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Whatcom County destroys the environment in order to save it

4/23/2013

Freedom Foundation Liberty Blog
by Glen Morgan
April 23, 2013

In 1968, during the Vietnam War, AP Correspondent Peter Arnett attributed a quote from an American Army Major after the destruction of the Vietnamese Village Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” This quote, which is still controversial, was repeated frequently by the anti-war protesters as an illustration of the lack of logic in the Vietnam conflict.

Today, this is also official policy and business as usual at Whatcom County as they require property owners to destroy wildlife habitat and wetlands in order to save the wildlife and wetlands. Last Friday I visited with a property owner – Joe Remenar in North Whatcom County near Blaine. Not far from the Martin property which I discussed in this post a few weeks ago.

Joe retired from the Department of Justice as a former special agent working with drug interdiction who had done overseas tours in places like Afghanistan. He purchased a small property and home not far from the Canadian border in Whatcom County. Enjoying the views out his back deck, he decided to improve the wildlife habitat on his property. He didn’t apply for a grant or take taxpayer dollars, he just spent his own time and money to improve the habitat for the birds, amphibians, insects, and other critters by building a pond. He was careful in his pond construction. He did not interrupt the flow of a stream (also known as an “instream flow” violation). The State Fish and Wildlife biologists reported that his pond was a clear and obvious wildlife enhancement project.

He was justifiably proud of his accomplishment and it changed a field with little habitat into a pond with nesting geese, feeding grounds for great blue herons, and other wildlife in the area. However, he made one crucial mistake – he did not get permission from the Central Planners at Whatcom County. For this crime against bureaucracy, he was going to be punished. As further proof that the Nanny State isn’t just a thorn in everyone’s side, but it is also a thoughtless, rapacious beast – the geniuses at Whatcom County led by Whatcom County’s lead Central Planner – Lyn Morgan-Hill (no relation to the author), demand that Mr. Remenar must destroy the pond and wildlife habitat in order to save the wildlife habitat. This was the solution only a dedicated Central Planner could invent and justify. Just to be clear, of course – Mr. Remenar would also have to pay one of the “preferred” consultants approved by Whatcom County to create the plan on how to fill in the pond.

Like most people, Mr. Remenar doesn’t want to destroy the wildlife habitat on his property. He wants to save it, but the Central Planning mindset at Whatcom County has only one plan, and Whatcom County’s plan is not required to make sense. The faux environmentalists who attack property owners like Mr. Remenar never have to say they are sorry or even have a rational reason for their actions. They just inflict harm on property owners like Mr. Remenar and care little about the consequences. To Central Planners like Lyn Morgan-Hill, it makes sense to destroy the environment in order to save it.

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Another Earth Day, and Comrades it's a Cooler One

4/22/2013

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Last year WE posted a bit o' history about Earth Day that's worth revisiting.

That post included an article that described the heavy environmental guilt-trip being laid on children without remorse. Read it again, and watch the accompanying short video, Green Washing a Young Mind (below)

Earth Day's message: Eliminate humans
by Brian Sussman, April 22, 2012

Yesterday I took a video crew to the Earth Day Festival in Santa Cruz, California. I chose this location because this city is known for being a model of greenness, and even maintains Department of Climate Change, complete with a director making $250,000 per year.

The question I posed in my man-on-the street-interviews was, “What is the greatest threat confronting mankind?”

In almost every interview, I was told the greatest threat was the human species.

Most troubling was an interview with a 12-year old girl who said she had been taught in school that global warming was real, that there were too many people on the planet, and that she occasionally thinks it might be best to end her own life to do her part to save the planet.

Her mom stood next to her, proudly looking on.

This is an example of what I write about in chapter six of Eco-Tyranny, entitled “Green Gospel.” What this girl has been taught is nothing less than green-child abuse. " (continue)

Here's the video Sussman described ... "Green Washing a Young Mind"

While kids are subjected to a steady diet of dire predictions in schools, there's growing evidence that CO2 greenhouse gas correlations may be significantly wrong, and the planet's condition may even be greening. But don't expect to get much honesty about that in Washington State, from our local governments, or in the press. The crisis scenario is too lucrative to abandon.

