OZONE: A GREAT GREENIE "SUCCESS" HAS ACHIEVED NOTHING (SURPRISE!)

It shows how dubious Greenie atmospheric physics can be

A satellite has detected record losses of ozone over Antarctica this year, further damaging the shield that protects Earth from cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. In the past decade, the level of ozone in Earth's atmosphere has fallen by about 0.3 per cent, increasing the risk of skin cancer, cataracts and harm to marine life, the European Space Agency said overnight. The presence of a hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic was first recognised in 1985.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said earlier this month that the hole was nearing its record size of 29 million sq km set in 2000. However, the depth of the hole was greater this year than in 2000, bringing the amount of lost ozone to 40 million tonnes on October 2, beating 2000's record of 39 million tonnes, ESA said in a statement. The ozone loss over Antarctica is calculated by measuring the hole's area and depth. "Such significant ozone loss requires very low temperatures in the stratosphere combined with sunlight," ESA atmospheric engineer Claus Zehner said. "This year's extreme loss of ozone can be explained by the temperatures above Antarctica reaching the lowest recorded in the area since 1979," Mr Zehner said. [Hey! Where did the global warming go??]

The WMO and the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) said in August that the protective layer may return to pre-1980 levels by 2049 over much of Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia, Latin America and Africa. The agencies said that in Antarctica, ozone layer recovery would likely be delayed until 2065. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) containing chlorine and bromine have been blamed for thinning the ozone layer because they attack ozone molecules, causing them to break apart. Many CFCs, once commonly used in refrigeration, air conditioning and industrial cleaning, were banned by the 1985 Vienna Convention and its Montreal Protocol of 1987. Despite that, CFCs had still not vanished from the air, ESA said.

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Air samples show recent build-up of CO2

Odd that the earth hasn't been warming up in recent years, then (See above)

The world's oldest library of airsamples has recorded the biggest increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide since sampling began in 1978. CSIRO air librarian Paul Fraser said the levels of the primary greenhouse gas have been growing at an increasing rate each year since 1978 and may reach an annual increase of two parts per million by the end of this year. Global CO2 levels have increased from 340ppm to 380ppm in the past 30 years due to combustion of fossil fuels. Mainstream climate scientists argue the world needs to stabilise levels to around 450ppm by 2050 to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Dr Fraser said while the library had revealed CO2 emissions had grown by 70 per cent a year since the 1970s, methane emissions had stabilised in the past seven years. To find this data, the CSIRO captures a 40km-long sheet of clean air from the Southern Ocean as it blows through Cape Grim on the rugged northwest coast of Tasmania. Dr Fraser said the recording instrumentation was so sensitive that samples could be contaminated by the gases released by ships beyond the horizon. "We sometimes collect tanks and find that they are a bit strange and the assumption is that something has got into the airstream that we weren't aware of," Dr Fraser said. "You could have a drop in the wind and the local vegetation could impact on it, or maybe cows - so we like to keep the wind speed nice and high and the wind direction off the ocean."

Wind is sampled each season and stored in pressurised cylinders at the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric research centre near Melbourne, where it is analysed for both greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases. While long-term trends are relatively stable, Dr Fraser said there was some natural variation as a result of El Nino and La Nina weather patterns and natural events such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 and the Indonesian bushfires in 1998.

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BRITAIN'S DOTTY METHOD OF ENCOURAGING PUBLIC TRANSPORT USE

And this under one of the world's "greenest" governments!

Thousands of seats are being ripped out of trains to create more standing room as a cheap solution to overcrowding on the busiest rail franchise in Britain. South West Trains is installing extra handholds and creating "perches" in place of seats. Almost 500 carriages, including some which entered service only two years ago, will lose more than a fifth of their seats. The increase in empty floor space will allow the Government to claim that it is meeting targets on reducing overcrowding. Passengers with 0.54 square metres of floor space are not deemed to be on an overcrowded train. (That could, for example, be an area 60cm by 90cm, that is slightly less than three double-page spreads of The Times, which laid toe-to-toe measure 60cm by 108cm).

South West Trains is already officially the most overcrowded franchise and is forecast to carry 20 per cent more passengers by 2016. The Department for Transport does not consider a train to be overcrowded until there are more than 35 people standing for every 100 with seats. But South West Trains breaches even what the department describes as "the acceptable number of passengers in excess of capacity". The 8.04am from Isleworth to Waterloo has 792 seats but carries an average of 1,138 passengers (44 standing per 100 seats), according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act. The 6.42am from Haslemere to Waterloo has 598 seats but carries 845 passengers (41 standing per 100 seats). The company, which carries 160 million passengers a year on a network stretching from the South Coast to London Waterloo, said that the changes "will allow more people to stand in comfort".

SWT claimed last month that it would increase the number of seats on peak suburban services by 20 per cent under its new ten-year contract. But when questioned by The Times, the company said that this had been a mistake and that much of the promised new capacity would be in the form of standing room rather than seats. Under the terms of the contract, it add ten carriages to its fleet of 1,400. The company has already begun removing 72 seats from its 20-year-old class 455 trains, which operate between Waterloo and the suburbs, including Chessington, Kingston, Guildford, Epsom, Hampton Court and Shepperton. It is also planning to take seats out of 28 Desiro trains, which were delivered from their German manufacturer only two years ago. These trains serve Wimbledon, Surbiton, Woking and dozens of other stations.

