Bon Jovi an elder statesman????

*Snicker*

He calls her "Mrs. C." And she calls on him to add a little celebrity gloss to her presidential campaign.

The rock singer Jon Bon Jovi and Hillary Rodham Clinton have been friends for more than a decade, uniting for state dinners at the White House and campaign fund-raisers.

If it seems strange that a rocker who sings paeans of working-class New Jersey is so friendly with a senator and former first lady who is using a Celine Dion song as the theme of her presidential campaign, consider a few items on Bon Jovi's social calendar in the last few months.

There were dinners with Clinton and another Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards. Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, her fiercest rival for the nomination, asked Bon Jovi to hear him speak in New York. And the former Vice President Al Gore caught up with him in London for a photo op.

Bon Jovi, 45, whose tousled golden mane and porcelain-white smile have twice helped him earn People magazine's award for sexiest rock star, can lay claim to an unofficial new title these days: the New Jersey's elder statesman.

In New Jersey, it is practically a requirement for any high-ranking politician to attend at least one of his shows. And despite his left-leaning political allegiances, Democrats and Republicans alike seek him out as if he were New Jersey's very own Bono.

He sings paeans of working-class New Jersey so that he can have Bruce Springsteens millions. Just because you sing about the working poor doesn't make you one of them.

And then there's this:

And as someone who sings about his "plastic dashboard Jesus" and performs at concerts to fight global warming, his appeal is broad.

[...]

The two were on a flight to Maryland for a day of horse racing at the Pimlico race course with some friends when someone asked them to compare occupations. "He said, 'Mr. President, which is better, your job or Jon's?' I said, 'I know the answer to that. Mine, because I get to keep the airplane and the house.' "

Hmmm...fighting global warming while bragging about owning airplanes -- there seems to be a disconnect there.

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Carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant

So, here is a study that goes against Al Gore, et al. What do you global warming enthusiasts do with this?

An inconvenient new peer-reviewed study published in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology.

Climate scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Alabama, and the University of Virginia report that observed patterns of temperature changes (‘fingerprints’) over the last thirty years are not in accord with what greenhouse models predict and can better be explained by natural factors, such as solar variability. Therefore, climate change is ‘unstoppable’ and cannot be affected or modified by controlling the emission of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, as is proposed in current legislation.

These results are in conflict with the conclusions of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and also with some recent research publications based on essentially the same data. However, they are supported by the results of the US-sponsored Climate Change Science Program (CCSP).

[...]

Co-author S. Fred Singer said: “The current warming trend is simply part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that has been seen in ice cores, deep-sea sediments, stalagmites, etc., and published in hundreds of papers in peer-reviewed journals. The mechanism for producing such cyclical climate changes is still under discussion; but they are most likely caused by variations in the solar wind and associated magnetic fields that affect the flux of cosmic rays incident on the earth’s atmosphere. In turn, such cosmic rays are believed to influence cloudiness and thereby control the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface and thus the climate.” Our research demonstrates that the ongoing rise of atmospheric CO2 has only a minor influence on climate change. We must conclude, therefore, that attempts to control CO2 emissions are ineffective and pointless. – but very costly.

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Gas-guzzling RC Hummer Monster Truck

Cool! I wonder what is it's carbon footprint? Maybe they'll start labeling products with their carbon footprint so consumers will know which product promotes the destruction of the planet.

I guess it's time to outlaw Christmas

The carbon footprint is too big:

A carbon footprint equivalent to 6,000 car journeys around the world will be produced by the UK tucking into Christmas dinner, researchers say.

It is claimed the UK's love of the traditional turkey dinner will generate 51,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

GoreHub.com

A Gore portal. Just in case you wanted a spot that contained all the latest happenings related to the savior of the world, Al Gore.

Save the environment, burn one less candle during Hanukkah

How about if Al Gore promises not to fly in a private jet during Hanukkah? That would certainly be enough, wouldn't it?

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won't need another miracle," said Liad Ortar, the campaign's cofounder, who runs the Arkada environmental consulting firm and the Ynet Web site's environmental forum. "Global warming is a milestone in human evolution that requires us to rethink how we live our lives, and one of the main paradigms of that is religion and how it fits into the current situation."

This sounds like a good idea as well:

"They should encourage people to light one less cigarette instead," Ravitz said.

So, how about it, smokers? Willing to give up your cigarettes for Hanukkah?

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It's snowing in November in NJ

I just looked out my window and saw snow! What the heck is it doing snowing in NJ before Thanksgiving? There are still leaves on the tree and we're getting snow? What's up with that? What happened to global warming?

"Nature should inspire us with awe, not pity"

Camille Paglia on global warming:

The recent horrific wildfires in California set off a gratuitous series of maunderings (from Jamie Lee Curtis to Thomas Friedman) about human culpability in global warming, the new liberal theology. Man is evil! Natural disasters are escalating! The world is coming to an end!

Good lord, were all these people in a coma through the gigantic storms like Hurricane Camille in 1969? The destruction wrought by that Category 5 storm is chronicled in Philip D. Hearn's book, "Hurricane Camille: Monster Storm of the Gulf Coast," published three years ago. With winds of 200 miles per hour, Camille devastated 26 miles of Mississippi's coastline and killed 170 people. The tidal surge reached 35 feet, while the barometric pressure approached an all-time low. One of my prized possessions is a poster torn from a London newsstand (I was traveling as a grad student in Europe): "HURRICANE CAMILLE WREAKS HAVOC!"

Hurricanes in the early 20th century were numerous and hugely destructive: For example, the 1926 Miami hurricane may have killed 800 people; the 1935 Florida Keys hurricane, a Category 5, killed more than 400 and was dramatized in the Humphrey Bogart film "Key Largo"; the Great New England hurricane of 1938 killed 600. The latter storm hit Long Island and the New England coastline with a 12- to 16-foot storm surge and catastrophically flooded downtown Providence, R.I. Among the large beachfront homes completely swept away was Katharine Hepburn's family house in Old Saybrook, Conn. Hepburn barely escaped with her life. All that was left was the bathtub and some family silver buried in the sand.

This facile attribution of climate change to human agency is an act of hubris. Good stewardship of the environment is an ethical imperative for every nation. But breast-beating hysteria merely betrays impious tunnel vision. Thousands of factors, minute and grand, are at work in cyclic climate change, whose long-term outcomes we cannot possibly predict. Nature should inspire us with awe, not pity.

Here column reads like a blog, she should start one :-) It would probably become my favorite.

Obnoxious Tween TV AD

This is the ad that I mentioned here. I think it's the most obnoxious ad I've seen in a while and if I really cared about getting a hybrid (I couldn't afford one because I'm not rich like the environmentalists) I wouldn't buy this one just because of it's ad.

Hybrid SUV Commercial
Uploaded by maxsilvestri

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Oh MY Gosh! Hybrids are the new status symbol for tweens?

How sick is that? I just saw a Ford commercial where the tween says she doesn't want her dad to drop her off because people in the part of town she is going to drive hybrids. Fortunately, he dad had one.

Jumping the Gun on Global Warming

"Every time I look around, it's in my face" are the lyrics to this catchy song from a few years ago that I keep singing in my head.

Might have nothing to do with global warming, per se, but it does seem apropos to me with how much attention global warming is getting these days.

My daughter was assigned to bring in two current event articles, her topic of choice: global warming. In my French class today, guess what we talked about? Global warming. What happened in the senate today? A Global warming bill advanced. It's everywhere!

Just about everyone has an opinion about this issue. My belief is that there may be signs that our planet has gotten warmer, marginally at best, but no one can prove it is man-made. Tsk, tsk me if you must, but that's my opinion.

And that's just it. All this global warming "science" is based on opinion or presumption, not fact.

Science cannot be based on a consensus it must be based on fact. I think we are jumping the gun on what we need to do about global warming.

I agree with The Anchoress' logic:

I think what’s happening is natural - it’s happened before - and only our generation is conceited enough to think that it’s all due to “us” or that “we” can do much about it. That’s not to say that conservation measures are not useful - they are, and I practice many of them in my life. But common sense says before we go off half cocked, creating laws and affecting governments and personal liberties, it behooves us to take a longer, closer, much more open-minded look at this thing and not simply submit to alarmism.

Let's also consider these words written in the WSJ by John R. Christy, one of the recipients of the Nobel prize. He is not convinced that the current global warming science proves much, yet:

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in thosewe-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .'"

I haven't seen that type of climate humility lately. Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.

I'm sure he won't popular with his scientist buddies, but his prudent and humble approach to global warming is really a breath of fresh air.

