Another nasty one for poor silly old Tom Yulsman

Tom Yulsman of CEJournal is one of the many purveyors of the recent "Antarctic crackup" story but he portrays himself as a reasonable commentator on climate change, open to all points of view. Therefore, on 18th., I challenged him to put up on his blog the latest report showing that the Antarctic is not melting overall at all. He put up an aggrieved reply on my blog post but has still NOT mentioned the latest report on his blog. He has exposed himself as a fraud.

I am too bored with the "Antarctic ice breaking up" story to post any more on it but if Tom wants to suffer a real crisis of faith, he should read this post. It shows -- complete with screen grabs -- that the Greenies trot out the same old false "crackup" story year after year.

How about it, Tom? Have you accepted that you are a crook yet? Or are you going to read the story?






We're winning!

Rasmussen poll: Only 34% Now Blame Humans for Global Warming. Looks like a lot of people have noted that the world is getting colder even if the Warmists haven't

Just one-out-of-three voters (34%) now believe global warming is caused by human activity, the lowest finding yet in Rasmussen Reports national surveying. However, a plurality (48%) of the Political Class believes humans are to blame. Forty-eight percent (48%) of all likely voters attribute climate change to long-term planetary trends, while seven percent (7%) blame some other reason. Eleven percent (11%) aren’t sure. These numbers reflect a reversal from a year ago when 47% blamed human activity while 34% said long-term planetary trends.

Most Democrats (51%) still say humans are to blame for global warming, the position taken by former Vice President Al Gore and other climate change activists. But 66% of Republicans and 47% of adults not affiliated with either party disagree.

Sixty-two percent (62%) of all Americans believe global warming is at least a somewhat serious problem, with 33% who say it’s Very Serious. Thirty-five percent (35%) say it’s a not a serious problem. The overall numbers have remained largely the same for several months, but the number who say Very Serious has gone down.

A growing number of Americans (58%) say the United States needs to build more nuclear plants. This is up five points from last month and the highest finding so far this year. Twenty-five percent (25%) oppose the building of nuclear plants.

While the economy remains the top issue for most Americans, 40% believe there is a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection. Thirty-one percent 31% see no such conflict, while 29% are not sure.

SOURCE








Humans declared toxic

Andrew Bolt

Humans breathe out carbon dioxide with every breath. It's a byproduct of keeping our bodies alive

The green faith reveals itself in full contempt. Humans are by their living, breathing nature now officially pollutants of this world:

THE US Environmental Protection Agency has shifted course and deemed carbon dioxide a health risk, in a turnabout important to global warming-related regulation.

But what will trees use for food when carbon dioxide is eliminated. Madness is on the hoof.

SOURCE






Science thrown right out the window: "Sea Levels Could Rise 10 Feet in 50 Years"

Even the IPCC forecasts nothing like this. The Fox news writer makes a couple of nice points at the end of the report, though. Really sad but not too unexpected when a reporter has more sense than academic journal editors. "Nature" is a crusading Warmist publication these days

Global sea levels could rise 10 feet in 50 years if the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps rapidly melt, a new study suggests. Analysis of coral beds formed in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula found that during the last warm period between ice ages more than 100,000 years ago, an entire layer of corals suddenly died, only to be replaced decades later by a new, smaller layer.

That indicates that sea levels had risen between 2 and 3 meters (6.6 to 10 feet) fairly rapidly — over 50 to 100 years. And the only thing that could cause that would be a substantial melting of the continental ice sheets.

"Scientists have tended to assume that sea level reached a maximum during the last interglacial very slowly, over several millennia," study leader Paul Blanchon of the National University of Mexico told Agence France-Presse. "What we are saying is 'No, they didn't.'"

The previous interglacial period, the Eemian, lasted from 130,000 to 115,000 years ago. It was warmer than the current interglacial, the Holocene, with hardwood forests well north of the Arctic Circle and, presumably, smaller ice caps.

Blanchon's sudden coral die-off occurred about 121,000 years ago, which means the Eemian may have continued to get warmer as it went on. "The potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability," he and his co-authors write in Friday's issue of the journal Nature.

Blanchon's work illustrates that sea levels can rise very quickly, but doesn't ascribe a cause for the rising temperatures back then. People skeptical of the theory of man-made global warming could use the paper as evidence the Earth warms up suddenly on its own, without any explanation.

