Live Earth was DOA

Were you watching the LIVE EARTH concerts this weekend? No? Apparently lots of people had more important things to do Saturday. While exact figures are not yet available, it looks like somewhere around 100 million people saw at least portion of a concert on the web, TV, or live. Those aren't shabby viewing figures, but much less than the 2 billions viewers claimed by SOS, the sponsoring organization.

The LiveEarth website claims a lofty goal:

Live Earth marks the beginning of a multi-year campaign led by the Alliance for Climate Protection, The Climate Group and other international organizations to drive individuals, corporations and governments to take action to solve global warming. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore is the Chair of the Alliance and Partner of Live Earth.

While it sounds like the actual goal is socialism, it seems clear that the success or failure of the concerts doesn't hinge on the number of viewers - it relies on what actions viewers will take now that they've been enlightened by music, socialist performers, and heavy use of the "f" word.

Live Earth has been branded a foul-mouthed flop.

Organisers of the global music concert - punctuated by swearing from presenters and performers - had predicted massive viewing figures.

But BBC's live afternoon television coverage attracted an average British audience of just 900,000.

In the evening, when coverage switched from BBC2 to BBC1, the figure rose to just 2.7 million.

And the peak audience, which came when Madonna sang at Wembley, was a dismal 4.5 million. Three times as many viewers saw the Princess Diana tribute on the same channel six days before.

Two years ago, Live 8 drew a peak television audience of 9.6million while Live Aid notched 10million in 1985.

The BBC blamed the poor figures on Saturday's good weather and said its Wimbledon tennis coverage had drawn away afternoon viewers.

Critics said however that the public had simply snubbed what they saw as a hypocritical event.

Musicians including Bob Geldof, Roger Daltrey and the Pet Shop Boys pointed out that a concert highlighting climate change had itself generated huge carbon emissions.

Performers were criticised for flying to concerts that were staged simultaneously on seven continents.

The BBC's coverage, which ran for 15 hours from 12.30pm on Saturday to 4am yesterday, also sparked dozens of complaints about bad language.

The swearing started at 1.30pm when Phil Collins, the first act on in London, used the f-word while singing with his band Genesis.

Razorlight singer Johnny Borrell used the same expletive a few minutes later in one of his songs. And Chris Rock swore while introducing fellow comic Ricky Gervais, who soon followed suit.

[...]

A BBC spokesman said: "We asked artists not to swear but sometimes they get carried away. We are very sorry for any offence caused."

And, as Patrick over at Born Again Redneck Yogi posted, the South Africa concert didn't draw a crowd:

Officials at LIVE EARTH Johannesburg have blamed the effects of climate change for poor audience attendance at Saturday's (07Jul07) South African event. Organiser John Langford believes extremely cold weather in the region - it snowed last week (ends06Jul07) for the first time in a quarter of a century - kept people away from the concert...

Of course, those evil capitalists had to get their hands into this green event, really ticking off Greenpeace - and rightly so. For a concert sponsored by a bunch of socialists, I can't imagine anything worse than a global corporation using this concert to make money off of their pseudo-green automobile. And to pour salt on the wound, Daimler now has, by virtue of association with this event, a big, green "get out of jail free" card when the green community protests automobiles, auto companies, and manufacturing in general.

Environmental pressure group Greenpeace is up in arms over the fact that auto giant DaimlerChrysler is the main sponsor for the Live Earth concert taking place in Germany on Saturday.

The concerts themselves are supposed to highlight the sorry state of the planet and the increasing damage that the human race is doing to the environment. But the Live Earth shows which will take place around the world this Saturday are under fire due to the German event being sponsored by a major automotive company.

Environmental pressure group Greenpeace is livid that the Live Earth concert in Hamburg will be broadcast to the world with the name of DaimlerChrysler splashed all over it. The fact that Daimler manufactures large, pollution-spewing automobiles, Greenpeace claims, means that a more inappropriate sponsor than the car giant would be hard to find.

