More connection problems

Two days ago I lost electrical power for about 12 hours, which meant that I could not get some of my blogs up.

Today, however, I have lost my cable connection while they are doing work to repair storm damage in my area

For some reason, however, Google addresses (such as this  one) and Facebook are still accessible.  So I can still post but am cut off from most news sources and my Hotmail.

If anybody has sent me a recent email via Hotmail, I would therefore be grateful if they would resend it to my Gmail address:  jonjayray@gmail,com

As a tentacle of Google, Gmail is unaffected for some reason

Blue skies, golden sunshine and still air again in Brisbane

My home State of Queensland has had a phenomenal amount of rain and wind over the last week.  And it caught up with me yesterday in the form of a nearly 12 hour electricity outage.  But, as you will see, paradise is regained today.

Warmists constantly claim that every drought indicates global warming so now that places as different as Australia and England are getting flooding, global cooling must be at work.  That's their logic, anyway, if logic you can call it.  Dogmatism would be a better word for it.

I am an atheist but I think there is better evidence for the divinity of Christ than for the link between recent weather and global warming.  Deprived of one religion, many people invent another.





GLOBAL WARMERS' RECORD FOR MAKING CORRECT PREDICTIONS

By Gregg Thompson, Astrophysicist, Australia

Now that none of the predictions made by Global Warmers have not eventuated and that the opposite has occurred, it's time for government to admit that Climate Change it is an extremely expensive scam on taxpayers.

The number of predictions GWers have got right is ZERO.  The media should be publishing the following.

LOOK AT THEIR MAJOR PREDICTIONS. All have been WRONG.

Temperatures would continue to go up.

WRONG. They haven't since 1997 and since 2007 they have gone down. Climate centres and NASA are finally admitting this.

Snow would never be seen again by many children. They  would not know what it is.

WRONG. Since 2006/7 winter there have been the heaviest snow falls in the northern hemisphere for 20 -80 years and in some places as far back as records go.

The Arctic would be half the size by now and it will be completely gone within this decade.

WRONG. It has gone back to its typical cold cycle size and it will not be gone due to the Sun being so dormant. It has never disappeared even when the Sun is at maximum for long periods because it is only summer there for 6 weeks and the rest of the time it is -25C to -50C.

Glaciers would continue to recede and many would no longer exist.

WRONG. Almost all glaciers are surging due to years of very heavy snow falls.

Drought would continue and this would have caused water wars by now.

WRONG. Since 2006, we have had huge floods, many the biggest on record across all developed continents . Many places like Lake Eyre have filled four times in 3 years! There has never been any water wars.  

Sea level would have risen by 2000 to start flooding low lying areas in cities at sea level. Flooded subways, basements and underground carparks would have make cities unliveable by now.  
   
WRONG. Sea level have not risen and there is no sign that it will. No islands at sea level have been evacuated as Al Gore so fraudulently claimed. And Bangladesh is still above sea level, contrary to his predictions.

CO2 causes heating of the climate.

WRONG. Changes in Solar Activity accounts for 99.99% of climate changes on Earth. The trivial amount of manmade CO2 at one ten millionth of the atmosphere has zero effect.

Received via email.  The author has requested that his email address not be published -- but all his facts are readily checkable






'Waste' heat generated by buildings in large cities 'can affect climate thousands of miles away'
 
This raises the possibility that ALL the measured temperature rise of the 20th century was caused by population and urbanization increase.  That possibility  is normally discounted by reference to stations outside the city.  But on this data cities would have an effect on even some isolated stations

Heat emanating from buildings, factories and vehicles in large cities can affect the climate thousands of miles away.  The 'waste heat' disrupts atmospheric systems that alter the weather over great distances, raising or lowering seasonal temperatures by up to 1C, research suggests.

The effect may explain why winter temperatures are warmer than predicted in some parts of the northern hemisphere.

Some of the world's most populated and energy-intensive cities lie beneath major circulation channels in the atmosphere.

They include the northern polar jet stream, a meandering river of wind that blows around the Earth at more than 100mph.

Heat energy carried from cities by these circulation systems accounts for winter warming across large areas of northern North America and northern Asia, say scientists.

In some remote areas, temperatures are pushed up by as much as 1C.

Meanwhile the air over parts of Europe is made cooler, the research shows. Here, changes to atmospheric circulation caused by the waste heat can lead to 1C reductions in temperature, mostly in the autumn.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggest that heat generated by cities can widen the jet stream.

Heat energy carried from cities by circulation systems accounts for winter warming across large areas of norther North America and northern Asia

`What we found is that energy use from multiple urban areas collectively can warm the atmosphere remotely, thousands of miles way from the energy consumption regions,' said lead scientist Dr Guang Zhang, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

`This is accomplished through atmospheric circulation change.'
Spread out across the world, the net average temperature increase produced by city waste heat is a negligible 0.01C. But at a regional level, the impact is significant, say the researchers.

Co-author Dr Aixue Hu, from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, said: `The burning of fossil fuel not only emits greenhouse gases but also directly affects temperatures because of heat that escapes from sources like buildings and cars.

`Although much of this waste heat is concentrated in large cities, it can change atmospheric patterns in a way that raises or lowers temperatures across considerable distances.'

The scientists analysed the energy consumption that generates waste heat. They calculated that in 2006, the world's total energy consumption was 16 terawatts, or 16 trillion watts - the equivalent of leaving 10 billion 100-watt lightbulbs on for a year.

Of this, an average 6.7 terawatts was consumed in 86 metropolitan areas in the Northern Hemisphere.

SOURCE





Draft UN climate report shows 20 years of overestimated global warming, skeptics point out

A preliminary draft of a report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was leaked to the public this month, and climate skeptics say it contains fresh evidence of 20 years of overstated global warming.

The report -- which is not scheduled for publication until 2014 -- was leaked by someone involved in the IPCC’s review process, and is available for download online. Bloggers combing through the report discovered a chart comparing the four temperature models the group has published since 1990. Each has overstated the rise in temperature that Earth actually experienced.

“Temperatures have not risen nearly as much as almost all of the climate models predicted,” Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, told FoxNews.com.  “Their predictions have largely failed, four times in a row... what that means is that it's time for them to re-evaluate,” Spencer said.

The IPCC graph shows that the midpoints of the various models predicted that the world would warm by between about 0.5 degrees Fahrenheit and 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit between 1990 and 2012. Actual warming was much less than that: 0.28 F, according the data the IPCC cites.

But that doesn’t mean the IPCC models are wrong, others argue.

“It’s important to keep in mind that there are natural short-term variations in global temperature that happen right alongside human-induced warming,” Aaron Huertas, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, told FoxNews.com.  [A big admission for a Warmist.  Once we let that in the door, how do we know or not that ALL the important factors are natural]

“For instance, it would have been impossible for the IPCC to predict if a volcanic eruption might temporarily cool the Earth, as the Mount Pinatubo eruption did in 1991.”

The IPCC’s climate report draft also notes that “the model projections ... do not fully account for natural variability.”

Other types of natural anomalies include solar variability and weather patterns such as the El Niño southern oscillation.

Scientists include a “margin of error” in their models to account for unpredictable variations like volcanoes and weather patterns. Yet one of the IPCC’s models missed the actual warming trend entirely -- in other words, the actual temperatures were outside its “margin of error.” In the other three models, the actual warming trend fell within the very lower bounds of what they predicted would happen.

At least that’s what the IPCC’s chart shows. One scientist who recently published a study that found that the IPCC predictions were very accurate argues that it is likely wrong.

“The IPCC graph you refer to is just a draft version which still has a number of problems that will be ironed out,” Potsdam University physics professor Stefan Rahmstorf [Germany's equivalent of Jim Hansen] told FoxNews.com.

Skeptics such as Spencer also say that the chart does not mean that global warming is a hoax.

“The IPCC's claim is that they are 90 percent sure that humans have 'contributed to' the observed warming. Hell, even I would agree with that innocuous statement.”

But he says it does indicate that greenhouse gases are having less of an affect on climate than the IPCC thought.

“It is evidence that CO2 is not nearly as strong a climate driver as the IPCC has been assuming. This is the possibility they do not allow to be considered, because it would end all of their policy-changing goals,” he said.

SOURCE



The slow retreat of Warmism

Last week the Research Council of Norway announced the results of a new assessment of the climate system’s “sensitivity” taking into account the leveling off of global temperatures during the decade from 2000 to 2010. The study projects that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations over pre-industrial levels will increase global temperatures by between 1.2°C and 2.9°C, with 1.9°C being the most likely outcome. That is considerably cooler than the UN IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) estimate of 2°C to 4.5°C, with 3°C as the most probable outcome.

Climate sensitivity is an estimate of how much warming results from a given increase in CO2 concentrations. Estimates typically project the amount of warming from a doubling of CO2 concentrations over the pre-industrial (year 1750) level of 280 parts per million (ppm). At the current rate of increase (about 2 ppm/yr), a doubling to 560 ppm is expected by mid-century.

Climate alarm depends on several gloomy assumptions — about how fast emissions will increase, how fast atmospheric concentrations will rise, how much global temperatures will rise, how warming will affect ice sheet dynamics and sea-level rise, how warming will affect weather patterns, how the latter will affect agriculture and other economic activities, and how all climate change impacts will affect public health and welfare. But the chief assumption is the range of projected warming from a doubling of CO2 concentrations — the sensitivity estimate.

