On Climate Change Climate Change

Kimberley Strassel wrote a very interesting piece in the WSJ titled: The Climate Change Climate Change about the increasing skepticism, around the world, regarding the climate change science that Al Gore and others have been claiming is completely "settled".

On Ethanol

I've seen an increase in articles lately critical of Ethanol. Here is a recent one (split into three pages) from BusinessWeek: "The Great Ethanol Scam". This particular article mostly concentrates on the apparent damage that the blend does on some car parts, though there are of course far more fundamental reasons to criticize the ethanol mandates. What the combination of government, environmentalists, and some select corporations have done to push ethanol on us all is is an outrage to say the least.

Unintended Consequences of the Ban on Strong Dishwasher Detergent

Another great story revealing unintended consequences of government laws and regulations. See the article: Spokane residents smuggle suds over green brands. Regular dishwasher detergents were banned in one county, but the green alternatives to clean dishes to the satisfaction of many residents. So... they end up driving further (something environmentalists wouldn't like!) than they otherwise would so they can still purchase the desired detergents.

Is California Going to Ban Black Cars?

Sound to silly to be true? Check out this article: California to reduce carbon emissions by... banning black cars?! Since it is not yet April 1, I assume this is not a joke.

Earth Hour vs. Human Achievement Hour

See this provocative video posted at CEI's website, a comparison between so-called "Earth Hour" vs. "Human Achievement Hour". I favor the latter attitude.

FYI, it seems an alternate name for this is "Edison Hour".

Lawnmower Inspections Coming Your Way!

Something I've had in my pile of stuff to blog about for a while now... is this interesting opinion item from the Wall Street Journal on July 19: The Lawnmower Men. Keep an eye on the EPA... yikes!

And then here is another good one, from July 22: Al Gore's Doomsday Clock. It explains why the challenge that Gore has put forth -- for America to run on 100% zero-carbon electricity in 10 years -- is ridiculous.

On Eco-Enslavement and Treadle-Pumps

Brendan O'Neill has written a very powerful piece on what he terms the "eco-enslavement" inherent in many of the carbon-offset schemes that so many rich folks in the West participate in. (Thanks to Robert Bidinotto for the link.) I highly recommend this article. I could quote many great parts from it, but instead I'll just give Mr. O'Neill's well-worded closing paragraph:

It is time to end this eco-enslavement, and put forward arguments for progress and equality across the globe. I would never pick up shit and use it to warm my home, or spend hours on a treadmill in order to raise water. Would you? Then why should we expect anyone else to do such things, especially in the name of making some rich snots feel better about themselves?

Malaria as "population control"?

The latest column by Walter Williams, Deadly Environmentalists, includes a couple of quotes that I'm sure have been widely commented on around the blogosphere. But they are so striking, I thought I'd quote them in case readers haven't heard them. After noting some of the proven benefits of DDT, Williams writes:

Environmental extremists see DDT in a different light. Alexander King, co-founder of the Club of Rome, said, "In Guyana, within almost two years, it had almost eliminated malaria, but at the same time, the birth rate had doubled. So my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it greatly added to the population problem." Jeff Hoffman, environmental attorney, wrote on grist.org, "Malaria was actually a natural population control, and DDT has caused a massive population explosion in some places where it has eradicated malaria. More fundamentally, why should humans get priority over other forms of life? . . . I don't see any respect for mosquitos in these posts." Berlau's book cites many other examples of contempt for human life by environmentalists and how they've made politicians their useful idiots.

Ouch. Malaria as human population control? Respect for mosquitos? DDT use is bad because it added to the population problem? I don't have the context for these quotes, but based on Williams' use of them, I don't think these guys were joking when they made these statements.

