Eco-friendly? Environmentalism

[Shammu]

Biofuels behind food price hikes: leaked World Bank report

Fri Jul 4, 3:34 AM ET

LONDON (AFP) - Biofuels have caused world food prices to increase by 75 percent, according to the findings of an unpublished World Bank report published in The Guardian newspaper on Friday.

The daily said the report was finished in April but was not published to avoid embarrassing the US government, which has claimed plant-derived fuels have pushed up prices by only three percent.

Biofuels, which supporters claim are a "greener" alternative to using fossil fuel and cut greenhouse gas emissions, and rising food prices will be on the agenda when G8 leaders meet in Japan next week for their annual summit.

The report's author, a senior World Bank economist, assessed that contrary to claims by US President George W. Bush, increased demand from India and China has not been the cause of rising food prices.

"Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases," the report said.

Droughts in Australia have also not had a significant impact, it added. Instead, European and US drives for greater use of biofuels has had the biggest effect.

The European Union has mooted using biofuels for up to 10 percent of all transport fuels by 2020 as part of an increase in use of renewable energy.

All petrol and diesel in Britain has had to include a biofuels component of at least 2.5 percent since April this year.

"Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate," the report said.

It added that the drive for biofuels has distorted food markets by diverting grain away from food for fuel, encouraging farmers to set aside land for its production, and sparked financial speculation on grains.

But Brazil's transformation of sugar cane into fuel has not had such a dramatic impact, the report said.

"The basket of food prices examined in the study rose by 140 percent between 2002 and this February," The Guardian said.

"The report estimates that higher energy and fertiliser prices accounted for an increase of only 15 percent, while biofuels have been responsible for a 75 percent jump over that period."

