Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 11/27/2010 5:18:42 PM PST by neverdem
Maybe it was just a bad dream.
Just a year ago, 15,000 of the world’s leaders, diplomats, and UN officials were gearing up to descend on Copenhagen to forge a global treaty that would save the planet. The world’s media delivered massive coverage. Important newspapers printed urgent front-page calls for action, and a popular new U.S. President waded in to put his reputation on the line. The climate talks opened with a video showing a little girl’s nightmare encounter with drought, storms, eruptions, floods and other man-made climate disasters. “Please help the world,” she pleads.
After two weeks of chaos, the talks collapsed in a smouldering heap of wreckage. The only surprise was that this outcome should have come as a surprise to so many intelligent people. These people actually seemed to believe that experts and politicians have supernatural powers to predict the future and control the climate. They believed that experts know how fast temperatures will rise by when, and what the consequences will be, and that we know what to do about it. They believed that despite the recent abject failure of Kyoto (to say nothing of other well-intentioned international treaties), the nations of the world would willingly join hands and sacrifice their sovereignty in order to sign on to a vast scheme of unimaginable scope, untold cost and certain damage to their own interests.
Copenhagen was not a political breakdown. It was an intellectual breakdown so astonishing that future generations will marvel at our blind credulity. Copenhagen was a classic case of the emperor with no clothes.
Mercifully, nobody will pay attention to the climate conference at Cancun next week, where a much-reduced group of delegates will go through the motions. The delusional dream of global action to combat climate change is dead. Barack Obama’s cap-and-trade scheme...
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
Every single temperate habitat in North America has been managed by people for thousands of years. To presume that "leave it alone" and it will all be fine is scientifically simply wrong.
I say this from the authority of twenty years of detailed native plant habitat restoration consisting of five major types to a level unique on the Central Coast of California: "Leave it alone" and it dies. I can reinforce that assertion with nearly a thousand pages of photographic evidence spanning the entire American West. I have witnessed the same problems in lands from Texas to North Carolina, from Massachusetts to Illinois, from Iowa to Idaho. There is a difference between stewardship and preservation. If you look closely, G_d told ha'Adam to tend the garden. Yet it was clearly man who told Woman not to touch the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (yada, btw). Hence, the first sin was his disobedience and lack of appreciation for the privilege of dressing and keeping G_d's prized tree.
We are God’s stewards and yes - its a lot of work involved. Where I disagree with the Greens is we should give our civilized existence to make that end possible.
You talk about these two ideas as if they exist in tension. I can assure you that they do not. Humans can be a source of vitality for the entire natural world, from Everest to the Mariana Trench, from Sudan to Kamchatka. It is a matter of how we live on that land, not whether we are there or not. We are told to manage every bird, fish, and creature. There are no exceptions.
And it's been going on a lot longer than many realize. While archive-diving for an unrelated item, I found an article by Jane S. Shaw in Liberty magazine that's entitled "Is Environmental Press Coverage Biased?" Contained in it is "The Dubious Issue Of Global Warming," which has several of the skeptics' points therein (including the heat-island effect distorting the temperature record.)
The issue I found it in was published in September 1990! The core (as it were) of the global-warming apologia is identified also, as is an open stridency that we all knew was lurking underneath.
I'm beginning to wonder if the term 'deniers' is another dispacement device. The same points skeptics make now have been brushed under the rug for more than twenty years.
[If anyone's interested, a PDF copy of the magazine can be downloaded here. "The Dubious Issue Of Global Warming" is on pp. 35.6.)
I published this in 2001:
The Convention on Nature Protection must be read to be believed. In his summary report to a distracted Senate, Executive Report No. 5, April 3 1941, Secretary of State Cordell Hull misrepresented its virtually unlimited scope.
From the Preamble (emphasis added):
"The Governments of the American Republics, wishing to protect and preserve in their natural habitat representatives of all species and genera of their native flora and fauna, including migratory birds, in sufficient numbers and over areas extensive enough to assure them from becoming extinct through any agency within man's control;"
After going on at considerable length about wilderness areas and national parks, they come back with this language in Article V Section 1:
"The Contracting Governments agree to adopt, or to propose such adoption to their respective appropriate law-making bodies, suitable laws and regulations for the protection and preservation of flora and fauna within their national boundaries but not included in the national parks, national reserves, nature monuments, or strict wilderness reserves referred to in Article II hereof."
All species, all land, no limits to the commitment. Mr. Hull made no mention of the scope of Article V in his summary. It was he who, upon Roosevelt's approval, convened the Planning Commission that created the United Nations soon after the adoption of this treaty. It is a document that exceeds the constitutional authority of the government of the United States.