Of course, that would also mean that the planet can rapidly cool down and slide into another ice age — as will likely happen within the next 5,000 years without man-made global warming.

SOURCE

Comment on the above received from Don Easterbrook [dbunny14@yahoo.com]:

We seem to be slipping back into the Dark Ages of science--this has got to be one of the dumbest papers I've ever seen. Why Nature would even publish such nonsense is amazing. Consider for example:

1. There is no way to date 120,000 year old corals with an accuracy of 20-50 years. The best you could do would be with a +/- of tens of thousands of years.

2. The average temp in Antarctica is about -55 degrees F below zero. In order to melt any ice at all you would have to raise the temperature 55 + 32 = 87 degrees just to get to the melting point of ice. To do this in 10-50 years is absurd! You would need to raise the temp many degrees above the freezing point at a rate of about 10 degrees per year every year!

3. The volume of ice in Antarctica is estimated to be about 30 million m3 To melt all of this ice in 10 years you would have to melt 3 million m3 per year in a land whose average temp is -55 degrees!

4. At the last glaciation maximum at (~20,000 yrs B.P.), glaciers covered huge areas in mid-latitude North America, northern Europe, and Russian. At the end of glacial maximum, temperatures rose abruptly and the continental glaciers melted at a maximum rate. That produced a sea level rise of about 10 mm per year or 1.0 m per century. Today, these glaciers are all gone and only two ice caps, Antarctica and Greenland, remain, so glacial melting cannot be anywhere near as drastic today as during the end of the maximum deglaciation. Therefore, the value of 10 mm per year (1.0 m in a century) may be used as an absolute maximum possible value for future sea level rise.






Beware green jobs, the new sub-prime

Dominic Lawson

When everybody seems to have the same big idea, you just know it can only mean trouble. Remember sub-prime mort-gages? Now universally excoriated as the spawn of the devil, the proximate cause of the credit crunch and all that followed, a few years back “sub-prime” was everyone’s darling. Financiers loved it because it generated sumptuously high-yielding debt instruments; governments, because it promised to make even the poor into proud property owners.

Now business lobbyists and governments on both sides of the Atlantic have got a new big idea. They call it “green jobs”. Leading the pack is, as you might expect, Barack Obama. The president recently defended a vast package of subsidies for renewable energy on the grounds that it would “create millions of additional jobs and entire new industries”.

In Britain, the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, promises billions in state aid for the same purpose. To add verisimilitude, last week he gave a royal wave from the inside of a prototype electric Mini. Mandelson’s chauffeur was a representative of the lower house: the transport secretary, Geoff Hoon.

The occasion for this photo opportunity was the government’s proposal to offer a £5,000 subsidy to anyone buying an electric car of a type not yet available: exact details to be given in Alistair Darling’s forthcoming budget. The idea is to create a “world-beating” British-based electric-car-manufacturing industry, while also attempting to meet Gordon Brown’s promise to have the nation converted to electric or hybrid cars by 2020.

That remarkable prime ministerial pledge predated the recession; its motive was to demonstrate that Britain was “leading the world in the battle against climate change”. We aren’t, as a matter of fact; but under new Labour we have certainly led the world at claiming to do so. Mandelson expressed this almost satirically last week when he declared that “Britain has taken a world lead in setting ambitious targets for carbon reduction”.

As ever, new Labour confuses announcements and newspaper headlines with real action. Whenever it becomes obvious even to ministers that Britain will not meet its current carbon reduction target, they replace it with a yet tougher target, only with an extended deadline.

It does not yet seem to have occurred to new Labour that this is making it look ridiculous, especially to the environmentalists whose support it is presumably trying to solicit. Or perhaps it has, but it would rather that than lose our “world leadership” in target-setting.

There is something almost comical in the government’s belief that the electric car, dependent as it is on the national grid, is a sort of magic recipe for reducing carbon emissions. Some months ago President Sarkozy of France had an identical idea and commissioned a report on the prospects for turning Renault and Citroën into producers of mass-market electric vehicles. The report concluded that “the traditional combustion engine still offers the most realistic prospect of developing cleaner vehicles simply by improving the performance and efficiency of traditional engines and limiting the top speed to 105mph. The overall cost of an electric car remains unfeasible at about double that of a conventional vehicle. Battery technology is still unsatisfactory, severely limiting performance”.

