OCEAN ACIDIFICATION

An email from Kirtland C. Griffin [kirtgriffin@sbcglobal.net] of Guilford, CT

In an article in the Economist, Feb 21st 2008, it talks about the acidification of the oceans caused by anthropogenic CO2. It says that if something doesn't change, portions of the world's oceans could no longer support certain forms of aquatic life. Specifically at risk are sponges, corals and brachiopods. The concern relates in part to the huge volcanic eruptions at the end of the Permian Period 252 million years ago. They say that CO2 spewed from the volcanos caused the world's oceans to become more acidic, or probably more correctly, less alkaline.

The origin of the concern is a mathematical model. Where have we heard that before? They say that it is not only the reduction in alkalinity that is a concern but that, in conjunction with increasing ocean temperature, is more detrimental than either alone. Of course, the claim is made that this could lead to a domino effect and who knows what could happen if we continue to emit green house gas pollution?

What is important is not so much what the article says but rather how I became aware of it as well as what it does not say. An associate of mine had shown me a news release by a prominent US University. Not surprisingly, it espoused the UN IPCC line of alarmist AGW catastrophes. Knowing how I felt about the subject he asked what I thought of it because he was going there over the coming weekend and would be able to ask those responsible for the news release to comment on my input. I gave him what I though was a good assortment of scientific and political arguments and off he went as I eagerly awaited the outcome. Well, since he was "one of them" working with the department on a project, they actually told him they didn't buy the global warming thing either. That was a story for the general public to force them to do the right thing for the wrong reason. The world has to change their lifestyle for its own good. One can only imagine my surprise to hear that what many had thought, was really true.

This would have been a significant enough revelation to make this story interesting to any skeptic, but there was more to come. After relating the story to me, this individual went back a second time. This time they presented him with the article from the Economist and asked for further comment thinking that this time he had me. Now I am no ocean scientist, nor am I a chemist, but something smelled. After a little looking I found my information on the CO2, carbonic acid, calcite system.

The oceans are a vast reservoir of Carbon in various forms and there is a well regulated compensation system that covers a wide range of CO2 concentrations and temperature variation that has worked over billions of years. The other thing was that volcanos spew out CO2 but also SO2 as the Number 2 gas. Sorry, no pun intended. SO2 dissolved in water yields sulfurous acid, so I am told by Oliver Manuel, which is a much stronger acid than carbonic acid. So the effects associated with volcanic eruptions are unrelated to the current situation and was more severe. But that has never bothered the DAGW proponents. When I presented my rebuttal, the response was that this has nothing to do with the AGW agenda. This is different. IT CLEARLY IS NOT!

As sure as I am sitting here writing this, acidification is the next hoax to be perpetrated on the world to rein in our fossil fuel appetite. As the average global temperature continues to decline, the socialist opportunists will have to find another way to control the world and collect their carbon taxes to support their agenda and profit motives. Has anyone ever wondered that the primary architect of the Kyoto Protocol is a buddy of Al Gore and sells carbon credits?

The recent report of ocean temperatures cooling will not help their cause but even the National Jet Propulsion Laboratory suspects there might be a problem with the measurements. Apparently, the results did not conform to their preconceived notion of the outcome. The ocean temperature data may be a revelation as to the condition of our surface measurement system which several have demonstrated has a warming bias from the location of the stations to the corrections for the urban heat island effect.

The President of the Czech Republic, Dr Maclav Klaus, had it right when he said "A week ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at the Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech there, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: "Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical - the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence of its proponents about their right to sacrifice man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality." What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism especially in its currently strongest version, climate alarmism....It has never been about the environment."






What the ABC News attack on climate scientist Fred Singer did not mention

At the end of 2006, climate scientist S. Fred Singer of the University of Virginia and the Science & Environmental Policy Project and Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute co-authored Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, a New York Times non-fiction bestseller. Yesterday, ABC's World News Sunday anchor Dan Harris aired a harsh attack on Dr. Singer in a segment titled "Global Warming Denier: Fraud or 'Realist'?"

Avery, Director of Hudson's Center for Global Food Issues, declares, "It seems likely that ABC attacked Singer now because the earth has apparently stopped warming -- in defiance of the man-made warming theory."

The earth's surface temperatures have registered no warming trend since 1998, even though the levels of atmosphere CO2 have continued to increase strongly. In 2000, the sunspot numbers turned downward, which historically has predicted a decline in the earth's temperatures roughly a decade later. The sunspot indices have continued to predict cooling ever since. Last month, three of the world's major monitoring sites announced that earth's temperatures actually declined from January 2007 to January 2008 -- the first such global temperature drop in 30 years. The Hadley Centre in the UK, NASA, and the University of Alabama/Huntsville all reported the decline.

