Slimy Greenie language

Post below lifted from Cheat-Seeking Missiles -- which see for links

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is proposing to declare the ice floe populations of the polar bear to be threatened with extinction -- a bureaucratic process that is supposed to be based on the best available science. Since the proposed action is predicated on global warming's threat to the species, the best available science should be abundant and above reproach, right? After all, the global warming debate is over, isn't it?

Well, it appears the Fish & Wildlife Service is having trouble finding that definitive, clear science. My friend Jim forwarded to me an official comment letter submitted to the Service by a certain Julie Smithson. I don't know who Smithson is, but her email address is "propertyrights@___.com," so she sounds like my kind of gal. Here's a splended excerpt from her letter:

The use of nebulous, unprovable words [in the proposed listing], including, but not limited to:

"might" (Pages 8, 49, 85, 86, 140, 147, 155, 243, 252, and 259 -- Page 243 is of special concern),

"may" [not to be confused with references to the month of May] (Pages 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 64, 67, 68, 71, 74, 77, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90 ["...

may be difficult to measure ..." and "... may initially obscure trends ..."], 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 107, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 139, 140, 142, 145, 149, 153, 155, 158, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 174, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187 [many times on this page], 188, 189, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 250, 251, 254, 257, and 259),

"possibly" (Pages 13, 16, 27, 33, 41, 54, 72, 80, 100, 101, 104, 105, 184, 185, 187, 246, 248, 249, and 251),

"potential" (Pages 21, 32, 34, 37, 58, 60, 68, 75, 82, 95, 97, 110, 126, 128, 129, 130, 138, 140, 141, 145, 152, 153, 156 [three times], 166 [three times], 169, 170 [three times], 175, 176, 178, 179, 183, 187, 191, 210, 236, 239, 249, 254, 257, and 259)

"potentially" (Pages 20, 24, 42, 99, 113, and 169), and "could" (Pages 13, 15, 18, 20, 27, 28, 37, 42, 52, 54, 72 [many times], 74, 76, 77, 83, 85, 86, 87 [many times], 89, 90, 91, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101, 103, 107, 110, 115, 126, 137, 138, 142, 143, 144, 147, 153, 155, 165, 168, 169 [several times], 170, 180, 181, 184, 186, 187, 189, and 251),

clearly illustrate failure to prove any need for polar bear listing.

Smithson concludes:

Unless and until such specious language is no longer used in "proposed rules," I recommend that not only the polar bear, but also all proposals for listing, be rescinded: immediately.

She's entirely right about other proposed endangered species listings, which are full not just of specious language, but of flawed studies posing under the guise of science as well. But there's a more important point to be made here: If the Fish & Wildlife Service can't make a case for the polar bear, which supposedly has been placed at risk by one of the less controversial claims of the Warmies, what of all the other claims?

They are might's, may's and could's as well. Oceans rising to flood seaside populations? "Potentially." Drought destroying global agriculture? "Possibly." Benefits from spending hundreds of billions of dollars on attempts to stop climate change? "May be difficult to Measure."





You can question free trade but not climate change

If you question whether global warming is happening, or whether human activity is causing it, or whether it's worth doing anything about it, then you must be a crack-pot. You are standing athwart the "consensus of scientists." You are disputing "settled science." You are a "global warming denier," the moral equivalent of an apologist for the Nazi holocaust.

But no such accusations are made against the protectionists who question the benefits of free trade among nations. Such people are in fact standing athwart 250 years of economics, and an overwhelming consensus of living economists. These protectionists are denying the enormous gains in standards of living and human freedom that are the direct result of free global trade.

Make no mistake about it. The benefits of free trade are settled science. It goes all the way back to the 18th century, beginning with the path-breaking work of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. From then till now, the science of economics has deepened its virtually unanimous embrace of free trade. Today's best-selling college economics textbook, Macroeconomics by Harvard's N. Gregory Mankiw, enshrines among the "ten principles of economics" the axiom that "Trade Can Make Everyone Better Off."

Indeed it can, and indeed it has. During the last several decades of unprecedented global economic growth we have witnessed increasing global trade and falling trade barriers. For all the worry about "outsourcing American jobs," the U.S. unemployment rate stands today at a low 4.5 percent. On the other hand, the Great Depression of the 1930s involved a collapse of global trade, triggered by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Back then there was no outsourcing. But the unemployment rate exceeded 20 percent.

