Finnish Environmentalist - "the state should enact draconian measures of discipline, prohibition, enforcement and oppression in order to make people comply with environmental dictates."
Before the apologists start and say that this eco-facist is a lone voice in the wilderness, not representative of the Green environmental movement and all the usual platitudes used to explain away these people; Google “Climate Skeptics should be punished” and consider the 7.4 million hits Google returns.
The demands of the Church of Climatology and its supporters for the punishment of sacrilege does not just come from Finland, the calls are global, from people such as the British Royal Family’s Green simpleton Prince Charles, Obama Science Czar John Holdren and NASA junk scientist James Hansen, who took time off from making up climate data, to demand jail for Climate Change Deniers.
In Australia Green Socialists have sought to control the media, in July 2011 the Green party leader Christine Milne demanded political censorship and punishment for dissent for the media to the enthusiastic applause from an audience of party faithful.
The Green campaigner in question is Finnish environmentalist guru Pentti Linkola who makes a combination of Hitler, Stalin and Mao all rolled into a complete entity, look an attractive proposition:
A Finnish environmentalist guru has gone further than any other global warming alarmist in openly calling for fascism as a necessary step to save the planet from ecological destruction, demanding that climate change deniers be "re-educated" in eco-gulags and that the vast majority of humans be killed with the rest enslaved and controlled by a green police state, with people forcibly sterilized, cars confiscated and travel restricted to members of the elite.
No doubt about it, the science is settled and the Green Stasi are going to keep it that way.
Linkola's barbaric and dictatorial philosophy has remained relatively obscure but is now gaining traction as the mask of environmentalism is lifted to unveil its true nature - a justification for 21st century tyranny on a grand scale, characterized by eugenics, sterilization, gulags, police states, and total government control over every aspect of our existence.
Now before proceeding further this article was published in September 2010, Google returns 11,200 results for Greens “greens denounce linkola” the results are only returned because they contain “denounce” or “linkola”. No statements from Greenpeace, WWF, FoE or another Green environmental movement distancing themselves from Linkola. Given the extreme views of this eco-facist and the time elapsed you could be forgiven for thinking someone, somewhere in the environmental movement would have said something like “this man is a nutter and not representative of the Green agenda”.
The silence is both deafening and also speaks volumes for the real agenda of Greens and environmentalists, there is no other way, and certainly no highway for anyone but the Green elite.
Under Linkola's proposal to save earth from man-made climate change, "only a few million people would work as farmers and fishermen, without modern conveniences such as the automobile." This system would be enforced by the creation of a "Green Police" who would abandon "the syrup of ethics" that governs human behavior to completely dominate the population.
The environmentalist believes that only jackbooted tyranny can help to save mother earth from "the worst ideologies in the world" which he defines as "growth and freedom".
“Growth and Freedom“, sounds all to familiar, though normally cloaked in much friendlier terms by warming alarmist outlets like the BBC and The Guardian who make the same case for no growth and actively support the idea of Green laws to punish people who don’t follow the Greens party line.
Those who refuse to be enslaved by Linkola's new eco-tyranny would be abducted and sent to the mountains for "re-education" in eco-gulags, according to the environmentalist, who says that the only solution "lies in a centralised government and the tireless control of citizens."
As part of his eco-fascist hell, Linkola calls for `killing defectives' by means of sterilization, licenses for births, tight regulation of electricity, forcing humans to eat rats, the confiscation of private cars, travel to be restricted to members of the elite only, and businesses to be terminated as the economy is entirely handed over to the control of the state.
The Hitler/Stalin/Mao being would be so proud of Linkola, but as previously stated Linkola is not alone:
Another prominent figure in the climate change debate who exemplifies the violent and death-obsessed belief system of the movement is Dr. Eric R. Pianka, an American biologist based at the University of Texas in Austin. During a speech to the Texas Academy of Science in March 2006, Pianka advocated the need to exterminate 90% of the world's population through the airborne ebola virus. The reaction from scores of top scientists and professors in attendance was not one of shock or revulsion - they stood and applauded Pianka's call for mass genocide.
