leps-l future

[Patrick Foley]

Paul,

Scientists are their own sharpest critics. Individual scientists and
individual ideas are often wrong, but we get Nobel prizes for showing that.
Corporate intellectual efforts are a real mixture of excellence, fraud and
opportunistic dishonesty.

If you seriously thing Pete DuPont knows anything about science, you
probably think George Bush knows something about the Middle East.

Patrick Foley

Paul Cherubini wrote:

> Patrick Foley wrote:
>
> > Do you want Exxon-Mobile deciding which
> > scientists are experts on global climate change? Times-Warner-
> > Disney-Microsoft deciding what is an appropriate email?
>
> Those of us employed in private industry would not like to see
> the academic community necessarily deciding everything either:
> Example: if this list was moderated by a group of environmental
> professors or government scientists, I bet the following commentary
> by the former governor of Delaware would not likely be allowed:
>
> http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pdupont/?id=105001823
>
> Coloring the Data Greens get caught red-handed committing
> scientific fraud.
>
> BY PETE DU PONT Wednesday, March 27, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
>
> So many federal agencies have been exposed falsifying environmental
> data that you have to wonder how many other frauds remain undetected.
> First came the December revelation that employees of the Fish and
> Wildlife Service and the Forest Service had planted fake wild lynx hair
> in states where there were no lynx, so that the areas could be
> labeled critical habitat, and thus off limits to human use.
>
> Then came the National Academy of Sciences' findings that shut off
> water to 1,000 farms in the Klamath Lake Basin in Oregon and
> California--all to save the suckerfish. That turned out to be based on
> faulty science too. Farms disappeared and people suffered because the
> Endangered Species Act had been invoked based on junk--or maybe
> political--science.
>
> In February the Forest Service admitted that it had erroneously
> reported 920 million national-forest visitors in 2000. The correct
> figure was 209 million, not exactly a rounding error.
>
> By March it had to confess to another misrepresentation. Court
> documents showed the Forest Service had knowingly used false
> data on spotted-owl habitats to prevent logging in a California forest.
> "Arbitrary, capricious and without rational basis" was how
> the judge characterized the service's actions.
>
> So why the lying? It seems deceit is the only way the greens can
> advance their Luddite agenda. They are ideologically inspired to try
> to limit, slow and if possible stop economic growth, for they believe
> that prosperity is harmful to the environment. But our nation's and the
> world's environments are getting better all the time, in fact so
> much better so much faster that it is hard to wave the green
> shirt based on honest data. Subterfuge and misrepresentation
> are thus left to energize the greens' antiprosperity cause.
>
> Consider fossil fuel consumption and its resulting pollution.
> The Cato Institute recently reported that since the first Earth
> Day, in 1970, "energy consumption has risen 41 percent, most
> of it from fossilfuels. But during that same period sulfur-dioxide
> emissions . . . have dropped by 39 percent . . .;volatile organic
> compounds . . . by 42 percent; carbon monoxide emissions . . .
> have dropped by 28 percent; and large particulate-matter
> emissions . . . by 75 percent." Not much of an environmental
> crisis in these data.
>
> And if the environmental alarmists are right, how come we're
> not running out of food, minerals or oil? Leading environmental
> groups preach that the globe's natural resources are being so
> depleted that the human race's very existence will soon become
> impossible, both economically and environmentally. The truth
> is just the opposite. Bjorn Lomborg's seminal book, "The Skeptical
> Environmentalist," details the facts: Since 1960 world grain
> production has increased to 680 pounds per capita from 560,
> and grain prices have fallen. Per capita daily calorie intake in
> the developing world has grown to nearly 2,700 from 1,900,
> and we work fewer hours to buy the food we eat. Poverty
> is declining and life expectancy is increasing. Proven global oil
> reserves have increased by a factor of 20. Production of copper,
> to take one nonenergy resource, has increased to over 12 million
> tons in 2000 from two million tons in 1950. Not much to worry
> about here either.
>
> As for global warming, several things are agreed: The
> temperature on the surface of the earth rose in the 20th century,
> and man burned more fossil fuels during that time. And that's
> about it, for it is not at all clear that the two are linked. Most
> of the warming occurred early in the century, before the
> surge in man-made gasses, and as Canada's Fraser Institute's
> 2001 study concluded, "There is no clear evidence of the effect
> of CO2 on global climate, either in surface temperature records
> of the past 100 years, or . . . balloon radio-sondes over the last
> 40 years, or [from] satellite experiments over the last 20 years."
> In fact, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies now reports
> that global warming has slowed so much that temperature
>  increases predicted for 2050 won't happen until 2100.
>
> And the population explosion? Well, the threat is not of
>  escalating birthrates but that in many countries--Italy, Russia
> and Germany, to name a few--they have fallen so far below
> the replacement rate that there soon won't be enough workers
> to support their economies and welfare programs. The
> U.N. reports that as of 2000, "44 percent of the world's
> population now lives in countries where the birth rate was below
> the death rate." It is below the replacement rate in others, so
> within a few decades the world's population will be in decline.
> In any case, the entire population of the world could
> fit in Texas, with each person enjoying 1,200 square feet
> of individual space.
>
> So the rhetoric and proposals of the green organizations
> that make their living and raise their money through predictions
> of cataclysmic catastrophe are far divorced from reality.
>
> The world is a different place than the environmentalists
> would have us believe. Prosperity is increasing and so pollution
> is decreasing, because it is prosperity, not increased regulation, that
> enables a society to support sound environmental policies.
> Poverty has been reduced more in the last 50 years than in
> the previous 500, according to the U.N. Yet with all the
> industrialization, energy generation, economic expansion
> and uncontrolled growth that made poverty reduction
> possible, the environment is still improving. Fewer cries
> of environmental catastrophe and more advocacy of growth
> and prosperity would encourage a cleaner world.
>
> Meanwhile over at the Fish and Wildlife offices, it's ethics
> that's facing extinction.
>
>
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