They call this a consensus?
"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled." So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.
Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.
More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies.
My series set out to profile the dissenters -- those who deny that the science is settled on climate change -- and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world's premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop -- the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.
What of the one claim that we hear over and over again, that 2,000 or 2,500 of the world's top scientists endorse the IPCC position? I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. "The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world," the IPCC Secretariat responded. "The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be on-line in the second half of 2007."
An IPCC reviewer does not assess the IPCC's comprehensive findings. He might only review one small part of one study that later becomes one small input to the published IPCC report. Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused.
A great many scientists, without doubt, are four-square in their support of the IPCC. A great many others are not. A petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine between 1999 and 2001 claimed some 17,800 scientists in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. A more recent indicator comes from the U.S.-based National Registry of Environmental Professionals, an accrediting organization whose 12,000 environmental practitioners have standing with U.S. government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. In a November, 2006, survey of its members, it found that only 59% think human activities are largely responsible for the warming that has occurred, and only 39% make their priority the curbing of carbon emissions. And 71% believe the increase in hurricanes is likely natural, not easily attributed to human activities.
Such diversity of views is also present in the wider scientific community, as seen in the World Federation of Scientists, an organization formed during the Cold War to encourage dialogue among scientists to prevent nuclear catastrophe. The federation, which encompasses many of the world's most eminent scientists and today represents more than 10,000 scientists, now focuses on 15 "planetary emergencies," among them water, soil, food, medicine and biotechnology, and climatic changes. Within climatic changes, there are eight priorities, one being "Possible human influences on climate and on atmospheric composition and chemistry (e.g. increased greenhouse gases and tropospheric ozone)."
Man-made global warming deserves study, the World Federation of Scientists believes, but so do other serious climatic concerns. So do 14 other planetary emergencies. That seems about right.
Source
India in blow to G8 hopes on climate
INDIA has dealt an early blow to hopes that this week's G8 summit will set new greenhouse gas reduction targets, declaring yesterday that it will neither accept a binding emissions cap nor agree to curbs that stunt its economic growth.
Following weekend talks between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Brazil's visiting President Lula de Silva on how to deal with climate change, Indian officials insisted yesterday they would not allow environmental policies to imperil plans to improve the lot of the country's impoverished masses. "We are willing to work in partnership in this process to cut emissions but we cannot accept equal responsibility (for the global mess caused by the industrialised nations)," an Indian official said.
India is one of the world's top polluters, ranked fourth behind the US, China and Russia. However, like China, it argues that the industrialised world is to blame for global warming and must bear the burden of reversing it.
Neither India nor Brazil are members of the G8 but are among five nations invited to the summit at which German Chancellor and current G8 president Angela Merkel will seek agreement for a global reduction in emissions to50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050. China, Mexico and South Africa are the three other non-G8 member states invited to the summit. China and India, with their booming economies and projections for growth, are seen as crucial to any agreement.
But India maintains that its commitment to improving the lot of its people must take precedent over any imperative to help clean up the global mess caused by the world's industrialised nations. With more than 40 per cent of its 1.1 billion people surviving on less than a dollar a day, it is estimated that, if India can maintain current annual growth rates of about 10 per cent, it will still take about 25 years to end poverty.
The country's top environmental official, Pradipto Ghosh, said yesterday that "legally mandated measures for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are likely to have significant adverse effects on the GDP growth of developing countries, including India". Dr Ghosh added that plans to cut back on greenhouse gases could also have "serious implications for our poverty-alleviation programs: this is not the path we want to pursue".
Source
CHINA QUESTIONS EU CLIMATE PLAN
China has said an EU proposal seeking to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius did not have scientific backing and it needed to be studied before it was used to set policy. Ma Kai, director of China's National Development and Reform Commission, which steers climate change policy, told reporters that the EU proposal had not been subjected to proper study. "I fear this lacks a scientific basis," he said of the EU's proposed goal.
China says its response to the threats of climate change must give overriding priority to economic development as the nation seeks to balance ambitions for growth with fears of environmental calamity. The remarks came in China's first national plan on climate change, which sets out the country's broad policies on global warming and greenhouse gas pollution. "The first and overriding priorities of developing countries are sustainable development and poverty eradication," the plan states. "China will continue to actively tackle climate change issues in accordance with its national sustainable development strategy in the future."
