TEMPERATURE AVERAGES INADEQUATE

An email from F.James Cripwell [jim_jill@ncf.ca] noting that the basic physics of global warming are being ignored

I suffer from the fact that I can find no-one with whom to discuss the fundamental physics of climate change and global warming; despite my best efforts. It seems to me that there are two separate, but interconnected problems, being discussed at the present time. The first is whether the world is warming up due to all causes; such as changes in volcanic activity, earth's albido, solar radiation, and greenhouse gas concentrations. The second is whether increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are causing the earth to warm up. I am concerned only with the latter.

It seems to me that for the first problem I mentioned, the average global temperature is a good measure of what is happening. But for the question about carbon dioxide, what is required is what might be called an average radiation temperature. Thinking reductio ad absurdum, if the temperature of an area of the desert were to increase from plus 40 degrees Celsius to 41 degrees, while at the same time an equal area of the Antarctic decreased from minus 40 to minus 41, the average temperature of the earth would stay constant. However, under Stephan-Boltzman, more radiation would be emitted by increasing the temperature of the desert, than the radiation loss from Antarctica.

So what is required is not so much an average global temperature, as an average radiation temperature; world global temperatures weighted by Stephan-Boltzman. This could be expressed either as a temperature, or as an emission spectrum showing the average amount of radiation emitted by the earth as a function of wavelength. What is then required is the percentage of this radiation which is absorbed by all the greenhouse gases, before it escapes from the earth.

I am imagining what an infra-red spectrometer, somewhere in space, might observe of the earth's radiation, if the sun were turned off; e.g. sort of like during a total eclipse of the sun. What one would see is the earth's radiation reduced by earthly Fraunhoffer lines. If we had this sort of fundamental data, it would be comparatively easy to assess what the effect of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide actually is, while assessing the effect of water, the dominant greenhouse gas, at the same time, with the same methodology.





Greenpeace goofs over SUVs

You would expect subscribers to a website called TreeHugger.com to be sympathetic to, even fully supportive of, Greenpeace, wouldn't you? Yet recently some of the site's contributors have expressed anger with Greenpeace over its new anti-4x4 advert. `What a terrible ad. Cruelty gets you nowhere', said Nathan. Someone called Dug added: `That childish ad made me regret donating money to Greenpeace.' What so upset Nathan, Dug and others about Greenpeace's latest media intervention?

The `gas guzzler' ad was launched to coincide with last month's International Motor Show in London. It is set in an office in London's city centre. A seemingly affable bloke enters the office building, but straight away we know that something is amiss. The receptionists sneer at him. His workmates seem reluctant to enter into friendly banter. Most strikingly, a colleague spits into his coffee (seriously - a long horrible spit, at that) and then slams the mug on his table. He sits alone at lunch, shunned by those around him, who prefer to squeeze on to already overcrowded tables rather than sit with this guy. And as he walks into the lift to leave work, we see that someone has stuck a note on his back saying `PRICK'.

What could he have done to deserve such treatment? As he enters the bowels of the car park, you expect some terrible horror to be revealed: perhaps he operates a secret sweatshop of children in the basement of the building, or underground meetings of the BNP. In fact, his only sin - and the reason he is treated as a pariah by his workmates - is that he drives a 4x4.

See the ad for yourself here. Have you ever seen such a petty-minded, dimwitted, teenage-angsty little film? This is bitching dressed up as a serious debate. It is also dripping, you will note, with a kind of loathing for the `wrong' sort of aspirational lifestyle. A Greenpeace press release to accompany the ad says: `The advert satirises the aspirational images and glossy marketing used by motor manufacturers to encourage car drivers to purchase an urban 4x4. In the film, a city employee encounters disdain from his fellow employees, but only at the end of the film does the viewer learn why - he owns a city gas guzzler. The ad ends with the line "What does your car say about you.?"' (Yet for all its anti-big-advertising prejudices, Greenpeace is not above learning a few tricks from aspirational lifestyle marketing. As the press release says: `Greenpeace took advice from advertising industry insiders before producing the film.' So the ad is somewhat hypocritical, as well as childish.)

Greenpeace has been campaigning against 4x4s for years, using a combination of tacky media stunts and `direct action' to demonise people who dare to drive such vehicles. Last year Greenpeace activists stormed the Range Rover assembly line in Solihull, forcing it to shut down for a day. Its volunteers also put cardboard clamps on the wheels of parked 4x4s, and stick fake tax discs on their windscreens calling for extra road tax for `gas-guzzling vehicles'. One car targeted by Greenpeace belonged to British actress Thandie Newton, star, ironically, of the Hollywood blockbuster film Crash. Now Newton has reportedly seen the error of her ways: she sold her BMW 4x4 and has replaced it with a hybrid car.

The `spit on the city boy' ad is the latest stage in Greenpeace's anti-4x4 campaigning. This can be seen as a new kind of `moralvert': adverts that communicate a deeply moralistic message but which don't even have the decency to label themselves `public information broadcasts' or `party political messages'. So there are more and more adverts in public loos telling us we're probably suffering from some STD, ads on TV warning women not to get unlicensed cabs in case they get raped, adverts about how much fruit and salt we should eat (a lot of fruit, not very much salt).

Greenpeace and others slate big advertisers for trying to manipulate consumers. Yet its and others' moralverts are even worse. They don't want to seduce us or make us laugh or have some fun with us; they just want to wag their fingers at our bad behaviour and our poor misguided vulnerability. They are far more morally manipulative than anything BMW or Rover could come up with.

It seems that Greenpeace is somewhat red-faced about the bad reaction to its ad - which might explain why you probably haven't yet seen it on TV or in a cinema. For all the money spent on making the ad, there is now little mention of it on the main Greenpeace website, and on other green-leaning websites, and the video-sharing site YouTube.com, there is much vocal criticism of Greenpeace. On YouTube, one user says: `They hate a man for the car he drives? That shows how loving they are as fellow humans.' Greenpeace, it seems, has been hoist with its own green petard. I should think so, too.

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OIL COMPANY SAYS THERE IS PLENTY OF OIL IN RESERVE

The world's biggest oil company has rubbished claims the planet is running out of oil, saying barely one-quarter of reserves have been used up in the past century. ExxonMobil Australia chief executive Mark Nolan said the theory that oil supplies had peaked and would dwindle over the next 20 years was of "no value", having surfaced regularly since the 1920s during times of high oil prices. "The fact is that the world has an abundance of oil and there is little question scientifically that abundant energy resources exist," Mr Nolan said yesterday. "According to the US Geological Survey, the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional recoverable oil resources. So far, we have produced one trillion of that."

Mr Nolan said conservative estimates of alternative oil sources, such as so-called heavy oil and shale oil, would probably push the total recoverable resource to more than four trillion barrels. The oil industry and society had "underestimated" the global resource base and the ability of technology to extend the life of oil and gas fields. "We should not forget that we can recover almost twice as much oil today as when we first discovered it over 100 years ago," he said. "And when you consider that a further 10 per cent increase in recoverability will deliver an extra 800 billion barrels of oil to our recoverable total, we have reason to be sure that the end of oil is nowhere in sight."

In Australia, petrol prices are tipped to fall below $1.20 in most capital cities in coming weeks, and as low as $1 early next year, as crude oil prices slide to a five-month low of less than $US66 a barrel. Analysts believe the commodities boom is beginning to lose momentum. They cite easing political tensions in the Middle East, concerns about the health of the US economy and strong supplies as reasons for the fall in key commodity prices. "The mega-run for commodities has run its course," said Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach. However, there were signs yesterday that some service stations might defy falling wholesale prices, with Coles hiking petrol prices by 11.4c a litre to 129.9c at its Coles Express outlets in Western Australia. Coles and Woolworths control 60-65 per cent of petrol sales in most states.

West Australian Motor Traders Association executive director Peter Fitzpatrick said the Coles Express move was an example of the increasing power of the supermarket chains. "With the supermarket chains having such a big proportion of the petrol market, there's no doubt they are using this to maintain profit levels," he said.

Mr Nolan said despite an increase in emerging and alternative energies, the world would continue to rely on fossil fuels. "In our estimation, if you go out to 2030, fossil fuels - that is, coal, oil and gas - will be supplying about 80 per cent of the world's energy," he said. "Even though those smaller providers of energy, such as solar and wind, will have rapid increases, our view is that they'll be less than 1 per cent of the mix out in 2030." Mr Nolan also questioned the benefits of using ethanol in fuel, given the energy needed to "plough the field, sow the sugar cane, wheat or corn crop, harvest the produce, transport it to the ethanol plant and run the ethanol plant". "ExxonMobil is not opposed to the use of ethanol in petrol where this is commercially viable and is acceptable to consumers. "However, we are strongly of the view that, with the assistance that it has already been given, the ethanol industry should now be prepared to compete with other fuels on a level playing field."

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William Kininmonth says: Don't be Gored into going along

Global warming militants don't know what they're talking about, says William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, is author of "Climate Change: A Natural Hazard" (Multi-Science Publishing Co, 2004)



Climate change is again making headlines as the world becomes mesmerised in the public relations glare of Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth. For critics and reviewers alike, the movie is further proof in their minds that we are heading for a climate catastrophe. But what's missing from the debate is sober, rational analysis of some scientific facts. Climate change attracts attention because weather and climate extremes account for 70 per cent of natural disasters. Also, the historical evidence is that climate goes through gyrations that are beneficial or destructive for civilisations.

The periods of the Roman Empire, medieval Europe and the past 200 years were all of remarkable warmth. The Dark Ages of the first millennium and the Little Ice Age of the second were characterised by cold, by advanced mountain glaciers and by social turmoil.

For the past 10,000 years, the Earth has been near peak warmth in the climatic roller-coaster that has characterised the past million years. Yet only 20,000 years ago, great ice sheets covered much of North America and Europe; permanent glaciers were also present over southeastern Australia and Tasmania. The sea level was 130m lower than today and land bridges connected New Guinea and Tasmania with the Australian mainland. The Great Barrier Reef was but limestone cliffs bordering the Coral Sea.

