• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Mark Steyn: The Ecopalypse, 96 Months Away? (Prince Charles)

Skeptic said:
Isaac Asimov, over 30 years ago (1975) wrote a similar -- better, I think -- article, "best foot backwards".

The romantics who wish for the "golden age" before technology "ruined" the planet with its pollution always think that, without technology, there will always be masses of people -- OTHER people -- to do all the dirty, boring, back-breaking work, the "natural" way, in "harmony with nature", without "polluting the enviornment".

They always imagine themselves as lords, priests, philosophers, architects, gentlemen-farmers, whatever -- never as the slaves, serfs, peasants or servants that made up 95% and more of the population in this pristine state of technology-free harmony with nature.

Their banner is, "up with slavery!" -- or, more precisely, "up with slavery for other people!".
Click to expand...



Well, ya know, they want all the goodies like penicillin without all the dirty infrastructure and industry needed to support it. Assuming they don't buy into some kind of super-Luddite crap and think it causes more problems than it solves.

My general curse on all humans applies doubly to them -- everyone gets to go live their next life in their ideal world, and let the consequences fall out naturally. Then compare at the 50, 100, 500, and 1000 year marks to see which is furthest along in quality, quantity, and length of life.
 
In case you really don't get it -- None of Gore's proposals have the slightest thing to do with "stopping climate change" except as a pretext. And everything to do with "global governance" by people like himself who will also incidentally get a whole lot richer.

Kapeesh?

And another thing

Science Fiction 'Czar'
Reason

Dr. John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—better known as the "science czar"—has been a longtime prophet of environmental catastrophes. Never discouraged but never right.

And thanks to resourceful bloggers, you can read excerpts from a hard-to-find book co-authored by Holdren in the late 1970s, called Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, online.

In it, you will find the czar wading into some unpleasant talk about mass sterilizations and abortions.

It's not surprising. Holdren spent the '70s boogying down to the vibes of an imaginary population catastrophe and global cooling. He also participated in the famous wager between scientist Paul Ehrlich, the now-discredited Population Bomb theorist (and co-author of Ecoscience), and economist Julian Simon, who believed human ingenuity would overcome demand.

...

When, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren was asked about his penchant for scientific overstatements, he responded that "the motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time."

"Motivation" is when Holdren tells us that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020. Or when he claimed that sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century when your run-of-the-mill alarmist warns of only 13 inches.

"Motivating"—or, in other words, scaring the hell out of people—about "possibilities" is an ideological and political weapon unsheathed in the effort to pass policies that, in the end, coerce us to do the right thing.

...
Click to expand...

[url=http://skepticalcommunity.com/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?p=474276#474276][i]corplinx[/i][/url] said:
At least he's not a creationist! He believes in the accepted forms of woo.
Click to expand...
 
Abdul Alhazred said:
In case you really don't get it -- None of Gore's proposals have the slightest thing to do with "stopping climate change" except as a pretext. And everything to do with "global governance" by people like himself who will also incidentally get a whole lot richer.
Click to expand...

Lunatic conspiracy theories have their own forum.
 
I always wondered if the "G" in Gore's name sounds like it does in Spanish...

There is, by the way, a joke about this (sorry to derail the thread) about Sir Samuel (I think) Hoar, who was once asked, friendly, "and how is Lady W?"
 
a_unique_person said:
Lunatic conspiracy theories have their own forum.
Click to expand...

Disparaging a politician's motives is not a "conspiracy theory", lunatic or otherwise.

Nice try.

If Gore really believes it about global warming, he's even a worse scoundrel than I think he is. Enriching himself off the coming crisis in a way that does nothing to remedy it, and diverts resources from a proper techical solution.

Happy heresy hunting.
 
Al Gore and friends create climate of McCarthyism
The Australian

ANYONE who questions green orthodoxy is accused of committing treason.

DISCUSSIONS about global warming are marked by an increasing desire to stamp out "impure" thinking, to the point of questioning the value of democratic debate. But shutting down discussion simply means the disappearance of reason from public policy.

In March, Al Gore's science adviser and prominent climate researcher Jim Hansen proclaimed that when it comes to dealing with global warming, the "democratic process isn't working". Although science has demonstrated that CO2 from fossil fuels is heating the planet, politicians are unwilling to follow his advice and stop building coal-fired power plants.

...

Krugman said that the "irresponsibility and immorality" of the representatives' democratic viewpoints were "unforgivable" and a "betrayal". He thus accused almost half of the democratically elected members of the house, from both parties, of treason for holding the views that they do, thereby essentially negating democracy.

Less well-known pundits make similar points, suggesting that people with "incorrect" views on global warming should face Nuremberg-style trials or be tried for crimes against humanity. There is clearly a trend. The climate threat is so great -- and democracies are doing so little about it -- that people conclude that maybe democracy is part of the problem, and that perhaps people ought not be allowed to express heterodox opinions on such an important topic.

...
Click to expand...

Emphasis added.

Some may be overenthusiastic "people who conclude that maybe democracy is part of the problem", and others may be people who like totalitarianism in the first place and see an opportunity.
 
xXMoshtradamusXx said:
We could always make NASA stop shooting off space shuttles. I forget how many emissions a single launch puts in the atmosphere but it's staggering.
Click to expand...

We can always tell Mother Earth to put a plug in it when she lets a volcano blow. They let off a bit of carbon too... But then, she's not too good at listening...
 
