Climate alarmists throw temper tantrum, refuse to debate skeptics

August 28, 2018 by Michael Bastasch, 8 Comments 

• Sixty global warming “campaigners” signed a letter calling on the media to keep skeptics out of their coverage.
• In their public letter, signatories said they would no longer appear in the media alongside their critics.
• “We are no longer willing to lend our credibility to debates over whether or not climate change is real.”

Dozens of politicians, environmentalists, scientists and other global warming activists signed a letter announcing their refusal to take part in public debates with people critical of their global warming claims — in the name of science, of course................“As campaigners and thinkers who are led by science and the precautionary principle, and who wish to debate the real and vital issues arising from human-triggered climate change, we will not assist in creating the impression that climate denial should be taken seriously by lending credence to its proponents, by entertaining ideas that lack any basis in fact,” they wrote.............Refusing to debate those skeptical of catastrophic global warming is nothing new. A similar trend emerged a few years ago that included environmentalists and prominent scientists refusing to debate global warming skeptics in the media............To Read More....

My Take - In the article it's noted by one of those who oppose all the climate change hysteria as saying those who've signed this document about refusing to debate any climate "skeptic" are doing so because they're unqualified to do so. I find this whole idea of accepted "science" is true across the board, including pest control. 

I've asked the trade journals, the NPMA, and anyone else who has the ability to set up a debate to allow me to publicly debate anyone from the pest control industry who disagrees with me about IPM, Green Pest Control, DDT, or any of the many other issues I take as a stand on in defense of our industry.   

 

Je défie!  Le gant est jeté!
 

First Yellowstone-area grizzly hunt in 40 years blocked by federal judge

By Laura Zuckerman, Reuters August 30, 2018

 

A federal judge in Montana on Thursday issued a court order temporarily blocking the first trophy hunts of Yellowstone-area grizzly bears in more than 40 years, siding with native American groups and environmentalists seeking to restore the animals' protected status.

 

The 14-day restraining order by U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen in Missoula, Montana, came two days before Wyoming and Idaho were scheduled to open licensed grizzly hunts allowing as many as 23 bears in the two states to be shot and killed for sport.

 

Groups opposing the hunts had sought a restraining order while waiting for the judge to rule on the larger question of whether the federal government should return Endangered Species Act safeguards to grizzlies in the greater Yellowstone region......To Read More....

 

My Take  - Another good reason for eliminating the Endangered Species Act. 

Maine DOT denies request from PETA to put up memorial for lobsters killed in crash

by WGME August 30th 2018

 

The Maine Department of Transportation has denied a request from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to build a 5-foot tombstone memorial where lobsters may have died after a crash on Route 1 in Brunswick last week.  Brunswick Police say a Cozy Harbor Seafood truck, carrying nearly 70 crates of lobster, rolled over and crushed several of them.............. “Countless sensitive crustaceans experienced an agonizing death when this truck rolled over and their bodies came crashing down onto the highway" PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman said. "PETA hopes to pay tribute to these individuals who didn't want to die with a memorial urging people to help prevent future suffering by keeping lobsters and all other animals off their plates." .......To Read More....

My Take - Sensitive crustaceans?  They left out tasty sensitive crustaceans! And how did the DOT respond? They denied their request because, "Route 1 in Brunswick is a “controlled-access highway,” which means they prohibit signs, and in this case a tombstone, because of safety concerns."

How about just telling PETA "no" because they're nuts?

Viewpoint: Public’s support for Canadian neonicotinoid ban obscures bigger threats to bee health

Health Canada held a news conference to explain why it was banning neonicotinoid insecticides.

Robert Arnason | Western Producer | August 29, 2018

Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency proposed a three- to five-year “phase out” of two neonicotinoids: clothianidin, a Bayer product and thiamethoxam, a Syngenta insecticide.

The first question from the media was telling. “What took so long? We’ve heard, for years, about the effects of (these) pesticides on pollinators and other insects,” Eric Atkins of the Globe and Mail asked in a tone suggesting the federal government should have banned the insecticides years ago.

Questions like that illustrate the gap that exists between the general public’s opinion and the opinion many in the agriculture sector have about the harm caused by neonic pesticides ….To Read More....
 
My Take - This is another example of how the lunatic left has dominated the media and government in Canada.  As for them banning neonics....good!  That makes it better for American farmers.  Make no mistake about this - if Canada wasn't sitting right next to a nation that's been - from it's very begining - a natural capital generator and the biggest economy the world has ever known - it would be a third rate crap hole, just like Europe is fast working to become.  All of which will be good for the U.S. as it won't be long before companies will be moving here or coming back to the only stable economic and political entity that will soon be left in the world.  The U.S. 

The Bretton Woods era is over, and Canada will only survive because it next to the U.S. 

When is it time for a scientist to call out peers over questionable research?

Ingfei Chen | Genetic Literacy Project | August 30, 2018

Recently, I received an email from a wildlife researcher — I’ll use the pseudonym Scientist A — who wanted to anonymously seek advice on a professional quandary. This researcher believes that two colleagues are presenting data on a controversial wildlife species in a misleading way. The dataset now spans roughly four decades, but when the method for counting the critters changed in the 1990s, the population census leapt by an unprecedented amount.

While Scientist A says the switch in survey methodology created the illusion of a spike in the animal’s population growth, the colleagues — whom we’ll refer to as Scientists B and C — portrayed the increase as a biological reality.

Scientist A further notes that although their older research reports clearly mentioned the shift to the newer census method, the more recent studies by Scientists B and C haven’t acknowledged it.

That includes a new report this year that ignored other published work pointing out the importance of the change in methods. As a result, Scientist A is now pondering whether the right move is to write another commentary and continue discussing the issue publicly in the literature — or demand retraction of recent papers by Scientists B and C. “Is this a case for scientific debate,” Scientist A wondered in the email message, “or a case of misconduct?”..........To Read More.....

The Insanity Continues

By Dr. Jay Lehr and Rich Kozlovich, Orginally posted on Sunday, June 12, 2011

Whenever the EPA or the green movement uses the term, “it’s for the children” as a justification for their legislative and regulatory actions, it is time to look deeper. First, the EPA banned DDT. And yes….it was a ban. It is true that there were exceptions written into the ban, and yes, it is true that this ban in the U.S. was not incumbent on other nations, and yes it is true that it was not a worldwide ban…..on paper. However, so much economic pressure was placed on countries that didn’t ban it outright that it became a de facto ban in all but a few nations.