Biofuels behind food price hikes: leaked World Bank report
~~~~~~~

Of course it to blame for the rise in food costs and even with biofuels gas still hasn't gone down so again we are paying the price but in 2 ways now!!

Yup the Eco-friendly/Environmentalism were right, pay more now so were use to the high prices. When they should have left everything alone, and learn how to shut their mouths. Hmmmmmmmm I wonder if this would be known as "Foot in Mouth" syndrome?

[Soldier4Christ]

Of course the World Bank wants people to think this as it takes all blame off of them. Actually the biofuels are only a portion of the high costs of foods. It is also due to the very large increase in the price of oil and gas production that is caused by oil speculators through the World Bank. We are seeing this continually all over. The U.S. Congress is blaming the oil specualtors and Opec, the oil speculators are blaming Congress and the environmentalists, the environmentalists are blaming Congress and the oil moguls ....

It is actually a combination of all of them.

[nChrist]

    

We'd might as well laugh about everything since there's nothing we can do about it anyway. I think that much of the world has been suffering from foot in mouth syndrome for quite some time. Common sense will NOT prevail. Are there any guesses about whether anything will be done to correct the food crisis? After all, Al Gore's imaginary issues have to be taken care of first.

[Soldier4Christ]

Are there any guesses about whether anything will be done to correct the food crisis? After all, Al Gore's imaginary issues have to be taken care of first.

Now that is laughable.

 

[Soldier4Christ]

Brought To You By The Pagan Religion of Gaia Worship


The Environmentalist Evil

Environmentalism regards man as a spreading cancer that must be eliminated at any cost. And its leaders mean it. Environmentalism is at root a movement against man. As novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand observed, "… [their] ultimate motive [is]…hatred for achievement, for reason, for man, for life."

Most people would not believe this to be true. A great number of people tend to regard Environmentalism as a movement for cleaner air and water, for a better environment for man. But the environmentalists' actions demonstrate otherwise.

Clear evidence of their disregard for human life is their decades-long campaign to ban the insecticide DDT, even for specific use against malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Whatever the long-term effects of DDT on human health, they should certainly be an option for the people at risk from the ravaging short-term effects of malaria.

Every year, about half a billion people become ill with malaria -- that's ten percent of Earth's population -- and several million die, mostly children.

Since its inception in the 1940's, the use of DDT has prevented the deaths of about six hundred million people, an average of ten million a year.

From 1993 to 1995 DDT was banned in Bolivia, Paraguay and Peru. Malaria increased ninety percent. In the same period, DDT's use was increased in Ecuador, and the incidence dropped sixty percent.

Its introduction in India, in 1960, reduced in the span of a year the number of malaria victims from a million to a hundred thousand, and in Sri Lanka from half a million down to almost zero. Soon after DDT was banned there, the number of victims climbed back to previous levels. Still today, environmentalists keep advocating a worldwide ban on DDT. They must be proud of their record.

Environmentalists are not only against DDT, but also against all insecticides. They aim to eventually ban them all, causing death and disease on a global scale. Their campaign makes perfect sense if we remember that one of the central tenets of Environmentalism is to eliminate overpopulation. As Jacques Cousteau, the famous French oceanographer admitted, "In order to stabilize world populations, we must eliminate three hundred and fifty thousand people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it."

More proof of the their hatred for human life is their persisting campaign to stop chlorinization of water, which kills the germs in it. Their partial success in Peru resulted in thousands of deaths in a single cholera epidemic in 1992. So far they have not succeeded to ban it in the US, though they are hard at it.

Note the Environmentalists' ferocious attack on genetically engineered foods, despite the advantage that they dispense with insecticide use. This new technology promises to enhance the quality of lives by tailoring foods to our specific needs. An example is the invention of engineered rice with beta-carotene, a substance that the body can convert into vitamin A. Every year two million people worldwide go blind and a hundred million more suffer from lack of vitamin A.

If environmentalists really cared about human life and suffering they would have welcomed the new rice and revised their position on banning GE foods. Why don't they?

Maybe David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth has part of the answer: "Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet."

The most glaring proof that Environmentalism is anti human is their stand for animal rights and their opposition to animal use in medical research. Given the alternative of sacrificing a few mice or letting a billion humans die, only the lowest kind of man haters could choose the latter.

How many more people will have to go blind, get sick or die before we see Environmentalism for what it truly is?

A movement of pure hatred for man disguised as a false love of nature.

Listen to Dave Foreman, founder of Earth First, whose primary goal is cutting the world's population by ninety percent: "We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox."

David M. Graber, a biologist with the National Park Service also puts it in the open: "Human happiness [is] …not as important as a wild and healthy planet. Somewhere along the line…we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth."

He is right that there is indeed a cancer growing on Earth. But it is not man. It is Environmentalism, and the sooner we get rid of it, the better.

David Holcberg, a former civil engineer and businessman, is now a writer living in Southern California. He is also a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

