Today, April 22, is Earth Day, the Holy Day of the present-day religion of Gaia.

She is very thirsty for human blood.

Here’s a UK government 2010 video canvassing our sympathy for the environmentalism that Earth Day celebrates:

Earth Day was begun in 1970.

Alan Caruba, writing at Canada Free Press, quotes leading environmentalists of that year:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” – George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” – Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” – New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” – Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” – Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day in 1970.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-CO)

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.

“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last!” – Steward Brand, writing in the Earth Catalog.

Now there’s a confession! Affording us proof of a theory we’ve held about eco-freaks these many years.

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” – Dave Forman, founder of Earth First

Indeed it will. No one left to worry about anything.

“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” – John Davis, editor of the Earth First Journal

Yeah, pity about modern medicine curing diseases. Much nicer when life was hard, agonizing and short.

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” – An editorial in The Economist.

All that was way back when Earth Day was begun.

How have the predictions panned out?

Daniel Flynn, a skeptic with a taste for facts, writes at Front Page:

The world’s population on [the forty-second] Earth Day is double the world’s population on the first Earth Day. Rather than ushering in Doomsday, more people have meant a more livable Earth. Life expectancy rates in the U.S. have ballooned by about ten years for men and women since the first Earth Day. Other parts of the world have experienced even greater gains. Revolutions in travel and communications have made the globe a smaller ball. Farming techniques opposed by extreme environmentalists have shifted the conversation from “Will we have enough to eat?” to “Will we eat what’s healthy?” The more, the merrier.

But in the doom-predicting and humanity-hating business, nothing’s changed.

The following comes from an article at Infowars.com by Paul Joseph Watson:

In 2006, an environmental magazine to which Al Gore and Bill Moyers had both granted interviews advocated that climate skeptics who are part of the “denial industry” be arrested and made to face Nuremberg-style war crimes trials.

[In 2010]  “Gaia hypothesis” creator James Lovelock asserted that “democracy must be put on hold” to combat global warming and that “a few people with authority” should be allowed to run the planet because people were too stupid to be allowed to steer their own destinies. 

Writing for Forbes Magazine, climate change alarmist Steve Zwick calls [now] for skeptics of man-made global warming to be tracked, hunted down and have their homes burned to the ground, yet another shocking illustration of how eco-fascism is rife within the environmentalist lobby. … “We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices. … They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?” …

It’s the argument of a demented idiot who’s obviously in the throws of a childish tantrum over the fact that Americans are rejecting the global government/carbon tax agenda for which man-made global warming is a front in greater numbers than ever before.

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What news for this special day from the Gaian Church of Man-Made Global Warming?

This comes from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page:

A University of Illinois 2009 survey [found] that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. This is easily debunked when one considers its selection methodology. … The Illinois researchers decided that of the 10,257 respondents, the 10,180 who demurred from the so-called consensus “weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, ‘overwhelming consensus’ was demonstrated once again.” The real percentage of concurring scientists in the survey is less than .008%. That these 75 were … “scientists of unknown qualifications” adds yet another layer to the boondoggle.

Earth-worship has been revived.

Now the fashionable religion of the unintelligent intelligentsia, it is  very ancient, very primitive.

The worship of the earth-goddess, Gaia, Isis, Terra Mater … (she had many names), came even before the worship of the moon-goddess, Luna, Diana, Selene, Artemis …

Daniel Greenfield writes, with scorn, but more in sorrow than in anger:

While conventional religion has been on the decline in the modern world, there is a devoutly held belief system … a faith propounded from newstands and newscasts, its proclamations of doom and grace are all around us. It is the green faith.

When all supernatural and unseen entities are banished from the pseudo-rational mind, only one force remains as the source of all life. Earth. Or Gaia, the mother of all life, whose eponymous hypothesis postulated that the planet was a single organism. In the absence of all deities, the planet itself became the deity. Its natural harmony is the way and those who live artificial lives are the sinners.

Harmony with the planet’s creative force is the mark of good people. Those striving to live natural lives. The jet setting nomads who recognize no border or nationality, whose trust fund investments are as global as their enthusiasm about the brotherhood of man. On the other is the farmer who struggles to wrest the natural world to his own ends, the builder who is always creating new structures and products.

Righteousness is measured by the size of one’s “carbon footprint”, a vow of technological poverty, usually sworn by the well-off on behalf of the badly off who unlike them are required to live by it. The ideal is to live as harmoniously with the mother goddess as possible, either through deprivation or complex schemes for juggling resources or carbon credits. These acts of outward piety serve as sacrifices by the faithful to the planet.

The mother goddess is in pain, we are told, crying out because we are harming her, raising temperatures, flooding islands and bringing storms. If we do not relent, she will destroy us. It is up to the faithful who have the special knowledge and who are attuned to her plight, to save mankind from the apocalypse that we have brought on ourselves with our sinful ways.