The current White House science czar John P. Holdren also advocates the most obscenely dictatorial, eco-fascist, and inhumane practices in the name of environmentalism. In his 1977 Ecoscience textbook, Holdren calls for a "planetary regime" to carry out forced abortions and mandatory sterilization procedures, as well as drugging the water supply, in an effort to cull the human surplus.
Linkola has outstripped even notorious murder mastermind Charles Manson in his hatred for the human race. During prison interviews, Manson routinely spoke of his belief that around 50 million humans should be slaughtered for the good of the planet, whereas Linkola and his fans simply believe that humanity should cease to exist in its entirety. A fan site dedicated to Linkola includes links to his articles which have headlines like "Extinguish Humans, Save the World".
Like Manson, Linkola has become a respected environmentalist guru for a new cult of believers who feel that governments and global institutions are not being ruthless enough in enforcing overdue measures to save the Earth from ecological destruction.
Then there are those who consider and actively push that the idea that Climate Change Denial is a mental disorder though judging from the content and comments the mental disorder would seem to belong to the very same people who set up the page in the first place.
SOURCE
Obama Discovers Natural Gas
Another election-year transformation
A re-election campaign is a terrible thing to waste, and this year's race is already producing miraculous changes at the Obama White House: The latest example of a bear walking on its hind legs is the President's new embrace of . . . natural gas from shale.
Last week the White House issued its latest report on jobs and it includes a section on "America's Natural Resource Boom." The report avers that a few years ago there were widespread "fears of a looming natural gas shortage," but that "the discovery of new natural gas reserves, such as the Marcellus Shale, and the development of hydraulic fracturing techniques to extract natural gas from these reserves has led to rapidly growing domestic production and relatively low domestic prices for households and downstream industrial users."
Please pass the smelling salts to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Lisa Jackson at the Environmental Protection Agency.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the White House has favorably mentioned the Marcellus Shale, the natural gas reservoir below Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other Northeastern states. And now he's taking credit for this soaring production.
As the White House report puts it: "Of the major fossil fuels, natural gas is the cleanest and least carbon?intensive for electric power generation. By keeping domestic energy costs relatively low, this resource also supports energy intensive manufacturing in the United States. In fact, companies like Dow Chemical and Westlake Chemical have announced intentions to make major investments in new facilities over the next several years."
And that's not all: "In addition, firms that provide equipment for shale gas production have announced major investments in the U.S., including Vallourec's $650 million plant for steel pipes in Ohio. An abundant local supply will translate into relatively low costs for the industries that use natural gas as an input. Expansion in these industries, including industrial chemicals and fertilizers, will boost investment and exports in the coming years, generating new jobs."
We checked to see if someone slipped a press release from the Natural Gas Council into the White House report by mistake, but apparently not.
The report does add the obligatory disclaimer about hydraulic fracturing that "appropriate care must to be taken to ensure that America's natural resources are extracted in a safe and environmentally responsible manner" with safeguards "to protect public health and safety." But no one disagrees with that.
The catch is that this endorsement runs against every energy policy pursued by the Obama Administration for three years. The Institute for Energy Research reports that royalties from oil and gas drilling have fallen more than 90% since 2008 because of Interior Department permitting delays and rejections.
The EPA recently issued a flawed report on groundwater contamination that could shut down the fracking process the President is now touting as a jobs producer. EPA's political goal is to grab power to supercede state drilling regulation. The industry regards new EPA authority as a real threat to its future.
Each year Mr. Obama has also supported a $40 billion tax hike on the oil and gas industry because, as he put it in 2009, the tax code "encourages overproduction of oil and gas" and "is detrimental to long-term energy security." Even the Securities and Exchange Commission has imposed extensive new reporting requirements on oil and gas fracking companies.
