We have some new twitter followers and I was snooping around when I found this article on one of Umphrey's twitter posts.

We are all looking at this issue of petroleum and food miles, and often feeling overwhelmed with the complexity of the changes required in our lives and culture. Is being a locavore actually possible, is it worth it and what benefit do we each find in the added effort involved?

The answer is a resounding yes, it is worth it.

Every purchase we make sends a message to our community. Every time we choose a California orange, rather than an Australian steak, we have shaved thousands of miles off our petroleum use. Every time we eat in season, we support farmers whose lives and livelihoods revolve around acknowledging the natural cycles of our planet. Certainly, lamb is an Easter food, or watermelon “should” be eaten on the 4th of July, but are those choices right for Montana?

Worth it, because as Jenny Sabo claims, eating locally grown food is "sustainable".

This stuff just amuses me no end.

I come from a religiously observant family, and I certainly live in a place where piety is valued and prominent, so I know a religious tenet when I see one.

We just had the spectacle of PETA attempting mass re-education by insisting on calling fish sea kittens. But Down Under cats are in bad odor. FoxNews:

It seemed like a good idea at the time: Remove all the feral cats from a famous Australian island to save the native seabirds.

But the decision to eradicate the felines from Macquarie island allowed the rabbit population to explode and, in turn, destroy much of its fragile vegetation that birds depend on for cover, researchers said Tuesday.

Removing the cats from Macquarie "caused environmental devastation" that will cost authorities 24 million Australian dollars ($16.2 million) to remedy, Dana Bergstrom of the Australian Antarctic Division and her colleagues wrote in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology.

"What was wrong was that the rabbits were not eradicated at the same time as the cats," University of Auckland Prof. Mick Clout, who also is a member of the Union's invasive species specialist group. "It would have been ideal if the cats and rabbits were eradicated at the same time, or the rabbits first and the cats subsequently."

One person's pet is another's pet cause.

The advent of "climage change delusion":

Last year, an anxious, depressed 17-year-old boy was admitted to the psychiatric unit at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne. He was refusing to drink water. Worried about drought related to climate change, the young man was convinced that if he drank, millions of people would die. The Australian doctors wrote the case up as the first known instance of "climate change delusion."

Robert Salo, the psychiatrist who runs the inpatient unit where the boy was treated, has now seen several more patients with psychosis or anxiety disorders focused on climate change, as well as children who are having nightmares about global-warming-related natural disasters.

Of course people are actually dying as a result of criminal negligence by eco-zealots in Australia. Their refusal to allow common sense conservation measures to thin brush has resulted in these horrific fires.

The article goes on to prescribe an army of shrinks to deal with eco-angst around the world. As I recall, there was a study that showed after Sept. 11th people who picked themselves up and went on with their lives rather than seeing a shrink did better over time. Of course, that was a real tragedy, not a delusional one.

And we just wasted billions on water-hog, energy-inefficient ethanol. Which will be looking for new handouts.

NY Times, "Ethanol, Just Recently a Savior, Is Struggling". God help us. They're not worried about the money, but about unmet mandates. Climate change hysteria will bankrupt us all:

“The ethanol industry is on its back despite the billions of dollars they have gotten in taxpayer assistance, and a guaranteed market,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy analyst at Rice University.

As if we didn't have enough idiocy on our plate, now we have to deal with not just the number of dollars in the "stimulus" bill but what it's actually going to spend money on--and the implications. Not only the intended consequences--social engineering by rolling back welfare reform, we know how well that went don't we, but, sigh, the unintended consequences.

The modern version of tilting at windmills. William Tucker, The American Spectator, on the next subprime meltdown:

Progress.

Jon Stewart should be required to register his wit with the police department. Its a devastating weapon. He has a knack for converting complex issues into simple perspectives. While panels of talking heads are baffling us with bullsh_t, Stewart simply gets to the point in an entertaining and instructive way.

Of course, we are also reminded that Stewart is a partisan. It drives him crazy that James Inhofe was right and he just can't resist a couple of digs. Nevertheless, kudos for having the integrity for dealing with the issue instead of studiously ignoring it.

