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What are the economic effects of the green environmentalist agenda?

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

Some day, environmental radicals will be held accountable for crimes against the ecosystem — the human ecosystem.

Back in 2007, they convinced federal Judge Oliver Wanger to rule that the Endangered Species Act gave the federal government the right to cut water to thousands of farmers in California’s Central Valley to protect a 3-inch baitfish called the delta smelt.

That ruling turned many of the Valley’s prized vineyards and almond groves into wastelands. Jobs were lost, family farms were shut, fields went fallow and food prices rose.

But there’s been just one problem with this overreaching of the law: Cutting off water didn’t save the smelt.

A draft of a new study from the Delta Stewardship Council shows the water cutoffs had no effect on the smelt. The smelt remains endangered even as farmers have been punished with a policy that cut off as much as 90% of their water.

“Environmentalists claimed the sky was falling in Delta, and the only way to save smelt was to flush more fresh water to the ocean,” said Andrew House, spokesman for Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif. “So they embarked upon a narrow path of diverting water from (San Joaquin Valley) farmers by using science to confirm their predetermined assessment of what was going on.”

But it didn’t work. Similar evidence is now coming out from the Pacific Northwest stating that shutting down the logging industry never did save the spotted owl.

In both cases, the science was highly speculative and new predatory species seem to be more likely causes. But that never stopped cocky environmentalists from saying they had all the answers — and all the power.

“Our farmers went through two years of supply cuts to have . .. better information and science, ” said Steve Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition, commenting on the report.

Wade noted that the water shut-off has been particularly hard on family farms, many of which have gone under as a result of the policies. He said their farms have been bought out by big agribusinesses, ironic given environmentalists’ hatred of that.

Unemployment reached 40% in some areas as a result of the cutoff, and even cities like Fresno (with an unemployment rate above 16%) ended up losing 25% of their water, too.

Food lines appeared in the world’s most fertile agricultural valley, with farmworkers accepting bags of carrots grown in China, a sorry emblem of man-made famine.

House notes that not only did the water shut-off wreak havoc on Central Valley farms, its smelt-saving basis — which Judge Wanger later called “sloppy science” — managed to endanger the smelt even more by not addressing the real reason for the creature’s demise.

“They wasted so much time focusing on a phantom problem, they haven’t examined what the real problems are. Now you have the Delta Stewardship Council saying” the species may not be saved, House said.

This was never about science anyway. “It was … about re-engineering the development of California, particularly the San Joaquin Valley,” said House. “They don’t think the west side should be farmed at all, they want it removed from production, gone to a natural state, re-engineered as a socialist Utopia.”

Real people’s lives were ruined by this green alarmism. And it’s happening everywhere. People losing their jobs, paying more for electricity, food riots and even people dying from malaria in the third world because of DDT bans.

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New study finds that advantageous traits don’t easily infuse in populations

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A new study in Nature (September 30,2010) has found something interesting. (H/T WgButler777)

Excerpt:

Our work provides a new perspective on the genetic basis of adaptation. Despite decades of sustained selection in relatively small, sexually reproducing laboratory populations, selection did not lead to the fixation of newly arising unconditionally advantageous alleles. This is notable because in wild populations we expect the strength of natural selection to be less intense and the environment unlikely to remain constant for ~600 generations.”

Consequently, the probability of fixation in wild populations should be even lower than its likelihood in these experiments. This suggests that selection does not readily expunge genetic variation in sexual populations, a finding which in turn should motivate efforts to discover why this is seemingly the case.”

What does it mean?

It means that good traits that evolve in a single individual do not necessarily “take” in the entire population, so that will live on in successive generations. If the accumulation of beneficial mutations is required for Darwinism to create all of these new body plans and organ types, then what are we to make of the creative power of Darwinian mechanisms?

Read more about it here at Uncommon Descent.

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MUST-READ: How reliable are the “independent” reviews of Climategate?

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From the Wall Street Journal. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Last November there was a world-wide outcry when a trove of emails were released suggesting some of the world’s leading climate scientists engaged in professional misconduct, data manipulation and jiggering of both the scientific literature and climatic data to paint what scientist Keith Briffa called “a nice, tidy story” of climate history. The scandal became known as Climategate.

Now a supposedly independent review of the evidence says, in effect, “nothing to see here.” Last week “The Independent Climate Change E-mails Review,” commissioned and paid for by the University of East Anglia, exonerated the University of East Anglia.

[…]One of the panel’s four members, Prof. Geoffrey Boulton, was on the faculty of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences for 18 years. At the beginning of his tenure, the Climatic Research Unit (CRU)—the source of the Climategate emails—was established in Mr. Boulton’s school at East Anglia. Last December, Mr. Boulton signed a petition declaring that the scientists who established the global climate records at East Anglia “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.”

Let’s assess the reliability of the “independent” reviews.

The Russell report states that “On the allegation of withholding temperature data, we find that the CRU was not in a position to withhold access to such data.” Really? Here’s what CRU director Jones wrote to Australian scientist Warrick Hughes in February 2005: “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]”

Then there’s the problem of interference with peer review in the scientific literature. Here too Mr. Russell could find no wrong: “On the allegations that there was subversion of the peer review or editorial process, we find no evidence to substantiate this.”

Really? Mr. Mann claims that temperatures roughly 800 years ago, in what has been referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, were not as warm as those measured recently. This is important because if modern temperatures are not unusual, it casts doubt on the fear that global warming is a serious threat. In 2003, Willie Soon of the Smithsonian Institution and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard published a paper in the journal Climate Research that took exception to Mr. Mann’s work, work which also was at variance with a large number of independent studies of paleoclimate. So it would seem the Soon-Baliunas paper was just part of the normal to-and-fro of science.

But Mr. Jones wrote Mr. Mann on March 11, 2003, that “I’ll be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor,” Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland. Mr. Mann responded to Mr. Jones on the same day: “I think we should stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues . . . to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”

Mr. Mann ultimately wrote to Mr. Jones on July 11, 2003, that “I think the community should . . . terminate its involvement with this journal at all levels . . . and leave it to wither away into oblivion and disrepute.”

There’s billions of dollars of funding at stake in global warming alarmism – your money and mine. They’re not going to just give that up.

Read the whole thing. And thanks to ECM for finding it.

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