A spokeswoman said: "In an ideal world no one would have to stand but we do not live in an ideal world. We recognise that passenger numbers are continuing to grow and we are reconfiguring the trains to give the best possible capacity." The company believes that creating wider aisles will encourage people to move away from the doors, allowing all the available floor space to be used. It claims that most passengers who cannot find a seat have to stand for only 20 minutes.

Britain has the fastest growing railway in Europe, with passenger numbers up 42 per cent in the past decade. In 2003 the Strategic Rail Authority proposed lengthening platforms on routes into Waterloo to accommodate trains with up to 12 carriages. The authority was abolished last year before it could make any progress towards this. Network Rail made similar suggestions in March but admitted that there was no budget or timetable for the improvements. The Government made no mention of lengthening platforms when it awarded the new ten-year franchise last month. Chris Grayling, the Shadow Transport Secretary, said: "We must provide longer trains rather than squeezing more standing passengers into existing carriages. It is unacceptable that people are paying more for their tickets but are increasingly less likely to get a seat."

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GREENIE REGULATIONS INFLATE FUEL PRICES

When the railroad, the telegraph and the telephone spread across the United States in the years immediately following the Civil War, a national market was created. For the first time in our history, farmers and butchers and tailors and other business people in locales such as Boston and Biloxi faced genuine competition from firms hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Many of these business people complained, of course. Competition is unforgiving of firms that lack the talent or the drive to satisfy consumers as fully as do firms with greater skills and dedication. But consumers benefited enormously.

One source of consumer benefits, beside the obvious one of more choices among sellers, was "economies of scale." If a producer can manufacture products on a large scale without significantly compromising product quality and at the same time spread many of the up-front, or "fixed," costs of production over a large number of units of output, that producer can afford to sell each unit of that output at a price lower than could be charged if he produced only a smaller quantity of output.

For example, if a shirt factory with a capacity of producing 10 million shirts per year is built at an annual cost of $1 million, the owner of that factory would probably operate more profitably by producing 10 million shirts annually than by producing only a million shirts. By producing the larger number of shirts, the cost of building the factory is spread over more shirts, so that the "factory-cost" portion of each shirt is 10 cents. If, however, the factory produced only 1 million shirts, spreading the cost of building the factory over this smaller output would mean that the "factory-cost" portion of each shirt is $1. In short, large-scale production often lowers product cost. And competition among large-scale producers lowers the prices that consumers must pay.

Allowing producers to grow large enough to exploit economies of scale is important to economic growth and consumer well-being. The railroad, the telegraph and the telephone -- by enhancing each producer's potential to serve ever-greater numbers of customers -- promoted such growth. Obviously, not all goods and services are produced on a large scale. Some things can be produced only on a small scale. For example, personal therapy. Other things might be produced on a small scale simply because consumers prefer it that way: If every consumer insisted that his shirt be hand-stitched and custom made, the opportunity for profitably producing shirts on a large scale would disappear. Shirts would be more costly to produce and, hence, would sell at higher prices. If consumers chose this option, though, we must conclude that the value to consumers of wearing custom-made shirts is greater that the value of the money they'd save by purchasing mass-produced shirts. Consumers are not worse off if they choose to buy more-expensive custom-made shirts.

But suppose customers would prefer to buy less-expensive shirts produced on a large scale (rather than higher-priced custom-made shirts). Clearly, if government forces consumers nevertheless to buy custom-made shirts they are made worse off. True, consumers get better shirts but they also pay more than they want to pay.

If you think that government would never force consumers to buy "boutique" products when consumers would prefer to buy mass-produced products, you're mistaken. In a new paper -- "Market Fragmenting Regulation: Why Gasoline Costs So Much (and Why it's Going to Cost Even More)" -- University of Illinois law professor Andrew Morriss and Mercatus Center scholar Nathaniel Stewart show that much of the recent rise in the price of gasoline at the pump was caused by regulations that obstruct oil-producers' abilities to produce and distribute gasoline on a large scale.

Although government started interfering significantly in the oil market in the early 20th century, Morriss and Stewart find that beginning only in the late 1980s did the EPA and state and local governments launch unprecedented requirements on how fuel is formulated: "These fuel requirements added a set of constraints to refinery operation and transportation of fuels." Significantly, "Through various State Implementation Plans (SIPs), state and local governments also imposed restrictions on gasolines sold in their jurisdictions. Although there is no comprehensive list of formulations mandated by all levels of government, there appear to be at least seventeen different formulations -- a major increase from the single standard (the lead standard) in place in the mid-1980s. In addition, some state and local governments have imposed 'biofuel' requirements."

The consequence? What would have been a national market in gasoline now is a fragmented market. Refiners are unable to take advantages of economies of scale. Consumers are denied the lowest possible prices for gasoline.

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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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