Ipsos MORI polled 1,039 adults in Great Britain and found that 6 out of 10 agreed that "many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change." Four out of ten agree that they "sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say." About 20% answered each question with a refusal to commit response. After years of much worse global warming propaganda in Great Britain even than we are subjected to here in the United States, the British public clearly has major doubts.
Many people did not want to place restrictions on their lifestyles. A small minority claimed to be willing to make significant and radical changes in their lifestyle, such as driving and flying less. More than half did not have confidence in international and British leaders to tackle climate change. Two-thirds want the government to do more, but nearly as many said they saw green taxes simply as 'stealth' taxes. The tax doubters are the perceptive ones.
The Global Warming Alarmists had hoped that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report last year would finally convince the Britons of the Global Warming Crisis. It is said that 2,500 scientists found a 90% chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gases. Actually, many scientists making contributions to the scientific review portion of the report do not agree with the summary portion of the report written largely by politicians and a few hand-picked scientists. Many critical scientists dropped out of the UN working groups in protest over how their scientific work and assessments were used in previous reports. Some of the public have doubts due to seeing the documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle" on TV and due to such books as that of Lord Lawson, a former Chancellor, who questions the consensus on climate change.
This is all very bad news for those in the UK government who aim to cut greenhouse emissions by 20% over the next 12 years. It is not looking as though the British people are on-board for such personal deprivation for such a dubious rationale.
The socialists have turned to environmentalism as a means to acquire power after their boast that they could provide everyone more worldly goods fell on its face and Capitalism emerged as the clear victor for providing people with more food, better clothing, better housing, better health care, more interesting jobs and entertainment, and a wider variety of personal choices. The only self-consistent collectivist environmentalist is one who wishes to return man to the status of the Noble Savage. For the moment, they are using scientists to provide a rationale for their grab for power. They are buying many of them with generous research money and a huge amount of media attention. As a result, many scientists are playing the Global Warming alarmist game with them. This is a close parallel to the old socialist technique of paying Capitalists for the rope that the socialist plans to use to hang the Capitalist with. When the public catches on that many scientists are leading them down a road of personal deprivation for reasons that are not sound, the public will lose its regard for science. The socialist environmentalists will have used the avarice and desire for attention of many scientists to totally discredit them and science itself.
Once the socialists have the power provided by the claim that they are saving the earth from the depredations of man, they will have no use for science and scientists. It will be enough to lead men suffused with superstition, teased by rumors, and fed and dreaming up conspiracies. Science will only cause problems in this quest to return man to the state of the Noble Savage as it approaches its goal. For now, bribed scientists are a tool to help the socialists to power. Later they are expendable. No, they are an impediment to be eliminated. These scientists have been only too willing to hand the socialists the rope to hang them with. The Capitalist society has been the great provider for science as both have evolved from the philosophy of the Enlightenment. As the socialists make further progress in destroying Capitalism, its destruction will entail the death of science.
Just as the production of goods and services flourishes in a free market place, so do ideas and technical developments prosper in a free market. Socialism is clearly the antithesis of the free market for goods and services. What people understand less well is that ideas and new inventions depend just as much upon the freedom of individuals to make their own choices and to pursue their own happiness. The market place of ideas must be as free as that for goods and services if ideas are to be explored and understanding is to be realized in the life of man.
As a part of the socialist agenda against Capitalism and the market place of ideas, the federal government scientist Dr. James Hanson of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies has called for using the courts to prosecute those politicians who deny the idea that man has caused Global Warming and that this is a disaster. Dr. Hanson is one of the media's favorite alarmists. Another prominent scientist alarmist had already made the same call. This scientist is Dr. David Suzuki, a Canadian scientist who became a producer of environmentalist documentaries and is well-known to the watchers of the CBC. Apparently scientists of the socialist environmentalist persuasion are highly inclined to the elimination of free inquiry and freedom of conscience. This tendency is broadly based in the postmodernist, multicultural, and environmentalist fascist socialist worldview.
Thanks to Robert Bidinotto for directing my attention to the article on the poll of the British people and to the comments of Dr. Hanson and Dr. Suzuki.