The EPA in the United States acts as the religious police, protecting the mother-goddess from the blasphemous abuses of the infidels. It is above the law and evidence because it is a religious body and not subject to such secular concerns. But its minions are only the enforcers of a vast international community of faith which is convinced that the doom of mankind is at hand and spends every minute calculating the day when the oceans will rise up and sweep man off the earth for his sins against the planet.

Environmental scientists have become inquisitioners, searching out heresy, denouncing it and destroying the reputations and academic positions of the heretics. The media and the entertainment industry have wholly dedicated themselves to the propagation of the faith …

World leaders are often among the first to adopt a new faith, and the leaders of the modern world are much more likely to kneel at the green altar than they are to hold conventional religious beliefs. The green faith provides them with a revolutionary role as the agents of change, impoverishing their own people, while lining their pockets and those of their friends. It is their kind of religion.

International covenants subscribing to the doctrines of this new faith have already been signed, binding each nation to the ranks of the green. Enforcement bodies have been empowered to protect the planet from the scourge of technology and educational programs have been embedded in every school in the modern world to inculcate children with the tenets of the faith and their responsibilities to the mother goddess.

It is a misnomer to say that the modern world is atheistic. It does have atheists, but they are not the majority anywhere.

More’s the pity! But give us time.

For the most part everyone believes in something, even if it’s only in the redeeming power of carbon credits and recycling. In a unified ecosystem that makes us brother to the whale, and child of the ape –

Not to disagree with his general drift, we butt in here to murmur: well, we are that, are we not? Not brother to the whale, but child of the ape, or at least of a common ancestor –

–  a harmonious environment which we moderns have disrupted with factories, jet planes and nuclear reactors.

The idealization of the environment is not a new phenomenon, it is among the most ancient of faiths. When thunderstorms struck, many of the ancients believed that the sky was angry at them, and we in our skyscrapers notice a warm month and eagerly point out to one another that our sins have made the planet grow hotter. The Romans would have laughed at us, the Greeks would have hooted, but the barbarian would have understood exactly what we were talking about. Like the pseudo-sophisticates, he would not have needed any more evidence than a proclamation by a wise man with sufficient juju.

Without knowing it, without realizing it, our societies have become barbaric in mores and in mindset.

Modern American and European elites congratulate themselves on their superiority to their 19th century ancestors, when in reality that are their intellectual and moral inferiors, sitting on a throne of technolog[ical] and military accomplishments built for them by the ancestors they dismiss as backward.

People have a basic need to believe things. They need to believe that they came from somewhere and that their lives have purpose.

But some of us accept gladly that we came from that ape-like ancestor, and we set our own purposes.

They need to believe that there is a higher force –

We know there are many higher forces – including the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. What we don’t know is why many believe in a divine higher force. But we don’t mean to carp. We agree with almost everything Greenfield has said so far.

–  a struggle between good and evil, in which they can play a part. …

The earth is tangible in a way that the older beings that man believed in are not. It is the touchstone of all pagan faiths because it is physically present. And that physical presence can then be cloaked in all sorts of mummery as a rock hurtling through space becomes the mother goddess of all life. When all other faiths have been dismissed by the high priests of the altimeter, it is the primitive source that they return to.

He goes on to discusse science as a belief system, and the “science” that supports the green religion:

But of course science is a wholly different thing from religion. This we all know. Science, we are told, is based on facts, while religion is based on faith. But every religion at its peak has insisted that it was the proven truth. Its esoteric proofs were incomprehensible to the laity, but they were there. And only a fool or a lunatic would disbelieve them. Intelligent people knew that the truth was the truth. As intelligent people know today that it is absolutely ridiculous not to believe the thing that some of the experts tell them they should believe.

The difference between the two rests in the ability to challenge a consensus based on proof, rather than in finding proof to support an existing consensus. Any intelligent person can do the latter, it is why debates on any given subject, no matter how trivial, can continue endlessly. It is not intelligence that sets the scientist apart, but integrity. And the green faith has repeatedly demonstrated how little integrity it has and how willing it is to put its beliefs ahead of the science.

This is not a new phenomenon, in or out of science. Human beings need to believe things, and the scientific method is a hedge against that weakness. But the only true defense against it is character, a commitment to the truth apart from any other beliefs. But how can one ask people to set aside their belief in the doom of mankind, the billions of dollars invested in preventing that doom and the moral transformation of society that can be achieved by leveraging that doom.

The Global Warming debate asks researchers to choose between their science and their religion, their pocketbook and their reputation. It is a miracle that there are any who have not fallen along with the procession to the green altar. It is hard to blame those who have.

