ONLINE SUPPORT FOR BECK PAPER

An email below from Prof. Ernst Beck [egbeck@biokurs.de] regarding his recent paper on CO2:

Additional to my paper "180 Years of atmospheric CO2 Gas Analysis by Chemical Methods" in ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT VOLUME 18 No. 2 2007 I want to give you access to a supplementing webpage with the most important historical resources. See here. Because of explosive content of my paper let me give you some further comments.

It's clear that it is not possible to reconstruct 150 years of scientific evolution concerning one subject thoroughly in 20 pages. This is the main difference to other papers concerning one single problem. I had to sample, evaluate and select hundreds of problems. Therefore my selection out of available data can always be criticized with all possible arguments.

For this reason the online support should serve as a first help before projected publication of the monograph with all inspected sources. So perhaps you realize that my paper is only a first sign of pointing to those "forgotten data". Your work will start right here. Probably you also agree that my paper is not in first place a climate paper, it's a chemical paper, because most historic resources are written by chemists.

As a biochemist I feel much more connected to CO2 as a climate scientist because of CO2 being an essential substance for all living things. Modern propagated image of carbon dioxide as a climate killer contradicts natural importance (biology, chemistry, medicine, nutrition science) in total.

Looking at history of modern natural science and measuring CO2 we see a timeline of two lines of arguments:

1. a 200 hundred year period of consecutive evolving natural science establishing most modern knowledge and laws of nature ( honoured by dozends of NOBEL awards in 20th century)

2. a 60 year period of climate science in parallel to (1) establishing a different, contradicting view of CO2 in nature with no real knowledge but most hypothesis and speculations.

Viewed from point 2 my paper is junk science. Viewed from a scientific point we have to evaluate verify and falsify both lines and join them together without excluding one or both a priori at the base of laws of nature.

Prof Beck is at Merian-Schule Freiburg Dep. Biotechnology and Nutrition Science 79104 Freiburg Rheinstr. 3 Germany






You would never guess from the latest nonsense below that plants THRIVE with more warmth and more CO2

Nor would you guess that warmer seas give off more water vapour and hence lead to MORE rain overall. Nor would you guess that life THRIVED during earlier warm periods in the earth's past. This nonsense ignores basic science

EQUATORIAL lands that are home to hundreds of millions of people will become uninhabitable as food and water run out due to climate change, scientists will warn this week. A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be published on Friday, will warn that the temperature rises of 2-3C predicted by 2050 spell global disaster for both humanity and the environment.

It will say that up to 40% of animal and plant species face extinction as rising temperatures destroy the ecosystems that support them. And it will point out that the 29 billion tons of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere each year are acidifying the oceans – threatening to destroy coral reefs, plankton and many commercial fish species.

By the middle of the century, the report will warn, more than 200m people could have been forced from their native lands by rising sea levels, floods and droughts, with many more facing early deaths from malnutrition and heat stress.

The report comes amid government embarrassment over the latest figures for Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions. Last week David Miliband, the environment secretary, admitted they had risen by 1.5% last year despite repeated Labour pledges to cut them.

“The picture that emerges from the research is quite appalling,” said Rachel Warren, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and one of the IPCC’s senior authors. “It is just horrendous realising what damage climate change can do to ecosystems.”

The IPCC report is a collation of the best peer-reviewed scientific research into the impact of climate change, published over the past five years or so. It will say that many of the worst effects on humans will be caused by water – or lack of it – in the form of floods, drought, melting glaciers, rising sea levels and ocean acidification.

Nearly a third of the world’s land surface may be at risk of extreme drought by 2099,[What? With warmer seas giving off more water vapour??] compared with about 1%. Such a change would destroy farmland and water resources and lead to mass migrations of “environmental refugees”.

The IPCC will also warn that the Amazon rainforest could be in danger. Professor Diana Liverman, director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, said the region was already experiencing an alarming reduction in rain. “The warming of the oceans seems to be changing the water cycle,” she said. In lands close to the equator, especially in Africa, declining crop yields could leave hundreds of millions of people unable to grow food.

In Europe, one of the most obvious early impacts will be the destruction of Alpine ski resorts, with about 70% losing snow cover by 2050. The IPCC will say it is “too late” to avert some degree of climate change. It will call on humanity to cooperate on adapting to the changes – while trying to limit them by cutting emissions.

Source




BRITAIN DUBIOUS ABOUT RENEWABLE FUEL - BECAUSE IT'S AMERICAN

Britain is looking for a way to tackle imports of biofuels from the United States which it believes will undermine the commercial case for European production, UK transport minister Stephen Ladyman said. "People who are being subsidised to produce renewable fuels in the United States are now planning to export that fuel to Europe where they hope to get a second subsidy when it is sold in Europe," he said. "That is undermining the commercial case for investment in Europe. It is one of the things that we have got to try and sort out," he told a conference organised by biofuels industry lobby group, the Environmental Industries Commission.

The United States has seen rapid growth in its bioethanol industry, boosted by strong goverment support motivated by a desire for energy security. European biodiesel makers have made the same complaint to Brussels -- that increasing sales of US biodiesel are being made in the EU with the help of unfair subsidies.

Britain offers tax incentives for motor fuels which contain biofuels as part of its effort to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases which are believed to contribute to global warming. The incentive is provided to both domestically produced and imported biofuels. Bioethanol, which is usually blended with petrol, can be made from grains or sugar crops. The US and Brazil are the world's two leading producers of bioethanol. Britain currently has no significant bioethanol plants although many are planned. It currently imports much of its bioethanol from Brazil.

Source




BRITAIN PLANS TO CUT EMISSIONS BY CUTTING DOWN TREES!

