Economist: Blood is now Green

by admin on February 15, 2010

Conflict conservation

Biodiversity down the barrel of a gun

Feb 8th 2010 | From The Economist online

THERE was a time when conservation meant keeping people away from nature. America’s system of national parks, a model for similar set-ups around the world, was based on the idea of limiting human presence to passing visits, rather than permanent habitation.

In recent years this way of doing things has come under suspicion. To fence off large areas of parkland is often impractical and can also be immoral—in that it leads to local people being booted out. These days, the consensus among conservationists is to try to manage nature with humans in situ. But there are still “involuntary parks”, to borrow a phrase from the writer and futurist Bruce Sterling, that serve to illustrate just how spectacularly well nature can do when humans are removed from the equation.

AFP

Some such “parks” are accidents of settlement, or its absence. Nature is preserved in those rare places that people just have not got round to overrunning—for example the Foja Mountains in western New Guinea, an area of rainforest that teems with an astonishingly rich variety of plants and animals. Others are accidents of conflict: places from which people have fled and where the fauna and flora have thrived as a result.

The demilitarised zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea is a good example. Over the past six decades this narrow and dangerous strip of land running 248km (155 miles) across the Korean peninsula has become a de facto nature reserve. As agriculture and industrialisation have moved ahead elsewhere, the thousand-square-kilometre DMZ, uninhabited and heavily mined, has been a refuge for two endangered birds: the white-naped and the red-crowned crane. It also contains Asiatic black bears, egrets and, according to some, an extremely rare subspecies of the Siberian tiger. The biggest threat to all this biodiversity is probably peace. There are already calls for the DMZ to be turned into a park in the event of reunification.

The Chagos Islands of the Indian Ocean are a military zone, too. The locals were forcibly removed by the British government, starting in the late 1960s, to make way for an American base on Diego Garcia, the archipelago’s main island. The Chagos Islands are thought to be home to some of the world’s healthiest coral reefs and the waters around them rank among the most pristine in the world. The Chagos Conservation Trust, a conservation group, would like to set up a reserve. The displaced islanders, however, plan to return one day, and if they do they will want to start fishing and building hotels and even an airport. Only military dominion keeps such activity at bay.

A little to the west of the Chagos, the Scotsman recently reported, the sea off Kenya’s northern coast currently has a profusion of fish because Somali pirates are keeping out all the big foreign fishing boats. Since the collapse of Somalia’s government in 1991, this part of the world has reportedly been plagued by illegal fishing. Now, goes the story, such boats are too afraid to enter the area because of the pirates.

The illegal dumping in the region of barrels of radioactive waste from European hospitals and factories, which has also been reported, has probably been similarly deterred, if it was taking place. This, though, is unlikely to bother the fish either way. Perhaps the most famous of the Earth’s involuntary parks is the evacuated area around Chernobyl, in Ukraine, where the burgeoning wildlife has been little affected by the risks of radiation.

Military conflict and the preparations that surround it are not, in themselves, good for the environment: far from it. Animals big enough to be eaten, or with body parts that can be sold for a profit, are well advised to stay out of war zones. It is depopulation that matters. Armed conflict and its knock-on effects simply happen to be one of the few forces on the planet that can cause quick and thorough depopulation. These areas struggle to survive when peace arrives. The nasty truth is that the likelihood of random and violent death is the cheapest form of conservation yet invented.


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India introduces GMO softkills to ‘mitigate the effects of Climate Change’

by admin on February 15, 2010

Debate over GM eggplant consumes India

12:03am EST

(Corrects to say 1.4 million farmers in paragraph 20 and 1.4 billion population in paragraph 24)

By Rina Chandran

MUMBAI, Feb 16 (Reuters) – The purple eggplant that Indian shopper Tanuja Krishnan picks out at a Mumbai market stall every week is an unlikely protagonist in a raging debate about whether genetically modified foods should be introduced into India.

A genetically modified version of eggplant, a staple in fiery curries, was slated to be the first GM food introduced into India in a bid to stabilise food prices and mitigate some of the effects of climate change on Indian food crop yields.

Yet, Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh blocked the release of the vegetable until further notice following an outcry by environmentalists and some farmers. The opposition to GM foods was so heated that some protesters burnt effigies.

