Bjørn Lomborg has a new column in USA Today.
This morning in USA TODAY, Lomborg argues that in virtually every developed country the air is more breathable and the water is more drinkable than it was in 1970. Deforestation has turned to reforestation and ever-more people have access to clean water and sanitation.
This Earth Day, we need a dose of realism about real environmental challenges — such as the air and water pollution that make life so miserable for billions — and the real opportunities that exist for environmental innovation, to make our planet a better place.
He writes:
Year after year, we are treated to a message of environmental doom and gloom and admonitions on Earth Day. On the back of this sentiment in wealthy countries, governments have invested billions of dollars in inefficient, feel-good policies such as subsidizing solar panels and electric cars.
But there are far better ways to improve environmental prospects for humanity and our planet. On Earth Day, we need more fracking, more wealth, smarter investments and fewer inefficient subsidies.
Full story: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/04/22/earth-days-good-news-column/2101327/
Another way is to show your ride:
David Burge (Iowahawk) writes on his FB page:
Rejoice, carbonators! It’s time for the 8th Annual Iowahawk Earth Week Cruise In!
8th Annual Iowahawk Earth Week Cruise-In – 7 days of peace, love, and carbon-belching horsepower straight from the garages of Iowahawk readers.
http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2013/04/the-2013-iowahawk-earth-week-cruise-in.html
During a general election here in the UK, then Prime Minister Harold MacMillan told the electorate that they’d never had it so good. However true it may have been he didn’t realise that the public don’t like news like that. He lost the election.
Turns out MacMillan actually won the election, but hey, never let the facts get in the way.
I’ll drive my F150 in solidarity with Iowahawk… (that, and I work 20 miles away from where I live, and bicycling I20/I75 in the Atlanta area is a sure sign of suicidal urges…)
I’m not sure this post will do anything good for WUWT’s reputation!
I know it’s in fun, but why give them a stick with which to beat you?
Earth day 1970;
“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University
“We have about five more years at the outside to do something.”
Kenneth Watt, ecologist
“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
George Wald, Harvard Biologist
“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution, by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.”
Life Magazine, January 1970
“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
Kenneth Watt, Ecologist
Hey dudes…..it’s 2013….and we’re still here… 🙂
Check out Iowahawk’s 2012 carbon-belching entries here.
Lomborg clearly exposes the foolish wastefulness of current policies and shows the way for prudent stewardship supporting research and development into breakthrough technologies.
Urge your legislators to support prudent stewardship into energy R&D, not foolish panicked policies.
Turning off the lights and using candles creates more CO2 than if you simply left the lights on. In case anyone is confused, candles are made from fossil fuel. The only reason we have forests today is because we stopped burning wood for heat.
Thank you for that uplifting insight. Yes, of course we have achieved quite a lot since the smogs of the last century. Indeed, I will even admit some green groups played an important role in raising the issue of air quality and ensuring action was taken.
However, because they got it so utterly incredibly wrong on global warming, I find it difficult to remember that we probably have a lot to be grateful to the past greens …. although modern greens have lost their way.
What could be greener than adding plant fertilizer and the building block for all life, C02, to the atmosphere? Any small amount of warmth it might add to our climate would simply be a bonus.
I plan to be doing some landscaping today, so will be producing extra C02 that way, through respiration. I recently had ten yards of sand brought, so the digging and hauling of that material produced lots of happy, green C02’s. We need an icon for that.
“ferdberple says:
April 22, 2013 at 7:34 am”
Apart from the stupid fire risk, beeswax candles are considered CO2-neutral, whatever that is.
‘Another way is to show your ride:
David Burge (Iowahawk) writes on his FB page:
Rejoice, carbonators! It’s time for the 8th Annual Iowahawk Earth Week Cruise In!’
I really hope someone out there has an early 70s vintage Kawasaki 500cc triple to proudly display for the Earth Week Cruise In. Not only was it the fastest accelerating wheeled vehicle (take that, 427 Cobra owners) of that era, it would leave your hapless stoplight competitor not just merely defeated, no, defeated in a humiliating cloud of blue smoke emitted by that romp stompin’ 2 cycle triple.