Back to pre-industrial wood-burning -- with all that lovely smoke pollution! Greenies running around in circles yet again



Britain hopes to slash carbon emissions by burning more home-grown wood under a new government plan announced on Wednesday. The Forestry Commission's Woodfuel Strategy for England aims to make 2 million tonnes a year more wood available for fuel by 2020 through better forest management and support. Burning this much wood, equal to about 3.6 million barrels of oil a year, should avoid an estimated 400,000 tonnes of carbon annually, biodiversity minister Barry Gardiner said. "Using wood instead of fossil fuels means that sustainably managed woodland can be a significant resource for a low-carbon economy," Gardiner said in a statement.

Wood production in England will have to increase by 60 percent to achieve the target and current wood supply chains are not capable of getting that much material to market, the Forestry Commission said in its report. The carbon released into the atmosphere by burning wood is partially absorbed by growing more trees, which means lowering emissions from the energy sector compared to coal, gas or oil.

Rather than importing other biofuels, which can come from environmentally-questionable sources, Britain should use its own woodland areas in an environmentally sustainable way, the plan's backers say. The Forestry Commission, which manages more than a million hectares of UK woodland, says more investment is needed to get the woodfuel market working more efficiently.

The government has set a domestic target to reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2010 and 60 percent by 2050 and the biggest contribution biomass can make to that goal is through heat generation, the Commission said. Unlike some European countries where communal heating systems are widely used, making the switch to biomass fairly cheap and easy, British homes are nearly all heated individually with gas, coal or oil. This is a major obstacle to the growth of biomass heating and support from government is needed to ensure dirty fossil fuel boilers are replaced with wood-burning ones quickly enough to establish effective supply chains, the Commission said. Currently, biomass provides 3 percent of UK energy needs.

Source







Climate doomsayers all at sea

Comment from popular Australian columnist Piers Akerman

Around 18,000 years ago, what is now Sydney Harbour was about 15km inshore of the coastline, and the sea level was at its lowest point, about 120m below the present sea level. The site of the Opera House, on Bennelong Point, was almost midway between the beach and Homebush, and South Head was midway between the Opera House and the coast. According to the Australian Museum, the sea reached its present level about 6000 years ago.

So, the sea level rose one metre every 100 years from its low point to the current level during that period. Not evenly, on a couple of occasions the sea rose several metres in very short periods - over a few decades. At other times, things stalled. But the worst-case scenario posed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which now has the worry warts twisting their knickers so anxiously, has sea level rising about 0.3m per 100 years, about a third of the rise known to have occurred in the relatively recent past. And they blame it all on Man!

There is an old joke about the smartest invention in the world, and one fellow says he believes it is the thermos flask because in winter it keeps hot food hot and in summer it keeps cold drinks cold. "Now, how does it know that?" he asks. Well, how do the experts know that Man is responsible for the current changes in climate?

Answer: they don't. They're guessing, and they are dressing up their guesses with computer modelling which is so unreliable that it can't even predict with any great success what the weather will be next year.

It's a jolly good thing there were no computer modellers around to scare the pants off the Sydney locals (had they been wearing pants) 16,000 years ago, and warn them to stop cooking their fish and goannas over carbon-emitting campfires, to throw away their fire sticks and eat their possum raw and like it. As for the pollution caused by the so-called science of fire-stick farming, forget it! Those bushfires every year must have sent the CO2 levels rocketing.

Or wasn't global warming responsible for the rising sea levels? If it wasn't, what was? And why were the sea levels sinking the beachside suburbs of the period three times faster than anything we face today ? It is easy to be afraid listening to Al Gore, Nicholas Stern and Tim Flannery, but it is difficult not to be concerned once their theories are questioned. The IPCC has long predicted that climate change was going to bring about more violent weather events than we have experienced, but that ignores the record in both hemispheres.

In our neighbourhood, however, the IPCC is quite specific. It says Australia will be hit by more frequent and intense heatwaves, bushfires, floods, drought and landslides as global warming sends temperatures soaring this century. Oh yeah? Temperatures in the southern hemisphere haven't altered in 25 years and, according to the records, the global temperature has been stationary since 1998.

What the scaremongers don't explain is that the temperature is measured on the Earth's surface, by balloons rising through the atmosphere and from satellites which look at particular molecular structures as they circle the globe. The purest of these is the satellite measurement because it is least affected by incidental events, but all of the above show that southern hemisphere temperatures haven't altered significantly over the past 25 years, despite the computer modelling which shows that the less polluted hemisphere should have become warmer than the northern hemisphere, which is shielded by particulate matter.

In fact, the compilers of the most recent IPCC report had to slash estimates of global temperature rises by nearly one third. Sane scientists, who are not chasing the climate-change dollar, joke that if this trend continues, the IPCC will be predicting another ice age within 10 years. Whoops! There were scientists pandering to the market for gloom and doom 30 years ago who were predicting a coming ice age. Lesson: hang on to that heavy overcoat.

The Great Barrier Reef is also under threat, and even though the greatest damage done in recent times was caused by an inundation of fresh water from a cloud burst, this dire warning ignores the reality that corals have lived in warmer seas than we now have, and overlooks the fact that they adjust. OK, the fossil coral outcrops metres above sea level didn't make the cut but, then again, the Great Barrier Reef was once a plain with no coral at all.

Those running around with their petticoats pulled firmly over their heads don't want to know that the Romans grew wine grapes in Britain, that Greenland got its name because it used to be warm enough for farmers, or that the Earth's climate has always been changeable. But they claim to have science on their side. Then so, too, did all those who thought Y2K - the Millennium Bug - was going to wipe out civilisation as we know it. There is a debate to be had, but it serves no one if those promoting fear are resorting to pseudo-science and questionable modelling to make their case.

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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