Russia, Canada in rivalry over Arctic resources By NATALIYA VASILYEVA , 09.16.10, 08:40 AM EDT
MOSCOW -- The foreign ministers of Russia and Canada each said Thursday they expect the United Nations to rule in favor of their nations' rival claims to Arctic resources.
Russia, the U.S., Canada, Denmark and Norway have all been trying to assert jurisdiction over parts of the Arctic, which is believed to contain as much as a quarter of the Earth's undiscovered oil and gas.
Yahoo! BuzzCanada's Lawrence Cannon and Russia's Sergey Lavrov said after talks in Moscow on Thursday that both nations claim the Lomonosov Ridge under the Arctic as an extension of their respective continental shelves.
The dispute has intensified as evidence grows that global warming is shrinking polar ice, opening new shipping lanes and new resource development opportunities.
Since polar ice isn't shrinking in any significant amount, this is moot.
Doh...
Arctic Sea Ice Reaches Lowest 2010 Extent, Third Lowest in Satellite Record ScienceDaily (Sep. 15, 2010) — The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest recorded since satellites began measuring sea ice extent in 1979, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center... ..."We are still looking at summers with an ice-free Arctic Ocean in perhaps 20 to 30 years," said Serreze, also a professor in CU-Boulder's geography department
Figure 1 shows the extent of Antarctic sea ice for 2010 up to September 10. Ice extent has been about 1 million square kilometers above the 1979 – 2000 average. Notice the 2009 ice amount was above average as well. This matches reports of record cold temperatures around the Southern Hemisphere. On July 27, 2010 we learned from Peru, “Temperatures plummeted to below -20°C prompting the government to declare a state of emergency for nearly half of the country Friday.”- Source
n an on-the-fly interview with CNSNews.com, White House Office of Science and Technology Director John P. Holdren explained what he meant when he wrote in his 1973 book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions that “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States.”
In that book, co-authored with Paul and Anne H. Ehrlich, Holdren also calls wealth redistribution (both within and among nations) “absolutely essential” in order to provide a decent life for everyone.
CNSNews.com: “You wrote ‘a massive campaign must be launched to restore a high quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States’ in your book Human Ecology. Could you explain what you meant by de-develop the United States?”
Holdren: “What we meant by that was stopping the kinds of activities that are destroying the environment and replacing them with activities that would produce both prosperity and environmental quality.”
When asked how this would be achieved, Holdren responded, “Through the free-market economy.”
Holdren has long worried about population overgrowth and what might happen should our current environmental and economic state not be able to support the world’s inhabitants. In Human Ecology, CNS News points out, he also calls for “political,“ ”legal,“ and ”boycott” action in order to make sure that resources and wealth are distributed evenly:
Resources must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries,” Holdren and his co-authors wrote. ”This effort must be largely political, especially with regard to our overexploitation of world resources, but the campaign should be strongly supplemented by legal and boycott action against polluters and others whose activities damage the environment. The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.
Also what are you showing with your graph there a 13 day trend to prove climate change is not happening? Interesting but if you read the climate change it seems that it's a trend of changing weather and temperature patterns, not so abrupt as some might try and say to scare everyone.
No. That was just to illustrate that practically our WHOLE SUMMER looked like that - BELOW normal. Sure didn't feel like any "warming trend" the last few of summers. We had ONE DAY that hit above 30C (86F) instead of weeks. Colder winters too!!
[This message has been edited by fierosound (edited 09-17-2010).]
No. That was just to illustrate that practically our WHOLE SUMMER looked like that - BELOW normal. Sure didn't feel like any "warming trend" the last few of summers. We had ONE DAY that hit above 30C (86F) instead of weeks. Colder winters too!!
We had a REALLY cool summer here in Northern California.
Don't believe that global warming is about global socialist redistribution of wealth? Well, here it is from the White House Science Czar:
Resources must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries,” Holdren and his co-authors wrote. ”This effort must be largely political, especially with regard to our overexploitation of world resources, but the campaign should be strongly supplemented by legal and boycott action against polluters and others whose activities damage the environment. The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.
and to quote Karl Marx
"the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It ... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “payment in cash” ... for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation ... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."
