Experts' dim view of green light bulb

Hilarious gap found in Greenie reasoning

THE cover story of this month's edition of Silicon Chip magazine is a comprehensive bagging of the Federal Government's plan to replace incandescent light bulbs with more efficient compact fluorescents (CFLs).

As publisher Leo Simpson points out, most domestic lighting use is at night, which means it is "merely using the 'spinning reserve' of our base-loaded power stations. "You could switch all the lights off ... and the base-load power stations would still be spinning away, using just as much coal," he says.

In a six-page analysis, Silicon Chip , the bible for electrical engineers, identifies drawbacks such as the fact that a CFL light bulb "takes about 10 to 15 minutes to achieve full brilliance"; doesn't last long when used for frequent short periods; can't be used with a dimmer switch; and can cause electrical and infra-red interference to the point where "CFLs can completely obliterate [radio] reception in rural areas" - and if you have a "CFL in the same room as your TV or hi-fi system, the infra-red remote control may not work at all". Heed the geeks.

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Global warming, global stifling

The planet has a problem caused by too much hot air -- comment by logician Gary Jason

The debate about global warming has reached a crescendo, and has acquired a deeply unsettling tone. We are witnessing a veritable rush to judgment - a rush that has now been accelerated by a United Nations report that accepts and supports the global warming theory. If there was ever a time for skepticism, it is now. The time has come for people who have reasonable doubts to speak up and offer the reasons for their doubts. In this article I will try to clarify what parts of global warming science give cause for doubt. I will also state the features of the global warming debate that are troublesome to me - and should be troublesome to you.

I'll start by making some distinctions. The first distinction is between the narrow theory of anthropic global warming (hereafter, the "Narrow Theory") and the grand metanarrative of global warming (hereafter, the "Grand Theory"). The Narrow Theory lies exclusively in the domain of climate science, and holds simply that:

* The earth's climate is warming significantly.
* This warming is exacerbated by the generation of CO2 and other anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
* This warming threatens to induce widescale ecological changes.

The Grand Theory - as presented on television and in several recent movies - is vastly more than a theory of climate science. It is a multiple-domain metanarrative or integrated worldview, including both moral assumptions and policy prescriptions. In essence, it posits twelve theses:

* The world is warming dramatically.
* This warming is unlike any other warming or cooling in the history of the planet.
* The warming is caused primarily by humans' burning of fossil fuels.
* If we keep burning fossil fuels at the present rate, warming will accelerate and increase without end.
* The result of warming will be a huge increase in the number of ecological and meteorological disasters, which will be of biblical proportions.
* These disasters will not be counterbalanced by any favorable effects of warming.
* Both warming and disaster will occur with such rapidity that mankind will be unable to adjust.
* The process can be reversed or controlled by drastically curtailing the use of fossil fuels.
* The only way to do this is by drastically curtailing the use of fossil fuels.
* The best plan is to slash the use of fossil fuels in the United States and other countries of the developed world, while leaving the less-developed world (including Brazil, China, and India) alone.
* Use of fossil fuel can best be curtailed by the exploitation of wind and solar power, and by massive "conservation."
* Whatever this will cost, directly and indirectly (and estimates range from trillions of dollars to nothing at all), will be less that the costs of the damage wrought by continued warming.

This Grand Theory is a wide ranging worldview, of which the Narrow Theory is but a minor part. It includes theses that are well beyond the domain of climate science, including theses derived, at least ostensibly, from history, geology, economics, agricultural science, power-plant engineering, and geopolitics, then given a moral cast, i.e., imbued with moral judgments. For example, Theses 6, 10, 11, and 12 are all either completely or in great part economic claims, having little if anything to do with climate science. To cite a specific example, Thesis 10 is a claim that can only be proven by looking at detailed, empirically based projections of emissions figures from industries in developed countries compared to those in the third world, and factoring in projections of efficiency and productivity. Another example: Thesis 11 is a sweeping claim about the economics of power generation, and can only be proven by looking at the economics of all known methods of generating power, including every feasible alteration in those technologies.

