Environment

Life in a climate cataclysm box

Dennis M. Mitchell and David R. Legates As children playing on the beach, we discovered a fascinating behavioral pattern among hermit crabs. Place a dozen in a cardboard box, and within minutes the crabs exit their shells and try to occupy another.  This mild...

Aussie Restoration: The perils of a carbon tax and other lessons from Down Under.

For more than a decade Australia had one of the world’s most successful center-right governments, and on Saturday it voted overwhelmingly for a restoration. After six years of Labor Party melodrama and leftward economic policies, Australians returned a Liberal government to power under new leader Tony Abbott. There are lessons here for conservatives in the U.S. and Europe.

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The Pawlowski Decision

In the Alberta Health Services v. Artur Pawlowski and Dawid Pawlowski decision last September, a Court of Queen’s Bench justice found the two brothers in contempt of court. The Pawlowski brothers openly challenged health ordinances and court orders and did not deny...

Rethinking Green: Save the Environment: Don’t Take Transit

“Although it is charging more than ever, getting heftier federal, provincial and municipal subsidies than at any time in its history, although fuelling a car is pricier; and though its customer base has never been larger or keener to reduce its carbon footprint, the TTC, the largest system in the country, is struggling as much as ever to stem its losses. If this is the future of public transit, it does not look bright.”

Climate Change Is Nature’s Way: It’s our good luck one of Earth’s many ice ages ended 12,000 years ago.

The bottom line? Weather changes and the occasional meteor have tossed this planet through roughly 142 mass extinctions since life began 3.85 billion years ago. That’s an average of one mass extinction every 26.5 million years. Where did these mass die-offs come from? Nature. There were no human capitalists, industrialists or cultures of consumerism to blame.

A Dose Of Skepticism Is Healthy: I’m perfectly willing to trust the climate experts. But isn’t doubt an integral part of serious research?

In any case, aren’t doubt and skepticism an integral part of serious research? Science evolves by trial and error, and there’s always a new discovery that challenges accepted theories. Whether or not the gloom-and-doom scenarios are probable, it would certainly be good for humanity and for Mother Earth to find alternative ways to provide cleaner energy. But the findings of the UN panel would be more convincing if they had rested on an open scientific debate.

The Gas Of Life: Western CO2 emissions increase plant yields in the Third World. So why are they asking for reparations?

At Copenhagen, Third World countries are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations from the West for the consequences of the West’s fossil fuel burning, among them droughts and crop failures. Third World countries have it backwards. The West’s CO2 emissions have been increasing crop yields while helping to ease the Third World’s water shortages. Rather than plead for reparations, Third World governments should offer a paean to Providence.