Echoes in Eternity

A couple of books (both of which I intend on reading when I find the time) have recently been released which further question the supposed "good" of environmentalism, liberalism, and the love child of the two movements: climate change hysteria. The first is Dr. Roy Spencer's Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor. Dr. Lindzen had this praise to give of Spencer's book:

Climate Confusion is the best book length treatment of global warming science that is available to the literate citizen. The title says it all. Spencer explains the broad agreement over the existence of some climate change and the existence of some human role, but he also explains why these have little to do with the implausible and overheated projections of environmental disaster. The author thus cuts through all the rhetorical brickbats of `denialism' and `salvationism' to allow the citizen to reach rational conclusions. Despite a light touch, Spencer does not pull punches when it comes to unclothing the moral pretenses of many in the environmental movement - pretenses often disguising some truly immoral agendas.

Regarding Spencer's qualifications, this is what Amazon.com has to say about him:

Roy W. Spencer is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he directs a variety of climate research projects. He received his Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin in 1981, and was formerly a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA. Dr. Spencer also serves as the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) flying on NASA's Aqua satellite. He is co-developer of the original satellite method for precise monitoring of global temperatures from Earth-orbiting satellites. He has authored numerous weather and climate research articles in scientific journals, and has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming.

The second book is Iain Murray's The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About--Because They Helped Cause Them. Dennis Prager interviewed Mr. Murray this afternoon, part of which I caught as I was going to lunch. During the interview, Prager asked Murray to name the two most important catastrophes. The first on his list was the malaria epidemic in Africa and how liberals had successfully fought against the overwhelmingly best method of malaria prevention: the chemical DDT. It was banned because in large quantities, it POSSIBLY could cause some thinning of eagle's eggs. Because DDT has been out of commission for a few decades, 50 million Africans have died. In other words, liberals have the blood of eight Holocausts worth of victims on their hands. On the "bright" side, the U.N. has finally acknowledged that this was probably a mistake and are considering promoting the reintroduction of DDT on the African continent. But the environmentalists aren't giving up, they are still trying to get the U.N. to ban the chemical completely.

The other catastrophe mentioned by Murray is the ongoing one that I've already mentioned once or twice: the ethanol/bio-fuel subsidizing disaster. Because environmentalists mindlessly keep promoting ethanol even though it is MORE destructive to the environment than regular gasoline, governments keep spending huge amounts of money on it as well as other food-based fuels. This in turn means that land that would normally be producing food for human consumption instead is used to produce fuel, which lowers the supply of food while not changing the demand. The result: skyrocketing food prices, global food riots, and starving third world people.

Needless to say, liberal environmentalists who willfully ignore all the evidence to the contrary are committing some of the most atrocious evil this century has known (and that is no understatement if one considers the numbers of victims involved).