Posted on 12/17/2004 2:19:06 PM PST by CHARLITE
Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri is an Indian-born scientist who currently chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He's also an unabashed environmental activist, a role he acts out as head, since 2001, of the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI). This organization sponsors in thousands of India's schools the Green Olympiad movement, which is a competition designed to test and enhance the knowledge of Indian schoolchildren about environmental issues and whose winners will be invited to participate in Terraquiz, the only environmental quiz show on Indian national television. Well, thank God for small favors. At least there aren't two environmental TV quiz shows in India.
Dr. Pachauri has been in the headlines recently for two reasons. First, in his position as IPCC Chairman and shameless Kyoto-Treaty flak, he's prominent at the Conference of Parties (COP10) meeting in Buenos Aires this week, the theme of which conference is climate change. Second, mainstream media, for some reason, have got it into their heads that he has something important to say about climatological matters. The problem is that Dr. Pachauri, like so many in the scientific community, spouts misinformation about global warming as if he didn't know any better.
It's highly likely, however, that he actually does know better, but that he's so politically committed to the trumped-up unscientific hogwash that is brought forward to support the global warming agenda that he can't back out now. Minimally, if he did actually admit what indisputable scientific data demonstrate to be true, his funding would get yanked and his standing in the worldwide leftist scientific community would diminish dramatically.
One of the reasons it's so hard to take environmental scientists seriously is because they sometimes, in unguarded moments, reveal their true agendas. Stephen Schneider, for instance, a scientist who criticized the overwhelming and indisputable evidence that Bjørn Lomborg amassed against global warming in his book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist," has offered this assessment of what scientists need to do to convince people that global warming is real: "[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, make little mention of any doubts we might have . . . decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."
In other words, it doesn't really matter what the evidence indicates. Never mind that Lomborg presented a meticulously researched and massively documented ("The Skeptical Environmentalist" contains more than 3,000 footnotes!) case against global warming and many other environmental disasters predicted by "science." What really matters to environmentalists is to promote an anti-capitalist agenda, specifically one which says that industrial civilization is bad for the environment across the board, in this instance because it tends to generate inordinate amounts of the gas carbon dioxide, which ostensibly contributes to the greenhouse effect, which in turn is going to lead, within our children's lifetimes, to massive changes in the earth's climate that will render many regions of our planet uninhabitable and create unimaginable chaos in our descendants' lives.
Never mind that, to cite only one counter argument among many, the United States is a net decrementer of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because our country is literally so "green" that the huge quantities of oxygen emitted into the air by our forests and other green spaces far outweigh the amount of carbon dioxide our cars and lawnmowers and manufacturing and power plants and other diabolical creations of our capitalist society manage to throw off into the atmosphere. And never mind that it is only in advanced capitalistic societies that real progress against the ostensible threat carbon dioxide poses is being made, that it is in modern western industrial democracies where the most effective progress in cleaning up the environment is occurring.
In fact, the real polluters, the heaviest contributors to the carbon dioxide problem are generally developing nations, which are following the same relatively unregulated path toward industrialization that our own country pursued through the first half of the last century. The good news, though — and Lomborg, again, makes this case convincingly — is that when industrialization and modernization in these developing countries reaches a critical mass, they too will, as we have done and continue to do, clean up their act.
But the real problem with the global warming hysteria that is being perpetrated by otherwise intelligent and educated scientists who should know better is that global warming itself is a phenomenon that has only become an issue in the past decade or so. Take a look at these dire predictions about the climatic future of our planet from a 1975 Newsweek Magazine article entitled "The Cooling World":
"There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically. . . . A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972."
The article went on to paint a doomsday picture of crop failures and widespread starvation due to the dramatic cooling that had been taking place in the previous quarter century and was continuing at a rapid pace. The question is, What happened between 1975 and the early 1990s, when predictions suddenly reversed and scientists began to caterwaul about global warming and the disastrous effects of the increase in the earth's temperature many of them had begun to "observe?"
First, there is the ascendancy of the computer model as the digital "bible" of so-called scientists. A computer model is a program into which its users enter suspect and incomplete and inevitably inaccurate data and arrive at conclusions about the future of the future of our planet that have virtually no way of being verified but will inevitably, if their conclusions are somehow weighed against the outcomes they purport to predict, prove those who stand behind them to be absolute idiots, except for the fact that those who have have stood behind them will be long gone by the time we can verify or discredit their conclusions. Paul Ehrlich (who is still alive to see what an idiot he was) predicted in the early 1970s that before the turn of the 20th century, the "population bomb" would explode and that hundreds of millions of people, especially in third world countries, would die in the massive famines that resulted because of overpopulation. Not even close.