Greenpeace are also angry that the company's Smart car is the official vehicle of the Live Earth artists and models are being used at the Hamburg gig to ferry stars such as Colombian singer Shakira around. The environmentalists claim that the car isn't even environmentally friendly as it can only carry two people.

Unbelievable

Image © WND

I think I might have heard it all, now.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon blames the ethnic and religious violence in Darfur on global warming and insists more conflicts of this kind are coming because of climate change.

"The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.

As WND reported in 2004, the U.S. declared the rape, pillaging and slaughter of blacks in western Sudan by the Islamist Khartoum regime and its Arab militia allies genocide. The U.N. has described it as the world's worst current humanitarian crisis, with estimates of over 200,000 dead and more than 2.1 million displaced in four years.

In his column, Ban said U.N. statistics showed rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.

"This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming," the South Korean diplomat wrote.

"It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought," Ban wrote.

If you have the stomach to read more, you can find it here.

Take That Al Gore

Czech President Václav Klaus rebuts Al Gore in a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee - sent to Congress before Gore testified in front of that committee.

My ambition is not to bring additional arguments to the scientific climatological debate about this phenomenon. I am convinced, however, that up to now this scientific debate has not been deep and serious enough and has not provided sufficient basis for the policymakers' reaction. What I am really concerned about is the way the environmental topics have been misused by certain political pressure groups to attack fundamental principles underlying free society. It becomes evident that while discussing climate we are not witnessing a clash of views about the environment but a clash of views about human freedom.

As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism. This ideology preaches earth and nature and under the slogans of their protection – similarly to the old Marxists – wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning of the whole world.

The US is not the bastion of freedom. We've passed that torch to men like President Klaus, who won't be bullied by the Global Warming thugs.

Does It Get Better Than This?

Photo© AP

Global warming? Not enough for these people.

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment...

Well, did the expedition achieve the objective and bring attention to global warming? No? Why not?

Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.

"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.

But what about the global warming?

The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft's 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.

Don't worry, you can always show the kiddies An Inconvenient Lie... I mean, er, Truth?

Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.

"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."

I only live in Michigan, but even I know that it is freakin' cold in the Arctic. How is that unpredictable? The reason for the bitter cold -100° was... global warming?

More Global Warming BS This Monday Morning

If you are reading this post, stop, because the world is coming to an end and you should spend your time protesting businesses and productive people.

I had to laugh when I read this in my morning Free Press:

A dozen Michiganders are helping Al Gore carry the message of his movie "Inconvenient Truth," preaching the gospel of global warming with his slides and their words.

Gore has personally trained 1,000 disciples. Part cheerleaders, part angels of gloom, they are fanning across the country with copies of his climate change slide show (330 slides) and the goal of getting their audience roused enough to demand action from their leaders.

If I ever have trouble sleeping, I'll know what to watch to get sleepy. Wow. Personally trained by Al Gore? How... boring.

The Free Press even included a cute little graphic to illustrate how awful the future is going to be in Michigan.



How wonderful... walleye and large mouth bass are supposed to increase in numbers! Looks like I'll get to do a lot more fishin' with my free time, now that I won't have to shovel snow. And with the money I save not needing winter clothing, I'll have so much more to spend on fishing gear.

What's going to happen in 20 years when we are back in the "A New Ice Age Is Coming" mode? And why are we still using fossil fuels? They were supposed to be completely gone by 2000, because my teachers back in grade school in the 70's told me so.

Click on the image to expand it to readable size.

Image is Copyright Detroit Free Press.

Hype

It is snowing outside as I write this. Not hard. In fact, we aren’t supposed to get over three inches of accumulation.

But, it is snowing.

I was on the road half an hour ago, and I made the mistake of tuning in the local all-news station to get an idea of the traffic.

“Happy Tuesday to you on this Winter Survival morning. Bitterly cold temperatures combined with heavy snow make for a miserable morning… please, if you don’t have to go out, stay inside this morning. The snow is making conditions dangerous. Allow yourself a lot of extra time. Now, off to Frank for our winter-survival traffic report…”

And so on.

