Greer, the disgusting Greenie

Although he was an outspoken conservationist, lots of Greenies disliked Steve Irwin out of jealousy -- he got so much of the publicity and admiration that they crave -- AND he was a supporter of Australia's conservative government. So they made various specious complaints about him "disturbing" the animals he filmed. So what we see below from Australia's chief ratbag -- "publicity at any price" Germaine Greer -- is a regurgitation of that. It shows what scum she is (and always was) that she should at this time defame such a brave and brilliant man. It is a credit to Australia's responsible Left that her words were rightly dismissed by one of their chief spokesman as "politically correct claptrap"



Feminist Germaine Greer should keep her thoughts about the death of Steve Irwin to herself, Labor foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said today. In an article in British newspaper The Guardian, Ms Greer said that the animal world had finally taken revenge on Irwin for causing stress to the animals he handled. "I think Germaine Greer should just stick a sock in it," Mr Rudd said in Canberra today. "You have got a grieving mother, you have got a couple of grieving young kids and a grieving nation and what to you get from Germaine Greer? You get a bucket load of politically correct pap - it's just nonsense.

"Steve Irwin was a nature conservationist, an animal conservationist and made a huge contribution to the preservation of wildlife worldwide. "And what do we get from Germaine Greer? - some gratuitous, politically correct claptrap. She should put a sock in it," he said.

Greer said she had "not much sympathy" for Irwin if he was grappling with the stingray that killed him on the Great Barrier Reef. Those on the boot with Irwin say he was not in any way harassing the stringray when it lashed out at him as he swam over it.

But The Guardian quoted Greer as saying: "As a Melbourne boy, Irwin should have had a healthy respect for stingrays, which are actually commoner and bigger in southern waters than they are near Port Douglas." She described Irwin's behaviour as "bizarre", noting the famed incident when he held his baby son while feeding a crocodile during a show at his Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast. "The whole spectacle was revolting," Greer said. "The crocodile would rather have been anywhere else and the chicken had a grim life too, but that's entertainment at Australia Zoo. "The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin, but probably not before a whole generation of kids in shorts seven sizes too small has learned to shout in the ears of animals with hearing ten times more acute than theirs, determined to become millionaire animal-loving zoo-owners in their turn."

Police yesterday said footage of the incident showed Irwin in no way harassed or provoked the stingray.

Source

Below is a reality-based account of Steve Irwin:



An American diver who owes his life to Steve Irwin says he was shattered to learn about the Crocodile Hunter's death. "He saved my life," an emotional Scott Jones said today from his home in Iowa. "I've lost a good friend."

Mr Jones was part of a tragic scuba diving expedition in the Sea of Cortez, off the coast of Mexico, in 2003. Mr Jones' friend, 77-year-old Katie Vrooman, died during the dive after a sea surge knocked her twice against rocks. Mr Jones fought to hold on to her unconscious body for almost two hours and, while hanging off rocks and floating in the water, attempted to resuscitate her. Eventually Mr Jones had to let Ms Vrooman's body go and he spent a harrowing night alone perched on rocks.

In a lucky twist of fate, Irwin and his film crew happened to be in the vicinity shooting a documentary and heard an SOS call on their radio that two divers had gone missing. Irwin, who had never met Mr Jones or Mr Vrooman, decided he would abandon his film project to try to find them.

Mr Jones was precariously sitting on a rock outcrop dehydrated and scarred from being battered on the rocks. Irwin, dressed in his khaki shorts and shirt, dived in the water and swam across to save Mr Jones.

At the time, Mr Jones did not realise Irwin was a celebrity. The quietly-spoken Mr Jones said he had heard of Paul "Crocodile Dundee" Hogan, but not the Crocodile Hunter. "After they got me on to the main boat, Steve helped me get my wetsuit off me and he went below to do something," Jones recalled. "Somebody behind me said 'So what do you think of the Crocodile Hunter?' "So I was looking around for Crocodile Dundee. I thought when the makeup comes off Dundee's looks must change. "But, when I finally got home my daughter turned the Animal Planet channel on and I started watching his show from then. "It was wild. He was jumping on crocodiles and things like that."

Jones and his wife Deborah sent flowers to Irwin's wife, Terri, and kids, Bindi and Bob. They are also planning a trip to Australia to speak to his family. "We'd love to go to Australia and tell his wife and kids just what a great man he is," Mr Jones, who declined to tell his age, adding it was a secret, said. "He was a hell of an educator, from kids all the way up to old farts like me. "He was a hero." Mr Jones, an experienced diver, said he was surprised a stingray, "one of the most gentle creatures in the ocean" caused Irwin's death.

Source




GREENIE POLLUTERS IN SWEDEN

Sweden has an international reputation for being environmentally progressive. With two weeks to go before elections, it turns our only a very small percentage of those politicians registered at Parliament actually have an eco-friendly car - and Green Party politicians are most likely to have a polluting old car.

Although ethanol, biogas and hybrids have been big sellers in Sweden the past few years, of the party leaders only Centre leader Maud Olofsson owns one.

Many cars produced in the 80s and before lacked catalytic converters, a small device used to reduce the toxicity of emissions from internal combustion engines. Through a chemical reaction, toxic byproducts from the engine are converted into less harmful emissions.

Even though politicians own so few eco-friendly cars, many have really old, toxin-spewing vehicles.

In the country's car parks, it is estimated 7 percent of cars lack catalytic converters. Politicians in the Green Party and the Centre Party - both of which claim a strong belief in a health environment - have an exceptionally higher number of dirty cars, reported TT.

Some 22 percent of Green Party cars and 18 percent of Centre Party cars lack catalytic converters.

If the boundary was set at 1994, the year converters became much more efficient, one half of Green Party cars pass wouldn't pass the test. About 42 percent of Left Party members drive cars made pre-94, and do 38 percent of Centre Party members

Source






HEADS I WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE: ANOTHER PESKY GLACIER

The growing Whitney glacier is portrayed as a rare exception but it is not. The Franz Josef glacier in New Zealand, for instance, is growing rapidly. I guess they will find some "special explanation" for that too

Whitney Glacier on Mount Shasta is growing, and scientists think global warming in Northern California is the reason. This is not the way global warming works in most parts of the world.

In the Arctic and the Antarctic, and all along the West Coast north of the California border, temperatures are rising and glaciers are melting. Nisqually Glacier on Mount Rainier on the northern end of the Cascades, for example, has retreated by nearly a mile in the past century and continues to shrink. But Whitney Glacier, on the southern end of the Cascades? "It's still growing," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a glaciologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

According to an article last summer in California Wild, a journal of the California Academy of Sciences, Whitney Glacier is the only ice river in the world that is larger today than in 1890. Tulaczyk and his team, who began studying the glacier in 2002 and now have expanded their work to the high peaks of the Sierra Nevada, link the advancing frozen mass to the unique way California is being affected by global warming.

While in the short term it means more snow, their findings also contain a dire forecast: High-altitude snowpack, a steady source of water for the state as the snow melts during the summer, is probably doomed. Tulaczyk said he and his team reviewed records dating back five decades collected from monitoring stations that measure the snowpack and its moisture content. By comparing those statistics against temperature trends, certain conclusions can be drawn. A key conclusion is that global warming is not just about rising temperatures, but about the capacity of warmer air to carry moisture.

As California's temperature rose by 1 degree Celsius over the past half-century, Tulaczyk said, the snowpack has moved higher up in the mountains. But because warmer air in the winter can carry more water, the amount of snow falling at the high peaks has grown. "At the higher elevations and on Mount Shasta there is more snow being dumped," he said. By their calculations, it takes a 20 percent increase in snow precipitation to counteract a 1-degree rise in the temperature.

So far, greater snowfall at the higher elevations has been able to balance out the loss of lower-elevation snowpack. But with models forecasting temperature increases of another 3 or 4 degrees, Tulaczyk said snow precipitation at the higher levels would have to double to maintain equilibrium. That's not likely to happen, he said. And that means that Whitney Glacier, as well as the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada, soon will begin to disappear before the summer months when their water is most needed.

In a paper published by Climate Dynamics, Tulaczyk and his team reach this grim conclusion: Greenhouse-driven temperature increases will "result in the loss of most of Mount Shasta's glacier volume over the next 50 years with near total loss by the end of the century." In a separate paper, the research team says the same thing will happen in the Sierra Nevada. "Glaciers exist only where snow can persist through all of the summer," Tulaczyk said. "So, disappearance of glaciers on Mount Shasta would mean also that there will be no summer snowpack on the mountain. The mountain will be more like most of the Sierra Nevada. It will have a winter snowpack that will completely melt in spring and summer." ...

