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Thursday 17 May 2012

Recommended Reading

I apologize for not being so active recently. I know how much this blog means to a lot of people, but I've had a bit of a hangover for the last couple of months.

Anyhow, there are some other excellent writers out there. In particular, I recommend this defense of the rational scientific public discourse:

Joe Bast’s Response to Scholars Feeling Pressure After Attacks on Heartland.

 Joe Bast responds to critics after the - as I see it - rather innocent billboard campaign showing that some leading murderous psychopats are also leading global warming alarmists. Some choice quotes:
Almost alone among think tanks, we focus on communicating with people who do not already agree with us. We rely on research and reason, not rhetoric and emotion, and still do.
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Finally, regarding the billboard, after 15 years of being the target of vicious ad hominem attacks, we decided to punch back instead of stand back. Our billboard was factual: The Unabomber was motivated by concern over man-made global warming to do the terrible crimes he committed. He still believes in global warming. We simply put his picture on a billboard, pointed out the “inconvenient truth,” and asked, “do you?”
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The mainstream media, which has tolerated and even promoted people who call global warming skeptics “Nazis” and “traitors’ and called for the death penalty for skeptics, now pretends to be “outraged” by this billboard. We took it down immediately and admitted that it was in poor taste and a mistake, but they continue to promote madmen on the other side of the issue including Michael Mann and Bill McKibben, and hypocritically pound on us for our “ethical lapse.” This is fake indignation, being staged by ideological extremists as part of the ongoing attack on us and our donors. It is not sincere, it is not accurate, and it is not ethical.
I also recommend the National Anxiety Center blog by Alan Caruba, who by the way is one of Heartland's experts. Alan has some great pieces.

Climate Nazis
What is it with the “warmists”, Al Gore and his clones who keep insisting the Earth is warming, that too much carbon dioxide (CO2) will be the death of us, and that we have to immediately stop burning “fossil fuels” if we are to save the planet? They are the most relentless liars on the face of the planet.
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Antihumanism has been around a long time. As Dr. Zubin points out, it has taken the form of “Darwinism, eugenics, German militarism, Nazism, xenophobia, the population control movement, environmentalism, technophobia, and most recently, the incredibly demented climatophobic movement, which seeks to justify mass human sacrifice for the purpose of weather control.” Al Gore, James Hansen, and even President Obama’s science advisor, John Holden, are card-carrying members of this cult. In 1971 Holden co-authored “Global Ecology” with Paul Ehrlich, famed for his 1968 book, “The Population Bomb.” They wrote “when a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later, it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the ‘carrying capacity’ of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet.” So you need to understand that you are no better than a fruit fly and you need to die in order to avoid depleting the planet’s supply of food and its energy resources. God knows I would like to ignore or—better still—never have to hear from these climate Nazis, but that is not going to happen so long as The New York Times, the United Nations, and a host of others keep repeating their lethal lies.
Playing God with "Endangered Species"
The answer is that the ESA was never about endangered species. It is a blunt instrument of environmental groups and those within the federal government to delay development anywhere in the nation. Almost 1,400 species on the government’s list are listed as “threatened” and none of them can be expected to avoid extinction, a natural process that cannot be impeded by human intervention.
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The only species that is endangered is the human species as environmental organizations continue to deny access and use of American land needed for growing crops, raising livestock, mining and drilling for energy resources, and building any new improvements including hospitals and other properties that would contribute to the welfare of the human inhabitants of planet Earth. Not only is the ESA a huge bureaucratic failure, it is testimony to the arrogance and evil intent of the environmental movement to harm any form of economic activity and growth in America. It is their way of playing God despite millions of years in which the extinction of species has been part of life on the planet. If dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, the ESA would declare them threatened and endangered.