Rachel Carson and "Silent Spring"

Keith Lockitch has written a powerful indictment of Rachel Carson, her 1960s classic "Silent Spring", and the horrific impact it -- and the events that followed -- had on the use of DDT to combat malaria. Millions have died as a result, pure and simple. Read this article to learn things like:

• Though nearly eradicated decades ago, malaria has resurged with a vengeance because DDT, the most effective agent of mosquito control, has been essentially discarded -- discarded based not on scientific concerns about its safety, but on environmental dogma advanced by Carson.
• The scientific case against DDT was, and still is, nonexistent. Almost 60 years have passed since the malaria-spraying campaigns began -- with hundreds of millions of people exposed to large concentrations of DDT -- yet, according to international health scholar Amir Attaran, the scientific literature "has not even one peer reviewed, independently replicated study linking exposure to DDT with any adverse health outcome."
• Estimates put today's malaria incidence worldwide at around 300 million cases, with a million deaths every year.
• We should seek, Carson wrote, not to eliminate malarial mosquitoes with pesticides, but to find instead "a reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves." If the untouched, "natural" state is one in which millions contract deadly diseases, so be it.
• Earth First! founder Dave Foreman writes: "Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as 'disease' (e.g., malaria) and 'pests' (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere."

Near the end of his article Lockitch notes: "In the few minutes it has taken you to read this article, over a thousand people have contracted malaria and half a dozen have died." Wow.

When Trade is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Trade

The following letter to The Economist ended with a great line, that I've used as the title for this posting:

SIR -- Your article on tigers outlined the cost to their conservation of refusing to countenance markets ("Market failure", April 21st). I have argued that the only way to save the tiger is to sell it, but conservationists have maintained that commerce and conservation are antithetical. Their principal strategy has been to prohibit tiger hunting and the trading of tiger parts. Policing has thereby become the cornerstone of conservation polices and, predictably, it has failed to stave the decline of tigers in the wild.

Some of the poorest people in the world live in close proximity to valuable resources like tigers, yet they have no incentive to conserve and manage the resources sustainably, allowing criminals and smugglers to profit from poaching. This is bad for the people and very bad for tigers. In contrast, 2m crocodiles are harvested each year from facilities as far apart as Australia, South Africa and the United States. The international availability of farmed crocodiles has virtually eliminated crocodile poaching. Clearly, when trade is outlawed, only outlaws trade and the only market failure here is the failure to let markets operate.

Barun Mitra
Liberty Institute
Delhi

That great line -- "When trade is outlawed, only outlaws trade" -- surely that is not new? Well, I looked it up on Google, and found only two other references. And guess who those are from? The same person, Barun Mitra: see "Commerce for Conservation" from April 17, 2007 in the Hindustan Times, and also "Environmentalists Can't Save the Tiger" from 2005. Both are on the same topic as the letter above, but go into more detail, and give examples beyond crocodiles.

So thanks for this great line Barun!

Getting Timber from Underwater Forests

The February issue of Wired had a very interesting article called "Reservoir Logs" about "A submersible robot called the Sawfish can harvest healthy timber from long-forgotten underwater forests. Clear-cutting never looked so green."

Chris Godsall, CEO of Triton logging, is an entreprenuerial and inventive genius. Read the article to find out how he is able to profitably cut down long-dead forests that are deeply submerged under water, and how he overcame various technical hurdles (like the fact that the trees are water-logged and hence wouldn't float after being cut). All this, and the environmentalists are applauding as well because the more wood we can get from already dead, submerged forests, the less clear-cutting of regular forests the market will ask for.

Alert: Don't Lick Your Lunchbox 600 Times a Day for 15 Days

I remember the good ol' cafeteria days I experienced at a public elementary school in a small town in Western, NY. Lunch ladies blowing a whistle when kids acted up, or worse, making us sit "boy/girl/boy/girl" because the boys (typically) would cause trouble if allowed to sit together. Of course, a few years later we gents would have been all to happy to be allowed to sit boy/girl/boy/girl, but in 2nd or even 5th grade, that was no fun at all.

