New Hope For Climate Deniers

WE holocaust, er sorry, global warming deniers are having a rough time these days, as super energy hog Al Gore gets an Oscar for his Inconvenient Truth. And girl columnists like Maureen Dowd call us names. So it gives us a warm fuzzy feeling to know that this week on TV in Britland they’ll be showing The Great Global Warming Swindle. Now that’s more like it! The film doesn’t parrot the official UN line of consensus science that the current global warming is driven by human carbon emissions.

Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun’s radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.

Let’s back up on that one. Given that the current climate of predominant ice ages interspersed with shorter interglacial periods have been going on for millions of years, it couldn’t be driven by human action. Obviously there are other climate-forcing causes at work.

And there is this, my favorite from Daniel B .Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies.

Nature changes over essentially all time scales

Another way of saying this is that if the world weren’t getting warmer it would be getting colder. And we don’t know why.

Apparently there’s a good quote from an African official:

James Shikwati, Kenyan director of the Inter Region Economic Network, says: ’The rich countries can afford to engage in some luxurious experimentation with other forms of energy, but for us we are still at the stage of survival.’

Africa as a continent is notable for being a plateau usually above 1,000 feet. Most of its rivers have cataracts fairly close to the sea, making river navigation difficult.

For Africa, a bit of global warming might be a benefit.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
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Liberal Coercion

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Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

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Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

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David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

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Conservatism's Holy Grail

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Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

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The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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