Why don't all Greenies move to New Zealand?

New Zealand has a-plenty the sort of clean Green life that Greenies claim they want while also being a modern country where you can drink the water and speak English to everyone.  An excerpt from a private blog written by a mother who has moved to a small town in New Zealand:

"The vege garden is another place my and Simon's time disappears into -- as we plant, weed & fertilise our pretty vast garden in the hope of having a large enough crop so we always have access to fresh organic veges whenever we like.  It is an amazingly liberating feeling to have control of our food sources and we are learning more and more everyday about what it means to be a vege and fruit gardener.  Also stay tuned as my Roses have just started to flower.. They are BEAUTIFUL!!

Last Monday the Playcentre organised a trip to a farm which is owned by one of the Playcentre families.  The farm was HUGE and on arrival we all met and drove up to the cow milking shed.  We had a tour then headed to a paddock which contained some pigs and also a herd of calves.  There were great hay piles to climb and we enjoyed watching the calves being fed by a big trailer full of milk covered in teats for the calves to suckle.  We then had some morning tea near the farm houses and then fed some lambs.  Once that was done we headed to the farm owner's house and enjoyed a sausage sizzle and the kids played together in the large back yard and tennis court.  We also had a celebration for one of the boys who is turning 5 which means  he starts school.  Kids start school on their 5th birthday in New Zealand which I feel is a nice way to transition the kids into school."

And the little two-year old girl in the family loves the lambs her family has adopted (Below)

I don't think Greenies know what they want



Emissions of Carbon Dioxide Hit Record in 2011.  So where is the temperature rise?

Wisely, the following report from the NYT is pretty restrained about the implications of the finding.  It reports what Warmists say but takes no position itself.  For a full-blown Greenie heart attack this Australian comment is hard to beat

Global emissions of carbon dioxide were at a record high in 2011 and are likely to take a similar jump in 2012, scientists reported Sunday — the latest indication that efforts to limit such emissions are failing.

Emissions continue to grow so rapidly that an international goal of limiting the ultimate warming of the planet to 3.6 degrees, established three years ago, is on the verge of becoming unattainable, said researchers affiliated with the Global Carbon Project.

Josep G. Canadell, a scientist in Australia who leads that tracking program, said Sunday in a statement that salvaging the goal, if it can be done at all, “requires an immediate, large and sustained global mitigation effort.”

Yet nations around the world, despite a formal treaty pledging to limit warming — and 20 years of negotiations aimed at putting it into effect — have shown little appetite for the kinds of controls required to accomplish those stated aims.

Delegates from nearly 200 nations are meeting in Doha, Qatar, for the latest round of talks under the treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Their agenda is modest this year, with no new emissions targets and little progress expected on a protocol that is supposed to be concluded in 2015 and take effect in 2020.

Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the climate convention, said the global negotiations were necessary but were not sufficient to tackle the problem.

“We won’t get an international agreement until enough domestic legislation and action are in place to begin to have an effect,” she said in an interview. “Governments have to find ways in which action on the ground can be accelerated and taken to a higher level, because that is absolutely needed.”

The new figures show that emissions are falling, slowly, in some of the most advanced countries, including the United States. That apparently reflects a combination of economic weakness, the transfer of some manufacturing to developing countries and conscious efforts to limit emissions, like the renewable power targets that many American states have set. The boom in the natural gas supply from hydraulic fracturing is also a factor, since natural gas is supplanting coal at many power stations, leading to lower emissions.

But the decline of emissions in the developed countries is more than matched by continued growth in developing countries like China and India, the new figures show. Coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive fossil fuel, is growing fastest, with coal-related emissions leaping more than 5 percent in 2011, compared with the previous year.

SOURCE



Another comment on the latest Warmist orgasm

Some excerpts from Doug Hoffman below.  I commented on the study in my lead post yesterday, mentioning some of the methodological difficulties in it, something  Hoffman also refers to.  

