GREENIE WATCH
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Warmist critic of vituperative gibberish engages in vituperative gibberish
Below are some comments from the original moonbat himself. He accuses climate skeptics of vituperative gibberish. But what is his article if it is not vituperative? I can see no mention of any single scientific fact in it. It is all abuse: "native idiocy", "infantile blathering" etc. And, as for "gibberish", his paranoid ravings that his critics are "astroturfers" (i.e. in the pay of "big oil" and the like) ignores all the eminent retired and tenured climate scientists (Singer, Lindzen, Kininmonth etc.) who need no pay from anyone to point out that global warming stopped more than 10 years ago. And paranoia is a type of madness, madness that often produces "gibberish" such as Monbiot's
On the Guardian's environment site in particular, and to a lesser extent on threads across the Guardian's output, considered discussion is being drowned in a tide of vituperative gibberish. A few hundred commenters appear to be engaged in a competition to reach the outer limits of stupidity. They post so often and shout so loudly that intelligent debate appears to have fled from many threads, as other posters have simply given up in disgust. I've now reached the point at which I can't be bothered to read beyond the first page or so of comments. It is simply too depressing.
The pattern, where environmental issues are concerned, is always the same. You can raise any issue you like, introduce a dossier of new information, deploy a novel argument, drop a shocking revelation. The comments which follow appear almost to have been pre-written. Whether or not you mentioned it, large numbers will concentrate on climate change – or rather on denying its existence. Another tranche will concentrate on attacking the parentage and lifestyle of the author. Very few address the substance of the article.
I believe that much of this is native idiocy: the infantile blathering of people who have no idea how to engage in debate. Many of the posters appear to have fallen for the nonsense produced by professional climate change deniers, and to have adopted their rhetoric and methods. But it is implausible to suppose that this is all that's going on. As I documented extensively in my book Heat, and as sites like DeSmogBlog and Exxonsecrets show, there is a large and well-funded campaign by oil, coal and electricity companies to insert their views into the media.
They have two main modes of operating: paying people to masquerade as independent experts, and paying people to masquerade as members of the public. These fake "concerned citizens" claim to be worried about a conspiracy by governments and scientists to raise taxes and restrict their freedoms in the name of tackling a non-existent issue. This tactic is called astroturfing. It's a well-trodden technique, also deployed extensively by the tobacco industry. You pay a public relations company to create a fake grassroots (astroturf) movement, composed of people who are paid for their services. They lobby against government attempts to regulate the industry and seek to drown out and discredit people who draw attention to the issues the corporations want the public to ignore.
Considering the lengths to which these companies have gone to insert themselves into publications where there is a risk of exposure, it is inconceivable that they are not making use of the Guardian's threads, where they are protected by the posters' anonymity. Some of the commenters on these threads have been paid to disseminate their nonsense, but we have no means, under the current system, of knowing which ones they are.
Two months ago I read some comments by a person using the moniker scunnered52, whose tone and content reminded me of material published by professional deniers. I called him out, asking "Is my suspicion correct? How about providing a verifiable identity to lay this concern to rest?" I repeated my challenge in another thread. He used distraction and avoidance in his replies, but would not answer or even address my question, which gave me the strong impression that my suspicion was correct.
So what should we do to prevent these threads from becoming the plaything of undisclosed corporate interests? My view is that everyone should be free to say whatever they want. I have never asked for a comment to be removed, nor will I do so. I believe that the threads should be unmoderated, except to protect the Guardian from Britain's ridiculous libel laws. But I also believe that everyone who comments here should be accountable: in other words that the rest of us should be able to see who they are. By hiding behind pseudonyms, commenters here are exposed to no danger of damaging their reputations by spouting nonsense. Astroturfers can adopt any number of identities, perhaps posting under different names in the same thread. We have no idea whether we are reading genuine views or corporate propaganda. There is also an asymmetry here: you know who I am; in fact some people on these threads seem to know more about me than I do. But I have no idea who I am arguing with.
Some people object that verifiable identities could expose posters to the risk of being traced and attacked. This is nonsense. I make no secret of my whereabouts and attract more controversy than almost anyone on these pages, but I have never felt at risk, even when, during the first few months of the Iraq war, I received emails threatening to kill, torture and mutilate me almost every day. For all the huffing and puffing in cyberspace, people simply don't care enough to take it into the real world.
So how could it best be done? Amazon prevents people from reviewing their own work by taking credit card numbers from anyone who wants to post. Is this the right way to go, or is there a better way of doing it? What do you think?
SOURCE
British Greenie academics say it's time to ditch "cap and trade" climate policies
Just when everyone has decided that "cap and trade" is the holy grail! What a nasty spanner in the works!
An international group of academics is urging world leaders to abandon their current policies on climate change. The authors of How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course say the strategy based on overall emissions cuts has failed and will continue to fail. They want G8 nations and emerging economies to focus on an approach based on improving energy efficiency and decarbonising energy supply. Critics of the report's recommendations say they are a dangerous diversion.
The report is published by the London School of Economics' (LSE) Mackinder Programme and the University of Oxford's Institute for Science, Innovation & Society. LSE Mackinder programme director Gwyn Prins said the current system of attempting to cap carbon emissions then allow trading in emissions permits had led to emissions continuing to rise. He said world proposals to expand carbon trading schemes and channel billions of dollars into clean energy technologies would not work. "The world has been recarbonising, not decarbonising," Professor Prins said.
"The evidence is that the Kyoto Protocol and its underlying approach have had and are having no meaningful effect whatsoever. "Worthwhile policy builds upon what we know works and upon what is feasible rather than trying to deploy never-before implemented policies through complex institutions requiring a hitherto unprecedented and never achieved degree of global political alignment."
The report has drawn an angry response from some environmentalists, who acknowledge the problems it highlights but fear that the solutions it proposes will not work. Tom Burke, from Imperial College London and a former government adviser, said: "The authors are right to be concerned about the lack of urgency in the political response to climate change. "They are also right to identify significant weaknesses in the major policy instrument currently being negotiated. "But nothing could be more harmful than to propose that the world stop what it is doing on climate change and start again working in a different way," Professor Burke contested.
"This is neither practical nor analytically defensible - and it seems to have been born more out of frustration than understanding of the nature of the political processes involved. "This is a far more complex, and urgent, diplomatic task than the strategic arms control negotiations and will require an even more sophisticated and multi-channel approach to its solution. Stop-go is not sophisticated."
G8 leaders will discuss climate change on Wednesday before joining leaders of emerging economies on Thursday for a meeting chaired by President Obama.
SOURCE
G8 EMISSIONS PLEDGE UNRAVELS AS RUSSIA OBJECTS
A target set by the G8 for developed countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 is unacceptable for Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev's top economic aide said Wednesday. "For us the 80 percent figure is unacceptable and likely unattainable," Arkady Dvorkovich told reporters. "We won't sacrifice economic growth for the sake of emission reduction," he added.
Dvorkovich declined however to unveil Russia's precise targets, saying that releasing them would be premature. Dvorkovich also said there was no consensus by which year emissions would have to be reduced. "This question is a mystery for everyone," he said. "The calculations are being done. There are different scenarios," he said, adding they ranged from 20 percent to 60 percent by 2050.
"Discussions on climate are of political nature and are sensitive for everyone," said the aide, within hours of his boss Medvedev apparently signing up to the deal. "There remains a lot of questions. No one wants to sacrifice their economic growth."
The Russian official was speaking on the margins of a three-day Group of Eight summit in the earthquake-shattered Italian town of L'Aquila. G8 leaders agreed on the summit's opening day Wednesday to bear the brunt of steep global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, agreeing to cut overall world emissions by 50 percent by 2050. At the same time they called on a broader bloc of developed countries to reduce pollution by 80 percent by the same year.
Medvedev's top economic aide also said the target to reduce emissions by 80 percent as compared to 1990 reflected the position of the European Commission but not the G8 as a whole.
Major developed and developing economies face mounting pressure to make ambitious commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions with the clock ticking ahead of the key Copenhagen climate change meeting to set international targets. "We still have the time to agree our positions before Copenhagan," Dvorkovich said.
SOURCE
No More Green Guilt
Every investment prospectus warns that “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” But suppose that an investment professional’s record contains nothing but losses, of failed prediction after failed prediction. Who would still entrust that investor with his money?
Yet, in public policy there is one group with a dismal track record that Americans never seem to tire of supporting. We invest heavily in its spurious predictions, suffer devastating losses, and react by investing even more, never seeming to learn from the experience. The group I’m talking about is the environmentalist movement.
Consider their track record—like the dire warnings of catastrophic over-population. Our unchecked consumption, we were told, was depleting the earth’s resources and would wipe humanity out in a massive population crash. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, forecasted hundreds of millions of deaths per year throughout the 1970s, to be averted, he insisted, only by mass population control “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”
But instead of global-scale famine and death, the 1970s witnessed an agricultural revolution. Despite a near-doubling of world population, food production continues to grow as technological innovation creates more and more food on each acre of farmland. The U.S., which has seen its population grow from 200 to 300 million, is more concerned about rampant obesity than a shortage of food.
The Alar scare in 1989 is another great example. The NRDC, an environmentalist lobby group, engineered media frenzy over the baseless assertion that Alar, an apple ripening agent, posed a cancer threat. The ensuing panic cost the apple industry over $200 million dollars, and Alar was pulled from the market even though it was a perfectly safe and value-adding product.
Or consider the campaign against the insecticide DDT, beginning with Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring. The world had been on the brink of eradicating malaria using DDT—but for Carson and her followers, controlling disease-carrying mosquitoes was an arrogant act of “tampering” with nature. Carson issued dire warnings that nature was “capable of striking back in unexpected ways” unless people showed more “humility before [its] vast forces.” She asserted, baselessly, that among other things DDT would cause a cancer epidemic. Her book led to such a public outcry that, despite its life-saving benefits and mountains of scientific evidence supporting its continued use, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Thanks to environmentalist opposition, DDT was almost completely phased out worldwide. And while there is still zero evidence of a DDT cancer risk, the resurgence of malaria needlessly kills over a million people a year.
Time and time again, the supposedly scientific claims of environmentalists have proven to be pseudo-scientific nonsense, and the Ehrlichs and Carsons of the world have proven to be the Bernard Madoffs of science. Yet Americans have ignored the evidence and have instead invested in their claims—accepting the blame for unproven disasters and backing coercive, harmful “solutions.”
Today, of course, the Green doomsday prediction is for catastrophic global warming to destroy the planet—something that environmentalists have pushed since at least the early 1970s, when they were also worried about a possible global cooling shifting the planet into a new ice age.
But in this instance, just as with Alar, DDT, and the population explosion, the science is weak and the “solutions” drastic. We are told that global warming is occurring at an accelerating rate, yet global temperatures have been flat for the last decade. We are told that global warming is causing more frequent and intense hurricanes, yet the data doesn’t support such a claim. We are warned of a potentially catastrophic sea level rise of 20 feet over the next century, but that requires significant melting of the land-based ice in Antarctica and Greenland. Greenland has retained its ice sheet for over 100,000 years despite wide-ranging temperatures and Antarctica has been cooling moderately for the last half-century.
Through these distortions of science we are again being harangued to support coercive policies. We are told that our energy consumption is destroying the planet and that we must drastically reduce our carbon emissions immediately. Never mind that energy use is an indispensable component of everything we do, that 85 percent of the world’s energy is carbon-based, or that there are no realistic, abundant alternatives available any time soon, and that billions of people are suffering today from lack of energy.
Despite all of that, Americans seem to once again be moving closer to buying the Green investment pitch and backing destructive Green policies. Why don’t we learn from past experience? Do you think a former Madoff investor would hand over money to him again?
It’s not that we’re too stupid to learn, it’s that we are holding onto a premise that distorts our understanding of reality. Americans are the most successful individuals in history – even in spite of this economic downturn – in terms of material wealth and the quality of life and happiness it brings. We are heirs to the scientific and industrial revolutions, which have increased life expectancy from 30 years to 80 and improved human life in countless, extraordinary ways. Through our ingenuity and productive effort, we have achieved an unprecedented prosperity by reshaping nature to serve our needs. Yet we have always regarded this productivity and prosperity with a certain degree of moral suspicion. The Judeo-Christian ethic of guilt and self-sacrifice leads us to doubt the propriety of our success and makes us susceptible to claims that we will ultimately face punishment for our selfishness–that our prosperity is sinful and can lead only to an apocalyptic judgment day.
Environmentalism preys on our moral unease and fishes around for doomsday scenarios. If our ever-increasing population or life-enhancing chemicals have not brought about the apocalypse, then it must be our use of fossil fuels that will. Despite the colossal failures of past Green predictions, we buy into the latest doomsday scare because, on some level, we have accepted an undeserved guilt. We lack the moral self-assertiveness to regard our own success as virtuous; we think we deserve punishment.
It is time to stop apologizing for prosperity. We must reject the unwarranted fears spread by Green ideology by rejecting unearned guilt. Instead of meekly accepting condemnation for our capacity to live, we should proudly embrace our unparalleled ability to alter nature for our own benefit as the highest of virtues.
Let’s stop wallowing in Green guilt. It’s time to recapture our Founding Fathers’ admiration for the pursuit of each individual’s own happiness.
SOURCE
EVEN THE BBC CLIMATE BLOG QUESTIONS 'SHRINKING SHEEP' HYPE
Wild sheep on a remote Scottish island are shrinking, and new research suggests that they're global warming's latest warning. But is climate change really to blame for the dip in this mouton célébré's size?
According to Tim Coulson and colleagues at Imperial College London, Soay sheep on the Outer Hebridean island of Hirta shrank by two kilos over the 25-year long study. And it's not because they've discovered the Atkins diet: Professor Coulson says that climate change is shortening Europe's harsh winters, allowing the puny sheep that would normally perish in the cold to survive. 'The Soay sheep provides another example of how far-reaching and unpredictable the effects of climate change can be', he remarks in the Times.
While there's no doubt that Europe's winters have become markedly warmer since the '70s, allowing the sheep to shrink, not all scientists are as sure as Professor Coulson that climate change is pulling the strings. This 2007 study by Dr Anastasios Tsonis, for example, points the finger at natural variability rather than greenhouse gas emissions. The North Atlantic Oscillation, the northern hemisphere's weather-maker, has simply been stuck in 'positive' (a.k.a. winter-warming) mode since the 1970s, he suggests.
'The standard explanation for the post 1970s warming is that the radiative effect of greenhouse gases overcame shortwave reflection effects due to aerosols', notes Dr Tsonis. 'However [our models suggest] an alternative hypothesis, namely that the climate shifted after the 1970s event to a different state of a warmer climate, which may be superimposed on an anthropogenic warming trend', he concludes.
So: William Blake's 'Little Lamb' can still thank the mild and the meek for its existence - but not necessarily climate change.
SOURCE
AMERICAN 'ENVIRONMENTALISM' GOES BACK A LONG WAY
The Democratic Party has won the White House and both houses of Congress. While Democrats won support from across the country their base of support is in the North-East. The US is in the midst of real economic, and alleged environmental, crises. During the Hundred Days the President has brought environmentalists into the senior realms of government and Congress has floated a raft of environmentalist legislation. The stage is set for a major federal government expansion that will change how electricity is generated and will restrict the amount of land available for development. The year is 1934.
More HERE
New Green/Left policy: Keep those ordinary scum Australians off Ayers rock
Only "special" people (like Greenies) should be allowed to set foot on it
Andrew Bolt
Whose rock is it anyway? And is this really about religion ... or power?
One reason to instinctively distrust this try-on is the claim that a ban is also for “visitor safety” and “environmental reasons”. Every visitor who climbs it knows full well from all the signs that it’s a challenge, and it’s clearly their own judgment that the climb is worth the risk, just as countless people judge that flying is worth the risk of deep vein thrombosis. By what right does Garrett insist it’s not? As for the “environmental reasons”, I rather suspect that a million more people may walk on this giant rock without grinding the thing into a pile of sand.
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Below are some comments from the original moonbat himself. He accuses climate skeptics of vituperative gibberish. But what is his article if it is not vituperative? I can see no mention of any single scientific fact in it. It is all abuse: "native idiocy", "infantile blathering" etc. And, as for "gibberish", his paranoid ravings that his critics are "astroturfers" (i.e. in the pay of "big oil" and the like) ignores all the eminent retired and tenured climate scientists (Singer, Lindzen, Kininmonth etc.) who need no pay from anyone to point out that global warming stopped more than 10 years ago. And paranoia is a type of madness, madness that often produces "gibberish" such as Monbiot's
On the Guardian's environment site in particular, and to a lesser extent on threads across the Guardian's output, considered discussion is being drowned in a tide of vituperative gibberish. A few hundred commenters appear to be engaged in a competition to reach the outer limits of stupidity. They post so often and shout so loudly that intelligent debate appears to have fled from many threads, as other posters have simply given up in disgust. I've now reached the point at which I can't be bothered to read beyond the first page or so of comments. It is simply too depressing.
The pattern, where environmental issues are concerned, is always the same. You can raise any issue you like, introduce a dossier of new information, deploy a novel argument, drop a shocking revelation. The comments which follow appear almost to have been pre-written. Whether or not you mentioned it, large numbers will concentrate on climate change – or rather on denying its existence. Another tranche will concentrate on attacking the parentage and lifestyle of the author. Very few address the substance of the article.
I believe that much of this is native idiocy: the infantile blathering of people who have no idea how to engage in debate. Many of the posters appear to have fallen for the nonsense produced by professional climate change deniers, and to have adopted their rhetoric and methods. But it is implausible to suppose that this is all that's going on. As I documented extensively in my book Heat, and as sites like DeSmogBlog and Exxonsecrets show, there is a large and well-funded campaign by oil, coal and electricity companies to insert their views into the media.
They have two main modes of operating: paying people to masquerade as independent experts, and paying people to masquerade as members of the public. These fake "concerned citizens" claim to be worried about a conspiracy by governments and scientists to raise taxes and restrict their freedoms in the name of tackling a non-existent issue. This tactic is called astroturfing. It's a well-trodden technique, also deployed extensively by the tobacco industry. You pay a public relations company to create a fake grassroots (astroturf) movement, composed of people who are paid for their services. They lobby against government attempts to regulate the industry and seek to drown out and discredit people who draw attention to the issues the corporations want the public to ignore.
Considering the lengths to which these companies have gone to insert themselves into publications where there is a risk of exposure, it is inconceivable that they are not making use of the Guardian's threads, where they are protected by the posters' anonymity. Some of the commenters on these threads have been paid to disseminate their nonsense, but we have no means, under the current system, of knowing which ones they are.
Two months ago I read some comments by a person using the moniker scunnered52, whose tone and content reminded me of material published by professional deniers. I called him out, asking "Is my suspicion correct? How about providing a verifiable identity to lay this concern to rest?" I repeated my challenge in another thread. He used distraction and avoidance in his replies, but would not answer or even address my question, which gave me the strong impression that my suspicion was correct.
So what should we do to prevent these threads from becoming the plaything of undisclosed corporate interests? My view is that everyone should be free to say whatever they want. I have never asked for a comment to be removed, nor will I do so. I believe that the threads should be unmoderated, except to protect the Guardian from Britain's ridiculous libel laws. But I also believe that everyone who comments here should be accountable: in other words that the rest of us should be able to see who they are. By hiding behind pseudonyms, commenters here are exposed to no danger of damaging their reputations by spouting nonsense. Astroturfers can adopt any number of identities, perhaps posting under different names in the same thread. We have no idea whether we are reading genuine views or corporate propaganda. There is also an asymmetry here: you know who I am; in fact some people on these threads seem to know more about me than I do. But I have no idea who I am arguing with.
Some people object that verifiable identities could expose posters to the risk of being traced and attacked. This is nonsense. I make no secret of my whereabouts and attract more controversy than almost anyone on these pages, but I have never felt at risk, even when, during the first few months of the Iraq war, I received emails threatening to kill, torture and mutilate me almost every day. For all the huffing and puffing in cyberspace, people simply don't care enough to take it into the real world.
So how could it best be done? Amazon prevents people from reviewing their own work by taking credit card numbers from anyone who wants to post. Is this the right way to go, or is there a better way of doing it? What do you think?
SOURCE
British Greenie academics say it's time to ditch "cap and trade" climate policies
Just when everyone has decided that "cap and trade" is the holy grail! What a nasty spanner in the works!
An international group of academics is urging world leaders to abandon their current policies on climate change. The authors of How to Get Climate Policy Back on Course say the strategy based on overall emissions cuts has failed and will continue to fail. They want G8 nations and emerging economies to focus on an approach based on improving energy efficiency and decarbonising energy supply. Critics of the report's recommendations say they are a dangerous diversion.
The report is published by the London School of Economics' (LSE) Mackinder Programme and the University of Oxford's Institute for Science, Innovation & Society. LSE Mackinder programme director Gwyn Prins said the current system of attempting to cap carbon emissions then allow trading in emissions permits had led to emissions continuing to rise. He said world proposals to expand carbon trading schemes and channel billions of dollars into clean energy technologies would not work. "The world has been recarbonising, not decarbonising," Professor Prins said.
"The evidence is that the Kyoto Protocol and its underlying approach have had and are having no meaningful effect whatsoever. "Worthwhile policy builds upon what we know works and upon what is feasible rather than trying to deploy never-before implemented policies through complex institutions requiring a hitherto unprecedented and never achieved degree of global political alignment."
The report has drawn an angry response from some environmentalists, who acknowledge the problems it highlights but fear that the solutions it proposes will not work. Tom Burke, from Imperial College London and a former government adviser, said: "The authors are right to be concerned about the lack of urgency in the political response to climate change. "They are also right to identify significant weaknesses in the major policy instrument currently being negotiated. "But nothing could be more harmful than to propose that the world stop what it is doing on climate change and start again working in a different way," Professor Burke contested.
"This is neither practical nor analytically defensible - and it seems to have been born more out of frustration than understanding of the nature of the political processes involved. "This is a far more complex, and urgent, diplomatic task than the strategic arms control negotiations and will require an even more sophisticated and multi-channel approach to its solution. Stop-go is not sophisticated."
G8 leaders will discuss climate change on Wednesday before joining leaders of emerging economies on Thursday for a meeting chaired by President Obama.
SOURCE
G8 EMISSIONS PLEDGE UNRAVELS AS RUSSIA OBJECTS
A target set by the G8 for developed countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 is unacceptable for Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev's top economic aide said Wednesday. "For us the 80 percent figure is unacceptable and likely unattainable," Arkady Dvorkovich told reporters. "We won't sacrifice economic growth for the sake of emission reduction," he added.
Dvorkovich declined however to unveil Russia's precise targets, saying that releasing them would be premature. Dvorkovich also said there was no consensus by which year emissions would have to be reduced. "This question is a mystery for everyone," he said. "The calculations are being done. There are different scenarios," he said, adding they ranged from 20 percent to 60 percent by 2050.
"Discussions on climate are of political nature and are sensitive for everyone," said the aide, within hours of his boss Medvedev apparently signing up to the deal. "There remains a lot of questions. No one wants to sacrifice their economic growth."
The Russian official was speaking on the margins of a three-day Group of Eight summit in the earthquake-shattered Italian town of L'Aquila. G8 leaders agreed on the summit's opening day Wednesday to bear the brunt of steep global cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, agreeing to cut overall world emissions by 50 percent by 2050. At the same time they called on a broader bloc of developed countries to reduce pollution by 80 percent by the same year.
Medvedev's top economic aide also said the target to reduce emissions by 80 percent as compared to 1990 reflected the position of the European Commission but not the G8 as a whole.
Major developed and developing economies face mounting pressure to make ambitious commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions with the clock ticking ahead of the key Copenhagen climate change meeting to set international targets. "We still have the time to agree our positions before Copenhagan," Dvorkovich said.
SOURCE
No More Green Guilt
Every investment prospectus warns that “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” But suppose that an investment professional’s record contains nothing but losses, of failed prediction after failed prediction. Who would still entrust that investor with his money?
Yet, in public policy there is one group with a dismal track record that Americans never seem to tire of supporting. We invest heavily in its spurious predictions, suffer devastating losses, and react by investing even more, never seeming to learn from the experience. The group I’m talking about is the environmentalist movement.
Consider their track record—like the dire warnings of catastrophic over-population. Our unchecked consumption, we were told, was depleting the earth’s resources and would wipe humanity out in a massive population crash. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, forecasted hundreds of millions of deaths per year throughout the 1970s, to be averted, he insisted, only by mass population control “by compulsion if voluntary methods fail.”
But instead of global-scale famine and death, the 1970s witnessed an agricultural revolution. Despite a near-doubling of world population, food production continues to grow as technological innovation creates more and more food on each acre of farmland. The U.S., which has seen its population grow from 200 to 300 million, is more concerned about rampant obesity than a shortage of food.
The Alar scare in 1989 is another great example. The NRDC, an environmentalist lobby group, engineered media frenzy over the baseless assertion that Alar, an apple ripening agent, posed a cancer threat. The ensuing panic cost the apple industry over $200 million dollars, and Alar was pulled from the market even though it was a perfectly safe and value-adding product.
Or consider the campaign against the insecticide DDT, beginning with Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring. The world had been on the brink of eradicating malaria using DDT—but for Carson and her followers, controlling disease-carrying mosquitoes was an arrogant act of “tampering” with nature. Carson issued dire warnings that nature was “capable of striking back in unexpected ways” unless people showed more “humility before [its] vast forces.” She asserted, baselessly, that among other things DDT would cause a cancer epidemic. Her book led to such a public outcry that, despite its life-saving benefits and mountains of scientific evidence supporting its continued use, DDT was banned in the United States in 1972. Thanks to environmentalist opposition, DDT was almost completely phased out worldwide. And while there is still zero evidence of a DDT cancer risk, the resurgence of malaria needlessly kills over a million people a year.
Time and time again, the supposedly scientific claims of environmentalists have proven to be pseudo-scientific nonsense, and the Ehrlichs and Carsons of the world have proven to be the Bernard Madoffs of science. Yet Americans have ignored the evidence and have instead invested in their claims—accepting the blame for unproven disasters and backing coercive, harmful “solutions.”
Today, of course, the Green doomsday prediction is for catastrophic global warming to destroy the planet—something that environmentalists have pushed since at least the early 1970s, when they were also worried about a possible global cooling shifting the planet into a new ice age.
But in this instance, just as with Alar, DDT, and the population explosion, the science is weak and the “solutions” drastic. We are told that global warming is occurring at an accelerating rate, yet global temperatures have been flat for the last decade. We are told that global warming is causing more frequent and intense hurricanes, yet the data doesn’t support such a claim. We are warned of a potentially catastrophic sea level rise of 20 feet over the next century, but that requires significant melting of the land-based ice in Antarctica and Greenland. Greenland has retained its ice sheet for over 100,000 years despite wide-ranging temperatures and Antarctica has been cooling moderately for the last half-century.
Through these distortions of science we are again being harangued to support coercive policies. We are told that our energy consumption is destroying the planet and that we must drastically reduce our carbon emissions immediately. Never mind that energy use is an indispensable component of everything we do, that 85 percent of the world’s energy is carbon-based, or that there are no realistic, abundant alternatives available any time soon, and that billions of people are suffering today from lack of energy.
Despite all of that, Americans seem to once again be moving closer to buying the Green investment pitch and backing destructive Green policies. Why don’t we learn from past experience? Do you think a former Madoff investor would hand over money to him again?
It’s not that we’re too stupid to learn, it’s that we are holding onto a premise that distorts our understanding of reality. Americans are the most successful individuals in history – even in spite of this economic downturn – in terms of material wealth and the quality of life and happiness it brings. We are heirs to the scientific and industrial revolutions, which have increased life expectancy from 30 years to 80 and improved human life in countless, extraordinary ways. Through our ingenuity and productive effort, we have achieved an unprecedented prosperity by reshaping nature to serve our needs. Yet we have always regarded this productivity and prosperity with a certain degree of moral suspicion. The Judeo-Christian ethic of guilt and self-sacrifice leads us to doubt the propriety of our success and makes us susceptible to claims that we will ultimately face punishment for our selfishness–that our prosperity is sinful and can lead only to an apocalyptic judgment day.
Environmentalism preys on our moral unease and fishes around for doomsday scenarios. If our ever-increasing population or life-enhancing chemicals have not brought about the apocalypse, then it must be our use of fossil fuels that will. Despite the colossal failures of past Green predictions, we buy into the latest doomsday scare because, on some level, we have accepted an undeserved guilt. We lack the moral self-assertiveness to regard our own success as virtuous; we think we deserve punishment.
It is time to stop apologizing for prosperity. We must reject the unwarranted fears spread by Green ideology by rejecting unearned guilt. Instead of meekly accepting condemnation for our capacity to live, we should proudly embrace our unparalleled ability to alter nature for our own benefit as the highest of virtues.
Let’s stop wallowing in Green guilt. It’s time to recapture our Founding Fathers’ admiration for the pursuit of each individual’s own happiness.
SOURCE
EVEN THE BBC CLIMATE BLOG QUESTIONS 'SHRINKING SHEEP' HYPE
Wild sheep on a remote Scottish island are shrinking, and new research suggests that they're global warming's latest warning. But is climate change really to blame for the dip in this mouton célébré's size?
According to Tim Coulson and colleagues at Imperial College London, Soay sheep on the Outer Hebridean island of Hirta shrank by two kilos over the 25-year long study. And it's not because they've discovered the Atkins diet: Professor Coulson says that climate change is shortening Europe's harsh winters, allowing the puny sheep that would normally perish in the cold to survive. 'The Soay sheep provides another example of how far-reaching and unpredictable the effects of climate change can be', he remarks in the Times.