It's certainly smart politics for Mr. Obama to distance himself from the anti-fossil fuels obsessives, and no doubt his political advisers are hoping it helps this fall in the likes of Ohio and Pennsylvania. On the other hand, this could be a one-year wonder, and if he wins Mr. Obama might revert to form in 2013. A good test of his sincerity would be to replace Ms. Jackson and Mr. Salazar.
SOURCE
Wholesale electricity price declines 50% as Shale Spurs Natural Gas Glut
A shale-driven glut of natural gas has cut electricity prices for the U.S. power industry by 50 percent and reduced investment in costlier sources of energy.
With abundant new supplies of gas making it the cheapest option for new power generation, the largest U.S. wind-energy producer, NextEra Energy Inc. (NEE), has shelved plans for new U.S. wind projects next year and Exelon Corp. (EXC) called off plans to expand two nuclear plants. Michigan utility CMS Energy Corp. (CMS) canceled a $2 billion coal plant after deciding it wasn't financially viable in a time of "low natural-gas prices linked to expanded shale-gas supplies," according to a company statement.
Mirroring the gas market, wholesale electricity prices have dropped more than 50 percent on average since 2008, and about 10 percent during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a Jan. 11 research report by Aneesh Prabhu, a New York-based credit analyst with Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC. Prices in the west hub of PJM Interconnection LLC, the largest wholesale market in the U.S., declined to about $39 per megawatt hour by December 2011 from $87 in the first quarter of 2008.
Power producers' profits are deflated by cheap gas because electricity pricing historically has been linked to the gas market. As profit margins shrink from falling prices, more generators are expected to postpone or abandon coal, nuclear and wind projects, decisions that may slow the shift to cleaner forms of energy and shape the industry for decades to come, Mark Pruitt, a Chicago-based independent industry consultant, said in a telephone interview.
Power Earnings Impact
Natural gas fell today on investor concerns that mild winter weather in the U.S. will damp demand. Natural gas for February delivery fell 18.2 cents, or 6.8 percent, to $2.488 per million British thermal units on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the lowest settlement price since March 2002.
"You're lowering the earnings ceiling every time natural- gas prices drop," said Pruitt, former director of the Illinois Power Agency, which negotiates power-purchase agreements for the state's utilities.
Price declines are expected to hurt fourth-quarter 2011 earnings and continue to depress profits through 2012, Angie Storozynski, a New York City-based utilities analyst with Macquarie Capital USA Inc., said in a Jan. 11 research note.
Hardest hit will be independent power producers in unregulated states such as Texas and Illinois, which don't have the protections given regulated utilities where states allow a certain level of profits.
60 Percent Decline
The Standard & Poor's independent power producer index, which groups Constellation Energy Group Inc. (CEG), NRG Energy Inc. (NRG) and AES Corp. (AES), has fallen 60 percent since the beginning of 2008, compared with a 14 percent drop for the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Low gas prices drained the momentum from a resurging nuclear industry long before last year's meltdowns at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plants in Japan, said Paul Patterson, a New York City-based utility analyst with Glenrock Associates LLC. No applications to build new reactors have been filed with federal regulators since June 2009.
Exelon, the largest U.S. nuclear operator, canceled plans last summer to boost capacity at two nuclear plants in Illinois and Pennsylvania after analyzing economic factors, Marshall Murphy, a spokesman for Chicago-based Exelon, said in an e-mail.
CMS Energy's canceled coal plant, planned for Bay City, Michigan, would have showcased the newest pollution-control technology for capturing and storing carbon-dioxide emissions.
Wind Expansion Slows
Investors also are cooling on wind investment because of falling power prices, a lack of transmission infrastructure and the possibility that federal subsidies may expire next year. T. Boone Pickens, one of wind power's biggest boosters, decided to focus on promoting gas-fueled trucking fleets after canceling plans for a Texas wind farm in 2010.
