HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE

From a Pro-Greenie site: "The large spike in global temperature in 1998 was associated with one of the strongest El Ninos of recent centuries, the scientists say, and a weak El Nino contributed to the unusually high 2002-2003 global temperatures."

Figure that one out!

The reader who pointed me to that outstanding example of Greenie logic also has a request:

"I've read that roughly 30% of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emmisions are due simply in human respiration. In other words, the world just breathing emits more CO2 than all SUVs and powerplants combined. What I'd love to see compared is the emission rate for CO2 between an average, modern SUV driven a mile and the amount of CO2 exhaled by an average person riding his bicycle one mile. I would not be at all shocked to find out that the bicyclist emits more CO2 per mile than does a new SUV.....do you know of a site listing CO2 emissions per mile?

Can any reader point us to such a site or quote the relevant information from some printed source?

I have also just put up an angry letter about Greenie follies from another reader here

Another briefer email just in:

"There has been a string of ecoterror incidents by the ELF and other environmental extremists in California over recent weeks. An arrest has been made in a case where several incendiary bombs were planted at the construction site of a housing development, but they didn't explode. ELF claimed responsibility in a letter received by a newspaper. The suspect? 21 year-old Ryan Daniel Lewis of Newcastle, CA.

Newcastle is an upscale semi-rural community near Sacramento, the kind that is full of custom homes and ranch retreats nestled between foothills and farms. Lewis lived with his parents in a custom 2-story home on Fox Hill Lane and - get this - Lewis drove an SUV! The home was newly built in 2001, surely on land that at one time was pristine habitat for some poor beetle or mouse. No doubt the home was constructed out of murdered trees.

But I understand that environmentalists are Very Important People, so they don't have to live by the standards they would impose on all us 'little people'. Its not their upscale homes, expansive acres, or polluting personal automobiles that are the problem. Its all those other people! Typical enviro-hypocrites and eco-narcissists.

And an angry email from a Canadian farmer:

"In the last ten years, the strident voices have been those of David Suzuki (apparently THE expert scientist on climatology), and Environment Canada weather people with zero credibility, but fervent views on global warming and the disaster that will befall Canada. They are brazen enough to suggest changes that we must make to adapt. As a farmer, I would not try growing subtropical fruit in Manitoba, as Env. Canada predictions suggest should be possible in a few decades.

Last winter, Environment Canada predicted a warm summer and suggested that farmers should plant corn and other long-season heat-loving crops. The summer was the most frigid, misty and rainy one that I can remember. Old timers concur. The season was marginal even for growing wheat!! If we get even colder weather we might have to start raising Reindeer like Siberian residents.

What kind of SUCKER would trust Environment Canada to accurately predict climate 100 or even 10 years ahead??

'Pollutants' in whale blubber are naturally produced

Noxious chemicals found in whale blubber may not be entirely artificial, research shows. Some of the compounds, which resemble the environmentally polluting chemicals we create as flame retardants, may be produced by sponges and other sea creatures. Scientists have known for years that certain artificial chemicals in the environment can accumulate in animals, especially in predators that eat other contaminated animals. Such tenacious molecules, called halogenated organic compounds, include the toxic pesticide DDT.

Recently, a group of similar compounds was identified in marine animals, but its source was not known. Were these methoxylated polybrominated diphenyl ethers (MeO-PBDEs) the natural products of slow, soft marine creatures, such as sponges? One sponge in the Indian Ocean had been shown to produce a MeO-PBDE, perhaps to deter predators or parasites. Or were they derived from discarded flame retardants, slightly altered by some biological process on the way? Unaltered flame-retardant molecules have been found in animal and fish tissues, including human breast milk.

Chris Reddy, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, sought to answer this question by looking at the different isotopes of carbon in the molecules. MeO-PBDE that had been produced by plants or animals would contain a consistent percentage of radioactive carbon-14, which is present at low levels throughout the ocean. If, on the other hand, the MeO-PBDE were artificial, it would have been made out of carbons from petroleum that was so old that all the carbon-14 would long since have decayed. "We call it a 'dead or alive' approach," says Reddy.

