Eco-Fascists
California’s War on Cars and Single Family Homes ~ e.g., eco-fascism
In the above presentation, Bill Whittle mentions Burt Rutan. His critique is here: PDF. I found it via a small bio done by Right Fan-Girl:
Burt Rutan, in case any of my readers are unaware is the guy that designed and built the Spaceship one spacecraft, and designed and built the voyager airplane that flew nonstop around the world. He is an absolute genius, pioneer, and generally a hero of the mind. So when I heard that he had taken a stance on a thing, I am inclined to pay attention, this is a guy that does things that work.
I started reading, and the first thing that jumped out at me is the title. “An Engineer’s Critique of Global Warming, Science” Now, this is something that I have been struggling with for decades. As many of you know, I am a civil engineer. In engineering, things have to work, so we are far far more parsimonious with what we accept as valid. We do not have the luxury of simply saying “well, the science should work out”, no, people die when engineers do that, so we accept only theories that have survived extensive testing, models that have proven exhaustively that they predict accurately, etcetera.
Anyway, this powerpoint is worth the perusing if anyone’s interested in why a well-educated intelligent person remains a skeptic on AGW.
The WSJ article about this war shows just how “fascistic” this movement is:
My April 9 Cross Country column commentary in The Wall Street Journal (California Declares War on Suburbia) outlined California’s determination to virtually outlaw new detached housing. The goal is clear: force most new residents into multi-family buildings at 20 and 30 or more to the acre. California’s overly harsh land use regulations had already driven housing affordability from fairly typical levels to twice and even three times higher than that of much of the nation. California’s more recent tightening of the land use restrictions (under Assembly Bill 32 and Senate Bill 375) has been justified as necessary for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
It is funny that a friend of mine loves classic cars but wholly endorses this movement:
…”68 percent of new housing in Southern California by 2035 would be condos and apartments,” despite the fact that census data shows that 80 percent of that region’s housing increase between 2000 and 2010 were single-family homes, indicating a clear preference for less dense housing. Planners believe that forcing people into a high-density housing will alleviate global warming by reducing the use of cars (Tulsa beacon)
Here is a 6-part presentation by Burt:
Paul Krugman Casts Science in a Fascistic Way (scientism): `Use It To Force Social Change` (How the Left and Evolutionary Thinking Destroys Science)
Mankind's Future = Belief in Evolution
“If you look back, the thing that strikes you, if you’ve got any sensitivity, is that extinction is the most common phenomena,” Leakey says. “Extinction is always driven by environmental change. Environmental change is always driven by climate change. Man accelerated, if not created, planet change phenomena; I think we have to recognize that the future is by no means a very rosy one.” Any hope for mankind’s future, he insists, rests on accepting existing scientific evidence of its past. ~ Richard Leakey (The Blaze)
This is another reason that many on the right distrust liberals/liberal scientific predictions about the environment. That is, they believe it okay to lie in order to produce a social response. Marxists called this propaganda. From exaggerating the Greenland Ice melting by almost 50-times, to this example:
“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. . . . Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)
✔ Krugman: scientists should falsely predict alien invasion (motls.blogspot.com)
✔ Krugman: Scientists Should Falsely Predict Alien Invasion So Government Will Spend More Money (newsbusters.org)
✔ Krugman : Scientists Should Lie – To Force The Country Further Into Debt(stevengoddard.wordpress.com)
Nature Journal hits it on the head, here-and-there. Here is a “there”
Alarming cracks are starting to penetrate deep into the scientific edifice. They threaten the status of science and its value to society. And they cannot be blamed on the usual suspects — inadequate funding, misconduct, political interference, an illiterate public. Their cause is bias, and the threat they pose goes to the heart of research.
Bias is an inescapable element of research, especially in fields such as biomedicine that strive to isolate cause–effect relations in complex systems in which relevant variables and phenomena can never be fully identified or characterized. Yet if biases were random, then multiple studies ought to converge on truth. Evidence is mounting that biases are not random. A Comment in Nature in March reported that researchers at Amgen were able to confirm the results of only six of 53 ‘landmark studies’ in preclinical cancer research (C. G. Begley & L. M. Ellis Nature 483, 531–533; 2012). For more than a decade, and with increasing frequency, scientists and journalists have pointed out similar problems.