"Boone still sees wind being a key part of America's energy future," Jay Rosser, a spokesman for Pickens, said in an e-mail. "Natural-gas prices will ultimately rise and make wind energy more competitive in the process."
NextEra didn't include new U.S. wind projects in its financial forecast for 2013, Lew Hay, chief executive officer of the Juno Beach, Florida-based company, said in a November conference call with investors. NextEra's wind expansion after 2012, when a federal tax credit for wind generators is expected to expire, is contingent upon "public policy support," said Steve Stengel, a spokesman for NextEra, in a telephone interview.
"Wind on its own without incentives is far from economic unless gas is north of $6.50," said Travis Miller, a Chicago- based utility analyst at Morningstar Inc. (MORN)
Shale Gas Boom
U.S. gas supplies have been growing since producers learned how to use hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling to tap deposits locked in dense shale rock formations. Gas prices have been falling since mid-2008, when a global recession sapped demand just as drilling accelerated in the gas-rich Marcellus shale in the eastern U.S., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Gas prices collapsed further in late 2011 on concerns mild winter weather in the U.S. will curb demand for the heating fuel. Gas is expected to stay below 2011's average price of $4.026 for the next two years, priced at around $3.10 per million British thermal units for 2012 and $4 for 2013, according to Robert W. Baird (BADC) & Co., an investment bank based in Milwaukee.
New Gas Generation
Declining power prices may also make it unprofitable for utilities to install pollution controls on older coal-fired plants, adding to the wave of plant closures that are expected to result from new U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rules over the next two to three years, Pruitt said.
As much as 90 gigawatts of new generation, enough capacity to light 72 million homes and businesses, will be needed by 2015 to replace retiring coal plants and meet electricity demand, according to a Nov. 30 research report by Hugh Wynne, an analyst at investment bank Sanford C. Bernstein.
Cheap gas makes it difficult for rival forms of fuel to compete, said Sam Brothwell, a senior utility analyst with Bloomberg Industries, in a telephone interview. Historically, gas-fired generators have been the least expensive to build, offset by a higher fuel cost, Brothwell said. With gas falling below $3, "it makes all other forms of producing electricity look less competitive by comparison," he said.
Gas Power Costs
The cost, including construction, to produce one megawatt hour of gas-fueled electricity was $62.37 an hour in the third quarter of 2011, which was less expensive than coal, wind and solar generators, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Power companies are leery of becoming too dependent on gas, which historically has had the biggest price swings of all the power fuels. In 2005, gas prices climbed to nearly $14 after hurricanes disrupted production in the Gulf of Mexico.
Project cancellations, along with a broader switch from coal to gas, will leave the industry with fewer alternatives and thus more exposed to rising gas prices, Pruitt said.
"The way to make $4 gas $8 gas is for everyone to go out and build combined-cycle natural-gas plants," Michael Morris, non-executive chairman of American Electric Power (AEP) Inc., said at an industry conference in November. "We need to be cautious about how we go about this."
SOURCE
The United States Possesses the Largest Energy Resources on Earth
We live in an age of abundance, so the misanthropic Greenies want to turn it into an age of artificial scarcity
A new report from the Congressional Research Service points out that in terms of total hydrocarbon resource, the US possesses the largest inventory of any nation on Earth. But under the Obama regime, an unstated but unrelenting program of "energy starvation" is being carried out -- from the DOE to the Department of Interior to the EPA, even including the NRC. It is one thing to be energy-poor because you lack the resources. It is quite another to intentionally cripple your own economy using half-baked policies of carbon hysteria, nuclear fear, and faux environmental crisis fabrication.
America's combined energy resources are, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service (CSR), the largest on earth. They eclipse Saudi Arabia (3rd), China (4th) and Canada (6th) combined - and that's without including America's shale oil deposits and, in the future, the potentially astronomic impact of methane hydrates.
