There was speculation on Sunday that hackers working for the Russian secret service were responsible for the theft of controversial emails in the ‘Climategate’ scandal. The speculation is just that. Speculation. There seems to be no real evidence that the Russians were involved, other than the location in which the emails first publicly appeared.
Achim Steiner, the director of the United Nations Environment Programme, said the theft of emails from CRU, which is a world-renowned centre for climate research, had similarities with the Watergate scandal which brought down US President Richard Nixon.
But he said: “This is not climategate, it’s hackergate. Let’s not forget the word ‘gate’ refers to a place [the Watergate building] where data was stolen by people who were paid to do so.
“So the media should direct its investigations into that.”
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said he believed the theft of the emails was not the work of amateur climate sceptics.
“It’s very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services,” he told The Times.
“If you look at that mass of emails a lot of work was done, not only to download the data but it’s a carefully made selection of emails and documents that’s not random at all.
“This is 13 years of data and it’s not a job of amateurs.”
Which actually tends to lend credence to the growing speculation that the work was done by an inside "whistleblower" and not outside hackers. In either case, the United Nations, the British Government, democratic leaders in the United States and the leftist media are all trying to focus the attention on the "hackers" calling the current situation "Hackergate," rather than on the real problem: falsified data which has cost governments worldwide and private industry worldwide billions and billions of dollars, both directly and indirectly.
So last week we all read about the scandal at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. There a hacker revealed confidential emails exposing attempts by global warming apostles to manipulate embarrassing info that countered their warming claims. These emails have been called "the nail in the coffin" of global warming hysteria.
I wish that were true.
Check out the sites where the Chicken Littles still thrive. About the hacked emails, The Huffington Post says "this criminal activity has created fodder for right-wing groups to promote their own agenda that global warming is not real." And, after admitting he was "deeply shaken" by the emails, a Guardian columnist adds that "To bury man-made climate change, a far wider conspiracy would have to be revealed."
Really?
For fun: imagine if these leaked emails weren't about global warming, but Gitmo. Or Dick Cheney. Or Sarah Palin's private life. How fast would Time, Newsweek, and an intensely sweaty Andrew Sullivan be all over them - calling these emails corruption of the highest order?
But they can't do this here. Because the lie is the lie that the media believed in. It's their Watergate - so it's no wonder there's no "Woodward and Bernstein" to bring it down.
So, where does this leave Al Gore? He's got his hands all over this leafy Ponzi scheme, and he stands to make buttloads of money off propagated fear. Something tells me he won't be discussing these emails in Copenhagen. Because as long as the sky keeps falling, his bank account keeps rising.
Here’s a dirty little secret about The New York Times. It likes to leak things. Important things. Things that change the course of the public conversation. From the Pentagon Papers to the ruined terrorist-surveillance programs of the Bush era, the Times has routinely found that secrecy is a danger and sunlight is a disinfectant.
Until now. A troublesome hacker recently released e-mails going to and from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain, e-mails that exposed how the "scientific experts" cited so often by the media on global warming display are guilty of crude political talk, attempts at censoring opponents, and twisting scientific data to support their policy agenda.
The e-mails prove just how dishonest this left-wing global warming agenda truly is. And now suddenly, the New York Times has found religion, and won’t publish these private e-mails. Environmental reporter Andrew Revkin, who’s more global warming lobbyist than reporter, quoted – sparsely – from the e-mails, but declared he would not post these texts on his "Dot Earth" blog on the Times website: "The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here."
You should be ashamed of yourself. As you sit here and read yet another global-warming-is-a-hoax post by yours truly you are contributing to the warming of the planet.
At least that is what this article claims.
Wissner-Gross estimates every second someone spends browsing a simple web site generates roughly 20 milligrams of C02. Whether downloading a song, sending an email or streaming a video, almost every single activity that takes place in the virtual environment has an impact on the real one.
Or even reading articles about how you can save the planet, right? What can be more unbelievable than the claim that sitting behind a computer monitor is destroying the planet? How about a new “green internet?”