It can't work either. This treaty is contrary to natural law.
Nature is a dynamic, adaptive, and competitive system. Under changing conditions, some species go extinct, indeed, for natural selection to operate, they must. The problem arises when human influence grows so powerful that one can always attribute loss of a species to being "within man's control." When humans ask, "Which ones lose?" the treaty specifies, "None," and demands no limit to the commitment to save them all. This of course destroys the ability to act as agent to save anything, much less objectively evaluate how best to expend our resources to do the best that can be done.
The demand of this treaty is based upon an assumption that is a Type II error. It cannot be logically satisfied.
A government that derives power from a genetic status quo is incapable of a solution. This is a system that assumes protection and preservation work. It gives agencies of government unlimited monopoly power to manage all land use as if that would help. It supposes that agencies are experts interested only in fulfilling their mandate. It dedicates unlimited tax resources for protection of an unlimited number of species and their genera. It invokes itself across the entire nation. It assumes that destroying an economy will benefit native species. How would we then fund the research to learn to do better?
“How high a price must the world pay for green folly?” asked the thinker Walter Russell Mead. “How many years will be lost, how much credibility forfeited, how much money wasted before we have an environmental movement that has the intellectual rigour, political wisdom and mature, sober judgment needed to address the great issues we face?”The answer is too high, too many and too much. Please grow up, people. You have important work to do.
The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing . . .It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity,
and they very seldom teach it enough. - Adam Smith
Take most of your last paragraph
“A government that derives power from a genetic status quo is incapable of a solution. This is a system that assumes protection and preservation work. It gives agencies of government unlimited monopoly power to manage all land use as if that would help. It supposes that agencies are experts interested only in fulfilling their mandate. It dedicates unlimited tax resources for protection of an unlimited number of species and their genera. It invokes itself across the entire nation. It assumes that destroying an economy will benefit native species.”
and substitute CO2 limitation for species preservation, and we see that using the warmistas, the radical greens stepped up their attack aimed at ruling localities due to affects on migratory animals passing through, to an attack aimed at ruling all global activity. It even surpasses the widespread implication that L.O.S.T. entails.
That substitution is just a thought exercise that reiterates the Motto of Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals: “The only thing truly progressive is the next trick that gains us another notch of power.”
Make it clear how all that these treaties and laws amounts to are a series of tricks designed to steal power from nations and individuals and give it to those greedy for power to lord it over all.
Just some comments about the posted article. The elephant in the living room at the Copenhagen conference was the revelation of massive fraud in global warming “research” that occurred just weeks before the conference. But amazingly, the article has no mention of the fraudulent generation of temperature data exposed in the “stolen” East Anglia emails, or the efforts of this clique to discredit skeptical meteorologists. Instead, what amounts to blatant criminality is ignored, in favor of some breast beating trivia concerning a lack of “intellectual rigor” or “political wisdom” on the part of environmentalists.
There is a difference between Conservation and environmental extremism, that is what we are fighting.
Pray for America
Thanks for the ping!
I dont know...but on my way to the local 2nd amendment meeting...I never swerved once to avoid a gun..
Can I hear an "Amen"?
Thanks for that common sense backed up by strong evidence and a strong argument.
That kind of common sense is very uncommon.
Hats off to you.
my 4 yr old watches disney channel in the a.m. and in between the “cartoons” they have these two puppets goofing around. sometimes the puppets start harping on about “saving the planet”. this is when the girl stomps one foot, hands on hips, and scolds the t.v. saying “you can’t save the planet, the planet is NOT in danger, people are NOT hurting it.”
You might enjoy this. As opposed to the picture book attached thereto (63pp), the new one is 245pp. I should have that up this winter.
Robust, credible science was thought to be the arbiter of conflicting points of view in regards to natural resource management. Unfortunately, the environmental groups got a hold of for hire “science: and tweaked it into “advocacy science” that supported their point of view. As government standards usually include “best available science,” they provided their brand for areas where studies were weak or non-existent. They have also used inappropriate models with adjusted assumptions and pre-determined outcomes to push their point.
Science has now become suspect and adulterated. We have lost a good tool when we can’t even agree on facts any more.
From your link: “Land restoration is an all-consuming multidisciplinary occupation, sometimes as much engineering as it is biology” Thank you for posting that link, it is an inspiration. I live on the river and have just started my restoration work. My plan is to make my relatively tiny 5 acres into something a lot closer to native and as self-sustaining as possible.
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