Stephanie Peatling, in the Sydney Morning Herald, seems to have had a bit of fun at Environmentalists’ expense modifying the figure in the leftwing Australia Institute’s projection that Australia would consume 60 per cent of its supposedly appropriate carbon dioxide production “budget” by 2020 to 95%.

The greenhouse gas cuts Australia must achieve to prevent dangerous climate change may be substantially higher than thought, with modelling to be released today suggesting it should be as much as 95 per cent by 2020.

Scientists have urged countries to restrict the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the end of the century to 450 parts per million, a figure that would see global temperatures rise by around 3 degrees by 2100.

But modelling done by the Australia Institute has discovered the country is on track to produce significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than this.

“The failure to take early action to reduce emissions has committed Australia to a development path that will make it almost impossible for Australia to stay within any carbon budget that is consistent with minimising the risks associated with global warming,” the deputy director, Andrew Macintosh, said.

One such budgetary figure would undoubtedly be just as incompatible with ordinary modern life as the other.

Via Tim Blair.

You know you’re living in one of our national centers of higher ethical culture and enlightenment when the neighbors take baseball bats to your new car.

Washington Post:

On a narrow, leafy street in Northwest Washington, where Prius hybrid cars and Volvos are the norm, one man bought a flashy gray Hummer that was too massive to fit in his garage.

So he parked the seven-foot-tall behemoth on the street in front of his house and smiled politely when his eco-friendly neighbors looked on in disapproval at his “dream car.”

It lasted five days on the street before two masked men took a bat to every window, a knife to each 38-inch tire and scratched into the body: “FOR THE ENVIRON.”

“The thought of somebody vandalizing it never crossed my mind,” said Gareth Groves, 32, who lives with his mother in a three-story home in the 4300 block of Brandywine Street NW in American University Park. “I’ve kind of been in shock.”

Now, as Groves ponders what to do with the remains of his $38,000 SUV, he has been the target of a number of people who have driven by the crime scene in his upscale neighborhood and glared at him in smug satisfaction.

“I’d say one in five people who come by have that ‘you-got-what-you-deserve’ look,” said his friend Andy Sexton, 27, who is visiting from Arkansas and has been helping Groves deal with fallout from the crime.

Neighbor Lucille Liem, 37, who owns a Prius hybrid, said that a common sentiment in the neighborhood is that large vehicles are impractical and a strain on the Earth — and Hummers in particular are a symbol of consumer excess.

“The neighborhood in general is very concerned with the environment,” said Liem, whose Prius gets about 48 miles a gallon compared with the Hummer’s 14 miles a gallon. “It’s more liberal leaning. It’s ridiculous to be driving a Hummer.”

1:15 video

The San Francisco Chronicle records the latest fashion accessory in PC Califormia.

Virtue may be its own reward — but as any self-respecting Prius Progressive can attest, the payoffs of hybrid ownership don’t stop there. Beyond the gas pump savings, the tax breaks, the entree to carpool lanes, the freedom to park without feeding meters and the aura of cool kinship with Hollywood hybriders such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, comes something more visceral.

“Absolutely, they’re buying the car for the statement it makes more than anything,” Art Spinella, president of CNW Marketing, told reporters last week.

The firm’s research concluded that more customers pick the Prius over alternatives like the hybrid version of the Honda Civic precisely because the Prius is exclusively — and identifiably — a hybrid. While just 36 percent cited fuel economy as a prime motivator for buying a Prius, 57 percent said their main reason was that “it makes a statement about me.”

What’s more, in focus groups, many Prius buyers admit expecting acclaim from friends and co-workers for making such a socially responsible, planet-saving purchase.

But the satisfaction of some eco-drivers risks swelling to self-righteousness — like the Prius driver coasting down Highway 101 in Marin County last week with the bumper sticker: “How many lives to the gallon do you get?”

Read the whole thing.

