Islamic Insanity - Boy, 6, Beheaded in Front of Screaming Mum in Saudi Arabia 'For Being Shia, Not Sunni'

The child was killed in Medina, Saudi Arabia, while visiting a shrine

to the Prophet Muhammad; Islam - The Religion of Peace

By Joshua Taylor Deputy news editor, The Mirror

A six-year-old boy was beheaded in front of his screaming mum in Saudi Arabia for belonging to the wrong branch of Islam, according to reports.

The child and his mum were allegedly approached while visiting a shrine to the Prophet Muhammad in Medina and asked if they were Shia Muslims.

Medina is the second holiest site in Islam. Those who beheaded the little boy were just following Sharia as written by Mohammed in the Quran. Devout Muslims!

The mum reportedly said yes and several minutes later a car pulled up beside them and the child was snatched away from her.

The boy - named locally as Zakaria Al-Jaber - was repeatedly stabbed in the neck with a piece of broken glass until he was beheaded, it is claimed.

His helpless mum could only watch and scream as the horror unfolded.

Saudi Arabia's predominant branch of Islam is Sunni, accounting for around three quarters of the population.

Human rights groups say practitioners of other forms of the faith - including Shia - are persecuted.

Shia Rights Watch, a Washington DC-based campaign group, said: "There was no intervention from anyone and no response from authority thus far.

"The Saudi Shia community came together in mourning and to show solidarity with the parents.

"The community also reported this incident is a result of ongoing violations and lack of protection by the Saudi authority toward its Shia population.  

"Saudi Shia have been under military crackdown by their government and many Shia are in prisons and on death toll."

Video - No Evidence That Gas Attack in Douma Even Happened - OPCW Whistleblower

But lots of evidence that counters the attack was covered up

by the OPCW, governments, and media

For the past year or two, I have called the 2017 gas attack in Douma, Syria, a false flag operation. It turns out that it wasn't even that. Chemical analyses performed by several different labs for OPCW revealed there was no chlorine gas attack in Douma at all. It was entirely faked.

If that's shocking to you, you need to understand that the OPCW knew of the lab test results long before issuing their report, but they hid the results and lied on their report. It was only by chance that the whistle-blower, who has been verified as a member of the OPCW, found out about the lab results.

UK Reporter Astounded By What He Found in Douma

OPCW Put Lid on Key Evidence in Douma Chemical Incident – Watchdog Whistleblower

Meanwhile, almost all national media outlets were crying for NATO, or the USA, to invade Syria and depose the monster, Assad. Tucker Carlson, of Fox News, not one of my favourite people, suggested that the USA wait for more evidence to come in before taking drastic action. He was in an extremely small minority with that view.

At Last an MSM Personality Sees Through the Syrian Gas Attack Rhetoric

BBC Producer Says Hospital Scenes After 2018 Douma ‘Chemical Attack’ Were Staged

The US, however, sent numerous missiles into Syria as a response to this unthinkable criminal act by Assad. They did that before the OPCW even had an opportunity to enter the region. 

US Will Act Against ‘Monster’ Assad With or Without UN ‒ Haley

Syria - OPCW Engineering Assessment: The Douma 'Chemical Weapon Attack' Was Staged

One OPCW member, dissenting from the report, stated that the theater looked staged and that the so-called chlorine canisters in the photographs could not have been dropped from above, as was suggested, but had to have been placed there from the ground. His opinion was left out of the report which was completely out of normal procedure for the OPCW.

Top MIT Scientist Slams OPCW Leaders for Repressing Dissenting Report on Douma

German Reporter Says Douma was Completely Staged - MSM Won't Report It

What this clearly proves is that the OPCW is a function of Deep State. Deep State has been trying to get Trump to continue and even upgrade the war in Syria for years. Douma was almost certainly not the first false flag, or possibly outright fraudulent event, in this war. 

Khan Sheikhun Sarin Gas Attack was a False Flag Operation

MOON of ALABAMA Discloses How Brits Run Secret Anti-Russian Smear Campaigns

The real question is, why is the media playing along? It is almost definitely policy to inflame the situation and smother anything that might mitigate the 'monstrousness' of Assad, anything that might promote peace. Are they being constantly duped by the war-mongers, or are they part of the game? And who's controlling the OPCW, a multinational organization?

Politicians, Military Asking the Obvious Questions About Douma, But Not Media

America, Britain, France, NATO, can't move the inventories of war if peace breaks out, so they do their best to prevent that from happening. 

The World: What is Really Happening - Craig Murray

Pakistan Summons Norwegian Ambassador Amid Outcry Over Koran Burning at Rally in Kristiansand

Islamabad expressed “deep concern” and launched a diplomatic action over the burning of the Koran in Norway, while the man who tried to save the book earned high praise on Pakistani social media.

