Ehrlich: More Cock-ups then Cock Robin!

Oh My God! I couldn't believe my ears when a turned on the car radio to our National Radio Station, the ABC, and there was Paul Ehrlich being given youthful deference by a female interviewer. It was obvious this young thing didn't have a clue to her guest's history of being a gold-plated false prophet. He makes Cock Robin, of the Sky-is-Falling fame, look downright clear-headed.

Actually, it's a miracle he's dropped in on us in Australia, since by his many past predictions he should be half-starved, very thirsty and short of petrol for his plane. Yet this professor of Population Studies at Stanford University is among us again, well-fed and watered and cheerful predicting some fresh apocalypse, this time he's on the global warming bandwagon.

He first started his bizarre career of doomsaying in 1968 and scared the bejeezus out of me and my young friends with his best-selling book, The Population Bomb. "The battle to feed humanity is over," he declared. "In the 1970's, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate."

This was heavy sh*t for my generation to swallow. The Earth had just turned over its two billionth person and if, he warned, we started nudging 3 billion we were goners! And in 1971 he was hard at it saying mass starvation would be visited on even the richest countries. He added that by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people. He even bragged, "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Another of his 1970 predictions stated that in 10 years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. Actually, the very opposite happened. So now, if you're near the coast, stick your head outside. That smell is not of rotting fish, but horse manure!

As the population kept climbing to 3, then 4, then 5 billion he kept up with his dire predictions, not missing a beat. It is an indictment of the West's intelligentsia (read: elite academic assholes) that Ehrlich is not only still taken seriously, but rewarded well for scaring us stupid...and stupidly. In 1990, he received a Swedish Royal Academy of Science prize and the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Award" for promoting a "greater public understanding of environmental problems", proving you will be forgiven any wild mistake or exaggeration if it's for a good cause. Amazing!

That explains Tim Flannery, Al Gore and David Suzuki, all made rich by predicting our doom as the prophet class, which likes to think it can see what the masses can't and likes even more an excuse to to control the mob's more unruly appetites. Thankfully a few academics have at least done their civic duty in debunking Ehrlich. Economist Julian Simon was so offended by Ehrlich's claim that by 1985, mankind will enter a genuine era of scarcity...he challenged him to a bet. Name 5 commodities (copper, nickel, gold whatever) that will lose value by 1990. Ehrlich lost and had to pay up. Yet here is this catastrophist loser bobbing up again in Australia now espousing the global warming mantra and the collapse yet to come.

The Way I See It....yet again Ehrlich underestimates human ingenuity and exaggerates our sins. The planet is not toxic; our pollution laws are ever stricter. We're not short of fossil fuels: oil shale is the next big thing. We're better able to survive pandemics. Our climate shows no sign of warming or dangerous disruption. And population growth is slowing at the 7 billion mark - not because we're running out of food, but because wealth is a contraceptive.

We face challenges Prof Erhlich, but see how brilliantly we've met them so far. Those extra billions of people you feared have been fed by even more spectacular advances in farming and breeding techniques, backed by better storage and transport. The U.N. may be slow to act at times but famines can be better handled with the world's food storage capacity. Only in one area do we seem to have gone backwards. We seem more irrational these days and for this Mr Ehrlich you are not only its evidence but its founding father.

Not Putting His B.E.S.T. Foot Forward!

It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once-and-for-all. This study that, in the words of its director, "prove you should not be a sceptic, at least, not any longer." Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (B.E.S.T.) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is still warming. (see top graph)

Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, this month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it. This study was cited uncritically by the usual "lame-stream media" in England and in numerous media outlets in America. Even the Washington Post said the BEST study had "settled the climate change debate and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a cynical fraud."

But...two days ago The Mail has revealed that a leading member of Prof Muller's team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact the BEST's research shows global warming has stopped. Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America's prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller's claim that he has proven global sceptics wrong was also a "hugh mistake" with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is no slouch when it comes to research. She had more than 30 years experience and was co-author of the BEST projects previous four research papers. She said this affair had to be compared with those scum-bag scientists at East Anglia University, whose leaked emails showed they were trying to "hide the decline rates" of warming. In fact, she said, the project's research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties - a fact confirmed by a new analysis and chart by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (see bottom graph).