Note that this crushing verdict came in a country where electricity is for the most part generated by nuclear power, which produces . In this country, more than three-quarters of the grid’s power comes from theno CO2 fossil fuels of gas and coal.

Presumably it is the latter that accounts for the fact that when the London borough of Camden commissioned a study to see whether it should introduce electric vehicles for some of its services, it found that “EVs relying on the average UK mix of energy to charge them were responsible for significantly more particles of soot that lodge deeply in the lungs . . . than the average petrol-powered car”.

If all our electricity were to be generated by wind power, without any fossil-fuel back-up, this criticism would not apply. Then the cars could take days, rather than hours, to recharge (depending on the weather) and would be so expensive to run that driving would become the exclusive preserve of the rich.

A further absurdity is that electric cars are suitable only for short rides within urban areas – precisely where we are being encouraged to abandon cars and use public transport. Ken Livingstone exempted electric cars from his congestion charge as if, in addition to their suppositious environmental benefits, they also had the magical property of being incapable of contributing to congestion. As the Ecologist magazine has reported: “The focus on electric vehicles and the political love they get is totally misguided . . . to have that as the spearhead of government transport carbon-reduction policy is insane.”

The magazine is controlled by Zac Goldsmith, the prospective Conservative candidate for Richmond Park and team Cameron’s environmental guru. Last week his colleague George Osborne took a different tack, observing that the absence of plans for a national network of charging points meant that “the Labour plan is like giving people a grant to buy an internal combustion engine, without bothering to set up any petrol stations”. Osborne had his own suggested grant to create “green jobs”: “We will give every household a new entitlement to £6,500 of energy-saving technologies.”

I’m not sure how the Tories came up with the figure of £6,500. It is pointedly bigger than Labour’s proposed £5,000 electric car subsidy; but all these figures are preposterous. If you multiply £6,500 by the number of households in the land, you get to £160 billion, bigger on its own than the national debt that Osborne has repeatedly told us is unaffordable.

Electoral bribes apart, there is a more serious misconception behind the idea that ploughing subsidies into the “green economy” is a sure-fire way of boosting domestic employment. At best it will move people from one economic activity to another. Labour’s plans would subsidise car production workers to move from making conventional models to electric vehicles, which hardly anyone wants to buy. Osborne’s proposals would subsidise the double-glazing and home insulation industry and suck in many workers gainfully employed (without subsidy) elsewhere.

The key to a successful, wealth-generating economy is productivity. Saving energy is what businesses have done already, because it lowers their production costs. The problem with any form of subsidy is that it makes the consumer (through hidden taxes) pay to keep inherently uneconomic businesses “profitable”. Meanwhile, diversified energy companies such as Shell, with plenty of speculatively acquired wind-farm acreage, are salivating at the plans by Obama to introduce cap-and-trade carbon emissions targets for American industry.

Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, had some soothing words for US manufacturing companies that complained that the new policy will make them even less competitive with Chinese exporters, since the people’s republic has indicated that it has no intention of inflicting a similar increase in energy costs on its own producers. He suggested that America might have to introduce some sort of “car-bon-intensive” tariff on Chinese goods. One of China’s envoys, Li Gao, immediately retorted that such a carbon tariff would be a “disaster”, since it could lead to global trade war.

Actually, Mr Li is right: and this is how an achingly fashionable and well-intentioned plan to create “millions of new green jobs” could instead end up making the global economy even sicker than it is already.

SOURCE





Australia: Green dream ruined by reality

AFTER spending five years raising three small children in what many consider the idyllic South Coast town of Berry, naturopath Amanda Haberecht and designer Stuart Cook couldn't wait to move back to the city.

"Over a bottle of wine one night, we realised that we actually liked art galleries and restaurants and doing nothing on the weekends," she said.

"Life in the country was working all week and then working all weekend to fix fences or build stuff or mow acres."

The Balmain couple say the years in the countryside were great for the children, "who can now deal with spiders and snakes and all those things city kids freak out about", but became a problem as they grew older.

"We spent so much time driving our kids around that we thought it really limited their independence," Ms Haberecht says. "In the city, kids have more opportunities and can get around on their own."

The couple also found it difficult to find enough employment while they lived in Berry and spent much of their time commuting back to Sydney for work.

"It took a real toll on the marriage because one of us was always single-parenting and the other was on the road," Ms Haberecht said.

"And you know what? I really hate gardening. I liked the idea of growing organic vegies, but I hated doing it."

SOURCE

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