Global warming treaty goes cold but not many know it

Blair and others might be casting doubt on the Kyoto Protocol, but the general belief in global warming is still rarely publicly challeged

Is the Kyoto treaty dead in the water? That was the suggestion underlying Tony Blair's speech this week to a conference on climate change in London. But while Blair's speech provided little encouragement for those demanding massive cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, there is little sign that the hysteria about global warming will subside any time soon.

If Blair is downbeat about Kyoto, he is only being realistic. The aim of the treaty was to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by relatively small amounts in the major industrialised nations by 2012. Developing countries, most notably China and India, were exempt in this first phase but the expectation was that any future emissions pact would include them, and involve much stiffer cuts in emissions.

However, when the USA refused to take part, the treaty became pretty pointless. Bill Clinton may have signed up for the treaty, but the US Senate did not, voting 95-0 against ratification. For all the Bush-bashing over global warming, it was always unlikely that Congress would have agreed to it.

As it happens, the treaty's biggest supporter, the European Union, has been more supportive in word than deed. As BBC News noted in July, the EU 'pledged to bring total greenhouse gas emissions to eight per cent below 1990s levels by 2008-2012, but by 2002 they had dropped only 2.9 per cent - and CO2 emissions had risen slightly. Only four EU countries are on track to achieve their own targets.' And the EU is economically stagnating. Any significant return to economic growth would surely end any prospect of meeting the targets.

Missing those targets will be expensive. A report in Ireland suggests that unless dramatic action is taken, the Irish government will have to pay as much as 120 million per year to buy carbon allowances from other countries to meet its Kyoto obligations. Even though Ireland is booming by European standards, that's quite a lot of money for a relatively small economy.

To top it off, even the most ardent environmentalist would concede that Kyoto would have no noticeable impact on climate change. The cuts envisaged are simply too small. The long-term target is for a cut of 60 per cent compared with 1990 levels by 2050, but this seems highly unlikely unless there is a dramatic shift in the way we generate electricity and power our vehicles.

'The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge', said Blair in his London speech. 'I think in the world after 2012 we need to find a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem.' So while the Kyoto targets still apply, Blair is keeping his fingers crossed that some other deal can be put together which can supersede them.

This is welcome news. The rush to cut emissions was thoroughly irrational. Even if climate change does proceed in the way that the biggest doom-mongers suggest, the draconian cuts in emissions would have cost far more than mitigating the problems caused by a warming world - and hindered economic development in the process.

Two recent disasters illustrate the benefits of development. The USA has been hit by a particularly busy hurricane season. One of its major cities has been flooded and millions of people displaced. Meanwhile, Pakistan has been struck by a massive earthquake.

In the former, the city has already been pumped dry and the death toll is in the hundreds. In the latter, many sections of the country are still paralysed, hundreds of thousands are still without proper shelter, and the dead are counted in the tens of thousands. Yet environmentalists persist in believing that the best way to cope with the floods and droughts forecast to result from climate change is effectively to downgrade development as a priority in favour of 'sustainability'.

The new emphasis encouraged by Bush and Blair will be on the development of new, low-emissions technologies and energy efficiency. This may well prove to be a diversionary gravy train in which huge sums are thrown at ideas that wouldn't otherwise have been considered practical: why else are huge windfarms assaulting our coasts and hills? There is at least some prospect of positive material spin-offs in a way that was unlikely with the target-setting approach. If this new initiative encourages the development of nuclear power, a technology that raises the possibility of producing a lot more energy in the future, it will be a good thing.

However, none of this really challenges the consensus around climate change: that the production of certain waste gases associated with economic growth will ultimately screw up the planet - and that in the not-too-distant future, the planet will exact some kind of revenge on humans both for their hubris in trying to control nature and their greed in wanting ever-greater standards of living.

In this regard, the EU is rhetorically as gung-ho as ever. In part, this is because global warming, along with the war in Iraq, has been one of the best sticks with which to beat the USA. Europe might be an economic failure, but that won't stop its leaders from trying to seize the moral high ground whenever possible.