And the food... ah, the food. Tater tots, fruit salad from a can, mexican pizzas (orange grease with some bread and other stuff holding it together), and of course small ice-cream dixie-cups for a quarter (if I remember correctly).

And then there were the lunchboxes. In the 1970s and early 1980s there were some very cool lunchboxes you could have: Star Wars and comic book superheroes for the guys, and other movie stars and things of interest for the girls (can you tell I didn't pay attention to "their" lunchboxes at that age?). Or, you could brown-bag it -- something we all did as we matured into middle- and high-school.

But what we didn't have were fancy, back-pack like vinyl lunch "boxes". I must have missed when those became popular, because I surely don't remember them from my days in school three decades ago. And perhaps that is just as well -- hot news in the newspaper and even on cable news today is that these things might have unsafe levels of lead in them, that could rub off and either get on children's skin or get into the food they are carrying inside. I hadn't heard this story before, but it no doubt made the news a while ago, as Wal-Mart pulled some brands and offered refunds for some customers (oh, that evil Wal-Mart!).

So the new news is that a report of 2005 testing by government scientists might have left out important information -- key data that meant the danger from lead in these lunchboxes was being wrongly dismissed. See this AP article from the Akron-Beacon Journal, nearly identical to the one which ran in my local paper. And if you want to learn more, you can read the release from the CEH (Center for Environmental Health) which is leading the charge against the CPSC (Consumer Product Safety Commission), the government agency "charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury or death from more than 15,000 types of consumer products."

If the CPSC committed scientific fraud in leaving out or distorting data, then that is one thing. Not being an expert, I can't really comment on the merits of the case being made by the CEH. Their press release includes various documents, but I'm not entirely convinced of what they are claiming against the CPSC.

And one reason I'm skeptical is that this story sound so very similar to the Alar scare (see Wikipedia entry) of the 1980s, in which the original tests that led to the scare actually meant that you'd have to drink far more apple juice every day than your stomach could even handle, and do so for many years, before Alar would be a risk as a carcinogen (or similarly eat so many apples that your insides would explode well before you were in danger of cancer from the Alar). The similarity arises here because of the following:

As a result of their tests, the CPSC issued a public statement last year reassuring consumers they had nothing to worry about: "Based on the extremely low levels of lead found in our tests, in most cases, children would have to rub their lunchbox and then lick their hands more than 600 times every day, for about 15-30 days, in order for the lunchbox to present a health hazard.''

Again, I'm not an expert here, but the similarity is striking.

Oh, and gotta love the knee-jerk over-reaction of some in Congress:

Said Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif.: 'I am concerned that the CPSC has failed to protect children from an unnecessary hazard they have known about for some time. We should protect our children by banning lead in all children's products.'

Ban all lead in all children's products? Really? Does the science really back that up? I highly doubt it. And I'm not even going to mention the philosophical question about the proper role of government, and whether it should be banning things like lead at all. Well, I guess I did just mention it... OK, so I won't say anything more about it... for now.

Mercury in Fish Another Overblown Issue

Today I read two somewhat contradictory stories in my local paper about mercury levels in fish, and to what extent this is a health hazard for us. The first (originally from Washington Post, but see it here) describes a recent report that suggests some areas are more susceptible to mercury pollution than others, describing these areas as mercury "hot spots". As a report about a report, it seemed like a fine article I suppose. But what it lacked was any mention of why we should care much about the issue. It just took it for granted that everyone knows that mercury-in-our-fish is a bad thing. And that is probably making a safe assumption on the part of readers, since we have been bombarded with stories of how dangerous mercury found in our fish diets can be for our health.

But the story gets very much complicated by the second, shorter article I read today. In the USA Weekend supplement to my local paper, the "Eat Smart" column by Jean Carper was titled "Phony Fish Scare?". Here it is in full:

Don't let a mercury scare keep you from eating fish, says William Lands, Ph.D., formerly with the National Institutes of Health and a leading expert on the benefits of fish oil. He says virtually all fish, even those high in mercury, are safe.

