THAT NAUGHTY E-WASTE

Just another way of wasting money and raising taxes

Haste maketh waste, and in the fast- paced world of technology, there's a lot of it. In California, home of the technology revolution, 10,000 home computers and TVs are retired daily. While that amounts to a tiny fraction of the state's total waste stream, the issue is creating heaps of hype and hysteria about what to do with the growing amount of electronic waste or "e-waste." This year, California became the first state to hold consumers responsible for their e-mess. Californians buying a TV, home computer or laptop must now pay $6 to $10 to finance a costly program to collect and recycle all used machines throughout the state.

While the fee may seem insignificant, there is little reason to believe it will remain low for long; the cost to recycle a single computer is six times that amount. Advocacy groups such as the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, who have been aggressively lobbying the state and Congress for mandatory recycling laws, already are arguing the fee does not go far enough. They would like to see the fee raised to $60 per product to cover the full costs of recycling. California's new law also requires manufacturers to rethink the way they build computers. By 2007, they must phase out lead - currently used in computers to protect users from the tube's X-rays - mercury, cadmium, and other substances crucial to the operation of PCs.

The widespread panic is based on misinformation spread largely by powerful eco-activist groups who believe the growing amount of electronic waste reflects the ills of a "throwaway" society and that recycling e-waste is our moral obligation to achieve "zero waste tolerance." Among the myths bandied about are that e-waste is growing at an uncontrollable, "exponential" rate; and that heavy metals contained in computers are leaking out of the landfills, poisoning our ground soil.

In reality, e-waste has remained at only 1 percent of the total municipal waste stream since the U.S. EPA began calculating electronics discards in 1999. Furthermore, the annual number of obsolete home computers is expected to level off at 63 million this year and will then begin to decline. While that still sounds like a lot of computers, it's not an unmanageable amount. Our landfills are fully equipped to handle all our waste - e-waste included.

Nor is there any scientific evidence that e-waste in landfills presents a health risk. Landfills are built today with thick, puncture-resistant liners that keep waste from coming into contact with soil and groundwater. Timothy Townsend of the University of Florida, a leading expert on the effects of electronic waste in landfills, conducted tests in 2003 on 11 municipal landfills containing e-waste from TV and computer monitors, along with other solid waste. He and his associate Yong-Chul Jang found concentrations of lead far below the safety standard and less than 1 percent of what EPA's lab tests had predicted. "There is no compelling evidence," according to Townsend, that e-waste buried in municipal landfills presents a health risk.....

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AWKWARD!

By now you would think that the idea of global warming was a fait d'accompli but even with predictions of soaring temperatures and the incessant cries of "global warming" it seems that things are not so hot on the climate change front. Global temperatures are yet to exceed the levels of 1998 despite the carbon dioxide emissions for the last six years being about 10 per cent of the total increase since 1750, according the UK's Climate Research Unit and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The average temperature in 2004 was 0.45C above the 1961-90 average but 1998's temperature was 0.13C higher again. It must anguish the proponents of global warming to see that all this extra gas appears to have no discernible effect.

There is little doubt that certain parts of the world are warming but it doesn't take an expert climatologist to understand that with global average temperatures still below 1998 levels it would seem that many regions are showing only very minor warming, little change or even perhaps some cooling.

Australian average temperatures show a similar pattern to global temperatures with 1998 still the highest in the approximately 85 years of reliable records. Last year's average temperature was 0.45C above the 1960-91 average, a long way short of the 0.84C above that average in 1998. According to the Bureau of Meteorology 2004 was merely the tenth highest on record, behind even the distant years of 1973, 1980, 1988. What's more, two of the six years since 1998 had average temperatures below that 1960-91 average. It would be premature to say that we are now entering a cooling phase but it could be a distinct possibility.

The late Dr Theodor Landscheidt, a specialist in studies of solar activity predicted that solar activity will now decline until about 2030 and this will cause a mini-ice age just as it did several times in the last 2,000 years. Whether that prediction will be correct remains to be seen but just now the earth is not warming as quickly as the pundits say that it should.

