one for the greenies

ANDREW BOLT
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Chilling news for a few hot greens

10apr03

MORE good news, I'm afraid, for the green movement.

No, world temperatures are not at record highs, the Antarctic ice sheet isn't melting fast, and genetically modified canola won't hurt humans a bit and can be safely grown here.
Sadly for lying organisations such as Greenpeace, the latest news confirms that the end of the world is not nigh, and maybe we're not such bad people after all. What a surprise.

One day we'll look back at the global-warming hysteria and wonder how so many scientists, activists, journalists, politicians and teachers went along with this phony scare.

And maybe that day is coming faster than many suspect.

Just this week, we learned that Harvard University researchers checked more than 240 scientific studies on world temperature and discovered -- gasp! -- it was not true that the past few years have been the hottest ever recorded, as green groups often claim.

Instead, temperatures between the ninth and 14th centuries were much higher than today's. That extra heat was such a good thing, by the way, that the English could grow vines and Viking farmers found that Greenland really was green.

But then came the little Ice Age, bringing famine and economic misery. What little warming we've seen in the past 100 years is just a recovery from that chill.

And is it our dirty ways that have caused that warming? Don't be silly, says Dr Sallie Baliunis, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. What warming we've seen is more closely linked to an increase in solar activity.

Fancy that -- Earth is being warmed by the sun. Who would have guessed?

All this helps to explain another bit of good news -- a new University of Washington study that has found no sign of increased melting of the western Antarctic ice sheet. The ice is just quietly melting at the rate it has maintained for 10,000 years, so don't expect Rosebud to be flooded any time soon.

This, too, should annoy Greenpeace, which last year published pictures of a Norwegian glacier it claimed had recently disappeared, adding: "The blame can be put squarely on human activity."

But then Professor Ole Humlum, one of Norway's finest glaciologists, said Greenpeace's glacier had in fact melted away in the 1920s, "as a result of a perfectly natural rise in temperature".

And the news just gets better. Last week, Australia's Gene Technology Regulator, Dr Sue Meek, approved the planting of our first genetically modified food crop.

Her reason was simple -- the GM canola posed minimal risks to the environment and none at all to humans. Even if she was wrong and it cross-bred with a weed, there was nothing a spray of weedkiller couldn't fix.

Naturally, anti-GM hysterics like Scott Kinnear of the Greens are furious, calling the decision "extraordinary".

Nonsense. What's really extraordinary is that our green gurus hate all this great news.