THE ISRAELI GREENIES

An email from an Israeli reader:

Water Environmentalists in Israel are a plague worse than anywhere, because they are convinced that Israel is placed somewhere Between Lake Maggiore in Switzerland and the Great Lakes in Canada. They demand to have flowing rivers with crystal clear fresh water, swimmable and with silvery fish. They don't realize that Israel is a miniature place in the dry Middle East, a desert, and it has the world's highest population density. Simply put, it never had rivers, except the Jordan which is a miserable stream that would never be thought as a river anywhere except in the desert.

Anyway, the Government has abdicated and is "recreating" rivers and lakes. The Government has recognized the "right of Nature to water" and 10% of Israel water resources are assigned to freely flow to the sea. The longest "river" is the Yarkon, that has some 20 km from its source to the Sea in Tel Aviv, but Tel Aviv demands a respectable river like say, the Hudson, the Rhine, the Seine in Paris, or at least like the Danube in Vienna.

Since Israel already uses about 100% of its water resources, the 10% required will come from seawater desalination. Already the world's largest desalination plant is working in Ashdod. We need more to free up enough water to satisfy Nature's rights, and it costs about 1 US $ per cubic meter (including pumping).

That's not all. Israel has no so called nature left, so it is importing European deer and eagles and wolves and other "nature" as imagined by our environmentalists. Nature also needs space, open land, forests, and land is the scarcest resource in this country, where a hectare can cost about 10 million US$. So there is a violent and I mean violent fight for space, against roads, development, swimming beaches, everything that is not Nature. This is happening everywhere, it not exclusive to Israel, but it is inhumane in a country so densely populated as Israel.

The ethnic aspect is interesting - Israel's population is 20% native Arab, which are implicitly considered Nature by environmentalists. They have the world's highest vegetative growth (check it out) - up to 4.5 per year. So the restrictions and zero population growth and so on are directed only toward the Jewish population, specifically toward the middle class Ashkenazi population. Of course environmentalists here are also all middle class Jews, so it is a case of curious but rabid self hate.

Just now in Tel Aviv we are having electricity cuts, as the Electric Company is unable to satisfy the demand. People are stuck in lifts, hospitals are on generators, air conditioners are out of service (and it is H O T ). People are desperate. The problem is that the Tel Aviv's "Reading" Plant is forbidden to operate by the Ministry of Environment because it was contaminating the environment. The Minister of Environment says that the Electric Company did not ask for renewal of its permit, and as soon they submit the form, he will grant it. The joke is that this is not a joke, it is happening.

Update

Yesterday the Government decided to renew the operation of the Reading Plant, contamination and all. By this weekend we in Israel shall enjoy lifts again (many are scared to be trapped in an elevator by a sudden breakdown of the electricity supply, so they are walking the stairs – good for us!) and also the people on lung machines may have to worry less (there were reported casualties).

The former Minister for Environment Mr Gideon Ezra publicly returned the prize he had received from Green Organizations for his courage of confronting the powerful Israel Electric Corporation and taking the decision of closing down the Reading Plant. He was much applauded when he ordered the closing of the Plant.





HOW ADAPTATION WORKS: ISRAELI RESEARCHERS STEM THE TIDE OF DESERTIFICATION

As the planet heats up, the population grows and natural resources are exploited, drylands - over half of the world's productive land - are becoming increasingly infertile and uninhabitable. This process - called desertification - is a direct cause of famine in third world countries. But it is not just an African or Asian problem: desertification affects over two thirds of the drylands in the US. Israeli scientists, using know-how gained from decades of 'making the desert bloom', are at the forefront of the global effort to find new technologies that take the pressure off of our valuable drylands.

"Israel is an arid and semi-arid country," explains Eli Feinerman, dean of the faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Faculty of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Quality Sciences in Rehovot. "Chronic scarcity of water is a fact of life in Israel." This is why finding new methods for seawater desalination and waste water are critical for this region - but not just here."

The HU researchers are among the world leaders working on novel solutions to desertification, an issue which is gaining worldwide attention. The United Nations declared 2006 the International Year of Deserts and Desertification, and the slogan of World Environment Day on June 5th is 'Don't Desert Drylands'.

Drylands, areas with low rainfall and high evaporation rates, cover 41 percent of the earth's surface. But these are no empty stretches of sand dunes: one third of the world's population lives and farms on these lands, ninety percent of whom are in developing countries. As well as its human inhabitants, drylands are home to various plant and animal life; each dryland area is unique in terms of how it evolved and who and what has made its home there. In 1981 the US had around 390 million hectares of drylands, but now it is estimated that around 74 percent are affected by desertification.