When the reseachers at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo (CICERO) applied their computer “model and statistics to analyse temperature readings from the air and ocean for the period ending in 2000, they found that climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration will most likely be 3.7°C, which is somewhat higher than the IPCC prognosis.” However, ”when they entered temperatures and other data from the decade 2000-2010 into the model, climate sensitivity was greatly reduced to a ‘mere’ 1.9°C.”

Referring to the IPCC AR4 warming forecasts, project manager Terje Berntsen, a geoscience professor at the University of Oslo, commented: “The Earth’s mean temperature rose sharply during the 1990s. This may have caused us to overestimate climate sensitivity.”

No single study can make a dent on the self-anointed “scientific consensus.” But the Norwegian study is one among several recent studies that call into question the IPCC sensitivity assumptions. Cato Institute climatologist Patrick Michaels recently summarized a partial list of such studies in Forbes magazine:

"Richard Lindzen gives a range of 0.6 to 1.0 C (Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 2011); Andreas Schmittner, 1.4 to 2.8 C (Science, 2011); James Annan, using two techniques, 1.2 to 3.6 C and 1.3 to 4.2 C (Climatic Change, 2011); J.H. van Hateren, 1.5 to 2.5 C (Climate Dynamics, 2012); Michael Ring, 1.5 to 2.0 C (Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, 2012); and Julia Hargreaves, including cooling from dust, 0.2 to 4.0 C and 0.8 to 3.6 C (Geophysical Research Letters, 2012). Each of these has lower and higher limits below those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

In Addendum: Climate Change Impacts in the United States (pp. 26-28), Michaels and his colleague Chip Knappenberger discuss those studies in greater detail and also illustrate with two graphs how the IPCC AR4 warming projections should be adjusted in light of more recent climate sensitivity research. Note that the ‘long, fat tail’ of high-end warming projections in AR4 is absent from projections based on more recent science.


TOP: A collection of probability estimates of the climate sensitivity as presented in the IPCC AR4.  The horizontal bars represent the 5 to 95 percent ranges, and the dots are the median estimate. BOTTOM: A collection of post-IPCC AR4 probability estimates of the climate sensitivity showing a lower mean and more constrained estimates of the uncertainty. The arrows below the graphic indicate the 5 to 95 percent confidence bounds for each estimate along with the mean (vertical line) where available.

Michaels comments: “People are beginning, cautiously, to dial back 21st century warming because there has been none. Because dreaded sea-level rise is also proportional, those estimates are going to have to come down, too.”

SOURCE




New Book By Hans von Storch: Climate Scientists Took On Role Of Prophets…”Completely In Over Their Heads”

At their blogsite here climatologist Professor Hans von Storch and cultural scientist Werner Krauss have announced they’ve authored a new book on the topic of climate change, society and policy:  “The Climate Trap – The dangerous proximity of politics and climate science”

The book will be released later this month by Munich publisher Hanser Verlag. A longer excerpt for reading is available here in German.

This is neither a skeptic nor an alarmist book. In it von Storch and Krauss have plenty of harsh criticism for both sides of the debate, and then some. Both sides, they claim, are responsible for having driven the climate issue into the ground. The book, they say, explains how climate science got there in the first place, and what possibilities are left to get climate sciences back on track so that it can produce productive action.

Here are some excerpts of the publisher’s excerpt.  On the state of climate change today, von Storch and Krauss write:

"After the unprecedented success story of climate change becoming an object of public attention and concern, climate policy and the accompanying climate debate have wound up in a dead end. Despite the Kyoto Protocol and other agreements, commitments to transform the energy supply, and all the climate summits, there’s been no noteworthy success. To the contrary: The curve depicting global emissions of greenhouse gases has been surging upwards. In the summer of 2012, at the summit Rio +20, katzenjammer was everywhere.”

On the climate debate:

"Together with climate politics, the climate sciences have ended up in a credibility crisis. The often-made commitment of limiting the temperature increase to 2°C is scientifically controversial and practically impossible politically. The debate is also being paralyzed by a raging public dispute between alarmists and skeptics. [...]

The climate debate is stuck in the mud, the credibility of climate scientists has been cast into doubt, and the policymakers’ ability to act on the issue of climate is minimal. We are sitting in the climate trap.”

Why are we in this trap? Von Storch and Krauss write:

"It’s not only incompetent politics, the exaggerations by the media and climate protectors, or the destructive forces of the skeptics that are responsible for the interim failure of climate policy. More responsible is the fact that we failed to understand the problem in its full dimension.”

The authors reveal how they feel about alarmist scientists. Since the early 2000s they felt “something was amiss”.

"Was the climate apocalypse really at our doorstep as we could read in the media? Or were they exaggerating in their depiction of the results coming from climate science? [...]

The climate scientist [von Storch] had the suspicion that climate science was dragging around a ‘cultural rucksack’ that was influencing the interpretation of the data. The cultural scientist [Krauss], with regards to the appearances by some climate scientists in the media and the roles they were readily assigned, was reminded of weather-wizards and shamans of foreign cultures.”

In the book, the authors even describe climate science as a ‘tribe of scientists’ and how some began behaving like prophets:

"Some climate scientists were regular interview-partners and talkshow guests – and thus self-confidence became bigger, to the point that they knew the truth about climate change and thus became convinced that policy-making and society should follow the deeper insight of science.

Without really being aware of it, climate scientists had taken over the role of prophets: They predicted the imminent end-of-the-world if society did not fundamentally change soon, reduced its emissions, and behaved more sustainably with the environment. The problem was not only the message, but also that they were were often completely way in over their heads with the role as mediator between nature and society.”

These “prophets” put out a story that was too much to handle. Von Storch and Krauss write:

"Science delivered the raw material for a big climate narrative, one that still continues to shape our perception and media depiction of climate change today. It unleashed the horror scenarios of the Cold War and the fear of the atom, conveying them into the 21st century. A narrative seeded in the world by climate scientists, and one that keeps going out of their control again and again.”

The authors tell us that the way out of the “climate trap” is to begin by “viewing climate change as an issue that does not hang over us like ominous writing on the wall, but as one that has an appropriate place in our societies.” Krauss and von Storch are telling us: “Cool it!” They propose a third, alternative way.

If the rest of the book is like the beginning, then it will have the potential to change the direction of the climate discussion in Germany for the better. It’ll be near the top of my birthday wishlist.

SOURCE




Renewables Fail the Cost Test, Again

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has just released their Energy Infrastructure Update report, which shows how much new electric generating capacity was installed for 2012. According to the report, renewable energy sources (biomass, geothermal, solar, hydro, and wind) accounted for 49.10% of all new domestic electrical generating capacity installed in 2012 for a total of 12,956 MW. More than a quarter of that new capacity (25.29%, or 3,276 MW) reportedly came on-line in the month of December 2012 alone and wind led the way in 2012 with 164 new "units" totaling 10,689 MW.

Advocates of renewable energy are likely cheering these new numbers-even though, according to the FERC report, renewables still only account for 15.40% of total installed U.S. operating generating capacity, with wind coming in at 4.97%. (Note: wind megawatts are not comparable to other megawatts, as they're not always available.)

Without directly saying so, the FERC report highlights renewable energy's dependence on government subsidies. Why in a twelve-month year, did more than a quarter of the new capacity come online in just one month-the month of December?

Despite intensive lobbying efforts on behalf of the American Wind Energy Association, the Production Tax Credit (PTC) for wind energy-that was set to expire at the end of 2012-wasn't extended until the Fiscal Cliff Deal became law on January 2, 2013. Those seeking to benefit from the government largesse had the financial motivation to get as many wind projects as possible up and running. As long as the project was completed in 2012, it would receive the PTC for the next ten years. The Fiscal Cliff Deal gave wind energy developers one more year to take advantage of the PTC-but the PTC extension wasn't a sure thing until after it had already expired. (Note: the new PTC deal changed the requirements from being completed by the end of the one year extension to qualify, to merely starting construction by December 31, 2013.)

Wind energy advocates claim that the PTC is needed to help make wind energy cost competitive with traditional energy sources, such as coal and natural gas. However a new report from the American Traditions Institute that looks at the "Hidden Costs of Wind Electricity" reveals that the true costs for wind-generated electricity are actually one-and-a-half to two times more than what the Energy Information Agency (EIA) forecasts.

According to the EIA, the levelized cost of electricity generated from an advanced natural gas-fueled, combined-cycle power plant is 6.3 cents per kilowatt hour and 11.1 cents from advanced coal or nuclear. The EIA models forecast wind-generated electricity at 9.6 cents per kilowatt hour-which sounds very promising-but fails to take into account the "hidden costs."

The hidden costs of wind-generated electricity include:

 *         Because, with rare exceptions, wind can only operate as an appendage to traditional generation, not as a replacement, the cost of primary fossil-fueled plants must be included. The traditional plants are kept available to balance wind's large variations in output. Adding wind to the system reduces the amount of generation for which the plants are paid and therefore increases their operating costs.

 *         The reduced fuel efficiency wind imposes on those plants.

 *         Due to the remote siting of most wind facilities, real costs include long-distance transmission and the losses that come with it.

According to the report, these hidden costs are not included in the EIA figures because the regulatory authorities have not required wind operators to pay for them, rather the costs have, once again, been borne by consumers. The authors state: "In an honest, transparent, and accountable political system, that should not be an excuse for policy makers to ignore their impact on consumers, jobs, and the economy."

