Apologies for bringing this up on a Sunday. Then again, perhaps it is appropriate to do so as global warming is now treated by some not so much as a scientific theory which demands (so boring) consistency in data and observations and models but more as a sort of warped religion where questions and empirical challenges are eschewed.
Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That reports on the eviction aspect, though it sounds more like ethnic cleansing than an eviction. (The New York Times story that he quotes is behind a subscription wall.)
“They said if we hesitated they would shoot us,” said William Bakeshisha, adding that he hid in his coffee plantation, watching his house burn down. “Smoke and fire.”…
But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.
The case twists around an emerging multibillion-dollar market trading carbon-credits under the Kyoto Protocol, which contains mechanisms for outsourcing environmental protection to developing nations.
The company involved, New Forests Company, grows forests in African countries with the purpose of selling credits from the carbon-dioxide its trees soak up to polluters abroad. Its investors include the World Bank, through its private investment arm, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, HSBC.
In 2005, the Ugandan government granted New Forests a 50-year license to grow pine and eucalyptus forests in three districts, and the company has applied to the United Nations to trade under the mechanism. The company expects that it could earn up to $1.8 million a year.
But there was just one problem: people were living on the land where the company wanted to plant trees. Indeed, they had been there a while.
“He was a policeman for King George,” Mr. Bakeshisha said of his father, who served with British forces during World War II in Egypt.
Let's repeat that, shall we?
But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.
Yes. The environment must come ahead of human life. As Anthony W. points out, the global warming conceit has achieved the "truly bizarre parallel" of the demented logic of the Vietnam War.
It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.
Prison Planet highlightts the killing aspect of this raid to "protect the environment".
Armed troops acting on behalf of a British carbon trading company backed by the World Bank burned houses to the ground and killed children to evict Ugandans from their homes in the name of seizing land to protect against “global warming,” a shocking illustration of how the climate change con is a barbarian form of neo-colonialism. ...The company claims residents of Kicucula left in a “peaceful” and “voluntary” manner, and yet the people tell a story of terror and bloodshed.
Villagers told of how armed “security forces” stormed their village and torched houses, burning an eight-year-child to death as they threatened to murder anyone who resisted while beating others.
Neo-colonialism and Vietnam War logic. It's a good guess that most of the people who believe in anthropogenic global warming oppose colonialism and opposed (or would have opposed) the Vietnam War. But this is the level to which their theory has sunk.
Man generates only 6% of greenhouse gases on the planet, with Mother Earth supplying the other 94%. Marc Comtois observed out a while ago that, even if man's tiny percentage is the tipping point (and this has not been proven) that has triggered global warming, the price is simply too high to reverse the phenomenon.
Recent developments now confirm his assertion.
The spectacular implosion of Solyndra, along with half a billion of our hard earned tax dollars, made it crystal clear (if Spain's failed experiment with green energy had not done so already) that, even with ample government mandates and very generous government subsidies (i.e., an open check drawn on the taxpayers' checking account), green energy is not a viable alternative. In fact, we will very quickly go broke pursuing it.
The revelation yesterday of these human rights violations carried out in Uganda exposes an entirely different and much higher cost.
Truly, the price is too high to stop global warming.
Approximately 130,000 - 110,000 years ago the Earth's climate was pretty much the same as it is today. The Earth then entered the fourth inter-glacial to glacial period which ended about 10,000 years ago.
The period from the first to fourth glacial cycle lasted about 900,000 years. The slide into the last glacial period occurred very quickly geologically within less than 400 years. The Earth became drier, evaporated water became snow and polar ice caps expanded into ice sheets.
The furthest extent of these ice sheets formed the geology of Long Island, Block Island, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. The ice in many cases was 1 mile thick.
We are currently exiting the last ice age which ended geologically 10,000 years ago into a period called the Holocene. The Earth is warming. Ice caps will melt. Species either will adapt or head into extinction.
The Earth's climate takes very little notice of man's activity on the planet. The average warming period can end rather abruptly geologically. To assume man is the primary driver of planetary climate is to believe in one's own ego more so than Mother Nature which doesn't give a whit who inhabits her. Just ask the dinosaurs.
Posted by: Justanotherjoe57 at September 25, 2011 12:01 PMThis particular case seems less about global warming than about violent and dangerous government practices. I assume the same thing would have happened if the forest was purchased for logging, mining, oil drilling, or housing developments.
"Man generates only 6% of greenhouse gases on the planet, with Mother Earth supplying the other 94%. Marc Comtois observed out a while ago that, even if man's tiny percentage is the tipping point (and this has not been proven) that has triggered global warming, the price is simply too high to reverse the phenomenon."