Much as we respect the pocketbook, we don’t find it hard to blame the betrayers of science at all.

After that Greenfield becomes rather obscure (here’s the link again for those who want to hear him out).

He ends with this, speaking of course not for us – us atheists and himself – but for them:

When we have nothing else to trust in, all that remains is the green, the natural renewal of the world, the primitive cycles of the seasons and the degeneracy of man into a savage who is at one with the mother goddess of the world.

Steven Hayward writes at Powerline about a French intellectual, Pascal Bruckner, who explains why  –

… apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists and intellectuals … You’ll get what you’ve got coming! That is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them.

Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. …

It is the paradox of open societies that they seem to be disordered … threatened by crime, loneliness, and drugs because they display their indignity before the whole world, never ceasing to admit their defects, whereas other, more oppressive societies seem harmonious because the press and the opposition are muzzled. “Where there are no visible conflicts, there is no freedom,” Montesquieu said. Democracies are by their nature uneasy, they never realize their ideal; they necessarily disappoint us, creating a gap between the hope they elicit and the realities they construct.

Freedom is messy, and messiness is fecund. Only where there is freedom do great things grow.

On March 28, 2012, fifty former employees of the  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed a letter to Charles Bolden, NASA’s Administrator.

Here is most of it. It can be found in full at Powerline:

Dear Charlie,

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.

As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself. …

In particular, the “unproven remarks” are being made by James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, of whom John Hinderaker of Powerline writes:

One of the world’s four or five leading global warming alarmists is James Hansen, [who], traveling in China, denounced the United States and hailed China as the world’s “best hope” to stave off global warming. Hansen described Americans as “barbarians” with a fake democracy, and urged China’s rulers to lead a boycott of the United States in the hope that it would bring our economy to its knees.

The reputation of NASA took a hit when President Obama redefined its foremost task as “reaching out to the Muslim world”:

In a far-reaching restatement of goals for the nation’s space agency, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says President Obama has ordered him to pursue three new objectives: to “re-inspire children” to study science and math, to “expand our international relationships,” and to “reach out to the Muslim world.” Of those three goals, Bolden said in a recent interview with al-Jazeera, the mission to reach out to Muslims is “perhaps foremost,” because it will help Islamic nations “feel good” about their scientific accomplishments.

What scientific accomplishments would those be?

Look up and see the wonder. Pigs are flying.

The latest report by the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) actually tells the truth. It is “a far cry from the IPCC’s usual slipshod, scaremongering standards.”

Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where “right” means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.

A few quotable quotes from the report:

“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”

“The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”

“The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”

The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:

“Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses … but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.”

So what this IPCC report is saying is that WE DO NOT KNOW if there’s an anthropogenic signal in extreme weather patterns, and that there does not seem to be a trend towards increased extreme weather events such as tornados and tropical storms.

Our quotes come from an article by James Delingpole in the Telegraph.

Here’s more:

They’re calling it Global Weirding now, as I suppose, inevitably they were bound to do in the end. Well “global warming” stopped working in 1989 when the globe stopped warming. Climate change was always a bit of a non-starter because climate does change regardless of whether or not we all drive 4 x 4s, or buy carbon offsets …  And Global Climate Disruption, as some pillock tried to christen it, was never going to catch on because, well, it’s just too blatantly contrived and desperate isn’t it?

So Global Weirding it is. The concept was popularised last week in a characteristically dire and parti pris BBC Horizon documentary which purported to have lots of new evidence (or ‘hearsay’ as it would more likely have been termed in a court of law) showing that our weather is getting more extreme – weirder. It seems to have been broadcast to coincide with a new IPCC report which has been excitedly written up in newspapers like the Guardian and the Detroit Free Press as evidence that we are heading towards climate disaster.

Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heatwaves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of scientists has said.

The greatest danger is in highly populated, poorer regions, but no corner of the globe is immune. The document, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heatwaves, deluges and droughts, and blames man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.

But this is pretty much the exact opposite of what the IPCC report actually says. …

How can the warmists bear it? How do the left-biased media deal with this document?

James Delingpole has told us how – they lie.

The liberal MSM is reporting the opposite. How come?

Well here’s the weird part. The misinformation comes from the IPCC’s summary of its own report .. which has been regurgitated, in classic churnalism style, by all the usual lazy MSM suspects.

It begins:

“Evidence suggests that climate change has led to changes in climate extremes such as heat waves, record high temperatures and, in many regions, heavy precipitation in the past half century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said today.” …

Thing is, the warmists are losing and growing desperate.

As we know, the great global warming alarmism Ponzi scheme is looking extremely vulnerable at the moment. Global warming has stopped. There’s a growing public backlash against eco-taxes, ugly flickery lightbulbs, higher energy bills, bat chomping eco-crucifixes [?] and all the other paraphernalia of the environmental religion.