As millions more go online each year some researchers say the need to create a green Internet ecosystem is not only imperative but also urgent.
Naturally the article never actually mentions what a “green internet" ecosystem is. That is because there is no such thing, this whole issue is made up. The only “green internet ecosystem” that I can come up with is that the government is going to take our “green” away from us through taxes and regulations. Maybe we can implement an email cap and trade policy.
The article also fails to take into account that the more our society has turned to computers and the internet for recreation, the more we turn away from other things that create so-called greenhouse gasses. Like baseball and bicycle riding. (Remember, we breathe in oxygen and breath out CO2, the greenhouse gas, and we do it more when we are active.)
The article goes on to claim the following:
Anti-virus software firm McAfee reports that the electricity needed just to transmit the trillions of spam emails sent annually equals the amount required to power over two million homes in the United States while producing the same level of greenhouse gas emissions as more than three million cars.
“Most people don’t appreciate that the computer on your desk is contributing to global warming and that if its electricity comes from a coal power plant it produces as much C02 as a sports utility vehicle,” said Bill St. Arnaud of Canarie, a Canada-based internet development organization.
There you have it, spam emails are just as harmful to the planet as SUVs and we have all seen the scrutiny that SUV drivers have been under in recent years. If spam emails are helping to destroy the planet, that means all emails are destroying the planet, the planet cannot differentiate between a spam email and a non-spam email. Doesn’t that mean that emails need to be regulated (through taxes of course) in order to save the planet?
Yesterday at the G8 summit in Italy, the leaders of the world’s industrialized nations agreed to control global temperatures with a piece of paper.
That’s right, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States all agreed to “recognize that global emissions should peak by 2020 and then be substantially reduced to limit the average increase in global temperature to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.”
And that takes care of that.
Significantly, the G8 leaders also agreed to reduce global carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2050, and by 80 percent the emissions of G8 nations. All in a day’s work, you see.
Also at the meeting were developing nations China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico who were invited to participate in a “Major Economies Forum.” However, the developing nations did not come to a wider agreement with the G8 on emissions reductions.
A lack of agreement in the area of carbon emissions is actually quite a blessing, since two of the primary causes for the increase in those emissions have been economic and population growth in the Industrial Age. In short, the developing nations took a firm stand against being forever consigned to the dustbin of history.
Since 1750, the world’s population has grown from about 720 million to 6.477 billion in 2005, an 899 percent increase. The world GDP (PPP) has grown from an estimated $371 billion in 1700 to $55 trillion in 2005, a 1,482 percent increase. And, as a result, during the industrial age, carbon emissions grew from 3 metric million tons in 1751 to 7,985 metric million tons in 2005, a 266,167 percent increase.
What is left unsaid by world leaders who did agree to reduce emissions is that you can’t get something for nothing.
Either the U.S. and other nations will decrease their standards of living while allowing their populations to continue to grow, maintain their standards of living and reduce their populations, or somehow magically maintain their standards of living and growth in populations without using oil, coal, gasoline, and natural gas for energy that has sustained that growth to date.
The last time global carbon emissions were anywhere near the 4,000 metric million tons annual range—about the level world leaders desire to return to—was 1970.
Assuming the so-called “Group of Eight” nations were not actually sitting around and working out the technical problems with making solar, wind, and plug-in hybrids as efficient and cheap as their carbon-emitting counterparts, the options are clear for those who wish to engage in this suicide pact.
Either nations forget about growing the economy and creating jobs as emissions are capped, energy prices skyrocket, and the “green” alternatives fail to fuel growth. Or they have to radically reduce the world’s population—by whatever frightening means necessary.
The real solution to this non-problem, of course, is to do nothing and just keep emitting carbon since the world’s temperatures have been declining since 1998 despite increases in carbon emissions. But leaving that aside, there are some, shall we say, real whackos who actually do view reducing the world’s population as the right way to reduce emissions and “save” the planet.
Which, of course, is the logical conclusion to come to when one views his or her own specie’s prosperity as unsustainable and its very survival as inherently evil.
