Hone Harawira a.k.a. Walking Eagle...and a pat on the back...

...Of all our useless trough feeding MP's, one stands out more than others...a true racist and self hater whose diatribes are grudgingly tolerated by a weary nation; Mr Hone Harawira. THIS interesting anecdote about Hone comes (courtesy PKH) simultaneously with the news that his own political cronies are once again at loggerheads with him (not that they have any moral authority to be critical - keeping a guilty silence over their own shortcomings) over his allegations that his daughter would be loathe to vote for the pathetic bunch that call themselves The Maori Party...

...On a recent trip to the U.S.A. , Maori Party M.P. Hone (rhymes with bonny) Harawira (alias John Hadfield, his true name, his grandfather was a pakeha (white)) was invited to address a major gathering of the American Indian Nations in Kitimat, B.C. about his recent examples of how to inflame the Maori Indigenous situation in New Zealand.He spoke for almost an hour, echoing his racist mother's doomed-to-fail radical ideas for increasing any First Nation's standard of living.At the conclusion of his speech, the tribes presented Hone with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name - "Walking Eagle".The proud Hone then departed with his entourage, waving to the crowd as he left a news reporter later asked the American Indian Chiefs how they came to select the new name given to Hone..They explained that "Walking Eagle" is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.

...and from Imre Saluzsinsky writing in The Australian...

WE did it. For once, we acted collectively, as humans, huddled together on a fragile planet, rather than as selfish individuals. And we did it: we beat global warming.
So now let's move on.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, 2010 was Australia's coldest year since 2001. Since logic tells us the planet can't be getting hotter and colder at the same time, we can confidently pronounce global warming dead, buried and comprehensively beaten.
This victory happened because individuals pulled together, within nations, and then the nations of the world themselves pulled together. Meetings were held in places such Kyoto. Rousing speeches were made by world leaders. People clapped and felt good about themselves. Documents were signed.Clearly, with each meeting, each speech, each inked treaty, global warming was pushed back.
Here in Australia, we also did our bit, big time. We declared global warming the great moral challenge of our generation. We talked confidently about doing something or other. (OK, I can't remember what it was, and we never actually did it, but then we talked about doing something different . . . though maybe not straight away.)Anyway, it worked, because last year was the coldest year since 2001.
Tim Flannery, Al Gore and others published books and made films. Clearly they deserve a slice of this massive victory over global warming. To them we say: "Thank you, gentlemen, you may now return to private life."
But now that we know what we can do by dint of collective effort, we should turn to new challenges....more here...

Quote of the day...

...from Richard Lindzen on climate change, corruption and economic meltdowns...

...When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further. The case of ENRON (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative in this respect. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, ENRON had been one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to over a trillion dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions. Hedge funds are actively examining the possibilities; so was the late Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs has lobbied extensively for the ‘cap and trade’ bill, and is well positioned to make billions. It is probably no accident that Gore, himself, is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense. Archer Daniels Midland (America’s largest agribusiness) has successfully lobbied for ethanol requirements for gasoline, and the resulting demand for ethanol may already be contributing to large increases in corn prices and associated hardship in the developing world (not to mention poorer car performance). And finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake.
With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased and that the case for such warming as was seen being due in significant measure to man, disintegrating. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, for more serious leaders, the need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence. More here...

Simply deelicious...

...the real decline of the environmental movement began with the awareness of the fact that Rachel Carson got it wrong; and that since the popular media embraced her anti-DDT polemic millions have died unecessarily from malaria. The late Denis Dutton, Petr Bekmann (Access to Energy) and prior to him Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource) and a host of others have pointed out green lies and hypocrisy, and illuminated the fact that green politics are fear and envy based alone. Administering another coup de grace to the old green hippies is Ben Pile of Spiked online...

