COMMON SENSE ENERGY

An email below from geophysicist Norm Kalmanovitch [kalhnd@shaw.ca]

With no new coal fired power plants constructed in the USA since the hysteria over global warming started, the only competition for oil was wind power and the price of a barrel of oil skyrocketed to $147/bbl until the economic collapse sent the price down to $34/bbl.

In China, which was politically excluded from the Kyoto Protocol, coal fired power plants were being constructed at a rate of two a week, and unlike the power plants in the USA which capture virtually all of the pollutants, (CO2 is not a pollutant) these plants in China have no such pollution controls making the power even cheaper. (But create a serious pollution problem)

The net effect of this is that China was powering its economy at less than 2cents/kWh while the USA was attempting to compete with power costs at least five times greater because of global warming advocacy.

Add to this the high cost of oil that caused a doubling of transportation costs in two years, and with the financial institutions and investment houses operating without any fiscal constraints on either mortgages or market speculations; you have all the makings for economic collapse.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of “global warming advocacy energy initiatives” is biofuels, and the effect that this had on food prices that were already high because of the increased transportation costs. With high oil prices, crops that produced the feedstock for biofuels became highly lucrative especially when government incentives were given. Biofuel crops were now unfairly competing with basic food staple crops, doubling the cost of food and quite literally starving the poor who can no longer afford these basic food staples.

Simply put, the economy is primarily controlled by the financial institutions and the markets, but it is powered by energy, and unless energy is bailed out, the trillion dollar bailouts of the economy will not succeed in reversing the economic decline.

Unlike the financial bailouts, there is no cost to the taxpayer to bail out energy; but there is a great political cost that none of the leaders seem to be willing to pay. All that has to be done is to demand that the IPCC make public the facts that there has been no global warming for over a decade, that the world has been cooling since 2002, and all this has occurred while CO2 emissions continue to rise demonstrating that there is no possible causal relationship between CO2 emissions and global temperature. For good measure the leaders can also demand that the IPCC “come clean” and admit there never actually was any evidence that supported the AGW hypothesis, and that all their publications were designed to convince the world of a non existent impending danger for the sole purpose of supporting their misguided political agenda.

This is all that remains to be done to fix the economy of the USA, which will fix the rest of the world’s economies that are ultimately affected by the state of the US economy. Unfortunately politicians have, by political necessity, committed their political futures to pursuing the initiatives of the IPCC, and in order not to jeopardize their positions, they are willing to spend taxpayers money on financial bailouts, but are afraid and unwilling to confront the IPCC even though it won’t cost the taxpayer anything and will help the lower income citizens who have been most seriously affected by this crumbling economy.

The false statements of the IPCC are the only rational for the entire vilification of CO2, so if the IPCC is forced to admit that there is no physical basis for reducing CO2, all of the ridiculous and costly CO2 initiatives can stop being subsidized, and this money put into clean coal (in the true sense of the word and not the environmentalist’s bastardized version) and nuclear power developments that will reduce the cost of power and give industry a fighting chance.

The economy cannot support the wildly fluctuating oil price of the last two years and there is also a simple way around this problem if the IPCC is relegated to oblivion. In the past year, the USA consumed 19.485million barrels of oil per day (mmbbls/d) but produced only 8.508mmbbls/d; importing the deficit of 10.977mmbbls/d at rates that jumped between $147/bbl down to $34/bbl. Even as the economy deteriorates, the oil price is rising from the low of $34/bbl to over $52/bbl today, because the OPEC oil cartel is cutting back production to raise the price. This $18/bbl increase in the price of oil equates to an additional $4.6billion leaving the economy each month, because an outside cartel is controlling the price.

The economies of Canada and Mexico are so intertwined with that of the USA that the portion of this money that comes from Canadian and Mexican oil imports, stays within the North American economy. Collectively North America consumed 23.975million barrels of oil per day, but produced 15.058million barrels of oil per day. This leaves a deficit of 8.917mmbbls/d.

There is enough potential production in the Canadian Oil Sands, the Bakkan formation, and “oil from coal” production, coupled with intelligent use of oil (i.e. conservation) to completely remove this deficit; but none of these oil producing initiatives can be undertaken unless there is a long term stable oil price of around $60/bbl. All that the USA has to do is to set a fixed North American Oil price of $60/bbl that is guaranteed for the long term future. This is the only way that the heavy capital investment for these projects can be undertaken. There is enough oil in these three reserves to keep North America oil independent for at least the next century by which time someone will have figured out how to harness energy from nuclear fusion making oil irrelevant as an energy source.

As well, this initiative does not cost the taxpayer anything; but it goes against the dictates of the environmentalists because these resources produce CO2, and even though there is no actual increase in fossil fuel usage, facilities such as the Canadian Oil Sands have already been made environmental targets and the politicians are unwilling to risk political futures upsetting environmentalists if they undertake these common sense energy initiatives.