KIarbonaders unite! – What’s not to like?
http://grydeskeen.dk/karbonader-med-gr%C3%B8n%C3%A6rter/menu/hovedret/
I am outdone. In honor of International Mother Earth Day, I drove the Tahoe, but I’ve been driving the two 4-bangers too much. I must make amends.
David L. Hagen,
“If we could make solar panels 2.0 or 3.0 cheaper than fossil fuels”
From what I have read, even if you could make solar panels that are 100% efficient, this will never happen. Solar power is simply too diffuse.
Man Oh Man, am I ever glad I stopped hanging around with certain Hippies when I did.
As I recall, the real reason for their depressing world-view was two-fold:
First, when you are stoned out of your gourd, you think you see all the answers, but it takes two hours to find your shoes and the car keys, and that makes it really hard to go out and get a real job.
Second, Mommy and Daddy had figured out you were spending the money they sent to you doing nothing but sitting around stoned out of your gourd, and they had firmly stated they were not going to send you any more. This, and not problems with the environment, was the real end of the world. (Or that Hippy world.)
Of course some are still sitting around and, though their parents are dead, they’re still living on trust funds. Come to think of it, they still have their hair the same, though it is now grey. Pushing age sixty, and even seventy, and they haven’t learned a thing.
Happy earth day! I scraped frost off my SUV’s windshield before driving to work. On this date in 1903 it was 84F according to the diary of a local man.
Patrick says:
April 22, 2013 at 8:04 am
“ferdberple says:
April 22, 2013 at 7:34 am”
Apart from the stupid fire risk, beeswax candles are considered CO2-neutral, whatever that is.
__________________________________
Careful but the Vegans do not like nor condone humans exploiting bees to produce wax or honey.
The film Thin Ice can be streamed in full today only, Earth Day, at thiniceclimate.org, and is premiering today at 200 venues around the world. Cast of characters includes Myles Allen and Ray Pierrehumbert. Nice photography and shows a variety of scientists in earnest endeavour. Pushes the view that warming is on us and can be up to 6 C (11F) this century, and that the only solution is a zero carbon emission future. The message was well received by the audience at the premiere I attended, and was a given in the panel discussion following the screening. Various statements made but not justified, such as that the CO2 v temperature correlation in ice cores makes it a given that CO2 is the driver of temperature change
@ Bloke down at the pub
MacMillan told the electorate that they’d never had it so good. However true it may have been he didn’t realise that the public don’t like news like that.
Depends on how they hear it. LBJ brought the house down at a Florida Teamsters convention with a line that went something like this: “I’m not saying ‘You never had it so good.’ But it’s true, isn’t it?”
Driving through Vancouver yesterday, I saw a small plane pulling one of those big sky banners. There’s a provincial election going on, and sure enough it was a political ad. Before we were close enough to it to see which party, the thought occurred to me that someone would make a stink about the amount of CO2 expended to drag that banner back and forth across the sky.
Turned out it was the Green Party.
So I was wrong. We all know their sh*t don’t stink.
The only way the hypocrisy could have been worse is if they’d done it on Earth Day.
“David L. says:
April 22, 2013 at 8:57 am”
Having transported ~90k bees from one place in “southern England” to another place…my land rover discovery was “swarmed” with bees…I just had to let them do what the needed to do. The insecticide was remarkable…
Slightly OT: We know weather is not climate (unless a climastrologist proclaims it) but I find it ironic that winter storm Zeus (the fourth winter storm of Spring) is sweeping across North America on Earth Day 2013.
Tom J says:
April 22, 2013 at 8:18 am
‘Another way is to show your ride:
Still have my old GT 380 , nicked named the blue haze , Yea she still runs !
Slowly, ever so slowly , the story of environmental success is leaking out despite the one-sided media droning.
To all intents and purposes, the Waters of the USA have been cleansed. There is not a significant body or water that is an open sewe,r as existed in 1970. That does not mean every river or lake has potable water, but the water is no longer dangerous. The days of “burning rivers” are long gone.
Likewise every area in the USA has Air Quality that meets the EPA’s Compliance levels, except for metropolitan Los Angeles and metro Houston.