The former US vice-president and his fellow travellers would have us believe that the actions of our civilisation are leading to dangerous climate change, as if climate is not inherently dangerous. There are many inconvenient truths about climate that are being ignored in the scare campaign that is being waged with relentless determination by sections of the community.

Start with carbon dioxide. As a greenhouse gas, it is a spent force for climate change; its present concentration is slightly less than 400 parts per million. Calculations show that 66 per cent of the greenhouse effect of CO2 is caused by the first 50ppm. With each doubling of concentration, (from 50 to 100, then to 200 and 400ppm), the incremental advance of the greenhouse effect is reduced.

Even for a further doubling to 800ppm, as projected by 2100 in the case of unabated fossil fuel usage, the increase in the greenhouse effect will only be 10 per cent of the present component attributable to CO2. Overall, CO2 is a relatively minor contributor to the greenhouse effect, which is dominated by the varying water vapour and clouds of the atmosphere. Increasing the CO2 concentration will have little additional effect.

Evaporation of water vapour will constrain the Earth's temperature and prevent a runaway greenhouse effect. Back radiation from the atmosphere because of greenhouse gases (water vapour, CO2 and so on), clouds and aerosols raises surface temperatures. But surface temperatures are also constrained by evaporation of water from plants, moist soil and the oceans. The tropical oceans generally do not exceed 30C and it is only over the arid inland that daytime temperatures exceed 40C. Any increase in back radiation because of increased CO2 will largely be offset by additional evaporation that will constrain the rise of surface temperature.

The oceans are the flywheels of the climate system. The warm tropical oceans are but a thin lens about 100m in thickness that overlay the cold abyss, extending to depths averaging about 5km. We are familiar with El Nino events, when changed upwelling modifies the entrainment of cold sub-surface water into the warm surface layer of the equatorial Pacific Ocean. As US climatologist Michael Glantz has noted, the changed surface temperature patterns modify the atmospheric circulation and spawn natural disasters such as floods, droughts and storms across the globe.

Global warming is constrained by the need to warm the ocean in advance. The polar ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are fundamentally stable. Ice cores recovered from there confirm that the ice sheets have survived previous interglacials and have likely existed for more than one million years. The surface elevation of the ice sheets is more than 3km above sea level across much of their extensive plateaus and temperatures remain below minus 10C during the brief summer. It is only at the lower elevations of the coastal margins that temperatures rise above freezing for a few months and the strong solar radiation causes ice-melt. Collapse of the polar ice sheets and a sea level rise of several metres is an unlikely scenario.

There are predictions, based on computer models, that Australia's rainfall will decrease as CO2 concentrations rise. According to published Bureau of Meteorology data, Australia (except for the southwest corner) was wetter during the second half of the 20th century than during the first. Against the prediction, as CO2 concentrations increased, there was an increase in continent-wide rainfall. These trends are likely to be no more than coincidence in the cycles of climate variability.

The Earth's climate system is extremely complex and we have only limited knowledge of many of its aspects. International collaboration is slowly unravelling some of the secrets and providing the basis for preparation and adaptation to change. Scientists' continuing inability to predict with confidence a season in advance should be cause for hesitation when projections of decades to centuries are made. Computer models are not reality and alarmist predictions have no sound basis.

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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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Save the planet, don't see the world?

Comment on the British Greenie hatred of air travel

'Help yourself to chocolate biscuits.' Welcoming me into his plush boardroom on the seventh floor of a business building in Baker Street - with a spectacular view of a sunny London skyline out of the window - David Soskin doesn't come across as an evil man. He doesn't look like the kind of person who works in a field so wicked that it makes `genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering'. And yet he is CEO of CheapFlights.co.uk, the UK's leading travel price comparison website, which facilitates more than its fair share of cheap and cheerful holidays abroad. And according to some of the more shrill critics of the aviation industry - who seriously claim that the pollution caused by flying is giving rise to a `genocide' - that puts him well and truly on the side of the devils. What does he have to say for himself? He takes a sip of tea.

`These people, these critics of flying and cheap flying, are so ignorant', he says, sounding surprisingly posh - and surprisingly unapologetic - for someone who runs a company called CheapFlights. And he has no doubts as to who `these people' are. `Those who slam no-frills airlines are usually newspaper columnists or green spokespeople. They are reasonably affluent, well-educated and tend to live in places like Islington. They are the kind of people used to taking their holidays in the Dordogne and Tuscany and they don't like the fact that that sort of holiday is now affordable for millions of people whom they find it difficult to relate to. One of the proponents of "eco-taxes" on flights is Zac Goldsmith, a scion of one of the richest families in Britain. They are so out of touch with the way ordinary people live. They are snobs.'

It's certainly true that sections of the media set and environmentalist activists have declared war on flying in recent years - especially `no-frills flying', the kind offered by easyJet, Ryanair and the rest, which allows all sorts of people to jet off to sunny and distant destinations for as little as 25 pounds. It was Guardian columnist George Monbiot who claimed that aeroplanes, because they emit a lot of CO2s, are creating a `killing field' that will make earlier genocides look like a mere `sideshow'. He concluded that flying across the Atlantic is now `as unacceptable as child abuse'. A front cover of the left-leaning weekly the New Statesman recently featured a photo of a jet taking off, a stream of grey smoke flowing from its engines, next to the headline: `The growth in flying will propel us into a future of melting ice caps, spreading deserts, rising sea levels and collapsing ecosystems.' Richard Chartres, the Bishop of London, argues that flying is a `symptom of sin' (whatever that might mean)

And don't get them started on cheap flying. `There is this feeling amongst environmentalists that it is the package-holidaymakers who rush off in no-frills aeroplanes to Spain and Greece who cause global pollution', says Soskin. `Those travellers are clearly in their sights more than those who engage in supposedly "responsible tourism". There is this idea that people who fly cheaply are themselves pollutants.' In an environmentalist action plan published in the Observer last year, titled `10 things we must do to make a difference' (note the word `must'), point no.2 said: `Put an end to cheap flights.' It called for government action to `curb passenger enthusiasm' for all this no-frills flying. One commentator argues that Brits must `give up cheap flights', those `easyJet quickies', before we end up `scattered like the environmental refugees of New Orleans'. No wonder bishops are sticking their noses into the discussion: this all sounds a lot like the old sermonic claim that living to excess and enjoying yourself is bad for you. Only flying won't just make you go blind - apparently it will cause droughts and disasters, kill the planet, and finish off future generations.

So is it true that people who fly, and especially people who fly lo-price, are effectively wringing the planet's, and by association their own and everyone else's necks? `The facts don't bear that out', says Soskin. `Aviation contributes about three per cent to global man-made carbon emissions - three per cent! That means 97 per cent is caused by other things. And yet flying is often discussed as the "main contributor" of emissions. Just the other day I heard the young George Osborne [Tory shadow chancellor] saying on the Today programme, "As everyone knows, aviation is a major contributor to pollution." No it isn't. Often people don't get their basic facts straight.'

Soskin's figures come from a pretty exhaustive study by The Economist in June this year, which found that aviation's contribution `to total man-made emissions worldwide is around 3%'. In its study of greenhouse gas emissions in America - said to be the most polluting (ie, most developed) country in the world - The Economist found that all forms of transportation contributed 27.4 per cent of emissions; flying on its own causes 3.2 per cent. So even within the world of transportation, flight is overshadowed by cars, ships and trains when it comes to coughing up the bad stuff. And where flight causes 3.2 per cent of America's greenhouse-gas emissions, electricity generation causes 33.9 per cent, industry causes 18.8 per cent, agriculture causes 7.6 per cent, residential properties cause 7.6 per cent and commercial properties cause 4.7 per cent. So actually flying seems to come pretty low down on the Wicked List.

Ah, but aviation is the fastest-growing transport sector, the critics of flying will respond, and thus it promises to become the greatest polluter unless we keep it in check now. Soskin takes something of an old-fashioned capitalist line on this issue. To those greens, journalists, Tory ministers and even government ministers pressuring the New Labour government and the EU to support slapping fatter taxes on flying, Soskin says: `Since when has it been good government policy to discourage growth in one of our successful industries?' He also points out that there is great demand for flying. `More and more people want to fly. They love it. CheapFlights.co.uk has about three million unique users a month to our UK website. That is three million people looking for cheap flights. They are going to be pretty nonplussed if those flights suddenly have an eco-tax.'

If flying is not the No.1 polluter many people presume it is, then cheap flying is even less so. The irony of all the media and greenish handwringing over no-frills flights that allow the young, the less well-off and just about anyone who earns a half-decent wage to visit far-flung corners of the globe is that cheap flights tend to be more green than old-fashioned, more expensive flights. `The no-frills airlines are a fine example of rather efficient use of aircraft, because they fill their aircraft up and always tend to travel full; they don't have aircraft hanging around chugging out pollutants; they use secondary airports quite a lot of the time, so their planes don't endlessly circle the skies waiting for an opportunity to land, like a BA flight over somewhere as busy as Heathrow', says Soskin. `And they invest in new stock. One of the reasons why easyJet and Ryanair have been so successful is because they tend to operate new aircraft, which are fast and fuel-efficient. So the environmentalist lobby and its supporters have, yet again, got it completely wrong. The no-frills airlines are probably more environmentally-friendly than the airlines they take to Mongolia.'

Another irony of today's focus on flying as a terrible polluter is that aircraft pollute less today than they did in the past. As The Economist put it, `Even though today's aircraft are about 70 per cent more efficient than those of 40 years ago, concerns over emissions have grown.' And aircraft are becoming more environmentally-friendly all the time. They are being made with lighter materials which means they need less fuel to keep them airborne; and something like the new Airbus A380 - the double-decker jet that will be able to carry 555 passengers - will lessen aviation's carbon impact on the environment by flying more people at once, which could lead to fewer take-offs from airports (a lot of emissions are expended during take-off) and less plane congestion on airport tarmacs. It's like cars, says Soskin. `When I was growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, cars really were gas-guzzlers. They were the most filthy, disgusting polluting things imaginable. But a lot of money went into investment to make them less polluting. It is not beyond the wit of man to do the same with planes.'

