RUTHFULLY YOURS

The IPCC’s call to phase out fossil fuels is economic nonsense and ‘morally outrageous’ for the developing world

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which published on Friday the first instalment of its latest report, is a deeply discredited organisation. Presenting itself as the voice of science on this important issue, it is a politically motivated pressure group that brings the good name of science into disrepute.

Its previous report, in 2007, was so grotesquely flawed that the leading scientific body in the United States, the InterAcademy Council, decided that an investigation was warranted. The IAC duly reported in 2010, and concluded that there were “significant shortcomings in each major step of [the] IPCC’s assessment process”, and that “significant improvements” were needed. It also chastised the IPCC for claiming to have “high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence”.

Since then, little seems to have changed, and the latest report is flawed like its predecessor.

Perhaps this is not so surprising. A detailed examination of the 2007 report found that two thirds of its chapters included among its authors people with links to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and there were many others with links to other ‘green’ activist groups, such as Greenpeace.

In passing, it is worth observing that what these so-called green groups, and far too many of the commentators who follow them, wrongly describe as ‘pollution’ is, in fact, the ultimate in green: namely, carbon dioxide – a colourless and odourless gas, which promotes plant life and vegetation of all kinds; indeed, they could not survive without it. It is an established scientific fact that, over the past 20 years, the earth has become greener, largely thanks to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Be that as it may, as long ago as 2009, the IPCC chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri – who is a railway engineer and economist by training, not a scientist, let alone a climate scientist – predicted that “when the IPCC’s fifth assessment comes out in 2013 or 2014, there will be a major revival of interest in action that has to be taken. People are going to say: ‘My God, we are going to have to take action much faster than we had planned.’” This was well before the scientific investigation on which the latest report is allegedly based had even begun. So much for the scientific method.

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/historic-visit-italian-minister-culture-and-tourism-hebron-david-wilder

Italian Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mr. Massimo Bray, hosted by Tiph in Hebron, walked near Beit Hadassah, where he was met and greeted by David Wilder, spokesman for Hebron’s Jewish Community. Following brief introductions, the minister toured the Hebron Heritage Museum and visited the community’s dav-care center. The visit was very positive. It was suggested that perhaps an Italian-sponsored project, spearheaded by the minister, could try and bridge the gap between Arabs and Jews in Hebron. The project could deal with common culture between both Arabs and Jews.

Hebron’s Jewish community welcomes such visits and hopes that other international leaders, particularly those from the EU, will follow in Minister Bray’s footsteps, following his example, and meet with Hebron community leaders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsDeaNjkWl8&feature=player_embedded#t=0

This week there was a milestone announcement that some may have missed. Half of Israel’s electricity now comes from natural gas – mainly from the new Tamar offshore gas field. As if to mark the occasion, last week was ablaze with news of energetic Israelis and their innovations and achievements.
Coinciding with the landmark natural gas highlight, Israel Corporation subsidiary IC Green Energy inaugurated a facility in New Jersey to produce gasoline from natural gas. The plant can produce up to 100,000 gallons (440,000 liters) of gasoline a year. Automobiles will be able to use the lower cost, less emissions fuel without any modifications.
Staying in the US, Ebay has brought in Israel’s Ormat Technologies to build a 5MW Recoverable Energy Generator (REG) for its Utah data center. REGs turn waste energy from industrial processes into usable electrical power. Ormat already recovers 160 megawatts in the USA and 595 MW worldwide.

Turning to individuals, Israel’s Miss Israel beauty queen, 22-year-old Ethiopian-born Yityish Aynaw, certainly energized the citizens of Los Angeles, where she was a guest of Christian preacher Ronald V. Myers. Rev Myers said that everyone should know what Israel did to rescue Ethiopian Jews. Over in Amsterdam, a 19-year-old Israeli, Shahar Shenhar, used the “magical” energy of his playing cards to become 2013 world champion at Magic: The Gathering. MtG is as popular as chess among young intellectuals.

When there is too much energy, Israel’s fire scouts are on hand to help put out the flames. About 1,500 Israeli teens (often from problem homes) learn to operate fire trucks, ladders and hoses, plus rescue techniques and types of fires. Their skills have saved lives directly, including two 18-month-old babies rescued from a burning apartment. Energetic kids also need safeguarding, so you may wish to consider the Israeli Foxiwatch to keep a watch on them. The Foxiwatch has GPS, a mobile phone and an emergency contact button.