With the hidden costs factored in, the report concludes that wind's true cost is about 15.1 cents per kilowatt hour for natural-gas fired back-up and 19.2 cents for coal-fired back up-or one-and-a-half to two times the cost of new-construction coal- or gas-fueled electricity. (The higher costs do not include the 12 billion in taxpayer dollars going to the wind industry due to the PTC extension.)

The authors believe these costs will go up, not down. First, wind energy is a mature industry-worldwide market is more than $50 billion per year. Therefore, costs are unlikely to be reduced by either technological advances or further economies of scale. Additionally, most current wind facilities have been built in locations that could piggyback on existing transmission infrastructure-as these easier opportunities are used up, new installations will have higher transmissions costs.

But the dollar figures are only part of the hidden costs.

Renewable energy proponents tout "clean" and "green" as one of its key selling points. Many utility companies offer customers an option to feel good about saving the planet by using the more expensive renewable energy.

But recent news from Germany-which is reputed to have more renewable energy than most of the developed world, and Greece-where the economy is known to be one of the worst in the developed world, show that, in practice, expensive energy is neither clean nor green, and carries negative unintended consequences.

Both countries are reporting that trees are disappearing from forests and parks as "impoverished residents, too broke to pay for electricity or fuel, turn to fireplaces and wood stoves for heat."

In Germany, Der Spiegel blames high energy costs for a rise in tree thefts and wood-burning stove purchases: "Germans bought 400,000 such stoves in 2011, the German magazine FOCUS reported this week. It marks the continuation of a trend: The number of Germans buying heating devices that burn wood and coal has grown steadily since 2005."

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal reports that in Greece: "As winter temperatures bite, that trend is dealing a serious blow to the environment, as hillsides are denuded of timber and smog from fires clouds the air in Athens and other cities, posing risks to public health." In addition to the environmental devastation, the illegal logging has caused and the visible pollution from burning wood, the high cost of electricity has caused schools in Greece to close because they can't afford heat and lives have been lost as the wood-burning fires have broken out of wood stoves, burned down houses, and killed residents-including children trapped in their burning home.

As most of America is in the midst of a deep freeze, and the Obama Administration is moving forward with its renewable energy programs, the hidden costs of expensive electricity to human life and the environment need to be counted as well as the economic impacts. As the stories from Europe clearly point out, expensive electricity hits the poor the hardest.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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Hiatus

There is a power outage at my place due to big storms so I am not sure whether I will be able to post much here today -- JR

Sophisticated Norwegian study scales back the scare

After taking the 21st century into account -- and effectively admitting that past model projections were radically wrong. But if they were all wrong, how can we have any confidence in any such predictions?

Policymakers are attempting to contain global warming at less than 2°C. New estimates from a Norwegian project on climate calculations indicate this target may be more attainable than many experts have feared.

Internationally renowned climate researcher Caroline Leck of Stockholm University has evaluated the Norwegian project and is enthusiastic.

“These results are truly sensational,” says Dr Leck. “If confirmed by other studies, this could have far-reaching impacts on efforts to achieve the political targets for climate.”

Temperature rise is levelling off

After Earth’s mean surface temperature climbed sharply through the 1990s, the increase has levelled off nearly completely at its 2000 level. Ocean warming also appears to have stabilised somewhat, despite the fact that CO2 emissions and other anthropogenic factors thought to contribute to global warming are still on the rise.

It is the focus on this post-2000 trend that sets the Norwegian researchers’ calculations on global warming apart.

Sensitive to greenhouse gases

Climate sensitivity is a measure of how much the global mean temperature is expected to rise if we continue increasing our emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas emitted by human activity. A simple way to measure climate sensitivity is to calculate how much the mean air temperature will rise if we were to double the level of overall CO2 emissions compared to the world’s pre-industrialised level around the year 1750.

If we continue to emit greenhouse gases at our current rate, we risk doubling that atmospheric CO2 level in roughly 2050.

Mutual influences

A number of factors affect the formation of climate development. The complexity of the climate system is further compounded by a phenomenon known as feedback mechanisms, i.e. how factors such as clouds, evaporation, snow and ice mutually affect one another.

Uncertainties about the overall results of feedback mechanisms make it very difficult to predict just how much of the rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature is due to manmade emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the climate sensitivity to doubled atmospheric CO2 levels is probably between 2°C and 4.5°C, with the most probable being 3°C of warming.

In the Norwegian project, however, researchers have arrived at an estimate of 1.9°C as the most likely level of warming.

Manmade climate forcing

“In our project we have worked on finding out the overall effect of all known feedback mechanisms,” says project manager Terje Berntsen, who is a professor at the University of Oslo’s Department of Geosciences and a senior research fellow at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo (CICERO). The project has received funding from the Research Council of Norway’s Large-scale Programme on Climate Change and its Impacts in Norway (NORKLIMA).

“We used a method that enables us to view the entire earth as one giant ‘laboratory’ where humankind has been conducting a collective experiment through our emissions of greenhouse gases and particulates, deforestation, and other activities that affect climate.”

For their analysis, Professor Berntsen and his colleagues entered all the factors contributing to human-induced climate forcings since 1750 into their model. In addition, they entered fluctuations in climate caused by natural factors such as volcanic eruptions and solar activity. They also entered measurements of temperatures taken in the air, on ground, and in the oceans.

The researchers used a single climate model that repeated calculations millions of times in order to form a basis for statistical analysis. Highly advanced calculations based on Bayesian statistics were carried out by statisticians at the Norwegian Computing Center.

2000 figures make the difference

When the researchers at CICERO and the Norwegian Computing Center applied their model and statistics to analyse temperature readings from the air and ocean for the period ending in 2000, they found that climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration will most likely be 3.7°C, which is somewhat higher than the IPCC prognosis.

But the researchers were surprised when they entered temperatures and other data from the decade 2000-2010 into the model; climate sensitivity was greatly reduced to a “mere” 1.9°C.

Professor Berntsen says this temperature increase will first be upon us only after we reach the doubled level of CO2 concentration (compared to 1750) and maintain that level for an extended time, because the oceans delay the effect by several decades.

SOURCE






Lovelock realizes that Greenies are ENEMIES of the environment

James Lovelock has written a letter of objection regarding a windfarm development in Devon (see link below for the whole thing). This bit strikes me as important.

"I am an environmentalist and founder member ofthe Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood and misapplied. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation."

As Phillip Bratby puts it, there are strong shades of Patrick Moore's regrets over the monster he created in Greenpeace. One might add that another parallel would be Mark Lynas's regrets over his anti-GMO activism.

I've said it before, but the damage done by environmentalists to the environment is beyond estimation.

SOURCE




Greece Shows Us How Poverty Degrades the Environment

By Iain Murray

Environmentalists' hearts surely rose when they read recently Greek air pollution levels had decreased by 40 percent from 2008 levels thanks to the ongoing recession there. Fewer people were using their cars or trucks, and, as a result, levels of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides in the air had plummeted.

But those gains have been reduced and then some. In fact, Greece recently has seen a massive increase in smog, which reminds us it is poverty that truly drives environmental damage.

Smog has been a particular problem this year in major cities such as Athens and Thessaloniki. But high smog levels have been reported all over Greece -- including the Peloponnese and Attica. Yet this isn't the sort of smog we worry about in American cities. It's an older, cruder, almost forgotten form here, reminiscent of the days of London's pea-soupers. The Greek smog is a result of the increased burning of wood as household fuel, and it has massively increased levels of pollutants. The average level of particulate matter in London fell from around 160 micrograms per cubic meter to less than 20 between 1961 and 1998, so successful was the industrialized west at cleaning up its act. The current levels in Greece are reaching 300 micrograms per cubic meter.

There will be substantial health effects from this increase in pollution back to dangerous levels. A London "black fog" in 1952 killed 4,000 people. Current Greek smog levels are fast approaching that level of danger. Moreover, the effects of such a lasting smog would be borne more by the poorest. As Greek commentator Nikos Konstandaras describes the smog:

"This new plague appears to be democratic, spreading out all over Athens's coastal basin, over the center and suburbs, over rich and poor, over young and old, natives and immigrants... But the veneer of universality is thin -- again it is the poor who suffer most: They live on lower floors, where the toxins congregate, they are forced to burn whatever they find, huddling around open fires and buckets of embers. They will not be able to send vulnerable family members to the countryside."

Not only is the smog destructive of the atmosphere, it is destructive of forests. Greeks have been forced by the high prices of home heating oil -- of which a large proportion is government-imposed taxes -- to use wood for fuel, and much of that wood is gathered illegally. The Greek environment ministry estimates more than 13,000 tons of wood was harvested illegally in 2012.

What we are seeing is Greece retreating back up the slope of what is known as the Environmental Kuznets curve. This model theorizes that, as a civilization starts to use natural resources, it increases its impact on the environment until it reaches a stage where it becomes more efficient to reduce its impact, This is why the richest societies generally also are the cleanest. Wealthier is healthier for the environment. That's exactly what we saw in the decreases in smog levels in the west over the last century.

