Liberals - The Ends Justify the Means > EU subsidizes left-leaning groups to lobby itself; Greenpeace lawsuit forces Netherlands to cut nitrogen use

 

Enviromental(sic) groups got EU subsidies to lobby for Timmermans' green plans: report

NL Times

The European Commission has been paying subsidies to environmental groups with the condition that they lobby for the Commission’s green plans, the Telegraaf reports based on a subsidy contract with one environmental group that it has in its possession. Environmental organizations also got subsidies to promote the green plans of former European Commissioner Frans Timmermans, according to the newspaper.

The money came from a pot for climate and environmental subsidies, and many came with conditions, the newspaper wrote. For example, the European Environmental Bureau - an umbrella organization of green organizations in Europe, including Milieudefensie and Natuurmonumenten from the Netherlands - was explicitly instructed to provide at least 16 examples of how the European Parliament has made green legislation more ambitious thanks to their lobbying. The umbrella group also promoted Timmermans’ Nature Restoration Act and had to steer the farmers’ debate in the green direction, according to the contract the Telegraaf has in its possession.

As a member of the budget control committee, NSC Member of the European Parliament Dirk Gotink and several colleagues are now investigating the subsidy contracts with environmental groups. “There were even lobby lists with names of politicians who had to be approached,” he told the Telegraaf. “This is not a smear campaign against the environmental movement. Of course, they are allowed to lobby. I am targeting the European Commission. This seems to be a highly orchestrated interplay between a green coalition led by Timmermans and a left-wing majority in the European Parliament.”

Timmermans is now back in Dutch politics as the parliamentary leader of GroenLinks-PvdA - the biggest opposition party to the Schoof I coalition, which includes the NSC.

“I want to know whether this also applies to other themes, such as migration,” Gotink said. “Brussels is the lobbying capital of Europe: is this a bad apple or is it a widespread practice?”

The European Environmental Bureau responded to the Telegraaf’s accusations with criticism. “A flourishing democracy requires resources that enable the voice of citizens to reach decision-makers,” Secretary General Patrick ten Brink said in a written response. “Unlike actors with much resources, such as foreign governments and multinationals, European citizens and their civil society organizations often do not have sufficient resources. EU support is needed to ensure a level playing field.”

Did the farmers have a level playing field, or were they plowing uphill all the way because you supported the green madness that farmers are a major factor in climate change?

Dutch government ordered to cut nitrogen emissions

by 2030 or face $10M penalty

By Chris Benson

Members of Greenpeace protest in front of the court in The Hague, the Netherlands, on Wednesday. A judge ruled for Greenpeace Netherlands' merits against the state. Greenpeace demands that nitrogen emissions be drastically reduced to protect nitrogen-sensitive nature. Photo By Phil Nijhuis/EPA-EFE

Jan. 22 (UPI) -- A European court has ordered the Dutch government to cut nitrogen pollution in designated protected areas or face a $10 million penalty, according to new information.

"This ruling is a celebration for nature, and finally there is clarity," Andy Palmen, director of Greenpeace Netherlands, said Wednesday.

The non-governmental organization revealed in November its intent to take the administration of Prime Minister Dick Schoof to court due to "excessive nitrogen emissions" and over the government's "inadequate nitrogen approach," arguing that the "most vulnerable" parts of Holland's nature preserves were "in danger of being irreparably damaged or even disappearing if no action is taken quickly."

The Hague verdict will require Schoof's government to make certain at least half of the country's vulnerable habitats fall below a harmful nitrogen threshold by 2030.

Palmen says the ruling means the government will have to "come up with proposals that will finally give farmers clarity and support them in a fair way in the necessary transition to ecological agriculture."

However, an appeal on Wednesday's ruling is viewed as likely.

Excessive nitrogen emissions, meanwhile, are largely caused by livestock farming mixed with transportation and industrial pollution.

This follows similar efforts in nations such as France, Germany and Ireland.