For now, however, the still-growing glacier can cause a different sort of problem. In July, during a hot spell, the U.S. Forest Service issued a warning to motorists: Highway 97 was being flooded because of the volume of water melting from Whitney Glacier.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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PEER-REVIEWED PAPERS SUPPORT OCEAN COOLING DIAGNOSIS

A 2004 Science article by E. Palle, P. R. Goode, P. Montanes-Rodriguez, and S. E. Koonin entitled "Changes in Earth's Reflectance Over the Past Two Decades" and a follow-on 2005 Geophysical Research Letters paper by Palle E., P. Montanes-Rodriguez, P. R. Goode, S. E. Koonin, M. Wild, and S. Casadio entitled "A multi-data comparison of shortwave climate forcing changes" provide support as a reason for the recent observed upper ocean cooling that is reported in Lyman et al. The two Palle et al papers are excellent scientific contributions on the monitoring of the radiative imbalance of the climate system. The abstract of the Geophysical Research Letters article reads:

"Traditionally the Earth's reflectance has been assumed to be roughly constant, but large decadal variability, not reproduced by current climate models, has been reported lately from a variety of sources. We compare here the available data sets related to Earth's reflectance, in order to assess the observational constraints on the models. We find a consistent picture among all data sets of an albedo decreased during 1985-2000 between 2-3 and 6-7 W/m 2, which is highly climatically significant. The largest discrepancy among the data sets occurs during 2000-2004, when some present an increasing reflectance trend, while CERES observations show a steady decrease of about 2 W/m 2."

An important excerpt from the paper is,

"One of the theoretical arguments used by Wielicki et al. [2005] against the large albedo increase in 2003 was the lack of response (cooling) in global temperatures and/or ocean heat content. This can be solved by the new ISCCP data, where the cloud increase 2000-2004 is mainly due to increasing mid and high clouds. These high altitude clouds will increase the Earth's reflectance, especially if the increase occurs over the relatively dark oceanic areas, but the net forcing of these high cloud changes is probably near zero or even positive, due to their strong infrared absorption."

The Lyman et al paper suggests that the net forcing is actually negative. The Wielicki et al 2005 Science paper is entitled "Changes in Earth's Albedo Measured by Satellite" by Bruce A. Wielicki, Takmeng Wong, Norman Loeb, Patrick Minnis, Kory Priestley, and Robert Kandel with the abstract:

"NASA global satellite data provide observations of Earth's albedo, i.e., the fraction of incident solar radiation that is reflected back to space. The satellite data show that the last four years are within natural variability and fail to confirm the 6% relative increase in albedo inferred from observations of earthshine from the moon. Longer global satellite records will be required to discern climate trends in Earth's albedo."

Thus the Wielicki et al 2005 paper was published to refute the Palle et al Science paper. An unsettling issue with the two Science papers, is that Palle was refused the opportunity to publish a response to the Wielicki et al criticism of their research. This is yet another example where a magazine that reports on climate science has inappropriately taken sides on an issue, and used its position to squelch alternative views of the science.

The Lyman et al paper, [preprint here] which documents ocean cooling, provides scientific support for the finds in the Palle et al study.

Source





Global warming tops post-Katrina worries

A year after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, global warming alarmists are still exploiting the intense hurricane season of 2005 for political purposes. A new study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute explores the relationship between tropical storms and climate change and makes recommendations for what policy makers can do to reduce exposure to such dramatic weather events in the future.

Contrary to some activist rhetoric, the science linking global warming with hurricanes remains a field of active inquiry and dispute. Current research indicates that some storms may get stronger, but others may get weaker, while the question of whether intense hurricanes have gotten more frequent has received differing answers depending on how far back one cares to look. “The findings of scientists working with tropical storm data continues to evolve, as does our understanding of how global warming will affect other elements of the climate,” said CEI Senior Fellow and co-author Marlo Lewis. “Given the lack of knowledge about how much storms will actually change in the coming years, it is imperative to direct government funding to the problems we can actually do the most about.”

Diverting precious resources into policies designed to reduce global warming rather than strengthen our resiliency in the face of hurricanes actually harms people in hurricane-prone areas. Instead, government policies should concentrate on reducing perverse incentives that encourage development in hurricane-prone areas. “The one thing that is clear about hurricanes and global warming is that the question is largely theoretical and of no help to Americans who live in hurricane-prone areas,” said CEI Senior Fellow Iain Murray. “Congress and the states need to think hard about whether their policies have brought misery to those people and reform them for the better.”

Source






TRAFFIC CONGESTION

A good short sharp comment from Jeff Jacoby. See the original for links

``Traffic congestion is choking our cities, hurting our economy, and reducing our quality of life,'' begins a new report from the Reason Foundation, the respected libertarian think tank. Rush-hour gridlock paralyzes 39,500 lane-miles of roadway each year, eating up $63 billion in lost time and fuel. But much worse is to come. By 2030, the number of severely congested lane-miles will reach nearly 60,000 per year, an increase of more than 50 percent. Commuters in the largest metropolitan areas will spend 65 percent more time in traffic than they do now. Within 25 years, at least a dozen major cities will be choked with travel delays worse than in today's Los Angeles, which is notorious for having the worst traffic congestion in America.

The solution is the obvious one: Build more highways, and manage them more intelligently. ``The old canard `we can't build our way out of congestion' is not true,'' the authors write. They estimate that 104,000 new lane-miles will be needed by 2030, at a cost of about $21 billion a year, much of which could be raised through electronic tolling. The return on that investment would be a stunning 7.7 billion fewer hours spent in traffic each year, along with all the wealth and freedom those time savings would generate.

All this is heresy, of course, to the car-haters and PC nannies who are forever lecturing us to quit driving and use mass transit. But we are overwhelmingly a nation of drivers; the real ``mass transit'' is the traffic on our highways. If the highways don't grow to keep up with that traffic, the strangulating misery of gridlock will only get worse.





Kyoto not the way to cool the world

The Kyoto agreement to cut greenhouse emissions is ineffectual and the world must be more realistic about the chances of preventing climate change and prepare for the inevitability of global warming, according to the head of one of Britain's foremost scientific societies. Frances Cairncross, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and chairwoman of the Economic and Social Research Council, was addressing the Festival of Science in Norwich, east England. She told Britain's biggest general science meeting that while measures to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming were essential, they had been emphasised ahead of the equally vital need to develop ways of coping with climate change. Ms Cairncross said the Kyoto Treaty would not stop temperatures rising, as the US and large developing nations such as China and India were not involved. She said even if a global agreement to limit carbon dioxide emissions was reached, a significant degree of warming was still likely.

London's Daily Telegraph newspaper reported that Ms Cairncross said developing drought-tolerant crops, constructing flood defences, improving building insulation or banning building close to sea level were as important as cutting emissions. She said the world needed to be more realistic about the chances of preventing climate change. "We need more sheltered public spaces. It is going to be either sunnier or rainier," Ms Cairncross said. Plants, insects and animals that needed to migrate north away from hotter climates should be provided with species corridors, among many other measures, she said. "Adaptation policies have had far less attention than mitigation and that is a mistake," Ms Cairncross told the meeting. "We need to think now about policies that prepare for a hotter, drier world."

Ms Cairncross said the Kyoto agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions was having little impact. India and China - representing a third of the world's population - had not signed up and the US "does not take any notice". Developing a successful global deal would mean "persuading this generation to accept sacrifices on behalf of posterity; and persuading countries that will gain from climate change, or lose little, to take action not on behalf of their own grandchildren but of the descendants of people in other nations". "We cannot relocate the Amazon or insulate coral reefs, so we need mitigation too," she said. "But the Government could and should put in place an adaptation strategy right away."

Despite the arguments about the mix between renewables, nuclear and fossil fuels, the bottom line was that, "with present technologies, no combination of existing energy sources can conceivably bring about the reductions in energy use that we need, or at least, not without a disruption that is politically unimaginable".

Ms Cairncross's message will be controversial as many environmental groups have discouraged talk of adapting to global warming as an inevitability for fear that it will hand politicians an excuse for failing to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Extreme rainfall has become more frequent and intense over the past 40 years in parts of Britain, particularly in Scotland and the north of England. Scientists from Newcastle University - who analysed British weather records from 1961 to 2000 - say the findings provide further evidence of climate change. They also suggest that the five million people who live near rivers - 10 per cent of the British population - can expect to be flooded with increasing regularity in the future, which has implications for the management of flooding and water resources.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Britain: The war on hot air

In the 1980s it was the bomb, in the 1990s globalisation. Now CO2 is the enemy du jour. Jonathan Leake on why green is the new black

It looked like any other demo. Hundreds of young protesters swarmed around the police on Thursday waving banners and shouting slogans; a few were arrested — and then the rest went home. Each week in London and other major cities such protests are routinely ignored by the public and the national media. However, in the candlelit tents pitched in a field close to Yorkshire’s mighty Drax power station, a hard core of protesters have spent the past few nights celebrating one of the green movement’s greatest publicity coups in years.

“We had 600 people, hardly enough to fill Trafalgar Square,” gloated one protester, “but at Drax we got top billing on every news programme and coverage in every newspaper. It shows that climate change is an issue whose time has come.”

Such good organisation. Such clever media management. Could it be that these demonstrators had a bit more to them than it seemed? Indeed they did. Around half of those attending the Drax climate camp were veterans of diverse direct action groups including road protesters, anti-globalisation demonstrators and anti-GM groups.

“Drax was like a reunion,” said Mark Lynas, an environmental activist and author. “There were dozens of familiar faces, many of whom I hadn’t seen for years. It was hugs and kisses all round.”

This alliance has alighted upon a common goal that they hope to make the cause celebre of the decade: a war on carbon dioxide.

Never mind that Drax is a highly efficient energy provider or that Britain cannot function without its electricity: the multi-chimneyed behemoth produces 7% of British CO2 pollution. Therefore, it is a target for protest. The Drax protesters are planning further demonstrations and disruption at power stations, factories, airports and motorways around Britain. “Anything that produces CO2 in large quantities is now a target,” said one activist.

