China Makes Western CO2 “control” Pointless

In recent news we heard that China has surpassed the USA as the worlds largest energy consumer. It’s now the “Big Boy” on the block. All the proposed CO2 “control” treaties to date have given a ‘free pass’ to the poor underdeveloped world on the theory that they needed special favors to ‘catch up’ to the evil west that had suppressed them. Well, folks, China is now the “Big Boy” on the block. Not some little backwater nobody striving to get their first light bulbs and flush toilettes. If you want to “control” CO2 emissions, you absolutely must include China. And that is just not going to happen.

China uses more coal than anything else

China is a coal based energy market. Somewhere over 70% of their energy consumption comes from coal. Exact numbers are hard to come by, and changing rapidly as they are growing like a weed. But the simple and well attested fact is they mostly use coal. So the CO2 “footprint” from energy usage in China is far higher than in other counties, such as the USA, that use more oil and natural gas in the mix.

Coal makes up 70 percent of China’s total primary energy consumption, and China is both the largest consumer and producer of coal in the world. China holds an estimated 114.5 billion short tons of recoverable coal reserves, the third-largest in the world behind the United States and Russia and about 13 percent of the world's total reserves. There are 27 provinces in China that produce coal. Northern China, especially Shanxi Province, contains most of China’s easily accessible coal and virtually all of the large state-owned mines. Coal from southern mines tends to be higher in sulfur and ash, and therefore unsuitable for many applications. In 2008, China consumed an estimated 3 billion short tons of coal, representing nearly 40 percent of the world total and a 129 percent increase since 2000. Coal consumption has been on the rise in China over the last eight years, reversing the decline seen from 1996 to 2000. More than 50 percent of China's coal use in 2006 was in the non-electricity sectors, primarily in the industrial sector. The other 50 percent is used in the power sector.

Putting “controls” on US energy use (or European or Australian or New Zealand or Russian or…) will simply move the usage to China, increasing their economic growth at the expense of others and moving more energy usage TO COAL and away from more environmentally friendly fuels and sources.

China is growing energy usage fast

Even in the present western economic recession, China is growing, fast. And that comes with very fast energy consumption growth.

BEIJING July 20 (Reuters) – China is likely to consume about 11 percent more electricity this year than in 2009, with second-half growth easing on the government’s curb on heavy users and a higher year-ago base, the National Energy Administration said.

And a bit further down:

China, the world’s largest coal consumer, brought in a record amount of foreign coal last year — about 126 million tonnes — on surging demand boosted by a runaway steel sector and heating demands during a cold winter.

The largest consumer is also growing the fastest. Restrictions on other countries will only increase that rate of growth and increase the total CO2 produced (as China is not as efficient nor improving in efficiency as as fast as the western economies).

In the computer world, this was covered by Amdahl’s Law. The thing that improves the most just moves the problem onto the thing that is not improved as fast. So you can move the “problem” to China, but you can’t fix it.

Conclusion? China dominates. Nothing else matters.

Any “CO2 Treaty” or “Cap and Trade” ( AKA Cap ‘N Tax) plan is doomed to fail. Horridly and catastrophically. It will increase costs to produce in the countries that sign up for such a plan, and those increased costs will move the most energy intensive industries to the lowest cost producers. The lowest cost producer is now China, and we see such industries already moving to China at a dizzying pace. Adding more “forcing” to that process will only accelerate it.

China mostly uses coal, and will use ever more of it over time. They are locking up coal supplies world wide by purchasing them or signing 20+ year contracts. They have no intention of reducing coal usage. They have also recently bought large chunks of Canadian Tar Sands, so you will find them being used too, despite their high CO2 production.

China is not improving energy efficiency as fast as the west, so any move of processes to China will make more CO2, not less.

Add those three together and you find that Cap ‘N Tax and Koyoto like treaties will result in a net increase in CO2 production as the sources simply move to China. This is NOT a theoretical, it’s already happening (and in large part has happened. Look at the size and growth of China steel production, for example.)