While there's no doubt that Europe's winters have become markedly warmer since the '70s, allowing the sheep to shrink, not all scientists are as sure as Professor Coulson that climate change is pulling the strings. This 2007 study by Dr Anastasios Tsonis, for example, points the finger at natural variability rather than greenhouse gas emissions. The North Atlantic Oscillation, the northern hemisphere's weather-maker, has simply been stuck in 'positive' (a.k.a. winter-warming) mode since the 1970s, he suggests.
'The standard explanation for the post 1970s warming is that the radiative effect of greenhouse gases overcame shortwave reflection effects due to aerosols', notes Dr Tsonis. 'However [our models suggest] an alternative hypothesis, namely that the climate shifted after the 1970s event to a different state of a warmer climate, which may be superimposed on an anthropogenic warming trend', he concludes.
So: William Blake's 'Little Lamb' can still thank the mild and the meek for its existence - but not necessarily climate change.
SOURCE
AMERICAN 'ENVIRONMENTALISM' GOES BACK A LONG WAY
The Democratic Party has won the White House and both houses of Congress. While Democrats won support from across the country their base of support is in the North-East. The US is in the midst of real economic, and alleged environmental, crises. During the Hundred Days the President has brought environmentalists into the senior realms of government and Congress has floated a raft of environmentalist legislation. The stage is set for a major federal government expansion that will change how electricity is generated and will restrict the amount of land available for development. The year is 1934.
More HERE
New Green/Left policy: Keep those ordinary scum Australians off Ayers rock
Only "special" people (like Greenies) should be allowed to set foot on it
Andrew Bolt
Whose rock is it anyway? And is this really about religion ... or power?
The Northern Territory Labor government and the federal opposition are furious with a federal plan to close the climb to the top of Uluru, saying Peter Garrett is slamming the gate on a world famous tourism experience.
A 10-year draft management plan for Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, released yesterday, indicates the days of climbing the rock are coming to an end: “For visitor safety, cultural, and environmental reasons, the director and the board will work towards closure of the climb,” it says.
One reason to instinctively distrust this try-on is the claim that a ban is also for “visitor safety” and “environmental reasons”. Every visitor who climbs it knows full well from all the signs that it’s a challenge, and it’s clearly their own judgment that the climb is worth the risk, just as countless people judge that flying is worth the risk of deep vein thrombosis. By what right does Garrett insist it’s not? As for the “environmental reasons”, I rather suspect that a million more people may walk on this giant rock without grinding the thing into a pile of sand.
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Prius a paler shade of green
Hybrid car buyers aren't as concerned about the environment as they would like us to believe, according to the maker of the world's most popular brand. At the launch of the new-generation Toyota Prius in Sydney yesterday, chief engineer Akihiko Otsuka admitted the company had opted for a bigger, more powerful engine because customers had demanded it.
He said the new car, which remains the most fuel-efficient in the country, could have been designed to use less fuel than the 3.9 litres per 100 kilometres it achieves. "With a different approach, we could have done even better. However, customers told us they wanted more performance. In response, we selected a larger engine." The car also has an eco-unfriendly power button that allows drivers to sacrifice economy for better acceleration.
The new Prius is 20 per cent more powerful than its predecessor, but only 10 per cent more fuel efficient. It is almost 40 per cent more powerful than the first-generation Prius launched in 1997. As a result, the Prius is no longer a standout leader in fuel efficiency. The diesel version of BMW's new Mini uses the same amount of fuel while Ford's new Fiesta Econetic model, due out towards the end of the year, will use less. European car makers argue that diesel engines are just as efficient as hybrids.
But Toyota yesterday hit back, claiming diesels were dirtier and produced more carbon dioxide. The new Prius produces just 89 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre compared with the Mini's 104 g/km.
The new Prius has several other tricks up its sleeve, with solar roof panels and plastics made from plants rather than petroleum-based chemicals.
SOURCE
HOW TO TURN AWAY INVESTORS: GREEN POLICE STATE BRITAIN
The boys in green are coming as the Environment Agency sets up a squad to police companies generating excessive CO2 emissions.
The agency is creating a unit of about 50 auditors and inspectors, complete with warrant cards and the power to search company premises to enforce the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), which comes into effect next year.
Decked out in green jackets, the enforcers will be able to demand access to company property, view power meters, call up electricity and gas bills and examine carbon-trading records for an estimated 6,000 British businesses. Ed Mitchell, head of business performance and regulation at the Environment Agency, said the squad would help to bring emissions under control. “Climate change and CO2 are the world’s biggest issues right now. The Carbon Reduction Commitment is one of the ways in which Britain is responding.”
The formation of the green police overcomes a psychological hurdle in the battle against climate change. Ministers have long recognised the need to have new categories of taxes and criminal offences for CO2 emissions, but fear a repetition of the fuel tax protests in 2000 when lorry drivers blockaded refineries.
The central unit, based in Warrington, Cheshire, can call on the agency’s national network of hundreds of pollution inspectors, many of whom will soon be trained in CO2 monitoring.
It will also be able to demand energy bills from utilities without the companies under investigation knowing they are being watched.
Perhaps most worrying for managers will be the publication of an annual league table ranking companies by performance in cutting emissions. The government hopes the potential shame of a lowly placing will drive organisations to greater energy efficiency.
Mitchell predicted the unit would audit about 1,200 businesses a year. The first stage would be a desk study of their energy bills and activities, followed by a visit when numbers do not add up. “The inspectors will carry warrant cards giving them powers of entry to collect evidence. We will also have access to company accounts with suppliers,” he said.
More HERE
GREEN CLASS WAR: WORLD'S RICH ARE THE NEW TARGET OF CLIMATE CAMPAIGNERS
Researchers in the U.S. have proposed a new way of allocating responsibility for carbon emissions they say could solve the impasse between developed and developing countries. The Princeton researchers estimated that in 2008 half of the world's emissions came from just 700 million people. The method sets national targets for reducing carbon emissions based on the number of high-income earners in each country, following the theory that people who earn more generate more CO2.
"It's fairer than some other ideas out there in the sense that we attribute responsibility for emission reductions based only on the number of high-emitting people in the country -- if the country has large number of people who are high-emitters then it has more work to do," said Shoibal Chakravarty, a research scholar at Princeton Environmental Institute.
When researchers at Princeton started working on the project two years ago, one of their first aims was to find a reliable way to estimate the average emissions of high-income earners. "There's actually a very strong relationship in every country between emissions and income," Chakravarty told CNN. "By and large for every 10 percent increase in income, the emissions from a certain person go up about six to 10 percent. This is true pretty much everywhere in the world."
Researchers based their estimates on decades of data from national statistics offices and the World Bank.
"What happens is that initially people spend their money mostly on direct use like transportation, air conditioning, heating and cooling and so on," Chakravarty said. "But they also spend a lot of their money on buying goods, and buying stuff. And to make stuff you use energy and you produce emissions."
More HERE
GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Four articles below:
Great Barrier Reef will be gone in 20 years, says prophet
This B.S. about disappearing coral has been going on for decades but the reef is still there. The galoot below "forgets" that "coral reefs were exposed throughout their geological history to higher temperatures and CO2 levels than at present and yet have persisted". See here
The Great Barrier Reef will be so degraded by warming waters that it will be unrecognisable within 20 years, an eminent marine scientist has said. Charlie Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, told The Times: “There is no way out, no loopholes. The Great Barrier Reef will be over within 20 years or so.”
Once carbon dioxide had hit the levels predicted for between 2030 and 2060, all coral reefs were doomed to extinction, he said. “They would be the world’s first global ecosystem to collapse. I have the backing of every coral reef scientist, every research organisation. I’ve spoken to them all. This is critical. This is reality.”
Dr Veron’s comments came as the Institute of Zoology, the Royal Society and the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) held a crucial meeting on the future of coral reefs in London yesterday. In a joint statement they warned that by mid-century extinctions of coral reefs around the world would be inevitable.
Warming water causes coral polyps to eject the symbiotic algae that provide them with nutrients. These “bleaching events” were widespread during the El Niño of 1997-98, and localised occurrences are becoming more frequent. (During an El Niño, much of the tropical Pacific becomes unusually warm.) Reefs take decades to recover but by 2030 to 2050, depending on emissions and feedback effects, bleaching will be occurring annually or biannually.
Although surface sea temperatures are rising fastest in tropical regions the other big threat to coral reefs comes from the higher latitudes. The cold water there absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide more readily than warm water and acidifies more easily. When carbon dioxide concentrations reach between 480 and 500 parts per million warm water is no barrier to acidification, and the pH in equatorial regions will have dropped so far, meaning higher acidity, that coral reef growth becomes impossible anywhere in the ocean. [In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates]
“Coral reefs are the most sensitive of marine ecosystems,” said Alex Rogers, scientific director of IPSO. “Increased temperature and decreased pH will have a double-whammy effect. Reefs were safe at CO2 levels of 350 parts per million. We are at 387ppm today. Beyond 450 the fate of corals is sealed.”
In the five mass extinction events in geological history, key was the carbon cycle, in which carbon dioxide is the primary currency. Its concentration in the atmosphere is higher than it has been for 20 million years. In the Permian extinction, as in all the big extinctions, tropical marine life was the hardest hit. Reef-building corals took more than ten million years to return.
The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest and most diverse marine ecosystem, is worth $4.5 billion (£2.8 billion) a year to Australia. Worldwide, reefs are worth $300 billion. “But that is trivial compared with the costs if coral reefs fail,” Dr Veron said. “Then it won’t be a matter of no income, it will be a matter of damage to livelihoods, economies and ecosystems.”
Yesterday’s meeting renewed calls for networks of marine conservation zones to boost the resilience of reefs.
SOURCE
It's getting chilly but still not cool to be a sceptic
Andrew Bolt
NOW that it's so chilly, I can understand why Climate Change Minister Penny Wong wants us to stare at the sea, instead. Better that than have us stare at the latest satellite data showing the world has now cooled down to the average temperature of the past 30 years.
Last month Family First senator Steve Fielding asked Wong a question she could no longer ignore: what proof did she really have that man's gases were heating the world to hell? And what got her attention was Fielding's threat: if she didn't give a good answer, the Rudd Government would not get his crucial vote in the Senate for its plan to slash our emissions with huge new taxes.
Specifically, asked Fielding: "Is it the case that carbon dioxide increased by 5 per cent since 1998 while global temperature cooled over the same period? If so, why did the temperature not increase; and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?" An excellent question, even if it's more accurate to say the world has cooled since 2001, despite a big increase in the gases we're told will make us fry.
So I thought the media might be interested in Wong's remarkable response a week later, given that she now said we'd all been wrong to fret about the air temperature. You see, "at time-scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend caused by the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases". Translated, that means, sure, it might be cooling now, which we still refuse to actually confirm, but one day it will warm again, just like we said. Just wait.
And then there was this appeal to start checking the seas instead: "(I)n terms of a single indicator of global warming, change in ocean heat content is most appropriate." So all that ominous talk about hotter temperatures at this city or that town? Just kidding. Meaningless.
Last weekend we could understand better why Wong is no longer keen on data on surface and atmospheric warming. NASA's Aqua satellite - one of the four main measurements of world temperature - found June had dropped back to just .001 degrees above the average for the past 30 years. That means we're back to "normal", even if "normal" now is slightly warmer than the average for last century, during which the planet came out of the Little Ice Age that ended 150 years ago.
Other land and satellite records agree the planet has cooled for most of the past decade, and while it's still too early to say global warming has stopped, rather than just paused, it's not too early to ask why there's less warming than most climate models predicted.
But what of Wong's claim that the true measure of global warming is the sea? Well, even Fielding's scientific advisers agree that's true, even if Wong never mentioned that before. But as world-ranked climate scientist Professor Roger Pielke Sr noted this week, three recent papers confirm that even the oceans seem to have stopped rising and warming since about 2004, or at least have slowed in doing so. "All of these analyses are consistent with no significant heating in the upper ocean and a flattening of sea level rise, and even more clearly, that these climate metrics are not 'progressing faster than was expected a few years ago'," he said.
I know the panic is on. I know almost no politician, other than Fielding, dares publicly confess that the science of global warming is not at all settled. But know this: the data shows less warming than the alarmists claimed, and no warming for several years. It may start warming again soon, but until then a sane person will keep his head -- and his doubts.
SOURCE
Climate change laws to "de-energize" poor Australians
POLITICALLY correct zealots penning new national energy laws have pulled the plug on the word "disconnection". The word is being replaced with the bizarre term "de-energisation". Angry consumer groups have accused the boffins behind the draft of making it easier for power companies to hide harsh treatment of customers struggling to pay their bills.
Consumer Action Law Centre policy director Nicole Rich said the bureaucrats were out of touch and should go back to the drawing board. "This is more than political correctness gone mad," she said. "It's worse, because it could have the effect of keeping the community in the dark about hardship problems by lumping in records of these disconnections with power being cut for maintenance and safety reasons."
The warning comes as households and businesses brace for higher electricity bills because of policies to combat climate change.
A team of state and territory bureaucrats wrote the draft of the National Energy Customer Framework, which notes: "De-energisation of premises means the deactivating or closing of a connection in order to prevent the flow of energy from a distribution system at the supply point".
Ms Rich said there was a distinct difference between power shutdowns for maintenance, or when customers moved house, and supply cuts to those battling with bills. Critics fear the national laws will also strip Victorians of protections such as bans on late payment fees, security deposit restrictions and compensation of $250 a day for wrongful disconnections. But the Herald Sun believes Victoria will not sign the laws unless key consumer protections are retained.
Ms Rich said the number of Victorians disconnected for not paying had dropped to the nation's lowest rate, about 6500 a year, since a renewed focus on repayment plans and hardship policies from 2004. Federal Energy Minister Martin Ferguson's office said the document was an early draft, and more consultations would be held.
SOURCE
Urban planners are the biggest culprits in keeping grocery prices higher than they need to be
Greenie anti-development and anti-"sprawl" thinking is the major influence on urban planners these days
By Michael Costa
THE decision by Kevin Rudd and Consumer Affairs Minister Craig Emerson to scrap the federal government's ill-conceived Grocery Choice website has to be applauded. Grocery Choice was a political stunt that was inevitably bound to backfire on the government. The real problem with retail price increases is to be found in the archaic anti-market planning laws that deliver significant economic rents to those with the resources to establish monopolies over the limited key retail sites.
While it is appropriate to criticise the government for making its announcement on the day Michael Jackson died, so that it could minimise the political fallout from this significant political backflip, it should not be the main concern with the decision.
Emerson, having worked as an adviser to Bob Hawke, saw first-hand the importance of sensible market reform. Having inherited the portfolio from Chris Bowen, who with no doubt an eye to promotion, appears to have become enamoured with Rudd's anti-market rhetoric, Emerson would have realised the potential political disaster Grocery Choice was. The failure of Grocery Choice will, for political purposes, no doubt be blamed on the major supermarket chains. The reality is that with or without the co-operation of these supermarket chains, this was a ham-fisted way to address retail competition.
Despite the claims of Choice, the self-appointed friend of consumers, there was no chance of the website working properly or gaining broad community participation. The problem for consumers has never been information; it has been a real lack of competitive alternatives at the point of the actual retail spends. If Choice wants to bat on with Grocery Choice it should do it at its own expense, not with taxpayers' funds. A subscription-based service will prove whether there is a real public demand for this sort of information.
The July 2008 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report into the competitiveness of retail prices for standard groceries concluded that while there was "little doubt that food prices have increased significantly in recent times in Australia", this was due to a number of domestic and international factors. Domestic factors such as the drought and international factors such as an increased global demand for food production resources have led to rising farm input costs such as fuel and fertiliser. On the basis of an examination of these factors and the gross margins of the major retail chains, the ACCC concluded that only "one-twentieth of the increase in food prices over the past five years could be directly attributable to the increase in gross margins" by the dominant duopoly.
This conclusion sits uncomfortably with other observations within the report that seemed to highlight the clear dominance of the majors in key retail sub-categories, such as dry groceries. The ACCC observed "that gross margins have experienced larger increases in categories where Coles and Woolworths have a relatively larger share of national sales". The report further observed that the more efficient of the two majors, Woolworths, has earning margins among the highest of all international grocery retailers. Whatever the degree of economic rent flowing to the majors because of the structure of the industry, it is clearly difficult to determine. Nevertheless there is a problem and a public perception that this is leading to higher grocery prices.
The real danger in the government's decision to walk away from its election commitment is not lack of consumer information but rather that the major underlying problem in retail competition, planning barriers to entry, will not be addressed effectively. Problems here are in jurisdictions normally outside the control of the federal government: state government planning departments and local councils. The ACCC correctly identified that state planning laws which contributed to a lack of suitable sites for new grocery retailers were a significant barrier to entry for competitors to the majors. Its recommendation that competition issues be taken into account when approvals are assessed for new supermarkets is laudatory but politically naive. State planning departments and local councils are structurally incapable of implementing this recommendation.
The issue is both ideological and political. Most state and local government planning agencies have been captured by planning zealots who are hostile to market-driven economic development. These planners believe the market is the fundamental problem in urban land use allocation. Rather than harnessing the power of the market to produce economically sensible land allocation outcomes they try to fit these decisions within the current cookie-cutter ideological fashion. The present fashion in urban planning focuses on what are called centres policies and urban villages. This fashion is dressed up in different language in different areas for local consumption but is essentially the same approach to urban planning and is not unique to Australia.
The policy results in the concentration of major retail activity in central locations and satellite local centres with much more limited retail opportunities. Urban planners don't seem to understand that by mandating that major retailers be concentrated in a limited urban footprint they are creating artificial scarcity, higher prices and monopoly opportunities. Retailers in the urban villages can't compete against the price advantages the large volume retailers have and they are limited in their consumer offerings. Eventually the areas become economically unviable and potentially urban crime zones.
This urban planning ideology creates an uncompetitive environment as new entrants cannot locate in the centres because these prime monopoly positions have already been secured by the major retail operators. The consequence of this type of planning approach as the ACCC noted is that it "significantly impedes the ability of competing supermarkets to access prime locations". This of course leads to higher retail prices for consumers.
There are many examples, as the ACCC acknowledges, where major retail operators, shopping centre providers and major supermarkets have used the planning laws to try to frustrate direct competition. In states such as NSW where local government areas haven't been properly reformed the problem is even greater for retail consumers, due to the greater influence of small community interest groups, who don't even support the restrictive centres policy and seek to eliminate all retail expansion, even within the designated centres.
Until there is a properly functioning competitive market for retail space it is impossible to gauge whether existing retail competition and retail margins are reflective of sound economic factors, or monopolistic rent seeking behaviour. The federal government needs to deal with urban planning and land use as part of its national competition reform agenda. The argument that this is a state and local government issue does not have credibility given the federal government intrusion through its environmental legislation into what were traditionally state and local government issues.
Surely the economy is still as important as the environment.
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Hybrid car buyers aren't as concerned about the environment as they would like us to believe, according to the maker of the world's most popular brand. At the launch of the new-generation Toyota Prius in Sydney yesterday, chief engineer Akihiko Otsuka admitted the company had opted for a bigger, more powerful engine because customers had demanded it.
He said the new car, which remains the most fuel-efficient in the country, could have been designed to use less fuel than the 3.9 litres per 100 kilometres it achieves. "With a different approach, we could have done even better. However, customers told us they wanted more performance. In response, we selected a larger engine." The car also has an eco-unfriendly power button that allows drivers to sacrifice economy for better acceleration.
The new Prius is 20 per cent more powerful than its predecessor, but only 10 per cent more fuel efficient. It is almost 40 per cent more powerful than the first-generation Prius launched in 1997. As a result, the Prius is no longer a standout leader in fuel efficiency. The diesel version of BMW's new Mini uses the same amount of fuel while Ford's new Fiesta Econetic model, due out towards the end of the year, will use less. European car makers argue that diesel engines are just as efficient as hybrids.
But Toyota yesterday hit back, claiming diesels were dirtier and produced more carbon dioxide. The new Prius produces just 89 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometre compared with the Mini's 104 g/km.
The new Prius has several other tricks up its sleeve, with solar roof panels and plastics made from plants rather than petroleum-based chemicals.
SOURCE
HOW TO TURN AWAY INVESTORS: GREEN POLICE STATE BRITAIN
The boys in green are coming as the Environment Agency sets up a squad to police companies generating excessive CO2 emissions.
The agency is creating a unit of about 50 auditors and inspectors, complete with warrant cards and the power to search company premises to enforce the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), which comes into effect next year.
Decked out in green jackets, the enforcers will be able to demand access to company property, view power meters, call up electricity and gas bills and examine carbon-trading records for an estimated 6,000 British businesses. Ed Mitchell, head of business performance and regulation at the Environment Agency, said the squad would help to bring emissions under control. “Climate change and CO2 are the world’s biggest issues right now. The Carbon Reduction Commitment is one of the ways in which Britain is responding.”
The formation of the green police overcomes a psychological hurdle in the battle against climate change. Ministers have long recognised the need to have new categories of taxes and criminal offences for CO2 emissions, but fear a repetition of the fuel tax protests in 2000 when lorry drivers blockaded refineries.
The central unit, based in Warrington, Cheshire, can call on the agency’s national network of hundreds of pollution inspectors, many of whom will soon be trained in CO2 monitoring.
It will also be able to demand energy bills from utilities without the companies under investigation knowing they are being watched.
Perhaps most worrying for managers will be the publication of an annual league table ranking companies by performance in cutting emissions. The government hopes the potential shame of a lowly placing will drive organisations to greater energy efficiency.
Mitchell predicted the unit would audit about 1,200 businesses a year. The first stage would be a desk study of their energy bills and activities, followed by a visit when numbers do not add up. “The inspectors will carry warrant cards giving them powers of entry to collect evidence. We will also have access to company accounts with suppliers,” he said.
More HERE
GREEN CLASS WAR: WORLD'S RICH ARE THE NEW TARGET OF CLIMATE CAMPAIGNERS
Researchers in the U.S. have proposed a new way of allocating responsibility for carbon emissions they say could solve the impasse between developed and developing countries. The Princeton researchers estimated that in 2008 half of the world's emissions came from just 700 million people. The method sets national targets for reducing carbon emissions based on the number of high-income earners in each country, following the theory that people who earn more generate more CO2.
"It's fairer than some other ideas out there in the sense that we attribute responsibility for emission reductions based only on the number of high-emitting people in the country -- if the country has large number of people who are high-emitters then it has more work to do," said Shoibal Chakravarty, a research scholar at Princeton Environmental Institute.
When researchers at Princeton started working on the project two years ago, one of their first aims was to find a reliable way to estimate the average emissions of high-income earners. "There's actually a very strong relationship in every country between emissions and income," Chakravarty told CNN. "By and large for every 10 percent increase in income, the emissions from a certain person go up about six to 10 percent. This is true pretty much everywhere in the world."
Researchers based their estimates on decades of data from national statistics offices and the World Bank.
"What happens is that initially people spend their money mostly on direct use like transportation, air conditioning, heating and cooling and so on," Chakravarty said. "But they also spend a lot of their money on buying goods, and buying stuff. And to make stuff you use energy and you produce emissions."
More HERE
GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Four articles below:
Great Barrier Reef will be gone in 20 years, says prophet
This B.S. about disappearing coral has been going on for decades but the reef is still there. The galoot below "forgets" that "coral reefs were exposed throughout their geological history to higher temperatures and CO2 levels than at present and yet have persisted". See here
The Great Barrier Reef will be so degraded by warming waters that it will be unrecognisable within 20 years, an eminent marine scientist has said. Charlie Veron, former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, told The Times: “There is no way out, no loopholes. The Great Barrier Reef will be over within 20 years or so.”
Once carbon dioxide had hit the levels predicted for between 2030 and 2060, all coral reefs were doomed to extinction, he said. “They would be the world’s first global ecosystem to collapse. I have the backing of every coral reef scientist, every research organisation. I’ve spoken to them all. This is critical. This is reality.”
Dr Veron’s comments came as the Institute of Zoology, the Royal Society and the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) held a crucial meeting on the future of coral reefs in London yesterday. In a joint statement they warned that by mid-century extinctions of coral reefs around the world would be inevitable.
Warming water causes coral polyps to eject the symbiotic algae that provide them with nutrients. These “bleaching events” were widespread during the El Niño of 1997-98, and localised occurrences are becoming more frequent. (During an El Niño, much of the tropical Pacific becomes unusually warm.) Reefs take decades to recover but by 2030 to 2050, depending on emissions and feedback effects, bleaching will be occurring annually or biannually.
Although surface sea temperatures are rising fastest in tropical regions the other big threat to coral reefs comes from the higher latitudes. The cold water there absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide more readily than warm water and acidifies more easily. When carbon dioxide concentrations reach between 480 and 500 parts per million warm water is no barrier to acidification, and the pH in equatorial regions will have dropped so far, meaning higher acidity, that coral reef growth becomes impossible anywhere in the ocean. [In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates]
“Coral reefs are the most sensitive of marine ecosystems,” said Alex Rogers, scientific director of IPSO. “Increased temperature and decreased pH will have a double-whammy effect. Reefs were safe at CO2 levels of 350 parts per million. We are at 387ppm today. Beyond 450 the fate of corals is sealed.”
In the five mass extinction events in geological history, key was the carbon cycle, in which carbon dioxide is the primary currency. Its concentration in the atmosphere is higher than it has been for 20 million years. In the Permian extinction, as in all the big extinctions, tropical marine life was the hardest hit. Reef-building corals took more than ten million years to return.
The Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest and most diverse marine ecosystem, is worth $4.5 billion (£2.8 billion) a year to Australia. Worldwide, reefs are worth $300 billion. “But that is trivial compared with the costs if coral reefs fail,” Dr Veron said. “Then it won’t be a matter of no income, it will be a matter of damage to livelihoods, economies and ecosystems.”
Yesterday’s meeting renewed calls for networks of marine conservation zones to boost the resilience of reefs.
SOURCE
It's getting chilly but still not cool to be a sceptic
Andrew Bolt
NOW that it's so chilly, I can understand why Climate Change Minister Penny Wong wants us to stare at the sea, instead. Better that than have us stare at the latest satellite data showing the world has now cooled down to the average temperature of the past 30 years.
Last month Family First senator Steve Fielding asked Wong a question she could no longer ignore: what proof did she really have that man's gases were heating the world to hell? And what got her attention was Fielding's threat: if she didn't give a good answer, the Rudd Government would not get his crucial vote in the Senate for its plan to slash our emissions with huge new taxes.
Specifically, asked Fielding: "Is it the case that carbon dioxide increased by 5 per cent since 1998 while global temperature cooled over the same period? If so, why did the temperature not increase; and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?" An excellent question, even if it's more accurate to say the world has cooled since 2001, despite a big increase in the gases we're told will make us fry.
So I thought the media might be interested in Wong's remarkable response a week later, given that she now said we'd all been wrong to fret about the air temperature. You see, "at time-scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend caused by the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases". Translated, that means, sure, it might be cooling now, which we still refuse to actually confirm, but one day it will warm again, just like we said. Just wait.
And then there was this appeal to start checking the seas instead: "(I)n terms of a single indicator of global warming, change in ocean heat content is most appropriate." So all that ominous talk about hotter temperatures at this city or that town? Just kidding. Meaningless.
Last weekend we could understand better why Wong is no longer keen on data on surface and atmospheric warming. NASA's Aqua satellite - one of the four main measurements of world temperature - found June had dropped back to just .001 degrees above the average for the past 30 years. That means we're back to "normal", even if "normal" now is slightly warmer than the average for last century, during which the planet came out of the Little Ice Age that ended 150 years ago.
Other land and satellite records agree the planet has cooled for most of the past decade, and while it's still too early to say global warming has stopped, rather than just paused, it's not too early to ask why there's less warming than most climate models predicted.
But what of Wong's claim that the true measure of global warming is the sea? Well, even Fielding's scientific advisers agree that's true, even if Wong never mentioned that before. But as world-ranked climate scientist Professor Roger Pielke Sr noted this week, three recent papers confirm that even the oceans seem to have stopped rising and warming since about 2004, or at least have slowed in doing so. "All of these analyses are consistent with no significant heating in the upper ocean and a flattening of sea level rise, and even more clearly, that these climate metrics are not 'progressing faster than was expected a few years ago'," he said.
I know the panic is on. I know almost no politician, other than Fielding, dares publicly confess that the science of global warming is not at all settled. But know this: the data shows less warming than the alarmists claimed, and no warming for several years. It may start warming again soon, but until then a sane person will keep his head -- and his doubts.
SOURCE
Climate change laws to "de-energize" poor Australians
POLITICALLY correct zealots penning new national energy laws have pulled the plug on the word "disconnection". The word is being replaced with the bizarre term "de-energisation". Angry consumer groups have accused the boffins behind the draft of making it easier for power companies to hide harsh treatment of customers struggling to pay their bills.
Consumer Action Law Centre policy director Nicole Rich said the bureaucrats were out of touch and should go back to the drawing board. "This is more than political correctness gone mad," she said. "It's worse, because it could have the effect of keeping the community in the dark about hardship problems by lumping in records of these disconnections with power being cut for maintenance and safety reasons."
The warning comes as households and businesses brace for higher electricity bills because of policies to combat climate change.
A team of state and territory bureaucrats wrote the draft of the National Energy Customer Framework, which notes: "De-energisation of premises means the deactivating or closing of a connection in order to prevent the flow of energy from a distribution system at the supply point".
Ms Rich said there was a distinct difference between power shutdowns for maintenance, or when customers moved house, and supply cuts to those battling with bills. Critics fear the national laws will also strip Victorians of protections such as bans on late payment fees, security deposit restrictions and compensation of $250 a day for wrongful disconnections. But the Herald Sun believes Victoria will not sign the laws unless key consumer protections are retained.