Whatever is decided to be done about global warming, it needs to be done judiciously and carefully. Going around like a bunch of Chicken Little's just won't help.

Al Gore: carbon neutrality for thee but not for me

Do you think that might be his answer for this?

As former Vice President Al Gore waits to hear if he has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless effort on climate change, a new video will air this weekend capturing Gore on a fuel-guzzling private jet!

RFK Jr. owns a bottled water company

How environmental is that? Maybe we should boycott him.

An environmental group shares Crow's TP concern

I thought it was a joke?

BTW, maybe our consumption is so high because of culture and availability. Do you think anyone in India is consciously saving TP out of environmental concerns?

If anyone had hopes that the new UN Secretary General would be and improvement over Annan

They certainly were dashed by this comment:

"The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," Ban said in a Washington Post opinion column.

UN statistics showed that rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades, he said, as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons.

"This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming," the South Korean diplomat wrote.

"It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought," Ban said in the Washington daily.

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If the UN is going to do something about the conflict, wouldn't it be helpful for them to understand it?

Tags: UN, Ban Ki-moon

Earth in the balance? Then why are you driving an SUV?

Pictures of the parking lot at an Al Gore appearance (scroll down).

Tags: Al Gore

Al Gore has lost his love of politics

This is a good thing! Al Gore struck me as someone who felt he was entitled to the White House. It's good to move on and do other things (even if those other things mean you harass others into altering their life style while you continue doing whatever you want to do):

Former U.S. vice president Al Gore says he has "fallen out of love with politics" and does not want to run for president although he has not ruled it out completely.

"If I do my job right, all the candidates will be talking about the climate crisis," Gore said in an interview with Time Magazine released on Thursday.

"And I'm not convinced the presidency is the highest and best role I could play."

I wonder what the draft Al Gore movement thinks of this. Is it the final word or is he still considering a run? There is a pretty strong desire to draft Al Gore since some in the party think Clinton is the devil and Obama is too inexperienced.

But the most interesting part of the article was this stunning admission:

The Time article also includes an excerpt from Gore's new book, "The Assault on Reason," in which he writes: "It is too easy and too partisan to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush.

"We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Why have they all failed us? ... American democracy is now in danger not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die."

As far as the left is concerned it's blaspheme to say that Bush isn't the blame for something. He's the reason for everything that is evil in the world.

Tags: Al Gore

Children contribute to global warming

Having large families impacts the environment, so couples should only have two children. Right now it's only a suggestion but eventually you know that the politicians will get involved and ban the activity that they believe is causing global warming. Once they do, choice will be out the window and it won't be "a women's body is sacred and you can't tell her what to do with it." There will be forced abortions as they do in China. But the rich won't be affected by this because they'll just buy their way out as they do in China. Think I'm exaggerating and it won't get to this? Maybe, but they're starting with the light bulb (and here and here), what's next?

HAVING large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.

The paper by the Optimum Population Trust will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family's carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.

John Guillebaud, co-chairman of OPT and emeritus professor of family planning at University College London, said: "The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights.

"The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child."

[...]

"The decision to have children should be seen as a very big one and one that should take the environment into account," he added.

Professor Guillebaud says that, as a general guideline, couples should produce no more than two offspring.

When do you think they'll realize that the problem isn't that we are having too many babies, it's that we're living too long. What do you think their solution will be then? Voluntary suicide of the elder? Assisted suicide?

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None of these candidates better run as the Green candidate

Creating quite the carbon footprint, aren't they?

A flock of small jets took flight from Washington Thursday, each carrying a Democratic presidential candidate to South Carolina for the first debate of the political season.

For Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, it was wheels up shortly after they voted in favor of legislation requiring that U.S. troops begin returning home from Iraq in the fall.

No one jet pooled, no one took commercial flights to save money, fuel or emissions.

All but Biden, who flew on a private jet, chartered their flights -- a campaign expense of between $7,500 and $9,000.

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Carbon Offset Fraud

I'm shocked by this! Shocked I tell you:

Companies and individuals rushing to go green have been spending millions on “carbon credit” projects that yield few if any environmental benefits.

A Financial Times investigation has uncovered widespread failings in the new markets for greenhouse gases, suggesting some organisations are paying for emissions reductions that do not take place.

Others are meanwhile making big profits from carbon trading for very small expenditure and in some cases for clean-ups that they would have made anyway.

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Tags: fraud