Their campaign against CO₂ is a vehicle for a much more radical political agenda, however. “Our movement is based on questioning the whole basis of economic growth,” said Robbie Madden of Rising Tide, one of the organising groups. “The road protesters provided the inspiration for the Drax camp. We have an honourable tradition of breaking the law for a higher aim which is to change the way people live and think. Climate change is an issue that can help us do that.”

How intriguing then that David Cameron, the Conservative leader, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California, are also riding this environmental bandwagon. On Friday, Cameron announced that the Conservatives would join Friends of the Earth’s call for new environmental taxes and legislation to cut Britain’s CO₂ emissions. Meanwhile, Schwarzenegger was putting the finishing touches to a landmark agreement to slash California’s CO₂ emissions by 25% by 2020. Schwarzenegger has made it clear that he thinks his new environmental taxes will get him re-elected. Similarly, the Conservatives’ own polls have shown that Cameron’s green policies are playing a major role in giving him his recent lead over Tony Blair.

If the war on CO2 emissions has become such fruitful ground for tacticians of both the left and the right, there is obviously something afoot. Could it be that this congruence of radical chic and mainstream politics marks the point at which the anxious public begins to accept real changes in lifestyle to halt global warming?

Scientists have been warning about the dangers of global warming for more than a decade now. Only last week, John Holdren, new president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, suggested that global sea levels could rise 13ft by the end of this century — much higher than previous forecasts. “We are experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate and we’re going to experience more,” Holdren said. Like Sir David King, Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, Holdren believes that the world has just a couple of decades to take the action needed to limit the global temperature rise to no more than 2C. Above this level, he warns, the world would face catastrophe from runaway warming that could melt ice caps and glaciers and force hundreds of millions from their homes.

Such warnings have been largely ignored by the general public in the past. No longer. In June, supermarkets were shocked to find themselves the target of a demonstration by the Women’s Institute (WI). Mothers were mobilising against them for using too much packaging — a prime source of CO2.

WI members all over the country demanded to see supermarket managers and then remonstrated with them on the shop floor. Soon afterwards, Tesco announced it would be cutting down on plastic bags and packaging. It also launched a multi-million pound celebrity advertising campaign in which consumers are urged to stop using plastic bags. “We all know we are using too many carrier bags. That’s why from now on, we’ll give you a green Clubcard point every time you re-use a bag,” says the Tesco website.

The backlash against gas-guzzling vehicles, especially 4x4s, has also spread rapidly. The Alliance Against Urban 4x4s now operates in cities across the country. “We want to make people realise that driving a big 4x4 in town is as socially unacceptable as drink-driving,” said one activist last week.

There are clear signs that people are beginning to alter their lifestyles to become green. Recycling, once the preserve of the few, has become almost the norm. Travelling by air is no longer the automatic option. Energy providers promote their green credentials. Octavius Black, 38, managing director of Mind Gym consultancy, flies regularly for business but has cut out holiday flights. “Since I watched Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, about climate I have now given up taking flights to go on short holiday breaks and I am cutting down on business flights whenever I can,” he said. “I also changed my electricity supplier to one that uses renewables.”

It is hard to judge how far such behaviour extends. Flight bookings are surging, and the number of cars on the road is also increasing. But Climatecare.org, a website-based service that calculates carbon emissions and invests in projects to offset them, has seen business surge recently with a 10-fold increase in sales. Similarly, the number of holidays from Britain sold as “responsible” or “sustainable” has now risen to 450,000 a year. This is still a small percentage of the total but, according to the consumer research firm Mintel, by 2010 the annual “ethical” holiday market from the UK will have swollen to 2.5m trips a year — not all of them climate-related but apparently indicative of an electorate increasingly willing to make sacrifices to safeguard its future.

While the new Tories capitalise on this sea-change, Labour still seems to be floundering. “So far Cameron has stolen all the green limelight,” said a government advisor in Defra, the environment ministry. “He doesn’t have any policies but he does look good and we have been left behind.”

The government’s efforts to deal with climate change have long been crippled by the fear that any meaningful measures would involve taxation. It remembers the fuel tax protests of 2000 when lorry drivers threatened to bring the country to a standstill over the rising cost of fuel. The green movement has been planning to reverse that setback ever since. Two years ago the chief executives of Britain’s biggest environmental groups — ranging from Friends of the Earth (FoE) and Greenpeace to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) — began regular private meetings in London.

The outcome of those discussions is the Stop Climate Chaos campaign, a coalition of around 30 organisations which, says Tony Juniper, director of FoE, aims to take climate change out of the ghetto. “We want to make it a truly populist issue with a mass movement that will force it up the political agenda.” Stop Climate Chaos will hold its first big demonstration in London on November 4. With its emphasis on saving mankind from self-destruction, it hopes to equal the pulling power of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which at its peak in the 1980s had more than 1m members.

What may concern ministers most is not that the Drax militants are expected to turn up on November 4 but that middle England is likely to come along, with delegations expected from the RSPB, the WI, Oxfam and many more highly respectable groups. Cameron’s green Conservatives are also expected.

For the RSPB, traditionally one of the least militant of organisations, it will be the biggest demonstration it has been involved with. “The government is not making enough progress on climate change and we want to generate political pressure to change that,” said Mark Avery, the RSPB’s director of conservation. “We have more than a million members — that’s more than all three main political parties put together. They would do well to remember that.”

(From The Times)






PERSPECTIVE ON THE CALIFORNIA "GREENHOUSE" FOLLY

President Bush wrote this on March 13, 2001, "As you know, I oppose the Kyoto Protocol because it exempts 80 percent of the world, including major population centers such as China and India, from compliance, and would cause serious harm to the U.S. economy. The Senate's vote, 95-0, shows that there is a clear consensus that the Kyoto Protocol is an unfair and ineffective means of addressing global climate change concerns."

The United States Senate by a 95-0 vote rejected the Kyoto Treaty--that means Democrats and Republicans were unanimous. That means Clinton, Kerry, Kennedy, Schumer, Boxer, Feinstein and every other radical liberal voted against confirming the Kyoto Treaty. They knew it would harm American jobs, our economy, families, and yes, it would harm our environment.

But, happily for the 49 other states, our Governor supported only by Democrats in promoting AB 32, is willing to risk the California economy. I know that Texans, the Utah economic development commission, Arizona business leaders must believe they died and gone to heaven. They won't have to sell their States to California business, they will have a choice of businesses to accept.

Senator Chuck Hagel, July 24, 2002 reminded us that Bill Clinton, even though he signed the Treaty, refused to allow the Senate to vote on it (his Vice President never complained about that, Al Gore), " The Clinton Administration never submitted it to the Senate for debate and consideration. I suspect it is because they knew what is still true today - if put to a vote in the Senate, the Kyoto Protocol would face resounding defeat."

He went on to say: "The Kyoto Protocol is collapsing under the weight of the reality of its economic consequences." Hagel is not a conservative Republican, he is a McCain Republican, yet he understands the economic consequences were wrong for the United States.

The Mercury News described AB 32 this way, "The bill, AB 32, mandates that California reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent -- to 1990 levels -- by the year 2020. Major carbon-emitting industries will be forced to report their emissions to the state Air Resources Board, which will craft regulations to reach those goals. Those regulations would take effect in 2012."

``Being the only state to have absolute caps on carbon emissions puts California at a competitive disadvantage,'' said Allan Zaremberg, president and CEO of the California Chamber of Commerce, who predicted that the legislation ``will have little impact on global climate change but a severe negative impact on California's economy.''

Every Republican in the California Assembly and State Senate voted against AB 32, the Schwarzenegger/Democrat California version of adopting the Kyoto Treaty. No one believes this creates jobs, the only debate is how many jobs it will cost. Just like Democrats believe tax increases create jobs, they and the Governor are playing Russian roulette with the economy and the families of California.

Republican Assembly leader Plescia was quoted in the RoundUp, "Assembly Republican Leader George Plescia of San Diego condemned the agreement shortly after it was announced." "'Adopting costly and unattainable regulations will drive businesses and jobs out of California into other states -- and even into other countries with no commitment to improve air quality,' he said in a statement. "

Source






MONTANA MYTHS FROM THE ALARMINGLY IGNORANT JARED DIAMOND

Eco-author Jared Diamond says humankind is committing "ecocide" by failing to recognize environmental degradation before it is too late and bringing on its own collapse. Diamond says such societies as the Mayans of Central America, and the Vikings on Greenland likewise brought about their own doom. He warns many modern societies are also headed for eco-doom--including the State of Montana. The state of Montana? In collapse? Why?

Diamond claims key problems, including raging forest fires, unsustainable farming, and impending climate change. Montana 's first problem, Diamond says, is that its vast forests are threatened by huge forest fires. It costs the federal government too much to thin the trees and take out the dead wood, which lightning ignites into massive flames. The state's timber industry has already declined 80 percent, which Diamond says is because Montana can no longer compete with tree-growers in warmer climates.

Debra Okonski, reporting for the Montana think-tank PERC, says the federal government has blocked Montana timber harvests--responding to the tree-huggers like Diamond. She says the state's private forest owners keep their trees thinned, their forest fuel loads low, and profitably sell timber. Montana certainly won't run out of trees in the middle of a global warming. Both warming and additional CO2 stimulate tree growth.

