Farrago Line

Get a long little doggies

Why "environmental sanitarians" disgust me.

On justifying the kicking of perfectly good dogs out of pubs and restaurants:

"There's always the issue of [fleas], feces, urine, shedding hair, that kind of thing and how would you control that," said Laura Hungerford, a professor of epidemiology and doctor of veterinary medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Prohibiting animals is done "not because pets carry disease, but just because it's gross."

Look, I don't think the dogs are going to complain about feces, urine, shedding hair, that kind of thing. And if they do, they can go someplace else.

Gross? Look who's talking.

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Esoterica Warning

In the spirit of openness, full disclosure, open sources, free ranges and what have you, this post, received the following comment:

An Inconvenient Truth - Sheikh Omran

Compare what media reported and what sheikh Omran said about Climate change
http://aswjblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-sheikh-omran-said-about-climate.html

First off, thanks to whomever at ASWJ for commenting.

Second, what's your point?

The "Clerical Error?" post does not defne or purport to know what the media reported ... about anything. It linked to a story in News.com.au. The post linked to that story so that Farrago Line readers (all both of them) could see for themselves the primary document from which I lifted two paragraphs to beef up my miserable post.

Furthermore, the ASWJ comment points to a partial transcript of a speech that, as far as I can tell, doesn't address one way or another anything in the "Clerical Errors" post.

All I can discern, from both the news.com.au story and the generous ASWJ comment is that at least one Islamic brother buys the Global Warming hype. He may disagree on who's to blame. Al Gore blames jet fuel burning, massive electric power using, big car driving Americans such as himself. And Sheik Omran blames, near as I can tell, secular scientists' experiments.

Maybe I'm missing something embarrassingly obvious?

The Green Conundrum

Human nature rears its ... rear, I guess.

Greens say that their message is getting out. We've all heard it. And we all want to save the earth ... just so we don't actually have to do anything about it.

An Australian TV network worked up a "2½ hour feast of practical advice on how (viewers) might save the planet."

But only about 600,000 actually tuned in. And it's not like nobody knew about the special.

"We had study guides in schools, we had the full support of the print media (italics added) , both editorially and with advertising, and an extensive [Ten Network] on-air campaign with a number of different creative treatments and different stances.

"We spent a fortune to get the audience there and it didn't work. We've talked about it quite a lot internally. We're disappointed."

The SydneyMorning Herald calls it "the green condundrum".

Despite the focus on climate change, the green conundrum is alive across myriad product categories, including toilet paper.

Australians spend $500 million a year on the stuff but just $20 million each year goes to brands using recycled paper. Since 2005 the category has been in decline, although it showed some promise in the latter part of last year.

Maybe it is a conundrum. Or perhaps it's hype overload?

Is it possible that decades of doomsayer prognostications -- all of which faded and were forgotten when the predicted troubles failed to materialize at the appointed time (the population bomb and attendant famine, overcrowding, even longer lines at the motor vehicle department, etc.; holes in the ozone; ice age; etc.) -- have inured us 'umble masses to the foam-flecked forecasting of panicmongers so that we no longer buy their incessant ballyhoo?

Maybe not.

Another explanation may be that we all know it's not nice to mock the Global Swarming theologians. "It's settled science!" "Debate Ended!" So we don't. When asked, we politely aver that we really do totally honest to gosh fully and wholeheartedly believe we're all gonna fry, drown, starve and go crazy in ten years if we don't use recycled toilet paper, carpool around in solar-powered coke cans and dwell in caves. But once left to ourselves, we resume our lives, heat our homes, drive to work, church, and soccer practice, and leave poor Mother Earth alone. Maybe we know instinctively that she's a tough old broad and can take anything we can dish out. Maybe we got the message about global warming. Maybe we don't need another two and half hours of media blast on earth-saving tips, especially not if it's up against CSI.

Or maybe we don't take the message any more seriously than Al Gore appears to.

And then, of course, there are those rebels who simply find GW's Kool-Aid too sweet.

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Chill Al

In a New York Times article today geology professor Don J. Easterbrook sprinkles ice water on Al Gore's global warming flames. According to the Times, Easterbrook is among a number of scientists who can't warm to Gore's global panic crusade.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

In a response, Gore makes a telling remark about the vaunted "consensu" on global warming in the scientific community.