A 2021 ruling by the European Union's Court of Justice determined that Germany had for years "systematically and persistently" violated pollution limits and allowed excessive nitrogen dioxide to be emitted across German cities such as Berlin, Stuttgart, Hamburg and Cologne.

On Wednesday, Palmen added that the Netherlands has been "postponing" measures that left society, particularly Dutch farmers and companies, in a state of "uncertainty," he said, after a series of 2019 rulings trigger a wave of new measures which lead to massive farmer protests.

It arrived after Schoof's right-wing Cabinet in June last year slashed a more than $25 billion transition fund put in place by ex-Prime Minister Mark Rutte. That fund was designed for supporting sustainability efforts and buying land.

Schoof instead opted to focus on tech solutions or other voluntary measures hoping to cut back on nitrogen emissions without stoking civil unrest in parts of the small European country roughly the size of Maryland.

Greenpeace, however, requested that the court test the government's nitrogen policy against the European Birds and Habitats Directive. The Netherlands has roughly 160 spots that could fall under it.

So, it's not the people Greenpeace is concerned about, it's the birds! Perhaps they should drop the "peace" from their name.

The annual cost of damage caused by nitrogen across Europe was between $98 billion and $450 billion, according to a 2011 study by the European Nitrogen Assessment. It concluded nearly 15 years ago that nitrogen pollution at the time was costing each European citizen anywhere from $200 to $1,000 annually.

One would think the EU would notice a line item like that in their budget.

Palmen said that systemically ignoring the nitrogen emission problem has in recent years caused further deterioration in nature.

In November, Greenpeace called it at a hearing the "last chance to save the most vulnerable habitats because if nitrogen emissions don't go down, we risk losing unique plants and animals."

"By not making choices, urgent measures must now be taken," Palmen said Wednesday. "We expect the government to finally take responsibility in the action plan and ensure that all relevant sectors, including agriculture, traffic, aviation and industry, make a fair contribution."

The international environmental action group was born in Canada in 1971 when a ragtag group of anti-nuclear protesters calling themselves the 'Don't Make A Wave Committee' sailed into the Amchitka nuclear test zone in Alaska in an attempt to stop testing.

"It has been so long that the judge has now intervened," Palmen said on the verdict. "It is a celebration without cake, because it should not be necessary for the judge to intervene again."

Without cake - because they need farmers to grow the wheat?

Environmental Threats Remote and Invisible Meant to Create Fear - Patrick Moore

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Environmental Threats Based on Invisible, Remote Subjects to Create Fear:

Greenpeace Co-founder

BY ISAAC TEO

May 22, 2021 Updated: May 23, 2021

The co-founder of Greenpeace says in his new book that alleged environmental catastrophes and threats are based on subjects that are either invisible or extremely remote in order to create fear, forcing people to rely on experts to tell them the truth.

“It dawned on me that the great majority of scare stories about the present and future state of the planet, and humanity as a whole, are based on subjects that are either invisible, like CO2 and radiation, or extremely remote, like polar bears and coral reefs,” wrote Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, in his book titled “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom.”

“Thus, most people have no way of determining the truth of these claims of alleged catastrophes and doomsday threats. Instead, they must rely on the activists, the media, the politicians, and the scientists—all of whom have a very large financial and/or political stake in the subject—to tell them the truth.”

Moore, also a senior fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, said he left Greenpeace after 15 years when he realized the movement had taken “a sharp turn to the political left.”

During a webinar on May 20, he said the main purpose of writing the book was to show that those narratives are “just a big hoax.”

Language is manipulated to invoke negativity, fear, and compliance in order for proponents of environmental catastrophes to push their narratives, Moore said.

“A classic example of propaganda is ‘dirty oil,’” he noted. “That’s how we grow our food—in dirt. So what’s wrong with dirty? But they’re not using it to mean dirt as in soil. They’re using it to mean ‘dirty rotten scoundrel.’ In other words, it’s purely an epithet—a negative epithet.”