[Soldier4Christ]

Frightening Quotes from Environmentalists

"The right to have children should be a marketable commodity, bought and traded by individuals but absolutely limited by the state."
—Kenneth Boulding, originator of the “Spaceship Earth”


"We have wished, we ecofreaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion—guilt-free at last!"
—Stewart Brand (writing in the Whole Earth Catalogue).


"Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed."
—Pentti Linkola


"What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
—Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-Colorado)


"I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems."
—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal


"Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs."
—John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal


"Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental."
—Dave Forman, Founder of Earth First!


"Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, is not as important as a wild and healthy planets…Some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
—David Graber, biologist, National Park Service


"The collective needs of non-human species must take precedence over the needs and desires of humans."
—Dr. Reed F. Noss, The Wildlands Project


"If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."
—Prince Phillip, World Wildlife Fund


Cannibalism is a “radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation.”
—Lyall Watson, The Financial Times, 15 July 1995



"We, in the green movement, aspire to a cultural model in which killing a forest will be considered more contemptible and more criminal than the sale of 6-year-old children to Asian brothels."
—Carl Amery


"To feed a starving child is to exacerbate the world population problem."
—Lamont Cole


"The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population."
—Reid Bryson, “Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man”, (1971)


"The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer."
—Paul Ehrlich, in The Population Bomb (1968)

[Soldier4Christ]

1 broken bulb pushes contamination to 300 times EPA limits
Poisonous vapor so bad, researchers recommend families no longer use CFLs

Compact fluorescent light bulbs have long been known to contain poisonous liquid mercury, but a study released earlier this year shows the level of mercury vapor released from broken bulbs skyrockets past accepted safety levels.

Following a story reported by WND last year about a Maine woman quoted $2,000 for cleaning up a broken fluorescent bulb (or CFL) in her home, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection studied the dangers of broken CFLs and the adequacy of recommended cleanup procedures.

The results were stunning: breaking a single compact fluorescent bulb on the floor can spike mercury vapor levels in a room – particularly at a child's height – to over 300 times the EPA's standard accepted safety level.

Furthermore, for days after a CFL has been broken, vacuuming or simply crawling across a carpeted floor where the bulb was broken can cause mercury vapor levels to shoot back upwards of 100 times what's considered safe.

Following the study, the Maine DEP made eight new recommendations for usage and cleanup of CFLs, including the recommendation to not even use the bulbs in carpeted rooms where children, infants, or pregnant women live. The likelihood of breakage, near impossibility of cleanup and risk of prolonged exposure, the study concluded, are just too great.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences website acknowledges that Brown University published a similar study last month confirming the Maine results: breaking a fluorescent bulb sends mercury vapor levels to unsafe levels for the elderly, pregnant and young – and those levels remain elevated for days.

The NIEHS website states, "Today’s CFLs underscore mercury's volatile vapor form, which is still a significant health concern – ventilation reduces but does not eliminate this toxicant. Mercury vapor inhalation can cause significant neural damage in developing fetuses and children."

According to a Mercury Policy Project overview paper, unpolluted air contains 1-2 nanograms (or billionths of a gram) of mercury vapor per cubic meter. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has established a level of 300 ng/m3 as the safety threshold for prolonged exposure to the poisonous gas.

Some states, though not the federal government, have also established a safety threshold for a one-time, acute exposure to mercury vapor. California, for example, has established that any level of exposure over 1,800 ng/m3 has potentially harmful health effects.

The Maine study, however, discovered that upon breakage of a CFL, mercury vapors can rise "with short excursions over 25,000 ng/m3, sometimes over 50,000 ng/m3, and possibly over 100,000 ng/m3 from the breakage of a single compact fluorescent lamp."

In other words, the study found breaking a single bulb can send mercury vapor levels in a room to over 50 times the level that California considers dangerous and to over 300 times what the EPA has established as a safe level for prolonged exposure.

Researchers in the study broke 45 bulbs in a variety of flooring surfaces and then studied lingering gas levels after a variety of cleanup techniques. The results contradicted a number of commonly held thoughts on CFLs, for example:

    • Though proponents of CFLs often argue a single bulb only contains 5 mg of mercury, the study found it was an average. The bulbs actually range from 0.9 to 18 mg of mercury.

    • Though the EPA's Energy Star program recommends placing a broken bulb "in a glass jar with a metal lid or in a sealed plastic bag," the study discovered mercury vapor leaches right through plastic bags. "Of the 12 different types of containers tested during the 23 different tests, the plastic bag was found to be the worst choice for containing mercury emissions," researchers stated. "Based upon this study, the DEP now suggests that a glass container with metal screw lid with a gum seal be used to contain debris."

