If it were to be built close to land, it would interfere with shipping lanes, Mr Salmond said, and it would also interfere with military radar installations. No windfarms will be built there, he said.

My company continued to invest in the resort in good faith. It wasn’t until August 2009 that Mr Salmond began to show his true mindset. My son, Donald Trump Jr, and George got a call from the First Minister’s special adviser, Geoff Aberdein, lamenting the ‘terrible criticism’ over the release of al-Megrahi.

One of the things that is so difficult to get over to the "Arrrgh! We're running out of everything!" crowd is that we humans actually create resources by inventing the technology that does that creation. I've blathered about this with respect to minerals here often enough. Today's example is fresh water.

These are all good reasons to feel good about the current status of the polar bear. It is plain to see that these ice-dwelling bears are not currently threatened with extinction due to declining sea ice, despite the hue and cry from activist scientists and environmental organizations. Indeed, because the polar bear is doing so well, those who would like to see polar bears listed as “threatened” depend entirely upon dramatic declines in sea ice prophesied to occur decades from now to make their case.

Who is really saving the world and our fellow humans? The skeptics. The scientists and others who have debunked the lies and exposed the agenda of the environmentalists. The Green Blog is dead. It is a victory for all of us.

The news confirms the fears of many householders – forced to comply with fortnightly collection rules and bin police regulations – that the painstaking recycling process ends when the dustmen have finished their round.

All of these proofs can be used in various combinations. Just mix and match as required and cook to taste but always take with a pinch of salt. For instance, based on a previous study of them, a new computer model predicts the endangered Snailbat will become extinct in less than a decade unless something is done to mitigate the impact of climate change on them. Of course, when you write it up for your paper, add in a lot of ass-covering caveats but you know the media will skip them all when your sensational research hits the front page. Sure, you’re going to have a squabble with the skeptics but that’ll all happen in the aftermath of the desired headlines and never be reported on anyway.

You follow it up with a DickPol showing how outraged people are at the desperate plight of the poor suffering snailbat and demanding action. The finishing touch would be to get Greenpeace to launch a Save the Snailbat campaign.

If that little lot doesn’t get you more research funding, nothing will.

But most important of all, farmers should be free to choose what kind of technologies they want to adopt. If you think the old ways are the best, that’s fine. You have that right.

What you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once.

So how much land worldwide was spared in the process thanks to these dramatic yield improvements, for which chemical inputs played a crucial role? The answer is 3 billion hectares, or the equivalent of two South Americas. There would have been no Amazon rainforest left today without this improvement in yields. Nor would there be any tigers in India or orang utans in Indonesia. That is why I don’t know why so many of those opposing the use of technology in agriculture call themselves environmentalists.

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

How to win against so mighty a foe? Simple. You have to call on the same reserves of courage, ingenuity, determination and raw cunning that in the past helped us see off the Spanish Armada, Napoleon’s navy and Hitler’s Luftwaffe. I’m not exaggerating. Truly, the Blitz spirit is alive and well in your nearest anti-wind-farm campaign group.

Take a look at green alternatives from the other side: the downside. Are these growing pains, or signs of a failing movement?

Two decades on, what was once the "most powerful political ideal" on the international scene crashed and burned at Rio +20. The failure of environmentalism as an ideology was inevitable, since it has so badly misconstrued the causes of many of the problems it claims to address. It will be interesting to see in which direction those cherishing a permanent animus against democratic capitalism will now go.

Scotland was literally and physically made by our climate: The ice ages formed our valleys; our cuisine of porridge from oats is because our climate doesn't suit wheat, and it was the colder climate of the 1690s & famine that followed, that led to our loss of our independence. According to historians up to a quarter of Scots died in just a few years. Imagine if it happened today: whole villages forced to beg on the streets in places like Edinburgh; parents having to choose which children to feed. Which of your children would you choose to die?

To oversee this unprecedented wealth transfer to UN bureaucrats and NGO activists, The Future We Want architects sought to establish “an intergovernmental process” to assess financial needs, consider the effectiveness, consistency and “synergies” of existing instruments and frameworks, evaluate additional initiatives, and prepare reports on financing strategies. This grand scheme would be implemented by an intergovernmental committee of 30 “experts,” who will be accountable to – no one, actually, except perhaps the Secretary General of the esteemed United Nations.