Early signs of trouble were appearing by the mid-1990s, when researchers began to document systematic positive bias in clinical trials funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Initially these biases seemed easy to address, and in some ways they offered psychological comfort. The problem, after all, was not with science, but with the poison of the profit motive. It could be countered with strict requirements to disclose conflicts of interest and to report all clinical trials.
Yet closer examination showed that the trouble ran deeper. Science’s internal controls on bias were failing, and bias and error were trending in the same direction — towards the pervasive over-selection and over-reporting of false positive results. The problem was most provocatively asserted in a now-famous 2005 paper by John Ioannidis, currently at Stanford University in California: ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’ (J. P. A. Ioannidis PLoS Med. 2, e124; 2005). Evidence of systematic positive bias was turning up in research ranging from basic to clinical, and on subjects ranging from genetic disease markers to testing of traditional Chinese medical practices.
How can we explain such pervasive bias?
To top it off, this “flawed thinking’ is the best evolution has to offer us, never reaching truth (see also my recent Serious Saturday post):
Morality, as Kant pointed out, hinges neither on success nor on failure. The moral law transcends the material world. The evolutionist’s sophomoric response is that morality evolved and so therefore is not absolute, but rather is relative. That’s like saying water is not wet. And while they’re at it, evolutionists, at least those in the atheist wing, not only deny values, they also deny truth. That’s right, evolutionists—who are constantly making religious truth claims and casting judgments on those who don’t go along with their mandate that evolution is a fact—deny the existence any real morality and truth. You can see the obvious dilemma they have constructed. If there is no morality or truth, then how can evolution be known to be a fact, and how can doubters of this modern mythology be such bad people?
All of this is painfully obvious at the New Scientist which today explains that evolution has bequeathed us with a clouded, flawed thinking process. And just why did we evolve such an apparently flawed instrument?
[….]
Our confidence is not helped by the evolutionist’s selective use of evidence and, yes, confirmation bias.
But if we evolved to be argumentative apes, then the confirmation bias takes on a much more functional role. “You won’t waste time searching out evidence that doesn’t support your case, and you’ll home in on evidence that does,” says Mercier.
Sound familiar? The article which reveals evolution’s circular logic finally comes around to a precise description of evolutionary thought: “You won’t waste time searching out evidence that doesn’t support your case, and you’ll home in on evidence that does.”
In their value-laden world where they deny the existence of values, evolutionists insist they know the truth which is that, ultimately, we cannot know the truth.
So Paul Krugman is merely spreading untruths in a fashion that fit with flawed evolutionary “confirmation bias,” causing science to merely be used as a power tool, thus making it fascistic:
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”
Mussolini, Diuturna pp. 374-77, quoted in A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews with an Absolutist (Ignatius Press; 1999), by Peter Kreeft, p. 18.
Which is why Prager mentions that whatever the left touches is destroyed:
Wind Farms Causing Global Warming! You Cannot Make This Stuff Up
Via Independent IE “Technology” page:
….But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.
Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built.
This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms.
It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.
It is reported China is now erecting 36 wind turbines every day and Texas is the largest producer of wind power in the US.
Liming Zhou, Research Associate Professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of New York, who led the study, said further research is needed into the affect of the new technology on the wider environment.
“Wind energy is among the world’s fastest growing sources of energy. The US wind industry has experienced a remarkably rapid expansion of capacity in recent years,” he said. “While converting wind’s kinetic energy into electricity, wind turbines modify surface-atmosphere exchanges and transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. These changes, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate.”
The study, published in Nature, found a “significant warming trend” of up to 0.72C (1.37F) per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to near-by non-wind-farm regions.
The team studied satellite data showing land surface temperature in west-central Texas….
….According to Prinn and Wang, this temperature increase occurs because the wind turbines affect two processes that play critical roles in determining surface temperature and atmospheric circulation: vertical turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport. Both processes are responsible for moving heat away from Earth’s surface.
In the analysis, the wind turbines on land reduced wind speed, particularly on the downwind side of the wind farms, which reduced the strength of the turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport processes. This resulted in less heat being transported to the upper parts of the atmosphere, as well as to other regions farther away from the wind farms….
Via Gateway Pundit, and the part on birds is found here:
Not only do wind farms kill off high-profile bird species like golden and bald eagles and California condors, the farms also cause global warming. After hundreds of millions in blown taxpayer money and thousands of dead birds the latest research shows that wind farms cause warming. Reuters reported, via Free Republic:
Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power…
…The world’s wind farms last year had the capacity to produce 238 gigawatt of electricity at any one time. That was a 21 percent rise on 2010 and capacity is expected to reach nearly 500 gigawatt by the end of 2016 as more, and bigger, farms spring up, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.
Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world’s largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.
The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.
“We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms,” the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.
“These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate,” the authors said.
But the Democrats will continue to dump billions into the costly energy source anyway. It makes them feel good.
BREAKING NEWS: Intimidating the Anti-AGW Bloggers
From What’s Up With That
The first blogger to break the Climategate2 story has had a visit from the police and has had his computers seized. Tallbloke’s Talkshop first reported on CG2 due to the timing of the release being overnight in the USA. Today he was raided by six UK police (Norfolk Constabulary and Metropolitan police) and several of his computers were seized as evidence.
From the Guardian:
Police officers investigating the theft of thousands of private emails between climate scientists from a University of East Anglia server in 2009 have seized computer equipment belonging to a web content editor based at the University of Leeds.
On Wednesday, detectives from Norfolk Constabulary entered the home of Roger Tattersall, who writes a climate sceptic blog under the pseudonym TallBloke, and took away two laptops and a broadband router. A police spokeswoman confirmed on Thursday that Norfolk Constabulary had “executed a search warrant in West Yorkshire and seized computers”. She added: “No one was arrested. Investigations into the [UEA] data breach and publication [online of emails] continues. This is one line of enquiry in a Norfolk constabulary investigation which started in 2009.”
Tattersall posted his own account of the police search on his blog: “An Englishman’s home is his castle they say. Not when six detectives from the Metropolitan police, the Norfolk constabulary and the computer crime division arrive on your doorstep with a warrant to search it though … They ended up settling for two laptops and an ADSL broadband router … I got the feeling something was on the go last night when WordPress [the internet host for his blog] forwarded a notice from the US Department of Justice.”
[….]
Last month, Tattersall’s blog, as well as at least four other blogs popular with climate sceptics, received a comment from a user called “FOIA” providing a link to a Russian server hosting a compressed folder containing more than 5,000 emails exchanged between climate scientists, along with a short message setting out the perpetrator’s motives. The folder also contained an encrypted subfolder containing a further 220,000 emails. It was the second time such a release had occurred.
In November 2009, thousands of emails were released in a similar manner on the eve the Copenhagen climate summit. The episode prompted a series of inquiries into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists’ handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness, they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced.
Both Tattersall and a US-based climate sceptic blogger known as Jeff Id said they had received a “formal request” via the blogging platform WordPress from the US Department of Justice’s criminal division, dated 9 December, to preserve “all stored communications, records, and other evidence in your possession” related to their own blogs as well as to Climate Audit, a climate sceptic blog run by a Canadian mining consultant called Steve McIntyre.
The point of this is not to catch the leaker, it’s to intimidate bloggers…. this is aimed at intimidating bloggers rather than catching the climategate leaker…. This has nothing at all to do with finding a hypothetical hackert Jo Nova makes a great point — highlighted — from the Washington Examiner has this story:What This Is Really About
Tallbloke’s computers were confiscated by police today, allegedly in the search for the climategate leaker. But it’s obvious that there won’t be any clues left on Tallbloke’s computer (it would have no record of comments dropped onto wordpress.com, a US service). See Watts Up.
The point of this is not to catch the leaker, it’s to intimidate bloggers.
Jeff ID writes: Tallbloke a fellow recipient blog of the climategate emails, and linked on the right, was raided today in what seems to be a coordinated effort by Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division and the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division. His home was raided and computers were taken for ‘examination’.
They don’t really want to catch the leaker, because a whistleblower is protected by UK legislation. The proof that this is aimed at intimidating bloggers rather than catching the climategate leaker is the coordinated and pointless US dept of Justice action through wordpress. To wit:
Both Tallbloke and JeffID received “the following notification from the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division and forwarded by Ryan at WordPress. ClimateAudit is also mentioned yet I’m not certain that Steve Received notice. It seems that the larger paid blogs may not have received any notice. On pdf –WordPress Preservation Request-1“
The notification apparently asks them not to make the information public or else... they may terminate their wordpress account.
This has nothing at all to do with finding a hypothetical hacker.