Most of the theses in the Grand Theory are packed with morally charged concepts. If an epidemiologist says, "The chance of bird flu becoming epidemic is growing significantly," she is making a narrowly scientific statement. If she says, "Bird flu is about to explode catastrophically! We have to stop it now!", she is going beyond science to make a moral and a policy judgment. That isn't a problem if the economics and morality are obvious - if, say, the cost of inoculation is trivial compared to the costs associated with a disease that has a mortality rate of nearly 50%. But when the economics is complex (with costs and benefits hard to measure, the range of options large, and the chances and scale of an anticipated event hard to estimate), or when the moral case is unclear (say, when the moral values being balanced are incommensurable with one another), such value-laden language is dangerous.

Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, an eminent specialist who is favorable to the Narrow Theory, made this point well in a recent interview with the BBC. He said, "Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists, too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror, and disaster with the careful hedging which surrounds science's predictions? . . . To state that climate change will be 'catastrophic' hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science."

The second distinction I want to make is between general agreement, at least among the scientists in a given field, and a complete convergence of opinion. When the majority of scientists agree that a theory in their domain is true, there is general agreement. But general agreement means that a significant minority of scientists still dissents. When a theory has survived repeated tests (i.e., has predicted with great accuracy phenomena that are then confirmed empirically) and has been tremendously fruitful in guiding research, then virtually all scientists active in its domain agree, and there is complete convergence. Ask physicists whether quantum theory is true, and 99.99% will say it is. You would see the same virtual unanimity if you asked biologists whether all life on this planet evolved from one original form.

There is general agreement about the Narrow Theory - though there are varying degrees of this agreement, depending on the particular thesis being considered. The summary of the UN study just released (the Fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or "IPCC") reports that its panel is over 90% certain that the "observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is . . . due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations." This means that a significant minority of the rele-vant scientists continues to doubt part or all of the Narrow Theory - perhaps a larger minority than is apparent, since the summary is often more "confident" than the actual study, and even more since the report's contributors were selected by politicians whose desire for scientific objectivity may not have been paramount. And although the highest percentage agrees that temperatures have risen (Thesis 1), there are prominent dissenters. Atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer questions Thesis 1. So do eminent climatologist Timothy Ball, and Neil Frank, former director of the National Hurricane Center. Climatologist William Gray of Colorado State University actually predicts global cooling - which, remember, was the dominant climatological prediction of the 1970s.

Fewer scientists agree that the rise was caused by human activity (Thesis 2), or that the potential ecological damage will include such threats as increased storm activity (often cited by supporters of Thesis 3). Much of the disagreement about Thesis 2 surrounds the question of whether the global warming posited by Thesis 1 is primarily or only partially caused by human fossil-fuel use. After all, methane is a greenhouse gas, and is emitted by cattle in large quantities, so it is caused by man, but not by the burning of fossil fuel. Then again, volcanoes and other natural processes create copious amounts of CO2.

Some scientists, such as Dr. Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, believe that the rise is caused by a rise in solar radiation, a cyclical pattern that they see going far back in geologic history. This explanation has the advantage of providing a reason for periods of global warming (and cooling) before human existence. Other climatologists point out that the geological record shows that some past rises in CO2 were preceded by temperature rises, and thus could not have been causes of those temperature increases. There must have been a different cause (such as increased solar radiation). Another recent theory is that temperature fluctuations may be caused by increased cloud formation resulting from increased cosmic radiation. And prominent Narrow Theory critic Richard Lindzen (a meteorologist at MIT) disputes whether rising temperatures will increase storm activity.

I am not a climate scientist. I do not know if complete convergence among climate scientists will ever occur, or if it does, whether it will be convergence on all three theses, or fewer. But I don't have to be a climate scientist to see that there is at present nothing approaching complete convergence on the Narrow Theory.

Turn to the Grand Theory, and things get very curious. While there seems to be a preponderance (though nowhere near a complete convergence) of opinion on the Narrow Theory, there isn't even anything approaching a consensus on the Grand Theory. For instance, an NREP (National Registry of Environmental Professionals) survey of licensed environmental specialists shows that only 66% consider the rate of global warming a serious problem facing the planet (with roughly the same percentage believing that the U.S. should do more to address the issue), and that only 39% consider regulation of carbon emissions as the most important tool in addressing global warming.

Nevertheless, it appears that many climatologists give evidence for the Narrow Theory - usually by showing that the carbon dioxide building up in the atmosphere has a human stamp - but then essentially assume that all the other theses of the Grand Theory follow automatically.

