Professor David Bellamy is likely to lose his role as the figurehead of two leading wildlife organisations because of his refusal to believe in man-made global warming. The television presenter and conservationist is the president of Plantlife International and of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts. Both organisations have given warnings that wildlife faces a catastrophe because of global warming. They have been acutely embarrassed to discover that while they have been campaigning to raise awareness, their president has been leading seminars and writing articles in science magazines declaring that man-made warming is a myth.
Last week Plantlife International, Britain's leading charity dedicated to the conservation of wild plants, wrote to Bellamy to say that his term of office would end in the autumn and he would not be asked to renew it. His presidency of the Wildlife Trusts - which has 562,000 members and manages 2,500 nature reserves - also ends in the autumn and is unlikely to be renewed. Stephanie Hilborne, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts, confirmed that Bellamy's position was due to be discussed at a board meeting at the end of this month. "We are not happy with his line on climate change. It is a very serious situation and there is a lot we need to talk about," she said. "Our views certainly differ from our president's and that is not a good situation to be in." Both organisations paid tribute to Bellamy who, they said, had put a huge amount of time and effort into supporting their other work.
Bellamy, 72, a former botany lecturer at Durham University, endeared himself to generations of youngsters with a series of popular wildlife programmes that ran from the 1970s through to 1999. He has also written many wildlife books. He won respect from hardline environmentalists with his campaigns to save Britain's peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania he was arrested when he tried to prevent loggers cutting down a rainforest.
In January he gave a keynote speech at the Royal Institution in London which was hosting Apocalypse No, a conference organised by the Scientific Alliance. "Global warming is a largely natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can't be fixed," he said. Last month he made similar assertions in New Scientist magazine when he claimed that glaciers were expanding because the world was getting cooler rather than warmer. The claim contradicted recent scientific studies that found 85% of the world's glaciers are in retreat.
Bellamy said this weekend: "If an organisation asked me to stand down of course I would, if they actually think I'm doing more harm than good." He added: "The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models which do not prove anything. When I say that they say `You must be in the pay of the oil industry'. I'm not. I'm not in the pay of anybody."
From The Times
HILARIOUS: SCIENTISTS HAVE FOUND WAYS OF NOT EMITTING CO2 AND THE GREENIES HATE IT!
Can we continue to burn fossil fuels and still hope to halt global warming? It seems unlikely - and with the cost of generating wind and solar electricity falling, perhaps unnecessary. Despite this, big money and big politics are lining up behind the development of "zero-emission" power plants that burn coal or gas but release no carbon dioxide.
The latest advocates are former fans of renewable energy at the European Union, who say the strategy will be "essential" if the EU is to meet targets for limiting the emissions of the greenhouse gas CO2. This month, at a conference in Brussels, Europe's new commissioner for energy, Andris Piebalgs, said the EU could cut CO2 emissions while continuing to burn its native coal and lignite. And still stay economically competitive.
One way to do this, Piebalgs said, is to embrace clean coal technologies - a move that would chime with the Bush administration's push for clean-coal technology in the US. The other is to store CO2 by capturing it before it leaves power plants and burying it underground. These are now the EU's two top priorities in energy research, something that will anger environmentalists who want the world to abandon fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
One technique to stop power stations producing CO2 is to pass emissions though chemical scrubbers which contain amines that react with and trap CO2. Similar technology is already used to remove CO2 from natural gas, to boost the proportion of hydrogen it contains. "It's just a matter of scaling up," says Julio Friedmann, a former ExxonMobil geologist now at the University of Maryland. In future, the carbon could even be removed from fuel before it is burnt.
To bury the CO2 securely underground, the gas has to be compressed, then injected under pressure down a pipeline into redundant coal seams, old oil or gas wells, or porous rocks filled with salt water. On a rig in the North Sea, the Norwegian company Statoil already strips a million tonnes of CO2 each year from natural gas at the Sleipner gas field and buries it in a saline aquifer without ever bringing it to land. At the Salah gas field in Algeria, energy giant BP last year began reburying a similar amount of CO2 in sandstone 2 kilometres down. Old oil and gas fields stored hydrocarbons safely for millions of years, raising hopes that the same can be done for CO2 from power stations.
Oil companies like the idea, because injecting CO2 into oil wells can flush out any remaining oil. As the oil dissolves the CO2, its viscosity falls and its volume increases, forcing it out under pressure. This technology too has been shown to work: more than a million tonnes of CO2 a year is being injected into the Weyburn oilfield in Saskatchewan, Canada, to flush out the remaining oil. In a similar way, the coal industry expects to be able to inject CO2 into coal seams, and recover methane gas into the bargain for use as fuel. An EU trial is under way in Poland.
More here
WACKY NEWS FROM NORTH CAROLINA
Post lifted from Ogre's View
You might be part of the majority of sane people who now realize that global
Senate Bill 1134 actually passed a committee. It spends money (from that budget that's cut to the bone) to study increases in global warming IN NC, and is to provide possible reduction goals for the state. I have a reduction goal: STOP SPENDING MY MONEY ON CRAP!
How about Senate Bill 1150? It gives away more money in the form of tax credits for people who use ethanol. The auto manufacturers would surely support this bill because ethanol-based fuels will destroy your engine faster than Harvey on Evil Glennn.
Not enough stupidity? Maybe you'd like House Bill 1460. This one wants to make North Carolina adopt California emissions standards rules. Of course they're selling it as being only required for state agencies. Sure, that makes sense. Make the state, who shouldn't be buying 1/100th of the vehicles they're already buying, pay even MORE for the vehicles they want. My counter proposal? Stop buying so many damn vehicle for lazy state workers and you'll reduce emissions even more!
Remember that the state's budget has been cut as much as they can cut it when you read House Bill 1556. This bill gives a check to "Global Warming Initiatives" (GWI) in the amount of $600,000. Why? Because they can. Of course, GWI is staffed with consultants and former elected officials and lobbyists. We have cut the budget to the bone. Keep repeating it.
And there's more! House Bill 1600 would force every agency in the state to report every year "their activities and research related to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change." And that won't cost a dime because we're already giving literally billions to every one of those state agencies. Oh, but it gives another $400,000 to the "State Energy Office" to process these reports.Your liberal Democrat North Carolina Legislature is still in session. Want an instant raise? Vote the Democrats out of office
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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.
Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists
Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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