Marks & Spencer, a UK food and clothing retailer, has saved the planet from inevitable devastation caused by a trace gas essential to life on Earth with a ground-breaking new product.
A carbon-neutral bra. No, really: (Daily Bayonet)
Daily Archives: April 13, 2011
Benny Peiser on overreacting to [perceived] risk
CCNet – 13 April 2011
The Climate Policy Network
Fear Itself: Overreaction To Risk Is A Costly Folly
In the face of a low-probability fearsome risk, people often exaggerate the benefits of preventive, risk-reducing, or ameliorative measures. Many people will focus, much of the time, on the emotionally perceived severity of the outcome, rather than on its likelihood. Vivid images and concrete pictures of disaster can ‘crowd out’ the cognitive activity required to conclude and consider the fact that the probability of disaster is really small. –Cass Sunstein and Richard Zeckhauser, Overreaction to Fearsome Risks
Scared people who don’t understand or care about parsing probabilities end up spending far more than is rational to avoid truly tiny risks. Worse yet, policy makers are often stampeded by frightened constituents into enacting regulations that cost far more than the benefits they offer in risk reduction. –Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, 12 April 2011
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. –H.L. Mencken
There is no energy shortage. What we have is a shortage of energy that we are allowed to be used. The list of energies we are allowed to use just keeps getting shorter. Techno-politico elitists are busily crossing out everything on the list, like coal, nuclear, all petroleum products, wood, and biofuels. The latest to join that list is the hope of the future: natural gas.—Pierre Gosslin, NoTricks Zone, 13 April 2011
The previously anti-nuclear Lib Dem, who famously became pro-nuclear on appointment to Energy Secretary, is yet to pronounce definitively on what the Japan atomic disaster may mean for UK plans for 10 new stations. But he has ordered an inquiry into safety concerns and several ministers seem to be smoothing the way for a new official line – that we don’t need nuclear power after all. Rowena Mason, The Daily Telegraph, 11 April 2011
Russell Jones, American Petroleum Institute’s senior economic adviser, called the Shale study bunk. “This study lacks credibility and is full of contradictions,” Jones said. “The main author is an evolutionary biologist and an anti-natural gas activist who is not credentialed to do this kind of chemical analysis.” –International Business Times, 13 April 2011
High carbon alternatives, such as coal and gas, may be used to ensure energy security if investors believe nuclear power is no longer a viable option. Using these alternatives would further detract from the Government’s CO2 reduction target of 80 per cent by 2050. –Emily Smoucha, Green Wise Business, 12 April 2011
What may be just as worrying to UK politicians is the impact of greater safety requirements on the cost of building each £5bn nuclear power station. The Government simply cannot ask the UK consumer to bear much more cost on their electricity bills without pushing thousands more into fuel poverty. – Rowena Mason, The Daily Telegraph, 11 April 2011
Posted in Silly scares
You know, I think there could be a lesson here
Tim Blair
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 at 03:36am
Former Al Gore senior aide Leslie Dach dared to dream:
In July 2006, Dach was installed as the public relations chief for Wal-Mart. He drafted a number of other progressives into the company, seeking to change the company’s way of doing business: its culture, its politics, and most importantly its products.
Out went drab, inexpensive merchandise so dear to low-income Americans. In came upscale organic foods, “green” products, trendy jeans, and political correctness. In other words, Dach sought to expose poor working Americans to the “good life” of the wealthy, environmentally conscious Prius driver.
How did that all work out?
After suffering seven straight quarters of losses, today the merchandise giant Wal-Mart will announce that it is “going back to basics,” ending its era of high-end organic foods, going “green,” and the remainder of its appeal to the upscale market. Next month the company will launch an “It’s Back” campaign to woo the millions of customers who have fled the store.
Further from the Wall Street Journal:
Starting in May, Wal-Mart shoppers in the U.S. will see signs in stores heralding the return of fishing tackle, bolts of fabric and other ‘heritage’ merchandise that Wal-Mart reduced or cut out altogether as it attempted to spruce up its stores …
There’s a lesson here for all manner of mass-consumer businesses. (Tim Blair)
Posted in Activists, Green scams
Look what the Green/Left/Clueless rainbow conglomerate government is trying pitch down-under
Combet, Gillard and Brown are trying to sell us a used tax
Terry McCrann From: Herald Sun April 14, 2011 12:00AM
WOULD you buy a used tax from Greg Combet and his mates Bob Brown and Julia Gillard?
It’s only been slightly used, only been driven so to speak on Sundays, by its former owner named Kevin – before his best mates Julia and Wayne persuaded him to garage it. And then, promptly ‘locked’ him in, or out, with it.
Because if you do, I’ve got a certain bridge in a city on the harbour to sell you. Newly painted and all.
Just how stupid does the prime minister and her climate minister think you are? Pretty damn stupid has to be the answer.