"Mercury is toxic in the absence of selenium," Lands says, "but fish is loaded with selenium that neutralizes the danger." A new University of North Dakota study shows that common fish, including grouper, swordfish, tuna and salmon, have much more selenium than mercury. Even albacore tuna (high on the government's hit list) has 15 times more selenium than mercury, making it perfectly safe, in Lands' view.

Is there any fish Lands would avoid because of high mercury? No, except maybe the pilot whale, not seen in U.S. markets.

So that was eye-opening for me. Selenium, which is common in fish, counter-acts the dangers from mercury.

So I did a little looking around the web, and I found several interesting things. The first was this article, which has an interesting excerpt including a graph showing the relative levels of mercury and selenium in various types of fish, and also in pilot whale -- the mammal mention by Lands above. Very interestingly, there are far greater levels of selenium than mercury in all the fish species shown: sole, flounder, salmon, tuna, pollock, halibut, cod, snapper, grouper, and swordfish. But in the case of pilot whale, the relative amount of selenium is much lower than in all the types of fish listed.

The info in the article was taken from materials at mercuryfacts.com, which seems to be the same site as fishscam.com. This site has lots of interesting materials, including critical comments about prominent scientists and environmentalists who are promoting fear of mercury in fish. As just one item on their site, see "The Flip Side of Mercury". One also discovers that much of the health concern over mercury in fish comes from a study that involved... guess what... pilot whale. See also the Mercury Myths page, which details problems with the following common claims:

• The amount of mercury in our environment (and in the fish we eat) is dangerously increasing.
• Mercury in fish presents a serious health risk to Americans.
• The health risk from mercury outweighs the health benefits of eating fish.
• You can get mercury poisoning from the amount of fish you might consume in a given week or month.
• Every year in the United States, 630,000 children are born with mercury levels in their blood that put them "at risk" for neurological disorders later in life.
• Eight percent of American women of childbearing age have unsafe levels of mercury in their blood.

Apparently there is good reason to doubt each of these claims.

Thinking About Organic, Fairtrade, and Local Food

The Dec. 9 issue of The Economist has both a brief opinion piece, "Good Food?", and a longer article, "Voting with your trolley" (both articles online require subscription), that ask some important questions -- and make some good points -- about the increasingly fashionable food trends of shopping for and buying organic, fairtrade, and local foods. If you make a point of doing so, or think that doing so is the ethically best approach to food shopping, these articles raise some facts that should give you pause. As the opinion piece summarizes:

There are good reasons to doubt the claims made about three of the most popular varieties of "ethical" food: organic food, Fairtrade food and local food. People who want to make the world a better place cannot do so by shifting their shopping habits...

Both the opinion piece and the article make the following enlightening points, that can be summed up as follows:

• Buy organic, destroy the rainforest. "Following the 'green revolution' of the 1960s greater use of chemical fertiliser has tripled grain yields with very little increase in the area of land under cultivation. Organic methods, which rely on crop rotation, manure and compost in place of fertiliser, are far less intensive. So producing the world's current agricultural output organically would require several times as much as land as currently cultivated. There wouldn't be much room left for the rainforest."
• Buy 'Fairtrade foods', hurt those you intend to help. "Fairtrade food is designed to raise poor farmers' incomes. It is sold at a higher price than ordinary food, with a subsidy passed back to the farmer. But prices of agricultural commodities are low because of overproduction. By propping up the price, the Fairtrade system encourages farmers to produce more of these commodities rather than diversifying into other crops and so depresses prices -- thus achieving, for most farmers, exactly the opposite fo what the initiative is intended to do. And since only a small fraction of the mark-up on Fairtrade foods actually goes to the farmer -- most goes to the retailer -- the system gives rich consumers an inflated impression of their largesse and makes alleviating poverty seem to easy."
• Buy local food, hurt the environment. "A study of Britain's food system found that nearly half of food-vehicle miles (i.e., miles travelled by vehicles carrying food) were driven by cars going to and from the shops. Most people live closer to a supermarket than a farmer's market, so more local food could mean more food-vehicle miles. Moving food around in big, carefully packed lorries, as supermarkets do, may in fact be the most efficient way to transport the stuff. What's more, once the energy used in production as well as transport is taken into account, local food may turn out to be even less green. Producing lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to Britain uses less energy than producing British lamb, because farming in New Zealand is less energy-intensive."

