GREENIE CORNER

The idea that many scientists might be influenced by such crass considerations as money is still hard for a lot of people to get used to -- though Leftists have always said it of any scientist who gets funding from business sources. But when juicy government funding is coming their way many scientists must want to believe the claims that produced the funding. The global warming myth is the most obvious case in point but I think I have just found another instance of it. The scaremongering over mobile phones is well-known but countless investigations of it have shown no harm in them (e.g. here). But a study has just been published which shows really gross ill-effects from mobile phones. How come? Why is that study so different? Are the results fake? Who knows? But want to bet that the authors of the study get big funding to investigate it further?

U.S. Spends Most on Pollution Abatement: "As a percentage of output, American manufacturers spend considerably more on pollution abatement than do their competitors in Germany, Japan, France, the U.K., Canada, Mexico, China, South Korea, and Taiwan,". See also here

"The environment values deserve as much -- but no more -- protection than other values. Nature cannot protect itself. Trees cannot have standing as legal actors, but behind every tree can stand an owner who, by protecting his property, protects it for all. The classical liberal approach is not to seek more efficient ways to advance some politically determined goal, but rather to create an institutional framework to facilitate exchanges and trade offs between individuals, empowering them to make their own choices."

How uncritically the press treat environmental stories and scares : "It often turns out that an idea that sounds like a hot controversy on the news is actually old hat to scientists, and long since discredited: saccharin as a danger to humans, electric and magnetic fields as a brain cancer cause, and on and on."

What Fun! The latest scientific findings are that burning fossil fuels has a measurable cooling effect on the climate. So those naughty fossil fuels both warm us up and cool us down. No wonder there is a lot of doubt about there being any overall effect at all!

Recent computer-model based claims of massive species extinction due to global warming have a serious flaw: Previous climate changes of similar magnitude were not associated with notable extinctions. So much for such "models" (in reality just a fancy name for guesswork).

Is wind power viable? Howard Hayden, Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut says: "With the right subsidies, wind could become a viable energy source. And, with the right subsidies, gasoline could be made free, and 2-carat diamonds could be given away in cereal boxes.

Some "global warming" news just in from one of my American correspondents: "Over the past 24 hours, much of the central US has been blanketed with snow -- and it's still falling. We're talking snow depths of 12 - 24 inches in some places. This storm hasn't been exceptionally powerful; it's just a slow moving, long lasting weather system that isn't forecast to leave our area until some time this evening. Having spent a good part of yesterday and this morning moving enough snow so our Australian Terrier could go out for her calls to nature, I can say that we haven't had snows like this in several years."

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