It is a fine line between dryland and desert, and drylands are crossing that line daily due to climate changes and human activities such as over-farming, deforestation and bad irrigation. This leads directly to a loss of the biological and economic productivity of these lands - and as our planet's population increases, losing land that could be lived on and used for agriculture is a critical problem. From its establishment in 1948, Israel, with sixty percent of its land defined as arid, has developed many innovative tools and methods to prevent her lands from becoming desert.

Feinerman, former chairman of the Israel Committee for Agricultural Water Pricing, predicts that in the next few years agriculture in Israel will move from using from fresh water to treated waste water, and he hopes that by the end of the decade, Israeli farmers will get half their water supply from recycled waste water. "I don't think that there is any other place in the world where 50 percent of the irrigation water is recycled waste water," he says.

One of those working on ways to bring about this scenario is Avner Adin, professor of Water Treatment Technology from the HU Faculty's Department of Soil And Water Sciences and president of the Israel Water Association. "Three thousand years ago, Moses struck a rock with a stick and water came out," he told ISRAEL21c. "We don't have that privilege so we have to use research, development and technology to provide solutions."

Adin's laboratory is working on how to clean water of particles of all sizes, ranging from several millimeters to a few nanometers (one billionth of a meter). These particles may be bacteria, algae, soil, earth, clay. The larger ones can be trapped by regular filters; it's the tiny particles that pose the problem. However, one thing these minuscule contaminants have in common is that they have a negative electric charge which means that, like two similar poles of a magnet, these particles push each other away. "Our target is to neutralize the charge and get them to stick together into larger particles so they can be filtered out," he explains.

To this end, Adin and his lab use a technique called electro-flocculation. Instead of using chemicals, which can pollute the environment, to neutralize the particles' charge, their device uses electrodes made of iron or aluminum. When the waste water passes the electrodes, which have a small electric current flowing across them, positively-charged aluminum or iron ions attract the negatively charged particles and they join to form larger particles which can be filtered out. "We have constructed the first electro flocculation plant in the world," says Adin. The plant, in the Israeli town of Gan Yavne, can clean 2400 cubic meters of water per day. "This is a major development in the field."

Oded Shoseyov, a professor at the Faculty's Institute of Plant Sciences and Agriculture, is concerned with the next step: the crops that this water is irrigating. "I am working on plant genetic modification for reforestation," he says. "The importance of forests cannot be overestimated. Every year forest five times the size of the state of Israel is logged." Less trees means more carbon dioxide, and this is a major factor in the greenhouse effect that leads to desertification.

Shoseyov and his team identified several genes connected with the cellulose in trees that is one of the crucial factors in tree growth. By modifying these genes, they have created transgenic plants that grow far faster than regular trees. The first tree they modified was the poplar, the paper industry's most popular tree. Shoseyov conducted a field trial in the US, and "after two years most of [the transgenic poplars] outperformed the control group," he told ISRAEL21c. "Some produced up to 370 percent more wood than the controls." The transgenic poplars were logged and it was found that their wood was also of a higher quality. He is currently running a field trial of modified eucalyptus trees - also widely used to make paper - in Israel and planning a field trial in Thailand. "A normal tree takes about three times the amount of land to produce the same amount [of wood] as the transgenic technology," he says.

Shoseyov has also modified potato plants to shorten their growth cycle and require less water. "This is important for Israel, and also for northern countries such as Sweden where the land freezes," he says. Sweden is testing his transgenic potato plants. Shoseyov is the chief scientist for a Rehovot-based Israeli start-up, CBD Technologies, which licensed his research from the Hebrew University in order to commercialize the techniques.

Further up the food chain, fish are Jaap van Rijn's research focus. The current method for growing cultured fish has them in earth-bottomed ponds, with only a few fish per pond. This takes a lot of water - around fifty cubic meters per kilogram of fish - and these ponds can only be used for around seven months of the year, when the weather is warm enough. If the fish need seawater, then the situation is even more limited: the fish are either grown in cages in the sea or in ponds very close to it.

Van Rijn, a senior lecturer in aquaculture, has developed a system for growing fresh or seawater fish in inland ponds, even in the desert - and with around a hundred times more fish in each pond. "We have done away with earth-bottomed ponds and moved to tanks, lined with plastic or concrete, where we treat and recirculate water," he said. His temperature-controlled system can be used all year and is completely closed: only a small amount of water needs to be added to compensate for evaporation. The water is cleaned using various types of bacteria, which break down the most serious pollutants, carbon and nitrogen, turning them into carbon dioxide and nitrogen gas and removing them from the system.

After first testing the system with freshwater fish such as carp, Van Rijn then adapted it for marine fish like sea bass: "We fill up the pond and add salt to the optimum salinity the fish need," he explains. The salt content stays level because the water is recycled.

In experiments, the prototype of the inland system demonstrated that only forty liters of water are needed per kilogram of fish, instead of around 5000 liters that a conventional system uses. And the fish seem to be happy: generally, a commercial fish is around 400 grams. "Two weeks ago we had a fish which was 1200 grams," boasts van Rijn, peering down into the tank.