...if the White House is in any way serious about impacting the economic Black Hole that is the burgeoning national debt, reinvigorating business big-time, creating real jobs and restoring ebbing national wealth, the best shot by a distance if you're American ... well, you're standing on it, or rather above it.
...While the US is often depicted as having only a tiny minority of the world's oil reserves at around 28 billion barrels (based on the somewhat misleading figure of `proven reserves') according to the CRS in reality it has around 163 billion barrels. As Inhofe's EPW press release comments, "That's enough oil to maintain America's current rates of production and replace imports from the Persian Gulf for more than 50 years". Next up, there's coal. The CRS report reveals America's reserves of coal are unsurpassed, accounting for over 28 percent of the world's coal. Much of it is high quality too. The CRS estimates US recoverable coal reserves at around 262 billion tons (not including further massive, difficult to access, Alaskan reserves). Given the US consumes around 1.2 billion tons a year, that's a couple of centuries of coal use, at least.
...In 2009 the CRS upped its 2006 estimate of America's enormous natural gas deposits by 25 percent to around 2,047 trillion cubic feet, a conservative figure given the expanding shale gas revolution. At current rates of use that's enough for around 100 years. Then there is still the, as yet largely publicly untold, story of methane hydrates to consider, a resource which the CRS reports alludes to as "immense...possibly exceeding the combined energy content of all other known fossil fuels." According to the Inhofe's EPW, "For perspective, if just 3 percent of this resource can be commercialized ... at current rates of consumption, that level of supply would be enough to provide America's natural gas for more than 400 years."
...With 85 percent of global energy set to come from fossil fuels till at least 2035 no matter what wishful thinkers may prefer, current US energy policy - much like European - is pure political pantomime.
SOURCE
A Misleading article in "Nature Geosciences"
In Nature Geosciences January 2012, Volume 5 No 1 on page -9, there is an article titled
Climate change confirmed. again
The article is written by Alexandra Witze
who covers the Earth and other sciences for the US biweekly magazine Science News
as reported in the Nature article.
My Comment: The first error in this article is that climate change (i.e. the title “[c]limate change confirmed…” ) is not just the global average surface temperature trend! Climate (and changes in climate statistics) is very much more than that limited metric, as discussed, for example, in
National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change: Expanding the concept and addressing uncertainties. Committee on Radiative Forcing Effects on Climate Change, Climate Research Committee, Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Division on Earth and Life Studies, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C., 208 pp.
The article starts with the text [highlight added]
Year after year, three top climate science groups analyse global surface temperature data and reach the same conclusion: the planet is warming at unprecedented rates. So why would a fourth team be needed to also scrutinize the data? The answer lies in the sociopolitical morass of how climate science is received today by much of the public. Sceptics have done their best to sow confusion by questioning, among other things, the integrity of the global temperature record. The criticisms are manifold. Weather monitoring stations have been cherrypicked, data sloppily extrapolated, and spurious effects not properly accounted for - or so say the detractors. Such arguments have gained traction among many audiences.
My Comment: The reporter’s statement that “the planet is warming at unprecedented rates” shows a failure by this journalist at examining actual data which conflicts with this statement. She is accepting the global average surface temperature as the definitive metric to diagnose global warming when other data sets (e.g. lower tropospheric temperature trends - see Figure 7; upper ocean heat trends) show no such unprecedented warming. Even the global average surface temperature trends have been muted in recent years with respect to what the multi-decadal global models are predicting (e.g. see).
The statement that “[s]ceptics have done their best to sow confusion” completely misrepresents the scientific method where scientists are obligated (if they are using the accepted scientific method) to seek to falsify hypotheses! Richard Muller’s BEST work is an example of hypothesis testing (and he should be credited for this), but, as discussed in my weblog posts on his work that are listed below, the hypothesis remains incompletely tested using his approach.