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”

The "degree of consensus". Oh, I get it. It's a degree of concensus. And does anyone dispute consensus on global warming? Isn't the question: Does human activity that produces CO2 cause catastrophic climate change? And if that's the issue on which there's a degree of consensus, what is that degree?

In the article, one scientist backs Gore while conceding "minor inaccuracies", "imperfections", and "technical flaws" in the former V.P.'s science. Ah, but then, he's also "a top adviser to Mr. Gore".

Oh...Kay.

Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work.

Could death threats and ostracization maybe have something to do with that? Or maybe he ignores Robert Carter's blog:

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

Clerical error?

Another Global Swarming true believer offers scientific evidence that man, or at least Australians, are responsible for global warming.

Radical sheik Mohammed Omran told followers at his Brunswick mosque that out-of-control secular scientific values had caused environmental disaster.

This guy certainly has the name for this game:

British-based Sheik Abdul Raheem Green forbade Muslims from having fewer than four children so Australia would become an Islamic state.

Green wants his followers to out-breed Australians so they can take over the country. Doesn't he know that Mark Steyn is wrong about that whole demographic thing?

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Death to the Cools

History repeats:

Hotties -- the Global Swarming True Believers -- are sending death threats to the Cools: anyone who dares to question the alleged science or sanity of the Humans-Cause-Global-Warming fundamentalists.

Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

Shades of Galileo. Different church.

One question: What's the most environmentally friendly way to kill a GW heretic?

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Terroir

How's your terroir?

Dr. Vino pours a glass of terroir talk here when he posts an essay by Terry Theise who writes about the spirit of a place as part of the expression of wine.

Spirit-of-place is a concept that's like really good soap; it's lovely, it feels good when it touches you, and it's slippery as hell. It isn't announced with billboards, you know. Spirit Of Place, five miles ahead, bear right to access . Not like that. Nor is it necessarily beautiful. The northernmost section of the New Jersey Turnpike is full of spirit-of-place, however repugnant it may be. I'd say it comes at the moment of ignition between your soul and that place, and a condition of that union is that it happens aside from your awareness. It is an inference, as all soul things are.

I intend to use this word, terroir, every chance I get until it becomes part of my vocabulary's terroir. See what I mean? And therefore, I shall speak of my workplace terroir, my basement's terroir, the various terroir's of local convenience and grocery stores, motorcycle emporiums, restaurants and, for even more fun, I shall evaluate the terroir of people with whom I come in contact.

Terroir.

I like the word. I like its terroir.

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We're All Gonna Die!!!

"We truly are standing at the edge of mass extinction"

So says Terry Root of Stanford University one of the many co-authors of yet another report on the imminence and dangers of global warming.

Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests like fire ants will thrive. The dead will rise from the grave!

OK, that last sentence was mine.

Anyway, more scaremongering inspired by the IPCC. Shine on True Believers (italics added):

The United Nations-organized network of 2,000 scientists was established in 1988 to give regular assessments of the Earth's environment. The document issued last month in Paris concluded that scientists are 90 percent certain that people are the cause of global warming and that warming will continue for centuries.

What do we care if warming continues? We'll be extinct, our bodies picked over by fire ants, our zoos overrun by polar bears.

How green is thy mountain?

Vermonters are the Enviro Church's strictest monks. They can't even abide windmills.

But Vermonters have been reluctant to allow the construction of 450-foot-tall towers on their ridgelines, and many of their objections are based on green arguments. Last year, three wind projects were either voted down by referendum or denied permits by regulators who cited--among other things--the potential threat to birds and bats from whirling turbine blades. Resistance to wind is, if anything, increasing in Vermont, where uncluttered views are an essential part of the environmental agenda.

Geoffrey Norman notes that power-shy Vermonters want to lower their contribution to "Global Warming". Not that it's all that big to begin with:

If every living creature in Vermont disappeared tomorrow, their lack of activity wouldn't compensate for the carbon dioxide produced by one of the coal-fired generating plants that China brings on line every 10 days.

Gassy.

Likely story

Reasons I didn't post yesterday:

1. Spent whole day caring, really caring; yet somehow nothing got done. (hat tip, James Taranto)

2. Maybe I was just too depressed?

3. Preoccupied with search for new foie gras suppliers.

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