This guy is headed right (or left) down the road.
Arn
[This message has been edited by Arns85GT (edited 09-17-2010).]
President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn’t actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called “global climate disruption” instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to “global climate disruption.”
I guess they won't give up on this until they pass cap & trade.
I guess they won't give up on this until they pass cap & trade.
You mean "Cap and Tax" (the true goal).
The Atlantic Wire notes, said: “An administration that goes out of its way to make terrorism sound less dangerous than it really is (i.e. ‘man-caused disaster’) makes the push to sell ‘global warming’ as more dangerous than it really is. Sounds like somebody’s starting to feel uncomfortable because the icecaps and Greenland ice sheets aren’t melting fast enough.”
[This message has been edited by fierosound (edited 09-19-2010).]
Notice how now it is referring to local climate changes and not "Global" climate change.
"It says: 'There is currently insufficient understanding of the enhanced melting and retreat of the ice sheets on Greenland and West Antarctica to predict exactly how much the rate of sea level rise will increase above that observed in the past century for a given temperature increase.
'Similarly, the possibility of large changes in the circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean cannot be assessed with confidence. The latter limits the ability to predict with confidence what changes in climate will occur in Western Europe.
What they don't talk about is the increased ice load in Antarctica, record cold recorded there this year, and the volcanic activity in Greenland. This is certainly a giant face-saving exercise if I ever saw one.
Good lord that video is crazy. How would anyone think that would be a good idea?
People who think the planet is dying, people who think CO2 will cause human kind to die, 100,000s of thousands of species to die off, sea levels will rise 20 feet world wide...THOSE kind of people.
People who think the planet is dying, people who think CO2 will cause human kind to die, 100,000s of thousands of species to die off, sea levels will rise 20 feet world wide...THOSE kind of people.
I don't like to lump everyone together but to each their own I guess. I think it's a case of very poor judgement by whoever OK'ed the video.
Here is what they say on their website:
With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain's leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis - writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn't and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended. http://www.1010global.org/global/news
Yes it is typical. Allot of it has to do with youth, who have not been brought up to respect their country. It also has to do with the low class riff raff the leftists use to bolster their numbers. Other rallies rely on working folk and responsible citizens. It is unfortunately the state of politics. The left really is populated with a disproportional number of bums, deadbeats, riff raff, and professional welfare leaches, as well as some unionists who are the rabble of the union movement. Of course there are union folk who are respectful, and are patriots, but you won't see them at such rallies.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is “an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 ‘to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense.’” It can now add “fund plays on climate change” to that list.
The New York Times reports that the federal agency will award $700,000 of taxpayer money to a New York theater company to produce a show on climate change. Titled, “The Great Immensity,” the production will explore “the emotional and psychological aspects of the current environmental crisis.”
Whether one agrees with the premise of the play is irrelevant. It is not something the NSF needs to allocate resources for, given its subjective message. Even the Times calls it a “rare gift” since the agency traditionally funds research that involves math, science, and engineering.
Despite rigorous dissention among the scientific community concerning the effects of anthropogenic warming, the climatologists who believe it to be a serious problem controlled the message for years and continue to espouse warnings of an environmental crisis. The truth is that many prominent climatologists disagree. Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT writes that “we now know that the effect of [carbon dioxide] on temperature is small, we know why it is small, and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate.”
Yes, the climate is changing, and it affects some areas of the world more than others. But it is not the crisis that alarmists purport it to be, and the environmental benefits from the proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are completely insignificant. Also often ignored are the benefits from living in a warmer world.
When there is much work to be done studying the effects of carbon dioxide and manmade emissions on global warming and creating a transparent debate on the science, is now the time to spend taxpayer dollars on a politically motivated play?
