Is this the "melting" Greenland that Greenie scientists are talking about?

While the rest of Europe is debating the prospects of global warming during an unseasonably mild winter, a brutal cold snap is raging across the semi-autonomous nation of Greenland. On Disko Bay in western Greenland, where a number of prominent world leaders have visited in recent years to get a first-hand impression of climate change, temperatures have dropped so drastically that the water has frozen over for the first time in a decade. 'The ice is up to 50cm thick,' said Henrik Matthiesen, an employee at Denmark's Meteorological Institute who has also sailed the Greenlandic coastline for the Royal Arctic Line. 'We've had loads of northerly winds since Christmas which has made the area miserably cold.'

Matthiesen suggested the cold weather marked a return to the frigid temperatures common a decade ago. Temperatures plunged to -25°C earlier this month, clogging the bay with ice and making shipping impossible for small crafts, according to Anthon Frederiksen, the mayor of the town of Ilulissat, where Disko Bay is located. 'On the other hand, it's an advantage for fishermen who rely on dogsleds for transportation,' Frederiksen said.

The mayor cautioned against thinking that the freezing temperature indicated that global warming claims were overblown. He noted that a nearby glacier had retracted more in the past two decades than in recorded history. 'We Greenlanders have acclimated to changing conditions over the past 1100 years,' said Frederiksen. 'Temperatures change at regular intervals.' Although Greenland's capital, Nuuk, and much of the island saw temperatures drop below -25° C yesterday, milder temperatures appeared to be on the way in the near future.

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Global cooling hits Israel

As the country contends with a cold wave that has left at least two people dead from hypothermia, Israel Electric reported this week that demand for electricity hit an all-time winter high of 9,900 megawatts late Sunday evening. The electric power station in Hadera is being pushed to capacity by the recent cold wave.

This prompted fears among consumers that IE may initiate a series of rolling blackouts to prevent the power system from shutting down. "I have a newborn baby at home and the thought of losing power in this cold weather is very unnerving," said one IE customer.

Caught off-guard by an early wave of extremely hot weather in June 2006, IE was compelled to initiate a series of intentional blackouts to protect the power system from shutting down due to a spike in demand and insufficient capacity. IE spokeswoman Yael Ne'eman said the company had learned its lesson from 2006 and took the appropriate steps to try and ensure that it won't happen again. "Recently we have began a campaign to provide our consumers with tips on how to save energy, through television commercials, radio advertisements and with pieces of advice included in monthly electricity bills," she said. Included among IE's tips is the recommendation to not set home thermostats above 20 degrees Celsius, as every degree higher forces the unit to work 5 percent harder.

The previous high for electricity demand in the winter came two years ago, peaking at 9,450 MW. The all-time high demand, winter and summer, was set this past July, topping 10,070 MW. Following the blackouts of 2006, the National Infrastructures Ministry appointed a committee to investigate the causes of the power shortages. It determined that the blackouts took place when several power plants were taken off-line for the company's annual Spring maintenance. "Coming out of those meetings, we made sure to schedule the maintenance of our power plants before the very cold and hot weather arrives so that we can avoid any situations where we may be faced with having to shut down any part of the system," Ne'eman said.

According to the ministry, all maintenance done to the country's power plants adheres to predicted weather patterns. Additionally, the ministry has initiated a campaign among the country's manufacturers to encourage them to cut down on energy usage during peak hours in exchange for reduced rates during the rest of the year.

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Green toffs vs the `shopping herd'

The panic about greedy mobs invading Oxford Street during the New Year sales is driven by elite disdain for consumerism and economic growth. Comment from Britain

Did we buy too much at Christmas, or not enough? Are the January sales a sign of economic health, or decadence? Proof that Britain is booming, or something that we will pay heavily for later?

Breast-beating over the sales has become an annual event. In 2006, anxiety focused on the `world's biggest ship', the Emma Maersk III, which was carrying 11,000 containers full of toys half way around the world from China - a sure sign of the victory of pester power over common sense. In 2005, newspapers worried over the `the lowest Christmas sales for 20 years' (1). In 2003, Sainsbury's did badly, but Next prospered, while thinking people worried, as usual, about Christmas excess.

This year, the expected collapse in Christmas sales failed to materialise. The credit crunch was expected to make shoppers too scared to commit to big purchases. The online gaming system, Wii, and The Simpsons Movie DVD boosted Amazon's sales, while Oxford Street, rather quiet on Christmas Eve, saw its Boxing Day footfall (yes, people really do count this) rise by 7.8 per cent on 2006. Some of the buoyancy was managed by retailers' furious discounting - around 80 per cent of goods were reduced in price, apparently.

You might think that retailers were to be congratulated on beating the winter gloom. But the editorials in the highbrow papers only saw problems ahead. Had the shoppers failed to understand that capitalist prosperity is all built on sand, they worried? Don't those greedy plebs understand that they will all be in Queer Street soon?