Greece is regressing. As it becomes poorer, its environment suffers more. The Greek financial crisis has been a disaster in many more ways than first thought. Two particular factors have combined here. The massive overspending by the Greek state could not be corrected by devaluation as Greece is part of the Eurozone. This has led to a massive wealth contraction within Greece, which has meant people do not have as much to spend on fuel. Secondly, the Greek government, as part of its austerity program, has relied heavily on raising taxes on energy -- home heating fuel and electricity especially. The result has been the increased reliance on wood and the looming environmental disaster.

If you ever needed an illustration of why affordable energy is important for the environment, Greece provides it. Poverty, on the other hand, is one of the worst enemies the environment can have.

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Subsidizing Stupid

I don't want to buy any windmills and I don't want to buy any solar panels. Most especially though - I don't want to pay for other people to buy them either. But my government is taking my money and giving it to them. I don't like that. I don't like it one bit. If hippie greenies are foolhardy enough to pay more for their heat and electricity because it's "green," they're free to do that. It would be none of my business as long as I didn't have to pay for their silliness.

I don't want to buy an electric car either - and I don't want to pay for other people to buy them. But again, my government is taking my money and giving it to people who manufacture those cars - and more of my money to still other people who buy them. I don't like that. It annoys me greatly.

There are lots of reasons why windmills don't cut it as a power source, but the biggest is this: calm days. Sometimes the wind doesn't blow. Sometimes it doesn't blow for several days running. Ergo, no electricity. Whatever activities require it are not possible until the wind blows again whenever that may be. Sailboats have the same trouble; that's why they're only used for recreation now.

Here's why solar panels don't cut it: the sun doesn't shine at night and days are often cloudy. What do we do on calm, cloudy days? We have to use the good old coal, oil, or natural gas generators. We have to keep that whole infrastructure in place and maintained on calm, cloudy days. Hippie greenies haven't solved those problems and probably never will, but that doesn't stop them from voting for "green" politicians who siphon money from my pocket to pay for their ridiculous notions.

There's yet another major problem with windmills: When the wind blows hard for a day or two, the power generated - which the electricity utility is forced by government to buy at above-market rates no less - could burn up the whole grid causing extensive, long-term blackouts! Because of this, Maine utility companies have to spend $1.4 billion to beef up transmissions lines against those windmill surges driving up their transmission rates by 19.6% as of July 1, 2012. Transmission costs are about half my total monthly electric bill here in western Maine. In spite of enormous, long-term government subsidies - money from me and you, that is - windmills remain the most expensive way to generate electricity by far, and there's nothing on the horizon to indicate that will ever change.

I have a generator to use when the grid shuts down, but I don't want to generate my own power because it's cheaper and more reliable to buy it from Central Maine Power (CMP). However, even when I send checks to CMP each month, much of that money goes to greenies and their windmills. That's because CMP is forced by government to buy excess power from their windmills whether it's needed or not and at inflated price as well! That means self-righteous hippie greenies can buy power at market rates when the wind doesn't blow - and sell it at above-market rates when it does. This infuriates me.

I don't want ethanol in my gasoline either, but I cannot buy gasoline that doesn't contain it. Hippie greenies have forced that on me too. Worse, government is making me pay for ethanol even though it costs more than gasoline - and I get less energy from it. I have to pay for its subsidies in my taxes and I have to pay for it again when I pump it into my gas tank. I know government does dumb things, but I especially hate it when it forces me to cooperate in its stupidity. We've known since at least 2005 that it takes at least 29% more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than you get from it when you burn it. Worse still, it damages small engines like my chainsaws, lawnmowers, four-wheelers, generators, and every other small gasoline engine most of us have. Can we please, please stop this ethanol craziness? Please?

Maine's Governor LePage is negotiating with Quebec Hydro to buy cheaper, more reliable electricity, but his biggest opponents are the hippie greenies who want to keep their windmill gravy train rolling here. Since the November election, they're back in control of Maine's legislature and likely to thwart LePage's efforts. Greenies love President Obama because he wasted somewhere between $80 billion and $90 billion of taxpayer money on "Green Energy" development, while doing his best to shut down cheaper, more reliable, more dependable sources of energy from fossil fuels.

Looks like I'll be forced to subsidize all this greenie government foolishness for the next several years at least. Sometimes I wish I were as stupid as they are, because then it wouldn't all piss me off so much.

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Desperately Trying to Derail Canadian Oil Sands

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman has approved his state’s portion of the Keystone XL pipeline, explaining that its revised route avoids areas that critics had earlier claimed were environmentally sensitive.

The Alberta-to-Texas pipeline would create more than 5,500 Nebraska jobs during its construction period and support 1,000 permanent jobs through 2030. During the project’s lifetime, KXL would generate $950 million in labor income, $130 million in property, sales and other state and local taxes, and $679 million for the state’s gross domestic product, by bringing Canadian oil sands petroleum to Texas refineries.

President Obama’s second term agenda, continued viability of Medicare and Social Security programs, and America’s economy and environment need the pipeline and oil even more than Nebraska does.

The pipeline and Alberta petroleum could mean $45 billion per year by 2035 in increased goods and services, up to 465,000 more jobs in the 2,000 American companies that already support oil sands operations or utilize the hydrocarbons in motor fuel and petrochemical manufacturing – and billions in annual state and federal tax revenues. While all fifty states would realize employment and economic gains, California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, Ohio, New York, Montana and Michigan would benefit most (in that order) from this job and economic activity, the Canadian Energy Research Institute calculates.

Canada has an estimated 169 billion barrels of oil sands fuel that can be recovered economically with today’s technology – 20% by mining and 80% via in situ drilling and steam injection. Much of this oil is destined for the United States via the KXL pipeline, to replace similar heavy crude that we now import from Mexico and Venezuela, and oil from other nations that have much lower environmental standards and far worse human rights records than Canada, including Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Russia, Iraq and Algeria.

During a recent tour of the mining and in situ operations, I smelled no hydrocarbons, learned that fresh water use is declining and water recycling has risen to 80-95 percent, and hiked through former mine sites that have been restored to beautiful lakes, creeks, forests … and grasslands where wild buffalo roam. Most oil sands will not be mined, however – but produced by drilling wells hundreds of feet deep, injecting steam to melt the bitumen, and collecting it in other pipes several feet below the steam pipes. Multiple wells are drilled from each widely separated site, and each is also reclaimed when the oil is recovered.

Oil sands production contributes only 0.14% of global greenhouse gases, Environment Canada notes, and would add only 0.00001 degrees C per year to global warming. Production-to-automotive-use CO2/GHG emissions for oil sands crude are on par with crude from Nigeria, America’s third biggest supplier.

All this has prompted oil sands and pipeline opponents to generate press releases and new “scientific reports,” in a desperate attempt to derail KXL permits, by raising scary sounding ecological issues.

* Assorted “experts” persist in trying to blame global warming and climate change for forest fires, droughts, floods, heat waves and even Hurricane Sandy – and say oil sands will somehow worsen these problems. But our planet hasn’t warmed in 16 years, US hurricanes are at one of their lowest cyclical ebb since the Civil War, humanity has confronted forest fires and severe weather events repeatedly throughout our history, and Sandy’s hardly unprecedented pounding of New York City was compounded by numerous ill-considered decisions by its political leaders.

* The anti-hydrocarbon group Oil Change International claims petroleum coke produced in the oil sands process is not fully accounted for in GHG analyses and will hasten global warming. However, “pet coke” burned as fuel in the Alberta oil sands operations is already included in GHG emission analyses. It is a byproduct of all heavy oil refining, so the Canadian variety simply displaces Mexican and Venezuelan pet coke. And most oil sands output is “upgraded” to medium weight oil for pipelining, by removing carbon and adding hydrogen – with the carbon stored onsite for later sale to manufacturers and other users.

* Scientists from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, say aromatic hydrocarbon levels have increased in the sediments of several Alberta lakes since oil sands development began in the 1960s. Various media stories claimed the study is another “blow to the Keystone pipeline.” The media spin is a bit far-fetched.

First, these hydrocarbon levels are rather typical of remote Alberta lakes, and are well below what is found in lakes near Canada’s urban areas. Second, the measured changes are 25 to 50 nanograms – parts per billion – the equivalent of 25-50 seconds in 32 years, or up to 50 billionths of a fifth of a teaspoon of water. Survey instruments could not even measure these amounts several decades ago, and even the scientists offered no evidence to suggest that such levels constitute an actual problem.

Second, while the hydrocarbons could have come from airborne pollution from oil sands production, they could also have come from conifer forest fires, or increasing boat and seaplane traffic on the lakes. The reported increases could even have resulted from contaminated samples, collecting gear or lab instruments, due to fuel sheens on the lake surface, oils on upper sediment levels, reused lab equipment, or even sunscreen or lotion on technicians’ hands. “Parts per billion” is tiny, and contamination a constant issue.

Finally, the researchers also noted that algae, photosynthesis and nutrient levels in the lakes have increased since the late 1970s, partly as a result of “climate warming” that began when Earth emerged from its 1942-1976 cooling period. This also increased algae-eating zooplankton populations. The lakes are healthy!

In short, the benefits of the oil sands and Keystone pipeline are clear. The downsides are minimal, exaggerated or imaginary. And the alternatives to oil sands are far worse for people and planet.

As analyst and author Indur Goklany demonstrates in his book, The Improving State of the World, we are living longer, healthier, more comfortable and productive lives – on a cleaner planet – than even kings and queens dreamed of 150 years ago. As he explains in his latest paper, “Humanity Unbound,” a major reason is fossil fuels, which have “saved humanity from nature, and nature from humanity.”