I listened to this while the traffic flow was driving about 5 miles below the posted speeds. No slick spots at all. For crying out loud, I could see the grass on the ground still! It wasn’t a big deal. Nothing catastrophic was happening. It was simply lightly snowing in the northern part of the US. Hype. Pure hype. No substance.

Ironically, they followed up the report of our “bitterly cold morning” (note to the radio station: it is December) with a national report on global warming. Hmmm.

It is February 14. All winter long I've seen my grass blades pop-up through the snow - which didn't start falling until the very end of January. For crying out loud, what is three inches of snow in Michigan in winter? It isn't like we are in Miami!

This reminds me of another hyped story (at least it was hyped locally). The Big 3 automakers posted record earnings at the beginning of this decade. The very next year was the second best financial year in Big 3 history - but the only reports coming out were “earnings plummeted by 8%,” and so on.

There is one major problem with news reporting - not everything is news worthy. Unfortunately, you can’t have a 24 hour news station without news, so news-unworthy stories become “news” and minor inconveniences become a “crisis.”

BRRR

It was -7 degrees F this morning going into work. BRRRR.

Still, winter is a great season! I can't stand the news stations hyping their "winter survival" stories. It is Michigan in winter time. No big deal. In a few months, they will hype their "it is too hot outside to do anything" stories.

Global Warming

Global warming is so severe it will "continue for centuries," leading to a far different planet in 100 years, warned a grim landmark report from the world's leading climate scientists and government officials.

That's great news. I woke up this morning to -5 degree F temperatures.

I'd love to be able to motorcycle all year long - but these cold Michigan temperatures take the fun out of it. Now the long-term forecast looks great! I'll be able to ride all year long for the next several centuries!

Why Does "Science" Care?

Most people, non-Christians included, know that the Bible teaches that Jesus walked on water. The Gospels (Matthew 14, Mark 6 and John 6) relate the story of Jesus walking out to the disciples as they battled bad weather on the Sea of Galilee.

The Bible makes it clear that Jesus did this because He was, and is, God's Son.

"Science," though, has a different explanation.

Florida State Prof. Doron Nof explains that Jesus walked on ice, not water.

Using statistical models to examine the dynamics of the Sea of Galilee (now known as Lake Kinneret) and records of surface temperatures of the Mediterranean Sea, Nof determined there was a period of cooler temperatures in the area between 1,500 and 2,600 years ago. He says this could have included the time in which Jesus lived.

Had the temperature dropped below freezing, it could have created ice to form in the freshwater lake that was then called the Sea of Galilee. And that ice would have been thick enough to support the weight of a man. What's more, it might have been impossible for distant observers--especially in the dark as the Gospel of John reports--to see that it was actually ice surrounded by water and not just water.

I've talked to many scientists over the years, and I've read the writings of many more. There is a common theme among most (certainly not all, though). Most scientists - shocking news coming up - don't believe in Jesus as the Son of God, nor do they believe in God at all.

Knowing this, I wonder why they waste their time and prestige coming up with silly theories like this. Come on, He walked on chunks of ice? If you don't believe the story, can't you do better than that? Why not just say, "you know what, in my professional scientific opinion, this never happened."

Why scientists continually feel the need to explain away Biblical stories that are "myths and legends" in their minds is beyond me. I just wish they'd do a better job than "walking on ice."

Jesus

Property Rights

Keith Carabell stands on his land in Chesterfield Township. Sixteen of his 19.6 acres have been classified as wetlands. Federal regulators prohibited him from filling the land, even though he received a permit from a Michigan administrative law judge.

Photo Copyright 2006 ERIC SEALS/Detroit Free Press


The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing two property rights cases from Michigan. The rulings will impact millions of acres of federally-designated "wet land," even if these pieces of land are no where near actual streams, rivers, lakes or other bodies of water.

It also pits the property-rights crowd against the environmental/conservation crowd.