But it is more than just temperatures which have raised questions about global warming matters. Just last month the journal Geophysical Research Letters published an article by two Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, which disputed the "hockey stick" graph of temperature, the famous graph which attempts to show that temperatures in the last 20 years have been the highest in the last 1,000 years. With complex mathematics and statistics they showed that the method used to create that graph would produce a similar graph from even random data. (Pre-print copy available here (pdf file 122KB).) This finding has caused quite a stir in several countries with contrary articles appearing in The Wall Street Journal, Canada's National Post and several Dutch newspapers.

The theories underlying climate change were also disputed at a conference at Gummersbach, Germany, on February 18 to 20. Called Kyoto - Climatic Predictions: Meaningfulness of the models and strategies for action, this conference was unusual because global warming sceptics were invited to present their arguments.

Feeling was running high in Germany following recent strong publicity for Michael Crichton's new book State of Fear in the widely-read Stern magazine with 17 pages devoted to the discussion of climate issues criticising some of the unjustified exaggeration of climate change issues, under the main title "Climate Catastrophe: a panic scare?". This was after Der Spiegel, another weekly, published an interview with Professor Hans von Storch in which he described the "hockey stick" graph as rubbish and criticised the unfounded hype of potential risks by climate alarmists.

One sensation of the Gummersbach conference was the announcement that out of 500 European climate researchers surveyed, 25 per cent still doubt whether most of the warming during the last 150 years can be attributed to human activities and CO2 emissions. So much for the supposed consensus on global warming among climate scientists. So much also for claims that only a tiny minority are sceptical. Speakers at this conference also disputed fundamental claims about global warming. Professor Mangini of the University of Heidelberg said with regard to the geological past, scientists are agreed about ice core evidence which suggests that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels followed an increase of temperatures - and not the other way round. Professor Gerlich of the Technical University of Braunschweig argued that at 0.03 per cent of the total volume of the atmosphere the concentration of carbon dioxide was simply too insignificant to cause any measurable temperature change. He and Britain's Julian Morris had little time for mathematical modelling with Gerlich suggesting that climate modellers were worse than astrologers, the latter of whom at least observed real planets and their movements.

Those comments about modelling may well be true if the predictions by Australia's CSIRO are anything to go by. The CSIRO models appear to be unable to accurately reproduce the temperature and rainfall in the last 40 years. What hope is there that their predictions for the next 100 years will even be close? In a recent paper in Ecological Modelling, Craig Loehle of the USA analysed 2 temperature sequences of 3,000 years. He concluded, as many global warming sceptics have before him, that anywhere from a major portion to all of the warming of the 20th Century could plausibly result from natural causes.

On February 25, 2005 David Taverne, a member of Britain's House of Lords, stated in parliament that he was in favour of reducing carbon dioxide emissions but went on to mention several of the uncertainties about climate change. He particularly noted the tendency for the IPCC's draft documents to initially show uncertainties but replace these with more definite statements prior to publication, a process he described as "sexing up". He went on to say, "There is a sort of political taboo about the issue. If you express doubts, you must be in the pay of the oil industry or a Bush supporter. There is a slight whiff of eco-McCarthyism about."

With natural events now being seen as the likely cause of recent warming, the accuracy of models being questioned, growing disquiet about global warming in several countries, more dissent among scientists than claimed, the "hockey stick" looking rather mangled, and temperatures failing to behave in the manner they are supposed to - and whether one will attract the ire of eco-McCarthyists or not for saying so - it seems that global warming theories may be headed for meltdown.

If global warming theories are indeed incorrect and carbon dioxide is not the cause, then the primary justification for the Kyoto Agreement disappears, and with it the associated concept of carbon trading, alternative energy systems, and funding for research projects. No wonder a few people are getting a little hot under the collar.

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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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