GINA COBB

Consensus is Building -- The Wrong Way

By DemocracyRules

Remember 'Baghdad Bob', the mouthpiece for Saddam who constantly proclaimed that Saddam was winning?  He became hilarious when Americans were bombing right behind him while he vowed the Crusader had lost.

The Global Warmers are getting progressively more like Baghdad Bob.  Each day more Global Warming skeptics join the doubters.  "WE HAVE CONSENSUS... THE DEBATE IS OVER", the Global Warmers claim, hoping we will not notice their colleagues rushing for the lifeboats.

"Manhattan Declaration", what's that?   Oh, that recent conference in New York that concluded that "'Global warming' is not a global crisis?" 

"Pshaw, what do they know?  A few [thousand] amateur skeptics and hangers-on who are bitter about funding rejections?  Well yes, hundreds of well-respected climate scientists did attend, and it's true they said they can't find much evidence to support  Anthropogenic Global Warming. 

But some are bald, and others were very foreign-looking.  The women scientists were all frigid stuck-up sluts.

Also there were a lot of JOOOOS there, did you notice the JOOOOS?  You can't trust them you know.

We can't help it if they refuse to believe Al Gore and the UN, what's wrong with them?  I tell you the world is ON FIRE!"

Earth Day

My daughter, staying home sick today, noticed a theme in children's television programming.  Every show seemed to be Earth-related.

For example, in Wonder Pets, the animals teamed up to save -- not another animal, as usual -- but a tree.  One of them then hugged the tree.  After which, one of the animals -- I think it was the guinea pig -- celebrated by yanking a stalk of celery out of the garden, ripping it apart, and eating it.

The contrast between the treatment of the tree and the celery was startling.

Poor celery!

My daughter finally came to me and asked me to Google whether it was Earth Day.

My first few searches turned up several references to the fact that every day is Earth Day.  Other web pages argued that the "real" earth day was in March.  However, we did confirm that today is indeed the special day.  (If Google has a cool Earth Day logo today, it's not showing up on my screen.) 

My daughter decided to go around the yard and gather flowers for her father, who she thinks needs to celebrate Earth Day more.

I've got news for her.  I don't really celebrate it either.

For one thing, Earth Day is still relatively new.  We have no Earth Day traditions passed down from my grandmother.

For another thing, if it's overdone, earth celebration can cross the line into earth worship.

And finally there are the recurring undertones of overtones of political partisanship.  Take Barack Obama's statement of the day, for example:

"Our leaders in Washington have to put what's right for our planet ahead of what's good for their friends in the energy industry," Obama, an Illinois senator, said in a statement on the day of the presidential primary in Pennsylvania, where he is in a tight race with Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.

Fine, Mr. Obama.  We'll put the planet first.  But just in case America actually needs energy while you're in the White House, it might be nice if you actually had a few friends in the energy industry.

There are also plenty of interest groups trying to hijack Earth Day for unrelated causes.  From Don Surber's e-mail: "Plant a tree. Turn down the air conditioner. Create HIV/AIDS awareness." What?

Look, for now, I'm willing to play along.  Sure, we can take one day a year to think extra hard about planet Earth.  But environmentalists would be ill-advised to use the day as a political hammer, because too much of that will kill the day.

One Year Ago on GINA COBB: The Deadly Human Cost of Environmentalist Overkill

Originally published on February 23, 2007

The Deadly Human Cost of Environmentalist Overkill

Suzanne Fields has an interesting article at RealClearPolitics with some more "inconvenient truths" for Al Gore and environmentalists generally -- some that I had not heard before. 

Did you know that environmentalist objections to DDT, asbestos, and large steel and concrete "sea gates" have each ended up taking a human toll?:

But when politics, fashion and entertainment fuse with scientific "factoids," truth drowns in a flood of misinformation. In his new book, "Eco-Freaks," John Berlau, a policy director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank devoted to environmental policies, catalogs the tragic mistakes imposed on the rest of us by the environmentally correct. After Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring," DDT was banned nearly everywhere. Most of her "evidence" later turned out to be all wrong, but 2 million poor Africans die every year of malaria that DDT was on the way to eradicating. Al Gore, of course, blames global warming.

Asbestos, like DDT, gets a bad rap in the popular media, but nothing else comes close as a shield against heat. The original plans for the World Trade Center called for the interior steel in both towers to be covered with asbestos-based fireproofing material. Asbestos was eliminated when environmentalists objected. Engineers think the twin towers might be standing today but for the politically correct construction. Asbestos would have at least slowed the spread of the fire and the melting of the metal, giving hundreds of those who perished a chance to escape.

Suzanne Fields has an interesting article at RealClearPolitics with some more "inconvenient truths" for Al Gore and environmentalists generally -- some that I had not heard before. 

Did you know that environmentalist objections to DDT, asbestos, and large steel and concrete "sea gates" have each ended up taking a human toll?:

But when politics, fashion and entertainment fuse with scientific "factoids," truth drowns in a flood of misinformation. In his new book, "Eco-Freaks," John Berlau, a policy director at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank devoted to environmental policies, catalogs the tragic mistakes imposed on the rest of us by the environmentally correct. After Rachel Carson published "Silent Spring," DDT was banned nearly everywhere. Most of her "evidence" later turned out to be all wrong, but 2 million poor Africans die every year of malaria that DDT was on the way to eradicating. Al Gore, of course, blames global warming.

Asbestos, like DDT, gets a bad rap in the popular media, but nothing else comes close as a shield against heat. The original plans for the World Trade Center called for the interior steel in both towers to be covered with asbestos-based fireproofing material. Asbestos was eliminated when environmentalists objected. Engineers think the twin towers might be standing today but for the politically correct construction. Asbestos would have at least slowed the spread of the fire and the melting of the metal, giving hundreds of those who perished a chance to escape.