Second, and equally important, there is the politicization of science. If it hadn't been for the fact that George W. Bush has been occupied with cleaning up the mess left by Bill Clinton's ignoring the real threats to our nation's safety, such as Islamist terrorism, while "science" was ginning up fears about global warming, I would argue that the Bush Presidency should be busy turning the tables on bought-and-paid-for science and selling us on global cooling. President Bush, however, has other battles to fight.
Scientific research has become a variant of the television show "Family Feud." In its heyday, that show, you'll remember, rewarded people for coming up with the same answers as those revealed by a survey of audience members. Now, however, instead of "Name three things you find in the bathroom," you're more likely to hear "Name three global conditions that could disastrously affect mankind's future on earth." Survey says: Global warming. Nuclear war. Unregulated telemarketers.
Unless and until we stop listening to such disingenuous charlatans as Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri and start paying attention to the fact that none of the credible data gathered on the issue of CO2-generated climate change, when brought together and analyzed responsibly, point to anything remotely resembling the "crisis" that so-called "concerned scientists," in collusion with I'm-happy-to-be-led-by-the-nose liberal-agenda media honks, are trying to sell us, we're doomed to be inundated by so-called "news" that predicts our collective climatological demise because we failed to limit our carbon dioxide emissions.
The bottom line is this: It's not that we need more data (though the data we gather over the next decade and beyond will certainly be a welcome addition to the rather funky and incomplete stuff collected thus far); it's that we need a more dispassionate and less agenda-driven assessment of the data currently available to us in order to better determine where we (and our planet) stand with regard to this issue of global warming. Until such credentialed (albeit compromised) scientists as Dr. Pachauri and his cohorts stop making global environmental issues the occasion for America-bashing and unsupported scaremongering, we can be assured that they are not using their knowledge and authority to serve the interests of the people of this planet.
Writer Greg Lewis is co-author, with Dr. Charles Gant, of the Warner Books hardcover "End Your Addiction Now." Dr. Lewis is a frequent contributor of political and cultural commentaries to several websites. His next book, "The Politics of Anger: How Marxism's Heirs Are Redefining Liberalism in America Today," is due out in late Spring.
Read more of his work at:
http://www.GregLewis.org
Comments:Glewis9000@aol.com
I'm going to have to edit the screen if I'm goimg to be light-fingered on the mouse.
One, I don't believe it, and I further don't believe you can produce a credible cite.
Two, the Vostok core samples are discontinuous (obviously, but in case you have trouble looking at data, which you might)-so they are not even sampled per 3kY. You cannot tell rate changes from those data.
== He's a great politician
Yeah ... so was Clinton.
I prefer Statesmen, myself.
But that's a breed we may never see in the Public Square again.
Thanks for the information. (Trust all is well, Mr. Noble).
Are you the same "farmfriend" who was yukking it up with the Clown Posse lately or did some schmuck steal your handle?
Given the first quote I mentioned, it would appear Bush is perfectly comfortable relying on "Democrats" for his scientific information on the environment.One reason that could be so is that it was REPUBLICANS who set forth nearly all of what we now consider to be "Democrat" talking points on the Environment (and abortion, birth control and the "education" of Americans to demand those "rights" which best avert downbreeding and ensure an optimal balance between productive and non-productive peoples worldwide.)
My original post of the 1970 GOP Task Force Report "Earth Resources & Population" is taken from Section II, the portion on population or "human quality" and the need for control and depopulation.
I would be more than happy to transcribe Section I for you if you are interested in how it was the Democrats managed to steal their environmental policy -- just like they stole "faithbased partnerships" and other "strict constitutionalist" curiosities -- from the Republicans.
I like the stories about how (yesterday, last week, last month) was the warmest in 150 years.
.....
So, pray tell, what made things so stinking hot 150 years ago?
Debunking the Myth~ Bump!
I was just starting to have fun playing with him!
And you go and zot him!
Corporate elites, of course.
December 30 1854
Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company incorporated on this date in New York by George H. Bissell of New Haven, Conn. This makes it the first oil company to be created.
1854
Heinrich Gobel constructs an incandescent lamp with a filament of carbonized bamboo placed in a glass vessel. In 1893, he wins a court case against Thomas Edison and receives credit as the inventor of the electric lamp.
I'm afraid you either don't understand or are deliberately misrepresenting President Bush's position on "global warming".
I suspect the latter.
Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer -- June 4, 2001Q Ari, does the President agree with the conclusions in this report from the U.N. that humans are responsible for global warming?