I mentioned yesterday how trivial was the sea-level rise reported but perhaps I can make it even clearer yet:  The rise in ocean level reported was SIX TENTHS OF A MILLIMETER per annum.  That translates to at most 60 millimeters over the next 100 years.  60 millimeters is just under two and a half INCHES!  I think I am going to be referring to that often in future

A new “comprehensive” report about the melting of Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets is being touted by climate alarmists as “grim news” but in fact says no such thing. This latest estimate, published this week in Science, combines data from many sources including 20 years of satellite data and 32 years of ice-sheet simulations to arrive at a mixed conclusion. It estimates that, between 1992 and 2011, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets lost 1350 ± 1010 and 2700 ± 930 Gt of ice, respectively. That is equivalent to an increase in global mean sea level of 11.2 ± 3.8 mm, less than 1/2 an inch. Moreover, while some areas were loosing ice mass others were gaining mass from snowfall. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), which occupies over 75% of Antarctica, experienced mass gains during the final years of the study.

The intent of this new report is quite clear, come up with an unassailable new estimate for ice loss that can be included in the next IPCC global warming report. In “A Reconciled Estimate of Ice-Sheet Mass Balance,” Andrew Shepherd et al. begin with some historical perspective. “Analysis of the geological record suggests that past climatic changes have precipitated sustained ice-sheet contributions, in excess of 10 mm year−1 over millennial time periods, and the prospect of such changes in the future are of greatest concern,” they state, accurately stating that there has been significant variation in ice-sheet loss and ocean levels before the specter of anthropogenic global warming raised its climate destroying head.

Naturally, the authors could not resist bowing to the dominant consensus driven, group think pap: “Even the modest rises in ocean temperature that are predicted over the coming century could trigger substantial ice-sheet mass loss through enhanced melting of ice shelves and outlet glaciers. However, these processes were not incorporated into the ice-sheet models that informed the current global climate projections.” Their data may not be reconciled but the authors are certainly demonstrating that they are go-along types of climate scientists. Exactly how they performed this extensive and exhaustive study is stated early on in the Science paper:

"In this assessment, we use 19 years of satellite radar altimeter (RA) data, 5 years of satellite laser altimeter (LA) data, 19 years of satellite radar interferometer data, 8 years of satellite gravimetry data, 32 years of surface mass balance (SMB) model simulations, and estimates from several glacial isostatic adjustment models, to produce a reconciled estimate of ice-sheet mass balance. The satellite data sets were developed by using independent methods and, in the case of the LA, gravimeter, and SMB data sets, through contributions from numerous research groups. To enable a direct comparison, we reprocessed the geodetic data sets with use of common time intervals and common definitions of the East Antarctic, West Antarctic, Antarctic Peninsula, and Greenland ice-sheet (EAIS, WAIS, APIS, and GrIS, respectively) boundaries (16). The maximum temporal extent of the satellite data sets spans the period 1992 to 2011, and results from all geodetic techniques are available between January 2003 and December 2008. Unless stated otherwise, all results are presented with 1-sigma uncertainty estimates."

There are a plethora of abbreviations here but the main thing to bear in mind is that the two big repositories of glacial ice are the Greenland ice-sheet (GrIS) and Antarctica (EAIS, WAIS, APIS). Drawing on all the satellite sources listed above the international team of 47 experts led by Shepherd munged the datasets together—data collected from almost 30 previous ice-sheet studies, including 20 years of data from 10 different satellite missions, adding a large dollop of computer model simulation results. What was found was that “over the course of our 19-year survey, the average rates of mass balance of the AIS and the GrIS were –71 ± 53 and –152 ± 49 Gt year−1, respectively.” ....

It should also be noted that the response in Greenland is significantly different from the response of the much larger Antarctic ice-sheet. Here is a summary of the Antarctic findings.