Ramesh said there was not enough public trust to support the introduction of such crops into India’s food supply until more research was done to remove all doubts that GM foods were safe for consumption.

But while those from the camp that opposed GM foods are celebrating, there are concerns that rising food prices will be a major problem for Indian policymakers in the future unless the country starts embracing genetically-modified food crops.

“This is bad for the country’s agricultural and biotechnology future. Our scientists have lost their credibility, companies will be unwilling to invest more money, and it will take us a long time to pick up the pieces again,” said C. Kameshwar Rao, an official at the Foundation for Biotechnology Awareness & Education, a GM advocacy institute.

“Scientists can’t win a shouting match with politicians.”

India’s farm sector has changed very little since the advent of the Green Revolution with crop yields failing to keep up with soaring population growth and rising incomes.

At the same time, damage to crops from pests and disease have worsened due to rising temperatures from climate change.

HYBRIDS

Known as Bt brinjal, the Indian word for aubergine, the GM vegetable is able to resist some pests responsible for devastating crops across India thanks to a gene from soil bacteria called ‘bacillus thuringniensis’ (Bt).

The thought of eating a genetic hybrid has made consumers such as Krishnan wary. “I would try it to see if it tastes any different, if it has fewer pests, but I think I would prefer organic brinjal just to be safe,” she said.

The moratorium against the release of the GM eggplant followed harsh criticism by environmentalists and farmers who demanded rigorous testing and labelling standards before Bt brinjal was cultivated.

“Stringent monitoring measures should be immediately put in place to ensure that no releases of GM crops happens,” said Rajesh Krishnan, a manager for sustainable agriculture at Greenpeace India.

India’s Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) opened the way for the commercial cultivation of Bt brinjal last October, seven years after approving Bt cotton, which is now grown on more than 80 percent of total cotton area.

Thanks to genetically modified cotton, India has become the world’s second largest cotton producer and exporter after China, with about 5 million farmers growing Bt cotton.

“Our experience with Bt cotton has showed the technology has benefited the farmer, the consumer and the states’ economies,” said Bhagirath Choudhary, head of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) in Delhi.

“We have a solid case in Bt cotton, with higher yields, double the output and less use of insecticide. But the technology is so sophisticated, the general public is ignorant about it.” India is among the top biotech crop growing countries, trailing only Argentina, Brazil and the United States.

NO OTHER OPTION

India is the world’s second largest producer of eggplant after China and the vegetable is also used in traditional medicine to treat diabetes and hypertension.

About 1.4 million farmers grow eggplant, which is very susceptible to pest attacks. Farmers tend to spray the crop with pesticides 30-50 times during a crop cycle.

“The brinjal we eat now is more harmful because of the pesticide residue,” said Raju Shetty, a farmer leader in western Maharashtra state and a member of parliament.

He supported Bt brinjal because he said “it will cut the cost of pesticide and boost yields. That’s what farmers are seeking”.

Even though the GM seeds for the vegetable would likely cost three times the price and farmers would need to purchase seeds for every sowing rather than reusing crop seeds, proponents say the extra expenses would be compensated by lower pesticide costs and less devastating crop loses.

Expanding India’s food supply is crucial in a country of one billion people, with predictions the population might reach 1.4 billion by 2025.

The United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organisation has said food production will need to double by mid-century to meet demand from a growing world population, prompting calls for a second Green Revolution.

But Greenpeace maintains GM crops are a costly distraction from tackling hunger through fighting poverty and helping small holders in developing countries sell their products.

A combination of changing diets, a growing population, demand for farmland for industrialisation and high energy prices have stoked food prices globally, including in India, where the food price index rose 17.56 percent in the 12 months to Jan. 23.

India is also battling with lower crop yields and more pests and plant disease because of higher temperatures, raising concerns that India’s farm output could lag demand and the world’s second most populous country will become a large food importer unless crop yields jump.

Some economists and scientists in India favour a raft of policy initiatives, including genetic engineering, to improve yields and increase resistance to pests, disease and drought.

“You have a large population that’s growing in affluence, but our resources — land, water, cheap labour — are all shrinking, so we have to increase output quickly and efficiently,” said Gyanendra Shukla, director of Monsanto India Ltd.

“I don’t see any other option but GM crops.”

Since Monsanto launched the world’s first GM crop in 1996, more than 25 countries have taken to biotech crops including soybean, corn, tomato, squash, papaya and sugarbeet.