This graph shows, as Prof Curry stated, that the trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all....through the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has carried on rising relentlessly. "This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting," Prof Curry adds. "Whatever it is that's going on here, it doesn't look like it's being dominated by CO2. Yet that schmuck, Prof Muller , is still standing in his dung heap of warmist denial."

The Way I See It....for the clueless or fanatical diehards who espouse man-made global warming, it's getting awfully cold out there. This latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom climate-change experts once lauded as their own. I already exposed the down-right unscientific processes the United Nation's I.P.C.C. uses behind the scenes which is polluted by political and activist frenzy to scare the crap ut of us. (See previous blog posting) Now, yet again we have another heroic exposure by a colleagues of this Douse-bag she works with. Good onya Prof Judith Curry!

Note: graphs have different time scales but still make sense)

I.P.C.C.'s Climate Kindergarten!

We have been told over and over that the eminent United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is made up of 4000, essentially humourless, scientists in white coats who go around and measure things and have been doing so for about 20 years proving climate change is ALL our fault.

Now...my dear friends and followers, I must tell you of a shocking new book written by Danna Laframboise, a Canadian investigative journalist. It's called, The Delinquent Teenager Who was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert. In it she reveals that the IPCC is actually stuffed with a majority of young activists, rather than leading scientists and they number perhaps 1500 not the 4000 experts we were told about compiling and editing and peer-reviewing papers. The details are priceless and beyond words. This is a shocking exposé!

Ms Laframboise chronicles how the IPCC participants are picked by governments, not for their scientific knowledge and expertise, but for their political connections and for their "warmist" feelings. Other issues she uncovers go as far as to say that approximately 1/3rd of IPCC's sources come from magazines, press releases and unpublished (unvetted) scientific papers. The famous Summary for Policy Makers (i.e. our leaders) is compiled by bureaucrats not scientists and often completed before the articles they actually summarise are made available.

She writes that Richard Klein, now a Dutch geography professor is a classic example. In 1992, Klein turned 23, completed a Masters degree and worked as a Greenpeace campaigner. Two years later, at the tender age of 25, he found himself serving as an IPCC lead author! Klein's online biography brags that since 1994, he has been a lead author for six IPCC reports. This means he was promoted to the IPCC most senior author at age 28 - six years prior to the 2003 completion of his Ph.D. Neither his youth not his thin academic credentials prevented the IPCC from regarding him as one of the world's top experts. Nor is he an isolated case.

Here's another example showing dubious scientific credibility: Take Laurens Bouwer who is currently employed by an environmental studies institute in Amsterdam. In 1999-2000 he served as an IPCC lead author before even earning his Masters. How can a young man without even a Masters degree become an IPCC lead author? Good question. Yes...he was studying climate change and water resources yet the chapter for which he served as lead author was entitled "Insurance and Other Financial Ramifications". It turns out that, during part of 2000, Bouwer was a trainee at Munich Reinsurance Company. This means the IPCC chose as a lead author someone who a) was a trainee, b) lacked a Masters degree and c) was still a decade away from receiving his 2010 Ph.D.

The Way I See It....when Al Gore published an open letter in the New York Times "To Skeptics on Global Warming," in which he compared them to medieval flat-Earthers and made his error-filled movie (which should've been called "Inconvenient Lies"), he began an era of junk science. And as more and scientists sold-their-souls to get in on the Grant Bonanza western governments embarked on anti-emission regulation and poured billions into research to justify it all based on a so-called obvious link between CO2 and global warming. All the while over the years no one government, newspaper or independent scientist seriously set out to hunt down errors or biases in the scare-mongering reports.

