NOW TREES ARE WRONG

Forget planting trees to negate your SUV's contribution to global warming -- according to Stanford University atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira, forests in the wrong location can actually make the Earth hotter. Plants absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, so scientists and policy makers have long assumed new forest growth helps combat global warming. At an American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco earlier this month, however, Caldeira rolled out a provocative new finding: Trees may be good at capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but their dark leaves are also very efficient at soaking up sunlight, which is later released as heat. At certain latitudes, the net effect of these two processes is warming, rather than cooling.

"Forests do store carbon, and as a result, the planet initially cools a little -- maybe tenths of degrees," Caldeira said. "But over the long term, trees' heat absorption warms things up more." Caldeira and colleagues at California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory created a computer simulation [i.e. a piece of gusswork] showing that if most land areas in northern latitudes were covered with forests, the planet would be six degrees warmer than it is today. Forest growth in equatorial areas, on the other hand, reduced global temperatures in the simulation because the warmer air in these regions allows more moisture to evaporate from the leaves of trees. This produces substantial cooling that cancels out the effects of heat absorption.

These seemingly maverick ideas have met with serious interest among some climatologists. "Planting trees definitely sequesters carbon dioxide, which tends to lower temperatures," said Eric Adams, an ecologist in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's environmental engineering department. "But the trees also do absorb light that might otherwise be reflected, which causes warming." "It's very interesting that changing land use -- whether that means growing trees or cutting them down -- can have an effect on climate," added David Erickson, director of the Climate and Carbon Research Institute at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. "That effect is working in conjunction with the impact of greenhouse gases."

If future studies confirm Caldeira's findings, his work could have a substantial impact on environmental policy. Currently, programs like Carbonfund and the Chicago Climate Exchange support the planting of temperate forests in various regions of the United States in order to reduce global warming. In the United Kingdom, for-profit Climate Care offers customers the chance to "cancel out" the carbon-dioxide emissions they produce by donating to a fund that supports reforestation efforts. Its Stratus package, which costs about $130, is billed as making one person "completely climate-neutral for the whole year."

Caldeira's research suggests efforts like these are off base. "Organizations should not be giving these kinds of credits," he said. "Planting forests in mid-latitudes should not be considered equivalent to using renewable resources." Carbonfund spokesman Craig Coulter, however, urged caution. "If scientific consensus shows that this study is valid, then of course we'd have to take that into account," he said. "But there's always been tit-for-tat among academics about different methods for calculating the impact of reducing carbon, and I'd want to see more studies along these lines before making policy changes." He also pointed out that planting trees has a variety of environmental benefits unrelated to global warming, such as restoring threatened animal habitats and preventing the erosion of topsoil.

Caldeira stressed that lawmakers shouldn't advocate chopping down swaths of forest in hopes of reducing global temperatures a few degrees. He thinks investing in new sources of clean energy, like hydrogen and biofuel, is a better way to address the global-warming problem. "Earth systems are very complicated -- you might be able to reduce warming by cutting down some trees, but that wouldn't be good for the environment overall," he said. "The less we interfere with the system, the more likely we are to have a healthy planet."

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Asbestos regulation

Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog

A primary school in my area was looking forward to some much-needed roof repairs. However, when the workmen knocked down the old ceiling, they discovered asbestos – and promptly downed tools. Government regulations demand that asbestos in public buildings must be dealt with professionally. That meant spending tens of thousands of pounds for specialist crews, in protective suits and breathing apparatus, to remove and dispose of this supposedly lethal mineral.

I say 'supposedly' because most asbestos is actually harmless. It comes in three varieties. Crocidolite ('blue asbestos'), was used in specialist applications like steam engines. Amosite ('brown asbestos') is found in old lagging and insulation. These forms contain long fibres which, if inhaled, may trigger cancer and respiratory disease up to 60 years later.

Both blue and brown asbestos were banned in 1985. But some 90% of what we call 'asbestos' is crysotile ('white asbestos'). Its short round fibres disappear quickly if inhaled. It is commonly bonded in cement, where the fibres cannot escape into the air anyway. Everyday exposure to the asbestos on your garage roof, your ironing board, or the lagging round your water tank, is effectively harmless. Nobody born after 1940 seems to have developed disease triggered by crysotile fibres.

Thus a sensible householder might best deal with asbestos by spraying a coat of paint over it, or leaving it alone (as the Health and Safety Executive itself advises). So why is everyone petrified by the stuff?

The answer is that inept government regulations lumped all asbestos together. So now it all has to be treated as if it were as toxic as blue or brown. That's a nice earner for the contractors in their protective suits and gas-masks, but a pointless expense on taxpayers and worried householders.

Asbestos Watchdog claims to have saved companies up to £480,000 by saving them from the unnecessary specialist removal of asbestos. Unfortunately, though, there are still plenty of firms, householders, and government bodies being taken for huge sums without justification – thanks to our regulators and the 'zero risk' mentality that drives our regulatory system. Time for a re-think?