MR. FLEISCHER: You know, the President addressed a little bit of that in his remarks today. But the President has come out with a proposal on global warming, because global warming is a serious issue and the President views it as such. What he has said about it is that -- and this is consistent with what the President has said and this recent report that came out and that the United States submitted to the United Nations, that there is "considerable uncertainty" -- that's in this recent report -- relating to the science of climate change. This report submitted to the United Nations also recognizes that any "definitive prediction of potential outcomes is not yet feasible" and that, "one of the weakest links in our knowledge is the connection between global and regional predictions of climate change."
The President has outlined a new approach with a plan to significantly reduce the growth in greenhouse gas emissions while sustaining economic growth needed to invest in new technologies to make our environment cleaner, and invest in science to better understand the challenges presented by climate change. The President's budget for fiscal year '03 provides $4.5 billion in funding for climate change, with a substantial amount of funds dedicated to research, to reduce scientific uncertainties related to climate change.
So this is an issue the President has put his finger on previously, has announced a plan that will begin to address many of these problems without wrecking the American economy.
Q Ari, can I follow that? The President said -- I read the report of the bureaucracy. Was he referring to the EPA?
MR. FLEISCHER: This is a report that came out of the EPA.
Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer -- June 5, 2001
Q Ari, if I could change subjects for a second. This morning you said that the President quoted a speech, indicating that the President believes that human activity is largely responsible for the increase in greenhouse gases. But I'm wondering if he also agrees with an EPA report which indicated that human activity is likely the cause of global warming?
MR. FLEISCHER: Let me just read from the President's statement of June 11th on global warming, and let me read from the recent report the EPA submitted to the United Nations. And I think you'll hear that on the key issues, they really sound very, very similar. This is the President on June 11th in the Rose Garden, in a speech where he announced his global warming policies.
"Concentration of greenhouse gases, especially C02, have increased substantially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And the National Academy of Sciences indicate that the increase is due in large part to human activity."That's the President himself speaking. Here is from the report, page 4, that was just submitted to the United States by the EPA:
"Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as the result of human activities, causing global mean surface temperature and subsurface ocean temperature to rise. While the changes observed over the last several decades are due most likely to human activities, we cannot rule out that some significant part is also a reflection of natural variability."
And I think what you're hearing is the same thing.
Q I'm glad you make the connection explicitly, since the President addressed greenhouse gases, but not specifically global warming. Does the President agree with the conclusion that human activity is likely the cause of global warming?
MR. FLEISCHER: That's what the President said in his speech in June.
Q That's not exactly what he said. He does agree with it?
MR. FLEISCHER: When the President cites the National Academy of Science as saying that the National Academy of Science indicates that the increase is due in large part to human activity, I don't know how the President could say it more specifically than that.
Q He hasn't changed his mind at all?
MR. FLEISCHER: No. Here's -- the bottom line for the President is, number one, he has made a proposal that he believes is a proposal that not only can reduce the problem of greenhouse gases and global warming, but also protects the American economy, so the American economy can lead the world in technological and scientific advances that also have an effect in reducing pollution.
The President has said, citing the National Academy of Sciences, that the increase is due in large part to human activity. The President has also continued, citing both, now this report the EPA has sent to the United Nations, previous evidence from the National Academy of Sciences, that there's uncertainty -- and the recent report notes that there is considerable uncertainty. That's the state of science, and the President agrees with it. I don't think people dispute that.
Q Its uncertainty, but he can still draw that conclusion, that --
MR. FLEISCHER: He didn't June 11th.
Q He didn't exactly do it, but you're saying it now.
MR. FLEISCHER: Again, when the President cites a report by the National Academy of Sciences that indicates the increase is due in large part to human activity, I think you have two reports that are very similar.
Q Why was he --
Q Why did he call it "the bureaucracy" yesterday?
MR. FLEISCHER: I think the EPA issued a report that says the same thing. And I think the President was also reflecting about some of the way it was covered, that made it sound as if the report was somehow inconsistent with what he had said previously.
Q I don't think he reflected at all, he just said that, I saw it put out by a bureaucracy. What did he reflect on?
MR. FLEISCHER: I'm sharing with you his insights.
Q Why didn't he give us his insights?
what the President has said and this recent report that came out and that the United States submitted to the United Nations, that there is "considerable uncertainty" -- that's in this recent report -- relating to the science of climate change.
That is exactly what he has always maintained. He has always been environmentally aware while never making the leap and outright depositing blame on mankind for climate changes (acknowledging the studies while not outright accepting their conclusions).
While continuing to point out the "science" is uncertain, he also promotes reducing pollution, etc.
"So, pray tell, what made things so stinking hot 150 years ago?"
Flatulence? ;-)
However, in a speech where he announced his global warming policies, Bush states positively:
"Concentration of greenhouse gases, especially C02, have increased substantially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. And the National Academy of Sciences indicate that the increase is due in large part to human activity."That's the President himself speaking.
