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Invasive Species

220px-SableHorses

Sable Island is about 110 miles (300 kilosquidgets) off the coast of Nova Scotia. It is home to a naturalized breed of ponies, which the improving minds of some scientists wish to see removed. Why? They are an “invasive species”. They are wrecking the ecology of this insignificant sandbar. Ian Jones, a “researcher specializing in the ecosystems of remote islands” is quoted as follows:

 

He, along with a host of other researchers who study invasive species, is suggesting the removal of the horses to preserve the island’s fragile ecosystem. They say the horses are causing the desertification of the island by eating the vegetation and compacting the soil with their hooves.

“It’s a debate between this romantic idea of horses and conservationism and biology,” says Mr. Jones. “[Science-based policy] is more difficult for some members of the public to buy into than this image of wonderful horses running wild on windswept offshore. But you have to differentiate between values and science.”

Note the number of self-serving tropes and embedded assumptions in one sentence:

  • Ecosystems are always “fragile”; they are never robust.
  • “science based policy” must trump any romantic consideration.
  • Invasive species are bad.

Whether we keep the horses on Sable Island or not is a matter of policy; we put them there (by unconsidered accident) and we can keep them there, or turn them into dog food.

I agree with young Mr. Jones that you have to differentiate between values and science. That is precisely why – assuming we humans are the sole cause of global warming, which I deny – so many people do not wish to return to the levels of wealth we experienced in 1900, or 1800, so that our planet can recover. We would rather take the chance that our analysis is wrong than that we should return to the poverty of earlier centuries that knew not how to enrich themselves by burning fossil fuels on the scale we now do.That is what I mean by distinguishing values from science. We have a choice in this matter. we have a choice in every matter, and “science based policy” is often no more than dressing up opinion in the robes of dogma.

Stepping around the abyss of anthropogenic global warming, let us consider some of the other arguments and unquestioned assumptions wrapped up in Ian Jones’ mind.

The fragile ecology

Ecosystems are fragile: the recurring motif of all ecological thinking is the fragility of the ecosystem. The motif operates at every scale. The planet is fragile, the planet is a spaceship, there is limited room, resources are limited, we must conserve.

earth from space Indian Ocean

There is a great George Carlin take-down of the absurd idea that the earth and the ecology are fragile.

“Science-based” policy

Why must the romantic notion of horses running free be trumped by “science-based policy”.  Even assuming Mr. Jones’ “science” is anything more than a pre-conceived opinion dressed up in the white lab coat of authority, there is no basis for us to be guided into action. Suppose the horses eat the grasses down to nothing, the whole place is swept away by a storm, and all the horse die. Is this a superior outcome to removing the horses to preserve this glorified sandbar? Why? What about introducing a few wolves? What about shooting a few of them? Options please, said the Prince to his council of ministers.

“Invasive Species”

All species invade econiches where they can make a living: moss on stones, musk-oxen on moss, wolves on hares and musk-oxen, humans on all of them. We whites have invaded a continent (North America) some thousands of years after the previous invaders from northern Asia, and all of mankind “invaded” the planet outside of Africa, starting some 30,000 years ago. We have invaded lands that used to be under ice, learning how to sew, make fires, and hunt mastodons, giant ground sloths, and two-ton bears as we followed the game out onto the tundra. Should we all go back to Africa?

Should the Department of Ecological Correction of the Canopean Empire remove the Polynesians from Hawaii, Tonga, and Samoa? Should New Zealand be depopulated of Maori and British?

Between “fragile ecology” and “invasive species” you can triangulate the voice of the mandarins crying in the wilderness: we the scientific caste, are the saviours of the planet. Let us have our way and Gaia will be healed. A more pretentious philosophy of rule has not been heard since the last Caliph or the last Emperor of China.

speared-mastodon-bone-early-americans-clovis-illustration_42340_600x450

 

Doomist cult utters fresh fatuities

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Has there been global warming?

Yes. Since the retreat of the glaciers 10,000 years ago in this part of North America, there has been global warming. Look at a map of North America. Do you see Long Island, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket? They are moraines from the last continental glaciation. Imagine the size of the glacier that pushed that amount of rock.

Long Island New York

When was the fastest rate of global warming observed?

At the end of the Little Ice Age, in England, between 1694 and 1733.

Are we increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Yes. Man-caused emissions of CO2 have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to above 400 parts per million.

Has there been significant global warming in the past 17 years?

No.

But I thought that increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere were causing global warming?

You are correct. That is the theory. That is the prediction. That is what all those expensive computer-generated climate models have been predicting.

So what has happened?

Several answers are possible. At the level of science, computer-generated models predict on the basis of a host of assumptions. Many of those assumptions were tweaked to generate predictions of warming.

Why?

Grants, prestige, publication, fear of being shunned, following the trend, getting grants and promotions. Money was the answer, what was the question? Billions have been invested in proving man-caused global warming.

But if the science is wrong, where is the impetus coming from?