(CNSNews.com) – Tough new rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency restricting greenhouse gas emissions would reduce the global mean temperature by only 0.006 to 0.0015 of a degree Celsius by the year 2100, according to the EPA's analysis. As a side effect, these rules would “slow construction nationwide for years,” the EPA said in a June 3 statement. Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee highlighted those findings in a report released last week. The GOP minority report, issued last Wednesday, said a series of proposed and partially implemented new regulations on industrial boilers, greenhouse gas emitters, and ozone levels will put over 800,000 jobs at risk with little environmental benefit. The authors cite the EPA’s own staff to show that greenhouse gas regulations, which would require major sources of CO2 (carbon dioxide) to obtain permits and limit their output, could seriously harm the economy if implemented. “It is clear throughout the country, PSD (Prevention of Significant Deterioration) permit issuance would be unable to keep up with the flood of incoming applications, resulting in delays, at the outset, that would be at least a decade or longer, and that would only grow worse over time as each year, the number of new permit applications would exceed permitting authority resources for that year.” the EPA wrote in the Federal Register on June 3. The EPA permits, under the Prevention of Significant Deterioration program, are already in place – but would be significantly expanded to include greenhouse gases. “(D)uring this time, tens of thousands of sources each year would be prevented from constructing or modifying,” the EPA staff wrote. “In fact, it is reasonable to assume that many of those sources will be forced to abandon altogether plans to construct or modify. As a result, a literal application (of the permit requirement) to GHG (greenhouse gas) sources would slow construction nationwide for years, with all of the adverse effects that this would have on economic development.” Because of these concerns, the EPA decided to create the “tailoring rule,” which changes the thresholds for being considered a major source of carbon; they claim this will limit immediate 2011 exposure to the regulations to only 900 sources. But Republicans on the Senate EPW committee said that a federal court could strike the tailoring rule because it does not follow explicit guidelines set out for the process of issuing permits for pollutants in the Clean Air Act (CAA), which has its own threshold of 100-250 tons of CO2 equivalent a year. “(T)he tailoring rule violates the plain language of the CAA. The Act defines ‘major sources’ as those that emit more than 100-250 tons per year of a regulated pollutant. In the tailoring rule, however, EPA arbitrarily changes those thresholds -- to 75,000 and 100,000 tons. For this reason, the rule likely won’t survive judicial scrutiny,” the staff wrote. The Republicans point in their report to a recent study from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which concludes that if the tailoring rule were stricken, the EPA “could be forced to regulate” about 260,000 office buildings, 150,000 warehouses, 92,000 health care facilities, 92,000 health-care facilities, 37,000 churches, and 17,000 farms, among other things. All of these complications stem from EPA’s desire to regulate mobile sources of greenhouse gases -- primarily automobiles. By issuing a finding last Spring that carbon dioxide is a danger to public health, the EPA is able to regulate mobile output of the gas; but the ancillary effect is that stationary CO2 emitters -- factories, schools, office buildings -- are now subject to those Clean Air Act regulations as well. But the benefit of regulating those mobile sources is, also by the EPA’s own estimations, as little as less than two thousandths of a degree in temperature reduction over a century. In rulemaking documents from April 2010, the EPA writes, “Based on the reanalysis the results for projected atmospheric CO2 concentrations are estimated to be reduced by an average of 2.9 ppm [parts per million] (previously 3.0 ppm), global mean temperature is estimated to by reduced by 0.006 to 0.0015 ˚C by 2100.” In a speech on the Senate floor last week, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the EPW committee, said the proposed rules would have “no meaningful” impact on the environment. “(T)hese rules would have no meaningful environmental benefits. Consider EPA’s rules to regulate greenhouse gases: they would reduce global temperatures by 0.0015 C by 2100, an amount so small it can’t be measured on a ground-based thermometer.” He also said all of the rules in the report had “sparked bipartisan opposition.” Indeed, several Democrats in the Senate wrote EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson last February to express their concern over the greenhouse gas regulations, including Sens. Robert Casey (D-Pa.), Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.). “We remain concerned about the possible impacts on American workers and businesses in a number of industrial sectors, along with farmers, miners, and small business owners, who could be affected as your agency moves beyond regulations for vehicle greenhouse gas emissions,” they wrote in the letter. Other proposed EPA regulations include: -- pending regulations on emissions from industrial and commercial boilers which the Republican staff says are stringent enough to make some factories shutter rather than become compliant, and risking 798,000 jobs; -- higher emissions standards for cement plants, which involves 15,000 jobs; -- and increased National Ambient Air Quality Standards for the amount of ground-level ozone to 60 parts per billion, which the EPA estimates could cost $19 billion to $90 billion to implement. Top House Republicans have formed the Rural America Solutions Group aimed at working on issue that effect agricultural areas of the country, and held a forum Wednesday on what they termed “the EPA’s Assault on Rural America.” They heard from witnesses representing the beef and cattle industry, farmers, coal workers, and others affected by the many new and proposed regulations laid out in the report. At the forum, Rep. Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) said, “In many instances, the EPA is overreaching its authority. Instead of operating within the law, EPA believes it can dictate to Congress that legislation needs to be passed for more government authority. And if Congress doesn’t act, it threatens to regulate anyway.” “Every day, the EPA seems to demonstrate how vastly disconnected it is to the folks who feed us.” Republicans invited EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to attend the forum, but she did not appear, nor did she send a representative.