The cost to humanity has been staggering as a result. It is estimated that there are up to one million deaths from malaria each year. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Each year approximately 500 million people (some believe this number is underestimated by WHO) are infected each year with up to “365 million cases of malaria in Africa alone in 2002”. As a result the cost in diminished lives has been far reaching. Children, who are impacted by malaria the most, will have serious development problems that will affect them for the rest of their lives, the lives of their family members and their societies as a whole. This is an economic burden that is not easily overcome when the numbers are so high. In many areas of the world there isn’t a family that hasn’t lost loved ones to malaria.

Now the EPA has decided on a program of rodenticide elimination. I know that it will mostly prevent unlicensed consumers from using the most effective rodenticides, but do we really believe this is the end of their meddling? The green activist’s ultimate goal is the elimination of rodenticides. Can any knowledgeable reasonable person believe this will end here?

They cite poison control figures of 12 to 15 thousand “reports” about rodenticides. What does that mean? Does that mean that up to 15 thousand people were sickened or died from rodenticides? No, it doesn’t. If you just call a poison control center and ask about rodenticides you go on the list. The fact that there are no figures listing anyone being sickened or dying from accidental exposures indicates that the actual number is amazingly small or they would have cited it. In a nation of three hundred million people where millions of rodenticide applications are being made each year by licensed applicators and homeowners that is an amazing safety record.

 What about the number of “reports” regarding household cleaners? Fifteen years ago or so when this was first becoming a major issue it was noted that “reports” about bleach was far greater. True, there is a per ratio issue here, but the fact that “reports” are recorded by the poison control center doesn’t justify these actions by the EPA.

At pest control conferences I have heard it said that most human poisonings from rodenticides were self induced in failed attempts to commit suicide. They usually fail because it takes a lot of rodenticide to kill a person.

This will definitely impact those at the lower end of the economic scale. Just as the EPA has created the regulatory nightmare that has caused this plague of bed bugs that is spreading around the nation; especially for the lowest income groups and their children, they are now potentially creating a situation where this same group will not be able to defend their children from rats and mice easily, effectively or inexpensively.

As for claims that this will cause the Black Death to return; well, right now, at this moment in time, a statement such as that might be viewed as overkill, but it isn’t irrational nor is it unreasonable to state it. We have cases of the plague every year in the American Southwest. There is a difference between the bubonic plague and the Black Death. The Black Death is a more virulent strain of the bubonic plague. Is it possible for this less virulent strain to become more virulent? Yes. About twenty years ago or so researchers noted that there was only a slight genetic difference between these two strains, and it was possible to induce the more virulent Black Death strain in the modern strain. Did they believe it was possible for the plague to become more virulent on its own? Yes…they did! Rodenticides and their extensive use have been one of the great success stories for humanity.

Let’s hope that the EPA stops doing things “for the children”, because much of what they have done hasn’t been so much “for the children” as it has been “to the children”, because it has been the children who have suffered the most.

In Alaska, Getting Mumps Is Preferable to Getting Vaccinated

By Alex Berezow — August 23, 2018 @ American Council on Science and Health

The MMR vaccine protects against three viral diseases: measles, mumps, and rubella, hence it's name.

We have already seen the devastating consequences of people choosing to forgo vaccination. Measles cases are occurring all over the country. Most infamously, a measles outbreak occurred in 2014-15 at Disneyland, the happiest place on Earth. Currently, Europe is experiencing a massive measles outbreak, which has infected more than 41,000 people and killed 37. Amazingly, Italy has made it even easier for parents to skip out on vaccines.

A new report from the CDC indicates just how incomprehensibly stubborn and stupid our society has become.

In May 2017, somebody from out-of-state visited Anchorage, Alaska. This person brought along a little friend, known as the mumps virus. Soon after, seven more people had mumps, so the Alaska Section of Epidemiology reminded all Alaskans to be sure to be up-to-date on their MMR vaccinations.

Did they listen? Of course not. By mid-November, there were 56 cases of mumps. Once again, Alaska's public health officials told people to get vaccinated, especially if they hang around large groups of people. Specifically, they suggested the MMR3 vaccine. (MMR3 is the third dose of the MMR vaccine; typically, children receive two doses, assuming their parents aren't anti-vaxxers.)
Did their warning work? No. By the end of December, the number of cases had grown to 138, and all of Anchorage was then recommended to get the MMR3 shot. Surely, surely, people paid attention to that... right?

Wrong. By the end of February, there were 247 cases of mumps. Exasperated, Alaska recommended that all citizens receive the MMR3 jab. You can probably guess what happened next. As of July 31, nearly 400 people have been infected.

For the FOMO crowd, fret not. Almost certainly, mumps will be coming to a community near you.

Source: Tiffany A, Shannon D, Mamtchueng W, Castrodale L, McLaughlin J. "Notes from the Field: Mumps Outbreak — Alaska, May 2017-July 2018." MMWR 67 (33): 940-941. Published: 24-Aug-2018. DOI: 10.15585/mmwr.mm6733a6
 

Who's the Cleanest of Them All

Stephen Moore  Aug 21, 2018

Take a wild guess what country is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? No, no, no, no, no and no.

The answer to that question is the U.S. of A. Wow! How can that be? This must be a misprint. Fake news. America never ratified the Kyoto Treaty some two decades ago. We never enacted a carbon tax. We don't have a cap-and-trade carbon emission program. That environmental villain Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accord that was signed by almost the entire rest of the civilized world.

Yet the latest world climate report from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy finds that in 2017, America reduced its carbon emissions by 0.5 percent, the most of all major countries. That's especially impressive given that our economy grew by nearly 3 percent -- so we had more growth and less pollution -- the best of all worlds. The major reason for the reduced pollution levels is the shale oil and gas revolution that is transitioning the world to cheap and clean natural gas for electric power generation.

Meanwhile, as our emissions fell, the pollution levels rose internationally and by a larger amount than in previous years. So much for the rest of the world going green.........So there you have it. The countries in the Paris climate accord have broken almost every promise they've made and the nation (the U.S.) that hasn't signed the treaty is doing more than any other nation to reduce global warming............To Read More....

Science and Environmental Litigation

By Chuck Dinerstein — August 21, 2018 @ American Council on Science and Health

The judiciary frequently acts in its role as a counterbalance to executive and legislative action and non-action. A new article in Nature Climate Change finds patterns of climate change litigation identified in the Sabin Center for Climate Change database, a part of Columbia’s School of Law. As it turns out, there are some instructive patterns, and we begin to see the role of Science – with a capital S.