Oil sands are a crucial component of the energy revolution that could generate millions of jobs and hundreds of billions of dollars in economic benefits and tax revenues, resurrect US steel and manufacturing industries, make North American largely energy independent, and enhance our national security.

We cannot afford to turn our backs on this – especially with 23 million Americans unemployed or underemployed, 47 million on food stamps, 128 million dependent on various government programs, and the nation $16 trillion in debt. This is unsustainable, and driving the USA toward Greece and Europe.

Equally unsustainable are policies advanced in name of preventing climate change. As Austrian film maker and environmentalist Ulrich Eichelmann explains in his new documentary, these Climate Crimes are “killing nature.” Dams are flooding vast ecological preserves to generate hydroelectric power; corn and other monoculture crops are destroying vital habitats; and German, Greek and other European families that can no longer afford heating oil and electricity are chopping down forests for firewood.

Here in the United States, thousands of monstrous wind turbines are butchering 13,000,000 to 39,000,000 birds and bats every year – including eagles, hawks, whooping cranes and other essential and endangered species. And yet the US Fish and Wildlife Service refuses to investigate or prosecute industrial wind operators for this horrific slaughter, and even assists in the flagrant deception and cover-up.

But the programs continue, thanks to billions of taxpayer dollars poured annually into Solyndra and other “green” schemes and bankruptcies, and despite scandals like miraculous Euro solar panels that generate electricity even at 2:00 am, US programs that turn janitors, bus drivers and paper cup makers into “green job” recipients and, not surprisingly, mafia involvement in Italy’s wind and solar escapades.

President Obama has a perfect opportunity to restore ethics and common sense to America’s energy and environmental policies. Our planet and children hope he makes the right choice and says Yes to Keystone.

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Warmist assumptions infect instrumentation

Professor Claes Johnson, a skeptic of man-made global warming claims, says he has found a fatal flaw in key instrumentation that supposedly measures, and thus proves, the radiation emitted because of of the “greenhouse gas effect” (GHE) which is calibrated in Watts.These instruments are used for scientific measurements of outdoor downward atmospheric long-wave radiation- the supposed source of the GHE’s added heating mechanism. Johnson performed detailed research into the thermometers of one leading manufacturers of IRT’s  Kipp&Zonen pyrgeometers, with their model CGR 4. Kipp & Zonen describe their CGR4 thermometers as having “extremely high reliability and accuracy.” But as Johnson discovered, this is a bogus and perhaps intentionally fraudulent claim.

The stunned professor laments, “There is no reason to believe that the fabricated "radiance product" has anything to do with reality. There is good reason to believe that we the people are deceived by government scientists. But if science can be used to deceive, science can also be used to reveal deception.”

Sweden’s most cited math professor says, “We read that the pyrgeometer measures a voltage proportional to net absorbed radiation, from which "by calculation" a quantity named "downward long-wave radiation DLR" is derived.” But is it?

Johnson tells us that the basic idea for a GHE measurement is from "atmospheric re-emission" by in particular carbon dioxide (CO2), which is claimed to be a "greenhouse gas.” By using the CGR4 thermometer it is possible to see a warming effect from DLR of about 4 W/srm2 per micrometer at a wavelength of 15 micrometer where the trace gas CO2 is emitting/absorbing.

However, after carefully crunching the numbers Johnson has spotted a monumental error. The pyrometer has been calibrated using a bungled calculation of the Stefan-Boltzmann (S-B) Law. The Swedish math professor from RTH claims, “The consequences for climate alarmism, and Kipp&Zonen are far-reaching.”

Digging deeper Johnson found that the S-B numbers Kipp&Zonen (and other manufacturers) used were taken from Guide to Meteorological Instruments and Methods of Observation issued by the World Meteorological Organization  (section 7.4.3 formula (7.17).  However, the Swedish math genius uncovered that “No scientific reference to (7.17) is given by WMO. So Kipp&Zonen uses a formula issued by WMO without scientific support.”

But it gets worse! The WMO admit this whole area of science is not actually known. In section 7.4.3 of their aforementioned document the WMO claimed that: “Over the last decade, significant advances have been made in the measurement of terrestrial radiation by pyrgeometers, which block out solar radiation. Nevertheless, the measurement of terrestrial radiation is still more difficult and less understood than the measurement of solar irradiance.”

The big question Johnson now poses is who is responsible for this deception? “ I think this is an interesting case concerning the responsibility of scientists and scientific institutions, and commercial actors relying on the science. It is clear that in medicine or building technology there are those who are held responsible. It must be so also in atmospherics science. I will ask WMO for the scientific source and report the answer,” said the professor.

If the WMO now decline to give Johnson a straight answer and admit to these serious flaws then once again we shall see how the man-made global warming fraud is sustained by a coterie of self-serving participants. Johnson asks the question: “Can the WMO be sued for distributing science which is admittedly not understood but which they say is valid simply by referring to measurements made by a pyrgeometer using the WMO formula?” if the WMO are allowed to get away with this con trick of circular reasoning then any formula can be validated this way.

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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A man who can't see what his own graph shows

After crowing about the high average temperature recorded for the USA in 2012, Warmist Zeke Hausfather grudgingly admits that the USA is not the globe.  He says:

"While the U.S. temperature topped the charts in 2012, the world as a whole was not quite so hot. Nonetheless, it still ranks as either the 9th, 10th, or 11th hottest year on record depending on which record is used. Figure 5 shows surface temperatures from NASA, NOAA, and the United Kingdom’s Hadley Centre from 1880-2012 and satellite temperature records from the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) from 1979-2012. While the satellite records run slightly lower than the surface temperature records, the trends are comparable in magnitude."


Figure 5: Annual temperature anomalies from major global (land/ocean) records.

SOURCE

The graph shows clearly what even some Warmists are now admitting  -- that the GLOBE has shown no warming trend in recent years.  Depending on where you start, you could even see a cooling trend.



Just the numbers please

Anthony Watts hits on a fatal weak point in what the official climatologists say:  If NCDC can’t accurately tell us what the past temperatures were, they are faced with a agency mission failure.  Watts is commenting on the effusions of Zeke Hausfather:

Zeke is upset that I made this statement in a story at Fox news:

"Is history malleable? Can temperature data of the past be molded to fit a purpose? It certainly seems to be the case here, where the temperature for July 1936 reported … changes with the moment. In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data."

He says:

"In the spirit of civility, I would ask Anthony to retract his remarks. He may well disagree with NCDC’s approach and results, but accusing them of fraud is one step too far."

I’d point out that Zeke has his interpretation but nowhere did I say “fraud”. He’s mad, and people don’t often think clearly when they are mad. That’s OK.  Without getting into semantics, I’d like to ask Zeke these simple questions:

* What is the CONUS average temperature for July 1936 today?

* What was it a year ago?

* What was it ten years ago? Twenty years ago?

* What was it in late 1936, when all the data had been first compiled?

We already know the answers to questions 1 and 2 from my posting here, and they are 76.43°F and  77.4°F respectively, so Zeke really only needs to answer questions 3 and 4.

The answers to these questions will be telling, and I welcome them. We don’t need broad analyses or justifications for processes, just the simple numbers in Fahrenheit will do.

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Experts can be hilariously wrong

Let's look at experts. Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) was a mathematician and scientist. Newton has to be the greatest and most influential scientist who has ever lived. He laid the foundation for classical mechanics, and his genius transformed our understanding of science, particularly in the areas of physics, mathematics and astronomy. What's not widely known is that Newton spent most of his waking hours on alchemy; his experiments included trying to turn lead into gold. Though he wrote volumes on alchemy, after his death Britain's Royal Society deemed that they were "not fit to be printed."

Lord William Thomson Kelvin (1824-1907) was a Belfast-born British mathematical physicist and engineer. Kelvin's major contribution was in thermodynamics, and he is widely recognized for determining the correct value of absolute zero, approximately minus 273 degrees Celsius. In his honor, absolute temperatures are expressed in Kelvin units. Being an expert in one field doesn't spare one from being an arrogant amateur in others. Based on his knowledge of heat dissipation, Kelvin criticized geologists of his day and claimed that Earth was between 20 million and 100 million years old. Kelvin also said that "X-rays will prove to be a hoax," but he changed his mind after he experienced an X-ray of his own hand. Kelvin also predicted, "I can state flatly that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible."

Linus Pauling (1901-94) was one of the most influential chemists in history. He was one of the founders of the field of quantum chemistry and is often called the father of molecular biology. Pauling won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, making him the only person awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes. Later, he was awarded the International Lenin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples by the Soviet Union. Many of Pauling's colleagues who admired his scholarly work saw him as a naive spokesman for Soviet communism.

Despite his genius in science, Pauling peddled fringe ideas. In the 1970 edition of his book "Vitamin C and the Common Cold," he said that taking 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C daily will reduce the incidence of colds by 45 percent. In the book's 1976 revision, retitled "Vitamin C, the Common Cold and the Flu," he recommended higher vitamin C dosages. In his third revision, "Vitamin C and Cancer" (1979), Pauling claimed that high doses of vitamin C may also be effective against cancer. In another book, "How to Live Longer and Feel Better" (1986), Pauling argued that megadoses of vitamins, such as the 12,000 to 40,000 milligrams he took daily, "can increase your enjoyment of life and can help in controlling heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and in slowing down the process of aging." There's absolutely no research that backs up any of Pauling's vitamin C claims.