Moore said that kind of wording has nothing to do with scientific description or the actual quality of oil. Rather, it’s an example of a propaganda technique where a normal concept is merged with an undesirable idea in order to make something seem bad.

“Much of propaganda is about associating negative words with normal words, and therefore turning them into a negative,” he said.

“This welcomes the opportunity to invent narratives such as the claim that ‘CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels are causing climate emergency,’” he writes in his book.

But Moore said the amount of CO2 has been declining in the global atmosphere for at least half a billion years based on historical records.

In his testimony before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight in 2014, Moore argued that although there is some correlation, there is little evidence to support a direct causal relationship between CO2 and global temperature through the millennia.

“The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming,” he testified at the time.

The book also addresses the issue of coral reefs reported to be dying allegedly due to climate change warming the oceans. Moore explains in the book that the most diverse coral reefs are found in the world’s warmest oceans, in a roughly triangular-shaped region in the western Pacific Ocean known as the Coral Triangle. The region extends from the Philippine Archipelago in the north to the Indonesia Archipelago in the south and extends east to the seas around the Solomon Islands.

The Coral Triangle has the world’s “highest biodiversity of coral, with more than 600 species, which is 76 percent of all coral species,” the book states. It adds that the region also has the “highest biodiversity of reef fish, with 2,000 species, which is 37 percent of all reef-fish species,” and is “home to six of the world’s seven species of marine turtles.”

“In other words, they found no evidence that there is anywhere in the world’s oceans that indicates a decline in species richness due to warmer ocean water,” Moore writes, referring to a research paper on global marine species diversity and the factors that influence higher or lower diversity.

“They found the opposite, that the warmest waters in the world have the highest species diversity for every taxonomic class of marine life.”

His book, “Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom,” also seeks to dispel what Moore calls the “unified theory of scare stories.” They include the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the North Pacific, which has a high concentration of microplastic debris and is said to be twice the size of Texas; polar bears being threatened with extinction due to climate change; and ocean acidification.

The book is published by Ecosense Environmental Inc. and is available on Amazon. (Click on Image).

Environmentalism: Evidence Suggests it Was Always and Only About Achieving World Government

WUWT Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

It is common sense to protect our environment, but what has occurred for 50 years is exploitation of that idea for a socialist agenda. We wasted 50 years believing that humans are not natural, and everything they do is destructive. We wasted and continue to waste trillions of dollars on unnecessary policies and useless technologies, all based on false assumptions, pseudoscience, and emotional bullying.

We now know 50 years later that every single prediction concerning the environmental demise of the Earth and the people made in the original Earth Day Report was wrong. We also know that every additional claim, such as overpopulation, global warming, sea level rise, desertification, deforestation, and sea ice collapse, among many others, were wrong. I challenge anyone to produce empirical evidence that proves anything happening today is outside any long-term record of natural activity.

Convince the people that the entire world is threatened, and you can convince them that no nation can save it. It is then easy to convince them that a world government is the only way to save the planet. The trouble is that none of it is true. The World is in good shape, and people are living longer and healthier lives in every nation.  

Like the majority of people, Elaine Dewar assumed environmentalists were commendable even heroic people. She began research for a book singing their praises. It didn’t take long to learn the basic premise was wrong. Following the traditional and proper methodology, rarely seen these days, Dewar identified the duplicitous characters involved in the Canadian environmental movement and laid them out in her book Cloak of Green. She spent five days at the UN with Canadian Maurice Strong arguably the world architect of official environmentalism. He was praised excessively, as in this article, “The World Mourns One of its Greats: Maurice Strong Dies, His Legacy Lives On.” Another article recognized the evil he personified, “Who is Global Warming Propagandist Maurice Strong?” After the five days, Dewar concluded,

“Strong was using the U.N. as a platform to sell a global environment crisis and the Global Governance Agenda.”