So if flying isn't so bad, and millions of people actually think it is quite bloody good, why does it remain the spectre of today's green debates? Soskin thinks it might be because it's an easier target than industry or big business. `But just because it is an easy target doesn't mean it should be the main target.' He says `there is definitely a snobbish element', too, where people who jet off on cheap holidays once or twice a year are seen as being `selfish and uncaring'. I expect it's also because flying fits perfectly with the environmentalist focus on guilt-tripping individuals about their personal behaviour. By describing aviation - somewhat inaccurately - as the causer of `melting ice caps and collapsing ecosystems', green-minded activists and writers can hold individual holidaymakers responsible for pollution and effectively emotionally blackmail them into holidaying less or holidaying more `responsibly'. The focus on flying exposes the deep moralistic strain that runs through today's politics of environmentalism.

Soskin says the campaign against cheap flying will impact most on the less well-off - not just holidaymakers, but also those who work in or benefit from the tourism industry. `Tourism is absolutely key to the economy and wellbeing of some of the poorest countries of the world. Environmentalists don't seem to understand that if you cut off the mass tourism to these countries - in other words, the jumbo jet-loads of people who now holiday in places like Bali, Sri Lanka and Thailand, which have all become mass tourist destinations - then you are very, very significantly damaging those local economies. And that is unforgivable. For these people to sit in their comfortable terraced houses in Islington and opine about where people should go and should not go, in blissful ignorance of how these countries actually depend on tourist money, is reprehensible.'

Strong words, and a good point. It wouldn't be the first time that green-minded politicians and campaigners called for some aspect of everyday life or business to be reined in without thinking through the impact on workers and others. Yet I can't help feeling that it is somewhat disingenuous of Soskin to present cheap flying as something akin to the saviour of the world's poor. That is similar to the argument used by the green lobby. They claim to be protesting against aviation in order to save the Third World poor from future hurricanes and floods, overlooking the fact that it is poverty that means the Third World remains at the mercy of such natural phenomena; while Soskin seems to believe that one reason we should keep holidaying abroad is to keep poor economies afloat, which also leaves more profound questions about the causes of poverty unaddressed and presents flying as a moral good, rather than simply a mode of transport.

No matter. It is a relief in our uncritical times to hear someone stand up for cheap flights and the millions of people who use them. `I think it should be a cause of national celebration that people of all income brackets can now go away on a regular basis, taste foreign food, meet people of different nationalities, embrace people of different cultures, in a way they couldn't 10 or 20 years ago. That should be a cause of unadulterated national rejoicing. Cheap flights are very good things and they should be encouraged.' Now, that's not a line you hear every day.

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In Hawaii: insects before astronomy?

An astronomer reports from Mauna Kea, where the construction of star-gazing telescopes has been halted to protect a rare species of bug

A well-built man in long flowing robes holds up what looks like an aubergine with leaves to the clear blue sky. Behind him one can glimpse the silvery dome of a telescope. The ground around his feet is dry, arid, volcanic. It looks like the surface of another planet - Mars, maybe. Is this the opening scene of a low-budget sci-fi movie? Unfortunately not. This was the scene recently on the summit of Mauna Kea, on the big Island of Hawaii, Earth's best site for astronomy, and the men with aubergines were self-styled `representatives of the mountain'. In early August a Hawaiian judge decided that protecting the environmental and religious `integrity' of Mauna Kea should take precedence over astronomy, and development of further telescopes on the mountain has been halted.

The summit of Mauna Kea is above 40 per cent of the Earth's atmosphere. The air is exceptionally dry and dark, perhaps the darkest of all skies on Earth. It is also outstandingly stable, providing some of the clearest images of the distant universe. Three of the world's largest telescopes are here, as well as many smaller telescopes, since astronomers in the Seventies realised the exceptional qualities of the site. Its only real competitor is the Andean mountainous region of Chile, but that is considerably more difficult to access. There is simply no other place like Mauna Kea.

The telescopes here have made a profound contribution to our understanding of the universe; our knowledge of the cosmos is infinitely richer than it was before the University of Hawaii began constructing telescopes on Mauna Kea. Extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology have been revolutionised thanks in large part to observations made on this summit.

But science is not static, something frozen in time. If the observations on the mountain have indicated that the universe might be filled with a mysterious `dark energy' (to complement the equally mysterious `dark matter' which makes up the rest of the Universe), then it is not enough to leave it at that. To discover more about these dark materials and the universe they inhabit, we need new instruments and telescopes even bigger and more ambitious than were the last generation: telescopes with 30-metre mirrors, which can survey the entire night sky to very faint magnitudes, not just every year but every night. (Managing the amount of data generated by such an operation is itself a task of unprecedented scale.)

However, increasingly the `needs' of Mauna Kea itself, and those who claim that it is a sacred or environmentally important site, are being elevated over the need to push our understanding of the universe and stars.

In recent years, attentive readers of astronomical journals will have noticed something strange at the end of some articles. Alongside the usual `thanks to Corporation A for funding and support' or `to Joe X who helped to operate the telescope', there also frequently appears the following statement: `We wish to extend special thanks to those of Hawaiian ancestry on whose sacred mountain we are privileged to be guests. Without their generous hospitality, most of the observations presented herein would not have been possible.' In my simplicity, I thought that making these observations was made possible thanks to 200 years of scientific development and the rigorous application of such science to manufacturing detectors and mirrors - but apparently, it's really made possible by the grace of local communities.

This apologetic attitude on the part of astronomers to building and working on Mauna Kea is a response to demands, both from some local unelected community groups and environmentalist campaigners, for the mountain to be left alone - demands that have grown louder and louder. Being apologetic has backfired on the astronomers, though. On 3 August a judge on the Big Island decided against renewing NASA's permit to construct `outrigger' telescopes for the Keck 10m telescopes. He ruled that the `Mauna Kea Master Plan' document, which outlined the plans for constructing six outrigger telescopes, was not comprehensive enough in its consideration of resource and land management on Mauna Kea. One campaigner against the building of the new telescopes said: `The decision has potentially major implications on the future development of astronomy on Hawaii.. But I think those implications are good.'

Good? As a result of the judge's decision, not only will the new telescopes not be built, but the very idea that man should use his scientific and technological know-how to improve our understanding of our surroundings has been thrown into question. For all the claims that Mauna Kea must be `preserved', the summit is one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. There is almost no living creature there. The green campaigners of the Sierra Club have, however, pointed out that there is one rare species of insect on the summit - the Wekiu bug - and protecting this insect has become a main plank of their crusade against the telescopes. Environmentalists have petitioned for the Wekiu bug to be placed on the US Federal endangered species list, and for the summit of Mauna Kea to be designated a `critical habitat for the Wekiu'. As one report noted, this would `impede astronomy projects'. And yet, it has not even been demonstrated that the construction of 11 other telescopes on the mountain over the past 30 years had any adverse impact on the Wekiu population.

The mountain may well be a place of worship for some sections of the Hawaiian community, and I don't have anything against people carrying out rituals there. But I suspect that many of the protesters calling for a halt to the construction of telescopes probably live in air-conditioned homes, drive cars and use the internet - and it is worth remembering that this material wealth and prosperity enjoyed by many on the islands of Hawaii (which would have seemed inconceivable even a century ago) is a product of the curious spirit which drove man to develop and discover in the first place.

Why is there uproar about the telescopes now? Why are the needs of Wekiu bugs now being elevated over the need and desire for discovery? After all, during almost 30 years of development on the mountain (which involved the construction of telescopes far larger than the proposed outriggers) there was very little dissent. The current protests seem to me to be linked to the growth of a Hawaiian secessionist movement, some of whose activists wish to create a state-within-a-state - which has led some to view NASA's and others' telescopes as an `American imposition'. The protests are also informed by our early twenty-first-century malaise, the lack of basic faith in the Enlightenment project of understanding and controlling our world. It is a sad state of affairs when a bug, or even the outdated traditions of ancient worship, can take precedence over getting to grips with the universe.

I have stood on the metal catwalk of the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope at 3am, on the highest point of the mountain, and looked across the mountain, down towards the sea, and up towards the silent skies. It certainly is one of the most beautiful places I've ever visited. But the human eye only sees a tiny fraction of all there is to see; our senses can only perceive imperfectly all there is to perceive. Our grasp and comprehension of the universe has been vastly augmented by the telescopes on Mauna Kea, which have benefited all of us. We should not stop this adventure of discovery now.

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Australia: Nukes the safest

Ask anyone what they most fear when going for a swim at the beach and they'll invariably say it's the likelihood of being eaten by a shark. Shark attacks are always newsworthy. Films featuring sharks, like Jaws, have a strange attraction. Not widely realised, however, is that more Australians die from box jellyfish stings than from shark attacks. The same quizzical phenomenon of fearing the lesser threat can be seen in the present and ongoing energy controversy, according to Western Australian Liberal MHR, Dr Dennis Jensen, a former CSIRO research scientist.

Delivering a Council of the National Interest special lecture on energy in Perth, he outlined how provision of nuclear-generated electricity was far and away the safest option. He demonstrated this point by focusing upon a huge unit of measure known as the terawatt year. Now, the terawatt is best comprehended by firstly defining the watt - named after the Scottish engineer James Watt (1736-1819) - as a unit of power that equals one joule of energy per second. To get to the terawatt one firstly multiplies a watt by 1,000 which is a kilowatt. Next multiply that kilowatt by another 1,000 and you have a megawatt. Now, if you multiply the megawatt by another 1,000 you have a gigawatt. To attain a terawatt you must multiply this gigawatt by yet another 1,000. What this means is that the terawatt you now have is a trillion - one followed by 12 zeros - watts.