And unfortunately … what these kind of people do when they get backed into a corner is not surrender but get nastier and more devious.

We’ve seen this recently in the Fakegate affair. …  And in the Planet Under Pressure comedy conference staged last week by comedy organisations including the Royal Society, mainly in order to try to breathe new life into the stagnant, green-tinged corpse of climate alarmism. …

Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be “treated”, according to an Oregon-based professor of “sociology and environmental studies”. Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South. …

As Paul Joseph Watson notes at Prison Planet: “The effort to re-brand legitimate scientific dissent as a mental disorder that requires pharmacological or psychological treatment is a frightening glimpse into the Brave New World society climate change alarmists see themselves as ruling over.”

Due to the fact that skepticism towards man-made global warming is running at an all time high, and with good reason, rather than admit they have lost the debate, climate change alarmists are instead advocating that their ideological opponents simply be drugged or brainwashed into compliance.

Some at least may concede that their cause is lost.

Look for more pig-flights this year.

The Draft International Covenant on Environment and Development (DICED) is, in the words of Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh writing at Canada Free Press, an Environmental Constitution of Global Governance.

She traces its history:

The first version of the Covenant was presented to the United Nations in 1995 on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. It was hoped that it would become a negotiating document for a global treaty on environmental conservation and sustainable development.

The fourth version of the Covenant, issued on September 22, 2010, was written to control all development tied to the environment, “the highest form of law for all human activity.’

She shows clearly what this terrible instrument is for. It is intended to be a global constitution, superseding all existing constitutions of all countries that have them, including the Constitution of the USA.

All signatory nations, including the U.S., would become centrally planned, socialist countries in which all decisions would be made within the framework of Sustainable Development.

“Sustainable Development” being the darling euphemism of the Left for “Our Control”.

The writers describe the Covenant as a “living document,” a blueprint that will be adopted by all members of the United Nations. They say that global partnership is necessary in order to achieve Sustainable Development, by focusing on “social and economic pillars.” The writers are very careful to avoid the phrase, “one world government.”

But they assert that “proper governance is necessary on all levels, ‘from the local to the global'”, and “Article 3 proposes that the entire globe should be under ‘the protection of international law’“.

Article 11 discusses “equity” and “equitable manner” which are code words for communism.

Article 16 requires that all member nations must adopt environmental conservation into all national decisions.

Article 20 requires that all nations must “mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.” If we ratify this document, we must thus fight a non-existent man-made climate change.

Article 31 requires the eradication of poverty by spreading the wealth from developed nations to developing countries.

If you ask, “Why can’t they get it into their heads that spreading wealth does not cure poverty?”, you’re forgetting that curing poverty is not actually their aim. Whatever would they do without the poor to act in the name of, to weep their crocodile tears over, and to feel superior to?

Article 32 requires recycling.

Article 33 demands that countries calculate “the size of the human population their environment is capable of supporting and to implement measures that prevent the population from exceeding that level”.

People who are allowed to live will be put where The Rulers decide they should be:

Article 33 delineates long-term resettlement and estimating the “carrying capacity of the environment.”

The Rulers will decide arbitrarily how goods and services should be priced:

Article 34 demands the maintenance of an open and non-discriminatory international trading system in which “prices of commodities and raw materials reflect the full direct and indirect social and environmental costs of their extraction, production, transport, marketing, and where appropriate, ultimate disposal.”

It will be one centrally planned economy:

Article 41 requires integrated planning systems, irrespective of administrative boundaries within a country, … to “facilitate allocation of land to the uses that provide the greatest sustainable benefits and to promote the transition to a sustainable and integrated management of land resources.”

The UN will morph into the Global Kremlin. Any “amendments” to the Constitution of the World will be reviewed by the UN Secretary-General – under some new name, of course, such as Secretary-General of the World Communist Party:

Article 71 describes the amendment process, which is submitted to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. UN Secretary-General would review the implementation of this document every five years.

Who are the writers of the Covenant?

The UN Secretariat, international lawyers, and U.S. professors from Cornell, Princeton, Pace University, Middlebury College, George Washington University Law School, Bucknell University, University of Indiana, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Meadville Theological School, University of the Pacific, two General Counsel Representatives from the Environmental Protection Agency, and two attorneys in private practice.

Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, who is constantly vigilant for all of us in the cause of freedom, and to whom the free world should gratefully pay attention, sums up their intent:

This Draft Covenant … is obviously intended to be a world constitution for global governance, … to control population growth, re-distribute wealth, force social and “economic equity and justice,” economic control, consumption control, land and water use control, and re-settlement control as a form of social engineering.