Last week, a young Muslim counter-protester tackled Lars Thorsen, the head of the Stop Islamization of Norway (SIAN), after he set a copy of the Koran on fire at an anti-Muslim rally in the city of Kristiansand. The video of the incident caused a strong reaction in Pakistan, where the man reportedly named Ilyas Umer was hailed as hero on social media for trying to “save” the most-revered book in Islam.

Warning - the noises in this video are a little disturbing

video 0:45

The nation’s Foreign Ministry even summoned the Norwegian Ambassador over the weekend to tell him that Thorsen’s actions “hurt the sentiments of 1.3 billion Muslims around the world, including those in Pakistan.”

The Ministry said that Koran-burning “could not be justified in the name of freedom of expression,” and urged Oslo to “prevent” such incidents from happening in the future.

An online petition was launched, calling on the police to release the man, dubbed “Ilyas the Koran Defender.”

The army’s spokesperson Asif Ghafoor also took to his personal Twitter account praise him for trying to stop Thorsen. “Salute to brave #Ilyas for displaying courage to stop an absolutely deplorable action,” he wrote.

Asif Ghafoor✔

@peaceforchange

Salute to brave #Ilyas for displaying courage to stop an absolutely deplorable action. Such Islamophobia based provocations only promote hatred & extremism.  All religions are and must stay respectable. Islamophbia is threat to global peace and harmony.#TheGloriousQuran#Norway

Meanwhile, protesters burnt Norwegian and US flags in Karachi, denouncing what they said was the desecration of the Koran.

Anti-Muslim actions overseas have in the past sparked demonstrations in Pakistan. In 2010, rallies were held in Pakistani cities after controversial Florida-based pastor Terry Jones announced plans to burn the Koran. Two years later, a massive protest was staged in front of the US embassy in Karachi against the American film ‘Innocence of Muslims’, which was deemed blasphemous by the local Muslim community.

Man Behind Anti-Islamic Film Sentenced To Another Year In Prison

November 7, 2012 • Mark Basseley Youssef admitted to violating four of eight conditions of his probation. He'd previously served 21 months in prison for bank fraud. His film, Innocence of Muslims, which depicted Prophet Muhammad as a fraud, sparked violence in the Muslim world.

Why Apocalyptic Claims About Climate Change Is Wrong - Environmentalist - Forbes

Climate Change scientists are beginning to speak out against the rampant hysteria

that floods the media these days, finally.

Michael Shellenberger
Forbes

Bill McKibben, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Greta Thunberg, and Zion Lights of Extinction Rebellion

Climate scientists are speaking out against grossly exaggerated claims about global warming. GETTY

The hysterics

Environmental journalists and advocates have in recent weeks made a number of apocalyptic predictions about the impact of climate change. Bill McKibben suggested climate-driven fires in Australia had made koalas “functionally extinct.” Extinction Rebellion said “Billions will die” and “Life on Earth is dying.” Vice claimed the “collapse of civilization may have already begun.” 

Few have underscored the threat more than student climate activist Greta Thunberg and Green New Deal sponsor Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The latter said, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.” Says Thunberg in her new book, “Around 2030 we will be in a position to set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.” 

Sometimes, scientists themselves make apocalyptic claims. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that,” if Earth warms four degrees, said one earlier this year. “The potential for multi-breadbasket failure is increasing,” said another. If sea levels rise as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts, another scientist said, “It will be an unmanageable problem.” 

Apocalyptic statements like these have real-world impacts. In September, a group of British psychologists said children are increasingly suffering from anxiety from the frightening discourse around climate change. In October, an activist with Extinction Rebellion (”XR”) — an environmental group founded in 2018 to commit civil disobedience to draw awareness to the threat its founders and supporters say climate change poses to human existence — and a videographer, were kicked and beaten in a London Tube station by angry commuters. And last week, an XR co-founder said a genocide like the Holocaust was “happening again, on a far greater scale, and in plain sight” from climate change.

Who is Michael Shellenberger?

Climate change is an issue I care passionately about and have dedicated a significant portion of my life to addressing. I have been politically active on the issue for over 20 years and have researched and written about it for 17 years. Over the last four years, my organization, Environmental Progress, has worked with some of the world’s leading climate scientists to prevent carbon emissions from rising. So far, we’ve helped prevent emissions increasing the equivalent of adding 24 million cars to the road. 

I also care about getting the facts and science right and have in recent months corrected inaccurate and apocalyptic news media coverage of fires in the Amazon and fires in California, both of which have been improperly presented as resulting primarily from climate change. 

Journalists and activists alike have an obligation to describe environmental problems honestly and accurately, even if they fear doing so will reduce their news value or salience with the public. There is good evidence that the catastrophist framing of climate change is self-defeating because it alienates and polarizes many people. And exaggerating climate change risks distracting us from other important issues including ones we might have more near-term control over.

I feel the need to say this up-front because I want the issues I’m about to raise to be taken seriously and not dismissed by those who label as “climate deniers” or “climate delayers” anyone who pushes back against exaggeration.