How would anyone feel knowing that agents may turn up at their home, take all their computers, phones, routers and records, and have a copy of all their emails, their tax records, letters to friends, music, photos, information about family and friends, and their passwords?
The inconvenience of living without their computer, software and everything else would cost potentially thousands but worse, for someone who values their privacy, just the knowledge that so much personal information was in the hands of strangers would be unsettling.
Furthermore, there’s the risk that a single malicious person in the government could “leak” the emails, photos, or letters, medical records and spread them on the internet. These are home offices, so everything is on the computer. It would only take one agent — someone thinking it was “only fair” to release all that information. There’s a perverse logic that though the climategate leaker carefully removed personal emails, and was releasing work related information from a work account, it was somehow “just” to release irrelevant personal information from the accounts of volunteers.
If the establishment was really in the mood to send a signal that blogging is a risky business, what’s next — Nixon style tax audits?
See also Tall Bloke & JeffID
Go Ahead~Press It~I Know You Want To
EPA: Enviromental Justice
Van Jones Marxist Neo-Paganism?
(A Must Post) A Failed Global Warming Prediction in 2005 Shows the Depths of Fear Mongering in the Left’s Secular Eschatology
I got a laugh from this Newsbusters Post:
To give you an idea of the kind of hysterical predictions the global warming crowd have made in recent years, the United Nations in 2005 actually forecast that by the end of the previous decade, there would be 50 million environmental refugees around the world as a result of climate change.
Britain’s Guardian reported October 12, 2005:
Rising sea levels, desertification and shrinking freshwater supplies will create up to 50 million environmental refugees by the end of the decade, experts warn today. Janos Bogardi, director of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University in Bonn, said creeping environmental deterioration already displaced up to 10 million people a year, and the situation would get worse.
“There are well-founded fears that the number of people fleeing untenable environmental conditions may grow exponentially as the world experiences the effects of climate change,” Dr Bogardi said. “This new category of refugee needs to find a place in international agreements. We need to better anticipate support requirements, similar to those of people fleeing other unviable situations.” […]
Hans van Ginkel, UN under-secretary-general and rector of the university, said: “This is a highly complex issue, with global organisations already overwhelmed by the demands of conventionally recognised refugees. However, we should prepare now to define, accept and accommodate this new breed of refugee.”
As Gavin Atkins of the Asian Correspondent noted Monday, the U.N. back in 2005 provided a handy map to identify “places most at risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean.”
Atkins chose to look at census figures for some of these “at risk” locales to see whether the U.N.’s predictions – pun intended – hold water. What he discovered was that far from seeing a population exodus, many of these areas are growing in their number of homo sapiens.
These included the Bahamas, St. Lucia, Seychelles, and the Solomon Islands. Atkins continued:
Meanwhile, far from being places where people are fleeing, no fewer than the top six of the very fastest growing cities in China, Shenzzen, Dongguan, Foshan, Zhuhai, Puning and Jinjiang, are absolutely smack bang within the shaded areas identified as being likely sources of climate refugees.
Similarly, many of the fastest growing cities in the United States also appear within or close to the areas identified by the UNEP as at risk of having climate refugees.
More censuses are due to come in this year, and we await the results for Bangladesh and the Maldives – said to be places most at risk – with interest.
However, a very cursory look at the first available evidence seems to show that the places identified by the UNEP as most at risk of having climate refugees are not only not losing people, they are actually among the fastest growing regions in the world.
Kind of like predicting a team to come in last place at the beginning of the season that ends up winning the Super Bowl, wouldn’t you say?
California-Losing Jobs Because of Unfounded Legislation by Eco-Fascists
This story comes from Big Government and made my jaw drop:
When Dwayne Whitney started his trucking business decades ago he had only one truck. Today he has eighteen and 20 employees. But that’s about to change.
“The State of California says my trucks are killing people,” says Whitney. “What do you say to that?”
In a few years, new air quality regulations approved by the California Air Resources Board will render Whitney’s entire fleet illegal.
“New CARB rules are putting me out of business,” he says.
CARB claims that diesel particulates, a type of pollution emitted from buses and trucks, contributes to 2,000 premature deaths in California each year. But UCLA epidemiologist Dr. James Enstrom says the number should be closer to zero.
In 2005 Enstrom authored an extensive study that found no relationship between diesel particulates and premature deaths. He says his study, as well as other evidence that agrees with it, have been ignored by an agency bent on passing ever more stringent regulations regardless of their effect on California’s economy.
