1. Reduce staff carbon emissions to pre-1956 levels by 2156, if not sooner; 2. Plant a tree by 2110; 3. Avoid spicy foods to reduce personal emissions; 4. Open canned sodas slower; 5. Petition Home Depot, Lowes and other plumbing suppliers to sell carbon sinks; 6. Recycle environmentalists into biofuels; 7. Increase personal use of ethanol derived from grape biomass and various grains and cereals (very popular); 8. Use more solar energy by taking longer beach vacations (also scored highly); 9. Commence R&D to turn environmentalist hot air into the primary source of energy for San Francisco; and 10. Turn the background of JunkScience.com's home page green (see, we're ahead of schedule!).

Tell us how you think we can make JunkScience.com even GREENer! Best additions/alterations to the list published.

Want better gas mileage?  Make sure your health insurance is paid up.

All you 'poor' in America without health insurance are just out of luck I guess.  Posted from JunkScience.com:

May 17, 2007
By Steven Milloy

Are you dying to get a car with better gas mileage? You may soon be running that risk, all in the name of “energy security.”

This week President Bush announced his plan to reduce U.S. gasoline consumption by 20 percent over the next 10 years. Five percent of this reduction — 8.5 billion gallons per year — is to come from increased gas mileage requirements for new cars and light trucks, known as Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards.

Increasing CAFE standards sounds like a no-brainer. Just mandate new standards and, somehow, auto company wizards will find a way to meet them with new technology, right?

The unfortunate reality, however, is that the only practical way automakers can meet higher CAFE standards at present is by the rather low-tech method of reducing the weight of automobiles.

And lighter cars are deadlier cars.

The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2001 that existing CAFE standards increased traffic deaths by 1,300 to 2,600 per year. A Harvard University/Brookings Institution study put the figure at between 2,200 and 3,900 deaths per year.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has estimated that since CAFE was implemented, more than 46,000 traffic deaths would have been avoided if people had been driving heavier cars. Many tens of thousands more, of course, have been needlessly injured.

The NHTSA concluded in an October 2003 report that CAFE standards are even deadlier than the agency previously thought.

Every 100-pound reduction in the weight of small cars (those weighing 2,950 pounds or less), for example, increased annual traffic fatalities by as much as 715, according to NHTSA. For larger cars and light trucks, the agency estimated that each 100-pound reduction in weight would increase annual traffic fatalities by as much as 303 and 296, respectively.

“When two vehicles collide, the laws of physics favor the occupants of the heavier vehicle (momentum conservation). Furthermore, heavier vehicles were in most cases longer, wider and less fragile than light vehicles. In part because of this, they usually had greater crashworthiness, structural integrity and directional stability. They were less roll-over prone and easier for the average driver to control in a panic situation,” explained NHTSA.

And just in case you’re thinking that air bags will save you or a loved one in a lighter, more fuel efficient car, you may need to reconsider depending on your height.

A study presented this week at the 2007 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine Annual meeting reported that air bags actually are harmful to short and tall people.

Dr. Craig Newgard, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Oregon Health and Science University, analyzed crash data for over 65,000 front-seat occupants and found that air bags, while effective for people of medium stature (5-foot-3 to 5-foot-11) were actually harmful to people shorter than 4-foot-11 and taller than 6-foot-3.

Despite CAFE’s acknowledged risks to life and limb, are these risks outweighed by any potential “energy security” or economic benefits?

In terms of energy security, it’s not at all clear how using 5 percent less gasoline would help protect the U.S. from global oil shocks. We import about 60 percent of our oil needs, 40 percent of which comes from OPEC members. Oil is a global commodity and prices are set in the global market.

About 50 percent of the known oil reserves are in the Middle East, a region that, as long as we use oil, will always have a major impact on the availability of and prices we pay for gasoline.

Given our growing economy and barring the development of stunning new automotive fuel technology, our oil import and consumption profiles are not likely to change any time soon. Energy security, at least in terms of imported oil, is a pipe dream.

