Archive for December 29, 2011

Background of the Hockey Stick and Climategate controversies

Dec 29th

Posted by admin in Global Warming

I think you will find this article very interesting.
Sky

 

Michael Mann, hounded researcher

 

http://www.skepticalscience.com/MichaelMann.html

 

Posted on 30 December 2011 by Andy S

 

“Here is a translation of  recent article (December 25th, 2011) in the French newspaper Le Monde by science journalist  Stéphane Foucart. He reports on a talk that Michael Mann gave at the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco, in which Mann introduces his forthcoming book  The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Foucart interviews Mann and discusses the background of the Hockey Stick and Climategate controversies. What is refreshing is the absence of the false balance, both-sides-of-the-story, style of reporting that is found so often in English language newspapers. ”

 

“Those who attack us have won in the sense that they have succeeded in delaying any action on global warming by ten, twenty, maybe thirty years,” he concedes with worry as he sees his country succumbing to anti-science. “Denying either anthropogenic climate change or evolution has become a condition of admission to the Republican Party. That’s something quite new and very scary”.

 

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Restoring European Growth

Dec 29th

Posted by admin in Obscene Wealth

Restoring European Growth

http://www.nationofchange.org/restoring-european-growth-1325085064

 

“Despite the new agreement reached at the European Union’s summit in December, strengthening financial markets’ confidence in the eurozone remains an elusive goal. In the aftermath of the summit, the euro’s exchange rate sank to its lowest level of the year (around $1.30), while yields on Italian five-year bonds hit a new high (almost 6.5%). InFrance, Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande flatly declared that the latest agreement ‘is not the right answer,” because “without economic growth we will achieve none of the targets on deficit reduction.’”

 

I get very confused with the financial opinions I read.  For instance, unlimited economic growth is an oxymoron, an apparition, a concept with no physical reality or one might say impossible when the necessary materials are finite.  Don’t I have this right?  If so, then how can economic growth be the answer to being broke?  On a more personal level, in the past when I have been broke, I had to stop spending on everything but the essentials to maintain a roof over my head, food and taxes.  It seems to me that with so many people in so many countries, gain with no pain has become a kind of birthright.  Again, getting personal here, I, along with my employers, contributed for all my working life; this is thousands of American dollars, to a pension fund.  Gainfully invested, this fund would have become immense.  But no, the American government spent it as fast as I contributed it.  Now, I am looked at as THE problem.  Hold on, I didn’t spend it and wasn’t given a choice as to where to invest it. 

 

When a business borrows more than it can pay back, it goes out of business; the investors lose their investment and the managers lose their jobs.  But actually, what we have seen in the last two or three years [perhaps since the dawn of civilization] is a rich upper management letting their greed get ridiculously out of hand and forcing governments to pass the costs down to the poor who have no power to refuse. They talk of losses, well the money went somewhere and it certainly was not distributed to the middle and lower economic classes was it?  How about Forbes list of billionaires. (2011) There are 1,210 names in this year’s list.

“Mega bank Credit Suisse uses a different definition, however, denoting anyone whose net assets exceed $1 million a millionaire. In those terms, there are 24.2 million millionaires on the planet – about 0.5% of the world’s adult population, or more than the entire population ofAustralia. [22,328,800 – 2010] 41% of them live in the U.S., 10% in Japan and 3% inChina.”

Let’s see now, there are 1,000 millions in an American billion.  So that means the number of billionaires [1,200] is equivalent to 1,200,000 more millionaires in the world.  So we have then, 25.4 million millionaires in the world. 

Here in Hartland, Devon, where I live, the Torridge District Council has decided that instead of supplying a portable tip 4 times a year, we all have to drive 50 miles round trip to the tip or pay out a steep fee to hire somebody else if we don’t run a car.  They say they are saving money.  Who’s money?  Who’s pollution?  Who’s petrol costs? 

Who’s lost their mind here? 

 

Additional Facts:

 

“Inequality, in all its repugnance, has become deeper and more entrenched. Today the richest 2% of adult individuals own more than half of global wealth, with the richest 1% accounting for 40% of total global assets. Although the gap in per capita income between the richest and poorest regions of the world fell from 15:1 to 13:1during the golden age of Keynesianism, it increased by 19:1 by 2002. And from 1970 to 2009 the per capita GDP of developing countries (excludingChina) averaged a mere 6.3% of the per capita GDP of the G8 countries (theUnited States,Japan,Germany,France, theUnited Kingdom,Italy,Canada, andRussia).”

This article was published at NationofChange at: http://www.nationofchange.org/wal-mart-larger-norway-exposing-myth-capital-competition-1322835390