When grappling with all these zeros, keep at the forefront of your mind that a 500-megawatt power station is considered worldwide as a sizeable base-load generating unit. Consequently, a station whose output was one terawatt would be equivalent to 2,000 such 500-megawatt stations, something that does not exist anywhere in the world.

Dr Jensen said that engineers and statisticians used the output of one terawatt of power over a year as a unit to compare the safety levels of different types of power stations - coal-fired, hydro-generation, gas fired, LPG and nuclear. He said: "I'll quote figures in terms of normalised deaths per terawatt year. In other words, if you generate one terawatt of energy for one calendar year, how many deaths can you expect in the industry?"

"For coal-fired power stations, there are 342 fatalities per terawatt year which are predominantly related to coal-workers actually extracting the coal. "However, this number would be far worse if the figures where there were fewer than five fatalities per incident were included. "With oil, it is 418 fatalities per terawatt year. "With natural gas, it is somewhat lower - 85 fatalities per terawatt year, and this refers to workers as well as the public. "Incidentally, LPG-related fatalities are extremely high - 3,280 per terawatt year of electricity generated.

"With hydro-electricity - a method that some opponents of nuclear energy favour while some dislike - there are 883 fatalities per terawatt year which predominantly involves the public due to collapsing dams. "Now we come to nuclear energy, with 31 fatalities per terawatt year. This is the lowest of all electricity-generation methods." Dr Jensen said this low fatality figure included Chernobyl's deaths and fatalities in the mining of uranium.

"I know some people might like to point to Chernobyl," he said. "According to the OECD, there have been 56 fatalities as a result of Chernobyl, due to thyroid cancer and the immediate deaths of the workers at the time - the major medical problem was radiation exposure. "The problem with Chernobyl, apart from anything else, was that it had inadequate containment. "But, as can be seen, nuclear energy is actually a very safe option - and it's inherently safer these days with Generation IV reactors. "Western containment has been far better.

"Regarding safety, nuclear power is demonstrably the safest form of power generation. "Consider the thousands of annual coalmining deaths and the probable millions who have died as a result of respiratory ailments due to coal-fired power," Mr Jensen said. "Consider the fatalities resulting from gas or hydroelectricity production, and it becomes clear that nuclear energy is very safe, even when you look at the history and take into account a sub-standard Soviet RBMK reactor."

He said he believed Australia could use Generation IV reactors, which are inherently safe. "These reactors cannot melt down because of the physics of the design of the reactor, not due to fail-safes appended to provide safety," he continued. "Most Generation IV reactors also don't need enriched uranium, so reserves of uranium would last about 50 times as long as it's assumed they will last for conventional reactors. "It is significant that Generation IV reactors, which will be modular in design, will allow small reactors to power smaller population centres and multiple modules to be joined together at the site of larger power demand.

"The economic side is put by some as a criticism. In fact, when you look at what is being considered, the economic argument is not a strong one. "What Parliament needs to consider is whether to legislate to allow nuclear power generation. "Economics should be left to power utilities which choose whether to use it or not. "Interestingly, the fact that many nuclear opponents push this line so strongly indicates that they are concerned that the economics of nuclear energy do stack up."

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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BACK TO THE CAVES!

Comment on the Green demonstrations outside the Drax coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire

Today's environmental campaigners, motivated by suspicion of modern technology, want to turn the lights off permanently. Listening to a TV interview with one of the self-appointed guardians of the planet, I was stunned by his response when asked what his alterative would be to the loss of seven per cent of the UK's generating capacity if Drax was closed down. He said it was something `we would all have to live with'. I was reminded of a religious sermon with a vicar chastising the congregation for sinning before God. In this case it was the sin of releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that offended our moral guardians....

But there is something risky about this, even from the point of view of the environmental movement. Targeting electricity generation is not the same as taking on vivisection, nuclear power or genetically modified crops. By taking on coal-fired power stations environmentalists are now questioning the actual existing fabric of our energy infrastructure without which modern society cannot function. It is not so much fears of new technology that are driving the protests, but doubts about whether already-existing technology is a good thing.

Electricity is an underrated marvel of the modern age. Our capacity to generate vast quantities of electrical energy has only really existed for a century or so. Electrification was the big advance of the early twentieth century in the modern economies of the world. We can easily forget how our lives are dominated by the easy availability of electricity. When there's a power cut our lives pretty much grind to a standstill as people go in search of musty candles and hidden boxes of matches.

It is therefore unthinkable that we should turn the clock back to a time before the national grid. Yet this is what some eco-warriors are seriously considering. Of course, it would be unfair to say they have advocated the abandonment of electricity generation per se; they want us to turn to alternative sources of electrical energy. The government, too, wants to go down the alternative route. The decline of natural gas supplies has driven the government to consider new rounds of nuclear power stations - which no serious green would agree to - and an expansion of alternatives including wind farms and tidal power.

But there is something unconvincing about being told to use wind, solar or tidal power as an alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power. With every statement advocating alternative sources of energy there is the proviso that, even with massive investment in alternatives, there just won't be enough capacity to match current consumption of energy.

We are really being offered another alternative - actually to reduce our demand for energy. During previous energy crises, when fossil fuel supplies looked in jeopardy, we were told to share baths, turn off the lights, cut back and economise. But that isn't quite what today's campaigners have in mind. They don't just want minor reductions in waste and increases in efficiency. They actually want us to reduce our energy use considerably and adjust to a new world of less.

In the past, this was called austerity. Governments that try to impose austerity on society need a pretty pressing reason to do so, as it usually isn't very long before it results in political conflict and either a reversal in policy or the removal of the government. However, today we are told to accept austerity in the name of saving the planet, and it is supposedly radical greens - taking their cue from government dithering about energy production - who are at the forefront of pushing the New Austerity. It is a strange inversion of history that today's young radicals are telling us to give up on modernity and look forward to a future which is not so bright - literally.

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THE GREEN NOMENKLATURA

One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others, became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness toward others made the sins of capitalism pale. The ruling elites of the Soviet Union, called the "nomenklatura," had their own separate and superior stores where ordinary citizens were not allowed to shop, their own separate and superior medical facilities, as well as their own separate and superior living quarters, all off-limits to the masses. Everyone in communist societies addressed one another with the egalitarian term "comrade." But some comrades had the arbitrary power of life and death over other comrades.

Soviet communism is now history but people who talk equality and practice elitism, who wrap their own selfishness in the mantle of idealism, and who sacrifice others on the altar to their own vision without a moment's hesitation are not only still with us but have become the norm on the left. They don't have nearly the power that the Soviet dictatorship had. But they use whatever power they do have in the same spirit. The green ideology of today, like the red ideology of the past, takes it for granted that other people do not have the same rights as the new nomenklatura.

Where the new nomenklatura enjoy a particular lifestyle in a particular community, then the power of government is used to preserve that lifestyle and freeze that community where it is, even if that means freezing out other people who may not have the same money or the same lifestyle preferences. Monterey County, California, is a classic example, though by no means unique. A recent story in the Wall Street Journal quoted residents of that coastal community as saying how much they liked its lifestyle and ambiance -- as a justification of laws that make it nearly impossible for anyone with less money to live there.

First of all, laws forbid building anything on three-quarters of the land in that county. Existing residents who support such laws don't own that land but they can politically keep others from living on it, which is the whole point of much rhapsodizing about "preserving" this and "saving" that. Land prices skyrocket when the supply of land is artificially and drastically reduced, which means that housing prices become astronomical. The consequences for those on the outside looking in were illustrated by the story of a farm worker in Monterey County whose family had been living in a room for years but who now could finally afford to buy a small house. This farm worker was described as "thrilled" to the point of tears as he bought a 1,013-square-foot home for $490,000, even though it would take 70 percent of his income to make the mortgage payments. He planned to rent out one of the rooms to try to make ends meet.

His situation was not as unusual as it would be in most other places. The average share of income required for someone with the average income in Monterey County to buy the average home there is 60 percent. But of course this does not apply to the existing residents who bought or inherited their homes in years past. Far from suffering economically from the laws they pass, they see the market values of their own homes go up by leaps and bounds. One of these residents describes herself as a liberal Democrat and an ardent environmentalist. Election results in this and other affluent counties in coastal California suggest that she is very much the norm among the new nomenklatura.

The green nomenklatura talk egalitarianism like the old red nomenklatura and similarly ride roughshod over others while doing it. Their economic ethnic cleansing has driven tens of thousands of blacks out of some liberal Democratic counties. There were 79,000 blacks living in San Francisco in 1990 and 46,000 today. So many people with children are leaving these bastions of liberal Democratic environmentalists as to force many schools in these counties to close. But the new nomenklatura go around feeling good about themselves while leaving havoc in their wake.

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World oil not running out, says energy boss

The world has an abundant supply of oil, and high petrol prices are just the reality of a globally traded commodity, ExxonMobil Australia chairman Mark Nolan said today. Mr Nolan used his speech to the Asia Pacific oil and gas conference in Adelaide today to debunk the theory of peak oil, which suggests oil supplies have peaked and will dwindle over the next 20 years. Such predictions, he said, had been around since the 1920s, particularly at times of high oil prices. "The fact is that the world has an abundance of oil and there is little question, scientifically, that abundant energy resources exist," Mr Nolan said. "According to the US Geological Survey, the earth currently has more than three trillion barrels of conventional, recoverable oil resources. "So far we have produced one trillion."

Mr Nolan said the oil industry had always underestimated the extent of global resources and the ability of technology to both extend the life of existing oil and gas fields and find new ones. "We should not forget that we can recover almost twice as much oil today as when we first discovered it over 100 years ago," he said. "And when you consider that a further 10 per cent increase in recoverability will deliver 800 billion barrels of oil to our recoverable total, we have every reason to be sure that the end of oil is nowhere in sight."