Who would have thought the current controversy over manmade global warming could lead to significant rethinking of the entire climate change phenomenon and, as an unintended consequence, shatter another environmental group-think error involving sustainable oil production? Stick with me here. We need to review some history first.
Climate change alarmists, seeking to bolster their theory of the hypothetical properties of carbon dioxide to foster manmade global warming, devised the concept of radiant energy balance. The problem is that all such concepts to date specify solar radiation as the primary source of energy for Earth's climate system. Unfortunately, not only is this fundamentally flawed science, it has made it difficult to fully explain variations in ocean temperatures causing such well-known regional phenomena as the Southern Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation,.
Any correct science model of physical phenomena must include all variables and constants. Missing from the current models is the heat input originating from the molten material forming the core of our planet and upon which the thin crust floats. A Canadian engineer estimates this core heat could range from 75% to nearly 100% of that received on earth originating from the sun. So why ignore something of such potential magnitude? Because core heat flow remains difficult to precisely quantify. Not only is little really known about the source of that heat, but its impact on climate appears discontinuous due to the movement of tectonic plates forming the crust.
However, as more and more scientists begin to realize what has been overlooked, focus is shifting to theories proposed over the last couple of decades which may provide the key to not only explain certain climate change phenomena but could lead to new conclusions about petroleum production. What is that key? It involves recognition of the potential source of the heat -- a nuclear fission reactor at or near the very center of the planet.
Current conventional wisdom holds that petroleum products result from accumulation of ancient biomass. Oil is said to form from preserved remains of prehistoric algae and zooplankton through a process called diagenesis.
In the late 19th Century, Dmitri Mendelev, renowned Russian chemist and inventor who achieved great fame when he proposed the first version of a periodic table of elements, studied petroleum hydrocarbons. He concluded hydrocarbons originated from carbon deposits in the depths of the earth perhaps dating back to the formation of the planet and could be formed by chemical combination under suitable temperatures and pressures without need for biomass. Astronomical observations of vast amounts of methane on other planets and moons (such on Saturn's Titan) -- obviously formed without the benefit of biomass -- supported this theory.
Such observations prompted Thomas Gold (1920-2004), an astronomy professor at Cornell University, to conclude that, since petroleum and its component hydrocarbons were present across the entire universe, including in meteorites and captured interplanetary dust, there was no reason to believe that only on Earth could they come from a biological origin. Further, he pondered a mystery about helium, one of the essential elements of the universe, present in trace amounts everywhere in nature yet never chemically combining like, say, hydrogen and oxygen do to form water. Yet the only place on Earth helium is ever found in abundance is with pools of petroleum underground.