The unveiling of Beijing's broad blueprint comes two days before President Hu Jintao attends a meeting of Group of Eight leaders in Germany at which global warming will feature. His country is facing international pressure to spell out targets for taming greenhouse gas emissions, which are trapping more heat in the atmosphere and threatening dangerous climate change.
International contention over emissions is set to intensify as negotiations open on extending a UN treaty on global warming and emissions beyond 2012, when the first phase of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol ends. China and other developing countries signed that treaty, but under current rules they do not have to set goals for emissions. Beijing is willing to strengthen international cooperation on climate change, but any regional cooperation should "complement" the Kyoto Protocol, the UN-sponsored treaty, the Chinese plan says.
US President George W Bush has signalled that he might seek an international agreement on the issue outside the Kyoto framework. "Regional cooperation on climate change, in any form, should function as a helpful complement to the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol rather than replacing or weakening them," China's plan states, referring to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, Kyoto's parent treaty.
Source
BRAZIL REJECTS BUSH MOVE ON CLIMATE CHANGE TALKS
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has flatly rejected President Bush's proposals for parallel global negotiations to combat climate change, insisting that countries come to agreement at the United Nations, and not under US leadership. In a rare interview with a British newspaper, President Lula told the Guardian that Brazil, a fast developing country whose support is critical to a global deal on emission cuts, had not even been informed that Mr Bush was contemplating a new negotiating framework, before the US president made his announcement last Thursday. "The Brazilian position is clear cut," Mr Lula said. "I cannot accept the idea that we have to build another group to discuss the same issues that were discussed in Kyoto and not fulfilled. "If you have a multilateral forum [the UN] that makes a democratic decision ... then we should work to abide by those rules [rather than] simply to say that I do not agree with Kyoto and that I will develop another institution," said Mr Lula, who was in London to watch Friday's England-Brazil international football friendly.
FULL STORY here
GERMANY IN CLIMATE CHANGE DILEMMA
As Chancellor Angela Merkel seeks to convince world leaders to cut greenhouse gases at a G8 summit this week, one of the biggest brown coal-fired power plants ever built is taking shape in this depressed town. Hosting the Group of Eight summit in Heiligendamm, Germany may see itself as a guardian of the environment and sometimes wags a green finger at the rest of the world's efforts to tackle global warming. But residents of this eastern town, where the population has halved since 1990, are delighted by the plant and by a plan to fuel it by re-opening an opencast pit which closed eight years ago.
The plant on the outskirts of Boxberg near the Polish border will emit 4.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year -- as much as 1.5 million cars -- and is one of 26 coal-burning plants due to be built in Germany. "Everyone here is in favor of the new power plant," said Boxberg mayor Roland Trunsch. "The town would have died without it. People went out to protest in the streets to get it built. The CO2 doesn't bother any of us. The jobs are more important."
FULL STORY here
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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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Tuesday, June 05, 2007
Deadly "biofuels"
HE survived decades of Colombia's murderous guerrilla uprisings. He lived through paramilitary purges and steered well clear of the cocaine overlords who swarmed across his rural region. It was something completely different that killed Innocence Dias. He died because the world is turning green.
The global quest for alternative sources of environmentally friendly energy has attracted high-profile support from American politicians, including President George W Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California. Celebrities such as Daryl Hannah, the actress, and Willie Nelson, the country singer, are leading a campaign to promote green fuels. Yet the trend has already had disastrous consequences for tens of thousands of peasants in rural Colombia. A surge in demand for biofuels derived from agricultural products has unleashed a chaotic land grab by a new breed of gangster entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on the world's thirst for palm oil and related bioproducts.
Vast areas of Colombia's tropical forest are being cleared for palm tree plantations. Charities working with local peasants claim that paramilitary forces in league with biofuel conglomerates - some of them financed by US government subsidies - are forcing families off their land with death threats and bogus purchase offers. "The paramilitaries are not subtle when it comes to taking land," said Dominic Nutt, a British specialist with Christian Aid who recently visited Colombia. "They simply visit a community and tell landowners, `If you don't sell to us, we will negotiate with your widow'."
Dias was one of several landowners around the remote settlement of Llano Rico who decided not to abandon his property when the paramilitaries first moved into the area. "My father felt protected because he had a local government position," said his daughter, Milvia Dias, 29. Even when paramilitaries warned the villagers that if they stayed they would be considered left-wing guerrilla sympathisers, Dias refused to be bullied. "He had cattle and land and one day, after all this happened, he went out to fix a hole in one of the farm's fences," his daughter said. He never came back. A search party found him with his throat cut and seven stab wounds in his torso. "We held the funeral at 5pm the same day and we ran away the next morning," said Dias. The land is now covered in palm trees owned by Urapalma, a Colombian enterprise that has repeatedly been accused in court proceedings of improperly invading private property.
Nutt said last week that he had heard stories of paramilitaries cutting off the arms of illiterate peasants and applying their fingerprints to land sale documents. In many cases, Nutt added, the land is collectively owned by indigenous people or Afro-Colombians and protected by federal laws that courts seem unable or unwilling to enforce. There is no reliable estimate of how many thousand acres have been appropriated, or how many of the 3m Colombians who have lost their homes since 1985 were forced out by the palm oil business.
Washington has been struggling for years to persuade Colombian farmers to turn their backs on coca leaf production in favour of other crops. Desperate to find energy alternatives to expensive and politically volatile sources of Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil, Bush is also advocating a global increase in biofuel production.
Alvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia, has urged local palm oil producers to more than double the land they have under cultivation within four years. Uribe's critics complain that he has effectively given a green light to paramilitaries. At a congressional hearing on Colombia last week, Luis Gilberto Murillo-Urrutia, the former governor of Choco province, told a House foreign affairs subcommittee that US trade policy was likely to "generate an expansion of palm oil cultivation in Afro-Colombian territories . . . there is evidence that palm oil companies, taking advantage of the vulnerability of Afro- Colombian people, have been taking over lands illegally".
For Don Enrique Petro, 67, formerly a wealthy landowner from Curvarado, growing international awareness of the human cost of a green conscience has come several years too late. "I arrived in Curvarado 39 years ago with my wife and five sons," he said last week. He bought a patch of jungle and slowly transformed it into a 30-acre spread with 110 cows, 20 bulls and 10 horses.
He lost two sons and a brother to the guerrilla wars and in the early 1990s fled his land for five years. When he returned, he found a right-wing paramilitary group in control. "They said they wanted my land to fight the guerrillas," Petro said. "They were lying. It was so they could grow palm on it and make money." Petro refused to sell up. He claims he was eventually taken prisoner by the paramilitaries and, when released, found his land had been planted with palm trees belonging to Urapalma. The company has denied that it is cooperating with paramilitaries or acquiring land illegally.
The world's demand for alternative fuels is unlikely to diminish, but Nutt argued that biofuel consumers should put pressure on Colombia to return stolen land. Celebrities such as Hannah are beginning to distinguish between palm oil and less controversial biofuels such as ethanol, which is derived mainly from corn. "I want biofuels that are grown and produced in a sustainable manner," said Hannah, who leads a pressure group which is lobbying for US government standards on green fuel production. "I would not buy biodiesel made from palm oil."
Source
Democrats Support Destructive Limits on America's Energy Sector
At today's EPW Committee hearing today, Senate Democrats expressed support for reducing mercury emissions from every power plant by 90 percent. Proponents of this approach generally claim that each power plant should be able to reduce mercury emissions by at least 90 percent, even though this level of reduction is not currently achievable and control technology vendors refuse to guarantee the performance of mercury removal technologies at these stringent levels.
FACT: According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), setting a 90% reduction mandate on mercury would cost up to $358 billion. A 90 percent reduction would result in fuel switching away from coal, which is our most abundant and least costly energy source, to natural gas. Increased reliance on natural gas for electricity generation will further increase prices, seriously impacting the ability of businesses to compete in the global marketplace and of families to pay their utility bills.
Further, like many other pollutants, mercury levels have also come down dramatically. Numerous industries that used to emit high levels of mercury, such as the municipal waste incinerators, have been controlled. The power sector industry is merely the latest industry to be regulated. And the regulations are significant - President Bush's Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR) will reduce power plant mercury emissions by 70 percent. And because the rule acts in coordination with CAMR- which reduces SO2, NOx, and particulate matter - it can be done for $2 billion. That's right - cutting 70% will cost $2 billion, but incrementally increasing that amount to beyond what the technologies can reliably do would cost up to $358 billion.