The Who and Why of Litigation

Who files these cases? - Environmental non-government organizations were the largest plaintiff, initiating 42% of cases, industry followed at 30%, with city, state and federal government involved in about 11%.  The Sabin database contained 838 cases from 1990 to 2016.

• 46% dealt with atmospheric environmental issues especially coal-fired power plants
• 8.5% dealt with energy efficiency or renewables
• 4% addressed water quality
• 8% raised concerns about biodiversity

The courts were asked to address the reduction in greenhouse gases, to assess responsibility for environmental impacts and as a way to change both corporate behavior and public debate (the latter presumably through policy).

For those interested in keeping some form of score, in those cases involving atmospheric environmental issues, the courts more often sided with the “anti-regulators.” On the other hand, “pro-regulatory” litigants won more often when the cases involved issues of energy. And whether it was an NGO or an industrial group acting as plaintiff, they were generally less successful than the defendants. The authors felt that this might reflect both weaker cases and the courts more often deferring to the judgment of state officials.

The Who and the Where

To file a court case, the plaintiff must have “standing,” a legal term that establishes that the plaintiff has suffered some injury [1] or that there is a causal relationship between the defendant’s actions and those injuries. In establishing standing, NGOs often found that collaborating with local stakeholders was helpful. If the NGO could not demonstrate “their” injury, then an alliance with a local community group who had suffered injury got them a seat at the plaintiff’s table. These collaborations were not limited to the NGOs; industrial litigants found that joining forces with other large business within the sector with also in their interest. The authors suggest that these collaborations helped to demonstrate a larger group of concerned citizens, helped to mask disagreements among the stakeholders and in some cases gain otherwise unavailable legitimacy.

The where of litigation is referred to as venue - the jurisdiction in which the case is heard. The plaintiff’s goal is to identify the most favorable court for hearing their case. Delaware is home to many corporations because its corporate laws frequently favor their concerns, which has resulted to more corporate litigation in that state which in turn creates a large body of case law to serve as precedence. California is a more favored venue when statutory concerns are pivotal, because of their strict environmental rulings and the case laws that have flowed from those decision. And in both instances, prior case law often provides a sense of how the courts may act.

The role of science

Unsurprisingly, both NGOs and industry felt that scientific evidence was an essential factor in the court’s ruling. Equally unsurprising was that the litigants offered differing evidence and used it in differing ways. The “pro-regulatory” litigants, the NGOs, used their scientific evidence to establish a causal link between the defendants and the injury. This could serve two purposes, first to warrant their standing before the court and then to substantiate the environmental effects causing the injury.  The “anti-regulatory” litigants also found the same two uses; using the “dismal science” of economics to demonstrate their economic injury, and the environmental science to refute the claims of the plaintiffs.

The researchers did not review the court transcripts, so what science and how it was presented remains unknown, but from studying the Court’s written judgments they found that scientific evidence was cited in roughly half the cases; it made no difference whether it was for or against regulation.

So what can we conclude? Everyone brings their own “scientific evidence” to the table; that their evidence differs is not a flaw in the scientific method, it is a feature. Scientific theory and evidence represent are a best current approximation, and there is always an unknown element. So our evidence will differ, only time and further replication will push us towards the “right” answer. As the authors write:

“The results turn on factors such as the roles courts think are appropriate for the judiciary in influencing important environmental, social and economic policy questions, how they react to scientific evidence that relates to climate change presented before agencies or during civil trials and what remedies they are willing to impose.”

The question we need to ask is whether a courtroom is the best venue for that discussion. The courts act on these matters because the other branches of the government are unable or unwilling to have this discussion; I think that those other branches are as able as the courts so that just leaves unwilling.

[1] Injury does not have to be physical, it can be emotional or anything that reflects a form of damage.

Source: Strategies in and outcomes of climate change litigation in the United States Nature Climate Change DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0240-8

Claims That Criticism of IARC Are Industry-Driven Do IARC More Harm Than Good

By Geoffrey Kabat — August 23, 2018

Neil Pearce, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has risen to the defense of the controversial International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), but falling back on hollow claims of IARC's superiority will do  little to dispel the serious questions about the Agency's process.

Pearce opens his piece by endorsing last week’s ruling by a California court finding that Monsanto – the maker of the most widely-used herbicide Roundup -- was liable for a rare cancer that developed in a grounds-keeper who had used the herbicide. Roundup contains the chemical glyphosate as its active ingredient. The court decision awarded $289M to the plaintiff.

Pearce proceeds to point out, approvingly, that IARC’s 2015 assessment that glyphosate was a “probable carcinogen” played a prominent role in the court’s decision. One would expect that in what follows he would have delved into the controversy surrounding the question of whether glyphosate is a carcinogen and, thus, whether there is a justification for public concern........To Read More...

My viral climate video was smeared as fake news. Here are the facts

August 23, 2018 by Marc Morano, 228 Comments @ CFACT

An environmental scientist who writes a column for The Guardian has claimed that my video on climate change “spreads climate denial misinformation” to millions of viewers on Facebook. Not so.

Here is my point-by-point rebuttal to Dana Nuccitelli’s claims in the British newspaper based on my video, which has attracted more than 8 million views and 139,000 shares on Facebook. The video has so alarmed climate activists that they’re using it to pressure Facebook to ban “climate deniers.”

Claim: “Basically, [Marc Morano’s] critique is that the study sample size was too small to make a conclusive determination about the level of expert consensus. That’s a valid point … ”

Response: So Nuccitelli admits my point about “77 anonymous” scientists making up the alleged 97 percent consensus is “a valid point.” Good. Let’s move on.

Claim: “In fact, the authors of seven separate [climate] consensus studies using a variety of approaches (some with very large sample sizes) teamed up in 2016 to publish a paper concluding that the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is between 90 and 100 percent. So, this critique is invalid when considering all the available consensus research.”

Response: Climate Depot, the website I founded, has covered and debunked the claims of these so-called “consensus” studies, which were a rehash of the same claims but packaged together to appear comprehensive. Chapter 3 of my book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” is devoted to debunking the 97 percent claims.

As I have detailed before: These claims “really confirm that it is easier to get papers published if they support the narrative of man-made global warming.”

Responding to these “consensus” surveys, I told the Media Research Center: “These types of ‘consensus’ surveys are meant to provide talking points to politicians and the media in order to crush dissenting voices and ban skeptics from the mainstream media. It frees the climate crisis promoter from having to research any scientific points and instead allows them to say, ‘90 percent of scientists agree. Case closed!’”