Thus, Gold theorized that oil and gas were born out of the Big Bang and trapped in the Earth 4.5 billion years ago in randomly dispersed molecular form. But, the intense heat of Earth's volcanic core "sweats them out" of the rocks that contain them, sending petroleum compounds and helium migrating upward through the porous deep Earth because they are more fluid and weigh less. Gold believed that, in a region between 10 and 300 kilometers deep, the hydrocarbons nourished vast colonies of microbes where all of earthly life began and where today a vastly greater mass of living things exist than on the surface of the planet. The migrating oil and gas swept up the biological wreckage of this life as they percolated upward, together with molecules of helium, all of which eventually became trapped and concentrated in near-surface reservoirs where oil is usually found.
When, in the late 1970s, Gold discovered that major oil-producing regions in the Middle East and southeast Asia were defined by large scale patterns in surface geology and topography, such as deep fault lines, he proposed a drilling project at Lake Siljan in central Sweden near a large meteor crater. While the project found an oily sludge at about 20,000 feet, Gold could not convince critics that it came from mantle flow. A second bore hole also discovered oil, but it too failed to provide convincing proof of Gold's theory.
Meanwhile, geologists in the Soviet Union were well along in formulating similar abiogenic hypotheses of oil production. In 1970, they began a major drilling project on the Kola Peninsula, near the Norwegian border, seeking a better understanding of the earth's crust. Scientists expected to find a geologic zone, known to exist because of seismic recordings, marking a transition between granite and denser basalt which would add credence to abiogenic theory. Instead, to their surprise, they found a layer of metamorphic rock (rock which has been intensively reworked by heat and pressure) extending about 3 to 6 miles beneath the surface. This rock had been thoroughly fractured and surprisingly saturated with water at depths where free water should not be found.
Three other big surprises came from the project. First, the Russians found a menagerie of microscopic fossils -- 24 distinct species of plankton microfossils as deep as 4 miles below the surface -- covered with carbon and nitrogen rather than the typical limestone or silica. Despite the harsh environment of heat and pressure once thought impossible to sustain life, the microscopic remains were remarkably intact. A second surprise was how quickly temperatures rose as the borehole deepened. At just 12 km (approximately 7 miles) down, temperatures exceeded 350O F at pressures where rocks began to act more like a plastic than a solid. The borehole had a tendency to flow closed whenever the drill bit was pulled out for replacement -- the factor which ultimately halted all progress in 1992. Finally, the Russians complained of mud flowing out of the hole described as "boiling" with hydrogen. Where did that come from?
Spurred on by the Russian findings and a 1990 discovery of crude oil in a 6-kilometer-deep well drilled in long-presumed oil-free granite of central Sweden (which he viewed as only explainable by migrating petroleum), Gold postulated an inexhaustible supply of petroleum constantly percolating outward from Earth's volcanic core. Convinced that he was onto something significant, Gold published his theory in a 1992 paper. "The Deep Hot Biosphere", followed seven years later by a book with the same name. However, as skeptics of manmade global warming would appreciate, some geologists were so incensed by Gold's ideas they petitioned to have the government remove all mention of it from the nation's libraries. Gold called the action "an effort at book-burning, pure and simple," but it had the desired effect of discrediting his work.
Now it appears that Gold may indeed have been correct about abiogenic oil production. He just did not correctly conceive of another means by which it could occur. J. Marvin Herndon, an American scientist with degrees in physics and nuclear chemistry, concluded that the conventional wisdom of a rock shell (the mantle) surrounding a hot fluid core could not, at the temperature and pressure at the center of the Earth, sustain long-term convectional heat transfer. Instead, beginning in 1993, Herndon published the first of a series of scientific articles revealing the background, feasibility and evidence of a nuclear fission reactor, called the georeactor, at Earth's center. The georeactor could provide the energy source for heating Earth's core. In addition, the nuclear reaction would provide the atoms needed for petroleum production, maintain earth's geomagnetic field (including solving riddles of geomagnetic field variability), and produce large quantities of deep-Earth helium.
While other scientists have proposed similar ideas, Herndon described a surprisingly large georeactor inside Earth's 2400-km core consisting of a uranium sub-core surrounded by a shell -- all approximately 24 km (17 miles) in diameter -- containing fission products and products of radioactive decay which form "a slurry or a fluid." Such a slurry would sustain convection in the microgravity environment within the shell allowing lighter (low atomic number) fission products, including carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and helium to flow outward while heavier actinides remained to sustain the critical mass needed for continuing fission.
