The Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior attempted to block a ship carrying coal from unloading in the harbor of Gdansk.
Armed Polish border guards boarded the vessel, breaking a window to gain entry. They arrested the captain, offloaded all 18 passengers and crew and seized the vessel.
CFACT has reported extensively on the strong antipathy the Polish people feel towards anyone who threatens their energy security, particularly as they view this as driving them into dependence on Russia.
Glenn Reynolds remains as indefatigable, witty, and preeminent among conservative bloggers as usual. One of his particularly effective blogging techniques is the use of amusing, and implicitly classifying and categorizing, post titles.
I happened to notice his use the other day of a scornful response to left-wing insolence and irrationality: “Sod off, Swampy!”, and I began wondering where that came from.
So I looked it up, and found that it goes back to a Greenpeace protest at London’s International Petroleum Exchange in 2005.
Kyoto protest beaten back by inflamed petrol traders
WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.
What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.
“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,†one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.â€
Another said: “I took on a Texan Swat team at Esso last year and they were angels compared with this lot.†Behind him, on the balcony of the pub opposite the IPE, a bleary-eyed trader, pint in hand, yelled: “Sod off, Swampy.â€
Greenpeace had hoped to paralyse oil trading at the exchange in the City near Tower Bridge on the day that the Kyoto Protocol came into force. “The Kyoto Protocol has modest aims to improve the climate and we need huge aims,†a spokesman said.
Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. “The violence was instant,†Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said.
“They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us.†When a trader left the building shortly before 2pm, using a security swipe card, a protester dropped some coins on the floor and, as he bent down to pick them up, put his boot in the door to keep it open.
Two minutes later, three Greenpeace vans pulled up and another 30 protesters leapt out and were let in by the others.
They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts “open outcry†trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading.
But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately,†a photographer said. “It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back.â€
Mr Beresford said: “They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.â€
Last night Greenpeace said two protesters were in hospital, one with a suspected broken jaw, the other with concussion.
A spokeswoman from IPE said the trading floor reopened at 3.10pm. “The floor was invaded by a small group of protesters,†she said. “Open outcry trading was suspended but electronic trading carried on.â€
Eighteen police vans and six police cars surrounded the exchange and at least 27 protesters were arrested. A small band blocked the entrance to the building for the rest of the evening.
Richard Ward, IPE’s chief executive, said that the exchange would review security but denied that protesters had reached the trading floor. However, traders, protesters and press photographers confirmed to The Times that the trading floor had been breached.
The Peruvian government is planning to file criminal charges against Greenpeace activists who may have permanently scarred the Nazca Lines World Heritage Site during a publicity stunt.
As The Guardian reports, the Nazca lines “are huge figures depicting living creatures, stylized plants and imaginary figures scratched on the surface of the ground between 1,500 and 2,000 years ago.” The figures, which can only be seen from the air, are believed to have had ritual functions related to astronomy.
The ground around the site is so sensitive and so sacred that Peru has even forbidden presidents and top officials to walk where the Greenpeace activists went. Peru’s Deputy Culture Minister told the BBC: “You walk there, and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years.” Tourists generally get to see the site from the air, or, on rare occasions, are equipped with special foot gear.
“They are absolutely fragile. They are black rocks on a white background. You walk there and the footprint is going to last hundreds or thousands of years,” said the minister. “And the line that they have destroyed is the most visible and most recognized of all.”
Several Greenpeace activists entered into the prohibited area beside the figure of a hummingbird where they laid big yellow cloth letters reading: “Time for Change! The Future is Renewable.” They were also sure to leave a signature. The message was intended for delegates from 190 countries at the UN climate talks being held in Lima.
Peru is planning to file criminal charges against the activists before they leave the country.
Christopher Booker, in the Telegraph, adds another glaring example to what is becoming an ever-growing list of exposed scientific falsehoods and wholly-fabricated claims of dire climactic effects.
This time it is the same Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that asserted that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 on the basis on a phone conversation has been found to be basing its claims concerning the Amazon rainforest on environmentalist agitprop.
The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report… citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.
A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.
Little of this has come as a surprise to those who have studied the workings of the IPCC over the years. As I show in my book The Real Global Warming Disaster, there is no greater misconception about the IPCC than that it was intended to be an impartial body, weighing scientific evidence for and against global warming. It was set up in 1988 by a small group of scientists all firmly committed to the theory of “human-induced climate change”, and its chief purpose ever since has been to promote that belief.
Or maybe you won’t have to. A jury in Britain last Wednesday, encouraged by extreme partisan testimony from chief fraudster James Hansen himself, exonerated Greenpeace vigilantes who vandalized a coal-fired powerplant.
The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.
Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse” under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door of a burning house to tackle a fire.
The not-guilty verdict, delivered after two days and greeted with cheers in the courtroom, raises the stakes for the most pressing issue on Britain’s green agenda and could encourage further direct action.
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How could any jury reach such a preposterous conclusion? Testimony from witch doctors on top of a prolonged steady diet of false information from the mainstream media, as in this typical example from the Telegraph.
Recent events have seen the scare campaign over global warming descend to the level of a Monty Python sketch.
Much publicity was given, for instance, to Lewis Gordon Pugh, who set out to paddle a kayak to the Pole to demonstrate the vanishing of the Arctic ice. At 80.5 degrees north, still 600 miles short of his goal, he met with ice so thick that he and his fossil-fuelled support ship had to turn back.
But this did not prevent him receiving a congratulatory call from Gordon Brown, nor boasting that he had travelled “further north than anyone has kayaked so far”.
It took the admirable Watts Up With That blog, run by the American meteorologist Anthony Watts, to point out that in 1893 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen found the Arctic so ice-free that he was able to kayak above 82 degrees north, 100 miles nearer the Pole than our hapless campaigner against “unprecedented global warming”.
Greenpeace thinks it has found the way to defeat the clever Japanese, who manage to harvest hump-backed whales in defiance of an international ban on whaling… “for research.” After they’ve been “researched,” you see, Japan’s harvested whales are not simply discarded, but instead manage to find their way to Japanese dining tables.
This year Greenpeace (couch-Eco-warriors that they are) is following the humpback whales by satellite, and proposes to save them by asking its website’s bleating moonbat readers to select a name. Once they’ve named the puppy, the theory is that presumably it will be that much easier to guilt the Japanese about eating it.
If you’re a leftist, it would never occur to you that Nature has cycles and that change is normal. If the weather is colder for few years, that must mean we’re headed into another Ice Age and human behavior is to blame. If the weather is slightly warmer for a few years, catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming has to be underway.
Glaciers couldn’t possibly shrink and grow at different periods of times. A shrinking glacier is a one-way process and event. Once it melts, its gone for good.
And, if you are a leftist, what can you do about this sort of problem? How do you change public policy? It’s very simple: you take off all your clothes and stand around naked in a public place out-of-doors in order to be photographed.
Reuters explains that Greenpeace thought all this would “establish a symbolic relationship between the vulnerability of the melting glacier and the human body.”
Isn’t there something fundamentally preposterous about the supposition that anyone would be willing to be guided on matters of science by the sort of people who have so little grasp of cause and effect that they rely upon pointless symbolic behavior to try to achieve political goals?