Or, even more succinctly and accurately, a form of World Communist Dictatorship.

If Barack Obama is given another four years in power, he will enthusiastically promote this agenda.

We hope a Republican president will appoint John Bolton his Secretary of State, because he is the man we trust – as far as skeptics can trust anyone – to save us from being DICED.

Note:  Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh’s source for her article was Agenda 21 on Steroids by Debbie Coffey, which may be found here.

Arguments for totalitarianism are crowding thick and fast on one another as the Left grows daily more arrogant, and at the same time more afraid that its days in power may be coming to an end.

The latest to reach our ears issue insistently from a Princeton professor, Peter Singer. He has worked himself up, like Michelle Obama, over the shape of other people’s bodies, how much they eat, and what they weigh. Also over manmade global warming. Also over an itch he has to redistribute your money to foreigners.

The aim of people who think like Professor Singer is to set up a global Politburo, consisting of control freaks like him, to keep the rest of us doing what they know is right for … for what or whom? For the planet. Yes. And for … for … whatever. Never mind for what or whom. The point is you must be controlled by those who know better than you what’s best for you. Your betters.

Okay, so maybe you won’t like it. No one is promising you that you’ll like it. Why should you? Stop being so selfish as to believe you have a right to pursue your personal happiness. You must do what you’re told for the Greater Good, for Society, for the human and geographical world as a whole.

This is from Front Page, by Daniel Flyn:

Flyers feeling violated by airport x-ray scanners or TSA pat-downs may find a new proposal just too heavy an intrusion. A professor wants to add scales to airports for carriers to weigh passengers. The pounds on the scale would determine the price of the ticket.

“Is a person’s weight his or her own business?” Peter Singer asks in a Project Syndicate article. “Should we simply become more accepting of diverse body shapes? I don’t think so. Obesity is an ethical issue, because an increase in weight by some imposes costs on others.” The Princeton bioethicist notes that a plane’s load factors into the fuel it consumes.

But some 747s weigh 1,000,000 pounds. Does the 230-pound woman sitting in 11C really make such a big difference?

Singer tacitly admits it doesn’t by shifting the discussion away from the ostensible subject of the piece, fat passengers weighing us down with heavy fuel costs, to eclectic matters more germane to his interests. The bioethicist argues that the increased fuels burned to propel large people to their destinations emit a spare tire of greenhouse gases around the earth, which contributes to global warming. He further justifies elephantine ticket prices for rotund travelers by noting the corpulent health-care costs of obesity. Singer reasons, “These facts are enough to justify public policies that discourage weight gain.”

The unfocused reasoning is a staple of the Australian’s argumentation. He finds no “ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one” since the money for the better television could have been used to help homeless Brazilian children.

What a reasoner he is! You have to admire the breadth of his vision, his capacity to connect widely separated and apparently disparate events.

He argues for a $30,000 cap on income to pay for life’s necessities but not its luxuries.

Who will decide what is necessary? They will.

Luxuries – ugh! (Remember, for all their talk of tolerance in sexual matters, they are the new puritans.)

He wants to take away the right to bear arms, to smoke tobacco, and even the right to life for babies.

Babies are a luxury?

In Rethinking Life and Death [!], he writes that “in the case of infanticide, it is our culture that has something to learn from others, especially now that we, like them, are in a situation where we must limit family size.”

He hasn’t noticed, or has chosen to ignore the fact that fertility rates are sinking so low that whole nations – Russians, Italians, Spaniards … – are dwindling to extinction.

While he advocates legalizing the murder of newborns, Singer condemns eating hamburgers, imprisoning whales at Sea World, and what he describes as the Auschwitz-like conditions of chicken coops.

Feeling sorry for chickens has been an emotional staple of the anti-human lobby for the last half century or so.

“Many of us are rightly concerned about whether our planet can support a human population that has surpassed seven billion,” Singer concludes in the Project Syndicate piece. “But we should think of the size of the human population not just in terms of numbers, but also in terms of its mass. If we value both sustainable human well-being and our planet’s natural environment, my weight — and yours — is everyone’s business.”

If such a private matter as one’s weight is the public’s business, then the question arises as to what, precisely, remains one’s private business? One’s finances, one’s weight, one’s choice of doctor, one’s plasma-screen television, and even the meat on one’s plate all become the business of Big Brother in Singer’s expansive vision of the state. Singer’s is the logic of totalitarianism. Since any private action can be rationalized as having a public consequence, all becomes the interest of the government. Singer advocates copious limits on private behavior. Where are the checks on the state’s gargantuan appetite?

The enormous arrogance required to force people onto scales as a prerequisite to boarding a flight is a natural consequence of Singer’s philosophy. The Ivy League philosopher is an heir to the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill …

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number” is the phrase used to sum up utilitarianism. But you can’t achieve a compilation of a commodity where there isn’t any of it to compile.

