MELTING ANTARCTICA: MY ARK IS READY

Comment from Riley Still (rileystill@mindspring.com)

Once again, "Science Express " has struck. The scary news now is that Antarctica is losing 36 cu miles of ice per year. In the Scotsman.com we read:

Science Express reports a new study

"However the latest survey - using a new technique to measure the mass of ice with NASA satellites - has become the first to suggest that overall it is in 'significant decline'. They found it was losing 36 cubic miles a year, enough to raise global sea level by 0.4 millimetres a year.

"The report's chief author, Dr Isabella Velicogna of Colorado University, said: "This is the first study to indicate the total mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet is in significant decline. "

My in-depth research reveals that Antarctica has 7,900,000 cu miles of ice. My computerized ice balance model estimates it will take 220,000 years for all the ice to be gone!! By then we will be in the next Ice Age. At .4 mm per year, my computerized ocean sea levels are rising model estimates that it will take 1,000 years for sea levels to rise 15 inches!!

Note this extensive study lasted less than four years. Dr. Velicogna might have said "This is the only study to indicate ..."

My ark is ready!






AN INTERESTING HISTORICAL COMMENT ON THE RECENT WATER WARS PANIC

An email from Munich mineralogist Friedrich Hahnemann (friedrich.hahnemann@freenet.de) points out that panic about resource scarcity goes back to the 1920s and the Nazis. More on that here

Some points about the water and oil wars: The 20th century saw a lot of violence. Most of it was due to vanity and lure for power, not at all for reasonable reasons like ressources or commodities. I don't believe that there is any war between France and Germany or France and England in the last thousand years that can be explained with lack of clean water. I think that clean reasoning in a civil society is the real scarce resource, since normally neighbors of a river profit from peaceful resolution of conflicts. Human culture started at rivers like Euphrates and Tigris.

But to explain the conflict between Israel and its neighbors with water rights is a total neglicence of the power and inherent risk of violent disagreement about religious and cultural opinions and attitudes. But who brought that up?

I would like to inform you about a now forgotten author, Anton Zischka. An Austrian-born best selling author in the twenties, millions of copies translated in a dozen languages - a self made man who could afford a private plane and a Finca on Mallorca based on his writing. He basically popularized the thesis that natural resources are the "real" reason for armed conflicts, based on then well renowned theoreticans like the Haushofer brothers (General and Geographer, founders of the so called Geopolitik).

Zischka's books in the thirties were sold world wide and were used for the Nazi propaganda effort, e.g. as text books in German Schools. Zischka positioned Germany (as did Haushofer for Japan) as pacifist and technology sharing anticolonist nation, only driven to fight by the oil and resource hungry US. This story is still quite popular today. Maybe, since people's beliefs turned green from brown, the theory holds more water.

But at least Germany starting really big wars like WWI and WWII had to do with stone-age minds ruling a top modern industrial society, not with water rights on the Rhine or Danube.






WE ARE BEING SOLD A TURKEY ON GLOBAL WARMING

From Financial Times, 2 March 2006. The writer is visiting reader in science at Aston University, Birmingham

It is said that turkeys are so stupid that when it rains they stare up at the sky with their mouths open until they drown. Turkey farmers insist this is an apocryphal story put about by those who know nothing of the ways of Meleagris gallopavo.

There is a no less apocryphal tale about Homo sapiens, according to which humans stare up at the sky and do nothing as the earth's climate changes and their livelihoods go down the drain. It would be funny were it not at the heart of so many dire predictions of the effects of global warming. From cities vanishing under rising seas to global starvation as key crops fail, they blithely ignore the time-honoured response of humans confronted by climate change: adaptation.

When the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers downed spears and took up farming instead. When American farmers were hit by the Dustbowl droughts of the 1930s, they responded by switching to hardier crops, diversifying production and improving irrigation - which allowed them to ride out an even greater drought that struck in the 1950s.

Yet despite this long history of successful adaptation, the climate change debate remains doggedly focused on mitigation strategies, such as the Kyoto protocol, that seek to compel the whole atmosphere to do our bidding. Even the staunchest supporters of such mitigation policies would concede that they have thus far been more honoured in the breach than the observance. The reason is not hard to find: politicians are chary of doing anything that threatens economic growth, and mitigation carries a hefty price tag.

Politicians might be more keen to take decisive action if they knew what happens when adaptation is factored into the equation. The dangers of failing to consider adaptation have long been recognised. Almost a decade ago, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation warned that predictions of the impact of climate change that ignored adaptation were "unrealistic". In 2001, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely regarded as the voice of the climate science community, declared that adaptation must be considered alongside mitigation when developing strategies for dealing with climate change.

Yet as the UK House of Lords select committee on economic affairs pointed out last summer, adaptation remains the Cinderella of the climate change debate. Its report was summarily dismissed by climate scientists, who claimed the committee lacked the expertise needed to pronounce on the subject. Only climate scientists obsessed with mitigation could deny that by comparison adaptation has received scandalously short shrift.

Take the latest study of the likely effect of global warming on Africa, published this week by an international team of scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It concludes that as crops wilt under heat and drought, African food production may be "severely reduced". Yields of maize, Africa's favourite crop, will be especially badly hit.

Only after reaching this headline-grabbing conclusion do the researchers state that they have taken no account of attempts farmers might make to avoid such a calamity, such as planting different crops or making better use of land and irrigation. They hint that a switch to other crops such as sorghum might help, but give few details.

When the effects of adaptation are taken into account, the results are frequently revelatory. In research about to appear in the journal Environment and Development Economics, a team led by Robert Mendelsohn of Yale University examines the economic impact of predicted climate change when adaptation is included. It finds that a warmer world can actually produce net economic gain - at least for the richest nations. In contrast, the poorest nations look set to suffer disproportionately, essentially because they have hot climates already.

This has important implications for policies for dealing with the impact of climate change. Because if rich nations actually thrive on a warmer planet, they will be in a position to assist more vulnerable nations to deal with the effects - without jeopardising their own economic growth.

Many questions have still to be addressed: what is the optimal mix of mitigation and adaptation, and how should rich nations assist those worst affected by global warming? But the biggest question of all is why climate scientists still seem so reluctant to accept that humans are more resourceful than the average turkey.






WHOSE PARTY AGENDA IS THIS? COMMUNIST, SOCIALIST, NAZIS, NEW LABOUR, TORIES OR GREENIES?

"We're fighting to improve the quality of life for everyone in our country. To build a dynamic economy we will put economic stability first so people know their mortgages are safe. To build a strong society we show that the right test for our policies is how they help the most disadvantaged in society, not the rich. We will improve public services for everyone, not help a few to opt out. And to build a sustainable environment we will put climate change and environmental policy at the heart of our agenda, not just an afterthought"

Unless you follow British politics closely, you would never guess. It is from the now sadly decayed British Conservatives.

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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

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