Finally, draconian mercury mandates fail to address the mercury emissions from outside of the United States. According to the EPA, Asia is responsible for 53 percent of mercury emissions worldwide, and that U.S. power plants contribute only about 1 percent of the mercury in the oceans. In fact, according to EPA, U.S. emissions of mercury were reduced by nearly half, from 1990 to 1999. While we have made great progress in reducing these emissions, they have been offset by increases in emissions from Asia, particularly China.
Source
Mercury concern overblown
Since 1970, we have had tremendous economic growth, and tripled our energy use and vehicle miles traveled. Despite this, instead of tripling our pollution or doubling or even holding it constant, we have cut our pollution levels by more than half. This is a success story that - hard as it is to believe - few people even realize is true.
This gets to the heart of my greatest concern over the mercury debate. Few understand it, and some have preyed upon that lack of understanding. We are literally scaring ourselves to death over mercury. A few years ago, when EPA and the FDA issued a joint advisory on mercury and environmentalists turned up their alarmist rhetoric, tuna consumption plummeted. People became afraid to eat fish because they believed it was bad for them.
Let's be clear: all seafood has some level of mercury - always has and always will. It is an element, pervasive in the environment and bioaccumulative. The question is not whether mercury causes birth defects and even kills in high doses - it does. The question is whether it's harmful in extremely low quantities. According to the biggest, best designed and longest running study ever done, the answer is a resounding "NO."
What most people do not realize is that is that the dose makes the poison. Fish is brain food. A diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids reduces colon and lung cancers and numerous other ailments, and aids brain development in the womb. The Seychelles Islands study found that, even though their seafood-rich diet meant they consumed more mercury than Americans, eating the seafood was beneficial. Let me repeat: by discouraging people from eating fish, we are literally scaring them to death.
That isn't to say we shouldn't make progress in bringing down mercury levels. We should and we are. But we need to put the issue in perspective. Like other pollutants, mercury levels have also come down dramatically. Numerous industries that used to emit high levels of mercury, such as the municipal waste incinerators, have been controlled. The power sector industry is merely the latest industry to be regulated. And the regulations are significant - the Clean Air Mercury Rule will reduce power plant mercury emissions by 70 percent. And because the rule acts in coordination with the Clean Air Implementation Rule - which reduces SO2, NOx, and particulate matter - it can be done for $2 billion.
Source
Why is the Vatican Backing Climate Change Theory?
On May 10, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican's representative at the United Nations, addressed the Economic and Social Council of the UN on the hot topic of climate change. His comments were disturbing to many since he seemed to indicate the Vatican was taking sides in the contentious debate around the causes of climate change. Furthermore, by failing to clarify that the Vatican does not support population control as a means to address global warming his use of the terminology employed by groups advocating population control as the primary solution to avert disaster is also raising eyebrows.
Archbishop Migliore stated, "The scientific evidence for global warming and for humanity's role in the increase of greenhouse gasses becomes ever more unimpeachable . . . and such activity has a profound relevance, not just for the environment, but in ethical, economic, social and political terms as well."
While debate among climate scientists rages about the human contribution to climate change and global warming, many are concerned that the Vatican ambassador has chosen to take sides on this controversial issue.
A few months ago the Evangelical leadership of the United States ventured into similar territory when the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) published the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The statement claimed that "climate change" is "human-induced" and would result in the deaths of "millions of people.most of them our poorest global neighbors," through climatological disasters such as hurricane Katrina.
Prominent Evangelical spokesmen, including Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson, and the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land called on the NAE to back down from its controversial stand "We believe there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue . . . Global warming is not a consensus issue, and our love for the Creator and respect for His creation does not require us to take a position," Dobson, Land and others wrote.
In language that could be equally addressed to the Vatican, Dobson told the NAE that certain individuals "are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children."
Another concerning comment in the Archbishop's address to the UN was a glowing reference to "sustainable development", UN lingo which has long been associated with population control. "There is still time to use technology and education to promote universally sustainable development before it is too late," he concluded.
Those in the pro-life community who have been following developments at the United Nations for the past decade are well acquainted with the language employed by Archbishop Migliore. It is the same as that which has been spouted by those seeking to force population control on developing nations by inciting fear of climate disaster and false promises of prosperity with from depopulation.
