the blog quebecois

From the Anchorage Daily News:

A California author and filmmaker who became famous for trekking to Alaska's remote Katmai coast to commune with brown bears has fallen victim to the teeth and claws of the wild animals he loved.

"I told him to be much more cautious ... because every time a bear kills somebody, there is a big increase in bearanoia and bears get killed,'' Miller said. "I thought that would be a way of getting to him, and his response was 'I would be honored to end up in bear scat.' ''

As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for -- it just might come true.

I remember seeing this guy and his girlfriend interviewed a few months ago. To put it mildly, they were both loons. They claimed that the bears communicated telepathically and were guiding them to some mysterious destination.

As they were. It's called "lunch."

I was reminded, too, of an incident in one of the National parks -- either Jasper or Banff -- a couple of years ago. A brown bear got into an authorized camping spot and mauled some tourists, fortunately not fatally. The rangers closed off the hiking trails and started to hunt it down.

This brought out the animal-rights clowns in force. Two of them, interviewed before they went skipping away down one of the closed trails, averred that, if they came across the bear, they'd "conquer it with love."

Unfortunately, the rangers found it first.

Use toilet paper sparingly, experiment with natural toilet paper substitutes including stones, vegetation and snow. Carry out all used toilet paper, brown plastic bags containing a drop of bleach make this more pleasant. Several forest fires have been started by burning toilet paper and burying paper in catholes is unacceptable as it doesn’t decompose. We can, however, bury used "TP substitutes" in the cathole, another reason to test these options. Know what you are using! Poison ivy and stinging nettle have been proven incompatible as a TP substitute.

Tips for campers, courtesy of the Sierra Club, via Professor Bunyip.

I myself have solved this problem by never going camping. Nature, you might know, consists mainly of:

a) bugs;
b) dirt;
c) bad weather;
d) carnivorous animals; and
e) lousy substitutes for toilet paper,

so I'd rather stay indoors and play Top Spin Tennis on my Xbox.

Still, you've got to admire their willingness to experiment. It must be one of those trial-and-error things -- "Hmmm. How about . . . cactus?"

We all owe a debt to the first guy who caught a lobster and said: "Now this looks like good eatin'!"

Or as the Sierra Club would have phrased it: "I wonder if I can wipe my bum with this thing?"

DUBLIN, Ireland (CP) - Prime Minister Paul Martin will do what he can at the G8 meeting in Scotland to persuade his neighbour George W. Bush to recognize the reality of climate change, say senior Canadian officials. But no one should expect the American president to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol against global warming, they said, adding that just an acknowledgement of climate change would be a big step.

It'll be a big step if Bush acknowleges that Martin exists. Even if he believed the moronic Kyoto treaty would accomplish anything besides destroy the U.S. economy, he'd be up against the Senate's 95-0 peremptory vote against ratifying it. Talk about your bipartisan consensus.

But by all means, Paul, just keep nagging away on -- or as I just heard you on the national news -- "explaining" the concept. I'm sure the President will be all ears. While you're at it, see if maybe he's interested in buying a slightly-used gun registry. Sure, the computer code's still a bit buggy, but it's nothing another few billion shouldn't fix.

Al Gore quoted in Grist Magazine:

Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.

Jonah Goldberg in NRO:

Gore told [Arianna] Huffington that this was his second trip to Cannes. “The first was when I was 15 years old and came here for the summer to study the existentialists -— Sartre, Camus. We were not allowed to speak anything but French!” This, gushed Huffington, “may explain his pitch-perfect French accent.” Perhaps. Though according to David Maraniss’s biography of Gore, the former vice president’s 15th summer was spent working on the family farm. . . . Then there’s the fact that young Al got C’s in French at his tony Washington high school, St. Alban’s. That’s some school if a kid who can intelligently discuss Sartre’s La Nausée and Camus’s Betwixt and Between in apparently pitch-perfect French still can’t earn a B in French class. Mon dieu!

Gore is such a chronic dissembler that I doubt even he knows what's real and what's imaginary in his life.