We wouldn't let a company issue a prospectus without being audited, but we'll transform the national economy based on a report issued by a foreign committee that no one has been paid to criticise. All these years...no audits on the science from the institutions like the IPCC, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, NASA or the CSIRO. No due diligence study has ever been done. The much hallowed Peer Review amounts to to anonymous reviewers, often picked from a pool of people who agree with the author in the first place. Classic Junk Science! As Deniers (and proud of it) we always felt there was something rotten at the IPCC when more and more evidence was disproving man-made climate change and they didn't change their tune. If any of you still has an ounce of doubt....get informed...get the book any way you can, because I'm sure you'll not read the serialized version in any Sunday newspaper any time soon.

10 Years of Cancer Research...Useless!

Medical science is rampant with fraud! At the Mayo Clinic, ten years of research that appeared to be leading towards harnessing the immune system to fight cancer is worthless because of fraudulent studies and also the later research based on the fraudulent ones. Editor of The Lancet, Richard Horton, says, "Fraudulent research is a scar on the moral body of science".

Retraction of medical research papers is at an all-time high. Though error was cited at a 3 to 1 rate over fraud, one must seriously question whether simple error is the primary reason. After all, these studies are peer-reviewed. They are supposed to have passed rigorous examination. But, what's the reality? The reality is that flaws in much of medical research are blatant. Often, merely examining a study, instead of taking it a face value, demonstrates that the conclusions are not supported by the evidence.

Nonetheless, those same studies are cited as evidence of efficacy of drugs and procedures. Even after papers have been retracted, the impression they've given doesn't disappear. Further research based on those papers is already designed and in process. Unfortunately, doctors are loathe to change their practices on the basis of bad studies. Changes are made more readily as new drugs and procedures are advocated, not as old ones are discredited. So the fraud is perpetrated on the unsuspecting patient.

Why so much Fraud in medical Studies? There is a tremendous amount to be gained by getting away with medical fraud. According to Dr Horton, a single paper published in Lancet and you get your academic chair and your get your money. It's your passport to success. "It's all about money!", he states. Most peer reviewers are doing their own studies. They want to be able to publish too. Therefore, they are not particularly inclined to make negative comments. Obviously, they don't want to alienate the authors of papers, since they hope to become published themselves.

Peer review is a farce! The only kind of review that makes sense is using professional independent reviewers. Yet, for decades we've had peer review trotted out as the be-all and end-all in determining the legitimacy of research papers and passed off as good science.

The Way I See It....there is inherent corruption in conventional medicine. This system I described demonstrates that it is anything but strictly evidence based. A recent study has shown that only 10-15% of medical treatment is based on real evidence. It is obvious when you consider the constantly increasing rate of chronic disease. Also when you take a look at the advent of drug resistant diseases. Or look at the false claims of disease eradication through vaccines, when any rational look at the evidence shows that it's not modern medicine we need to thank, but adequate food, good water and good sanitation systems. More tragically, consider the rise of a new kind of Whooping Cough, 10 times more virulent than the old version and caused by the vaccine itself, while being blamed on the unvaccinated! Let's hope the fraud and pseudo-science that brought us....

• Vioxx, the pain medication that caused heart attacks


• the deeply flawed statin studies that hid adverse effects


• the antidepressant and antipsychotic studies that had no efficacy & bad side effects


• the misguided studies on lowering salt intake claiming greater health when it was found to cause a greater death rate.


• numerous other drug recalls and debunked surgical operations.....will decrease as a more vigilant population questions any and all treatment proposed to them.

While Dr Horton's comment about fraudulent studies being the "scar on the moral body of science" is true, the whole truth is far more disheartening. The entire system of conventional medicine treating symptoms and not the enhancing the body's inner doctor has become a scar on the psyche and soma of humans.

Dutch Courage....finally!

The Netherlands, where six per cent of the population is now Muslim, is scrapping multiculturalism. With Germany, England, France , Denmark and now Italy all publicly admitting that their multicultural policies are not working, but Holland is doing something about it.

This move was the culmination of the efforts of Geert Wilders (photo) and his Party for Freedom over many years. Since 2004 Wilders has campaigned to stop what he and many dutch people view as the "Islamisation of the Netherlands". He says, "Multiculturalism has encouraged Muslim immigrants to create a parallel society within the Netherlands". He compares the Quran with Mein Kampf and has campaigned to have the book banned in his country. He advocates Europe should end immigration from Muslim countries to stop it becoming Eurarabia in the next 30 years. With the continued low birthrates of the Europeans, especially Germany, this is a distinct possibility.