The take-home lesson is that experts are notoriously fallible outside of their fields of endeavor -- and especially so when making predictions. There tends to be an inverse relationship between a predictor's level of confidence and the accuracy of his prediction. Irving Fisher, a distinguished Yale University economics professor in 1929, predicted, "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Three days later, the stock market crashed. In 1954, Dr. W.C. Heuper of the National Cancer Institute said, "If excessive smoking actually plays a role in the production of lung cancer, it seems to be a minor one."

Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, in 1943 allegedly said, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." "(Research on the atomic bomb) is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives." That was Adm. William Leahy's prediction in 1945.

The bottom line is that the fact that a person has academic degrees, honors and status is no reason for us to abandon our tools of critical thinking.

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Prophecies about Exhaustion of Resources go back a long way

    "Indeed it is certain, it is clear to see, that the earth itself is currently more cultivated and developed than in earlier times. Now all places are accessible, all are documented, all are full of business.  The most charming farms obliterate empty places, ploughed fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts, sandy places are planted with crops, stones are fixed, swamps drained, and there are such great cities where formerly hardly a hut... everywhere there is a dwelling, everywhere a multitude, everywhere a government, everywhere there is life. The greatest evidence of the large number of people: we are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate to us; and our needs straiten us and complaints are everywhere while already nature does not sustain us."  -- The words of  Tertullian (Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus), written about A.D. 200

    In 1865, Stanley Jevons (one of the most recognized 19th century economists) predicted that England would run out of coal by 1900, and that England’s factories would grind to a standstill.

    In 1885, the US Geological Survey announced that there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California.

    In 1891, it said the same thing about Kansas and Texas. (See Osterfeld, David. Prosperity Versus Planning : How Government Stifles Economic Growth. New York : Oxford University Press, 1992.)

    In 1939 the US Department of the Interior said that American oil supplies would last only another 13 years.

    1944 federal government review predicted that by now the US would have exhausted its reserves of 21 of 41 commodities it examined. Among them were tin, nickel, zinc, lead and manganese.

    In 1949 the Secretary of the Interior announced that the end of US oil was in sight.

    Claim: In 1952 the US President’s Materials Policy Commission concluded that by the mid-1970s copper production in the US could not exceed 800,000 tons and that lead production would be at most 300,000 tons per year.

    Data: But copper production in 1973 was 1.6 million tons, and by 1974 lead production had reached 614,000 tons – 100% higher than predicted.

    Claims: In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb and declared that the battle to feed humanity had been lost and that there would be a major food shortage in the US. "In the 1970s ... hundreds of millions are going to starve to death," and by the 1980s most of the world's important resources would be depleted.

He forecast that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980-1989 and that by 1999, the US population would decline to 22.6 million. The problems in the US would be relatively minor compared to those in the rest of the world. (Ehrlich, Paul R. The Population Bomb. New York, Ballantine Books, 1968.) New Scientist magazine underscored his speech in an editorial titled "In Praise of Prophets."

    Claim: "By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people ... If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.

    Claim: Ehrlich wrote in 1968, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971, if ever."

    Data: Yet in a only few years India was exporting food and significantly changed its food production capacity. Ehrlich must have noted this because in the 1971 version of his book this commented is deleted (Julian Simon, The Ultimate Resource, Princeton: Princeton Univesity Press, 1981, p. 64).

    The Limits to Growth (1972) – projected the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead and natural gas by 1993. It also stated that the world had only 33-49 years of aluminum resources left, which means we should run out sometime between 2005-2021. (See Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: New American Library, 1972.

    Claim: In 1974, the US Geological Survey announced “at 1974 technology and 1974 price” the US had only a 10-year supply of natural gas.

    Data: The American Gas Association said that gas supplies were sufficient for the next 1,000-2,500 years. (Julian Simon, Population Matters. New Jersey: Transaction Publications, 1990): p. 90.

Much more HERE.  See also here





Science facts versus Obama

Should Obama nuke China?  It's where Warmism leads

President Barack Obama in his second inauguration address called for new action to “respond to the threat of climate change.” Taking advantage of the bully pulpit and a huge national audience, Obama mustered his best possible arguments in a brief case for why addressing global warming is supposedly necessary. Unfortunately for global warming alarmists, Obama’s case was exceptionally flimsy. Then again, Obama did not have much to work with, as the overall case for global warming alarmism is exceptionally flimsy.

Obama presented his argument as follows: “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”

Given a fresh canvas on which to work, Obama sought the most compelling examples of an asserted global warming crisis. He chose wildfires, drought and powerful storms. At the same time, he urged us to defer to the “overwhelming judgment of science” on these matters.

President Obama, I agree we should strongly consider the overwhelming judgment of science. Let’s apply the overwhelming judgment of science to your three cherry-picked examples and see what the science reveals.

Leading off the Obama “Big Three” is wildfires. What does the overwhelming judgment of science reveal?

The National Interagency Fire Center reports the number of annual wildfires in the United States has been declining for more than 30 years. In fact, the “overwhelming judgment of science” reveals the number of wildfires rose from the 1950s through the 1970s, as global temperatures declined, and has been declining ever since, as global temperatures have modestly warmed.

The really interesting part about wildfires in the United States is a recent increase in the number of acres burned per wildfire after the federal government reversed a decades-long policy of putting out as many wildfires as quickly as possible. In the 1990s, environmentalists and federal forest officials reported forests had become overgrown as a result of firefighters putting out too many natural fires too quickly. Since then, firefighters are responding to fewer forest fires and letting more acres burn.

As a result, even though wildfires occur less frequently as our planet warms and as soil moisture improves (more on that coming right up), our global warming Alarmist in Chief presents the misleading assertion that global warming rather than a change in federal wildfire policy is causing a recent increase in acres burned due to wildfires.

Next in Obama’s “Big Three” of asserted global warming crises is drought. What does the “overwhelming judgment of science” reveal?

U.S. and global soil moisture improved throughout the 20th century as our planet warmed in its recovery from the Little Ice Age. According to the Global Soil Moisture Data Bank, global soil moisture increased throughout the 20th century at almost all sites. Moreover, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that 20th century droughts were quite mild when compared to droughts in previous centuries. This “overwhelming scientific judgment of science” was confirmed in November when a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature found “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”

Finally, the President asserts that global warming is causing more powerful storms. This assertion is particularly fictitious. NOAA reports a long-term decline in strong tornadoes striking the United States. The National Hurricane Center reports that the past 40 years have seen the fewest major hurricane strikes since at least the mid-1800s. Even Hurricane Sandy reminds us that the U.S. Northeast has experienced only one major hurricane strike since 1960, but experienced six major hurricane strikes during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, when global temperatures were cooler.

Clearly, the “overwhelming judgment of science” contradicts President Obama and global warming alarmists. This is a good thing.

Now let’s play a game of “pretend.”

Let’s pretend that none of the overwhelming scientific evidence presented above actually existed. Let’s pretend that science supported rather than contradicted President Obama’s assertions. The question is, what would Obama have us do to solve the problem?

Obama’s solution is to impose still more economy-killing carbon dioxide restrictions on the U.S. economy. This makes about as much sense as losing your car keys in Boston but insisting on searching for them in Los Angeles. True, global carbon dioxide emissions have risen more than 33 percent since the year 2000. However, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined during that time and will continue to decline for the foreseeable future. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that during 2012 alone, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions declined by 8 percent compared to 2011.

China by far emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation and Chinese emissions are growing rapidly. China alone accounts for 75 percent of the global increase in carbon dioxide emissions since 2000. If the United States completely eliminated all of its carbon dioxide emissions today (something that is impossible to do), the only thing we would accomplish would be to delay by about five years an equal increase in Chinese emissions. And China has repeatedly and emphatically insisted it will not agree to any restrictions on its carbon dioxide emissions.

Thankfully, President Obama, the “overwhelming judgment of science” shows the asserted global warming crisis exists solely in the minds of global warming alarmists.

SOURCE  




Greens complain about BPA-free products they helped spur

Anti-chemical environmental activists rarely consider the consequences of their policies. They demonize chemicals that have been used safely for decades and advance chemical bans based on weak science without considering whether the replacement products will be any safer.

This is why it is particularly ironic that they are now complaining about the replacement chemical for bisphenol A (BPA), which greens have pressed government to ban.  BPA is used to make hard, clear plastics and resins that line food cans among other things. Suddenly, greens are up in arms because new clear plastics are made with an alternative product to BPA called bisphenol S (BPS). “[S]wapping out BPA for BPS may have meant ‘jumping from the frying pan to the fire,’” reads an article on CommonDreams.org. But the greens only have themselves to blame.

Last year, some activists pointed out that BPS may be a more potent “endocrine disrupter” and that the human body does not metabolize BPS as easily as it does for BPA. Now a research paper on the topic has appeared in Environmental Health Perspectives.

But there are many reasons to doubt that trace exposures to BPS — or any synthetic chemical for that matter — could have significant hormonal effects. Synthetic chemicals simply are not potent enough. Consider the fact that natural substances in our diets that we consume every day — such as soy, almonds and a variety of legumes — contain “endocrine mimicking” substances that are tens of thousands of times more potent than that of synthetic chemicals. And we all know, soy and nuts aren’t only safe — they are pretty good for you.