For those who need more sophisticated monitoring of their energy levels and other physiological readings, Israel’s Elfi Tech monitors your pulse rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, blood flow and much more, non-invasively at any time with the help of a sensor smaller than a dime. It has just been selected as a finalist of the Nokia Sensing XChallenge.

  http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4011/abbas-fatah What has been happening in Fatah lately is more than differences of opinion among the faction’s top brass. A series of incidents over the past few weeks indicate that the Palestinian Fatah faction, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, is witnessing a sharp power struggle between some of its top leaders. The infighting in Fatah […]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4004/islamophobia-dictionaries In Denmark, construction crews raised the first-ever minaret on September 3 that will alter Copenhagen’s low-rise skyline in a colossal project to build the biggest mega-mosque in Scandinavia. The so-called Grand Mosque was made possible through a grant of 150 million kroner ($26 million) from Qatar. This gift has led critics voice concern that […]

http://www.city-journal.org/2013/eon1007mm.html#.UlQOTi4PsR4.email Contra Bill de Blasio, the real divide is between those who pay taxes and those who live off them. As its very name suggests, mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s tale of two cities is pure fiction, a myth that formed the intellectual basis of leftist politics long before Marx turned it into “science.” Its […]

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5913 The largest funeral in the history of the state of Israel took place on Monday evening in Jerusalem. More than 700,000 mourners attended the procession of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef to the Sanhedria cemetery, causing virtually the entire city to shut down. Anticipating the mob scene and potential public safety risk, police spent the hours […]

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/10/why-bother-being-jewish.php?pf=yes Why should American Jews bother to be Jewish? According to a new Pew Research Center survey of the American Jewish community, more and more American Jews have reached the conclusion that there is no reason to be Jewish. Outside of the Orthodox Jewish community, intermarriage rates have reached 71 percent. Thirty-two percent of Jews […]

The giant scissors of destiny are clicking and clacking their way to our national credit card. If we don’t raise the debt limit, so we can borrow more money to pay the interest on the money we borrowed before, the scissors will snip and snap like economic armageddon.

And then the big shiny credit card that pays for everything gets cut up in two pieces. But never fear. If worst comes to worst, we still have options.

Our government is big. Really big. So big that the nearly 3 million government employees should be their own state.

The population of government employees is already larger than the populations of Rhode Island, Wyoming, Delaware, Alaska, Montana, North and South Dakota, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska and New Mexico. It’s so big that if government employees formed their own state, it would be the 36th largest state in the union.

So why not go for it?

Call it Bureaucratia, its state flag will be a stapler on a manilla background, its nickname will be ‘The Inaction State’, its state bird will be the Ostrich, its state flower will be made of plastic and its entire population will spend all their time in committee meetings to determine a suitably inoffensive state motto, pending that its motto will be, “I’m On Break”.

Under this arrangement, all government employees would be folded into a single state with two senators and the correct number of congressmen, and no more clout than that. And the other 50 states will finally have senators and congressmen working to create jobs for them, instead of jobs for government workers.

http://www.jpost.com/Experts/Now-Irans-nuclear-program-should-glow-menacingly-328139

We may have good reason to doubt that Mutual Assured Destruction could work as well in the Middle East, as it did during the Cold War.

Unhindered by the flagrantly contrived diplomacy launched recently in Washington, Tehran now marches unhindered to full nuclear weapons status. When this condition is finally achieved, any American rapprochement with new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani notwithstanding, Israel and the United States will desperately try to contain a long-anticipated atomic menace. Asymmetrically-sized, but more-or-less jointly imperiled, the two allied states will then seek to identify still-available remedies.

In essence, this compensatory default position will center on instituting a dependably stable system of nuclear deterrence.

To be sure, any such residual effort by Washington and Jerusalem would be well-intentioned and indispensable. After all, to avoid a possible future of near-measureless lamentations, these allies would need to reconstruct certain earlier core elements of “Mutual Assured Destruction.” MAD, of course, was the nuclear threat-based scheme that had successfully preserved superpower peace during the US-Soviet Cold War.

Moreover, already back in 1995, David Ivry, then director-general of the Ministry of Defense (later, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States), had openly referred to MAD “as a model for Israel.”