The environmental movement as the basis for a socialist world government was in the minds of people like Strong and fellow members of the Club of Rome in the late 1960s. However, it was launched on the world on April 22, 1970, by a small group centered at Stanford University. The date is critical because it was the first Earth Day. It is also very important to know the choice was deliberate because it is the birthday of Vladimir Lenin. The environmental movement was a deliberate program to impose communism on the world.

The underlying theme of the environmental movement makes the following false assumptions.

That almost all change is a result of human activity. The UN claim, using computer models, that 95%+ of temperature increase since 1950 is due to human-produced CO2. This works because they don’t consider most natural causes.

That humans are unnatural. The 1990 “Greenpeace Report on Global Warming” says CO2 is added to the atmosphere “naturally and unnaturally.”  Yes, that unnatural production is from humans.

That we are not part of nature. Ingrid Newkirk, co-founder of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) comment explains.

“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” “If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”

Remarkable insanity - it's astonishing that anyone in the world pays any attention to this lunacy.

That we should be eliminated or dramatically reduced in number. In May 2015, the Pope produced Laudate Si an Encyclical about his view of the state of the Earth. It is a socialist diatribe, but that is not surprising since the main contributor was Hans Schellnhuber, a pantheist. This group believes the world population should be below 1 billion people.

That if the western world reduces levels of CO2 production, the rest of the world will follow. China has 2,363 coal plants and is constructing 1,171 more. The US has 15 and is not constructing any.   

The US can build as many clean-burning coal plants as they want and burn coal pollution free. They don’t have to worry about CO2 because it is not a pollutant and is not causing climate change. No significant environmental problems are threatening the world. All the stories about impending environmental doom are fictions deliberately created to make people surrender control to the government.  It is time to break the emotional stranglehold of those who used the environment to create global socialism.

This is the allegation that Lord Christopher Monkton has been putting forth for years. 

Journalist Investigates the IPCC with Disturbing Results

Donna Laframboise, an investigative journalist was not very interested in environmental sciences until she began to see other journalists regurgitating unproven ideas on climate change as though they were facts. 

She began to investigate and found that, no, 97% of scientists were not in agreement on anthropogenic global warming. Then she began to look at the IPCC and was thoroughly dismayed at what she found.

The following video on FB is 53+ minutes long but mesmerizing as Laframboise meticulously lays out her disturbing findings. The video was recorded in 2013, but is even more relevant today.

Greenpeace Founder: Global Warming Hoax Pushed by Corrupt Scientists ‘Hooked on Government Grants’

Now understand one thing. He is not saying the planet isn't warming up, he is saying that the theory that it is anthropogenically driven is a construct to generate hysteria resulting in wealth and power to some.

The climate issue is the biggest threat to the Enlightenment that has occurred since Galileo.

Nothing else comes close to it. This is as bad a thing that has happened to science in the history of science.

Antarctica ice loss increases six fold since 1979: studyNASA/AFP/Chris LARSEN

Greenpeace co-founder and former president of Greenpeace Canada Patrick Moore described the cynical and corrupt machinations fueling the narrative of anthropocentric global warming and “climate change” in a Wednesday interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with hosts Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak.

Moore explained how fear and guilt are leveraged by proponents of climate change:

Fear has been used all through history to gain control of people’s minds and wallets and all else, and the climate catastrophe is strictly a fear campaign — well, fear and guilt — you’re afraid you’re killing your children because you’re driving them in your SUV and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and you feel guilty for doing that. There’s no stronger motivation than those two.

Scientists are co-opted and corrupted by politicians and bureaucracies invested in advancing the narrative of “climate change” in order to further centralize political power and control, explained Moore.

