Tell a big enough lie often enough and people will believe it

As the article below shows, Dr Goebbels has able heirs among the Greenies. That corals FLOURISH in warmer waters is not mentioned. The Great Barrier Reef stretches over 1500 miles from North to South along Australia's East coast -- from quite cool to distinctly warm waters. And corals become MORE abundant moving Northwards -- i.e. as the waters get warmer

It is probably too late to save the Great Barrier Reef and other coral reefs from global warming. Even if governments implement far-reaching measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions, they will not prevent the annihilation of coral reefs around the world. These are the conclusions of analysis by leading marine scientists to be published today in the prestigious journal Science. "There is a terrible future in front of us for the reefs," said Canada-based United Nations University professor Peter Sale, one of 17 authors from seven nations of the Science paper.

On Wednesday, Kevin Rudd told the UN's Bali climate change conference that global warming was threatening Australian natural wonders such as the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu National Park and rainforests, killing rivers and exposing people to more frequent and ferocious bushfires.

The scientists present three scenarios for the future of coral reefs - the world's largest lifeforms - under different climatic conditions. If current conditions continue, with the stabilisation of temperatures and emissions at today's level of 380 parts per million (ppm), reefs will survive but undergo fundamental changes. However, scientists agree that stabilisation of current conditions is not possible. The paper warns that if emissions rise to between 450 and 500 ppm, with an associated temperature rise of 2C by 2050 - the most optimistic outcome predicted by the landmark study by British economist Nicholas Stern - reefs will suffer "vastly reduced habitat complexity and loss of biodiversity".

But if they rise above 500ppm, the minimum emission level forecast by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climage Change by 2050, reefs will become "rapidly eroding rubble banks". "These changes will reduce coral reef ecosystems to crumbling frameworks with few calcareous corals," the paper says. "It is clear that coral reefs as we know them today would be extremely rare." The scientists determined that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere of 380ppm was 80ppm higher than it has been for 740,000 years, and probably for as long as 20 million years.

Professor Sale, who is in Brisbane this week for a World Bank-sponsored marine science conference, said there was no point speculating about the outcome for reefs in the worst-case scenarios outlined by the Stern and IPCC reviews, of temperature rises as high as 6C. "In the best-case predictions, with temperature rises of 2C by 2050, the outlook can hardly be more dire," he said. However, he said some damage could be averted if radical measures were introduced to curb emissions. "There is a ray of hope, but it is fading fast."

Climate change sceptic Bob Carter, a James Cook University researcher, said while he was not familiar with the Science paper, caution needed to be exercised about "alarmist" climate modelling. "Too often these climate models are basically PlayStations which have not been validated scientifically," Dr Carter said.

But the lead author of the Science paper, University of Queensland professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, said the $7billion Great Barrier Reef tourism industry was at risk. "With conservative estimates predicting emission levels exceeding 500ppm, coral reefs will dwindle into insignificance," Professor Hoegh-Guldberg said. "These changes dwarf anything that happened in the Ice Age transitions and they are happening faster than Stern and the IPCC predicted. The outlook is very grim."

Note that Hoeghie has also blamed coral damage on COLD weather. Heads I win, tails you lose

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Some dangerous Bali nuttiness

The week started off with a cornucopia of "side events." These are sessions in which various climate lobbying organizations tout their proposals for solving the "climate crisis." As my first foray into the climate change meeting, I attended a session sponsored by the World Council of Churches on "The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework," a report supported by the Heinrich Boll Foundation and Christian Aid.

The report outlines an "emergency climate program" that aims to keep the earth's average temperate from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Keep in mind that average temperatures have already risen by as much as 0.8 degrees Celsius over the past century. In addition, some scientists believe that the amount of GHG already in the atmosphere will lead to an average temperature increased of 1.5 degrees Celsius even if there were no more emissions. So what allegedly must be done?