And should we drive less-safe cars for a pipe dream?

President Bush’s plan is also folly in economic terms. What is the economic impact of a 5 percent reduction in gasoline use? Let’s generously assume for the sake of argument that CAFE standards reduce gasoline use and that lower demand for gasoline translates into a $1-per-gallon savings in gas prices, for a total annual savings on a national scale of $8.5 billion based on the president’s plan.

Sounds great, right? But when you balance that potential benefit against the 2,000 lives lost annually from the CAFE standards, it’s not such a bargain.

Putting aside the thousands of annual family and personal tragedies caused by CAFE, at $5 million per life — that’s the value the U.S. government puts on our lives when it comes to environmental protection — CAFE’s cost is $10 billion in lost lives. And that figure doesn’t include CAFE-caused health care costs and lost income due to non-fatal traffic injuries.

The bottom line is that CAFE standards endanger lives without providing commensurate benefits to individuals or to the nation. Improved gas mileage is a fine goal, but let’s figure out a less lethal way of achieving it.

·The 1986 Immigration and Reform Control Act blanket amnesty for an estimated 2.7 million illegal aliens

·1994: The "Section 245(i)" temporary rolling amnesty for 578,000 illegal aliens

·1997: Extension of the Section 245(i) amnesty

·1997: The Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act for nearly one million illegal aliens from Central America

·1998: The Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act amnesty for 125,000 illegal aliens from Haiti

·2000: Extension of amnesty for some 400,000 illegal aliens who claimed eligibility under the 1986 act

·2000: The Legal Immigration Family Equity Act, which included a restoration of the rolling Section 245(i) amnesty for 900,000 illegal aliens]

Guess what? None –not one—of those amnesties was associated with a decline in illegal immigration. On the contrary, the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. has tripled since President Reagan signed the first amnesty in 1986. The total effect of the amnesties was even larger because relatives later joined amnesty recipients, and this number was multiplied by an unknown number of children born to amnesty recipients who then acquired automatic US citizenship.

And as I've noted before, there is no such thing as a "temporary" amnesty.

From the Australian reality/comedy show The Chasers, a brilliant bit with misogynistic Islamic preacher Taj Al Din Al Hilali, who threatens to punch out the “reporter.” Religion of Peace™!

(Hat tip: LGF readers.)

Fox News and MSNBC are reporting that the hour of reckoning is at hand. Stand by for details, although I think we already know most of them.

Update: “Quick legal status.”

A bipartisan group of senators reached agreement with the White House Thursday on an immigration overhaul to grant quick legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the U.S. and fortify the border against new ones…

It set the stage for what promises to be a bruising battle next week in the Senate on one of Bush’s top non-war priorities.

The group of lawmakers had been haggling over the terms of agreement for weeks were reviewing language negotiated Wednesday night in efforts to nail down a deal. Among the final sticking points was a stubborn dispute over how much family ties count toward green cards under a new “point system.” The plan prioritizes advanced skills and education levels for future immigrants.

Update: The formal announcement is at 1:30. Reuters has a few of the basics already; it looks like the GOP won the battle over whether illegals can bring extended family with them.

The legislation would create a temporary worker program that would require laborers to return home after a period of time. Tough border security and workplace enforcement measures would go into place before the temporary worker program, congressional aides said.

The proposal would limit family-based migration to immediate family members and establish a merit-based system by which future migrants could earn points for skills, education, understanding of English and family ties.

Update: Michelle is posting reaction and points to a WashTimes report from last night that claimed Bush was ready to cave on safeguards that would prevent fraud in the guest-worker program. She also links to a point by point rebuttal of the GOP talking points at Lone Wacko.

Update: Quote of the day:

Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, said he had doubts about this approach, but said Congress had to do something because his constituents were telling him that “they feel they are being overrun with uncontrolled immigration.”