Abdul Alhazred said:
Al Gore and friends create climate of McCarthyism
The Australian



Emphasis added.

Some may be overenthusiastic "people who conclude that maybe democracy is part of the problem", and others may be people who like totalitarianism in the first place and see an opportunity.
Click to expand...

:dl:

Author of opinion piece:

Bjorn Lomborg, the director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre, is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming.
Click to expand...

No, this isn't more Green == Fascist name-calling. Why, the Green people are the name-callers!
 
Where is the "scientific" connection between global warming and the proposed solutions?

That is what you refuse to address. Not the evidence for global warming itself.

It is the usual suspects power grabbing and nest feathering to the detriment of the rest of us.

Global Warming: White Man's Problem
Reason

...

Rather than engage with the issues, eco-pundits are grasping for all kinds of fanciful pseudo-scientific theories to explain why Obama's sweet-talking ways are leaving the rest of the world cold. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for instance, recently blamed the lack of progress on the faulty circuitry evolution has wired into the human brain. According to Kristof, evolution has programmed us to be alert to immediate threats, such as snakes, or enemies with clubs, but not for vastly greater but less imminent dangers that require forethought. If this sounds like a warmed-over, 21st-century version of the Calvinistic crooked-timber view of human nature, that's because it is.

Not to be outdone, Kristof's Nobel Prize-winning colleague at the Times, Paul Krugman, pulled out the folk story about the frog and the boiling pot in his latest column to explain our collective torpor over climate change. Just as the proverbial frog wasn't able to feel the gradually rising temperature before he boiled to death, so too, in Krugman's telling, human beings are not equipped to comprehend the dangers of an overheating planet before they fry to death.

But this psychologizing only exposes the inability of climate activists to take seriously the rational case for inaction. In fact, there is a perfectly good reason developing countries are unwilling to act on climate change: What they are being asked to do is more awful than climate change's implications--even if one accepts all the alarmist predictions.

...
Click to expand...

Emphasis added.
 
Who invented cap-and-trade?

Hint #1: Not Al Gore
Hint #2: Republicans better not be too smug.

Pay to Play (So You Can Pay and Pay)
National Review

With the current outrage over apparent "pay-to-play" by some conservatives, it seemed timely to remind everyone about who invented cap-and-trade — which is the biggest pay-to-play scam in history — and how they pursued it, as detailed in a memo (excerpted below) that Ken Lay aide John Palmissano wrote to his boss at Enron, expressing the fact that their hard work had just paid off in Kyoto and that it was time to set the green groups they'd cultivated off on a well-financed campaign to now assign value to Enron's windmill, solar panel, and credit-trading (with Goldman-Sachs) schemes:
-- “This treaty [Kyoto] is exactly what I have been lobbying for.”

-- “This agreement will be good for Enron stock!!”​
...
Click to expand...
 
Brainster said:
The simple solution to global warming.

1. Identify the people with the top 10% of carbon footprints, with no allowances for offsets.
2. Take them out and shoot them.

In one stroke, you get rid of probably 25% of carbon emissions and enviro-hypocrites like Prince Charles and Al Gore. It's a win/win scenario!
Click to expand...


The more complicated one:


1. Do nothing since warming isn't really all that bad, not even taking into account thwarting the economy will have a bigger downside than global warming would, with respect to actual, measurable lives.
 
Brainster said:
The simple solution to global warming.

1. Identify the people with the top 10% of carbon footprints, with no allowances for offsets.
2. Take them out and shoot them.

In one stroke, you get rid of probably 25% of carbon emissions and enviro-hypocrites like Prince Charles and Al Gore. It's a win/win scenario!
Click to expand...
Before I sign up for this, may I see the criteria for "top 10%", including numbers and what might constitute total carbon footprint?
(I drive a Ford F-150 aned a KIA, and design airplanes...)
 
Abdul Alhazred said:
Where is the "scientific" connection between global warming and the proposed solutions?

That is what you refuse to address. Not the evidence for global warming itself.

It is the usual suspects power grabbing and nest feathering to the detriment of the rest of us.

Global Warming: White Man's Problem
Reason



Emphasis added.
Click to expand...

Emphasis added part is sheer ignorance. They have no idea the scope of changes that are coming. We will use our magical powers of science to solve all our problems. If our scientific powers are so amazing, why is it impossible to use them to prevent AGW, but no problem at all to cope with AGW?
 
I think we need to turn more of our attention to adaptation as the horse is pretty much out the barn door.

We need to focus on a more varied crop agriculture, we are dependent on far too few species and monocultures which are becoming more prone to disease as the climate changes. Right now, our diet is dependent on just 33 species of crops. We need to bring the other thousands of crops into play.

We also need to work on water management and purification. Earth is a closed system, we just need to make it work for us. Science has come a long way with solar energy, it has a long way to go. I think though that Moors' Law can be applied to solar energy, bringing down the cost of water management to where we can clean it, get it where it needs to be, and store it for future use perhaps under the ground.
 
The burden of proof is on the "warmerers".

Not indeed warming itself, but the alleged connection between their proposed solutions and CO2 emissions.

Why not address that issue?
 
In so far as the goal is to "save the planet" and not just for Westerners to prove their hearts are pure, what do we do when India and China continue not to cooperate?

Go to war to save the planet?

If it really is about saving the planet, wouldn't war be justified?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom