JARED DIAMOND'S EASTER ISLAND PARABLE DEBUNKED AGAIN

From the archaeologist who did the most thorough radiocarbon dating there



For thousands of years, most of Rapa Nui [Easter island] was covered with palm trees. Pollen records show that the Jubaea palm became established at least 35,000 years ago and survived a number of climatic and environmental changes. But by the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of these large stands of forest had disappeared.

It is not a new observation that virtually all of the shells housing palm seeds found in caves or archaeological excavations of Rapa Nui show evidence of having been gnawed on by rats, but the impact of rats on the island's fate may have been underestimated. Evidence from elsewhere in the Pacific shows that rats have often contributed to deforestation, and they may have played a major role in Rapa Nui's environmental degradation as well.

It also appears that the islanders began building moai and ahu [stone statues] soon after reaching the island. The human population probably reached a maximum of about 3,000, perhaps a bit higher, around 1350 A.D. and remained fairly stable until the arrival of Europeans. The environmental limitations of Rapa Nui would have kept the population from growing much larger. By the time Roggeveen arrived in 1722, most of the island's trees were gone, but deforestation did not trigger societal collapse, as Diamond and others have argued.

There is no reliable evidence that the island's population ever grew as large as 15,000 or more, and the actual downfall of the Rapanui resulted not from internal strife but from contact with Europeans. When Roggeveen landed on Rapa Nui's shores in 1722, a few days after Easter (hence the island's name), he took more than 100 of his men with him, and all were armed with muskets, pistols and cutlasses. Before he had advanced very far, Roggeveen heard shots from the rear of the party. He turned to find 10 or 12 islanders dead and a number of others wounded. His sailors claimed that some of the Rapanui had made threatening gestures. Whatever the provocation, the result did not bode well for the island's inhabitants.

Newly introduced diseases, conflict with European invaders and enslavement followed over the next century and a half, and these were the chief causes of the collapse. In the early 1860s, more than a thousand Rapanui were taken from the island as slaves, and by the late 1870s the number of native islanders numbered only around 100. In 1888, the island was annexed by Chile. It remains part of that country today.

In the 1930s, French ethnographer Alfred Metraux visited the island. He later described the demise of Rapa Nui as "one of the most hideous atrocities committed by white men in the South Seas." It was genocide, not ecocide, that caused the demise of the Rapanui. An ecological catastrophe did occur on Rapa Nui, but it was the result of a number of factors, not just human short-sightedness.

I believe that the world faces today an unprecedented global environmental crisis, and I see the usefulness of historical examples of the pitfalls of environmental destruction. So it was with some unease that I concluded that Rapa Nui does not provide such a model. But as a scientist I cannot ignore the problems with the accepted narrative of the island's prehistory. Mistakes or exaggerations in arguments for protecting the environment only lead to oversimplified answers and hurt the cause of environmentalism. We will end up wondering why our simple answers were not enough to make a difference in confronting today's problems.

Ecosystems are complex, and there is an urgent need to understand them better. Certainly the role of rats on Rapa Nui shows the potentially devastating, and often unexpected, impact of invasive species. I hope that we will continue to explore what happened on Rapa Nui, and to learn whatever other lessons this remote outpost has to teach us.

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Down with carbon colonialism

Did you know that the money you donate to carbon-offsetting schemes is often spent on programmes that stifle development in the Third World?

`When you drink one, Africa drinks one too.' So says the Onederful advertisement on hoardings around London, promoting a new soft drink for the caring executive classes. `All profits', it boasts, `go to build unique roundabout water pumps'. While you quench your thirst after a workout in the gym, children in Africa are getting a workout in order that they can have a drink. These water pumps, celebrated in Cameron Sinclair's latest book Design Like You Give A Damn, are designed to look like a children's roundabout. Ingeniously, each playful rotation raises water from a well, and so youngsters can now do something socially responsible instead of just playing selfishly for themselves.

But regardless of the paternalistic pretension of this scheme (this roundabout is nothing other than a hand pump), and its deception (this is child labour dressed up as doing children a favour), this is a way of acclimatising the Third World to their own lack of development and infrastructure. Children in developing countries want iPods like anyone else, but schemes such as this alter the existing situation just enough that their poverty doesn't look so bad to the Western eye.

Back in the Eighties, Bob Geldof's Live Aid threw down a conscious challenge to the public to `Give us your fucking money'. Not very diplomatic and more than a little contemptuous; but at least he was prepared to engage us and try to earn our money. More recently, charities and campaigns have been searching for more novel, reflexive or unconscious ways to be charitable. Tapping into Western consumer culture is the latest hassle-free method of charitable giving. This is charity without the inconvenience of inconvenience, without the annoyance of having to convince someone of the merits of the case. While this avoids the hassle of engaging in why the organisation's work is important, it also circumvents the possibility of more active engagement.

This model was best exemplified by Bono's RED designer Motorola mobile phone. Buying a phone anyway? Why not buy this trendy one for a little bit more and the proceeds will let a black baby live for another day or two. No skin off your nose (see Why the new Amex card makes me see RED, by Daniel Ben-Ami).

Subverting the everyday into a political act still needs some kind of acknowledgement - hence the need for some recognisable object that indicates what has been done: a wristband, a phone, or a credit card. `Brand Aid' provides a way to contribute without interrupting your daily life, while those in the know will be aware that you've done your bit.

Climate change: a feelgood crisis

The latest stage in this creeping process of unwitting charitable activity makes Bono's sanctimoniousness sound positively engaging. As Africa has slipped down the political agenda, climate change has moved centre stage as the ultimate feelgood crisis. This is a moral dilemma with no argument needed; there is general agreement, it seems, that global warming is potentially devastating and that `something has to be done'.

A quarter of a century ago, Geldof saw people as part of the solution - his beef at the time was with intransigent politicians. Today, aid agencies, especially those working on environmental projects, frequently see people as the problem. The more consumer-driven, modern or economically advanced we become, the more we are deemed to be harming the future of the planet. The consequences of seeing ordinary actions and lifestyles as inherently detrimental to the planet are paradoxical, reinforcing both a sense of self-loathing as well as a moral piety. The Guardian offers some assistance in that `if you really can't, or don't want to, change your lifestyle to reduce the damage you do to the planet, you could consider doing something to offset it'.

Eco-aid giving has now been turned into a contemporary form of absolution, saving you from the guilt of the modern world, best exemplified by `carbon offsets'. Whatever you do, from driving a car to taking a holiday to boiling a kettle of water, gives rise to carbon emissions. Having fewer cups of tea is one way of reducing your `carbon footprint' (the amount of carbon that you produce through your actions) and is seen as a positive objective. Having a zero-emissions (or even a positive feedback) effect is even better. Planting a tree, for example, will help produce oxygen and remove some CO2 from the atmosphere. Powering your home from your own wind turbine or solar cells can mean that surplus power can be fed back into the system resulting in a net positive carbon impact.

Ironically, these environmental organisations assume that we are so wrapped up in Western consumer culture that change has to be engineered through the subversion of that very consumer culture. Thus, environmental groups are now using consumerism - the traditional object of their ire - as a way of legitimating their programme of activities without the consumer necessarily knowing about it. This cynical approach to funders - or donors as they used to be called - is surely a new low in the long history of environmental contempt for consumers.

The real irony, of course, is that most of these campaigning organisations are large businesses themselves. ClimateCare, for example, `was the idea of eco-entrepreneur Mike Mason'. Brian Wilson, who was energy minister in Blair's government until 2003, recently became the chairman of the UK operations board of Airtricity, the Irish-based renewable energy company constructing windfarms all over Ireland and beyond. Both Land Rover and British Gas have bought into ClimateCare's programme of offsets.

The non-executive board members of CarbonNeutral comprise a venture capitalist, an investment banker and an ex-manager at Shell. These examples show that big business is content to do business with environmentalists - and why not? After all, these environmental companies are proper moneymaking concerns that are gratefully receiving your donations.

For some eco-businesses, instead of developing a profitable business plan to encourage shareholder investment (with the attendant awkwardness of accountability), or to manufacture and sell useful products to raise capital, they prefer to use donations to prop up their organisations. Others prefer to provide their more discerning clientele with a carbon-free environmental service as an added-value treat. Still others are diverting resources into lo-tech (carbon-free) technologies as a way of capturing a new market share. Carbon neutrality is, for all businesses, simply an exercise in corporate social responsibility.

Passive giving

So combining the worst elements of all the previous trends with a few new ones, environmental campaigners are now asking people to `donate' in the most passive way possible. Students at Linacre College, Oxford may not realise that Thabit Al-Murani, their student environmental representative, has pledged around 1,250 pounds of their funds to ClimateCare to make the college the first carbon neutral college in Oxbridge

The Carbon Footprint agency (motto: `It doesn't cost the Earth to save the planet') has done a number of deals with third parties to make saving the planet as painless as possible. For example, you can join WeightWatchers and Carbon Footprint will offset 1500kg of CO2; or 2500kg when you subscribe to match.com dating agency. What does this mean? Well, in simple terms, match.com will give a sum of money, via Carbon Footprint, to a carbon neutral campaigning group to do good works. The financial sum has been assessed as the cost of whatever is needed to absorb an equivalent amount of carbon that has been emitted as part of your everyday activities. In the past it might have been called a discount, whereas now it is disguised as an ethical trade-off.