And in the report of his administration, is also the positive statement that, despite the uncertainties:
... the changes observed over the last several decades are due most likely to human activities, [though, due to uncertainties] we cannot rule out that some significant part is also a reflection of natural variability."
Indeed, uncertainties exist. The only thing that Bush, the American Academy of Sciences and his Administration feel comfortable stating with any certainty, however, is that Humans are "in large part" "most likely" responsible for the climate changes. Uncertainty comes in only where an additional "significant" factor of "natural" variability is concerned.
In fact, if you'll read the second excerpt again, you'll see that Fleischer takes 4-5 responses to reiterate the President's assigning primary responsibility to human activity while yet gilding that lilly with "uncertainties" such that folks who wish to believe otherwise have a little wiggle room for Personal Interpretation.
And this is why I'm not only giving you a pass on deliberately misrepresenting Bush (whom you've clearly misinterpreted if his own Press Secretary's relating of Bush's "insights" is any indication), I'm also giving you a pass on deliberately misrepresenting me. I suspect you're just another one of those wimmen who thinks "Askel hates Bush" or "has an obsession about 'stem cells'" and that's why I follow certain issues pertaining to human life so intently.
Hardly.
To the contrary, any time someone in a real position of power quotes the American Academy of Sciences as an authority on a subject -- however dubious the "science -- I take note. To wit:
As a result of reduced death rates, there are more people in their non-productive years than ever before. More children and more elderly people unable to participate in the world's work force increase the burden on the productive age group. [...] The National Academy of Sciences has said:Either the birth rate must go back down or the death rate must go back up.
That's linked above, of course, in the GOP Task Force Report whose initial section on Earth Resources clearly would be an education for you where Republican environmental policies and prejudices AGAINST human beings are concerned.
But don't bother reading it unless you're ready to spin the Big Boys who speak a little more plainly than our current President about the nefarious Breeders of the human race. For example:
Mr. Speaker, the weeks before recess our Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population held three hearings.The subjects discussed at these hearings were: the hereditary aspects of human quality, that activities of the Earth Resources Survey Program Review Committee, and the environmental problems created by our rapid rate of population growth.
So that all Members of the House can share the information we heard, I offer our hearing highlights for the RECORD:
HEARING HIGHLIGHTS, TUESDAY, AUGUST 5, 1969
Dr. Williams Shockley, Professor, Stanford University.
Dr. Arthur Jensen, Professor, University of California at Berkeley.Dr. Shockley stated that he feels the National Academy of Sciences has an intellectual obligation to make a clear and relevant presentation of the facts about hereditary aspects of human quality. Furthermore, he claimed our well-intentioned social welfare programs may be unwittingly producing a down breeding of the quality of the U.S. population.
but wait ... there's more!
Mr. Speaker, as chairman of the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population, I would like to comment on two newcomers to the Washington scene. They are Dr. Philip Handler, the new president of the National Academy of Sciences and Dr. Roger Olaf Egeberg, the Assistant HEW Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs subject to his confirmation by the Senate. I was extremely heartened by the sense of urgency expressed by both of these national leaders on the problems of overpopulation and dwindling resources. In a recent interview with This Week magazine, Dr. Handler stated:
"The greatest threat to the human race is man's own procreation. [...]
[...] Dr. Egeberg has displayed his keen awareness of the crisis our world is facing by emphasizing that at the top of his list of priorities will be intensified efforts in environmental and population control through technological innovations and family planning, the reclamation of waste products, and the development of a low pollution automobile.We look to these two men for dynamic and purposeful leadership as the new [Nixon] administration charts its course.
I have searched for a couple of years now -- ever since posting my NSSM-200 thread -- for any indication ANY of these policies or intentions (per national defense memoranda and the Congressional Record) ever were reneged upon publically or covertly. I have found nothing.
I'm not misrepresenting anyone. In fact, I think it's best that you and I both let them speak for themselves or let their appointed professional handlers -- such as Fleischer -- handle the spin (emphasis added, natch).
I think you learn more that way than listening for only what you want to hear and ignoring the rest ... particularly when the last 60 years of Context stares you in the face.
I beg your pardon?
You're not a woman?
My apologies. You sure post like one.
But, so do a lot of the men around here anymore. I was wrong to jump to conclusions and I do apologize.
If that concludes the sum total of the bases on which you believe (1) Bush in no way supports the notion human are responsible for global warming or (2) that I would purposefully misrepresent anything Bush has to say (in the same way his press secretary did, for example), I guess we're done.
Regards, Mister Cooper.
I'm a woman. I'm not a "wimmen", whatever the hell that's supposed to be.
You're a bitch, I take it?
As to the subject of the thread, my post #34 stands unrefuted. There are no contortions or spinning needed no matter your assertions to the contrary.
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