They weren’t recorded, registered, taxed, or regulated. Naturally, urban-dwelling environmentalists hated the river shacks of rural South Carolina, and they recently succeeded in persuading the Palmetto State’s greasy pols to impose a permit system incorporating a sunset law completely eliminating these private refuges of individual freedom from South Carolina’s waters in five years. The state’s governor expressed regret at the death of a rural tradition, but he wouldn’t stick his neck out by vetoing the new law.

These days, Huck Finn would not be permitted to raft down the river to get away from Aunt Polly and her civilized regime of rules. Old ladies of both sexes have long since taken care to extend the jurisdiction of the Leviathan state right down every river’s main channel, and up every tributary and every backwater, lest some free American escape from civilization and its discontents, or evade its taxes and its rules.

New York Times:

For who knows how long, people have plopped these river shacks into watery coves and curves along the South Carolina coast. They permanently anchor their shacks miles from the nearest landing and use them to fish, hunt or just get off the grid for a while. Some contraptions are so modest that to call them shacks is too kind, while others are so well appointed that they all but cry out for granite countertops and potpourri.

It all sounds so innocent, so idyllic — so American, in a Huck Finn kind of way. That is, until you consider that the river shack owners are essentially laying claim to public property without paying license fees, taxes or, in some cases, even respect. A few people use the river as their personal toilet; others abandon their shacks, leaving the structures to rot amid the natural splendor.

But environmentalists who see these shacks as an affront to the concept of resource management recently succeeded in lobbying for their extinction. This spring the state passed a law requiring owners to seek permits for the structures — recent surveys counted at least 170 on several rivers and Lake Marion — with the stipulation that in five years all shacks must be removed from the water. …

The issue even posed a dilemma for Gov. Mark Sanford, who ultimately decided to allow the river shack bill to pass into law without his signature. While he supports land preservation, he explained in a letter to legislators, he wonders about increasing gentrification, and “the idea that someone could tie a bunch of 55-gallon drums together and stake out a house on the waterway is representative of what I would consider the magic of ‘old time South Carolina.’ ”

But Patrick Moore, a lawyer working for the Coastal Conservation League, which led the legislative fight against river shacks, sees no dilemma. “The idea that these shacks are some sort of entitlement of our natural heritage is, frankly, an insult to that very heritage,” he says.

slideshow

Ice core investigations by Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Copenhagen, demonstrate that Greenland was much warmer during the last Interglacial Period than at any time more recently.

This kind of information should not be altogether surprising, but it does demonstrate incontrovertably the fact that the Earth’s climate has been significantly warmer in the past than it is today as the result of natural processes completely unconnected to any possible human agency.

AP story:

Ice-covered Greenland really was green a half-million or so years ago, covered with forests in a climate much like that of Sweden and eastern Canada today.

An international team of researchers recovered ancient DNA from the bottom of an ice core that indicates the presence of pine, yew and alder trees as well as insects.

The researchers, led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, say the findings are the first direct proof that there was forest in southern Greenland.

Included were genetic traces of butterflies, moths, flies and beetles, they report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

The material was recovered from cores drilled through ice 1.2 miles thick at a site called Dye 3 in south central Greenland.

Hat tip to Scott Drum.

R. Timothy Patterson, Professor of Geology at Carleton University, argues with the popular junk science of climate change, noting that some significant research suggests that a major cooling cycle may occur around 2020.

Politicians and environmentalists these days convey the impression that climate-change research is an exceptionally dull field with little left to discover. We are assured by everyone from David Suzuki to Al Gore to Prime Minister Stephen Harper that “the science is settled.” At the recent G8 summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel even attempted to convince world leaders to play God by restricting carbon-dioxide emissions to a level that would magically limit the rise in world temperatures to 2C.

