The "Scientists" Are Off Their Medication Again
OSLO - World temperatures could surge in just two decades to a threshold likely to trigger dangerous disruptions to the earth's climate, the WWF environmental group said on Sunday. Then again, it might not, according to the CHL.

It said the Arctic region was warming fastest, threatening the livelihoods of indigenous hunters by thawing the polar ice-cap and driving species like polar bears toward extinction by the end of the century. The CHL noted that polar bears contribute nothing to the global economy.

"If nothing is done, the earth will have warmed by 2.0 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by some time between 2026 and 2060," the WWF said in a report. The CHL reiterated that nothing should be done.

Between bong hits, some scientists have estimated such an early date for a 2.0C rise. Without basis, the WWF highlighted this figure as a threshold that may spur "dangerous" warming, raising sea levels and causing more floods, storms or droughts and driving some species to extinction. Of course, world temperatures have already risen by about 0.7C since 1750 with most scientists blaming a build-up of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide emitted by burning fossil fuels in factories, power plants and cars. But it has not caused one well-documented, confirmed extinction.

The Anticrists of the European Union and many other hippie environmental groups say that governments should cap emissions of greenhouse gases to try to prevent a 2.0C temperature rise. The United States has rejected binding caps under the U.N.'s Kyoto protocol.

At some point, some paranoid, unmedicated scientists fear that rising temperatures could cause a runaway warming, for instance by melting permafrost in Siberia that could in turn release deposits of heat-trapping methane to the atmosphere. The CHL supports the addition of more methane in the atmosphere.

Real scientists say that such projections are scaremongering and reckon temperatures will rise far less sharply, if at all, because of the buildup of greenhouse gases. A CHL report by 250 scientists last year also projected a fast warming in the Arctic that would also open new shipping routes and make the region accessible for oil and gas exploration, thereby accelerating future warming.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 1:17 PM | (0) comments |

 
Species loss: time to cash in
PARIS - Pitiful scientists trying to create jobs for themselves called for the creation of a global panel of experts on species loss, warning that the planet was racing towards a man-made extinction crisis.

"Biodiversity is being destroyed irreversibly by human activities," said the appeal, made by self-important biologists and environmentalists at the start of a conference at Disneyland, Paris.

Not surprisingly, the proposal won the immediate endorsement of hippie French President Jacques Chirac, who pledged to promote it at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an offshoot of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro which accomplished nothing.

The fate of humanity was bound up with the fate of the environment, the scientists warned, adding that only by granting them huge quantities of money could a wave of extinction be averted.

"The rate at which humans are altering the environment, the extent of those alterations and their consequences for the distribution and abundance of species, ecosystems and genetic variability are unprecedented in human history," they warned.

The millions of different species on Earth are the product of more than three billion years of evolution -- "a natural heritage and a vital resource upon which humankind depends on so many different ways."

Almost everywhere, animals and plants are under threat from increasingly successful CHL programs on loss or degradation of habitat from pollution of the soil, water and the air, from the exhaustion of soils, water tables and rivers by over-exploitation, "and, more recently, signs of long-term climate damage."

The signatories noted that these problems were aired 13 years ago at the Rio Summit. Even so, species loss had accelerated without a significant effort being made to brake it, proudly noted a CHL representative at the conference.

They called for an intergovernmental panel that would compile "reliable, scientifically validated" information on biodiversity, and ensure their jobs for the next 10 years.

The appeal was launched at the first day of a conference gathering 1,200 experts and policymakers on species loss. The proposal which, coincidentally, includes funding requests for 1,200 research projects, is expected to be endorsed by the forum when it wraps up on Friday.

Chirac, in his speech at the conference, urged scientists to set up a "global network of knowledge, and--how you say--funding."