The irony is that most Republicans would accept a compromise on the back half of the equation, even if it meant legalizing large numbers of illegals who are already here, if the party was serious about plugging the leaks in the border. Show us a sustained, good faith effort to secure it and then we can deal charitably with the “undocumented.” Anyone think that’s in the offing?

Update: WaPo has the major details. 400,000 “guest workers” a year. And unless they’ve made an oversight, the English-language requirement for the “Z visa” that would grant permanent legal status has been dropped: “each Z Visa itself would be renewable indefinitely, as long as the holder passes a criminal background check, remains fully employed and pays a $5,000 fine, plus a paperwork-processing fee.”

Update: Near as I can tell (nitty gritty details being suspiciously hard to come by in news reports on immigration), there are two basic innovations to the bill: replacing family connections with a “points system” that emphasizes job skills and education as the key criteria for a green card — which seems odd given the argument about needing low-skilled workers to do the jobs Americans won’t do — and the requirement that the “Z visa” program not be triggered until certain measures have been taken to enforce the border. Question per Lone Wacko: Does that mean actual, concrete improvements in border security or merely passing laws and allocating funds for improvements that are never going to be made, like that nifty border fence they passed last year?

We had a Republican Congress and a Republican White House for six years. Six years, and it’s come to this.

Update: Bush applauds. And I take it back — here’s the line of the day:

“This is what my 9th grade teacher told me government is all about and I finally got to experience it,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Update: The Counterterrorism Blog says it’s a national security disaster:

In short order, the system will be overwhelmed. Whatever minimal fraud detection and prevention safeguards might be erected won’t last long in the face of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of applications and petitions to be adjudicated. What that means is the information provided on those applications and petitions, and whatever supporting documents they may have (if any), will essentially be taken at face value. Whatever the applicant alien tells the adjudicator will essentially be taken at face value. There will be little time or process available to verify anything, perhaps beyond running the applicant’s name through a standard battery of computer databases (and, even that may become so time consuming some will slip through the cracks).

Update: Who among the GOP candidates reaps the whirlwind on this? It’s got to be McCain, right?

Expect Rudy to pronounce himself “troubled” by the deal.

Update: Jim DeMint: “I don’t care how you try to spin it, this is amnesty.”

Update: Tancredo goes right after McCain:

“Senator McCain and his allies seem to think that they can dupe the American public into accepting a blanket amnesty if they just call it ‘comprehensive’ or ‘earned legalization’ or ‘regularization.’ Unfortunately for them, however, the American people know amnesty when they see it,” said Tancredo. “The President is so desperate for a legacy and a domestic policy win that he is willing to sell out the American people and our national security.”

“If Senator McCain and Senator Kennedy spent as much time working on improving border security as they did poll testing creative euphemisms for amnesty, America would be a much safer place,” quipped Tancredo.

Update: Rich Lowry thinks the “triggers” are a scam from the word go, with amnesty granted immediately upon passage of the bill and the “Z visas,” which are keed to the enforcement triggers, only relevant insofar as they allow the bearer to travel. But even if Lowry’s wrong, what happens to the illegals who are here while the feds are working towards the triggers? Let’s say they get bogged down and can’t get them done for another decade. What’s the status of the “undocumented” during that interim period?

Update: Illegal aliens don’t like the bill either, a claim which will doubtless be trumpeted by proponents to “prove” that it’s a fair compromise. Actually, what it proves is that even the amnesty side of it is crap that won’t achieve what it means to.

The sub-moronic “touchback” provision comes in for special abuse:

David Guerra wants to be legal, but he says the path to citizenship offered by the Senate on Thursday would be too risky and too expensive, and could end up driving him deeper into the shadows…

“If I go home, who is going to guarantee that I’ll be let back in?” said the 44-year-old who lays bricks, clears weeds and does landscaping…

“Where would I find $5,000? In two years, I don’t get $5,000,” said Daniel Carrillo Maldonado, an illegal immigrant who was looking for construction work outside a Home Depot in Phoenix…

Amy Ndour, a 23-year-old illegal immigrant from Senegal who lives in New York, said she would be willing to pay the $5,000 fine, but not return home because her family there depends on what she earns as a hair braider.

