The Great Global Warming Swindle

UK climate scientist to temporarily step down

Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

We should believe he has done nothing wrong, yet is stepping down?

John Stossel on Climategate

Issues Bigger than Climate Change

As I was wading through the cesspool of information surrounding the “climategate” scandal a question came to me: Could there be any other issue out there bigger than climate change? Well knowing how the left operates I wasn’t disappointed because there are.

According to academic Julian Cribb, who appeared before the Australian Senate, food is bigger!

Dealing with the prospect of food shortages in the next 40 years is a bigger problem than climate change, a Senate inquiry has been told.

With the world’s population expected to reach about 9.2 billion by 2050, coupled with food demand growing at one per cent per annum, the requirement for food will roughly double by mid-century, academic Julian Cribb says.

But the EU sees things differently. Our European cousins say it’s biodiversity!

“The threat of loss of biodiversity is bigger than climate change if we consider that, once a species is lost, no mitigation measure can help to bring it back,” commented Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas during the March 2006 conference of the 188 governments that have signed up to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, in Curitiba, Brazil.

However, while the UN wouldn’t go as far as saying something was bigger than climate change, it did say a water scarcity is now a “bigger threat than [the] financial crisis.”

The two reports – one by the world’s foremost international economic forum and the other by 24 United Nations agencies – presage the opening tomorrow of the most important conference on the looming crisis for three years. The World Water Forum, which will be attended by 20,000 people in Istanbul, will hear stark warnings of how half the world’s population will be affected by water shortages in just 20 years’ time, with millions dying and increasing conflicts over dwindling resources.

But at the end of all the searching I found the single biggest problem, man, the human being. From the BBC:

Even more difficult than putting something like biodiversity loss on the agenda, says former government adviser Jonathon Porritt, is getting politicians and the wider environmental community to accept that underpinning everything are the unsustainable size of the Earth’s human population and our unsustainable (and rising) hunger for the Earth’s natural resources.

Recently he raised the population issue in his blog – only to be excoriated by columnist Melanie Phillips for having a “sinister and de-humanised mindset” – which is perhaps an indicator of why other contemporary environmental thinkers are so reluctant to raise it publically, despite admitting its importance in private.
London traffic

Traffic pollution still causes thousands of deaths per year in rich countries

“Too controversial,” he says.

“Population raises all these issues about religion, about culture, about male dominance in the world; and (people) get very uncomfortable about that.”

Nevertheless, he argues, the logic is undeniable.

Well there you have it; we are the cause of all the leftists perceived problems. So be ready, when the climate change hoopla dies down expect another global crisis will be sung from mountain top to mountain top. But know, it has nothing to do with the story purported, because in reality it’s all about you and me. We are the threat, we are the enemy.

Demon pigs at war with our future

Cap and Trade would hit Ohio’s Pocketbook

This letter to the editor appeared in The Columbus Dispatch:

It’s been a remarkably contentious few months in our nation’s capital. But one thing is clear from the flurry of bills, amendments and stump speeches on climate change: Cap and trade will fail Americans, especially in the lower and middle classes, and bring higher fuel costs across the board.

The fuels that individuals and businesses use every day — gasoline, diesel and jet fuel — will increase dramatically in price under this legislation. Despite the number of bells and whistles attached, from green-power subsidies or weak nuclear-power amendments to minor offshore-drilling concessions, cap and trade is a toxin that will spread to every corner of our economy.

According to a study by the Heritage Foundation, Ohioans would be looking at almost $4 billion less in disposable income, 46,000 jobs lost and $10.6 billion in lost state revenue. Though the White House and its allies in Congress have relentlessly marketed cap and trade as the ticket for a “green economy” and “green jobs,” many Americans are catching on that these do not exist without massive taxpayers’ subsidies and exponentially higher energy rates.

Ohioans must stay on guard; this issue is far from dead. Urge Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown and George V. Voinovich to stop cap-and-trade legislation and keep America moving on the transportation fuels it needs.
PETE SEPP
Vice president Policy and Communications National Taxpayers Union Alexandria, Va.

Do you think any of our political class even care?

The Importance of Cars; The Irrelevance of Transit

Speaking of mass transit, while I was catching up on my reading at the The Anti-Planner, this article jumped out at me, The Importance of Cars; The Irrelevance of Transit.

This quote says quite a bit:

People in wealthy economies drive more; people who drive more live in wealthier economies.

So as we Ohioans are pushed toward the mass transit scheme being cooked up by the statists in Columbus, who desire nothing more than to control your life, it might do us well to remember that mass transit has a distinct and negative effect on the economy of a community; it makes you poor.

If we put mass transit on top of what the republicans have done to the state for the last 15 years, the democrats should have us back to riding horses. No that wont happen, HSUS contends livestock animal cause 50 percent of all green house gases, so it will likely mean mass transit bicycles built in China.

MUST READ: Soros’ Own Words!

To all remaining freedom loving people in Ohio, you must read this article written by the chief architect, George Soros, of the contemporary global social-fascism scheme being thrust upon the United States of America, and I dear say, you’ll be mad as hell after reading this.