But as the first quote indicates, he feels that the truth is at best a flexible thing. All in the service of Higher Causes, you see.

I haven't seen this anywhere in the Canadian press. It's from the Opinion Journal's Political Diary from a few days ago. (Pay-subscription link.)

The chancellor of British Columbia's Thompson Rivers University has become a public enemy after uttering judicious words on global warming on a Canadian Broadcasting breakfast show last week. Chancellor Nancy Greene Raine, previously an Olympic skiing champion and national heroine as Canada's official "female athlete of the century," told listeners: "In science, there's almost never black and white. We don't know what next week's weather is going to be. To say in 50 or 100 years, the temperature is going to do this, is a bit of a stretch for me."

The result was a "furor on campus," reports the local Kamloops Daily News. Professors have demanded Ms. Greene Raine's ouster from the ceremonial post. A Canadian government meteorologist "questioned why Greene Raine would offer comment about something on which she is not versed. He noted that no one comes to him for advice on skiing."

In fact, poor Ms. Greene Raine was making exactly the judgment that all citizens and politicians are called upon to make in the global warming debate: How reliable are long-range climate predictions? How should we weigh the costs and benefits of various policy prescriptions? Nor is she alone. Freeman Dyson, the legendary physicist and mathematician, offered similar views in a commencement address at the University of Michigan last year. For that matter, Ms. Greene Raine was kicked off a film of Canadian celebrities talking about global warming in 2005 when the producers discovered she thought spending money on poverty and disease was more urgent than spending money on climate change.

Questions of whether to adapt to climate change or try to prevent it, of how much to spend on CO2 reduction and the like, are questions the public is apparently supposed to shut up about. Message to Ms. Greene Raine and anyone else: Your job is merely to register support for "good" environmentalists versus "bad" skeptics, then submit to whatever policies the Al Gores of the world prescribe for our salvation.

You would think her name alone -- Green(e)-Rain(e) -- should inoculate her from the Gaiazoids' (I figured it's time their religion got a name) righteous fury, but apparently not.

Via Tongue Tied 3

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. -- Charles MacKay

Toronto Sun:

Here's what's happened so far in the two years the [European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme] ETS has been up and running.

- There's been "megatonnes" of profits, all right, mainly pocketed by some of Europe's largest energy companies -- the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.

- The spot wholesale price of electricity in some jurisdictions, which will eventually be passed on to consumers, has jumped by up to 66%.

- The ETS has created an instant new industry of carbon trading consultants, brokers and speculators, many making big profits.

- By contrast, some hospitals and schools have been forced to spend millions buying emission credits, instead of hiring nurses and teachers.

- While ETS supporters argue overall greenhouse gas emissions will go down, all that's gone down so far are projections of future emissions. Real emissions are up.

It isn't only European power companies and brokers looking to profit: Note this:

The chief executives of 10 major corporations, on the eve of the State of the Union address, urged President Bush on Monday to support mandatory reductions in climate-changing pollution and establish reductions targets.

"We can and must take prompt action to establish a coordinated, economy-wide market-driven approach to climate protection," the executives from a broad range of industries said in a letter to the president.

In case you were thinking that this springs from tender solicitude for Mommy Nature, guess again. They're simply following the path of another noted player:

With a payoff worth tens of billions of dollars at stake, Enron Corporation laid out millions in campaign contributions in the 1990s apparently in part to persuade the Clinton Administration and the U.S. Senate to support the Kyoto global warming treaty.

Enron hoped to cash in on the Kyoto treaty by masterminding a worldwide trading network in which major industries could buy and sell credits to emit carbon dioxide - the inert gas that some scientists and most environmentalists believe contributes to global warming.

Yes, that would be the Enron of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, those pillars of probity.

I've got no objection to companies making money. What I do object to is them raking in profit from gaming a phony market that won't do a damned thing to correct the problems it's purported to solve. It's often been said that there is only one taxpayer -- well, there is only one consumer, too, and it's from his hide that this money will be extracted.