What science really says

With that out of the way, let’s look whether the science supports what’s being said.

First, no credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilization much less the extinction of the human species. “‘Our children are going to die in the next 10 to 20 years.’ What’s the scientific basis for these claims?” BBC’s Andrew Neil asked a visibly uncomfortable XR spokesperson last month.

“These claims have been disputed, admittedly,” she said. “There are some scientists who are agreeing and some who are saying it’s not true. But the overall issue is that these deaths are going to happen.”

“But most scientists don’t agree with this,” said Neil. “I looked through IPCC reports and see no reference to billions of people going to die, or children in 20 years. How would they die?”

“Mass migration around the world already taking place due to prolonged drought in countries, particularly in South Asia. There are wildfires in Indonesia, the Amazon rainforest, Siberia, the Arctic,” she said.

But in saying so, the XR spokesperson had grossly misrepresented the science. “There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide,” notes IPCC, “but limited evidence that climate change or sea-level rise is the direct cause” 

What about “mass migration”? “The majority of resultant population movements tend to occur within the borders of affected countries," says IPCC.

It’s not like climate doesn’t matter. It’s that climate change is outweighed by other factors. Earlier this year, researchers found that climate “has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential.”

Last January, after climate scientists criticized Rep. Ocasio-Cortez for saying the world would end in 12 years, her spokesperson said "We can quibble about the phraseology, whether it's existential or cataclysmic.” He added, “We're seeing lots of [climate change-related] problems that are already impacting lives."

That last part may be true, but it’s also true that economic development has made us less vulnerable, which is why there was a 99.7% decline in the death toll from natural disasters since its peak in 1931. 

In 1931, 3.7 million people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did.  And that decline occurred over a period when the global population quadrupled.

What about sea level rise? IPCC estimates sea level could rise two feet (0.6 meters) by 2100. Does that sound apocalyptic or even “unmanageable”?

Consider that one-third of the Netherlands is below sea level, and some areas are seven meters below sea level. You might object that Netherlands is rich while Bangladesh is poor. But the Netherlands adapted to living below sea level 400 years ago. Technology has improved a bit since then.

What about claims of crop failure, famine, and mass death? That’s science fiction, not science. Humans today produce enough food for 10 billion people, or 25% more than we need, and scientific bodies predict increases in that share, not declines. 

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) forecasts crop yields increasing 30% by 2050. And the poorest parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa, are expected to see increases of 80 to 90%.

Nobody is suggesting climate change won’t negatively impact crop yields. It could. But such declines should be put in perspective. Wheat yields increased 100 to 300% around the world since the 1960s, while a study of 30 models found that yields would decline by 6% for every one degree Celsius increase in temperature.

Rates of future yield growth depend far more on whether poor nations get access to tractors, irrigation, and fertilizer than on climate change, says FAO.

All of this helps explain why IPCC anticipates climate change will have a modest impact on economic growth. By 2100, IPCC projects the global economy will be 300 to 500% larger than it is today. Both IPCC and the Nobel-winning Yale economist, William Nordhaus, predict that warming of 2.5°C and 4°C would reduce gross domestic product (GDP) by 2% and 5% over that same period.

What about the Koalas?

Does this mean we shouldn’t worry about climate change? Not at all. 

One of the reasons I work on climate change is because I worry about the impact it could have on endangered species. Climate change may threaten one million species globally and half of all mammals, reptiles, and amphibians in diverse places like the Albertine Rift in central Africa, home to the endangered mountain gorilla.

But it’s not the case that “we’re putting our own survival in danger” through extinctions, as Elizabeth Kolbert claimed in her book, Sixth Extinction. As tragic as animal extinctions are, they do not threaten human civilization. If we want to save endangered species, we need to do so because we care about wildlife for spiritual, ethical, or aesthetic reasons, not survival ones.  

And exaggerating the risk, and suggesting climate change is more important than things like habitat destruction, are counterproductive.

For example, Australia’s fires are not driving koalas extinct, as Bill McKibben suggested. The main scientific body that tracks the species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, labels the koala “vulnerable,” which is one level less threatened than “endangered,” two levels less than “critically endangered,” and three less than “extinct” in the wild. 

Should we worry about koalas? Absolutely! They are amazing animals and their numbers have declined to around 300,000. But they face far bigger threats such as the destruction of habitat, disease, bushfires, and invasive species. 

Think of it this way. The climate could change dramatically — and we could still save koalas. Conversely, the climate could change only modestly — and koalas could still go extinct. 

The monomaniacal focus on climate distracts our attention from other threats to koalas and opportunities for protecting them, like protecting and expanding their habitat.

As much as I love koalas, climate change distracts our focus from the real issues that are a million times more important. Issues like poverty and child sexual abuse. These issues are destroying a generation of children and that destruction often lasts a lifetime. If you want to do something worthwhile in your life, take on a issue that is genuinely evil, rather than wasting your time with this manufactured hysteria. It's amazing, that we are so overwhelmed with a problem that is quite manageable, and we pay so little attention to the worst atrocity humans have ever inflicted upon themselves.