Bt brinjal was developed by Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Co (Mahyco) under licence from Monsanto, and estimates show economic benefits from higher yields could top $400 million a year.

GEAC has also approved studies of GM okra, tomato and rice, but opponents say GM should be a last resort.

“You can’t simply abandon all other solutions, including organic farming, to focus just on biotechnology when the testing, labelling and enforcement standards are so inadequate,” said Kushal Yadav, an official at the Centre for Science and Environment.

NO PANACEA

Aside from health and safety concerns, critics worry that the widespread use of GM crops will put India’s food supply largely in the hands of a few giant corporations that make the seeds.

There is also the possibility of genetic contamination if the Bt genes cross pollinate with other varieties.

A recent report by U.S. health and environment protection groups said that rather than reduce the use of pesticides, genetically engineered crops had actually prompted increased use of these chemicals, caused an epidemic of herbicide-resistant weeds and resulted in more chemical residues in foods.

A backlash against the technology also appears to be growing globally, with consumer resistance to what British tabloids have dubbed “Frankenfood” taking root.

Even advocates in India admit genetically modified crops are no magic bullet.

“Bt can’t be the panacea for all the problems in Indian agriculture. But if we miss this, we miss the chance to usher in a new technology, see how it can help us,” Choudhary said. (Additional reporting by Rajendra Jadhav and Sujoy Dhar; Editing by Megan Goldin)

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The Prison Planet

by admin on February 15, 2010

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Phil Jones Starting to Crak

by admin on February 15, 2010

Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

By JONATHAN PETRE
Last updated at 5:12 PM on 14th February 2010


  • Data for vital ‘hockey stick graph’ has gone missing
  • There has been no global warming since 1995
  • Warming periods have happened before – but NOT due to man-made changes
Professor Phil Jones

Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

More…

Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.

Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.

Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.

That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.

Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.

Enlarge Chart

But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

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Predictive Programming: The Green Police

by admin on February 10, 2010

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Germans given refuge from “totalitarian” EU

by admin on February 10, 2010


German homeschoolers’

political asylum in

America exposes the EU Gulag

By Gerald Warner World Last updated: February 1st, 2010

41 Comments Comment on this article

The case of the homeschooling couple from Germany who were granted political asylum in the United States, about which Ed West blogged recently, becomes even more interesting if one reads the remarks of the man who granted the Romeikes asylum, Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman, of Memphis, Tennessee.

Burman said: “We can’t expect every country to follow our constitution. The world might be a better place if it did. However, the rights being violated here are basic human rights that no country has a right to violate.” He observed: “Homeschoolers are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress. This family has a well-founded fear of persecution… therefore, they are eligible for asylum…”

Those last remarks might have been uttered in 1933. Do we truly realise the significance of what has happened? Do we understand that, as citizens of the European Union, we now belong to a totalitarian state from which fleeing citizens are being granted political asylum in the United States? Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, tyranny is back in business in Germany.

Judge Burman added that the scariest thing about this case was the motivation of the German government. He said that, rather than being concerned with the welfare of the children, it was trying to stamp out parallel societies. Making his court order, the judge voiced concern that, although Germany was a democratic country and an ally, the policy of persecuting homeschoolers was “repellent to everything we believe as Americans”.

That offers a useful insight into how Americans, living in a free country, view the creeping totalitarianism that has engulfed Europe. For this is not just a German issue: we are all helots under state control. Why did the German homeschoolers not seek political asylum in Britain? Because our rulers subscribe to the same tyrannical statist philosophy, is the answer. Every possible obstacle is put in the way of homeschooling parents in Britain.

The mentality is that the state – not parents – is the natural controller and shaper of children’s lives and beliefs. When a schoolgirl can be given an abortion without her parents’ knowledge, we know that, while public utilities may have been privatised, children have been nationalised. The Romeikes who fled from Germany objected to their children being forced to follow a curriculum that they believed was anti-Christian. The same would apply in British state schools, where pornographic sex education is increasingly being made compulsory.