Economic theory aside, and real-world results aside, there's another fundamental argument for free trade. Simply, free trade is a human right. People have an unalienable right to trade with each other as they choose, be they next-door neighbors or half a world apart.

So why is it that when people question the free-trade consensus - when they deny the manifest evidence of its success or challenge its status as a human right - they are not treated like those who question global warming? Question the global warming consensus and you're something between a fool and a Nazi. But question free trade? Ah . that's different. That's politically correct.

Consider the front page article in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. It celebrated the courage of a handful of economists - all of whom happen to be politically active - who are "rethinking" and "critiquing" free trade (not "denying," mind you). Princeton's Alan Blinder, for example, is saying that, thanks to the new technologies of global trade, "40 million American jobs [are] at risk of being shipped out of the country in the next decade or two."

Of course, the story's author doesn't wonder how this brave rethinker and critiquer can predict the number of job losses 20 years into the future, or why he is silent on the number of new jobs that will be created over the same period. We learn only that "Mr. Blinder's job-loss estimates . are electrifying Democratic candidates," and that he is advising the campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the issue. Would Clinton and Obama have been "electrified" if Blinder had estimated that global warming will go away over the next decade or two? It's doubtful.

A case in point: Last October, liberal senators Jay Rockefeller and Olympia Snowe sent a letter to the CEO of Exxon Mobil urging him - one might say bullying him - to cut off his company's funding of a "small cadre of global climate change skeptics," to cease its "dangerous support of the `deniers.'" But when it comes to free trade, the liberals now in control of Congress are only too happy to support the deniers, whether or not they have Alan Blinder's credentials. The hypocrisy is undeniable.

To wit, when best-selling author Michael Crichton - who, as a trained doctor, at least has a background in science - questioned global warming while testifying before a Republican-chaired Senate committee, leftist bloggers dismissed him as an "egomaniacal `novelist.'" But in testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade this week, the star witness was CNN's Lou Dobbs. His qualifications to stand against a 250-year scientific consensus on free trade are . well . come to think of it, he doesn't have any. He's just a well-known TV talking head who most nights can be seen ranting against the evils of trade and extolling the virtues of protectionism.

Global warming "deniers" are attacked, not because they stand against a scientific consensus, but because they stand against a powerful liberal special interest group: the environmental lobby. The global-warming threat must be maximized so that environmentalists can keep raising more money and getting more political influence.

Meanwhile, free-trade "deniers" are lionized, despite the fact that they stand against a scientific consensus and because they stand with a powerful liberal special-interest group: unions. Free trade must be opposed, because it means the transformation of traditional union jobs into non-union jobs that are better suited for a dynamic global economy.

So none of this has anything to do with science or scientific consensus after all. And it's certainly not a matter of promoting prosperity or preserving human rights. It's just liberal politics. And nowadays, that's something nobody dares deny.

Source






Peak performance?

Peter Odell, one of the most astute, life-long observers of global oil scene, calls them "peak-oilers." Some of them were quite unhappy when I pointed out (in Energy at the Crossroads, in these pages, and in Worldwatch in January 2006) their propensity for wholesaling catastrophic scenarios of the world once the global oil production peaks and begins to decline. But how else can one label such writings as Richard C. Duncan's "Olduvai theory" according to which the declining oil extraction will plunge humanity into life comparable to that experienced by some of the first primitive hominids who inhabited that famous Kenyan gorge some 2.5 million years ago? And no one else can be blamed for the repeated failure of their forecasts but the prominent peak-oilers themselves. According to Colin Campbell the global oil extraction was to peak in 1989; Ivanhoe's peak was in 2000; Deffeyes set it first in 2003 and then, with ridiculous accuracy, on the Thanksgiving of 2005.

Well, the numbers for 2006 are in. And they show that even after OPEC once again cut its production (by 1.2 million barrels a day effective November 1, 2006) in order to arrest yet another rapid fall in prices, the global oil supply for the entire year rose once again, by about 0.85 million barrels a day. That is about 42 million metric tons a year, or more than the annual output of Oman or nearly twice the annual extraction in Azerbaijan, a major oil power on the Caspian Sea. But once we take into account the need to replace worldwide reserve depletion (currently amounting to more than one million barrels a day) this means that some 2 million barrels of new oil found their way on the global market, an equivalent of adding a bit more than UK's entire North Sea production or Iraq's annual extraction.