Other options are potentially more dangerous. For example, greens suggest glass because somehow they think that melting sand into a hard clear substance is more “natural” than making lighter weight, more energy efficient plastics. But who could seriously deem it safer? We all know the risks associated with broken glass. Indeed, children face far higher risks from cuts and subsequent infections than they do from a trace chemical that has been used for decades without any documented adverse health impacts.

Bans on BPA resins that line cans may pose more serious risks. Specifically, BPA resins line food containers — from soup to soda cans — to prevent the spread of deadly pathogens like  E. coli. Accordingly, bans that force us to buy inferior alternatives may mean increased food-borne illnesses. Now that’s something to complain about.

SOURCE




Top British doctor disses global warming

A dire warning of the coming dangers of a world without functioning antibiotics has been levelled by professor Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer of England.

Routine operations may in the near future become life-threatening ordeals without the protection of antibiotics to ward off increasingly powerful hospital borne bacteria, Davies told a committee of British MPs.

“It is clear that we might not ever see global warming,” she said. “The apocalyptic scenario is that when I need a new hip in 20 years I’ll die from a routine infection because we’ve run out of antibiotics.”

The last oral antibiotic used to treat gonorrhea failed to cure the infection in about 7% of tested cases in a study in Toronto, a figure the authors of the work called “relatively high.”

The report, published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association, is believed to be the first from North America of treatment failure with the antibiotic, cefixime. And it is the latest reminder that in the battle with this sexually transmitted infection, the bug is winning — and fast.

It raises concerns that convenient approaches for treating gonorrhea may soon be out of reach — a development that could lead to fewer people undergoing successful treatment for the infection.
Some strains of bacteria, notably MRSA, are becoming feared in hospital wards around the world, and there are also reports of antibiotic resistance in strains of E. coli and tuberculosis.

Painting a future where normally treatable illnesses can once again kill without resistance, Davies pointed out that gonorrhoea, for instance, is no longer treatable except with one antibiotic that has dwindling effectiveness.

SOURCE  

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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Greenland ice didn't melt away during the last warming

There have been previous findings that Greenland ice did not melt away in prehistoric warm periods so this is not surprising.  The actual figures are interesting though.  The temperature during the last warming was 8 degrees higher than now (far higher than anything the Warmists project) but less than 25% of the Greenland icecap melted. The implication is that the warmist projections are  hugely out of line with the facts

As a general methodological note, making generalizations from a sample of one is nonsense -- so drawing conclusions about the whole of Greenland from this one drillsite is rather extraordinary. It suggests that glaciology is at a very primitive state of development  -- far too primitive to make any "consensus" reasonable.  And the Arctic is in fact known for considerable local variations in temperature so sampling considerations are more than theoretical

Scientists say an ice core taken from almost three kilometres down in the Greenland ice sheet has given them an extraordinary vision of what the planet could look like as it heats up.

The ice core dates from the last warming period around 120,000 years ago, and it identifies temperatures which are about four degrees Celsius higher than now.

Surprisingly, it revealed that the Greenland ice sheet was more resilient than previously thought.

By understanding this natural warming event, scientists say they can get a better idea of where the planet is heading in the face of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

Fourteen countries are taking part in the ice core expedition.

The CSIRO's Dr Mauro Rubino, a member of the team, says the first challenge was to find a suitable site to extract ice.

"The idea was to have an ice core that could go back 130,000 years - enough to cover [the Eemian] period, which was the last interglacial warm period before the current one."

By analysing the ice, the team, led by the University of Copenhagen, hoped to get an insight into how hot it was during the Eemian period, and how the planet coped.

Drilling through almost 3,000 metres of ice layers, they measured temperatures, greenhouse gas concentrations using air samples trapped in the ice, and took a closer look at how sea levels rose when the planet was warming.

Dr Rubino says the team found that the last interglacial period "was eight degrees warmer than today."

"Eight degrees warmer is a big difference and it's actually bigger than it was previously thought to be," he said.

He says the sea level at the time was four to eight metres higher than it is today, and the sample gives an insight into "a number of environmental climatic conditions that could possibly be reproduced in the future."

Until now efforts to extract a Greenland ice core with a complete record of the last warming period have proven too difficult.

Scientists say the new findings mean they can use the past as the best analogue to model for the future to see how the planet will cope as it warms due to increasing greenhouse gases.

David Etheridge, who is also from the CSIRO and part of the ice core expedition, says there was some good news.

He says the research team found that Greenland was not as sensitive as previously thought to temperature increases.

"The Greenland ice sheet was perhaps a little bit more robust to warming than some of the ice sheet models were predicting - which is actually a good news story," he said.

"It means that for the future we can expect Greenland to not reduce as much and as quickly as some of the models were saying."

But the flipside of that is that the sea level increase that occurred at the time has to be found from somewhere, and that is most likely now to be the Antarctic ice sheet.

SOURCE

Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core

Abstract

Efforts to extract a Greenland ice core with a complete record of the Eemian interglacial (130,000 to 115,000 years ago) have until now been unsuccessful. The response of the Greenland ice sheet to the warmer-than-present climate of the Eemian has thus remained unclear. Here we present the new North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (‘NEEM’) ice core and show only a modest ice-sheet response to the strong warming in the early Eemian. We reconstructed the Eemian record from folded ice using globally homogeneous parameters known from dated Greenland and Antarctic ice-core records. On the basis of water stable isotopes, NEEM surface temperatures after the onset of the Eemian (126,000 years ago) peaked at 8 ± 4 degrees Celsius above the mean of the past millennium, followed by a gradual cooling that was probably driven by the decreasing summer insolation. Between 128,000 and 122,000 years ago, the thickness of the northwest Greenland ice sheet decreased by 400 ± 250 metres, reaching surface elevations 122,000 years ago of 130 ± 300 metres lower than the present. Extensive surface melt occurred at the NEEM site during the Eemian, a phenomenon witnessed when melt layers formed again at NEEM during the exceptional heat of July 2012. With additional warming, surface melt might become more common in the future.

Nature 493, 489–494 (24 January 2013)

New paper predicts CO2 fertilization will greatly improve plant productivity -- by 40-60%

A paper published today in Biogeosciences finds that the increase in CO2 levels since 1850 has greatly enhanced plant fertilization and that a doubling of CO2 levels would be predicted to increase plant productivity by 40 - 60%. The study derives "a probabilistic prediction for the globally averaged strength of CO2 fertilization in nature, for the period 1850 to 2000 AD, implicitly net of other limiting factors such as nutrient availability" and predicts, "the increase in gross primary productivity (GPP) in response to a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial values is very likely (90% confidence) to exceed 20%, with a most likely value of 40–60%."

Related: Greenhouse operators increase CO2 levels by 3-4 times to enhance plant productivity by up to 50%

A model-based constraint on CO2 fertilisation

P. B. Holden et al.

Abstract

We derive a constraint on the strength of CO2 fertilisation of the terrestrial biosphere through a "top-down" approach, calibrating Earth system model parameters constrained by the post-industrial increase of atmospheric CO2 concentration. We derive a probabilistic prediction for the globally averaged strength of CO2 fertilisation in nature, for the period 1850 to 2000 AD, implicitly net of other limiting factors such as nutrient availability. The approach yields an estimate that is independent of CO2 enrichment experiments. To achieve this, an essential requirement was the incorporation of a land use change (LUC) scheme into the GENIE Earth system model. Using output from a 671-member ensemble of transient GENIE simulations, we build an emulator of the change in atmospheric CO2 concentration change since the preindustrial period. We use this emulator to sample the 28-dimensional input parameter space. A Bayesian calibration of the emulator output suggests that the increase in gross primary productivity (GPP) in response to a doubling of CO2 from preindustrial values is very likely (90% confidence) to exceed 20%, with a most likely value of 40–60%. It is important to note that we do not represent all of the possible contributing mechanisms to the terrestrial sink. The missing processes are subsumed into our calibration of CO2 fertilisation, which therefore represents the combined effect of CO2 fertilisation and additional missing processes. If the missing processes are a net sink then our estimate represents an upper bound. We derive calibrated estimates of carbon fluxes that are consistent with existing estimates. The present-day land–atmosphere flux (1990–2000) is estimated at −0.7 GTC yr−1 (likely, 66% confidence, in the range 0.4 to −1.7 GTC yr−1). The present-day ocean–atmosphere flux (1990–2000) is estimated to be −2.3 GTC yr−1 (likely in the range −1.8 to −2.7 GTC yr−1). We estimate cumulative net land emissions over the post-industrial period (land use change emissions net of the CO2 fertilisation and climate sinks) to be 66 GTC, likely to lie in the range 0 to 128 GTC.

SOURCE

What happens when you lift pressure to go along with the dominant paradigm

A group of Apollo Era NASA Retirees have published new report which says that the science is not settled!!  Below is their  summary

1. The science that predicts the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming is not settled science.

2. There is no convincing physical evidence of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Most of the alarm regarding AGW results from output of unvalidated computer models. We understand scientific arguments regarding how doubling CO2 in the atmosphere over a hundred years or more (if possible) can have a small direct warming effect, but we question the accuracy of feedback simulations in current models computing climate system responses that amplify CO2 effects. Efforts to estimate climate sensitivity to CO2 based solely on physical data have large uncertainties because many factors affect global temperatures, and CO2 levels rise in the atmosphere after the earth warms due to other factors. While paleoclimate data clearly show CO2 levels rise and fall in the atmosphere hundreds of years after temperature rises and falls due to other causes, the evidence is very weak to support claims of a catastrophic rise in global temperatures caused by CO2 emissions related to human activity.

