You’re unfair to Laura Secor here. I remember her excellent piece on the Iranian dissident movement from late 2005 in the New Yorker… I strongly suggest you go back and look at that article before branding her an apologist for the mullahs.

I had a complete different take on the Chirac comments.

The rationales for having nuclear weapons is
1) They make the owners safer.
2) They make your enemies less safe.

Chiracs points were clear -

1)If Tehran decided to use a nuclear weapon, it would be razed before the weapon reached its target
2) The real risk is that all of Irans neighbors would also feel compelled to acquire nuclear weapons.

The Eqgyptians and Saudis have already announced that they would also like to have “nuclear energy” programs, just like Irans.

Hence, the Iranian nuclear weapons program serves no purpose but to trigger a regional arms race.

Even worse, given the flight times between the various protagonists in the Middle East, they would all have to adopt a policy of “Launch on Warning”.

IMHO The purpose of Chirac’s comments was to point out to Tehran that they were arguing about something that makes them less safe. The only rational reason for any nation to give up any weapons is because it makes them “less safe”.

“Don’t tell that to Nigel Weiss, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, past President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a scientist as honoured as they come. The science is anything but settled, he observes, except for one virtual certainty: The world is about to enter a cooling period.”

Professor Weiss goes on to describe the relationship between sun spot cycles and ice ages which are documented in history for the little ice age.

In summary, we’ve been in a very high activity cycle and are due for a crash.

Last time this happened you could walk from Manhattan to Staten Island with neither boat nor bridge.

Climate forced atmospheric CO2 variability in the early Holocene: A stomatal frequency reconstruction. Paper, key phrase from the abstract: “The reconstructed CO2 changes also show a distinct similarity to indicators of changing solar activity. This may suggest that at least the Northern Hemisphere was particularly sensitive to changes in solar activity during this time and that atmospheric CO2 concentrations fluctuated via rapid responses in climate. ” Bottom line, climate can drive CO2 level changes, which is the opposite of Global Warming Doctrine.

The solar constant isn’t. Constant, that is. A Russian scientist believes that global cooling, caused by a cyclic drop in solar output, could begin in 2012-2015.

The CO2 level (currently 0.038%) has been nowhere near stable during geological time either. And it’s decrease during the last 150 million years does not correlate with the estimates of average global temperature either.

There is also an inexplicable neutrality of CO2 acceleration for at least the first 100 years of the industrial age, from 1850 to 1950, with an unusual spike from 1950 to today. We’re about ten millenia late for the current CO2 wave which precedes and triggers ice ages, and this has no explanation at all. Does the spike have something to do with the delay? Who knows? The Hockey Stick offers no proof, because it eliminates at least two events of importance in order to achieve it’s radical acceleration.

Th current CO2 spike is a vector within a potential wave of CO2, and seems to follow industrial combustion rates, but it might have no relationship at all.

The cliche “consensus science” is tossed around, but it makes sense in a way. Consensus is the goal of a consensus-ocracy, because it validates and uphold its purpose. That’s reason for suspicion in the first place.

Ethanol conversion plants need a source of heat, which is (usually) natural gas and (sometimes) coal. If we build more coal-fired ethanol plants, then that is a good thing for energy independence, because it reduces the cost of ethanol relative to oil-based fuels…but there are more CO2 emissions from the coal plant than the nat gas plant.

When something else comes along with a better track record of improving people’s lives ….