    • Though the Energy Star guidelines suggest ventilating a room for 15 minutes before attempting cleanup, the study found that in every case – even in well-ventilated rooms – it took over an hour to drop mercury vapor levels below the EPA safety standard.

    • And for cleanup on carpets, the Energy Star guidelines suggest vacuuming and disposing of the dust bag. The Maine study, however, discovered that vacuuming served to simply stir the vapor into the air and "irreversibly contaminate the vacuum". The researchers, acknowledging it was inconvenient, recommended only one course of action for broken bulbs on carpet: remove the carpet.

The Maine study also discovered, however, that carpets aren't the only problem with broken bulbs.

"All three flooring surfaces in this study (pre-finished hardwood, short nap carpet, and shag carpet) were able to be cleaned up with pre-study cleanup guidance so that they looked clean. However, mercury vapors emanating from all three surface types were detected, especially when agitated, for weeks after the cleanup of a break. … Flooring surfaces, once visibly clean, can emit mercury immediately at the source that can be greater than 50,000 ng/m3."

"Flooring surfaces that still contain mercury sources emit more mercury when agitated than when not agitated. This mercury source in the carpeting has particular significance for children rolling around on a floor, babies crawling, or non mobile infants placed on the floor."

As WND has reported, several countries, including the United States, have signed laws that will eventually phase out typical incandescent light bulbs and dictate their replacement with CFLs.

Even the U.S. EPA, however, has recognized that recent studies show CFLs aren't safe for all circumstances.

The Maine study may prove the most condemning of the use of fluorescent bulbs yet.

Part of the study detailed the potential hazards posed by mercury vapor:

"There are a number of studies documenting neurotoxicity as a consequence of inhalation of elemental mercury in adults. … Studies documented changes in EEG, deficits in peripheral nerve function, autonomic effects, psychological and sleep changes, and deficits in fine motor performance, visuomotor coordination, visual reaction time, visual scanning, memory, concentration, and executive function."

In children, and especially unborn children, the results can be far worse:

"It is well established that the developing organism may be much more sensitive than the adult to neurotoxic agents. For example, methylmercury exposure can produce devastating effects in the fetus, including cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, and even death, while producing no or minimal effects in the mother."

Children are also more susceptible to mercury vapor exposure from broken CFLs:

"Infants and toddlers also have a much higher rate of respiration than adults. Therefore they have a higher exposure to similar concentrations. They also are lower to the floor and therefore closer to the source of the exposure and presumably more apt to obtain a concentrated dose of mercury."

The study, however, didn't leave out the elderly:

"Elderly and unhealthy individuals may already be at comprised health and be more susceptible to mercury effects than a healthy individual. For example, mercury does kidney damage which could exacerbate an already existing kidney disease."

Unlike many poisons that can be flushed out of the body, mercury bioaccumulates, which means the various tissues store the toxin in increasing amounts, a particular concern as the use of CFLs increases.

The Mercury Policy Project summary paper quotes an estimate that the U.S. currently releases 2 tons of mercury vapor into the environment each year from broken fluorescent bulbs alone. Two tons contrasts startlingly with the level the EPA has established as dangerous to human health: a mere 300 billionths of a gram.

[Soldier4Christ]

Wind Jammers
August 18, 2008; Page A14

In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.

To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.

Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.

In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."

California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.

Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.

Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.

In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have and I'm sure that they will find something wrong with those also.

[Soldier4Christ]

Councils recruit unpaid volunteers to spy on their neighbors
'Sounds like something straight out of the East German Stasi's copybook'

Councils are recruiting 'citizen snoopers' to report litter louts, dog foulers and even people who fail to sort out their rubbish properly.

The 'environment volunteers' will also be responsible for encouraging neighbours to cut down on waste.

The move comes as local authorities dish out £100 fines to householders who leave out too much rubbish or fail to follow recycling rules.

It will fuel fears that Britain is lurching towards a Big Brother society, following the revelation this week that the Home Office is extending some police powers to council staff and private security guards.

Critics said the latest scheme could easily be abused and encourage a culture of bin spies and curtain twitchers.

Matthew Elliott, of the Taxpayers' Alliance, said: 'Snooping on your neighbours to report recycling infringements sounds like something straight out of the East German Stasi's copybook.

'With council tax so high, the last thing people want to pay for is an army of busybodies peering through their net curtains at their neighbours as they put out their rubbish.'

Recruitment adverts appealing for the unpaid environmental volunteers have appeared across the country in recent months.

In Hampshire, Eastleigh council wants locals to 'monitor local environmental quality' and report 'issues' involving recycling and waste. In East London, Tower Hamlets is recruiting volunteers for a crackdown on reluctant recyclers. Other councils are expected to launch similar schemes.

Officially, the volunteers are not encouraged to spy on neighbours or report them. But councils are unlikely to ignore tip-offs.

Earlier this year the Daily Mail revealed that councils have hired 850 agents and informers to catch fly-tippers, tax cheats and other offenders.