3. Computer models need to be validated before being used in critical decision-making. Our manned aerospace backgrounds in dealing with models of complex phenomena have convinced us that this rule must be followed to avoid decisions with serious unintended consequences.

4. Because there is no immediate threat of global warming requiring swift corrective action, we have time to study global climate changes and improve our prediction accuracy. While there are many benefits due to some global warming, the major threats appear to be associated with a net loss of Greenland and Antarctica ice sheet mass that would contribute to a gradual sea-level rise. The history, current trends, and specific causes of ice sheet melting and ice accumulation by precipitation must be better understood before determining how best to respond to threats of accelerated sea-level rise.

5. Our US government is over-reacting to concerns about Anthropogenic Global Warming. More CO2 in the atmosphere would be beneficial for forest and crop growth to support the earth's growing population, so control of CO2 emissions is not an obvious best solution to hyped-up concerns regarding AGW. Eventually the earth will run out of fossil fuels and alternative energy sources will be required. Market forces will (and should) play a big role in this transition to alternative energy sources. Government funding of promising research and development objectives for alternative fuels appears to be a better option at this time than expenditures of enormous resources to limit CO2 emissions.

6. A wider range of solution options should be studied for global warming or cooling threats from any credible cause. CO2 effectiveness in controlling global average temperatures or sea levels has not been established. More reliable and greater control authority may be available from engineering solutions that would accommodate the beneficial aspects of more CO2 in the atmosphere.

SOURCE






“Climate Crimes”:  Green Policies That Are Killing Nature

These days, much is spoken and written about the destruction of our planet as a result of climate change. In his evocative film “Climate Crimes”, the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Eichelmann who was an active member of WWF for 17 years and worked in conservation for decades, now documents that it is rather the reverse: he shows how many ecosystems, species, habitats and the cultural heritage too are threatened – but, as he sums up, “not by climate change, but by climate protection and the things done in its name.” It is predominantly hydropower and bioenergy projects that threaten to destroy precious areas of our planet’s nature.

That current climate policies harm conservation in many ways is nothing new, even if many do not want to admit it. However, no one so far has compiled the evidence as strongly and on a global scale as Eichelmann. His one-hour film, which is shown in several cinemas in Germany these days and also on Austrian television, is the result of two years of work that led his team to Brazil, Turkey, Iraq and to Indonesia, but also to the model country of climate protection, Germany, where crimes against nature are especially evident.

Eichelmann feels particularly affected by what he has found out in the course of his research; that’s because, as he says, he has been deeply involved in the fight against climate change – until he discovered some time ago “that something went wrong here “.

The individual stages of the film:

Brazil: The huge dams of the South American country, each of which put dozens of square miles of rainforest under water for the generation of electricity, have always been a problem for the Amazon basin. But now, as the momentum of climate policy is added, all laborious progress in terms of environmental sustainability, which has been be built up in recent decades, and even all moratoria, have gone overnight. 60 mega dams of several kilometres in length and several hundreds of medium size are planned in the Amazon basin in coming years. One of them alone, the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River, will flood a forested area larger than the Lake of Constance; it threatens 200 fish species and will force 20,000 people to relocate. One of the very few large nesting sites of Amazon turtles will fall victim to the dam. The Catholic Bishop Erwin Kräutler, who works there, calls Brazil’s current energy policies of Brazil the “death knell” for the Amazon rainforest.

Turkey: One of the oldest cities in Anatolia, Hasankeyf, renowned for its extensive cave dwellings and other buildings dating from the fourth century, built on the border between the Eastern Roman and the Sassanid Empire, will simply disappear from the map. The reason: the Ilisu dam, which is built there to produce “clean energy”, will ensure that the Tigris will swallow the city. With luck, the upper tips of the ancient minarets could still poke out of the reservoir.
By the way: Do you remember the worldwide outrage over the Taliban, when they destroyed the giant statue of Buddha of Bamiyan? These barbarians, it was said at that time! The loss of Hasankeyf would be vastly greater, yet outrage outside Turkey did not happen – in the name of climate protection people keep quite.

Iraq: There was also great indignation worldwide when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the mid 1990s dried up the vast Mesopotamian marshes near Basra, out of revenge for what he deemed as the missing fighting spirit of its inhabitants during the first Gulf War. The wetlands, where many species live and people have their agricultural livelihoods, have since been partially restored laboriously. Now, they will finally disappear because dams further upstream will deny them enough water.

Germany: It is hardly possible to describe in words the damage done to German nature, as Eichelmann describes it in his film. The country side is made desolate by monoculture of corn fields stretching to the horizon, and biosphere reserves are not spared. Everything is done just to ensure enough biofuels are produced to meet Germany’s climate targets – all in the name of a supposedly clean energy. Many bird species have already disappeared completely, others will follow. Hares and other soil dwellers will not be seen again. The largest biogas plant in the country needs 1,000 tons of corn per day. 7,000 plants have already been built, about 1,000 on average will be added each year. Due to generous subsidies, the corn farmers can pay any rent, so the rents have more than doubled and farms are going bankrupt. By the way: in 2011 Germany could not cover its cereal needs for the first time.

Indonesia: Even greater is the sprawl of monocultures in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, where palm oil plantations – not least for the production of biodiesel – have destroyed the rainforest almost completely. The last orang-utans are losing their habitat.

Eichelmann presents calculations in his film which show that almost every single project he presents, e.g.  each “Climate Crime”, is responsible for emitting more carbon dioxide or methane instead of reducing emissions. Although he has changed from being a climate change campaigner into a fighter against this kind of climate protection, Eichelmann still assumes that greenhouse gases pose a risk to the global climate. He thinks the only chance to counter the risk is to question the idea of global economic growth. Only in this way, he argues, the world could prevent the “Climate Crimes”, which his film documents.

You do not have to share – like this writer – the growth denial strategy in order to be impressed by the movie which is extremely well and comprehensively researched. The development of the global climate, the warming pause in the last decade and a half, and the climate forecasts for the next few years could indicate that it might be useful to transform our energy supply in the long run; but there is no reason today to throw out “the baby with the bathwater”, as economist Niko Paech says in the film – or to accept that “climate protection is used as a cover for environmental crimes.”

My fear is, however, that a growth denial strategy would be nothing else than throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The fact is: only growth-oriented economies can afford to protect the environment. To crack this historic challenge is not impossible theoretically, but it could lead to similar questionable experiments as documented in “Climate Crimes”.

We must take the time to plan sensibly and not to rush into “head-over-heels” measures. Let us beware of exaggerated doomsday prophecies and instead protect nature. Either way, growth or denial, greenhouse hysteria or cool head: “Climate Crimes” is one of the most interesting and daring films on the subject.

By email from The Global Warming Policy Foundation






Paper finds solar activity at end of 20th century was at highest levels of past 9,000 years

The slight warming of the late 20th century explained

A 2012 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reconstructs solar activity from isotopes in ice cores and tree rings, and finds solar activity at the end of the 20th century was at the highest levels of the past 9,000 years. The paper confirms other peer-reviewed publications indicating that the Sun was particularly active during the 20th century in comparison to the past several millenia  In addition, the authors find good agreement between solar activity and the Asian climate as determined from stalagmites in the Dongge cave, China.

9,400 years of cosmic radiation and solar activity from ice cores and tree rings

Friedhelm Steinhilbera et al.

ABSTRACT

Understanding the temporal variation of cosmic radiation and solar activity during the Holocene is essential for studies of the solar-terrestrial relationship. Cosmic-ray produced radionuclides, such as 10Be and 14C which are stored in polar ice cores and tree rings, offer the unique opportunity to reconstruct the history of cosmic radiation and solar activity over many millennia. Although records from different archives basically agree, they also show some deviations during certain periods. So far most reconstructions were based on only one single radionuclide record, which makes detection and correction of these deviations impossible. Here we combine different 10Be ice core records from Greenland and Antarctica with the global 14C tree ring record using principal component analysis. This approach is only possible due to a new high-resolution 10Be record from Dronning Maud Land obtained within the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica in Antarctica. The new cosmic radiation record enables us to derive total solar irradiance, which is then used as a proxy of solar activity to identify the solar imprint in an Asian climate record. Though generally the agreement between solar forcing and Asian climate is good, there are also periods without any coherence, pointing to other forcings like volcanoes and greenhouse gases and their corresponding feedbacks. The newly derived records have the potential to improve our understanding of the solar dynamics and to quantify the solar influence on climate.

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

Greenpeace warns against expanding coal exports

The facts have never mattered to Greenpeace

A new report has warned Australia to stop expanding coal exports or risk inflicting "catastrophic" effects of climate change on the world.

The Greenpeace-commissioned study identifies the expansion of Australian coal exports as one of 14 proposed coal, oil and gas projects around the world that will raise greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.

The study predicts Australia will increase coal exports to 408 million tonnes a year, producing an estimated 1,200 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Greenpeace's Georgina Woods says if the projects go ahead, they will warm the globe more than two degrees Celsius.

That is considered the temperature limit to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

"Our coal exports are already our biggest single contribution to climate change, and part of a global fossil fuel expansion enterprise that will push us beyond the point of no return in climate change," she said.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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