I'll make a prediction. In 200 years, the Earth will still be here; the weather will be as varied and unpredictable as ever; our descendants will be as mystified by this hysteria as we are today, looking back at the Dutch Tulip Craze.

The Times Online:

The world has just 10 years to reverse surging greenhouse gas emissions or risk runaway climate change that could make many parts of the planet uninhabitable.

The stark warning comes from scientists who are working on the final draft of a new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report, due to be published this week, will draw together the work of thousands of scientists from around the world who have been studying changes in the world’s climate and predicting how they might accelerate.

It's kind of amusing how these doomsday scenarios slot neatly into nice round numbers. I recall that noted oceanographer, Ted Danson (link doesn't lead to the quote -- it was made before the Internet turned commercial) predicting the "death of the oceans" by the year 2000 if something (what, precisely, he didn't say) wasn't done.

Even though the death of the oceans made me sad, I've gotten over it by now. I'm resilient that way.

The Telegraph:

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led by the European Union. In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto treaty was finally ratified.

An interesting (and skeptical) look at the politics of global warming.

National Post:

Several Conservatives are objecting to David Suzuki's suggestion that politicians who ignore the science behind climate change should be jailed.

"It's environmental fascism," said Ontario MPP Randy Hillier, who has previously cast doubt on the theory of global warming, saying he did not see greenhouse gases as a "terrible evil."

"It used to be unacceptable to have thoughts that were not politically correct, but pretty soon it will be a crime."

Outgoing MP Bob Mills, who called the Kyoto Protocol "a great socialist plot," was taken aback by the exhortation.

"What he says accomplished absolutely nothing," he said.

"Besides, I don't know a Conservative, a Bloc member, a Liberal member who denies that there is climate change."

The member from Red Deer, Alta., suggested that Mr. Suzuki talk about grassroots ways of improving the environment, rather than making accusations.

"Let's talk about clean-coal technology or solar," he said, adding that he himself is trying to install 28 solar panels but has encountered 1½ years of provincial bureaucratic bungling.

"We need to get moving on these kinds of practical issues."

While a spokesman for the noted environmentalist and broadcaster insisted that the comments made last Thursday at a McGill University event should not be taken literally, Mr. Suzuki previously made similar remarks, and attendees said that his tone was serious.

In a similar vein, I hereby call for the assassination of David Suzuki.

Ha! Ha! Just kidding! Ask my friends, I'm always joking around like that.

More seriously, I have neither the time nor the inclination to do anything about Suzuki; and I have no doubt that my readership, such as it is, is probably engaged in more constructive pursuits, like earning a living.

I can't say the same for Suzuki's crew of acolytes, several of whom are probably even nuttier than he. Because politicians are -- to put it mildly -- unlikely to enact legislation making Suzuki effectively the dictator of this country and because ordinary citizens have no ability to imprison people they don't like, that leaves only one option, which I've alluded to above.

It would not at all surprise me if one of Suzuki's befuddled admirers, inspired by his incendiary rhetoric, reaches the same conclusion and takes a serious run at a politician. What he is doing is no less than counselling murder.

Surely the cheezburger kittehs are next?

The Telegraph:

Six thousand bunnies were killed last year. The corpses were frozen and then sent to a special heating plant at Karlskoga, in central Sweden, where the cadavers were burnt in order to help heat the homes of residents of Värmland.

The U.K. might be in terminal decline; but she still produces journalists that put the majority of ours to shame. The iconoclastic webzine spiked takes a realistic look at Alberta's oil sands and the stupid, stupid "documentary" it recently spawned:

While Dirty Oil suggests that we shift to renewable energy sources, it also provides a childish view of the relationship between big business and the rest of society. This is ‘big people picking on little people and assuming that they can get away with it’, says a spokesperson for the green group the Natural Resources Defense Council. The film also suggests that it is somehow our individual greed which, by creating demand for this ‘dirty’ oil, is screwing up the planet. But there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better off; the whole world should enjoy the living standards of the average American. Cheap, reliable energy is absolutely essential for that. Alberta’s oil boom is set to continue for many years to come.