Showing posts with label Noble Savage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Noble Savage. Show all posts
24 June 2008
20 June 2008
The Fallacy of Man the Vicious Animal Killer
A great many Americans believe that we are greatly endangering the animals of the United States by virtue of our high technology, mobile, and reasonably comfortable lifestyle. They believe that we have pushed those other animals of North America, which we commonly simply refer to as the animals, as though we were not animals ourselves, to the verge of extinction. Where they are not almost extinct, their survival has become more brutish and nasty than ever before. Cities now cover the continent and there is nowhere for wild animals to live anymore. We build roads everywhere and our mining, lumbering, and oil and gas fields are destroying animal habitats everywhere outside the cities. We have no right to deprive these other animals of their place in the environment and ought to return to the status of the Noble Savage in order to claim no more resources than it is our right to do.
This flies in the face of both simple everyday observation and the observations of many scientists who have studied a wide variety of animals. Since those scientists who do publish or broadcast alarmist claims of the deaths and extinctions, usually possible future extinctions, of the animal kingdom's denizens get far more publicity than do those who report that the animals are holding their own in most cases, let us concentrate on what we ourselves see, if we are observant at all. Certainly the states of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio ought to be among the worst states for animals if they are fairing badly in the onslaught of habitat destruction by voracious humans. I speak of these states because I hear news accounts more regularly about the deer, raccoon, fox, and rabbit populations in this area of the country than in others. I also travel about in them more than in other states over the time period since 1971.
In the 1970s, I lived in Cleveland. In Cleveland, not in one of its bedroom communities. We had rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons in the neighborhood on a regular basis. In 1980 we moved moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC suburb. In our yard we see squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, mice, moles, and voles. In the woods along the Paint Branch Creek a few hundred yards away, I constantly see deer, as I did last weekend on a bike ride. I have also seen opossums there. In the woods near College Park, home of the University of Maryland, I have seen many raccoons. On my drive to my laboratory in Columbia, MD in the Baltimore - Washington corridor, I constantly see deer and foxes, both silver and red. Of course, I also smell skunks with great frequency. I have seen muskrats on the drive to work. I have had both skunks and foxes in front of my laboratory. I just returned from a bike ride along a bike path through a large residential neighborhood in Columbia and I saw three deer on this ride. When we moved here in 1980, the number of deer was starting to grow and their numbers were way up in the late 1980s. It has only been in the last 10 years that I have made frequent sightings of foxes.
On a trip to Virginia, I saw a coyote in a park east of the Appallachian Mountains. On trips in Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia, I am constantly seeing deer. Twice in Maryland, deer have run into family cars. Just over a week ago, a deer in Rochester, New York ran into my daughter Katie's car. Everywhere we hear and see the evidence of a burgeoning deer population causing more and more car accidents. Yet the deer populations continue to grow. Apparently, as we have become more wealthy and more people move to metropolitan areas, we hunt less and the hunting is apparently more of a factor in decreasing deer populations than is their foolish tendency to run into cars. Perhaps another factor favoring deer population growth in many areas outside the growing metropolitan areas was the long term reduction in the amount of land being farmed. In much of the country, land farmed in the late 1800s and early 1900s has reverted to forest and woodlands. But this has not been a necessary factor in the increased deer or fox populations, since they are growing even in the face of the growth of the Washington - Baltimore high population corridor.
Once upon a time, most Americans did not want to see foxes. They worried that the foxes would eat their chickens, cats, and small dogs. Nowadays, people are clearly more tolerant of them and even of coyotes, whose population is also growing. Reports are that puma and black bear populations are also growing. Apparently, when people are not dirt poor and when farms are better equipped to provide their farm animals with more protected housing, more and more people are not driven to exterminate carnivorous animals or to worry quite so much that the deer might eat a few ears of corn. Generally farmers are making very good money these days.
Maybe humans are not so voracious after all. Maybe they become less so as their lives become more secure and they feel less threatened. Maybe they even acquire some significant joy in seeing other creatures thrive and living well. I do. Yet, we see this happening even in cities and metropolitan areas. If this is the case, should we be so ready to believe that drilling for oil and then producing it and delivering it by pipeline is going to kill off the caribou? Well, that experiment has now been done. The results are in. The caribou herds are growing, not dying off. Similarly, we hear that some future possible few degrees of warming is going to decimate the polar bears. Well, the warming of the 1970s to 1998 did not do that. In fact, the polar bears did just fine. For them, it is not swings of a few degrees of temperature that matter so much as how much they are hunted. Rather the same situation as with the deer or foxes and coyotes.
