British energy survey reveals gap between attitudes and action

The Electricity Policy Research Group (EPRG) at the University of Cambridge commissioned YouGov to survey 1000 UK residents on issues ranging from the future of the electricity supply to their current purchasing decisions. While climate change concerns are voiced most strongly among the young, Liberal Democrat voters and Guardian/Independent readers, these attitudes are not translated into personal action. The poll showed, for example, that Guardian/Independent readers are no more likely to have taken any specific energy saving actions than tabloid readers, and are actually less likely to have insulated their homes.

Paradoxically, older people who are least concerned with climate change are also far more likely to have taken concrete action to save energy, including buying energy efficient light bulbs, insulating their homes and lowering their thermostats.

The survey also revealed that while half of the respondents had changed electric or gas suppliers in the past five years, 90% cited reasons of price and just 4% claimed greener energy as the reason they switched.

The EPRG report ranked environment and fuel prices among the top ten issues facing the UK and placed climate change as the top environmental concern. The poll discovered significant support for investing in renewable energy, with over two-thirds of respondents saying they would support wind farms even if situated in their own locality.

Roughly half of the people surveyed supported the building of new nuclear power stations, provided they were based on existing sites. Surprisingly, one-third supported the establishment of new sites around the country.

Coal-power was considered the least popular energy option, although opinions improved when those surveyed learnt more about developments in carbon dioxide capture and storage technologies.

Dr David Reiner, Course Director of the MPhil in Technology Policy at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge and author of the report, said: "There is a real engagement among the British public on questions of energy and environment, particularly over climate change. There is a willingness to support government policies, but even those groups that are the strongest supporters of policy action do not translate this support into their personal energy saving behaviour. They show a clear divergence between their views as citizens and their actions as consumers."

Source





GLOBAL CYNICISM IN AUSTRALIA TOO

(Holden is the Australian tentacle of General Motors. Their biggest-selling model is the Commodore, available as a straight six or a V8)

Australians bought a record number of V8-engined cars last month despite growing fears of global warming and uncertainty over petrol prices. One in four Commodores and Statesman/Caprices sold in November had a 5.7-litre V8 under the bonnet. As a percentage of total Holden sales, it was the highest number of V8-engined cars sold since the company began keeping reliable records in 1991. Holden spokesman Philip Brook said V8s usually made up less than 20 per cent of sales. More than 1440 V8-powered cars were sold by dealers last month -- the highest number sold since 2002.

"It's certainly something we're happy about and those figures are driven by private sales, because fleets don't tend to buy V8s," Mr Brook said. "They're not designed to be just basic transport. If you love driving, the V8 is the sort of car you'll be attracted to." Holden also believes the fuel price issue has died off in the past few months. "The sort of customers who buy V8s are a bit less price sensitive, both with the price of the car they are buying and the running costs, but people have also got used to payingover $1 a litre for fuel," Mr Brook said.

Josh Budd, 26, of Bellevue Hill, bought a new HSV R8 ClubSport last week. "It's the Aussie way - buying a big V8," he said. "I love the sound, the look and the performance I've always loved Bathurst and the whole V8 thing."

It's a similar story at Ford Performance Vehicles, the majority of which are powered by V8 engines. The company smashed its all-time annual sales record in November, with a month left to set a new mark.

Source






USA MAKING MORE PROGRESS ON EMISSIONS THAN EUROPE

(As America's more market-driven economy shifts manufacturing to China -- where global warming concerns don't apply, apparently)

Climate-change activists and Democrats on Capitol Hill are gearing up to push the U.S. to limit so-called greenhouse gases. In their telling, America must save mankind from an eco-Apocalypse by adopting the arbitrary targets popular with Europe and other Kyoto Protocol signatories. Well, let's look at results in the real world, as opposed to this Kyoto spin. Recent data show that placing artificial limits on emissions not only fails to make the world cleaner, it is also counterproductive, even on the environmentalists' own grounds. Contrary to caricature, the American approach offers more promise than the European one.

