The Problem With Dirt...

I've said before... the man made global warming hoax is causeing people to miss the real environmental problems that are out there.

This article is about one of them. Some people scoff at this idea, but it is a problem, and getting worse.

"Globally, it's clear we are eroding soils at a rate much faster than they can form," said John Reganold, a soils scientist at Washington State University. "It's hard to get people to pay much attention to this because, frankly, most of us take soil for granted."

The National Academy of Sciences has determined that cropland in the U.S. is being eroded at least 10 times faster than the time it takes for lost soil to be replaced.

The United Nations has warned of worldwide soil degradation -- especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where soil loss has contributed to the rapidly increasing number of malnourished people.

Healthy topsoil is a biological matrix, a housing complex for an incredibly diverse community of organisms -- billions of beneficial microbes per handful, nitrogen-fixing fungi, nutrients and earthworms whose digestive tracts transform the fine grains of sterile rock and plant detritus into the fertile excrement that gave rise to the word itself ("drit," in Old Norse).

As such, true living topsoil cannot be made overnight, Montgomery emphasized. Topsoil grows back at a rate of an inch or two over hundreds of years. Very slowly.

There are many problems like this, that go unnoticed, such as overfishing, over irrigation (and under irrigation, both of which contribute to loss of topsoil and loss of good farmland) over deforestation, problems with strip mining and the cleanup that often doesn't happen, over population in some areas (causing problems with water supply and putting more stress on the land) problems with recycling, issues with introduction of non native species that wreak havoc on native plants and animals, and some climate change (which is sometimes caused by combinations of all those factors). There are also a lot of human problems, such as disease, genocide and starvation that are directly attributable to some of those environmental issues.

I would encourage you to read "Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed" by Dr. Jared Diamond to find out more, and to see what you can do.

We need to be good stewards of the earth God gave us.

Yet Another Exhibit In The Case AGAINST Man Made Global Warming...

File this as another exhibit against man made global warming...

"Stock up on fur coats and felt boots!" advises Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and senior scientist at Moscow's Shirshov Institute of Oceanography. "The latest data . . . say that earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012."

Sorokhtin dismisses the conventional global warming theory that greenhouse gases, especially human-emitted carbon dioxide, is causing the earth to grow hotter. Like a number of other scientists, he points to solar activity - sunspots and solar flares, which wax and wane over time - as having the greatest effect on climate.

"Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change," Sorokhtin writes in an essay for Novosti. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind." In a recent paper for the Danish National Space Center, physicists Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen concur: "The sun . . . appears to be the main forcing agent in global climate change," they write.

Given the number of worldwide cold events, it is no surprise that 2007 didn't turn out to be the warmest ever. In fact, 2007's global temperature was essentially the same as that in 2006 - and 2005, and 2004, and every year back to 2001. The record set in 1998 has not been surpassed. For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric carbon dioxide continues to accumulate - it's up about 4 percent since 1998 - the global mean temperature has remained flat. That raises some obvious questions about the theory that CO2 is the cause of climate change.

Běh Vaclav!

The Czech's have almost always been overrun by someone, be it the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Soviet Union. This has caused them to become writers, poets, musicians and such like, rather than warriors like their neighbors. It has also caused them to question authority and accepted belief and to search for truth. People like Jan Hus and Vaclav Havel are examples of this, and there are many others.

Well, add another name. Vaclav Klaus is saying it like it is on global warming. I found this quote particularly good...

The approach of environmentalists toward nature is similar to the Marxist approach to economic rules, because they also try to replace free spontaneity of the evolution of the world (and of mankind) with ... global planning of the world's development," Klaus writes in his book.

"That approach ... is a utopia leading to completely other than wanted results."

I think I'll pick up his book sometime...

The People's Cube

The People's Cube (a satire website/blog) has up several new stories, and interesting takes on other stories:)

Also, I would like to point out that I had the same idea about the similarity between "carbon credits" and indulgences:D

Post Oscars

Okay... typical Oscar night. Alot of preening, self congratulations by the Hollywood community. Posing, positioning... kind of gross actually. Oh well.

I was actually pretty right about my predictions though! I was thrown a curve by two awards. Best Foreign Language didn't go to Pan's Labyrinth, a film I thought was worthy of Best Picture. And, in the only break from the SAG awards... Alan Arkin won Best Supporting Actor for Little Miss Sunshine. I really like him ever since I saw his film debut in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming was nominated for and Oscar, and he was GREAT in that. Poor Eddie Murphy. Oh well. I was right on all the others:D

Scorcese has an Oscar! Whoo hoo! Very happy for him.

And I just want to say, Ellen should't be asked again. It was mildly funny, but she just didn't seem right. Some stuff was quite good, but her opening and some of the other jokes and things fell flat. Jerry Seinfeld was awesome though:) Wish he would be the host...

Oh, and no matter what anyone says, Al Gore didn't win an Oscar. Davis Guggenheim won. Yes, it was Al Gore's film, but he didn't produce it. But I do have to admit. Al Gore was very funny, relaxed and comfortable last night. He would have been president if he had been that way in 2000.

Okay. That's all I have to say on that subject. You can read more about it in this very good article by Brian Lowry (in Variety). He sums up the evening well:)

Hooray for Czech!

The Czech's, being under the political power of somebody for pretty much their entire existence, tend to be very willing to speak the truth and challenge the prevailing authority. That is what allowed them to finally overcome the Soviet Union. They are a very tough people, it takes alot to break them

No exception here! Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic, came out and said it like it is. Speaking about the UN global warming panel, he said,

"These are politicized scientists who arrive there with one-sided opinion and assignment," he told interviewers.

According to the Czech president, "each serious person and scientist" says that global warming is a myth.

Way to go! 90% certainty is not science.

You can read another interesting article posted by my friends at Mod-Blog on another reason to at least be very skeptical of man made global warming claims.