Leadership Fail

Ontario's Dalton McGuinty.

Almost no new net power will be generated by all the green-energy projects hastily funded since the bill was passed, but the average residential consumer will see more than $400 a year added to his power bill for a decade to pay for all the bad contracts with and subsidies to eco-friendly power suppliers.

Incredible.

"Scientific heresy"

To whet your appetite:

The [IPCC's] glacier claim was not peer reviewed; nor was the alteration to the sensitivity function Lewis spotted. The journalist Donna Laframboise got volunteers all over the world to help her count the times the IPCC used non-peer reviewed literature. Her conclusion is that*: “Of the 18,531 references in the 2007 Climate Bible we found 5,587 - a full 30% - to be non peer-reviewed.”

Yet even to say things like this is to commit heresy. To stand up and say, within a university or within the BBC, that you do not think global warming is dangerous gets you the sort of reaction that standing up in the Vatican and saying you don’t think God is good would get. Believe me, I have tried it.

Does it matter? Suppose I am right that much of what passes for mainstream climate science is now infested with pseudoscience, buttressed by a bad case of confirmation bias, reliant on wishful thinking, given a free pass by biased reporting and dogmatically intolerant of dissent. So what?

After all there’s pseudoscience and confirmation bias among the climate heretics too.

Well here’s why it matters. The alarmists have been handed power over our lives; the heretics have not. Remember Britain’s unilateral climate act is officially expected to cost the hard-pressed UK economy £18.3 billion a year for the next 39 years and achieve an unmeasurably small change in carbon dioxide levels.

At least* sceptics do not cover the hills of Scotland with useless, expensive, duke-subsidising wind turbines whose manufacture causes pollution in Inner Mongolia and which kill rare raptors such as this griffon vulture.

At least crop circle believers cannot almost double your electricity bills and increase fuel poverty while driving jobs to Asia, to support their fetish.

At least creationists have not persuaded the BBC that balanced reporting is no longer necessary.

At least homeopaths have not made expensive condensing boilers, which shut down in cold weather, compulsory, as John Prescott did in 2005.

At least astrologers have not driven millions of people into real hunger, perhaps killing 192,000 last year according to one conservative estimate, by diverting 5% of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel*.

That’s why it matters. We’ve been asked to take some very painful cures. So we need to be sure the patient has a brain tumour rather than a nosebleed.

Handing the reins of power to pseudoscience has an unhappy history. Remember eugenics. Around 1910 the vast majority of scientists and other intellectuals agreed that nationalizing reproductive decisions so as to stop poor, disabled and stupid people from having babies was not just a practical but a moral imperative of great urgency.

“There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact,” said George Bernard Shaw*, “that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’’ By the skin of its teeth, mainly because of a brave Liberal MP called Josiah Wedgwood, Britain never handed legal power to the eugenics movement. Germany did.

Or remember Trofim Lysenko*, a pseudoscientific crank with a strange idea that crops could be trained to do what you wanted and that Mendelian genetics was bunk. His ideas became the official scientific religion of the Soviet Union and killed millions; his critics, such as the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, ended up dead in prison.

Am I going too far in making these comparisons? I don’t think so. James Hansen of NASA says oil firm executives should be tried for crimes against humanity. (Remember this is the man who is in charge of one of the supposedly impartial data sets about global temperatures.) John Beddington, Britain's chief scientific adviser, said this year that just as we are "grossly intolerant of racism", so we should also be "grossly intolerant of pseudoscience", in which he included all forms of climate-change scepticism.

Do send it to your friends and family.

As I've been saying for years....

Climate cycles are driven by that big ball of fire in the sky, not farting cows and long-haul trucking.

The first results from the lab's CLOUD ("Cosmics Leaving OUtdoor Droplets") experiment published in Nature today confirm that cosmic rays spur the formation of clouds through ion-induced nucleation. Current thinking posits that half of the Earth's clouds are formed through nucleation. The paper is entitled Role of sulphuric acid, ammonia and galactic cosmic rays in atmospheric aerosol nucleation.

This has significant implications for climate science because water vapour and clouds play a large role in determining global temperatures. Tiny changes in overall cloud cover can result in relatively large temperature changes.

Unsurprisingly, it's a politically sensitive topic, as it provides support for a "heliocentric" rather than "anthropogenic" approach to climate change: the sun plays a large role in modulating the quantity of cosmic rays reaching the upper atmosphere of the Earth.

Well, DUH! (H/T)

NDP MP Megan Leslie didn't get the memo

The asinine, money-sucking, socialist, wealth transfer schemeKyoto is dead, darlin'. The ruse is over. Time to move on.

Related.

In which farting becomes a criminal act

Indigenous Andean Gaia worship, writ large. Because what's good for Bolivia must be thrust upon us all.

Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country. [...]

Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth... grants the Earth a series of specific rights that include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities, and the right to be free from pollution.

HRM anti-idling by-law

Moronic ecofascists at work in Halifax Regional Municipality.

Halifax now has a noise bylaw that aims to prevent idling over five minutes, but the proposed new rules would make it illegal to run an engine in a motionless vehicle during a shorter time frame. [...]

The planned bylaw will probably have a stipulation that no stationary vehicle have its engine running for longer than 180 seconds, MacLellan said.

... including metro buses, police cars, construction equipment, transport trucks, school buses, emergency vehicles, eh?

Good luck with enforcement, chaps.

No place for religion in Quebec schools

Excepting the Cult of Gaia, of course.

Is the cult of environmentalism now so zealous and pernicious that it has come to this – a six-year-old Quebec kindergartener is punished for bringing a sandwich to school in a plastic bag? What’s next, suspending him for using a nightlight that has an incandescent bulb rather than a compact fluorescent one? [...]

Recently, Felix began crying when his mom went to pack his lunch in a resealable plastic bag. When asked what the trouble was, Felix told his parents that his kindergarten class had had a draw for a stuffed toy, but that he had been excluded from the contest because his teacher had found a plastic sandwich bag in his lunch kit. So he pleaded with his mom not to make him an enviro-criminal again.

For the record....

Educational curriculum always promulgates a set of beliefs and ideals, subtly, in most cases, and incessantly, year over year over year. There is always an indisputable dogma being promoted and reinforced. Educators themselves are hardly objective. Except for the scattered "rogue" teacher, they promote and enforce the cultural, religious and sociological ideals of the system in lockstep. Breaking the mold makes you a troublemaker and is a surefire way to crimp your status with the school administration and hinder your advancement through the union ranks. If you're not a believer, if you're not "with the program," then you're in for a rough ride.

And so it is that in Quebec public schools, while organized religious activities of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, etc., are considered verboten outside of some sort of innocuous World Religion and Ethics course, a totalitarian environmentalist program can be implemented at a school-wide level with compliance rewarded and non-compliance punished down to the youngest child.

Similarly, the Ontario Human Rights Commission is poised to "take over" all education curriculum, including that of private and home schools, according to the Family Coalition Party of Ontario.

The question is not whether or not any credo will be taught to the next generation as much as it is which one(s) will be taught.