Mr Nolan said that by 2030, conventional fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal) would still account for 80 per cent of the world's energy requirements. But Mr Nolan said it was very difficult to predict what would happen in the future with both crude oil and petrol prices. "They are both regionally traded commodities, they are priced by the market, priced by the region," he said. "The fuel price is ultimately driven by the source of the product, which is the crude price, and of course that is traded regionally and internationally."

Mr Nolan's comments were endorsed by the president of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, Eve Sprunt, who said the proponents of peak oil theory often confused oil reserves with available resources. "When you are talking about reserves, you are only talking about a very small fraction of the total resource base," she said. "The reserves are the portion for which the infrastructure is largely in place, the technology is in place and that can be produced at the current oil price. "But if you are planning for the long-term energy future of your country you need to understand the resource base." "The whole name of the game is moving resources into the reserves category." Ms Sprunt said high oil prices also presented opportunities such as the viable development of other fuels. "It's a time when new alternatives emerge," she said.

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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Germany's wind farms destroy jobs and don't reduce greenhouse gas output

Since the 1980s, Germany's government has promoted and subsidised wind energy with wide political support. In 1991, all parties backed a law forcing utilities to buy electricity from wind-energy firms at 90% of the average retail price, making suppliers and consumers pay for the growth of wind farms. Building wind farms became popular among farmers seeking extra income from pastures and among underutilised shipyards with skilled labour and trying to diversify. Many schemes were in underdeveloped regions, so many local politicians backed them. Later, investors in wind energy could also deduct investments against tax, making the deal attractive for high earners. So wind energy came to be promoted by a wide range of people who could hide their special interests behind the screen of green slogans.

Incentives improved further with the Renewable Energies Act in 2000. This abolished the link to retail energy prices, which had fallen thanks to liberalisation of the electricity market, and replaced it with a guaranteed price of 0.091 Euros per kWh for wind farms, a good three times the German average production cost of electricity of 0.025 to 0.03 Euros.

Germany produces about 3.1% of its electricity from wind energy, but this comes at the cost of an annual subsidy of 4bn Euros or so. But what about the alleged benefits for the economy and the environment? It is often claimed wind power has created 45000 jobs in Germany. But with a large subsidy anyone can create jobs, although, at more than 80000 Euros a job a year, it would be cheaper to send workers on permanent vacation in a tropical paradise.

Wind farms actually lower employment, thanks to higher energy prices for the economy, according to the Bremer Energie Institut. If the economic effects were not bad enough, it also seems ecological benefits of German wind energy exist only in the imagination of its supporters. First, the wind in Germany is unreliable, so wind generators operate at full capacity for about 1400 hours a year on average - just more than 58 days' worth. Britain, claiming better wind, still only managed to reach a third of its wind-power capacity in the very windy year of 1998, according to its trade and industry department. So every wind turbine still needs full conventional energy backup.

Even if wind power did decrease the amount of carbon emissions from conventional electricity firms, those utilities could sell on those carbon savings to anyone else: "carbon emission trading" gives companies an emission allowance, and allows them to buy or sell it, locally or internationally. A 2004 report for Germany's federal economics ministry showed carbon reduction would be zero, at the considerable cost of higher energy prices.

Another concealed environmental problem is carbon emissions from manufacturing turbines. The wind sector is now the second-biggest consumer of steel, after car makers, in Germany. At lower wind speeds you need more than 10 tons of iron for a given output, compared with about two tons for coal, one for gas and half a ton for nuclear.

Germany's wind energy promotion has been extremely expensive, and has probably destroyed jobs. Its ecological benefits under carbon trading are nonexistent, and it needs full conventional backup. The German experience does not prove that wind energy can never be viable, but it does show that state interference with the market can create enormous economic and ecological distortions. If wind energy really is the energy of the future it must prove itself in the market without state subsidies, but this has not yet happened anywhere.

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Biofuels from food crops bugs VW

Volkswagen has attacked biofuels made from food crops as unsustainable, setting the German car maker at odds with US President George Bush, US car makers and European governments, which have all been touting ethanol as an environmentally friendly alternative to petrol in cars. Bernd Pischetsrieder, chief executive, called on politicians to lower tax breaks for current "first-generation" fuels - made in the US and Europe from corn, wheat, rape seed and sugar beet - and instead provide financial support for new second-generation technologies that promise big cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2).

Mr Pischetsrieder said some of the current biofuels were "totally pointless" and "like a wolf in sheep's clothing". He criticised tax benefits that were not linked to carbon dioxide, since some methods of refining biofuel actually led to higher carbon emissions than from petrol. "The current situation is totally unsatisfactory, both from the environmental and economic standpoint," he said.

Even as Mr Pischetsrieder was speaking in Berlin, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed an increase to renewable fuel requirements - mainly ethanol - from 2.78 per cent of all fuel this year to 3.71 per cent next year, and said it would help cut CO2 emissions.

Mr Pischetsrieder is the highest profile opponent of today's biofuel technology. The handful of opponents of the fuel in the environmental movement have mostly been concerned about increased leakage of carcinogenic fumes, development of monoculture farms and the danger to rainforests from new palm plantations in developing countries, particularly Malaysia and Indonesia. Soaring demand for biofuels has contributed to a surge in the price of several of the grains and oilseeds used to make ethanol and biodiesel.

US car makers have been strongly supportive of biofuels, running expensive ad campaigns in an attempt to win back customers concerned about the environment who had defected to Japanese rivals. General Motors and Ford argue that even though the carbon benefits of today's technology are small, and biofuel is more expensive per mile than petrol even with tax breaks, the fuel should be promoted by governments in order to ensure the market is prepared when new technologies arrive.

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Australia: The water shortage problem is political, not technical

Managing water supply is the biggest climate-change adaptation facing Australia. And governments and planners realise the problem is upon us. Faced with the converging threats of population growth, a warming climate and increased environmental flows into the nation's river systems, water policy-makers are pursuing a suite of controversial new technologies to ensure urban Australia does not run out of water. "Australia doesn't have a water problem. It has a water-management problem," says Adelaide University's professor of water economics Mike Young. Three-quarters of Australia's population live in the urban centres, but they consume only 8 per cent of available water. Irrigators account for 67 per cent.

The price paid for water by Australian households varies between cities, but lurks at about $1.30 a kilolitre. This translates into less than a dollar a day for most households. Irrigators pay no more than a few cents per kilolitre. The entire flow of water tapped by Adelaide from the Murray is equivalent to the allocation of just 15 large-scale rice farmers. It's little wonder then that talk of linking urban and regional water markets has some farmers more than a little nervous. Allowing urban water authorities to freely buy irrigators' allocations would be like letting loose a busload of Australian tourists in a Kuta Beach department store. Their buying power would be phenomenal. The scale of the transfers is likely to be small - less than 1per cent of Australia's total water supply - but Young says within that range are many farmers who are only too keen to sell to new urban players. "The thing that many people forget is that a small amount of water in a rural setting goes a very long way in an urban area," he says. "We're not talking about very big transfers of water; there can be some local effects but in terms of the national economy the effect on Australian agriculture is not very big."

Increasing water scarcity around the world is driving a similar evolution. Water has become a valuable resource and governments are forced to find ways of getting it to the highest-value users. As sure as water always runs downhill, this is creating tensions between the historical and the new users. In the Australian context, this means a transfer from farms to cities, and it has already started. Adelaide recently purchased water from former dairy farmers in the lower Murray, while Perth's water authority bought similar entitlements from Harvey Water in return for investment in infrastructure that will result in water savings equivalent to the entitlement purchased.

National Farmers Federation natural resources manager Vanessa Findlay says the farm sector recognises that this water market transition is an evolving reality. While acknowledging that the effects would be felt unevenly across regional Australia, Findlay says the political pain of the transition will be eased if farmers see a genuine effort by urban Australia to similarly improve its water efficiency. "But we acknowledge that with increasing population forecast over the next 30 years, taking the position that we are not going to trade with urban Australia isn't sustainable."

Despite this view from farmers, the new market thinking is casting a more critical eye over the appropriateness of maintaining severe water restrictions on urban households while selling them the water at bargain prices. While recognising the need to use tools such as short-term restrictions to deal with a supply crisis, National Water Commission chairman Ken Matthews is more doubtful about institutionalising such arrangements in the long term. "We often hear people say that after the drought ends, we really should institutionalise these urban water restrictions forever. I wonder whether that's so," he told the Australian Water Summit earlier this year. "We know that there are better and worse urban water restrictions in different cities of Australia, and why would we concrete the worst such restrictions into a fixed regime?"

Young says the existing regime of restrictions has thrown up a number of inequities that are unsustainable. "If someone is prepared to pay the full cost to enjoy a green environment and the water is available, then that is a perfectly acceptable use," he says. "We need to build mechanisms that make people aware of the value of water. But at the moment people who have swimming pools are allowed to keep them full but poorer people who can't afford them are not allowed to let their children play under a sprinkler when doing that would use a lot less water than what a swimming pool would evaporate. "I can see prices generally being twice as high as they are today but even with that, water would still be very cheap."

At the International River Symposium in Brisbane this week, water engineer Mark Hamstead postulated that Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide are best placed to tap into these irrigators' markets because of their proximity to river systems, which means they are able to set up inexpensive pipelines to make such trading viable. Sydney has the capacity to establish pipelines to the Hunter, Central Coast or the Murrumbidgee river while Melbourne could tap into the nearby Goulburn system. Adelaide is already plugged into the lower Murray.

By contrast, Perth and Brisbane - which combined are predicted to grow by more than a million people within 15 years - have far more limited opportunities to access farmers' water and will therefore rely more heavily on new water technologies being developed. These include the political hot potatoes of desalinisation and recycling, trapping and reprocessing storm water and tapping into ground water, which are all expected to play an increasing role in securing water for urban Australia for the next century and beyond.