According to the study, global GHG emissions must peak by 2015 (seven years from now) and then begin to drop by 6 percent per year until 2050 to reach a level that is 80 percent below 1990 levels. The rich developed countries must cut their emissions by 90 percent by 2050. Even poor countries must cut their emission by 30 percent between 2020 and 2030. Note that these cuts are dramatically deeper than what is actually on the table here at the COP. Martin Khor, head of the international left-wing activist group the Third World Network said during the panel discussion that the latter cuts would come as a "shock" to developing nations such as India, China, and Brazil.

The study's authors argued that there is not only a climate crisis, but also a "development crisis." As evidence, they pointed out that 2 billion people lack clean cooking fuels, 1.5 billion are without electricity, 1 billion have no access to fresh water, and 2 million children die each year of diarrhea. Clearly, the first priority of people living in these conditions must be development. Interestingly, while environmental lobbyists tend to avoid saying words like "wealth" and "growth," "development" means that the world's poor need more wealth generated by economic growth.

Without going into the details, the Greenhouse Development Rights Framework (GDR) proposal foresees levying the equivalent of a climate "consumption luxury tax" on every person who earns over a "development threshold" of $9,000 per year. The idea is that rich people got rich in part by dumping carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil fuels into the atmosphere, leaving less space for poor people to dump their emissions. In one scenario, Americans would pay the equivalent of a $780 per person luxury tax annually, which amounts to sending $212 billion per year in climate reparations to poor countries to aid their development and help them adapt to climate change. In this scenario, the total climate reparations that the rich must transfer annually is over $600 billion. This contrasts with a new report commissioned by the U.N. Development Program that only demands $86 billion per year to avoid "adaptation apartheid."

The authors do not go into any specifics about what kinds of institutions-private, public or partnerships-would annually transfer $212 billion to poor countries from the U.S. Considering that the $2.3 trillion spent on foreign aid in the past 50 years has largely failed to generate economic growth or permanent improvements in living standards for most people living in poor countries, the institutional question is not trivial. By some estimates lifting trade barriers could produce benefits of $600 billion annually, reducing the number of people living on $2 per day by 144 million. A woman from Papua New Guinea in the audience warned that such climate aid was likely to disappear into the corrupt pockets of poor country politicians rather than lift poor people out of poverty. But the touching faith of climate campaigners in the efficacy of international and national bureaucracies is immune to such realities.

It is not also clear whether the authors think that rich countries must cut their emissions by lowering their living standards, or by adopting not-yet-invented low-carbon energy technologies, or both. One person in the audience was overheard to ask why we don't just divide up all the wealth equally anyway? Of course, the entire "climate crisis" could have been avoided if today's rich countries had eschewed the industrial revolution in the first place. In any case, while a $780 per person climate luxury tax would be painful, it would not bankrupt the U.S., even if bundles of dollar bills were shipped abroad and burned in bonfires.

To get a somewhat different perspective, I attended the International Energy Agency's (IEA) side event, "Energy Policy in a Greenhouse World." The IEA was created in 1974 by the world's rich countries to advise them on energy supply and demand problems. The IEA issues an annual World Energy Outlook (WEO), which looks at various scenarios for energy supply and demand until 2030. This year's report was quite sobering.

IEA analyst Laura Cozzi noted that the world currently emits 27 gigatons of CO2 to produce energy. In a business-as-usual scenario, in which energy demand increases by 50 percent by 2030, CO2 emissions are projected to rise to 42 gigatons. To achieve CO2 atmospheric stabilization at 450 parts per million by 2050, emissions would have to be cut by 19 gigatons to only 23 gigatons by 2030. Such cuts, according to Cozzi, would mean that every electric power plant built after 2012 would have to emit no CO2. That would require the development of a robust carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology to bury CO2 in the ground, building vastly more nuclear power plants, the invention of second-generation biofuels, and improvements in energy efficiency at twice the rate that we've seen in the past 25 years.

Just to lift everybody's spirits, Cozzi told the audience that the IEA is "quite worried" about the oil supply/demand balance for the next 7 years. New oil fields to supply an additional 12 million barrels per day must come online by 2016. "We can't rule out a supply crunch in the oil market," said Cozzi.