As the nearby chart shows, CO2 emissions growth in the U.S. far outpaced that of the 15 "old" members of the European Union from 1990-95 and especially from 1995-2000, when Mr. Climate Change himself, Al Gore, was the second-most powerful man in America. But, lo, the U.S. has outperformed the EU-15 since 2000, according to the latest U.N. data. America's rate of growth in CO2 emissions from 2000-04 was eight percentage points lower than from 1995-2000. By comparison, the EU-15 saw an increase of 2.3 points.

As far as individual EU states go, only two, Britain and Sweden, are on track to meet their Kyoto emissions commitments by 2010. Six more might meet their targets if they approve and implement new, as yet unspecified, policies to restrict carbon output, while seven of the 15 will miss their goals.

Cynics play down America's improvement, noting that its economy cooled from the earlier years to 2000-04. True, but the EU-15 also had lower economic growth in the latest period and still saw its emissions growth rate double. What's more, the U.S. economy expanded 38% faster than the EU-15 in 2000-04, and its population twice as fast. So the trend lines, for now, are reversing. That may make the green lobby choke on its alfalfa wrap, because its fund raising depends on vilifying the U.S. But facts are facts, no matter how underreported they are.

Europe's dismal record is explained by its approach to reducing emissions. The centerpiece of the Continent's plan is a carbon-trading scheme in which companies in CO2-heavy industries receive tradable permits for a certain amount of emissions. If they emit more CO2, they must buy credits from firms that are under quota. The idea is to force companies to emit less CO2 by making it prohibitively expensive to keep the status quo.

All this scheme has done so far is provide further proof that government cannot replicate the wisdom of markets. A red-faced European Commission recently admitted that it allowed more permits than there were emissions in 2005-07, keeping permit prices low and undermining the entire system. When Brussels tried to make amends by ordering several member states to cut carbon permits by 7% more than expected for 2008-2012, industry and national capitals squealed. The market hadn't priced in such a dramatic reduction. With carbon permits trading relatively cheaply, firms have been able to get by with minimal changes to the way they do business. That has minimized Kyoto's economic impact.

Once the supply of permits is more in line with the eurocrats' ambitious environmental goals, though, expect European industry to take a big hit. The number of firms moving manufacturing work to countries without emissions caps, such as China and India, will only grow. That might make Europe's emissions data look good, but it will have zero net effect on world's production of greenhouse gases.

Some companies may elect to purchase cleaner equipment, but the rising cost of compliance -- i.e., buying more carbon permits at higher prices once the supply is slashed -- will eat into the money available for developing the next generation of clean technology. In short, Europe offers no magic solution for capping greenhouse gases.

America may even have a few things to teach the Old World. The U.S. strategy has been to keep economic growth strong and provide incentives for private industry to develop cleaner technologies. For instance, the Bush Administration has granted $1 billion in tax credits for nine new coal-fired power plants that will double efficiency and reduce pollution compared with older generations. China is picking up on these tactics. This year it bought $58 million in machines from Caterpillar Inc. that trap methane in coal mines and use it to power electric generators.

If global-warming activists were as interested in lowering air temperatures as they are in expanding the role of the state, they'd understand that the key to reducing emissions lies in unleashing the private sector, not capping it. That's the real lesson from the policies -- and the results -- in Europe and the U.S.

Wall Street Journal, 14 December 2006






Solar Global Warming

I have reproduced the rather colourful post below from Hall of Record

I've had some communication with Dr. Tim Patterson of Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Patterson is among a growing number of scientists from various fields who have a minority view about global warming: climate change is ongoing and primarily driven by solar activity and some apparent increases in temperature can be linked directly to urbanization.