This is true, but a look at the PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere since we started 'terraforming' the planet en-masse makes it pretty clear that we are pumping a lot more of the stuff into the atmosphere than the planet can soak up. Imagine if humans were up to some activity that 'only added 6%' to the oceans' salinity? It would be disastrous.
Before you group me in with the global warming alarmist crowd, I should say that while I do believe that what we're doing is causing climate change (heck, black pavement in streets causes significant 'climate change' in cities), I don't think it's realistic that we're going to change it. I think 'global warming' is going to happen regardless and we need to work on mitigating the knock-on effects more than the root causes.
Posted by: mangeek at September 25, 2011 1:14 PM"New Forests Company, grows forests in African countries with the purpose of selling credits from the carbon-dioxide its trees soak up to polluters abroad."
I've never understood why tax credits are transferrable. If you're looking to sell them, clearly you don't need them, and selling them simply defeats the purpose.
Posted by: Patrick at September 26, 2011 9:18 AMApril 1975 Newsweek Magazine...."Global Cooling to devastate crops and the world within 10 yrs."
30 yrs later same magazine changes tune. Global warming is going to get us all.
No science just conjecture and now murder. The left will stop at nothing as it heads down the rabbit hole of liberalism.
Man made global warming,cooling,lukewarming is a lie just as liberalism is.
The price is too high, eh? In that case, better to let your children pay it. That about right?
"The American `allergy' to global warming: Why?"
www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/09/25/science-us-climate-the-disconnect_8699270.html
In the face of years of scientific findings and growing impacts, the doubters persist. They ignore long-term trends and seize on insignificant year-to-year blips in data to claim all is well. They focus on minor mistakes in thousands of pages of peer-reviewed studies to claim all is wrong. And they carom from one explanation to another for today's warming Earth: jet contrails, sunspots, cosmic rays, natural cycles.Posted by: Russ at September 27, 2011 1:31 PM"Ninety-eight percent of the world's climate scientists say it's for real, and yet you still have deniers," observed former U.S. Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, a New York Republican who chaired the House's science committee.
Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.'s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds it "very, very perplexing, this apparent allergy that there is in the United States. Why?"
The Australian scholar Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, "Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change."
In an interview, he said he found a "transformation" from the 1990s and its industry-financed campaign, to an America where climate denial "has now become a marker of cultural identity in the `angry' parts of the United States."
"Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism," he said, a movement that has "a visceral loathing of environmentalism."
Russ since you liberals and the Mad Hatter Gore started this mania about man-made climate change...prove it. Consensus is not science. Also there are not 98% of scientists in agreement about anything especially an unproven theory. Kyoto? That was a stab at disabling American capaitalism. The Chinese and all the 3rd world countries were not going to sign that one. Keep trying lefty.
Posted by: ANTHONY at September 28, 2011 12:45 AMRuss since you liberals and the Mad Hatter Gore started this mania about man-made climate change...prove it.
I didn't start it, and Gore certainly didn't. However the following organizations had some influence...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
I realize that for you folks this isn't about pointing to scientific evidence or consensus or you'd already be convinced enough to take action.
But there is something in your post I think I can correct. You're confused about the nature of scientific theory. When you say "prove it," you ask for an impossibility. Here's Stephen Hawking from "A Brief History of Time":
A theory is a good theory if it satisfies two requirements. It must accurately describe a large class of observations on the basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements, and it must make definite predictions about the results of future observations. For example, Aristotle believed Empedocles’s theory that everything was made out of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. This was simple enough, but did not make any definite predictions. On the other hand, Newton’s theory of gravity was based on an even simpler model, in which bodies attracted each other with a force that was proportional to a quantity called their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Yet it predicts the motions of the sun, the moon, and the planets to a high degree of accuracy.Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory... a good theory is characterized by the fact that it makes a number of predictions that could in principle be disproved or falsified by observation. Each time new experiments are observed to agree with the predictions the theory survives, and our confidence in it is increased; but if ever a new observation is found to disagree, we have to abandon or modify the theory.
Yes, consensus is science, as much as the anti-environmental special interests wish it wasn't so.
Posted by: Russ at September 28, 2011 4:04 PMRuss............go back to your room and try again. Consensus is NOT science. Have you been reading about the speed of light lately? The Global Warming Robots are influencing policy,bankrupting taxpayers and costing jobs.......see Solyndra. This is a scam and history will prove it so. Yeah right...SUV's,Pick-up trucks and coal fired plants are going to kill mother Earth. Got any more fiction to add to your "science"?
Posted by: ANTHONY at September 29, 2011 3:10 PM