Moore noted how “green” companies parasitize taxpayers via favorable regulations and subsidies ostensibly justified by the aforementioned narrative’s claimed threats, all while enjoying propagandistic protection across news media”

And so you’ve got the green movement creating stories that instill fear in the public. You’ve got the media echo chamber — fake news — repeating it over and over and over again to everybody that they’re killing their children. And then you’ve got the green politicians who are buying scientists with government money to produce fear for them in the form of scientific-looking materials. And then you’ve got the green businesses, the rent-seekers, and the crony capitalists who are taking advantage of massive subsidies, huge tax write-offs, and government mandates requiring their technologies to make a fortune on this. And then, of course, you’ve got the scientists who are willingly, they’re basically hooked on government grants.

When they talk about the 99 percent consensus [among scientists] on climate change, that’s a completely ridiculous and false number. But most of the scientists — put it in quotes, scientists — who are pushing this catastrophic theory are getting paid by public money, they are not being paid by General Electric or Dupont or 3M to do this research, where private companies expect to get something useful from their research that might produce a better product and make them a profit in the end because people want it — build a better mousetrap type of idea. But most of what these so-called scientists are doing is simply producing more fear so that politicians can use it to control people’s minds and get their votes because some of the people are convinced, ‘Oh, this politician can save my kid from certain doom.’

The narrative of anthropogenic global warming or “climate change” is an existential threat to reason, warned Moore:

It is the biggest lie since people thought the Earth was at the center of the universe. This is Galileo-type stuff. If you remember, Galileo discovered that the sun was at the center of the solar system and the Earth revolved around it. He was sentenced to death by the Catholic Church, and only because he recanted was he allowed to live in house arrest for the rest of his life.

So this was around the beginning of what we call the Enlightenment, when science became the way in which we gained knowledge instead of using superstition and instead of using invisible demons and whatever else, we started to understand that you have to have observation of actual events and then you have to repeat those observations over and over again, and that is basically the scientific method.

“But this abomination that is occurring today in the climate issue is the biggest threat to the Enlightenment that has occurred since Galileo,” declared Moore. “Nothing else comes close to it. This is as bad a thing that has happened o science in the history of science.”

Moore concluded, “It’s taking over science with superstition and a kind of toxic combination of religion and political ideology. There is no truth to this. It is a complete hoax and scam.”

Greenpeace Gets it Wrong, Again; Increased Prosperity Improves Ecosystems

Mark Milke
The Province Opinion Op-Ed

Tourists and Londoners along the Thames River. DHF/ZDS / Dinendra Haria/WENN

Economic growth — implicitly criticized — can and has damaged the environment. However, increasing prosperity, once a minimum threshold of subsistence income is reached, inevitably allows for improved ecosystems.

You may know this frightening if self-evident bit of advice: “Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.” The quote is ostensibly from Canada’s First Nations peoples (the Cree are often cited) but popularized by Greenpeace.

The point is clear enough: Anyone with sense should avoid killing the earth and/or their own future just to make a few bucks.

But most of life is not composed of such binary, either-or dramatic choices. You can fish, for example, just as some First Nations did 15,000 years ago or 15 minutes ago, without necessarily depleting fish stocks.

As with all of life, it is a question of balance. That also includes managing government lands (always more difficult than managing private property) so resources are not overused and depleted.

That noted, here is the other reality check on the romanticized quotation: Economic growth — implicitly criticized — can and has damaged the environment. However, increasing prosperity, once a minimum threshold of subsistence income is reached, inevitably allows for improved ecosystems.

For example, 140 years ago, London’s Thames River was a polluted, poisonous, dead body of water. When a passenger ship sunk in 1878 after a collision, at least some of the 600 passengers who died might have survived. The problem was that as some swam to shore they were overcome “by the noxious cocktail of pollution in the water,” was how the Daily Telegraph described it.

By 1957, the Thames was pronounced biologically dead. But after an intensive environmental program, as well as improved technology, it was revived, and as of 2010, when the Telegraph wrote its story, the river was home to 125 types of fish and more than 400 species of invertebrates. Herons and seals now frolic near Canary Wharf.

