 "Photo: Hilary Stohs-Krause")
Most college students consider themselves lucky when they save enough money each month to buy ramen noodles, but Taylor Wahl is trying to raise $650 per month to change minds.
"I noticed that Lincoln does not have anti-abortion messages, but on my way to Fairbury I noticed seven in 45 minutes," said Wahl, a freshman education major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Wahl wanted to show Lincoln women "if you're pregnant, it's a baby." And the best way to show that, she decided, was a billboard.
Wahl found that St. Joseph Catholic Church in Lincoln was auctioning off a billboard, but it wasn't in the desired location, so she called Lamar Advertising Company and decided to raise the money on her own, at the cost of $650 per month.
"My friends and family were very supportive," Wahl said. "I started a Facebook group and people began sending money."
The billboard is now on Normal Boulevard and South Street, two blocks away from Planned Parenthood.
"I wanted the billboard to be one of the last things a woman read right before going into Planned Parenthood," Wahl said. "Even if it saved one baby, my job was done."
Wahl said she has not been contacted by Planned Parenthood. Bobbi Kierstead, vice president of public affairs for Planned Parenthood of Nebraska and Council Bluffs, said she hadn't seen the billboard, and therefore couldn't comment on it.
When Lincoln Right To Life got word of Wahl's billboard, they thought she was doing an outstanding thing.
"She literally put her money where her mouth was," said Ron Zimmer, Lincoln Right to Life's mail list manager.
Wahl originally only had enough money to have the billboard up for a month, but after continuous donations from churches, friends and women's rights groups, she can now afford to keep the billboard up for four months.
"I have heard many stories of regret from women who have had an abortion and I think that women don't expect how they feel after it," Wahl said. "I want to make women really think about their choice."
Wahl sent out 400-500 letters and e-mails in effort to keep her billboard up as long as possible. She said is grateful for everyone that helped to keep her effort going.
"She is a champion of women," Zimmer said. "Taylor gives hope to many people and is doing a fantastic thing."
nicolegatz@dailynebraskan.com
Do you mean the author of Cool It described by its promo as:
A groundbreaking book that transforms the debate about global warming by offering a fresh perspective based on human needs as well as environmental concerns.Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world's temperature for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply-which can be addressed at a fraction of the cost and save millions of lives within our lifetime. He asks why the debate over climate change has stifled rational dialogue and killed meaningful dissent.Lomborg presents us with a second generation of thinking on global warming that believes panic is neither warranted nor a constructive place from which to deal with any of humanity's problems, not just global warming. Cool It promises to be one of the most talked about and influential books of our time.Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD), a body under Denmark's Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. cleared him of charges of scientific dishonesty.
A Dutch think tank, HAN, Heidelberg Appeal the Netherlands, published a report in which they claimed 25 out of 27 accusations against Lomborg to be unsubstantiated or not to the point. A group of scientists with relation to this think tank also published an article in 2005 in the Journal of Information Ethics, in which they concluded that most criticism against Lomborg was unjustified, and that the scientific community misused their authority to suppress Lomborg.
But then I don't need the services of Lomborg when I can count on the services of Dr. Phil Jones.
Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed a Freedom of Information request with NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in August of 2007. Finally on December 31, 2009 NASA complied releasing emails and other documents. He found that NASA had been actively engaged in scrubing their website of their own documents, and quietly pulling down numerous press releases grounded in proven wrong data. The emails show NASA claiming that their own temperature errors (which they have been caught making and in incorrect form aggressively promoting) are merely trivial after years of aggressively trumpeting much smaller warming anomalies. Horner described NASA's conduct as examples of "the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and suspect data management and integrity of NASA wildly spinning in defense of their enterprise."
Dr Phil Jones is most notable for maintaining the time series of the instrumental temperature record; this work figured prominently in the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report Summary for Policymakers. He was director of the Climatic Research Unit and a Professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. His research interests are instrumental climate change, palaeoclimatology, detection of climate change and the extension of riverflow records in the UK. He was a contributing author to the IPCC's 2001 Third Assessment Report chapter 12 Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes. Together with Michael E. Mann, he has published on the temperature record of the past 1000 years. In late 2009, certain climate-change-related emails of his became controversial.
Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor of Meteorology at Penn State, is best known for creating his infamous Hockey Stick graph and he is one of the key climatologists in ClimateGate.
Justin says “Well, why don't you tell me what you think he meant, since you're swinging him around as the authority? Maybe if you didn't understand what he was saying, you shouldn't rely so heavily on his statements.”
Who is Dr. Jones? Dr. Phil Jones, long-time director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (until he stepped down in December under investigation for scientific misconduct) and the provider of much of the most important data on which the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Many governments have based fears of unprecedented global warming starting in the mid-1970s, on Dr, Jones’ “science”. In a BBC interview Jones:
The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.
Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.
Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.
Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.
But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.
Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.
‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’
He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.
He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.
And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.
Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.
But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.
‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’
Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.
Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.
Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.
But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.
He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.
He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.
Justin says “Well, why don't you tell me what you think he meant, since you're swinging him around as the authority? Maybe if you didn't understand what he was saying, you shouldn't rely so heavily on his statements.”
Who is Dr. Jones? Dr. Phil Jones, long-time director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (until he stepped down in December under investigation for scientific misconduct) and the provider of much of the most important data on which the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Many governments have based fears of unprecedented global warming starting in the mid-1970s, on Dr, Jones’ “science”.
A devastating “mega-drought” occurred between 700 and 1000 years ago in the Great Plains of the USA. Geologists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln used “optically stimulated luminescence of sand particles and carbon-14 dating of seeds in peat laying between sand dunes in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, which form the largest sand sea in North America!
What do you suppose happened Justin? Did the ancient Pawnee have to many cars? Did they run to many coal burning power plants? But don't worry this was Great Plains warming not Global Warming. Though last time I checked the Great Plains was part of the Planet earth.
UK Times February 14, 2010