Diamond claims Montana's farming will collapse due to soil erosion, fertilizer pollution, and spreading salt water seeps. Fortunately, technology, is already resolving those problems. No-till farming uses herbicides to control weeds rather than plowing, and cuts soil erosion by 65-95 percent. It similarly cuts fertilizer run-off from the fields. No-till also doubles soil moisture. Montana's no-till farmers no longer fallow half their 9 million acres every year, leaving them bare to searing winds and explosive raindrops. Ending fallow also helps prevent the downhill seepage of salts from fallow fields, which Diamond says caused the salinity problem.

Global warming will reduce the snowmelt for irrigation, says Diamond. Meanwhile, Egypt has bioengineered a new wheat variety that needs only one irrigation per season, instead of eight--because of a gene borrowed from barley. The new drought-proof wheat, farmed with no-till, will help Montana to stay in the wheat business.

Diamond goes on to lament "rich people" buying land in Montana for second homes. However, he vacations there himself, noting that recreation is one of the booming industries of the 21st century. If Montana manages its forests and wildlands well, it ought to harvest more and more dollars from skiers, hunters, fisherman, and a wide variety of vacationers. This is collapse?

Diamond believes the Modern Warming is being caused by human-emitted CO2. The planet is certainly warming, but the microfossils in seabed sediments tell us the Earth has had 600 moderate, natural warmings in the last million years. Solar-created beryllium isotopes in the sediments link the warming to changes in the sun's irradiance. The Modern Warming may favor some shifts in Montana's tree species. After the last Ice Age, the warming climate triggered a rapid spread of lodgepole pine in Montana and Douglas fir across the Pacific Northwest. But that's adaptation, not collapse.

Jared Diamond is overstating our environmental problems, and ignoring strategies and technologies that make modern societies more sustainable. That's not information, it is alarmism.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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Global warming: Too vital for guesses

Growing belief in global warming is pressuring governments and scientists to get their projections right says environment writer for "The Australian", Matthew Warren:

Al Gore is a kind of nerdy superman. He pushed the development of the internet, won the popular vote in the 2000 US presidential election without being elected and has made a movie about himself giving a slide show about saving the planet from climate change. His film An Inconvenient Truth, unsurprisingly, has polarised believers in severe climate change and their critics with its dire predictions of "a planetary emergency", including melting ice sheets, rises in sea levels, more frequent and severe cyclones and spreading tropical diseases. Due to open in Australia on September 14, the film catalogues mainstream science on climatic change as the basis for a swift and decisive shift to lower greenhouse gas-emitting energy systems across the developed world.

Prominent Australian climate-change sceptic Bob Carter, a geologist at James Cook University in north Queensland, provided this blunt review: "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention."

Cinema launches of the film across the world inevitably leave a trail of scientists praising or condemning the former US vice-president's claims. Despite nearly two decades of consolidated research on the subject, there is still limited agreement about climate-change science. It is accepted that in the past 4.6 billion years the Earth's surface temperature has had a series of significant warm and cool periods, much hotter and cooler than now. Natural global warming 20,000 years ago removed giant sheets of ice that would have buried much of the northern hemisphere. The Earth is in a relatively cold period, not a warm one. Within these significant periods are much shorter and sharper natural fluctuations in temperature.

In the past millennium, temperature changes have manifest into smaller warming and cooling cycles; a noticeably warm spell from 1000 to 1400 called the Medieval Optimum, during which came the Viking colonisation of Greenland, followed by a Little Ice Age that lasted until the mid-19th century.

The Earth has been warming for about the past 200 years, a split-second in geological time. Since the start of the 20th century, global average surface temperatures have risen between 0.6C and 0.7C. Last year was the warmest year of the instrumental record, which dates back, coincidentally, only to the mid-19th century, when the present warming cycle kicked in. It is also agreed that the level of greenhouse gases have increased directly or indirectly because of human activities.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide are about 375 parts per million in the atmosphere, up from pre-industrial concentrations of about 280 parts per million. Other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also higher. As Will Steffen, the director of resource and environmental studies at the Australian National University in Canberra, points out in a recent report to the federal Government, "the evidence for a warming Earth is stronger and the impacts of climate change are becoming observable".

Alarmists v sceptics: As the planet heats, so does the debate. The fundamental divide is between a growing majority of scientists who say there is increasingly certain evidence linking higher than predicted temperate changes with these known anthropogenic (man-made) increases in greenhouse gases, and a vocal minority who say such a claim is unsupportable.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988 and provides the collective opinion of government climate scientists from more than 120 member countries. It is considered the eminent body in the world on the science of climate change. Since its first report in 1990, the IPCC has been evolving its modelling of the complex climate systems and has become more confident and certain of its modelled climate projections. In the 2001 third assessment report, it projected a temperature rise of between 1.4C and 5.8C by the end of the 21st century. Its draft fourth report, due for release next April, has narrowed the projected temperature range considerably to about 3C at the present rate of greenhouse gas emissions. Stabilising greenhouse gas emissions at present levels would reduce this increase by about 1C by 2100. Increased confidence in improved climate models projects sea-level increases of 14cm to 43cm by 2100, with further increases of up to 80cm in the following century, projected increased storm intensity, but not frequency, and sustained reductions in rainfall in Australia of about 0.1mm a day.

It has been well publicised that such changes could inundate some island nations and low-lying stretches of mainland countries, notably Bangladesh. CSIRO research predicts the biggest local effect would be to increase the impact of storm surges, particularly on Australia's tropical northern coastline.

These new findings are unlikely to silence the critics of the IPCC who describe them as alarmists: a tight-knit self-serving peloton earnestly riding at increasing speed in the wrong direction. In reply, the climate-change mainstream portray their critics as a handful of cranky, anorak-clad sociopaths and contrarians operating mostly outside the accepted scientific processes who, given the chance, would argue about what time it was.

The sceptics continue to argue that the development and evolution of these climate models is self-serving and predictive: in other words, that they assume a causal link between anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and climate change and then retrofit their models to fit the theory. They claim that man-made increases in carbon dioxide levels are tiny compared with the Earth's natural exchanges: about 5.5 gigatonnes of carbon a year from human activity compared with about 750 gigatonnes in the atmosphere, another 1000 gigatonnes in the surface oceans and 2000 gigatonnes in vegetation and soils. The deep oceans, they say, contain 38,000 gigatonnes. To them, increased confidence in such modelling is inevitable but reveals nothing except the ability to refine and adapt new data to reinforce a predetermined, but flawed, thesis.

The sceptics argue that such modelling, even at its most advanced stage, is trying to reconcile natural systems that contain too many unknowns or unknowables to be meaningful. These include the complex interaction between the surface ocean and deep oceans, the role of currents in shifting energy around the planet and the complex interplay between the surface and layers of the atmosphere that includes myriad feedback effects. They claim these gaps inevitably have to be filled by assumptions, sometimes little more than educated guesses, which allow scope to manipulate outcomes and undermine the integrity of the findings. Such disagreement is absolutely normal in the history of scientific argument and debate.

What makes climate change so different is the stakes. The economic, social and environmental effects of a significant change in the Earth's temperature are potentially so severe that the issue has lured the interest of the broader community and business, and right on their tails are the politicians.

Beyond doubt? British philosopher Karl Popper observed that there was no such thing as an inalienable truth in science. Science, he said, was never right, it was always just increasingly less wrong. The contestability of any scientific theory is fundamental to the robust and progressive development of science. Only by continually challenging scientific theories do we make progress. While individuals in the political spin surrounding the climate-change debate repeatedly talk of the science being beyond doubt, the scientists are generally more circumspect. The IPCC talks of increased confidence in its models rather than in absolutes, and acknowledges some, albeit fewer, uncertainties remain about aspects of their modelling. Their critics are more certain of the uncertainty.

US paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson told a congressional committee last year that there was no meaningful correlation between carbon dioxide levels and Earth's temperature during this geologic time frame. "In fact, when carbon dioxide levels were over 10 times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half-billion years," Patterson said.

The hockey stick debate: This refers to the shape of one of the high-profile diagrams used by the IPCC to demonstrate the relative severity of recent climate change. US climatologist Michael Mann has used tree rings, ice cores and other proxies of past climates to reconstruct northern hemisphere temperatures during the past 1000 years. The modelling shows relatively stable temperatures for most of the millennium, then a sharp spike towards the end of the 20th century, producing a hockey stick appearance that gave a powerful visual cue to the scale of recent climate change and that figured prominently in public debate when the IPCC released its third assessment report in 2001. Mann's research said the 1990s were likely to be the warmest decade in the millennium.

In 2003, Canadian economist Ross McKitrick and engineer Stephen McIntyre tried to replicate the research and couldn't, claiming it was based on insufficient data and that it was the design of Mann's model that produced the hockey stick. What ensued was two years of claims and counter-claims on internet blogs and in the media between the scientists, and a growing band of supporters on both sides. Eventually the US Congress bought into the dispute and commissioned an independent review, which found that Mann's statistical work was flawed and unable to support the claims of the hottest century, decade and year of the past millennium. Yet further modelling by other climate scientists has since supported Mann's original conclusions.