Ponder another example: In the 1950s and in subsequent decades, Los Angeles was choked by smog. Public demands coupled with technological advances (you need the second to realistically satisfy the first) meant air quality improved by the time I lived there briefly in the 1980s. The smog was still there, but Los Angeles air was far better than in previous decades. L.A. air quality has also steadily improved in the last three decades despite many more people who live and drive in the city and state.

Air quality in the Fraser Valley and Vancouver, British Columbia has improved remarkably in the past two decades as the Port of Vancouver installed huge electric outlets for ships to plug into when in port, rather than running their diesels continuously. 

Then there are trees. Forest cover around the world has been recovering for decades in every place where people have prospered under increasingly market-friendly economies. According to Human Progress, China, Europe and North America have all gained forest cover in the last three decades: 511,800 more square kilometres in China; 212,122 more in Europe; and 64,410 square kilometres gained in North America.

The exception to this positive trend has been in countries that are poor, thus Africa is still losing forest cover. No surprise there. Mothers and fathers need fuel to cook food for their families, and if trees are the only option, expect them to disappear. The remedy, which should be obvious, is to use natural gas or electricity from hydro, where available. That will prevent “cutting down the last tree.”

The other remedy is more and not less economic growth to advance human prosperity. Those in poverty, either as families or entire countries, have nothing left with which to buy less-polluting energy. In the case of governments, it is difficult to require and enforce more stringent pollution controls when consumers live hand-to-mouth and companies are barely profitable.

Widespread prosperity allows families to purchase other forms of energy rather than burning what is nearest to them. Rising living standards also allows for clean-ups of rivers and significantly better automobiles, the Thames and Los Angeles lessons respectively.

None of this means nirvana exists. In China, for example, while forest cover has increased, smog is thick for much of the year. That nation’s consumers, businesses and often corrupt governments in particular could usefully spend more money on effective environmental improvements. Also, overfishing in the oceans is still a problem. That speaks to the need for (some) environmental organizations to stop opposing fish farming, which can ease pressure on fish stocks in the commons.

But the general rule holds: It is increasing prosperity which allows for people once too poor to avoid environmental dead ends, to instead have the money and time to care for the environment. Or put another way, only when the last bit of propaganda from Greenpeace ends, might more people realize that from increasing forest cover to cleaner rivers, many environmental indicators have been trending positive for decades.

Mark Milke is an author, policy analyst and contributor to Canadians for Affordable Energy. 

Another Eminent Scientist Laughs Off Man-Made Climate Change

As with my previous post on this subject, I repeat that I'm not convinced of this assertion. However, I have an open mind and I am always willing to tell both sides of a debate. 

My position continues to be that the global temperature is increasing and we are contributing to it - whether we contribute 1% or 80%, I cannot hazard a guess. And anyone who does hazard a guess is doing just that, guessing.

This story, like the previous is a bit dated. I hope you will forgive me for that as I try to get caught-up on this file.

Another scientist has pushed back against the doom-and-gloom climate change predictions from the United Nations and other governmental agencies.

Dr. Leslie Woodcock, emeritus professor at the University of Manchester (UK) School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, is a former NASA scientist along with other impressive accomplishments on his distinguished professional resume.

In an interview, he laughed off man-made climate change as nonsense and a money-making industry for the green lobby, which approaches the subject with a religious fervor. 

Explained Woodcock:
“The term ‘climate change’ is meaningless. The Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial, that is since the Earth was formed 1,000 million years ago. The theory of ‘man-made climate change’ is an unsubstantiated hypothesis [about] our climate [which says it] has been adversely affected by the burning of fossil fuels in the last 100 years, causing the average temperature on the earth’s surface to increase very slightly but with disastrous environmental consequences. The theory is that the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel is the ‘greenhouse gas’ causes ‘global warming’ — in fact, water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04 per cent. There is no reproducible scientific evidence CO2 has significantly increased in the last 100 years. Anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean anything in science, it’s not significant…”

Added Woodcock:
Even the term ‘global warming’ does not mean anything unless you give it a time scale. The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years, if there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us. Global warming is nonsense.”