Ms Rich said the number of Victorians disconnected for not paying had dropped to the nation's lowest rate, about 6500 a year, since a renewed focus on repayment plans and hardship policies from 2004. Federal Energy Minister Martin Ferguson's office said the document was an early draft, and more consultations would be held.
SOURCE
Urban planners are the biggest culprits in keeping grocery prices higher than they need to be
Greenie anti-development and anti-"sprawl" thinking is the major influence on urban planners these days
By Michael Costa
THE decision by Kevin Rudd and Consumer Affairs Minister Craig Emerson to scrap the federal government's ill-conceived Grocery Choice website has to be applauded. Grocery Choice was a political stunt that was inevitably bound to backfire on the government. The real problem with retail price increases is to be found in the archaic anti-market planning laws that deliver significant economic rents to those with the resources to establish monopolies over the limited key retail sites.
While it is appropriate to criticise the government for making its announcement on the day Michael Jackson died, so that it could minimise the political fallout from this significant political backflip, it should not be the main concern with the decision.
Emerson, having worked as an adviser to Bob Hawke, saw first-hand the importance of sensible market reform. Having inherited the portfolio from Chris Bowen, who with no doubt an eye to promotion, appears to have become enamoured with Rudd's anti-market rhetoric, Emerson would have realised the potential political disaster Grocery Choice was. The failure of Grocery Choice will, for political purposes, no doubt be blamed on the major supermarket chains. The reality is that with or without the co-operation of these supermarket chains, this was a ham-fisted way to address retail competition.
Despite the claims of Choice, the self-appointed friend of consumers, there was no chance of the website working properly or gaining broad community participation. The problem for consumers has never been information; it has been a real lack of competitive alternatives at the point of the actual retail spends. If Choice wants to bat on with Grocery Choice it should do it at its own expense, not with taxpayers' funds. A subscription-based service will prove whether there is a real public demand for this sort of information.
The July 2008 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report into the competitiveness of retail prices for standard groceries concluded that while there was "little doubt that food prices have increased significantly in recent times in Australia", this was due to a number of domestic and international factors. Domestic factors such as the drought and international factors such as an increased global demand for food production resources have led to rising farm input costs such as fuel and fertiliser. On the basis of an examination of these factors and the gross margins of the major retail chains, the ACCC concluded that only "one-twentieth of the increase in food prices over the past five years could be directly attributable to the increase in gross margins" by the dominant duopoly.
This conclusion sits uncomfortably with other observations within the report that seemed to highlight the clear dominance of the majors in key retail sub-categories, such as dry groceries. The ACCC observed "that gross margins have experienced larger increases in categories where Coles and Woolworths have a relatively larger share of national sales". The report further observed that the more efficient of the two majors, Woolworths, has earning margins among the highest of all international grocery retailers. Whatever the degree of economic rent flowing to the majors because of the structure of the industry, it is clearly difficult to determine. Nevertheless there is a problem and a public perception that this is leading to higher grocery prices.
The real danger in the government's decision to walk away from its election commitment is not lack of consumer information but rather that the major underlying problem in retail competition, planning barriers to entry, will not be addressed effectively. Problems here are in jurisdictions normally outside the control of the federal government: state government planning departments and local councils. The ACCC correctly identified that state planning laws which contributed to a lack of suitable sites for new grocery retailers were a significant barrier to entry for competitors to the majors. Its recommendation that competition issues be taken into account when approvals are assessed for new supermarkets is laudatory but politically naive. State planning departments and local councils are structurally incapable of implementing this recommendation.
The issue is both ideological and political. Most state and local government planning agencies have been captured by planning zealots who are hostile to market-driven economic development. These planners believe the market is the fundamental problem in urban land use allocation. Rather than harnessing the power of the market to produce economically sensible land allocation outcomes they try to fit these decisions within the current cookie-cutter ideological fashion. The present fashion in urban planning focuses on what are called centres policies and urban villages. This fashion is dressed up in different language in different areas for local consumption but is essentially the same approach to urban planning and is not unique to Australia.
The policy results in the concentration of major retail activity in central locations and satellite local centres with much more limited retail opportunities. Urban planners don't seem to understand that by mandating that major retailers be concentrated in a limited urban footprint they are creating artificial scarcity, higher prices and monopoly opportunities. Retailers in the urban villages can't compete against the price advantages the large volume retailers have and they are limited in their consumer offerings. Eventually the areas become economically unviable and potentially urban crime zones.
This urban planning ideology creates an uncompetitive environment as new entrants cannot locate in the centres because these prime monopoly positions have already been secured by the major retail operators. The consequence of this type of planning approach as the ACCC noted is that it "significantly impedes the ability of competing supermarkets to access prime locations". This of course leads to higher retail prices for consumers.
There are many examples, as the ACCC acknowledges, where major retail operators, shopping centre providers and major supermarkets have used the planning laws to try to frustrate direct competition. In states such as NSW where local government areas haven't been properly reformed the problem is even greater for retail consumers, due to the greater influence of small community interest groups, who don't even support the restrictive centres policy and seek to eliminate all retail expansion, even within the designated centres.
Until there is a properly functioning competitive market for retail space it is impossible to gauge whether existing retail competition and retail margins are reflective of sound economic factors, or monopolistic rent seeking behaviour. The federal government needs to deal with urban planning and land use as part of its national competition reform agenda. The argument that this is a state and local government issue does not have credibility given the federal government intrusion through its environmental legislation into what were traditionally state and local government issues.
Surely the economy is still as important as the environment.
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Tropics are on the move (?)
Below is an article summarizing a non-peer-reviewed and unpublished paper which was primarily written by a woman employed by an Australian university Department devoted to climate change (full details of that below). Despite its undistinguished origins, however, it has made the news so I think a few comments are in order.
For a start, she could well be right that the tropical climate zone expanded in recent years. That it might shrink again is her unexamined assumption, however. There WAS global warming in the '80s and '90s and that has more or less plateaued since then, though in the last two years we have seen what seem to be the first signs of a corrective downswing in temperature.
That really is all one needs to say but a couple of minor points just for fun: She characterizes the sub-tropical zone as dry. I live in that zone in Australia, so I wonder if she would like to explain the rain falling outside my window at the moment in what is normally the driest time of the year here (winter)? She seems not to consider that global warming might increase precipitation in ALL areas of the globe -- as it should in theory do (more warmth means more evaporation off the sea and hence more rainfall).
She also concedes that a tropical climate is best for biodiversity -- but seems to imply that that is a bad thing -- an unusual stance for a Greenie!
She also says that disease patterns of the tropics will spead more widely -- completely ignoring that cold weather is a lot more fatal than warm weather and that an expansion of the warm zone should therefore SAVE lives.
She also says that warming will cause more extreme rainfall events in the tropics, with the implication that that is a bad thing. I have news for her. I was born and bred in the middle of an area that CONSTANTLY had extreme rainfall events (Tully to Babinda) and we did quite well there. With around 7 yards of rain a year the crops certainly grew like mad.
I could go on but what is the point in arguing with a religion? -- JR
A review of scientific literature released today by James Cook University shows that the Earth’s tropical zone is expanding and with it the subtropical dry zone is extending into what have been humid temperate climate zones. The authors of the review concluded that the effects of a poleward expansion of the tropical and subtropical zones were immense, resulting in a variety of social, political, economic and environmental implications.
Conducted by Dr Joanne Isaac, Post-Doctoral Fellow at JCU’s Centre for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change, with Professor Steve Turton, from JCU’s School of Earth and Environment Sciences, the review looked at scientific findings from long-term satellite measurements, weather balloon data, climate models and sea surface temperature studies.
Professor Turton said that the review - Expansion of the Tropics: Evidence and Implications - encompassed about 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers and reports from scientists and institutions right around the world. The review found that of particular concern were regions which border the subtropics and currently experience a temperate Mediterranean climate. “Such areas include heavily populated regions of southern Australia, southern Africa, the southern Europe-Mediterranean-Middle East region, the south-western United States, northern Mexico, and southern South America – all of which are predicted to experience severe drying.
“If the dry subtropics expand into these regions, the consequences could be devastating for water resources, natural ecosystems and agriculture, with potentially cascading environmental, social and health implications.”
The survey reveals that scientific data suggests while these areas could experience an increased frequency of droughts, the expansion of the tropical zone could result in extreme rainfall events and floods to regions which have not previously been exposed to such conditions, and a poleward shift in the paths of extra-tropical and possibly tropical cyclones in the next 100 years.
“A further implication of the expansion of the tropical zone is the possible expansion of tropical associated diseases and pests.” The review looked at scientific findings in relation to dengue among other tropical diseases and reports that some models predict the greatest increase in the annual epidemic potential of dengue will be into the subtropical regions, including the southern United States, China and northern Africa in the northern hemisphere, and south America, southern Africa, and most of Australia in the southern hemisphere.
The tropical zone is commonly defined geometrically as the portion of the Earth’s surface that lies between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn at 23.5 degrees latitude north and south respectively.
Evidence accumulating: “In general, atmospheric scientists estimate the climatic boundaries of the tropics extend further from the equator to around 30 degrees latitude north and south,” the review reports. “In recent years a variety of independent studies, employing different methodologies have found evidence for the widening of the topical region, as defined by climate scientists.
“However, while evidence is accumulating for the widening of the tropical belt and shifts in other climatic events, there is still much uncertainty regarding the degree of the expansion and the mechanisms which are driving it. “For example, across the studies reviewed the estimates of the increase in the tropics vary from 2.0 to more than 5 degrees of latitude approximately every 25 years. That makes the minimum agreed expansion of the Topics zone equivalent to around 300 kilometres. “This variation of estimates makes predicting future shifts difficult. Estimates for the expansion of the tropical zone in next 25 years (assuming the rate of movement is the same as the past 25 years) range from approximately 222 kilometres to more than 533 kilometres depending on which estimate is used.”
The tropics currently occupy approximately 40 per cent of the Earth’s land surface and are home to almost half of the world’s human population and account for more than 80 per cent of the Earth’s biodiversity. The majority of the world’s endemic animals and plants, which are found nowhere else on earth, are found in the tropics and are adapted to the specific climatic conditions found there.
“Thus, the implications of a poleward expansion of the tropical and subtropical zones are immense and the effects could result in a variety of social, political, economic and environmental implications,” the review said.
SOURCE
NYT: Polar Bear Populations in Decline
The predicted outcome of the recent polar bear "summit" has been duly delivered. They are "endangered" -- a conclusion reached while the man who has studied them longest, Mitchell Taylor, was barred from the meeting. HE says that the bears are increasing in numbers
There is rising concern among polar bear biologists that the big recent summertime retreats of sea ice in the Arctic are already harming some populations of these seal-hunting predators. That was one conclusion of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, a network of bear experts who met last week in Copenhagen to review the latest data (and data gaps) on the 19 discrete populations of polar bears around the Arctic. The group, part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, includes biologists in academia and government and at nonprofit conservation organizations. Only one bear population is increasing (in the Canadian high Arctic), while eight are declining in numbers, the scientists said. At its last meeting, in 2005, the group concluded that five populations were in decline. Three populations appear to be stable and seven are too poorly monitored to gauge a trend.
The data gaps exist in important regions, including the Russian Arctic, where there are no ongoing population studies despite poaching problems. The group said that in Canada, home to two-thirds of the world’s polar bears, population studies have been so sporadic that there is no reliable way to track trends. The meeting was not without controversy. Mitchell Taylor, a Canadian expert on polar bears who was in the specialists’ group for many years, told some reporters that he was excluded this year because he disputes that the bears are in danger and that human-caused global warming poses a substantial threat to them. But Andrew Derocher, the current chairman of the group, wrote a detailed rebuttal on Tim Lambert’s Deltoid blog rejecting the assertions.
While pressing for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions and better efforts to control hunting, both legal and illegal, the participating scientists concluded on an optimistic note, saying they were “optimistic that humans can mitigate the effects of global warming and other threats to polar bears, and ensure that they remain a part of the Arctic ecosystem in perpetuity.”
SOURCE
An amusing footnote on the official reason why Dr. Taylor was not allowed at the meeting. Dr Taylor has just recently retired so the convenor of the meeting grabs that as a bureaucratic excuse and says that is why Dr. Taylor's vast knowledge has suddenly become useless: "Involvement with the PBSG is restricted to those active in polar bear research and management and Dr. Taylor no longer fits within our guidelines of involvement". What a laugh!
The convenor concludes: "The PBSG has heard Dr. Taylor's views on climate warming many times. I would note that Dr. Taylor is not a trained climatologist and his perspectives are not relevant to the discussions and intent of this meeting".
But the meeting was (at least ostensibly) about polar bears, not climate! So that conclusion is a total red herring!
U.S. Government Scientist: 'Climate Model Software Doesn't Meet the Best Standards Available'
Plus: Another Gov't Scientist admits 'chaotic component of climate system...is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically'
Two prominent U.S. Government scientists made two separate admissions questioning the reliability of climate models used to predict warming decades and hundreds of years into the future.
Gary Strand, a software engineer at the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), admitted climate model software “doesn't meet the best standards available” in a comment he posted on the website Climate Audit. “As a software engineer, I know that climate model software doesn't meet the best standards available. We've made quite a lot of progress, but we've still quite a ways to go,” Strand wrote on July 5, 2009, according to the website WattsUpWithThat.com.
Strand's candid admission prompted WattsUpWithThat's skeptical Meteorologist Anthony Watts to ask the following question: “Do we really want Congress to make trillion dollar tax decisions today based on 'software [that] doesn't meet the best standards available?'”
Meteorologist Watts also critiqued the current climate models, noting, “NASA GISS model E written in some of the worst FORTRAN coding ever seen is a challenge to even get running. NASA GISTEMP is even worse. Yet our government has legislation under consideration significantly based on model output that Jim Hansen [of GISS] started. His 1988 speech to Congress was entirely based on model scenarios.”
Another Government Scientist Admits Climate Model Shortcomings
Another government scientist -- NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt -- admitted last week that the "chaotic component of climate system...is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically." Schmidt made his admission during a June 29, 2009 interview about the shortcomings of climate models. Schmidt noted that some climate models “suggest very strongly” that the American Southwest will dry in a warming world. But Schmidt also noted that “other models suggest the exact opposite.”
“With these two models, you have two estimates — one says it's going to get wetter and one says it's going to get drier. What do you do? Is there anything that you can say at all? That is a really difficult question,” Schmidt conceded. “The problem with climate prediction and projections going out to 2030 and 2050 is that we don't anticipate that they can be tested in the way you can test a weather forecast. It takes about 20 years to evaluate because there is so much unforced variability in the system which we can't predict — the chaotic component of the climate system — which is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically. That is something that we can't really get a handle on,” Schmidt lamented.
More HERE
MIT Climate Scientist on man-made climate fears: 'Ordinary people see thorough this -- but educated people are very vulnerable'
Scientific foundation for climate fears 'falling apart'
MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen mocked man-made global warming fears in a July 2, 2009 radio interview on WRKO's Howie Carr program. (Full audio of Lindzen's interview available here.) He noted that man-made climate fears were "divorced from nature" and the scientific foundation for climate fears was "falling apart."
"How did we get a population that can be told something that contradicts their senses and go crazy over it?" Lindzen asked on the program. Lindzen recently co-signed an open letter to Congress with a team of scientists warning: "You Are Being Deceived About Global Warming' -- 'Earth has been cooling for ten years.'
When asked about climate fears, Lindzen dismissed the notion that "ordinary" Americans are buying into former Vice President Al Gore's climate views. "We are too smart for that. You look at the polls, ordinary people see thorough this, but educated people are very vulnerable," Lindzen quipped. (at 09:14 min. mark on audio)
Lindzen noted that people are being told that if they change a lightbulb, they are "saving the Earth", they are "virtuous, they are smart." "Now you are told if you that if you don't understand global warming is going on, you are dumb, but if you agree to it, you are smart," Lindzen explained.
More HERE
Does climate catastrophe pass the giggle test?
The argument for doing drastic things to prevent global warming has two parts. The first has to do with climate change, with reasons to think that the earth is getting warmer and that the reason is human action, in particular the production of CO2. The second has to do with consequences of climate change for humans.
Most of the criticism I have seen, in comments to this blog and elsewhere, has to do with the first half, with critics arguing that the evidence for global warming, or at least the evidence it is caused by humans and will continue if humans do not mend their ways, is weak. I don not know enough to be sure that those criticisms are wrong; pretty clearly climate is a very complicated and not terribly well understood subject. But my best guess, from watching the debate, is that the first half of the argument is correct, that global climate is warming and that human action is at least an important part of the cause.
What I find unconvincing is the second half of the argument. More precisely, I find unconvincing the claim that climate change on the scale suggested by the results of the IPCC models would have catastrophic consequences for humans. Obviously one can imagine climate change large enough and fast enough to be a very serious problem—a rapid end of the current interglacial, for example. And if, as I believe is the case, climate is not very well understood, one cannot absolutely rule out such changes.
But most of the argument is put in terms not of what might conceivably happen but of what we have good reason to expect to happen, and I think the outer bound of that is provided by the IPCC models. They suggest a temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade over the next hundred years, resulting in a sea level rise of about a foot and a half. What I find implausible is the claim that changes on that scale at that speed would be catastrophic—sufficiently so to justify very expensive measures now to prevent them.
Human beings, after all, currently live, work, grow food in a much wider range of climates than that. Glancing over a U.S. climate map, it looks as though all of the places I have lived are within an hour or two drive of other places with an average temperature at least two degrees centigrade higher. If people can currently live, work, grow crops over a temperature range of much more than two degrees, it is hard to imagine any reason why most of them couldn't continue to do so, about as easily, if average temperature shifted up by that amount—especially if they had a century to adjust to the change. That observation raises the question with which I titled this post: Does climate change catastrophe pass the giggle test? Is the claim that climate change of that scale would have catastrophic consequences one that any reasonable person could take seriously?
I can only see two ways of defending such a claim. The first is some argument to show that present arrangements are, due to divine intervention or some alternative mechanism, optimal, so that any deviation, even a small one, can be expected to make things worse. The second, and less wildly implausible, is the observation that people have adapted their activities—the sort of houses they live in, the varieties of crops they grow—to current conditions. Put in economic terms, we have sunk costs in our present way of doing things. Even if the planet has not been optimized for us, we have optimized our activities for the planet, with the details depending in part on the local climate. Hence any change in either direction can be expected to be a worsening, making our present way of doing things less well adapted to the new conditions.
That would be a persuasive argument if we were talking about a substantial change occurring over five or ten years. But we aren't. We are talking about a not very large change occurring over a century. In the course of a century, most existing houses will be replaced. If temperatures are rising, they will be replaced with houses designed for a (slightly) warmer climate. If sea levels are rising, they will be replaced, in low lying coastal areas, with houses a little farther inland. Over a century, farmers will change at least the varieties they are growing, very possibly the kind of crop, multiple times, in response to the development of new crop varieties, shifting demand, and similar changes. If temperatures are rising, they will gradually shift to crops adapted to a (slightly) warmer climate.
Climate aside, we do not live in a static world—consider the changes that have occurred over the past century. The shifts we can expect to occur due to technological progress alone, even without allowing for political and demograpic shifts, are much larger than the shifts required to deal with climate change on the scale I am discussing.
My conclusion is that this version of climate catastrophe, at least, does not pass the giggle test. There may be other versions, based on more pessimistic predictions of climate change, that do. But the claim that we now have good reason to expect climate change on a scale that will produce not merely problems for some but catastrophe for many is one that no reasonable person should take seriously.
SOURCE
Another Moonwalker Defies Warmists
NASA Astronaut Dr. Buzz Aldrin rejects global warming fears: 'Climate has been changing for billions of years'
At a House global warming hearing on Capitol Hill on April 24, 2009, former Vice President Al Gore once again compared skeptics of man-made climate fears to “people who still believe that the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona." Gore appears ignorant that his several years old analogy has been refuted by two of NASA's moonwalkers themselves -- Moonwalker and Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist Jack Schmitt – who recently declared he was a global warming skeptic and now, Award-Winning NASA Astronaut and Moonwalker Dr. Buzz Aldrin.
Gore was not asked during his April 24, 2009 Congressional hearing how he can link climate skeptics to people who believed the moon landing was "staged" when two prominent moonwalkers themselves are man-made global warming skeptics.
NASA's Dr. Aldrin -- who earned a Doctorate of Science in Astronautics at MIT -- declared he was skeptical of man-made climate fears in a July 3, 2009 UK Telegraph interview. "I think the climate has been changing for billions of years," Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon, said.
On July 20, 1969, Aldrin and astronaut Neil Armstrong made their historic Apollo 11 moonwalk, becoming the first two humans to set foot on the Moon. According to his bio, "Aldrin has received three U.S. patents for his schematics of a modular space station, Starbooster reusable rockets, and multi-crew modules for space flight." Aldrin was also decorated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest American peacetime award and he has received numerous distinguished awards and medals from 23 other countries.
"If it's warming now, it may cool off later. I'm not in favor of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today," Aldrin explained. "I'm not necessarily of the school that we are causing it all, I think the world is causing it," Aldrin added.
Aldrin joins fellow moonwalker Schmitt, who flew on the Apollo 17 mission, in declaring their skepticism of man-made global warming fears. "The 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society's activities," Schmitt, who flew on the Apollo 17 mission, said in 2008.
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Below is an article summarizing a non-peer-reviewed and unpublished paper which was primarily written by a woman employed by an Australian university Department devoted to climate change (full details of that below). Despite its undistinguished origins, however, it has made the news so I think a few comments are in order.
For a start, she could well be right that the tropical climate zone expanded in recent years. That it might shrink again is her unexamined assumption, however. There WAS global warming in the '80s and '90s and that has more or less plateaued since then, though in the last two years we have seen what seem to be the first signs of a corrective downswing in temperature.
That really is all one needs to say but a couple of minor points just for fun: She characterizes the sub-tropical zone as dry. I live in that zone in Australia, so I wonder if she would like to explain the rain falling outside my window at the moment in what is normally the driest time of the year here (winter)? She seems not to consider that global warming might increase precipitation in ALL areas of the globe -- as it should in theory do (more warmth means more evaporation off the sea and hence more rainfall).
She also concedes that a tropical climate is best for biodiversity -- but seems to imply that that is a bad thing -- an unusual stance for a Greenie!
She also says that disease patterns of the tropics will spead more widely -- completely ignoring that cold weather is a lot more fatal than warm weather and that an expansion of the warm zone should therefore SAVE lives.
She also says that warming will cause more extreme rainfall events in the tropics, with the implication that that is a bad thing. I have news for her. I was born and bred in the middle of an area that CONSTANTLY had extreme rainfall events (Tully to Babinda) and we did quite well there. With around 7 yards of rain a year the crops certainly grew like mad.
I could go on but what is the point in arguing with a religion? -- JR
A review of scientific literature released today by James Cook University shows that the Earth’s tropical zone is expanding and with it the subtropical dry zone is extending into what have been humid temperate climate zones. The authors of the review concluded that the effects of a poleward expansion of the tropical and subtropical zones were immense, resulting in a variety of social, political, economic and environmental implications.
Conducted by Dr Joanne Isaac, Post-Doctoral Fellow at JCU’s Centre for Tropical Biodiversity and Climate Change, with Professor Steve Turton, from JCU’s School of Earth and Environment Sciences, the review looked at scientific findings from long-term satellite measurements, weather balloon data, climate models and sea surface temperature studies.
Professor Turton said that the review - Expansion of the Tropics: Evidence and Implications - encompassed about 70 peer-reviewed scientific papers and reports from scientists and institutions right around the world. The review found that of particular concern were regions which border the subtropics and currently experience a temperate Mediterranean climate. “Such areas include heavily populated regions of southern Australia, southern Africa, the southern Europe-Mediterranean-Middle East region, the south-western United States, northern Mexico, and southern South America – all of which are predicted to experience severe drying.
“If the dry subtropics expand into these regions, the consequences could be devastating for water resources, natural ecosystems and agriculture, with potentially cascading environmental, social and health implications.”
The survey reveals that scientific data suggests while these areas could experience an increased frequency of droughts, the expansion of the tropical zone could result in extreme rainfall events and floods to regions which have not previously been exposed to such conditions, and a poleward shift in the paths of extra-tropical and possibly tropical cyclones in the next 100 years.
“A further implication of the expansion of the tropical zone is the possible expansion of tropical associated diseases and pests.” The review looked at scientific findings in relation to dengue among other tropical diseases and reports that some models predict the greatest increase in the annual epidemic potential of dengue will be into the subtropical regions, including the southern United States, China and northern Africa in the northern hemisphere, and south America, southern Africa, and most of Australia in the southern hemisphere.
The tropical zone is commonly defined geometrically as the portion of the Earth’s surface that lies between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn at 23.5 degrees latitude north and south respectively.
Evidence accumulating: “In general, atmospheric scientists estimate the climatic boundaries of the tropics extend further from the equator to around 30 degrees latitude north and south,” the review reports. “In recent years a variety of independent studies, employing different methodologies have found evidence for the widening of the topical region, as defined by climate scientists.
“However, while evidence is accumulating for the widening of the tropical belt and shifts in other climatic events, there is still much uncertainty regarding the degree of the expansion and the mechanisms which are driving it. “For example, across the studies reviewed the estimates of the increase in the tropics vary from 2.0 to more than 5 degrees of latitude approximately every 25 years. That makes the minimum agreed expansion of the Topics zone equivalent to around 300 kilometres. “This variation of estimates makes predicting future shifts difficult. Estimates for the expansion of the tropical zone in next 25 years (assuming the rate of movement is the same as the past 25 years) range from approximately 222 kilometres to more than 533 kilometres depending on which estimate is used.”
The tropics currently occupy approximately 40 per cent of the Earth’s land surface and are home to almost half of the world’s human population and account for more than 80 per cent of the Earth’s biodiversity. The majority of the world’s endemic animals and plants, which are found nowhere else on earth, are found in the tropics and are adapted to the specific climatic conditions found there.
“Thus, the implications of a poleward expansion of the tropical and subtropical zones are immense and the effects could result in a variety of social, political, economic and environmental implications,” the review said.
SOURCE
NYT: Polar Bear Populations in Decline
The predicted outcome of the recent polar bear "summit" has been duly delivered. They are "endangered" -- a conclusion reached while the man who has studied them longest, Mitchell Taylor, was barred from the meeting. HE says that the bears are increasing in numbers
There is rising concern among polar bear biologists that the big recent summertime retreats of sea ice in the Arctic are already harming some populations of these seal-hunting predators. That was one conclusion of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, a network of bear experts who met last week in Copenhagen to review the latest data (and data gaps) on the 19 discrete populations of polar bears around the Arctic. The group, part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, includes biologists in academia and government and at nonprofit conservation organizations. Only one bear population is increasing (in the Canadian high Arctic), while eight are declining in numbers, the scientists said. At its last meeting, in 2005, the group concluded that five populations were in decline. Three populations appear to be stable and seven are too poorly monitored to gauge a trend.
The data gaps exist in important regions, including the Russian Arctic, where there are no ongoing population studies despite poaching problems. The group said that in Canada, home to two-thirds of the world’s polar bears, population studies have been so sporadic that there is no reliable way to track trends. The meeting was not without controversy. Mitchell Taylor, a Canadian expert on polar bears who was in the specialists’ group for many years, told some reporters that he was excluded this year because he disputes that the bears are in danger and that human-caused global warming poses a substantial threat to them. But Andrew Derocher, the current chairman of the group, wrote a detailed rebuttal on Tim Lambert’s Deltoid blog rejecting the assertions.
While pressing for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions and better efforts to control hunting, both legal and illegal, the participating scientists concluded on an optimistic note, saying they were “optimistic that humans can mitigate the effects of global warming and other threats to polar bears, and ensure that they remain a part of the Arctic ecosystem in perpetuity.”
SOURCE
An amusing footnote on the official reason why Dr. Taylor was not allowed at the meeting. Dr Taylor has just recently retired so the convenor of the meeting grabs that as a bureaucratic excuse and says that is why Dr. Taylor's vast knowledge has suddenly become useless: "Involvement with the PBSG is restricted to those active in polar bear research and management and Dr. Taylor no longer fits within our guidelines of involvement". What a laugh!
The convenor concludes: "The PBSG has heard Dr. Taylor's views on climate warming many times. I would note that Dr. Taylor is not a trained climatologist and his perspectives are not relevant to the discussions and intent of this meeting".
But the meeting was (at least ostensibly) about polar bears, not climate! So that conclusion is a total red herring!
U.S. Government Scientist: 'Climate Model Software Doesn't Meet the Best Standards Available'
Plus: Another Gov't Scientist admits 'chaotic component of climate system...is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically'
Two prominent U.S. Government scientists made two separate admissions questioning the reliability of climate models used to predict warming decades and hundreds of years into the future.
Gary Strand, a software engineer at the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), admitted climate model software “doesn't meet the best standards available” in a comment he posted on the website Climate Audit. “As a software engineer, I know that climate model software doesn't meet the best standards available. We've made quite a lot of progress, but we've still quite a ways to go,” Strand wrote on July 5, 2009, according to the website WattsUpWithThat.com.
Strand's candid admission prompted WattsUpWithThat's skeptical Meteorologist Anthony Watts to ask the following question: “Do we really want Congress to make trillion dollar tax decisions today based on 'software [that] doesn't meet the best standards available?'”
Meteorologist Watts also critiqued the current climate models, noting, “NASA GISS model E written in some of the worst FORTRAN coding ever seen is a challenge to even get running. NASA GISTEMP is even worse. Yet our government has legislation under consideration significantly based on model output that Jim Hansen [of GISS] started. His 1988 speech to Congress was entirely based on model scenarios.”