What is a credible authority? Mainstream climate scientists repeatedly make the point that while they stick to the accepted regime of advancing their theories and models through the discipline of publication and peer review in important scientific journals, most of their critics do not. They also claim that many of their critics are industry-funded and not independent. Their critics counter that the IPCC process has been dominated by government-funded scientists with an interest in promoting a climate problem that would justify further research and therefore funding.

Policy response: The new IPCC report will further fuel demand for immediate and drastic action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to contain the effects of increasing climate change. Given the most recent projections, it is likely that the suite of policy responses may need to consider processes to help adapt to climate changes that appear increasingly likely to occur.

Source






New Report Warns Against Expansive New Regulation of 'Invasive Species'

Says Limits Would be of Dubious Value But Would Require Massive New Regulations on Property Use; Most 'Invasive Species' Actually are Beneficial

Calls by some federal lawmakers to add burdensome new regulations to quarantine, to control or to kill so-called 'invasive species' are of dubious environmental value and represent a real threat to property owners, says a new report released by The National Center for Public Policy Research.

According to Dana Joel Gattuso, senior fellow at the National Center and author of the study, efforts on Capitol Hill to regulate non-native species -- plants or animals that are considered by some to be alien to a particular ecosystem -- is based more on "emotion rather than science." Gattuso argues that adding new invasive species regulations would be a disaster for sound scientific practices and would require massive expansion of government regulatory control on land.

The study, "Invasive Species: Animal, Vegetable or Political?," argues that most non-native species are not an environmental calamity but, in fact, adapt to their surroundings and are even useful for ecosystems, the environment, human health and industry.

"In spite of the fact that most non-native species are harmless, lawmakers are reacting to hype and exaggerations," writes Gattuso. "[T]here is no scientific evidence of actual global extinction caused by a non-native species. Nor do exotic species threaten species 'richness' or 'biodiversity.'"

To the contrary, non-native Asian oysters are better than native oysters at filtering out water pollutants. Non-native South American water hyacinth blankets eat raw sewage, which provides a natural way to clean up polluted waters.

"The well-kept secret about exotic species is that cases of destruction are the exception; most non-indigenous species are benign or beneficial," writes Gattuso. "Collectively, nonnative crops and livestock comprise 98 percent of our food system."

Soybeans, kiwi fruit, wheat and nearly all cattle are examples of invasive species. And several states such as Maryland, Vermont, California and South Dakota honor non-native species as their State Flower or State Birds. "In fact, invasives have become such a common part of our environment, culture and even diet that we don't think about them," writes Gattuso.

However, these benefits have not prevented Congress from introducing numerous bills that assign billions of tax dollars to eradicate or otherwise to prevent the spread of invasives. Under some lawmakers' plans, government would have sweeping new authority to screen out non-native species and to regulate these species where they exist - on private as well as public lands.

"The 'invasive species' bills pending in Congress are not based on science but rather assume all non-indigenous species are harmful unless proven otherwise," writes Gattuso. "The key problem with government's handling of the issue of non-natives is that it takes a simplistic view, bundling all the species together and exaggerating their effects on ecosystems and commercialism."

Source






HEY! WHAT HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING IN CALIFORNIA THIS YEAR?

Rare but not impossible, Sacramento breezed through the month of August without reaching or exceeding 100 degrees. Consider it a reward for enduring the blistering heat of July. Temperatures in downtown Sacramento have remained mercifully in the double digits since a record-breaking heat wave ended July 27. "This is one of the nicest Augusts I can remember," said Don Noxon, who knows of what he speaks. A forecaster for the National Weather Service in Sacramento, Noxon has lived here since 1952.

That's not to say it hasn't been balmy in August before. Looking over the period of record, which stretches back 129 years, this is the 24th August in Sacramento to escape triple digits. Before 2006, the most recent year it happened was in 1991. It's worth noting that 1991 is distinguished by another bit of weather trivia: In that year, the mercury reached triple digits on Oct. 10, the latest date of the year. In other words, it's not over until it's over. September can be hot, too. An average September in Sacramento sees three days of 100 degree-plus temperatures.

So far, though, there appears no end to the spate of relatively mild days and cool nights. The forecast high for today is 97, moderating to the mid-90s on Saturday and low 90s on Sunday. Between Labor Day and Thursday, the forecast calls for highs between the mid-80s and mid-90s. The moderate temperatures of August had a noticeable impact on electricity use. Demand for the month, as tracked by the California Independent System Operator, which manages the power grid for about 80 percent of the state, reached a peak of 43,709 megawatts on Aug. 9.

By contrast, July's peak -- a record-breaker -- was 50,270 megawatts, reached on July 24. Another contrast: The overall average temperature in August was 1.9 degrees below normal, while July was 4.4 degrees higher than normal. The difference between the two months may have played a part in people's perception of August as unusually pleasant. As Dace Udris, a spokeswoman for the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, put it, "Maybe it's because I hated the end of July so much that August seemed great." In terms of electricity bills, August may well turn out to be great -- or at least, not as bad as July, which produced some whoppers. SMUD said its preliminary figures -- based on a small sampling of 20,000 bills that have been prepared for residential customers, out of 560,000 -- show an average August billing of $95.07. That's 4 percent lower than bills in August 2005, and markedly below the average residential SMUD bill of $123.67 in July, Udris said. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. also saw significantly lower peak demand. Spokesman Jon Tremayne said it will be another week or so before the utility company can say what August bills will look like as a result.

The back-to-back unusual months of summer inevitably raise questions about global climate change. But they're not questions that climate scientists can definitively answer, at least not based on two months of weather. "Nobody makes statements about global warming based upon single months or single years," said Bryan Weare, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of California, Davis. "There are some projections that say the variability will be greater on a warmer Earth," Weare said. "But to try to make anything out of two months really doesn't make any sense."

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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

Evidence Of Ancient SUVs In Antarctica

Post lifted from Cheat Seeking Missiles



Giant, prehistoric SUVs roamed the frozen Antarctic continent between 12 and 14 million years ago. It must be true because:

A 30-mile maze canyons in Antarctica was carved out of bedrock by the catastrophic draining of subglacial lakes during global warming between 12 million and 14 million years ago, according to university researchers who warn a similar event today could have serious environmental consequences.

Although scientists have previously theorized that the Labyrinth region in southern Victoria Land was created by water released from lakes that had formed under glaciers, researchers at Syracuse University and Boston University say they found geological evidence to bracket the timing of the last major flooding and link it to a global warming trend at the time. (source)

Warmies tell us incessently that it's our oil-fired lifestyle that's the problem, so we now can conclude that odd as it seems, there must have been prehistoric gas-guzzlers.

Remember, we can lick global warming! All it takes is adopting a less oil-consuming, less warm in the winter, less cool in the summer lifestyle ... and waiting out the current planetary temperature cycle.






SIGNIFICANT GREENHOUSE BACKDOWN

The world's top climate scientists have cut their worst-case forecast for global warming over the next 100 years. A draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, obtained exclusively by The Weekend Australian, offers a more certain projection of climate change than the body's forecasts five years ago. For the first time, scientists are confident enough to project a 3C rise on the average global daily temperature by the end of this century if no action is taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The draft Fourth Assessment Report says the temperature increase could be contained to 2C by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are held at current levels.

In 2001, the scientists predicted temperature rises of between 1.4C and 5.8C on current levels by 2100, but better science has led them to adjust this to a narrower band of between 2C and 4.5C. The new projections put paid to some of the more alarmist scenarios raised by previous modelling, which have suggested that sea levels could rise by almost 1m over the same period.

The report projects a rise in sea levels by century's end of between 14cm and 43cm, with further rises expected in following centuries caused by melting polar ice. The new projections forecast damage by global warming, such as stronger cyclones, modest sea-level rises and further shrinking of the arctic sea ice.

CSIRO research predicts the biggest impact of sea-level changes of this scale would be to increase the effect of storm surges, particularly on Australia's tropical northern coastline. The forecast temperature rises would also result in lower rainfall over most of the Australian mainland and exacerbate the threat to the survival of coral reefs and shellfish by increasing the risk of bleaching and increasing the acidity of the ocean.

Australian Conservation Foundation energy program manager Erwin Jackson said theprojections required an urgent and immediate response from the federal Government to drive accelerated investment in low-emissions technology in Australia. "Every day we delay taking action, the problem gets worse," Mr Jackson said. "The Government keeps throwing up the costs of action but totally ignores the costs of inaction. "No one ever said that saving the planet would cost nothing - that's the bottom line."

A recent Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics report on the cost of cutting greenhouse gas emissions estimated Australians would incur a fall in real wages of about 20 per cent if the nation was to unilaterally cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050.

John Howard this week said that sort of scenario would have an "enormously damaging" effect on the economy. "I accept that climate change is a challenge," the Prime Minister said. "I accept the broad theory about global warming. I am sceptical about a lot of the more gloomy predictions. "I also recognise that a country like Australia has got to balance a concern for greenhouse gas emissions with a concern for the enormous burden to be carried by consumers ... of what you might call an anti-greenhouse policy. It's a question of balance."

Federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell said the draft IPCC report was still undergoing a thorough review process before its approval by the panel next year. "It highlights the need for an effective global response to climate change as Australia alone cannot alter the pattern of world emissions," Senator Campbell said. "We are taking a leading role internationally to achieve effective engagement by all major greenhouse gas-emitting countries."