There is no reason to prevent the exploration, drilling, and production of oil and gas on the Federally owned lands that dominate most of the western states or of the lands and waters of the northern areas of Alaska or anywhere else. We can easily both find and produce oil and have a habitat very suitable for wild animals. Apparently, the animals are more adaptable and sturdy than many give them credit for being. In fact, some animals just love oil fields and pipelines. In the late 1960s I worked in oil fields and on pipelines in the summers to earn money for college. In the oil fields along the south bank of the Red River in Texas, the copperheads and scorpions just loved the pumphouses as a place to live. Along the pipeline in north central Oklahoma and another in west Texas that I worked on, the prairie dogs loved to establish colonies straddling the pipelines. Why? Because the pipelines are heated in the winter to allow the oil to flow better. Prairie dogs are not fools. They like warmth in the winter. Working on the pipelines you had to be careful however. Sometimes, rattlesnakes by the several dozen would move into prairie dog colonies. They really like the ready-made holes and the warmth also.
Many scientists can be bought with research money, and/or with fame, and/or with political correctness incentives. Some courageous scientists will buck such political delusions, but many non-scientists may not be able to or inclined to read their published work and make a critical analysis of it for themselves. However, most Americans do evidence significant analytical capability in their own line of work and this has made them the most productive workers in the world. So, when you see yourself that so many animals are flourishing, as you must see, or smell in the case of the ubiqutious skunk, trust in your own ability to evaluate the claims that man is eradicating the animals and appropriating all the resources of the planet to his own needs and leaving nothing for the other animals. This politically correct thesis is clearly nonsense.
So, do not buy the line that man must not drill for oil and gas in the Federal lands of the west or in the north slope of Alaska. Do not accept the idea that drilling in the oceans will pollute all the beaches and kill the fish. Actually, the fish thrive around the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Do not believe the nonsense when environmentalist radicals claim that the caribou will be eradicated by a single pipeline across Alaska or even by several. Use your common sense. Do not go gently into the night and the dank cave that those who worship the Noble Savage would thrust you into. Demand your use of energy so man can continue to be nobly productive and creative in building a world ever better for man and also for the animals who seem to be thriving even as we thrive.
This flies in the face of both simple everyday observation and the observations of many scientists who have studied a wide variety of animals. Since those scientists who do publish or broadcast alarmist claims of the deaths and extinctions, usually possible future extinctions, of the animal kingdom's denizens get far more publicity than do those who report that the animals are holding their own in most cases, let us concentrate on what we ourselves see, if we are observant at all. Certainly the states of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio ought to be among the worst states for animals if they are fairing badly in the onslaught of habitat destruction by voracious humans. I speak of these states because I hear news accounts more regularly about the deer, raccoon, fox, and rabbit populations in this area of the country than in others. I also travel about in them more than in other states over the time period since 1971.
In the 1970s, I lived in Cleveland. In Cleveland, not in one of its bedroom communities. We had rabbits, squirrels, and raccoons in the neighborhood on a regular basis. In 1980 we moved moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC suburb. In our yard we see squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks, mice, moles, and voles. In the woods along the Paint Branch Creek a few hundred yards away, I constantly see deer, as I did last weekend on a bike ride. I have also seen opossums there. In the woods near College Park, home of the University of Maryland, I have seen many raccoons. On my drive to my laboratory in Columbia, MD in the Baltimore - Washington corridor, I constantly see deer and foxes, both silver and red. Of course, I also smell skunks with great frequency. I have seen muskrats on the drive to work. I have had both skunks and foxes in front of my laboratory. I just returned from a bike ride along a bike path through a large residential neighborhood in Columbia and I saw three deer on this ride. When we moved here in 1980, the number of deer was starting to grow and their numbers were way up in the late 1980s. It has only been in the last 10 years that I have made frequent sightings of foxes.