Nuccitelli, as seen here and here, has a history of skewing climate science to fit his political narrative.

Claim: “Morano also critiques the consensus study that my colleagues (including John Cook) and I published in 2013. He does so simply by quoting economist Richard Tol saying our 97 percent figure ‘was pulled from thin air.’ Tol argued that the methodology in our study was flawed, but when we applied his critiques in a follow-up paper published in 2014, we found that the consensus was still 97 [percent, plus or minus 1 percent].”

Response: Here are Tol’s own words on Cook’s claim of 97 percent consensus, and readers can judge whether I accurately quoted him:

The 97 percent estimate is bandied about by basically everybody. I had a close look at what this study really did. As far as I can see, the estimate just crumbles when you touch it. None of the statements in the papers [is] supported by the data that’s in the paper. The 97 percent is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.

Tol continued to be unimpressed with Cook’s claims even after his follow-up paper published in 2014. In 2015, Tol again ripped Cook’s continued claims of a 97 percent consensus. “Cook’s analysis is a load of old bollocks,” he wrote.

(I debated Cook in 2015 at the U.N. Paris climate summit. Listen here.)

Claim: “In short, Morano’s only evidence to dispute the expert consensus on human-caused global warming is to quote an economist who agrees the consensus is 90 to 100 percent, and that the experts are correct that humans are responsible for global warming.”

Response: Tol has pushed back on claims that he cited a consensus of 91 percent.
PolitiFact to Tol in 2015: “The 91 percent endorsement rate is a direct quote from your paper: ‘The headline endorsement rate would be 91 percent in that case.’ (Cook cites it multiple times in his reply to your paper.)”

Tol rebuffed this, writing back to PolitiFact: “Do check the grammar: ‘would […] in that case’ does in no way indicate my agreement with the number. In fact, I make it very clear that any number based on Cook’s data is unreliable.”

Listen or Read: The Politically Incorrect Book That Debunks Climate Change Myths

In addition, Nuccitelli’s claim in The Guardian that my “only evidence” is Tol is not correct. In the 2-minute Facebook video, I alluded to Tol’s comment and to the other key “consensus” study. But in my book, I devote a whole chapter to debunking all of the various 97 percent consensus claims.
Also see this and this. And past climate “consensuses” have changed dramatically, as seen here and here.

Claim: “Morano claims that we’re not actually in the midst of the hottest period on record, and that ‘hottest year’ claims are ‘merely political statements’ because for example, he claims, scientists can’t say with 100 percent certainty that 2016 was hotter than 2015 due to the margin of uncertainty in the data. This claim is similar to one made on Fox News that earned a ‘Pants on Fire’ rating from PolitiFact based on consultation with climate scientists. The years 2014 through 2017 are indeed the four hottest years on record, outside the range of uncertainty.”

Response: First off, citing PolitiFact as a climate science authority is beyond the pale, even for The Guardian. Second, the media has been forced to admit that “hottest year” claims are statistical noise.
In 2015, the Associated Press issued a “clarification,” stating in part:

The story also reported that 2014 was the hottest year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, but did not include the caveat that other recent years had average temperatures that were almost as high—and they all fall within a margin of error that lessens the certainty that any one of the years was the hottest.

“Hottest year” claims are purely political statements designed to persuade the public that the government needs to take action on man-made climate change.

In Chapter 7, my book deals with “hottest year” claims and their statistical significance.

Claim: “Morano argues that the experts are wrong because there are hundreds of factors influencing Earth’s climate, and that carbon dioxide ‘is one of these factors that gets essentially drowned out, and you can’t distinguish its effect from natural variability.’ That claim is entirely false, as elegantly illustrated in this graphic created by Bloomberg.”

Response: The claim here is that carbon dioxide can have a warming impact on the atmosphere, but this does not mean CO2 is the control knob of the climate.

Philip Stott, University of London’s professor emeritus of biogeography, rebuts the notion that carbon dioxide is the main climate change driver, writing:

As I have said, over and over again, the fundamental point has always been this: Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors, or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets. 

Climate is the most complex coupled nonlinear chaotic system known to man. Of course, there are human influences in it, nobody denies that. But what outcome will they get by fiddling with one variable (CO2) at the margins? I’m sorry, it’s scientific nonsense.

Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, a pioneer in development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, has declared (as quoted in my book): “I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.”

Claim: “Human-caused global warming now [is] far outside the range of natural variability. In fact, we’re now warming global temperatures more than 20 times faster than Earth’s fastest natural climate changes.”

Response: Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever points out that “.8 degrees is what we’re discussing in global warming. [Just] .8 degrees. If you ask people in general what it is, they think—it’s 4 or 5 degrees. They don’t know it is so little.”

Climatologist Pat Michaels explained that in any case the world’s temperature “should be near the top of the record given the record only begins in the late 19th century when the surface temperature was still reverberating from the Little Ice Age.”

“We are creating great anxiety without it being justified … there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic,” award-winning climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”
As climatologist Roy Spencer wrote in 2016:

Global warming and climate change, even if it is 100 percent caused by humans, is so slow that it cannot be observed by anyone in their lifetime. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and other natural disasters have yet to show any obvious long-term change. This means that in order for politicians to advance policy goals (such as forcing expensive solar energy on the masses or creating a carbon tax), they have to turn normal weather disasters into ‘evidence’ of climate change.

And even if we actually faced a man-made climate catastrophe, we would all be doomed!
University of Pennsylvania geologist Robert Giegengack, as I write in my book, noted in 2014:  “None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”

Claim: “And of course, climate scientists have observed human fingerprints all over climate change. … ”
Response: As Spencer wrote, “There is no fingerprint of human-caused versus naturally-caused climate change … To claim the changes are ‘unprecedented’ cannot be demonstrated with reliable data, and are contradicted by some published paleoclimate data which suggests most centuries experience substantial warming or cooling.”

Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate scientist, said that believing CO2 controls the climate “is pretty close to believing in magic.” Climate Depot revealed the real way they find the “fingerprint” of CO2.
Nuccitelli’s “fingerprint” argument in The Guardian echoes claims by the Associated Press from 2017, when AP science reporter Seth Borenstein wrote: “There’s a scientifically accepted method for determining if some wild weather event has the fingerprints of man-made climate change, and it involves intricate calculations. Those could take weeks or months to complete, and then even longer to be checked by other scientists.”

I responded to Borenstein’s claims by writing that he seems to believe “there is some kind of arcane black box that finds the fingerprint of man-made global warming” and it is available only to a select few.