Another Government Scientist Admits Climate Model Shortcomings
Another government scientist -- NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt -- admitted last week that the "chaotic component of climate system...is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically." Schmidt made his admission during a June 29, 2009 interview about the shortcomings of climate models. Schmidt noted that some climate models “suggest very strongly” that the American Southwest will dry in a warming world. But Schmidt also noted that “other models suggest the exact opposite.”
“With these two models, you have two estimates — one says it's going to get wetter and one says it's going to get drier. What do you do? Is there anything that you can say at all? That is a really difficult question,” Schmidt conceded. “The problem with climate prediction and projections going out to 2030 and 2050 is that we don't anticipate that they can be tested in the way you can test a weather forecast. It takes about 20 years to evaluate because there is so much unforced variability in the system which we can't predict — the chaotic component of the climate system — which is not predictable beyond two weeks, even theoretically. That is something that we can't really get a handle on,” Schmidt lamented.
More HERE
MIT Climate Scientist on man-made climate fears: 'Ordinary people see thorough this -- but educated people are very vulnerable'
Scientific foundation for climate fears 'falling apart'
MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen mocked man-made global warming fears in a July 2, 2009 radio interview on WRKO's Howie Carr program. (Full audio of Lindzen's interview available here.) He noted that man-made climate fears were "divorced from nature" and the scientific foundation for climate fears was "falling apart."
"How did we get a population that can be told something that contradicts their senses and go crazy over it?" Lindzen asked on the program. Lindzen recently co-signed an open letter to Congress with a team of scientists warning: "You Are Being Deceived About Global Warming' -- 'Earth has been cooling for ten years.'
When asked about climate fears, Lindzen dismissed the notion that "ordinary" Americans are buying into former Vice President Al Gore's climate views. "We are too smart for that. You look at the polls, ordinary people see thorough this, but educated people are very vulnerable," Lindzen quipped. (at 09:14 min. mark on audio)
Lindzen noted that people are being told that if they change a lightbulb, they are "saving the Earth", they are "virtuous, they are smart." "Now you are told if you that if you don't understand global warming is going on, you are dumb, but if you agree to it, you are smart," Lindzen explained.
More HERE
Does climate catastrophe pass the giggle test?
The argument for doing drastic things to prevent global warming has two parts. The first has to do with climate change, with reasons to think that the earth is getting warmer and that the reason is human action, in particular the production of CO2. The second has to do with consequences of climate change for humans.
Most of the criticism I have seen, in comments to this blog and elsewhere, has to do with the first half, with critics arguing that the evidence for global warming, or at least the evidence it is caused by humans and will continue if humans do not mend their ways, is weak. I don not know enough to be sure that those criticisms are wrong; pretty clearly climate is a very complicated and not terribly well understood subject. But my best guess, from watching the debate, is that the first half of the argument is correct, that global climate is warming and that human action is at least an important part of the cause.
What I find unconvincing is the second half of the argument. More precisely, I find unconvincing the claim that climate change on the scale suggested by the results of the IPCC models would have catastrophic consequences for humans. Obviously one can imagine climate change large enough and fast enough to be a very serious problem—a rapid end of the current interglacial, for example. And if, as I believe is the case, climate is not very well understood, one cannot absolutely rule out such changes.
But most of the argument is put in terms not of what might conceivably happen but of what we have good reason to expect to happen, and I think the outer bound of that is provided by the IPCC models. They suggest a temperature increase of about two degrees centigrade over the next hundred years, resulting in a sea level rise of about a foot and a half. What I find implausible is the claim that changes on that scale at that speed would be catastrophic—sufficiently so to justify very expensive measures now to prevent them.
Human beings, after all, currently live, work, grow food in a much wider range of climates than that. Glancing over a U.S. climate map, it looks as though all of the places I have lived are within an hour or two drive of other places with an average temperature at least two degrees centigrade higher. If people can currently live, work, grow crops over a temperature range of much more than two degrees, it is hard to imagine any reason why most of them couldn't continue to do so, about as easily, if average temperature shifted up by that amount—especially if they had a century to adjust to the change. That observation raises the question with which I titled this post: Does climate change catastrophe pass the giggle test? Is the claim that climate change of that scale would have catastrophic consequences one that any reasonable person could take seriously?
I can only see two ways of defending such a claim. The first is some argument to show that present arrangements are, due to divine intervention or some alternative mechanism, optimal, so that any deviation, even a small one, can be expected to make things worse. The second, and less wildly implausible, is the observation that people have adapted their activities—the sort of houses they live in, the varieties of crops they grow—to current conditions. Put in economic terms, we have sunk costs in our present way of doing things. Even if the planet has not been optimized for us, we have optimized our activities for the planet, with the details depending in part on the local climate. Hence any change in either direction can be expected to be a worsening, making our present way of doing things less well adapted to the new conditions.
That would be a persuasive argument if we were talking about a substantial change occurring over five or ten years. But we aren't. We are talking about a not very large change occurring over a century. In the course of a century, most existing houses will be replaced. If temperatures are rising, they will be replaced with houses designed for a (slightly) warmer climate. If sea levels are rising, they will be replaced, in low lying coastal areas, with houses a little farther inland. Over a century, farmers will change at least the varieties they are growing, very possibly the kind of crop, multiple times, in response to the development of new crop varieties, shifting demand, and similar changes. If temperatures are rising, they will gradually shift to crops adapted to a (slightly) warmer climate.
Climate aside, we do not live in a static world—consider the changes that have occurred over the past century. The shifts we can expect to occur due to technological progress alone, even without allowing for political and demograpic shifts, are much larger than the shifts required to deal with climate change on the scale I am discussing.
My conclusion is that this version of climate catastrophe, at least, does not pass the giggle test. There may be other versions, based on more pessimistic predictions of climate change, that do. But the claim that we now have good reason to expect climate change on a scale that will produce not merely problems for some but catastrophe for many is one that no reasonable person should take seriously.
SOURCE
Another Moonwalker Defies Warmists
NASA Astronaut Dr. Buzz Aldrin rejects global warming fears: 'Climate has been changing for billions of years'
At a House global warming hearing on Capitol Hill on April 24, 2009, former Vice President Al Gore once again compared skeptics of man-made climate fears to “people who still believe that the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona." Gore appears ignorant that his several years old analogy has been refuted by two of NASA's moonwalkers themselves -- Moonwalker and Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist Jack Schmitt – who recently declared he was a global warming skeptic and now, Award-Winning NASA Astronaut and Moonwalker Dr. Buzz Aldrin.
Gore was not asked during his April 24, 2009 Congressional hearing how he can link climate skeptics to people who believed the moon landing was "staged" when two prominent moonwalkers themselves are man-made global warming skeptics.
NASA's Dr. Aldrin -- who earned a Doctorate of Science in Astronautics at MIT -- declared he was skeptical of man-made climate fears in a July 3, 2009 UK Telegraph interview. "I think the climate has been changing for billions of years," Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon, said.
On July 20, 1969, Aldrin and astronaut Neil Armstrong made their historic Apollo 11 moonwalk, becoming the first two humans to set foot on the Moon. According to his bio, "Aldrin has received three U.S. patents for his schematics of a modular space station, Starbooster reusable rockets, and multi-crew modules for space flight." Aldrin was also decorated with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest American peacetime award and he has received numerous distinguished awards and medals from 23 other countries.
"If it's warming now, it may cool off later. I'm not in favor of just taking short-term isolated situations and depleting our resources to keep our climate just the way it is today," Aldrin explained. "I'm not necessarily of the school that we are causing it all, I think the world is causing it," Aldrin added.
Aldrin joins fellow moonwalker Schmitt, who flew on the Apollo 17 mission, in declaring their skepticism of man-made global warming fears. "The 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society's activities," Schmitt, who flew on the Apollo 17 mission, said in 2008.
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Monday, July 06, 2009
"Denialists hiding behind ideology" (?)
Green/Left "projection" at work again. The post below is from the Warmist in Chief of a major Australian newspaper. He accuses "denialists" of being governed by ideology but look at what he says. There is NOT ONE scientific fact mentioned in what he writes. It is ALL ideology!
In ExxonMobil’s 2008 corporate citizenship report, the fossil fuel giant said this: "In recent years, we have discontinued contributions to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change diverted attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner."
If only it were true. This from the Sydney Morning Herald, via The Guardian: "Company records show ExxonMobil gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to such lobby groups last year. These include the National Centre for Policy Analysis in Dallas, which received $75,000, and the Heritage Foundation in Washington, which received $50,000."
Heritage was one of the groups which helped to fund the conference - mutual denialist back-slapping - which Senator Steve Fielding attended a few weeks ago before returning to Australia having swallowed their nonsense. From it’s title, you might think the NCPA was a genuine centre of repute. Not so. This from their website: "NCPA scholars believe that while the causes and consequences of the earth’s current warming trend is still unknown.."
Wow. These guys are scholars. Aren’t they supposed to read stuff? At least have a stab at a theory. Back in May, Professor Geoffrey Heal, professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, told an audience at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the following"
"It is mainly politicians on the right, who champion the efficiency of free markets, that have tended to dispute both the science and economics of climate change. They have a problem because they believe that governments should not intervene in markets. But environmental problems, such as climate change, cannot be tackled without governments acting. In addition, there are many on the right in the United States who are hostile to science because of their beliefs, whether it is evolution or climate change."
And who’d have thunk it? So it’s not down to science after all - just a bunch of free-market ideologists and Christians desperately trying to justify their beliefs.
SOURCE
He also greatly misrepresents both what Exxon Mobil did and what it reported. They did in fact cease funding some "denialist" organizations and their contributions to "denialist" groups in total came to only 4% of what they gave to groups interested in the environment. See my third post down here. Warmists just wallow in deception. It's all they've got
OCEAN TEMPERATURES: THE NEW FRONTIER OF CLIMATE ALARMISM
An email from David Evans [david.evans@sciencespeak.com]
The Fielding-Wong meeting spawned a brief email debate between climate heavyweights. The alarmist started it by patronizing Fielding's independent scientists, but it seems that when you call the bluff of a government funded alarmist scientist and put a direct question you don't get a direct reply -- only evasion and arrogance. Typical alarmist-skeptic exchange, but this one is now public for all to see. Read all about it here
BTW, climate alarmism is a paper tiger -- there is no evidence. There has been a change in direction by the alarmists, as shown by their new "Synthesis Report". They have abandoned air temperatures as a measure of global temperature, for obvious reasons, and switched to ocean temperatures.
They claim that ocean temperatures are rising and rising fast. This is rubbish, but it will take time to inform the public and politicians that it is rubbish. With the US climate bill and Copenhagen coming up, they only need to make the public believe their schtick for a few months. All the public education we did with air temperatures starts all over again with ocean temperatures:
1. Ocean temperatures can only be adequately measured by the Argo buoy network. Argo buoys duck dive down to 700m, recording temperatures, then come up and radio back the results. There are 3,000 of them floating around all the world's oceans.
2. The Argo buoys have only been operational since the end of 2003. Since then they show a slight cooling, See here and here and here
3. Josh Willis, who runs the Argos buoy program, said in March 2008: "There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant":
4. The Argo network initially showed definite cooling, but were recalibrated in 2007. After recalibration they showed slight warming, but now show slight cooling. See here
5. The Argo data shows that the AGW hypothesis is wrong, because temperatures are definitely not rising as fast as predicted by AGW
6. Before the Argo network we used bathythermographs (XBTs) to measure ocean temperatures. Those records are inadequate both for depth and geographical coverage
Global temperatures 'have plunged .74°F since Gore released 'An Inconvenient Truth'
The latest global averaged satellite temperature data for June 2009 reveals yet another drop in the Earth's temperature. This latest drop in global temperatures means despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled .74°F since former Vice President Al Gore released "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006.
According to the latest data courtesy of algorelied.com: "For the record, this month's Al Gore / 'An Inconvenient Truth' Index indicates that global temperatures have plunged approximately .74°F (.39°C) since 'An Inconvenient Truth' was released." (see satellite temperature chart here with key dates noted, courtesy of www.Algorelied.com - The global satellite temperature data comes from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.)
Gore has not yet addressed the simple fact that global temperatures have dropped since the release of his global warming film. A record cool summer has descended upon many parts of the U.S. after predictions of the "year without a summer." There has been no significant global warming since 1995, no warming since 1998 and global cooling for the past few years.
In addition, New peer-reviewed scientific studies now predict a continued lack of global warming for up to three decades as natural climate factors dominate.
This means that today's high school kids being forced to watch Al Gore's “An Inconvenient Truth” – some of them 4 times in 4 different classes – will be nearly eligible for AARP (age 50) retirement group membership by the time warming resumes if these new studies turn out to be correct.
Claims that warming will “resume” due to explosive heat in the "pipeline" have also been thoroughly debunked. See: Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. 'There is no warming in the pipeline'
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
GREEN JOBS GROWING, BUT DESTROYING OTHERS?
Clean-energy research and engineering posts could be poised for a growth spurt in the United States if a predicted 'green-job' explosion becomes reality. But some critics suggest that green jobs - those with a role in reducing waste and pollution and benefiting the environment - are replacing other jobs and are costly to create.
The Clean Energy Economy, released on 10 June by the Pew Charitable Trusts, based in Washington DC, and Climate 2030: A National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy, released last month by the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are enthusiastic about the effect of clean energy on the US economy and about the potential for job growth. A related document from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Clean Power, Green Jobs, predicts that some 297,000 new green jobs will be created in sectors such as agriculture, forestry, manufacturing and construction by 2025. And the Pew report counted 770,000 existing green jobs in the United States as of 2007.
The Pew report, which claims to be the first analysis to count actual jobs, business and investments for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, notes that venture-capital investments in clean technology plunged 48% in the first quarter of 2009 compared with the same period the year before, but points out that that's still better than the 61% drop seen across all sectors. Clean technology growth has varied widely from state to state, the report found. Nineteen states had more than the 2007 national average of 15,106 clean-energy jobs (referred to as 'large' states on map, below), and 18 'fast-growing' states had average annual growth between 1998 and 2007 that was above the national average of 1.9%.
Representatives from both organizations agree that green-job growth is most likely to occur in the manufacturing and construction sectors, although they predict expansion in science and engineering research positions as well. Kil Huh, project director of research at the Pew Center on the States in Washington DC and lead researcher on the report, cannot estimate how many of the green jobs in the report are in science or science research. But he says that clean energy, energy efficiency and environmentally friendly production are magnets for venture capital and federal fiscal stimulus investment, which, he predicts, will generate new research positions.
But economist Roger Meiners, a senior fellow with the Property & Environment Research Center, an environmental think tank based in Bozeman, Montana that in May published 7 Myths About Green Jobs, says that green jobs actually cost the economy. The report says that in Spain, for example, each green job created has destroyed 2.2 existing jobs in other sectors.
The report says green-job outlays take resources from other sectors, raise energy prices, and encourage companies to move production facilities to lower-cost nations.
Meiners says building and construction, not research, is the focus of nearly all green jobs. "Most federal funds are designed to force construction of wind and sun technology," says Meiners. But Jeff Deyette, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, points to a clean-energy bill that is currently under congressional review. If passed, billions of dollars in federal funding will be directed to science research in clean energy and clean technology over the next several decades. Research targets such as wave power and hydrokinetics, nanotechnology and photovoltaic-cell technology are likely to receive federal funding, he says.
Nature, 25 June 2009
The Carbonated Congress
Orszag nails it: The 'largest corporate welfare program' ever
President Obama is calling the climate bill that the House passed last week an "extraordinary" achievement, and so it is. The 1,200-page wonder manages the supreme feat of being both hugely expensive while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
The Washington press corps is playing the bill's 219-212 passage as a political triumph, even though one of five Democrats voted against it. The real story is what Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House baron Henry Waxman and the President himself had to concede to secure even that eyelash margin among the House's liberal majority. Not even Tom DeLay would have imagined the extravaganza of log-rolling, vote-buying, outright corporate bribes, side deals, subsidies and policy loopholes. Every green goal, even taken on its own terms, was watered down or given up for the sake of political rents.
Begin with the supposed point of the exercise -- i.e., creating an artificial scarcity of carbon in the name of climate change. The House trimmed Mr. Obama's favored 25% reduction by 2020 to 17% in order to win over Democrats leery of imposing a huge upfront tax on their constituents; then they raised the reduction to 83% in the out-years to placate the greens. Even that 17% is not binding, since it would be largely reached with so-called offsets, through which some businesses subsidize others to make emissions reductions that probably would have happened anyway.
Even if the law works as intended, over the next decade or two real U.S. greenhouse emissions might be reduced by 2% compared to business as usual. However, consumers would still face higher prices for electric power, transportation and most goods and services as this inefficient and indirect tax flowed down the energy chain.
The sound bite is that this policy would only cost households "a postage stamp a day." But that's true only as long as the program doesn't really cut emissions. The goal here is to tell voters they'll pay nothing in order to get the cap-and-tax bureaucracy in place -- even though the whole idea is to raise prices to change American behavior. At the same time -- wink, wink -- Democrats tell the greens they can tighten the emissions vise gradually over time.
Meanwhile, Congress had to bribe every business or interest that could afford a competent lobbyist. Carbon permits are valuable, yet the House says only 28% of the allowances would be auctioned off; the rest would be given away. In March, White House budget director Peter Orszag told Congress that "If you didn't auction the permit, it would represent the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States."
Naturally, Democrats did exactly that. To avoid windfall profits, they then chose to control prices, asking state regulators to require utilities to use the free permits to insulate ratepayers from price increases. (This also obviates the anticarbon incentives, but never mind.) Auctions would reduce political favoritism and interference, as well as provide revenue to cut taxes to offset higher energy costs. But auctions don't buy votes.
Then there was the peace treaty signed with Agriculture Chairman Colin Peterson, which banned the EPA from studying the carbon produced by corn ethanol and transferred farm emissions to the Ag Department, which mainly exists to defend farm subsidies. Not to mention the 310-page trade amendment that was introduced at 3:09 a.m. When Congress voted on the bill later that day, the House clerk didn't even have an official copy.
The revisions were demanded by coal-dependent Rust Belt Democrats to require tariffs on goods from countries that don't also reduce their emissions. Democrats were thus admitting that the critics are right that this new energy tax would send U.S. jobs overseas. But instead of voting no, their price for voting yes is to impose another tax on imports from China and India, among others. So a Smoot-Hawley green tariff is now official Democratic policy.
Mr. Obama's lobbyists first acquiesced to this tariff change to get the bill passed. Afterwards the President said he disliked "sending any protectionist signals" amid a world recession, but he refused to say whether this protectionism was enough to veto the bill. Then in a Saturday victory lap, he talked about green jobs and a new clean energy economy, but he made no reference to cap and trade -- no doubt because he knows that energy taxes are unpopular and that the bill faces an even tougher slog in the Senate.
Mr. Obama wants something tangible to take to the U.N. climate confab in Denmark in December, but the more important issue is what this exercise says about his approach to governance. The President seems to believe that the Carter and Clinton Presidencies failed by fighting too much with Democrats in Congress. So his solution is to abdicate his agenda to Congress -- first the stimulus, now cap and trade, and soon health care. We wish he had told us he was running to be Prime Minister.
SOURCE
Australia: Senator Barnaby Joyce dismisses climate nonsense
"The ETS is the Employment Termination Scheme"
Senator Barnaby Joyce has a good grasp of political issues and the ability to speak in a language the people understand. When Oppositions fail to do their job properly, an individual, a group or party faction inevitably steps forward to fill the power vacuum. In the case of the Rudd Government's proposed emissions trading scheme (ETS), Queensland Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce has moved to fill the space of a credible policy alternative by speaking out against a scheme which has the potential to devastate Australia's economy.
Rather than take a leadership stand on behalf of the Opposition, Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull has taken the soft option of calling for a delay in any government decision until after the United Nations climate talkfest in Copenhagen in December. Moreover, Mr Turnbull has also called for yet another inquiry - this time by the Productivity Commission. Presumably, Mr Turnbull is incapable of striking a balance between the Liberal Party's climate-change believers, such as Greg Hunt, and its sceptics, such as WA MP Dennis Jensen, and does not want to be "wedged" on the issue.
His position is one of agreement with the Rudd Government's steps to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to 20 per cent below 2000 levels. However, he wants to delay action for another few months. The Labor Party rightly criticises Mr Turnbull for continually moving the goalposts without offering a feasible alternative policy.
If Mr Turnbull's suggestion of a referral to the Productivity Commission is taken up, at least officials in that organisation will be familiar with the subject matter. The commission has already completed as many as a dozen separate reports on the economic effects of attempting to contain greenhouse gases, stretching back to 1991 before the issue was even fashionable. Most recently, the Productivity Commission produced yet another - a substantial 93-page submission to the Garnaut Climate Change Review, itself the landmark advice to the Rudd Government on moving the policy forward.
However, Senator Joyce is arguing that any Senate deferral of the ETS until after Copenhagen would be the equivalent to voting it down. "The ETS is the Employment Termination Scheme for working families in the coal-mining and farming belts of Australia," Senator Joyce wrote in a statement late in May. "It is undeniable that this scheme will put our major export at risk and also put us on the path to further exacerbate the loss of our food sovereignty. "You cannot take the major income-earner out of the house, then put more impediments on the food in the cupboard and expect the life in the house will go on as before. "The mining industry has clearly spelled out this will be a disaster. The farming sector has shown us that this could lead to a 20 per cent reduction in the economy of some regions. The ramifications will flow up every street, no matter where you live."
Senator Joyce argues that ETS basically is tokenism, an ineffective gesture when put against the vast quantity of emissions from overseas. In a typical turn-of-phrase he describes it as a sop to Labor's constituency at "the Mystical Monkey Coffee Shop in inner suburban Nirvanaville".
From his arrival in Canberra from Queensland in 2005 as an unpredictable maverick who was prepared to defy his party and Liberal colleagues to repeatedly cross the Senate floor on key issues, Senator Joyce has slowly graduated into the mainstream of political debate. He has a good grasp of issues and - that rare commodity in politics - the ability to speak in a language that people understand. He also understands that riding shotgun alongside the Liberal Party but without a gun, is as good as useless. In other words, the party has to stand for something or die.
In September last year, Joyce was elected without fanfare as Nationals leader in the Senate, but, critically, he refused to take an Opposition portfolio responsibility. This meant that, even though he was in the Coalition leadership group, he was not locked into a Coalition policy straightjacket and had the ability to continue to speak his mind.
Reluctantly, Nationals MPs are coming around to realising that Senator Joyce's aggressive, independent strategy is more effective in raising the Nationals brand name - particularly while in Opposition. Some Nationals MPs resent the publicity that Senator Joyce manages to attract, and they consider him an unpredictable upstart. But older and wiser hands, such as long-time Queensland Senator Ron Boswell, whose loyalty to the Coalition was never given the recognition it deserved, realise that a separate identity for the party is vital. Events are moving in a way whereby Nationals will soon be asking: is Senator Joyce a leader in the making?
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Green/Left "projection" at work again. The post below is from the Warmist in Chief of a major Australian newspaper. He accuses "denialists" of being governed by ideology but look at what he says. There is NOT ONE scientific fact mentioned in what he writes. It is ALL ideology!
In ExxonMobil’s 2008 corporate citizenship report, the fossil fuel giant said this: "In recent years, we have discontinued contributions to several public policy research groups whose position on climate change diverted attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner."
If only it were true. This from the Sydney Morning Herald, via The Guardian: "Company records show ExxonMobil gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to such lobby groups last year. These include the National Centre for Policy Analysis in Dallas, which received $75,000, and the Heritage Foundation in Washington, which received $50,000."
Heritage was one of the groups which helped to fund the conference - mutual denialist back-slapping - which Senator Steve Fielding attended a few weeks ago before returning to Australia having swallowed their nonsense. From it’s title, you might think the NCPA was a genuine centre of repute. Not so. This from their website: "NCPA scholars believe that while the causes and consequences of the earth’s current warming trend is still unknown.."
Wow. These guys are scholars. Aren’t they supposed to read stuff? At least have a stab at a theory. Back in May, Professor Geoffrey Heal, professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, told an audience at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the following"
"It is mainly politicians on the right, who champion the efficiency of free markets, that have tended to dispute both the science and economics of climate change. They have a problem because they believe that governments should not intervene in markets. But environmental problems, such as climate change, cannot be tackled without governments acting. In addition, there are many on the right in the United States who are hostile to science because of their beliefs, whether it is evolution or climate change."
And who’d have thunk it? So it’s not down to science after all - just a bunch of free-market ideologists and Christians desperately trying to justify their beliefs.
SOURCE
He also greatly misrepresents both what Exxon Mobil did and what it reported. They did in fact cease funding some "denialist" organizations and their contributions to "denialist" groups in total came to only 4% of what they gave to groups interested in the environment. See my third post down here. Warmists just wallow in deception. It's all they've got
OCEAN TEMPERATURES: THE NEW FRONTIER OF CLIMATE ALARMISM
An email from David Evans [david.evans@sciencespeak.com]
The Fielding-Wong meeting spawned a brief email debate between climate heavyweights. The alarmist started it by patronizing Fielding's independent scientists, but it seems that when you call the bluff of a government funded alarmist scientist and put a direct question you don't get a direct reply -- only evasion and arrogance. Typical alarmist-skeptic exchange, but this one is now public for all to see. Read all about it here
BTW, climate alarmism is a paper tiger -- there is no evidence. There has been a change in direction by the alarmists, as shown by their new "Synthesis Report". They have abandoned air temperatures as a measure of global temperature, for obvious reasons, and switched to ocean temperatures.
They claim that ocean temperatures are rising and rising fast. This is rubbish, but it will take time to inform the public and politicians that it is rubbish. With the US climate bill and Copenhagen coming up, they only need to make the public believe their schtick for a few months. All the public education we did with air temperatures starts all over again with ocean temperatures:
1. Ocean temperatures can only be adequately measured by the Argo buoy network. Argo buoys duck dive down to 700m, recording temperatures, then come up and radio back the results. There are 3,000 of them floating around all the world's oceans.
2. The Argo buoys have only been operational since the end of 2003. Since then they show a slight cooling, See here and here and here
3. Josh Willis, who runs the Argos buoy program, said in March 2008: "There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant":
4. The Argo network initially showed definite cooling, but were recalibrated in 2007. After recalibration they showed slight warming, but now show slight cooling. See here
5. The Argo data shows that the AGW hypothesis is wrong, because temperatures are definitely not rising as fast as predicted by AGW
6. Before the Argo network we used bathythermographs (XBTs) to measure ocean temperatures. Those records are inadequate both for depth and geographical coverage
Global temperatures 'have plunged .74°F since Gore released 'An Inconvenient Truth'
The latest global averaged satellite temperature data for June 2009 reveals yet another drop in the Earth's temperature. This latest drop in global temperatures means despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled .74°F since former Vice President Al Gore released "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006.
According to the latest data courtesy of algorelied.com: "For the record, this month's Al Gore / 'An Inconvenient Truth' Index indicates that global temperatures have plunged approximately .74°F (.39°C) since 'An Inconvenient Truth' was released." (see satellite temperature chart here with key dates noted, courtesy of www.Algorelied.com - The global satellite temperature data comes from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.)
Gore has not yet addressed the simple fact that global temperatures have dropped since the release of his global warming film. A record cool summer has descended upon many parts of the U.S. after predictions of the "year without a summer." There has been no significant global warming since 1995, no warming since 1998 and global cooling for the past few years.
In addition, New peer-reviewed scientific studies now predict a continued lack of global warming for up to three decades as natural climate factors dominate.
This means that today's high school kids being forced to watch Al Gore's “An Inconvenient Truth” – some of them 4 times in 4 different classes – will be nearly eligible for AARP (age 50) retirement group membership by the time warming resumes if these new studies turn out to be correct.
Claims that warming will “resume” due to explosive heat in the "pipeline" have also been thoroughly debunked. See: Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. 'There is no warming in the pipeline'
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
GREEN JOBS GROWING, BUT DESTROYING OTHERS?
Clean-energy research and engineering posts could be poised for a growth spurt in the United States if a predicted 'green-job' explosion becomes reality. But some critics suggest that green jobs - those with a role in reducing waste and pollution and benefiting the environment - are replacing other jobs and are costly to create.
The Clean Energy Economy, released on 10 June by the Pew Charitable Trusts, based in Washington DC, and Climate 2030: A National Blueprint for a Clean Energy Economy, released last month by the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are enthusiastic about the effect of clean energy on the US economy and about the potential for job growth. A related document from the Union of Concerned Scientists, Clean Power, Green Jobs, predicts that some 297,000 new green jobs will be created in sectors such as agriculture, forestry, manufacturing and construction by 2025. And the Pew report counted 770,000 existing green jobs in the United States as of 2007.
The Pew report, which claims to be the first analysis to count actual jobs, business and investments for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, notes that venture-capital investments in clean technology plunged 48% in the first quarter of 2009 compared with the same period the year before, but points out that that's still better than the 61% drop seen across all sectors. Clean technology growth has varied widely from state to state, the report found. Nineteen states had more than the 2007 national average of 15,106 clean-energy jobs (referred to as 'large' states on map, below), and 18 'fast-growing' states had average annual growth between 1998 and 2007 that was above the national average of 1.9%.
Representatives from both organizations agree that green-job growth is most likely to occur in the manufacturing and construction sectors, although they predict expansion in science and engineering research positions as well. Kil Huh, project director of research at the Pew Center on the States in Washington DC and lead researcher on the report, cannot estimate how many of the green jobs in the report are in science or science research. But he says that clean energy, energy efficiency and environmentally friendly production are magnets for venture capital and federal fiscal stimulus investment, which, he predicts, will generate new research positions.
