AAARGH! WHAT A NIGHTMARE FOR THE GREENIES: OIL RESERVES THAT KEEP FILLING UP

Eugene Island is an underwater mountain located about 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1973 oil was struck and off-shore platform Eugene 330 erected. The field began production at 15,000 barrels a day, then gradually fell off, as is normal, to 4,000 barrels a day in 1989, Then came the surprise; it reversed itself and increased production to 13,000 barrels a day. Probable reserves have been increased to 400 million barrels from 60 million. The field appears to be filling from below and the crude coming up today is from a geological age different from the original crude, which leads to the speculation that the world has limitless supplies of petroleum.

This really interested some scientists. Thomas Gold, astronomer and professor emeritus of Cornell held for years that oil is actually renewable primordial syrup continually manufactured by the earth under ultra hot conditions and tremendous pressures. This substance migrates upward picking up bacteria that attack it making it appear to have an organic origin, i.e., come from dinosaurs and vegetation. As best I have found so far Russian scientists support his position, at least that petroleum is of primordial origin. There is now plenty of evidence around proving the presence of methane in our universe. It is easy to see it as a part of the formation of the earth. Under the right conditions of temperature and pressure, it converts to more complex hydrocarbons.

Roger Andersen, an oceanographer and executive director of Columbia's Energy Research Center proposed studying the behavior of this reservoir. The underwater landscape around Eugene Island is weird, cut with faults and fissures that belch gas and oil. The field is operated by PennzEnergy Co. Andersen proposed to study the action of the sea bottom around the mountain and the field at its top and persuaded the U S Dept of Energy to ante up ten million which was matched by a consortium of oil giants including Chevron, Exxon, and Tex Corp. This work began about the time 3-D seismic technology was introduced to oil exploration. Anderson was able to stack 3D images resulting in a 4D image that showed the reservoir in 3 spatial dimensions and enabled researchers to track the movement of oil. Their most stunning find was a deep fault at a bottom corner of the computer scan that showed oil literally gushing in. "We could see the stream," says Andersen. "It wasn't even debated that it was happening."

Work continued for five years until funds ran out and they were unable to continue. With the world having 40 years of proven reserves in hand it is difficult to interest the major oil producers in much exploration, let alone something done merely for research, and so far from the current accepted theory of a fossil origin for oil. Similar occurrences have been seen at other Gulf Of Mexico fields, at the Cook Inlet oil field, at oil fields in Uzbekistan, and it is possible this accounts for the longevity of the Saudi Arabian fields where few new finds have been made, yet reserves have doubled while the fields have been exploited mercilessly for 50 years.

Not only can the doom and gloomers not show us running out of the natural resources we recycle, but now there appears to be good odds of a limitless supply of petroleum working its way up to where we can capture it. A caveat: Gold's theory is not yet accepted by all scientists, probably all the more reason to trust it.

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BENT WEATHER CHANNEL

Proclaiming itself as the "pre-eminent provider of weather information," The Weather Channel may appear politically passive and objective to most of its viewers. Yet, the network has become an aggressive force in the battle against "global warming," even sending its sole climatologist to a recent Capitol Hill news conference to defend the science behind the climate change theory and to promote economic solutions to the problem.

The Weather Channel (TWC), which boasts on its website that it "understands and cares about the connection between weather and people's lives," also served as a consultant and allowed the use of its name and logo in the 2004 "global warming" disaster film, "The Day After Tomorrow." That's the same film that was heavily hyped by former Democratic Vice President Al Gore and the liberal group Moveon.org.

On March 15, TWC's climatologist Heidi Cullen appeared at the U.S. Senate Dirksen Building to support a disputed scientific report that asserted human activity was causing a catastrophic warming of the North Pole..... Cullen also appeared to reveal her personal ideology when she joined Hollywood actors at the May 2004 premier of "The Day After Tomorrow," the politically charged and heavily publicized film that cost $125 million and provided what Gore called "a rare opportunity to have a national conversation about what truly should be seen as a global climate emergency."

As the celebrities arrived and posed for the paparazzi that night, a mock snow machine overhead churned out snow flakes on the celebrity carpet. Paul Iaffaldano, the senior vice president for network sales at The Weather Channel, also shared "the downy walkway with the stars," at the New York premiere of the film, according to Advertising Age magazine. "[The Weather Channel] acted as consultants. They used our hurricane graphics in the movie. And they (the movie) showed the Weather Channel reporting, factually, what was going on around the world," Iaffaldano was quoted as saying in the June 7, 2004 edition of Advertising Age.....

"The Weather Channel has evolved from a station providing pure weather information to one providing what they perceive to be entertainment," said Patrick J. Michaels, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, in an interview with Cybercast News Service. "I am not surprised that [The Weather Channel's] take on global warming has gone from neutral to more lurid," said Michaels, noting that the network's emphasis on climate change is consistent with its "foray into the genre of tragedy television." The Weather Channel has in the past offered up such programming as "Tornado Week" and "Storm Stories." ....

Cullen joined the The Weather Channel in July of 2003. In December of that year the network announced that it was officially taking a position that "a significant portion of the current warming is a result of human activities." Following the announcement, titled, "The Weather Channel Position Statement on Global Warming," Cullen began a regular segment called "Forecast Earth," to focus on climate change and other environmental issues. The TWC statement went even further by asserting that "humans are also changing the climate on a more localized level" through the eradication of "vegetation by buildings and roads.....