'Lest you think WE make this up, check out this Reuters story published just last week in Norway:

Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown
(Reuters) - OSLO, April 16, 2013

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.

Getting this right is essential for the short and long-term planning of governments and businesses ranging from energy to construction, from agriculture to insurance. Many scientists say they expect a revival of warming in coming years.

Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.

The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.

Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments' willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the end of 2015 to combat global warming.

"The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought," said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" who estimates that moderate warming will be beneficial for crop growth and human health.

Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to correct a 2007 report that exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers and wrongly said they could all vanish by 2035.

"My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years," said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.

Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first showed in the 1890s how man-made carbon dioxide, from coal for instance, traps heat in the atmosphere. Many of the exact effects are still unknown.

Greenhouse gas emissions have hit repeated record highs with annual growth of about 3 percent in most of the decade to 2010, partly powered by rises in China and India. World emissions were 75 percent higher in 2010 than in 1970, UN data show." (more)

The article goes on to say that even though anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change models driven by CO2 increases don't seem to be working very well, the IPCC will probably adjust its predictions and carry on anyway. No surprise there.

May the sane among you, and your little ones, make it through Earth Day without suffering pangs of guilt for living.

ADULT EXTRA - If you can bear a few F-bombs (bless his heart, you know George Carlin) watch this too...

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Can trees grow without Central Planning?

4/17/2013

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Update: Glen led a "Freedom Academy" event at the Rome Grange on Mt. Baker Highway April 20th, attended by over 50 folks. Freedom Foundation encourages the public to learn about civics and become directly involved in local government "because people want to be free." (Well, most folks do. Some take juvenile pride in mocking liberty. )

April 17, 2013
Glen Morgan, Property Rights Director
Freedom Foundation, Citizens Action Network blog

How many government employees does it take to plant a tree?

It sounds like an old joke (the answer starts at five and grows from there), but it is a real question some of us have asked when we see the expansion of “Tree Ordinances” in local jurisdictions in Washington State. The City of Tukwila, for example, is exploring a tree ordinance consisting of many pages of make-work rules to manage every aspect of pruning, planting, protecting, removing, and enjoying trees and landscaping. The question, unanswered, of course, is how did the City of Tukwila become one of the most heavily treed cities (47% according to their “consultant” report) in Washington State without this critical, crucial, crises ordinance process to save our trees from ourselves? This is indeed a mystery nobody in the Tukwila government appears able to solve. However the citizens and elected officials of Tukwila still have the opportunity to avoid the tree ordinance fiasco which the Mercer Island City Council attempted to impose on their citizens (and which was impressively rejected by the residents in 2001).

Anyone who has ever enjoyed driving around some of the older neighborhoods of Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham, Spokane, Olympia, and other cities has been able to enjoy the wonderful landscaping located there– many of the trees are more than a century old. If you were to look back on photos from the late 1800s in most of these locations the ground was entirely barren before the homes were built. No hundred page tree ordinances with fees, fines, arborist requirements, or other complicated bureaucratic contortions existed at the time. Somehow, to our modern amazement – trees were planted and they grew without the Nanny State and Central Planners to micromanage the process. I’m sure this is a great mystery to the current Central Planners and naïve politicians who are writing, and passing these mostly worthless and pointless ordinances. It is something to ponder.

Bellingham (historic)

However, if what we are experiencing is “progess” then the “Progressives” have decided that trees can no longer grow on their own, and in fact we would all live in a barren wasteland devoid of plants, trees, and beautiful landscaping without their critical ordinances - despite overwhelming common sense observations to the contrary. At some point, like George Orwell’s memory hole from the novel 1984, the current Central Planners require the inconvenient fact that all those beautiful trees in all those old neighborhoods just somehow were planted, cultivated, and grew without Central Planning’s interference.

Unfortunately, what we are more likely to see with the proliferation of pointless, homogenous tree/landscaping ordinances provided by Central Casting at the American Planning Association (this is the group that provides the cookie-cutter planning documents for most of our planning departments), is the reduction in both variety of landscaping/tree planting results, and the tendency to force whatever the fad of the day might be upon our communities with little local control or individuality allowed. Secret, midnight pruning, and using the ordinance as the excuse to file complaints against neighbors are certain and well-documented outcomes.