While there is a shift going on in relation to the best method of dealing with climate change, there has been in many ways a closing of minds on the science. Now that Bush has less need to oppose emissions targets, he has sounded a less sceptical note on the science itself, stating on the eve of the G8 conference in July that 'the surface of the Earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases is contributing to the problem'. If the politicians close ranks around the assumption that the world will get dramatically warmer in the future unless we change our ways, that may leave less room in public debate for those who are critical of the global warming orthodoxy.

If some realism is brought to bear on the subject of climate change, all the better. But the problems still remain: the basic science has been politicised to the point where sensible discussion of genuine uncertainty is impossible; the capacity of human society to cope with change, climate or otherwise, is still denigrated; and development is still assumed to be a luxury that should take a backseat in favour of the environment.

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Science goes down the river

Insane US environmental authorities have forced General Electric to remove a type of 'cancer-causing' chemical from the Hudson River. On what evidence?

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and General Electric (GE) - described by Bloomberg.com as 'the world's second-biggest company by market value' - recently reached agreement on plans to begin removing polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from the Hudson River. Specifically, GE agreed to meet EPA demands to remove 10 per cent of the PCBs along a 40-mile stretch of the river in upstate New York. Negotiations are still underway regarding the clean-up of the other 90 per cent, and EPA will sue GE if it does not agree to a second phase of the removal process.

Environmentalists think this agreement is a travesty. As a Sierra Club officer put it: 'It's like an oncologist going in and only taking out 10 per cent of a tumor.' Indeed, the 'agreement' is a travesty, but not for the reason cited by the Sierra Club.

EPA maintains that PCBs, particularly in Hudson River fish, pose a cancer hazard - but there is no evidence that such a risk exists. The stark truth is that there is no benefit to public health in mandating that traces of PCBs be removed from the river. There are, however, big costs - all of which will be borne by consumers.

Until 1977, PCBs were used in the manufacture of transformers, adhesives and capacitators, among other things. GE legally disposed of PCBs by releasing them into the river north of Albany. The PCBs are now embedded in the mud beneath the river and are not generally dispersed in the water.

The EPA's assertion that PCBs in fish pose a human cancer risk is based solely on observations that high-dose, prolonged PCB exposure causes tumors in laboratory animals. A representative from the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which is staffed with the top cancer epidemiologists in the world, told me that they know of 'no evidence' that eating fish from the Hudson poses a human cancer risk.

So, a private company is being ordered by the government, under threat of large fines, to remove trace levels of PCBs, which they had deposited legally, when there is no evidence that this massive effort will in any way protect public health. EPA will require GE to spend at least $700million in this purposeless effort. Those costs are likely to be borne by GE stockholders, employees and consumers. Enormous costs, zero benefits.

How did this EPA order come about? Three reasons come to mind: First, for many years General Electric, armed with stacks of scientific literature showing that trace levels of PCBS in the Hudson posed no human health threat, fought the EPA mandate - but the company eventually gave up, perhaps under the pressure of public opinion, and elected to comply. Second, cancer experts at the NCI and at medical centres around the USA did little or nothing to protest this misdirection of cancer prevention efforts toward a phantom threat. Third, America's fear of cancer is so intense that there is a prevailing view that we should do anything and everything to prevent the disease, even if there is no evidence that our efforts will be effective.

The strongly held (but inaccurate) belief that what causes cancer in very high doses in rodents must also be assumed to cause cancer in much smaller doses in humans prevails today as it has for almost 50 years. Indeed, we cling to animal cancer tests almost as we do to superstitions. As one cancer epidemiologist told me recently: 'Of course rodent tests do not accurately predict human cancer risk, but most Americans perceive we have nothing else to protect ourselves from cancer. So, even if these tests are not useful in predicting our risks, we still embrace and respond to them - in the same way we know that walking under a ladder won't bring us bad luck, but we take a few steps out of our way, just in case.'

The tragedy here is that that we do have alternatives to using animal data to prevent cancer: the science of epidemiology has clearly outlined factors that pose real cancer threats. And the more of our time and resources we squander on non-risks - like traces of PCBs in the Hudson - the less we have for tackling cancer.

