Why the Vile?
Now we have a leftist ADMITTING that their position is just that, they dont support the troops and we are flaming him over it? Please people, realize that this is a GOOD THING. The truth will set you free (and win us more elections).
Discussion on everything from politics to local news and maybe a quick history lesson...if I have time.
I DON'T SUPPORT our troops. This is a particularly difficult opinion to have, especially if you are the kind of person who likes to put bumper stickers on his car. Supporting the troops is a position that even Calvin is unwilling to urinate on.
I'm sure I'd like the troops. They seem gutsy, young and up for anything. If you're wandering into a recruiter's office and signing up for eight years of unknown danger, I want to hang with you in Vegas.
And I've got no problem with other people — the ones who were for the Iraq war — supporting the troops. If you think invading Iraq was a good idea, then by all means, support away. Load up on those patriotic magnets and bracelets and other trinkets the Chinese are making money off of.
But I'm not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken — and they're wussy by definition. It's as if the one lesson they took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.
The paper estimates that this unexplained phenomenon could account for 10-30% of the world's methane emissions.
2005 was a very expensive year for gasoline. And thanks to Washington, 2006 could be even worse.
The feds did not waste any time, with two costly gasoline requirements having taken effect on January 1st. That’s right. The year has already begun with two new regulations that will raise the price at the pump.
The first is the new ethanol mandate -- part of the massive energy bill passed last August. Under the new law, 4 billion gallons of this corn-derived fuel additive will have to be included in the nation’s gasoline supply throughout 2006.
Ethanol costs more than gasoline (if it didn’t, its producers would not need federal help) -- and its use reduces fuel economy. The new mandate is great news for some well-connected special interests, namely Midwestern corn farmers and big ethanol producers like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). But those who are stuck paying the tab -- you -- will be far less thrilled.
Please make special note of this. Ethanol if sold per gallon, is the same price as a bottle of top shelf Vodka. The true cost of ethanol is about $20 per gallon once everything is factored in. There is no evidence that it burns any cleaner than gasoline, and in many people realize the uselessness of ethanol. But the fun doesnt stop here...
Over the past ten years, the EPA has imposed a bewildering variety of fuel requirements, with as many as 18 so-called boutique fuels in use at any given time. The cost and complexity of this scheme goes well beyond any rational clean air justification. Granted, air quality has been improving, but it was doing so just as quickly before these newfangled fuel requirements were imposed.
The new ethanol and sulfur rules may each add several cents to the price per gallon -- bad enough, but it’s the cumulative burden of all these federal regulations that is even more substantial.
The fuel regulations will continue to grow after 2006. For example, EPA is required, pursuant to a settlement of a lawsuit brought by an environmental group, to propose another round of regulations limiting the amount of benzene and similar trace components from gasoline. The regulation must be proposed by February 2006 and take effect by 2007.
So here we are, faced with the facts and blindly ignoring in the name of the environment....Let's start with jailing the ecofreaks.
GREEN groups are preparing to protest outside a climate-change conference in Sydney, arguing the forum will do nothing to halt global warming.
But environmentalists insist their protests will be peaceful and they will not blockade the city hotel where the international conference is due to take place this week.Prime Minister John Howard will host the first meeting of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which begins in Sydney on Wednesday.
So why did they chose Sydney? Because they couldn't find a parka in Japan, or any of the rest of Asia for that matter...