Young says urban water authorities are likely to discover that recycling and stormwater capture would be prohibitively expensive, which would make them look again at desalination, which is becoming increasingly efficient. Despite controversy about its high energy use, new technologies from Israel have driven efficiencies up and costs down to nearly half the price for urban water. Desalination is a serious option for cities such as Perth, with limited alternatives and access to inexpensive, low greenhouse emission energy sources such as gas. "The great thing about desalination is that it is not climate-dependent. So you can actually have the water continuously and have it just in time: you don't have to store it and let it evaporate while you are waiting to use it," Young says.

Tom Hatton, the director of a CSIRO water program, says initial public resistance is almost inevitable when new technologies are proposed. The challenge for policy-makers is to foster public understanding and confidence in the ideas being proposed. "Most of our cities have traditionally had one source of water, or maybe two," Hatton says. "Over the next 10 years people will notice they will start to diversify to three or four." Hatton doesn't express a view as to whether such a free market for water is a good thing. What CSIRO is doing is building a national water stock market, to be known as the water resources observations network.

The network is about 10 years from completion and will allow instant trading of water entitlements, adjustment for seasonal and natural flows, and the creation and trading of derivatives such as water futures, options and hedges. It will be better able to allocate optimal environmental flows, remove uncertainty from the market process, optimise prices, find the most willing buyers and sellers, and signal scarcity. "The solutions are going to be different for Perth than they will be in Sydney. Those choices will not be made on perceptions but on analysis and a lot more technical confidence," Hatton says. "We need to get to the point where those in the market almost have real-time modelling available to them to tell them the state of their water system at any given moment and how vulnerable that is in the near term and medium terms to drought, fire pollution and other environmental threats."

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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Bugged, Literally, By Latest Eco-Hysteria

Post lifted from Cheat Seeking Missiles



Here's the headline from the latest OH MY GOD! story posted on the Society of Environmental Journalist's daily journal of eco-hysterical news coverage:

Pesticides lurk in daycare centers

Lurk! To lie in wait, as in ambush; to sneak; to exist unobserved or unsuspected. What a fabulous choice of words; let's send this headline writer a big fat blue ribbon.

Try as they might, the writers at Environmental Science & Technology just couldn't keep up the hysteria (with my emphasis):

Millions of children get exposed to pesticides while attending daycare, concludes the first nationwide study of insecticide residues in U.S. daycare centers. The study, published today on ES&T’s Research ASAP website (DOI: 10.1021/es061021h), found low levels of organophosphate and pyrethroid pesticides. Although the health impacts are unclear, the results raise questions about the risks children face from these chemicals.

What kind of questions are raised? Oh, how about actual concentrations? How about even a remote statistical correlation between any of the compounds detected and any disease? We read on, wondering if there might actually be some kind of point here ....

“We found at least one pesticide in every daycare center,” says lead author Nicolle Tulve, a research scientist with the U.S. EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory. Tulve says that the concentrations were quite low. She did not comment on whether these concentrations might be harmful but notes that no health advisories or national standards currently exist for such exposures.

I'm beginning to wonder if there's a story here ... maybe a "your tax dollars wasted" kind of story ... but it turns out that the story just peters out with a couple of quotes from hand-wringers, never making a single significant point except:

[Paul] Lioy [deputy director of the Enviornmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute at Rutgers University] also notes that pesticides are not all bad. These chemicals kill roaches, which can cause allergies in some children.

Well, about time! Pesticides exist for a reason, and pests are called pests for a reason! Besides cockroaches, pesticides kill spiders, some of which have poisonous bites, fleas (remember bubonic plague?), centipedes, scorpions and all sorts of crawly dangers more real than the fear of very low concentrations of very thoroughly tested chemicals.

Also not mentioned in the story: Moms and dads use pesticides at home; restaurants use them; governments use them; doctors use them. Is there any evidence that day care exposure is any greater than what these kids are experiencing elsewhere ... or is there just this exciting emotional pull with day care that grabs reporters' attention?

Methinks the latter.





Green CEOs Bad for Business

Green CEOs and good business just don’t mix. Witness this past week’s embarrassing examples of Ford Motor Co.’s Bill Ford and BP’s Lord John Browne – with General Electric’s Jeff Immelt warming up in the bull pen.

Bill Ford just announced that he would step down as CEO after a disastrous 5-year reign during which company shares lost two-thirds of their market value. While Ford Motor’s woes can’t entirely be blamed on Ford, you have to wonder what Ford Motor’s board was thinking when it selected him as CEO. Ford appears to have had two major qualifications that impressed the board – he was the great-grandson of company founder Henry Ford and he chaired the company’s Environmental and Public Policy Committee. While Ford’s genetics didn’t necessarily doom his leadership, his fancying himself as an environmentalist most likely did.

Ford always appeared more concerned about being green than being profitable. In May 2000, he declared that SUVs – his company’s most profitable product – harmed the environment. He lectured a Greenpeace audience that something needed to be done about global warming. Ford focused on turning the company’s massive Rouge plant into an “icon of lean, green manufacturing” and issued reports about vehicle exhaust contributing to global warming. As the SUV-dependent company headed for a rough and certain reckoning with high gas prices, Ford announced in 2004 his support for higher gas taxes to reduce fuel consumption. While higher gas taxes didn’t happen, higher gas prices did, due to foreseeable supply-and-demand forces. Now the public reduces fuel consumption by not buying Ford SUVs.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Bill Ford’s green sheen has bought him no peace from environmentalists who, as pointed out previously in this column, ridicule him publicly. The good news for Ford’s shareholders is that he no longer runs the company on a day-to-day basis. The bad news is that he’s still chairman of the board. Shareholders ought to hope that’s only a face-saving move before he transitions to a green activist group where he belongs.

BP CEO Lord John Browne also wants to be hailed as an “enlightened” CEO-environmentalist. Under Browne, BP spends more than $100 million annually on its “Beyond Petroleum” campaign – an effort to convince the public that BP is no more an oil company than Greenpeace. BP not only advocates for global warming regulation – including announcing this week that it will help Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger implement California’s new global warming law – but the company also calls its primary profit-producing product (gasoline) a “necessary evil” in television commercials. (Earth to Lord Browne: Gasoline is a miracle product upon which our civilization depends.)

While Lord Browne has distracted himself and BP management with the “Beyond Petroleum” mindset, BP has come under pressure from a series of negligent and possibly criminal actions. A March 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City, Texas, refinery complex killed 15 workers and injured many more. Poor maintenance at BP’s Alaskan oil pipeline caused the largest-ever oil spill on the North Slope in March 2006. A BP oil rig damaged by Hurricane Katrina still leaks one year later. BP traders are under investigation for possibly illegal manipulation of the propane, crude oil and unleaded gasoline markets. Lord Browne has tried to paint BP green, but his distraction from core business needs has given the company a black-eye.

General Electric’s shareholders ought to learn the lessons taught by Ford and Browne. GE’s stock price has gone nowhere since Immelt took over from Jack Welch a few years ago, and he apparently sees being green as GE’s path forward. He’s re-branded GE’s products with the gimmicky name, “Ecomagination,” and is lobbying for greenhouse gas regulation, apparently in hopes of passing laws that force customers to buy Ecomagination products.

Just this week, Immelt announced an Ecomagination “advisory council” that includes the likes of Eileen Claussen (whose Pew Center on Global Climate Change lobbies for global warming regulation), Dan Reicher (a former activist with the anti-nuclear, pro-Kyoto Protocol Natural Resources Defense Council); Jonathan Lash (president of the ultra-green World Resources Institute) and James Cameron (chairman of the Ted Turner-funded, global warming regulation-pushing Carbon Disclosure Project).

Immelt describes these and other like-minded folks on the Ecomagination advisory council as “thought leaders on matters of energy, science and the environment.” But they seem more like hard-line green activists whose agendas probably have little in common with that of the typical GE shareholder. Immelt and his green friends may very well succeed in pressuring politicians to encumber the U.S. economy with greenhouse gas regulation – there is, after all, little if any debate that such regulation will increase the cost, and reduce the availability, of energy for consumers and businesses. But since GE’s business fortunes tend to move with the general economy, it’s difficult to see how hampering the economy won’t also hamper GE’s already lethargic stock price.

Suffering the consequences, of course, will be GE shareholders – not the well-paid Immelt or the Ecomagination advisory council members whose green mission will have been accomplished. GE’s shareholders don’t have to suffer the same fate as Ford Motor’s or BP’s – but they will need to take action before it’s too late.

Source







Australian falcons are no Greenies



Workers at the Caltex oil refinery have more than petrol production on their minds these days after two of the fastest killers in the skies took up residence in the plant. A pair of peregrine falcons has made the Kurnell refinery home, establishing a nest among the flaming chimneys and kilometres of pipes - on the side of a six-storey high furnace which vaporises oil at 500C.

The male of the pair was dubbed Steve, in honour of the first worker he took a surprise dive at a few weeks ago. Since then a warning sign has been placed on the ladder leading to the ledge where Steve and his lady companion have made their nest - and hopefully are incubating eggs which will soon hatch chicks. "Employees ... had sighted a pair of peregrine falcons over the plant for more than a year but not realised until recently that the pair were nesting in a large heating unit," refinery manager Tip Huizenga said. "An employee working in a section of the unit was startled when the male peregrine swooped at him a few times. "Investigations around the unit eventually revealed a nest in the unit and a female nesting."

Steve is a regular sight soaring above the refinery or keeping watch on his nest from a distant tower with eyes that can pick out prey from 3km away. When he does find prey they stand little chance: peregrine falcons can dive at 300km/h to strike and kill instantly with their powerful talons.

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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Making kids eco-crazy

It’s back to school time for kids and, of course, for the environmental crazies that means creating a huge mythology of things that will kill them the minute they venture into the jungle of hazards and horrors that await them in school. The biggest hazard I encountered was a kid named Mario who, not surprisingly, ended up in jail. I did not worry about what my clothes were made from, if the acrylic paints would poison me, or the importance of using both sides of the piece of paper.