On a trip to Virginia, I saw a coyote in a park east of the Appallachian Mountains. On trips in Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia, I am constantly seeing deer. Twice in Maryland, deer have run into family cars. Just over a week ago, a deer in Rochester, New York ran into my daughter Katie's car. Everywhere we hear and see the evidence of a burgeoning deer population causing more and more car accidents. Yet the deer populations continue to grow. Apparently, as we have become more wealthy and more people move to metropolitan areas, we hunt less and the hunting is apparently more of a factor in decreasing deer populations than is their foolish tendency to run into cars. Perhaps another factor favoring deer population growth in many areas outside the growing metropolitan areas was the long term reduction in the amount of land being farmed. In much of the country, land farmed in the late 1800s and early 1900s has reverted to forest and woodlands. But this has not been a necessary factor in the increased deer or fox populations, since they are growing even in the face of the growth of the Washington - Baltimore high population corridor.
Once upon a time, most Americans did not want to see foxes. They worried that the foxes would eat their chickens, cats, and small dogs. Nowadays, people are clearly more tolerant of them and even of coyotes, whose population is also growing. Reports are that puma and black bear populations are also growing. Apparently, when people are not dirt poor and when farms are better equipped to provide their farm animals with more protected housing, more and more people are not driven to exterminate carnivorous animals or to worry quite so much that the deer might eat a few ears of corn. Generally farmers are making very good money these days.
Maybe humans are not so voracious after all. Maybe they become less so as their lives become more secure and they feel less threatened. Maybe they even acquire some significant joy in seeing other creatures thrive and living well. I do. Yet, we see this happening even in cities and metropolitan areas. If this is the case, should we be so ready to believe that drilling for oil and then producing it and delivering it by pipeline is going to kill off the caribou? Well, that experiment has now been done. The results are in. The caribou herds are growing, not dying off. Similarly, we hear that some future possible few degrees of warming is going to decimate the polar bears. Well, the warming of the 1970s to 1998 did not do that. In fact, the polar bears did just fine. For them, it is not swings of a few degrees of temperature that matter so much as how much they are hunted. Rather the same situation as with the deer or foxes and coyotes.
There is no reason to prevent the exploration, drilling, and production of oil and gas on the Federally owned lands that dominate most of the western states or of the lands and waters of the northern areas of Alaska or anywhere else. We can easily both find and produce oil and have a habitat very suitable for wild animals. Apparently, the animals are more adaptable and sturdy than many give them credit for being. In fact, some animals just love oil fields and pipelines. In the late 1960s I worked in oil fields and on pipelines in the summers to earn money for college. In the oil fields along the south bank of the Red River in Texas, the copperheads and scorpions just loved the pumphouses as a place to live. Along the pipeline in north central Oklahoma and another in west Texas that I worked on, the prairie dogs loved to establish colonies straddling the pipelines. Why? Because the pipelines are heated in the winter to allow the oil to flow better. Prairie dogs are not fools. They like warmth in the winter. Working on the pipelines you had to be careful however. Sometimes, rattlesnakes by the several dozen would move into prairie dog colonies. They really like the ready-made holes and the warmth also.
Many scientists can be bought with research money, and/or with fame, and/or with political correctness incentives. Some courageous scientists will buck such political delusions, but many non-scientists may not be able to or inclined to read their published work and make a critical analysis of it for themselves. However, most Americans do evidence significant analytical capability in their own line of work and this has made them the most productive workers in the world. So, when you see yourself that so many animals are flourishing, as you must see, or smell in the case of the ubiqutious skunk, trust in your own ability to evaluate the claims that man is eradicating the animals and appropriating all the resources of the planet to his own needs and leaving nothing for the other animals. This politically correct thesis is clearly nonsense.
So, do not buy the line that man must not drill for oil and gas in the Federal lands of the west or in the north slope of Alaska. Do not accept the idea that drilling in the oceans will pollute all the beaches and kill the fish. Actually, the fish thrive around the oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Do not believe the nonsense when environmentalist radicals claim that the caribou will be eradicated by a single pipeline across Alaska or even by several. Use your common sense. Do not go gently into the night and the dank cave that those who worship the Noble Savage would thrust you into. Demand your use of energy so man can continue to be nobly productive and creative in building a world ever better for man and also for the animals who seem to be thriving even as we thrive.
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