The mid-winter Saturnalia shows us the deep muddle at the heart of modern capitalism. On the one hand, there is the existential fear that pulsates in every barrow boy: that tomorrow the shoppers might just stay at home. It is written into the free market system that you can never know what will happen tomorrow, whether that stock on the shelves is gold or rubbish.

Since the 1990s the retail sector has been the healthiest part of British business - not a great sign of the importance of innovation in industry. That was how the Christmas sales turned into such a high-wire act for UK plc. Instead of watching the results at the end of the financial year, economic commentators were reduced to watching the winter solstice for signs of the coming spring, like some Druid shaman.

But just as some retailers were nervously hoping that the shoppers would empty their purses, an altogether different noise was coming from another corner of the British establishment. The green loathing of greedy consumerism that used to be the preserve of a handful of middle-class cranks has spread throughout much of the British ruling class.

Toffs whose fathers were hard-nosed capitalists have turned into eco-warriors these days. Leading green Lord Peter Melchett's fortune was made by his father, Alfred Mond, at Imperial Chemicals Industries; ecologist Tory Zac Goldsmith inherited his 300 million pounds from dad James Goldsmith's Bovril sales. To the sons and daughters of the capitalist elite, nothing is more distasteful than the mass market that made them wealthy.

Instead of celebrating the trickle down of consumer goods, the elite are repulsed by it. They cannot bear to see hoi polloi driving cars like them, or shopping in their shops. They erect elaborate consumer rituals to mark themselves apart from the herd - but to their dismay, the herd keeps cracking the code. In days gone past, the sheer awkward coldness of an art gallery or music recital would have been enough to keep it exclusive, but no longer. Even their costly organic food has been sucked up by Tesco and Morrisons.

The green sentiment favours an economic policy of restraint - and it is in danger of succeeding in choking what growth the British economy has experienced. When ordinary households took advantage of wider credit availability to buy homes and cars in the 1990s, the green reaction was intensely hostile - and governments listened, cutting road-building programmes, choking off house-building with green belt planning controls, hiking fuel duties. And when those regulatory constraints on the expansion of big-ticket consumer goods pushed up prices, the caution merchants demanded limits on higher interest rates.

Of course it is a real problem that Britain's retail boom was premised on a trillion pounds of consumer credit, increasingly paying for goods from abroad. But the inroad made by East Asian manufacturers into Britain's domestic markets is itself a consequence of a business climate that is, in the words of the UK Department of Trade and Industry, `risk averse'. Despite all the talk about a New Economy, the growth in employment has all been in relatively low-productivity service sector jobs, so much so that average productivity actually fell in the UK (2).

Disdaining product innovation in manufacturing as a `race to the bottom', Britain's entrepreneurs are increasingly preoccupied with `rent-seeking' behaviour - spying out opportunities to use their cash to lay claim to someone else's hard industry. British law firms are the ones suing Third World nations over debt bought up cheaply, and they are the ones pursuing Chinese manufacturers claiming `intellectual property rights' over handbags and children's toys. At the climate talks in Bali at the end of last year, it was British negotiators who imagined a world where restraints on industry would be rewarded, just as it is British financiers who are already making money trading in carbon futures, and British boffins who are wasting their time making carbon-inefficient windmills.

If, as seems more than likely, the economy does slow down as predicted this spring, why should we be surprised? The environmentally minded intelligentsia has been deeply hostile to economic growth. Worse still, their voices have shaped economic policy, demanding restraint in road-building, house-building, consumer-spending and the spread of technology. The gloom-mongers' despair over Christmas spending is turning into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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EU rethinks biofuels guidelines

Brainless politicians again. Government by kneejerk

Europe's environment chief has admitted that the EU did not foresee the problems raised by its policy to get 10% of Europe's road fuels from plants. Recent reports have warned of rising food prices and rainforest destruction from increased biofuel production.

The EU has promised new guidelines to ensure that its target is not damaging. EU Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said it would be better to miss the target than achieve it by harming the poor or damaging the environment.

A couple of years ago biofuels looked like the perfect get-out-of-jail free card for car manufacturers under pressure to cut carbon emissions. Instead of just revolutionising car design they could reduce transport pollution overall if drivers used more fuel from plants which would have soaked up CO2 while they were growing. The EU leapt at the idea - and set its biofuels targets.

Since then reports have warned that some biofuels barely cut emissions at all - and others can lead to rainforest destruction, drive up food prices, or prompt rich firms to drive poor people off their land to convert it to fuel crops. "We have seen that the environmental problems caused by biofuels and also the social problems are bigger than we thought they were. So we have to move very carefully," Mr Dimas told the BBC. "We have to have criteria for sustainability, including social and environmental issues, because there are some benefits from biofuels."

He said the EU would introduce a certification scheme for biofuels and promised a clampdown on biodiesel from palm oil which is leading to forest destruction in Indonesia. Some analysts doubt that "sustainable" palm oil exists because any palm oil used for fuel simply swells the demand for the product oil on the global market which is mainly governed by food firms.