The rulings won't impact two pieces of property in Michigan - they will impact every property owner who wants to do something with his or her property.

The Supreme Court must answer this question: can the federal government restrict development on isolated wetlands not adjacent to navigable streams and lakes to protect water quality?

The Government says "yes." The Clean Water Act allows it to protect isolated wetlands, drainage ditches and tiny streams because of their impact on the health of larger lakes and rivers.

The Property rights crowd says "NO!" The Clean Water Act only regulates navigable waters and wetlands adjacent to them. Applying this Act any other way is effectively a confiscation of private property.

Tags: Property Rights , Environmentalism , Conservation , Supreme Court

More Thoughts on Intelligent Design

What do scientists hold to be the truth regarding evolution vs. Intelligent Design (ID)? Obviously a majority of scientists still hold to evolution, but a growing percentage are examining and some even endorsing ID.

I don't understand why science teachers are afraid of mentioning that there are other ideas out there besides Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. If they don't want to teach about ID, fine. But is every theory challenging evolution really religion in disguise? Have we elevated Darwin to saint-like status and made evolution a de facto state-supported religion?

I personally wonder why any science teacher confident in the theory of evolution would mind a challenge from ID. If ID is so inferior, or simply repackaged creationism, shouldn’t smart, young students be able to figure this out? At what point does the education system feel safe in letting a student critically think for themselves?

I would like to see a head-on clash between the best of the scientists who back evolution and the pro-ID scientists. Let's have a very public debate and see all the evidence as presented by the best minds and communicators on both sides. I am tired of the portrayals of pro-ID scientists as minor league brains who fall for repackaged creationism. I am equally tired of seeing portrayals of pro-evolution scientists as evil athiests who fear their career and work will be forever invalid if they are wrong on Darwin.

Don't attack ID in court. Bring it to the forefront of scientific and newsworthy analysis and break it into pieces. Do the same with evolution. Investigate the teaching materials. Analyze every bit of the theories in microscopic detail. Put the investigators on shows like CSI to shame; be an example to them on how to do critical, open-minded, methodical, careful and thoughtful research.

When all is said and done, I imagine we would find strengths and weaknesses in both theories. Who knows, maybe we could make some significant advances in science education if both sides remember they are dealing with theory.

Intelligent Design

What in the world is a court of law hearing a case on Intelligent Design (ID)? Why are the courts determining what is education and what is science?

If you are not familiar with the court case I am referencing, let me explain. A school board in Pennsylvania adopted a policy in October, 2004, stating that its biology curriculum must include the notion that life on Earth was produced by an unidentified intelligent cause. U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III said that Dover Area School Board members violated the Constitution when they set this policy. Judge Jones also noted that several of the Board members professed religious beliefs.

According to CNN, “the Dover policy required students to hear a statement about intelligent design before ninth-grade biology lessons on evolution. The statement said Charles Darwin's theory is ‘not a fact’ and has inexplicable ‘gaps.’ It refers students to an intelligent-design textbook, ‘Of Pandas and People,’ for more information.”

Judge Jones wrote that he wasn't saying the intelligent design concept shouldn't be studied and discussed, but, "our conclusion today is that it is unconstitutional to teach ID as an alternative to evolution in a public school science classroom."

We have several important pieces of the Constitution that should have been at work here. According to Article III, Section 2, this case should not have been heard in court as it is out of the court's jurisdiction.

The First Amendment states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Tenth Amendment states:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Here is how things should have panned out, according to the Constitution. The Dover School Board of Education required ID must be taught as an alternative to evolution. The people of the community, exercising their First and Tenth Amendment rights (petitioning the government for a redress of grievances, and enjoying the powers as delegated in the Constitution), don’t like this decision and vote eight of the incumbents into retirement, replacing them with anti-Intelligent Design board members who, according to the will of the people, will remove ID from the science curriculum. End of story, or at least, it should have been.

The court system is not the place to develop science education.


Tags Intelligent Design , Justice