The new projections are based on the results of 23 climate models, developed by government climate scientists from IPCC member countries. According to current climate change models, stabilising global greenhouse gas levels to 400parts per million offers a good chance of avoiding 2C global temperature increases. This would require global emissions to be 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

CSIRO recently concluded that the goal of 60 per cent reductions might be considered the minimum needed to avoid dangerous climate change. Any further reductions in global temperatures would require cuts in emissions of about 80-90 per cent in industrialised countries by 2050, which would require a faster transition to near-zero emissions technologies.

Source





SOME HURRICANE HISTORY

Understanding hurricane history takes on new urgency in the wake of the worst hurricane season on record. In 2005, the Atlantic basin produced more tropical storms, 28, and more full-blown hurricanes, 15, than any year in at least the past half century. Last year, memorable for its four major hurricanes, could also lay claim to three of the six strongest storms on record. And as bad as it was, the 2005 season was just an exclamation point in a decade-long hurricane onslaught, which will end-well, scientists can't agree on when, or even whether, it will end.

That's because late last year, around the time Hurricane Katrina stormed ashore in Mississippi, climate scientists were engaged in an urgent debate. According to one group, the increasing intensity of Atlantic storms comes from a natural climate cycle that causes sea surface temperatures to rise and fall every 20 to 40 years. According to another group, it comes from human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. (So far, no one has linked the number of hurricanes to global warming.) In the first scenario, the fever in the Atlantic might not break for another decade or more; in the second, it might last for the rest of this century and beyond.

After the war, the U.S. Weather Bureau-renamed the National Weather Service in 1970-established a formal program of hurricane research. To study these formidable whirlwinds, flights continued to transport scientists through turbulent eye walls and the eerie stillness of the eye itself. In the 1960s, earth-orbiting satellites began providing even higher observational platforms. Since then, forecasters have progressively narrowed "the cone of uncertainty," the teardrop-shaped blob that surrounds their best predictions of where a hurricane is likely to go. At 48 hours, track forecasts are now "off" on average by just 118 miles; at 24 hours, by less than 65 miles, both significant improvements over 15 years ago. Despite these advances, hurricanes undergo sudden surges in power that are easy to spot once they start but dauntingly hard to predict.

Like a giant bumblebee, the P-3 Orion buzzes in from Biscayne Bay, dipping a wing as it passes the compact concrete building that houses the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Miami-based Hurricane Research Division. The plane, a modification of the submarine hunters built in the 1960s for the U.S. Navy, is one of two that fly scientists in and out of some of the planet's mightiest storms, including Hurricane Katrina as its engorged eye neared landfall.

Among those on that flight was research meteorologist Stanley Goldenberg, whose third-floor office looks, appropriately enough, as if a hurricane just blew through it. Goldenberg is well acquainted with hurricanes blowing though. In 1992 Hurricane Andrew demolished his family's rented house in Perrine, Florida. A computer-enhanced satellite image of the hurricane, with its monstrous circular eye wall, now hangs on his wall. "The bagel that ate Miami," he quips.

Hurricanes belong to a broad class of storms known as tropical cyclones, which also occur in the Indian and Pacific oceans. They do not develop spontaneously but grow out of other disturbances. In the Atlantic, most evolve out of "African waves," unstable kinks in the atmosphere that spiral off the West African coast and head toward Central America. Along the way, these atmospheric waves generate ephemeral clusters of thunderstorm-producing clouds that can seed hurricanes.

At the same time, hurricanes are much more than collections of thunderstorms writ large; they stand out amid the general chaos of the atmosphere as coherent, long-lasting structures, with cloud towers that soar up to the stratosphere, ten miles above the earth's surface. The rise of warm, moist air through the chimney-like eye pumps energy into the developing storm.

Ocean warmth is essential-hurricanes do not readily form over waters cooler than about 79 degrees Fahrenheit-but the right temperature is not enough. Atmospheric conditions, such as dry air wafting off the Sahara, can cause hurricanes-along with their weaker cousins, tropical storms and depressions-to falter, weaken and die. Vertical wind shear-the difference between wind speed and direction near the ocean's surface and at 40,000 feet-is another formidable foe. Among the known regulators of vertical wind shear is El Ni¤o, the climate upheaval that alters weather patterns around the globe every two to seven years. During El Ni¤o years, as Colorado State University tropical meteorologist William Gray was first to appreciate, high-level westerlies over the tropical North Atlantic increase in strength, ripping developing storms apart. In 1992 and 1997, both El Nino years, only six and seven tropical storms formed, respectively, or a quarter of the number in 2005. (Then again, Goldenberg observes, the devastating Hurricane Andrew was one of the 1992 storms.)

Five years ago, a possible explanation for this pattern emerged. Goldenberg shows me a graph that plots the number of major hurricanes-Category 3 or higher-that spin up each year in the Atlantic's main hurricane development region, a 3,500-mile-long band of balmy water between the coast of Senegal and the Caribbean basin. Between 1970 and 1994, this region produced, on average, less than half the number of major hurricanes that it did in the decades before and after. Goldenberg then hands me a second graph. It shows a series of jagged humps representing the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation, a swing of sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic that occurs every 20 to 40 years. The two graphs seem to coincide, with the number of major hurricanes falling as waters cooled around 1970 and rising as they began warming about 1995.

Scientists have yet to nail down the cause of the multi-decadal oscillation, but these striking ups and downs in surface temperatures appear to correlate-somehow-with hurricane activity. "You can't just heat up the ocean by 1 degree Celsius and Pow! Pow! Pow! get more hurricanes," says Goldenberg. More critical, he thinks, are atmospheric changes-more or less wind shear, for example-that accompany these temperature shifts, but what comes first? "We still don't know which is the chicken and which is the egg," he says. "The ocean tends to warm when the trade winds get weaker, and the trade winds can get weaker if the ocean warms. Will we lock it down? Maybe someday."

After leaving Goldenberg's office, I drive across town to the National Hurricane Center, a low-lying bunker whose roof bristles with satellite dishes and antennae. Inside, as computer monitors rerun satellite images of Katrina's savage waltz toward the Gulf Coast, top National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials have gathered to announce the agency's best estimate of how many tropical storms and hurricanes are likely to form in 2006. It's not an encouraging forecast: eight to ten hurricanes, fewer than last year, but four to six of them Category 3s or higher. (Last year there were seven.) The predictions are based, in large part, on the multi-decadal oscillation. "The researchers are telling us that we're in a very active period for major hurricanes," says Max Mayfield, the center's director, "one that will probably last at least 10 to 20 more years."

From his 16th-floor office on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, meteorologist Kerry Emanuel commands a crow's-nest view of the esplanade along the Charles River, the dividing line between Boston and Cambridge. In 1985, he remembers, the windows wept with spray blown up from the river by Hurricane Gloria, a moderately strong storm that, nonetheless, made a mess of the Northeast. A painting by a Haitian artist that shows people and animals drowning in a storm surge hangs on a wall near his desk.

Last year, right after Katrina hit, Emanuel found himself in the media spotlight. A few weeks earlier he had published evidence in the journal Nature that hurricanes in both the North Atlantic and the western basin of the North Pacific had undergone a startling increase in power over the past half century. The increase showed up in both the duration of the storms and their peak wind speeds. The cause, Emanuel suggested, was a rise in tropical sea surface temperatures due, at least in part, to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

Even scientists who would expect hurricanes to intensify in response to greenhouse warming were stunned by Emanuel's suggestion that global warming has already had a profound effect. Computer simulations of a warming world, notes climate modeler Thomas Knutson of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, suggest that by the end of this century, peak sustained wind speeds could increase by around 7 percent, enough to push some Category 4 hurricanes into Category 5 territory. But Knutson, along with many others, did not think that the intensity rise would be detectable so soon-or that it might be five or more times larger than he and his colleagues anticipated. "These are huge changes," Knutson says of Emanuel's results. "If true, they may have serious implications. First we need to find out if they're true."

Emanuel's paper raised the ante in what has grown into an extremely intense debate over the sensitivity of the earth's most violent storms to gases spewed into the atmosphere by human beings. In the months since the dispute began, dozens of other studies have been reported, some of which support Emanuel's conclusions, others of which call them into question. The debate has grown so impassioned that some former colleagues now scarcely speak to one another.

Sorting out the differences between the two camps is not easy. Goldenberg and Landsea, for example, grant that greenhouse gases may be contributing to a slight long-term rise in sea surface temperatures. They just don't think the effect is significant enough to trump the natural swings of the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation. "It's not simply, yes or no, is global warming having an effect?" says Landsea, the science and operations officer for the National Hurricane Center. "It's how much of an effect is it having?"

Emanuel, while respectful of Landsea, is not backing down. In fact, he has now stirred up a second storm. "If you'd asked me a year ago," Emanuel says, "I would have probably told you that a lot of the variability in hurricane activity was due to the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation. I've now come to the conclusion that the oscillation either doesn't exist at all or, if it does, has no perceptible influence on the temperature of the tropical Atlantic in the late summer and fall"-that is, in hurricane season.