This doesn't surprise me, because, again, most of the other theses of the Grand Theory are economic or even moral, hence not in the climatologists' domain of expertise. Such things frequently happen with multi-domain metanarratives. Because the experts in one field (say, atmospheric physics) don't know much about another field (say, agricultural economics), they can't agree or disagree with the experts in that field in any meaningful way. This is why these metanarratives are more often put forward by advocacy groups than by groups of scientists reasoning as scientists.

It is easy to see why certain advocacy groups oppose the Grand Theory. Most obviously, opposition is clearly in the self-interest of the fossil fuel industries. But who pushes the theory? Five kinds of people reflexively support it:

The first, and some of the most exuberant, are people with a religious faith that dovetails with the Theory. I have in mind the pagan, neo-Romantic Greens who worship Mother Earth, and believe that She is being ravished by Corrupt Mankind. These folks have been around since at least Rousseau. They are especially common among baby boomers, many of whom were hippies before being compelled by economic reality to acquire a job, and are still in touch with their tree-hugging inner selves. The idea of sinful industrial man being punished for the offense of developing the planet for such filthy purposes as survival excites these folks more than all the Viagra in Vegas. Their political force is a phalanx of well-funded environmental organizations: Greenpeace, the National Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, etc.

The second sort of people who reflexively support the Grand Theory are the open anticapitalists (socialists, Marxists, anarchists, and assorted other aging revolutionaries manqu‚s, pining for the Great Communist Heaven that has heretofore eluded them). They hate capitalism generally, but American industry in particular. American prosperity sticks in their craw. It shows what free enterprise can do. These people love the Kyoto Accord precisely because it proposes to channel industry into China and Brazil, while throwing massive numbers of Americans out of work. If implemented, it would allow them to exclaim, "Can't you see, worker? Can't you see how the evil multinational corporations deliberately send your jobs abroad?" And, as believers in equalizing world incomes, they would have the pleasure of equalizing America downward.

The third group advocating the Grand Theory consists of global redistributionist, Wilsonian liberals and one-world bureaucrats. These people also want to end global income inequality, even if ending it comes at the price of ending global prosperity. It galls them to see America so rich and third-world countries so poor, although they are congenitally unable to see that the blame lies with the bad governments that have afflicted the third world. To admit that would be to "blame the victim."

The fourth group enamored of the Grand Theory is that of the modern statist liberals. Modern liberals love the extensive control of the economy that taxation and regulation bring them. The pork that statist liberals derive from the Grand Theory is not trivial. The yearly spending on "alternative energy" alone is $14 billion, and statist politicians get to hand it out. More, vastly more, can be expected from fuller applications of the Theory.

The fifth group of reflexive advocates is, of course, the individuals and corporations who stand to gain financially from extensive regulation of the energy industries. Groups 4 and 5 often work together. For example, prominent advocates of the "cap and trade" proposal (a proposal to set emission targets, and allow those companies who beat the targets to sell their "savings credits" to companies which fail to meet their targets) are the large brokerage firms Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, who are happy to testify in favor of the Grand Theory in hearings run by Democratic power players such as Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer. Probably the main player here is USCAP - the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, which includes energy companies, brokerage firms, and manu-facturers, as well as some big environmentalist organizations (Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change). All this is classic rent-seeking.

Add to group five the usual gathering of weasels, to wit, parasitic trial lawyers who will rip off uncountable billions by suing productive enterprises because of CO2 emissions. Naturally, California has jumped into the lead here. State Attorney General Jerry Brown (yes, Governor Moonbeam, redivivus) is aggressively pursuing a federal lawsuit directed at the major auto makers, seeking billions of dollars in compensation because cars allegedly constitute a "nuisance" by contributing to global warming. You might well ask why Moonbeam didn't start by suing the utilities firms (which, after all, use fossil fuels to run their power plants). But no: California suffered power shortages a few years back, and the voters tossed out a recently reelected governor because they held him to blame. The attorney general knows this. Also, he has a long-standing hatred of private cars; during his own eight years as governor, he notoriously refused to build any freeways. State by state, industry by industry, such junk lawsuits will proliferate........

Much more here





Live Earth: change the record

The anti-development message of the Al Gore-inspired gig planned for July is nothing to sing and dance about

How do we stop this global disaster? No, not climate change, stoopid - Live Earth! This 24-hour smugfest of seven concerts on six different continents will bring together 150 acts including Madonna, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Kanye West, the Foo Fighters, Bon Jovi, Sheryl Crow...really, lots and lots of pop stars, with probably a squillion more guest appearances to be announced.