"The pattern of WAIS imbalance is dominated by mass losses (Amundsen Sea sector) and gains (Kamb Ice Stream) of dynamical origin. Although close to balance during the 1990s, there have been significant mass losses from the APIS since then because of glacier acceleration in the wake of ice-shelf collapse and calving-front retreat. The APIS now accounts for around 25% of all mass losses from Antarctic regions that are in a state of negative mass balance, despite occupying just 4% of the continental area. In contrast, the EAIS, which occupies over 75% of Antarctica, was in approximate balance throughout the 1990s. Although the EAIS has experienced mass gains during the final years of our survey, our reconciled data set is too short to determine whether they were caused by natural fluctuations that are a common feature of Antarctic ice-core records or long-term increases in precipitation that are a common feature of global and regional climate model projections.

Consider what the term “reconciliation” means—an attempt to bring multiple datasets into agreement though they represent very different ways of gathering data and yield noticeably different results....

Both of the papers discussed here concentrate primarily on Antarctica, and rightfully so, since it contains most of Earth's glacial ice. For Greenland things are a bit murkier. “Assessments of GrIS mass balance require more careful consideration than was possible here, because the surrounding mountain glaciers and ice caps are included in some, but not all, of our geodetic surveys and because the ice-sheet domains varied in area by 2%,” explain Shepherd et al..

It is unclear how these trends, such as ice loss from Greenland, will evolve, says Ian Joughin, one of the paper's co-authors and a satellite expert at the University of Washington in Seattle: “It really remains unclear whether such losses will decline, whether they’ll level off or they’ll accelerate further.” This should be viewed in light of recent data that show Greenland underwent a similar episode of ice loss in the 1930s.

Indeed, Shepherd et al. admit that their work is based on too short a time span to draw any meaningful long-term conclusions. “We have shown that assessments of mass imbalance based on short geodetic records should be treated with care, because fluctuations in SMB can be large over short time periods,” they admit, hinting at the study's fundamental problem. Recent ice-core data reveal that the Antarctic Peninsula area undergoes bouts of rapid warming periodically.

It is striking that supporters of calamitous climate change always base their projections on the last three decades or so—a period that was, in fact, a time of increasing warmth. In this case, they found melting ice around the globe, just not as much as often claimed and certainly not justification for projections into the future for 50 or 100 years. Go back 150 years and people were not worried about retreating glaciers but advancing ones.

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




British company set to resume fracking as government backs UK shale gas

Cuadrilla is poised to spearhead the creation of a new UK industry in shale gas extraction, its chief executive has said, as the company prepares to resume "fracking" in Lancashire.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Francis Egan said the private-equity-backed company was ready to "press on quickly" once Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, lifts a moratorium on the controversial process.

Cuadrilla, whose chairman is former BP chief Lord Browne, believes it could be producing shale gas in the UK by March next year.  "We are starting a whole new onshore gas industry. In our licence alone we can supply a quarter of the UK's gas demand," Mr Egan said.

Cuadrilla initially planned up to 800 wells but will need to secure local planning permission for each well.

The Chancellor will this week throw his weight behind plans for fracking, when he is expected to announce the creation of a new Office for Shale Gas to help shape the nascent UK industry.
Mr Osborne has already said he is considering tax breaks for shale gas.

Ministers will also unveil a new gas generation strategy, setting out plans for 20GW of new gas-fired generation – about 20 power plants – by 2030. The plans will alarm environmentalists but cheer those who believe shale gas could provide a source of cheap gas for the UK.

Mr Egan said: "Britain is spending tens of billions of pounds importing gas. If we are able to develop gas resources here . . . it could make a major difference for the country in terms of tax revenues, balance of payments and at a time when the economy is the pits."

The moratorium on fracking – which sees water pumped into rocks to remove oil and gas – was imposed in 2011 after drilling by Cuadrilla caused two small earth tremors in Blackpool.

A decision to lift the ban had been thought likely earlier in the year after an independent Government-commissioned report recommended it resume. It is now expected soon after Wednesday's Autumn Statement.

Mr Davey, who will take the decision in a quasi-judicial role, has said he will support shale gas exploitation only if it is economic and "can be carried out with the full protection of the environment".

