Environmental News

Time for another round-up of environmental and global warming news, because there's just too much for separate posts.

Sheryl Crow on Reality:

Sheryl "One Square of Toilet Paper" Crow wrote a column for the Huffington Post Friday, and in it she said:

However, what terrifies me is not what we are ignoring about the state of our planet but the fact that we seem to have lost touch with our connection to the earth. We have risen to great heights of arrogance in our refusal to acknowledge that the earth is changing. We hold steadfast to our belief that nothing can happen to us as a people. We get into our oversized, war-machine-like vehicles, get on our cell phones and blackberries, and avoid having human contact all day long.

I have not lost my connection to earth. I walk on it every day. I fall down on it. I drive on it (is a Corolla a "war-machine-like vehicle"?). Yes, I keep my gravity bill paid.

Oh, she says the toilet paper thing was pulled out of context from a comedy routine.

Children are a scourge on the earth:

The Australian reported yesterday that, far from being a blessing from God, children are a bad thing.

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.

John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights.

"The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child."

They're already doing that, except for their immigrants, who will eventually have Britain to themselves.

Mankind as Virus:

This is related to the previous one. Dan Gainor's column Sunday for the Business & Media Institute criticized an environmentalist's views.

Apparently, saving the whales is more important than saving 5.5 billion people. Paul Watson, founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and famous for militant intervention to stop whalers, now warns mankind is “acting like a virus” and is harming Mother Earth.

Watson’s May 4 editorial asked the question “The Beginning of the End for Life as We Know it on Planet Earth?” Then he left no doubt about the answer. “We are killing our host the planet Earth,” he claimed and called for a population drop to less than 1 billion.

I'm surprised at the 1 billion figure. The earth's carrying capacity used to be proclaimed as 2.2 billion. Still, these guys always want you to be the one who is eliminated, not them. Never them. They're too important to be sacrificed for that cause.

Global Warming Is Confusing Migratory Birds:

Reuters reported yesterday that migratory birds are having troubles.

Birds, whales and other migratory creatures are suffering from global warming that puts them in the wrong place at the wrong time, a U.N. official told 166-nation climate talks on Monday.

A warmer climate disrupts the biological clocks of migratory species including bats, dolphins, antelopes or turtles, said Lahcen el Kabiri, deputy head of the U.N.'s Bonn-based Convention on Migratory Species.

Birds are sometimes hatching early in a warmer climate, but sometimes insect food can flourish even earlier. Pied flycatcher birds in Europe, for instance, have suffered from a lack of caterpillars for their chicks.

Why aren't the scientists glad for the caterpillars who don't get eaten by the flycatchers?

El Kabiri said governments should cooperate more to create and protect international migration corridors.

I'm not sure how protecting a migration corridor will help the migratory species to use them, when they think it's plenty warm where they happen to be at the time.

Expert Climatologist Calls Global Warming Fears Absurd:

Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News reported yesterday on climatologist Reid Bryson, age 86.

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

Indeed.