Michaels criticized Cullen for her appearance on the same stage as the authors of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report, who he said "were certainly alarmists." Michaels added that climate change is an issue that "prospers in a culture of exaggeration and politicization." He noted that the earth has seen much warmer periods than the present. "The earth was warmer than it is now for three millennia between 4 and 7,000 years ago. Alaska was warmer than it is now by two degrees between 9 and 11,000 years ago and that is when human cultures up there began to flourish," Michaels said.....

Ebell of CEI said TWC should stick to what it does best. "The Weather Channel does a good job giving accurate weather forecasts, but forecasts aren't very exciting. It looks like their global warming features are intended to add a little excitement, but they wouldn't do that if they weren't alarming," said Ebell. "So instead of just giving the facts about global warming, they are featuring scare stories," he added.

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A POLITICAL SCIENTIST COMMENTS ON THE GLOBAL WARMING SCARE

I think overwhelmingly what we have is a kind of a fixation on carbon dioxide particularly. If we start with looking at what the risks that we face are, it's not necessarily the case that focusing our attention on CO2 is the best way to tackle the problem. It's certainly the case that CO2 is the largest single anthropogenic greenhouse gas, but there are others that.James Hanson, who some people would call the father of global warming, has suggested that there are other greenhouse gases that can be tackled technically much more simply, and economically at much lower cost, or that have co-benefits if we tackle them first. So, in fact, we've got a much broader range of choice to respond to a problem that is much more uncertain than certain people who are pushing the issue would have us believe.

I've been studying environmental politics and policy for 35 years, and I hadn't done much work on climate change policy until the mid-90s, but I'd done a lot on energy planning and so on, and I was always fascinated because the theory of CO2 forcing of the climate, it's been around since the 1890s, at least, and I was fascinated as to what had led it into a problem from the mid-1980s onwards. If we look back now, we can see, for example, in Germany, Helmut Kohl quite deliberately talked up climate change as a problem because he wanted to compromise the Social Democrats and the Greens who, at that stage, from the time of the German federal election then, were actually arguing for a phase-out, an end to the nuclear program and an expansion of coal as the basis for German energy. Kohl thought he had the perfect problem because this compromised their opposition to nuclear energy by suggesting that their proposed alternative, namely accelerated coal production, had environmental problems. That's typical of the way in which those who had particular agendas thought that here was a problem which suited their solutions, and that's what the `garbage can theory of organisational choice' is about. It says that problems and solutions kind of float around out there, they meet each other in the garbage can where they've been discarded, and it's not just that we start with clearly defined problems to which we seek solutions; there are always those who have solutions looking for problems.

I first encountered this-I did a study of electricity planning, including here in Tasmania, the good old Hydro Electric Commission in the old days-and the logic was much the same; they would produce forecasts of future demand which were then taken as immutable, and then they would try and justify particular policy responses to those. In the case here it was with hydro dam construction. But we've got much the same thing with the climate change problem, because all of the projections of future greenhouse gas levels and so on all depend on economic scenarios projected off into the future, which are now looking somewhat dubious after some good critiques-from Ian Castles, particularly, at ANU-somewhat unrealistic. All of those scenarios assume that we'll do nothing to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and then on that basis we're then supposed to be hostage to this future which is an entirely virtual future, rather than one in which we have a number of choices, a number of ways in which to respond to highly uncertain social science which, in fact, drives the natural science. The natural scientific models themselves are, of course, inherently uncertain. We're talking about coupled, non-linear systems which are inherently uncertain. We can't have certain knowledge about the future. The way in which we should respond is exactly the same as we should respond in electricity planning and that is flexibly and not necessarily locking ourselves into courses of action that might be extremely costly should the high scenario, the doomsday scenario, not be shown, in the course of a hundred years, to be justified.

There's a fairly well-accepted adage in political science that where you stand depends on where you sit, and the problem of course looks different, and decarbonisation looks different depending on where you sit. One of the problems with Kyoto and one of the reasons the United States and Australia have been reluctant to ratify and come on board, is that it is the least harsh on those two nation states which have the largest historic contribution to the problem, which is the United Kingdom and Germany. CO2 lingers in the atmosphere, we think, for around 100 years, so this is not a problem which is just about what emissions of nation states were in 1990. It's about who's contributed what the past 100-or-so years. If we look at that as.the Brazilians were mischievous enough to suggest this as a possibility in the Kyoto negotiations.if we tried to actually assign responsibility for who's caused the problem we'd look at who's contributed over the past 100 years and the two biggest contributors are the United Kingdom and Germany.

Both of them are let off most lightly by the selection of 1990 as a base year for emission reduction targets. The Germans, because German reunification occurred that year and the following 12 months was a 30 per cent collapse in the East German economy which produced a substantial windfall reduction in CO2 emissions. In the United Kingdom's case, Thatcher privatised the electricity sector that year. She'd been after the coal mining unions for years. She was able then to start closing pits. The European Union the same year relaxed the prohibition on burning natural gas for fuel, so we had a so-called `dash for gas' in the next five years, and a 12.5 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector in the UK.

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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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