Fires

As for fire, one of Australia’s leading scientists on the issue says, “Bushfire losses can be explained by the increasing exposure of dwellings to fire-prone bushlands. No other influences need be invoked. So even if climate change had played some small role in modulating recent bushfires, and we cannot rule this out, any such effects on risk to property are clearly swamped by the changes in exposure.”

Nor are the fires solely due to drought, which is common in Australia, and exceptional this year. “Climate change is playing its role here,” said Richard Thornton of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre in Australia, “but it's not the cause of these fires."

The same is true for fires in the United States. In 2017, scientists modeled 37 different regions and found “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.” Of the 10 variables that influence fire, “none were as significant… as the anthropogenic variables,” such as building homes near, and managing fires and wood fuel growth within, forests.

A very recent article suggests that the use of glyphosate in forest management may be making fires much worse. The theory is that glyphosate prevents deciduous trees from growing over harvested land, allowing only coniferous trees to grow. That's economically advantageous; except, forest fires often stop at the edge of a grove of deciduous trees. Without them, fires burn much more efficiently and therefore are far more dangerous and destructive. Consequently, fires get worse whether the climate is changing or not.

Scientists push back

Climate scientists are starting to push back against exaggerations by activists, journalists, and other scientists. 

“While many species are threatened with extinction,” said Stanford’s Ken Caldeira, “climate change does not threaten human extinction... I would not like to see us motivating people to do the right thing by making them believe something that is false.”

I asked the Australian climate scientist Tom Wigley what he thought of the claim that climate change threatens civilization. “It really does bother me because it’s wrong,” he said. “All these young people have been misinformed. And partly it’s Greta Thunberg’s fault. Not deliberately. But she’s wrong.”

But don’t scientists and activists need to exaggerate in order to get the public’s attention?

“I’m reminded of what [late Stanford University climate scientist] Steve Schneider used to say,” Wigley replied. “He used to say that as a scientist, we shouldn’t really be concerned about the way we slant things in communicating with people out on the street who might need a little push in a certain direction to realize that this is a serious problem. Steve didn’t have any qualms about speaking in that biased way. I don’t quite agree with that.”

Wigley started working on climate science full-time in 1975 and created one of the first climate models (MAGICC) in 1987. It remains one of the main climate models in use today.

“When I talk to the general public,” he said, “I point out some of the things that might make projections of warming less and the things that might make them more. I always try to present both sides.”

Which, of course, is unheard of in the media these days.

Part of what bothers me about the apocalyptic rhetoric by climate activists is that it is often accompanied by demands that poor nations be denied the cheap sources of energy they need to develop.

“If you want to minimize carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 2070  you might want to accelerate the burning of coal in India today,” MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel said. 

“It doesn’t sound like it makes sense. Coal is terrible for carbon. But it’s by burning a lot of coal that they make themselves wealthier, and by making themselves wealthier they have fewer children, and you don’t have as many people burning carbon, you might be better off in 2070.” 

Emanuel and Wigley say the extreme rhetoric is making political agreement on climate change harder. 

“You’ve got to come up with some kind of middle ground where you do reasonable things to mitigate the risk and try at the same time to lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient,” said Emanuel. “We shouldn’t be forced to choose between lifting people out of poverty and doing something for the climate.”

Happily, there is a plenty of middle ground between climate apocalypse and climate denial.

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and Green Book Award Winner. He is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Washington Post...

How America is Strangling the Canadian Oil Industry, and We're Helping Them

Anti-pipeline campaign was planned, intended, and foreign-funded: Vivian Krause

Great Bear Rainforest is the size of Ireland, to protect 100 bears. Krause says it's a trade barrier

Brian Zinchuk / Pipeline News

Weyburn Oil Show 2019 - Vivian Krause

Weyburn, Sk., – Vivian Krause has spent the better part of a decade, digging into foreign funding backing campaigns to block Canadian salmon farming, and then Canadian oil. She was one of the headline speakers at the Saskatchewan Oil and Gas Show on June 5.

Krause pointed out Texas’ oil production had more than doubled, and it is now exporting oil to 20 countries, but in Canada, there are protests against further oil and gas development.

“How is it that we got to this place? How is it that pipelines, of all things, are now a major election issue? We’re not talking about fentanyl, or drug prices,” she said. “What are we talking about? Pipelines? They used to be out of sight, out of mind. No one ever had a pub conversation, or dinner conversation, over pipelines. But now we do.

“This didn’t happen for no reason. It was planned. It was the intended outcome of a campaign, a campaign with a name,” Krause said, explaining she first stumbled on it eight years ago with three little words: “tar sands campaign.”

