bolt to the head…..

The bedwetters of climatism would rather you didn’t have children, the voracious little CO2 hounds; or better yet that we in the western world should undergo some form of ‘cull’. 

Interestingly they never seem to offer themselves up first for the bolt to the head…..hypocrites.

Culling for Gaia

Time for another selection of Classic Sentences from the Guardian. Or rather the Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, the Observer. Until recently, I had thought the Observer’s commentary wasn’t quite as obnoxiously self-loathing as the material that swills all but daily through the piping of the Guardian. Sadly, it seems I was mistaken:

Fewer British babies would mean a fairer planet.

So barks the headline of AlexRenton’s latest exercise in ecological hair-tearing. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. It’s just another overexcited sub-editor and not representative of an otherwise measured and sober article. However, the first line reads,

The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children.

And besides,

One less British child would permit some 30 women in sub-Saharan Africa to have a baby and still leave the planet a cleaner place.

It continues,

Why not start cutting population everywhere? Are condoms not the greenest technology of all…..

RTWT 

bedwetters, your religion is false!

I suppose the double plus good bedwetters shall be knocking at my door soon to correct the deficiencies of my education. Until they get here, please enjoy:

More here, and here.

friends of the twingo

In the latest bit of panty waisted whingeing to appear from our betters on the other side of the pond, Friends of the Earth is in a snit over the latest antics of Top Gear*.   According to FoE, the show “appeared to have gone out of its way to be as crass and juvenile as possible“.**  FoE campaigner Mr Declan Allison said that “The wanton destruction of tens of thousands of pounds worth of machinery impresses no-one. It’s a wasteful extravagance and, in the middle of a global recession, in very poor taste“.

Poor Taste?  Mr Allison, the proles actually enjoy watching TG.  Shocking, yes, and very unenlightened of us, but for a few brief moments it allows us to escape our wretched lives and seek enjoyment in mindless humour.  I know, I know we simply don’t get it, but then that’s what you can expect from the grey mass of  drudges – we’re not like you.  Why we can barely get through a sitting of Waiting for Godot, or plough through a Margaret Atwood novel*** - we just want our Renaults destroyed in the most imaginative of fashions and if there is a tinge of humour about the whole thing, then so much the better.  Oh and a beer or two to chase it down with wouldn’t be out of place.

Maybe FoE didn’t get it;  TG fired a Renault Twingo into the ocean!  What can possibly be wrong with that?   Removing one C02 emitting, gasoline consuming Renault from the planet has got to rank quite high as one of the most unselfish and altruistic acts I’ve heard of in a long time.   Of course if FoE and their ilk had their way the western world would live in perpetual recession,  a sort of purgatory for having had the temerity to produce the most fantastic economic miracle known to mankind.  Instead FoE won’t rest until twingo’s aren’t produced at all (let alone flung into the ocean).  

Quit Whining!

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* Top Gear, for those of you most of unfortunate to have never heard of it, is quite possibly the best entertainment ever produced by the BBC.  Please note that I said entertainment.  It has no other redeeming qualities – but I love it.

** That’s sort of the point, really.

***Obscure and difficult Canadian author.   But there I go revealing my elitest tendancies again.

my carbon footprint is bigger than yours

signs of common sense?

Australian Senate defeats a cap and trade bill 42-30.  Ian Plimer, almost soley responsible for changing the debate from the ’science is settled’, to one of common sense – at least in Australia.    The tone deaf climate warming alarmist cheerleaders won’t likely change their tune here in Canada. 

Some money quotes:

“Climatology suffers from the same fads, fashions, dictators, and fraud that other fields of endeavor enjoy. In order to be funded well, climatology needs to be fashionable, and it is. The fundamental causes have been known for a long time, but predictions are only based on computer models that have very incomplete input. The IPCC models of 1990 and 1995 did not predict the 1998 El Nino nor the 21st-century cooling. So how can we use these to predict climate a century in advance?… The models have been spectacularly wrong, yet they are still used with no humility….

“Environmentalism has many of the hallmarks of failed European socialism and Western (failed) Christianity. It has a holy book which few have read (IPCC reports), has prophets (Gore) who cannot be challenged, relies on dogma, ignores contrary evidence, has armies of wide-eyed missionaries…; imposes guilt, has a catastrophist view of the planet, and seeks indulgences.”

careful what you wish for

On occasion and what with the economy in the tank, some folk muse openly about imposing carbon based penalties on China – a new form of protectionism if you will.   The implications of this need to be understood before our poll happy politicians attempt to score domestic points – fortunately some cautionary thoughts are available over at Marginal Revolution.  RTWT.