Recycling waste water, speeding up plant growth and raising fish in the desert are just some of the ways in which Israeli researchers are fighting desertification and preserving drylands and all those who live on them, not just in Israel but worldwide. If techniques such as these are adopted and commercialized, the future may not be as dry as the United Nations fears.

Source






WHAT THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD SHOWS ABOUT CO2 AND TEMPERATURE

Below is a small extract from here -- including an inconveniently truthful chart

Average global temperatures in the Early Carboniferous Period were hot- approximately 22 degrees C (72 degrees F). However, cooling during the Middle Carboniferous reduced average global temperatures to about 12 degrees C (54 degrees F). As shown on the chart below, this is comparable to the average global temperature on Earth today!

Similarly, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Early Carboniferous Period were approximately 1500 ppm (parts per million), but by the Middle Carboniferous had declined to about 350 ppm -- comparable to average CO2 concentrations today!

Earth's atmosphere today contains about 370 ppm CO2 (0.037%). Compared to former geologic times, our present atmosphere, like the Late Carboniferous atmosphere, is CO2- impoverished! In the last 600 million years of Earth's history only the Carboniferous Period and our present age, the Quaternary Period, have witnessed CO2 levels less than 400 ppm.

Global Temperature and Atmospheric CO2 over Geologic Time



Late Carboniferous to Early Permian time (315 mya -- 270 mya) is the only time period in the last 600 million years when both atmospheric CO2 and temperatures were as low as they are today (Quaternary Period ).

There has historically been much more CO2 in our atmosphere than exists today. For example, during the Jurassic Period (200 mya), average CO2 concentrations were about 1800 ppm or about 4.8 times higher than today. The highest concentrations of CO2 during all of the Paleozoic Era occurred during the Cambrian Period, nearly 7000 ppm -- about 19 times higher than today.

The Carboniferous Period and the Ordovician Period were the only geological periods during the Paleozoic Era when global temperatures were as low as they are today. To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today-- 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming.

There is an article from the year 2000 here which sets out some of the evidence for the "perverse" real-world relationship between CO2 and temperature





Turtle blocks $11 billion gas project



When I wanted to put up a turtle picture to go with the post below, I originally linked to one on the site of photographer Tom Balks. He was however childish enough to go to the trouble of replacing his picture with an abusive message. It was obviously opaque to him that readers interested in wildlife could trace the picture back to his site. He was in short abusive because I gave him free advertising. What a dummy!

A little-known turtle has blocked - at least for now - Western Australia's much vaunted $11 billion Gorgon LNG project. WA's Environmental Protection Authority said today the huge gas export project on Barrow Island off WA's far north coast was environmentally unacceptable mainly because of the risk to the rare and threatened flatback turtle. It is the second time the EPA has rejected the Gorgon proposal, which was first rejected in July 2003. But WA Cabinet overrode the EPA decision in September 2003, allowing restricted access to Barrow Island to the project which is forecast to provide 6000 jobs and boost Australia's gross domestic product (GDP) by $2 billion.

Today EPA chairman Wally Cox said subsequent work done by the Gorgon joint venture partners - ExxonMobil, Shell and project operator Chevron - had highlighted the land and marine conservation values of the island and surrounding waters. "Flatback turtles in particular would be put at risk from the proposal with two of the most important nesting beaches located adjacent to the proposed LNG processing plant site and the materials off-loading facility," Dr Cox said. "There is very little science available on the life-cycle, behaviour and feeding habits of flatback turtles and as a consequence it is not possible at this time to identify management measures that would ensure ongoing survival of this Pilbara flatback turtle population. "As a result, the proposal in its present form cannot meet the EPA's environmental objectives and is considered environmentally unacceptable."

Flatback adult turtles shells grow up to 99cm and weigh about 90kg. They live in bays, coastal shallow reefs and grassy shallows and eat sea cucumbers, jellyfish, molluscs, prawns, other invertebrates and seaweed. Dr Cox also said the partners had not been able to demonstrate risk could be reduced to satisfactory levels in areas such as dredging and the introduction of non-indigenous species.

The Gorgon field has enough gas to power a city of one million people for more than 800 years and there has been enough reserves set aside to power WA for 40 years. Gorgon LNG is one of seven big gas projects - worth an estimated total of $50 billion - being considered for development in WA. The joint venture partners are due to make a final investment decision on the project towards the end of the year or early in 2007. The EPA recommendation will now be sent to the state and federal environment ministers with a ministerial decision due towards the end of the year.

Source

Note the following comment from a nature site:

"Though we don't know for certain, the flatback turtle is probably the least threatened sea turtle with an annual nesting population of up to 10,000. It can be found near Indonesia and Papua New Guinea but only breeds on the north and northeastern coasts of Australia."

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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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