The World Land Trust (WLT) is offering to offset 140kg of your despicable carbon usage if you simply send them a text message. What could this mean? Well, simply that the text nets WLT 1.50 pounds (after network charges have been deducted) and they will plant a tree to the equivalent amount (about a twigful). Call me cynical, but the WLT is a conservation organisation whose very raison d'etre is to plant trees around the world, so it all seems like a canny way to get more cash and a higher profile. And while they boast that `you can sleep soundly, safe in the knowledge that we have taken care of [your emissions] for you', it offers texters the chance to win `free carbon neutral flights to Tenerife'. Climate Relief, on the other hand, will send an unsuspecting friend a 20 pound gift voucher worth 100kg emissions. Ideal for the man who has everything.

The Observer claims that if you've done 120 school runs in a 4x4, then 1.50 pounds should be enough to clear your conscience and if you buy your 4x4 from Autobid.com then they'll offset 3 tonnes of carbon (5). (Before you get too excited, this salesman patter simply nets the equivalent of a 30 pound discount.) If you are planning on holding an event to explain all this, the WLT (not to be confused with the Woodland Trust) asks for a `contribution of 1,000 pounds or above [to] offset the CO2 travel and venue emissions [sic] from a business conference or training event.' But for the really guilty, they suggest that `an investment of o20,000 or above can offset at least 800 tonnes of carbon dioxide (close to the annual heating and lighting-related emissions of 140 households)' (6). Presumably, then, this is what used to be called a `subsidy' to shore up a company, but now it is an `investment' in the future of the planet. And it can be done from your home with the minimum of fuss or involvement.

It is reputed that each tree planted by one of these company's offsets about 730kg CO2 over its lifetime, whereas each person actually uses/ creates about 7,000kg per year (500 tonnes a lifetime). So model citizens should plant 10 trees per year for the rest of their lives. As it happens, temperate forests in developing countries such as the US, UK and Canada have actually been expanding over the past 40 years, so things aren't as black as they're painted, even in the terms of the debate. However, let not the facts get in the way of an ecological bandwagon.

You don't even have to be a charity or eco-company to do it. BP has launched a new non-profit initiative called TargetNeutral to counter the fact that `a typical motorist will generate around four tonnes of CO2 over 10,000 miles, which would cost o20 to offset'. Simply pull up at a service station, fill up and if you are using one of their loyalty cards, you can automatically pay the sum to TargetNeutral and BP will match it. You haven't got to do a thing; it's automatic. If you're not yet convinced, rest assured that Jonathan Porritt, chair of the UK Sustainable Development Forum will be part of `an independent panel' to oversee its actions. Mind you, BP isn't totally convinced, asking: `Is BP genuine in trying to tackle the problem of global warming, or is it simply a PR stunt that jumps on the green bandwagon? We'd like to hear from you.' If you buy into BP's selfless motives, your money goes to fund wind turbine projects in India and Mexico that BP are committed to building anyway. But any extra cash wouldn't go amiss.

Carbon colonialism

Carbon trading is everywhere, from estate agents to gifts, from insurance products to pension schemes. Take the figures with a pinch of salt though, because they are, effectively, made up. Lots of websites have set up basic software programmes to allow you to assess your impact on the planet, but there seems to be little consistency. CO2Balance also say that o9-worth of CO2 emissions (0.16 tonnes) are caused by travelling 600 miles in a 1.4L petrol-engine car, whereas ClimateCare says that the same car journey racks up 0.18 tonnes of CO2, costing 1.35 pounds. Then again, Carbon Footprint assess it as 0.149 tonnes, which can be offset `by planting 0 trees'. The Scotsman suggests that driving 12,000 miles in a family saloon releases 3.6 tonnes and costs just o20, whereas Newcastle Council states that one tonne of CO2 offset costs 13.65 pounds . So it seems that if you shop around, you can get some good deals. but maybe that'll just make you feel even more guilty.

Obviously, the basis of carbon trading schemes is that they can't offset carbon produced in the West, say, by investing in a technology that produces carbon emissions in the offset country. That would be `irresponsible'. Therefore all of these agencies that have sprung up over the past five or so years are engaged in low- or alternative-technology projects in the under-developed world.

ClimateCare, for instance, invests in low or zero-carbon emissions projects in Kazakhstan, among other places. Here, the silly Kazakhstanis use `traditional incandescent lights in buildings' but by donating to ClimateCare, you are investing in a project called `Education for Sustainability and Climate Change in Central Asia' which delivers `workshops to 98 schools to teach children about climate change. supported by posters, CDs and a teachers' handbook.' The project partners are `developing a monitoring and verification plan', implying that if the scheme doesn't meet target objectives then something'll have to give. Oh, and they can forget about real development using more carbon intensive and effective technology.

ClimateCare also funds projects in India, where it is encouraging villagers to stop using forest wood for fuel so that the indigenous tiger's habitat is preserved; or it employs 400 people in Uganda to clear grassland to plant trees to satisfy the needs of the indigenous primate population. Did you know that you were funding a scheme that promotes wildlife over people - even wildlife that eats people? And what's that got to do with climate change? Given that the carbon offset scheme is premised on the fact that human activity is endangering nature, I suppose that it is a small and logical step to put animals before people.

There are many such examples. United by the allusion to the nobility of the indigenous tribespeople, or the overseeing and monitoring of their performance in the carbon-offset programmes, these initiatives seem faintly colonial. In Mayer Hillman's book, How We Can Save The Planet, he argues that giving carbon credits on an equal individual basis across the globe would be a win-win situation for everyone. While we in the West, he argued, may not be so keen to give up our living standards, what does a person in the Third World want with all those carbon credits? After all, they have no car, phone or significant travel plans. This leaves them `free' to sell the credits off to salvage the conscience of the West. Unfortunately, the consequential maintenance of underdevelopment is the real truth behind carbon offset schemes, and one that, unsurprisingly, the marketing managers don't really want you to know about.

Carbon offsets are premised on the notion that modern lifestyles are inherently damaging to the planet: that you are part of the problem. If you agree, then the answer is simple: reduce your consumption, only travel locally (using muscle power), campaign against housebuilding and give generously to the Third World for schemes that treat the environment as sacrosanct. However, bear in mind that even the water-pump roundabout in Africa, paid for by the profits of a bottled water company in the West, can't really be argued to be zero carbon. After all, the collective CO2 exhalation of malnourished children forced to push a massive playground roundabout in order to extract water is bound to contribute in some small way to the melting of the polar icecaps.

If, however, you think that the under-developed world needs development, then the CO2 equation has to be put on the back burner. The chief priority is to encourage the liberation of millions of people from grinding poverty, not to make them guilty about wanting the material standards that the West has.

Once the under-developed world starts developing, we will encourage an enlightened view of humanity. Similarly, a more enlightened view of humanity can kickstart that development. Meeting this dialectical challenge requires a human-centred, rather than an eco-centric, view of the world. Once we reclaim this agenda for humanity, only then might there be scope for setting a positive agenda for change to deal with environmental factors. At the moment, sanctifying the environment, combined with an anti-humanist guilt, keeps half the world in penury while the other half ponders their purchasing decisions. Unfortunately, consumer choices and carbon offsets are designed to maintain the iniquitous status quo, and make you feel good about it.

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ONLINE ALTERNATIVES TO THE ESTABLISHMENT ACADEMIC JOURNALS

This may be a partial answer to the capture of many important journals by Greenies

Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research can now pursue another path to fame by taking their research straight to the public online. Instead of having a group of hand-picked scholars review research in secret before publication, a growing number of Internet-based journals are publishing studies with little or no scrutiny by the authors' peers. It's then up to rank-and-file researchers to debate the value of the work in cyberspace. The Web journals are threatening to turn on its head the traditional peer-review system that for decades has been the established way to pick apart research before it's made public.

Next month, the San Francisco-based nonprofit Public Library of Science will launch its first open peer-reviewed journal called PLoS ONE, focusing on science and medicine. Like its sister publications, it will make research articles available for free online by charging authors [$750.00] to publish. But unlike articles in other PLoS journals that undergo rigorous peer review, manuscripts in PLoS ONE are posted for the world to dissect after an editor gives them just a cursory look. "If we publish a vast number of papers, some of which are mediocre and some of which are stellar, Nobel Prize-winning work - I will be happy," said Chris Surridge, the journal's managing editor.

It's too early to tell how useful this open airing will be. Some open peer-reviewed journals launched in the past year haven't been big draws. Still, there appears to be enough interest that even some mainstream journals like the prestigious British publication Nature are experimenting. Democratizing the peer-review process raises sticky questions. Not all studies are useful and flooding the Web with essentially unfiltered research could create a deluge of junk science. There's also the potential for online abuse as rogue researchers could unfairly ridicule a rival's work.

Supporters point out that rushing research to the public could accelerate scientific discovery, while online critiques may help detect mistakes or fraud more quickly. The open peer review movement stems from dissatisfaction with the status quo, which gives reviewers great power and can cause long publication delays. In traditional peer review, an editor sends a manuscript to two or three experts - referees who are unpaid and not publicly named, yet they hold tremendous sway.