If everyone in the grand scheme is personally unhappy – except of course the members of the Politburo who will have their dachas, their special stores, their limos, their engorged egos – there won’t be a general happiness. But never mind. Thing is, the rest of us will be equally unhappy.

Ah, drab new world that has such monsters in it!

The human species is wrong for this world. Those of us – we special few who bear the heavy knowledge of human inadequacy and who know what is good for the world – might have to come to the conclusion that humankind must be eliminated altogether. But before we take drastic final action to rid the planet of the human plague, we will try our utmost to improve the species: adapt it, trim it, re-shape it physically and mentally; change its habits, its desires, its appetites and ambitions, its needs, its abilities; transform it, using the very minimum of the material it’s made of as a base on which to build what we judge an earth-suitable ratiocinating species should be.

Three members of our panel, Matthew Liao of the University of New York, professor of Philosophy and the young hybrid ecumenical discipline Bioethics [Ecumenical: from Greek oikoumene = the inhabited earth], and Anders Sandberg and Rebecca Roache of Oxford,  have published a paper on how human beings may be experimentally re-engineered in a last-ditch effort to solve the paramount problem of CLIMATE CHANGE.  

Liao gave an interview to the Atlantic – with the consent of the rest of us, we hasten to confirm. The full report of it may be read here.

Greatly excited that we can at last hint at what we, the “Doom Panel” as we  jokingly call ourselves, are contemplating in our closed meetings, we select a few highlights to whet your curiosity.

Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating.

Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.

Here is why we think “human engineering could be the most ethical and effective solution to global climate change”.

Each kilogram of body mass requires a certain amount of food and nutrients and so, other things being equal, the larger person is the more food and energy they are going to soak up over the course of a lifetime. There are also other, less obvious ways in which larger people consume more energy than smaller people – for example a car uses more fuel per mile to carry a heavier person, more fabric is needed to clothe larger people, and heavier people wear out shoes, carpets and furniture at a quicker rate than lighter people, and so on. And so size reduction could be one way to reduce a person’s ecological footprint. For instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm, you could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means lower energy and nutrient needs.

There are “various ways humans could be engineered to be smaller”, Liao explains:

You might try to do it through a technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which is already used in IVF settings in fertility clinics today. In this scenario you’d be looking to select which embryos to implant based on height.

Another way to affect height is to use a hormone treatment to trigger the closing of the epiphyseal plate earlier than normal …  In fact hormone treatments are already used for height reduction in overly tall children.

A final way you could do this is by way of gene imprinting, by influencing the competition between maternal and paternal genes, where there is a height disparity between the mother and father. You could have drugs that reduce or increase the expression of paternal or maternal genes in order to affect birth height. …

The paper “also [discusses] the pharmacological enhancement of empathy and altruism, because empathy and altruism tend to be highly correlated with positive attitudes toward the environment”.

(What is most wanted is empathy with and altruism towards the earth, don’t forget. Always remember it is the earth that matters, not the people on it.)

What we have in mind has more to do with weakness of will. For example, I might know that I ought to send a check to Oxfam, but because of a weakness of will I might never write that check. But if we increase my empathetic capacities with drugs, then maybe I might overcome my weakness of will and write that check.

In giving this example, Liao is putting himself hypothetically on your level. Writing checks for Oxfam is the sort of thing your will should be used for. Leave the greater vision to us.

Some of you are probably mumbling about liberty. We know that you continue to be concerned about that grand old chimera, and we have not ignored your attachment to the idea.

The authors of the paper “suggest that some human engineering solutions may actually be liberty enhancing”:

It’s been suggested that, given the seriousness of climate change, we ought to adopt something like China’s one child policy. There was a group of doctors in Britain who recently advocated a two-child maximum. But at the end of the day those are crude prescriptions – what we really care about is some kind of fixed allocation of greenhouse gas emissions per family. If that’s the case, given certain fixed allocations of greenhouse gas emissions, human engineering could give families the choice between two medium sized children, or three small sized children. From our perspective that would be more liberty enhancing than a policy that says “you can only have one or two children.” A family might want a really good basketball player, and so they could use human engineering to have one really large child.

You could order Child by the pound, you see.

Don’t think of it as an entirely new definition of freedom – notice that you will still have choice: two medium sized children, OR three small sized children, OR one hulking great basketball player.

Embarras de richesses!  

And that’s not the only way the new techniques will be “liberty enhancing”:

Liao: I would return to the weakness of will consideration. If you crave steak, and that craving prevents you from making a decision you otherwise want to make, in some sense your inability to control yourself is a limit on the will, or a limit on your liberty. A meat patch would allow you to truly decide whether you want to have that steak or not, and that could be quite liberty enhancing. …

In any case, liberty is not a major issue. Speaking for the whole panel, Liao stresses –

We believe that mitigating climate change can help a great many people, [so] we see human engineering in this context as an ethical endeavor. 

