Carlos Alberto Montaner identifies the true identity of the sides fighting the battle over Global Warming, and proposes that the liberals, like Al Gore, who want to save us from Global Warming need to give up automobiles, electricity, and private jets first, before we start letting them apply new taxes to us.

On the surface the topic is global warming, but the issue goes a lot deeper. It is another modality of the near-cosmic debate that collectivists and individualists have engaged in for at least two centuries. The collectivists — in this case, those who look after the interests of the collective — assume that, because of industrial activities and the combustion of fossil fuels, the planet’s temperature will rise several degrees, bringing catastrophic consequences: a polar meltdown, coastline flooding, extinction of species, and the rapid expansion of deserts over large areas of the planet.

Individualists, for their part, affirm that climate predictions are closer to witchcraft than to science. Not long ago, for instance, Ãlvaro Vargas Llosa recalled sardonically that three decades ago the prevailing fear was the inevitable beginning of a glacial period that would freeze our bones, while George F. Will wondered which was better: today’s frozen and inhospitable Greenland, or the warmer and more hospitable island discovered by the Vikings one thousand years ago, where they established settlements and planted vineyards…

After the barely scientific debate — because it is based on educated guesses or questionable statistical probabilities, not on proven cause-and-effect relations — what remains is another form of the ideological and moral battle between the left and the right, or, broadly speaking, between those who defend society in the abstract (they usually write Mankind with a capital M) and those who focus their discourse on protecting human beings of flesh and bone.

That is why it is not surprising that in the ranks of the environmentalist collectivists, the Greens, you’ll find socialists of every ilk, the communists who survived the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, their clothes still covered with ideological rubble, and, in general, all the members of the happy-go-lucky, vast and illusional family of the “progressives,” while on the other side, the side of the individualists, you’ll find the liberals (in the European and Latin American sense of the word) who are more interested in the rights of people here and now than in the unforeseeable fate of future generations.

Read the whole thing.

Matt Drudge:

Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it’s a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It’s neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it’s an undignified slapstick that people don’t wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the “but’s” are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses. This is clearly such an incredible failure of so many people, from journalists to politicians. If the European Commission is instantly going to buy such a trick, we have another very good reason to think that the countries themselves, not the Commission, should be deciding about similar issues.

Hat tip to The News Junkie at Maggie’s Farm.

Roosevelt elk

Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer are trying to make sure that hundreds of healthy Roosevelt elk and Kaibab mule deer living on Santa Rosa Island are exterminated by the federal government.

The animals have been living there since the 1910s and 1920s when the island’s former owners imported them to provide hunting opportunities on the 52,794 acre off-shore property, then being operated as a cattle ranch. The introduction proved extremely successful, and the island became noted for the trophy animals it produced.

In March 1980, however, Congress established a Channel Islands National Park. In 1986, the Federal Government purchased Santa Rosa Island. The purchase agreement, however, granted the former owners the right to continue ranching and operating a hunting concession for 25 years.

In 1997. however, the National Park and Conservation Association, another litigious self-appointed group of busybodies, sued to end ranching and hunting immediately, claiming that they interfered with public access. The lawsuit resulted in a settlement agreement ending ranching, and stipulating the removal of the elk and deer by 2011.

Hunting is cruel, you see, but exterminating non-native species (who have lived there for a century) is good conservation, California-style.

The National Rifle Association has taken up the fight to save the 1100 animals.

The New Scientist blissfully imagines a world in which humanity has become extinct.

Humans are undoubtedly the most dominant species the Earth has ever known. In just a few thousand years we have swallowed up more than a third of the planet’s land for our cities, farmland and pastures. By some estimates, we now commandeer 40 per cent of all its productivity. And we’re leaving quite a mess behind: ploughed-up prairies, razed forests, drained aquifers, nuclear waste, chemical pollution, invasive species, mass extinctions and now the looming spectre of climate change. If they could, the other species we share Earth with would surely vote us off the planet.

“Now just suppose they got their wish. Imagine that all the people on Earth – all 6.5 billion of us and counting – could be spirited away tomorrow, transported to a re-education camp in a far-off galaxy. (Let’s not invoke the mother of all plagues to wipe us out, if only to avoid complications from all the corpses). Left once more to its own devices, Nature would begin to reclaim the planet, as fields and pastures reverted to prairies and forest, the air and water cleansed themselves of pollutants, and roads and cities crumbled back to dust.

“The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better,” says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California…

Pretty quickly – 24, maybe 48 hours – you’d start to see blackouts because of the lack of fuel added to power stations,” says Gordon Masterton, president of the UK’s Institution of Civil Engineers in London. Renewable sources such as wind turbines and solar will keep a few automatic lights burning, but lack of maintenance of the distribution grid will scuttle these in weeks or months. The loss of electricity will also quickly silence water pumps, sewage treatment plants and all the other machinery of modern society.

The same lack of maintenance will spell an early demise for buildings, roads, bridges and other structures. Though modern buildings are typically engineered to last 60 years, bridges 120 years and dams 250, these lifespans assume someone will keep them clean, fix minor leaks and correct problems with foundations. Without people to do these seemingly minor chores, things go downhill quickly…

With no one to make repairs, every storm, flood and frosty night gnaws away at abandoned buildings, and within a few decades roofs will begin to fall in and buildings collapse. This has already begun to happen in Pripyat. Wood-framed houses and other smaller structures, which are built to laxer standards, will be the first to go. Next down may be the glassy, soaring structures that tend to win acclaim these days. “The elegant suspension bridges, the lightweight forms, these are the kinds of structures that would be more vulnerable,” says Masterton. “There’s less reserve of strength built into the design, unlike solid masonry buildings and those using arches and vaults.”

