Monday, December 25, 2006
CAN WE GET SOME CONCENSUS HAPPENING AROUND HERE?
A brief history of environmentalist panic, compiled by the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby:
In 1902, the Los Angeles Times reported that the great glaciers were undergoing “their final annihilation” due to rising temperatures. But by 1923, it was the ice that was doing the annihilating: “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada,” the Chicago Tribune declared on Page 1.
So it was curtains for the Canadians? Uh, not quite. In 1953, The New York Times announced that “nearly all the great ice sheets are in retreat.” Yet no sooner did our neighbors to the north breathe a sigh of relief than it turned out they weren’t off the hook after all: “The rapid advance of some glaciers,” wrote Lowell Ponte in “The Cooling,” his 1976 bestseller, “has threatened human settlements in Alaska, Iceland, Canada, China, and the Soviet Union.” And now? “Arctic Ice Is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say,” the Times reported in 2002.
Over the years, the alarmists have veered from an obsession with lethal global cooling around the turn of the 20th century to lethal global warming a generation later, back to cooling in the 1970s and now to warming once again. You don’t have to be a scientist to realize that all these competing narratives of doom can’t be true.
I bet Geoffrey Lean believes all of them.
FROM DANISH CARTOONS TO FLYING IMAMS
Michelle Malkin reviews 2006, the “year of perpetual outrage”.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
IT'S AN AL GORE CHRISTMAS
We have snow in Tasmania and also Victoria, which is enjoying its second-coldest Christmas on record.
UPDATE. Merry Christmas, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani!
MERRY CHRISTMAS
Merry Christmas to all readers, commenters, emailers, tipsters, co-workers, lurkers, loathers, and seethers. You’ve built quite a thing here. Thank you for that. More importantly, have a great time with your families, and send pictures if you’re so inclined.
Special bonus Christmas linkage: everybody loves the Eclipse snowman.
PREDICTION COMES TRUE
Geoffrey Lean, the Independent’s environment editor, presents a global scoop of apocalyptic proportions:
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
Terrifying! You’ll note, however, that Lean doesn’t tell us exactly when Lohachara vanished. Was it last week? A few months ago? Maybe we’ll find out later.
As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.
It’s the domino theory of island obliteration! As environmentalists always warned, once Lohachara falls, that’s it for Egypt.
The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.
Got that right, Geoffrey. I can’t remember Lohachara ever disappearing previously.
Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years’ time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.
By quite a margin, as it happens. Lean doesn’t say so, but Lohachara apparently vanished two decades ago. So much for Lean’s scoop; the event took place back when Lean had hair, and several years before he emerged from a coma. Some locals aren’t buying that global warming line, by the way:
Atanu Raha, director of Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, said the islands were getting eroded by oceanic currents, not by rising sea levels.
“Erosion and accretion are natural phenomena. Across the world islands submerge and new ones emerge. This is natural,” Raha said.
Not according to Lean, who evidently believes all weather change is due to Meddling Humans. And that’s all change, whether towards cold or heat. In 2004, Lean reported that “Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming”. Two years later, he asked: “So where has all the snow gone?” There’s no pleasing Geoffrey.
UPDATE. This nonsense was republished in the NZ Herald.
CHRISTMAS PHOTO PHRENZY BEGINS
Sunrise over St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Florida, photographed by Australian David Davis:
And from Adrian the cabbie, whose clan celebrates Christmas the week prior to the 25th, this shot of him with one of his mother’s ten great-grandchildren:
Send your own Christmas images here. We’ll run a picture gallery at the end of the day.
KOFI KONTINUALLY KONCERNED
A last-minute Christmas rush of deep concern from Kofi Annan:
Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday he was “deeply concerned” about a Libyan court’s decision to reimpose death sentences on five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor convicted of infecting children with HIV.
It’s even better over at the UN’s own site:
SECRETARY-GENERAL STRONGLY DEPLORES OUTBREAK OF FIGHTING IN SOMALIA, DEEPLY CONCERNED ESCALATION WILL HAVE DISASTROUS IMPACT ON CIVILIANS
Kofi also adds that his concern is “grave”.
(Via Hank Reardon)
LIKE A CARBON TAX, EXCEPT USEFUL
Andrea Harris keeps this site running smooth. Send some admin-assisting Christmas cash her way.
"WE'RE ALL DOOMED"
Author Katherine Ellison in the Los Angeles Times:
Global warming is a bit like sex: Long before you think it’s time to explain it to your children, they’ve already heard the mixed-up details on the playground.