Bellingham (now)

My recommendation is to dump most aspects of these pointless tree ordinances. I’ve personally planted thousands of trees and dozens of varieties. I’ve also had to remove trees that were either unhealthy or becoming a problem where they were located. I am far from alone in this interest and activity, and miracle of miracles – nobody had to write a law to force me or most other people to do this. None of us need the Nanny State or Central Planning to tell us what to do. This is the cycle of life, and the beauty of landscaping and interacting with nature is that you can make it better now and for the future.

We do this because we enjoy watching the trees and plants grow, and if a community wants to encourage tree planting, they can do so without these ordinances. Use the history of Arbor Day as an inspiration on how you can get your community to plant trees without government harassment. Review your local ordinances to see what is restricted, "managed," or "permited" where you live. To the Nanny State and those who support it – please just leave us alone and let us plant and manage our trees without your interference. To the amazement of the Central Planners the trees really will grow without their ordinances.

Do we really need a tree ordinance to "manage" this?

Editorial note: Look through our LOCAL LANDSCAPING ORDINANCES for yourself. Ferndale's (very new) takes the cake!

Bellingham
Whatcom County
Ferndale

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All the Objectivity That's Fit to Reject

4/8/2013

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Last month, Dr. Donald Easterbrook, professor emeritus from Western Washington University testified at The Senate Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee in Olympia, criticizing the anthropogenic climate chaos hypothesis. A few days later, he was publicly attacked by members of his own Department of Geology, in a letter which the Bellingham Herald obligingly published on Easter Sunday.

Several people came to Easterbrook's defense, including Lord Monckton, who posted a reply to the article in the Herald's online edition.

Today, WE discovered an interesting twist at the popular blog, Watts Up With That, by meteorologist and anthropogenic climate chaos sceptic, Anthony Watts. It is an article entitled, Rebuttal to the attack on Dr. Don Easterbrook. The note by author Dr. David Deming really caught our eye:

[author's note: this article was originally submitted as a "letter to the editor" to the Bellingham Herald, a newspaper that published an attack on Dr. Don Easterbrook. The Herald refused to publish my rebuttal. The executive editor, July Shirley (julie.shirley@bellinghamherald.com) explained "We only print letters from residents of Whatcom County. We are not publishing your letter."]

Well, you just know WE had to do something about that! If they won't print it, WE will. It concerns news of local interest, after all. So here's the rejected letter to the editor of The Bellingham Herald, exactly as it appears on the WUWT blog:

Letter to the Editor by Dr. David Deming

I write in rebuttal to the March 31 letter by WWU geology faculty criticizing Dr. Don Easterbrook. I have a Ph.D in geophysics and have published research papers on climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. In 2006 I testified before the US Senate on global warming. Additionally, I am the author of a three-volume history of science.

I have never met Don Easterbrook. I write not so much to defend him as to expose the ignorance exhibited in the letter authored by WWU geology faculty. Their attack on Dr. Easterbrook is the most egregious example of pedantic buffoonery since the Pigeon League conspired against Galileo in the seventeenth century. Skepticism is essential to science. But the goal of the geology faculty at WWU seems to be to suppress critical inquiry and insist on dogmatic adherence to ideology.

The WWU faculty never defined the term “global warming” but described it as “very real,” as if it were possible for something to be more real than real. They claimed that the evidence in support of this “very real” global warming was “overwhelming.” Yet they could not find space in their letter to cite a single specific fact that supports their thesis.

There is significant evidence that would tend to falsify global warming. The mean global air temperature has not risen for the last fifteen years. At the end of March the global extent of sea ice was above the long-term average and higher than it was in March of 1980. Last December, snow cover in the northern hemisphere was at the highest level since record keeping began in 1966. The UK just experienced the coldest March of the last fifty years. There has been no increase in droughts or wildfires. Worldwide hurricane and cyclone activity is near a forty-year low.

One might think that the foregoing facts would raise doubts in scientists interested in pursuing objective truth. But global warming is not so much a scientific theory subject to empirical falsification as it is a political ideology that must be fiercely defended in defiance of every fact to the contrary. In the past few years we have been told that not only hot weather but cold weather is caused by global warming. The blizzards that struck the east coast of the US in 2010 were attributed to global warming. Every weather event–hot, cold, wet or dry–is said to be caused by global warming. The theory that explains everything explains nothing.