Claim: “It would be absurd to take Marc Morano’s word over the evidence published in peer-reviewed studies by climate scientists at NASA and other scientific institutions around the world.”

Response: I wholeheartedly agree. There is no reason to take the word of either The Guardian’s Nuccitelli or me. We have science, data, and the geologic history of the Earth to handle that.
Current NASA climate claims (under Gavin Schmidt and formerly James Hansen) are steeped in politics and funding. Former NASA scientists have criticized the agency (see here and here).
Other prominent scientists reject carbon dioxide fears.

Ivy League geologist Robert Giegengack, former chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke out against fears of rising CO2 impacts promoted by Al Gore and others. Giegengack noted that “for most of Earth’s history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler.”
He explained:

[Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa. … It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2.

In 2014, Giegengack told Climate Depot: “The Earth has experienced very few periods when CO2 was lower than it is today.”

This article originally appeared in The Daily Signal

The disconnect between predictions of a ‘bee-apocalypse’ and rising bee populations

New Zealand Herald | August 20, 2018

Media stories around bee-apocalypse and imminent collapse of the human food system require a dose of reality.

There are more managed bee hives globally, and more bees, than there have ever been in the past. And although there are many statements around the fact that every third mouthful has a contribution by bees, the staples of life (corn, wheat, rice, potatoes and cassava) do not rely on bees for pollination. The first three are seeds from wind-pollinated plants and the second two are starch-filled tubers.

 

The bee-apocalypse stories started in the mid-2000s when bee deaths began occurring in large numbers. Colony Collapse Disorder …. was rife in the northern hemisphere. Whole hives died over winter and predictions were dire..............Read full, original article: Jacqueline Rowarth: Enough of the bee-apocalypse stories

‘Children killer’ glyphosate found in Cheerios? Experts dismantle Environmental Working Group’s glyphosate study

Cameron English | Genetic Literacy Project | August 17, 2018

“If you or your children are eating Cheerios right now, there’s a good chance that they’re accompanied by a potentially harmful weed killer called Roundup,” Fortune told its readers on August 16. Newsweek headlined its article, “Dangerous Weed Killer Ingredient Found in Cheerios, Quaker Oats and Other Breakfast Cereals.”

These were two of literally hundreds of news outlets that botched coverage of what scientists say is a dubious study of breakfast cereals and granola bars by virulently anti-GMO Environmental Working Group, a Washington DC-based public health advocacy group........To Read More....

A double ban gets a double reversal

Interior Department reverses activist-initiated Obama-era ban on farming activities in refuges

Paul Driessen

I don’t pull my punches over destructive, inhumane or just plain lunatic policies demanded by extreme environmentalists. I criticize them, as well as friends and “good guys,” when I think they got it wrong on energy or environmental issues. I also offer praise when it is deserved.

When Department of the Interior (DOI) Secretary Ryan Zinke – whom I admire greatly – let a last-minute Obama endangered species designation for the “Rusty Patched Bumblebee” (RPB) take effect in March 2017, I faulted the decision (here and here). Now I want to praise his recent decision to reopen certain wildlife refuges to modern farming practices.

The RPB decision did the unthinkable. It gave Interior’s often hyper-activist U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) potential veto power over every farm operation, building project and land use decision across 378 million Eastern and Midwestern acres, the RPB’s (possible) erstwhile habitat. That’s equal to Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois and Indiana combined!

All to “protect” a ground-nesting bee that provides minimal pollinating services, has supposedly been sighted” a number of times since 2000 in 13 states, has long been rare for multiple reasons, and got its “endangered” status due to an collusive sue-and-settle lawsuit between agitators and regulators.

This is the same FWS that told a timber company it had to create “potential” habitat on its land in Louisiana for a “dusky gopher frog” that has not been seen in the state for 33 years and could not survive on the 1,544 acres of company land selected by the FWS, because the chosen area did not offer essential habitat conditions. So Fish and Wildlife ordered the company to convert the land into “suitable” habitat, at company expense – after which the company could never cut trees in the area!

The RPB decision was particularly perilous for farmers because, just a few years earlier, the Service had eagerly negotiated yet another sue-and-settle style agreement with radical greens in the Center for Food Safety, to ban genetically engineered crops (aka GMOs) and neonicotinoid insecticides on the extensive lands the FWS leases to farmers in often enormous U.S. wildlife refuges.

The ban was issued without any public consultation or comment period. Worse, it was wholly at odds with USDA and EPA findings on the environmental safety of both GMOs and neonics. But it was a huge gift to activists who have been campaigning against those technologies for years. It set a dangerous precedent of basing government decisions on “precautionary” criteria, much like Europe’s wholly unscientific regulatory process, which is completely antithetical to the risk-based U.S. system.

The infinitely malleable “precautionary” pseudo-guideline says chemicals and other technologies should be restricted or banned if there is any possibility (or accusation by radical activists) that they could be harmful, even if no evidence-based cause-effect link can be shown.

Even worse, the “Precautionary Principle” only examines (often inflated) risks from using technologies that activists or regulators dislike. It never considers the risks of not using them – or risks that using them could reduce or eliminate. Just as perversely, anti-technology factions ignore or actively suppress evidence of harmful impacts from supposed alternatives – and from any technologies they support.

The European Union has formalize the Precautionary Principle as official policy. Regulators thus have carte blanche authority to take any action, at any time, no matter how arbitrary, based on the claim that sometime in the future, in ways not yet understood, something might possibly have a negative impact on people or the environment. Scientific evidence is not needed.

It’s an open door to regulation by activists who are experts at raising alarms and making claims of impending Armageddon unless a targeted technology is banned. Europe’s embrace of “precaution” in agricultural regulation is a major reason why the continent has become a net importer of food, despite having some of the most fertile land and predictably temperate weather in the world.

If this horrendous refuge precedent had stood, combined with the Endangered Species Act, it could have given a few USFWS activist regulators the power to micro-manage enormous swaths of the American public and private landmass, and large segments of the nation’s agricultural and construction economy.

Its impacts would have been felt almost as widely as the infamous “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule that presidential candidate Donald Trump vowed to kill and which the EPA under Scott Pruitt began to dismantle – or the even more insidious Paris climate treaty, which would have given international and United Nations climate alarmists control over the entire U.S. economy.

I’m therefore happy to note that Mr. Zinke Department has implemented a double reversal of the USFW double ban. In an August 2 memo, Interior again spelled out the need to raise crops in parts of wildlife refuges to provide food for people and forage for ducks, geese and other wildlife – and to note the important role that genetically engineered plants and neonics play in that effort.