I asked my 11-year-old son what he knew. “The water is going to rise about 20 feet, and we’re all doomed,” he said matter of factly ...
Those aren’t “mixed-up details”; Ellison’s kid is repeating exactly what he’s been told by stupid enviromentaloids. Who knew the Independent was so influential among LA-area pre-teens? Ellison continues:
Apocalyptic fears have shadowed U.S. childhood before this. Who among us boomers doesn’t remember all that Cold War ducking and covering? But global warming is profoundly scarier. For starters, to trigger a nuclear holocaust, somebody has to be the first to bomb. To trigger eco-Armageddon, all we need do is continue to ignore leading scientists’ warnings.
Armageddon is caused by ignoring scientists! Let’s avert crisis by inviting them out to lunch.
So many of us don’t discuss [global warming] with our children, as if we could somehow “protect” them that way.
I wonder if Ellison has ever discussed militant Islam with her 11-year-old.
To be a parent is to teach responsibility through sacrifice, to shell out constantly for braces, college savings, roof repairs and on and on. If we want to show our kids we mean business about global warming, let’s start by ponying up for a carbon tax.
You do that, lady. Your boy won’t go to college and he’ll have British teeth, but at least your roofless hovel will be safe from The Warmening.
As a backup, however — because parents should always have backups — I’ve been introducing my own children to Buddhist meditation. It has been used for 2,500 years to cope with suffering, anxiety and change — and may be helpful in the hot decades to come.
With luck, her lad will grow up to be a NASCAR driver.
(Via J.F. Beck)
LABOR LISTENS
Former Victorian Liberal leader Robert Doyle on Kevin Rudd:
Why is it that Labor leaders always begin by “listening”? A 10-day “listening tour”, for goodness sake. What have they been doing in opposition for 10 years? Talking to each other?
Given how feud-riven is the ALP, they probably haven’t been talking to each other. A listening tour of Labor’s front bench would be a frosty exercise.
QUOTE SEASON CONTINUES II
This batch features ABC (US) newsguy Terry Moran’s calm report on Barack Obama:
They’re even naming babies after him!
FLY THE GREEN SKIES
Another environmental frequent flier:
We must be “conscious of our global contribution”. We must “act responsibly”. Saving the planet “means making radical changes to how we live our lives”.
The green message from the Scottish Executive is clear, but practising what you preach is never that easy.
Scotland on Sunday can reveal that the head of the Executive’s department in charge of lowering the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions is commuting to work by jet every week from his home in the south of England.
Add this to the bulging file marked “green hypocrisy”.
CLAY REGAZZONI
Ex-Ferrari driver Clay Regazzoni, a one-time teammate of Australian F1 world champion Alan Jones, died this month in a traffic accident.
A charismatic fellow, Regazzoni scored the first win for the Williams F1 team.
Saturday, December 23, 2006
JUST WRONG
Someone has hacked Jeremy Sear’s blogs. I was once subject to a similar, but not anywhere near so thorough, attack; as I said at the time, “If ever a right-winger tries to pull the same dumb stunt on a lefty, well, let me condemn you in advance.”
UPDATE. Andrew Landeryou contacts Sear after being accused of hackerizing:
The legal professional had to be reminded that by making that claim he was accusing me of engaging in a serious crime under Australian law. Clearly no genius, his stuttering and stammering indicated he hadn’t quite thought about that.
Sear’s claim has been removed.
UPDATE II. Chris Chittleborough:
This sort of stunt is almost always the work of young male social failures trying to find at least one area of activity in which they aren’t total losers (and even then they have to rely more on obsessive effort than skill).
Agreed ... although Tim Lambert isn’t very young.
DEATH WISHED
The Sydney Morning Herald’s Hugh Mackay on the deaths of Steve Irwin and Peter Brock, and swimmer Ian Thorpe’s retirement:
Steve was one of our great gifts to the world. Some of the neighbours might have been saying “Steve who?” and making up jokes about stingrays, but in America people were openly weeping ...
And then for Peter Perfect to go so soon after, crashing a car of all things. It was too much. Yet there was a kind of poetry in it, we all felt. A stingray for Steve, a prang for Peter. Going out doing what they loved best. May we all be so lucky.
Thinking along the same lines, you can’t help wondering whether Ian would have done better to have met with a watery accident of some kind.
What a ghastly little man is Mackay.