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Fuel's paradise? Power source that turns physics on its head

I have the feeling that we have heard all this before but being dogmatic about anything in subatomic physics would be the height of folly

It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.

Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Dr Mills says that his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.

The problem is that according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the behaviour of atoms, the idea is theoretically impossible. "Physicists are quite conservative. It's not easy to convince them to change a theory that is accepted for 50 to 60 years. I don't think [Mills's] theory should be supported," said Jan Naudts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Antwerp.

What has much of the physics world up in arms is Dr Mills's claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.

This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer.

According to Dr Mills, there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics must be wrong. "We've done a lot of testing. We've got 50 independent validation reports, we've got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles," he said. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. People are very strong and fervent protectors of this [quantum] theory that they use."

Rick Maas, a chemist at the University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNC) who specialises in sustainable energy sources, was allowed unfettered access to Blacklight's laboratories this year. "We went in with a healthy amount of scepticism.

While it would certainly be nice if this were true, in my position as head of a research institution, I really wouldn't want to make a mistake. The last thing I want is to be remembered as the person who derailed a lot of sustainable energy investment into something that wasn't real."

But Prof Maas and Randy Booker, a UNC physicist, left under no doubt about Dr Mill's claims. "All of us who are not quantum physicists are looking at Dr Mills's data and we find it very compelling," said Prof Maas. "Dr Booker and I have both put our professional reputations on the line as far as that goes."

Dr Mills's idea goes against almost a century of thinking. When scientists developed the theory of quantum mechanics they described a world where measuring the exact position or energy of a particle was impossible and where the laws of classical physics had no effect. The theory has been hailed as one of the 20th century's greatest achievements.

But it is an achievement Dr Mills thinks is flawed. He turned back to earlier classical physics to develop a theory which, unlike quantum mechanics, allows an electron to move much closer to the proton at the heart of a hydrogen atom and, in doing so, release the substantial amounts of energy he seeks to exploit. Dr Mills's theory, known as classical quantum mechanics and published in the journal Physics Essays in 2003, has been criticised most publicly by Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency. In a damning critique published recently in the New Journal of Physics, he argued that Dr Mills's theory was the result of mathematical mistakes.

Dr Mills argues that there are plenty of flaws in Dr Rathke's critique. "His paper's riddled with mistakes. We've had other physicists contact him and say this is embarrassing to the journal and [Dr Rathke] won't respond," said Dr Mills.

While the theoretical tangle is unlikely to resolve itself soon, those wanting to exploit the technology are pushing ahead.

"We would like to understand it from an academic standpoint and then we would like to be able to use the implications to actually produce energy products," said Prof Maas. "The companies that are lining up behind this are household names."

Dr Mills will not go into details of who is investing in his research but rumours suggest a range of US power companies. It is well known also that Nasa's institute of advanced concepts has funded research into finding a way of using Blacklight's technology to power rockets.

According to Prof Maas, the first product built with Blacklight's technology, which will be available in as little as four years, will be a household heater. As the technology is scaled up, he says, bigger furnaces will be able to boil water and turn turbines to produce electricity.

In a recent economic forecast, Prof Maas calculated that hydrino energy would cost around 1.2 cents (0.7p) per kilowatt hour. This compares to an average of 5 cents per kWh for coal and 6 cents for nuclear energy.

"If it's wrong, it will be proven wrong," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. "But if it's right, it is so important that all else falls away. It has the potential to solve our dependence on oil. Our stance is of cautious optimism."

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Update

A reader has sent in the following comments on the article above. For those who enjoy such things, the last word of the second sentence tells you the nationality of the writer!

"I read your excerpt about the hydrino stuff. Don't buy any shares in it eh! Just reading the excerpt you posted sets off enough alarm bells.

1. Claiming scientific heresy. Maybe it was just to spice the article up, but no scientist thinks in terms of heresy.

2. "According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed. The two particles are simply not allowed to get any closer."

That is flat out wrong. The orbits are not strictly defined, for different "orbits" the electron has a probability of being located at particular points, which is described by the wave function. Some of the states even penetrate the nucleus.

3. "We ran into this theoretical resistance and there are some vested interests here. People are very strong and fervent protectors of this [quantum] theory that they use."