New TPA research out this week exposed how taxpayers’ money is squandered on EU grants to environmentalist campaigns. Taxpayers pay twice: once for the grants handed out and then again with the higher prices that result when environmentalist groups successfully lobby for new taxes and regulations. It isn’t right for politicians and bureaucrats to use their access to taxpayers’ money to support groups pushing their ideological agendas at our expense.

The organization responsible for managing a global cap-and-trade system worth billions of dollars for carbon emissions projects around the world is trying to get sweeping legal immunities for its actions, even as it plans to expand its activities dramatically in the wake of the United Nations’ Rio + 20 summit on sustainable development, which starts June 20.

If you want to learn what farmers think (and need), talk to African farmers – not to bureaucrats, environmental activists or politicos at the Rio+20 United Nations summit in Rio de Janeiro. You’ll get very different, far more honest and thoughtful perspectives.

The NGOs would place both nature and man in jeopardy, since they call for curbs on “any technologies that might imply a serious risk for the environment or human society, including in particular synthetic biology, geo-engineering, genetic modification, nuclear energy and nanotechnology,” Rothbard observed.

They would curtail the very technologies that allow us to provide for people’s needs in the most efficient, least intrusive manner. Few policies are more counterproductive than forcing people to grow low yield crops that are susceptible to insects and drought, or to rely on inefficient energy technologies, he said.

I fail to understand how anyone thinking rationally can argue that poverty and economic hardship will enhance environmental stewardship, or that the planet is more important than the people who live on it.

The lies required to maintain environmentalism and its vast matrix of laws and regulations are being publicly rejected and a recent example is a letter sent to NASA administrator by fifty present and former astronauts, scientists, and engineers who work for NASA is a seminal moment, not unlike Martin Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

This fact is why photos of oil-covered wildlife are dangerous: They make us aware of petroleum's risks while we remain oblivious to petroleum's benefits.

In the real world petroleum is an astonishingly beneficial, versatile and inexpensive resource. In the fantasy world of too many people, however, petroleum is a vile substance that does little beyond enriching a few sheiks and billionaires while it kills both the planet and humanity.

But in fact our world is incalculably better and even cleaner because of petroleum -- which is why it is especially regrettable that newspaper pictures of the likes of plastic wrap and asphalt would not grab readers' attention with anywhere near the impact of pictures of oil-covered animals.

Now, the Greenies will undoubtedly say that the tiger—when it attacks a human—is just behaving naturally. Well, that pretty much sums up my relationship with toilet paper—just doing what comes naturally. Using technology to improve my health and well-being—that’s how humans roll, baby.

Socially sustainable? Culturally sustainable? We don’t even know if what we currently do is culturally or socially sustainable. How can we guess if some development is culturally sustainable?

I swear, sometimes I think people have totally lost the plot. This is mental onanism of the highest order, to sit around and debate if something is “culturally sustainable”. Like I said … let’s get back to feeding the kids. Once that’s done, we can debate if the way we fed them is culturally sustainable.

City-dwelling green voters will be happy with their cleaner air, unmindful that the pollution has simply been shifted into other people's backyards out in Flyover Country, along with all those additional strip mines and hazardous waste dumps.

On the Maryland side, only the "hunting" of wild stock was allowed, on the Virginia the leasing of seabed and planting then harvesting.

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise to find out that Virginia produces vast numbers of fat oysters and has similarly vast numbers still in the water. Maryland has been pretty much fished out.

Now, in any well run organization, this official finding by the Inspector General of flagrant flouting of the scientific requirements would call for an immediate do-over … but this is not a well run organization, it is the US Government, sub-species EPA.

So what did the EPA bureaucrats do in response to the IG’s Report?

Well, they promised that they would never, never ever do such a thing again, cross their heart they won’t.

But it’s not just biofuels, a product of global warming alarmism, that are unleashing a genocide against black people in poorer countries, it’s the whole anti-development mantra embraced by climate change activists that is being enforced by supranational organizations like the World Bank and the IMF in the name of reducing carbon dioxide, the evil life-giving gas that plants breathe and humans exhale.