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Another Oil Smear

By Dr. Benny Peiser

On 19 July, the Times published a frontpage lead story about a number of U.S. American think tanks that have received funding from Exxon Mobile. Some of these organisations were co-sponsors of the March 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

In its article, the Times gave the false impression that the GWPF was represented at the March 2009 New York conference and that the GWPF may have received Exxon Mobil funding too. In fact, the Foundation did not exist at the time. The GWPF was only founded in November 2009. I was there as a private individual and an academic who was invited to speak about "The Crisis of EU Climate Policy." Moreover, the Times knows perfectly well that the GWPF is precluded by its articles of association from accepting funds from the energy industry.

The Times should also have been aware that Nigel Lawson had refuted the same misleading smear in the Independent on Sunday of 14 February.

I have written to the editor of the Times to set the record straight only for them to refuse to publish my letter. This is the second time this year that the Times has written a misleading story about the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and for the second time it has refused us a right of reply. This kind of behaviour speaks for itself.

The Times has now corrected the inaccurate claim about me in the online version of its story. But the damage to the GWPF has been done, and hardly anyone will notice the correction to the online version now that it is behind a paywall and the Times has lost 90% of its online viewers. All we can do is to set the record straight on our own website in the hope that interested observers will see through these smear tactics.

Benny Peiser

Letter to the Editor of the Times

Sir, Contrary to the clear impression given by your report (19 July), the Global Warming Policy Foundation was not represented at the March 2009 International Conference on Climate Change in New York, for the very good reason that the Foundation did not exist at that time. It did not come into being until November 2009; and I was there as a private individual and academic.

Had you contacted us, or consulted our website, you also would have discovered our explicit funding policy, which makes clear in no uncertain terms that the GWPF is "funded entirely by voluntary donations from a number of private individuals and charitable trusts. In order to make clear its complete independence, it does not accept gifts from either energy companies or anyone with a significant interest in an energy company".

London, 20 July 2010, Dr Benny Peiser, Director, The Global Warming Policy Foundation

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New Russian Research: Medieval Warming Greater Than Modern Warming

Discussing: Panin, A.V. and Nefedov, V.S. 2010. "Analysis of variations in the regime of rivers and lakes in the Upper Volga and Upper Zapadnaya Dvina based on archaeological-geomorphological data". Water Resources 37: 16-32.

Background

The authors write that "long-term decrease in seasonal peaks of water levels allows the settling of relatively low geomorphic locations, such as river and lake floodplains, while a rise in flood levels causes settlements to be shifted to higher elevations," based on the logical assumption that "ancient settlements could not persist under the impact of regular inundations."

What was done

In a study of the Upper Volga and Zapadnaya Dvina Rivers of Russia, Panin and Nefedov documented "the geomorphological and altitudinal positions of [human] occupational layers corresponding to 1224 colonization epochs at 870 archaeological sites in river valleys and lake depressions in southwestern Tver province," identifying "a series of alternating low-water (low levels of seasonal peaks, many-year periods without inundation of flood plains) and high-water (high spring floods, regular inundation of floodplains) intervals of various hierarchial rank."

What was learned

The two Russian researchers report finding that "low-water epochs coincide with epochs of relative warming, while high-water epochs [coincide] with cooling epochs," because "during the climate warming epochs, a decrease in duration and severity of winters should have resulted in a drop in snow cover water equivalent by the snowmelt period, a decrease in water discharge and flood stage, and a decrease in seasonal peaks in lake levels," noting that "a model of past warming epochs can be the warming in the late 20th century, still continuing now."

They also report finding that "in the Middle Ages (1.8-0.3 Ky ago), the conditions were favorable for long-time inhabiting [of] river and lake floodplains, which are subject to inundation nowadays [italics added]." In addition, their results indicate that of this time interval, the period AD 1000-1300 hosted the greatest number of floodplain occupations.

What it means

Interestingly, Panin and Nefedov state that this last period and other "epochs of floodplain occupation by humans in the past can be regarded as hydrological analogues of the situation of the late 20th-early current century," which they say "is forming under the effect of directed climate change." And this relationship clearly implies that the current level of warmth in the portion of Russia that hosts the Upper Volga and Zapadnaya Dvina Rivers is not yet as great as it was during the AD 1000-1300 portion of the Medieval Warm Period.

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I come to bury Schneider not to praise him

His own words tell you all you need to know about him

By James Delingpole,

De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? Yeah, yeah, whatever. But why, pray, should one even try to find anything nice to say about the man who, more perhaps than any other, was responsible for steering the already pretty nebulous field of “climate science” into a branch of political activism so extreme that it might just as well have rechristened itself “climate Leninism”?

