Georgy Porgy is shameless

The original moonbat has learned SOME caution. He starts out with a big caveat about the relationship between climate and weather. But he then goes on to say exactly what I and other skeptics said when drought was the Warmist scare du jour. He has discovered that warming should produce MORE rain and snow. How odd that he ignored that for so long! Laws of physics do backflips according to how convenient their conclusions are, apparently:

One paper, by Seung-Ki Min and others, shows that rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have caused an intensification of heavy rainfall events over some two-thirds of the weather stations on land in the northern hemisphere. The climate models appear to have underestimated the contribution of global warming on extreme rainfall: it's worse than we thought it would be.

None of this should be surprising. As Richard Allan points out, also in Nature, the warmer the atmosphere is, the more water vapour it can carry. There's even a formula which quantifies this: 6-7% more moisture in the air for every degree of warming near the Earth's surface. But both models and observations also show changes in the distribution of rainfall, with moisture concentrating in some parts of the world and fleeing from others: climate change is likely to produce both more floods and more droughts.

More HERE





Permafrost: Models trump reality again

The melting Siberian permafrost scare is an old one. Trouble is that Russian scientists say it is NOT melting. See HERE, for instance. And there is no evidence that "greenhouse" gases warm us up anyhow: Rather the reverse on recent trends. Steve Goddard also has a laugh at this bit of speculation

Up to two-thirds of Earth's permafrost likely will disappear by 2200 as a result of warming temperatures, unleashing vast quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, says a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

The carbon resides in permanently frozen ground that is beginning to thaw in high latitudes from warming temperatures, which will impact not only the climate but also international strategies to reduce fossil fuel emissions, said CU-Boulder's Kevin Schaefer, lead study author. "If we want to hit a target carbon dioxide concentration, then we have to reduce fossil fuel emissions that much lower than previously thought to account for this additional carbon from the permafrost," he said. "Otherwise we will end up with a warmer Earth than we want."

The escaping carbon comes from plant material, primarily roots trapped and frozen in soil during the last glacial period that ended roughly 12,000 years ago, he said. Schaefer, a research associate at CU-Boulder's National Snow and Ice Data Center, an arm of CIRES, likened the mechanism to storing broccoli in a home freezer. "As long as it stays frozen, it stays stable for many years," he said. "But if you take it out of the freezer it will thaw out and decay."

While other studies have shown carbon has begun to leak out of permafrost in Alaska and Siberia, the study by Schaefer and his colleagues is the first to make actual estimates of future carbon release from permafrost. "This gives us a starting point, and something more solid to work from in future studies," he said. "We now have some estimated numbers and dates to work with."

Schaefer and his team ran multiple Arctic simulations assuming different rates of temperature increases to forecast how much carbon may be released globally from permafrost in the next two centuries. They estimate a release of roughly 190 billion tons of carbon, most of it in the next 100 years. The team used Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

More HERE





Deep-Sea Volcanic Vents Discovered in Chilly Waters of Southern Ocean

This could be the explanation for the occasional odd bits of warming at the margins of the Antarctic -- similar to the Gakkel ridge in the Arctic

Scientists aboard the Royal Research Ship James Cook have discovered a new set of deep-sea volcanic vents in the chilly waters of the Southern Ocean. The discovery is the fourth made by the research team in three years, which suggests that deep-sea vents may be more common in our oceans than previously thought.

Using an underwater camera system, the researchers saw slender mineral spires three metres tall, with shimmering hot water gushing from their peaks, and gossamer-like white mats of bacteria coating their sides. The vents are at a depth of 520 metres in a newly-discovered seafloor crater close to the South Sandwich Islands, a remote group of islands around 500 kilometres south-east of South Georgia.

"When we caught the first glimpse of the vents, the excitement was almost overwhelming," says Leigh Marsh, a University of Southampton PhD student who was on scientific watch at the time of the discovery.

Deep-sea vents are hot springs on the seafloor, where mineral-rich water nourishes lush colonies of microbes and deep-sea animals. In the three decades since scientists first encountered vents in the Pacific, around 250 have been discovered worldwide. Most have been found on a chain of undersea volcanoes called the mid-ocean ridge, however, and very few are known in the Antarctic.