Josh Willis, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently told National Public Radio that the oceans had stopped warming 4-5 years ago, based on key information from new high-tech ocean buoys. The embarrassing truth is that the weak correlation between earth's temperatures and human-emitted greenhouse gases is rapidly worsening. The CO2 correlation with earth's thermometer record since 1860 is less than 22 percent. The correlation between earth temperatures and sunspots is 79 percent and strengthening.

Singer and Avery have published extensively on the evidence of the moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle, which was discovered in the Greenland ice cores in 1984, and a few years later in the Vostok Antarctic glacier core -- at the opposite end of the earth. The three researchers who led the climate cycle discovery received the "environmental Nobel" -- the Tyler Prize -- in 1996: Willi Dansgaard of Denmark, Hans Oeschger of Switzerland, and Claude Lorius of France.

Singer and Avery have also presented the names of more than 700 scientists who have published peer-reviewed evidence on the physical evidence of the 1,500-year climate cycle. It comes from such sources as the oxygen isotopes in the layers of ice cores and cave stalagmites, in the one-celled sediment fossils of oceans and lakes worldwide, in fossil pollen from across America, Asia, Europe, and Africa -- and even in the tooth enamel of dead Vikings buried in Greenland.

Singer and Avery emphasize that their book was funded by Wallace O. Sellers, a retired executive of Merrill Lynch who was a member of the Hudson Institute Board of Directors. Neither has received any significant funding from the energy industry.

"It seems likely that if the earth's temperatures continue to defy the 'global warming consensus' there will be more attacks on those who study the physical evidence of the earth's previous warmings," says Avery. These include the Medieval Warming (950 -- 1300 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC -- 600 AD), and the two much-warmer Holocene Warmings, which peaked about 5,000 and 7,000 years ago. There have been at least 500 such warmings over the past one million years.

Source




NORDHAUS ON EUROPE'S SCHEMING

Earlier this month, Ted Nordhaus posted "The `Serious Business' of Kyoto: EU to `overshoot' its emissions reductions targets? Read between the lines." His analysis rightly takes the EU to task for overselling its GHG-emissions-reduction activities, in the hope that the U.S. will buy what they're selling and leap aboard the sinking ship of carbon cap-and-trade. Nordhaus reveals that the EU's claims to leadership and projected success on the GHG-reduction front are based on assumptions that will likely prove embarrassing in hindsight.

The December 2007 report to which he refers, incorporating emissions through 2005, is risible for its spin. The authors somehow lowered their projection of future emissions from the year before, after emissions turned upward, and strongly, in 2006 (because of a good economic year). The European Environment Agency (EEA) won't officially report the 2006 spike until June 2008, so for a few more months, this whopper of a lie has as shelf life.

The EU isn't a straight shooter on the environment - but some Americans work quite hard to ignore this. Nordhaus's post is useful, because he realizes the EU's reporting is all smoke and mirrors, and it seems that the only way to get that fact to register publicly with greens and policymakers (to the extent they don't already know it privately) is for the case to be made by realistic eco-progressives lke Nordhaus.

There is even more smoke and mirrors than Nordhaus indicates, though. He focuses on the EU's projected "reduction" by 2012 of 11 percent below 1990 GHG emission levels, and describes it as oversold for two reasons: 1) the political decisions unrelated to Kyoto: the UK's "dash for gas" and the shuttering of East German industry after reunification accounts for most of the promised "reduction," and 2) the cocktail of implausible overperformance by states, policies, and Kyoto programs. Nordhaus gets the gist of Europe's fudging, paper shuffling, and exaggerated optimism, but his focus on the EU's projection is to the apparent exclusion of looking at actual performance.

Any analysis of GHG-reduction performance to date tells us that EU emissions will be nowhere presumed levels. Nordhaus grants the projection more credit than it deserves under any reasonable scrutiny of the EEA's own muddied presentation of the facts. The EU says that if it just coasted from today, its existing measures "will" yield an average reduction over 2008-12 of 4 percent below 1990 - but that "will" depends on a host of implausible "ifs." That 4 percent reduction is patent nonsense, given the EU's admitted (if, again, not advertised) emissions increases in two out of every three years since Kyoto was agreed in 1997 - which has left them, as of a year ago, at or about their 1990 emission levels, with those emissions rising.