The fact that science is many years away from properly understanding global climate doesn’t seem to bother our leaders at all. Inviting testimony only from those who don’t question political orthodoxy on the issue, parliamentarians are charging ahead with the impossible and expensive goal of “stopping global climate change.” Liberal MP Ralph Goodale’s June 11 House of Commons assertion that Parliament should have “a real good discussion about the potential for carbon capture and sequestration in dealing with carbon dioxide, which has tremendous potential for improving the climate, not only here in Canada but around the world,” would be humorous were he, and even the current government, not deadly serious about devoting vast resources to this hopeless crusade.

Climate stability has never been a feature of planet Earth. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually and, at times, quite rapidly. Many times in the past, temperatures were far higher than today, and occasionally, temperatures were colder. As recently as 6,000 years ago, it was about 3C warmer than now. Ten thousand years ago, while the world was coming out of the thousand-year-long “Younger Dryas” cold episode, temperatures rose as much as 6C in a decade — 100 times faster than the past century’s 0.6C warming that has so upset environmentalists. …

Climate-change research is now literally exploding with new findings. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the field has had more research than in all previous years combined and the discoveries are completely shattering the myths. For example, I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of all energy on the planet.

My interest in the current climate-change debate was triggered in 1998, when I was funded by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council strategic project grant to determine if there were regular cycles in West Coast fish productivity. …

My research team began to collect and analyze core samples from the bottom of deep Western Canadian fjords. …

Using various coring technologies, we have been able to collect more than 5,000 years’ worth of mud in these basins, with the oldest layers coming from a depth of about 11 metres below the fjord floor. Clearly visible in our mud cores are annual changes that record the different seasons: corresponding to the cool, rainy winter seasons, we see dark layers composed mostly of dirt washed into the fjord from the land; in the warm summer months we see abundant fossilized fish scales and diatoms (the most common form of phytoplankton, or single-celled ocean plants) that have fallen to the fjord floor from nutrient-rich surface waters. …

Using computers to conduct what is referred to as a “time series analysis” on the colouration and thickness of the annual layers, we have discovered repeated cycles in marine productivity in this, a region larger than Europe. Specifically, we find a very strong and consistent 11-year cycle throughout the whole record in the sediments and diatom remains. This correlates closely to the well-known 11-year “Schwabe” sunspot cycle, during which the output of the sun varies by about 0.1%. Sunspots, violent storms on the surface of the sun, have the effect of increasing solar output, so, by counting the spots visible on the surface of our star, we have an indirect measure of its varying brightness. Such records have been kept for many centuries and match very well with the changes in marine productivity we are observing. …

Our finding of a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators (called “proxies”) is not unique. Hundreds of other studies, using proxies from tree rings in Russia’s Kola Peninsula to water levels of the Nile, show exactly the same thing: The sun appears to drive climate change.

However, there was a problem. Despite this clear and repeated correlation, the measured variations in incoming solar energy were, on their own, not sufficient to cause the climate changes we have observed in our proxies. In addition, even though the sun is brighter now than at any time in the past 8,000 years, the increase in direct solar input is not calculated to be sufficient to cause the past century’s modest warming on its own. There had to be an amplifier of some sort for the sun to be a primary driver of climate change.

Indeed, that is precisely what has been discovered. In a series of groundbreaking scientific papers starting in 2002, Veizer, Shaviv, Carslaw, and most recently Svensmark et al., have collectively demonstrated that as the output of the sun varies, and with it, our star’s protective solar wind, varying amounts of galactic cosmic rays from deep space are able to enter our solar system and penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. These cosmic rays enhance cloud formation which, overall, has a cooling effect on the planet. When the sun’s energy output is greater, not only does the Earth warm slightly due to direct solar heating, but the stronger solar wind generated during these “high sun” periods blocks many of the cosmic rays from entering our atmosphere. Cloud cover decreases and the Earth warms still more.

The opposite occurs when the sun is less bright. More cosmic rays are able to get through to Earth’s atmosphere, more clouds form, and the planet cools more than would otherwise be the case due to direct solar effects alone. This is precisely what happened from the middle of the 17th century into the early 18th century, when the solar energy input to our atmosphere, as indicated by the number of sunspots, was at a minimum and the planet was stuck in the Little Ice Age. These new findings suggest that changes in the output of the sun caused the most recent climate change. By comparison, CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long, medium and even short time scales.

