Rats Rule

Draconian eco-measures in the UK, driven by global warming hysteria in the EU. Is this the future here? Lionel Shriver, WSJ:

Pressed to meet European Union targets for reducing landfill volume, many local councils now collect refuse only once every two weeks. As flies and vermin gather while food scraps achieve a fine perfume, residents have grown so enraged that bin-men are under repeated physical attack. [snip]

Halving the frequency of waste removal conveniently saves money. A host of other new "green" measures in the U.K. will make money: $200 fines for poorly separated recycling, or microchips implanted in wheelie bins to weigh residential refuse -- dragging Britain's surveillance culture to a new low, and facilitating charges for waste disposal by the kilo. Furious that they are already paying once for this service through local taxes, some householders have ripped the microchips from their bins.

The premier example of having to pay twice for the same dispensation, all under the guise of environmentalism, is the British government's proposal to bring in "road pricing," unveiled last December. This literal highway robbery would charge motorists up to $2.56 per mile to drive on roads whose construction they had paid for to begin with. Announcement of the scheme stirred the complacent, slow-to-anger British public to circulate an Internet protest petition that secured 1.8 million signatures.

Mark Steyn on the selective civil libertarian outrage on the Left and some implications for human progress.

Will rats rule?

(I would put up a pix of rats but I can't make myself do it.)

Meanwhile, contrarian observations are piling up on global warming being man-made. In addition to the not man-made Mars ice melt, others planets are melting as well. A very informative piece by Tom Bethell "Global Warming in Space" in the May issue of the American Spectator (print edition). Here's a key phrase that explains why this issue has become so easily politicized:

"Climatology is a generalist discipline in an age of specialists". Here's a key paragraph: A new book, Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future, notes the failure of mathematical models to predict changes in coastal geology. The modelers too freely apply fixed values to quantities that vary all the time, the authors say. If they didn't, their equations would become excessively complex, they wouldn't be able to predict much of anything, and they wouldn't attract media attention.

Rats!

UPDATE: He was the first director of Sen. Earth Day Gaylord Nelson's (D-WI) Institute of Environmental Studies at the UW, established back in the 70's (I was a Senate intern in Nelson's office in the summer of '74). Before that, Dr. Reid A. Bryson, now 86, founded the Meteorology Dept. at UW, now the Dept. of Oceanic and Atmospheric Science. Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News:

Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.

“I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News.

In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional wisdom.

“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”

“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

We're just getting back to the norms of when Greenland was Greenland. And this:

Q: Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?

A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.