31 March, 2015

Two extracts from the Global Warming Policy Foundation

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity. The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. --Ross McKitrick
 


In 2007 we were told on all sides that, by the end of the summer melt in 2014, the entire Arctic would be “ice free”. Polar bears were disappearing. The mighty Greenland ice cap was melting. Even as late as 2013 the National Geographic warned that the great expanse of Hudson Bay was warming so fast that it would soon reach “tipping point”, changing its ecosystem forever. How have all those predictions turned out? In fact last year’s Arctic ice melt was the smallest in nine years and its thickness is now back to its level in 2006. Several studies show that across most of the Arctic, polar bears have never done better. --Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 29 March 2015

19 March, 2015

Alan Oxley as quoted by Andrew Marshall in The Land

"Land available to farming shrank by 15pc between 2000 and 2013 and water entitlements in the Murray-Darling Basin shrank about a third.
Then federal Water Minister Penny Wong's irrigation rights buying campaign had been motivated by drought-fuelled concern about the downstream environment's impact from what was envisaged as continuing drought.
But he said the federal government and zealous environmentalists ignored the river system's history of low and non-existent flows, targeting water extraction cuts based on almost-random figures proposed by the anti-irrigation lobby.
"There was no environmentally defensible reason for the sort of buy-back figures chosen by government," said Mr Oxley, who heads the trade consultancy firm ITS Global."

I couldn't have said it better myself!