"2005 Ties for 2nd Warmest Year" - "With a global average temperature that was three-tenths of a degree Celsius warmer than seasonal norms, 2005 tied with 2002 as the second warmest year in the past 27, according to data gathered by NOAA satellites and processed at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH)." (Newswise)
Not so global global warming. Interestingly, the Northern Polar region appears to have a rising trend from 1992. The Southern Polar region, however, demonstrates no clear trend, having cooled slightly. Contrary to hysterical claims this is pretty much the coup de grâce for the catastrophic anthropogenic greenhouse warming hypothesis. 'How so?' I hear people puzzling - it's actually pretty simple, let's walk through it:
- the misnamed 'greenhouse effect' can be experimentally demonstrated in the lab;
- logically, some warming (or not cooling) must have occurred with rising greenhouse gases;
- whether this effect is sufficiently large in the real world to even be detected is moot;
- anthropogenic greenhouse gases are well mixed in the atmosphere;
- due to topography and population, the greatest concentration of cooling particulates is located in the Northern Hemisphere;
- the cold, dry polar atmosphere has the greatest greenhouse warming potential;
- the coldest, driest atmosphere is located over Antarctica;
- air samples taken at the South Pole show anthropogenic greenhouse gases present at levels within a couple of parts per million of those taken elsewhere on the globe;
- despite its lack of cooling particulates, the Southern Polar region shows no detectable temperature response (dose-response?) to rising anthropogenic greenhouse gases;
- there is no postulated mechanism by which anthropogenic gases could cause warming in the Northern Polar region but not in the Southern Polar region;
- this tells us that warming observed in the Northern Polar region is driven by something other than anthropogenic greenhouse;
- since something other than anthropogenic greenhouse is driving all the observable (measurable) temperature change then we can be confident that tweaking anthropogenic emissions will have no measurable effect.
See? It needn't cost trillions of dollars to solve the greenhouse emission 'problem' after all.
What about the all-important "solar shield" we hear so much about having to protect so that it will preserve us from UV bombardment? Well, not much, actually. UVA (ultraviolet radiation in the 320-400 nanometer [nm] band), which is implicated in deep skin DNA changes thought responsible for melanomas, is not blocked by ozone at all. [Note: De Fabo, et al, claim the reverse to be true for the cause of melanoma, at least in a mouse model - see: Ultraviolet B but not Ultraviolet A Radiation Initiates Melanoma. Meanwhile: Melanoma risk only partially associated with exposure to UVB from sunlight - The report in the Dec. 21 [2005] issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute also indicates that only nonmalignant skin cancers (basal and squamous cell carcinoma) are strongly associated with exposure to UVB radiation. (University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center)] UVB (270-320nm), which causes sunburn, is both blocked by ozone (O3) and, if allowed to penetrate the atmosphere, creates ozone lower in the atmosphere where it can be an irritant in photochemical smog - thick clouds also block UVB. UVC (<270nm),>2), in addition to ozone (O3). Regardless, life flourishes in the tropics, where stratospheric ozone levels are never high and where solar radiation bombardment is roughly 1,000 times higher than that received in the region of the Antarctic Ozone Anomaly.
What's it all mean? Basically, sunburn is the last thing Ozone Al's Patagonian sheep and backyard rabbits would have to worry about if transported under the so-called "ozone hole" in the South Pole's first light of spring. And, unless you intend sunbathing in the Antarctic in September, this seasonal event will have no effect on you at all.
What unleashed the PETM is unclear. Most fingers of blame point to volcanic eruptions that disgorged gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, or coastal reservoirs of methane gas, sealed by icy soil, that were breached by warmer temperatures or receding seas.
And while the original discoverers still keep a watchful eye on what lies
above – this year's hole was one of the largest on record – for the first time in more than a decade, they claim they may be seeing not the beginning of the end for the hole, but, to paraphrase Churchill, perhaps the very start of the end of the beginning.
It’s that time of year again when we at JunkScience.com reflect on all the dubious achievements and irresponsible claims made by the junk science community throughout the year.
These “lowlights” have a lot in common — namely exaggeration and hidden agendas — but they cover a diverse range of scientific themes, from child development to embryonic stem cell research to everyday radiation exposure to trying to lay blame for hurricanes.