• It can be very hard to identify and isolate the energy inputs into an exported product, especially if the host government is uncooperative and a lot of money is at stake.
• Last I checked China was funding a big chunk of our government’s debt.  Confronting them would have to be bundled with a regime of extreme fiscal conservatism and unilateral foreign policy.
• Chinese citizens wanting clean air at home are possibly our biggest ally so let’s not alienate them.

how fast can you get your meter to spin?

The Final Word:

north korea, its earth hour friendly - every day of the year!

 

Oops…..….evil candle – next in line to be banned once we have gotten rid of electricity

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Bumped:

Diversity includes celebrating those with ‘unique’ cultural points of view – mine just happens to include enjoying electricity and heat……

_________________________

Earth Hour is on us again – except in North Korea where it seems it is always earth hour, every day, every week, every year.

Mind you, if you plan to emit CO2 in an environmentally friendly^TMeco dancing sort of way, then you get a pass from the star…..

Me?  I plan to celebrate earth hour in Orlando FLA, with the AC maxed and an extra chilled beer or three…

re-education in three, two, one……

and so the worm turns…..

Does anyone even remember the serial ’scares’ which pop up from time to time – an oldy but a goody being Ehrlich’s  ‘population bomb’ which seemed to have rather fizzled than exploded.   I guess this whole AGW thingy will have them shaking their heads in about twenty years wondering how so many smart folks could have gotten it so wrong.   However never underestimate the ability for those who like to interfere in your life to find another reason…..

Don’t get me wrong – as I have said before, I do quite a bit on my own to keep the peace with this hunk of rock without anyone having to coerce me or threaten to apply carbon taxes or any of that other nonsense. 

Anyway – this should have the goracle and his ilk firing up the spin machine pretty quickly…..

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

around the world – part 32.1 (in which I help reverse the cooling trend and discover a thingplatz)

Dec 01 2008

Once again in Bavaria, and imagine my shock and horror to discover that it had snowed.  Clearly something was amiss.  I scratched my head in puzzelment attempting to sort through the flood of information I knew to be true.  According to the Goracle (respectful genuflections) snow could only be a figment of my imagination as it had been banished forever by the evil ways of western man, yet here, plain for all to see was a couple of inches of snow, with more (gasp!) on the way.  This was clearly not what I was expecting, lead to believe that the world was irrevocably headed towards becoming a burnt over desert,  I had only packed shorts and t-shirts – falsely believing that Germany in December would give the French Riviera a run for its money.  Who to blame?  Apparently all of those selfish North Americans, busy not driving their SUVs had spawned a freak cooling trend, one so unexpected that even the prophets could hardly acknowledge it.  And then it struck me – I had the divine duty to reverse this cooling trend, this affront to the gospel and so…..

I embarked on my very own warming crusade -  namely a needless, entirely gratuitious and deliciously delightful CO2 burning tour of the countryside.  Believe me, equipped with a Mercedes C220 and a handy autobahn I figure I have personally reversed the global cooling trend by about two or three hours.  You can thank me later….

And so this time my excursion took me towards Eichstatt in search of the ruins of an elusive ThingPlatz.  Inspired by recent timewasting sojourn on the interwebs thingy, I determined to find abandoned evidence of Germanys recent past.   Getting close to the ruined amphitheatre took almost no effort, however finding it did require a little more trouble – its not like there are signs pointing to relics of an embarrasing history.  

Just southwest of Winterhof, overlooking Eichstatt is the ruin – and what a creepy feeling to be standing on the site.  I tramped around the place taking a few photographs and the entire time I could not shake the feeling of horror.  I have no idea if the place was ever actually used for party functions, however that was clearly the intent.  At any rate the whole place carries an unsettled feeling…

We’re number 7, but…thou shalt believe!

The sky is falling – again.  According to the same fruitbats who brought us ‘earth hour’, Canada ranked second last in their climate change ’score card’.    

What does it take to surpass the evil bu$haliburton regime and secure rock bottom anyway?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080703.wglobal0703/BNStory/International/home
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Now that clarifies it….apparently one to many magic mushrooms amongst the caring set….

The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.

The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific “consensus” warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to “patriarchal” science; curtains to the species.

A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: “And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” That’s Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.

And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the “solutions” chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.

Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What’s remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?

As it turns out, a lot, at least if you’re inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature’s great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.

an inconvenient winter

Its about damn time for some of that global warming around here.   High tomorrow of -1, with no prospect of substantially warmer weather for at least another two weeks.  End of March and I still have snow banks three feet high.  Hell, if I leave the lights on during earth hour, I might just stand a chance of moving bicycling weather a little bit closer…that can’t be bad right?