"We're finding deep-sea vents more rapidly than ever before," says expedition leader Professor Paul Tyler of the University of Southampton's School of Ocean and Earth Science, which is based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. "And we're finding some in places other than at mid-ocean ridges, where most have been seen before."

By studying the new vents, the team hope to understand more about the distribution and evolution of life in the deep ocean, the role that deep-sea vents play in controlling the chemistry of the oceans, and the diversity of microbes that thrive in different conditions beneath the waves.

The researchers were exploring 'Adventure Caldera', a crater-like hole in the seafloor three kilometres across and 750 metres deep at its deepest point. Despite its size, Adventure Caldera was only discovered last year by geophysicists from the British Antarctic Survey.

The new vents are the fourth set to be discovered around Antarctica in three expeditions since 2009. Their discovery is part of a project funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), which involves researchers from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, the Universities of Southampton, Newcastle, Oxford, Bristol and Leeds, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US

SOURCE





Anti-ethanol legislation begins popping up

Two bills have recently been introduced that intend to block efforts made to increase U.S. consumption of ethanol.

The first, from Rep. John Sullivan (R-OK), intends to cut funding for EPA’s E15 program. My understanding of the legislation is that “cutting funding” for the program is the equivalent of ending it, as the EPA needs funds to carry out the remainder of the regulatory process (permits, guidelines for fueling stations, E15 warning stickers, etc.).

The second is from Jeff Flake (R-AZ), would end the VEETC and corresponding tariff on foreign ethanol.

Both bills would slightly limit the excessive production of corn ethanol (a good thing), but the bigger problem is the ever-increasing mandate known as the Renewable Fuel Standard. An ideal bill would end the mandate, tax credit, tariff, end the law that allows E-85 vehicles to qualify for mileage standards, and end EPA’s ability to regulate the amount of ethanol in our fuel. Then the ethanol industry couldn’t fairly argue that they’re being denied access to the market. Some energy analysts even believe E85 could exist profitably as a niche industry in the mid-west.

Realistically, in the short run, petroleum would still dominate. However, freeing capital away from politically motivated ends makes it more likely that capital will flow into areas that will actually generate benefits for consumers. It is unclear if that will ever happen with corn ethanol and/or its variants (cellulosic, biodiesel, etc.).

Here is a good piece (and a challenge) by Tim Carney on the ethanol’s industry claim that they’re being unfairly denied access to the fuel market by the EPA. Of course, the ethanol industry is being incredibly disingenuous in its calls for fair competition. They have done this before.

SOURCE





California nightmare

"Clean" energy pollutes! Go figure!

In the San Joaquin Valley, our air-quality challenges are more difficult than those in any other region in the nation. Two biomass plants, intended to help the San Joaquin Valley clean up the air, have been tagged with one of the state's largest air-pollution fines in recent history.

Global Ampersand of Boston was fined more than $800,000 for excess ozone-related emissions and other violations from biomass plants in Madera and Merced counties, federal authorities announced Tuesday.

The fine is among the largest in the San Joaquin Valley and California over the past several years, say officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Though they didn't have specific numbers, officials said fines of nearly $1 million are unusual in California.

Ampersand agreed to the fines for violations that began in 2008 at the Ampersand Chowchilla Biomass in Madera County and Merced Power near El Nido, the EPA said. The biomass plants burn woody waste from farms and cities to create electricity. Ampersand agreed to reduce ozone-forming oxides of nitrogen and carbon monoxide. Company officials could not be reached for comment.

The large fine reflects the amount of pollution and duration of the violations. The violations took place during 2008, 2009 and 2010. The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District discovered the problems.

Biomass plants are considered a cleaner option than open-field agricultural burning, which has been mostly banned in the Valley. But modern biomass plants must meet strict standards to prevent adding to the air-quality problems, especially in the Valley.

"Today's enforcement actions are a victory for human health," said Jared Blumenfeld, EPA's regional administrator.

Ampersand bought and refurbished the two biomass plants in 2007 and 2008, federal air officials said. The operations had been shut down during the 1990s, according to the Valley air district.

Aside from nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide, the two plants violated limits for sulfur dioxide. The two plants also failed to perform timely testing to measure emissions, EPA said.