And that is just taking each of these three separately. Consider what happens when you try to both buy Fairtrade and buy local:

And the local-food movement's aims, of course, contradict those of the Fairtrade movement, by discouraging rich-country consumers from buying poor-country produce. But since the local-food movement looks suspiciously like old-fashioned protectionism masquerading as concern for the environment, helping poor countries is presumably not the point.

Each of these issues is of course more detailed and complicated than summarized here. See the opinion piece and the longer article for more info.

Great Animal Photos

If you enjoyed the link I gave back in July for cool insect photos, then you might also enjoy these interesting animal photos (as before, thanks goes to Stephen Hicks for the link). Its hard for me to choose a favorite from this bunch, but perhaps it would be the last one -- Nick Dunlop's photo of the bird on the mossy post.

Disaster Was Bound to Happen

The Sept. 4 issue of US News and World Report has a good little article titled "A Disaster Long in the Making". It is actually not an article, but rather an excerpt from the book Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age fo Superstorms, by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein.

It first briefly describes the New Orleans area relative to the sea, much of which I already knew. But what I found most interesting were the horrific details of the negligence of government officials in properly planning for "the big one" and the evasion of the facts of reality concerning the risks of that region. Here is the part I am talking about:

When computer modeling of storm surges improved in the 1980s and 1990s, however, it became clear that even a weak hurricane could put virtually any point under water. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands could end up dead. Hundreds of thousands could be trapped on rooftops. New Orleans itself could be destroyed.

The models made explicit one of the strangest trade-offs in American history. Faced with the risk of New Orleans being destroyed, the policy of the U.S. government was to throw up its hands. Local governments could try to save as many lives as possible, but the city itself would be sacrificed. Higher, stronger levees could eliminate the risk, or at least reduce it, but that option would never be a priority with the corps or Congress. The corps was building its system as originally designed. It hadn't failed yet, and that was good enough.

As emergency professionals gathered regularly for hurricane planning, New Orleans officials seemed curiously uninterested in the most urgent issue they faced. In 2004, a federally funded exercise called Hurricane Pam had tested the government response to a catastrophic flood of New Orleans. But while the city sent a representative or two to Hurricane Pam exercises, it played no real leadership role and did little to act on the recommendations. During the National Hurricane Conference in early 2005, various participants discussed and debated how to get the people out of New Orleans, but no city officials bothered to attend.

Wow... assuming that is true... Wow! I understand that disaster preparedness is a risk calculation, and that resources (people, time, etc.) are always limited. But given the evidence, the studies, the articles, the advice -- over many decades (including a National Geographic article I believe the year before Katrina), it is just amazing how government leaders and others acted as they did, and set up New Orleans for Katrina.

It makes me wonder what thinking is going into the rebuilding efforts, both of the levees, but also of the city itself. Of course, I generally wonder why people rebuild houses over and over in hurricane areas and flood zones. It always the first thing they say when interviewed on TV after the disaster, things like "Horrible, just horrible. But... we'll... rebuild. We've got to." Umm... no you don't... at least not in those exact locations!

WIldlife: They're Pooping in the Water

Thanks goes to Jerry Taylor for his funny blog posting over at Cato, "Shoot 'em Before They Poop Again". He writes:

If I were to ask you what the number one cause of bacterial pollution in the Potomac, Anacostia, and more than two dozen other rivers on the federal “impaired waters” list, what would you guess? Sewage discharges? Stormwater run-off? Agricultural waste? How about increased mountains of dung from our supposedly threatened wildlife populations? You guessed it - because we have done such a good job making the human environment safe for all of God’s creatures, we are destroying the planet.