Careers can be at stake. In the cutthroat world of research, publishing establishes a pedigree, which can help scientists gain tenure at a university or obtain lucrative federal grants. Researchers whose work appear in traditional journals are often more highly regarded. That attitude appears to be slowly changing. In 2002, the reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman created a buzz when he bypassed the peer-review system and posted a landmark paper to the online repository, arXiv. Perelman later won the Fields Medal this year for his contribution to the Poincare conjecture, one of mathematics' oldest and puzzling problems.

Editors of traditional, subscription-based journals say the peer-review system weeds out sloppy science. The traditional process isn't designed to detect fraud (referees rarely look at a researcher's raw data), and prestigious journals have unwittingly published bogus work. Last year, for example, Science retracted papers on embryonic stem cell research by a South Korean cloning scientist who admitted falsifying his results.

Work submitted to PLoS ONE, for instance, is debated after publication by colleagues who rate the research based on quality, originality and other factors. Commenters cannot alter the paper, which becomes part of the public record and is archived in databases. If there is disagreement, authors can respond to comments. To prevent abuse, the site is monitored for inflammatory language and the postings can't be anonymous. "The fact that you get published in PLoS ONE isn't going to tell you whether it's a brilliant paper. What it's going to say is that this is something worth being in the scientific literature, but you need to look at it more closely," Surridge said.

Another open peer-reviewed journal, Philica, launched earlier this year takes a more radical approach. Authors are responsible for uploading their research to the Web site at no cost and without any peer review. Comments are anonymous, but users whose identities have not been verified by site administrators are flagged with a question mark next to their comments. The journal, still in the trial stage, has published about 35 papers so far. About a third still needs to be critiqued. Philica co-founder and University of Bath psychology professor Ian Walker said the system discourages authors from publishing fake studies because others can rat them out. "Imagine if somebody puts up absolute garbage, you will have plenty of reviews that will say, 'This is terrible, terrible, terrible,'" he said.

Academics are eyeing the open peer-review experiment with interest. Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician who heads the University of Minnesota's Digital Technology Center, is encouraged by the growing number of online journals. Whether they will work - he's not sure. Some researchers might only post unhelpful one-liners for fear of reprisal. Granting anonymity may boost participation, but could lead to "malicious postings from cracks," Odlyzko said.

Even some mainstream journals are toying with a tame form of open peer review. This summer, Nature allowed authors whose papers were selected for traditional peer review to have their manuscripts judged by the public at the same time. Editors weigh both sides when deciding whether to publish a paper, and rejected research can be submitted elsewhere. Linda Miller, the journal's U.S. executive editor, said she was encouraged by the participation. More than 60 papers have been posted on Nature's site for open peer review as of mid-September including one that has been accepted for publication. Several others are on the path to being published. Miller said Nature's experimentation with the Internet is just another way the journal is trying to reach out to the public. Two of its specialized journals on neuroscience and genetics already offer a blog-like forum for researchers to post their thoughts on published articles, though they have attracted little attention, she said. "If we don't serve the community well, we will become irrelevant," she said.

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

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

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

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OZONE: A GREAT GREENIE "SUCCESS" HAS ACHIEVED NOTHING (SURPRISE!)

It shows how dubious Greenie atmospheric physics can be

A satellite has detected record losses of ozone over Antarctica this year, further damaging the shield that protects Earth from cancer-causing ultraviolet rays. In the past decade, the level of ozone in Earth's atmosphere has fallen by about 0.3 per cent, increasing the risk of skin cancer, cataracts and harm to marine life, the European Space Agency said overnight. The presence of a hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic was first recognised in 1985.

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said earlier this month that the hole was nearing its record size of 29 million sq km set in 2000. However, the depth of the hole was greater this year than in 2000, bringing the amount of lost ozone to 40 million tonnes on October 2, beating 2000's record of 39 million tonnes, ESA said in a statement. The ozone loss over Antarctica is calculated by measuring the hole's area and depth. "Such significant ozone loss requires very low temperatures in the stratosphere combined with sunlight," ESA atmospheric engineer Claus Zehner said. "This year's extreme loss of ozone can be explained by the temperatures above Antarctica reaching the lowest recorded in the area since 1979," Mr Zehner said. [Hey! Where did the global warming go??]

The WMO and the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) said in August that the protective layer may return to pre-1980 levels by 2049 over much of Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia, Latin America and Africa. The agencies said that in Antarctica, ozone layer recovery would likely be delayed until 2065. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) containing chlorine and bromine have been blamed for thinning the ozone layer because they attack ozone molecules, causing them to break apart. Many CFCs, once commonly used in refrigeration, air conditioning and industrial cleaning, were banned by the 1985 Vienna Convention and its Montreal Protocol of 1987. Despite that, CFCs had still not vanished from the air, ESA said.

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Air samples show recent build-up of CO2

Odd that the earth hasn't been warming up in recent years, then (See above)

The world's oldest library of airsamples has recorded the biggest increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide since sampling began in 1978. CSIRO air librarian Paul Fraser said the levels of the primary greenhouse gas have been growing at an increasing rate each year since 1978 and may reach an annual increase of two parts per million by the end of this year. Global CO2 levels have increased from 340ppm to 380ppm in the past 30 years due to combustion of fossil fuels. Mainstream climate scientists argue the world needs to stabilise levels to around 450ppm by 2050 to avoid the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Dr Fraser said while the library had revealed CO2 emissions had grown by 70 per cent a year since the 1970s, methane emissions had stabilised in the past seven years. To find this data, the CSIRO captures a 40km-long sheet of clean air from the Southern Ocean as it blows through Cape Grim on the rugged northwest coast of Tasmania. Dr Fraser said the recording instrumentation was so sensitive that samples could be contaminated by the gases released by ships beyond the horizon. "We sometimes collect tanks and find that they are a bit strange and the assumption is that something has got into the airstream that we weren't aware of," Dr Fraser said. "You could have a drop in the wind and the local vegetation could impact on it, or maybe cows - so we like to keep the wind speed nice and high and the wind direction off the ocean."

Wind is sampled each season and stored in pressurised cylinders at the CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric research centre near Melbourne, where it is analysed for both greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases. While long-term trends are relatively stable, Dr Fraser said there was some natural variation as a result of El Nino and La Nina weather patterns and natural events such as the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 and the Indonesian bushfires in 1998.

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BRITAIN'S DOTTY METHOD OF ENCOURAGING PUBLIC TRANSPORT USE

And this under one of the world's "greenest" governments!

Thousands of seats are being ripped out of trains to create more standing room as a cheap solution to overcrowding on the busiest rail franchise in Britain. South West Trains is installing extra handholds and creating "perches" in place of seats. Almost 500 carriages, including some which entered service only two years ago, will lose more than a fifth of their seats. The increase in empty floor space will allow the Government to claim that it is meeting targets on reducing overcrowding. Passengers with 0.54 square metres of floor space are not deemed to be on an overcrowded train. (That could, for example, be an area 60cm by 90cm, that is slightly less than three double-page spreads of The Times, which laid toe-to-toe measure 60cm by 108cm).

South West Trains is already officially the most overcrowded franchise and is forecast to carry 20 per cent more passengers by 2016. The Department for Transport does not consider a train to be overcrowded until there are more than 35 people standing for every 100 with seats. But South West Trains breaches even what the department describes as "the acceptable number of passengers in excess of capacity". The 8.04am from Isleworth to Waterloo has 792 seats but carries an average of 1,138 passengers (44 standing per 100 seats), according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act. The 6.42am from Haslemere to Waterloo has 598 seats but carries 845 passengers (41 standing per 100 seats). The company, which carries 160 million passengers a year on a network stretching from the South Coast to London Waterloo, said that the changes "will allow more people to stand in comfort".

SWT claimed last month that it would increase the number of seats on peak suburban services by 20 per cent under its new ten-year contract. But when questioned by The Times, the company said that this had been a mistake and that much of the promised new capacity would be in the form of standing room rather than seats. Under the terms of the contract, it add ten carriages to its fleet of 1,400. The company has already begun removing 72 seats from its 20-year-old class 455 trains, which operate between Waterloo and the suburbs, including Chessington, Kingston, Guildford, Epsom, Hampton Court and Shepperton. It is also planning to take seats out of 28 Desiro trains, which were delivered from their German manufacturer only two years ago. These trains serve Wimbledon, Surbiton, Woking and dozens of other stations.

A spokeswoman said: "In an ideal world no one would have to stand but we do not live in an ideal world. We recognise that passenger numbers are continuing to grow and we are reconfiguring the trains to give the best possible capacity." The company believes that creating wider aisles will encourage people to move away from the doors, allowing all the available floor space to be used. It claims that most passengers who cannot find a seat have to stand for only 20 minutes.

Britain has the fastest growing railway in Europe, with passenger numbers up 42 per cent in the past decade. In 2003 the Strategic Rail Authority proposed lengthening platforms on routes into Waterloo to accommodate trains with up to 12 carriages. The authority was abolished last year before it could make any progress towards this. Network Rail made similar suggestions in March but admitted that there was no budget or timetable for the improvements. The Government made no mention of lengthening platforms when it awarded the new ten-year franchise last month. Chris Grayling, the Shadow Transport Secretary, said: "We must provide longer trains rather than squeezing more standing passengers into existing carriages. It is unacceptable that people are paying more for their tickets but are increasingly less likely to get a seat."