The idea was simple, but the task was anything but. Reddy's colleague Emma Teuten spent months working with a smelly 10-kilogram sample of blubber from a fatally beached True's beaked whale (Mesoplodon mirus). "I cut the skin off, and diced it and blended it, which gave something the consistency of a strawberry smoothie," she recalls. Then she burned off the fat with acid and isolated small amounts of MeO-PBDEs from it.

Carbon-14 was present in levels consistent with the surrounding ocean, the researchers report in Science. This suggests that the MeO-PBDE was a natural creation, and Reddy's team suggests that it accumulated in the whale after it ate some unknown creature, perhaps a squid, that had in turn gobbled up the organic creator of the chemicals.

More here







SOME REALISM FROM ALASKA

Alaska's climate seems to be heating up fast, with eroding coastlines, melting glaciers, oozing permafrost and retreating sea ice. Some researchers argue that these changes can definitely be blamed on greenhouse-gas emissions. Not so fast, says atmospheric scientist John Walsh, one of the country's leading investigators into climate change. "I think there's a (human-caused) part to what's going on, but at least as large in my view is the natural variability," Walsh says. "For that reason, I would hesitate to predict that the next 30 years will see a warming comparable to the last 30 years."

Walsh is the chief scientist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He helped write the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment for the international Arctic Council, to be released later this year.

Q. What is the most dramatic evidence of climate change in Alaska?

A. The most dramatic I would have to say is the sea ice distribution. The last three or four summers, we've had ice really unprecedented distances offshore north of Alaska. And the past few winters, we've had very little ice in the Bering Sea, and this winter is following the pattern very well. There's not much ice out there.

I think the one other area I find impressivein Alaska is the glacier wastage that's been studied by the glaciologists. Alaska's loss of glacial ice over the past several decades is actually larger than anywhere else, in terms of contribution of water to sea level. There's even more fresh water being lost from Alaska glaciers than Greenland. And the photographs tell the story. There is some very impressive evidence there.

Q. Are we losing sea ice because of changing air temperatures or because of changes in ocean currents?

A. That's a really good question. It may be the temperatures, it may also be the wind, and it may also be the ocean current bringing more heat in from the Atlantic, and from the Pacific as well. And I don't think there are real good answers. What does seem clear is that in the early 1990s, actually '90 to '92, there were a few years of wind patterns that did push most of the thick ice away from where it had been found for decades. In a sense, the Arctic Ocean did not recover from those few years, even though the winds have (since) returned to a more normal pattern. So my hunch is that winds are at least part of the story. The oceanography also seems to be finding indications of an inflow of warm water below the surface of the sea ice from the Atlantic Ocean. ... So that's another push toward less ice.

Q. Given all this, is there any doubt that climate change is well under way?

A. There are skeptics, and there are skeptics at a couple of levels. Even if we all agree that there's change going on, there will still be debate as to whether it's anthropogenically driven - greenhouse-gas driven - or whether it's attributed to natural variation or some other factor. There's even some who'd argue that we're just seeing ups and downs, cycles so to speak, that are part of natural variability and that we aren't experiencing a trend. Now the proponents of that argument arebecoming fewer and farther between as time goes on. But even when the (public overview of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) came out back in November, there was some reaction by some of what I'd call conservative science groups saying that (the report) was overplaying the trend itself and that it was overplaying the human attribution.

Q. Do we know what would be happening to the climate if people stopped releasing greenhouse gases?

A. When they run (supercomputer) models without the greenhouse gases, without the global greenhouse gases increasing, there are ups and downs that last for a decade or two - in temperature and several of the other variables. And these ups and downs do tend to be larger in the Arctic than they are in the global average. So these swings - the ups and downs that last a decade or two - are apparently part of the natural climate system.

Q. So people should understand that the role played by greenhouse gases in recent climate change is not settled yet?

A. Right.

Q. And it's still not absolutely clear that we're launched on a permanent warming trend?

A. Right. There are going to be bumps in the road along the way. Actually, the analogy that I heard that I think is very good is the analogy to the stock market in a bull market situation. The market may be going up, but along the way there are ups and downs, there are corrections.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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