Is that a new idea? Not at all. It was first implemented as government policy in 1919, during the short-lived communist dictatorship of Bela Kun in Hungary, when Georg Lukacs, as deputy commissar for “culture”, enforced his system of Cultural Terrorism, force-feeding children pornographic sex education, teaching them to laugh at their parents and at monogamy and to reject the family and religion. Lukacs was a founder of the Frankfurt School of Marxism, later popularised by Herbert Marcuse, whose demented notions are today called Political Correctness and, as such, have colonised Western governments.

It takes the forthright remarks of an American judge, in a country where the culture war has not yet been lost, to bring home to us in Europe that we already inhabit the Gulag. The Berlin Wall did not “fall” – it was just moved further west.

Gerald Warner

Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator who writes about politics, religion, history, culture and society in general.


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States move in on Free Speech

by admin on February 10, 2010

No joke: South Carolina now requires ’subversives’ to register | Raw Story

southcarolinacapitol No joke: South Carolina now requires subversives to registerFive-dollar registration fee for persons planning to overthrow US government

Terrorists who want to overthrow the United States government must now register with South Carolina’s Secretary of State and declare their intentions — or face a $25,000 fine and up to 10 years in prison.

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”

There’s even a $5 filing fee.

By “subversive organization,” the law means “every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States [or] of this State.”

Story continues below…

A PDF of the registration form can be found here, courtesy of FitsNews.

The law also gives subversive organizations “subject to foreign control” 30 days to register with the state after setting up shop in South Carolina.

While the intention of the law is apparently aimed at Islamic terrorists, it’s unclear in the law’s wording whether it can be applied to right-wing militias, some of whom have reputedly called for the overthrow of the US government. The law states that “fraternal” and “patriotic” groups are exempt from the law, but only if they don’t “contemplate the overthrow of the government.”

While the law is clearly redundant — there are plenty of statutes at the state and federal level through which terrorists can be prosecuted — it reflects a not-uncommon pattern in some states of “doubling down” against particular crimes.

For instance, South Carolina is among those states which require drug dealers to declare their illegal income, or face additional criminal penalties on top of the already established penalties for buying, possessing and selling drugs.

The South Carolina blog FitsNews describes the new law as “bureaucracy for terrorists.”

“In the long and storied history of utterly retarded legislation in South Carolina, we may have finally found the legal statute that takes the cake for sheer stupidity, which we think you’ll agree is saying something,” the unsigned blog posting scathingly commented.


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Welcome to the New System

by admin on February 10, 2010

EU wipes England off the map – as Gordon Brown flies the flag of St George over Downing Street

Last updated at 16:23 23 April 2008
The Tories have issued a St George’s Day rallying cry against plans by Brussels to “wipe England off the map” and create a United Europe.

As Gordon Brown hoisted the English national flag over 10 Downing Street to celebrate St George’s Day, it was revealed that EU officials had revised a map wiping out the country and the Channel.

The change splits England into three and lumps those parts together with chunks of other countries to create “transnational regions”.

Scroll down for more…

St George's Flag Downing StreetFlying the flag: The cross of St George over No 10 Downing Street today

It is claimed these zones – which have been allocated their own budgets – are intended to boost trade between EU nations.

But the Tories yesterday accused the Government of trying “to create a European superstate via the back door”.

Under the programme, known as INTER-REG, counties along England’s south coast form the “Manche Region” along with northern France.

Scroll down for more…

Divide and rule: How the South-East has been paired up with regions across the Channel

Enlarge the image

The “Atlantic Region” takes in western England, along with Ireland, Wales and parts of Portugal, Spain, France and Scotland.

Meanwhile eastern England is part of the “North Sea Region”, which covers areas of Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Norway and the Netherlands.

Gordon Brown: Celebrating Englishness

The UK Government is fully behind the project, even though the words “England” and “Britain” are left off official maps of each area and the Manche Region renames the English Channel “The Channel Sea”.

Each region, which will be given taxpayers’ money to promote trade links, cultural ties, transport policies and tourism, is to be run by a “managing authority” of unelected officials overseen by a director.

None will be based in the UK, with Manche ruled by the French, Atlantic by the Portuguese and North Sea by the Danes.

The regions have legal status and Manche has a budget of £261million between 2007 and 2013, Atlantic £127million and North Sea £219million.

Every project funded by a region must have a publicity campaign which ensures “there is provision for flying the EU flag at least one week every year”.

Eric Pickles, the Conservatives’ communities spokesman, said: “We already knew that Gordon Brown had hoisted the white flag of surrender to the European Constitution.