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GREENIE REGULATIONS INFLATE FUEL PRICES

When the railroad, the telegraph and the telephone spread across the United States in the years immediately following the Civil War, a national market was created. For the first time in our history, farmers and butchers and tailors and other business people in locales such as Boston and Biloxi faced genuine competition from firms hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

Many of these business people complained, of course. Competition is unforgiving of firms that lack the talent or the drive to satisfy consumers as fully as do firms with greater skills and dedication. But consumers benefited enormously.

One source of consumer benefits, beside the obvious one of more choices among sellers, was "economies of scale." If a producer can manufacture products on a large scale without significantly compromising product quality and at the same time spread many of the up-front, or "fixed," costs of production over a large number of units of output, that producer can afford to sell each unit of that output at a price lower than could be charged if he produced only a smaller quantity of output.

For example, if a shirt factory with a capacity of producing 10 million shirts per year is built at an annual cost of $1 million, the owner of that factory would probably operate more profitably by producing 10 million shirts annually than by producing only a million shirts. By producing the larger number of shirts, the cost of building the factory is spread over more shirts, so that the "factory-cost" portion of each shirt is 10 cents. If, however, the factory produced only 1 million shirts, spreading the cost of building the factory over this smaller output would mean that the "factory-cost" portion of each shirt is $1. In short, large-scale production often lowers product cost. And competition among large-scale producers lowers the prices that consumers must pay.

Allowing producers to grow large enough to exploit economies of scale is important to economic growth and consumer well-being. The railroad, the telegraph and the telephone -- by enhancing each producer's potential to serve ever-greater numbers of customers -- promoted such growth. Obviously, not all goods and services are produced on a large scale. Some things can be produced only on a small scale. For example, personal therapy. Other things might be produced on a small scale simply because consumers prefer it that way: If every consumer insisted that his shirt be hand-stitched and custom made, the opportunity for profitably producing shirts on a large scale would disappear. Shirts would be more costly to produce and, hence, would sell at higher prices. If consumers chose this option, though, we must conclude that the value to consumers of wearing custom-made shirts is greater that the value of the money they'd save by purchasing mass-produced shirts. Consumers are not worse off if they choose to buy more-expensive custom-made shirts.

But suppose customers would prefer to buy less-expensive shirts produced on a large scale (rather than higher-priced custom-made shirts). Clearly, if government forces consumers nevertheless to buy custom-made shirts they are made worse off. True, consumers get better shirts but they also pay more than they want to pay.

If you think that government would never force consumers to buy "boutique" products when consumers would prefer to buy mass-produced products, you're mistaken. In a new paper -- "Market Fragmenting Regulation: Why Gasoline Costs So Much (and Why it's Going to Cost Even More)" -- University of Illinois law professor Andrew Morriss and Mercatus Center scholar Nathaniel Stewart show that much of the recent rise in the price of gasoline at the pump was caused by regulations that obstruct oil-producers' abilities to produce and distribute gasoline on a large scale.

Although government started interfering significantly in the oil market in the early 20th century, Morriss and Stewart find that beginning only in the late 1980s did the EPA and state and local governments launch unprecedented requirements on how fuel is formulated: "These fuel requirements added a set of constraints to refinery operation and transportation of fuels." Significantly, "Through various State Implementation Plans (SIPs), state and local governments also imposed restrictions on gasolines sold in their jurisdictions. Although there is no comprehensive list of formulations mandated by all levels of government, there appear to be at least seventeen different formulations -- a major increase from the single standard (the lead standard) in place in the mid-1980s. In addition, some state and local governments have imposed 'biofuel' requirements."

The consequence? What would have been a national market in gasoline now is a fragmented market. Refiners are unable to take advantages of economies of scale. Consumers are denied the lowest possible prices for gasoline.

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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ADDLED GORE: CIGARETTE SMOKING 'SIGNIFICANT' CONTRIBUTOR TO GLOBAL WARMING

So is he -- or: How to win the smokers' vote in one easy lesson. Another example of environmentalism being used to attack people you don't like

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore warned hundreds of U.N. diplomats and staff on Thursday evening about the perils of climate change, claiming: Cigarette smoking is a "significant contributor to global warming!"

Gore, who was introduced by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said the world faces a "full-scale climate emergency that threatens the future of civilization on earth." Gore showed computer-generated projections of ocean water rushing in to submerge the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, parts of China, India and other nations, should ice shelves in Antarctica or Greenland melt and slip into the sea. "The planet itself will do nicely, thank you very much what is at risk is human civilization," Gore said. After a series of Q& A with the audience, which had little to do with global warming and more about his political future, Annan bid "adios" to Gore.

Then, Gore had his staff opened a stack of cardboard boxes to begin selling his new book, "An Inconvenient Truth, The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It," $19.95, to the U.N. diplomats.

Source




Greens 'aid destruction of planet'

(What fun!)

Environmental groups are setting back the fight against global warming with misguided and irrational objections to nuclear power, according to Britain’s leading thinker about the future. Climate change will be the greatest of many significant challenges for humanity over the next century, and every tool available, including nuclear energy, will be needed to prevent it wrecking the planet, James Martin told The Times.

While the anti-nuclear campaign is well-intentioned, it fundamentally misunderstands the safety of the latest generation of reactors and threatens to hold back a technology that could be critical to the world’s future, he said.

The criticism of groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth by Dr Martin, a computer scientist and physicist, will be keenly felt as he is himself a prominent green who has spent much of his large IT and publishing fortune on research into global warming and environmental science. Last year, he donated £60 million to the University of Oxford to found the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation, the first school of its kind dedicated to studying problems of the future such as climate change and emerging technologies.

Though nuclear power generates very low carbon emissions, most green lobby groups are opposed to it because of the problem of disposing of waste that remains radioactive for thousands of years, and the risks of an accident.

In The Meaning of the 21st Century, his new book published today, he names climate change as the greatest challenge currently facing humanity, and openly endorses nuclear power as part of the solution. The “fourth-generation” nuclear plants that could be built now are profoundly different from older designs, with safety features that make meltdown impossible, low waste output, and fuel that is not suitable for bombs, Dr Martin said.

He is keen on the pebble bed reactor, an experimental South African and Chinese design, in which the fuel is incapable of melting. A prototype has been built in Beijing. “With the pebble bed reactor, the fuel is easily disposed of, and it can be divorced absolutely from the bomb industry,” he said. Green critics of nuclear power, he said, are delaying adoption of this technology. “I think they are misguided. South Africa would have had a pebble bed reactor running by now if it hadn’t been for Greenpeace.”

His book sets out a number of grand challenges for the next 100 years. While the greatest of these is global warming, he also lists water shortages, which will lead to wars, the loss of global biodiversity, terrorism, diseases such as pandemic flu and HIV/Aids, and the emergence of biotechnology and artificial intelligence that could change the fundamental nature of humanity.

Nathan Argent, a Greenpeace spokesman, said: “While the fourth generation of reactors produce less waste by volume, they produce more of the most radioactive and long-lived waste, and there is still no safe way of dealing with this. We argue that the better way to tackle climate change is to decentralise power generation and make it more efficient.”

Source




Bans on useful shopping bags are wasteful and pointless



In the hairshirt fashion houses of modern environment policy there are many labels but few emblems. In the 1980s it was nuclear disarmament. In the '90s it was recycling. But for true retail environmentalism, these days it's hard to go past the plastic bag. If black is the new black, plastic bags are the new cause celebre. In seemingly Orwellian fashion they are now no longer just a couple of grams of super-convenient plastic, but stand accused of killing marine wildlife in their hundreds of thousands, wreaking havoc across the oceans and choking our rivers, zoos and possibly even troubling our livestock. Apparently they are everywhere in their ubiquitous billions. Plastic bags have become an emergency that must be stopped.

In July the Victorian Government announced just that. Describing them as "a symbol of our inefficient use of resources", the Government banned free plastic bags from 2009, a headline act in its 90-page sustainability action statement. The statement claimed about 10 million of these shopping bags "become litter that endanger the health of marine wildlife, damage property through clogged drains and machinery and detract from the beauty of our environment". "Giving consumers incentives and stronger choices to 'say no to plastic bags' is a way we can all contribute to environmental sustainability - in itself a small action but important in developing a more sustainable culture in Victoria."

The action may indeed be small but the impact of such a ban certainly has not been. What the Victorian statement conveniently excluded was the evidence before the Government before its announcement that such a ban would be every bit as wasteful as the bags themselves. In May, the Productivity Commission released its much anticipated draft report on waste generation and resource efficiency in Australia. In this report it warned that enforcing bans on plastic bags must be based on rigorous cost-benefit analysis. In plainer words, the commission said if a government imposed the largely hidden costs of this kind of blunt regulation, then it needed to demonstrate that such costs were worth it, and that the action taken was the most effective and efficient way of achieving the stated objective.