Mr Dimas said it was vital for the EU's rules to prevent the loss of biodiversity which he described as the other great problem for the planet, along with climate change.

On Monday, the Royal Society, the UK's academy of science, is publishing a major review of biofuels. It is expected to call on the EU to make sure its guidelines guarantee that all biofuels in Europe genuinely save carbon emissions.

In the US the government has just passed a new energy bill mandating a major increase in fuel from corn, which is deemed by some analysts to be useless in combating rising carbon dioxide emissions. The bill also foresees a huge expansion in fuel from woody plants but the technology for this is not yet proven on a commercial scale.

Sonja Vermeulen from the International Institute for Environment and Development's Forestry and Land Use Programme applauded Mr Stavros' promise to impose rigorous standards on biofuels. "The EU announcement is an important step towards reconciling the highly polarised positions of biofuels supporters (mainly governments, investment agencies and large companies) and detractors (mainly environmental NGOs and lobby groups)," the researcher said.

"In reality, policy decisions about biofuels involve difficult trade-offs: carbon benefits versus other environmental benefits; food security versus export development; efficient large-scale production versus smaller-scale or mixed production systems that deliver more equitable rural development. "We hope that any new certification scheme for biofuels considers the distribution of costs and benefits of the scheme, especially to poorer producers and consumers."

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Global Warming Hysteria in "The West Australian"

By Roger Underwood -- a research manager and bushfire (forest fire) specialist with over 40 years experience of bushfire management in Australia and overseas

Over the last 6 months, readers of The West Australian newspaper have been subjected to a barrage of hysteria over global warming. Very bad news stories of one kind or another are published almost every day, all with the common theme that civilisation as we know it is about to be destroyed.

Some of these stories are simply laughable, like the article asserting that a rise in temperature of 1-2 degrees will result in the extinction of the karri forest. Another reported that rising sea levels (caused by global warming) will, amongst other calamities, lead to a killer increase in salinity in the Swan River. Many readers were surprised by this, since the Swan River is a tidal estuary in its lower reaches, and is fed by the salt-laden Avon River in its upper reaches.

Day after day The West Australian delivers stories unequivocally foretelling the melting of ice caps and glaciers, death of forests, disease outbreaks, the collapse of agriculture, social disruption, loss of coastal communities and beaches, catastrophic storms, floods, droughts and bushfires. All of this is based on an unquestioning acceptance of the theory that human-induced CO2 emissions are causing the world to heat up, and an unquestioning belief in the link between projected warming and ghastly consequences.

I am curious about this lack of editorial scepticism. When it comes to reporting politics or community issues, journalists generally pride themselves on pricking sacred balloons, cutting down tall poppies, exposing spin and highlighting hidden agendas, in short doing what journalists do. The West Australian is quite good in this area, even if their judgement is not always infallible. They have not been afraid to attack government Ministers or powerful Union bosses or to probe politically-incorrect issues, such as alcoholism and education in Indigenous communities. But on global warming their stance is one of uncritical acceptance of Worst Case Scenarios.

The whole package of political game-playing and agenda-driven alarmism is taken at face value and delivered on to readers as if the newspaper was a propaganda pamphlet, rather than a mature organ of the Australian media.

It is not just The West Australian. ABC current affairs journalists to a man and woman are also promoters of Global Warming Apocalypse. A good example was the recent segment on The 7.30 Report which suggested that a slight projected increase in temperature would result in a regime of completely unstoppable bushfires. This proposition was put to the gullible journalist by a climatologist and an environmental activist, neither of whom had any experience in bushfire science or management. No one with this knowledge or experience was interviewed.

And just before the Global Warming True Believers launch their barbs at me, I assure them that I accept the idea of climate change - the climate is always changing. I am also concerned about air pollution from industry and vehicles. However, I regard as unproven the theory of `accelerated global warming" as a result of human CO2 emissions. And I consider the worst-case scenarios uncritically presented as fact by journalists to be unhelpful to a community struggling to make sense of a complex issue.

There are risks associated with constant promotion of Worst Case Scenarios. The first is that people will start to shrug their shoulders, feeling that the whole situation is beyond hope: the planet is doomed, so we might as well live for the minute. This leads to the second risk: doomsday projections becoming self-fulfilling prophecies.

The one-sided reporting of the global warming debate is perhaps explained by the fact that journalists are frightened of presenting both sides of the global warming story. They do not want to alienate those powerful sections of the community who will attack them if they do, i.e. environmentalists, academics and business interests profiting from global warming alarm.

Alternatively we are just seeing another example of the professional immaturity of the Australian media. I have observed that they have always regarded dramatic disasters and fearsome calamities as more newsworthy than everyday life or good citizenship. Thus trees being chainsawed to the accompaniment of wailing protesters is a far "better" story than a forest quietly regrowing under the stewardship of dedicated foresters. I can see no solution to this.

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