St George, played by historical interpreter Alan Larson, does his best at dispatching the Dragon at Scarborough Castle

“Now the Labour Government has been caught red-handed conspiring with European bureaucrats to create a European superstate via the back door.

“Gordon Brown literally wants to wipe England off the map.”

But a spokesman for the Department for Communities and Local Government insisted: “It has nothing to do with altering names on maps.

“It is about support for business, helping boost employment and turning around deprived areas… helping firms in Kent do business with people in Northern France or promoting joint tourism initiatives between different countries.”

A St George’s Day flag flies next to a statue of Sir Winston Churchill in London’s Parliament Square today

The move came as Gordon Brown ordered that all UK Government buildings with two flag poles should fly the cross of St George alongside the union banner.

It follows a review of flag flying practices. Number 10 will in future fly the Scottish and Welsh flags on their patron saints’ days.

Northern Ireland does not have an official national flag, and so the same practice will not apply on St Patrick’s Day.

“The Prime Minister’s view is that of course we should celebrate our Britishness, but celebrating our Britishness does not mean we cannot also celebrate our Englishness, Scottishness, Welshness or Northern Irishness,” said the spokesman.

The English flag last flew over Downing Street during the 2006 World Cup.

New map of Britain that makes Kent part of France…and it’s a German idea

by TIM SHIPMAN

Last updated at 09:11 04 September 2006

Graphic of Kent as part of France

Click the image to enlarge

For centuries the people of Kent have called their county the Garden of England. So they might find it quite a surprise that – according to the European Union at least – they are actually part of France.

Along with next-door Sussex, Kent has been rolled in with the Calais area on a map drawn up for Brussels.

The counties now belong to the “Trans-Manche region”.

Under the plans from German cartographers, the East of England has also been shoehorned into a new region, which includes Scandinavia.

The Western side of Britain has been lumped together with Ireland and the Atlantic coasts of France, Spain and Portugal.

The Tories accused the EU of plotting to undermine nation states and even “wipe Britain off the map”.

They warned that the German government wants to make the downgrading of national borders a key plank of its presidency of the EU next year – despite the rejection of the European Constitution by voters.

Brussels bureaucrats are poised to take charge of all “spatial information” in EU nations, forcing the 25 member states to bring their maps into line with specifications laid down by Brussels.

Those living in counties from Essex northwards will join the North Sea region under the plans, which take in coastal areas of Belgium, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

The new regions have been drawn up for a project called Interreg, which wants to foster cross-border co-operation on issues such as tourism, trade, health and the environment.

The EU project will lead to a harmonisation of geographical names, administrative units and maps.

Brussels will also be able to create a database of property information used for taxation purposes.

The Tories claim this could be the first step in imposing an EU-wide property tax.

Local government spokesman Eric Pickles said: “Under the Labour Government, Britain has already been subdivided into regions as part of John Prescott’s empire building.

“I fear that there is an agenda to undermine national identities and impose a United States of Europe by stealth. Conservatives will fight these attempts to Balkanise Britain.

“I fear Eurocrats could literally wipe Britain off the map and hardworking families and pensioners should be concerned that Europe wants the authority to build a database of their homes – this threatens to lead to an EU-wide property tax.

“We should work constructively with Europe to promote trade and co-operation between nations, but Conservatives believe that this is just the type of unwarranted interference that gives Brussels a bad name.”

In a dossier on the new map, the Tories also warned: “Extending “transnationality” is to be a key part of German plans for their presidency of the European Union next year.”

In June, Wolfgang Tiefensee, a German minister, said: “There is the great hope underlying the goal of a United Europe that we can permanently overcome old borders.”

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The dam is cracking

by admin on January 27, 2010

Andrew Neil | 09:42 UK time, Tuesday, 26 January 2010

The bloggers are all over the UN IPCC 2007 report, the bible of global warming, which predicted all manner of dire outcomes for our planet unless we got a grip on rising temperatures — and it seems to be crumbling in some pretty significant areas.

The dam began to crack towards the end of last year when leaked e-mails from one of the temples of global warming, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, suggested that a few sleights of hand were being deployed to hide facts inconvenient to the global warming case. An official investigation into these e-mails is on-going.