Cozzi's IEA colleague, Debra Justus, was even more cheery. Justus is working on an energy technology perspective report for 2008. She began with a baseline case in which CO2 emissions would increase to 62 gigatons, or 137 percent by 2050. She outlined two alternative scenarios, one in which the goal is to keep average temperatures from rising more than three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels (ACT scenario) and another which aims to stabilize CO2 in the atmosphere at 450 ppm by 2050 (Blue scenario). Achieving the ACT scenario would require an additional $20 trillion over an above projected energy infrastructure costs for the next 50 years and the Blue scenario would cost $50 trillion more. Justus calculates that first scenario implies a price of $50 per ton of CO2 and in the second, CO2 costs $200 per ton.

At the end of the World Council of Churches' discussion, one panel member, Mohamed Adow from drought-stricken northern Kenya, asked the audience to please "remember the suffering and poverty caused by greenhouse gas emissions." But is climate change really the biggest challenge facing the world's poor? When droughts hit rich countries, people do not starve, and few farmers lose their livelihoods. I do not doubt the suffering that recent weather disasters have inflicted on Adow's people, but even Kenya's share of $600 billion in climate reparations is unlikely to make up for that country's rank of 150th out of 179 countries on Transparency International's global corruption index.

Finally, I mentioned at the beginning that the mood of the climate activists here in Bali was triumphal. I suspect that's because many now really believe that an impending climate crisis will at last endow them with the power to completely remold the world's economy in a more egalitarian direction. And that's what they've always wanted, anyway.

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Global Warming Lies Create a Climate of Crisis

The United Nations conference in Bali, attended by some 15,000 participants and observers, is likely to make future generations conclude that ours was deranged to be discussing how humans could have any affect whatever on the climate. They will, in retrospect, agree that the global warming theory was a lie whose agenda was to retard anything that might extend and enhance life on earth.

The Protocol is based entirely on a lie that predicts dramatic and imminent global warming. Global warmers insist that carbon dioxide emissions must be reduced, but carbon dioxide does not cause climate change. Climatologists will tell you that any rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not precede, but follows warming cycles. The science is well known, but hucksters like the odious Al Gore and those behind the original Kyoto Protocol, with the media as accessories, have created a climate of crisis.

It's a very good thing that our Senate voted unanimously in 1997 against binding America to the United Nations Kyoto Protocol on Climate Control and that both the Clinton and Bush Administrations refused to act on the proposed limits. The reason for the Senate resolution was to avoid "serious harm to the economy of the United States."

A November 30 Bloomberg News article by Kristian Rix and Mathew Carr reported that Japan, Spain, and Italy face as much as $33 billion in fines as the result of having failed to meet their agreement to reduce so-called "greenhouse gas" emissions. These three nations are deemed the "worst performers among 36 nations that agreed to curb carbon dioxide gases that cause climate change." Among the nations exempt from the Kyoto Protocol are China and India, which represent a combined two of the six billion people on planet Earth. The idea that limits on carbon dioxide emissions could be achieved without their participation is idiotic.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) plays a minor role in determining the Earth's climate but at the same time plays an essential role in the maintenance of all of the Earth's vegetation, whether it takes the form of crops, jungles, forests, or just someone's front lawn. Without CO2 all animal life, including our own, dies because of its dependence on food crops. The Earth's atmosphere is composed of 78% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.038% carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of other gases, including water vapor. We call this "air" and humans depend on the oxygen content for life. At the same time all six billion of us individually exhale about two pounds of carbon dioxide every day. By contrast, Nature emits about 30 times more CO2 than humans. The oceans of the world absorb and release CO2 all the time. This is Nature's balance that maintains all life, animal and vegetable, on earth.