Cuadrilla may not be prepared to wait much longer. "If we get a negative decision this week, we would have little alternative than to walk away," Mr Egan said.

"We have proven that there is gas and that it will flow. In the three years we have been doing tests, they have drilled 60,000 wells in the US. We don't have infinite patience and our investors don't have infinite patience."

SOURCE





Facing a Triple Threat: Doha, EPA and Congress

Climate alarmists are meeting in Doha, Qatar, to hammer out a new international treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol that expires this year. The US Environmental Protection Agency is poised to unleash its first wave of carbon dioxide regulations. And Congress is teaming up with the White House to legislate taxes on hydrocarbon use and CO2 emissions, on top of pending tax hike on “the rich.”

This serious triple threat to our energy, economy, jobs, living standards, health and welfare is justified by assertions that the actions will stabilize Earth’s climate and prevent a litany of global warming horrors.

Our planet’s climate has never been stable, and never will be. There is no empirical evidence that carbon dioxide drives climate change, or that greenhouse gases have supplanted the complex and interrelated natural forces that have produced big and little ice ages, floods and droughts, stormy and quiescent periods throughout the ages.

Even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 280 parts per million before 1880 to 391 ppm (0.0391%) today, average global temperatures have flat-lined for 16 years;hurricane and tornado frequency and intensity have fallen to new lows; Antarctic sea ice continues to expand, while Arctic ice caps were reduced, not by warming, but by huge storms; and the rate of sea level rise remains steady.

While alarmists insist that Hurricane Sandy was “unprecedented” and proof that “climate change is real,” it is just one of many major storms that have battered New York and eastern Canada over the years.

Moreover, every ton of painful, economy-crippling US carbon dioxide reductions would be offset by 100 tons from India, China and elsewhere, and atmospheric CO2 concentrations would continue to climb.

But these inconvenient truths are irrelevant to climate campaigners, who are using “dangerous manmade climate change” as the best pretext ever devised to control energy use and economies. They simply hypothesize, model and assert that every observed weather and climate phenomenon is due to human CO2 emissions. Warmer or colder, wetter or drier, more ice or less, more storms, fewer storms, occasional big storms – if not now, someday, sooner or later. It’s exactly what climate alarmists predicted.

This is not science. It is political science, rooted in a loathing of hydrocarbons, economic growth and humanity. It’s ideological, religious – the only state-sanctioned, state-supported religion permitted today.

If Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex was bad, what are we to make of today’s political-scientific-university-bureaucratic-military-industrial-media-environmentalist complex? Funded and driven by tens of billions of dollars annually for research grants, renewable energy programs and regulatory regimes, it has far too much at stake to forsake adherence to Mann-made global warming cataclysm hypotheses.

According to Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer, well-connected political cronies take hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for “green energy” and “global warming prevention” programs, funnel it to soon-to-be-bankrupt companies, keep a few million for themselves, and launder a few hundred thousand back to the politicians who brokered the deals. Obama campaign bundlers, says Schweizer, received more than $21,000 of corporate welfare for each dollar they donated to the Obama reelection campaign. Big Green environmentalist groups also garner countless millions in taxpayer lucre.

The consequences for average workers and families are dire. If even one of these swords of Damocles falls – Doha, EPA or the carbon tax – the effects will be disastrous. If all three are imposed (or all three in conjunction with tax hikes on job and wealth creators), the impacts will be utterly devastating.

Ignoring these facts, extensive other evidence for natural climate change, and the numerous scientists who reject their manmade climate catastrophe claims, advocates of a new Doha climate treaty, EPA “CO2 endangerment” rules, and “carbon taxes” insist these actions are needed to avoid ecological calamities.