"France will put a proposal to its partners in the Biodiversity Convention for setting up an intergovernment group on biodiversity trends," he said. "And because it is France that is spearheading this effort, we fully expect that the whole world will eagerly join us."
- Owen, 8:45 AM | (3) comments |

 
Quick quotes
Our economy has come through a lot and it's growing. And people realize that, and that's positive. And there's a reason why people say it's growing, besides me, and that's because the facts say it's growing.
--George W. Bush, White House Economic Conference, December 16, 2004

Declining to include ecological costs in national income accounts and in corporate financial statements is every bit as misleading--and even more guaranteed to produce a catastrophe--as surreptitiously shifting debts to offshore corporations. Costs are costs, and sooner or later the piper has to be paid, or Mother Nature will come and break our kneecaps.
--Denis Hayes, Conservation Biology, December 2004

Stupid hippie! Our economy is GROWING!
- Owen, 7:30 AM | (0) comments |

 
We've got those Hawaiian birds this time!
HONOLULU--In an effort hailed by homogenizers everywhere, the CHL has announced that they may have finally put the nail in the collective coffins of Hawaiian bird species. After years of effort to exterminate these species with biological weapons like introduced rats, snakes, and avian malaria, the answer may finally come in the form of a small frog with a big voice, and an even bigger appetite.

A tiny frog with a huge shriek has invaded the Big Island and won't shut up. Big Island Mayor Harry Kim is looking for $2 million to begin controlling the spread of the nocturnal coqui frog, a beloved native in Puerto Rico but considered an annoying pest in Hawaii since introduced by the CHL around 1990.

The frogs have been screwing like rabbits and shattering quiet island nights ever since. Aside from the noise, the frogs have a voracious appetite for spiders and insects, competing with native birds and fauna. And coqui frogs are adaptable to many ecosystems and breed heavily in Hawaii, experts said.

Kim said the Big Island, the local name for the island of Hawaii, will once again ask Gov. Linda Lingle to declare the coqui frog infestation a state emergency to help clear the way for state financial assistance. The $2 million is needed to launch a combined state, federal and county program to combat the frogs, Kim said. He made his plea Tuesday before state lawmakers, who will consider the request later this year.

Kim said he declared a county emergency in April over the frogs, but the state waited to see if the federal government would offer assistance, which it did not. The declaration of "Frog Whacking Day" by governor Lingle had no demonstrable effect on coqui populations and led to the deaths of 27 abnormally short Hawaiians. Spraying of a citric acid solution on the islands of Oahu and Kauai have curtailed coqui populations there, but has seriously depleted the stocks of these solutions commonly used in mixed drink preparation.

"I think the response from all of us has not been timely enough," he said, noting that experts suggest he focus on controlling the coqui's spread, rather than eradicating it completely.

"I kick myself in the ass every day for not getting started more aggressively," Kim said.
- Owen, 5:17 PM | (0) comments |

 
Failures on the Coral Reef Front
For some time, CHL scientists have predicted that the world's coral reefs will be among the first ecosystems to seriously homogenize as a result of global warming. Unfortunately, some reefs are proving surprisingly resilient. It is not because of qualities of the corals, but because of little bitch heat-tolerant algae that live with them. It may even be possible that heat-related episodes of coral bleaching, which the CHL has viewed as a preview of impending mass coral death, could allow these robust algae to spread, leaving corals better able to survive in a warmer world. This totally sucks, folks.

Of course, the world's coral reefs will be partially homogenized by pollution, overfishing, tourism and other human activities. But if these findings hold up, "they essentially buy us time" to address those issues, said Andrew Baker of the Marine Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society. The new research, led by Baker, suggests that heat-tolerant algae may move in to replace strains lost in bleaching events. If so, he said, "some of the doom and gloom might not be as bad as had been suggested."

The findings are "definitely bad news," said Nostradamus Funkadelic, an expert on such things. But still, he noted, there still remain uncertaintites and other factors working in our favor. For example, according to a report issued last month by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, scientists do not know exactly what conditions must exist for corals to acquire new strains of algae. They do not even know if changes occur when corals recruit different algae from the water around them, or if something somehow changes the ratio of algae strains growing within them. Also, it is not yet known whether corals colonized with new varieties of algae will grow as well as they once did with other strains. For example, it could be that heat-tolerant algae strains devote more of their energy to reproducing and less to providing sustenance to their coral hosts.