But economist Roger Meiners, a senior fellow with the Property & Environment Research Center, an environmental think tank based in Bozeman, Montana that in May published 7 Myths About Green Jobs, says that green jobs actually cost the economy. The report says that in Spain, for example, each green job created has destroyed 2.2 existing jobs in other sectors.
The report says green-job outlays take resources from other sectors, raise energy prices, and encourage companies to move production facilities to lower-cost nations.
Meiners says building and construction, not research, is the focus of nearly all green jobs. "Most federal funds are designed to force construction of wind and sun technology," says Meiners. But Jeff Deyette, an energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, points to a clean-energy bill that is currently under congressional review. If passed, billions of dollars in federal funding will be directed to science research in clean energy and clean technology over the next several decades. Research targets such as wave power and hydrokinetics, nanotechnology and photovoltaic-cell technology are likely to receive federal funding, he says.
Nature, 25 June 2009
The Carbonated Congress
Orszag nails it: The 'largest corporate welfare program' ever
President Obama is calling the climate bill that the House passed last week an "extraordinary" achievement, and so it is. The 1,200-page wonder manages the supreme feat of being both hugely expensive while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions.
The Washington press corps is playing the bill's 219-212 passage as a political triumph, even though one of five Democrats voted against it. The real story is what Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House baron Henry Waxman and the President himself had to concede to secure even that eyelash margin among the House's liberal majority. Not even Tom DeLay would have imagined the extravaganza of log-rolling, vote-buying, outright corporate bribes, side deals, subsidies and policy loopholes. Every green goal, even taken on its own terms, was watered down or given up for the sake of political rents.
Begin with the supposed point of the exercise -- i.e., creating an artificial scarcity of carbon in the name of climate change. The House trimmed Mr. Obama's favored 25% reduction by 2020 to 17% in order to win over Democrats leery of imposing a huge upfront tax on their constituents; then they raised the reduction to 83% in the out-years to placate the greens. Even that 17% is not binding, since it would be largely reached with so-called offsets, through which some businesses subsidize others to make emissions reductions that probably would have happened anyway.
Even if the law works as intended, over the next decade or two real U.S. greenhouse emissions might be reduced by 2% compared to business as usual. However, consumers would still face higher prices for electric power, transportation and most goods and services as this inefficient and indirect tax flowed down the energy chain.
The sound bite is that this policy would only cost households "a postage stamp a day." But that's true only as long as the program doesn't really cut emissions. The goal here is to tell voters they'll pay nothing in order to get the cap-and-tax bureaucracy in place -- even though the whole idea is to raise prices to change American behavior. At the same time -- wink, wink -- Democrats tell the greens they can tighten the emissions vise gradually over time.
Meanwhile, Congress had to bribe every business or interest that could afford a competent lobbyist. Carbon permits are valuable, yet the House says only 28% of the allowances would be auctioned off; the rest would be given away. In March, White House budget director Peter Orszag told Congress that "If you didn't auction the permit, it would represent the largest corporate welfare program that has ever been enacted in the history of the United States."
Naturally, Democrats did exactly that. To avoid windfall profits, they then chose to control prices, asking state regulators to require utilities to use the free permits to insulate ratepayers from price increases. (This also obviates the anticarbon incentives, but never mind.) Auctions would reduce political favoritism and interference, as well as provide revenue to cut taxes to offset higher energy costs. But auctions don't buy votes.
Then there was the peace treaty signed with Agriculture Chairman Colin Peterson, which banned the EPA from studying the carbon produced by corn ethanol and transferred farm emissions to the Ag Department, which mainly exists to defend farm subsidies. Not to mention the 310-page trade amendment that was introduced at 3:09 a.m. When Congress voted on the bill later that day, the House clerk didn't even have an official copy.
The revisions were demanded by coal-dependent Rust Belt Democrats to require tariffs on goods from countries that don't also reduce their emissions. Democrats were thus admitting that the critics are right that this new energy tax would send U.S. jobs overseas. But instead of voting no, their price for voting yes is to impose another tax on imports from China and India, among others. So a Smoot-Hawley green tariff is now official Democratic policy.
Mr. Obama's lobbyists first acquiesced to this tariff change to get the bill passed. Afterwards the President said he disliked "sending any protectionist signals" amid a world recession, but he refused to say whether this protectionism was enough to veto the bill. Then in a Saturday victory lap, he talked about green jobs and a new clean energy economy, but he made no reference to cap and trade -- no doubt because he knows that energy taxes are unpopular and that the bill faces an even tougher slog in the Senate.
Mr. Obama wants something tangible to take to the U.N. climate confab in Denmark in December, but the more important issue is what this exercise says about his approach to governance. The President seems to believe that the Carter and Clinton Presidencies failed by fighting too much with Democrats in Congress. So his solution is to abdicate his agenda to Congress -- first the stimulus, now cap and trade, and soon health care. We wish he had told us he was running to be Prime Minister.
SOURCE
Australia: Senator Barnaby Joyce dismisses climate nonsense
"The ETS is the Employment Termination Scheme"
Senator Barnaby Joyce has a good grasp of political issues and the ability to speak in a language the people understand. When Oppositions fail to do their job properly, an individual, a group or party faction inevitably steps forward to fill the power vacuum. In the case of the Rudd Government's proposed emissions trading scheme (ETS), Queensland Nationals Senator Barnaby Joyce has moved to fill the space of a credible policy alternative by speaking out against a scheme which has the potential to devastate Australia's economy.
Rather than take a leadership stand on behalf of the Opposition, Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull has taken the soft option of calling for a delay in any government decision until after the United Nations climate talkfest in Copenhagen in December. Moreover, Mr Turnbull has also called for yet another inquiry - this time by the Productivity Commission. Presumably, Mr Turnbull is incapable of striking a balance between the Liberal Party's climate-change believers, such as Greg Hunt, and its sceptics, such as WA MP Dennis Jensen, and does not want to be "wedged" on the issue.
His position is one of agreement with the Rudd Government's steps to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to 20 per cent below 2000 levels. However, he wants to delay action for another few months. The Labor Party rightly criticises Mr Turnbull for continually moving the goalposts without offering a feasible alternative policy.
If Mr Turnbull's suggestion of a referral to the Productivity Commission is taken up, at least officials in that organisation will be familiar with the subject matter. The commission has already completed as many as a dozen separate reports on the economic effects of attempting to contain greenhouse gases, stretching back to 1991 before the issue was even fashionable. Most recently, the Productivity Commission produced yet another - a substantial 93-page submission to the Garnaut Climate Change Review, itself the landmark advice to the Rudd Government on moving the policy forward.
However, Senator Joyce is arguing that any Senate deferral of the ETS until after Copenhagen would be the equivalent to voting it down. "The ETS is the Employment Termination Scheme for working families in the coal-mining and farming belts of Australia," Senator Joyce wrote in a statement late in May. "It is undeniable that this scheme will put our major export at risk and also put us on the path to further exacerbate the loss of our food sovereignty. "You cannot take the major income-earner out of the house, then put more impediments on the food in the cupboard and expect the life in the house will go on as before. "The mining industry has clearly spelled out this will be a disaster. The farming sector has shown us that this could lead to a 20 per cent reduction in the economy of some regions. The ramifications will flow up every street, no matter where you live."
Senator Joyce argues that ETS basically is tokenism, an ineffective gesture when put against the vast quantity of emissions from overseas. In a typical turn-of-phrase he describes it as a sop to Labor's constituency at "the Mystical Monkey Coffee Shop in inner suburban Nirvanaville".
From his arrival in Canberra from Queensland in 2005 as an unpredictable maverick who was prepared to defy his party and Liberal colleagues to repeatedly cross the Senate floor on key issues, Senator Joyce has slowly graduated into the mainstream of political debate. He has a good grasp of issues and - that rare commodity in politics - the ability to speak in a language that people understand. He also understands that riding shotgun alongside the Liberal Party but without a gun, is as good as useless. In other words, the party has to stand for something or die.
In September last year, Joyce was elected without fanfare as Nationals leader in the Senate, but, critically, he refused to take an Opposition portfolio responsibility. This meant that, even though he was in the Coalition leadership group, he was not locked into a Coalition policy straightjacket and had the ability to continue to speak his mind.
Reluctantly, Nationals MPs are coming around to realising that Senator Joyce's aggressive, independent strategy is more effective in raising the Nationals brand name - particularly while in Opposition. Some Nationals MPs resent the publicity that Senator Joyce manages to attract, and they consider him an unpredictable upstart. But older and wiser hands, such as long-time Queensland Senator Ron Boswell, whose loyalty to the Coalition was never given the recognition it deserved, realise that a separate identity for the party is vital. Events are moving in a way whereby Nationals will soon be asking: is Senator Joyce a leader in the making?
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Sunday, July 05, 2009
A garden of piggish delights
Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.
The stimulus bill was the legislative equivalent of the famous cantina scene from Star Wars, an eye-popping collection of the freakish and exotic, gathered for dubious purposes. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, known as ACES (the American Clean Energy and Security Act), is more like the third panel in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights — a hellscape that disturbs the sleep of anybody who contemplates it carefully.
Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.
The House of Representatives, famously, did not read this bill before passing it, which is testament to either Nancy Pelosi’s managerial incompetency or her political wile, or possibly both. If you take the time to read the legislation, you’ll discover four major themes: special-interest giveaways, regulatory mandates unrelated to climate change, fanciful technological programs worthy of The Jetsons, and assorted left-wing wish fulfillment. We cannot cover every swirl and brushstroke of this masterpiece of misgovernance, but here’s a breakdown of its 50 most outrageous features.
SPECIAL-INTEREST SOPS
1. The big doozy: Eighty-five percent of the carbon permits will not be sold at auction — they will be given away to utility companies, petroleum interests, refineries, and a coterie of politically connected businesses. If you’re wondering why Big Business supports cap-and-trade, that’s why. Free money for business, but higher energy prices for you.
2. The sale of carbon permits will enrich the Wall Street investment bankers whose money put Obama in the White House. Top of the list: Goldman Sachs, which is invested in carbon-offset development and carbon permissions. CNN reports: "Less than two weeks after the investment bank announced it would be laying off 10 percent of its staff, ***Goldman Sachs confirmed that it has taken a minority stake in Utah-based carbon offset project developer Blue Source LLC. . . . “Interest in the pre-compliance carbon market in the U.S. is growing rapidly,” said Leslie Biddle, Head of Commodity Sales at Goldman, “and we are excited to be able to offer our clients immediate access to a diverse selection of emission reductions to manage their carbon risk.”
3. With its rich menu of corporate subsidies and special set-asides for politically connected industries, Waxman-Markey has inspired a new corporate interest group, USCAP, the United States Climate Action Partnership — the group largely responsible for the fact that carbon permits are being given away like candy at Christmas rather than auctioned. And who is lined up to receive a piece of the massive wealth transfer that Waxman-Markey will mandate? Canada Free Press lists:
Alcoa, American International Group (AIG) which withdrew after accepting government bailout money, Boston Scientific Corporation, BP America Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Chrysler LLC (which continues to lobby with taxpayer dollars), ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy, DuPont, Environmental Defense, Exelon Corporation, Ford Motor Company, FPL Group, Inc., General Electric, General Motors Corp. (now owned by the Obama administration), Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, Inc., Pepsico, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, PG&E Corporation, PNM Resources, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, World Resources Institute, Xerox Corporation.
One major group of recipients of the free money being given to industry in the form of carbon permits are the electric utilities, represented in Washington by the Edison Electric Institute. Along with the coal and steel businesses, the utilities are positioned to receive a huge portion of the carbon permits — some of which will be disguised as measures for consumers — and have become one of the nation’s highest-spending lobbies, working to ensure that their interests are served by cap-and-trade.
More HERE
Energy Leninism
"The worse, the better," Vladimir Lenin is said to have observed. What Lenin meant was that the worse social conditions became in Russia, the more likely he and the Bolsheviks could foment a communist revolution. President Barack Obama's White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently updated Lenin's maxim, saying, "Never allow a crisis to go to waste."
Last Friday, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives took those maxims to heart when they pushed through their 1,200-page American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act by a vote 219 to 212. The bill is supposed to address the twin crises of economic recession and climate change by creating millions of new "green" jobs. Instead of an old-fashioned Soviet-style five-year plan, ACES can be thought of as 50-year plan to radically transform how Americans produce and use energy.
The new climate and energy bill would create a convoluted cap-and-trade scheme that aims to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide by American consumers and businesses. Why? Because the extra carbon dioxide emitted into the air from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil to produce energy is heating up the atmosphere. That additional heat will melt glaciers, raise sea levels, change rainfall patterns, cause plants and animals to shift their habitats, and so forth. To avoid these consequences, argue congressional Democrats, it is necessary for Americans to shift from cheap fossil fuels to expensive renewable energy fuels.
So the 1,200-page House bill would set a declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions that, by 2020, reduces them by 17 percent below 2005 levels and by 83 percent below by 2050. Each year the Environmental Protection Agency would issue a lower number of carbon dioxide emissions permits. Under the House bill 85 percent of the permits would be given away for free to various energy producers and users while the remaining 15 percent would be auctioned off. A company must have a permit for each ton of carbon dioxide it emits. The idea is that some companies will be more efficient in reducing their emissions and so will have some permits left over that they can sell to other, less-efficent emitters.
Trading permits in the market will set a price on carbon dioxide emissions. This means that electricity and automobile fuels produced using coal and oil will become more expensive. Higher electricity and gasoline prices are intended to encourage consumers to buy more fuel-efficient automobiles and appliances and to cut back on home heating and cooling. These higher energy prices will also boost what Americans pay for most goods and services. Finally, higher prices are supposed to incentivize inventors and entrepreneurs to develop and deploy lower carbon energy sources like solar and wind power. Sounds simple, but ACES is anything but simple.
The bill is replete with tax breaks, subsidies, and mandates aimed at buying off various special interest groups and industries. For example, it authorizes $60 billion for carbon capture and sequestration projects, $15 billion in subsidies to small and medium sized businesses to finance the cost of clean energy manufacturing products, and $2.5 billion for residential energy efficiency block grant programs to states. The bill also puts $150 million in an Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Worker Training Fund, and so on.
The new 50-year energy plan leaves little to chance. Congress has issued a flood of mandates large and small. For example, utilities must purchase 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, states and utilities are obliged to build regional infrastructures to support plug-in electric vehicles, new homes have to be 30 percent more energy efficient and—since no detail is too small to escape congressional notice—requires rising energy efficiency standards for outdoor lighting.
Will Americans tolerate such sweeping interventions into their lives and workplaces? Perhaps not. The American Clean Energy and Security Act is even bigger in scope and complexity than President Bill Clinton's 1993 Health Security Act. Clinton's 1,364-page bill would have created over 100 new federal bureaucracies, hundreds of new regulations, and massive changes in the tax code. At the same time, President Clinton in 1993 proposed a tax on the heat content of various fuels, known as the BTU (British Thermal Units) tax. This tax aimed to reduce pollution and encourage conservation. It was estimated that the BTU tax would increase energy costs for the typical household by 4.5 percent or about $105 in 1996. The price of gasoline would have risen by 7.5 cents per gallon. Public and business opposition effectively killed both the health care scheme and the BTU in 1994. Even supporters of ACES, who are eager to low-ball its costs, admit that it will eventually boost gasoline prices by 25 cents per gallon and household energy bills by $175 per year. Other estimates suggest that ACES will force energy prices far higher.
In 2009, a Democratic president and Democratic Congress are once again proposing costly and intrusive changes in both health care and energy supplies. The 1994 mid-term election became a referendum on big government and ushered in Republican control of both the Senate and House of Representatives for the first time since the early 1950s. Given the Republican Party's current disarray, it's unlikely that 2010 will see another "Republican Revolution." However, as the new energy policies slow economic growth and impose vast new costs on consumers, it will be the Republicans who are quietly saying, "The worse, the better."
SOURCE
More tax oppression
Why did a bare majority (219-212) of the members of the U.S. Congress vote for the largest tax increase in American history this past Friday, under the claim it was a vote to save the climate?
Before you answer the question, consider the following facts. The proponents claim this tax bill will reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, which are purported to cause global warming. First, despite the claims of President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many in the media, there is no consensus in the scientific community about how much climate change, other than the normal cycles, is taking place, nor how severe it will be, and how much man-made CO2 is responsible. None of the climate models predicted the unexpected global cooling of the last decade.
It is known that the legislation will have a negligible effect on global CO2 emissions, particularly since the big polluters, such as China and India, are not playing ball. It is also known that the "cap and trade" system that the legislation calls for has been a failure in Europe, where it has been in operation for the last few years, in that it has proven to be far more costly than envisioned, has not met the CO2 reduction targets, and has been highly susceptible to corruption and abuse.
In addition, because the legislation requires Americans to use more inefficient energy (wind and solar) sources, it cannot help but raise costs for American businesses and citizens, and hence will kill jobs rather than create them (as contrasted to what Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi have incorrectly claimed).
In sum, serious people understand the legislation will hurt the U.S. economy, reduce the standard of living and yet not accomplish its claimed intent; therefore, why were so many members of Congress willing to vote for it?
Are they idiots, or do they have another agenda? Yes, a few are not that bright, but many more see this as an opportunity to extract wealth from one group of Americans, give it to other groups of Americans they favor, and to their political cronies who will reward them in campaign contributions and in other ways — both seen and unseen. They are willing to engage in more tax oppression in exchange for more political power to themselves.
The tendency for political leaders — even those fairly elected — to look out more for their own personal interests rather than the greater good is not confined to America. The Organization for Cooperation and Development (OECD), whose 30 members are the major industrialized democratic countries, was formed half a century ago to promote policies to increase economic growth and free trade.
Unfortunately, political leaders in high-tax states (notably France and Germany) have captured part of the OECD and are using it as an instrument — by creating "black" and "gray" lists — to squash tax competition from low-tax-rate countries and financial freedom and privacy (which are important for global economic growth).
A European economic policy organization, Institut Constant de Rebecque, has just published an important study, "Tax burden and individual rights in the OECD: an international comparison." As part of the study, the author, Pierre Bessard, created a Tax Oppression Index by using OECD and World Bank data to measure the overall tax burden, public governance, and taxpayer rights. Italy and Turkey were judged to have the most tax oppression, while Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland were judged to have the least oppressive tax systems. A sample of the major countries in the index can be seen in the accompanying table.
Those who advocate bigger governments and more repressive tax systems claim that the additional tax revenue is needed to promote the common good. In 2007, the government spending in Switzerland was equal to 35.7 percent of GDP (very close to the government share of GDP in the United States of 37.4 percent) while the Italians had a government sector equal to 48.5 percent of GDP.
The Italians and the Swiss share a long peaceful border, but Italy is far richer in natural resources and access to the sea than land locked Switzerland. Yet the Swiss are far more prosperous and do a much better job in delivering government services than do the Italians (or French with 52.4 percent of government spending) while, at the same time, engage in far less tax repression. The Austrian government spends 48.2 of its GDP, which is almost equal the size of the Italian government spending, but manages to raise the necessary tax money in a far less oppressive way.
The United States is in about the middle of the pack, but could have a lower score if it improved its public governance by reducing the corruption and inefficiency in Washington, and did a much better job in protecting taxpayer rights. (The U.S. Constitution explicitly gives citizens the presumption of innocence, but the Internal Revenue Service chooses to ignore the Constitution in this and many other matters.)
The world would be richer and more just if the low-tax-rate countries that protect taxpayer rights and privacy could penalize the states that engage in high levels of tax oppression, rather than vice versa, which is now the case.
The empirical evidence from the new Institut Constant study clearly shows (as have many other studies) that it is not necessary to have high tax rates or deny taxpayers basic rights and financial privacy for the government to obtain all of the revenue it legitimately needs. But as the vote on the "climate" (tax) bill in the Congress clearly showed last week, for all too many politicians, tax policy is not about revenue but political power and control.
SOURCE
A right to pollute being enacted
The House passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act Friday was billed as a narrow victory for President Obama and the green lobby. But was it a victory for real environmentalism? Sadly, no. The legislation's many loopholes that had to be added to secure its passage will make it far less effective -- to be charitable. The "cap and trade" regime that the bill would create promises to ratchet down carbon emissions over time but creates a dangerous precedent for the environment.
Cap and trade essentially creates a property right out of polluting. Once Company A has an emissions permit, it can release a certain amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Or it can sell its permit rights to Company Z. The bright idea is to create an incentive to decrease carbon emissions so that a company can profit off its excessive permits. In reality, what it does is create an enforceable right to pollute.
In the past, pollution was seen as a sort of "necessary evil" that could be regulated or rescinded if necessary. Now companies will have a right to pollute because they were already in the polluting business and were grandfathered in, or because they paid good money for that right. Cap and trade guarantees the right to pollute over a certain, fixed amount of time. The bill ratchets down the amount of carbon emissions allowed over time by a schedule. That sounds like a win for environmentalism. However, the percentages and dates create expectations that go along with these permits being sold.
Companies will purchase permits from each other with the expectation that they will be able to emit a specific amount of carbon over a specific time period. These percentages and dates are political goals and are not based on solid scientific research. That could lead to unexpectedly bad results. For example, the amount of carbon emissions allowed could turn out to be incredibly dangerous to the public. Under a cap and trade regime, if the government attempts to "fix" the problem the action would amount to a "taking." Lawyers would then tie it up in court for years.
And the "cap" part of cap and trade is hardly set in stone. The bill allows companies to offset their carbon emissions beyond their permitted use by "helping the environment" in some other politically favored way. For example, if a company pays to preserve an acre of rain forest, it secures the right to release more carbon emissions. That might superficially seem to maintain the balance between carbon producers and carbon reducers, but that balance is a convenient myth.
Forget for a moment that the generous offsets allowed by the bill were crafted in response to industry prodding. There is no hard evidence that carbon offsets actually work.
And, remember, the environment is far bigger than the United States. Companies can often go elsewhere. Congress has to take into consideration that pushing companies out of the United States into other, less regulated areas, would have the opposite effect of the bill's intention.
Politicians need to realize there is a difference between doing "something" to help combat global warming and doing "anything" on that front. It's unwise to ram a 1,500-page bill through the House in the dead of the night -- with a last minute 300-page amendment tacked on to buy needed votes -- and expect that to work.
All it amounts to now is a "feel good" bill with no realistic environmental benefits at a huge cost to individuals.
SOURCE
GLOBAL WARMING AND THE RISE OF CIVILIZATIONS
The last time global warming came to the Andes it produced the Inca Empire. A team of English and U.S. scientists has analyzed pollen, seeds and isotopes in core samples taken from the deep mud of a small lake not far from Machu Picchu and their report says that "the success of the Inca was underpinned by a period of warming that lasted more than four centuries."
The four centuries coincided directly with the rise of this startling, hyper-productive culture that at its zenith was bigger than the Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire, the two most powerful contemporaries of the Inca.
"This period of increased temperatures," the scientists say, "allowed the Inca and their predecessors to expand, from AD 1150 onwards, their agricultural zones by moving up the mountains to build a massive system of terraces fed frequently by glacial water, as well as planting trees to reduce erosion and increase soil fertility.
"They re-created the landscape and produced the huge surpluses of maize, potatoes, quinua and other crops that freed a rapidly growing population to build roads, scores of palaces like Machu Picchu and in particular the development of a large standing army."
No World Bank, no NGOs.
The new study is called "Putting the Rise of the Inca within a Climatic and Land Management Context" and was prepared by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, an English paleo-biologist working for the French Institute of Andean Studies, in Lima. Alex led a team that includes Brian Bauer, of the University of Illinois, one of today's top Inca-ologists. The study is being published in Climate of the Past, an online academic journal.
Alex spends a lot of time in Cuzco and he told me the other day that the report "raises the question of whether today's global warming may be another opportunity for the Andes."
The core samples from the sediment of the little lake, Marcacocha, in the Patakancha valley above Ollantaytambo, show that there was a major cold drought in the southern Andes beginning in 880 AD lasting for a devastating century-plus through into 1000AD. This cold snap finished off both the Wari and the Tiahuanaco cultures which had between them dominated the southern Andes for more than a millennium.
It was at this same time that the Classic Maya disappeared in Yucatan. It was also a time, on the other side of the Pacific when major migrations from East Asia took place into Polynesia, an indication of a major Niño event; a Niño sees western Pacific currents switch to flow from West to East.
Core samples from glaciers and from the mud beneath lakes in the Andes, the Amazon and elsewhere have built up a history of the world's climate and the message is crystal clear. It is that changes have taken place in the past, during the six or seven thousand years of our agriculture-based civilizations, that are just as big as the ones we are facing from today's CO2 warming.
More HERE
Australia: "Green" investment options a flop
Real Greenies probably have no money left to invest after they have spent all their money on solar panels, water tanks and "organic" food etc.
A decade ago, a fresh wave of interest in sustainable investing broke out in Australia — and elsewhere — but things have not turned out quite as the sector's advocates expected. Howard government changes to allow a choice of super funds would let people dictate how their money was invested. This democratisation would translate into greener, more human financial markets.
Mainstream institutions such as Westpac, AMP and Perpetual launched funds into a niche market — call it ethical, socially responsible or sustainable investing — that had been held by principled specialists such as Australian Ethical Investment and Hunter Hall, who did nothing else. Real money was expected to flow into this niche, then worth about $1.4 billion. Big companies such as BHP may not have cared what a few tiny green fund managers did with their money, but failure to pass a sniff test backed by powerful financial institutions with billions to invest posed a different reputational risk.
After the Dow Jones Sustainability Index was launched in 1999, for example, everybody wanted to make the cut. But the fund managers had a dilemma: how to offer investment-grade sustainable funds that conformed with industry rules about diversification? Get too green and you limit your investment options and your chance of beating the market. No trustee or their consultant would endorse a fund likely to underperform. Not green enough and you get shot down for hypocrisy and lose your marketing edge — the offer of a true alternative — as well as any upside from green investing that might exist.
A crop of funds were launched that balanced performance against integrity to varying degrees. Slowly money trickled in, except most super fund members almost never chose the sustainability option offered by their fund. Most mandates were wholesale. By the end of last year, according to Super Ratings managing director Jeff Bresnahan, take-up of the sustainable options offered by super funds was "pitiful".
A recent Super Ratings survey, answered by 76 funds with 15 million members and $370 billion in assets, found that for 90 per cent of respondents, sustainable investments — now offered by almost two-thirds of funds — represented well under 5 per cent of net assets.
For example Vision Super, a $4 billion fund, had just $8.5 million invested in its sustainable options. The $28 billion Australian Super had just $29 million invested in its comparable green plan — that's only 0.1 per cent. "People just aren't voting with their feet with (these) options," Bresnahan says. "A lot of funds have done the research among their members, and it comes back with a resounding 'yes', but there's very little take-up."
It's not the performance that's a turn off. In fact there's nothing in it — sometimes they're ahead, sometimes behind, depending on the time period, asset allocation, research used, and so on. Super Ratings found that sustainable super options underperformed by a measly 33-38 basis points a year over the five years to the end of May, with the median option delivering annual returns of 4.37 per cent (balanced) or 6.72 per cent (shares) after tax and fees.
Morningstar data for retail (non-super) funds shows a similar underperformance of 45 basis points a year over the five years to May. That's also after fees, which is part of the explanation — the added research required to analyse sustainable investments costs fund members 1.81 per cent, or an extra 21 basis points, a year more than mainstream funds.
More HERE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.
The stimulus bill was the legislative equivalent of the famous cantina scene from Star Wars, an eye-popping collection of the freakish and exotic, gathered for dubious purposes. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, known as ACES (the American Clean Energy and Security Act), is more like the third panel in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights — a hellscape that disturbs the sleep of anybody who contemplates it carefully.
Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.
The House of Representatives, famously, did not read this bill before passing it, which is testament to either Nancy Pelosi’s managerial incompetency or her political wile, or possibly both. If you take the time to read the legislation, you’ll discover four major themes: special-interest giveaways, regulatory mandates unrelated to climate change, fanciful technological programs worthy of The Jetsons, and assorted left-wing wish fulfillment. We cannot cover every swirl and brushstroke of this masterpiece of misgovernance, but here’s a breakdown of its 50 most outrageous features.
SPECIAL-INTEREST SOPS
1. The big doozy: Eighty-five percent of the carbon permits will not be sold at auction — they will be given away to utility companies, petroleum interests, refineries, and a coterie of politically connected businesses. If you’re wondering why Big Business supports cap-and-trade, that’s why. Free money for business, but higher energy prices for you.
2. The sale of carbon permits will enrich the Wall Street investment bankers whose money put Obama in the White House. Top of the list: Goldman Sachs, which is invested in carbon-offset development and carbon permissions. CNN reports: "Less than two weeks after the investment bank announced it would be laying off 10 percent of its staff, ***Goldman Sachs confirmed that it has taken a minority stake in Utah-based carbon offset project developer Blue Source LLC. . . . “Interest in the pre-compliance carbon market in the U.S. is growing rapidly,” said Leslie Biddle, Head of Commodity Sales at Goldman, “and we are excited to be able to offer our clients immediate access to a diverse selection of emission reductions to manage their carbon risk.”
3. With its rich menu of corporate subsidies and special set-asides for politically connected industries, Waxman-Markey has inspired a new corporate interest group, USCAP, the United States Climate Action Partnership — the group largely responsible for the fact that carbon permits are being given away like candy at Christmas rather than auctioned. And who is lined up to receive a piece of the massive wealth transfer that Waxman-Markey will mandate? Canada Free Press lists:
Alcoa, American International Group (AIG) which withdrew after accepting government bailout money, Boston Scientific Corporation, BP America Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Chrysler LLC (which continues to lobby with taxpayer dollars), ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy, DuPont, Environmental Defense, Exelon Corporation, Ford Motor Company, FPL Group, Inc., General Electric, General Motors Corp. (now owned by the Obama administration), Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, Inc., Pepsico, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, PG&E Corporation, PNM Resources, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, World Resources Institute, Xerox Corporation.