Politicians and journalists — two groups who ordinarily lack any scientific training or background — insist that the global warming debate is settled and there are no dissenting scientists.

So-called green guru Dr. James Lovelock also questioned the climate change movement (which used to be called global cooling and then global warming). He described the environmental movement as becoming like “a religion, and religions don’t worry too much about facts.” He added that “It’s just as silly to be a denier as it is to be a believer. You can’t be certain.”

In perhaps a further contrary development for the climate change adherents, it’s been reported that the polar ice cap is actually expanding rather than contracting: “… In fact, receding Arctic ice rebounded between 2012 and 2013, growing by 29 percent into an unbroken patch more than half the size of Europe and within 5 percent of what it was 30 years ago, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Last month near the South Pole, a Russian ship carrying scientists and tourists traveled to the bottom of the Earth so passengers might document global warming and shrinking ice caps. But the ship got stuck on ice that was thicker than at any time since records started being kept in 1978.”

This article, except for my input, was written in the spring of 2014. Arctic sea ice expanded in extent during 2013 and remained nearly constant through 2014. In 2015, however, it resumed its downward trend since sea ice began to be measured in 1979.

Dr. Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace co-founder, has also publicly expressed the opinion that “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years… no actual proof, as it is understood in science, actually exists.”

As The Inquisitr recently reported, Americans are apparently increasingly becoming convinced that global warming and/or climate change is a hoax.

That is obvious just from the responses to this blog.

Christians Persecuted in 3/4 of the World's Countries and Growing

Yesterday, on one of my posts, I predicted that the anti-Christian movement would explode across the world with astounding speed. I guess I could claim to be right except that I learn today that it has already happened. 

This excellent opinion piece helps put Meriam's ordeal into perspective, but also documents the 'explosive growth' of anti-Christianity around the world.

WALL STREET JOURNAL  OPINION

Meriam Ibrahim and the Persecution of Christians
Sentenced to death because of her faith—it's a modern story with ancient echoes.

By CHARLOTTE ALLEN
June 26, 2014 6:48 p.m. ET

A 27-year-old Sudanese woman named Meriam Ibrahim seemed likely to become a 21st-century Christian martyr in May when she was sentenced to death by hanging because of her faith. Then this week Ms. Ibrahim was saved when a court overturned her conviction for apostasy from Islam—her father was a Muslim, and under Islamic law she is automatically a Muslim too. (She had also been sentenced to public flogging for adultery because her husband, Daniel Wani, is also a Christian, and Islamic law doesn't recognize marriages between Muslim women and non-Muslim men.) But the day after her release on Monday, Ms. Ibrahim was arrested again. While the Associated Press reported Thursday that she had again been released Thursday, her future remained uncertain.

Her story is harrowing. Ms. Ibrahim was eight months pregnant with her second child when she was convicted in a Khartoum court on April 30 under the Islamic Shariah law that has governed Sudan since 1989. On May 27, while in prison awaiting execution, Ms. Ibrahim gave birth to her daughter, Maya. Mr. Wani reported that his wife was shackled to the floor during labor. Their year-and-a-half-old son, Martin, had been jailed along with her.

Ms. Ibrahim was re-arrested on Tuesday by a government security force as she, Mr. Wani and their two young children tried to leave Sudan for the U.S. The Sudanese-born Mr. Wani has been an American citizen since 2005. The new charges against Ms. Ibrahim—which are reported to carry penalties of up to seven years in prison—consist of falsifying the family's travel documents, which were issued by the embassy of South Sudan, the largely Christian territory that seceded from overwhelmingly Muslim Sudan in 2011 after a decades-long civil war. Mr. Wani hails from what is now South Sudan.