Consider now how many schools, hospitals, bridges, roads, and other benefits to their citizens that $33 billion represents to Japan, Spain, and Italy. Such fines will be transferred to the coffers of the United Nations for having failed to curb CO2 emissions that are actually a benefit to the Earth! An entirely bogus system of "carbon credits" has been created to transfer huge amounts of money from industrialized nations accused of producing too much CO2 to those nations that, for lack of development - failed economies - will garner funding as they "sell" their excess credits. The same system would allow various industries to sell the same worthless credits to those - primarily producers and users of energy - deemed to be major CO2 "polluters."

Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has fallen prey to the lie that CO2 represents a form of "pollution" and should be regulated, the known science renders this decision an egregious juridical error. The Earth, over billions of years, has gone through cycles of warming and cooling that are well established. It has gone through periods when the CO2 content in the atmosphere was far higher than today. The latest cooling period is called the mini-ice age and lasted from around 1300 to 1850. The Earth has been warming naturally since then.

There is no dramatic warming occurring. Predictions of this are based on totally flawed computer models, none of which can begin to approximate the sheer chaos and complexity of the Earth's weather system. These computer models, put forth by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control, have been repeatedly revealed to be inaccurate to the point of deliberate deception. The constant assertion that there is a "consensus" among scientists that global warming is caused by humans is yet another part of the lie.

As the anti-capitalist forces meet in Bali, the rest of us must demand that we shall not be penalized and threatened by limits imposed on industries and agriculture around the world. The people of the world must not submit to a lie of global warming that is intended to deprive them of the future benefits that energy use, improved transportation, technological innovations, and the expanded production of food portends.

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New Australian PM fends off climate ambush with a nod to Howard

KEVIN Rudd has avoided an ambush at Bali. It was an ambush prepared by green groups using false expectations and perceptions to lock a 10-day-old Government into unrealistic and binding targets on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. He has done well to avoid the ambush and keep his climate change credentials intact.

The frenetic expectation of dramatic results from the UN climate change conference was based on a misreading of the Rudd Labor Government's climate change policy and the Prime Minister's own position. There is an almost wilful, certainly a wishful, misinterpretation of the new Australian Government's attitude towards targets for cutting carbon emissions. Such a misinterpretation stems from demonising the Howard government's approach, a misleading emphasis during the election campaign and an unfulfilled expectation that Labor had to do anything to get elected and would just change its position after the poll.

Just so that no one is in any doubt about Australia's aim to set medium-term targets for cutting carbon emissions, the Prime Minister spelt it out clearly at the conference this week. The Australian Government is committed to cutting greenhouse gases; such action cannot be unilateral and must be global; developed as well as developing countries, such as China and India, must be committed to binding aims; Australia will introduce a carbon trading system; there is a commitment to mandatory renewable energy targets until 2020; there will be a commitment to medium-term emissions cuts by 2020 and the targets will depend on how they will affect the Australian economy.

All of this is perfectly reasonable at every level. Yet, before Rudd arrived in Bali and before Climate Change Minister Penny Wong had spoken, the expectation was that the Bali conference would lead to targets involving a reduction in emissions of 25 per cent to 40 per cent by 2020. In the long process of international climate change negotiations, the consideration or inclusion of a new set of parameters can shape and direct the international architecture and must be acceded to with great caution.

Green groups complained publicly that Australian officials were obstructing this aim and they hoped things would look up once the ministers arrived. However, when Wong arrived in Bali, things got worse from the green groups' perspective. It was no longer nameless bureaucrats who opposed the adoption of such extreme targets but the minister herself....

In his press conferences and in his speech to the conference, Rudd made it clear Australia would not act on setting targets, which could have a disastrous effect on the nation's resources-led economy, until the economic analysis was completed. By ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, Rudd set himself apart from the Howard government's refusal to do so, but apart from that Australia's approach hardly changed at all....

Rudd's emphasis on ratifying the Kyoto Protocol kept the focus on the pre-2012 climate change debate and gave him a powerful symbolic advantage. Yet - and Rudd made this crystal clear during the campaign - the ALP had the same approach as the Coalition. Howard was not dissembling or exaggerating when he described Rudd's adoption of the Coalition's post-2012 policy as the most stunning turnaround of the election campaign, after Labor's then environment spokesman Peter Garrett had stumbled. Rudd supported the policy and believed in it; he just didn't want to talk about it during the campaign.