It started with fish

Originally working in the salmon farming industry, Krause first worked on discovering the roots to a campaign to discredit farmed salmon from British Columbia. She soon found commonality with that campaign with the one against the oilsands.

She dug into tax returns of charitable foundations in the United States. She first found efforts to shift people away from farmed salmon. Activists were “demarketing” farmed salmon, getting them to buy less, and they were being supported by these foundations. “Demarketing is done by instilling FUD, fear, uncertainty and doubt,” Krause said.

The fight against aquaculture, or farmed fish, was used to prop up the market for commercial fisheries, principally in Alaska, under a banner of sustainability.

These tactics would later be used against Canadian oil.

The organizations she found backing these efforts included the Tides Foundation, based in San Fransisco, and Tides Canada, based in Vancouver.

“It was in the course of this fish farming research that I found in the tax returns of the Tides Foundation an organization called Corporate Ethics got $700,000 one year for something called the tar sands campaign,” Krause said. She noted that the Tides Foundation took money from other donors and passed it along, so she sought out the origins of the money. “I found it, in the tax returns of the Rockefellers Brothers Fund.”

She noted that it was meant to stem demand for Canadian oil, the third time a resource-based industry had been targeted. First it was forestry, then aquaculture, and now oil.

Tar sands campaign

From 2007 to 2012, money poured into Corporate Ethics for the the coordination of the tar sands campaign. Then the Rockefellers Fund switched to the New Venture Fund, based in Washington, D.C.

“The interesting thing is the purpose for which the money was being provided. The grants database said the money was specifically to cap tar sands production in Alberta,” she said. And in 2015, the then-new NDP government in Alberta did exactly that.

The money kept coming for the tar sands campaign.

Another area of concern was a new park along the B.C. coast to protect the “Great Bear,” and became known as the “Great Bear Rainforest.”

She pointed to payments that had been made to Indigenous groups in opposition to pipelines. Others organized students and youth. For a while, much of the money went to opposition in the United States to the Keystone XL pipeline.

“Over the years, I’ve traced the funding of all these reports, all these stunts and celebrity appearances and many more, all these protests. Every single one of them is funded as part of the same campaign. I can’t find one single organization that’s not funded as part of the same campaign,” she said.

The CBC did a story on her efforts earlier this year. In that story, the Corporate Ethics webpage was highlighted, noting from the very beginning, the campaign strategy was to “to landlock the oilsands so the crude could not reach international markets.”

Days after that story aired, that verbiage was removed from the website or rewritten to talk about “educating voters.”

It took credit for delaying the Northern Gateway and Keystone XL projects. She added that 11 years ago, even the Mackenzie Valley pipeline was targeted.

“If we don’t respond differently to the activists against the current pipeline projects, that is, Line 3, Trans Mountain, Keystone, expect the same fate that happened against the Mackenzie Valley pipeline. It’s the same campaigners, the same money, the same funders. It stands to reason the results are going to be the same, unless there is a different response,” Krause said.

Living Oceans was another organization involved, and it was a key participant in the court challenge which stymied the Trans Mountain Expansion project last summer. She noted that $63,576 was spent in one year on the application to the Federal Court of Appeal. She said, “What this means is that that court ruling was brought about as part of a campaign to landlock Canadian crude, and keep Canada out of the oil market. Now, I’m not saying the judge was influenced by the money. I am saying that the application, the legal work that brought that application to the court, was partially funded as part of this campaign.”

Three organizations got $700,000 from the Tides Foundation, she said. The leading applicant of the court challenge was funded specifically to oppose and stop the Kinder Morgan pipeline project.

“What this means is that when the judge ruled that government needed to consult, and meaningfully, with the First Nation, what she was telling the government was that it was needing to consult with the very same First Nation that was getting funded to shut down the project. Of course, in the ruling, none of this was mentioned.”

Krause said she didn’t come across this until after the ruling came about.

“I can go through every single court ruling that has slowed down or stopped all the pipeline projects, and there isn’t one single court ruling that has been brought about, that has not been funded. Every single court action slowing down these pipeline projects is part of this campaign,” she said.

A small amount of money has been spent on door-to-door campaigns during elections, she asserted. Other money was spent to set up “fake grassroots campaigns” run from a private company run out of a treehouse office on Salt Spring Island, B.C.

The funding foundations, she said, are all members of an umbrella group called the “Consultative Group on Biological Diversity,” created in the late 1980s by the U.S. government, which still provides a very small amount of funding.

Large scale initiatives vary from protecting bears to another which includes two-thirds of Canada, half of which they want no “extractive industries,” no logging, roads, mining, hydro, oil or gas. Protecting large tracts of land, from the beginning, was about protecting the habitat of iconic species like caribue and grizzly. It was also about restricting oil and gas development in Canada, Krause said.

In the U.S., the initiative only affects states that don’t produce 95 per cent of America’s oil.

Great Bear Rainforest

Coming back to the Great Bear Rainforest, Krause said that was the basic premise of Bill C-48, the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act, which passed into law a few weeks after the presentation.