One major group of recipients of the free money being given to industry in the form of carbon permits are the electric utilities, represented in Washington by the Edison Electric Institute. Along with the coal and steel businesses, the utilities are positioned to receive a huge portion of the carbon permits — some of which will be disguised as measures for consumers — and have become one of the nation’s highest-spending lobbies, working to ensure that their interests are served by cap-and-trade.
More HERE
Energy Leninism
"The worse, the better," Vladimir Lenin is said to have observed. What Lenin meant was that the worse social conditions became in Russia, the more likely he and the Bolsheviks could foment a communist revolution. President Barack Obama's White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel recently updated Lenin's maxim, saying, "Never allow a crisis to go to waste."
Last Friday, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives took those maxims to heart when they pushed through their 1,200-page American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act by a vote 219 to 212. The bill is supposed to address the twin crises of economic recession and climate change by creating millions of new "green" jobs. Instead of an old-fashioned Soviet-style five-year plan, ACES can be thought of as 50-year plan to radically transform how Americans produce and use energy.
The new climate and energy bill would create a convoluted cap-and-trade scheme that aims to curb the emissions of carbon dioxide by American consumers and businesses. Why? Because the extra carbon dioxide emitted into the air from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil to produce energy is heating up the atmosphere. That additional heat will melt glaciers, raise sea levels, change rainfall patterns, cause plants and animals to shift their habitats, and so forth. To avoid these consequences, argue congressional Democrats, it is necessary for Americans to shift from cheap fossil fuels to expensive renewable energy fuels.
So the 1,200-page House bill would set a declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions that, by 2020, reduces them by 17 percent below 2005 levels and by 83 percent below by 2050. Each year the Environmental Protection Agency would issue a lower number of carbon dioxide emissions permits. Under the House bill 85 percent of the permits would be given away for free to various energy producers and users while the remaining 15 percent would be auctioned off. A company must have a permit for each ton of carbon dioxide it emits. The idea is that some companies will be more efficient in reducing their emissions and so will have some permits left over that they can sell to other, less-efficent emitters.
Trading permits in the market will set a price on carbon dioxide emissions. This means that electricity and automobile fuels produced using coal and oil will become more expensive. Higher electricity and gasoline prices are intended to encourage consumers to buy more fuel-efficient automobiles and appliances and to cut back on home heating and cooling. These higher energy prices will also boost what Americans pay for most goods and services. Finally, higher prices are supposed to incentivize inventors and entrepreneurs to develop and deploy lower carbon energy sources like solar and wind power. Sounds simple, but ACES is anything but simple.
The bill is replete with tax breaks, subsidies, and mandates aimed at buying off various special interest groups and industries. For example, it authorizes $60 billion for carbon capture and sequestration projects, $15 billion in subsidies to small and medium sized businesses to finance the cost of clean energy manufacturing products, and $2.5 billion for residential energy efficiency block grant programs to states. The bill also puts $150 million in an Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Worker Training Fund, and so on.
The new 50-year energy plan leaves little to chance. Congress has issued a flood of mandates large and small. For example, utilities must purchase 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020, states and utilities are obliged to build regional infrastructures to support plug-in electric vehicles, new homes have to be 30 percent more energy efficient and—since no detail is too small to escape congressional notice—requires rising energy efficiency standards for outdoor lighting.
Will Americans tolerate such sweeping interventions into their lives and workplaces? Perhaps not. The American Clean Energy and Security Act is even bigger in scope and complexity than President Bill Clinton's 1993 Health Security Act. Clinton's 1,364-page bill would have created over 100 new federal bureaucracies, hundreds of new regulations, and massive changes in the tax code. At the same time, President Clinton in 1993 proposed a tax on the heat content of various fuels, known as the BTU (British Thermal Units) tax. This tax aimed to reduce pollution and encourage conservation. It was estimated that the BTU tax would increase energy costs for the typical household by 4.5 percent or about $105 in 1996. The price of gasoline would have risen by 7.5 cents per gallon. Public and business opposition effectively killed both the health care scheme and the BTU in 1994. Even supporters of ACES, who are eager to low-ball its costs, admit that it will eventually boost gasoline prices by 25 cents per gallon and household energy bills by $175 per year. Other estimates suggest that ACES will force energy prices far higher.
In 2009, a Democratic president and Democratic Congress are once again proposing costly and intrusive changes in both health care and energy supplies. The 1994 mid-term election became a referendum on big government and ushered in Republican control of both the Senate and House of Representatives for the first time since the early 1950s. Given the Republican Party's current disarray, it's unlikely that 2010 will see another "Republican Revolution." However, as the new energy policies slow economic growth and impose vast new costs on consumers, it will be the Republicans who are quietly saying, "The worse, the better."
SOURCE
More tax oppression
Why did a bare majority (219-212) of the members of the U.S. Congress vote for the largest tax increase in American history this past Friday, under the claim it was a vote to save the climate?
Before you answer the question, consider the following facts. The proponents claim this tax bill will reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, which are purported to cause global warming. First, despite the claims of President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many in the media, there is no consensus in the scientific community about how much climate change, other than the normal cycles, is taking place, nor how severe it will be, and how much man-made CO2 is responsible. None of the climate models predicted the unexpected global cooling of the last decade.
It is known that the legislation will have a negligible effect on global CO2 emissions, particularly since the big polluters, such as China and India, are not playing ball. It is also known that the "cap and trade" system that the legislation calls for has been a failure in Europe, where it has been in operation for the last few years, in that it has proven to be far more costly than envisioned, has not met the CO2 reduction targets, and has been highly susceptible to corruption and abuse.
In addition, because the legislation requires Americans to use more inefficient energy (wind and solar) sources, it cannot help but raise costs for American businesses and citizens, and hence will kill jobs rather than create them (as contrasted to what Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi have incorrectly claimed).
In sum, serious people understand the legislation will hurt the U.S. economy, reduce the standard of living and yet not accomplish its claimed intent; therefore, why were so many members of Congress willing to vote for it?
Are they idiots, or do they have another agenda? Yes, a few are not that bright, but many more see this as an opportunity to extract wealth from one group of Americans, give it to other groups of Americans they favor, and to their political cronies who will reward them in campaign contributions and in other ways — both seen and unseen. They are willing to engage in more tax oppression in exchange for more political power to themselves.
The tendency for political leaders — even those fairly elected — to look out more for their own personal interests rather than the greater good is not confined to America. The Organization for Cooperation and Development (OECD), whose 30 members are the major industrialized democratic countries, was formed half a century ago to promote policies to increase economic growth and free trade.
Unfortunately, political leaders in high-tax states (notably France and Germany) have captured part of the OECD and are using it as an instrument — by creating "black" and "gray" lists — to squash tax competition from low-tax-rate countries and financial freedom and privacy (which are important for global economic growth).
A European economic policy organization, Institut Constant de Rebecque, has just published an important study, "Tax burden and individual rights in the OECD: an international comparison." As part of the study, the author, Pierre Bessard, created a Tax Oppression Index by using OECD and World Bank data to measure the overall tax burden, public governance, and taxpayer rights. Italy and Turkey were judged to have the most tax oppression, while Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland were judged to have the least oppressive tax systems. A sample of the major countries in the index can be seen in the accompanying table.
Those who advocate bigger governments and more repressive tax systems claim that the additional tax revenue is needed to promote the common good. In 2007, the government spending in Switzerland was equal to 35.7 percent of GDP (very close to the government share of GDP in the United States of 37.4 percent) while the Italians had a government sector equal to 48.5 percent of GDP.
The Italians and the Swiss share a long peaceful border, but Italy is far richer in natural resources and access to the sea than land locked Switzerland. Yet the Swiss are far more prosperous and do a much better job in delivering government services than do the Italians (or French with 52.4 percent of government spending) while, at the same time, engage in far less tax repression. The Austrian government spends 48.2 of its GDP, which is almost equal the size of the Italian government spending, but manages to raise the necessary tax money in a far less oppressive way.
The United States is in about the middle of the pack, but could have a lower score if it improved its public governance by reducing the corruption and inefficiency in Washington, and did a much better job in protecting taxpayer rights. (The U.S. Constitution explicitly gives citizens the presumption of innocence, but the Internal Revenue Service chooses to ignore the Constitution in this and many other matters.)
The world would be richer and more just if the low-tax-rate countries that protect taxpayer rights and privacy could penalize the states that engage in high levels of tax oppression, rather than vice versa, which is now the case.
The empirical evidence from the new Institut Constant study clearly shows (as have many other studies) that it is not necessary to have high tax rates or deny taxpayers basic rights and financial privacy for the government to obtain all of the revenue it legitimately needs. But as the vote on the "climate" (tax) bill in the Congress clearly showed last week, for all too many politicians, tax policy is not about revenue but political power and control.
SOURCE
A right to pollute being enacted
The House passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act Friday was billed as a narrow victory for President Obama and the green lobby. But was it a victory for real environmentalism? Sadly, no. The legislation's many loopholes that had to be added to secure its passage will make it far less effective -- to be charitable. The "cap and trade" regime that the bill would create promises to ratchet down carbon emissions over time but creates a dangerous precedent for the environment.
Cap and trade essentially creates a property right out of polluting. Once Company A has an emissions permit, it can release a certain amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Or it can sell its permit rights to Company Z. The bright idea is to create an incentive to decrease carbon emissions so that a company can profit off its excessive permits. In reality, what it does is create an enforceable right to pollute.
In the past, pollution was seen as a sort of "necessary evil" that could be regulated or rescinded if necessary. Now companies will have a right to pollute because they were already in the polluting business and were grandfathered in, or because they paid good money for that right. Cap and trade guarantees the right to pollute over a certain, fixed amount of time. The bill ratchets down the amount of carbon emissions allowed over time by a schedule. That sounds like a win for environmentalism. However, the percentages and dates create expectations that go along with these permits being sold.
Companies will purchase permits from each other with the expectation that they will be able to emit a specific amount of carbon over a specific time period. These percentages and dates are political goals and are not based on solid scientific research. That could lead to unexpectedly bad results. For example, the amount of carbon emissions allowed could turn out to be incredibly dangerous to the public. Under a cap and trade regime, if the government attempts to "fix" the problem the action would amount to a "taking." Lawyers would then tie it up in court for years.
And the "cap" part of cap and trade is hardly set in stone. The bill allows companies to offset their carbon emissions beyond their permitted use by "helping the environment" in some other politically favored way. For example, if a company pays to preserve an acre of rain forest, it secures the right to release more carbon emissions. That might superficially seem to maintain the balance between carbon producers and carbon reducers, but that balance is a convenient myth.
Forget for a moment that the generous offsets allowed by the bill were crafted in response to industry prodding. There is no hard evidence that carbon offsets actually work.
And, remember, the environment is far bigger than the United States. Companies can often go elsewhere. Congress has to take into consideration that pushing companies out of the United States into other, less regulated areas, would have the opposite effect of the bill's intention.
Politicians need to realize there is a difference between doing "something" to help combat global warming and doing "anything" on that front. It's unwise to ram a 1,500-page bill through the House in the dead of the night -- with a last minute 300-page amendment tacked on to buy needed votes -- and expect that to work.
All it amounts to now is a "feel good" bill with no realistic environmental benefits at a huge cost to individuals.
SOURCE
GLOBAL WARMING AND THE RISE OF CIVILIZATIONS
The last time global warming came to the Andes it produced the Inca Empire. A team of English and U.S. scientists has analyzed pollen, seeds and isotopes in core samples taken from the deep mud of a small lake not far from Machu Picchu and their report says that "the success of the Inca was underpinned by a period of warming that lasted more than four centuries."
The four centuries coincided directly with the rise of this startling, hyper-productive culture that at its zenith was bigger than the Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire, the two most powerful contemporaries of the Inca.
"This period of increased temperatures," the scientists say, "allowed the Inca and their predecessors to expand, from AD 1150 onwards, their agricultural zones by moving up the mountains to build a massive system of terraces fed frequently by glacial water, as well as planting trees to reduce erosion and increase soil fertility.
"They re-created the landscape and produced the huge surpluses of maize, potatoes, quinua and other crops that freed a rapidly growing population to build roads, scores of palaces like Machu Picchu and in particular the development of a large standing army."
No World Bank, no NGOs.
The new study is called "Putting the Rise of the Inca within a Climatic and Land Management Context" and was prepared by Alex Chepstow-Lusty, an English paleo-biologist working for the French Institute of Andean Studies, in Lima. Alex led a team that includes Brian Bauer, of the University of Illinois, one of today's top Inca-ologists. The study is being published in Climate of the Past, an online academic journal.
Alex spends a lot of time in Cuzco and he told me the other day that the report "raises the question of whether today's global warming may be another opportunity for the Andes."
The core samples from the sediment of the little lake, Marcacocha, in the Patakancha valley above Ollantaytambo, show that there was a major cold drought in the southern Andes beginning in 880 AD lasting for a devastating century-plus through into 1000AD. This cold snap finished off both the Wari and the Tiahuanaco cultures which had between them dominated the southern Andes for more than a millennium.
It was at this same time that the Classic Maya disappeared in Yucatan. It was also a time, on the other side of the Pacific when major migrations from East Asia took place into Polynesia, an indication of a major Niño event; a Niño sees western Pacific currents switch to flow from West to East.
Core samples from glaciers and from the mud beneath lakes in the Andes, the Amazon and elsewhere have built up a history of the world's climate and the message is crystal clear. It is that changes have taken place in the past, during the six or seven thousand years of our agriculture-based civilizations, that are just as big as the ones we are facing from today's CO2 warming.
More HERE
Australia: "Green" investment options a flop
Real Greenies probably have no money left to invest after they have spent all their money on solar panels, water tanks and "organic" food etc.
A decade ago, a fresh wave of interest in sustainable investing broke out in Australia — and elsewhere — but things have not turned out quite as the sector's advocates expected. Howard government changes to allow a choice of super funds would let people dictate how their money was invested. This democratisation would translate into greener, more human financial markets.
Mainstream institutions such as Westpac, AMP and Perpetual launched funds into a niche market — call it ethical, socially responsible or sustainable investing — that had been held by principled specialists such as Australian Ethical Investment and Hunter Hall, who did nothing else. Real money was expected to flow into this niche, then worth about $1.4 billion. Big companies such as BHP may not have cared what a few tiny green fund managers did with their money, but failure to pass a sniff test backed by powerful financial institutions with billions to invest posed a different reputational risk.
After the Dow Jones Sustainability Index was launched in 1999, for example, everybody wanted to make the cut. But the fund managers had a dilemma: how to offer investment-grade sustainable funds that conformed with industry rules about diversification? Get too green and you limit your investment options and your chance of beating the market. No trustee or their consultant would endorse a fund likely to underperform. Not green enough and you get shot down for hypocrisy and lose your marketing edge — the offer of a true alternative — as well as any upside from green investing that might exist.
A crop of funds were launched that balanced performance against integrity to varying degrees. Slowly money trickled in, except most super fund members almost never chose the sustainability option offered by their fund. Most mandates were wholesale. By the end of last year, according to Super Ratings managing director Jeff Bresnahan, take-up of the sustainable options offered by super funds was "pitiful".
A recent Super Ratings survey, answered by 76 funds with 15 million members and $370 billion in assets, found that for 90 per cent of respondents, sustainable investments — now offered by almost two-thirds of funds — represented well under 5 per cent of net assets.
For example Vision Super, a $4 billion fund, had just $8.5 million invested in its sustainable options. The $28 billion Australian Super had just $29 million invested in its comparable green plan — that's only 0.1 per cent. "People just aren't voting with their feet with (these) options," Bresnahan says. "A lot of funds have done the research among their members, and it comes back with a resounding 'yes', but there's very little take-up."
It's not the performance that's a turn off. In fact there's nothing in it — sometimes they're ahead, sometimes behind, depending on the time period, asset allocation, research used, and so on. Super Ratings found that sustainable super options underperformed by a measly 33-38 basis points a year over the five years to the end of May, with the median option delivering annual returns of 4.37 per cent (balanced) or 6.72 per cent (shares) after tax and fees.
Morningstar data for retail (non-super) funds shows a similar underperformance of 45 basis points a year over the five years to May. That's also after fees, which is part of the explanation — the added research required to analyse sustainable investments costs fund members 1.81 per cent, or an extra 21 basis points, a year more than mainstream funds.
More HERE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Saturday, July 04, 2009
GREENHOUSE GASES AND LIVESTOCK
Lots of good emails today -- via Benny Peiser. The first email below is from Dr. Albrecht Glatzle [glatzle@chaconet.com.py] of Filadelfia, Paraguay -- noting the myths about cow farts, sheep burps, etc. It was originally sent to TGS Newsletter editor, Ian Partridge, in Queensland, Australia
Yesterday I received the latest TGS Newsletter (Volume 25 No. 1 & 2). It was a pleasure to look at the beautiful photographs of various well known personalities from the Australian pasture science scene. But when I got to the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) chapters I was a bit embarrassed about how much you Australians seem to be concerned on the GHG emissions by ruminant livestock and their potential effects on climate change. I'd like to make some comments on this topic:
1) Except the fossil fuel borne CO2-emissions by the livestock industry (production, processing and commercialization of meat and milk) and except some unique biosphere borne CO2-emissions, associated with land use change (e.g. deforestation), domestic animal husbandry is totally "climate neutral" (using a controversial terminology, only justified under the assumption of any measurable effect of anthropogenic GHG-emissions on global temperature). Why? Because all the CO2 emitted by forage digestion and respiration had previously been captured from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Therefore, not a single CO2 molecule is added additionally to the atmosphere that had not been there before, recently.
2) This is also true for the methane produced by internal fermentation. Methane derives from organic substances originating from recent photosynthetic processes. And - as Richard Douthwaite from Ireland correctly points out in his letter (page 11) - methane molecules in the air are oxidized to CO2 and water at the end of their residence time in the atmosphere, closing the cycle. As a matter of fact the methane concentration has stabilized or even passed its peak just at the beginning of the new millennium. So obviously, just as much methane is oxidized in the atmosphere as is added to the air per unit of time. The resulting CO2 is available to be re-captured by photosynthesis. Therefore animal borne methane (how much its proportion ever may be among the total global methane emissions), just like CO2, forms part of a natural cycle, and not a single methane molecule is added additionally to the atmosphere by rumen fermentation that had not been there before, recently, unless livestock numbers increase.
3) The European satellite ENVISAT measured over a three years period the world wide close-to-the-surface-methane-concentrations. The average values are shown in figure 2 (source: University of Bremen here). Not even international organizations like the IPCC or FAO seem to have taken notice of the fact, that even the humid tropical forests do obviously emit far more methane than grazing cattle. How can the big grazing areas of the world (Australia, Southern Latin America, South and East Africa, and Western United States with hundreds of millions of cattle) and even India with the highest cattle density worldwide show such low methane concentrations? Something wrong with the theory?
4) While it is banally true that all improvements in the efficiency of livestock production reduce herbage intake and along with it GHG emission per unit of product (meat or milk), the often cited figure of 18% of anthropogenic GHG emissions originating from domestic animal husbandry, as claimed by the highly controversial FAO-Report "Livestock's Long Shadow" is clearly exaggerated. This document, that has done so much damage to the reputation of the livestock industry, was still proudly exposed at an international FAO symposium on the "Mitigation of GHG Emissions from Livestock", held last month in Asunción, Paraguay:
a) How can the FAO claim that 25% of the domestic-livestock-borne CO2-equivalents originate from internal fermentation (methane), considering what has been outlined in the paragraphs 2 and 3? Just like CO2-emissions from the biosphere, animal borne methane emissions are part of a natural steady state equilibrium. So the 25% should be corrected to 0% as long as livestock numbers are constant.
b) How can the FAO claim that one third of the domestic animal borne CO2-equivalents come from deforestation (land use change), considering FAO yearbook numbers telling us that net deforestation on a world wide scale is almost zero? Close to 30% of the terrestrial surface are covered by forests and woodlands with very little change over the past 6 decades. So, once again just one scale pan of the balance has been taken into account.
5) When looking a little bit beyond GHG emissions and balances, e.g. how good the alarming IPCC projections fit the empirically observed mean global temperatures, one starts to doubt whether the so called Green House Gases (particularly the very small proportion of total emissions originating from human activity) really do have any notable effect on the planet's climate. Since about the change of the millenniums global temperature (satellite measured lower troposphere mean temperature anomalies, University of Alabama, Huntsville) decreased, just inversely proportional to the smoothed atmospheric CO2 concentration. Not one single IPCC model projected this "inconvenient truth" (just for some). Surprise? No! Even the theory tells us that the infrared absorption is almost saturated at present CO2 levels. In order to reach such prominent temperature increases as projected by the IPCC, one has to make very risky assumptions of strongly reinforcing feedbacks of the very slight warming effect intrinsic to CO2, even when doubling or tripling its concentration in the air.
6) Recent studies discovered the stalagmites in this globe's caves as very reliable climate archives conserving a range of precious indicators of past climates and solar activity. Looking to what these archives reveal, we cannot find any unusual or scaring temperature development during the past decades. No need, whatsoever, for anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases to explain the slight temperature increase observed during the past century.
So definitely there is no need at all to be concerned about our livestock's emissions of so called Greenhouse Gases! We won't save the planet distorting ourselves in an effort to teach our cattle how to emit less methane. And we will not harm the planet when we go on with our cattle industry business as usual. Let's just rebut unqualified attacks (unfortunately also originating from such prominent organizations as the FAO) on our livelihood! The sound arguments are ours.
LOOKING ONLY A LITTLE AHEAD
An email from Brian Porter [b.porter@bluewin.ch]
It appears that the US and its CO2 constraining allies will most likely get an unpleasant surprise in a few years when the global production of hydrocarbons will be hard-hit by currently falling levels of capital investment. Around that time the global economy should start to rebound and demand for hydrocarbons (among other commodities) will pick up substantially in developing countries.
In that sellers market rebound, the US, as a major dependent purchaser, will be at a significant economic disadvantage due to both its high import tariffs and its politically constrained environment for domestic production. It will in effect be strangling itself by enforcing an artificial constraint on a critical economic input. Therefore, any attempt to force others into compliance with ill-advised policies using tariffs and repressive political policies - will backfire.
This looming energy supply shortage will exacerbate an ongoing US economic crisis brought on by an apparent ignorance of the fact that it is savings, production and free markets that drive economic growth - not debt, consumption, government planning, political subterfuge and outright market manipulation.
This kind of aggressive posturing only proves that the war has already been lost by its perpetrators. One is left only to consider the reparations - or war on another front...
SOME AMUSING IMPLICATIONS OF THE AMERICAN CLEAN ENERGY AND SECURITY ACT (WAXMAN-MARKEY)
An email from Prof. James H. Rust [jrust@bellsouth.net] below:
The United States House of Representatives narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also called Waxman-Markey, June 26. Many features are in this act and little has been published about ramifications of these features. Most notable are requirements that United States greenhouse gas emissions be 17 percent below those of 2005 by 2020 and 15 percent of electric power generation is from renewable sources(wind, solar, biomass, or geothermal) by 2020.
The United States has always been a growing nation; so the 2020 population is estimated forty million greater than the 296 million of 2005--a 13.5 percent increase. So the per capita energy use due to fossil fuels must fall from 284 million Btu per year to 206 million Btu per year by 2020. This 28 percent decrease in fossil energy use will present a challenge unless many creature comforts such as hot water, heating, and air conditioning are curtailed.
Many states in the United States are unsuitable for use of solar or wind as electricity sources. These states will have to purchase power from more gifted states at considerably higher rates. In 2005 the total electric power generation for the United States was about 4 trillion kilo-watt-hours. If there is no growth for the 15 years to 2020--which is quite unlikely--the amount of electricity due to renewables would have to be 600 billion kilo-watt-hours. Because of solar power's higher costs, wind power will probably be the greatest source of renewable power. The typical 1.5 megawatt wind power plant produces about 3.3 million kilo-watt-hours per year. Thus in the eleven years to 2020, the United States would need about 180 thousand 1.5 megawatt wind turbines. This means 45 new wind turbines per day.
As a means to keep utilities from shutting down operating coal plants, Waxman's Malarkey Bill allows fossil fuel users to purchase carbon offsets that nullify carbon dioxide production by removing carbon dioxide at other locations. This feature should make investors with similar dispositions to Bernard Madoff weep for joy. The offsets may sell $50 to $80 per ton of carbon. The offsets may be from planting forests in Brazil or constructing hydroelectric dams in China. The same tree may be used as offsets for different countries or utilities. What is to prevent trees planted for offsets being harvested for fuel consumption? All kinds of mischief should be possible from this means to forestall reductions in fossil fuel use.
THE NOTORIOUSLY UNPREDICTABLE MONSOON
An email for Madhav Khandekar [mkhandekar@rogers.com]
The Indian Monsoon & by extension the Asian Monsoon which impact about 4 B people (70% of world's humanity) today is perhaps the most complex feature of the earth's climate system and climate models have achieved only a limited success so far in simulating many features of this complex system.
Normally the Indian monsoon arrives at the southern tip of Indian Peninsula (about 8N) by May 25 and by June 7/8 the Monsoon onset begins over Mumbai (largest Indian city, pop: ~20 M) and it progresses further into central India and by June 25th to June 30th the Monsoon generally spreads over most of India. Despite year-to-year variations in these dates, the onset dates over a 150-yr database (one of the best datasets) shows Monsoon arrival dates remarkably robust. Delay in Monsoon arrival is often associated with anxiety about water shortage, impact on agriculture and of course an increased hype about "global warming, climate change and possible adverse impact". A careful examination of past data, however, shows such 'fears' about adverse global warming impact are without any merit.
Despite significant advances in Monsoon meteorology, predicting onset and overall intensity and distribution of Monsoon rainfall during the four summer months (June-September) is still a daunting task and considerable research efforts are needed at present to improve predictability of Indian/Asian Monsoon. Since the Indian/Asian Monsoon system transfers sufficient energy across the entire climate system, any future projection of earth's climate must include an improved modelling of the Monsoon system than what is available at present.
This year's Monsoon was predicted to be about normal (96% of normal) by the IMD ( India Met Dept) as early as April 18th and an early arrival (second week of May) of Monsoon rains at the southern tip of India suggested this year's Monsoon to be about two weeks early. However, further progress of Monsoon was stalled for reasons that we meteorologists do not fully understand and this stalling and later creating acute shortage of water in Mumbai and New Delhi ( India's capital city with a pop, ~14 M) has evoked comments like "Monsoon gamble, looming spectre of a drought etc" from many, including a scientist working with Greenpeace.
It must be remembered that such delays in Monsoon arrival have occurred in the past and has affected India's agricultural output, but such delays and irregular Monsoon progression are all part of natural variability, quite possibly linked to large-scale atmospheric circulation systems like the ENSO phase in Eq pacific, Eurasian and Himalayan winter snow cover, QBO (Quasi-Biennial Eq Stratospheric Wind Oscillation) phase and perhaps a host of other regional features. This is what makes the Indian/Asian Monsoon so very complex and a challenging scientific problem.
In 1972 the Indian Monsoon was delayed, esp in Peninsular India by almost six weeks and that year proved to be one of severest drought year for the Monsoon (most certainly this was attributed to the 1972 strong El Nino) which resulted in sharply reduced rice yield that year.
Earlier in 1961 Monsoon rains were heaviest during the four months with extensive flooding over many parts of India. Such floods and droughts have occurred irregularly and are still not fully understood. The worst ever drought was in 1877 which sparked an article (Proc of Royal Society) by Henry Blanford (British Met Reporter for the then Govt of India) to speculate linkage between extensive snow cover over Himalayas during preceding winter and weak Monsoon.
Climate modellers almost 100 years later were able to simulate this inverse relationship. However much remains to be understood about how winter Eurasian snow cover impacts Monsoon circulation few months down the road and how the easterly Jet Stream that emanates from east of Bangkok to Saudi Arabia at about 12 km level over Peninsular India (during Monsoon months) evolves and influences Monsoon rains.
Per most recent IMD communication, Monsoon seems to be spreading over most of India (by June 30th) and this season's rains would be only about 93% of normal. The month of July is the most critical month with regular rains over most of eastern & western Gangetic Plains during normal Monsoon. Whether the Monsoon this year "behaves normally" for the rest of the season remains to be seen. The ENSO phase is about normal at this point in time, so NO adverse impact from Eq Pacific is expected. Winter snow cover was heavy during the past winter, however the continued westerly phase of the QBO may help produce good rains over next few weeks.
Accurate Monsoon simulation and prediction with a lead time of few weeks to few months still remains an intractable problem for climate scientists.
CERN: COSMIC RAYS & CLIMATE
You've probably all heard of Svensmark and the Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) to cloud cover modulation theory by now. Lot's of warmists say it is "discredited". However, CERN in Switzerland isn't following that thinking, and after getting some encouraging results in the CLOUD06 experiment, they have funded a much larger and more comprehensive CLOUD09 experiment. I figure if it is "discredited", a bunch of smart guys and gals like CERN wouldn't be ramping up the investigation. There's also word now of a new correlation:
Correlation recently reported between solar/GCR variability and temperature in Siberia from glacial ice core, 30 yr lag (ie. ocean currents may be part of response)
I get so many tips now it is hard to choose, but this one is a gem. If you look at nothing else this month, please take the time to download the slide show from CERN's Jasper Kirkby at the end of this article.