Among the gems in the endless litany of nonsense we are subjected to are claims that global warming causes earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. Last year we were warned that global warming would turn us all into hobbits, the mythical creatures from J. R. R. Tolkien’s novels. I am not aware of any member of the WWU geology faculty criticizing these ridiculous claims. Their vehemence seems to be reserved for honest skeptics like Dr. Easterbrook who advance science by asking hard questions.

At the heart of the WWU geology faculty criticisms was the claim that peer review creates objective and reliable knowledge. Nonsense. Peer review produces opinions. Scientists, like other people, have political beliefs, ideological orientations, and personal views that strain their scientific objectivity. One of the most disgusting things to emerge from the 2009 Climategate emails was the revelation of an attempt to subvert the peer-review process by suppressing the publication of work that was scientifically sound but contrary to the reviewer’s personal views.

The infamous phrase “hide the decline” refers to an instance where a global warming alarmist omitted data that contradicted his personal belief that the world was warming. This sort of bias is not limited but pervasive. Neither is science a foolproof method for producing absolute truth. Scientific knowledge is always tentative and subject to revision. The entire history of science is littered with discarded theories once thought to be incontrovertible truths.

The WWU geology faculty letter asserted that technological advances arise from application of the scientific method. They claimed that airplanes were invented by scientists. But the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics–not scientists. The modern age of personal computing began in a suburban California garage in 1976. The most significant technological advance in human history was the Industrial Revolution in Britain that occurred from 1760 through 1830. When Adam Smith toured factories and inquired as to who had invented the new machinery, the answer was always the same: the common workman. Antibiotics were not discovered through the rigorous application of scientific methodology but serendipitously when Fleming noticed in 1928 that mold suppressed bacterial growth.

Dr. Easterbrook’s contributions have furthered the advance of scientific knowledge and the progress of the human race. It matters not if a multitude of professors oppose him. As Galileo explained, it is “certain that the number of those who reason well in difficult matters is much smaller than the number of those who reason badly….reasoning is like running and not like carrying, and one Arab steed will outrun a hundred jackasses.”

David Deming

Professor of Arts & Sciences

University of Oklahoma

email: ddeming [at] ou.edu

====================================================

A list of Dr. Easterbrook’s credentials are listed here:

http://myweb.wwu.edu/dbunny/dje_cv.html

(See the entire article in its original setting at WUWT, along with the reader comments...).

Dr. Deming is quite a lightning rod in his own right; WE're a bit surprised that The Bellingham Herald would choose to spike his letter.

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That Which Must Not be Named

4/2/2013

9 Comments

He Who Must Not be Named

Say the name, "Agenda 21" and a shocked pall falls over the room. Environmental collectivists glare menacingly, and cast a spell conjuring up incantations about tinfoil hats. Conservatives shrink in fear. Boo! Agenda 21? It doesn't exist! Stop talking about it, you... you foolish conspiracy theorists! What Agenda 21...? Oh - the 21st Century Agenda. Gotta stay current on the nomenclature.

Guess which sorcerer invoked "That Which Must Not be Named" by name yesterday? That's right, the headmaster of the Forbidden Forests, Ken Salazar apparated yesterday into Anacortes, which isn’t even in the San Juans (but no matter, those with federal powers conjured the illusion). With a magic wand, the presidential pen, these islands have been declared a national monument, an unusual new brand of territory with special magical places and waters that must be protected from Muggles, you know. Click here, if you dare! Just make sure you have practiced your defenses against the dark arts.

The Magic New Map (with all of Lummi Island)

The little people can thank "conservative" councilman Sam Crawford and Whatcom County Council for adding their blessings to this, back in 2011. WE can't imagine this was conjured-up to have no affect. What that will be, we shall see in time.

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Whatcom County destroys the environment in order to save it

Another Earth Day, and Comrades it's a Cooler One

Can trees grow without Central Planning?

All the Objectivity That's Fit to Reject

That Which Must Not be Named

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