Ian Plimer excoriates the global warmers with the aid of historical facts

Ian Plimer is a professor of geology at the University of Adelaide and former head of the school of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne

Heat, bushfires. Just another Australian summer, some hotter, some wetter, some cooler, some drier. As per usual, the northern hemisphere freezes and the blame game is in overdrive. At the 2005 UN Climate Change Conference in Montreal, Greenpeace's Steven Guilbeault stated: "Global warming can mean colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with."

It is that simple! If it's hot, it's global warming; if it's cold, it's global warming. Demonstrators in frigid temperatures in Montreal chanted: "It's hot in here! There's too much carbon in the atmosphere!" The same apocalyptic Guilbeault says: "Time is running out to deal with climate change. Ten years ago, we thought we had a lot of time, five years ago we thought we had a lot of time, but now science is telling us that we don't have a lot of time." Really.

In 1992, Greenpeace's Henry Kendall gave us the Chicken Little quote, "Time is running out"; in 1994, The Irish Times tried to frighten the leprechauns with "Time running out for action on global warming, Greenpeace claims"; and in 1997 Chris Rose of Greenpeace maintained the religious mantra with "Time is running out for the climate". We've heard such failed catastrophist predictions before. The Club of Rome on resources, Paul Ehrlich on population, Y2K, and now Greenpeace on global warming.

During the past 30 years, the US economy grew by 50 per cent, car numbers grew by 143 per cent, energy consumption grew by 45 per cent and air pollutants declined by 29 per cent, toxic emissions by 48.5 per cent, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3 per cent and airborne lead by 97.3 per cent. Most European signatories to the Kyoto Protocol had greenhouse gas emissions increase since 2001, whereas in the US emissions fell by nearly 1per cent. Furthermore, carbon credits rewarded Russia, (east) Germany and Britain, which had technically and economically backward energy production in 1990.

By the end of this century, the demographically doomed French, Italians and Spaniards may have too few environmentalists to fund Greenpeace's business. So what really does Greenpeace want? A habitable environment with no humans left to inhabit it? Destruction of the major economies for .07C change?

Does it matter if sea level rises a few metres or global temperatures rise a few degrees? No. Sea level changes by up to 400m, atmospheric temperatures by about 20C, carbon dioxide can vary from 20 per cent to 0.03 per cent, and our dynamic planet just keeps evolving. Greenpeace, contrary to scientific data, implies a static planet. Even if the sea level rises by metres, it is probably cheaper to address this change than reconstruct the world's economies.

For about 80 per cent of the time since its formation, Earth has been a warm, wet, greenhouse planet with no icecaps. When Earth had icecaps, the climate was far more variable, disease depopulated human settlements and extinction rates of other complex organisms were higher. Thriving of life and economic strength occurs during warm times. Could Greenpeace please explain why there was a pre-Industrial Revolution global warming from AD900 to 1300? Why was the sea level higher 6000 years ago than it is at present? Which part of the 120m sea-level rise over the past 15,000 years is human-induced? To attribute a multicomponent, variable natural process such as climate change to human-induced carbon emissions is pseudo-science.

There is no debate about climate change, only dogma and misinformation. For example, is there a link between hurricanes Katrina and Rita and global warming? Two hurricanes hit the US Gulf Coast six weeks apart in 1915, mimicking Katrina and Rita. If global warming caused recent storms, there should have been more hurricanes in the Pacific and Indian oceans since 1995. Instead, there has been a slight decrease at a time when China and India have increased greenhouse gas emissions. The impact of hurricanes might seem more severe because of the blanket instantaneous news coverage and because more people now live in hurricane-prone areas, hence there is more property damage and loss of life.

Only a strong economy can produce the well fed who have the luxury of espousing with religious fervour their uncosted, impractical, impoverishing policies. By such policies, Greenpeace continues to exacerbate grinding poverty in the Third World. The planet's best friend is human resourcefulness with a supportive, strong economy and reduced release of toxins. The greenhouse gases - nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and methane - have been recycled for billions of years without the intervention of human politics.

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What you say when you are fresh out of ideas

A ludicrous apology for a serious political party policy: Pure political hot air

Australia must prepare to take in a new class of environmental refugees from the Pacific if the worst fears of climate change are realised, federal Labor says. Under its Pacific climate change plan, released today, Labor said a regional coalition should develop a strategy to relocate thousands of islanders when their island homes become uninhabitable. Low-lying Pacific island states such as Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu - which sit just a few metres above sea level - are at risk of being swamped as global warming forces sea levels to rise.

"We should be part of an international coalition which is prepared to do our fair share," Opposition environment spokesman Anthony Albanese said. "The alternative to that is to say, and I don't think any Australian would accept this, that we're going to sit by while people literally drown."

More here

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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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