But in Bali, in rejecting the international pressure to embrace extreme targets, Rudd had no difficulty in speaking about the post-2012 policy. "It requires a multilateral solution. Unilateral action is not enough," he said bluntly. "Action to tackle climate change will not be easy. It will require tough choices. And some of these will come at a political price," he acknowledged.

Then he outlined that he - not just Wong or the bureaucrats - was prepared to use the Garnaut report to head off the ambush or a panicked reaction. "We commissioned a major study to help us to set shorter-term targets along the way. This study, the Garnaut review, will report in mid-2008. Together with modelling under way in the Australian Treasury and, also critically, informed by the science, this review will drive our decisions on short and medium-term targets," the Prime Minister said.

"These will be real targets. These will be robust targets," he declared, but he wasn't committing to any targets before the analysis was completed and without the developing nations being part of the solution. "We expect all developed countries to embrace a further set of binding emissions targets, and we need this meeting at Bali to map out the process and timeline in which this will happen. And we need developing countries to play their part, with specific commitments to action," he said. That's Rudd talking. Rudd's right, and he believes in what he is saying. It could have been Howard.

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Brazil's offshore oil bonanza may be even bigger

We have covered with great interest the discovery of a huge offshore oil field by Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company. The Tupi oil field was reckoned to contain as much as 8 billion barrels of oil, an as-yet unknown fraction of which will be recoverable, but almost certainly a few billion barrels if past experience is any guide. As was hinted at the time, a neighboring offshore tract shows promise of being far larger in terms of its oil potential. Recognizing this, the government of Brazil has postponed the auction of drilling rights in an area geologically similar to Tupi, in order to gather and analyze further information on its potential. Bloomberg reports:

A geological formation beneath a 2-mile (3.2-kilometer) layer of salt in Brazil's Santos offshore basin, is larger than Tupi and, if oil bearing, may contain "significantly more'" oil than Tupi, Gustavo Gattass, an analyst with UBS Pactual in Rio de Janeiro, said in a note to clients. Petrobras, as Brazil's state-controlled oil company is known, Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Repsol YPF SA, BG Group Plc, Hess Corp. and Galp Energia SGPS all have concessions in the neighboring area, Gattass said, referring to the formation as "Sugar Loaf."

"Through crude measuring it appears that Sugar Loaf's area is about five times larger than that of Tupi," Gattass said, citing former Petrobras geologists and studies of Tupi and Sugar Loaf. "We expect the first announcements of a find over the next two months and test results between four and seven months."

An informed industry observer tells me that a figure of 21 billion barrels is being mentioned as a rough estimate of the potential of Sugar Loaf. Of course, at this stage it is all guesswork. For comparison, Saudi Arabia's petroleum reserves are officially reckoned at 260 billion barrels. Even better news: there are other similar geological formations in the Santos Basin area. The ultimate potential of the area is unknown, but potentially gigantic: a multiple of the figures being mentioned today.

Brazil emphasizes the production of ethanol for domestic consumption, a solution that makes far more sense in a tropical country which produces energy-rich sugar cane than it does in the more temperate American corn belt. Because of this, much of Brazil's oil may be offered for export on the world market. Hugo Chavez will not like this.

The fact is that the potential for deep oil in offshore Brazil is but one example of the as-yet unexplored potential of other territories, such as ANWR, federal lands in the American West, and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, where oil development is officially banned. When oil production is banned, there is no incentive to conduct the expensive tests which could give us better data on the development potential.

Scare-mongers would have us believe that "peak oil" production has been realized, and that we face a future of increasing scarcity and economic chaos. But when governmental restrictions are loosened, and the human mind is unleashed and driven by the potential for profit, experience suggests that previously ignored, missed, or misunderstood potential will be realized. Doom-sayers have been with us throughout recorded history. Sometimes they have been vindicated, but mostly they have been wrong.

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