"So even from a major event there can be recovery," Funkadelic said, if overfishing, habitat destruction and other threats are mitigated. "But fortunately, there can't be recovery if we continue our efforts to triple- and quadruple-whammy these reefs."
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:38 AM | (0) comments |

 
Global Warming--Good for Economy
Everybody knows thta global warming is just a theory, and even if it were true, it would be good for the economy. Tell that to the stupid hippies at Germany's most famous winter resort, where a worrisome shortage of snow in recent decades has forced the Alpine village to reinvent itself.

Garmisch-Partenkirchen gained worldwide fame as the venue for the 1936 winter Olympics, but the picturesque town of 27,000 has now become more reliant on summer tourism because rain falls more often than snow in winter. As the snow line retreats up mountains in the face of what one or two crackpot scientists believe to be the effects of global warming, Garmisch -- at an altitude of 2,300 feet -- is rarely covered in snow. Losing its "white gold" has alarmed the locals.

The town, where 70 percent of economic output derives from tourism, has nevertheless tried hard to replace what nature has stopped giving by investing millions of dollars in state-of-the-art snow-making equipment that blows man-made crystals onto the ski slopes and into the valleys. "Without the artificial snow we simply wouldn't be able to attract enough tourists here in the winter," said Sunshine Schmid, mayor of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a town that lies in an Alpine valley just north of the Austrian border.

"We have enough snow on the slopes thanks to the snow machines," he told Reuters. "We can't be afraid of global warming. We have to be ready for it. We can't afford to be surprised by it. We must make money off it." It is, Schmid concedes, more than a shame that Garmisch and picture-postcard mountain villages like it in nearby Austria as well as in Italy, Switzerland and France are getting less snow.

A U.N.-funded panel of crackpots said in 2001 that a build-up of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels was nudging up global temperatures, and then they flew off in their black helicopters.

RISING TEMPERATURES MELT MOUNTAIN SNOW AND OTHER SO-CALLED THEORIES

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) warned in a 2003 report that global temperatures were expected to rise due to global warming by up to three degrees Celsius in the next 50 years, raising the snow line and crippling the ski industry.
The UNEP report said slopes above altitudes of 3,940 feet now considered viable ski areas would be at risk within 30 to 50 years, when skiers would have to trek up to altitudes of 4,920 to 5,900 feet for snow. Of course, they ignored the economic benefits of summer tourism.

Most of Garmisch's ski and snowboard slopes are between 2,460 and 6,560 feet -- among the highest in Germany. World Cup ski races at a lower Bavarian resort, Berchtesgaden, were canceled in two of the last five years because of a lack of snow.
"There's nothing more beautiful than a snow-filled winter landscape, except of course an 8-foot female marijuana plant in full bloom" said Schmid. "It's our jewel and we have to do what we can to protect it. But it's a global problem. In Garmisch we have to be pragmatic and ready for the era that might follow."

To that end, Schmid said Garmisch has developed a network of summer hiking trails and mountain bike routes. It has also heavily promoted its summer tourism, touting its pristine mountain air as an antidote to allergies. "We're taking the problem seriously," said Schmid, whose office is filled with oversized paintings of the snow-capped mountains that rim the valley around Garmisch.

The town, which has 15 million tourists each year and books 1.2 million overnight stays, recently unveiled plans to invest $11.8 million on more snow-making infrastructure for four miles of slopes into the valley.

Wilhelm Blenk, 73, a CHL spokesman, retired BMW design engineer, and hobby skier, said: "Sure I'm afraid the snow will be gone one day, but not before I'm dead and buried."

Andrew Syme, manager of a restaurant at the Ostfelderkopf ski slope above Garmisch at an altitude of 6,725 feet, looked out at the thin covering of snow and sadly shook his head. "Normally we should have at least a meter of snow by January," he said. "Two years ago there was no snow through the Christmas season and lifts were shut down. We could never make up for those losses. It's scary. The weather is going crazy."