A new integreation bill, which Dutch Interior Minister, Piet Hein Donner, presented to the parliament reads: The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and will shift priority back to the values of the Dutch people as its central role. It continues to state that "a more obligatory integration is justified because the government sees that as a means of survival of the Dutch culture. He stressed, "the bill is necessary because otherwise the society gradually grows apart and eventually no one feels at home anymore in the Netherlands."

This new integration policy will place more demands on immigrants, for example, like being required to learn the Dutch language, learn Dutch history and values and obey Dutch laws. The government will stop offering subsidies for Muslims to integrate...that's their own job. The government will introduce new legislation soon that will ban the construction of new mosques, outlawing forced marriages and will impose tougher measures against Muslims who lower their chances of employment by the way they dress. More specifically, there will be a ban on the idiotic face-covering burqas as of January 1, 2013. Other European countries are taking note.

The Way I See It....Muslim immigrants leave their countries of birth because of civil, tribal and/or political unrest created by the very nature of their medieval culture. Countries like Holland and my Australia have an established Judeo-Christian modern way of life that works, so why embrace a culture that should be on the dung-heap of history? If Muslims do not wish to accept and mix with an Infidel culture and remain apart....simply stay where you are.

Unfortunately the cult of multiculturalism is still alive in Australia. When you have the Minister for Immigration, Chris Bowen, ignoring Europe's leaders concerns and observations and smugly saying, "multiculturalism is thriving in Australia" you want to bitch-slap him! Then you have a the Melbourne AGE Newspaper (part of the lame-stream media), print in a nasty editorial attack of political correctness on Mr Wilder's visit to Australia, "It's bad enough the virulently anti-Islam Dutch MP Geert Wilders plans a visit to Australia to spread his hatred, but it's "shameful"that a Liberal MP is eager to help him do so. This for a man who calls the Prophet Mohammad a "paedophile" (Editor: any man who marries a 9 year old is suspect) and describes the Quran as a blueprint for "intolerance, murder and terror" (Editor: all true: they obviously didn't read the damn book). We say Wilders should be barred from Australia because of his "repugnant" ideas". (Editor: So much for freedom of speech in a "Free" country)

ARAB Spring or JIHADIST Winter?

The death of Libyan leader Gadhafi could create a vacuum that a whole new slew of Islamic terrorists and would-be despots seek to fill. There is a grave risk that the fractious and inherently violent nation divided along tribal lines could fracture or further weaken , creating a new breeding ground for terrorists.

Already, there is tension from the Islamist fighters of the Tripoli Military Council, and also of the militias of the city of Misrata who played a key military role in toppling Gaddafi and killing him and keeping his body in cold storage. Islamists, led by several charismatic clerics and the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood are better at organizing many other groups.

One very disturbing element is the fact that a former al-Qaida terrorist by the name of Abdul Hakim Belhadj, who the CIA renditioned into Thailand, is now back in his original stomping ground. Arnaud de Borchgrave, board member of a Washington, DC-based intelligence forecasting service, says, "Libya is where he was head of the al-Qaida underground. Now he's above ground and commander of the Tripoli garrison." He also added;

• Gadhafi's death is a major plus for Libya. It will do little to help world oil prices in the short term as the country has to rebuild its infrastructure before it can restart pumping at full capacity.
  


• The search is on for the millions-possibly billions- of dollars that Gadhafi expropriated from his oil-rich nation.
  


• Syria, unfortunately, is unlikely to follow Libya soon because of that country's well-organized military and intelligence services. Killing over 30,000 of his people doesn't seem to faze the "mild-mannered" Bashar alAssad while his tough younger brother does the massacring.