Meriam Ibrahim and Husband Daniel Wani

Ms. Ibrahim's story bears uncanny parallels to another Christian story involving young African mothers who did become Christian martyrs, during the early third century: the story of Felicitas and Perpetua, executed for their faith in the Roman port city of Carthage in today's Tunisia. Vibia Perpetua was a well-educated young woman, not unlike Ms. Ibrahim, who is trained as a doctor. Felicitas was a slave in an advanced state of pregnancy when she was thrown into prison along with Perpetua and other Christians to await their deaths by wild animals in the Carthage arena. Perpetua, like Ms. Ibrahim, went to prison along with a baby son. Felicitas, like Ms. Ibrahim, bore a baby daughter before her execution date.

The most dramatic parallel is the simple affirmation that Ms. Ibrahim gave in court that led to her death sentence: "I am a Christian." Those also were Perpetua's words, as they were of many martyrs in Roman times. Like Perpetua, Ms. Ibrahim, who was brought up in the Ethiopian Orthodox faith of her mother, also refused to recant.

This isn't just a matter of ancient and modern coincidences. More significantly, the Roman world of the third century was strikingly like today's secularized West in its contempt for Christians and indifference to their persecution.

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has found that Christians are persecuted in more places today than any other religious group, suffering formal or informal harassment in three-quarters of the world's countries. The persecution of Christians, Paul Marshall of the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom wrote in the June 23 Weekly Standard, "is occurring on a massive scale, it is under-reported, and in many parts of the world it is rapidly growing."

Yet this persecution is mostly ignored. The Sudanese civil war included waves of genocidal mass killings of southern Sudanese Christians by the Khartoum government during the 1990s, but the media looked the other way until the Sudanese started slaughtering Muslim rebels in Darfur in 2003. The recent kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by the Islamic-fanatic group Boko Haram has been portrayed as a war on women's education. You seldom hear that most of the girls are Christians and one of the aims of the abduction was their forced conversion to Islam.

Amnesty International has admirably agitated for Meriam Ibrahim's release, but partly on grounds of Amnesty's opposition to the death penalty. Even many Christian churches in the West seem to be too constrained by ethnic sensitivities to assert themselves on behalf of their persecuted brethren. They haven't paid much attention to the near-extermination of the ancient Christian communities in Iraq during the past decade of turmoil, or to the systematic destruction of Coptic churches in Egypt by Islamic radicals in 2013.

Meriam Ibrahim did manage to gain the attention and sympathy of the West by reason of her courage, her beauty, her status as a mother of two young children and the extreme circumstances of her case. If there are parallels between her experience and a story of ancient martyrdom, the lesson might be that the West's cultured classes' hostility to Christianity, like that of their of Roman forbears, results in a passivity that tolerates attacks on people whose only crime is their faith.

Ms. Allen is the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus" (Free Press, 1998).

Greenpeace, Pussy Riot to be Given Amnesty

The members of the Pussy Riot punk band, Greenpeace activists and protesters jailed after the May 2012 Bolotnaya demonstration will be freed in an amnesty dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Russian Constitution, Russian media report.

A total of 25,000 people will be freed under the amnesty initiated by President Putin, Interfax cited Vladimir Vasilyev, deputy speaker of parliament, as saying.

Two members of Russian punk band Pussy Riot in prison since March 2012

“Around 1,300 people will be released from prison, and 17,500 people will be relieved of non-custodial sentences. In addition, criminal proceedings against nearly 6,000 can be terminated,” Vasilyev said.

Several Russian media including Izvestia and Vedomosti newspapers have obtained a copy of the draft amnesty, which was submitted to the parliament by President Vladimir Putin on Monday.

According to the papers, the participants in such high-profile cases as the Pussy Riot Cathedral protest, Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise boarding of an oil rig and the Bolotnaya Square riots will all be granted amnesty.