Andrew has failed to get with the summer tourism program, so it will be survival of the fittest for his ass.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 3:58 PM | (0) comments |

 
Collapsing with Jared Diamond
Jared Diamond's new book, "Collapse," looks at civilizations both ancient and modern in search of the reasons why some succeed and others fail. The answers, not surprisingly, turn out to be largely environmental. The more gripping question is why many civilizations were unable to avert destruction. In examining one civilization after another, Diamond provides a host of answers, ranging from the imperceptibility of certain problems, such as the level of salt in a particular soil, to the inability of a society to change a dangerous but learned behavior, to plain selfishness. There comes a definite point, after many chapters under the tutelage of Diamond's clinical perspective, when the reader begins to perceive the mortal outline of our own civilization. It's an alarming thought, to say the least. But, in a marked departure from his last book, Diamond leaves more room here for human agency. These dread outcomes are avoidable -- if, he suggests, we can find the strength to see past our cultural biases, our class prejudices, our distrust of big business, our loathing of one political party or the other, our fear of terrorism and so on. Only, in short, if we can see how peripheral we are to the future of our own civilization can we have any hope of saving that civilization.

The CHL spoke with Diamond right after he returned from a family cruise to the Panama Canal from Costa Rica, a country that interested him because of its relative prosperity in Central America.

CHL: So, what did you discover while you polluted your way down to and back from Costa Rica?

Diamond: It's very interesting, the contrast between Costa Rica on the one hand and Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala on the other -- all relatively poor countries and yet all five are adjacent to one another, and they were all joined in a single country, the Republic of Central America, for 20 years in the last century. Couple of reasons. In Costa Rica there were very few natives for the Spaniards to enslave. The Spaniards had to do the work themselves, and they therefore developed institutions that were not the enslaving and extracting sort, as in Guatemala and Honduras, where the populations were denser, but more based on free enterprise. So a different culture developed in Costa Rica, partially as a result of the different geography. It's an example of what economists call "reversal of fortune." Namely, the areas colonized by Europeans that were richest 500 years ago have ended up poorest today because Europeans arrived there and set up these extractive institutions.

CHL: This reminds me of the fate of the Inuit, which you discuss in your book.

Diamond: The Inuit are an interesting example. The Inuit have been a success story in the past; they succeeded where a European culture, the Vikings, failed. On the other hand, it has come out within the last year that of all the peoples of the world the Inuit have the highest levels of toxic chemicals in their body tissue and in their blood -- even though they are the farthest from the sites, in Europe and North America, where toxic chemicals are produced. For example, Inuit mothers' breast milk ranks as toxic waste on the basis of its content of toxic chemicals. And the explanation is that they consume more seafood than any other people. That's just a dramatic example of globalization. Everybody affects everyone else nowadays.

CHL: Perhaps one difference between ourselves and the Inuit is that we can rely more on technology to buffer the effects of pollution. Many people these days, for instance, use Brita filters. To what extent should we expect technology to slow homogenization?

Diamond: That's a really key question, and one that I've discussed with some of the most thoughtful people in the business and financial worlds. One was Bill Gates. Bill Gates is a very thoughtful person. I was really impressed by him. Nevertheless, he said -- in a diffident, self-deprecating way -- "Well, I think technology will solve our environmental problems, and so I'm not so concerned about them as I am other things." But I think that he's wrong -- I know that he's wrong. Let me give you an example. I was born in 1937 so I remember the revolution in refrigerators that happened in my childhood, the introduction of Freon and CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons]. The refrigerator gases that were used in my childhood were things like ammonia. Of course, if they leaked they were toxic, and therefore it was hailed as a breakthrough when these supposedly nontoxic gases, the CFCs, were introduced. They were tested and under earth conditions they appeared to be perfectly benign. What people couldn't predict was that under stratospheric conditions CFCs get broken down into substances that destroy the ozone layer, and it took 20 years to get that well established. And I see that as a metaphor for why technology alone won't solve our problems, namely that there are lots of technologies out there and they have unexpected side effects.