Speaking about the Libyan revolution, Barack Obama hailed "the rights of peaceful assembly, free speech and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their own destiny and also praised "the peaceful transition to democracy in both Tunisia and in Egypt." He didn't seem to notice that the new Tunisian government has banned movies being shown and announced that other theatrical performances will be monitored for un-Islamic content. Also, Egypt seems to be rushing headlong toward becoming a Sharia state and might be going to war with Israel after the shocking attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo last month. It is a well-known fact that a significant percentage of Egyptians manifest a deeply ingrained Islamic antisemitism that leads them to hate Israel and would like to tear up the 1979 Camp David Accords. Is the Arab Spring turning into a nasty Jihadist Winter?

The Way I See It....actually no. The democratic movement in the middle East is a powerful positive force for both its people and the world at large. It is a seismic shift in a region that has stagnated for many decades. It will unsettle old norms and practices and cause political upheaval. The Islamists, being better organized, will gain strength in the first phase, but that should spur the moderates to get their act together. A sensible demand for moderation from the country's western-inspired youth should bring economic reform and much-needed jobs.

Already, I see that the Arab Spring has had one positive strategic effect; the weakening of Iran. For a decade, Iran with it's sub-mental leadership, has been making an ambitious bid for regional leadership. However, its support for regional rogues like Syria and Hizballah and it's subterfuge in undercutting Iraq's fledgling democracy has left Tehran no longer looking like a place of inspiration for the Arab masses; instead it resembles the old Arab autocracies. We can all hope a successful revolution will come to Iran some day.

The Heroes of 9/11

I have a personal relationship with the horrors of 9/11. Two and half hours before the first plane struck the Towers we received a phone call that a new grand-daughter was born to my eldest daughter, Natalie. Much joy accompanied the news of Charlie's birth but within a few short celebratory hours it turned into profound shock and sadness as we watched, with millions of others, these tragic events unfold.

On this 10th anniversary, we cannot help but relive the pain we experienced when nearly 3,000 innocent Americans were murdered in cold blood by Islamist extremist scum. It isn't pleasant remembering that day, but we would be remiss if we did not honour them.

We owe it to the dead to never forget them because they died for us, as citizen soldiers who were thrust unexpectedly into a war they never saw coming. We owe it to the living also because there is (strange as it may sound) a silver lining in the dark cloud that cast its dreadful shadow that day. I'm talking about the shining light of incredible courage that was demonstrated by hundreds of ordinary Americans. On that day we discovered unknown heroes hidden in our midst. Who could forget Todd Beamer, a business man on United Airlines flight 93, who shouted "Let's roll" as he and his fellow passengers rushed the cockpit to subdue a group of hijackers. Their jet crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, saving an indeterminable number of people.

Hundreds of miles away at the site of the burning World Trade Center, more heroes emerged. There was Father Mychal Judge, a Catholic priest, who hurried to the burning towers to administer the last rites of his faith to the dying. Tragically, he soon found himself among them. He was joined by an equally unwavering group of New York City firefighters, who stared into the face of death and deliberately put themselves in harm's way.

Ernest Hemingway famously defined courage as "grace under pressure," and those words certainly apply to the 343 firefighters and paramedics who made the ultimate sacrifice that grim day. From my perspective, we have never sufficiently honoured these fallen firefighters, rescue workers, police officers and the many other first responders of 9/11 who gave their lives to save others. Don't forget the over one thousand people who are belatedly suffering from illness caused in helping in the immense search for survivors and the following cleaning up of Ground Zero.

The Way I See It....such deserving heroes should be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor so that we might officially recognize their unsurpassed courage. While we are paying tribute, we must not forget the many soldiers from around the world who have lost their lives in the war on terrorism, as well as those seriously wounded. They represent what is best about western civilization....the willingness of ordinary people to make immense sacrifices to defend their ideals of liberty, free-speech and justice.

Beyond this, the heroes of 9/11 are exemplars of an even greater ideal, one which even if we fail to reach, all of us should at least strive to attain. It is an ideal succinctly stated by Jesus in the Gospel of St John: "Greater love hath no man than this; that a man lay down his life for his friends." A fitting epitaph for Todd Beamer, Father Judge, the NYC firefighters and all the rest who fell that day to save their distant neighbours, many people they did not know but loved nonetheless.