Science is worth fighting for. It helps us understand the world and ourselves better and will benefit all humanity.

Perhaps the environmentalists of the Corps grew tired of waiting decades to realize their dream of a "restored Missouri River." Perhaps these elements heard the warnings and saw in them an opportunity to force an immediate re-naturalization of the river via epic flood. At present, that is impossible to know, but to needlessly imperil the property, businesses, and lives of millions of people constitutes criminal negligence. Given the statements of Corps personnel, and the clear evidence of their mismanagement, the possibility that there is specific intent behind their failure to act must be investigated without delay.

What is and isn’t a resource is determined by human ingenuity. Likewise, human ingenuity determines how much “utility” – satisfaction; gratification; pleasure; relief-of-felt-uneasiness (call it what you will) – can be gotten at any moment in time from any given unit of physical stuff. As long as human ingenuiity is free to create, there is no necessary practical limit to the amount of any ‘natural’ resource that is available for humans to use productively.

Consider petroleum. Is its stock strictly limited? For a physicist the answer is yes. But not so for an economist, who asks different questions than does the physicist. The economist asks: “How available is this particular substance – petroleum – for the continuing satisfaction of human desires?”

No, I do not kneel at the church of science just like I do not kneel at anyone’s altar. I do not blindly follow along with a crowd just because someone says something is true. I question everything, especially authority, and look into things on my own. I look into not only the science behind things, but the politics behind things and the wealth, power and control that can be derived from supporting certain agendas. It seems to me that big government and world government are quickly becoming like a modern version of “the church” as it existed and exerted its control through the dark ages. It seems that many scientists have become the new priest class and manmade climate change the new terrorizing threat of being damned to hell for all eternity.

The underlying philosophy behind this global, Orwellian nightmare is "communitarianism," another name for communism. The Agenda 21 website specifically states that property is "too important" to be privately controlled, and big homes with big appliances are "unsustainable."

Poor people are getting less poor. To me, that’s a great thing. The warmer winters are merely a bonus.

The free market has always proved that the Malthusians and the Luddites are wrong. Always. The direct result of a more prosperous world will be substantially less pollution. If the scales ever fall from your eyes you will see that warmth is better than cold, and rich countries are better for the planet than poor countries. Word up, my man. Planet Earth needs prosperity.

Dear grandchildren: Although the oceans have been rising by a foot or two per century since the most recent ice age ended, we leftists created taxes and regulations projected to reduce the rise from 18 inches to 17.9 inches over the 21st century. Of course, then another mini ice age struck the planet and the ocean levels actually fell, but at least our intentions were good. Turns out, climate change simply is caused by sunspots. Gosh, are we embarrassed!

By the way, don't forget to pay the bill for all of our pointless efforts: At last count, it was a little over 50 trillion dollars in deficit spending for windmills, luxury electric sports cars for leftist movie stars, lost economic productivity, and massive unemployment. Sorry about that.

But hey, it's not the end of the world.

Galileo had the courage to stand apart from the mob of philosophers and scientific explorers who bowed to bullying from religious and Government authority. He was enslaved that we could be free. His greatest gift is beyond his science, it is our freedom. Although he suffered, ironically the world has come around to him.

That is now threatened as ideology seeks to replace science and control seeks to replace freedom.

What Obama was saying was that he could rebuild a moribund economy by cannibalizing those still-healthy industries and transferring resources to those portions of the economy that never could stand on their own without government coercion.

Not only is that idea delusional, it also puts the government on an economic path that is unsustainable. Government can no more save the economy by destroying than the U.S. armed forces could save Vietnam by bombing it into the Stone Age.

I am afraid to say that our manic post hoc ergo propter hoc-ery survives to this day. When Phuket in Thailand was hit by the 2004 tsunami, there really were a large number of religious nut-jobs - and not only in America - who were convinced that this was some kind of divine vengeance on that town for the alleged immorality of its residents and its reputation for sex tourism. It is always us, us, us. Many are the terrors of the Earth, says the chorus in Sophocles, and nothing is more terrible than mankind. Well, the only good thing about an earthquake and tsunami on this scale is that they remind us that even Sophocles was capable of talking bilge. There are plenty of things more terrifying than man, and they include asteroids, earthquakes, tsunamis and anything else that reminds us that we are tiny blobs of flesh and blood crawling on the thin integument of a sphere of boiling rock and metal, and that there are events in the life of that planet that are simply nothing to do with human action.