A year earlier, all environment ministers in Australia - the Environment Protection and Heritage Council - had commissioned just such analysis. Respected economists Allen Consulting reported back to them in June, and the numbers on a ban didn't look good. The report found that even with generous definitions of environmental hazard for plastic bags, the cost of imposing various types of bans and other similar mechanisms was still about four times greater than the environmental benefit. They estimated the cost of a national ban would be as high as $1.4 billion over 10 years through a range of retail costs including slower checkouts and other indirect costs borne by retailers. These are effectively the same as a tax on consumers as retailers pass the costs on in higher prices.

The key point made in the report was not that nothing should be done to address the environmental impacts that plastic bag litter might cause, but that banning all or most bags to target the estimated 0.8 per cent of bags causing the problem was a pretty brutal and indirect way of going about it, like banning all cars to cut air pollution. It is hardly surprising, then, that a number of state governments reportedly fought to block the release of the Allen report, which was finally released to the public in September.

Under increasing pressure from government, retailers eventually introduced a voluntary program to reduce plastic bag use and began selling the lurid green polypropylene reusable bags with considerable success, cutting bag use by 46 per cent in three years. This was only just shy of the agreed 50 per cent target by 2005, but clearly not good enough for the Victorian Government. Victorian Opposition spokesman David Davis estimates the Victorian ban will cost $106 million a year. "Instead of advancing the co-operative approach the state Government has chosen to use a powerful stick that will add costs for consumers," he says. Despite his concerns, the political cachet of being tough on plastic bags was undeniable: "We didn't oppose the bill but we did express great doubt about this aspect."

The Victorian ban had no regulatory impact statement, no supporting evidence that the move was based on anything more than green political opportunism. The scientific evidence of the environmental impact of plastic bags is mostly anecdotal and flagrantly thin. The seminal report in Australia was completed in 2002 and is, by its own admission, based in many parts on nothing more than educated guesses simply because of the vacuum of credible, documented science.

Plastic bags have two environmental impacts: the resources used to make them; and their impact in the litter stream. Each bag weights about 2g, but like an ant can carry more than a thousand times its weight. Because they are so light they make a relatively tiny dent on landfill and resource use: only about 0.2 per cent of solid waste in Australia. A typical car return trip to a supermarket consumes about the same energy as nearly 100 bags.

On the litter side the claims are more outrageous. Environmental branding and marketing company Planet Ark has been one of the primary megaphones of the "plastic bags are evil" message, claiming they kill at least 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles every year. This claim, which has been proudly recycled by politicians and activists across Australia, is based on a single study - from Canada, more than 20 years ago. Planet Ark director Jon Dee claims to have countless anecdotes of landfills hiring people to pick up plastic bags, farmers complaining about their livestock dying from plastic bags and negative reports from zoos, wildlife rescuers and litter groups. He has even seen the footage of a Bryde's whale that died on the beach near Cairns in 2000 after reportedly ingesting 6cum of plastic.

"It's nearly impossible to measure how big the problem is," he says. He's right, but without the exclamation mark. The more sober independent study from 2002 had this to say about such reports: "Actual numbers of animals injured or killed annually by plastic bag litter is obviously nearly impossible to determine. Despite this lack of reliable data, the potential for plastic shopping bags to injure marine wildlife is real and of a high concern to Australians. Measures to reduce the littering of bags, other plastic film and other packaging should be a high priority."

Reducing the risk of such a hazard to ocean wildlife and other animals is an agreed and noble idea. That's not the problem. The vacuum of credible data allows a near hysterical debate to rage, which risks distorting policy from problem. There is no reliable data on the total size of the litter stream in Australia. For the purpose of the exercise, the consultants made an educated guess that between 50 and 80million plastic bags end up as litter annually. Truth is they have no idea. The bags come from a variety of sources including bags blown from landfills, bags re-used in public places and then left behind, and bags inadvertently littered from places such as street bins. This is curious because the proposed Victorian ban from 2009 targets bags from supermarkets but proposes exemptions for small retailers. The places where most of the at-litter-risk bags are likely to be coming from will be exempted from the ban, while those at low risk will be targeted.

What this research actually flags is that the trouble with plastic bags is they are a victim of their own success. They are light, strong, versatile be it as a bin liner, temporary storage device or dog's poop scooper. Because the bags are so versatile, households continue to store them rather than discard them. About 60 per cent of bags are estimated to be re-used before disposal. Most councils will not accept them in kerbside recycling systems because they can only be recycled if packed in tight with 100 other plastic bags and not wrapped conveniently around wine bottles and milk cartons. And so they continue to breed in kitchen-sink cupboards across the country. Tim Grant from the Centre for Design at RMIT University thinks most households respond more to the immediate sense of waste in their homes than have some greater awareness of potential risk to marine wildlife. "People are coming from that resource aspect rather than being overly concerned about litter," he says.

Federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell thinks the voluntary approach has been working and believes Australians and their state governments should persist with it. He would also like to see the development of degradable bags to further reduce the littering of plastic bags rather than a mix of populist state taxes, bans and levies. "We should be very proud of what we have achieved with a voluntary approach and just keep the momentum going. The practical way to get plastic bags out of the litter stream is to replace them with a degradable alternative," Campbell says. "If I had a billion dollars to spend over the next 10 years I'd rather spend it on climate change than on a more marginal environmental issue like plastic bags. We have limited resources in this country and we need a rational debate on this sort of issue that considers all the costs and benefits."

Degradable bags sound a great solution, but there are complications. First, the bags are still resource-intense. Second, there are discrete types of degradation - in water, in the earth and in sunlight. If marine wildlife is the primary concern then water-degrading bags may be best suited, while reducing land-born litter would favour light-degrading bags. One size does not fit all.

Clean Up Australia chairman Ian Kiernan also supports a continuation of the existing voluntary approach, which has delivered a significant reduction in plastic bag use through effective community engagement. "To then go and whack a 10c levy on them and punish them is not equitable," he says.

Other state governments, including NSW and South Australia, are looking at similar measures to Victoria's, with the issue to be revisited at the next EPHC meeting in November. A spokesman for NSW Environment Minister Bob Debus says considering the different cost options to reduce plastic bags is "part of the debate we have to have" about plastic bag management. "We know that there is strong feeling in the community for a reduction in plastic bag use," the spokesman says. The Victorian bans are big on political symbolism but dangerously thin on actually addressing the problems at hand. A more considered approach might have looked at more direct strategies that specifically addressed the main environmental threats of plastic bags for a much lower cost. After all, that's what cost-benefit means.

Australia faces a wide range of serious environmental challenges. Climate change, water management and the continued protection of biodiversity are chief among them. The plastic bag problem sits in the shallow end. It remains an issue anchored in symbolism and amplified by its physical tangibility to the public rather than the scale of its environmental impact.

Source





ECONOMISTS REMAIN DIVIDED OVER COSTS AND BENEFITS OF GLOBAL WARMING

Will the spending needed to prevent global warming cost the world more than just sitting back, or even enjoying the possible financial benefits of a hotter planet? Economists are divided over that cold financial calculation in the week ahead of a major report on the issue to be presented to ministers of the world's leading nations. Some want action now to curb climate-changing emissions, saying that will cost little today but more if we delay, while others urge a slower approach, saying uncontrolled climate change will cost little or nothing in the short-term.

The report by UK government scientist Nicholas Stern to the G8 nations and major emerging countries including China, India and Brazil, may favour the first argument, according to some sources who contributed to it. Also in that camp is Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz. "The net cost (of taking action) is even potentially negative but certainly is not very significant," said Stiglitz. Financial benefits, or negative costs, occur from energy efficiency savings. "We need to start doing something now," Stiglitz said. "There is a risk of very rapid climate change."

Robert Mendelsohn, professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, argues that such negative costs may still be less than the benefits. He sees a net global warming bonus in the near-term, as higher farming yields in northern countries offsets damage elsewhere, especially in Africa. "In that sense it doesn't make sense to spend money right now," Mendelsohn said, adding that beyond 2050 and a 2 degrees celsius rise the damage and need for action grows. He added that he does not cost species extinctions and health effects, and only crudely measures the cost of island inundations.

Richard Tol, Senior Research Officer at Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute, has a similar stance. "(My damage estimate) does hide some things that some people will get very upset about," Tol said. "From an economic perspective small island states are so tiny and people are moving out of there anyway." As an example Tol estimates the welfare loss of the Maldives submerging at three times the inhabitants' annual salaries, in addition to the 100 percent loss of the country's GDP. Citizens are happy to value the preservation of the global ecosystem at a cost of 50 euros per person per year, Tol says, but added he does not factor in the risk of rapid sea level rise.

A third camp treats with suspicion both cost and damage estimates, fearing they could be huge underestimates. "I worry that existing damage estimates have little to do with what we'll actually see," said John Reilly, senior research scientist at MIT. "They do not really value the widespread ecological changes that are likely to occur." A particular concern is the cost of runaway climate change, where temperature rises spin out of control, and which could trigger knock-on disasters like conflicts, or sudden sea level rise which could wipe out part or whole countries like the Netherlands, Egypt and Bangladesh.

On the costs of policies, the concern is of over-optimistic assumptions about the update of new clean energy technologies, with recent oil price hikes, for example, spurring less adoption impact than some had expected. The annual costs of tackling climate change escalate rapidly the tougher the action. Reilly estimates the cost of staying within a 3 degrees temperature rise at 2 percent of global GDP in 2100, but at some 8 to 10 percent of GDP to stay under 2 degrees -- or some $25 trillion in 2100 money -- seen as a danger threshold.