Yes, I’m talking about Stephen Schneider. Stephen Schneider – who recently died of a heart attack, and God rest his soul – was the Stanford university Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change who in the 1970s was warning us all of an imminent ice age. Then, without a flicker of shame or embarrassment, Schneider flipped and became an equally fervent advocate of Man-Made Global Warming. So fervent that he seemed to believe it was perfectly acceptable scientific practice to lie about it, as he hinted in his most infamous quote:

“….. we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support , to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have.”

It was one such scary scenario that he offered for a Time magazine cover story in 1987 when he said:

“Humans are altering the earth’s surface and changing the atmosphere at such a rate that we have become a competitor with natural forces that maintain our climate. What is new is the potential irreversibility of the changes that are now taking place”

This was at best a grotesque exaggeration of what scientists believed, let alone were capable of backing up with any real-world data, in 1987. We know this because, despite four increasingly desperate IPCC reports, they still haven’t managed to do so to this day.

So Schneider – RIP, sympathy to his grieving relatives and all that – was instrumental in setting the whole AGW porkie pie machine in motion, with consequences we will be ruing for generations to come. He was an early advocate of Post Normal Science: the philosophy which says that if your cause is sufficiently pressing and just it’s OK to abandon the usual rules of rigour and empiricism and lie and cheat and make stuff up.

And to the very last he was pushing alarmist drivel to the max, as in this final interview he gave to his university magazine. Here he is playing the “nothing to see here” game with the Climategate emails:

I do not believe it’ll have any long-lasting impact on the credibility of climate science, because it is fundamentally sound. Unfortunately, the likely coming super heat waves and the hurricanes that will take out parts of Miami and Shanghai, for example, will show that, in a politically tangible way. And nobody will remember climategate 10 years from now.

Here is providing his disingenuous rationale for shutting out of the debate all those distinguished scientists who disagree with CAGW:

The reason that we do not ask focus groups of farmers and auto workers to determine how to license airplane pilots and doctors is they have no skill at that. And we do not ask people with PhDs who are not climatologists to tell us whether climate science is right or wrong, because they have no skill at that, particularly when they’re hired by the fossil-fuel industry because of their PhDs to cast doubt. So here is where balance is actually false reporting.

Here he is explaining why the little people who fund his research grant and pay the increased taxes and energy bills resulting from his hysterical CAGW projections are too stupid to deserve any say in this debate:

We know we have a rough 10 percent chance that [the effect of global warming] is going to be not much; a rough 10 percent chance of ‘Oh, My God’; and everything else in between. Therefore, what you’re talking about as a scientist is risk: what can happen multiplied times the odds of it happening. That’s an expert judgment. The average person is not really competent to make such a judgment.

And so, in the name of a problem that doesn’t exist, our political masters at the United Nations and the EU, as well as in our own governments, are presenting us with a bill for at least $45 trillion. They plan to ruin our beautiful country with wind farms, remove our property rights under the UN’s sinister Agenda 21, bomb our economies back to the dark ages and render us increasingly in thrall to technocrats, bureaucrats, and “experts” over whom we have no democratic control.

This is war. A war in which the other side shows it has no scruples whatsoever – as we learned for example yet again the other day with Bishop Hill’s astonishing scoop regarding the Lord Oxburgh of Persil inquiry into Climategate. You’ll probably know of it already, but I repeat it for the record. It seems that one of the two people consulted as to which papers should be examined by the inquiry was none other than Phil Jones.

Can you imagine any court of law allowing the decision regarding which information the prosecutors were allowed to use being dictated by the defendant? I can’t. It’s a disgrace. And one which the Mainstream Media remains unforgivably reluctant to report.

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Even Jim Hansen's own climate model has been falsified by the facts

Dr. James Hansen is the Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Dr. Hansen is right up there with Al Gore, Michael Mann and the Climategate CRU on the list of people helping the UN to swindle the United States and other western democracies out of trillions of dollars through his promotion of the Anthropogenic Global Warming fraud.

Hansen kind of got the ball rolling in 1988 with his publication of a climate model that predicted dire global warming over the next 20 years if mankind did not stop burning fossil fuels… Hansen et al. 1988.