Joan Veon, a veteran UN expert who has reported on about 100 United Nations conferences explained what UN policy-makers mean when they use the term sustainable development. In 1992 during the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development Veon observed: "Sustainable development basically says there are too many people on the planet, that we must reduce the population."
Not only UN experts but also national leaders have admitted publicly that population control lies at the heart of plans to combat global warming. Last month China boasted that its one-child policy, which has been criticized by many nations for including forced abortion and sterilization, had reduced greenhouse gases. Speaking at a meeting in Oslo on the UN's Kyoto Protocol, Hu Tao of China's State Environmental Protection Administration said the one-child population control policy has slowed "global warming" by limiting the population to 1.3 billion. "This has reduced greenhouse gas emissions," he said.
In 2004 Russian presidential economic advisor Andrei Illarionov called the Kyoto Protocol - a UN sponsored treaty to reduce greenhouse gases - an "undeclared war against Russia" since it required depopulation. Quoting a British team of scientists and government officials Illarionov said, "As long as you reduce your population, you can meet the Kyoto Protocol requirements."
Recently population control advocates have become more open about their agenda. A report published May 7 by the Optimum Population Trust declared that the best "carbon-offset strategy" was to reduce the number of human beings and thus defeat the "global warming" phenomenon. "Population limitation should therefore be seen as the most cost-effective carbon offsetting strategy available to individuals and nations," read the report, A Population-Based Climate Strategy. "The most effective personal climate change strategy is limiting the number of children one has," the report says. "The most effective national and global climate change strategy is limiting the size of the population."
The stance of most of the pro-life movement regarding the environment was recently expressed by Czech President Vaclav Klaus in March of this year. "All of us are very much in favour of maximum environmental protection and protection of nature," he said in an interview with the Cato Institute. "But it has nothing in common with environmentalism, which is ideological and practically attacking our freedom." Environmentalism is, he said "a way of introducing new forms of statism, new forms of masterminding human society from above."
Should the Vatican wish to get into the game of prediction of man-made climate disasters perhaps they should revisit Biblical interpretations of natural disasters resulting from the sinfulness of mankind. The Biblical account of Noah's Ark describes the whole known population of the earth being drowned in a flood except for Noah and his family, who were faithful to God. To say nothing of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the flood was caused, teaches the Church, not by global warming, but by global sinning.
Source
A reminder about the limitations of rationality when dealing with Greenies
"Then came Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968), in which he opened famously by saying, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Writing in Ramparts magazine, he went even further, “Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles…the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979…the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics.” Hepatitis and dysentery would sweep America by 1980 and nearly all of us would wear gas masks. Over 65 million Americans would starve in the 1980s, leaving only 22.6 million starved Americans alive in 1990. In 1990, he incredibly justified his claims as being right – a trait common to Doomsday prophets."
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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
HE survived decades of Colombia's murderous guerrilla uprisings. He lived through paramilitary purges and steered well clear of the cocaine overlords who swarmed across his rural region. It was something completely different that killed Innocence Dias. He died because the world is turning green.
The global quest for alternative sources of environmentally friendly energy has attracted high-profile support from American politicians, including President George W Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California. Celebrities such as Daryl Hannah, the actress, and Willie Nelson, the country singer, are leading a campaign to promote green fuels. Yet the trend has already had disastrous consequences for tens of thousands of peasants in rural Colombia. A surge in demand for biofuels derived from agricultural products has unleashed a chaotic land grab by a new breed of gangster entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on the world's thirst for palm oil and related bioproducts.
Vast areas of Colombia's tropical forest are being cleared for palm tree plantations. Charities working with local peasants claim that paramilitary forces in league with biofuel conglomerates - some of them financed by US government subsidies - are forcing families off their land with death threats and bogus purchase offers. "The paramilitaries are not subtle when it comes to taking land," said Dominic Nutt, a British specialist with Christian Aid who recently visited Colombia. "They simply visit a community and tell landowners, `If you don't sell to us, we will negotiate with your widow'."