The 'covert human intelligence sources' keep watch on suspected law-breakers and yobs. Any evidence they find, such as illegal alcohol sales or wastedumping, can be used in court.

The latest recruits are being hired by council environment departments.

Eastleigh has already taken on around a dozen who answered an advert in a council newsletter which said: 'Volunteers will be involved in reporting issues in their area such as recycling, waste, fly-tipping, graffiti, dog fouling and abandoned vehicles'.

The recruits will also be involved in the 'promotion of recycling and waste minimisation across the borough'.

The LibDem-controlled council denied the volunteers would be asked to spy on neighbours.

'These are all people who care about the environment and they will be ambassadors for their area,' a spokesman said. 'They will be there to report graffiti, abandoned vehicles and local vandalism, but not to report on other individuals.'

The volunteers will be trained on the council's waste and recycling policies and asked to explain them in the community.

'They might go to an over-60s club and talk about recycling,' said the spokesman.

But Labour councillor Brian Norgate said: 'I wouldn't be overkeen on asking volunteers to be snooping, if that's what this turned out to be. We have people trained in doing this.'

Tower Hamlets calls its volunteers 'environment champions'. According to the council they report on 'a number of environmental crimes, issues and concerns, such as graffiti, dumped rubbish and abandoned cars.'

A spokesman said: 'They demonstrate environmentally-friendly behaviour, encourage other residents to recycle and are pro-active in the neighbourhood.'

The Local Government Association said: 'Environment volunteers care passionately about their area and want to protect it. They are not snoopers. They will help councils cut crime and make places cleaner, greener and safer.'

The news follows a trend of recruiting ordinary people to help catch those responsible for minor crimes. On Wednesday, it emerged more than 1,400 people will have police powers under the Home Office's Community Safety Accreditation Scheme.

Security guards, park wardens and other local authority staff can issue fines for a large number of offences, stop cars and seize alcohol from underage drinkers.

[Soldier4Christ]

Gore urges civil disobedience to stop coal plants
Al claims 'the world has lost ground to the climate crisis'

Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon.

The former U.S. vice president, whose climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award, told a philanthropic meeting in New York City that "the world has lost ground to the climate crisis."

"If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration," Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause.

"I believe for a carbon company to spend money convincing the stock-buying public that the risk from the global climate crisis is not that great represents a form of stock fraud because they are misrepresenting a material fact," he said. "I hope these state attorney generals around the country will take some action on that."

The government says about 28 coal plants are under construction in the United States. Another 20 projects have permits or are near the start of construction.

Scientists say carbon gases from burning fossil fuel for power and transport are a key factor in global warming.

Carbon capture and storage could give coal power an extended lease on life by keeping power plants' greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere and easing climate change.

But no commercial-scale project exists anywhere to demonstrate the technology, partly because it is expected to increase up-front capital costs by an additional 50 percent.

So-called geo-sequestration of carbon sees carbon dioxide liquefied and pumped into underground rock layers for long term storage.

[Soldier4Christ]

Solar Wind Influenced Cosmic Rays Not CFCs Produce Ozone Hole


New theory predicts the largest ozone hole over Antarctica will occur this month.

A University of Waterloo scientist says that cosmic rays are a key cause for expanding the hole in the ozone layer over the South Pole—and predicts the largest ozone hole will occur in one or two weeks. Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy who studies ozone depletion, says that it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth’s ozone layer is depleted by chlorine atoms produced by sunlight-induced destruction of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmosphere. But more and more evidence now points to a new theory that the cosmic rays (energy particles that originate in space) play a major role. The ozone layer is a layer in Earth’s atmosphere that contains high concentrations of ozone. It absorbs almost all of the sun’s high-frequency ultraviolet light, which is potentially damaging to life on Earth and causes diseases such as skin cancer and cataracts. The Antarctic ozone hole can be larger than the size of North America.

Lu says that data from several sources, including NASA satellites, show a strong correlation between cosmic ray intensity and ozone depletion. Lab measurements demonstrate a mechanism by which cosmic rays cause drastic reactions of ozone-depleting chlorine inside polar clouds. Satellite data in the period of 1980-2007, covering two full 11-year solar cycles, demonstrate the significant correlation between cosmic rays and ozone depletion. “This finding, combined with laboratory measurements, provides strong evidence of the role of cosmic-ray driven reactions in causing the ozone hole and resolves the mystery why a large discrepancy between the sunlight-related photochemical model and the observed ozone depletion exists,” Lu says.

For example, the most recent scientific assessments of ozone depletion by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, which use photochemical models, predict ozone will increase by one to 2.5 per cent between 2000 and 2020 and Antarctic springtime ozone is projected to increase by five to 10 per cent between 2000 and 2020. In sharp contrast, Lu says his study predicts the severest ozone loss—resulting in the largest ozone hole—will occur over the South Pole this month. The study also predicts another large hole will probably occur around 2019.