Hansen constructed three scenarios… “Scenario A assumes continued exponential trace gas growth, scenario B assumes a reduced linear linear growth of trace gases, and scenario C assumes a rapid curtailment of trace gas emissions such that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the year 2000.” ....

Hansen’s scenarios “A” and “B” predicted a temperature anomaly about 1.0°C by 2009. Scenario “C” predicted an anomaly of about 0.7°C by 2009. Since Hansen’s publication, atmospheric CO2 levels have tracked Scenario “A” and CH4 levels have tracked Scenario “C”. Even though CH4 is a more potent greenhouse gas, it accounts for only a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect:

CO2 is the “Big Kahuna”. Even if CH4 has 20X the greenhouse effect of CO2. 1800 ppb is 0.46% of 390 ppm…20 X 0.46% = 9.2%. At most, CH4 accounts for only about 10% of the greenhouse effect of CO2 in Earth’s current atmosphere.

So, according to Hansen’s 1988 predictions, the global temperature anomaly should be about 90% of the way from Scenario “C” to Scenario “A”… ~0.97°C. In reality, the global temperature anomaly is about half of what Hansen predicted for a similar rise in greenhouse gases.

The actual warming has been slightly less than Hansen’s Scenario C…

“In scenario C the CO2 growth is the same as scenarios A and B through 1985; between 1985 and 2000 the annual increment is fixed at 1.5 ppmv/yr; after 2000, CO2 ceases to increase, its abundance remaining fixed at 368 ppmv.”

In most branches of science, when experimental results falsify the original hypothesis, scientists discard or modify the original hypothesis. In Hansen’s case, he just pitches the story with zealotry rarely seen outside of lunatic asylums…

Much more HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)




Global warming alarmists getting desperate as skeptics attack greenhouse theory

Sensing that their sky-is-falling theory is crumbling under scientific scrutiny, the always-insecure global warming True Believers are losing their cool, lashing out at critics with a mounting campaign of scurrilous personal attacks, impugning the motives, integrity and mental state of anyone who refuses to genuflect before the high priesthood of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The latest target of the Warmists: Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, a mathematician and leading critic of the global warming theory, a.k.a. "climate change." Monckton was recently mocked and browbeaten in a 115-slide presentation by John Abraham, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. His "hit and run" slide-show attack was an attempt to discredit a presentation that Monckton had given in St. Paul, Minnesota, in October 2009.

Monckton replied with a powerful rebuttal that, point by point, eviscerated Abraham's embarrassingly dishonest production. Monckton called on Abraham and the university to issue a formal apology, remove the libelous presentation from the Internet, and donate $110,000 to a Haitian charity as compensation for the damage done to his reputation.

As Joanne Nova observes:

"Abraham went on to assemble a list of things Christopher Monckton didn't say, complained about things he didn't cite (even if he did and it's printed on his slides), pretended he couldn't find sources (but didn't take ten minutes to ask), and created a litany of communication pollution in an effort to denigrate Monckton's character."

The assaults on Monckton and other high-visibility skeptics (for example, Marc Morano of Climate Depot, Joe D'Aleo of ICECAP, Dr. Willie Soon, Dr. Fred Singer, Anthony Watts and Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi) are further evidence that the global warmists are in full retreat and resorting to slash and burn tactics as they make a desperate last stand to defend their cherished theory from the onslaught of countervailing scientific evidence.

Recently, the so-called "greenhouse effect" has itself come under increasing attack by a phalanx of scientific experts, including Dr. Gerhard Gerlich and Dr. Ralf D. Tscheuschner, professor Nasif Nahle, applied mathematician Claes Johnson, former radio-chemist Alan Siddons, analytical chemist Hans Schreuder, combustion research scientist Martin Hertzberg, and engineer Heinz Thieme.

Last year, 130 skeptical German scientists co-signed an Open Letter of protest to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, asserting, among other things, that a "growing body of evidence shows anthropogenic CO2 plays no measurable role" in Earth's climate.

The scientists derided global warming as a "pseudo religion," said the "UN IPCC has lost its scientific credibility," and dismissed the alarmist warnings of rising CO2, claiming it "had no measurable effect" on temperatures.

The critics of the atmospheric greenhouse effect have been relentless in their attacks. They continue to blast holes in the theory, whose roots go back to the traditional works of Fourier (1824), Tyndall (1861), and Arrhenius (1896).