Read the whole article.

Barry Dauphin comments along familiar lines at YARGB.

Virtually all of the features of Christianity which the rational and enlightened portion of mankind find objectionable survive perfectly happily in modern secular environmentalist leftism. Is there any real difference between the flagellant penitents of the Middle Ages and members of today’s militant chorus of greens? Both believed the imminent destruction of the world was at hand, and that it had been provoked by mankind’s instigation of divine wrath via excessive materialism and pursuit of pleasure. The only possibility, then or now, of averting ultimate catastrophe would be a vigorous program of repentance featuring a solid dose of self-inflicted pain and suffering. The key difference is that the medievals used wooden switches while the moderns prefer regulations and taxation.

Global warming gives a variety of people the way to “make nice” with each other. We can join hands and save the planet. Even scientists decide the issue by “consensus” rather than by thorough, accurate, appropriately cautious data collection, including challenges to the data collection and interpretation as is expected from any discipline that presumes to take the falsification principle seriously. By agreeing it’s the “big” problem, we are to put aside our differences. “Skeptics” are to be treated with derision. The question is said to be “settled” (there we can all agree about that). The remaining questions involve what to “do” about it. And most of the solutions appear to be either quasi-socialism or outright socialism, again to make level, to obliterate differences. There are to be no differences, no competition. We are to all agree.

AGW offers modern people and modern societies a secular sacrament. It is a New Penance: Forgive me, Gaia, for I have sinned. It’s been 5 yrs. since my last recycling. Instead of saying the rosary or davening, we can chant “sustainability” and become pure again. And now virtually everyone is getting in to the act. Even ChimpyMcBushitler is on board, although new religions may seek new sacrificial lambs. We will be told that it is the evil market system, which creates this problem. And that will lead to being told it is the individual’s pursuit of self-interest that lay at the heart of the warming- even life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may come to be seen as culprits, if they haven’t already been. Top-down enforced social cooperation will save us from ourselves. A new god would be born, until…. Well, that wouldn’t really be paradise, and even the true believers would find that out at some point. But they could wreak a lot of hell in the meantime.

Lionel Shriver, in the Wall Street Journal, describes how environmentalism is used by Government in Britain to justify reduced services, fee increases, and more totalitarian surveillance.

As they campaigned for midterm regional elections on Thursday, the biggest issue that British politicians met on doorsteps was a load of rubbish. Specifically, one load of rubbish, where before there were two. Pressed to meet European Union targets for reducing landfill volume, many local councils now collect refuse only once every two weeks. As flies and vermin gather while food scraps achieve a fine perfume, residents have grown so enraged that bin-men are under repeated physical attack.

The logic of fortnightly collections — if you can follow it — is to encourage recycling. Lest widespread consternation over garbage seem petty, fortnightly collections now emblemize a broader source of indignation: the U.K. government’s self-righteous “green” justifications for reduced services on the one hand, and thievery on the other.

Halving the frequency of waste removal conveniently saves money. A host of other new “green” measures in the U.K. will make money: $200 fines for poorly separated recycling, or microchips implanted in wheelie bins to weigh residential refuse — dragging Britain’s surveillance culture to a new low, and facilitating charges for waste disposal by the kilo. Furious that they are already paying once for this service through local taxes, some householders have ripped the microchips from their bins.

The premier example of having to pay twice for the same dispensation, all under the guise of environmentalism, is the British government’s proposal to bring in “road pricing,” unveiled last December. This literal highway robbery would charge motorists up to $2.56 per mile to drive on roads whose construction they had paid for to begin with. Announcement of the scheme stirred the complacent, slow-to-anger British public to circulate an Internet protest petition that secured 1.8 million signatures.

