Most people just don’t believe the environmentalists. They think they’re being had. And they might just be right.

Of the more than 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers published on climate change in the last three years, less than half endorse, either explicitly or implicitly, the theory of anthropogenic global warming, a new survey has found. While few reject it out of hand, a plurality are neutral on the question.

Among the public, only four in ten Americans think there is evidence that humans cause climate change. and more than half of all Britons, says the BBC, believe politicians and scientists exaggerate global warming “to make money”.

And they’d be right. The very same BBC reports that a study by the UK Taxpayers’ Alliance finds that the government collects almost twice as much in green tax than is needed to pay for the “carbon footprint” those revenues are meant to “offset”. The change the government pocketed? More than £10 billion. Per household, that’s £400 pounds the greens and the bureaucrats are stealing.

Meanwhile, those “offsets” include such eco-friendly efforts as providing foot pumps to replace diesel-driven water pumps in the third world, so rural farmers can do long days of the sort of hard labour that a century ago was outlawed as too harsh for British prisoners.

You’d think that if British environuts are going to exploit third-world slave labour to salve your conscience, they’d at least figure out how to do it at a profit, so you can get a decent tax rebate too. Mind you, I guess someone has to pay for their fancy hybrids, solar panels, hemp fashions and organic artichokes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at Politics.za, they note an interesting article in The Telegraph, which reports that Britain has been told by China that it would withdraw all support from Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, save humanitarian aid. If true, this would be a dramatic shift in policy, and could precipitate the final collapse of the regime. Even if Mugabe has not lost his appetite for power.

The economy is already on its knees. With prices having been fixed by government dictat, the only supply of goods and services is on the black market. With wages having been fixed too, nobody can afford them.

It’d be nice to think that the South African government had the foresight to accept Zimbabwean economic refugees and grant them work permits on the basis that their labour and entrepreneurship will contribute to the South African economy. However, the protectionist impulse among the politicians, steeped as they are in socialism and unionism, is too strong. So a refugee crisis is what it’ll be.

On the other hand, the sooner Zimbabwe collapses altogether, the sooner Zimbabweans can get to work rebuilding a new post-Mugabe country. Let’s hope this happens without a war.

Not bad, considering. It’s surprising, perhaps, that as late as 1979, they didn’t foresee e-mail, but thought electronic mail would be a sort of fax. The drinks robot is technically possible but hardly ubiquitous, and the videophone from 2001: A Space Odyssey remains an object of perennial futurism. Otherwise, the only real quibble is with the architecture and jump-suit fashion. Mind you, couch potatoes with day-glo tracksuits aren’t entirely alien to our civilisation either.

Click on the image for a large and legible version. I don’t know what magazine this is from, nor is the date certain. According to the image as posted on Flickr, it is available under a Creative Commons licence, which strikes me as unlikely. If anyone can spot the original hardcopy source, let me know. Hat tip: Cynical C.

Used to be the CIA spied on the KGB, and vice versa. In the post Cold War world, the black and white hats appear to have been passed to Microsoft and Google.

It appears Microsoft Virtual Earth captured a picture of a super-secret stealth propeller design (see alongside — publish and be damned, I say) on an American Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine in the graving dock at the naval base at Bangor, Washington. A couple of months ago, Google Earth took a snap of what appeared to be China’s new nuclear submarine, so the Chinese won’t be feeling so stupid anymore.

Monster Maritime has more details, including a picture of how the Navy normally keep its secret prop under wraps. The comments section contains some more interesting places curious spies might want to check out.