She noted there are about 100 blonde-coloured black bears, the Kermode Bear, in a small area. They are of spiritual significance to some First Nations people. The original idea was to protect those bears. But the area was expanded, from the northern tip of Vancouver Island, to Alaska.

(The British Columbia website for the Great Bear Rainforest notes it is the size of Ireland).

“Now we have this huge area that’s called the Great Bear Rainforest, but in most of it, there are no Great Bears,” Krause said. “Now we’re told we can’t have any tankers there. The bears don’t like it.”

“What started off as a good idea, a protection of the habitat of a special bear, that idea has morphed and become a great trade barrier. Something is being protected here, and it’s not the bear. It doesn’t even live in most of the area. What is being protected is the American monopoly on our oil, that is keeping our country over a barrel. That is what is being passionately protected,” she said to applause.

She noted that of the Moore Foundation (Gordon Moore co-founded Intel) has put $267 million into organizations operating in Canada, of which 90 per cent was for activism. Tides Canada got $83 million, and First Nations groups got a combined total of $58 million. 

She noted the Moore Foundation’s $267 million, $115 million went to developing four marine plans for the West Coast of British Columbia, which want no pipelines, no tankers, and no trade infrastructure for exporting energy products off the northern B.C. coast, in the name of protecting the Great Bear.

OPEN and SAFE

“What concerns me most is that this campaign hasn’t kept one barrel of oil in the ground,” Krause said. That oil is simply being produced by other countries.

She said the Online Progressive Engagement Network (OPEN), based in California, said they ended 2015 by moving the needle in the Canadian federal election and contributed greatly to the ousting of the Conservative Party of Canada as government. It is the parent organization of Leadnow, which was active in that election. She provided information about this to Elections Canada, but got nowhere.

All the various components of the anti-pipeline campaign trace back to 2003-04, not long after the beginning of the Iraq War and the California energy crisis Krause said. “These two events are really what triggered this group of California philanthropists to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get control of our global energy supply, our policy.’”

One of the organizations established at the time is Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), which was funded by some of the same foundations who funded the tar sands campaign. It is to protect American businesses from high and volatile oil prices.

In 2004, the Packard Foundation made a $15 million payment to start the Great Bear Rainforest. Another payment for $12 million were made to start the Canadian Boreal Initiative. 

“As I was studying the history of this, it was very clear to me that the same charitable foundations who wanted to get the West off Mideast oil. It was geopolitics, and it’s very clear in their explaining this,” she said. But she couldn’t explain the campaign against the Keystone XL pipeline.

But the 2013 strategy paper she found made it clear to her that not only did they want to get the West off Mideast oil, “They also wanted to discourage investment in Canada. And if you think about it, 10 years ago, we were the best place to invest. The goal was to turn us from the best to the worst. That wouldn’t have happened if Keystone had gone ahead. Part of the strategy was to make investors nervous.”

Harper-era Canadian Revenue Agency audits into related charities found 41 of 42 in non-compliance, and many got funding they weren’t supposed to get. “All these charity audits were put on hold in 2015,” she said. The law has since been changed and charities are now unlimited in this regard.

In summary, she said there were four motivations of the American funders. “They want more renewable energy. They want more energy efficiency, and they want more energy security. All of that is good stuff.

“But then they have this fourth objective, and that is to landlock our country and keep Canada out of world oil markets. And that’s where I think we have to say no. Because we all want to make the very best use of every barrel of oil that we need to burn. But as we go on this green transition, no country, least of all Canada, should be benched out of the oil market.”

She said she was encouraged by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, saying, “Finally, we have Canadian politicians with the courage to take on the Rockefellers. So I think we need to make sure we continue to support them, let them know they’re not alone in this fight. This is no small ordeal. It’s a huge, daunting challenge.”

Especially when the Prime Minister's good friend and former Principal Secretary, and one of the most powerful men in the country, was Gerald Butts, former CEO of WWF. He was involved in many of the projects listed above. 

There Used to be Nine Species of Human. What Happened to Them?

The disappearance of these other species resembles a mass extinction. But there’s no obvious environmental catastrophe, except for the rise of Homo Sapiens

There is a lot of imagination in anthropology. Take what you want from this, but remember, these theories will continue to evolve for some time.

The spread of modern humans out of Africa has caused a sixth mass extinction, a greater than 40,000-year event extending from the disappearance of Ice Age mammals to the destruction of rainforests by civilisation today.Getty Images

The Conversation

Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one. The Neanderthals, Homo Neanderthalensis, were stocky hunters adapted to Europe’s cold steppes. The related Denisovans inhabited Asia, while the more primitive Homo Erectus lived in Indonesia, and Homo Rhodesiensis in central Africa.