Let’s understand that, for years now, children have been taught that the Earth is virtually on its last legs and that Global Warming is sufficient for them to abandon all hope of ever being as old as their grandparents, most of whom are probably already dead from inhaling asbestos, having their lungs destroyed by radon, or being slowly poisoned from having used pesticides to kill bugs in their bedroom. Plus, those old people all ate fast foods, drank soda, and probably smoked. If they aren’t dead, they are obviously just a freak of nature.

So you can imagine how thrilled I was to receive an email from something called “EcoMall.com” described as “one of the oldest and largest portals for environmental shopping.” According to the folks at EcoMall.com, back-to-school time is also the perfect time to “start introducing earth-friendly concepts into their children’s everyday lives.” Or, to put it another way, time to start scaring the living daylights out of them by ruining what fun they might have in the few, short years of their childhood.

One hardly knows where to begin in the long list of life-threatening things the mere act of going to school involves. For example, “Petroleum oil, a non-renewable resource, is used in the manufacture of chemicals and plastic commonly found in most school supplies. Environmentally speaking, using supplies made from natural ingredients is always preferable.”

Wait a minute! Are these loonies telling me that oil is not a “natural” substance produced by the Earth? Are they suggesting that all chemicals are automatically a hazard? That plastic is a bad thing? Yes, they are. And they are telling your children this as well.

For the environmentally demented, recycling is as much a religious duty as facing Mecca five times a day is for Muslims. “Schools should remember to use both sides of the paper, save and reused paper clips, thumbtacks, rubber bands, etc., and recycle newspapers, cans, and bottles.”

Suffice it to say, recycling is expensive, requires a lot of power, and many states and cities have concluded it is a huge waste of money and manpower. It has no practical value other than to make people feel bad about using stuff.

EcoMall.com is determined to warn parents to dress their children only in “organic cotton and hemp” because “conventional cotton cultivation uses 25% of the world’s pesticides.” It is also one of the most popular cloths in the world and under attack from a wide range of insect predators such as the famed Boll Weevil. You want cotton? You have to kill the bugs. EcoMall.com actually says that their cotton products “do not contain toxic pesticides.” What do you want to bet that ordinary cotton clothing doesn’t either?

It is important, too, to make sure the school only provides “organic food and juice, as well as rBGH-free milk.” Have you checked the cost of organic food versus the food that all the rest of us buy at the supermarket?

Perhaps most important of all is to “Make your school a toxin-free zone.” Parents should storm the local school board and demand the use of non-toxic cleaners “which can impact indoor air quality.” Whatever else is going on in school, it is essential that “toxic pesticides” are not used “in or around the school” because of the “significant health risks to your children if exposed.”

Oddly, I know something about pest control, having worked with the industry for several decades. None of the pest control professionals I have known are bent on killing every child in every school in America. Quite the contrary, they are concerned with killing the legions of cockroaches, mice, rats, and other disease-spreading pests that routinely invade school cafeterias and anywhere else food can be found such as desks, lockers, and the teacher’s lounge! They fend off pigeons whose droppings degrade school structures and, universally these days, they do this work at night when schools are empty. Despite being around pesticides all day, these people actually have families of their own and their children are as healthy as yours. Many of them go into the business!

Here are just a few of the school items EcoMall.com warns against: magic markers, disposable pens, plastic folders and notebooks, acrylic paints and scented art products, epoxy or instant bonding glues, artist’s pastel crayons, and glossy paper used for art projects. You have been warned!

Somewhere in this great land of ours, some eco-scientists are conducting experiments that will conclusively prove that your children are in more danger in school than if they lived in downtown Baghdad.

It’s all foolishness, of course, but it is a dangerous, malign and evil foolishness. It adds levels of anxiety to the daunting challenge of learning anything in today’s horrid schools that routinely fail to teach the basic knowledge children will need to survive in a world where the competition will be truly global.

Source






BRITISH BUSINESS CATERS TO GREENIE FADS

Shoppers will soon be able to compost ready-meal packs and fruit and vegetable wrappers alongside grass clippings and food waste as shops try to woo green-minded customers. Sainsbury’s fired the latest salvo in the war to be the most environment-friendly supermarket today when it made available 500 of its ready-meal brands and organic fruit and vegetables in compostable packing. The change — highly likely to be followed by the other retailers — will remove the millions of plastic bags and trays that are currently dumped in landfill sites and cut thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, which contribute to global warming.

The offensive is also part of the supermarkets’ drive to boost their green credentials. Where once these companies attracted customers by slashing prices on staple goods and petrol, they are now determined to attract the growing number of ethical shoppers. Asda has already moved its food distribution from road to rail to cut down emissions and Tesco, which is following suit, has a scheme that awards customers loyalty points for recycling or using fewer carrier bags.

Supermarket bosses are also keen to woo the estimated one in three of households interested in home composting. A bottle-green logo of an arrow piercing an apple is to appear on all Sainsbury compostable packs, and this could be taken up by companies to highlight the green message. The packs will be made from maize, sugar cane or starch packaging, which breaks down into carbon dioxide and water. This provides organic material that is excellent for bringing out moisture in the soil. If the compostable packs are placed in compost pile in a sunny position in the garden, they may break down in a fortnight. Generally the bigger the heap, the faster the process. Gardeners have been particularly keen on composting this summer because of the drought and the hosepipe bans.

The initiative may force the Government to review its waste strategy. Today, councils have an incentive to collect green waste rather than to promote home composting. They have been told to recycle the highest possible tonnages, which has resulted in green waste collection becoming the fastest growing form of recycling, growing to 400,000 tonnes last year from 20,000 tonnes in 1997. Experts have estimated that the green wheelie bins have generated an extra 300lb of green waste per household a year when most of it could easily be used on a garden. The Waste Resources Action Programme, which advises ministers on waste, believes it should promote home composting.

Almost half of all organic fruit and vegetables will be sold in compostable packs at Sainsbury’s from this week, rising to 80 per cent by next January. All ready meal packs will be compostable within a year. Justin King, Sainsbury’s chief executive, called on rival supermarkets to follow suit and for the Government to give every home a free compost bin. He said: “Our customers tell us that food packaging is extremely important to them. We’re confident that putting 500 types of our food in compostable packaging will significantly help to reduce the packaging that most threatens the environment.”

Jane Gilbert, of the Composting Association, said that she hoped every household would now be given information on how to compost at home. She said that there were no health problems with compost piles of food or compostable packaging but that if compost piles were too small it could take six months for waste to break down into organic matter. A good average size for a household compost bin was about a metre squared, she said.

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Greenie puritans



To the women of Miss Kitka's it was their regular act - a striptease down to vintage underwear, and a few balloons popped for added spice. But to some of the attendees of the Canberra Climate Change forum it was all too much. Red-faced organisers of the 17th annual forum have apologised for their "inappropriate" choice of entertainment during the forum dinner. But that did not stop two government departments from withdrawing their $8000 sponsorship for the annual event.

The House of Burlesque show involved stripping one woman of red balloons with a pin, but forum organisers said it was intended to be "lighthearted entertainment". Miss Kitka, better known as Australian National University student Rebecca Gale, said you would see more nudity on a beach and that members of the audience had overreacted to the "tongue-in-cheek" act. "It is very unfortunate and upsetting," she said. "We are being portrayed as strippers and while there is an element of striptease, the least anyone stripped down to was vintage underwear."

However, when Miss Kitka came out clad in red balloons and offered pins to anyone who wanted to help her pop them, the temperature increased more rapidly than any predictions for climate change. While that was going on, another troupe member stripped off a coat, hat, gloves and dress.

In a statement delivered this afternoon, the ANU organisers apologised for their "misjudged" choice of entertainment. "The ANZ Climate Forum organising committee apologises for any offence taken at the forum dinner," the organisers said in a statement read out at the close of the forum. "The intent was lighthearted entertainment. "In retrospect the choice of entertainment was inappropriate for the occasion. "We understand if the sponsors wish to withdraw."

An ANU spokeswoman said there was no nudity involved in the event. "The Department of the Environment and Heritage's Australian Greenhouse Office considers the nature of the 'entertainment' at this event to be highly inappropriate," said the department's deputy secretary, Howard Bamsey. "Our representative was among those who walked out ... (and) we are withdrawing our sponsorship of this event." Environment Minister Ian Campbell has withdrawn $3000, saying the Government "could not be associated with such inappropriate activity". The Bureau of Rural Sciences, part of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, has withdrawn $5000 in funding.

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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RAIL COMEBACK IN BRITAIN

It is being justified in terms of the Global Warming religion in order to make the British government bow down but the effect of reducing road congestion should be desirable to all. Mind you, turning the railway tracks into dedicated roadfreight highways would be infinitely more beneficial but that would require a government willing to REALLY upset the status quo

An unprecedented increase in freight trains will rid the motorway of 12,000 lorries a day but risks causing a decade of disruption for rail passengers. Network Rail, the rail infrastructure company, said yesterday that it will remove bottlenecks from its network to allow mile-long goods trains to operate between ports, power stations and distribution centres. It will also create room for an extra 120 freight trains a day by 2015, with bulk goods, such as imported coal, fuel and building materials, expected to fill much of the extra space. Each train will be able to carry 2,000 tonnes, the equivalent of 100 lorry loads. The boom in freight will reduce congestion on the roads but rail passengers may face delays from engineering works and are also more likely to find themselves stuck behind slow-moving freight trains.

Announcing Network Rail's frieght strategy for the next ten years, John Armitt, its chief executive, said: "We must maximise what rail can offer because otherwise we will end up with a lot more trucks on the road." He said that the increase in rail freight capacity would cost up to 500 million pounds, which would have to be funded by the Government. Ministers are committed to expanding rail freight but have said that decisions on the future level of rail spending would be made next summer.