If you weren't feeling patronised enough by Live 8, the freebie gig in 2005 that called on G8 politicians to cancel Third World debt (which they were planning to do anyway), Live Earth might really tip you over the edge. It will consist of a rolling series of concerts in China, Australia, South Africa, the UK, Brazil, Japan and the USA on 7 July this year. The aim of the concerts is to raise lots of money so that the concert organisers (former US vice-president Al Gore and Live 8 producer Kevin Wall) can carry on bemoaning what human beings are doing to the planet through a new foundation called Save Our Selves (SOS).

What's SOS all about? `Save Our Selves is designed to trigger a mass-scale movement to combat our climate crisis. Our climate crisis affects everyone, everywhere. That's who SOS is aimed at. The magnitude of the climate crisis makes it so that only a global response can begin to address it. SOS asks all people to Save Our Selves because only we can. SOS is more than a distress call. The most important part is how people respond. As we move forward, SOS will not only issue the call, but will provide the solutions individuals, corporations, governments and the world can use in answering it.'

Decide for yourself whether the dominant tone is bombastic or melodramatic. But ticket-buyers for Live Earth might want to pause to think about their feelings at becoming a stage army for Gore and Wall's international consultancy service. Once SOS can say that `two billion people' watched its concerts and had their `awareness' raised, it can demand that politicians listen to its policy prescriptions. Why worry about winning elections when you can just organise a gig? Right, Al?

One criticism of the concerts is that they're likely to generate as much carbon dioxide as they save. After all, there will be 150 acts with electrically-powered equipment and chemically-powered entourages. They won't be travelling to their venues by bicycle, that's for sure. The organisers have promised to offset all the performers' flights and use carbon-neutral energy sources. (Ironically, when I debated with event spokesman Yusuf Robb on Irish radio station Newstalk this morning, he suggested Irish music fans should go to the London gig on a ferry or `take a Ryanair flight'. He clearly doesn't realise how much the Irish airline is hated by green campaigners on this side of the pond.)

Even if the concerts themselves are carbon-neutral, the organisers and performers quite clearly have lifestyles that are at odds with the message they are preaching to the rest of us. They own big cars, private jets, huge homes and enjoy the best of everything. Yet their advice to everyone else is that we must tighten our belts, rein in our ambitions, make do and mend etc, if we ever hope to Save Our Selves and the planet.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist (or a climate scientist for that matter) to work out that getting a bit of global exposure won't do any of these acts any harm. The newer performers will be hoping to use Live Earth as a platform to break through outside of their own countries. Some of the older performers need all the credibility they can get. For the more superannuated acts involved - for whom Madonna is rapidly becoming the role model - it won't be Save Our Selves so much as Save Our Sales.

Climate change is certainly the cause du jour for celebrities who want to prove that they aren't shallow prima donnas. Witness this month's Vanity Fair magazine, which features Leonardo Di Caprio, alongside Berlin Zoo's polar bear superstar, Knut, as an `eco-hero'. We can look forward to his own film about global warming, The 11th Hour, which will include such tub-thumping as this: `So, we find ourselves on the brink. It's clear humans have had a devastating impact on our planet's ecological web of life. Because we've waited, because we've turned our backs on nature's warning signs, and because our political and corporate leaders have consistently ignored the overwhelming scientific evidence, the challenges we face are that much more difficult. We are in the environmental age whether we like it or not.'

This is at least a bit more honest than Save Our Selves. SOS presents its arguments as being in the interests of people everywhere. But you know that, underneath, SOS has a fairly low opinion of humanity. Di Caprio just comes right out and says it: we must repent for our sins against nature. Leo is a wealthy man whose main claim to fame is pretending to be other people and living a glamorous lifestyle off his superstar salary. Environmentalism is the product of his nagging guilt about that fact.

And he's not alone, as James Heartfield has argued on spiked: `[O]ne could state as a law of politics that the relationship between green thinking and increasing consumption is not contradictory, but complementary. The greater role that consumption plays in our lives, the more we are predisposed to worrying about the planet.. As sure as night follows day, the very people that are most preoccupied with the environment will increase their consumption from one year to the next.'

