Geoffrey Lean of The Independent on Sunday adds a new element to the catastrophist case:

“Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.”

One slight problem with…

Read the full story

CEI Adjunct Fellow Steve Milloy has more on the polar bear issue in his weekly must-read FoxNews column:

“Let’s keep in mind that polar bears have survived much warmer times than we are now experiencing — like 1,000 years ago when the Vikings farmed Greenland during the Medieval Climate Optimum and 5,000-9,000 years ago during the period known as the Holocene Climate Optimum.

“But even giving the proposal the benefit of the doubt, will it accomplish anything?

“When I asked Secretary [of the Interior…

Read the full story

Nobel laureate Gary Becker has some thoughts on the New York City trans-fats ban (reflecting on comments by his co-blogger, Judge Richard Posner):

“Posner also gives a kind of lower bound estimate of the benefits as $100 million, and also suggests a much lower cost to restaurants of becoming trans fat-free — I take this as $30 million. With a small taste benefit from the use of trans fats — the New England Medicine Journal article I cited earlier does admit positive…

Read the full story

Malaria cases in Jamaica have surpassed 160, the Associated Press reports. This is the first outbreak there in more than four decades. One headline says, incorrectly as we will see, “Jamaica Fights Rare Malaria Outbreak.” Expect to hear endless arguments about how this is due to global warming and human-induced climate change. How horrific it is that human are changing the natural climate cycles!     

One problem with this theory! The disease was never “rare” in Jamaica until man-made DDT, despised by enviros from…

Read the full story

With the bald eagle poised to come off the endangered species list (huzzah!), another species of charismatic megafauna is needed to replace it as the Endangered Species Act’s totem.  Step forward, the polar bear:

The Bush administration has decided to propose listing the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, putting the U.S. government on record as saying that global warming could drive one of the world’s most recognizable animals out of existence.

The proposal–described by an Interior Department official who…

Read the full story

Some remarkable statements about the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions performance in an official EU document by Eija-Riitta Korhola, Vice-Chair of Kokoomus (Finnish National Coalition Party), and EPP (EU center-right party grouping) Rapporteur on Energy Policy and Member of the European Parliament:

“[T]he EU’s political decisions and rhetoric are sound but their implementation is becoming problematic.”

“The truth is that unless something radical is devised the EU will soon have to admit that it cannot achieve its Kyoto goals.”

“Now that the internal emissions…

Read the full story

From Numberwatch, the Sixth Annual Numby Awards.  Readers will be glad to know every effort was made to preserve the planet’s delicate ecosystem:

Once again the Chairman of the Judges was that paragon of urbanity, Sir Hugh Jerrors, Professor of Modelling Those Little Fluffy Bits Round The Edges Of Clouds at the Metropolitan University of Nether Wallop. There was a murmur of disapproval as he took out an electric torch in order to read his notes, but this turned to rapturous…

Read the full story

The great boon that is automobility is set to spread to India, with the introduction of a family car that will cost only $2000.  Naturally, the rajahs of the environmental lobby is apoplectic at this keenly-anticipated extension of people power:

“It will be a total disaster,” said Anumita Roychoudhury, an associate director at the Centre for Science and the Environment in New Delhi. “One person dies every hour in Delhi from air pollution-related diseases and most Indian cities have pollution levels…

Read the full story

In November, Michigan voters adopted Proposal 2, a state constitutional amendment that bans racial preferences in state university admissions and in government contracts and employment. State universities like the University of Michigan are now flouting the will of the voters by claiming that they have a First Amendment right to discriminate based on race, no matter what the Michigan Constitution says.

They have now challenged Proposal 2 in court, making the audacious claim they have a First Amendment “right” to use…

Read the full story

I came across a UK government site that looks into the future across a range of issues. It’s part of the UK’s Foresight Program. Herewith a description:

Foresight, and its associated horizon scanning centre aims to provide challenging visions of the future, to ensure effective strategies now. It does this by providing a core of skills in science-based futures projects and unequalled access to leaders in government, business and science.