It is not a coincidence that when the Chinese overtook the USA in CO2 emissions in 2006, that the economy of China also increased dramatically while the US economy was starting to stagnate because of the limited and costly energy supply.

Renewables are listed as “wood, black liquor, other wood waste, municipal solid waste, landfill gas, sludge waste, agricultural by products, other biomass, geothermal, solar thermal, photovoltaic, and wind” and collectively these produced 2.21% of the US electrical power in 1997. (The year Kyoto was signed) Coal produced 52.83% of the electricity in 1997.

After all the rhetoric and cost and ten years of no global warming, by 2008 these renewables were increased to supplying 2.74% of the power; coal was reduced to supplying 48.61% of the power, and the difference was made up with natural gas which also is a fossil fuel and produces CO2.

In the last decade the cost of power went up and the emissions increased by 24%, and now instead of getting rid of this environmentalist blight on the economy, the government now wants to tax the poor even further with carbon taxes and cripple the economy by replacing cheap energy with energy that costs five times as much; all because they are more afraid of the environmentalists than the economic collapse that this will cause.

How many more years of global cooling with increased CO2 emissions will it take before common sense kicks in and the false doctrine of the IPCC is exposed? Tomorrow would not be soon enough!!

Update

An email from Norm Kalmanovitch

Please note my error in "COMMON SENSE ENERGY". A watt is a unit of power and a kilowatt hour is a unit of energy; I inadvertently had them reversed. (Some clarification!!)






Global Warming: A Classic Case of Alarmism

The big temperature picture. Graph and insight from Dr Syun Akasofu

(2009 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 2009).

The global temperature has been rising at a steady trend rate of 0.5°C per century since the end of the little ice age in the 1700s (when the Thames River would freeze over every winter). On top of the trend are oscillations that last about thirty years in each direction:

1882 – 1910 Cooling
1910 – 1944 Warming
1944 – 1975 Cooling
1975 – 2001 Warming

In 2009 we are where the green arrow points, with temperature leveling off. The pattern suggests that the world has entered a period of slight cooling until about 2030.

There was a cooling scare in the early 1970s at the end of the last cooling phase. The current global warming alarm is based on the last warming oscillation, from 1975 to 2001. The IPCC predictions simply extrapolated the last warming as if it would last forever, a textbook case of alarmism. However the last warming period ended after the usual thirty years or so, and the global temperature is now definitely tracking below the IPCC predictions.

The IPCC blames human emissions of carbon dioxide for the last warming. But by general consensus human emissions of carbon dioxide have only been large enough to be significant since 1940—yet the warming trend was in place for well over a century before that. And there was a cooling period from 1940 to 1975, despite human emissions of carbon dioxide. And there has been no warming since 2001, despite record human emissions of carbon dioxide.

There is no actual evidence that carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming. Note that computer models are just concatenations of calculations you could do on a hand-held calculator, so they are theoretical and cannot be part of any evidence. Although the models contain some well-established science, they also contain a myriad of implicit and explicit assumptions, guesses, and gross approximations—mistakes in any of which can invalidate the model outputs.

The pattern suggests that the world has entered a period of slight cooling until about 2030

Furthermore, the missing hotspot in the atmospheric warming pattern observed during the last warming period proves that (1) the IPCC climate theory is fundamentally broken, and (2) to the extent that their theory correctly predicts the warming signature of increased carbon dioxide, we know that carbon dioxide definitely did not cause the recent warming (see here for my full explanation of the missing hotspot). The alarmists keep very quiet about the missing hotspot.

No one knows for sure what caused the little ice age or for how many more centuries the slow warming trend will continue. It has been warmer than the present for much of the 10 thousand years since the last big ice age: it was a little warmer for a few centuries in the medieval warm period around 1100 (when Greenland was settled for grazing) and also during the Roman-Climate Optimum at the time of the Roman Empire (when grapes grew in Scotland), and at least 1°C warmer for much of the Holocene Climate Optimum (4 to 8 thousand years ago).

Addendum

Measuring the global temperature is only reliably done by satellites, which circle the world 24/7 measuring the temperature over large swathes of land and ocean. But satellite temperature records only go back to 1979. Before that, the further back you go the more unreliable the temperature record gets. We have decent land thermometer records back to 1880, and some thermometer records back to the middle of the 1700s. Prior to that we rely on temperature proxies, such as ice cores, tree rings, ocean sediments, or snow lines.

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The powerpoint and audio from Dr Akasofu’s presentation at The International Climate Change Conference 2009 can be downloaded here.