And little wonder. Since the average British commuter travels 9.6 miles each way, a nine-to-fiver in a built-up area would pay $50 a day for the privilege of going to work. The Sunday Telegraph calculates that even in moderately populated Yorkshire, where the first pilot programs are planned, road-pricing would cost the average family $6,000 a year. …

Environmentalism has become the fashionable fig leaf to cover for extortion. If a tax is “green” it is “for the sake of the planet,” and fairness doesn’t come into it. Neither, apparently, does greed. Hence Britain’s petrol duty — the fourth highest in the world at over $4 a gallon plus 17.5% VAT levied on both the fuel and the duty ( in the U.K., even taxes are taxed) — has nothing to do with sticky fingers; it’s to confront the all-purpose bogeyman of global warming.

Mayor Ken Livingstone has installed a “congestion charge” for central London. At $10 per day at inception, the charge has risen to $16 in three years; the area covered by the charge doubled in February. Mr. Livingstone further proposes that high carbon-emission “Band G” vehicles — not only SUVs, but smaller sedans like the Ford Mondeo — be charged instead £25 per day, and be excluded from the 90% residents’ discount. That’s fifty bucks — every weekday, if you live or work in the congestion zone, or $13,000 a year. Richmond council has followed suit, tripling the cost of parking for Band G cars to £300 — meaning even outside of central London it will cost close to $600 a year to park in front of your own house. But that’s ok! It’s for the sake of the planet.

Britain pursues monetarily punitive policies to advance environmental goals. Expediently, punitive fiscal policies line treasury coffers. They not only disproportionately penalize the less well off, and stultify economic growth; these fees, fines, duties, and charges lurking on every corner also create a larger social climate of oppression, resentment, and paranoia.

Mark Steyn identified the author as “an American lady novelist in London and a Guardian columnist of conventionally leftie views” writing under a nom de plume, but he complimented and linked her column, and added the following comments.

It’s not enough that the average Briton is captured on closed-circuit TV cameras in his car, in the street, in the shopping mall, and even in country lanes where the rural constabulary have hidden them in trees to catch illegal fox hunters. Now the government is monitoring his garbage. If they ever take up Sheryl Crow’s all-we-are-saying-is-give-one-piece-a-chance toilet-paper rationing, you can bet the enforcers will mandate CCTVs in every bathroom if not microchips in the bowl.

If George Bush put a microchip in your garbage under the Patriot Act, there’d be mass demonstrations across the land. But do it in the guise of saving the planet and everyone’s fine with it.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds (for the Mark Steyn item).

that God hates cell phones.

Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious ‘colony collapse’ of bees.

Quick, somebody call Al Gore.

Amanda Byrd photo.

Australian Television debunks the above photo in this 3:43 video

Newsbusters story.

Hat tip to Michael Lawler.

Visiting some environmentalist whackjobs in Manhattan, the New York Times’ Penelope Green found:

DINNER was the usual affair on Thursday night in Apartment 9F in an elegant prewar on Lower Fifth Avenue. There was shredded cabbage with fruit-scrap vinegar; mashed parsnips and yellow carrots with local butter and fresh thyme; a terrific frittata; then homemade yogurt with honey and thyme tea, eaten under the greenish flickering light cast by two beeswax candles and a fluorescent bulb.

Michelle Conlin rides her scooter, even in the snow. “Rain is worse,” she said.

A sour odor hovered oh-so-slightly in the air, the faint tang, not wholly unpleasant, that is the mark of the home composter. Isabella Beavan, age 2, staggered around the neo-Modern furniture — the Eames chairs, the brown velvet couch, the Lucite lamps and the steel cafe table upon which dinner was set — her silhouette greatly amplified by her organic cotton diapers in their enormous boiled-wool, snap-front cover.

A visitor avoided the bathroom because she knew she would find no toilet paper there.

The nincompoop has a web site. All this idiocy does, of course, have a motive beyond mere self-righteousness. Both a book and a film are in the works.