They are adamant in contending that carbon taxes will somehow benefit the economy, create jobs and balance out-of-control spending. One is reminded of Will Rogers insightful quip: “Suppose you were an idiot – and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Every one of these actions is intended to increase the cost of the hydrocarbon energy that powers our economy. But raising the cost of transportation fuels, electricity, lighting, heating, air conditioning, and thus of food, materials and equipment will severely impact the bottom line for factories, utilities, offices, farms, shops, airlines, shippers, hospitals, schools, churches, charities and government offices.

The poorest families may get rebates for their increased energy costs. These institutions will not. They will be forced to reduce wages and benefits, hire fewer full-time employees, lay people off, outsource operations to countries where energy costs are lower, or even close their doors.

Taxes paid by companies and employees will dwindle. Instead of paying taxes, newly jobless workers will collect unemployment and welfare – from shrinking government coffers. Charities will have much less money, even if deductions for donations remain in the tax code.

Unemployment will bring reduced nutrition, increased stress, and higher rates of heart attacks and strokes, spousal and child abuse, alcohol and drug abuse, suicide and premature death. The social, economic and healthcare costs will further “fundamentally transform” America, as President Obama is determined to do.

Even if Congress legislates carbon taxes, nothing suggests that Lisa Jackson will refrain from imposing EPA’s anti-hydrocarbon CO2 rules on top of them, or that the White House will reject any Doha treaty. There is no hint that the Interior Department will cease using the Endangered Species Act and other laws to shut down oil and gas drilling, while ignoring the ESA and growing slaughter of eagles and whooping cranes by wind turbines – or that the Energy and Defense Departments, EPA and Congress will stop spending more in borrowed funds to subsidize corn ethanol and Navy biofuel schemes.

These anti-hydrocarbon policies also mean the US Treasury will be deprived of hundreds of billions in lease bonuses, royalties, taxes and other revenues that it would realize from the development of our nation’s vast oil, natural gas and coal deposits. Instead, the United States will be forced to pay billions more for imported oil, often from dictatorial, unethical, environmentally reckless countries.

New hydrocarbon energy restrictions and green energy demands will deprive Third World families and communities of abundant, reliable, affordable energy, obstruct human rights progress, and keep entire nations impoverished. They will kill millions more from lung infections (from burning wood and dung), intestinal diseases (from contaminated water), malaria and other diseases of poverty and eco-imperialism.

Those countries will receive far less foreign aid from increasingly cash-strapped Western nations – and little of the Green Climate Fund cash that industrialized nations will supposedly transfer to kleptocratic ruling elites in poor countries, as reparations for supposedly causing climate change.

For every nation, this coerced energy and economic deprivation will make it increasingly difficult to adapt to future climate changes that nature will inevitably bring our way – in an era when mankind ought to have the wealth and technology to adapt far more easily than our ancestors were able to do.

The Climate Change Complex will do everything in its power to avoid discussing these issues, and vilify anyone who brings them up. However, we need to have this debate, and we need to have it now – in Doha, Congress, the courts and our state legislatures – before our fate is sealed for us.

SOURCE




Connecting the Global Cooling Dots

By Alan Caruba

Winter doesn’t officially begin until December 21, but winter has a mind of its own as does all of nature. While the United Nations charlatans gathered in Doha, Qatar to try to save its global warming hoax by first calling it “climate change” and then by fashioning a funding mechanism to transfer the wealth of developed countries to those who are not, winter has arrived “early” around the world.

That might just have something to do with the cooling cycle that has been active for the past sixteen years, “inconveniently” blowing a big hole in the global warming lies we’ve been hearing and reading since the late 1980s.

From IceAgeNow.info, a site by Robert W. Felix, the author of a book about ice ages (the Earth has been through quite a few in its 4.5 billion years), here are some recent news stories:

On December 1, “Heavy snowfall severs Russia” told of “Hundreds of drivers (who) were caught by surprise in a 40km traffic jam after an unexpected snowfall and heavy winds.”