Now, it appears that Foresight’s Horizon Scanning Centre has two current scans:…

Read the full story

A good story in the New York Times about how subsidies to domestic oil and gas producers are a waste of taxpayer dollars:

Analysts said the meager impact of royalty incentives was not surprising: for oil and gas companies deciding whether to drill in deep water, the potential money involved in royalty incentives is small compared with the money at stake in changes of market prices.

Eliminating royalties on oil or gas will save a company 12 to 16 percent on some of…

Read the full story

The Washington Post continued its hard-hitting series attacking farm subsidies today. The article notes that some important counter-forces to the big-bucks farm lobbies are emerging to offer the moral high ground arguments.

Yesterday’s article pointed out how the biggest share of farm support goes to large-scale farmers, not the small family farm:

Large family farms, defined as those with revenue of more than $250,000, account for nearly 60 percent of all agricultural production but just 7 percent of all farms. They receive more than…

Read the full story

Frank Johnson, the Thatcherite journalist and wit, died recently at the tragically early age of 63. It has been a bad year for Thatcherites - we lost Ralph Harris and Milton Friedman as well this year - but John O’Sullivan reminds us of the zeal with which Thatcherites opposed the nanny state in the 1970s in his excellent obituary for Frank in ConservativeHome. A sample:

No one present when the TUC’s Len Murray attended one of Bill Deedes’s Telegraph drink parties could…

Read the full story

If you’re flying this holiday season, once you’re on board the plane — after getting through with the stripping of belt and shoes, the unfolding of laptops, the confiscation of liquids, and possible patdowns — you may want to whip out a book the Transportation Security Administration doesn’t want you to read.

The new book that lays bare the TSA’s sorry record at flight security is called Unsafe at Any Altitude. Don’t let the sensational title fool you. Being the author…

Read the full story

Yesterday, President Bush announced that he may go along with Congressional Democrats’ proposal for an increase in the federal minimum wage, in exchange for some tax and regulatory. Today, I note in The American Spectator that this may not be a politically wise move.

Read the full story

Today the French newspaper L’Express attacked CEI and other skeptics of catastrophic global warming as “les négationnistes” or “deniers” — following the low ground captured by Senators Snowe and Rockefeller (see earlier posts on this).

It’s interesting too that the article needed some serious fact-checking — not only about the science of global warming, but about CEI. L’Express said that CEI is “une organisation de lobbying créée par ExxonMobil.” (Translation: “a lobbying organization created by ExxonMobil”)

Mais non! CEI was créée, founded, established…

Read the full story

Wonder where all the money the developed world is investing in the developing world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is going? To the privileged few, of course:

Among their targets is a large rusting chemical factory here in southeastern China. Its emissions of just one waste gas contribute as much to global warming each year as the emissions from a million American cars, each driven 12,000 miles.

Cleaning up this factory will require an incinerator that costs $5 million — far less…

Read the full story

David Maddison of the University of Birmingham in the UK adds his voice (PDF link) to the criticisms of the Stern Review, concluding:

There is much in the Stern report with which one can wholeheartedly agree. Climate
change is a problem. Climate policy can be informed by cost benefit analysis. The
treatment of uncertainty is of paramount importance and economic instruments have a
role to play in cutting carbon emissions. Permitting tropical deforestation is madness.
Some of the background material commissioned by Stern is top quality.

But…

Read the full story

Early last month, at about the time of the publication of the Stern Review with its inclusion of “catastrophe” in its analysis of the risks of global warming, Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, warned that things were getting out of hand:

I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric.

It seems that it is we,…

Read the full story

According to news reports, the U.S. Department of Agriculture will release on Wednesday a database showing just which farmers get part of the $56 billion in subsidies listed. Although this information has been available, the data have been difficult to locate and it has been almost impossible to find the names of individuals who received subsidy payments.

The USDA said the database is too huge for its website, so it is distributing the data to some news organizations and to the…

Read the full story