Megan McCardle

I am thoroughly unimpressed with the belief that global warming scientists have been engaging in some kind of massive conspiracy to conceal the truth. First, because we seem to be able to observe things like polar ice sheets melting, which point to warming. And second, because, well, why the hell would they? I can imagine a sort of selection bias in the grant process. I cannot imagine hundreds of scientists thinking, well, I put ten years into getting my PhD--time to spend the rest of my life faking data in order to get some grant money! One, yes. All of them, no.

Its hard to understand how someone so naive could have such a prominent platform.

History is replete with instances of top-to-bottom delusion, and more specifically, how its accomplished.

McCardle is right--hundreds of scientists won't all think they should spend their careers faking data, at least not in the beginning. Then again, what young person, having completed their education, ever thinks they'll make the compromises they will all inevitably make to keep their jobs, make the house payment and otherwise keep what they have? More to the point, who among us won't rationalize those choices anyway we can?

Perhaps McCardle has never been in that situation...yet. I have. I quit a good job because I didn't want to participate in a fraud, but a half dozen of my associates--all otherwise good people, went along with it, so they could see their shares vested, so they could keep their jobs.

All one has to do to co-opt scientists (or anyone else), is threaten their survival. You reward the compliant and punish the uncompliant. Because of the obvious nature of the coercion, those that have gone-along will willingly participate in the marginalization of those that didn't.

Welcome to the real world Megan. Spend some time with us--you'll be a better columnist.

Speaking of ruinous messes...

This is an interest and probably accurate analysis as far as I'm concerned:

The global warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their realization that the actual evidence they had — which, let me emphasize, all hype aside, is serious, troubling and establishes in my mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources — was not sufficient to get the world’s governments to do what they thought needed to be done. Hyping the threat increasingly doesn’t look like an accident: it looks like it was a conscious political strategy.

Indeed.

For all you aspiring politicians and political activists out there, consider that this mistake has been made on a variety of diverse policies, including gay marriage.

Its difficult to convince people of things they may not want to be convinced of because it runs contrary to their perceived interest, their prejudices or threatens to disturb a state of blissful apathy, but ultimately there are no shortcuts to marshaling public opinion.

The attempts to bypass democratic institutions breeds enormous suspicion and resentment, as does the massive program of astroturfing public support. In the end, the credibility and effectiveness of all of these participating institutions, many of them which originally did good and creditable work, is damaged beyond repair. How many kids in contemplating future careers are thinking, "climate scientist--yeah, that sounds good..."?

There is in fact a very old parable warning against just this mistake.

The boy who cried wolf.

Melting Himalayan glaciers cuts a little close to home in India.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalized the IPC chairman even further.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

I admit to a little Schadenfreude, but the story has a larger significance beyond the destruction of the climate change conspiracy.

The U.N. was never more relevant than during the cold war, in which small countries, usually irrelevant in terms of international diplomacy, could act as brokers between the two great powers of the time. Canada's long and intense commitment to the U.N. arose from the late Prime Minister Lester Pearson's success in helping to resolve the Suez crisis. Pearson got a Nobel Prize out of the deal, and Canada got to feel like an important country in the global scheme of things.

The end of the cold war, and the rise of globalism created a number of new economic powerhouses in the world, which in turn translated to a larger number of important global players to take into account for whatever ambitions a country had. How is China going to feel about this? India? The U.S.? The E.U.? Russia?

One might have expected the U.N. to have become even more relevant in a multi-polar world, but unexpected, it became less so, and for good reason.

The U.N. was always a pretense, and simply did not reflect the global realities in any meaningful way. Global players increasingly sought bi-lateral agreements, and in some cases multi-lateral agreements that were completely outside the purview of the U.N. Clinton ignored it in the former Yugoslavia, Bush ignored it in the middle east AND Afghanistan, and Obama saw no reason to change anything.

The IPCC was perhaps a final chance for the U.N. to stake out some relevancy in a world that doesn't appear to have any use for it.