But even though buildings will crumble, their ruins – especially those made of stone or concrete – are likely to last thousands of years. “We still have records of civilisations that are 3000 years old,” notes Masterton. “For many thousands of years there would still be some signs of the civilisations that we created. It’s going to take a long time for a concrete road to disappear. It might be severely crumbling in many places, but it’ll take a long time to become invisible.”..

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.

And if the visitors chanced across one of today’s landfills, they might still find fragments of glass and plastic – and maybe even paper – to bear witness to our presence. “I would virtually guarantee that there would be some,” says William Rathje, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated many landfills. “The preservation of things is really pretty amazing. We think of artefacts as being so impermanent, but in certain cases things are going to last a long time.”

Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don’t occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF4, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof – for anything that cares and is able to listen – that we once had something to say and a way to say it.

But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth – and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along – it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling – and perversely comforting – reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

Personally, I prefer to imagine a world without idiots like these people.

From Ed Driscoll.com via Maggie’s Farm.

Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute tells a story about Julian Simon, the late and great economist.

He was at some environmental forum, and he said, “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Naturally, every hand shot up. He said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” Nothing. Again: “Is there any evidence I could give you — anything at all — that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Not a stir. Simon then said, “Well, excuse me, I’m not dressed for church.

Coastal California is made up of either Redwood forest or what is basically a desert nicely cooled by fogs from the Pacific. The non-forested portion of the California landscape had little to offer the eye beyond a modest variety of native weeds, and European settlers got right to work planting trees and flowers.

Today, the cult of extreme Environmentalism flourishes the length of the left coast, and purists in California have come to regard non-native Holland grass (originally planted to keep the sand dunes from eroding), Eucalyptus, wild rose and other non-native trees, plants, and shrubs as sacrilegious human affronts to Mother Nature’s original perfection.

San Francisco is going to spend a lot of money deliberately de-foresting the Presidio and other parks.

While in Southern California, botanical vigilantism is being prosecuted.

video

The Wall Steet Journal’s liberal reporters wonder who made it. Must have been oil company lobbyists, they conclude.

Here’s a television advertisement from Greenpeace UK, which alarmingly illustrates the intolerance and appetite for power of Environmentalist extremists.

Gas Guzzler video

American oil companies are not permitted to hunt for oil on the continental shelf adjacent to the Florida coast, but Canadian companies are already pumping 19,000 barrels a day 90 miles from Key West, and Communist Cuba is now exploring for oil even closer, aided by Canada, Spain, and China.

Washington Times

Agence France-Presse via Yahoo tells us that the UN is now warning us about “endangered deserts.”

The world’s deserts are being threatened “as never before”, particularly by climate change, but can still be used as a key resource if action is taken to protect them, according to a report released on Monday.

The study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) highlights the problems facing desert areas but also their potential uses in vital sectors such as energy, food and medicine.

Shafqat Kakakhel, from UNEP, said: “Far from being barren wastelands, (deserts) emerge as biologically, economically and culturally dynamic while being increasingly subject to the impacts and pressures of the modern world.

“They also emerge as places of new economic and livelihood possibilities, underlining yet again that the environment is not a luxury but a key element in the fight against poverty and the delivery of internationally-agreed development goals.”

At least 25 percent of the Earth’s surface — 33.7 million square kilometres (13 million square miles) — has been defined as desert and is home to more than 500 million people, according to the report, “Global Deserts Outlook”.

But one of its authors, University College London geography professor Andrew Warren, said the unique landscapes, ancient cultures, flora and fauna in deserts were at risk of disappearing….

Kaveh Zahedi, deputy director of UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre based in Cambridge, eastern England, added that action was needed.

“These deserts are unique and dynamic eco-systems and, if sensitively treated, can provide the answers to many of the challenges that we face today, whether it’s for energy, for food or for medicine,” he said…

“The pharmaceutical potential of desert plants has yet to be tapped,” the report notes.

This, plus sustainable eco-tourism and conservation schemes, could benefit not just the local desert communities but the wider population, it added.

Isn’t it amazing how all the world’s most worthless real estate is unique and precious, and always (whatever the climate, no matter how barren) a treasure house of marvels just waiting to be found?

There seems be no hierarchy of desirability to any of this marvellous uniqueness.

Suppose we could convert some miserable arid, baking, rocky desert into a nice wet, fever-ridden swamp. Or, alternatively, we decided to change it into a hot, steaming and impenetrable jungle. Or we changed our minds again and froze the whole thing into the precise equivalent of Alaska’s North Slope (solid ice 10 months of the years; open water, soggy ground and a mind-boggling number of mosquitoes for two months — but fewer snakes). Or we waved our magic wand, and produced… New Jersey!

Exactly which of all these unique and marvellous alternatives would offer the most intellectually and aesthetically intriguing diversity of life? Which would offer the richest gifts to Science? I hate to admit it (since I loathe New Jersey and kind of enjoy a good snake), but, if you think about it, you know exactly what would win.

David Burge at Iowahawk responds to Al Gore’s call to action with ten helpful suggestions.

—————

Hat tip to PJM.

Reports the London Free Press.

Personally, I always thought liberals were born that way.