He does a superb job of tying it all together. I found Kirkby's slide show quite interesting, and I've grabbed some slides for our WUWT readers. He proposes a GCR to cloud droplet mechanism, which to me, makes sense meteorologically. He also touches on the possibility that the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) may have been shifted due to GCR modulation during the LIA/Maunder Minimum. This ties in with Willis Eschenbach's theories of the ITCZ being a "thermostatic mechanism" for the planet with some amplification effects.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
A pipedream of six turbines a day until 2020
Lord Hunt has made one of the most absurd claims that can ever have been uttered by a British minister, writes Christopher Booker
Last Wednesday, two days before our Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, told us that motorists could help save the planet by changing more quickly to a lower gear, his underling Lord Hunt made one of the most absurd claims that can ever have been uttered by a British minister. Solemnly reported by the media, he said that by 2020 he hopes to see thousands more wind turbines round Britain's coasts, capable of producing '25 gigawatts (GW)" of electricity, enough to meet "more than a quarter of the UK's electricity needs".
In three ways this was remarkable. First, as most of us know by now, thanks to the intermittency of the wind, the actual output from 25GW of turbine capacity would only average out at 7.5GW. Since Britain's peak demand is 56GW, Lord Hunt's turbines would meet barely a seventh of our needs, just over half what he claims.
Nor did he mention their cost. Thanks to the British Wind Energy Association telling us that the current price of offshore turbines is £3.1 million per megawatt, the bill we would all have to pay for Lord Hunt's dream would be £77 billion, plus the £15 billion that he did admit would be needed to pay for cabling to connect his windmills to the grid. For the same £92 billion we could build 34 nuclear power stations, enough to meet all Britain's needs, at a seventh of the cost for each unit of electricity.
The second remarkable feature of Lord Hunt's vision is that, in practical terms, there is no conceivable way it could happen. To build the 10,000 turbines that would be required by 2020 would mean installing more than two of these 2,000-ton monsters, the size of Blackpool Tower, every day for the next 11 years. But, thanks to weather conditions at sea, it is only possible to carry out the work for four months each summer. So the true rate would be more like six a day. Nowhere in the world has anyone managed to instal more than one a week, as opposed to Lord Hunt's hypothetical 45.
The third, perhaps most disturbing point is that the media dutifully reported Lord Hunt's absurd claims without asking any of the elementary questions that could have revealed that he was talking utter nonsense. One cannot of course expect Opposition MPs to take an intelligent interest in such matters. But if journalists allow ministers to get away with talking such tosh, the slide into unreality can only continue.
SOURCE
BRAZIL JOINS INDIA, CHINA IN OPPOSING WESTERN CLIMATE DEMANDS
Brazil wants historic emissions to be the basis for greenhouse gas pollution targets, slated for discussion during December climate talks in Copenhagen, Brazil's top climate negotiator said in an interview. Jose Miguez, who heads Brazil's Interministerial Commission on Global Climate Change, said Brazil is not yet proposing targets for emissions cuts under the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol because developed nations should take the lead. "The greenhouse effect is not caused by emissions, it is caused by the accumulation of emissions in the atmosphere," he said. "We are proposing that the second period of (Kyoto Protocol) commitments be based on the historic responsibilities of each country." Miguez said China, India and South Africa will back the historic emissions proposal in the United Nations talks aimed at reining in warming that the U.N. climate panel says will cause more droughts and crop failures and raise sea levels.
In China, which scientists say has surpassed the United States as the world's biggest carbon polluter, a state think tank this year proposed a greenhouse gas trading plan to reflect the historic emissions of rich and poor nations. Miguez said Brazil opposes "carbon intensity" proposals that measure emissions per dollar of GDP because they favor bigger economies and risk allowing continued increases in global emissions as economies grow. "It's the proposal backed by the U.S., Japan and Germany, it's good for countries with big GDPs," said Miguez.
More HERE
Note from Benny Peiser: It would appear that President Obama's climate policies run the serious risk of alienating international allies in the developing world, democratic nations (such as India, Brazil, South Africa, etc) that may even turn into potential adversaries if the West's foolish strategy of green protectionism were to take hold. It would be a historical tragedy if future climate conflicts and trade wars were triggered by Western climate hysteria and political extremism rather than anything the climate is throwing at us.
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Lots of good emails today -- via Benny Peiser. The first email below is from Dr. Albrecht Glatzle [glatzle@chaconet.com.py] of Filadelfia, Paraguay -- noting the myths about cow farts, sheep burps, etc. It was originally sent to TGS Newsletter editor, Ian Partridge, in Queensland, Australia
Yesterday I received the latest TGS Newsletter (Volume 25 No. 1 & 2). It was a pleasure to look at the beautiful photographs of various well known personalities from the Australian pasture science scene. But when I got to the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) chapters I was a bit embarrassed about how much you Australians seem to be concerned on the GHG emissions by ruminant livestock and their potential effects on climate change. I'd like to make some comments on this topic:
1) Except the fossil fuel borne CO2-emissions by the livestock industry (production, processing and commercialization of meat and milk) and except some unique biosphere borne CO2-emissions, associated with land use change (e.g. deforestation), domestic animal husbandry is totally "climate neutral" (using a controversial terminology, only justified under the assumption of any measurable effect of anthropogenic GHG-emissions on global temperature). Why? Because all the CO2 emitted by forage digestion and respiration had previously been captured from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. Therefore, not a single CO2 molecule is added additionally to the atmosphere that had not been there before, recently.
2) This is also true for the methane produced by internal fermentation. Methane derives from organic substances originating from recent photosynthetic processes. And - as Richard Douthwaite from Ireland correctly points out in his letter (page 11) - methane molecules in the air are oxidized to CO2 and water at the end of their residence time in the atmosphere, closing the cycle. As a matter of fact the methane concentration has stabilized or even passed its peak just at the beginning of the new millennium. So obviously, just as much methane is oxidized in the atmosphere as is added to the air per unit of time. The resulting CO2 is available to be re-captured by photosynthesis. Therefore animal borne methane (how much its proportion ever may be among the total global methane emissions), just like CO2, forms part of a natural cycle, and not a single methane molecule is added additionally to the atmosphere by rumen fermentation that had not been there before, recently, unless livestock numbers increase.
3) The European satellite ENVISAT measured over a three years period the world wide close-to-the-surface-methane-concentrations. The average values are shown in figure 2 (source: University of Bremen here). Not even international organizations like the IPCC or FAO seem to have taken notice of the fact, that even the humid tropical forests do obviously emit far more methane than grazing cattle. How can the big grazing areas of the world (Australia, Southern Latin America, South and East Africa, and Western United States with hundreds of millions of cattle) and even India with the highest cattle density worldwide show such low methane concentrations? Something wrong with the theory?
4) While it is banally true that all improvements in the efficiency of livestock production reduce herbage intake and along with it GHG emission per unit of product (meat or milk), the often cited figure of 18% of anthropogenic GHG emissions originating from domestic animal husbandry, as claimed by the highly controversial FAO-Report "Livestock's Long Shadow" is clearly exaggerated. This document, that has done so much damage to the reputation of the livestock industry, was still proudly exposed at an international FAO symposium on the "Mitigation of GHG Emissions from Livestock", held last month in Asunción, Paraguay:
a) How can the FAO claim that 25% of the domestic-livestock-borne CO2-equivalents originate from internal fermentation (methane), considering what has been outlined in the paragraphs 2 and 3? Just like CO2-emissions from the biosphere, animal borne methane emissions are part of a natural steady state equilibrium. So the 25% should be corrected to 0% as long as livestock numbers are constant.
b) How can the FAO claim that one third of the domestic animal borne CO2-equivalents come from deforestation (land use change), considering FAO yearbook numbers telling us that net deforestation on a world wide scale is almost zero? Close to 30% of the terrestrial surface are covered by forests and woodlands with very little change over the past 6 decades. So, once again just one scale pan of the balance has been taken into account.
5) When looking a little bit beyond GHG emissions and balances, e.g. how good the alarming IPCC projections fit the empirically observed mean global temperatures, one starts to doubt whether the so called Green House Gases (particularly the very small proportion of total emissions originating from human activity) really do have any notable effect on the planet's climate. Since about the change of the millenniums global temperature (satellite measured lower troposphere mean temperature anomalies, University of Alabama, Huntsville) decreased, just inversely proportional to the smoothed atmospheric CO2 concentration. Not one single IPCC model projected this "inconvenient truth" (just for some). Surprise? No! Even the theory tells us that the infrared absorption is almost saturated at present CO2 levels. In order to reach such prominent temperature increases as projected by the IPCC, one has to make very risky assumptions of strongly reinforcing feedbacks of the very slight warming effect intrinsic to CO2, even when doubling or tripling its concentration in the air.
6) Recent studies discovered the stalagmites in this globe's caves as very reliable climate archives conserving a range of precious indicators of past climates and solar activity. Looking to what these archives reveal, we cannot find any unusual or scaring temperature development during the past decades. No need, whatsoever, for anthropogenic Greenhouse Gases to explain the slight temperature increase observed during the past century.
So definitely there is no need at all to be concerned about our livestock's emissions of so called Greenhouse Gases! We won't save the planet distorting ourselves in an effort to teach our cattle how to emit less methane. And we will not harm the planet when we go on with our cattle industry business as usual. Let's just rebut unqualified attacks (unfortunately also originating from such prominent organizations as the FAO) on our livelihood! The sound arguments are ours.
LOOKING ONLY A LITTLE AHEAD
An email from Brian Porter [b.porter@bluewin.ch]
It appears that the US and its CO2 constraining allies will most likely get an unpleasant surprise in a few years when the global production of hydrocarbons will be hard-hit by currently falling levels of capital investment. Around that time the global economy should start to rebound and demand for hydrocarbons (among other commodities) will pick up substantially in developing countries.
In that sellers market rebound, the US, as a major dependent purchaser, will be at a significant economic disadvantage due to both its high import tariffs and its politically constrained environment for domestic production. It will in effect be strangling itself by enforcing an artificial constraint on a critical economic input. Therefore, any attempt to force others into compliance with ill-advised policies using tariffs and repressive political policies - will backfire.
This looming energy supply shortage will exacerbate an ongoing US economic crisis brought on by an apparent ignorance of the fact that it is savings, production and free markets that drive economic growth - not debt, consumption, government planning, political subterfuge and outright market manipulation.
This kind of aggressive posturing only proves that the war has already been lost by its perpetrators. One is left only to consider the reparations - or war on another front...
SOME AMUSING IMPLICATIONS OF THE AMERICAN CLEAN ENERGY AND SECURITY ACT (WAXMAN-MARKEY)
An email from Prof. James H. Rust [jrust@bellsouth.net] below:
The United States House of Representatives narrowly passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, also called Waxman-Markey, June 26. Many features are in this act and little has been published about ramifications of these features. Most notable are requirements that United States greenhouse gas emissions be 17 percent below those of 2005 by 2020 and 15 percent of electric power generation is from renewable sources(wind, solar, biomass, or geothermal) by 2020.
The United States has always been a growing nation; so the 2020 population is estimated forty million greater than the 296 million of 2005--a 13.5 percent increase. So the per capita energy use due to fossil fuels must fall from 284 million Btu per year to 206 million Btu per year by 2020. This 28 percent decrease in fossil energy use will present a challenge unless many creature comforts such as hot water, heating, and air conditioning are curtailed.
Many states in the United States are unsuitable for use of solar or wind as electricity sources. These states will have to purchase power from more gifted states at considerably higher rates. In 2005 the total electric power generation for the United States was about 4 trillion kilo-watt-hours. If there is no growth for the 15 years to 2020--which is quite unlikely--the amount of electricity due to renewables would have to be 600 billion kilo-watt-hours. Because of solar power's higher costs, wind power will probably be the greatest source of renewable power. The typical 1.5 megawatt wind power plant produces about 3.3 million kilo-watt-hours per year. Thus in the eleven years to 2020, the United States would need about 180 thousand 1.5 megawatt wind turbines. This means 45 new wind turbines per day.
As a means to keep utilities from shutting down operating coal plants, Waxman's Malarkey Bill allows fossil fuel users to purchase carbon offsets that nullify carbon dioxide production by removing carbon dioxide at other locations. This feature should make investors with similar dispositions to Bernard Madoff weep for joy. The offsets may sell $50 to $80 per ton of carbon. The offsets may be from planting forests in Brazil or constructing hydroelectric dams in China. The same tree may be used as offsets for different countries or utilities. What is to prevent trees planted for offsets being harvested for fuel consumption? All kinds of mischief should be possible from this means to forestall reductions in fossil fuel use.
THE NOTORIOUSLY UNPREDICTABLE MONSOON
An email for Madhav Khandekar [mkhandekar@rogers.com]
The Indian Monsoon & by extension the Asian Monsoon which impact about 4 B people (70% of world's humanity) today is perhaps the most complex feature of the earth's climate system and climate models have achieved only a limited success so far in simulating many features of this complex system.
Normally the Indian monsoon arrives at the southern tip of Indian Peninsula (about 8N) by May 25 and by June 7/8 the Monsoon onset begins over Mumbai (largest Indian city, pop: ~20 M) and it progresses further into central India and by June 25th to June 30th the Monsoon generally spreads over most of India. Despite year-to-year variations in these dates, the onset dates over a 150-yr database (one of the best datasets) shows Monsoon arrival dates remarkably robust. Delay in Monsoon arrival is often associated with anxiety about water shortage, impact on agriculture and of course an increased hype about "global warming, climate change and possible adverse impact". A careful examination of past data, however, shows such 'fears' about adverse global warming impact are without any merit.
Despite significant advances in Monsoon meteorology, predicting onset and overall intensity and distribution of Monsoon rainfall during the four summer months (June-September) is still a daunting task and considerable research efforts are needed at present to improve predictability of Indian/Asian Monsoon. Since the Indian/Asian Monsoon system transfers sufficient energy across the entire climate system, any future projection of earth's climate must include an improved modelling of the Monsoon system than what is available at present.
This year's Monsoon was predicted to be about normal (96% of normal) by the IMD ( India Met Dept) as early as April 18th and an early arrival (second week of May) of Monsoon rains at the southern tip of India suggested this year's Monsoon to be about two weeks early. However, further progress of Monsoon was stalled for reasons that we meteorologists do not fully understand and this stalling and later creating acute shortage of water in Mumbai and New Delhi ( India's capital city with a pop, ~14 M) has evoked comments like "Monsoon gamble, looming spectre of a drought etc" from many, including a scientist working with Greenpeace.
It must be remembered that such delays in Monsoon arrival have occurred in the past and has affected India's agricultural output, but such delays and irregular Monsoon progression are all part of natural variability, quite possibly linked to large-scale atmospheric circulation systems like the ENSO phase in Eq pacific, Eurasian and Himalayan winter snow cover, QBO (Quasi-Biennial Eq Stratospheric Wind Oscillation) phase and perhaps a host of other regional features. This is what makes the Indian/Asian Monsoon so very complex and a challenging scientific problem.
In 1972 the Indian Monsoon was delayed, esp in Peninsular India by almost six weeks and that year proved to be one of severest drought year for the Monsoon (most certainly this was attributed to the 1972 strong El Nino) which resulted in sharply reduced rice yield that year.
Earlier in 1961 Monsoon rains were heaviest during the four months with extensive flooding over many parts of India. Such floods and droughts have occurred irregularly and are still not fully understood. The worst ever drought was in 1877 which sparked an article (Proc of Royal Society) by Henry Blanford (British Met Reporter for the then Govt of India) to speculate linkage between extensive snow cover over Himalayas during preceding winter and weak Monsoon.
Climate modellers almost 100 years later were able to simulate this inverse relationship. However much remains to be understood about how winter Eurasian snow cover impacts Monsoon circulation few months down the road and how the easterly Jet Stream that emanates from east of Bangkok to Saudi Arabia at about 12 km level over Peninsular India (during Monsoon months) evolves and influences Monsoon rains.
Per most recent IMD communication, Monsoon seems to be spreading over most of India (by June 30th) and this season's rains would be only about 93% of normal. The month of July is the most critical month with regular rains over most of eastern & western Gangetic Plains during normal Monsoon. Whether the Monsoon this year "behaves normally" for the rest of the season remains to be seen. The ENSO phase is about normal at this point in time, so NO adverse impact from Eq Pacific is expected. Winter snow cover was heavy during the past winter, however the continued westerly phase of the QBO may help produce good rains over next few weeks.
Accurate Monsoon simulation and prediction with a lead time of few weeks to few months still remains an intractable problem for climate scientists.
CERN: COSMIC RAYS & CLIMATE
You've probably all heard of Svensmark and the Galactic Cosmic Ray (GCR) to cloud cover modulation theory by now. Lot's of warmists say it is "discredited". However, CERN in Switzerland isn't following that thinking, and after getting some encouraging results in the CLOUD06 experiment, they have funded a much larger and more comprehensive CLOUD09 experiment. I figure if it is "discredited", a bunch of smart guys and gals like CERN wouldn't be ramping up the investigation. There's also word now of a new correlation:
Correlation recently reported between solar/GCR variability and temperature in Siberia from glacial ice core, 30 yr lag (ie. ocean currents may be part of response)
I get so many tips now it is hard to choose, but this one is a gem. If you look at nothing else this month, please take the time to download the slide show from CERN's Jasper Kirkby at the end of this article.
He does a superb job of tying it all together. I found Kirkby's slide show quite interesting, and I've grabbed some slides for our WUWT readers. He proposes a GCR to cloud droplet mechanism, which to me, makes sense meteorologically. He also touches on the possibility that the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) may have been shifted due to GCR modulation during the LIA/Maunder Minimum. This ties in with Willis Eschenbach's theories of the ITCZ being a "thermostatic mechanism" for the planet with some amplification effects.
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
A pipedream of six turbines a day until 2020
Lord Hunt has made one of the most absurd claims that can ever have been uttered by a British minister, writes Christopher Booker
Last Wednesday, two days before our Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, told us that motorists could help save the planet by changing more quickly to a lower gear, his underling Lord Hunt made one of the most absurd claims that can ever have been uttered by a British minister. Solemnly reported by the media, he said that by 2020 he hopes to see thousands more wind turbines round Britain's coasts, capable of producing '25 gigawatts (GW)" of electricity, enough to meet "more than a quarter of the UK's electricity needs".
In three ways this was remarkable. First, as most of us know by now, thanks to the intermittency of the wind, the actual output from 25GW of turbine capacity would only average out at 7.5GW. Since Britain's peak demand is 56GW, Lord Hunt's turbines would meet barely a seventh of our needs, just over half what he claims.
Nor did he mention their cost. Thanks to the British Wind Energy Association telling us that the current price of offshore turbines is £3.1 million per megawatt, the bill we would all have to pay for Lord Hunt's dream would be £77 billion, plus the £15 billion that he did admit would be needed to pay for cabling to connect his windmills to the grid. For the same £92 billion we could build 34 nuclear power stations, enough to meet all Britain's needs, at a seventh of the cost for each unit of electricity.
The second remarkable feature of Lord Hunt's vision is that, in practical terms, there is no conceivable way it could happen. To build the 10,000 turbines that would be required by 2020 would mean installing more than two of these 2,000-ton monsters, the size of Blackpool Tower, every day for the next 11 years. But, thanks to weather conditions at sea, it is only possible to carry out the work for four months each summer. So the true rate would be more like six a day. Nowhere in the world has anyone managed to instal more than one a week, as opposed to Lord Hunt's hypothetical 45.
The third, perhaps most disturbing point is that the media dutifully reported Lord Hunt's absurd claims without asking any of the elementary questions that could have revealed that he was talking utter nonsense. One cannot of course expect Opposition MPs to take an intelligent interest in such matters. But if journalists allow ministers to get away with talking such tosh, the slide into unreality can only continue.
SOURCE
BRAZIL JOINS INDIA, CHINA IN OPPOSING WESTERN CLIMATE DEMANDS
Brazil wants historic emissions to be the basis for greenhouse gas pollution targets, slated for discussion during December climate talks in Copenhagen, Brazil's top climate negotiator said in an interview. Jose Miguez, who heads Brazil's Interministerial Commission on Global Climate Change, said Brazil is not yet proposing targets for emissions cuts under the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol because developed nations should take the lead. "The greenhouse effect is not caused by emissions, it is caused by the accumulation of emissions in the atmosphere," he said. "We are proposing that the second period of (Kyoto Protocol) commitments be based on the historic responsibilities of each country." Miguez said China, India and South Africa will back the historic emissions proposal in the United Nations talks aimed at reining in warming that the U.N. climate panel says will cause more droughts and crop failures and raise sea levels.
In China, which scientists say has surpassed the United States as the world's biggest carbon polluter, a state think tank this year proposed a greenhouse gas trading plan to reflect the historic emissions of rich and poor nations. Miguez said Brazil opposes "carbon intensity" proposals that measure emissions per dollar of GDP because they favor bigger economies and risk allowing continued increases in global emissions as economies grow. "It's the proposal backed by the U.S., Japan and Germany, it's good for countries with big GDPs," said Miguez.
More HERE
Note from Benny Peiser: It would appear that President Obama's climate policies run the serious risk of alienating international allies in the developing world, democratic nations (such as India, Brazil, South Africa, etc) that may even turn into potential adversaries if the West's foolish strategy of green protectionism were to take hold. It would be a historical tragedy if future climate conflicts and trade wars were triggered by Western climate hysteria and political extremism rather than anything the climate is throwing at us.
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Friday, July 03, 2009
Everything is bent to promote global warming -- even the size of sheep
Crazy stuff. Why? 1). Since there has been no global warming for 10 of the 24 years concerned, the explanation given fails its most basic assumption. More likely is that some imported pest has reduced the amount of forage available and that factor enhances the survival of smaller animals. 2). Most sheep in Australia run wild and do so in much warmer climates than St. Kilda -- and they are generally big healthy animals. By the logic below they should all be the size of Chihuahuas
CLIMATE change has caused a flock of wild sheep on a remote northern Scottish island to become smaller, according to an unusual investigation published on Thursday. The study explains a mystery that has bedevilled scientists for the past two years.
The wild Soay sheep live on Hirta, in the St. Kilda archipelago in the storm-battered Outer Hebrides, and have been closely studied for nearly a quarter of a century. The law of evolutionary theory says the brown, thick-coated ungulates should have got progressively bigger. Tough winters mean that bigger sheep have a better chance of survival and of reproducing than smaller ones, and eventually they would dominate in the flock's numbers. But in 2007, stunned researchers realised that the average size of the Hirta sheep, instead of rising, had been progressively falling.
The answer, British biologists said on Thursday, lies in climate change. A team led by Tim Coulson, a professor at Imperial College London, pored over data for the animals' body size and life history over 24 years. They found that the sheep were not growing as fast as they once did and smaller sheep were likelier to survive into adulthood instead of perishing as lambs. This gives smaller sheep a shot at reproduction, which means that the average sheep size has fallen - by 81gram per year on average.
Coulson believes that shorter, milder winters mean that lambs do not need to put on as much weight in the first months of life in order to survive to their first birthday, as they did when winters were colder. “In the past, only the big, healthy sheep and large lambs that had piled on weight in their first summer could survive the harsh winters on Hirta,” he said. “But now, due to climate change, grass for food is available for more months of the year and survival conditions are not so challenging - even the slower-growing sheep have a chance of making it, and this means smaller individuals are becoming increasingly prevalent in the population.”
Another factor in the sheep shrinkage is a so-called “young mum effect.” Ewes that give birth earlier tend to produce smaller sheep, thus adding to the smaller average size.
Man-made climate change is already having an impact on species in terms of habitat and migratory patterns. But scientists say it is hard to predict which will be winners and losers from the change, partly because of the complexity of separating out evolutionary pressures from environmental factors.
The new study, published in the US journal Science, could help, said Coulson. “Biologists have realised that ecological and evolutionary processes are intricately intertwined, and they now have a way of dissecting out the contribution of each,” he said. “Unfortunately, it is too early to tell whether a warming world will lead to pocket-sized sheep.”
SOURCE
NEW SVENSMARK PAPER ON COSMIC RAYS & CLIMATE CHANGE
Henrik Svensmark et al have a new GRL paper in press entitled: 'Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds'
The Abstract states:
Close passages of coronal mass ejections from the sun are signaled at the Earth's surface by Forbush decreases in cosmic ray counts. We find that low clouds contain less liquid water following Forbush decreases (FDs), and for the most influential events the liquid water in the oceanic atmosphere can diminish by as much as 7%. Cloud water content as gauged by the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) reaches a minimum around 7 days after the Forbush minimum in cosmic rays, and so does the fraction of low clouds seen by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and in the International Satellite Cloud Climate Project (ISCCP). Parallel observations by the aerosol robotic network AERONET reveal falls in the relative abundance of fine aerosol particles which, in normal circumstances, could have evolved into cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). Thus a link between the sun, cosmic rays, aerosols, and liquid-water clouds appears to exist on a global scale.
The paper concludes:
Our results show global-scale evidence of conspicuous influences of solar variability on cloudiness and aerosols. Irrespective of the detailed mechanism, the loss of ions from the air during FDs reduces the cloud liquid water content over the oceans. So marked is the response to relatively small variations in the total ionization, we suspect that a large fraction of Earth's clouds could be controlled by ionization. Future work should estimate how large a volume of the Earth's atmosphere is involved in the ion process that leads to the changes seen in CCN and its importance for the Earth's radiation budget. From solar activity to cosmic ray ionization to aerosols and liquid-water clouds, a causal chain appears to operate on a global scale.
Reference: Svensmark, H., T. Bondo, and J. Svensmark (2009), Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds, Geophys. Res. Lett., doi:10.1029/2009GL038429, in press. (accepted 17 June 2009)
SOURCE
Exxon-Mobil gives peanuts to climate skeptics
Skeptics get $365,000 out of a total of 9 million (4%) given to all environment groups
Company records for 2008 show that ExxonMobil gave $75,000 (£45,500) to the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas and $50,000 (£30,551) to the Heritage Foundation in Washington. It also gave $245,000 (£149,702) to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington.
The list of donations in the company’s 2008 Worldwide Contributions and Community investments is likely to trigger further anger from environmental activists, who have accused ExxonMobil of giving tens of millions to climate change sceptics in the past decade. All three groups have raised questions about global warming. [How awful1 Raising questions! Unforgiveable] The Heritage Foundation published note last year that said: “Growing scientific evidence casts doubt on whether global warming constitutes a threat, including the fact that 2008 is about to go into the books as a cooler year than 2007”.
ExxonMobil promised in 2006 to stop funding climate change sceptics after it was criticised by the Royal Society for giving money to researchers who were “misinforming the public about the science of climate change”. In its 2008 corporate citizenship report, published last year, ExxonMobil repeated that it would cut funds to several groups that “divert attention” from the need to find new sources of clean energy.
The company has cut funding to several of the more controversial groups, including Frontiers for Freedom, who said in 2007: “The truth is, there is no conclusive or reliable scientific proof that the sky is falling or that Earth’s climate is experiencing cataclysmic warming caused by man’s activities.” The George C Marshall Institute also did not receive any Exxon money last year.
The oil giant also funded a range of environmental groups last year, giving $110,000 (£67,222) to the Alliance to Save Energy, $105,000 (£64,166) to the Annapolis Center for Science-based Public Policy, $100,000 (£61,113) to the Energy research centre at Columbia University and $35,000 (£21,389) to the Center for Clean Air Policy.
A spokesman for ExxonMobil said the company reviews its contributions annually and that it had “the same concerns as people everywhere, and that is how to provide the world with the energy it needs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We take the issue of climate change seriously and the risks warrant action.”
ExxonMobil donated a total of $9 million (£5.5million) to environment-related groups in 2008, and a total of $225million (£137million) to charity, 1/200th of its $45.2billion (£27.6billion) profits for the year.
SOURCE
CALIFORNIA'S GREEN SUICIDE
General Motors this week announced it is quitting its three-decade joint venture with Toyota at the vaunted NUMMI plant near San Francisco. The facility has been much ballyhooed over the years for its cooperative symbolism - it benefited then-neophyte Toyota to employ UAW labor as it entered a wary, protectionist-minded, 1980s U.S. market, while GM was eager to learn Toyota's vaunted manufacturing techniques - but that has outlived its usefulness now that GM and Toyota are struggling with overcapacity today.
But the little details of the NUMMI plant are equally newsworthy.
NUMMI is Toyota's most expensive manufacturing facility in North America - and it is the only auto manufacturing plant in California, period (despite the Golden State's status as America's largest auto market). Why? Because California is a nightmare for large manufacturing.
Its high energy costs, high taxes, and heavy-handed environmental regulation make it prohibitively expensive to build cars relative to other states in the union. Yet Washington is rushing headlong to adopt California's economic and regulatory model for the entire country.
And that means future large manufacturing will be going overseas.
SOURCE
Green-industrial complex gets rich from carbon laws
THE word environmentalist usually conjures images of down-at-heel campaigners in tie-dyed T-shirts who eat only organic muesli. In truth, going green has become big business. We are witnessing the emergence of a green-industrial complex, an alliance between national governments, corporations and powerful individuals that is using the politics of fear to transform the economic and political worlds.
For a snapshot of the government and business interests intertwined in the rise of green capitalism, consider Al Gore. He's getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests.
Gore is chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, an outfit that seeks to "persuade people of the importance, urgency and feasibility" of going green. It recently launched a $US300 million ad campaign to coax American people and politicians to embrace the carbon-lite lifestyle.
But Gore is also chairman of a greeninvestment firm called Generation Investment Management, which is a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international collaboration of businesses and science bodies, and which invests in firms that produce renewable energy and low-carbon technology. So Gore uses one of his multimillion-dollar organisations, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to put pressure on government to promote the low-carbon lifestyle that will furnish one of his other multimillion-dollar organisations, General Investment Management, with booming business.