The text continues with
This explains the intense media response to the first papers published from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, led by iconoclastic physicist Richard Muller of the University of California, Berkeley. The BEST scientists set out to reassess records from weather stations by compiling an independent, bigger data set from scratch and developing their own statistical techniques to analyse it.
My Comment: The reporter repeats the erroneous statement that the BEST data set is independent of the NCDC, CRU and GISS data sets, as discussed in the posts
Is There A Sampling Bias In The BEST Analysis Reported By Richard Muller?
Richard Muller On NPR On April 11 2011 - My Comments
Comment On The Article in the Economist On Rich Muller's Data Analysis
Comments And Questions On The BEST Analyses
The Nature Geosciences article also failed to report that there is a siting problem with the surface temperature trend data as was reported in detail in
Fall, S., A. Watts, J. Nielsen-Gammon, E. Jones, D. Niyogi, J. Christy, and R.A. Pielke Sr., 2011: Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res., 116, D14120, doi:10.1029/2010JD015146.Copyright (2011) American Geophysical Union.
Below this article on the same page, is a separate write-up titled “The journalist's take” [a subscription is needed to read]
which starts with the paragraph
For climate scientists, the question of whether Earth's surface is warming was settled in the affirmative long ago. But for journalists, other considerations come into play when deciding whether to run such a well-trodden story.
My Comment: The journalist who wrote this text fails to recognize that the question as to whether the Earth surface is warming needs to be continually monitored each year, as the climate is much more dynamic than represented by a monotonically increasing annual average global surface temperature. Perhaps, in the coming years, the surface temperature will warm but it is not a “settled” question but one that needs to be continually reassessed.
In this case, the very fact of who was releasing the study, and why they actually did it, was newsworthy. Nearly every public discussion of the surface-temperature record now comes with at least one sceptic raising the issue of station quality and data integrity. Richard Muller, head of the BEST team, is a self-proclaimed climate sceptic to a certain degree.
My Comment: The identification of Richard Muller as a “skeptic” who has had an epiphany seems to be the main reason that the news media are so focused on his views. In reality, he is a newcomer to the climate issue, and, from my perspective, is still very much on a learning curve.
SOURCE
Increase in temperatures will cut short lives, says "expert"
What a lot of rubbish. It's cold that is bad for you. Deaths are much higher in winter. Another "modelling" exercise, no doubt. New Nostradamus also has a laugh at this "study"
A GLOBAL temperature rise of 2C by 2050 would result in increased loss of life, a new Queensland study has found. Scientists from the Queensland University of Technology and the CSIRO examined the "years of life lost" due to climate change, focusing on Brisbane.
"A two-degree increase in temperature in Brisbane between now and 2050 would result in an extra 381 years of life lost per year in Brisbane," lead researcher Associate Professor Adrian Barnett, from the university's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, said.
"A two-degree increase in temperature is the figure in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is dangerous, but could be reached unless more aggressive measures are undertaken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."
Prof Barnett said the "years of life lost" measurement gives greater weight to deaths at younger ages instead of focusing only on elderly people. "We suspected that many temperature-related deaths were in the elderly, which would reduce the public health importance of temperature compared with other issues," he said. "In fact, we found the opposite, with a surprisingly high years of life lost figure."
Prof Barnett said that an increase of more than two degrees would be catastrophic. "A four-degree increase in temperature would result in an extra 3242 years of life lost per year in Brisbane."
Interestingly, the study found that a one-degree increase would result in a decrease in the number of lives lost. This is believed to be because the increase in heat-related years of life lost are offset by the decrease in cold-related years of life lost. The researchers said cold-related deaths were significant, even in a city with Brisbane's warm climate.
And many deaths could be avoided if people had better insulation in their houses. "Many houses in Brisbane are built of thin planks of wood and are poorly insulated, which means the occupants are exposed to whatever the temperature is outside," Prof Barnett said.
The researchers believed that while their work was focused on Brisbane, it contained helpful information to decision-makers in other areas as well.
The study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
SOURCE
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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