At the level of politics, global warming was the ultimate authority for limiting economic activity by a governing class, because the market, left to itself, could only destroy the earth through heat generation. That is was and always shall be the source of its political power: a form of economic determinism to replace the failed theory of Karl Marx. It justifies a class of international, unelected, remote bureaucrat in governing economies.

What can I do?

Do nothing. This hysteria will pass. It is receding already.

Saint Suzuki of the Church of Gaia considers himself a failure

Failed to turn us into a North Korea, that is.

The Vancouver Observer reports:

The federal government has been vigorously spying on anti-oil sands activists and organizations in BC and across Canada since last December, documents obtained under the Access to Information Act show.  Not only is the federal government subsidizing the energy industry in underwriting their costs, but deploying public safety resources as a de-facto ‘insurance policy’ to ensure that federal strategies on proposed pipeline projects are achieved, these documents indicate.

Before the National Energy Board’s Joint Review Panel hearings on the proposed Enbridge oil pipeline, the NEB coordinated the gathering of intelligence on opponents to the oil sands. The groups of interest are independent advocacy organizations that oppose the Harper government’s policies and work for environmental protections and democratic rights, including Idle No More, ForestEthics, Sierra Club, EcoSociety, LeadNow, Dogwood Initiative, Council of Canadians and the People’s Summit.

Excellent! Keep up the good work. People who would send us back to the levels of prosperity (or poverty) we knew in 1913, or 1813, or what they have in North Korea, are active enemies of civilization and should be monitored.

I do not think enough people are aware that the end goal of “environmentalism” is the destruction of a free and capitalist society.

David Suzuki feels as if he has failed because the transformative leap into full-scale destruction of industrial society has not taken place yet.

MacLean’s Magazine records him saying:

“Many of the battles that we fought 30 or 35 years ago, that we celebrated as enormous successes . . . Thirty-five years later, the same damn battles have started again. That’s where I think we failed,” Suzuki says. “We fundamentally failed to use those battles to get that awareness, to shift the paradigm. And that’s been the failure of environmentalism.”

It is more accurate to say that Canadians failed to shift awareness to the ecological paradigm because they were not persuaded that returning to the energy usage of 1949, or 1919, or 1880, could be accomplished without returning to the poverty (you may call them levels of wealth) of those times.

Further, they failed to convert to the religion that says man is a noxious weed and our existence on Gaia an offence to Great Mother Earth, a religion whose logical outcome is a sincere wish to reduce human numbers by mass exterminations. Suzuki and his tribe have done their best to use the battles to shift the paradigm; the reason they have failed is not for lack of trying. People want freedom and prosperity, and they have a strong feeling that the two are linked.

Suzuki wants to reduce our freedom and our prosperity, as a necessary outcome of his doctrines. Environmentalism masks itself as a concern for clean air and water, a concern which all rational creatures share. Behind environmentalism, however, is the age-old anti-human ideology that we can return to a tribe living in harmony with nature if only we surrender our rights and freedoms to the priesthood of the ecology, who will assign us to our menial tasks, and appease Gaia with sacrifices which we must make because we have sinned against her, and the rule of ecological shamans is the propitiation of our sins. They will reduce our numbers through poverty, immiseration, and disease, probably sped along by timely mass exterminations to accelerate the cleansing of our planet from the disease of humanity.

No, Doctor Suzuki, we did not fail to understand you. We understood your doctrines all too well, and all the resources of the political left, the CBC propaganda platform, and the zillions raised from the faithful have not sufficed to turn us into self-annihilating zealots. You have every right to consider yourself a failure, thank God.

 

Warming good, cooling bad

As we enter the most recent phase of northern hemisphere global cooling (formerly called winter), remember these points

1. The globe may be cooling or warming.

2. It only matters whether we humans are causing it, and how much.

3. There has been slight warming since the end of the last mini-ice age, which lasted from the 1350s to the 1850s.

4. Massive changes in the earth’s climate have occurred before man arrived, and have occurred during man’s occupancy, and will occur when we are gone.

5. In the meantime, more warmth is good for bears. (And us, too, who sit atop the food chain.)

California expecting the ‘Big One’?

The ability of animals to predict incipient earthquakes is well known. Could this be the case in California?

 Could the appearance of rare “sea serpents” washing ashore beaches in Southern California portend disaster?

The question comes following the discovery of the carcass of a rare 18-foot-long oarfish off the coast of Catalina Island on Oct. 13, followed by another snakelike 14-foot-long oarfish found on Oct. 18 in Oceanside.

Fishermen in Japan reported a sharp uptick in oarfish sightings in March 2010 following the massive magnitude-8.8 earthquake in Chile that same month, which marked almost exactly one year before the country was devastated by its own magnitude-8.9 quake in northeast Japan…

According to traditional Japanese lore, oarfish rise to the water’s surface and beach themselves to warn of an impending earthquake, a notion that some scientists have speculated could be supported by the bottom-dwelling fish being more sensitive to seismic shifts.