Even in those two locations, the Air is much, much better. LA used to have over 300 days of choking smog per year. Now it suffers from smog for only 25 days a year. In addition, on those smoggy days, the smog is much lighter. Are we done with the job? No, but we are in the closing phases of our 40 odd years of hard effort. I still think we need to recognize the long effort and success. We need a VE Day Holiday. a Victory for the Environmen Day. America once again shows the way for the rest of the World.
If you can stomach the “science” here is the schlockumentary “Thin Ice”:
http://thiniceclimate.org/watch-the-film
I’m watching it piecemeal, and just came to the part where they “show” how whenever C02 goes up, so does the temperature, and vice-versa. So, it’s top-notch Gorescience.
And let’s not forget that Earth Day co-founder Ira Einhorn is spending life in prison for murdering his girlfriend and then composting her remains. While watching a wildlife camera earlier today there were many at the chatroom part proudly exclaiming, “Happy Earth Day!”. I doubt any one of those folks know about Einhorn and perhaps would just shrug their shoulders anyway.
They used to say that the Houston Ship Channel was too thick to drink, too thin to plow! But it never caught fire like the river in Cleveland!
In 1970 the Charles River in Boston had an “F” rating. Due to paint factories on the Cambridge side, it changed its hue from day to day. Now it is one of the cleanest big-city rivers in the nation, with a “B+” rating, and is clean enough to swim in.
The real environmentalists worked long and hard and did a very good job. However environmentalism has been hijacked by political fruit cakes.
Real environmentalists brought the population of whooping cranes back from 21 to over 200, but now the population is in decline, likely due to “eco-friendly” wind turbines. (Google “wind turbines whooping cranes,” and you will learn more than you like about the subject.) (I wrote my view here http://sunriseswansong.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/for-the-birds/ )
Maybe we could get a movement going to have “Earth Day” renamed “Julian Simon Day”.
Jeez, I hope you’re kidding. I raced one of those in a Vintage Team Challenge race and – man, was it one nasty handful! The power band was all in the last 1,100 rpm. Keeping that thing on the boil was butt clenchingly …. exciting. Combine that peaky and powerful hit with skinny non-race compound rubber with brakes that sorta-kinda work and you’ve got two or six scary events per lap. Never want to ride one again.
We did, however, finish very well. But, boy, was I glad when that race was over.
@Caleb –
Ditto for California condors – several have been killed by the wind turbines at Tehachapi.
As for Earth Day – I find it profundly signficant that April 20 is the birthday of two of the world’s most murderous socialist tyrants – Valdimir Ulyanov, aka Lenin, and Adolf Hitler. That would seem to comport with green politics.
History has repeatedly demonstrated that environmental concerns are mostly to almost entirely generated by those whose economic status is middle class or above. The pernicious programs pursued and promoted by the purveyors of anti-carbon catastrophism which aim to keep the billions of humans who still spend their complete lives in grinding poverty from ever being able to advance beyond that state are therefore the ultimate anti-environment agenda.
Despite their efforts, the world has made profound progress in expanding economic opportunity, to the point where it is now several years since we passed, for the first time in all of human history, the moment where more than half of all living humans could be considered “middle class”.
http://www.economist.com/node/13063298?story_id=13063298
This was accomplished not by any program of “wealth redistribution”, but by nations like China, India, Brasil, and others, whose top down command and control economic systems had kept their populations eternally poor, allowing just a few inroads of market economics to operate in their realms. The only place in the world where this looming tide of progress has been successfully thwarted on a large scale is Africa, which some will of course argue is proof of the power of “white supremacy”, but which I would argue is a clear demonstration of the evil that results from leaving the economy of an entire continent in the hands of the worldwide antipoverty bureaucracy.
The sad fact of modern environmental zealotry, is that it is completely dedicated to programs that make them “feel good” about themselves with no consideration allowed for the mounting evidence that those programs are much more damaging to human and environmental prospects than any of the supposed evils they claim to be battling. To celebrate Earth Day I offer this blast from the past from Penn and Teller about recycling. As with all of P&T’s efforts the contents are mildly offensive.