Emanuel says that much of the cooling in the tropical North Atlantic in the 1970s can be traced to atmospheric pollutants, specifically to a haze of sulfurous droplets spewed out by volcanoes and industrial smokestacks. Global climate modelers have recognized for years that this haze in the atmosphere acts as a sunshade that cools the earth's surface below. Emanuel says that now that this form of air pollution is on the wane (and this is a good thing for all sorts of reasons having nothing to do with hurricanes), the warming influence of greenhouse gas pollution, and its effect on hurricanes, is growing ever more pronounced. "We will have some quiet [hurricane] years," he says. "But unless we have a really big volcanic eruption, we'll never see another quiet decade in the Atlantic in our lifetime or that of our children."

Is such a grim prediction warranted? Scientists on the periphery of the debate aren't yet sure. For now, says meteorologist Hugh Willoughby of Florida International University, the points of agreement among experts are more important than the differences. Whether a natural oscillation or greenhouse warming is to blame, the odds of a major hurricane striking the U.S. coastline are higher than they have been for more than a generation. And the dangers such storms pose are higher than ever.

Adjusted for inflation, the 1938 New England hurricane destroyed or damaged some $3.5 billion worth of property. Today, estimates Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the same hurricane would leave behind a tab of up to $50 billion. The 1900 Galveston hurricane would cause property losses as high as $120 billion. And at the very top of Pielke's list of catastrophic disasters is a replay of the Category 4 hurricane that slashed into Miami in 1926, eighty years ago this September. Were the same hurricane to hit the Miami area in 2006, Pielke estimates, the bill could approach $180 billion. "And," he adds, "if you want to compare apples to apples, Katrina was an $80 billion storm."

More here




HURRICANE HYSTERIA

It's peak North Atlantic hurricane season again and much is being made of a supposedly increased hurricane threat due to man-made global warming. It's a contentious issue, to say the least. JunkScience.com has tried to slice through a little of the overblown rhetoric to see what, if any, cold, hard facts are available.

If you look at a graph from the Chronological List of All Hurricanes Which Affected the Continental United States: 1851-2005 compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the years 2004-2005 represent the only time in this relatively short record that there have been two consecutive years with more than four hurricanes making U.S. landfall.

This, however, does not constitute proof of global warming-enhanced, landfalling hurricane activity. Since 1928 -- the mid-point of the period 1851-2005 -- there have been 134 landfalling hurricanes as compared to 145 landfalling hurricanes prior to 1928. So there's actually been a significant decrease in hurricane frequency though global temperatures likely have warmed somewhat since 1928. There also hasn't been an increase in the number of stormy seasons. Pre-1928, there were nine years with three or more hurricanes compared to only five years with three or more hurricanes post-1928.

There appear to have been more category four and category five storms post-1928 as compared to pre-1928 (12 vs. 9). But since that difference depends on measurements of maximum hurricane wind speeds, it could easily be questioned given dramatic technological improvements in modern hurricane data collection.

Looking at the data by decade, it's apparent that the anomalously quiet 1920s were followed by surging landfalling hurricane frequency in the 1930s and 1940s. But after the 1940s, the remainder of the 20th century was rather quiet.

The statistics for 2004 and 2005 may look ominous at first blush, but we have no way of knowing how the remainder of the decade will ultimately pan out. With annual landfalling hurricane counts of 0, 1, 2, 6 and 6 for the period 2001-2005, it could be a big decade -- or not.

The question originally posed, of course, was whether the increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is associated with more or more-severe landfalling hurricanes. To answer this question, we plotted storms against atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Curiously, the post-World War II period of increasing fossil fuel use and associated increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is concurrent with the most sustained lull in landfalling hurricane activity throughout the record. While this doesn't disprove any association between global warming and landfalling hurricane frequency or intensity, it lends no support to the contention either. It then strongly looks as though 2004-2005 was simply an unlucky anomaly since hurricane trends bear no similarity to the annual atmospheric carbon dioxide trend and, by extension, to global warming.

The last time there were 15 landfalling hurricanes in a four-year period was back in the 1880s. Even so, the entire 1880s ended up having only one or two more landfalling hurricanes than the preceding and subsequent decades. History, therefore, cautions us against jumping to rash conclusions about whether the opening decade of the Third Millennium will likely become a record-breaker. We'll have to wait and see -- but history suggests it's somewhat unlikely.

Finally, we've also plotted a new graph of global temperature data -- from the UK's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research -- against atmospheric carbon dioxide data -- from Mauna Loa, Hawaii, the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations available in the world. The graph shows very little change in either global temperature or atmospheric carbon dioxide level since 1850. That's because we plotted the ranges on scales that better suit planetary history as opposed to the global warming lobby's fascination with dramatized illustrations of relatively small temperature change over short time periods. Temperatures are plotted in degrees Kelvin, the absolute temperature scale, and carbon dioxide levels are plotted in terms of their historical range, which has been more than an order of magnitude greater than current levels.

Has the planet warmed over the last two centuries? Almost certainly it has. But we can say with equal certainty that, from a planetary perspective, it hasn't warmed very much and, when viewed on a more appropriate scale, nowhere near the "dangerous" levels claimed by alarmists. And no one knows with any certainty why the warming has occurred.

This is why the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) estimate of average global temperature change - 0.6 ñ 0.2 degrees Centigrade during the 20th century - is really a trivial matter when viewed in the proper historical context. Simply put, a change in absolute planetary mean temperature of 0.2 percent is unlikely to have caused catastrophic climate change.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE SUN GOES DOWN?



When the price of oil is high, talk turns to alternative forms of energy, including wind, biofuels and solar. One kind of solar energy isn't getting much publicity. But solar thermal power is quietly becoming a significant source of electricity in the Southwest. In the desert south of Las Vegas, crews working on a project called Nevada Solar One are assembling a parabolic trough of curved mirrors connected in a huge array. At the center, a closed-loop tube will be filled with oil that will be heated by the sun. The hot oil will flow around the 400-acre project and into a building where it will turn water into steam. It, in turn, will turn a steam turbine, which will make electricity.

Solar PV, or photovoltaics -- panels on roofs -- are what most people think of when they think of solar power. The largest PV array in the world, located in Germany, produces 10 megawatts of electricity. But Nevada Solar One will produce 64 megawatts -- enough to power 40,000 homes in the Las Vegas area during the hottest part of the day.

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SCHWARZENEGGER GOES POPULIST

Popular fads are hard for politicians to resist when the harm of them is not immediately apparent

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, a Hummer-driving Republican with his own Gulfstream jet, has delighted Democrats and environmentalists by promising to sign a Bill that will require his state to reduce its carbon emissions by a quarter over the next 14 years. In the process he has established himself as the leading voice in the US for action on climate change, which President Bush has so far refused to tackle with federal legislation. It has also confirmed California as the country's most influential political laboratory and virtually guaranteed Mr Schwarzenegger's own re-election in November. Not bad for one flourish of what is presumably a rather robust gubernatorial pen.

The smog that fills the Los Angeles basin for most of the year has long since served as a reproach to Californians for their extravagance, but it has never dented their confidence in shaping the future. The Golden State has pioneered bold anti-pollution measures before, with mixed success. This time, the fate of an agreement to drive greenhouse gas emissions down to their 1990 level by 2020 will depend on the ability of research-led business to produce the requisite clean new technologies, and the willingness of the biggest polluters - especially power generators - to invest in it.

If they do, history may smile on the somewhat optimistically-named Global Warming Solutions Act. But Mr Schwarzenegger has already sealed an astonishing comeback by endorsing it. Nine months ago, after stubbornly promoting a series of failed reforms tailored to his partisan base, his political future appeared terminal. He has since appointed Democrats to run his own staff and the state's Environmental Protection Agency and steered decisively back towards the political centre, opening a 14-point lead over his nearest rival. A second term in office is now his to lose. If he wins, it will be thanks partly to a strategy of distancing himself from Mr Bush not just on climate change but also on such key domestic issues as stem-cell research, which he supports, and sending troops to guard the Mexican border, which he opposes.

Mr Schwarzenegger hopes his lead on carbon emissions will be "an example for other states and nations". It will certainly be studied carefully. California's relentless modernity, as well as its sheer size as the world's eighth-largest economy, gives its "local" politics global significance - and if he is as serious about the environment as he says he is, George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, on a visit to Japan, should head there from Tokyo even at the cost of 1.2 extra tonnes of carbon.

The Governor could propose a system that will require carbon emissions from every significant industrial polluter to be measured, with cuts mandated and enforceable by 2012. Mr Bush believes such cuts cannot be achieved by legislation. The more popular Mr Schwarzenegger believes they cannot be achieved without it. They agree, however, on the central role of new technologies in which California hopes to lead the world.

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BRITISH CONSERVATIVES GO POPULIST

Popular fads are hard for politicians to resist when the harm of them is not immediately apparent

Taxes on motoring, flying and other polluting activities would rise under a Conservative government, according to George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor. He said that the Tories would raise more money from green taxes and less from taxes on employment, investment and savings. The policy is aimed at giving the Conservative Party a green image, but risks alienating both motorists and right-wingers, who want more emphasis on tax cuts. He made one of his clearest statements yet on tax on a trip to Japan, where he is studying ways of reducing pollution, including the use of super-fast trains to curb demand for internal flights. Today he will take a ride on a magnetic train capable of travelling at 360mph, which he said could virtually eliminate domestic flights if brought to Britain.