But the flood gates really opened after theIPCC had to withdraw its claim that the Himalayan glaciers would likely all have melted by 2035, maybe even sooner.

This turned out to have no basis in scientific fact, even though everything the IPCC produces is meant to be rigorously peer-reviewed, but simply an error recycled by the WWF, which the IPCC swallowed whole.

The truth, as seen by India’s leading expert in glaciers, is that “Himalayan glaciers have not in anyway exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.”

So the 40% of the world’s population that relies on the seven major river systems supplied by these glaciers can sleep a little more soundly in the knowledge that their water won’t run out in 25 years after all.

himalayan.jpgThen at the weekend another howler was exposed. The IPCC 2007 report claimed that global warming was leading to an increase in extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Like its claims about the glaciers, this was also based on an unpublished report which had not been subject to scientific scrutiny — indeed several experts warned the IPCC not to rely on it.

The author, who didn’t actually finish his work until a year after the IPCC had used his research, has now repudiated what he sees has its misuse of his work.

His conclusion: “There is insufficient evidence to claim a statistical link between global warming and catastrophe loss.”

Yet it was because of this — now unproved — link that the British government signed up to a $100 billion transfer from rich to poor countries to help them cope with a supposed increase in floods and hurricanes.

It was also central to many of the calculations in Britain’s Stern Report, which might now need to be substantially revised.

Now after Climate-gate, Glacier-gate and Hurricane-gate — how many “gates” can one report contain? — comes Amazon-gate. The IPCC claimed that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests were risk from global warming and would likely be replaced by “tropical savannas” if temperatures continued to rise.

This claim is backed up by a scientific-looking reference but on closer investigation turns out to be yet another non-peer reviewed piece of work from the WWF. Indeed the two authors are not even scientists or specialists on the Amazon: one is an Australian policy analyst, the other a freelance journalist for the Guardian and a green activist.

The WWF has yet to provide any scientific evidence that 40% of the Amazon is threatened by climate change — as opposed to the relentless work of loggers and expansion of farms.

Every time I have questioned our politicians about global warming they have fallen back on the mantra that “2,500 scientists can’t be wrong”, referring to the vast numbers supposedly behind the IPCC consensus.

But it is now clear that the majority of those involved in the IPCC process are not scientists at all but politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs and green activists.

They may — or may not — still be right or wrong but what has become clear in the past couple of months is that, contrary to what many leaders have claimed, the science as promulgated by the IPCC is very far from “settled” and that there are important questions still to ask. The mainstream media has been slow to do this.

The bloggers, too easily dismissed in the past, have set the pace with some real scoops — and some of the mainstream media is now rushing to catch up.

Rajendra Pachauri says he will not resign – BBC News (26 January)

The sceptics may be about to get their first scalp. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairmanoften wrongly described in the media as the world’s leading climate scientist (he’s actually a railway engineer), at first attacked those who questioned the IPCC’s alarming glacier prediction as “arrogant” and believers in “voodoo science”.

He’s since had to retract the prediction but can’t quite manage an apology — and is now under mounting pressure in his Indian homeland to resign.

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EPA Suppresses Internal Global Warming Study

by admin on January 27, 2010

William Yeatman

GlobalWarming.org
January 27, 2010

The Competitive Enterprise Institute today charged that a senior official of the U.S. Environment Protection Agency actively suppressed a scientific analysis of climate change because of political pressure to support the Administration’s policy agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.

As part of a just-ended public comment period, CEI submitted a set of four EPA emails, dated March 12-17, 2009, which indicate that a significant internal critique of the agency’s global warming position was put under wraps and concealed.

The study the emails refer to, which ran counter to the administration’s views on carbon dioxide and climate change, was kept from circulating within the agency, was never disclosed to the public, and was not added to the body of materials relevant to EPA’s current “endangerment” proceeding. The emails further show that the study was treated in this manner not because of any problem with its quality, but for political reasons.

“This suppression of valid science for political reasons is beyond belief,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “EPA’s conduct is even more outlandish because it flies in the face of the President’s widely-touted claim that ‘the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.’”

CEI’s filing requests that EPA make the suppressed study public, place it into the endangerment docket, and extend the comment period to allow public response to the new information. CEI is also requesting that EPA publicly declare that it will engage in no reprisals against the study’s author, a senior analyst who has worked at EPA for over 35 year

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