Of course, the GMO-neonic ban never made an iota of scientific sense. Hundreds of government and independent studies – and decades of eating and other real-world experience – confirm that GMOs are as safe for human and animal consumption as the almost 100% of crops that have been genetically modified by traditional breeding … or by soaking seeds in harsh chemicals or bombarding them with radiation to cause multiple mutations, some desirable, others unknown, but just fine with organic food promoters.

Equally important, the massively funded environmentalist campaign against neonics was based heavily on the wholly fabricated “bee-pocalypse” scare of several years ago. As most people now know, honeybee populations have been rising the entire time since neonics were first used, and the problems honeybees had for several years were due to due to Varroa destructor mites and an assortment of bee diseases.

Anti-neonic agitation also ran headlong into EPA’s scientific risk assessments. Even amid the regulatory frenzy of the final Obama years, EPA could find no scientific reason to take away the long-standing approvals of these vital crop production tools, which target only insects that actually feed on crop plants.

Not surprisingly, though, once the honeybee-pocalypse was debunked, activists immediately switched gears to the equally fraudulent claim that wild bees are on the path to extinction – because of neonics, of course. However, wild bee problems are also almost entirely due to disease and long-term habitat loss.

The vast majority of wild bee species are “doing just fine,” prominent U.S. Geological Survey wild bee expert Sam Droege has noted. Even more telling, a recent global study of wild bees found that those which pollinate crops and thus come into most frequent contact with neonics are flourishing.

Greens have already announced they will sue to block the refuge decision, but that’s par for the course.

Secretary Zinke deserves high praise for starting to rein in USFWS’s regulatory power grab. However, it’s only a start. There’s much more left to do: at Interior, Agriculture, Energy and of course EPA.

Next up should be the Fish and Wildlife Service’s role in implementing the Endangered Species Act. Even if congressional attempts to rein in some of the worst abuses of the ESA finally succeed, after years of futility resulting from environmentalist intransigence, agency activists will find ways around them.

Mr. Zinke also deserves major kudos for pushing back on the nonsensical claim that 129 million dead trees in California, repeated conflagrations that completely wipe out wildlife habitats and species, over 700,000 once-Golden State acres burned so far this summer (Rhode Island plus Washington, DC), and 57 Californians killed by forest fires in two years – are due to that all-purpose villain: climate change.

As the Secretary makes clear, this horrific destruction is the result of near-criminal mismanagement of that state’s forests, at the behest of rabid greens who refuse to allow any timber harvesting anywhere. 

There’s an old saying that “personnel is policy.” Secretary Zinke next needs to replace DOI zealots with permanent, career service land and resource managers who can keep the eco-power-grabbers under control, by honestly, dispassionately and transparently applying evidence-based science to rulemaking.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death and other books and articles on energy, climate change, economic development and human rights.

 

Cartoon of the Day

Junk Science and Leftist Folklore Have Set California Ablaze

How left-wing "global warming" policies are torching the West Coast.

August 17, 2018 Bruce Thornton 106

The Left Coast is burning. Oregon is fighting 13 wildfires encompassing 185,000 acres. California is battling 19 fires, including tornados of fire called "fire whirls," which have gobbled up 577,000 acres and left eight dead. A good progressive who never lets a crisis go to waste, Governor Jerry Brown told Californians, “With climate change, some scientists are saying that Southern California is literally burning up.” He warned that man-made global warming created a “new normal,” and that “more serious predictions of warming and fires to occur later in the century, 2040 or 2050, [are] now occurring in real time.”

A few days later Brown had a tweet-duel with President Trump, who in contrast claimed, “California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws,” like those against thinning and clearing forests: “Tree clear to stop fire spreading!” Seems like on this issue, the allegedly doltish Trump has the better argument than the Berkeley and Yale-trained Brown.....To Read More....
 

Disorder In The Court - A Supernaturally Dumb Lawsuit Over The Word 'Natural'

By Josh Bloom — August 15, 2018 @ American Council on Science and Health

The terms "natural" and "organic" have spurred a cottage industry in which companies and internet sleazebags compete to suck money out of the thoroughly manipulated and misguided American public. And it's been a smashing success!

For example, how many of you know that organic foods:

1. Are grown using chemicals -  pesticides and herbicides. To be certified organic, farmers are permitted to use chemicals from a different list, all of which have their own properties, including toxicity. 
2. Offer no additional nutritional value than their conventional counterparts.
3. Cost a whole lot more than their conventional counterparts.

And did you know that:

1. Lead is natural
2. So is uranium
3. And so are dioxins (1)

So, let's just call this a mini-lesson about how useless and confusing the two terms are. Too bad Alexandra Axon doesn't read ACSH or she'd know how scientifically ridiculous her lawsuit against Florida’s Natural and its parent company, Citrus World Inc.

Or is it?

Or perhaps she does know. The Brooklyn woman is suing the company as part of a class-action lawsuit by The Richman Law Group, against the juice maker, claiming that the presence of trace quantities of glyphosate in the juice means the claim "natural" cannot be used on the label.

Hmm. Glyphosate. Monsanto. It's only natural to sniff out a hidden agenda when lawyers smell a fat payday against Monsanto (2). And that's the case here. There have been more than 300 cases filed against the company in a San Francisco federal court by cancer victims who claim that the chemical caused their cancers.

And who can blame Axon for wanting a piece of the action? On August ninth a California jury ruled against the company and awarded $289 ( $39.2 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages) for failing to warn Dewayne Johnson, a groundskeeper, who claimed that the herbicide caused his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, about the risk of cancer from glyphosate. The only problem is that glyphosate does not cause cancer, something that my colleague Dr. Alex Berezow wrote about last year (See Glyphosate-Gate: IARC's Scientific Fraud).

Despite the overwhelming evidence against the carcinogenicity of the chemical, when you follow the formula:  The name Mosanto + Any chemical or product + Any California jury + California anti-chemical Craziness.

The verdict is virtually guaranteed to be determined in advance: Defendant is doomed regardless of evidence, lack of evidence, whether the defendant even had cancer, or whether the day of the trial ends in "Y."

But this article is not about cancer. It's about how ridiculous the Brooklyn "natural" claim is. In the suit, Axon claims that Florida’s Natural Growers orange juice should not contain the term "natural" because it contains minuscule amounts of glyphosate. How much? An independent lab determined that the juice contained 5.11 nanograms per mL. Is this a lot? A little? Does it matter? Let's do some math. Perhaps it will even be correct (3).