Gore's activities provide only a glimpse into the new collusion between greens, businesses and government. So speedily has this network come together that according to one critic of the politics of environmentalism, Bjorn Lomborg, it is not going too far to liken the new green-industrial complex to the military-industrial complex that president Dwight Eisenhower warned of in the 1950s.
Governments across the world are promoting green ideology and economics on the back of the recession. President Barack Obama has spoken of a "green revolution" and spending $US150 billion to create five million "green-collar" jobs. As a result, the race is on among green-leaning businesses to snap up new government contracts and among not-so-green businesses to improve their green-industrial credentials in the hope of reaping government cash.
Yet the international evidence suggests the attempt to create green jobs will hamper economic recovery. Obama cited Spain as a country where green jobs have improved economic matters. In fact, according to a study by a professor of economics at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, for every green job created by the Spanish government in recent years, an average of 2.2 other jobs were destroyed to make way for it. Furthermore, green jobs tend not to be permanent; in Spain, only 1 in 10 green jobs exists for a significant period.
In Britain, green-industrial activists have used their political clout and scientific research, much of it derived from studies that underpin the business-science alliance of the Copenhagen Climate Council, to pressure the government to adopt a green new deal. In response, Gordon Brown announced in April that he would create 400,000 green jobs and a "low-carbon economy".
Yet his figures don't add up. The Brown government imagines that by 2015 it will have created 39,600 new jobs in geothermal energy, 74,900 in the development of alternative fuels, 25,300 in solar power and 69,300 in the construction of wind turbines. Yet, as a result of Britain's debilitating crisis of credit, the renewables industry, in which tens of thousands of new jobs are apparently going to be created, is in a dire state. Five of Britain's biggest wind-energy projects have been abandoned or put on hold indefinitely and British Petroleum recently cut 620 jobs in its solar-energy division because it wasn't profitable. As journalist Christopher Booker argues, Brown's "green revolution" is "babyish make-believe".
The Spanish and British experiences suggest Obama should not so enthusiastically sign up for the creation of a post-recession US informed by the politics and prejudices of the green-industrial complex. But, then, Obama and other leaders' embrace of the green-industrial complex is not about effecting real change, far less about making economies properly more productive. Rather, it is about instituting a new political outlook, one in which government intervention on the side of science-exploiting, globally conscious corporations becomes the solution to contemporary problems.
Indeed, green activists talk openly about the recession being a good thing. A leading European scientist whose views inform the Copenhagen Climate Council recently said, "It's a cruel thing to say ... but if we are looking at a slowdown in the economy, there will be less fossil fuels burning, so for the climate it could be an advantage."
This captures the complex's cavalier attitude towards individual hardship and its disdain for anything other thanbig government-big business solutions. This is about creating a new mission for the elite while enforcing a culture of low horizons among the "little people".
We should remember that the green-industrial complex's business interests played a role in bringing about the recession. The company whose collapse precipitated the credit crunch, Lehman Brothers, enthusiastically embraced the idea of carbon trading, which is held up by all members of the green-industrial complex as the way forward. In its 2007 report, The Business of Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities, Lehman expressed hope that it might become a "prime brokerage for (carbon) emissions permits", meaning it aspired to make money not only from speculating in mortgages but also from trading in thin air.
Lehman was inspired by European carbon-trading schemes. Under the plan first proposed in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and introduced in Europe in the early and mid-2000s, the EU and UN allocated to industry legal titles to emit a certain amount of CO2. Because the titles are transferable and because large numbers were allocated to large corporations when the licenses were first introduced, there arose a market in carbon trading. Powerful businesses were able to sell their CO2 permits to smaller companies that needed to emit a certain amount of CO2.
Many smaller public institutions suffered as a result.
In Britain, for example, the University of Manchester forked out pound stg. 92,500 for CO2 permits - and when the carbon-trading market hit the recession and the value of CO2 permits fell, the university would be doing well, said one report, "if it managed to get pound stg. 1000 for the lot of them".
The green-industrial complex's transformation of CO2 into a tradeable commodity empowered large corporations over smaller ones.
Now there are calls for an international carbon-trading regime. The World Bank has proposed that it broker "carbon rights" between the developed and developing world. In the already international and informal world of "carbon offsetting", wealthy individuals in the West pay large sums to charities that fund "eco-friendly" farming and industry in the developing world. It was recently revealed that Prince Charles has made donations to a charity that encourages Indian farmers to use foot pumps rather than machinery to draw water for their crops. In short, guilt-ridden rich people are paying poor people to stay poor so that they can continue living carbon-rich lives over here.
Formalising such an unequal relationship with international brokerage of carbon-emission rights would be a disaster, a form of eco-slavery.
Far from ushering in a brighter future, the green-industrial complex's activities hinder economic experimentation, individual initiative and human aspiration. Theirs is a recipe for economic stagnation rather than recovery and for a new form of politics dominated by an elite green clique and closed off to us mere mortals.
SOURCE
Renewable sources of enegy? No Thanks! Say Greenies
There's no such thing as a happy Greenie
GREENIE CRAZINESS IN AUSTRALIA
Three posts below
Greenie people-hate on display again
MILLIONS of dollars worth of luxury waterfront homes at Byron Bay will be demolished in the name of climate change following a council decision to enshrine "planned retreat" in law. The radical step to block homeowners protecting their property from rising sea levels was contained in a coastal planning policy released by the Greens-run Byron Bay Council yesterday. It would be the first time in NSW that the idea of planned retreat - where nature is allowed to take its course - will be imposed on existing dwellings under state law. And it means that, once gazetted by the State Government, any house under threat of erosion can be legally demolished.
NSW Environment Minister Carmel Tebbutt, under threat in her own seat of Marrickville from the NSW Greens, has refused to intervene. She said it was up to residents to lobby the council.
Some of the country's rich and famous face losing their homes to rising sea levels, including former actor, now recluse, John Cornell. The council has prevented them building rock walls to help protect their beachfront homes from storm surges. They will now proceed with legal action against the council, claiming they have been denied the basic right of being able to protect their homes. The local business chamber has written to Premier Nathan Rees calling for State Government intervention to stop what they described as "lunacy".
Local business group Byron United president Ed Ahern said the actions of the local council were "alarming". "The State Government needs to intervene in these matters and take over responsibility," he said. "We urgently request that the Government intervenes in this important matter." He said landowners had been prevented from protecting their properties and the issue was now the subject of a formal complaint to the NSW Ombudsman.
Byron Bay Mayor Jan Barham, of the Greens, has defended the move, previously claiming planned retreat had been a policy in Byron Bay since the 1980s. Ms Barham, who is reported to be considering a move to the NSW Upper House, did not return a request to be interviewed. However, she has said that wealthy residents who built their homes along the beach were always aware of the erosion issue.
Ms Tebbutt said the NSW Government would continue to encourage Byron Shire Council to take a practical and reasonable approach when dealing with the affected landowners. "Our draft policy allows landowners affected by coastal hazards, including sea level rise, to seek approval from their local council to protect their property," she said. [In other words: "Get lost"]
SOURCE
Greenie delusions
A solar power station that will generate power 24 hours a day? Really?? I must be missing something. The moon must be VERY bright in South Australia
WHYALLA's 301 days of annual sunshine will be driving the world's first solar power station, producing electricity 24 hours a day by this time next year.
The $15 million plant will again put South Australia's regional areas at the forefront of sustainable and emission-free energy production. It will also address the problem of finding an emission-free electricity source capable of providing a base-load, or 24-hour, power supply, which is a necessity for the world to combat climate change.
Construction of the solar-thermal power plant, Whyalla Solar Oasis, began last week. It will initially comprise four "Big Dishes" while the technology is demonstrated, generating power for up to 1000 homes. The long-term plan is for 600 dishes to be built, each 500sq m in area, in a 2km by 1km area at the city's northern entrance. The expanded plant is expected to generate about 130 gigawatts of power a year, enough for 19,000 average homes and preventing 129,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions being produced – equal to that generated by 36,000 cars each year.
Whyalla Council deputy mayor Eddie Hughes said it was "incredibly exciting" for work to start after 12 years of planning and 30 years of research by the Australian National University.
SOURCE
Business baulks at extra green tape
A PUSH to force state governments and local councils to refer development proposals with a large carbon footprint to the federal government for approval has alarmed business groups, who claim it could stall economic recovery. The proposal is contained in the interim report of a review of the federal Environment Protection Act, released this week. Green groups have proposed adding greenhouse gas emissions to the seven triggers that require any proposed development to be referred to the federal environment minister.
The panel reviewing the act, chaired by former ANU chancellor Alan Hawke, rejects the idea of a permanent trigger, but says such a mechanism could be introduced as an interim measure until the onset of a national emissions trading scheme, now not anticipated until 2011 at the earliest. "If there is to be a delay in effective establishment of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, then there is a much stronger case for introduction of a greenhouse gas trigger to drive down emissions in the interim period," the report says.
The potential for significant projects to be tied up in an extra layer of bureaucracy would appear to flow counter to yesterday's push at the Council of Australian Governments to develop national performance measures on development approvals designed to speed economic recovery.
Infrastructure Partnerships Australia's Brendan Lyon said the interim report was a cause for concern on several fronts because it could risk further unnecessary delay to critical infrastructure projects. "Climate change is an important consideration and infrastructure will play a major role in equipping Australia to cut reductions, while sustaining living standards and economic productivity," Mr Lyon said. "But the mechanism for carbon abatement should be through an emissions trading scheme backed by a price on carbon. "Australia's economy will adapt best through the phasing in of a robust price for greenhouse gas emissions, rather than through adding an additional layer of complexity and potential delays in approval processes."
The present seven triggers in the act, covering actions by government or private enterprise with "a significant impact on a matter of national environmental significance", have not significantly affected major developments. But the trigger for endangered species caused a stoush recently between the NSW and federal governments after federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett temporarily halted logging in a NSW state forest out of concern for declining numbers of superb parrots.
John Sheahan from the Australian Property Institute said the key point about a greenhouse trigger would be its design, given such a move would represent "the most significant intrusion ever" by the commonwealth into land use. "Some projects might end up spending many months in that office in Canberra waiting to be assessed," he said. Mr Sheahan said the innate conservatism of local councils would mean Mr Garrett's office could be flooded with referred applications it did not have the resources to deal with.
Aaron Gadiel from developers' lobby Urban Taskforce said an extension of the Environment Protection Act was "the last thing the Australian economy needs right now".
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
Crazy stuff. Why? 1). Since there has been no global warming for 10 of the 24 years concerned, the explanation given fails its most basic assumption. More likely is that some imported pest has reduced the amount of forage available and that factor enhances the survival of smaller animals. 2). Most sheep in Australia run wild and do so in much warmer climates than St. Kilda -- and they are generally big healthy animals. By the logic below they should all be the size of Chihuahuas
CLIMATE change has caused a flock of wild sheep on a remote northern Scottish island to become smaller, according to an unusual investigation published on Thursday. The study explains a mystery that has bedevilled scientists for the past two years.
The wild Soay sheep live on Hirta, in the St. Kilda archipelago in the storm-battered Outer Hebrides, and have been closely studied for nearly a quarter of a century. The law of evolutionary theory says the brown, thick-coated ungulates should have got progressively bigger. Tough winters mean that bigger sheep have a better chance of survival and of reproducing than smaller ones, and eventually they would dominate in the flock's numbers. But in 2007, stunned researchers realised that the average size of the Hirta sheep, instead of rising, had been progressively falling.
The answer, British biologists said on Thursday, lies in climate change. A team led by Tim Coulson, a professor at Imperial College London, pored over data for the animals' body size and life history over 24 years. They found that the sheep were not growing as fast as they once did and smaller sheep were likelier to survive into adulthood instead of perishing as lambs. This gives smaller sheep a shot at reproduction, which means that the average sheep size has fallen - by 81gram per year on average.
Coulson believes that shorter, milder winters mean that lambs do not need to put on as much weight in the first months of life in order to survive to their first birthday, as they did when winters were colder. “In the past, only the big, healthy sheep and large lambs that had piled on weight in their first summer could survive the harsh winters on Hirta,” he said. “But now, due to climate change, grass for food is available for more months of the year and survival conditions are not so challenging - even the slower-growing sheep have a chance of making it, and this means smaller individuals are becoming increasingly prevalent in the population.”
Another factor in the sheep shrinkage is a so-called “young mum effect.” Ewes that give birth earlier tend to produce smaller sheep, thus adding to the smaller average size.
Man-made climate change is already having an impact on species in terms of habitat and migratory patterns. But scientists say it is hard to predict which will be winners and losers from the change, partly because of the complexity of separating out evolutionary pressures from environmental factors.
The new study, published in the US journal Science, could help, said Coulson. “Biologists have realised that ecological and evolutionary processes are intricately intertwined, and they now have a way of dissecting out the contribution of each,” he said. “Unfortunately, it is too early to tell whether a warming world will lead to pocket-sized sheep.”
SOURCE
NEW SVENSMARK PAPER ON COSMIC RAYS & CLIMATE CHANGE
Henrik Svensmark et al have a new GRL paper in press entitled: 'Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds'
The Abstract states:
Close passages of coronal mass ejections from the sun are signaled at the Earth's surface by Forbush decreases in cosmic ray counts. We find that low clouds contain less liquid water following Forbush decreases (FDs), and for the most influential events the liquid water in the oceanic atmosphere can diminish by as much as 7%. Cloud water content as gauged by the Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) reaches a minimum around 7 days after the Forbush minimum in cosmic rays, and so does the fraction of low clouds seen by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and in the International Satellite Cloud Climate Project (ISCCP). Parallel observations by the aerosol robotic network AERONET reveal falls in the relative abundance of fine aerosol particles which, in normal circumstances, could have evolved into cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). Thus a link between the sun, cosmic rays, aerosols, and liquid-water clouds appears to exist on a global scale.
The paper concludes:
Our results show global-scale evidence of conspicuous influences of solar variability on cloudiness and aerosols. Irrespective of the detailed mechanism, the loss of ions from the air during FDs reduces the cloud liquid water content over the oceans. So marked is the response to relatively small variations in the total ionization, we suspect that a large fraction of Earth's clouds could be controlled by ionization. Future work should estimate how large a volume of the Earth's atmosphere is involved in the ion process that leads to the changes seen in CCN and its importance for the Earth's radiation budget. From solar activity to cosmic ray ionization to aerosols and liquid-water clouds, a causal chain appears to operate on a global scale.
Reference: Svensmark, H., T. Bondo, and J. Svensmark (2009), Cosmic ray decreases affect atmospheric aerosols and clouds, Geophys. Res. Lett., doi:10.1029/2009GL038429, in press. (accepted 17 June 2009)
SOURCE
Exxon-Mobil gives peanuts to climate skeptics
Skeptics get $365,000 out of a total of 9 million (4%) given to all environment groups
Company records for 2008 show that ExxonMobil gave $75,000 (£45,500) to the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas and $50,000 (£30,551) to the Heritage Foundation in Washington. It also gave $245,000 (£149,702) to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington.
The list of donations in the company’s 2008 Worldwide Contributions and Community investments is likely to trigger further anger from environmental activists, who have accused ExxonMobil of giving tens of millions to climate change sceptics in the past decade. All three groups have raised questions about global warming. [How awful1 Raising questions! Unforgiveable] The Heritage Foundation published note last year that said: “Growing scientific evidence casts doubt on whether global warming constitutes a threat, including the fact that 2008 is about to go into the books as a cooler year than 2007”.
ExxonMobil promised in 2006 to stop funding climate change sceptics after it was criticised by the Royal Society for giving money to researchers who were “misinforming the public about the science of climate change”. In its 2008 corporate citizenship report, published last year, ExxonMobil repeated that it would cut funds to several groups that “divert attention” from the need to find new sources of clean energy.
The company has cut funding to several of the more controversial groups, including Frontiers for Freedom, who said in 2007: “The truth is, there is no conclusive or reliable scientific proof that the sky is falling or that Earth’s climate is experiencing cataclysmic warming caused by man’s activities.” The George C Marshall Institute also did not receive any Exxon money last year.
The oil giant also funded a range of environmental groups last year, giving $110,000 (£67,222) to the Alliance to Save Energy, $105,000 (£64,166) to the Annapolis Center for Science-based Public Policy, $100,000 (£61,113) to the Energy research centre at Columbia University and $35,000 (£21,389) to the Center for Clean Air Policy.
A spokesman for ExxonMobil said the company reviews its contributions annually and that it had “the same concerns as people everywhere, and that is how to provide the world with the energy it needs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We take the issue of climate change seriously and the risks warrant action.”
ExxonMobil donated a total of $9 million (£5.5million) to environment-related groups in 2008, and a total of $225million (£137million) to charity, 1/200th of its $45.2billion (£27.6billion) profits for the year.
SOURCE
CALIFORNIA'S GREEN SUICIDE
General Motors this week announced it is quitting its three-decade joint venture with Toyota at the vaunted NUMMI plant near San Francisco. The facility has been much ballyhooed over the years for its cooperative symbolism - it benefited then-neophyte Toyota to employ UAW labor as it entered a wary, protectionist-minded, 1980s U.S. market, while GM was eager to learn Toyota's vaunted manufacturing techniques - but that has outlived its usefulness now that GM and Toyota are struggling with overcapacity today.
But the little details of the NUMMI plant are equally newsworthy.
NUMMI is Toyota's most expensive manufacturing facility in North America - and it is the only auto manufacturing plant in California, period (despite the Golden State's status as America's largest auto market). Why? Because California is a nightmare for large manufacturing.
Its high energy costs, high taxes, and heavy-handed environmental regulation make it prohibitively expensive to build cars relative to other states in the union. Yet Washington is rushing headlong to adopt California's economic and regulatory model for the entire country.
And that means future large manufacturing will be going overseas.
SOURCE
Green-industrial complex gets rich from carbon laws
THE word environmentalist usually conjures images of down-at-heel campaigners in tie-dyed T-shirts who eat only organic muesli. In truth, going green has become big business. We are witnessing the emergence of a green-industrial complex, an alliance between national governments, corporations and powerful individuals that is using the politics of fear to transform the economic and political worlds.
For a snapshot of the government and business interests intertwined in the rise of green capitalism, consider Al Gore. He's getting rich from environmentalism, not just by being paid a whopping $US175,000 ($217,500) a speech but by using political pressure to force government policy in a direction that benefits his business interests.
Gore is chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection, an outfit that seeks to "persuade people of the importance, urgency and feasibility" of going green. It recently launched a $US300 million ad campaign to coax American people and politicians to embrace the carbon-lite lifestyle.
But Gore is also chairman of a greeninvestment firm called Generation Investment Management, which is a member of the Copenhagen Climate Council, an international collaboration of businesses and science bodies, and which invests in firms that produce renewable energy and low-carbon technology. So Gore uses one of his multimillion-dollar organisations, the Alliance for Climate Protection, to put pressure on government to promote the low-carbon lifestyle that will furnish one of his other multimillion-dollar organisations, General Investment Management, with booming business.
Gore's activities provide only a glimpse into the new collusion between greens, businesses and government. So speedily has this network come together that according to one critic of the politics of environmentalism, Bjorn Lomborg, it is not going too far to liken the new green-industrial complex to the military-industrial complex that president Dwight Eisenhower warned of in the 1950s.
Governments across the world are promoting green ideology and economics on the back of the recession. President Barack Obama has spoken of a "green revolution" and spending $US150 billion to create five million "green-collar" jobs. As a result, the race is on among green-leaning businesses to snap up new government contracts and among not-so-green businesses to improve their green-industrial credentials in the hope of reaping government cash.
Yet the international evidence suggests the attempt to create green jobs will hamper economic recovery. Obama cited Spain as a country where green jobs have improved economic matters. In fact, according to a study by a professor of economics at Juan Carlos University in Madrid, for every green job created by the Spanish government in recent years, an average of 2.2 other jobs were destroyed to make way for it. Furthermore, green jobs tend not to be permanent; in Spain, only 1 in 10 green jobs exists for a significant period.
In Britain, green-industrial activists have used their political clout and scientific research, much of it derived from studies that underpin the business-science alliance of the Copenhagen Climate Council, to pressure the government to adopt a green new deal. In response, Gordon Brown announced in April that he would create 400,000 green jobs and a "low-carbon economy".
Yet his figures don't add up. The Brown government imagines that by 2015 it will have created 39,600 new jobs in geothermal energy, 74,900 in the development of alternative fuels, 25,300 in solar power and 69,300 in the construction of wind turbines. Yet, as a result of Britain's debilitating crisis of credit, the renewables industry, in which tens of thousands of new jobs are apparently going to be created, is in a dire state. Five of Britain's biggest wind-energy projects have been abandoned or put on hold indefinitely and British Petroleum recently cut 620 jobs in its solar-energy division because it wasn't profitable. As journalist Christopher Booker argues, Brown's "green revolution" is "babyish make-believe".
The Spanish and British experiences suggest Obama should not so enthusiastically sign up for the creation of a post-recession US informed by the politics and prejudices of the green-industrial complex. But, then, Obama and other leaders' embrace of the green-industrial complex is not about effecting real change, far less about making economies properly more productive. Rather, it is about instituting a new political outlook, one in which government intervention on the side of science-exploiting, globally conscious corporations becomes the solution to contemporary problems.
Indeed, green activists talk openly about the recession being a good thing. A leading European scientist whose views inform the Copenhagen Climate Council recently said, "It's a cruel thing to say ... but if we are looking at a slowdown in the economy, there will be less fossil fuels burning, so for the climate it could be an advantage."
This captures the complex's cavalier attitude towards individual hardship and its disdain for anything other thanbig government-big business solutions. This is about creating a new mission for the elite while enforcing a culture of low horizons among the "little people".
We should remember that the green-industrial complex's business interests played a role in bringing about the recession. The company whose collapse precipitated the credit crunch, Lehman Brothers, enthusiastically embraced the idea of carbon trading, which is held up by all members of the green-industrial complex as the way forward. In its 2007 report, The Business of Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities, Lehman expressed hope that it might become a "prime brokerage for (carbon) emissions permits", meaning it aspired to make money not only from speculating in mortgages but also from trading in thin air.
Lehman was inspired by European carbon-trading schemes. Under the plan first proposed in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and introduced in Europe in the early and mid-2000s, the EU and UN allocated to industry legal titles to emit a certain amount of CO2. Because the titles are transferable and because large numbers were allocated to large corporations when the licenses were first introduced, there arose a market in carbon trading. Powerful businesses were able to sell their CO2 permits to smaller companies that needed to emit a certain amount of CO2.
Many smaller public institutions suffered as a result.
In Britain, for example, the University of Manchester forked out pound stg. 92,500 for CO2 permits - and when the carbon-trading market hit the recession and the value of CO2 permits fell, the university would be doing well, said one report, "if it managed to get pound stg. 1000 for the lot of them".
The green-industrial complex's transformation of CO2 into a tradeable commodity empowered large corporations over smaller ones.
Now there are calls for an international carbon-trading regime. The World Bank has proposed that it broker "carbon rights" between the developed and developing world. In the already international and informal world of "carbon offsetting", wealthy individuals in the West pay large sums to charities that fund "eco-friendly" farming and industry in the developing world. It was recently revealed that Prince Charles has made donations to a charity that encourages Indian farmers to use foot pumps rather than machinery to draw water for their crops. In short, guilt-ridden rich people are paying poor people to stay poor so that they can continue living carbon-rich lives over here.
Formalising such an unequal relationship with international brokerage of carbon-emission rights would be a disaster, a form of eco-slavery.
Far from ushering in a brighter future, the green-industrial complex's activities hinder economic experimentation, individual initiative and human aspiration. Theirs is a recipe for economic stagnation rather than recovery and for a new form of politics dominated by an elite green clique and closed off to us mere mortals.
SOURCE
Renewable sources of enegy? No Thanks! Say Greenies
There's no such thing as a happy Greenie
17 Miles Of Maine's Kennebec River Restored
It's been 10 years since the federal government ordered the Edwards Dam on Maine's Kennebec River to be torn down. Regulators had decided that the public would be better served by a free-flowing river than the tiny amount of electricity produced by the dam's hydro plant. Removing the dam has changed the environment — for the better.
More HERE. (NPR Audio at link)
GREENIE CRAZINESS IN AUSTRALIA
Three posts below
Greenie people-hate on display again
MILLIONS of dollars worth of luxury waterfront homes at Byron Bay will be demolished in the name of climate change following a council decision to enshrine "planned retreat" in law. The radical step to block homeowners protecting their property from rising sea levels was contained in a coastal planning policy released by the Greens-run Byron Bay Council yesterday. It would be the first time in NSW that the idea of planned retreat - where nature is allowed to take its course - will be imposed on existing dwellings under state law. And it means that, once gazetted by the State Government, any house under threat of erosion can be legally demolished.
NSW Environment Minister Carmel Tebbutt, under threat in her own seat of Marrickville from the NSW Greens, has refused to intervene. She said it was up to residents to lobby the council.
Some of the country's rich and famous face losing their homes to rising sea levels, including former actor, now recluse, John Cornell. The council has prevented them building rock walls to help protect their beachfront homes from storm surges. They will now proceed with legal action against the council, claiming they have been denied the basic right of being able to protect their homes. The local business chamber has written to Premier Nathan Rees calling for State Government intervention to stop what they described as "lunacy".
Local business group Byron United president Ed Ahern said the actions of the local council were "alarming". "The State Government needs to intervene in these matters and take over responsibility," he said. "We urgently request that the Government intervenes in this important matter." He said landowners had been prevented from protecting their properties and the issue was now the subject of a formal complaint to the NSW Ombudsman.
Byron Bay Mayor Jan Barham, of the Greens, has defended the move, previously claiming planned retreat had been a policy in Byron Bay since the 1980s. Ms Barham, who is reported to be considering a move to the NSW Upper House, did not return a request to be interviewed. However, she has said that wealthy residents who built their homes along the beach were always aware of the erosion issue.
Ms Tebbutt said the NSW Government would continue to encourage Byron Shire Council to take a practical and reasonable approach when dealing with the affected landowners. "Our draft policy allows landowners affected by coastal hazards, including sea level rise, to seek approval from their local council to protect their property," she said. [In other words: "Get lost"]
SOURCE
Greenie delusions
A solar power station that will generate power 24 hours a day? Really?? I must be missing something. The moon must be VERY bright in South Australia
WHYALLA's 301 days of annual sunshine will be driving the world's first solar power station, producing electricity 24 hours a day by this time next year.
The $15 million plant will again put South Australia's regional areas at the forefront of sustainable and emission-free energy production. It will also address the problem of finding an emission-free electricity source capable of providing a base-load, or 24-hour, power supply, which is a necessity for the world to combat climate change.
Construction of the solar-thermal power plant, Whyalla Solar Oasis, began last week. It will initially comprise four "Big Dishes" while the technology is demonstrated, generating power for up to 1000 homes. The long-term plan is for 600 dishes to be built, each 500sq m in area, in a 2km by 1km area at the city's northern entrance. The expanded plant is expected to generate about 130 gigawatts of power a year, enough for 19,000 average homes and preventing 129,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions being produced – equal to that generated by 36,000 cars each year.
Whyalla Council deputy mayor Eddie Hughes said it was "incredibly exciting" for work to start after 12 years of planning and 30 years of research by the Australian National University.
SOURCE
Business baulks at extra green tape
A PUSH to force state governments and local councils to refer development proposals with a large carbon footprint to the federal government for approval has alarmed business groups, who claim it could stall economic recovery. The proposal is contained in the interim report of a review of the federal Environment Protection Act, released this week. Green groups have proposed adding greenhouse gas emissions to the seven triggers that require any proposed development to be referred to the federal environment minister.
The panel reviewing the act, chaired by former ANU chancellor Alan Hawke, rejects the idea of a permanent trigger, but says such a mechanism could be introduced as an interim measure until the onset of a national emissions trading scheme, now not anticipated until 2011 at the earliest. "If there is to be a delay in effective establishment of the carbon pollution reduction scheme, then there is a much stronger case for introduction of a greenhouse gas trigger to drive down emissions in the interim period," the report says.
The potential for significant projects to be tied up in an extra layer of bureaucracy would appear to flow counter to yesterday's push at the Council of Australian Governments to develop national performance measures on development approvals designed to speed economic recovery.
Infrastructure Partnerships Australia's Brendan Lyon said the interim report was a cause for concern on several fronts because it could risk further unnecessary delay to critical infrastructure projects. "Climate change is an important consideration and infrastructure will play a major role in equipping Australia to cut reductions, while sustaining living standards and economic productivity," Mr Lyon said. "But the mechanism for carbon abatement should be through an emissions trading scheme backed by a price on carbon. "Australia's economy will adapt best through the phasing in of a robust price for greenhouse gas emissions, rather than through adding an additional layer of complexity and potential delays in approval processes."
The present seven triggers in the act, covering actions by government or private enterprise with "a significant impact on a matter of national environmental significance", have not significantly affected major developments. But the trigger for endangered species caused a stoush recently between the NSW and federal governments after federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett temporarily halted logging in a NSW state forest out of concern for declining numbers of superb parrots.
John Sheahan from the Australian Property Institute said the key point about a greenhouse trigger would be its design, given such a move would represent "the most significant intrusion ever" by the commonwealth into land use. "Some projects might end up spending many months in that office in Canberra waiting to be assessed," he said. Mr Sheahan said the innate conservatism of local councils would mean Mr Garrett's office could be flooded with referred applications it did not have the resources to deal with.
Aaron Gadiel from developers' lobby Urban Taskforce said an extension of the Environment Protection Act was "the last thing the Australian economy needs right now".
SOURCE
***************************************
For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.
*****************************************