This supply had fully covered the global demand even with OPEC's production cuts and with China's record imports of oil bought in order to start filling the country's new massive strategic oil reserve. The average price of OPEC's basket of exported crude oils dropped from the peak of about $70/barrel in July to $55/barrel by the end of the year. And then it slid below $50/barrel in January 2007. In 2006 non-OPEC production rose strongly in the countries of the former Soviet Union, surpassing the level of 12 million barrels a day for the first time since the collapse of the USSR and coming within 5 percent of the record annual production reached in 1987 So much for the rumored inability of Russia to maintain its production, and for the "disappointing" results in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan.

Higher outputs came from Africa, particularly from Angola, as well as from Latin America, and even China recorded a small increase. Extraction in the United States, still recovering from the Katrina damage in the Gulf, dipped a bit but it is expected to increase this year (by about 4%) and again in 2008. And the world's largest oil company, Saudi Aramco, continues with its plans to expand its production capacity from the current 11 million barrels a day to 12 millions barrels a day by 2009. .

If one is to believe the catastrophic prophecies of Matthew Simmons, another prominent peak-oiler, this must be the stupidest business decision of the 21st century. Simmons claims that Saudis have falsified their oil reserve data so much that in reality they have only a fraction of the claimed oil left in the ground, and that their, and the world's, largest oilfield, al-Ghawar, has been so damaged by waterflooding (used for enhanced recovery of oil) that it faces imminent and massive extraction downturn. And yet Saudis will be investing nearly $50 billion between 2007 and 2011 to get this nonexistent oil to the global market. Perhaps they know something that Simmons is not aware of (these days it is, after all, de rigueur to say only bad things about Saudis).

And, of course, market forces eventually assert themselves as prices rise. In 2006 oil demand was down in all of the leading importing affluent countries (US, EU and Japan) and no dramatic increases are expected this year. Consequently, global oil extraction may be lower in 2007 than it was in 2006, but if such a dip were to take place (China's and India's imports will make it unlikely) it would reflect a reaction to prices, not any physical inability to produce more oil or outright absence of requisite oil reserves in the Earth's crust.

That another non-peak year came and went is no surprise (merely a rational expectation). But I was surprised with what I found when this non-event led me to return to King Hubbert's original peak oil forecasts and to discover how badly off they were.

Hubbert is the patron saint of peak-oilers, seen as an infallible and astonishingly prescient seer because he correctly predicted the peak of the US oil production in 1970. Not quite. In his March 8, 1956 presentation before the Spring Meeting of the Southern District Division of Production of the American Petroleum Institute, Hubbert plotted two production curves, one for the ultimate US output of 150 billion barrels that peaked in 1962 at 2.6 billion barrels a year, and another one for the ultimate output of 200 billion barrels that peaked in 1968 at 3 billion barrels a year. In later revisions of this original work (the last major one was published in October 1968 and published as a chapter in the National Academy Science's Resources and Man in 1969) he put the peak of the complete cycle of US petroleum liquids (that is crude oil and natural gas liquids) at "about 3.5 billion barrels a year . . . during the first half of the 1970-decade." The actual peak came in 1970 at 4.12 billion barrels, 18% above Hubbert's prediction.

That is not an insignificant miss, but it is a small error compared to Hubbert's insistence that the complete production curve of a resource is perfectly symmetrical -- that is, that the post-peak decline of extraction is a mirror image of the incline. This led Hubbert to produce a curve that put the US oil output in 1980 at about 3 billion barrels (while the actual production was 3.7 billion barrels) and the 2000 extraction at 1.2 billion barrels. The actual extraction was 2.8 billion barrels or 2.33 times higher, hardly an enviable accuracy for a 30-year forecast.

And Hubbert's record is no better in forecasting the peak of global oil extraction. In 1969 he put it (for two different estimates of ultimately recoverable oil) either in 1990 at 25 billion barrels, or in 2000 at 37 billion barrels, projecting again a symmetrical curve and continuing high demand that prevailed during the 1960s.