... Environmentalism has been a loud and bizarre spectacle of UK politics, but it has never moved more than a handful of people out onto the streets at any one time. It has never achieved sufficient numbers to count as a political force. And there has been no cohesive environmental philosophy. Instead, as Lynas admits, environmentalists were united, not by science, but by their emotional rejection of contemporary society.
As with most criticism of environmentalism, it is often the reaction to it that reveals more than the criticism itself. Monbiot replies that the movement was unsuccessful, not because it failed to capture the minds of the public, but because ‘we are massively out-spent by corporate-funded movements which have had hundreds of millions poured into them telling government and the media there isn’t a problem’, a claim which surely ignores the UK and EU governments’ environmental policies. He complains that Channel 4 has ‘broadcast a series of polemics about the environment… over the last 20 years’. But the three films he’s talking about – Against Nature, The Great Global Warming Swindle and What the Green Movement Got Wrong – occupied no more than six hours of two decades of near continuous broadcasting. What environmentalists lack in terms of a sense of proportion, they make up for with a sense of persecution.What Lynas has realised, and Monbiot has not, is that ‘sceptics’ did not undermine the environmentalists’ cause. Environmentalists were their own worst enemy. They have alienated the rest of society by their own uncompromising and misanthropic outlook. The challenge for the new environmentalists is to emerge from this crisis of their own making into an era of growing scepticism, while keeping an eye on the consequences of their arguments. But without the precautionary principle, alarmism, doom and catastrophe, and premature claims to scientific certainty, what is environmentalism?

Jolly hockey sticks...

Zombie (bless him) says...The data underlying the famous “hockey stick” global warming graph has finally been found after having earlier been misplaced by leading climate researchers. The newly recovered data confirms the accuracy of the abrupt upward turn in readings characteristic of the “hockey stick” shape found in many global warming projections.
Up until now, however, the data on which the controversial graph had been based was presumed to be lost, so it was not known exactly which aspects of global warming the chart illustrated. Now that the data has been recovered, scientists can state with complete certainty that this updated chart accurately chronicles the past and future trajectory of the global warming crisis.
View the full-size graph by clicking HERE or on the small version shown at right...

Hansen's (and others) predictions...

As we move into 2011, it's pertinent to remind ourselves and others of the threats, warnings and outright lies from the green left over AGW. NASA's James Hansen has been one of the most upfront and outrageous of the lot. Now he's getting skewered. Hansen has been wetting himself over global warming for 20 years. 25 metre sea level rises, England to become "a tropical paradise"...Now delighted bloggers are highlighting his ecoporn fetish. From the comments after this Bishop Hill post......


...One by one these wild doomsday predictions are coming back to haunt the Chicken Littles. When I started to doubt the whole Global Warming thing my first thought was that time will tell as the predictions that were then being made either happened or failed to happen. The hallmark of good science is that it makes predictions which are later verified. It is not necessarily a sign of bad science when predictions don’t work out because at the cutting edge everyone is still learning and refining what they know. However, anyone making confident predictions of the future when all of their previous predictions have spectacularly failed, is unlikely to be taken very seriously. At least we hope not....

The whole article is a delight. More here...


...and in the same vein, bowing towards Julian Simon, this is a treat from JoNova...Busted predictions from brazen prophets...

...examples..

• Within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.”
  David Viner, East Anglia CRU, 2000.
• In June 2007, Tim Flannery warned Brisbane that its “water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months”. Last month Brisbane recorded the wettest December in 150 years.

...and here, with thanks to Samizdata, Spiked Online commentator Brendan O'Neill puts it very nicely indeed...

"What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies - and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis."

Choose a caption...

...now I'm going to show him how to gut it and fillet it. Then we'll eat it raw...

The Hadron Collider and God...

... Scientists have always wondered about The Big Bang. What actually happened during it and immediately afterwards ? The Hadron Collider is attempting to duplicate conditions that will help answer these questions...but not it seems to help answer an even bigger question...What came before The Big Bang ?Now some scientists are claiming that "mysterious forces" - yikes ! -are at work sabotaging or jinxing their quest...

"SCIENTISTS claim the giant atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being jinxed from the future to save the world.
In a bizarre sci-fi theory, Danish physicist Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Japan claim the LHC startup has been delayed due to nature trying to prevent it from finding the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle".
They say their maths proves that nature will "ripple backward through time" to stop the LHC before it can create the God particle, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
“One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” Dr Nielsen says in an unpublished essay.
“He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
"While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus," Dannis Overbye wrote in the New York Times.

"In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus...." More here...