As professors Gerlich and Tscheuschner have pointed out in their research paper, "Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics":

"[The greenhouse theory] essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system.

"According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation.

"Neither the absorption nor the reflection coefficient of glass for the infrared light is relevant for this explanation of the physical greenhouse effect, but only the movement of air, hindered by the panes of glass."

A growing body of scientists have joined Gerlich and Tscheuschner in exposing the "accepted science" underlying the greenhouse effect. Here are a few of their more damning statements:

(Heinz Thieme, engineer)

"The phenomenon of 'atmospheric backradiation' is presently advanced as an explanation of thermal conditions on Earth, and as the basis of some statements about climate change. However, scientific evaluation in strict accord with the laws of physics and mathematics suggests that 'atmospheric backradiation' is physical nonsense.

"An assessment conducted in the light of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the principles of vector algebra of the key greenhouse theory concept of 'atmospheric backradiation' suggests that it is simply a mirage. The only 'Backradiation Phenomenon' that needs explaining is how this physical nonsense maintains its place in numerous earth sciences textbooks at both school and university level."

(Alan Siddons, radio chemist)

". . . if the tenets of this [greenhouse] theory are valid there can be no outcome other than a doubling of surface energy (a doubling at minimum, that is, since there's no reason to suppose that radiation from the now-warmer surface would not continue to be back-radiated, absorbed, and amplified in a 'runaway' heating cascade).

"Simple as it is, though, no scientist in the world is able to construct a model that exhibits any radiative gain because the theory's tenets (called 'the basic science') are not valid. On a theoretical basis alone, conservation of energy (the First Law) forbids a model like this from working. You can't obtain more energy than you put in.

"Just like temperature, radiant energy flows do not add. Lumping two 70° balls of clay together doesn't result in a single ball that's 140°, nor do 70 watts per square meter beaming back onto a body that's radiating 70 [degrees] raise it to 140 [degrees]. Frankly, it is stupid to think otherwise."

(Claes Johnson, professor of applied mathematics)

"It is surprising to see large parts of the scientific community including academies of sciences embracing a hypothesis of global warming from atmospheric CO2, without any convincing scientific support. It appears that the mere mentioning of Stefan-Boltzmann's Radiation Law has been enough to annihilate any further demands of scientific evidence.

"This may be a result a 2Oth century physics education with both the Radiation Law and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics being based on statistical mechanics not understood by anybody. In any case, the acceptance by the scientific community of CO2 climate alarmism without physical basis, needs to be understood and corrected."

(Dr. Martin Hertzberg, combustion research scientist)

"The most significant atmospheric component in the radiative balance is water: as a homogeneous absorbing and emitting vapor, in its heat transport by evaporation and condensation; as clouds, snow and ice cover, which have a major effect on the albedo, and as the enormous circulating mass of
liquid ocean, whose heat capacity and mass/energy transport with the atmosphere dominate the earth's weather.

"In comparison to water in all of its forms, the effect of the carbon dioxide increase over the last century on the temperature of the earth is about as significant as a few farts in a hurricane!"

(Siddons, Hertzberg and Schreuder, "A Greenhouse Effect on the Moon?")

"The Earth is not "unusually" warm. It is the application of the predictive equation [Stefan-Boltzmann formula] that is faulty. The ability of common substances to store heat makes a mockery of blackbody estimates. The belief that radiating trace gases explain why earth's surface temperature deviates from a simple mathematical formula is based on deeply erroneous assumptions about theoretical vs. real bodies."

These are just a few examples of the mounting criticism directed at the very foundation of the AGW theory -- a theory driven not by science, but rather by a cabal of powerful elitists who seek to dominate and control the planet's economy through a system of confiscatory taxation and Orwellian people controls.

The "science" underlying greenhouse warming alarmism increasingly is being exposed as pure fantasy -- a house of cards built on manipulated climate models supporting pre-ordained conclusions based on cherry-picked land-based temperature data that has been homogenized, interpolated and adjusted to produce, without fail, a politically correct increase in planetary warming.

But as Gerlich and Tscheuschner observe, the science of climate change is fraught with uncertainties and unknowns that make a mockery of the predictive powers of laboratory computer models:

"The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing in their own models."

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