“I’m helping myself” here, she said. “I’m helping people there too.”…

Many illegal immigrants said they had little incentive to apply for residency because the process was long and did not offer much hope of bringing their families.

“If I’ll never be able to bring my family, why should I apply?” said Jose Monson, a 33-year-old illegal immigrant from Guatemala who has lived in Los Angeles for four years. “I prefer to just stay here illegally.”

Those Who Cannot Remember the Past

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If you went to college in the sixties, like I did, you might not know how much higher education has changed since then. Universities today are different places. At Vanderbilt, where I got my law degree, I hear you can take courses in third wave feminism or colonial governmentality.

Your guess is as good as mine.

On the other hand, some of the courses that we took for granted aren't around at all. One area of study that's almost disappeared from universities today is military history -- the history of warfare.

I was reminded of this recently, reading a piece in The New Republic by historian David Bell. He's certainly not the only person to mourn this change, though. One of my favorite historians, Victor Davis Hanson, wrote on the same subject several years ago in National Review.

There are a number of reasons that military history is no longer taught. Partly, it has to do with the ideological shift in university faculties over the past few decades. The post-Vietnam anti-war movement tends to see all wars as mutual mistakes -- with both sides in a conflict equally wrong. Some of these folks think war can be avoided by refusing to have anything to do with it.

Hansen thinks it also has something to do with the spread of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. In an age with intercontinental ballistic missiles, the old subjects of strategy and tactics can seem obsolete. The importance of battles at Valley Forge or the Alamo might not be evident if you're thinking of warfare in terms only of pushing big red buttons.

The enemies of civilization, though, have adapted -- as they always do. Nuclear deterrence won't protect you if the other side thinks they win if we all die together. Furthermore, they've learned to hide among the innocent. Iran's missiles, nestled among civilian neighborhoods and UN outposts in Lebanon, were fired into Israel -- but Iran was never hit back. The British and the Spanish have discovered, through terrorist attacks on bus and train lines, that the enemy is studying us daily. They learn our every weakness by living and working among us – but our schools have stopped offering courses that would help us meet their challenge.

All of this means that if there were ever a time to put our best minds to the study of warfare, it is now. I know that, for many people, it's an unpleasant topic they would just as soon avoid -- but history that ignores the importance of warfare is not history. There is a reason that both sides in the Civil War studied Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” – though it was written in the 5th or 6th Century BC.

Hansen writes, "The hundred years of talking about slavery was not as important as two days at Gettysburg. The success or failure of Normandy affected Hitler more in an hour than had years of pleading with him in the 1930s."

If for no other reason than that we want to avoid war whenever we can, universities should at least offer the option of studying it. We know that students would sign up for the classes, because books on the subject are always reliable sellers. Television programmers have also responded to the sizable hunger for military history.

These alternate sources of information are important, but they don't replace the need for serious scholarship in our universities. If you agree, I have a suggestion.

One thing we know for sure about colleges, they're better than bill collectors at tracking you down. If you ever took a single class, you'll be asked for contributions the rest of your life. Next time you get one of those calls, ask that student fundraiser to pass on the message that you'd probably give more money to the old alma mater if the school were offering more classes in military history. It's worth a try, anyway.

Next week, I'd suggest you make sure to pack an umbrella because you're going to be hearing from a lot of Republican senators who are going to be peeing all over your leg and trying to tell you that it's raining.

That's because the Senate GOP is about to betray America by voting for Ted Kennedy's amnesty bill.

They're going to tell you that it's not an amnesty bill. They're going to be lying.

They're going to tell you that it doesn't reward people for breaking our laws. They're going to be lying.

