Gore Milks Cash Cow, Sego May Run Again: What France Is Reading

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=206...&refer=muse

<span style="font-size:18pt;line-height:100%">Gore Milks Cash Cow, Sego May Run Again: What France Is Reading

</span>Review by Jorg von Uthmann
Dec. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Climate-change skeptics are taking a beating these days even in France, where people long resisted the green creed.

Paris bookstores brim with guidebooks -- including one shaped like a toilet seat -- that tell readers how to help save our planet. Yet the dissidents refuse to shut up, even now that Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize and the U.S. government has agreed to negotiate a new global-warming treaty by 2009.

The most conspicuous doubter in France is Claude Allegre, a former education minister and a physicist by profession. His new book, ``Ma Verite Sur la Planete'' (``My Truth About the Planet''), doesn't mince words.

He calls Gore a ``crook'' presiding over an eco-business that pumps out cash. As for Gore's French followers, the author likens them to religious zealots who, far from saving humanity, are endangering it. Driven by a Judeo-Christian guilt complex, he says, French greens paint worst-case scenarios and attribute little-understood cycles to human misbehavior.

Allegre doesn't deny that the climate has changed or that extreme weather has become more common. He instead emphasizes the local character of these phenomena.

While the icecap of the North Pole is shrinking, the one covering Antarctica -- or 92 percent of the Earth's ice -- is not, he says. Nor have Scandinavian glaciers receded, he says. To play down these differences by basing forecasts on a global average makes no sense to Allegre.

He dismisses talk of renewable energies, such as wind or solar power, saying it would take a century for them to become a serious factor in meeting the world's energy demands.

Let Us Eat Cake

To his relief, France has taken another path: Almost 80 percent of its electricity comes from nuclear reactors. What's more, France has a talent for eating its cake and having it, too: Although it signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the country is nowhere near meeting the agreed targets.

``Ma Verite Sur la Planete'' is published by Plon/Fayard (240 pages, 18 euros).

Jean de Kervasdoue, a health expert, also stresses the benefits of nuclear power, noting that it emits only a small fraction of the greenhouse gas that comes from burning coal, oil or gas. His pet peeve, though, is genetically modified food.

In ``Les Precheurs de l'Apocalypse'' (``The Doomsday Preachers''), Kervasdoue decries how shrill and sometimes violent campaigners have prevented GM foods from gaining a foothold in Europe. They way they talk, he says, ``it sounds as if Martians are attacking the Earth.''

Insulin and Obesity

In fact, genetically modified organisms have proved highly beneficial to mankind, he argues, pointing to insulin, an artificially created hormone that has saved the lives of countless diabetes sufferers. A much greater danger to health and life expectancy, he says, is obesity -- even though the food that European fatsoes ingest is ``natural.''

Kervasdoue also has politically incorrect things to say about asbestos and Chernobyl. The motto of his book comes from Marcel Proust: ``Facts don't enter a world dominated by our beliefs.''

``Les Precheurs de l'Apocalypse'' is from Plon (254 pages, 19 euros).

Segolene Royal, the Socialist who lost the presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy, would never utter such heresies. Her new book, ``Ma Plus Belle Histoire, C'est Vous'' (``My Most Beautiful Story Is You''), pays homage to the ``fight against global warming and the protection of our planet.''

Political Hodgepodge

Royal does own up to a few political mistakes, such as not paying enough attention to Socialist heavyweights during her campaign. Yet the main reason for her defeat, she insists, was the lukewarm support from her own party: ``How is it that the attacks came more from the left than from the right?''

She stands by her outlandish proposals, such as creating citizens' juries to oversee parliament and having the military deal with unruly juveniles. The political platform set forth in her book is the same hodgepodge of empty slogans that failed to convince a majority of French voters.

Yet Royal makes it clear that she's determined to run again. ``It's a solemn promise,'' she says. ``It's my way of telling you: With me, politics will never again be made without you.''

``Ma Plus Belle Histoire, C'est Vous'' is from Grasset (335 pages, 19.50 euros).