Or perhaps not.

Scientists, however, say there is no data to support an actual link between the two phenomena.

“It’s probably just a coincidence,” said Rick Feeney, who has been studying fish for almost 35 years for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

According to Feeney, four sightings have been reported since 2010 from the Central Coast southward, including in Malibu in 2010 and Lompoc in 2011.

The Fanatcism of the Apocalypse

Pascal Bruckner, a left-wing French philosopher, has written a book on the ecological movement which cannot be distinguished from what I write, save only he is 1) French and 2) left-wing, and therefore immune from criticism. [He must have been reading my blog postings for years.] Bruckner gets to the anti-human core of ecologism. Whereas Marx blamed capitalism for the scourges of the world, ecologism blames humanity itself.

Ecologism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence, modes of production as much as ways of life. In it are found all the faults of Marxism applied to the environment: the omnipresent scientism, the appalling visions of reality, the admonishment of those who are guilty of not understanding those who wish us well. All the foolishness of Bolshevism, Maoism, and Trotskyism are somehow reformulated exponentially in the name of saving the planet.

Steven Hayward, reviewing Bruckner’s book in The Weekly Standard, writes:

Bruckner offers a particular twist on the environmentalism-as-religion theme. More than just a form of faith, environmentalism revives a monastic mentality that wraps human guilt together with a call for humility, repentance, and a discipline of abasement. This “gaseous equivalent of Original Sin”—an eco version of the fall of man—explains why environmentalists are congenitally resistant to facts, science, and progress itself. Environmentalism isn’t out primarily to save nature, but to purify humanity: “Adding ‘eco’ .  .  . and ‘bio’ to any word is enough to sanctify it”—although it is no longer acceptable to the high priests to carry your holy eco-water in plastic bottles.

 

The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse is available here.

 

The March of Large Stupid Ideas

The coverage of Ontario’ s energy policy in the Post today by the incomparable Ross McKitrick leads me to reflect upon the invincibility of stupidity.

Essentially, the government of Ontario has pursued an energy policy predicated on reducing dependence on fossil fuels, substituting more expensive and unreliable wind power for coal and natural gas, and paying for the lot by raising prices. Who benefits? Small groups of investors in wind farms, close to the regime. Sound like Venezuela? Who loses? Everyone but the small groups of investors in wind farms. McKitrick predicts that Ontario could price itself out of significant manufacturing and processing jobs because of higher electricity prices.

Which leads me too stupidity. The premier of the province, Dalton McGuinty, is one of the most pedestrian dullards to have ever led a Canadian province. He became convinced of this Large Stupid Idea on the basis, one supposes, of the general Opinion climate created by environmental catastrophism ceaselessly propagated in the media. Desiring to Do Something in that earnest stupid way of his, he gutted normal regulatory oversight, common sense, and economic rationality in favour of doing something for future generations, such as loading them with debt and higher prices in the name of being environmentally friendly.

The Germans have an expression for it:

Gegen Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain.

It follows with ineluctable necessity that you cannot make people richer by raising their input costs for so basic a commodity as electrical energy. As McKitrick observes of the Ontario government’s response to his study:

This response is completely inadequate. Ontario, having already lost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs in the past decade, is throwing away its longstanding competitive advantage in electricity prices for the sake of minuscule environmental benefits that could have been achieved in other ways at a fraction of the cost. Our information about the air pollution consequences of various energy strategies are not pulled out of thin air; we use the same data the government itself uses.

More to the point, the Minister’s (Bob Chiarelli)  response is disconnected from reality. Ontario has always used coal for at least some of its electricity. So do many Canadian provinces, most U.S. states, most of Europe, China and all the other jurisdictions our exporters compete against. Even Germany, which Ontario claims to be copying in its green energy strategy, opened two new coal-fired power plants last year, will open six more this year, and plans six more after that. Ontario is ready to price our manufacturing sector out of business based on an ideologically-driven energy strategy at odds with all our major trading partners.

The environmentalist fallacy of green energy and its policy consequences are catastrophic and they go on and on and on and on.

 

The world has stopped getting warmer

Says the Met Office of the UK.

global temperature changes

Do I believe this? Do you mean: do you think the anthropogenic global warming thesis is proved or disproved by the earth getting warmer, or not? The answer must be “no”. The issue is the cause of global warming, or cooling. The earth will continue to heat up until it stops and gets colder. Perhaps it will plunge back into an ice age in two to five thousand years. This would be a continuation of a long period of glaciation and temporary inter-glacials, ever since Panama connected with South America a million years ago. We are in a temporary inter-glacial, which has mostly run its course.

And suppose man has heated the environment? So what? Does that mean we have prevented the next ice age? I doubt it, but I do not know, and neither does anyone else. Those who wish to put us into 19th century levels of prosperity by cutting electricity consumption,  on the basis of spurious, politicized  science, should face trials for crimes against humanity.

A hat tip to Glendronach for the Daily Mail article.