They're going to tell you that we're better off signing a bad bill now, than getting nothing. They'll be wrong.

They're going to tell you that the American people want this bill. They'll be wrong.

They're going to tell you about the great new security measures that will be brought about because of this bill. What they won't tell you is that behind the scenes, there will be senators working to thwart every one of those security provisions and because of that, they won't work. Look at the border fence that was signed into law during the 2006 elections. It's the law, money is appropriated for it, and so far they've built two miles of fencing.

Any senator who votes for this bill, in my view, does not deserve your support and I would strongly encourage you not to volunteer for him or contribute money to his campaign. Moreover, although I don't believe in protest votes, if I were going to refuse to pull the lever for a Republican over a single vote, it would be over this monstrosity.

PS: If Mitch McConnell were a real leader in the Senate, he'd be organizing a filibuster of this bill, not going along with it. If this is the best he can do, he should resign and let a real leader take over.

As the media continue to pound the table about the debate being over, another state climatologist has come out of the closet so to speak to voice his views about all things climate change.

As reported by the Columbus, Mississippi, Commercial Dispatch Wednesday (emphasis added throughout, h/t NBer dscott):

“First off, there isn't a consensus among scientists,” [Mississippi state climatologist Dr. Charles] Wax told the Columbus Rotary Club Tuesday. “Don't let anybody tell you there is.”

Wax spent much of his presentation telling the audience how the global climate is cyclical. It's always gone through periods of warming and cooling. As for cries of impending doom, Wax says there's tons of data on both sides - and man's ever-changing weather monitoring capability further clouds the picture.

How refreshing, wouldn’t you agree? Yet, Wax was just getting warmed up:

“I don't know if it's going to rain Thursday or not. Certainly I don't know what the temperature is going to be in 2050,” he said.

Wax said political and policy confusion have fueled the debate over global warming, and changes in the way weather is tracked have added to the confusion.

“In 1957, all the thermometers (the government uses to track temperatures) were moved from fields onto airports,” Wax said. “It went from the Weather Bureau, which supported agriculture, to the Department of Commerce. Cities are hotter. (If you look at the numbers) you'll see a major climate change in 1957 alone.”

Those of you familiar with this debate know that this is an issue that many skeptics have pointed out, namely, that in the past 50 years, temperatures have been taken around large population centers which are inherently warmer. As such, comparing these readings to temperatures before this point is comparing apples to oranges.

The article expounded on this theme:

Wax showed Rotarians graphs of climate trends over 11,000 years, pointing out the cycles global temperatures have gone through. He said the rise of civilization coincided with a warming period.

“There was a little ice age from 1400 to 1800,” Wax said. “We're warming back up, but it's not nearly as warm as it was 2,000 or 7,000 years ago.”

Wax then addressed Gore’s contention in his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth” that the 2005 hurricane season was tied to global warming:

Wax said the 2005 hurricane season was the result of a decades-long natural cycle coming around at the same time that all six weather variables needed for hurricanes to form were above normal levels.

Then, when forecasters called for another terrible hurricane season in 2006, all was quiet.

“The vertical wind shear blasted everything off,” Wax said. “There wasn't a single hurricane. It's become known as the ‘Year of Shear'.”

Finally, Wax addressed the folly in comparing recent hurricane activity to that of the past given radical technological increases in the way such storms are measured and observed:

That 2005 hurricane season set a record for named tropical cyclone activity. The previous worst year was 1933.
“Are totally different things happening now? I think probably not - we're just seeing more,” Wax said.

“I think 1933 was worse. In ‘06, we had satellites, radar and people flying around looking at storms,” he continued. “In 1933, we had people on ships and people on land waiting for the storms to hit. When you're on a ship, if you see a storm you head the other way. We still managed to find 25.”

For those unfamiliar, this is quite the same case made by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s Chris Landsea as reported by NewsBusters last August.

Sadly, this is another inconvenient truth the media don’t want to share with the citizenry.