Mendelsohn estimated that the top end of possible temperature rises, nearly 6 degrees, would cost up to 2 percent of GDP in 2100. Britain's Stern will present his findings to ministers in Mexico next week, a month before countries start talks -- expected to last years -- on a successor to take the Kyoto protocol beyond 2012.

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.

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

HYDROGEN BREAKTHROUGH

With fears for the environment growing and the price of fossil fuels rising, a team of Israeli researchers working in Israel and the US is working on a new emission-free method to run your car - with water. Water may seem like an unlikely source of fuel, but in fact it is full of hydrogen - a gas that many experts believe can be used in future to power internal combustion engines and generate electricity. The only problem with hydrogen, however, is that production of the flammable gas is inefficient, expensive and environmentally unfriendly, as well as being extremely difficult to store and transport.

Dr. Tareq Abu-Hamed, an Israeli scientist currently at the University of Minnesota, and colleagues, Professor Jacob Karni, and Michael Epstein, head of the Solar Facility at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, have developed a new method to produce hydrogen fuel cheaply, efficiently and safely while at the same time addressing current onboard storage or transportation problems. The scientists use the element boron, a lightweight semi-metallic element, to react with water to produce hydrogen that can be burnt in an internal combustion engine or fed to a fuel cell to generate electricity. The goal is to create hydrogen on demand - enough hydrogen to match the needs of the car's engine. "Boron and water can be stored separately in two containers. Mixing them in a controlled fashion will release hydrogen as demanded by the engine," says Abu-Hamed.

According to the New Scientist, today's hydrogen-fuelled cars rely on stocks of gas produced in centralized plants and distributed in either liquefied or compressed form via refueling stations. Liquefaction takes about 40 percent of the energy content of the stored hydrogen, while the energy density of the gas, even when compressed, is so low that it is unlikely to ever be able to fuel a normal car. Hydrogen-on-demand removes the need for costly hydrogen pipelines and distribution infrastructure, and also makes hydrogen vehicles safer, the New Scientist adds.

According to Abu-Hamed, an Israeli Arab from east Jerusalem, there are no CO2 emissions from this process. The only by-product is boron oxide, which can be removed from the car, and converted back into boron for re-use. Abu-Hamed is now working on an innovative new method of doing just this in a solar-powered plant. Abu-Hamed and his team estimate that to create the same energy content as a 10 gallon tank of gasoline, the car would have to carry 40 pounds of boron and 12 gallons of water. Together they would produce 11 pounds of hydrogen - enough to fuel an average car for 220 miles. While Abu-Hamed's work is still only at research stage, a functioning prototype is expected by 2009, and Abu-Hamed believes that efforts to commercialize the technology will begin in the next one to two years...

One of the problems with this method is that boron is expensive, but Abu-Hamed believes that the use of solar energy to recycle the boron, will reduce costs substantially...

More here




GREEN JETSETTERS

They are the green jetsetters - environmental campaigners who are leading the fight to restrict aviation and cut greenhouse gas emissions, but who also clock up hundreds of thousands of miles flying around the world on business and pleasure. In the past year the directors and chief executives of groups such as WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Soil Association have crisscrossed the globe, visiting the Falklands, Japan, Africa and Brazil. All are running high-profile campaigns to persuade people to change their lifestyles and cut emissions of carbon dioxide.

George Monbiot, a leading environmentalist, said this weekend he was "very disappointed - especially if they are flying on holiday". Heat, Monbiot's new book on climate change, warns of disastrous temperature rises unless western countries cut carbon emissions by 90% by 2030, meaning a virtual end to flying.

Among those with the highest air miles is Bob Napier, chief executive of WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund, one of the best-known environment groups. In the past 12 months he has visited Spitsbergen, Borneo, Washington, Geneva, and Beijing on business trips and taken a holiday in the Falklands, generating more than 11 tons of carbon dioxide. A typical British household creates about six tons of CO2 a year. Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, flew to Malaysia, South Africa, and Amsterdam on business and took his family on holiday to Slovakia in the past year. This weekend he is on a business trip to Nigeria. His trips are estimated to have generated at least eight tons of CO2. "This is the dilemma faced by all international organisations, including green ones," said Juniper. "We do all we can to cut travel but we need to do some flying to make decisions." Aviation generates about 5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions but their warming effect is up to four times greater at high altitudes.

Graham Wynne, chief executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, says he was acutely aware of such issues when he made business trips to Indonesia, Washington and Scotland over the past year, clocking up more than five tons of CO2. He also takes occasional holidays to New Zealand.

Next month the RSPB will bus hundreds of supporters to a rally in Trafalgar Square against climate change."There are a lot of contradictions like these which organisations like ours have to solve," said Wynne. Other "green" leaders share such concerns. All of those interviewed had imposed "green" measures on their families and organisations, including encouraging staff to walk to work, installing low-energy light bulbs and insulating their homes.

Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, who has flown this year to Japan, America (twice) and four European destinations, generating about six tons of CO2, said: "I am deeply concerned about my flying. I am campaigning for a solution but I am still part of the problem." Such conflicts are also found in Greenpeace, which recently helped organise a runway blockade at Nottingham East Midlands airport. John Sauven, the group's campaigns director, has flown his family on holiday to Italy and taken a business trip to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil (total emissions, three tons).

More here





The two worlds of oil

In 1980 most experts agreed that oil prices could only go up. Following the panic of the Iranian revolution, the price spiked to more than $80 a barrel adjusted for inflation. I gained some notoriety at the time by publishing an article with William Brown, a Hudson Institute colleague, in the Wall Street Journal predicting that oil prices would fall in 1980 and that the 1980s would be a decade of decreasing, not increasing, oil prices. Indeed, the price fell sharply in 1980 and by the late 1980s the price had fallen to around $30 a barrel, and it dipped to around $20 in the late 90s.

Today there is a great chorus, in which New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's voice stands out, calling upon the United States and other nations to radically reduce their oil consumption because, as Friedman and others contend, the world will soon run out. In the mean time, they say, our continued dependence on (or "addiction to") oil means a continued dependence on oil exporting countries--so many of which are run by less than democratic governments--and high energy prices of $70 a barrel, or more. But a deeper understanding of the supply side and a longer term perspective of demand produces a different view. Between now and the middle of the century $30 is likely to be more typical of the price of a barrel of oil than $60. Most of the time sellers will be competing for buyers, not pushing them around. And the Arabs are likely to have a smaller share of the market in the future, not a larger one. Before long the fear of Arab oil power is likely to seem unimaginably dated.

Two factors influence oil prices. First is the amount of oil in the ground. Second is the capacity of oil production and transportation facilities. Too few wells and pipelines create oil shortages, and therefore high prices, regardless of how much oil there is in the ground. For our purposes, "oil in the ground" refers to oil that investors think they can bring to market for less than $20 a barrel if things go near enough to plan. Capacity, on the other hand, refers to every element of the process from extraction to delivery, including the production of equipment associated with each element of that process.

So how much oil is out there waiting to be discovered? Chevron Corporation has been buying advertisements claiming that, "The world consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel discovered." Fortunately Chevron is only speaking the truth if you use an artificial definition of how much oil is being discovered. For example, Canada is now estimated to have 150 billion barrels of recoverable oil in their tarsands. Twenty years ago we couldn't produce that oil at competitive costs. Now we are producing a million barrels/day at a cost of about $15 each. In effect we have "discovered" 150 billion barrels of oil in Canada--more than the entire world used in the last five years--which Chevron doesn't count.

There are other potentially large additions to world oil resources. According to Leigh Price, an expert on oil deposits who died in 2000, there are over 200 billion barrels in the Bakken "oil play" in Montana and North Dakota. It is not yet clear whether Price's theory is correct, but recently a number of drillers have started producing oil from that deposit, which is not even included in standard estimates of oil reserves. Bakken might not turn out to be as significant as Price expected, but the larger point remains: A number of potential sources exist. Recently an Israeli claimed to have discovered how to economically produce oil from oil shale. Since such claims have been made for more than twenty years, we can't put too much faith in this announcement. But there is no reason to assume that we won't solve this problem in the future. There are hundreds of billions of barrels of shale oil in Colorado and probably as much in other parts of the world.

There are two ways to discover oil. One is the conventional way--drilling to find new deposits of the same kind as we produced before. The other is to develop new technologies that either allow us to retrieve oil from formerly out of reach places, or economically recover oil from deposits where extraction is currently too expensive. The net result is that the known available oil supply in the ground today is larger than it was 20 years ago, or 50 years ago, despite all the oil we have taken out of the ground and burned. Despite this experience, the oil supply in the ground 20 years from now may not be larger than it is today. No one can say either way with any certainty. Still, today, as in the past, oil investors find myriad opportunities to seek oil that is expected to be delivered at a cost of $20 a barrel or less. Therefore we can be relatively certain that present high prices are not the result of a lack of oil in the ground.