Enstrom blew the whistle on CARB for, among other things, failing to publicize that the lead author of the study that was used to justify the new regulations falsified his education history (he purchased his PhD from an online diploma mill).
But UCLA didn’t come to Enstrom’s defense. In fact, officials informed him that, after 34 years at the university, he was out of a job.
“The environmental regulation machine in powerful in California,” says Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is defending Enstrom in the fight to keep his job. “When Dr. Enstrom went up against that machine he was retaliated against.”
A hearing that begins on April 4 will determine whether Dr. Enstrom keeps his job, and the final decision rests with UCLA Chancellor Gene Block.
Says Kissel, “If Dr. Enstrom loses his job because he exercised his academic freedom, then it’s a message to other researchers that you’d better not rock the boat because you might be next.”
Eco-Nuts Killing Jobs
Dan Sparks hit one out of the park:
The enviros have succeeded in destroying both the environment and jobs with their radical legislative successes. First, it was their complete stranglehold on our nation’s energy policy: no new nuclear plants, a complete ban on exploring for natural gas domestically or for drilling for oil near our coasts. This forced us into the more hazardous and more expensive deep water drilling. This time they’ve succeeded with the outlawing of the lowly light bulb. The incandescent light bulb, the one Thomas Alva Edison invented in 1879, will be put to death in the US due to federal energy regulations. A law passed quietly in 2007 will be phased in next year with the final sales of incandescents occurring in 2014. Don’t blame Obama, this was done under George W. Bush’s watch. Money QuoteFirst, we ban imports of lead in Chinese toys and now this: forcing Americans to buy toxic light bulbs from the Chinese at the expenses of American jobs and consumer safety?
The liberals, who always cry for “choice”, don’t want to give the American consumer choice in choosing light bulbs. They’re apparently only pro-choice with baby killing. Otherwise, they will tell you just how to live your life, thank you. The banning of the incandescent light bulb meant that General Electric, the largest maker of light bulbs, had to close all their plants in the US. The last factory closed in Winchester, VA. in September of last year. The jobs are now all in China. They’re the largest makers of the compact fluorescent bulbs, CFLs. They’re not made here, in part, because they’re too hazardous.
Ironically, the CFL’s contain mercury, a highly toxic substance. A broken bulb can create an environmental nightmare and according to Scientific American at least one case of mercury poisoning has been linked to these bulbs. Toxic cleanup crews may be necessary to contain a broken light bulb. I guess this is what the enviros mean by creating more “green jobs”. Cleaning up the mess that they’ve foisted on the American people through advocacy of their radical legislation. First, we ban imports of lead in Chinese toys and now this: forcing Americans to buy toxic light bulbs from the Chinese at the expenses of American jobs and consumer safety? What kind of insanity is this?
[….]
Fortunately, there’s hope on the horizon. The new chairman of the House Energy Committee, Michigan Republican Rep. Fred Upton, promised to re-examine this ban on the incandescent. Let’s just hope Representatives Fred Upton and Ted Poe along with their GOP house can keep the lights on for us.
The problem comes when a bulb breaks. Mercury escapes as vapor that can be inhaled and as a fine powder that can settle into carpet and other textiles. At least one case of mercury poisoning has been linked to fluorescents: A 1987 article in Pediatrics describes a 23-month-old who suffered weight loss and severe rashes after a carton of eight-foot (2.4-meter) tubular bulbs broke in a play area.
GOP Takeover of Congress = Death Knell of the Species (Chomsky)
GATEWAYPUNDIT posts this video of Noam Chomsky:
Following the link to THE DAILY CALLER, Chomsky is referring to the scare tactics of the left while using scare tactics to describe the right:
The problem? The new members of Congress aren’t on board with the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
“One of the reasons is because they’re global warming deniers,” he said. “Almost all – that means the powerful House committees, like science and technology and so on, are in hands of people who think there’s nothing to it – or at least claim that they think that, but what they actually think is another story.”
He pointed toward the United States’ stature in the world as to why it means the entire downfall of humanity.
“If this was happening in some small country, in you know maybe Monaco or something, it wouldn’t matter much, but when it’s happening in the richest, most powerful country in the world – it’s a danger to the survival of the species,” Chomsky said. “Nobody else is going to do much if the United States doesn’t do a lot, not just some but take the lead. So we’re essentially saying let’s kiss each other goodbye.”