It is true that the report to which Nordhaus refers claims that emissions as of 2005 were 2 percent below 1990 levels. As I have previously demonstrated, that figure is the product of serially changing their 1990 baseline years after the fact. The larger subterfuge will be revealed as false when 2006 figures are finally released by Brussels, barring more funny business with their numbers. Nordhaus is far too indulgent of the EU's spin. The fact is: emissions aren't down, economy-wide or among ETS-covered sectors.

Since policies inspired by Kyoto began accumulating in Europe, emissions are rising steadily. The ETS did not change this, to much embarrassment. Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas even admitted that he could identify no emissions reduction for which the ETS could claim credit. Had Nordhaus looked at how the EU's promises compare to performance, he would have seen the so-called reduction that he accepts arguendo is actually no such thing, with CO2 emissions at about 5 percent over 1990 levels through 2006 (this will be updated and formalized by EEA in June, but sufficient member-state data is available to support this assessment). To take just one isolated example: the UK's claimed reduction to date of 12 percent below 1990 levels was off by, oh, about 12 percent.

The EEA assume that this, like every year in the decade preceding it, is the year when they will wrench their trajectory from upward-ticking to a starkly downward one. For a decade they have proven wildly unreliable. There is no reason in the record to believe that the claims in the report Nordhaus reviewed are any different. Their projected reduction is far more implausible than Nordhaus lets on. In short, this analysis isn't factually wrong, but with the appropriate context could be more right.

Source





THIS ORGANIC VIEW IS BANANAS

To all of the ill-effects blamed on man-made global warming, we might add one more. It appears that an obsession with climate change can make sane people warm to mad ideas. Take the Soil Association proposals to make it harder for produce from Africa to be labelled as organic, in order to cut the amount of fruit and vegetables flown into the UK. The justification is that this will reduce "food miles", CO2 emissions and man-made global warming, and thus protect the developing world from the impact of climate change. The likely effect will be to put some of the most downtrodden farmers in the world out of work.

So how do we save Africa from a possible future disaster? Apparently, by creating a real disaster in the here and now: making poor Africans even poorer. That sounds like madness - or plain badness - to me.

Air-freighted produce makes up 1 per cent of total UK organic sales - and those remain a tiny niche in the grocery market. Only a mind as sharp as an organic Kenyan banana could seriously believe that this is a big factor in Britannia's "carbon footprint". Indeed, the whole notion of "food miles" is hard to swallow. Research suggests that growing food in the sunshine of Africa and flying them to Europe produces less carbon - not to mention more taste - than growing them under glass and artificial heat in Britain or the Netherlands. Greenhouse effect, anybody?

Some of us might even suspect that, under the fresh-looking label of environmental concern, the UK organic lobby is expressing soiled Little Englander prejudices about keeping out "foreign muck". BA and Virgin Atlantic are flying in farmers' representatives from Ghana and Kenya to put their case against the new restrictions on organic air-freight. Even this old man of the Left can see that here the corporate giants are on the side of the angels, while the "radical" organic fruitcakes are flying in the face of progress and equality. We should defend the freedom of African farmers to air-lift their produce on to our plates.

Of course, in an entirely sane world, these African farmers would not have to jet around the world to demand their right to use backward and back-breaking "organic" methods which, as one village co-operative member told The Times, are simply "the way our fathers and grandfathers farmed". In a saner world they would be raising investment in the sort of industrialised and, yes, chemically assisted agricultural methods necessary to feed their people properly as well as to fly us fresh fruit and veg all year round. But in the current mad climate surrounding climate change, no doubt that will be thought bananas.

Source





'TOTALLY INSANE' BIO FOOLS IN BRITAIN

Plans to force motorists to run their cars on "green" petrol could lead to higher levels of greenhouse gases, the Government's leading environment scientist warned yesterday. Professor Robert Watson said it would be "totally insane" to promote the use of biofuels for environmental purposes if it was found that their production contributed to greater carbon emissions through the destruction of forests. He called on the Government to delay the compulsory use of "green" petrol and diesel until a review has been completed into the sustainability of their production.

From next week, 2.5 per cent of all fuel sold at British pumps must be derived from biofuels, a figure expected to rise to five per cent by 2010. The move, under the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO), is aimed at reducing the impact of fossil fuels, regarded as a major contributor to climate change. But scientists fear it could have the opposite effect.

Last month, a study by the Nature Conservancy and the University of Minnesota, published in Science magazine, warned that clearing forests, grassland and peatland to plant crops for biofuels released more carbon than it saved.

Prof Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, said yesterday that it was time to heed the concerns. "It would obviously be totally insane if we had a policy to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of biofuels that's actually leading to an increase in the greenhouse gases from biofuels," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

FULL STORY here

***************************************

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL 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.

*****************************************