Dr Akasofu published a paper explaining the above graph last week (thank you to Rick Werme).

SOURCE. (H/T David Evans)




Scientist Links Melting Polar Ice to Greenhouse Effect but His Group's Own Research Shows Otherwise

A scientist who tracks levels of ice and snow in the Arctic Ocean told CNSNews.com Monday that there is a “correlation” between the receding ice in the Arctic Sea and man-made global warming caused by the greenhouse effect.

But Dr. Walter Meier, a cryosphere scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., admits he can’t prove that the link is cause-and-effect. “The thing that’s very clear is that the sea ice changes that we are seeing go hand in hand with the warming temperature that we’ve seen, particularly in the Arctic and around the globe,” Meier told CNSNews.com.

Meier and a group of scientists from NASA – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration -- announced Monday that this winter had the fifth lowest maximum ice extent on record. “The maximum sea ice extent for 2008-09, reached on Feb. 28, was 5.85 million square miles,” according to researchers at the NSDIC. “That is 278,000 square miles less than the average extent for 1979 to 2000.”

According to NASA, the NSDIC team used two years worth of data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) to make his observations. They found that seasonal ice averages about 6 feet in thickness, while ice that had lasted through more than one summer averages about 9 feet, though it can “grow much thicker in some locations near the coast.”

CNSNews.com posed a question to Meier: “Given the fact that Arctic sea ice has changed many times in the past, how is it possible to know scientifically whether the melting is due to so-called man-made ‘global warming’ or to a natural cyclical phenomenon?”

Meier said he thinks there is a link between higher temperatures and increased greenhouse gases. But he admitted that sea ice has changed a lot through time and his understanding of long-term ice change is limited “somewhat” to century-old data. “How it (Arctic sea ice) varied before our satellite record, which started in 1979, which is relatively short, is harder to say,” Meier told CNSNews.com, “although we have fairly good records at least back to the 1950s and somewhat that’s good through the early 1900s.”

But a veteran climatologist who questions the global warming idea, told CNSNes.com that NSIDC'’s own data refute Meier’s claim – and point to “solar activity” as a prime cause for the melting ice pack. Dr. Joe D’Aleo, executive director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project [ICECAP], said the depletion of sea ice in the Arctic is part of the Earth’s cycles – and “solar activity”. “The Arctic temperatures undergo a cyclical change every 60 to 70 years tied to cycles on the sun and in the oceans,” said D’Aleo, who was the first director of meteorology at The Weather Channel. “You can see very warm temperatures in the 1930s then cooling and another warming in the last few decades in close correlation with solar activity,” he added, “but with a poor correlation with CO2.”

D’Aleo said that NSIDC’s own research put a spotlight on the correlation between melting Arctic ice sheets and solar activity back in 2007. “One prominent researcher, Igor Polyakov at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, pointed out that ‘pulses of unusually warm water have been entering the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic, which several years later are seen in the ocean north of Siberia,’” D’Aleo said. “These pulses of water are helping to heat the upper Arctic Ocean, contributing to summer ice melt and helping to reduce winter ice growth.”

Evolution of the Arctic

Regardless of its origin, the NASA and NSDIC scientists pointed out that melting sea ice is having profound effects on the Arctic. According to Ronald Kwok, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, older, thicker ice is disappearing and is being substituted by newer, thinner ice that is susceptible to the summer melt. “Thin seasonal ice – ice that melts and re-freezes every year – makes up about 70 percent of the Arctic sea in wintertime, up from 40 to 50 percent in the 1980s and 1990s,” according to the NASA scientist. "Thicker ice, which survives two or more years, now comprises 10 percent of wintertime ice cover, down 30 to 40 percent,” said another NASA researcher, Thomas Wagner.

The thinning ice is a problem for the Arctic’s wildlife and the people who reside there, Meier said. “Of course there are also ramifications within the Arctic on wildlife that rely on the sea ice, such as polar bears, and seals, and walrus; and people that live in the Arctic that rely on the ice for transportation, for hunting, where the ice is really part of their culture,” he added.

Ironically, however, the scientists say the Arctic sea ice melt may uncover new ocean routes, new terrain for natural resources exploration, and change geographical ownership, according to the observations by NASA and the NSIDC. “As this ice goes away, we’re going to have new trade routes, new opportunities to explore for natural resources, and it will completely change the geo-political landscape,” said NASA’s Wagner.

Wagner added that change in landscape may involve “everything from the potential for security issues for the U.S. to think about to how to respond to other nations that are making claims to the Arctic.”