Dias was one of several landowners around the remote settlement of Llano Rico who decided not to abandon his property when the paramilitaries first moved into the area. "My father felt protected because he had a local government position," said his daughter, Milvia Dias, 29. Even when paramilitaries warned the villagers that if they stayed they would be considered left-wing guerrilla sympathisers, Dias refused to be bullied. "He had cattle and land and one day, after all this happened, he went out to fix a hole in one of the farm's fences," his daughter said. He never came back. A search party found him with his throat cut and seven stab wounds in his torso. "We held the funeral at 5pm the same day and we ran away the next morning," said Dias. The land is now covered in palm trees owned by Urapalma, a Colombian enterprise that has repeatedly been accused in court proceedings of improperly invading private property.
Nutt said last week that he had heard stories of paramilitaries cutting off the arms of illiterate peasants and applying their fingerprints to land sale documents. In many cases, Nutt added, the land is collectively owned by indigenous people or Afro-Colombians and protected by federal laws that courts seem unable or unwilling to enforce. There is no reliable estimate of how many thousand acres have been appropriated, or how many of the 3m Colombians who have lost their homes since 1985 were forced out by the palm oil business.
Washington has been struggling for years to persuade Colombian farmers to turn their backs on coca leaf production in favour of other crops. Desperate to find energy alternatives to expensive and politically volatile sources of Middle Eastern and Venezuelan oil, Bush is also advocating a global increase in biofuel production.
Alvaro Uribe, the president of Colombia, has urged local palm oil producers to more than double the land they have under cultivation within four years. Uribe's critics complain that he has effectively given a green light to paramilitaries. At a congressional hearing on Colombia last week, Luis Gilberto Murillo-Urrutia, the former governor of Choco province, told a House foreign affairs subcommittee that US trade policy was likely to "generate an expansion of palm oil cultivation in Afro-Colombian territories . . . there is evidence that palm oil companies, taking advantage of the vulnerability of Afro- Colombian people, have been taking over lands illegally".
For Don Enrique Petro, 67, formerly a wealthy landowner from Curvarado, growing international awareness of the human cost of a green conscience has come several years too late. "I arrived in Curvarado 39 years ago with my wife and five sons," he said last week. He bought a patch of jungle and slowly transformed it into a 30-acre spread with 110 cows, 20 bulls and 10 horses.
He lost two sons and a brother to the guerrilla wars and in the early 1990s fled his land for five years. When he returned, he found a right-wing paramilitary group in control. "They said they wanted my land to fight the guerrillas," Petro said. "They were lying. It was so they could grow palm on it and make money." Petro refused to sell up. He claims he was eventually taken prisoner by the paramilitaries and, when released, found his land had been planted with palm trees belonging to Urapalma. The company has denied that it is cooperating with paramilitaries or acquiring land illegally.
The world's demand for alternative fuels is unlikely to diminish, but Nutt argued that biofuel consumers should put pressure on Colombia to return stolen land. Celebrities such as Hannah are beginning to distinguish between palm oil and less controversial biofuels such as ethanol, which is derived mainly from corn. "I want biofuels that are grown and produced in a sustainable manner," said Hannah, who leads a pressure group which is lobbying for US government standards on green fuel production. "I would not buy biodiesel made from palm oil."
Source
Democrats Support Destructive Limits on America's Energy Sector
At today's EPW Committee hearing today, Senate Democrats expressed support for reducing mercury emissions from every power plant by 90 percent. Proponents of this approach generally claim that each power plant should be able to reduce mercury emissions by at least 90 percent, even though this level of reduction is not currently achievable and control technology vendors refuse to guarantee the performance of mercury removal technologies at these stringent levels.
FACT: According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), setting a 90% reduction mandate on mercury would cost up to $358 billion. A 90 percent reduction would result in fuel switching away from coal, which is our most abundant and least costly energy source, to natural gas. Increased reliance on natural gas for electricity generation will further increase prices, seriously impacting the ability of businesses to compete in the global marketplace and of families to pay their utility bills.
Further, like many other pollutants, mercury levels have also come down dramatically. Numerous industries that used to emit high levels of mercury, such as the municipal waste incinerators, have been controlled. The power sector industry is merely the latest industry to be regulated. And the regulations are significant - President Bush's Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR) will reduce power plant mercury emissions by 70 percent. And because the rule acts in coordination with CAMR- which reduces SO2, NOx, and particulate matter - it can be done for $2 billion. That's right - cutting 70% will cost $2 billion, but incrementally increasing that amount to beyond what the technologies can reliably do would cost up to $358 billion.