Since lack of oil in the ground isn't to blame for current high prices, these prices must be a product of insufficient production equipment. There is no shortage of iron or other raw materials used to build drilling rigs, pipelines, and other necessary equipment, so we can produce as much oil production equipment as we want. Why don't we have enough of it? The answer is easy: It's expensive and the manufacturing process is long. Operators don't buy oil production equipment if they don't think they'll need it. If producers buy more production capacity than they need, supply becomes too high, the price goes down, and producers aren't able to sell as much as they anticipated. The problem is predicting demand 5 or 10 years ahead of time. High prices are the result of producers underestimating the need for oil; low prices are the result of producers overestimating the need for oil. And the difficulty of estimating the future demand is shown by the wild fluctuation of prices.

This is where all the talk about excess demand from China and the "failure to conserve" comes into the picture. Some critics say we don't have enough oil because demand has been rising too rapidly. Global demand has been rising, but only about 2.5 percent per year including China, which uses only 8 percent of the world's oil. What's more, nothing prevented producers from increasing oil production facilities faster than the demand for oil increased.

Even if demand doesn't increase at all, new wells must be drilled to replace older wells with decreasing production. Therefore an oil shortage can occur with no increase in demand. The world now has high oil prices using about 84 million barrels per day. We could reduce our use to 60 million barrels a day and again have high prices if a lack of investment failed to maintain production capacity. Or, as I predict, a few years from now we will have ample production capacity and lower prices at a consumption rate of 90 million barrels a day.

No matter how much oil is consumed--whether the amount is more or less than today--we can have high prices and shortages if there is not enough production equipment. Or, if enough equipment has been produced, we can have a favorable balance of supply and demand and moderate or low oil prices. This will be true until there is not enough oil in the ground--but there is no hard evidence of such a shortage, only theories.

Let's put all this together in a scenario for the future. Here is my prediction of what might very well happen, although many other scenarios are also possible: The basic price of oil for the next 50 years will be about $30 a barrel. Some of the time it will be higher, but I would bet that a lot of the time it will be lower. The key point is that any investments made in oil or oil substitutes that depend on oil prices staying well above $30 a barrel stand a good chance of losing money. They are imprudent, risky investments--although nobody can say for sure that they won't pay off.

In the long run price depends on the balance between demand and the amount of oil in the ground and the cost of getting it out. My guess about flat average oil prices--lower than now, but higher than average prices over the past 70 years--is based on another guess: that consumption will grow by a couple of percentage points a year until about 2025, when autos that burn hydrogen made from natural gas will begin to significantly reduce oil consumption for transportation. Demand growth will then slow, and gradually stop. Beginning around the middle of this century, world population will begin slowly declining. Even though gross world product will keep on rising--because we will get richer faster than population declines--oil consumption will be close to flat. In brief, my guess is that mid-century oil production will be between 120 and 150 million barrels per day with a price of approximately $30 per barrel.

To some extent, this conclusion is based on the fact that the price of almost all minerals taken from the ground has consistently decreased--despite increased demand. The best bet is that at the end of the 21st century we will pay much less for minerals and for raw agricultural products like wheat, corn, and rice than we do today. But oil may prove the exception. On the basis of historical experience and the broadest perspective of geology and technology, my projections represent a plausible scenario. There are other plausible scenarios, too. But there is no reason to believe those who say we are doomed to oil shortages and high prices; or that oil will certainly become more and more scarce; or that, in the long run, it is foolish and dangerous to rely on oil; and that we must take drastic measures to change our use of energy. Any measures we take to reduce oil consumption in the next few years should be based on the assumption that such measures may not be needed over the long term. With that in mind, our first priority should be finding better solutions to the short-term problems, such as increased storage

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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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Schwarzenegger signs greenhouse cap

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation yesterday that imposes the nation's first cap on greenhouse gas emissions and challenges Californians to temper energy consumption. The measure, aimed at curbing global warming, is expected to have political and practical implications, from increasing pressure for federal action from the Bush administration to accelerating new technologies that could deliver fuel-saving cars, power plants, refineries and factories. "It will begin a bold new era of environmental protection in California that will change the course of history," the Republican governor said during a bill-signing ceremony in San Francisco. It was attended by a bipartisan cast of political luminaries - and British Prime Minister Tony Blair via satellite. Schwarzenegger held a similar event later in Malibu.

The legislation, sponsored by Democratic lawmakers, requires a gradual rollback of greenhouse gas emissions, widely believed to be the primary culprit for the gradual warming of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans. At the same time, the state will launch an emissions market for businesses to buy and sell pollution credits, a potential moneymaker for innovators and a possible buoy for those companies that cannot economically or technologically meet the looming cap. Future governors will be given the authority to temporarily pull the plug on regulations during economic calamity - a central concession to industry.

Business interests are putting together a wish list of additional concessions they say are vital to keep companies from fleeing to other states, where they will not be bound by tighter restrictions. Industry plans to ask the governor and lawmakers to exempt investments in fuel-saving equipment from the sales tax. "It is the immediate initial barrier to modernization," said Dorothy Rothrock, representing the California Manufacturers and Technology Association.

Although not taking a position on the sales tax proposal, Schwarzenegger has dismissed complaints that Assembly Bill 32 will be a drag on California's economy and drive companies out of the state. "In fact, we will create a whole new industry that will pump up our economy - a clean-tech industry that creates jobs, sparks new cutting-edge technology and is a model for the rest of the nation," he said.

Allan Zaremberg, president of the California Chamber of Commerce, said he remains concerned that the new regulations could cause harm, particularly with a possible spike in energy prices. "We want to make sure that the businesses which spring up to meet the demand for new energy technologies do more than just sell them to California," he said in a prepared statement. "We want those businesses to locate here, employ Californians and provide revenues for the state." .....

Californians will not see immediate change, but cars and everyday appliances will evolve as the state's regulations take hold in 2012. "Ultimately, it's about the fuel you burn and the electricity you consume," said Catherine Witherspoon, executive officer of the California Air Resources Board, the agency charged with developing the regulations. Witherspoon does not see an economic earthquake rolling across the state. "The savings will be in the power plants you don't have to build and the fuels you don't have to burn," is her message to companies.

More here





MEDIA DISTORTIONS

Senator Inhofe responds to the media coverage of his earler speech

This past Monday, I took to this floor for the eighth time to discuss global warming. My speech focused on the myths surrounding global warming and how our national news media has embarrassed itself with a 100-year documented legacy of coverage on what turned out to be trendy climate science theories.

Over the last century, the media has flip-flopped between global cooling and warming scares. At the turn of the 20th century, the media peddled an upcoming ice age -- and they said the world was coming to an end. Then in the 1930s, the alarm was raised about disaster from global warming -- and they said the world was coming to an end. Then in the 70's, an alarm for another ice age was raised -- and they said the world was coming to an end. And now, today we are back to fears of catastrophic global warming -- and again they are saying the world is coming to an end. Today I would like to share the fascinating events that have unfolded since my floor speech on Monday.

CNN CRITICIZES MY SPEECH

This morning, CNN ran a segment criticizing my speech on global warming and attempted to refute the scientific evidence I presented to counter climate fears. First off, CNN reporter Miles O'Brien inaccurately claimed I was "too busy" to appear on his program this week to discuss my 50 minute floor speech on global warming. But they were told I simply was not available on Tuesday or Wednesday. I did appear on another CNN program today -- Thursday -- which I hope everyone will watch. The segment airs tonight on CNN's Glenn Beck Show on Headline News at 7pm and repeats at 9pm and midnight Eastern.

Second, CNN's O'Brien falsely claimed that I was all "alone on Capitol Hill" when it comes to questioning global warming. Mr. O'Brien is obviously not aware that the U.S. Senate has overwhelmingly rejected Kyoto style carbon caps when it voted down the McCain-Lieberman climate bill 60-28 last year - an even larger margin than its rejection in 2003.

Third, CNN's O'Brien, claimed that my speech earlier contained errors regarding climate science. O'Brien said my claim that the Antarctic was actually cooling and gaining ice was incorrect. But both the journals Science and Nature have published studies recently finding - on balance - Antarctica is both cooling and gaining ice.

CNN's O'Brien also criticized me for saying polar bears are thriving in the Arctic. But he ignored that the person I was quoting is intimately familiar with the health of polar bear populations. Let me repeat what biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the Arctic government of Nunavut, a territory of Canada, said recently: "Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present." CNN's O'Brien also ignores the fact that in the Arctic, temperatures were warmer in the 1930's than today.

O'Brien also claimed that the "Hockey Stick" temperature graph was supported by most climate scientists despite the fact that the National Academy of Sciences and many independent experts have made it clear that the Hockey Stick's claim that the 1990's was the hottest decade of the last 1000 years was unsupportable.

So it seems my speech struck a nerve with the mainstream media. Their only response was to cherry pick the science in a failed attempt to refute me. It seems that it is business as usual for many of them. Sadly, it looks like my challenge to the media to be objective and balanced has fallen on deaf ears.

SPEECH BYPASSED THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Despite the traditional media's failed attempt to dismiss the science I presented to counter global warming alarmism, the American people bypassed the tired old traditional media by watching CSPAN or clicking on the Drudge Report and reading the speech online. From the flood of overwhelming positive feedback I received, I can tell you the American people responded enthusiastically to my message. The central theme was not only one of thanks, but expressing frustration with the major media outlets because they knew in their guts that what they have been hearing in the news was false and misleading. Here is a brief sampling:

Janet of Saugus, Massachusetts: "Thank you Senator Inhofe. Finally someone with the guts to stand up and call it what it is -- a sham. I think you have taken over Toby Keith's place as my favorite Oklahoman!!"