SOURCE







Skeptics From Around the Globe: SWEDEN

Dr. Wibjorn Karlen Emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden, says:

"Newspapers should think about the damage they are doing to many persons, particularly young kids, by spreading the exaggerated views of a human impact on climate .... As far as I can see the IPCC 'Global Temperature' is wrong. Temperature is fluctuating but it is still most places cooler than in the 1930s and 1940s ... it will take about 800 years before the water level has increased by one meter"

"Changes in solar irradiation have been the dominant causes of changes in climate. Volcanic eruptions can have caused some cooling events and greenhouse gases may have contributed to the increase in temperature over the last decades. However, the influence of solar variability has been the major forcing factor and will probably also remain so in the future."

SOURCE






INDIA, CHINA REJECT CLIMATE PACT THAT OBSTRUCTS ECONOMIC GROWTH

Which makes the pact toothless -- but the UN guy is trying to put the best face on it

India and China have told the United Nations a climate change agreement that slows down their economic growth and locks them into poverty is unacceptable to them. The UN's climate change boss said Monday the two Asian giants have taken a series of "ambitious" domestic actions to combat climate change but want to draw the line at anything that would upset their economic growth strategies. "Both of those countries are increasingly taking action - at home - not waiting for an agreement," said Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

India and China are among 190 countries that are trying to agree a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change by the end of the year in Copenhagen. The protocol, which runs out in 2012, lays down the percentages by which countries have to reduce (from a 1990 base) their emissions of greenhouse gases that are leading to climate change. These gases are common by-products of industrial activity.

But major developing countries are excluded from binding commitments under the 'polluter pays' principle, according to which countries that are chiefly responsible for causing climate change - the rich industrialised countries - must set an example for the rest of the world.

Mr. De Boer said India and China are "participating very constructively in these negotiations, while at the same time pointing out that their overriding concern is economic growth and poverty eradication and that any climate change agreement that's adopted in Copenhagen must be in line with that dual role. "That's why for me this whole notion of clean growth is so important," Mr. De Boer told reporters. "A climate change response that strangles world economic growth and locks countries into poverty is not the way we need to be moving forward."

De Boer said India and China had implemented steps - "if only out of self-interest" - to tackle the impact of climate change in the areas of food and water security. "And that was translated in the case of India and China into ambitious national strategies to tackle climate change, both mitigation and to limit the growth of emissions." He said green growth, including climate-friendly activities, are at the core of China's economic recovery strategy. "China is already the leading investor worldwide into renewable sources of energy. China has a huge ambition in terms of industrial energy efficiency improvements in terms of creating sustainable cities," he added.

SOURCE







DUTCH GOVERNMENT DITCHES ECO TICKET TAX IN EFFORT TO HALT DECLINING TRAFFIC

The Dutch Government is to scrap from July 1 its air passenger ticket tax, first dubbed the ‘eco’ tax when it was introduced against major opposition by aviation and local industry last year. The controversial departure tax, which ranges from 11 to 45 euros, is blamed for a steep decline in passenger traffic at the main Dutch airports, particularly at Amsterdam Schiphol. The move was welcomed by airlines, particularly those from the low-cost sector, who called for similar taxes to be abandoned in Italy, Ireland and the UK.

The tax was expected to raise around €300 million ($395m) a year but a commissioned report concluded that it would cost the Dutch economy €1.3 billion ($1.7bn) in lost revenue. At a time when the Government was trying to underpin the economy, reports aviationwatch.eu, the Dutch transport ministry, backed by the aviation industry, business, tourism and right-wing parties, won the day against the environment ministry that had fought to keep the tax.

Schiphol Group, which operates Amsterdam Schiphol, Eindhoven, Rotterdam and Lelystad airports, said it had been hit by a strong decline in traffic and increasing international competition, and recently announced cuts in its work force of 10-25% by the end of next year. Schiphol Airport, Europe’s fifth biggest in terms of passenger enplanements, recorded a drop of 430,000 passengers in February, a 13.7% fall against the same month a year ago. The number of locally boarding passengers fell by 17.7%. The number of transfer passengers, who were exempted from the tax, declined by 8.5%.

The airport operator along with Dutch carrier KLM had previously warned that potential passengers would try to avoid the tax by flying from airports across the border in Belgium or Germany. The Belgian Government has already abandoned a proposal to introduce a similar tax.

The European Low Fares Airline Association (ELFAA) welcomed the “enlightened” decision to lift the tax, claiming it was discriminatory in that it was only levied on passengers starting their journey in the Netherlands and exempted cargo flights and transfer passengers. It urged the governments of Italy, Ireland and the United Kingdom to follow the Dutch lead in dropping airline passenger taxes.

Major low-cost operators including Ryanair, easyJet and Flybe voiced similar sentiments. “Ryanair has campaigned against high airport taxes and so called ‘eco’ taxes, which deter visitors and has cost the Dutch tourism industry millions in lost revenue,” said a spokesman for the carrier.

SOURCE

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