Several short, small-brained species survived alongside them: Homo Naledi in South Africa, Homo Luzonensis in the Philippines, Homo Floresiensis (“hobbits”) in Indonesia, and the mysterious Red Deer Cave People in China. Given how quickly we’re discovering new species, more are likely waiting to be found.

By 10,000 years ago, they were all gone. The disappearance of these other species resembles a mass extinction. But there’s no obvious environmental catastrophe – volcanic eruptions, climate change, asteroid impact – driving it. Instead, the extinctions’ timing suggests they were caused by the spread of a new species, evolving 260,000-350,000 years ago in Southern Africa: Homo sapiens.

Unless there was a global flood!

The spread of modern humans out of Africa has caused a sixth mass extinction, a greater than 40,000-year event extending from the disappearance of Ice Age mammals to the destruction of rainforests by civilisation today. 

But were other humans the first casualties?

We are a uniquely dangerous species. We hunted wooly mammoths, ground sloths and moas to extinction. We destroyed plains and forests for farming, modifying over half the planet’s land area. We altered the planet’s climate. But we are most dangerous to other human populations, because we compete for resources and land.

History is full of examples of people warring, displacing and wiping out other groups over territory, from Rome’s destruction of Carthage, to the American conquest of the West and the British colonisation of Australia. There have also been recent genocides and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Darfur and Myanmar. Like language or tool use, a capacity for and tendency to engage in genocide is arguably an intrinsic, instinctive part of human nature. There’s little reason to think that early Homo sapiens were less territorial, less violent, less intolerant – less human.

History is full of examples of people warring, displacing and wiping out other groups over territory

Optimists have painted early hunter-gatherers as peaceful, noble savages, and have argued that our culture, not our nature, creates violence. But field studies, historical accounts, and archaeology all show that war in primitive cultures was intense, pervasive and lethal. Neolithic weapons such as clubs, spears, axes and bows, combined with guerrilla tactics like raids and ambushes, were devastatingly effective. Violence was the leading cause of death among men in these societies, and wars saw higher casualty levels per person than World Wars I and II.

Old bones and artefacts show this violence is ancient. The 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man, from North America, has a spear point embedded in his pelvis. The 10,000-year-old Nataruk site in Kenya documents the brutal massacre of at least 27 men, women, and children.

It’s unlikely that the other human species were much more peaceful. The existence of cooperative violence in male chimps suggests that war predates the evolution of humans. Neanderthal skeletons show patterns of trauma consistent with warfare. But sophisticated weapons likely gave Homo sapiens a military advantage. The arsenal of early Homo sapiens probably included projectile weapons like javelins and spear-throwers, throwing sticks and clubs.

Complex tools and culture would also have helped us efficiently harvest a wider range of animals and plants, feeding larger tribes, and giving our species a strategic advantage in numbers.

The ultimate weapon

But cave paintings, carvings, and musical instruments hint at something far more dangerous: a sophisticated capacity for abstract thought and communication. The ability to cooperate, plan, strategise, manipulate and deceive may have been our ultimate weapon.

The incompleteness of the fossil record makes it hard to test these ideas. But in Europe, the only place with a relatively complete archaeological record, fossils show that within a few thousand years of our arrival , Neanderthals vanished. Traces of Neanderthal DNA in some Eurasian people prove we didn’t just replace them after they went extinct. We met, and we mated.

Elsewhere, DNA tells of other encounters with archaic humans. East Asian, Polynesian and Australian groups have DNA from Denisovans. DNA from another species, possibly Homo erectus, occurs in many Asian people. African genomes show traces of DNA from yet another archaic species. The fact that we interbred with these other species proves that they disappeared only after encountering us.

But why would our ancestors wipe out their relatives, causing a mass extinction – or, perhaps more accurately, a mass genocide?

The answer lies in population growth. Humans reproduce exponentially, like all species. Unchecked, we historically doubled our numbers every 25 years. And once humans became cooperative hunters, we had no predators. Without predation controlling our numbers, and little family planning beyond delayed marriage and infanticide, populations grew to exploit the available resources.

Further growth, or food shortages caused by drought, harsh winters or overharvesting resources would inevitably lead tribes into conflict over food and foraging territory. Warfare became a check on population growth, perhaps the most important one.

Our elimination of other species probably wasn’t a planned, coordinated effort of the sort practised by civilisations, but a war of attrition. The end result, however, was just as final. Raid by raid, ambush by ambush, valley by valley, modern humans would have worn down their enemies and taken their land.

Yet the extinction of Neanderthals, at least, took a long time – thousands of years. This was partly because early Homo sapiens lacked the advantages of later conquering civilisations: large numbers, supported by farming, and epidemic diseases like smallpox, flu, and measles that devastated their opponents. But while Neanderthals lost the war, to hold on so long they must have fought and won many battles against us, suggesting a level of intelligence close to our own.

Today we look up at the stars and wonder if we’re alone in the universe. In fantasy and science fiction, we wonder what it might be like to meet other intelligent species, like us, but not us. It’s profoundly sad to think that we once did, and now, because of it, they’re gone.