• 5.11 nanograms = 0.0000051 mg. This is the amount of glyphosate in 1 mL of the juice.
• 8 ounces = 237 mL 
• So, one 8-oz glass of the OJ will contain 0.0012 mg of glyphosate.
• The LD₅₀of glyphosate in rats is about 2,800 mg.
• So, it would take 233,333,333 glasses of OJ to get enough glyphosate to kill a rat (4).
• That's a lot of #%#%#ing OJ

So, the orange juice isn't going to harm anyone or anything, but is it "natural?" This is a rather existential question because although the EPA doesn't list a maximum allowable quantity of glyphosate for orange juice, it does for oranges - 0.5 ppm, which is 100-times more than the amount found in the OJ. Which means: If the OJ isn't "natural", neither is the organge. Which also means: Nothing on Earth is "Natural".

Because with the right analytical instrument something man-made will be found in every food on earth. Do you see how silly this is?

But it gets sillier. Also in the suit are claims that the OJ cannot be called natural because of "deaeration, the process of removing oxygen as a preservative; blending and long-term storage."

 

Well isn't that interesting? Mixing the juice, sucking out the oxygen, and putting it in a carton also means it cannot be natural. Which makes me wonder about milk. 





"Not Natural" because they were Pasteurized, mixed and put in a carton.



So, neither is...

Not Natural......Because it's in a container.

Photo: Modern Farmer.

Nor is...

Not Natural...because the milk is being collected in a pail!

 

So, the only way to drink truly natural milk would be...

This article is obviously stupid, but I couldn't think of a better way to describe what is going on in the court in Brooklyn.   So I had to write it................ Naturally.

NOTES:

(1) Dioxins are formed by volcanoes and forest fires. They were in the environment long before any human roamed the earth.
(2) Sorry, Monsanto haters, you'll need a new placard. The company was recently bought by Bayer.
(3) But more likely not. I use math in my articles from time to time. I don't believe I've ever gotten it right, even once. Go ahead. Shoot me down. I'm used to it.
(4) There is no LD₅₀ data for glyphosate humans, but the very low toxicity is consistent in other animal models. There have been fatalities from intentional exposure of the chemical, but these deaths are attributed to other ingredients that help the chemical get into plants.

Taming the EPA Regulatory Hydra: An essential first step

In America’s most powerful, intrusive and costly agency, power resides in one administrator

William L. Kovacs

Since President Trump’s election, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has turned off its massive regulatory printing press. The nation is still here, there have been no man-made environmental catastrophes, and job creation is quickly growing now that the business community is not under the daily fear of another regulation that will slash its profits, force it to lay off employees or put it out of business.

So far, so good. However, if America is to continue its job creation activities, it needs to continue the Trump Administration’s balance between environmental protection and creating jobs and growing businesses. Unfortunately, in the future another anti-business president could be elected.

If the current administrative process and EPA’s organizational structure remain the same, the new, anti-business president could quickly stop economic progress by issuing many billion-dollar regulations that again freeze business activity, while imposing huge extra costs on consumers for everything they purchase from cars, to light bulbs, to housing – once again for little or no health or environmental benefit.

While President Trump ordered EPA to begin deregulatory activity, those efforts take years. To repeal a regulation, the agency must go through the same administrative process it went through to produce the initial regulation.

The Trump administration has started to revise the three most costly regulations: Waters of the United States, the Clean Power Plan and automobile mileage standards. This effort will last well into third or fourth year of the Trump administration – and then the lawsuits will begin. Equally important, while we need wholesale deregulation at EPA, it is likely that this administration will only make a dent in EPA’s historic overreach.

The almost fifty-year history of the EPA regulatory process is like the mythological “Hydra,” a monster with many heads; when one was cut-off, two more grew back. Such an aggressive regulatory process crowned EPA as the most aggressive regulator in history.

EPA alone has published over 25% of all the pages of regulations issued by all the agencies of the Federal Government, and almost twice as many as the much-derided IRS. Of the 28 most costly regulations issued in eight years by the Obama administration, EPA issued 13 of them.

This situation places those seeking a long-term, rational regulatory process at EPA in a quandary. Determining what can be done to tame this monster is a complex undertaking, because stopping new regulations in one administration does not prevent many more regulations from being issued in another.

However, considering EPA administrators of the past, the first change must be to ensure that no single person in the United States government can exercise the massive powers wielded by those past bosses. Such powers determine who gets a permit to operate, and who does not; what technologies a business must use; what lightbulbs are available for your homes; what gas we can buy; what chemicals can be used; where companies can mine; what local land use decisions will survive; and even where a pond can be built on private property.

While the President of the United States has massive powers over war and peace, and sets the operating philosophy of federal agencies, the EPA Administrator has direct power over the business operations … and thus the economy … of the entire nation.

EPA makes the environmental rules we live under. It is the fact finder who determines if we are breaking the rules, the prosecutor of all alleged violations – and the administrative judge who makes the findings of fact, interprets the law, and permits or punishes our actions.

It’s frightening when you think about it how much power one person can have over our lives. Yet, we don’t think about it until the agency wants to “get us.”

How should we restructure EPA to ensure the agency can still protect our environment – while controlling the massive amount of power exercised by one individual?

Several mechanisms would tame this hydra. Perhaps the most important and most effective would be converting EPA from an Executive Branch agency to an independent agency directed by five commissioners: three appointed by the party holding the presidency and two from the other party.

This commission-style agency would limit the power to act by requiring that any final regulation be approved by a majority of the commissioners. While an anti-business president would still appoint a majority of anti-business commissioners, the minority commissioners would have access to all evidence and decision-making documents, and could file dissenting opinions on all final decisions.

These dissents would allow discussion of the flaws in the majority’s reasoning – including facts, science, economics, costs and benefits.

Under the current regulatory process, there is only EPA’s final rule and a record that can run hundreds of thousands of pages. While the public is allowed to comment, the courts usually uphold EPA’s decision if it is “rational,” meaning the agency can point to some part of the record that supports its reasoning, and can conceal or ignore any parts that do not support its reasoning.

Dissenting opinions would ensure that the reviewing court sees the flaws in the majority decision. This would be invaluable for good policy making, since the minority commissioners could also review and present all the science and economics used by the majority. That would enable the minority to keep an out-of-control agency in balance.

Historically, EPA has not provided all the scientific studies and models to the public for review, analysis and comment. Having access to these documents would allow minority commissioners to point out not just flaws, but also deceptions, concealed facts and data, and hidden agendas.