He could not, as nobody did, anticipate a substantial decline of oil demand following OPEC's two rounds (1973-74, 1979-81) of extortionary price increases. Consequently, the global oil extraction did not peak either in 1990, when it was actually about 4% below the level forecast by Hubbert, or in 2000, when it was, at 27.4 billion barrels, 26% lower than Hubbert's predicted peak. And while the global production still keeps going up, it was still below 31 billion barrels a year in 2006. So in this case Hubbert was nowhere near being correct either on the timing or the production level.

These facts, I am sure, will not make the least difference to the devotees of an imminent oil peak whose mantra has been to elevate the timing of an obviously inevitable event to a dreadful watershed of history, and whose insistence has been on pinpointing its largely irrelevant arrival. Irrelevant because once the extraction of conventional liquid oil peaks we will intensify our (already advancing) efforts to produce more non-conventional oil and to use more natural gas and accelerate the production of gas- and coal- and biomass-derived liquids.

Finally, a practical reminder: If there is an imminent peak of oil extraction, should not then the prospective shortage of that increasingly precious fuel result in relentlessly rising prices and should not buying a barrel of oil and holding onto it be an unbeatable investment? But a barrel of a high-quality crude, say West Texas intermediate, bought at $12.23/b in 1976 as a nest-egg for retirement and sold before the end of 2006 at $60/b would have earned (even when assuming no storage costs) about 1.2% a year, a return vastly inferior to almost any guaranteed investment certificate and truly a miserable gain when compared with virtually any balanced stock market fund. And a freedom-at-55 investor who bought that barrel at 30 years of age in 1980 and sold in 2005 would have realized a nearly forty per cent loss on his precious investment. Being a true believer in imminent peak oil may be fine as a provocative notion but not as a means of securing a comfortable retirement.

Source




Mankind 'can't influence' climate says Australian expert

MANKIND is naive to think it can influence climate change, according to a prize-winning Australian geologist. Solar activity is a greater driver of climate change than man-made carbon dioxide, argues Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and winner of several notable science prizes. "When meteorologists can change the weather then we can start to think about humans changing climate," Prof Plimer said. "I think we really are a little bit naive to think we can change astronomical and solar processes."

Speaking last night after presenting his theory for the first time, to the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy in Sydney, Prof Plimer said he had researched the history of the sun, solar and supernovae activity and had been able to correlate global climates with solar activity. "But correlations don't mean anything, you really need a causation," Prof Plimer said. So he then examined how cosmic radiation builds up clouds. A very active sun blows away the cosmic radiation, while a less active sun allows radiation to build up, he said. "So you can very much tie in temperature, cloud formation, cosmic radiation and the sun," he said.

The next part of Prof Plimer's research was to examine the sources of carbon dioxide. He said he found that about 0.1 per cent of the atmospheric carbon dioxide was due to human activity and much of the rest due to little-understood geological phenomena.

Prof Plimer also argued El Nino and La Nina were caused by major processes of earthquake activity and volcanic activity in the mid-ocean ridges, rather than any increase in greenhouse gases. Nor does the melting of polar ice have anything to do with man-made carbon dioxide, he said. "Great icebergs come off, not due to temperature change but due to the physics of ice and the flow of ice," Prof Plimer said. "There's a lag, so that if temperature rises, carbon dioxide rises 800 years later. "If ice falls into the ocean in icebergs that's due to processes thousands of years ago."



On the same basis, changes to sea level and temperature are also unrelated to anything happening today, he said. "It is extraordinarily difficult to argue that human-induced carbon dioxide has any effect at all," he said.

Prof Plimer added that as the planet was already at the maximum absorbance of energy of carbon dioxide, any more would have no greater effect. There had even been periods in history with hundreds of times more atmospheric carbon dioxide than now with "no problem", he said.

The professor, a member of the Australian Skeptics, an organisation devoted to debunking pseudo-scientific claims, denied his was a minority view. "You'd be very hard pushed to find a geologist that would differ from my view," he said. He said bad news was more fashionable now than good and that people had an innate tendency to want to be a little frightened. But Prof Plimer conceded the politics of greenhouse gas emissions meant that attention was being given to energy efficiency, which he supported. The professor, who is writing a book on the subject, said he only used validated scientific data, published in reputable peer-reviewed refereed journals, as the basis of his theories.

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

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