Part of his argument with those who claim atmospheric carbon dioxide is driving climate change (i.e. global warming) is that the geological record does not support that contention. Carbon dioxide is about 2-3% of the so-called "greenhouse" gases in our atmosphere. Water vapor comprises pretty much the rest of this greenhouse gas. Any increase in carbon dioxide will have a minuscule impact on overall climate and, indeed, over millions of years the concentration of carbon dioxide has been significantly higher... even when global temperatures were colder... during ice ages. Dr. Patterson is not arguing that global warming isn't happening, just that popular wisdom has the wrong drivers of this phenomenon.

I have had online conversations with some, including one person who claimed that Dr. Patterson and anyone like him were "mouthpieces of the coal industry." Actually, Dr. Patterson is far removed from the coal industry. Most of his research is geological and paleontological in nature. Although not the primary focus of his work, by using sedimentary deposits from the ocean floor, he provides a wonderful history of earth's biology directly related to climate changes in some of his work.

Research

My research program is presently concentrated on the use of foraminifera to identify: neotectonic and paleo sea levels; paleoceanographic phenomena on the coastal regions of Canada; strategic significance of natural variability in NE Pacific fish populations; the further development of arcellacea as a new class of paleolimnological indicators; and whether the methods of complex systems are applicable in the study of evolutionary phenomena.

For those who fear global warming caused by increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide, I suggest that you plow your way through just two of Dr. Patterson's publications in Adobe format: Late Holocene sedimentary response to solar and cosmic ray activity influenced climate variability in the NE Pacific and Application of Wavelet and Regression Analysis in Assessing Temporal and Geographic Climate Variability: Eastern Ontario, Canada as a Case Study.

Of course, the titles alone may discourage some of you so I will provide summary extracts that may bring out the important points:

Marine-laminated sediments along the NE Pacific coast (Effingham inlet, Vancouver Island) provide an archive of climate variability at annual to millennial scales. A 7.75-m portion of piston core TUL99B-03 was deposited during a ~3045-year interval [~1440–4485 years before present (yBP)] under primarily anoxic conditions. Darker clay laminae were deposited under higher precipitation conditions in winter, and diatom-dominated laminae were laid down when marine productivity was higher in the spring through autumn.

Wavelet transform and other time-series analysis methods were applied to sediment color (i.e. gray-scale values) line-scans obtained from X-ray images and compared with global records of cosmogenic nuclides 14C and 10Be, as well as the Ice Drift Index (hematite-stained grains) record to detect cycles, trends, and nonstationarities in the climate and sedimentary pattern. Our results show that the marine sedimentary record in the NE Pacific responded to abrupt changes and long-term variability in climate that can be linked to external forcing (e.g., solar and cosmic irradiance). Specifically, a strong cooling in the NE Pacific at ~3550F160 yBP can be correlated to a weakening of high-frequency (50–150 years) pulses in sun activity at the Gleissberg cycle band, similar to what occurred at the onset of the Little Ice Age at ~1630 AD.

Three intervals of unusually low sun activity at ~2350, 2750, and ~3350 yBP are characterized by thick, clay-rich annual sedimentation that we interpret as representative of unusually wet conditions. These intervals of higher precipitation conditions may have been related to a regional intensification of the Aleutian Low (AL) caused by an eastward migration of the Center of Action (COA) of the AL, which occurs during intervals of solar minima. Dryer conditions in the region occur when the COA of AL migrates westward and the COA of the North Pacific High (NPH) migrates northward during intervals of solar maxima. A cyclicity of 50–85, 33–36, and 22–29 years in the sediment color record, lamination thickness, and 14C cosmogenic nuclide, characterized the relatively warm interval from 3550 to 4485 yBP. This record is similar to that of present-day low- and highfrequency variants of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Aleutian Low.

2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

as well as...

Our research results indicate that a significant portion of the long-term temperature record in the annual and multidecadal spectrum in urban Ottawa is a result of episodic urbanization (i.e., heat island effects). Analysis of normalized monthly temperature records from three stations in eastern Canada indicates that there was: (a) no significant temperature increase outside the urban Ottawa area during the last century, and (b) most of the interannual variability in the urban and rural areas could be related to non-periodic natural fluctuations.

Also see this.

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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 generally 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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