On November 30, “Finland snowstorm causes blackouts” reported that “Tens of thousands of households were without electricity on Friday as the result of a storm that dumped heavy snow across southern Finland and sent winds gusting up to 27 meters per second, felling trees and downing power lines.” That same day, across the former land bridge between Russia and North America, “Fairbanks – Coldest back-to-back November on record” was a news item what reported “The mercury hit 30 below for the first time this winter at Fairbanks International Airport…”

On November 29, the news was about a “Severe snow storm hits northern Japan” during which it was “blasted by an intense snow storm causing widespread havoc to residents of Hokkaido and Northern Honshu.”

On November 28, “Snowfall paralyzes life in China” was the headline of a report that “China has experienced the biggest snowfall in 52 years. Snow caused power outages in 57 villages, brought down thousands of trees and killed numerous domestic animals. Temperatures fell by as much as 14 degrees below zero in some areas.”

You don’t have to be a meteorologist to connect the dots. It is getting colder in the northern hemisphere of the world. To those who would dismiss this, saying that Russia has always been famous for its winters, that is the equivalent of whistling passed the graveyard.

In England, a November 29 report in The Telegraph, reported that “Councils are gearing up for what could be Britain’s coldest winter in 100 years, as sub-zero temperatures and snow follow days of downpours that have devasted large parts of the country.” The Met Office, England’s equivalent of the U.S. Weather Bureau, warned that “The forthcoming cold snap, caused by clear skies and northerly winds, could herald the start of a freezing winter.”

This was not unforeseen, however. In late January 2012, the British daily, The Mail, reported that “The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planning has not warmed for the past 15 years. The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th century.” England and much of the northern Europe and North America was gripped by a mini ice age that lasted from 1300 to 1850.

It is no secret to climate scientists that the sun is in what they call a “grand minimum” by way of describing relatively few magnetic storms, also known as sun spots. Few storms means less solar radiation and, since the sun is the primary source of heat for the Earth that means things get colder here. This is worth keeping in mind when the Secretary General of the United Nations or any other lying politician or alleged scientist tells you otherwise.

In a new book worth reading, “The Whole Story of Climate” by E. Kirsten Peters, the author brings a wealth of knowledge to the subject from the standpoint of a geologist. As to the claim that carbon dioxide emissions are the “cause” of a warming that is not happening, she points out that “The fact is, if human beings had remained hunter-gatherers throughout our entire history, never producing a single molecule of greenhouse gases through agriculture or industry, climate today would still be changing. It would be lurching toward higher temperatures, crashing toward vastly colder temperatures, or at least swinging toward something different from what has been. That’s just the nature of Earth’s climate.”

Preceding the introduction and rise of humans was an age known as the Pleistocene Epoch about 1.8 million years ago. It “was not a time of only monotonous cold. In fact, it alternated between long periods of cold—lasting roughly 100,000 years—and short periods of considerably warming times—lasting about 10,000 years.”

We humans are the result of the Holocene Epoch, a much more temperate, warmer period that followed the Pleistocene and, writes Peters, “From the Earth’s point of view, the Holocene is no different at all from other brief, warm intervals in the Pleistocene…” We are now about 11,500 years into this warmer cycle and, if the current cooling cycle continues and gets colder, we are knocking on the door of the next ice age.

Nor is this a problem for the northern hemisphere. Southern hemisphere polar sea ice expanded in September 2012 to its greatest extent since satellites began measuring the Antarctic ice cap in 1979.

That’s what Robert W. Felix has been warning about in his book, “Not by Fire, But by Ice”, published initially in 2005. He’s not alone. Habibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences predicts that there will be a sharp drop in the temperature of the Earth starting in 2014. He’s predicting it will last about 200 years.

We are well past when the next ice age—mini or not—should have begun and, if all the global warming charlatans are right, we can actually THANK heightened levels of carbon dioxide for delaying it! However, the truth is that higher or lower levels of carbon dioxide show up centuries after any shift in the Earth’s temperature.

Just as the recent weather reports indicate, lower temperatures, greater snowfall, and other miseries of a colder Earth are in the future of the billions who live in the northern hemisphere. Bundle up.

SOURCE

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