If you’re rushing off to make a bag of popcorn to watch the upcoming brawl between the National Wildlife Foundation (a polluter-defense league if there ever was one) and Greenpeace, walk, don’t run. Animal pollution good. People pollution
bad.

He links to this recent Washington Post article, Wildlife Waste Is Major Water Polluter, Studies Says. This two-page article is worth reading... here are a few snippets:

Part of the problem lies with the unnaturally high populations of deer, geese and raccoons living in modern suburbs and depositing their waste there. But officials say it would be nearly impossible, and wildly unpopular, to kill or relocate enough animals to make a dent in even that segment of the pollution.

That leaves scientists and environmentalists struggling with a more fundamental question: How clean should we expect nature to be? In certain cases, they say, the water standards themselves might be flawed, if they appear to forbid something as natural as wild animals leaving their dung in the woods.

"You need to go back and say, 'Maybe the standards aren't exactly right' if wildlife are causing the problem," said Thomas Henry, an Environmental Protection Agency official who works on water pollution in the mid-Atlantic.

And then this, the first quote of which gave me a chuckle and still does:

"They're pooping in the water," said Chuck Frederickson, an environmentalist who is keeper of the James River, gazing at geese slurping algae off river rocks one recent day. He said the goose population is an obstacle to improving the river: "Do we want less bacteria in the water, or do we want geese around?"

But it is one thing to blame wild animals for pollution and another to figure out how to get them to stop.

Scientists have actually run the numbers for many local streams, using mathematical models to estimate how much the bacteria from wildlife dung needs to be reduced to meet the standards.

But these calculations, required by EPA rules, often have an oddball quality: In the Willis River in central Virginia, for instance, scientists created highly specific estimations of the population density for various animal species (.07 raccoons per acre, for example, and 2.751 muskrats), then factored in the number of grams of waste each animal produces a day (450 grams per raccoon, 100 per muskrat).

Eventually, they determined that there needed to be an 83 percent reduction in the amount of waste that wildlife left directly in streams.

And then finally I'll snip these bits too:

Some environmentalists have an answer: Just stop worrying about the wildlife.
...
Now, the EPA and state agencies seem to be coming to a similar conclusion. In interviews and in official documents, they say they're considering holding some streams to different standards, expecting that not every stream can be made safe for swimming. In such cases, the states would plan to reduce bacteria from human sources as much as possible and then reassess to see whether some level of bacteria from wildlife is natural. But, for now, no such reassessments have been made in this area. Maryland officials seem especially unwilling to do so in the near future, fearing how the public would react to such a lowering of the bar.

Provocative Video To Help The World's Poor

Here is a provocative video intended to help the world's poor... its likely does not have the message you would guess it would, or that you have seen anywhere else. (HT: Robert Bidinotto)

Interesting Take on Global Warming Lawsuit

Greg Perkins over at Noodlefood offers up two interesting responses to the recent announcement of a lawsuit over global warming by California against six of the worlds largest car makers. He notes that there are many others that could be sued... why arbitrarily choose the car makers? What about the car owners, the car drivers, the car dealers, gas stations, or the oil companies? He also raises the possibility that this lawsuit might end up being a good thing, by bringing to light the shoddy science and arguments on the Global Warming side, much as the Dover, Pennsylvania "Intelligent Design" case did. We'll see...

Health and Environment News from California

Two recent, short posts from Cato on legislation in California:

• The Great Wait, by Michael Tanner, which includes some good numbers on wait lists in countries with "single-payer" health care systems
• California Dreamin', by Patrick Michaels, about the new law in California "restricting the emissions of carbon dioxide to 1990 levels by the year 2020." Which will do a what exactly? Why, "According to scientists from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, the amount of warming these reductions would prevent by the year 2060 is 0.05 degrees Celsius."