For example, in March, Jonathon Porritt, one of Gordon Brown’s environmental ministers, advocated reducing Britain’s population by 50 percent from 61 million to 30 million. He said, “Each person in Britain has far more impact on the environment than those in developing countries so cutting our population is one way to reduce that impact.”
Other writers, like Derrick Jensen, outright view civilization as the problem. In “World at gunpoint,” he writes rather cryptically (and chillingly), “What if, instead of asking ‘How shall I live my life?’ people were to ask the land where they live, the land that supports them, ‘What can and must I do to become your ally, to help protect you from this culture? What can we do together to stop this culture from killing you?’ If you ask that question, and you listen, the land will tell you what it needs. And then the only real question is: are you willing to do it?”
This is a not-so-veiled call for all but wiping out the human race. But, as noted, he despises civilization. Jensen is a so-called anarcho-primitivist. He views modern industrial society as the primary evil in this world, and would return to the pre-Industrial Age. In “Actions Speak Louder Than Words,” he wrote, “Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I’m not sure that’s right.”
It’s time for a little truth: People that wholeheartedly believe in this ideology—nay, cult—are extraordinarily dangerous. The only things that will prove more dangerous are governments that agree with them. After all, government is the only institution in history to have engaged in mass genocide.
And, just yesterday, the world’s leaders agreed to reduce human activity by 50 percent by 2050. Somehow. Let’s just say that those who place primacy on the right to live should be more than a little bit worried.
While the whole world has been enraptured by the tragic death of an icon beloved by millions — R.I.P., Ed McMahon — our leaders have been busy little beavers. On Friday the House of Representatives passed the Wacky-Malarkey Bill, AKA Crap and Trade. The allegedly Earth-rescuing legislation passed by a vote of 219-212, which is undoubtedly Mother Nature’s closest shave ever.
Yay! The environment is saved! So, okay, if this passes the Senate and President Obama signs it, your utility bills, along with the cost of everything else you might ever want to purchase, will go through the roof. But won’t the resulting gentle breeze be a nice substitute for all that nasty air conditioning? And so what if it’ll cost everybody more to drive a car, ship food and other goods, run a business, and do anything else that requires electricity or fuel? We need to stop modern life in its tracks! Put aside your petty personal needs and think of the planet, man.
Gaia just dodged a bullet.
…
What’s that? They did what?
The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.
Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision…”
Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBSNews.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. “It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else,” Carlin said. “That was obviously coming from higher levels.”
Man, don’t these guys know The Science Is Settled™? But wait, there’s more!
Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.
After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. “My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide),” he said. “There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They’re not going up, and if anything they’re going down.”
Undergrad degree? Sheesh! Leave the science to the experts, buddy. Like Al Gore.
Look, deniers: Just because the planet’s getting cooler doesn’t mean there isn’t global warming, and just because the climate isn’t changing much doesn’t mean it isn’t changing a whole bunch. When it comes to tricking people into doing things they’re too dumb to know they need, words can mean whatever we font gem through seen.
Apparently, Michelle Obama is not a cheap date. A $73,000 "date night" for the Obamas will cost taxpayers about $73,000.
Not that I care all that much about the cost. This country has a lot bigger spending problems to face than Presidential travel. And, to a certain extent, this is one of the perks of the job. All Presidents traveled for personal pleasure, and being the President means having an entourage and a security detail everywhere you go. It’s unavoidable.
What I’m much more worried about is the carbon footprint. After all, Obama wants to tax carbon emissions and regulate where our thermostats are set and what sort of vehicles we drive all in the name of thwarting what he believes will be a global warming apocalypse, yet he can whisk his wife away to New York on a gas-guzzling jet (not to mention a gas-guzzling helicopter) for a date?
Obama tells me I have to change my lifestyle and sacrifice for the greater good while he’s busy flying down to New York for some fine dining and theater.
If you ask me, this little move by Obama should kill his cap and trade legislation. If global warming isn’t enough of a threat to get Obama to change his lifestyle, then why should it be enough to justify regulating every part of my lifestyle?
When it comes to Global Warming, Obama is Al Gore Part 2: Do as I legislate, not as I do.