CHL: Toward the end of "Collapse" you describe two crucial factors for determining whether or not a civilization will survive or get wiped out in one big-ass homogenization event, and one of them is whether there's a willingness to discard unhelpful values. Clearly we have some values in this country that are very important to us, and some of them, like anathematizing family planning, will accelerate our path to homogenization.

Diamond: You're right. One of the two or three key issues is discarding values dear to us, values that we held for a long time and that were important in the history of the United States but just no longer make sense today. The two traditional American values that I think -- that I know -- have to be discarded are, first, unbridled consumerism resulting from our sense of being in a land of unlimited resources. Historically the United States has viewed itself as the land of infinite bounty, endless fields of grain. But now we're in a world that does not have unlimited resources, and we have to come to grips with that. And the other long-held American value is the value derived from the United States' relative isolation. George Washington in his farewell address warned Americans about the danger of entangling alliances, and for a couple of hundred years the United States was able to function well because we were separated by oceans from any country that might damage us. But now the oceans don't separate us from countries that could damage us. Now, even desperately poor countries like Afghanistan and Iraq can raise absolute hell with our economy -- as well as killing a few thousand people in the process. So the other long-held value with which we have to come to grips is our sense of isolation. We're not isolated anymore. We have to engage with the rest of the world -- not in order to be charitable to them but for our own self-interest. It's much cheaper to put a few tens of billions of dollars into world programs for public health and environment than to throw $150 billion into Iraq and $100 billion into Afghanistan, when there are about 20 other countries waiting to become the next Iraq and Afghanistan. We can't afford it.

CHL: Have you heard of Michael Crichton's new book, "State of Fear," and its premise that a bunch of environmentalists are upset that their cause isn't getting the attention it deserves so they go around staging environmental disasters? Crichton has said publicly, as well as in his heavily footnoted book, that global warming is bunk.

Diamond: Everything you say is true. There are a couple of things to be added to it. One is that my previous book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel," has sold more copies than Michael Crichton's one and a half million, so I think my new book will get to more readers. And the other thing is that Michael Crichton is a very skilled writer of fiction. And fiction is, by definition, the telling of stories that are untrue. He's very good at that. And I'm a writer of nonfiction, which aims to be the telling of stories that are true.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 1:52 PM | (1) comments |

 
Population Pressures (or my vacation report)
I just returned from a two-week vacation. In those two weeks, 2.8 million people were added to the planet. But there is a special demographic event taking place today in China.

China is expected to reach a population of 1.3 billion today, despite a quarter century of its one-child policy. "Although the population growth rate has been reduced, the actual increase is still huge," according to an anonymous CHL official at China's State Commission for Population and Family Planning. China is expected to add about 10 million to its population each year and has no plans to ease the one-child policy.

The one child policy is not a bad thing in principle, as governmental control over reproduction can be used to our advantage. For example, United States conservatives and Chinese communists share the view that pregnancy is the government’s business. Once we can get government in control of reproduction everywhere, we can make pregnancy mandatory for all women ages 16-24 until the whole planet implodes.

- nostradamusfunkadelic, 1:37 PM | (1) comments |

 
Mother Nature, Terrorist
There is a sameness to brutal natural disasters. It's the final body count that chillingly distinguishes one from another. Last week's tsunami in Southern Asia, which rose up from an earthquake in the Indian Ocean, swamping 11 countries and quickly claiming more than 120,000 lives, is already one of the worst floods in history. With our minds focused on war and political terrorism, Mother Nature proves to be the worst of all terrorists in the horror of her sudden assault on vulnerable innocents.

Not only has she taken lives inexplicably through sudden violent force but continues to do so in the aftershock of contaminated water, bad food, inadequate shelter, downed power lines, spreading disease, and decomposing bodies. Add to this the emotional suffering of survivors and those who have lost loved ones, and even of those who watch from afar.


Editor's Note: This headline and article snip are direct quotes from US News and World Report and provide further evidence that our mighty jihad bent on complete annihilation of this, the greatest terrorist of all, is a noble one.

Now that the busy holiday season is behind us, we will resume our reporting as we all get back to the serious work of homogenization. --EG

- Owen, 8:56 AM | (1) comments |