In addition to laying extra lines on routes that have only a single track, Network Rail said that it would widen dozens of bridges and tunnels to allow trains to carry the standard international size of freight container. It also promised to lengthen passing loops - the parallel stretches of track where freight trains wait while being overtaken by faster passenger services - on the East and West Coast Main Lines to accommodate longer trains.

Supermarkets have begun the switch back to rail, to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions caused by distribution and to improve their public image. Last month Tesco started moving non-perishable goods by train from the Midlands to its main Scottish distribution centre as part of a plan to save 4.5 million road miles a year and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 6,000 tonnes. It joins Asda, which moves its goods from southern ports to northern depots by rail. Other companies, including Sainsbury, Toyota and Nissan, have also announced plans to carry their less time-sensitive goods by rail, and even mail trains, which were all but dead in January 2004, have made a comeback.

EWS, Britain's largest rail freight company, said that trains produced a tenth of the harmful emissions of trucks per tonne carried. Network Rail proposes to increase the total weight of goods carried by train by 30 per cent by 2016. The growth will be higher when the long distance travelled by rail freight is taken into account. EWS predicts that the number of tonne-kilometres - the industry's preferred measurement, which multiplies the number of tonnes by the number of kilometres travelled - will be 50 per cent up on current levels by 2015. That would restore rail freight to the level last achieved in the 1950s, when steam trains still dominated the network Graham Smith, EWS's planning director, said that the growth would be achieved only if the Government addressed the unfair advantage enjoyed by road hauliers. "We welcome Network Rail's vision for growth, but it will not happen unless the costs of using the rail infrastructure are made more affordable," he said. "We are being undercut by road hauliers coming from Europe, where they buy cheaper fuel and pay lower wages to Eastern European drivers."

EWS is lobbying against the Rail Regulator's proposal to double track access charges paid by freight operators. It said that it may have to cancel all goods trains through the Channel Tunnel from November 30, when the public subsidy for cross-Channel rail freight ceases. EWS is facing additional costs of 8,000 pounds a train for using the tunnel, but says that it can afford only 500 pounds a train.

Mr Armitt said that Network Rail's predictions assumed Britain's continued reliance on imported coal for power generation in the next ten years. "Even if we see a new nuclear programme, that will take time to deliver and may only deliver 20 to 25 per cent of generating capacity, so there will still be big demand for coal," he said.

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Biotech forests

Last March, activists at the 8th Conference of the Parties (COP-8) for the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Curitiba, Brazil called for a global moratorium on genetically modified trees (GM trees). The activists claimed that genetically enhanced trees could harm the environment and the livelihoods of indigenous and local communities. In response, the COP-8 passed a resolution recommending the CBD signatories "take a precautionary approach when addressing the issue of genetically modified trees." The precautionary approach "recognizes that the absence of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing decisions where there is a risk of serious or irreversible harm." In general, it is chiefly decisions that would permit the deployment of new technologies that the precautionary approach postpones. We shall see that this line of attack cuts both ways when considering the effects of genetically enhanced trees.

In response to the COP-8 resolution, the United Nations Environment Programme is considering a global moratorium on the planting of genetically modified trees. UNEP is accepting comments on the proposed moratorium until September 1.

Are GM trees a danger to the natural environment? Opponents claim that the potential effects of GM trees include the contamination of native forests, the destruction of biodiversity and wildlife, loss of fresh water, the collapse native forest ecosystems, and cultural destruction of forest based traditional communities and severe human health impacts.

What biotech opponents mean by "contamination" is that GM trees could interbreed with conventional trees passing along their modified traits. That could happen, but is that a real threat to native forests? For example, one of the traits that biotechnologists have modified is boosting soft cellulose and reducing tough lignin fiber in wood. Such trees are easier to turn into paper and produce much less waste. However, trees with this bioengineered trait would have great difficulty surviving in the wild, so it is very unlikely to spread to native trees. Oregon State University forestry professor Steven Strauss dismisses activist concerns over GM trees somehow wiping out wild forests as "sheer nonsense." As for destroying biodiversity and wildlife, GM trees are much more likely to help than to harm. How? By boosting the productivity of tree plantations.

Opponents dismiss tree plantations as "green deserts" devoid of the natural biodiversity of wild forests. Actually, tree plantations do harbor a lot of wild species, but even if they didn't they would still offer significant environmental benefits. Right now about one-third of the world's industrial wood comes from tree plantations and if it could all come from tree plantations that would dramatically relieve pressure to harvest natural forests. An Israeli biotech company claims to have been able to engineer eucalyptus trees that grow four times faster than conventional trees. The modified trees are being field tested by a major Brazilian forestry company. If it works, this means that more trees can be grown on less land.

In fact, Roger Sedjo, a senior fellow at Resources from the Future notes that "all of the world's timber production could potentially be produced on an area roughly five to ten percent of the total forest today." Sedjo points out that this would mean that "more of the earth's forests could remain in their natural states, thereby maintaining continuous habitat for biodiversity conservation." It's hard to see what could be more eco-friendly than saving natural forests from loggers' axes.

What about the claim that biotech trees would harm indigenous and local communities? Again, to the extent that indigenous communities are directly dependent on native forest products and species for their livelihoods, reducing commercial pressure to cut down those forests will protect their traditional ways of life. Another concern is that forestry corporations in cahoots with developing country governments will expand tree plantations onto indigenous lands. Surely the better and more direct solution to problems caused by defective land tenure is to give indigenous people strong property rights to their land rather than banning biotech trees.

Biotechnology can also help protect and restore tree species that are threatened by pests and disease. For example, the American chestnut was devastated by an introduced fungal disease that killed more the 3.5 billion trees in the first half of the 20th century. These majestic trees could reach 100 feet in height and five feet in diameter. The chestnut had been the dominant hardwood species throughout the Appalachian Mountains. An enterprising squirrel, we are told, could travel from Maine to Georgia without touching the ground through the interlinked branches of chestnut trees. Now scientists at the University of Georgia and the State University of New York are investigating ways to insert blight-resistance genes into American chestnut artificial seed embryos. Thanks to biotechnology, the American chestnut could be restored later this century to the forests from which it has been missing for nearly two generations.

Looking at current silvicultural practices can also help clarify the benefits and risks involved with GM trees. "Many ecological criticisms of GM trees appear to be overstated," concludes a recent study by silviculturalists at Oregon State University. "The ecological issues expected from the use of GM poplars appear similar in scope to those managed routinely during conventional plantation culture, which includes the use of exotic and hybrid genotypes, short rotations, intensive weed control, fertilization and density control." For example, choosing to plant a conventional poplar or a poplar genetically modified to produce less lignin will have far fewer ecological effects than choosing between planting a poplar, modified or not, and a conifer species. "The specific changes in wood chemistry imparted by GM will be orders of magnitude less than the vast number of new chemicals that distinguish a pine from an aspen," notes the Oregon State study.

Some activists are not content to campaign for moratoriums backed by the United Nations. In 2001, the activists from the radical Environmental Liberation Front destroyed genetically modified trees at the University of Washington-Seattle and a poplar farm in Oregon.

Recall that under the precautionary approach favored by anti-biotech activists the absence of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing decisions where there is a risk of serious or irreversible harm. By opposing biotech trees, it seems that the activists have gotten it backward. The risks to the environment, specifically to wild forests, are far too great to postpone further research and development of genetically enhanced trees. The only sensible conclusion is that imposing a United Nations' moratorium on GM trees risks serious and irreversible harm to the earth's wild forests.

Source







Greenie dam-hatred bears fruit in Australia

Brisbane could become the first capital city to wear harsh level-five water restrictions, which include a total ban on outdoor watering. Queensland Water Commission chairwoman Elizabeth Nosworthy said it was "almost inevitable" that level-four restrictions would be introduced in southeast Queensland at the end of next month. And if this summer is as dry as the last, when little rain fell in catchments, level-five restrictions could be introduced as early as next March.

Australia's capital cities have to date been able to avoid the level-five restrictions that have been imposed in regional centres such as Toowoomba in Queensland and Goulburn in NSW. Although water is a central issue in the Queensland election campaign, the Beattie Government has been tight-lipped about the forced water conservation measures, including the level-four restrictions set to be introduced after the poll this weekend.

Under level four, residents face mandatory swimming pool covers and a further crackdown on garden watering. At the same time, businesses will be forced to install water-saving devices, such as waterless urinals and water limiters on taps.

Ms Nosworthy said businesses would have to do much more to save water, but she indicated that the 180,000 swimming pool owners in southeast Queensland would be the main residential targets under level-four restrictions. She said 11 million litres of water were wasted every day through pool evaporation and mandatory covers were under consideration. "Pools is an issue that we really have to deal with," Ms Nosworthy told The Australian. "People in the community without pools would expect people with pools to be taking responsibility for doing the right thing." Industry sources put the average cost of a backyard pool cover at $500, with another $500 for a roller to operate it, but the state Government has promised rebates. Ms Nosworthy said level-four restrictions had not been finalised and proposals would be discussed with local councils at a meeting on September 11 - two days after the election.

Residents of Brisbane and other southeast Queensland centres were banned from using hoses under level-three restrictions earlier this year, with only buckets and watering cans being permitted for outdoor watering. Ms Nosworthy said that while buckets could now be used at any time, their use could be restricted under level-four rules to late afternoons and nights. She said restrictions might need to be phased in over time if, for instance, retail outlets did not have sufficient supplies of pool covers. It was unlikely residents would ever be able to again water gardens freely. "I think those days are over," Ms Nosworthy said.

Hawkins Home Garden Living Centres owner John Hawkins said more than 40 plant nurseries in southeast Queensland had been forced to close because of water restrictions, with the loss of 1000 jobs. He said the industry might not be able to withstand the impact of further restrictions. "Level five would wipe us out altogether," he said. Premier Peter Beattie has denied he called an early election to avoid community anger at level-four restrictions.

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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