[Soldier4Christ]

Noble Savage myth covers up truth
David Deming
The Edmond Sun

The late Joseph Campbell maintained that civilizations are not based on science, but on myth. “Aspiration,” Campbell explained, “is the motivator, builder and transformer of civilization.” Our technological society has been built on Francis Bacon’s myth of the New Atlantis.

Competing with Bacon’s vision of a scientific society based on intelligence, knowledge and innovation, is an older, more persistent fable: the Noble Savage. The Noble Savage is not a person, but an idea. It is cultural primitivism, the belief of people living in complex and evolved societies that the simple and primitive life is better. The Noble Savage is the myth that man can live in harmony with nature, that technology is destructive and that we would all be happier in a more primitive state.

Before Christ lived, the Noble Savage was known to the Hebrews as the Garden of Eden. The Greeks called it the lost Golden Age. In all the ages of the world, otherwise intelligent and learned persons have fallen swoon to the strange appeal of cultural primitivism. In the 16th century, French writer Michel de Montaigne described Americans Indians as so morally pure they had no words in their languages for lying, treachery, avarice and envy. And Montaigne portrayed the primitive life as so idyllic that American Indians did not have to work, but could spend the whole day dancing.

In 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that what appeared to be human progress was in fact decay. The best condition for human beings to live in, according to Rousseau, was the “pure state of nature” in which savages existed. When men lived as hunters and gatherers, they were “free, healthy, honest and happy.” The downfall of man occurred when people started to live in cities, acquire private property and practice agriculture and metallurgy. The acquisition of private property resulted in inequality, aroused the vice of envy and led to perpetual conflict and unceasing warfare.

According to Rousseau, civilization itself was the scourge of humanity. Rousseau went so far as to make the astonishing claim that the source of all human misery was what he termed our “faculty of improvement,” or the use of our minds to improve the human condition.

Since Rousseau wrote, more than 250 years of archeological and ethnographic research have shown that most of the imaginative conceptions associated with the Noble Savage are simply wrong. Archeologist Steven A. Leblanc wrote that “warfare in the past was pervasive and deadly.” Conflict between bands of hunter-gatherers was universal and intense, and the practices of cannibalism and infanticide were common.

Before the Industrial Revolution disease and poverty were endemic, even in civilized societies. In 18th century Europe half of all children died before their 10th birthday, and life expectancy at birth was only 25 years.

Neither did pre-industrial civilizations live in a state of ecological harmony with their environment. Their exploitation of nature was often destructive. The Mediterranean islands colonized by the ancient Greeks were transformed into barren rock by overgrazing and deforestation. The Bay of Troy, described in Homer’s Iliad, has been filled in by sediment eroded from surrounding hillsides destabilized by unsustainable agricultural practices.

All of this would be of academic interest only, were it not the case that the modern environmental movement and many of our public policies are based implicitly on the myth of the Noble Savage. The fountainhead of modern environmentalism is Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” The first sentence in “Silent Spring” invoked the Noble Savage by claiming “there was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.”

But the town Carson described did not exist, and her polemic, “Silent Spring,” introduced us to environmental alarmism based on junk science. As the years passed, Carson was elevated to sainthood and the template laid for endless spasms of hysterical fear-mongering, from the population bomb, to nuclear winter, the Alar scare and global warming.

The truth is that human beings have not, cannot, and never will live in harmony with nature. Our prosperity and health depend on technology driven by energy. We exercise our intelligence to command nature, and were admonished by Francis Bacon to exercise our dominion with “sound reason and true religion.”

When we are told that our primary energy source, oil, is “making us sick,” or that we are “addicted” to oil, these are only the latest examples of otherwise rational persons descending into gibberish after swooning to the lure of the Noble Savage. This ignorant exultation of the primitive can only lead us back to the ages when human lives were “nasty, brutish and short.”

DAVID DEMING is a geologist and associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.

[Soldier4Christ]

Beavers snitched on for 'illegal logging'
Police: 'The [environmentalist] campaigners are feeling pretty stupid'



GREEN campaigners called police after discovering an illegal logging site in a nature reserve – only to find the culprits were a gang of beavers.

Environmentalists found 20 neatly stacked tree trunks and others marked with notches for felling at a beauty-spot in Subkowy, northern Poland.

But when officers followed a trail left by a tree which had been dragged away, they found a beaver dam right across the river as reported by the Austrian Times.

A police spokesman said: "The campaigners are feeling pretty stupid. There's nothing more natural than a beaver."

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Let's arrest the beavers and implement a carbon tax on them. That will take care of it.

[Soldier4Christ]

Someone that can't tell the difference between beaver cuts and axe cuts has no business being that far out in those woods without an experienced guide. The beavers might use them as logs.

[nChrist]

Someone that can't tell the difference between beaver cuts and axe cuts has no business being that far out in those woods without an experienced guide. The beavers might use them as logs.

       

That might be a good thing.