Thus, given the heat and pressure environment of the outer core and surrounding mantle, it becomes no great scientific leap to postulate (as did Mendelev) molecular bonding of the elemental carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen into simple molecules of methane, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen dioxide (water). The simple molecules, along with free helium isotopes and hydrogen, would continue to rise upward migrating within the near-liquid lower crust. There, following the scenario laid out by Thomas Gold nearly 20 years ago, the molecules would settle in reservoirs forming the sources of petroleum with an organic fingerprint and accompanying helium found today -- providing a renewable and virtually inexhaustible supply.
Thus, as researchers dig deeper into sources of climate change, we must seriously consider the concept of a molten Earth core fed by nuclear waste from a georeactor at its center emitting heat as well as the elements to form hydrocarbons creating petroleum. With great heat (including an abundance of CO2) escaping the crust by mechanisms such as hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor triggering major events such as El Nino ocean warming, we may be getting closer to climate change truth than the mythology of "man-made climate disruption."
I am surprised the Newf hasn't posted on this, telling us how the Telegraph Newspaper is owned by big oil and the learned Professor is paid by the nuclear industry.
This is a well written and solidly based letter. Thanks,
I am surprised the Newf hasn't posted on this, telling us how the Telegraph Newspaper is owned by big oil and the learned Professor is paid by the nuclear industry.
This is a well written and solidly based letter. Thanks,
Why would I need to comment about it again??? There's a whole thread about it which you and Fierobear participated in. Is it news now because another website reprinted it?
And calling me (or anyone else) out because I have a differing opinion on a subject seems kind of lame. It can really come accross as having a closed mind and "Holier than though" attitude IMO.
So the fact that the Telegraph printed the story, and that they are very reputable doesn't phase your point of view that anything Fierobear or I post is wrong? And, that your point of view is always right?
jebus hebus christ, and I call you 2 countrymen......
2500 fracken years ago in a dead empire called Egypt or another one called Rome, people were arguing about climate change and peoples activities causing it..........
Well, the climate DIDNT change because of anything they did...........didnt then, and wont now.........
Al Gore is as full of crap as Obama is.........
The fracking oil leak in the gulf ???.........well, ww1 and ww2 saw 50 times that much oil and fuel spilled in the oceans.......took ma nature all of 20 years to clean up.......
The only thing warming is the greenies bank accounts !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow, the erudite Mr. M has weighed in and as usual, with his keen mind and razor wit he has succinctly zeroed in on the salient point. Well said my learned friend.
Wow, the erudite Mr. M has weighed in and as usual, with his keen mind and razor wit he has succinctly zeroed in on the salient point. Well said my learned friend.
Arn
I knew there was a reason I liked Canadians (well, not so sure about newf )
You'll notice Newf's avatar. There are some Canadians from Newfoundland who have never accepted the vote that brought Newfoundland into Canada in 1949. So, you'll see the old Newfoundland flag and lots of anti-government rhetoric. But, that is their right and privilege I guess. The Newfoundland people have contributed huge to both world wars and their soldiers and sailors have served proudly ever since before Newfoundland became part of Canada and since. In fact, many are decorated and lauded as truly great warriors for democracy.
However, there are allot of Canadians who swallowed the Great Global Warming Swindle hook line and sinker. There are also some Canadians who are left of center in their politics. But that again is their right and privilege.
The Atlantic Wire notes, said: “An administration that goes out of its way to make terrorism sound less dangerous than it really is (i.e. ‘man-caused disaster’) makes the push to sell ‘global warming’ as more dangerous than it really is. Sounds like somebody’s starting to feel uncomfortable because the icecaps and Greenland ice sheets aren’t melting fast enough.”
They forgot to include "Greenhouse effect". That one has been out of style a while.