(Jorg von Uthmann is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this review: Jorg von Uthmann at uthmann@wanadoo.fr .

 

Count me as one of the man-made global warming skeptics.

Of course there's global climate change. There always is and has been. The Earth used to be a snowball, they theorize, so it has to be warmer now than then or we'd still be a snowball. This is true of 500 years ago, long before the industrial revolution and man burning fossil fuels.

What really bothers me about the whole debate, and this article nails it quite well, is that I am a huge believer in Science (and not much else, actually). Science is about truth, not about opinion polls or beliefs. When I hear "consensus" of scientists believe, there are are two words that stick out and don't belong in any scientific discussion: "concensus" and "believe."

Consensus is about popularity and opinion polls. We (or scientists) don't vote whether gravity causes objects to fall to the Earth or that the speed of light is 186,000 miles/second. What does consensus have to do with anything when it comes to science or scientific truth? NOTHING!

Belief is something in the realm of Religion. If Science becomes a belief system, it is not Science anymore, it's an actual religion in its own right.

So when "scientists" tell me that they believe there's life out there in the universe, outside of Earth, I roll my eyes and laugh to myself. They believe it with a religious fervor (much like they believe in man-made global warming)! The scientific facts are that there's never, ever, been a single shred of evidence or a fossil or anything that can be measured scientifically, that there is life anywhere else. Nada, zip, zilch. So like a proper Scientist, I simply don't accept that there's life out there. When someone does find the evidence, I will accept it - why not?

Skepticism is so vital to Scientific Endeavor. If people aren't skeptical, they'll accept anything Al Gore says, verbatim, as Truth. They'll accept that the Earth is flat and that the Sun orbits the Earth. Even if the evidence appears to make something true, it isn't necessarily so - the Sun does appear to go around the Earth, after all.

Likewise, I am not convinced that Nature operates on the rules of Evolution. Evolution is one of those things where the evidence can be made out so the theory is true. Not that I believe in Creationism, because I don't at all! The thing is, there are plenty of things that bring Evolution into question. If Natural Selection were truly the rule, the Dinosaurs would still rule the Earth (think about it). They died not because of failure to Naturally Select, they died because of a cataclysm. The Earth's history is filled with such Cataclysms, and Evolution does not account for these things. Nor does the Cambrian Explosion fit in with Evolutionary Theory - all at once there was a massive number of new species of life that appeared - not through generations of selection and mutation. I don't know why or how it occurred, it just did, and it doesn't fit.

I'll cite some references at the end of this post, but for now, let me conclude with this thought. Ike made a famous speech about "Beware the Military/Industrial Complex" (his last speech as president, in fact). A little publicized fact is that the speech originally read "Beware the Military/Industrial/Scientific Complex." Get what I'm saying? I'll leave it up to you to consider the vested interests that scientists and corporations that hire scientists have, especially when enormous amounts of govt. funding is involved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion

he Cambrian explosion or Cambrian radiation describes the seemingly rapid appearance of most major groups of complex animals in the fossil record, around 530 million years ago.[1][2] This is accompanied by a major diversification of other organisms.[3] Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were simple, comprised of individual cells occasionally organised into colonies. In the following 70�"80 million years, the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude,[4] and the diversity of life began to resemble today’s.[5]

The Cambrian explosion has generated extensive scientific debate. The seemingly rapid appearance of fossils in the “Primordial Strata” was noted as early as the mid 19th century,[6] and Charles Darwin saw it as one of the main objections that could be made against his theory of evolution by natural selection.[7]

http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/m..._58_print.shtml

Shortly before Christmas, Moos handed the finished draft to the President, who “liked the speech,” the writer recalled. “He said, I think you have got something here, Malcolm. Let me sleep on it.” With the help of his brother Milton Eisenhower, then president of Johns Hopkins University, the Chief Executive made some revisions to the draft, but not many: He rewrote only a few passages and excised perhaps a dozen lines. The original cautioned against a “military-industrial-scientific complex,” but at the urging of Eisenhower’s science adviser, James Killian, it was shortened to the now-famous phrase.