England spends $2.5 Billion on Cars - Millions Starve

Post lifted from Gust of Hot Air

England will spend AU$2.5 Billion over the next four years replacing the governments 78,000 vehicles with cars that are much greener and slash carbon emissions by 15% according to TimesOnline.

What? a 15% decrease in carbon emissions and the are prepared to fork out $2.5 billion for this?

Ok, the average car produces about 6 tons of carbon dioxide a year. So 78,000 cars and we have 468,000 tons. A 15% decrease means that AU$2.5 billion will save the world from about 70,000 tons, which is of course a good effort.

In 2001, the world produced around 24,000,000,000 tons of carbon into the atmosphere. This means that the 70,000 tons that the UK government is going to save will be about 1/300,000th of the carbon emissions saved. Basically, jack shit.

According to Wigley (1998), if we are to reduce our emissions by 43% this will result in a decrease in world temperature of 0.07 degrees C. Basically immeasurable by normal ground thermometers.

So lets do some more maths, and we find that England, in spending AU$2.5 billion in changing their cars over will reduce the world wide temperature of around 0.000000023 degrees Celsius.

Well done.

But wait there's more. According to World Vision Australia. For just AU$468, one can sponsor a child in Africa or Bangladesh. They will receive education, medicine against diseases, and fresh drinkable running water. What we all take for granted, but is a luxury in some of these parts of the world. Essentially, the British government could have spent their AU$2.5 million on this, and sponsored 5.3 million people, but they obviously have other vote grabbing agendas.

Tell me which you would rather do. Reduce the world wide temperature by 0.000000023 degrees Celsius or give over 5 million starving malnourished children shelter, water and medicine?

There is no need to answer that question.




Most Everything You Know About Air Pollution Is Wrong

NCPA Study Shows How Regulators, Environmentalists and Journalists Exaggerate Levels and Risks

Contrary to what many environmental activists, regulators and journalists regularly assert, air pollution is not a growing problem or a serious threat to the public's health, according to a new study from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). "The truth is air quality in America's cities is better than it has ever been," said Joel Schwartz, author of the study and an adjunct scholar with the NCPA. "Air pollution of all kinds has sharply declined because of cleaner cars, power plants, factories, home appliances and an array of consumer products." According to the study, air pollution levels have dropped substantially. For example, from 1980 to 2005:

* Fine particulate matter declined 40 percent and carbon monoxide concentrations fell 74 percent

* Peak 8-hour ozone levels dropped 20 percent, and days per year exceeding the 8-hour ozone standard fell 79 percent.

* Nitrogen dioxide levels decreased 37 percent and sulfur dioxide dropped 63 percent.

What makes these air quality improvements so extraordinary is that they occurred along with increasing motor vehicle and energy use and economic growth. For example, during the same period automobile miles driven each year nearly doubled (93 percent), while coal burned for electricity production increased 61 percent.

Schwartz also noted that "Americans harbor health fears about air pollution that are far out of proportion to minor risks posed by current air quality." According to the study:

* While the incidence of asthma has nearly doubled in the last 25 years, air pollution cannot be the cause, since air pollution of all kinds declined at the same time. Emergency room visits and hospitalizations for asthma are lowest during July and August, when ozone levels are at their highest.

* Reducing nationwide ozone from 2002 levels (the highest of the last six years) to the federal 8-hour ozone standard would reduce respiratory hospital emissions by 0.07 percent and asthma emergency room visits by only 0.04 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

* Particulate matter does not kill animals in laboratory studies, even at levels many times higher than ever occur in the air we breathe. Recent studies with asthmatic human volunteers found no evidence of harm, even with particulate levels a few times greater than occur in the most polluted cities.

Regulators and activists claim low-level air pollution kills thousands of people each year, but the research evidence shows this claim is implausible.

Source





Logging 'would have lessened fire threat'

Australia is in the midst of its annual wildfire season and it is looking like one of the bad ones

Tasmania's bushfire crisis would not be so severe if the state's forests had been logged rather than protected, Federal Forestry Minister Eric Abetz said today. Senator Abetz said today the severity of the bushfires, which have destroyed 14 homes in Tasmania's east, called into question the value of making forests off-limits to logging and grazing. He blamed a build-up of fuel in wilderness areas for the severity of the fires. "Many Australians are starting to feel cheated that they were sold a line that you could simply lock up our forests and keep them forever," Senator Abetz said on ABC radio. "And then fire comes through and destroys the koala habitat, the alpine plant species and, in Tasmania ... those areas that people have argued to be locked up are now just there in ashes."

Firefighters have prepared a control line on the edge of the Wielangta State Forest, which is the subject of a court battle by Greens leader Bob Brown who wants to prevent the area from being logged.

Senator Brown rejected Senator Abetz's arguments. "The majority of the forest that we've been talking about in the Federal Court wasn't burnt in the fire," he said on ABC radio. The areas that had been burnt would recover quickly and remain an important habitat for key species, Senator Brown said.

Source





HAS THE IPCC REALLY DOWNGRADED ESTIMATED SEA LEVEL RISE (SLR)?

An email to Benny Peiser from Madhav Khandekar [mkhandekar@rogers.com]

I quickly converted the value 17 inches to centimeters and I get about 43.18cm. This value is still a bit higher than the 290+/-150 mm projected by IPCC Clim Change Docs 2007 ch 10 which I am presently reading. The IPCC projections has high error bars, so in reality the SLR may be no more than about 20 cm for next 100 years or so, a value most nations, including Bangladesh (which was one of the nations mentioned repeatedly by IPCC scientists in the 1990s as a prime-target of GW deleterious impacts) with a population of about 120 M with large number of people living on small islands can cope with.

Allow me to make some observations here: The IPCC and the 'warmoholics' are slowly changing their tunes by moderating the GW impacts over the last 15 years or about. In the early 1990s, all climate alarmists, including Jim Bruce (former ADM of Environment Canada and who inititaed IPCC in 1988, while at WMO), were using Bangladesh & Maldive Islands as "victims' of GW. When it was shown by Prof Morner that the Maldive Islands are under NO such threat and further, in the last 15 years, Bangladesh has had NO serious threat from any Tropical Cyclones (for reasons which neither I nor my good friend Tad Murty, tsunami & a storm surge expert do not fully understand), the alamists 'invented' Tuvalu Island as a GW Victim. I had never heard of Tuvalu Island before that. Most studies and SL data now show Tuvalu Islands are NOT experiencing escalating SLR in recent years. Now the alamists are pointing at Greenland & Antarctic Ice sheets melting away, producing massive flooding etc. Recent papers (e.g. Sarah Raper & Roger Braithwaite, Nature 2006) show that SLR due to mountain glaciers and icecaps melting will be only about 5 cm by 2100, about half of previous estimates.

The Toronto Star (Canada's largest daily newspaper) had a news item a few days ago, about Europe enjoying a balmy weather past several weeks, with very little snow on the Alps (disappointing news for ski operators, who could have used Canada's Rockies this year where there is "tons of snow") and places like Sweden even discovering growth of some species of mushroom & flowers! I am hoping that in next few years, more Europeans will realize the benefits of global warming and will stop worrying about climate scare-mongering.

***************************************

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 Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************