He also touches on another point, a particularly sensitive one perhaps, that has to be made: the human species is guilty of harming the planet, and must be made to pay for what it has done:

We [humanity as a whole] caused anthropogenic climate change, and so perhaps we ought to bear some of the costs required to address it.

But having said that, we also want to make this attractive to people—we don’t want this to be a zero sum game where it’s just a cost that we have to bear. Many of the solutions we propose might actually be quite desirable to people, PARTICULARLY THE MEAT PATCH. 

Ah, yes. We knew that would entice you. Only have patience, and it will come to you just as soon as we can get it out in sufficient quantities for world-wide distribution. And that depends only on when the US government can raise the necessary taxes.

And maybe – just maybe – if you all give up eating meat, have very few very small children (if you must have any at all), become truly empathetic to the earth, and show willing to sacrifice yourselves for it’s welfare to the extent we tell you is needed, we may allow some of you to continue existing. For a while at least. No guarantees.

We breed at the planet’s peril. They say.

The Daily Caller reports:

During a discussion series … at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., speaker and activist Kavita Ramdas argued that contraceptives should be part of a strategy to save the planet, calling lower birth rates a “common sense” part of a climate-change reduction strategy.

Kavita Ramdas is “executive director of the Program on Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford University”.

“Social Entrepreneurship”. Another pseudo-science to entice kids into dead-end courses at universities?

At the event, titled “Women’s Health: Key to Climate Adaptation Strategies,” Ramdas pointed to studies conducted by health consultants at the for-profit Futures Group, the government-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, in Austria, to connect contraception with climate change.

Ramdas told The Daily Caller that the research shows “empowering women to time their pregnancies” and avoid unwanted births would reduce carbon emissions between 8 to 15 percent globally.

8 to 15 percent? Wonderful what they can calculate, these mathematical geniuses of the global warming lobby!

“It is common sense that when women are able to plan their pregnancies, populations grow more slowly and as a result so do greenhouse gas emissions,” she explained. “Providing access to contraception and preventative health should be one of the many effective strategies used to fight climate change.” …

Global warming activists argue increasing greenhouse gas emissions, partly resulting from unsustainable population growth, is resulting in “environmental devastation” such as frequent severe weather events and rising sea levels.

There it is. Doom. You go and have babies and what happens? Tornados whip up, seas rise, the earth heats, deserts spread.

The United States and other countries with high levels of emissions, Ramdas [said], have the potential to make the biggest impact by making contraception more accessible.

So it’s not the ignorant Third World that’s breeding too much; its the First World, and in particular the USA.

She said every child in America absorbs, on average, 40 percent more of the earth’s resources than children in other countries.

Greedy little imperialist pigs!

Ramdas isn’t the first activist to suggest a connection between global warming and birth rates.

At a January “Climate Change, Population and Sustainability” event organized by Aspen Global Health and Development, International Planned Parenthood Federation regional director Carmen Barroso said limiting population growth may reduce carbon emissions significantly. …

“It’s about the facts,” said Barroso. … “Recent research shows that meeting this need, and thereby slowing population growth, could reduce carbon emissions by 16 to 29 percent of the emission reductions necessary to avoid dangerous climate change.”

16 to 29 percent now, not 8 to 15? Or is it just fluffy math?

The anti-human ethos is not without its critics in the profession:

Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment, said the “population issue” has been underneath the surface of the global warming debate since it began. Activists’ solution to that particular problem, he explained, has always been to decrease the human population somehow.

“It is the case that less people [fewer people, please Myron – JB] means less carbon emissions [emission],” Ebell told TheDC. [About grammar none of them gives a damn.] “But we fundamentally disagree with the effect that it is having on the planet. We believe that people are an asset, not a burden, to the world.”

To the world? What world is there to be benefited or harmed if there are no people?

Kavita Ramdas confesses that her big concern is not after all the saving of the earth but the prevention of births as a cause in itself.

In her address … Ramdas said there was a growing global consensus about putting “population development and women’s rights” in the same argument. [She]  later told The Daily Caller, however, that her contraception advocacy isn’t about population control, but rather supporting a woman’s right to decide when to get pregnant. The two causes, she insisted, just happened to complement one another.

And besides, if you say you’re working on population/carbon control, you get the big bucks.

President Obama is an anti-birth enthusiast:

The president’s proposed 2013 budget, which calls for $296.8 million in funding for the Title X Family Planning Progress, $104.8 million for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program and $530 million for USAID family planning and reproductive health programs.