There they both were yesterday, saying we want to hit you with a $10 billion tax, to pretty quickly grow to a $20 billion or $30 billion one. And we promise to give you back half of it.
They actually think this is the trump card! Climate Change Minister Combet: “I can assure you … that more than 50 per cent of the carbon price revenue will be used to assist households.”
While earlier in the day, the prime minister herself even more emphatically: “I can guarantee that more than 50 per cent … of the revenue raised will go to assisting households.”
She then managed to say with a straight face: “That means millions of Australian households will be better off under a carbon price.”
How persuasive can you get? We hand over $10 billion, they give us $5 billion back. And it just gets “better” as the tax rises. We hand over $20 billion, they give us back $10 billion. We hand over $40 billion, they give us back $20 billion.
So this is what Ms Gillard means when she claims that people will be “better off”. Just focus on the $5 billion or $10 billion or more that you are “getting back”.
You don’t need to worry about the $10 billion or $20 billion or more flowing to Canberra, because as Gillard and Combet keep claiming, you won’t be paying it.
No, only the big so-called polluters will be paying the tax. Believe that and I have an opera house to throw in with the bridge I’ve got to sell you. (Herald Sun)
Posted in Cap and tax, Crazy carbon schemes
Really good question that you may be able to answer with the soon-to-be released JunkScience.com’s Daily Global Mean Temperature Index
Stockwell asks: Is the Atmosphere Still Warming?
Posted on April 13, 2011 by Anthony Watts
Guest post by Dr. David Stockwell
I suspect that the only really convincing evidence against global warming is a sustained period of no global warming or cooling — climate sensitivity and feedbacks are too esoteric.
I have followed the recent global temperature with some excitement, and started to prepare a follow up to a previous article I wrote on the failure of global temperature to meet AGW expectations. (WUWT)
Posted in Climate change
Misanthropists now have a country to call ‘home’
Ideology: Bolivia wants the United Nations to recognize Earth as having the same rights as humans. This, of course, is harebrained nonsense. Unfortunately, such thinking isn’t confined by national borders.
The Bolivian regime of President Evo Morales is pursuing a United Nations treaty that will recognize the Earth as “a living entity that humans have sought to dominate and exploit, to the point that the well-being and existence of many beings is now threatened.”
This is a country, after all, that has a Ministry of Mother Earth.
Bolivia has no monopoly on absurdity, though. Developed nations have more than their fair share of zealots who believe that man is but a plague on Mother Earth. As Sierra Club founder John Muir said: “Man is always and everywhere a blight on the landscape.”
Such thinking even flows through the schools, where our children go to attain wisdom. University of Texas biologist Eric Pianka once said, “We’re no better than bacteria” and declared that “things are gonna get better after the collapse” of the human population “because we won’t be able to decimate the Earth so much.”
Sounds a lot like the reader who admitted during a complaint about our editorials that he made no distinction between human life and any other. To his way of thinking, an amoeba has the same rights as a person.
We don’t recall the reader’s name. But we can’t rule out that he’s a contributor to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the “primary mandate” of which is to “assume a law enforcement role as provided by the United Nations World Charter for Nature.” Its position is that humans are the “AIDS of the Earth.”
Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson wrote some years ago that “we need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than 1 billion.”
Some would say those are the words of a deep thinker. But columnist Deroy Murdock provided the proper context when he noted that men like Watson and Pianka are looking for “better living through mass death.”
Though man-as-plague is a fringe idea, it’s a thread that weaves through mainstream environmental groups. It’s hardly harmless, because it incites violence. Eco-terrorists aren’t developed in a vacuum. (Investors.com)
Posted in Activists, Enviros, Misanthropy, Rubber room
Pesky refugees turn up missing
Junk Science: Five years ago, the U.N. predicted that by 2010 some 50 million people would be fleeing climate change, rising seas, mega-hurricanes and so on. Instead, no islands have sunk and their populations are booming.
It’s been said that when you make a prediction and provide a date, never give a number, and if you give a number, never provide a date. That way you can always claim to be right, even when you are wrong, and that it just hasn’t happened yet.
The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) made that mistake in 2005 when it produced a map showing areas to be impacted by the effects of climate change. These areas would produce 50 million “climate refugees” driven out by rising sea levels, increased frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, disruptions in food production, etc.
As related by blogger Gavin Atkins, who unearthed the forgotten prophecy of doom, some of these areas have conducted censuses and if they are facing any problems at all, it’s caused by their rapid and sustained population growth. If anybody is leaving any of the danger zones, it’s because they are getting too crowded. (Investors.com)
Posted in Climate change, IPCC, Silly scares
AGU journal higlights
Climate modelers figure we aren’t (yet) in a little ice age; glacial retreat actually really good for ocean productivity and; oh darn, Russian heat wave was weather and not climate change. See them here
Posted in Climate