The real problem with Live Earth, with Vanity Fair and with every other `green special' of one sort or another is that they send out a message which is not simply misplaced but downright reactionary. When human beings were part of `our planet's ecological web of life' our lives were nasty, brutish and short. Only by steadily separating ourselves from that web of life and manipulating it in a host of ways for our own ends have some people been able to enjoy long and relatively comfortable lives.

The pressing political question of our age should be about how we can both improve our lives still further and ensure that everyone in the world enjoys the benefits. The message of SOS seems to be that we've gone too far and we need to call a halt to development. That's nothing to sing and dance about.

Source






Perfect storm for global warming fight

Weather used to be the ultimate safe topic for conversation. That was before climate change came along. Indeed, we've witnessed a sudden shift in Washington's conventional wisdom on this topic. Virtually every major player on and off Capitol Hill has concluded that the global-warming train is leaving the station, and no one dares to be left behind. Comprehensive legislation to mandate reductions in CO2 emissions from power plants, autos, factories, farms and office buildings has line-jumped the congressional agenda.

The perfect storm started last November when Democrats regained control of Congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly created the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and named as chairman her close ally and rabid environmentalist, Rep. Ed Markey (D.-Mass.). Sen. Barbara Boxer (D.-Calif.), another ardent environmentalist, assumed chairmanship of the Senate Environment Committee.

The storm gathered strength in January when California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed to a mandatory 25% reduction in statewide CO2 emissions from by 2020 and an even more ambitious goal -- reducing emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.

Category Five status arrived in early February with the release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report. Media outlets labeled it "dire" and speculated openly about a "a 21-foot increase in sea level, forcing the relocation of more than 300 million people living in low-lying areas worldwide."

Actually, as my Heritage colleague Ben Lieberman points out, the study "retreated on a number of important assertions," including a downward revision in future sea-level estimates and hedges considerably on whether global warming contributes to powerful hurricanes like Katrina. Nonetheless, industry groups sought shelter -- and purchased tickets on the global-warming train:

* On the day the UN report emerged, Exxon Mobil conceded "it is prudent to develop and implement strategies that address the risks [of global warming]," including "putting policies in place that start us on a path to reduce emissions."

* The utility industry quickly followed. The Edison Electric Institute and the Electric Power Supply Association braced "for expected federal mandates" and announced support for federal caps on CO2 emissions.

* The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of CEOs from 10 blue-chip companies and four environmental organizations, called for a 10% to 30% reduction in worldwide atmospheric concentrations of CO2 within 15 years, and up to 80% by 2050.

* Meanwhile, other global-warming skeptics, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, find themselves sidelined by splits among their members.

Conspiracy theorists believe those splits aren't accidental and point to efforts by left-leaning foundations such as the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, which has convinced 42 large corporations -- including Intel, Alcoa, Georgia-Pacific, Sunoco, Lockheed Martin, Weyerhaeuser and Toyota -- to embrace ambitious global-warming legislation. Pew's president, Eileen Claussen, has even boasted about this divide-and-conquer strategy: "The whole objective was to split the industry so you could get people who were progressive to begin to do something" to advance global-warming legislation.

But the companies climbing aboard are hardly motivated by altruism. "We also believe," Pew's website states, "that companies taking early action on climate strategies and policy will gain sustained competitive advantage over their peers."

Indeed, some of these companies want to force their competitors to shoulder costs they have already borne. "Since 1991," a DuPont executive recently told Congress, "we've reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 72% globally and avoided $3 billion of energy costs." Having incurred these costs, DuPont now wants its competitors "across the entire U.S. economy" to do likewise. But, it adds, any global-warming legislation must recognize "voluntary actions taken to reduce emissions," thereby exempting DuPont from its economic consequences. Similarly, a BP executive told Congress that "from a business point of view, [this] is the right direction to take."

Sen. Kit Bond (R.-Mo.) has offered us a much-needed historical lesson -- namely, that Enron once trolled these waters. "An internal Enron memo," The Washington Post reported in 2002, "said the Kyoto agreement, if implemented, would do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory initiative" and would be "good for Enron stock."

To Bond, Enron's self-interested advocacy of a global-warming agreement "shows how companies of all stripes sometimes are willing to work for environmental goals because it fits their business model, pads their bottom line" and "maybe or maybe not" furthers noble environmental ends. "That's why," he concluded, "I'm not worried . about what certain companies think about carbon caps," but rather how these companies "would profit off of the pain of other industries and consumers . who are captive to . other sources of energy."

Source

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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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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