Mr Osborne and David Cameron, the Conservative leader, are touring Asia as part of their strategy to portray the party as a government in waiting, being taken seriously by foreign leaders and with a coherent range of policies. Mr Cameron will next week visit India, where he will meet business and political leaders. Speaking in Tokyo, Mr Osborne said: "I believe we in Britain should move some of the burden of taxation away from income and capital and towards taxes on environmentally-damaging behaviour. Instead of a tax system that penalises hard work and enterprise, I want to move towards more effective and fair taxes on pollution. I want the proportion of tax revenue raised by green taxes to rise." He refused to be drawn on any details of tax changes, but said they were considering fuel tax and vehicle excise duty, as well as tax on aviation, and a new carbon tax to help to tackle global warming.

Steve Norris, who leads a Conservative working group on transport, said that he was sure the party would reintroduce the fuel duty escalator, whereby the tax on petrol and diesel is automatically increased every year. The fuel duty escalator was abolished by Gordon Brown after protests by lorry drivers and farmers.

Ed Balls, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, hit back: "I think the question George Osborne failed to answer is: is he really saying that he thinks taxes on motorists should be going up now at a time when petrol prices are so high? If you are going to be a serious Opposition you need to come along and say what are your proposals, how would you pay for them. Until then people won't take you seriously."

The Shadow Chancellor also insisted that Britain should compete with the rest of the world by developing a series of high-speed rail links with magnetically levitated trains, connecting major cities. Such "maglev" trains already operate in Japan and China, and are being tried out in Germany. "If Japan is developing this technology, if China has already introduced this kind of train, if Germany is looking at this technology, why are we not doing so in Britain?"

Mr Osborne's claims that such travel would tackle global warming by reducing demand for flights was rebuffed by Cliff Perry, of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, who said that maglev trains produced more pollution than slower trains and were the "railway equivalent of Concorde". An aide to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, said that the maglev network would cost tens of billions of pounds. "No party will ever be taken seriously when they throw around commitments on tax and spending like this. David Cameron and George Osborne are proving that they simply do not have the maturity and experience to address the serious issues facing Britain's future," he said.

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Australia: A gay Green politician

A Greens candidate has pleaded guilty to being a public nuisance after undercover police arrested him at a local gay beat. Candidate for Townsville John Boucher yesterday admitted visiting a public toilet in Townsville three weeks ago and undoing his fly outside a cubicle. But the 55 year-old said he was investigating the site after he heard homosexual men were being unfairly targeted by police at the beat.

Greens campaign coordinator Ian Gittus said Mr Boucher last night regretted having pleaded guilty, but wanted to put the episode behind him quickly. "He didn't go there for sex," Mr Gittus said. "He went there to investigate and as soon as he went in there, three undercover police arrested him." Mr Boucher is a probation officer with Queensland Corrective Services and is also a long-time gay rights activist.

Throughout his campaign he has argued for equal rights and social justice issues. Mr Boucher will remain part of The Greens campaign, with the full support of the party. "We do feel that police are harassing gay men in Townsville and we call for a hotline for gay men to call if they are being harassed," Mr Gittus said. Mr Boucher was fined $300.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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CREATING JOBS AND DESTROYING WEALTH

Twenty states have set standards that require utilities to obtain some of their power from “renewable” resources like windmills and solar panels. California wants 20% renewable power by 2017 and New York 24% by 2013. California will succeed by conveniently defining hydroelectric dams as renewable. New York’s less inclusive definition gives it 0.2% renewable capacity today. Texas is ahead of schedule in getting to 2,000 megawatts (2% of capacity) by 2009.

Ask most people about renewables and you will probably hear about solar power and fuel cells. In reality renewables generate only 2.2% of America’s electricity. Thirty years of work on solar power and it still produces only 1% of that 2.2%. California has geothermal resources and Maine has wood chips, but almost everywhere else renewables mean windmills, helped along by substantial federal subsidies.

Of course, even if renewables are expensive they might reduce some of the global warming caused by CO2 emitted by fossil-fuel powerplants. There are uncertainties about whether warming will really be bad (think longer growing seasons) but let’s assume it actually will get several degrees hotter (choose your own figure). The nations that signed the Kyoto Protocols on global warming agreed to cut their emissions over the future. If each of them made the sacrifices of full compliance (the betting is that few will even come close), the world would end up only a tenth of a degree cooler. And if that big an effort gets no results, state and local government policies can only be empty gestures. Economic activity will shift away from them toward other areas or nations -- remember that China and India are exempt from the agreement.

Renewables may not help much with global warming, but the nation might still benefit from all the new jobs that will come from building and operating them. Recent work by Professor Lloyd Dumas of the University of Texas at Dallas predicts that happy result. Dumas cites research showing that if 20% of future power plants are renewable, they will create two to three times more jobs than if they all burn fossil fuels.

It’s the same argument we hear from consultants hired by local governments to estimate the employment that a tax-financed subway or stadium will create. Both they and Dumas conveniently forget that the money to pay these newly employed workers is unavailable for spending by consumers or investment by businesses. Workers who used to produce those goods move to other jobs, possibly after a spell of unemployment.

Even if new workers somehow materialize, electricity will be expensive. It takes skilled people to build and operate a megawatt of capacity, and more of them for renewable facilities than conventional ones. And more renewables are required to get the same output: clouds can make a solar panel ineffective, and calm air or gale force winds do the same for windmills. It takes about three solar generators or windmills to achieve the same dependability as a single gas-burning generator. Voila’ three times more jobs.

It is easy to invent policies that create lots of jobs -- just make delivery trucks illegal and create work for human porters. Want to create jobs, hire people to shatter window’s in homes and businesses and you would create a boon in the glass making industry. However, it wastes the skills and services of a labor force that could have produced things that people really wanted, just like a renewables policy.

All over the world, for several centuries workers have become more productive and their services have risen in value. Renewable power plants as currently constituted are just a high-tech method of throwing that improved productivity away.

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A COAL-FIRED FUTURE IS MOST LIKELY

Coal is the most geographically widespread and accessible hydrocarbon in the world. Its distribution is in marked contrast to oil and gas in that reserves are located in some of the major areas of energy consumption. As China and India have relatively poor oil and gas resources, coal is seen as central to meeting their future energy demand growth. Both countries have been expanding coal production at a rapid rate.

Since reserves are so widespread and prolific, in contrast to other hydrocarbons, coal scores high in terms of security of supply. It is also favored because of its low cost of extraction. The rise in oil and gas prices over the last three to four years has made steam coal look increasing economic as a power generation feedstock, while burgeoning demand for steel has increased the consumption of metallurgical coal.

Coal's failing is that it is dirty. Compared with gas, coal produces more carbon dioxide per unit of energy. However, the cost and location of coal, combined with expected growth in energy demand, have led policymakers in many countries to conclude that the world's future energy needs cannot be met without coal. The International Energy Agency projects that coal use will grow each year until 2030.

Such a scenario is incompatible with targets to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Faced with two possibilities--to replace coal with cleaner alternatives or make coal clean--policymakers are opting for the latter. Not least in this calculation are the political difficulties of attempting to run down national coal industries.

The power industry has already made large steps in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power stations. Engineering firm Mitsui Babcock, for instance, is installing in China a supercritical boiler plant. A more efficient plant means less coal can be burnt for the same energy output, thereby reducing emissions per unit of energy produced. There is little doubt that the installation of more efficient coal plants is an important contribution to reducing emissions where it replaces existing coal-fired plants. However, when meeting additional energy demand growth, high-carbon-dioxide output capacity is still installed.

As a solution, some companies are promoting carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), which aims to capture carbon dioxide and store it permanently underground. CCS technology is not commercial at present, but companies such as Mitsui Babcock advocate building CCS-ready plants now so that CCS technology can be retrofitted once it is developed. However, there is no guarantee that CCS will ever be commercially viable on a large scale.

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Australian Leftist governments plan to stop cow farts!



The success of the Labor states' proposed carbon emissions trading scheme may hinge on stopping cows breaking wind. A joint discussion paper released by the states says agricultural emissions must be cut by 60 per cent and part of the solution is reducing flatulence in cows. Livestock produces more than 60 million tonnes of methane gas annually - the equivalent of 10 per cent of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions. The discussion paper was released this month to support the case for a state-based carbon emissions trading scheme.

Prime Minister John Howard has attacked the idea and Premier Peter Beattie, although supportive, is concerned about the impact of the proposed scheme on Queensland's coal industry. The paper says agricultural emissions of methane and nitrous oxide are a particular concern. "In order to achieve around a 60 per cent reduction in emissions by the middle of this century, agricultural emissions would need to be addressed at some point," it said. "Achieving emissions reductions in agriculture will require a significant research and development effort."

Reducing flatulence in cows is identified as one of the most promising research areas. In particular, it points to "preliminary rumen ecology" research being undertaken in Queensland. Scientists at the Department of Primary Industries are working on three projects. These include investigating whether bacteria found in the gut of kangaroos - which emit very little methane - could be used to reduce emissions from cattle and sheep.

Principal scientist Athol Klieve yesterday said three different types of bacteria had been isolated. "We have been looking at them in a fermentation apparatus . . . to see how well they can colonise, and see if they can reduce methane," he said. "There are promising indications that if we can work out a bit better the requirements they need to be able to persist in the rumen, they will be able to reduce methane emissions." Dr Klieve said the other two projects involved putting coconut oil and cotton seed in cattle feed. "It is known a lot of these liquid-based feed materials do reduce methane emissions," he said.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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