Ahh, the old chestnut. If you go back and look at when QM was developed it didn't take long at all for these fervent protectors to take to it like ducks to water. Why? Because it was better, explained more and opened up a whole new field for people to work in.

4. "Dr Mills's idea goes against almost a century of thinking. When scientists developed the theory of quantum mechanics they described a world where measuring the exact position or energy of a particle was impossible and where the laws of classical physics had no effect. The theory has been hailed as one of the 20th century's greatest achievements."

Again, wrong. Is this guy supposed to be a physicist? The Heisenberg uncertainty principle says no such thing. It basically states that you can't measure complementary properties to an arbitrary degree at the same time. You can quite happily measure the energy of a particle to whatever accuracy your apparatus will allow, you just can't simultaneously measure some other properties to the same degree at the same time. The laws of classical physics do have effect when suitably recast in terms of quantum operators.

5. "But it is an achievement Dr Mills thinks is flawed. He turned back to earlier classical physics to develop a theory which, unlike quantum mechanics, allows an electron to move much closer to the proton at the heart of a hydrogen atom and, in doing so, release the substantial amounts of energy he seeks to exploit."

Here is where I'll get a bit catty. These alternative breakthrough theories that "disprove" quantum mechanics are near universally developed by electrical engineers. Why? Because they don't like thinking in terms of wave functions, statistical mechanics and all that new-fangled rubbish. They love currents and classical mechanics, things they can express as circuit diagrams or the like. Which is why these new theories are always a step backward from quantum mechanics to some pseudo-classical model. They'll find some actual anomaly or unexplained phenomenon (because such things do exist, chiefly because there is an awful lot to research and not that many people that can do it) and sieze on it as a failure of the entire theory. While in the past such things have lead to a breakthrough (eg the orbit of Mercury and Einstein's relativity) the vast majority have not, and left quite a few people a bit lighter on cash. The research community at large wouldn't suppress this sort of thing, it's the sort of thing every researcher loves... a whole new field to play in and make discoveries with. The problem is that this guy has this great new model to explain some supposedly unexplainable things, which actually seems more like his dislike for the nature of QM itself, but he can't show that everything else explained by QM, from lasers to semiconductors to nuclear power to, well, everything will still be explainable. My bet would be that many of these things would fail under his new theory. Even worse is that these states of hydrogen should have been blindingly obvious to any graduate student doing lab work. QM is undoubtedly incomplete and flawed, but the natural successor to it will not be a step back to more classical mechanics. If you do a search on the web you'll find this guy touting for cash for over a decade with his hydrinos that supposedly explain why the big bang is wrong as well... it is a theory that explains too much, yet explains nothing.

6. "Dr Mills will not go into details of who is investing in his research but rumours suggest a range of US power companies. It is well known also that Nasa's institute of advanced concepts has funded research into finding a way of using Blacklight's technology to power rockets."

If he won't give details, don't give him cash. It's the old running a car on water scam.

7. "According to Prof Maas, the first product built with Blacklight's technology, which will be available in as little as four years, will be a household heater. As the technology is scaled up, he says, bigger furnaces will be able to boil water and turn turbines to produce electricity."

Prediction, you won't see anything in four years and it won't be because the great physics research cabal has stifled him either.

8. ""If it's wrong, it will be proven wrong," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. "But if it's right, it is so important that all else falls away. It has the potential to solve our dependence on oil. Our stance is of cautious optimism.""

Pinning hopes on a new science that will supposedly revolutionise and save the world. It's worth remembering that none of the great breakthroughs have ever been done for this and when they do actually offer such a thing they are kneecapped by the greenies. Oh the irony.

Oh these things are funny when they pop up, there was even some guy on NZ TV documentary trying to sell a water-based combustion engine. The main problem is that media have no ability to spot the obvious fakes drumming up cash for their pet hobbies.

In the end, to say something is a load of crap isn't dogmatic. It should be a challenge to show why you're right and not brand those who call you out as "conservative" or "vested interests"... that smacks of the global warming debate and the bile directed at those who don't accept the hockey stick".

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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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