With the IPCC discredited, the U.N. is destined for a kind of diplomatic dinner theater, joining the various royal remnants as symbols of an earlier time and set of ideas.

What I think is likely is a rather drastic cut in dues payments to the U.N. The combination of intense budget pressure and the ignominy of the IPCC's deception is going to make the U.N. dues budget an attractive target for future administrations. Other countries will follow suit, and the U.N. will simply be starved to death rather than abolished.

“I tell you I have been in the editorial business going on fourteen years, and it is the first time I ever heard of a man's having to know anything in order to edit a newspaper.”
- Mark Twain, How I Edited an Agricultural Paper Once

Last week the Guardian broke a story that had been in the blogosphere for at least two years:

A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced

It is interesting that the “evidence” the Guardian relies on is the email discussion by CRU scientists that the non-CRU researcher responsible for the data “screwed up”. The actual argument for the screw up is in this 2007 paper written by Douglas Keenan. Sans Keenan’s paper, the email exchange is meaningless. But the Guardian didn’t give any credence to Keenan’s thesis until the “establishment” scientists were shown, via the climategate emails, to have done so. Keenan’s paper speaks for itself, but the Guardian journalists do not exhibit any ability to make their own independent judgment. Now that they can’t trust the establishment, where will the Guardian go for critical analysis?

RELATED:

The march of the poodles. Steyn notes the failure of journalism in the climate debate. The point I'm trying to make above is that failure is largely due to the ignorance of the J-school types who must rely on others for their critical thinking. Considering the liberal bent of their training, it is not surprising these journalist tend to trust the views of their liberal ("establishment") climate scientists - especially when opposing views are labeled heretical by the same establishment.

The New York Times:

Skeptics of global warming are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks more like global cooling, they taunt.

Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.

Just so you understand--Hurricanes are harbingers of global warming. Massive snow storms are also harbingers of global warming.

That is all.

Greenpeace has become an oxymoron:

The politicians have failed. Now it's up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It's not working. We need an army of climate outlaws

This green warrior is a little late calling forth the eco-outlaws. Activists have long been spiking trees, bid tampering land lease auctions, committing arson to name a few eco-crimes in vogue. Or does he fit the definition of someone who keeps doing the same thing but expecting different results?

What is new is the rash of law breaking designed to perpetuate the religion of environmentalism or cash in on the eco-duped. For instance Phil Jones, former director of the East Angilia Climate Unit would be facing charges for violating freedom of information laws (ed.: if not for the statute of limitations). He was trying to hide information that didn't support the eco-theology. The EU is embroiled in fraudulent carbon credits. Every day it seems, a new eco-fraud story appears:

It might sound like common sense. But the misspelling of an expert’s name in a multibillion-dollar environmental lawsuit filed against Chevron is what tipped off Chevron’s lawyers to the fact that the reports may have been fudged, a fact that has now been conceded by the expert himself...

The disclosure comes in the midst of a huge lawsuit accusing Chevron of causing widespread environmental damage in the Ecuadorean rain forest. In 2004, the plaintiffs hired an American biologist named Charles Calmbacher to help oversee soil and water tests in Ecuador.

Reports signed by Calmbacher showed high levels of toxins at two sites and estimated the contamination would cost more than $40 million to clean up at these sites alone.

But in a sworn deposition last week, Calmbacher said he didn’t write the reports submitted over his signature, which said the sites were highly polluted and needed remediation.

“I concluded that I did not see significant contamination that posed immediate threat to the environment or to humans or wildlife around it,” Calmbacher said, according to a transcript provided by Chevron.

Eco-fraud is certainly run by "Green" outlaws - perhaps not the types Mr. Green Warrier is enlisting, but he ignores them at his peril. The politicians at Copenhagen did fail to enact his agenda - but I submit they were in fact influenced a great deal by the unraveling of outlaw eco-huckster schemes.

Update: Rewrote the post to better express my point.

Update II: Here it is April 6, and I woke up to 12 inches of white global warming. I know it's only weather when it snows and Global Warming when it doesn't but just saying...