Other actions would enable EPA to bring focus and coordination to the 13 separate statutes it administers, largely in the absence of any mission statement or meaningful congressional direction.

Those steps will be discussed in Part 2 of this article.

William L. Kovacs was active in national policy issues for over 40 years, as a senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs for a major business trade association, a chief counsel on Capitol Hill, chairman of a state environmental board, and a partner in several Washington, DC law firms.

Putting Science on the Stand

By Richard Zuber August 16, 2018

In a closely watched decision, a California jury ruled last week that Monsanto owed former Bay Area school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson $289 million in damages. Though Monsanto maintains that its products are safe, pointing to clean bills of health from a wide array of national health agencies, Johnson's attorneys argued that the company covered up the risks of the weed-killers Roundup and Ranger Pro – which they say were responsible for their client's terminal cancer.

The lawsuit thus carefully avoided delving into the complex epidemiology of Roundup's active ingredient, glyphosate, arguing instead that the groundskeeper's illness arose from glyphosate's interactions with the weed-killer's other ingredients. Yet with even less available evidence about the safety of Roundup's formulation than about glyphosate, the verdict has revealed far more about the challenges of evaluating science in the courtroom than about the herbicide's alleged risks.............. Read more

Maybe the Collectivists Will (Un)Breed Themselves Out of Existence

September 10, 2009 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

(Editor's Note:  Although this is a "Blast From the Past", nothing has changed.  The thoughts and concepts are still the same nine years later.  If I'm still alive in nine years and republish this article all the thoughts and concepts would still be applicable.  RK)

The UK-based Telegraph reports that some outfit called the Optimal Population Trust is suggesting that people should have fewer babies to fight supposed global warming (or climate change, or whatever they’re calling it now). This is a reflection of the people-are-bad mentality that seems disturbingly common among enviro-statists:

The report, Fewer Emitter, Lower Emissions, Less Cost, concludes that family planning should be seen as one of the primary methods of emissions reduction. The UN estimates that 40 per cent of all pregnancies worldwide are unintended. …Roger Martin, chairman of the Optimum Population Trust at the LSE, said: “It’s always been obviously that total emissions depend on the number of emitters as well as their individual emissions.

 

Reading this article, though, reminded me of another article from a British paper. As this story from the Daily Mail explains, some radical environmentalists are deliberately choosing to sterlilize themselves to avoid having kids:

Had Toni Vernelli gone ahead with her pregnancy ten years ago, she would know at first hand what it is like to cradle her own baby, to have a pair of innocent eyes gazing up at her with unconditional love, to feel a little hand slipping into hers – and a voice calling her Mummy. But the very thought makes her shudder with horror. Because when Toni terminated her pregnancy, she did so in the firm belief she was helping to save the planet. …Incredibly, so determined was she that the terrible “mistake” of pregnancy should never happen again, that she begged the doctor who performed the abortion to sterilise her at the same time. He refused, but Toni – who works for an environmental charity – “relentlessly hunted down a doctor who would perform the irreversible surgery. …”Having children is selfish. It’s all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet,” says Toni, 35. “Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population.” …Toni is far from alone. When Sarah Irving, 31, was a teenager she sat down and wrote a wish-list for the future. …Most young girls dream of marriage and babies. But Sarah dreamed of helping the environment – and as she agonised over the perils of climate change, the loss of animal species and destruction of wilderness, she came to the extraordinary decision never to have a child. “I realised then that a baby would pollute the planet – and that never having a child was the most environmentally friendly thing I could do.” …Mark adds: “Sarah and I live as green a life a possible. We don’t have a car, cycle everywhere instead, and we never fly. “We recycle, use low-energy light bulbs and eat only organic, locally produced food. “In short, we do everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint. But all this would be undone if we had a child.”

 

Think about what this means. If the nut-job environmentalists persist in not having kids, that almost surely means the world’s population will gradually become more sensible about these issue since mommy and daddy enviro-statist won’t be raising little interventionists to plague future generations.

Sounds like a win-win situation for everyone.
 

Environmentalists’ Latest Attempts to Save the Planet May Be the Last Straw

By John Stonestreet | August 13, 2018

You’d think incredibly harsh laws designed to protect the planet would—you know—protect the planet. But that’s not typically the case.  Sometimes, caring for the environment requires making important sacrifices. Far more often, however, the calls to action we’re told will save the planet spawn needlessly inconvenient laws with little if any benefit. That’s the case with this new campaign to ban plastic straws.

Last month, Santa Barbara made national news and invited not a little bit of ridicule by passing an ordinance which could send restaurant employees to jail for up to six months for giving out plastic straws.

Seattle has also sipped this environmental Kool-Aid, imposing a $250 fine on straw-distributing outlaws. Not to be outdone, San Francisco’s city council voted unanimously to adopt a similar ban. Other efforts to criminalize plastic straws are underway in New York City, Portland, and Washington, D.C. Now, even if we think the penalties are ridiculous, a case can be made for serious steps that would stop an environmental crisis. That case cannot be made here, however...........And, as Susan Freinkel wrote several years ago in the New York Times, plastic doesn’t have to be a pollutant. This marvelous substance was originally “hailed for its potential to reduce mankind’s heavy environmental footprint,” replacing commodities like paper, which exact a high toll on nature. (Remember the “paper or plastic” decision at the grocery store)..........To Read More.....

With glyphosate-cancer legal battles poised to escalate, what are the ramifications for agriculture if the herbicide is restricted?

Cameron English | Genetic Literacy Project | August 13, 2018

Now that a jury in San Francisco has decided that exposure to Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) was responsible for California groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson’s cancer, the movement to restrict the herbicide has been re-energized. 

Carey Gillam, director of research at the anti-GMO group U.S. Right to Know, who worked closely with the lawyers suing Monsanto, said following the verdict that “It is time for public officials across the globe to act to protect public health and not corporate profits.” French President Emmanuel Macron is on record trying to ban it and activists organizations in numerous countries are already attempting to leverage the jury’s verdict. 

A judge in Brazil recently suspended the use of the herbicide, pending a review by the nation’s agriculture ministry, and Europe may reassess the costs and benefits of a ban over the next five years.

The UK retailer Homebase is reviewing its sale of the weed killer following the verdict. And depending upon how Bayer’s announced appeal plays out (Bayer recently acquired Monsanto) and the fate of numerous glyphosate cancer suits to come, it’s not out of the question that manufacturers of generic glyphosate will begin reassessing their potential liability in keeping the herbicide on the market...........To Read More.....