UPDATE on 9/15: Michaels today had another post with more interesting climate data and commentary on the new California law.

Hurricanes? I ask... where are all the hurricanes?

So far, I haven't heard a peep in the media, or from those who promote global warming theories and the claim that it is mankind's fault, regarding the slow start to the hurriance season this year. Maybe I've just missed it though. And of course there is a long way to go... perhaps we will still get a lot of them by the end of the year, and perhaps even an above-average number of them. We'll see..

But I'm not alone in noticing this... thanks to Robert Bidinotto for this link that shows the data so far.

Gore Lives as Very-Light-Colored-Green

I have no way of confirming or disconfirming the claims in this editorial, but I have heard similar questions raised elsewhere. See the USA Today editorial Gore isn't quite as green as he's led the world to believe.

Global Warming is quite busy

Here is a very interesting list of links to things that "Global Warming" has been said to be the cause of. Now, one would expect a massive global change of any kind to effect a lot of things, like if a massive asteroid hits the earth, or if the sun changed in some dramatic way. But I don't intuitively put the increase in CO2 levels from human activity to be on that obvious of a level, so the length of this list of claimed effects of "Global Warming" seems a bit hard to believe to me.

This was my first experience with the site Numbers Watch. Although its site design looks like something from 1996 or so, it is updated regularly and seems to have some good resources included. The other "list" like the one mentioned above is a list of things that have been argued to give you cancer. But there is much content at this site besides these two lists, and I plan to look it over more in the future.

Questions raised on NSF Coral Reef Report

Patrick J. Michaels of Cato has raised some interesting questions in Okay Coral regarding a recent NSF study about the connection between increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide and the acidity of the oceans and the effect of this on coral reefs. I'm not very knowledgeable in this area, so I'd be interested in hearing any responses to the questions he raises, if any are forthcoming from NSF or elsewhere... so if readers know of any, please let me know.

So-called Smart Growth and High Real Estate Prices

Thomas Sowell makes some interesting points about conservation of "open spaces" and the broader desire for "smart growth". He has some data regarding San Francisco in particular, which has sky high real estate prices these days.

Scientists Respond to Gore

See this enlightening article "Scientists Respond to Gore's Warnings of Climate Catastrophe".

In that article you can learn a bit about the "vast majority of scientists" that Al Gore refers to (are they relevant experts, that is climate change experts, or just scientists in various fields?), and more importantly, learn of numerous counterpoints to the claims Gore makes in his film.

Greenpeace Founder Favors Nuclear Energy

In recent years I have read many things written by Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace. While still defending a cleaner environment, he is quite critical of many contemporary environmentalists and the current "movement" as a whole. Thanks goes to my friend Stu for pointing out his latest, an opinion piece in the Washington Post titled Going Nuclear. Read both pages of this article... I think you'll be impressed. He makes a very good case for why the US should have more Nuclear plants.

Included are brief responses to the major criticisms of increasing electricity production from Nuclear plants. For example, in response to the charge that Nuclear plants are not safe, Moore writes:

Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while fighting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one has died of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program.

And in response to the "most serious" issue raised against Nuclear power, that Nuclear fuel can be diverted to make nuclear weapons, Moore writes:

...just because nuclear technology can be put to evil purposes is not an argument to ban its use. Over the past 20 years, one of the simplest tools -- the machete -- has been used to kill more than a million people in Africa, far more than were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings combined. What are car bombs made of? Diesel oil, fertilizer and cars. If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire.

His responses on each point are all good ones. A good read, and further proof that "environmentalism" is far from a monolithic movement.

List of Global Warming Doubts

Without here getting into a debate on the subject, I thought I'd link to an interesting blog item from an editor at Scientific American, George Musser. He has gathered together a categorized list of doubts about the dominant view on climate change, global warming. A thorough list, and an interesting read.