SOURCE





Old Nazis prominent in the rise of the postwar German Green movement

For them, the global warming scare began very early -- in 1958

One of the primary pioneering theorists on apocalyptic global warming is Guenther Schwab (1902-2006), an Austrian Nazi. In 1958, Schwab wrote a fictional novel built off of Goethe's (1749-1832) Faustian religious play entitled "Dance with the Devil."

While a few scientists since the late 1800's had contemplated the possibility of minor global warming coming from industrial pollution, Schwab used Goethe's dramatic approach to convert the theory into an apocalyptic crisis. The book outlines many looming environmental emergencies, including anthropogenic global warming. Guenther Schwab's very popular novel was an apocalyptic game changer. By the early 1970's, it had been translated into several languages and had sold over a million copies.

At one point in his novel, Schwab opines on the fragile relationship between oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Assuming the planet has only about 100 years remaining, Schwab frets over the continuing rise of carbon dioxide that "will absorb and hold fast the warmth given out by the earth. This will cause the climate to become milder and the Polar ice will begin to thaw. As a result, there will be a rise in the level of the ocean and whole continents will be flooded."

Schwab had been a strong nature lover since boyhood, and by the 1920's he became very active in the emerging environmental movement in Austria. Later, he joined the Nazi Party. While this may sound odd to many who have bought into the Marxian propaganda over the years that the Nazis were right wing capitalistic extremists, greens who signed up for the Nazi Party were actually very typical of the day. The most widely represented group of people in the Nazi Party was the greens, and Guenther Schwab was just one of among many. The greens' interest in lonely places found a solitary niche in the singleness of Adolf Hitler, who ruled the Third Reich from his spectacular mountain compound, high in the Bavarian Alps called the Berghof. In English, this could easily be translated as Mountain Home, Bavaria.

After the war in the 1950's, Guenther Schwab's brand of environmentalism also played a fundamental role in the development of the green anti-nuclear movement in West Germany. The dropping of the atom bomb and the nuclear fallout of the Cold War helped to globalize the greens into an apocalyptic 'peace' movement with Guenther Schwab being one of its original spokesmen. The unprecedented destruction in Germany brought on by industrialized warfare never before seen in the history of the world only served to radicalize the German greens into an apocalyptic movement. Their hatred toward global capitalism became even more vitriolic precisely because the capitalists were now in charge of a dangerous nuclear arsenal that threatened the entire planet.

Later, Guenther Schwab joined the advisory panel of "The Society of Biological Anthropology, Eugenics and Behavior Research." Schwab was especially concerned with the burgeoning population explosion of the Third World that he was sure would eventually overrun Europe. By advocating modern racial science based on genetics, Schwab believed that the population bomb, together with its associated environmental degradation, could be averted. Here, Schwab shows his basic commitment to the Nazi SS doctrine of 'blood and soil' -- an explosive concoction of eugenics and environmentalism loaded with eco-imperialistic ambitions that had devastating consequences on the Eastern Front in World War II.

The success of Schwab's book helped him to establish an international environmental organization called "The World League for the Defense of Life." Not surprisingly, Werner Haverbeck, former Hitler Youth member and Nazi environmental leader of the Reich's League for Folk National Character and Landscape, later became the chairman of Schwab's organization. In 1973, Haverbeck blamed the environmental crisis in Germany on American capitalism. It was an unnatural colonial import that had infected Germany like a deadly foreign body.

Both Schwab's organization and Haverbeck were also instrumental in establishing the German Green Party in 1980. Such embarrassing facts were later managed with a little housecleaning and lots of cosmetics, which was further buoyed by characterizing such greens as extreme 'right wing' ecologists -- a counterintuitive label that continues to misdirect and plague all environmental studies of the Third Reich. Worst of all is that Haverbeck's wife is also a Holocaust denier.

Long before Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth," green Nazi Guenther Schwab played a large role in catalyzing the frightening theory of global warming. With no small thanks to Schwab, the Great Tribulation of Global Warming was ushered into the modern consciousness behind the collapse of the Millennial 1,000 year Third Reich. There is therefore a swastika in the German woods that needs to be closely watched here.

SOURCE

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

For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here

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