And of course wherever there’s interference in private lives, a plan to redistribute your property, accusation that you’re guilty because you’re a prosperous Westerner (extra so if you’re American), you can be certain the United Nations is involved.

The United Nations Population Fund would also receive $39 million, a $4 million increase over 2011 funding. It supports family planning, population development and climate change mitigation work, among other causes.

A publication by the U.N. agency called “Population Dynamics and Climate Change” argues that “the lack of consideration of population dynamics hampers the development of stronger, more effective solutions to the challenges climate change poses.”

In other words: people are bad for the earth.

The UN’s number two obsession (after the need to excoriate Israel) is to save the earth from people. That’s where the two causes – climate control and population control – connect.

So let fewer babies be born. Eventually, with enough US funding, perhaps none at all. Free of the burden of raising the next generation, existing adult populations will age delightfully and live longer. Until the last generation, coming quite soon.

But … wait a moment. Who will work to support the carefree life of the old?

In Russia, in Japan, in Italy, Portugal and Spain, and many another country where the professors’ writ runs, the population is just about halving with each generation.

A world without children is a dying world.

Once cleansed of people, it may become a “healthy” planet spinning round the sun, but who will know it?

Here’s a new scandal in the on-going climate change drama.

It concerns a now disreputable scientist, Peter Gleick, who “studies the hydrological cycle” and “serves as president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Oakland, Calif.” Or did so serve.

The Washington Post – sympathetic to warmism – reports:

The battle over climate science continues to escalate. The latest skirmish culminated in the admission Monday night by Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and author, that he assumed a fake identity to obtain documents that would expose the inner workings of a climate skeptic group. 

The “climate skeptic group” is the Heartland Institute. Gleick (and the Washington Post, no doubt) hoped the stolen documents would expose something shady about that honest institution, but they didn’t. So in the interests of manmade global warming’s higher truth, Gleick found he had to forge a document to fulfill his hope.

Here’s what the Heartland Institute President Joe Bast has to say about Peter Gleick, the theft and the forgery. He names the scandal “Fakegate”.  (Video from Watts Up With That?):

And this commentary is from RedState:

The preliminary steps of removing Peter Gleick from positions of authority and respect have begun: he’s ‘resigned’ from his position with the National Center for Science Education, and his scientific ethics task force chairmanship(!) for the American Geophysical Union. One wonders whether groups like the MacArthur Fellows Program and NAS will insist that Gleick cut all ties from them, as well. Nobody’s really expecting the Pacific Institute to join in, of course: it’s a well-known reliable quote machine for the American Left.

Quick background: last week … a variety of documents appeared that purported to show that there was some sort of nefarious global warming ‘denialist’ (that’s what a Lefty calls somebody who has noticed that, hey, the temperature’s not actually rising the way that people told us it would) conspiracy centered around the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute was not amused by this, and has been making it clear that at least one document was a pathetic forgery. This latter point has generally been conceded by all the players, if tacitly, and the great walkback is beginning. …

But let’s go back to what got revealed, for a moment. The documents can be grouped into two categories: a variety of materials that global warming advocate (and lecturer on ethics) Peter Gleick admitted stealing from Heartland; and the aforementioned pathetically faked document. Since we now know that not even Gleick is standing by the provenance of said document, let us ignore it completely… So, what’s in those [stolen] documents?

• Fundraising plan – confidential budget and fundraising information that has nothing to do with Heartland’s positions on climate change policy (thus, not germane). Also, this was a general fundraising plan, not one specifically concentrating on climate change.

• 2012 Budget -…Umm, it’s their general budget. No line items for Sooper Sekret Globeal Wharming Projekt here. Just salary/line item information that’s nobody’s business except Heartland’s.

• January 17, 2012 Director’s Agenda – They read a bunch of reports at that one. Which happens at every meeting, everywhere, and will continue to do so until the end of time, amen.

• Notice of January 17, 2012 – I assume that it’s here to get more phone numbers into the internet stream.

• IRS Tax forms …

• October 18, 2011 Director’s meeting …

• Board of Directors contact list – Hey, let’s make sure that Heartland staffers get a lot of personalized hate mail/stalkers/harassment! Smooth move there, Peter Gleick.

In other words? Nothing. No conspiracies, no nefarious plans, nothing really of particular interest to outsiders – except, of course, for contact information for Heartland’s top staff, which is provided in handy-dandy format for the Left’s near-psychopaths to use to try to make a bunch of climate “denialists’” lives miserable. Which is really the point to this sort of thing; it’s not actually about the climate, and it’s not even really about the politics. It’s about shutting people up.

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The term “warmther” has come into use to describe an Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) devotee; on the analogy of “truther” to describe the obsessive who believes fantastic lies about 9/11.