Although virtually the entire “Top 10” could easily consist of global warming items — climate hysteria being the most important junk science issue of our time — in the interest of diversity, JunkScience.com’s Top 10 for 2005 are:
1. Obese Statistics Get Liposuction. After years of alarming the American public with ever-scarier estimates of obesity-related deaths, the Centers for Disease Control finally backed away from its exaggerated 2004 claim of 400,000 deaths annually and made a 93 percent downward adjustment to just 25,814 deaths. It’s not clear that even that number can stand up to scrutiny. Read more...
2. Cruelty to Students. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was permitted to incorporate its radical animal rights school curriculum throughout America via its “education” arm known as TeachKind. PETA’s “learning materials” claim that such innocuous behavior as drinking milk is an example of “animal cruelty,” which their Web site repeatedly claims is an unmistakable predictor of future adult psychopathy. Read more…
3. U.N.-natural disasters? In a bid to blame alleged global warming for hurricanes and tsunamis and, ultimately, to force the deep-pocket U.S. government, businesses and taxpayers to pick up the tab for damages from such climatic phenomena, the United Nations conspicuously dropped the word “natural” from the title of its annual conference on natural disasters. Read more…
4. Burger Baloney. Researchers from the National Cancer Institute and the American Cancer Society, looking into whether beef consumption could be linked to increased risk of colon cancer, published a study in January with apparently alarming conclusions. Closer examination, however, revealed more creative slicing and dicing of data by a few researchers at the NCI who seem to have a history of publishing anti-meat research. Read more…
5. Franken-movie, not Franken-food. An anti-biotech “crockumentary” entitled “The Future of Food” opened in small movie theaters around the country, resuscitating environmentalists’ long-discredited claims about the “dangers” of biotech crops, one of the most thoroughly tested and regulated technologies ever developed.
Tragically, the Green’s anti-biotech mania continues to doom millions in the Third World to blindness caused by nutritional deficiency. Read more…
6. Afraid-iation? In July, a National Academy of Sciences research panel ominously announced that there is no safe exposure to radiation. While this may sound intuitively plausible, the panel ignored a host of facts, including that 82 percent of the average person’s exposure to ionizing radiation is natural and unavoidable – coming at low levels from the universe and the ground – and that, other than slightly higher cancer rates among the Japanese atomic bomb survivors, there are no data to support the idea that typical exposures are dangerous. Read more…
7. Warning: This Label Based on Junk Science. In July, the Center for Science in the Public Interest petitioned the FDA to require warning labels on soft drinks. It seems the “food police,” who have no credible scientific data on which to base their petition, are out to demonize just about every food other than soy milk and bulgar wheat. Read more…
8. Stem Cell Fast-One. August headlines touted the latest breakthrough in stem cell research – Harvard researchers announced they had discovered a way to fuse adult skin cells with embryonic stem cells, effectively bypassing the ethical concerns surrounding stem cell research by not having to produce or destroy human embryos.
In reality, the hype was not only premature — since the new cells were still contaminated with embryonic genetic material — it appears to have been an exercise in political science as the Senate neared consideration of a bill that would circumvent President Bush’s funding limitations for embryonic stem cell research. Read more…
9. The Lone-Tree Theory. It nearly took an act of Congress to get the researcher behind the notorious “hockey stick” graph, which purports to show a steep rise in global temperature in the 20th century following a millennium of stable temperatures, to release his publicly funded data and computer code. Among other dubious presumptions, the graph is derived from data that bases climate estimates for the entire 15th century on the tree ring measurements of a single tree. Read more…
10. Baby Bottle Battle. In introducing a bill to ban toys and child care articles made with the chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), California State Assemblywoman Wilma Chan fell prey to an environmentalist-perpetuated myth that had long ago been debunked. The “endocrine disruptor” scare has been perpetuated by the unsubstantiated and irreproducible scientific claims of an activist-researcher long-determined to frighten the public away from perfectly safe products. Read more…
So fasten your safety belts for 2006. No doubt the future holds many more not-so-great “junk science” moments for us all.