Environmental radicals are losing political momentum
Today, U.N. negotiators will begin two weeks of meetings in Cancun, Mexico, looking for a way to move the climate action agenda forward, impose global carbon emissions caps and compel countries to pay a series of new international taxes to underwrite environmental programs. Maybe they'll get what they want when hell freezes over.
The mood of climate alarmists going into Cancun is decidedly downbeat. The sense of impending doom they had cultivated over the last decade or so has largely evaporated. The Climategate scandal took a severe toll on the credibility of some of the climate theology's leading high priests, and subsequent investigations into some of the more outlandish claims on which their doomsaying was based found them to be either exaggerated or fabricated. The November demise of the Chicago Climate Exchange - which sought to transfer billions of dollars to political insiders trading in government-rigged carbon markets - signaled that there was no money in the game anymore. Last week, even Al Gore admitted his fallibility when he retracted his earlier support for ethanol fuels. The god bleeds.
Last year's Copenhagen confab was intended to seal a comprehensive global climate deal but turned into an exercise in humiliation. The imagined 2009 treaty - originally billed as "the single most important piece of paper in the world today" - would have instituted global governance of carbon emissions enforced by an international body with the power to levy taxes to force countries to impose its will. But the final, hastily written three-page agreement contained none of those controversial proposals and was simply a nonbinding statement regarding voluntary emissions caps. The most significant event at last year's summit was when the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa unceremoniously snubbed President Obama, who was reduced to barging his way into their meeting uninvited. It was a low moment for the president personally, and a poor showing for what is under most circumstances the strongest country in the world.
The principal goal of this year's meeting seems to be to hang on to the meager gains made in 2009 and to discuss what to do about the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire at the end of 2012. The green utopians are up against more immediate problems than their imagined impending climate catastrophe. The debt crisis in Europe will blunt the enthusiasm of countries in the Eurozone to underwrite expensive new international initiatives. China, India, Brazil and South Africa, among others, will be even less willing to agree to cut back growth than they were when they scuttled the Copenhagen deal. The United States delegation will have to accept the fact that whatever schemes they would like to agree to, any treaty language would have to meet the approval of the incoming more conservative Senate, a highly unlikely proposition. Cancun will be dead on arrival.
One benefit of meeting in Mexico is that the conference will avoid the embarrassment last year when the Copenhagen meeting ended in an unexpected blizzard. It's harder to sell global warming to world leaders who have to flee the city before their flights are grounded by an ice storm. The worst the Cancun conferees will have to deal with is the threat of being kidnapped by heavily armed gangs of drug dealers.
n an on-the-fly interview with CNSNews.com, White House Office of Science and Technology Director John P. Holdren explained what he meant when he wrote in his 1973 book Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions that “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States.”
In that book, co-authored with Paul and Anne H. Ehrlich, Holdren also calls wealth redistribution (both within and among nations) “absolutely essential” in order to provide a decent life for everyone.
CNSNews.com: “You wrote ‘a massive campaign must be launched to restore a high quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States’ in your book Human Ecology. Could you explain what you meant by de-develop the United States?”
Holdren: “What we meant by that was stopping the kinds of activities that are destroying the environment and replacing them with activities that would produce both prosperity and environmental quality.”
When asked how this would be achieved, Holdren responded, “Through the free-market economy.”
Holdren has long worried about population overgrowth and what might happen should our current environmental and economic state not be able to support the world’s inhabitants. In Human Ecology, CNS News points out, he also calls for “political,“ ”legal,“ and ”boycott” action in order to make sure that resources and wealth are distributed evenly:
Resources must be diverted from frivolous and wasteful uses in overdeveloped countries to filling the genuine needs of underdeveloped countries,” Holdren and his co-authors wrote. ”This effort must be largely political, especially with regard to our overexploitation of world resources, but the campaign should be strongly supplemented by legal and boycott action against polluters and others whose activities damage the environment. The need for de-development presents our economists with a major challenge. They must design a stable, low-consumption economy in which there is a much more equitable distribution of wealth than in the present one. Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being.
He wants a free market economy and redistribution of wealth? Jeckyl and Hyde?
Canada 
