the environmentalists are wrong, that is a good thing. If
the people who say man cannot harm or is not affecting mother earth in a
significant and dangerous way are wrong, well, we are toast. Or at
least North Central Africans will be first. I guess they are called
Sub-Sahara. They all ready have it bad enough.

bye for now.
phil