The UN’s IPCC Assessor David Shearman wants you to pay an eco tax of $18,000 for every child you have. This is to compensate the planet for you being a human. Don’t forget the eco elitists in power think you are a disease, a scourge on the planet, a virus that needs to be eliminated so the logical consequence is they want you to pay even more for being a human – that is to them of course. They have taken it upon themselves to represent the earth – no one voted them there – they elevated themselves to that position and now they feel they have the right to tell the rest of us how to live. They are taking their Malthusian steps like the Fabians – one step at a time. Putting us in a pot of cold water like lobsters and slowly heating it till it is boiling.

Insofar as the essential nature of production and economic activity is to improve the relationship between the chemical elements constituting the earth and man's life and well-being, it is also necessarily to improve man's environment, which is nothing other than those very same chemical elements and their associated energy forces. The notion that production and economic activity are harmful to the environment rests on the abandonment of man and his life as the source of value in the world, and its replacement by a nonhuman standard of value — i.e., the belief that nature is intrinsically valuable.

With man and his life as the standard of value, the environment is improved when it is filled with houses, farms, factories, and roads, all of which serve directly or indirectly to make his life easier. When nature in and of itself is seen as valuable, then the environment is harmed whenever man creates any of these things or does anything whatever that changes the existing state of nature, for he is then destroying alleged intrinsic values.

And guess what? Not only does the great big new Biodiversity scam already have its own IPCC but it even has its own pseudoeconomic, panic-generating Stern Report. This one is produced by a member of Deutsche Bank which – as Hilary Ostrov tells us in an excellent post well worth reading in full – has form when it comes to promoting half-witted, ill-documented, patently political climate change ****ocks.

It will take a generation or two or three to rid ourselves of the chains environmentalism has imposed on us and the economy, but it will happen. It took some seventy years for the former Soviet Union to ultimately implode.

Just as communism killed millions, so too has environmentalism. Both still exist in various places and various forms, but they will fail. Perhaps not in my lifetime or yours, but if we remain vigilant, if we resist, they too will die a deserved death.

Britons are less environmentally conscious than they were five years ago, with twice as many people now "bored" by talk of climate change as in 2005. Four in 10 take no action at all to reduce their household carbon dioxide emissions. Experts warn that green fatigue is a major reason why there are more cars on the roads, more planes in the sky and no reduction in the mountain of packaging waste.

Recycling makes many people feel good, but feelings are not the best test of environmental soundness. When it makes more sense to recycle than to throw something away; government compulsion isn't needed. And when recycling is a profligate use of natural and human resources, government mandates can't change the fact. Big Brother can force you to recycle your garbage, but that doesn't make garbage-recycling green.

Sea levels are not going to rise by 20 feet. Or 10. Or five. There is not going to be a climatic tipping point that pushes our planet into a spiral of ever-increasing temperatures. Global warming is not going to cause the extinction of half the species on this planet, or even 1%.

And it is long past time that respected members of the scientific community publicly acknowledge those facts and helped bring this debate back within the realm of reality.

Has it occurred to you that you have the ability to reduce the overpopulation that you assert by removing yourself from existence?

Of course, that would only reduce the population by one, but it would be a demonstration that you mean what you say. And if all those who share your view were to do the same then the world would certainly be a better place.

I followed a troop of horses through town the other day, on a motorcycle, and every few dozen yards one of them deposited another malodorous mini-roundabout on the Queen's highway. It was like a shit slalom.

And this was just a dozen or so horses, not the many thousands that once tramped the roads of London. So the piston engine not only saved the horse from its burden, it saved us from its ordure. This was a good thing.

How can any scientist worth their salt accept predictions based on only one, partial variable?

How can any scientist worth their salt accept that a retrospective regression fit constitutes ‘foundational’ evidence, or even, science?

How can any scientist worth their salt accept predictions based on models for which we know virtually nothing about some 80 per cent of the factors involved, including some of the more fundamental, such as water vapour and clouds?