While international cooperation on regulatory reform is difficult to achieve on a piecemeal basis, it may be attainable in a grand bargain that rearranges the entire financial order. A new Bretton Woods conference, like the one that established the post-WWII international financial architecture, is needed to establish new international rules, including treatment of financial institutions that are too big to fail and the role of capital controls. It would also have to reconstitute the International Monetary Fund to reflect better the prevailing pecking order among states and to revise its methods of operation.

In addition, a new Bretton Woods would have to reform the currency system. The post-war order, which made the US more equal than others, produced dangerous imbalances. The dollar no longer enjoys the trust and confidence that it once did, yet no other currency can take its place.

The US ought not to shy away from wider use of IMF Special Drawing Rights. Because SDRs are denominated in several national currencies, no single currency would enjoy an unfair advantage.

The range of currencies included in the SDRs would have to be widened, and some of the newly added currencies, including the renminbi, may not be fully convertible.  This would, however, allow the international community to press China to abandon its exchange-rate peg to the dollar and would be the best way to reduce international imbalances. And the dollar could still remain the preferred reserve currency, provided it is prudently managed.

One great advantage of SDRs is that they permit the international creation of money, which is particularly useful at times like the present. The money could be directed to where it is most needed, unlike what is happening currently. A mechanism that allows rich countries that don’t need additional reserves to transfer their allocations to those that do is readily available, using the IMF’s gold reserves.

Reorganizing the world order will need to extend beyond the financial system and involve the United Nations, especially membership of the Security Council. That process needs to be initiated by the US, but China and other developing countries ought to participate as equals. They are reluctant members of the Bretton Woods institutions, which are dominated by countries that are no longer dominant. The rising powers must be present at the creation of this new system in order to ensure that they will be active supporters.

The system cannot survive in its present form, and the US has more to lose by not being in the forefront of reforming it. The US is still in a position to lead the world, but, without far-sighted leadership, its relative position is likely to continue to erode. It can no longer impose its will on others, as George W. Bush’s administration sought to do, but it could lead a cooperative effort to involve both the developed and the developing world, thereby reestablishing American leadership in an acceptable form.

The alternative is frightening, because a declining superpower losing both political and economic dominance but still preserving military supremacy is a dangerous mix. We used to be reassured by the generalization that democratic countries seek peace. After the Bush presidency, that rule no longer holds, if it ever did.

In fact, democracy is in deep trouble in America. The financial crisis has inflicted hardship on a population that does not like to face harsh reality. President Barack Obama has deployed the “confidence multiplier” and claims to have contained the recession. But if there is a “double dip” recession, Americans will become susceptible to all kinds of fear mongering and populist demagogy. If Obama fails, the next administration will be sorely tempted to create some diversion from troubles at home – at great peril to the world.

Obama has the right vision. He believes in international cooperation, rather than the might-is-right philosophy of the Bush-Cheney era. The emergence of the G-20 as the primary forum of international cooperation and the peer-review process agreed in Pittsburgh are steps in the right direction.

What is lacking, however, is a general recognition that the system is broken and needs to be reinvented. After all, the financial system did not collapse altogether, and the Obama administration made a conscious decision to revive banks with hidden subsidies rather than to recapitalize them on a compulsory basis. Those institutions that survived will hold a stronger market position than ever, and they will resist a systematic overhaul. Obama is preoccupied by many pressing problems, and reinventing the international financial system is unlikely to receive his full attention.

China’s leadership needs to be even more far-sighted than Obama is. China is replacing the American consumer as the motor of the world economy.  Since it is a smaller motor, the world economy will grow slower, but China’s influence will rise very fast.

For the time being, the Chinese public is willing to subordinate its individual freedom to political stability and economic advancement. But that may not continue indefinitely – and the rest of the world will never subordinate its freedom to the prosperity of the Chinese state.

As China becomes a world leader, it must transform itself into a more open society that the rest of the world is willing to accept as a world leader.  Military power relations being what they are, China has no alternative to peaceful, harmonious development.  Indeed, the future of the world depends on it.

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the world is facing another stark choice between two fundamentally different forms of organization: international capitalism and state capitalism. The former, represented by the United States, has broken down, and the latter, represented by China, is on the rise. Following the path of least resistance will lead to the gradual disintegration of the international financial system. A new multilateral system based on sounder principles must be invented.

Why Mark Levin Hates Glenn Beck

This second video from the Southern Avenger screams at the neo-con fools…especially to all the knuckleheads in Ohio jumping on the Kasich bandwagon.

The Myth of Objective Journalism

Thanks to the Southern Avenger.

I would add to the video content, this would be a great time to develop a “counter” newspaper, call it republican or the right side, to the leftist Columbus Dispatch. Not knowing the markets in Cincinnati, Cleveland or Toledo, I would think the chances of getting a newspaper off the ground and oriented toward freedom and liberty in the capital city might be possible, if not successful (not that the Ohio Republican Party have been oriented toward freedom and liberty in the last 20 years; I prefer to use the word in the literal context of the word republican, not the party).