Al of Clinton, Connecticut writes: "It's about time someone with a loud microphone spoke up on the global warming scam. You have courage - if only this message could get into the schools where kids are being brow-beaten with the fear message almost daily."

Kevin of Jacksonville, Florida writes: "I'm so glad that we have leaders like you who are willing to stand up against the onslaught of liberal media, Hollywood and the foolish elected officials on this topic. Please keep up the fight!"

Steven of Phoenix, Arizona writes: "As a scientist, I am extremely pleased to see that there is at least one member of congress who recognizes the global warming hysteria for what it is. I am extremely impressed by the Senator's summary and wish he was running for President."

Craig of Grand Rapids, Michigan writes: "As a meteorologist I strongly agree with everything you said."

My speech ignited an internet firestorm. So much so, that my speech became the subject of a heated media controversy in New Zealand. Halfway across the globe, a top official from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition challenged New Zealand's television station to balance what he termed "alarmist doom-casting" and criticized them for failing to report the views of scientists in their own country that I cited here in America. ( http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0609/S00306.htm )

As the controversy in New Zealand shows, global warming hysteria has captured more than just the American media. The reaction to my speech keeps coming in: Just this morning, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review newspaper wrote an editorial calling my speech "an unusual display of reason" on the Senate floor.

I do have to give credit to another publication, Congressional Quarterly, or CQ for short. On Tuesday, CQ's Toni Johnson took the issues I raised seriously and followed up with phone calls to scientist-turned global warming pop star James Hansen's office. CQ wanted to ask Hansen about his quarter of a million dollar grant from the left-wing Heinz Foundation, whose money originated from the Heinz family ketchup fortune. As I have pointed out, many in the media dwell on any industry support given to so-called climate skeptics, but the same media completely fail to note Hansen's huge grant from the partisan Heinz Foundation. It seems the media makes a distinction between ketchup money and oil money.

But Hansen was unavailable to respond to CQ's questions about the 'Ketchup Money' grant, which is highly unusual for a man who finds his way into the media on an almost daily basis. Mr. Hansen is always available when he is peddling his increasingly dire predictions of climate doom.

ABC NEWS PROMOTES CLIMATE HYSTERIA

I have been engaged in this debate for several years and believe there is a growing backlash of Americans rejecting what they see as climate scare tactics. And as a result, global warming alarmists are becoming increasingly desperate. Perhaps that explains why the very next day after I spoke on the floor, ABC News's Bill Blakemore on Good Morning America prominently featured James Hansen touting future scary climate scenarios that could / might / possibly happen. ABC's "modest" title for the segment was "Will the Earth Become Too Hot? Are Our Children in Danger?"

The segment used all the well worn tactics from the alarmist guidebook -- warning of heat waves, wildfires, droughts, melting glaciers, mass extinctions unless mankind put itself on a starvation energy diet and taxed emissions. But that's no surprise - Blakemore was already on the record declaring "After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such [scientific] debate" about manmade catastrophic global warming. ( http://abcnews.go.com/US/print?id=2374968 )

You have to be a pretty poor investigator to believe that. Why would 60 prominent scientists this last spring have written Canadian Prime Minister Harper that "If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary." ( http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605 ) On Tuesday's program, the ABC News anchor referred to Blakemore as "passionate" about global warming. "Passionate" is one word to describe that kind of reporting, but words like objectivity or balance are not.

I believe it's these kinds of stories which explain why the American public is growing increasingly skeptical of the hype. Despite the enormous 2006 media campaign to instill fear into the public, the number of people who believe that weather naturally changes -- is increasing. A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll in August found that most Americans do not attribute the cause of recent severe weather events to global warming, and the portion of Americans who believe that climate change is due to natural variability has increased over 50% in the last five years. Given the diminishing importance of the mainstream media, I expect that trend to continue.

I hope my other colleagues will join me on the floor and start speaking out to debunk hysteria surrounding global warming. This issue is too important to our generation and future generations to allow distortions and media propaganda to derail the economic health of our nation.

Source





NO EVIDENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING IN SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE?



Spencer and Christy have updated their tools to calculate the tropospheric temperatures between 1979 and the present era from their and NASA's satellite data to a new version 6.0 beta (readme file). The three graphs above show the global average, the Northern Hemisphere, and the Southern Hemisphere. This upgrade is also discussed by Steve McIntyre. If you look at the third graph, you see that there was no warming on the Southern Hemisphere in the last 25 years even though the "global warming theory" and the corresponding models are predicting even faster rise of the tropospheric temperatures than for the surface temperatures. The decadal trend is quantitatively around 0.05 degrees which is noise whose sign can change almost instantly.

Normally, I would think that one should conclude that according to the observations, there is no discernible recent warming on the Southern Hemisphere, and an experimental refutation of a far-reaching hypothesis by a whole hemisphere is a good enough reason to avoid the adjective "global" for the observed warming. Of course, the proponents of the "global warming theory" will use a different logic. The troposphere of the Southern Hemisphere is bribed by the evil oil corporations, and even if it were not, the data from the Southern Hemisphere can't diminish the perfect consensus of all the hemispheres of our blue planet: the debate is over. All the hemispheres of our planet decide equally about the catastrophic global warming, especially the Northern Hemisphere that shows that the warming is truly global and truly cataclysmic. Be worried, be very worried.

James Hansen, one of the fathers of the "global warming theory", has a new paper. When Hansen writes a paper, the media immediately publish hundreds of articles. The present temperatures are warmest in 12,000 or one million years, depending on the source. However, when you open their paper, you see that it looks like one of these jokes propagating through the blogosphere and the authors are kind of comedians.

First of all, most of the paper is dedicated to not-too-substantiated arguments with Michael Crichton. Michael Crichton stated in "State of Fear" as well as the U.S. Congress that Hansen's predictions from a 1988 testimony were wrong by 300 percent: a calculation based on a particular choice of time period and scenarios. Hansen then proposed three scenarios - "A,B,C" - how the temperatures would rise. "A" is a catastrophe in which no action is taken and the emissions continue to rise. "B" involves a peaceful limit in which emissions stabilize around 2000 and the warming is smaller. "C" is the scenario assuming drastic cuts of CO2 emissions.

The result as we know it in 2006? The reality essentially followed the temperatures of the scenario "C" even though the CO2 emissions continued to rise just like in the scenario "A". More details are summarized by Willis E who discusses the content of the figure 2 of the new Hansen paper. Isn't it enough to admit that Hansen was just wrong? If it is not enough, what kind of wrong prediction does he have to make in order for us to know that he has made an error? I just can't understand it.

The new paper contains even crazier assertions - e.g. the present temperature is probably the maximum temperature in the last 12,000 or one million years. This is probably based on the graph 5 on the bottom of page 5 (or 14291) and this graph's data is taken from a completely different paper written by very different authors: Hansen's only role is to hype and politicize their numbers. You see in that graph that since 1870, the oceans' surface temperature was more or less constant and the previous temperature probably can't be trusted, especially not the relative vertical shift of the graph in comparison with the current temperatures.

Even more amusingly, the paper is filled with a lot of completely off-topic comments that indicate that Hansen et al. are unable to focus on rational thinking. When I was reading one of the last sentences, I started to laugh loudly. Hansen et al. criticize the "engineering fixes" of the global climate recently discussed by Paul J. Crutzen, the 1995 Nobel prize winner for chemistry, and Ralph Cicerone, the current president of the National Academy of Sciences. Hansen says that these fixes are "dangerous" because they could diminish the efforts to reduce the CO2 emissions.

That's very funny because this is, indeed, exactly the purpose of these papers - to propose more efficient methods than the most stupid method you can imagine for the hypothetical case that we would ever need to regulate the global climate. The papers are indeed intended to diminish the role of the most uncultivated proposals how to fight with the hypothetical "climate change". As Hansen explains, that's exactly his problem with those papers.

It is very clear that the paper was only written in order to misinterpret another paper, draw media attention (which is guaranteed with Hansen), and make a purely political statement about the programs that are beginning to supersede the naive carbon dioxide cuts - political statements that have nothing do with science - in a scientific journal. Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick's comments on the paper are here. Hansen's reasoning is not too unsimilar to the reasoning of Quantoken.

Incidentally, Crutzen's proposed technology involves artificial volcanos. A major natural volcano eruption can cause 0.2-0.5 degrees of cooling over 2-3 years. Using the favorite technologies of Hansen and Gore - namely stifling the civilization - such a cooling would cost tens of trillions of dollars or many thousands of Virgin corporations. Al Gore would have to fly roughly millions of times to give his prayers for impressionable billionaires - because not all of them would decide in the same way as Branson - and these flights would probably overcompensate the cooling effect anyway.

Source

When we note that there is a far greater human presence in the Northern hemisphere, a point that could be made is that the results discussed above point to the Northern hemisphere being one big "heat island" -- i.e. the temperature rise is a heat artifact, a direct result of human heat generation, not an effect of CO2 emissions

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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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