Note to Anthony:
I don’t suppose you’ve been invited to speak at the climate change segment of Chico State’s Earth Day/Hitler’s Birthday celebrations?
If I weren’t handicapped and unable to go on my own, I’d be there picketing.
What Lomborg fails to understand is that Warmists don’t want to “improve environmental prospects for humanity” their aim is to “improve environmental prospects for….our planet.”
I will celebrate Vladimir Lenin’s Birthday by turning all the exterior lights on at my farm from dark until I go to bed! I think they rather tipped their watermelon hands when they declared Lenin’s birthday as “Earth Day”. I think they are all envious of the number of people Lenin’s system of government managed to remove from the planet.
One of the best ways to celebrate Earth day is to pump out the nasty, noxious plant poison called co2. It has had the paradoxical effect of greening the planet. Someone needs funding to research this strange phenomena. 🙂
Another BFTP from the original Earth Day
http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/joncgabriel/the-13-worst-predictions-made-on-earth-day-1970
Folks here should, as I do, most appreciate number 13
“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt
I forgot to include a HT to http://americandigest.org/ for the link to the above
Happy Watermelon Day. So why is Earth Day April 22…..hhmmmm first celebrated in 1970….. hhhmmm. 100 years earlier was… wait for it….the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, (April 22nd 1870) the Father on modern communism. Watermelons are only good for eating
@Owen –
Don’t forget it’s also Hitler’s birthday.
Mike Haseler says “we probably have a lot to be grateful to the past greens …. although modern greens have lost their way”
Very true. Past Green concerns were based on real problems. The campaign against fossil fuels is based on a non-problem. It’s very hard to argue against a Green because they are in the grip of noble cause arguments. But it’s also very difficult for genuine Greens to see that this time they’re pursuing a non-problem, because of the corruption in climate science.
Rabid greenies are a disaster in any language, but in the case of CAGW the real culprits are the scientists, both those who pump unsupported hypotheses at our expense and those who stay quiet while the scientific process gets corrupted.
[Note, I draw a distinction between Green and greenie]
Tom J says:
April 22, 2013 at 8:18 am
‘Another way is to show your ride:
Seriously serendiptitious; my friend just sent me a “found” picture of me on my 1972 Kawasaki S2 350cc 2-stroke, just coming down from a launch wheelie, probably in 1973. I am off to Iowahawk.
What greater demonstration of watermelonhood than to realize that today is Lenin’s birthday.
One can fly the red and green flag.
Jim Arndt says April 22, 2013 at 1:32 pm
Imagine this in a Star Treck episode:
Watermelons are only good for eating
Are you advocating cannibalism, Jim?
Nows your chance to watch for free the new Climate Change propaganda documentary. See how it rates along side. An Inconvenient Truth, Age of Stupid, etc.
http://thiniceclimate.org/
This just in from the electric car revolution front
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/22/fisker-spent-600k-for-every-car-it-sold-skids-toward-bankruptcy/
$600K for each $100K car, such a brilliant plan. Of course US taxpayers supplied a goodly portion of it, but hey, what could possibly go wrong?
A while back I was riding on my scooter and I came across an over sized SUV with a bumper sticker that read, “Go Green, Go Solar”. Well, IF you really wanted to “Go Green”, you wouldn’t be driving an over sized SUV silly.
The only reason for an improving environment is use of fossil fuels, cheap, available energy 24/7 not wind power occasionally at the weather’s whim.
Here is something earth day related that I found funny:
http://imgur.com/Sw5eh45
Re: Hitler’s birthday
Hitler was born April 20, Lenin April 22
What annoys me is that around 1960 there was a huge effort to remove particles using the newly commercially viable electrostatic precipitators and sulphur scrubbing to clean the air. This was calculated at the time to provide a small but noticeable one degree or so increase in the temperatures towards that of the natural level, which dirt and anti greenhouse gases had artificially lowered. The decision to ignore this in the computer models was blatantly political by those now big names in the climate change world. It cannot possibly be ignorance given they are supposed to be basing climate behaviour on greenhouse gases.