Nick Longrich, Senior Lecturer, Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Bath.

China Ramps up Coal-Fired Energy Production Nullifying Efforts to Reduce CO2

INNER MONGOLIA, CHINA - NOVEMBER 04: Smoke billows from a large steel plant as a Chinese labourer works

at an unauthorized steel factory, foreground, on November 4, 2016 in Inner Mongolia, China. To meet China's targets

to slash emissions of carbon dioxide, authorities are pushing to shut down privately owned …Kevin Frayer/Getty

JAMES DELINGPOLE

China is planning massively to ramp up its coal-fired energy production. This makes a nonsense of claims by gullible Western politicians and dishonest environmental activists that China is as keen as anyone to do its bit to ‘combat climate change.’

Bloomberg reports that China now has enough coal-fired power plants in the pipeline to match the entire capacity of the European Union, ‘driving the expansion in global coal power and confounding the movement against the polluting fossil fuel.’

It says:

The nation has almost 148 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity under active construction or likely to be resumed after being suspended, Global Energy Monitor, a non-profit group that tracks coal stations, said in the report Thursday based on plant-by-plant data. That’s almost equivalent to 150 gigawatts of existing coal fleet capacity in the EU and more than the combined 105 gigawatts under construction in the rest of the world, it said.

In contrast to many other countries, including the U.K.’s pledge to shut all coal plants by 2025, Beijing remains committed to coal as its biggest source of power, representing a major challenge to global emissions reduction targets. Its additions in the 18 months to June dwarf declines elsewhere in the world, according to the report.

None of this will come as the slightest surprise to climate realists. One of their main arguments against concerted government action by the West to decarbonise its economies is that it takes no account of emerging economies like India’s and, especially, China’s. Any attempts to cut carbon dioxide production in Western economies are more than offset by the growth in China’s CO2 output.

This was predicted in a report published last year by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

As the report’s author, Patricia Adams explained:

“The Chinese have spent a lot of money on renewables without results on anything like the scale required. So despite their continuing outward support for the green agenda, China is actually going all out for fossil fuels. The Communist Party’s grip on power depends on it.”

In his foreword to the paper, former U.S. Ambassador and U.S. special envoy to the UNFCCC Dr Harland Watson said:

“Many in the environmental community look to China to assume the role of global climate leader. But Patricia Adams questions China’s interest in assuming this role as the need for continued economic growth means securing new energy supplies will take priority over climate change concerns.”

The report was, of course, largely ignored by the mainstream media which prefers to listen to ‘experts’ like Nicholas Stern.

Only three years ago Nicholas Stern – amusingly billed by the Guardian as ‘an eminent climate economist’, even though his infamous ‘Stern Report’ has been widely discredited for its poor understanding of climate science and economics – was hailing China’s ‘Coal Peak’ as a ‘Turning point in the history of the world’.

The Guardian‘s July 2016 report began with a flourish:

The global battle against climate change has passed a historic turning point with China’s huge coal burning finally having peaked, according to senior economists.

They say the moment may well be a significant milestone in the course of the Anthropocene, the current era in which human activity dominates the world’s environment.

China is the world’s biggest polluter and more than tripled its coal burning from 2000 to 2013, emitting billions of tonnes of climate-warming carbon dioxide. But its coal consumption peaked in 2014, much earlier than expected, and then began falling.

According to ’eminent’ economist Stern, this was a key moment in the war on climate change:

“I think it is a real turning point,” said Lord Nicholas Stern, an eminent climate economist at the London School of Economics, who wrote the analysis with colleagues from Tsinghua University in Beijing. “I think historians really will see [the coal peak of] 2014 as a very important event in the history of the climate and economy of the world.”

Except, of course, that it wasn’t and it isn’t. China wants economic growth and feels under no obligation to kowtow to the green sky fairy invented by activists in the West to justify their fixation with renewable energy.

This tension between green aspirations and economic reality is only likely to intensify.

According to a separate report, produced by the Stockholm Environment Institute, growing fossil fuel output is likely to ‘swamp’ any attempts agreed by the Paris Climate Accord to limit global CO2 output.

 Oil, gas and coal output already planned or in the pipeline will overwhelm efforts to cap global warming at levels consistent with a liveable planet, the UN and leading research groups warned Wednesday […]

[…] “We show for the first time just how big the disconnect is between Paris temperature goals and countries’ plans and policies for coal, oil and gas production,” said lead author Michael Lazarus, director of the Stockholm Environment Institute’s US Center.

This “production gap”—between output in the pipeline and the Paris climate goals—is largest for coal, according the report, a joint project by the UN Environment Programme and four climate change research centres.

Countries plan to produce 150 percent more coal by 2030 than would be consistent with a 2C world, and 280 percent more than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5C.

Greta Thunberg can wag her little index finger all she likes. The global economy just isn’t listening.