Finally, draconian mercury mandates fail to address the mercury emissions from outside of the United States. According to the EPA, Asia is responsible for 53 percent of mercury emissions worldwide, and that U.S. power plants contribute only about 1 percent of the mercury in the oceans. In fact, according to EPA, U.S. emissions of mercury were reduced by nearly half, from 1990 to 1999. While we have made great progress in reducing these emissions, they have been offset by increases in emissions from Asia, particularly China.
Source
Mercury concern overblown
Since 1970, we have had tremendous economic growth, and tripled our energy use and vehicle miles traveled. Despite this, instead of tripling our pollution or doubling or even holding it constant, we have cut our pollution levels by more than half. This is a success story that - hard as it is to believe - few people even realize is true.
This gets to the heart of my greatest concern over the mercury debate. Few understand it, and some have preyed upon that lack of understanding. We are literally scaring ourselves to death over mercury. A few years ago, when EPA and the FDA issued a joint advisory on mercury and environmentalists turned up their alarmist rhetoric, tuna consumption plummeted. People became afraid to eat fish because they believed it was bad for them.
Let's be clear: all seafood has some level of mercury - always has and always will. It is an element, pervasive in the environment and bioaccumulative. The question is not whether mercury causes birth defects and even kills in high doses - it does. The question is whether it's harmful in extremely low quantities. According to the biggest, best designed and longest running study ever done, the answer is a resounding "NO."
What most people do not realize is that is that the dose makes the poison. Fish is brain food. A diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids reduces colon and lung cancers and numerous other ailments, and aids brain development in the womb. The Seychelles Islands study found that, even though their seafood-rich diet meant they consumed more mercury than Americans, eating the seafood was beneficial. Let me repeat: by discouraging people from eating fish, we are literally scaring them to death.
That isn't to say we shouldn't make progress in bringing down mercury levels. We should and we are. But we need to put the issue in perspective. Like other pollutants, mercury levels have also come down dramatically. Numerous industries that used to emit high levels of mercury, such as the municipal waste incinerators, have been controlled. The power sector industry is merely the latest industry to be regulated. And the regulations are significant - the Clean Air Mercury Rule will reduce power plant mercury emissions by 70 percent. And because the rule acts in coordination with the Clean Air Implementation Rule - which reduces SO2, NOx, and particulate matter - it can be done for $2 billion.
Source
Why is the Vatican Backing Climate Change Theory?
On May 10, Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Vatican's representative at the United Nations, addressed the Economic and Social Council of the UN on the hot topic of climate change. His comments were disturbing to many since he seemed to indicate the Vatican was taking sides in the contentious debate around the causes of climate change. Furthermore, by failing to clarify that the Vatican does not support population control as a means to address global warming his use of the terminology employed by groups advocating population control as the primary solution to avert disaster is also raising eyebrows.
Archbishop Migliore stated, "The scientific evidence for global warming and for humanity's role in the increase of greenhouse gasses becomes ever more unimpeachable . . . and such activity has a profound relevance, not just for the environment, but in ethical, economic, social and political terms as well."
While debate among climate scientists rages about the human contribution to climate change and global warming, many are concerned that the Vatican ambassador has chosen to take sides on this controversial issue.
A few months ago the Evangelical leadership of the United States ventured into similar territory when the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) published the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The statement claimed that "climate change" is "human-induced" and would result in the deaths of "millions of people.most of them our poorest global neighbors," through climatological disasters such as hurricane Katrina.
Prominent Evangelical spokesmen, including Focus on the Family founder Dr. James Dobson, and the Southern Baptist Convention's Richard Land called on the NAE to back down from its controversial stand "We believe there should be room for Bible-believing evangelicals to disagree about the cause, severity and solutions to the global warming issue . . . Global warming is not a consensus issue, and our love for the Creator and respect for His creation does not require us to take a position," Dobson, Land and others wrote.
In language that could be equally addressed to the Vatican, Dobson told the NAE that certain individuals "are using the global warming controversy to shift the emphasis away from the great moral issues of our time, notably the sanctity of human life, the integrity of marriage and the teaching of sexual abstinence and morality to our children."
Another concerning comment in the Archbishop's address to the UN was a glowing reference to "sustainable development", UN lingo which has long been associated with population control. "There is still time to use technology and education to promote universally sustainable development before it is too late," he concluded.
Those in the pro-life community who have been following developments at the United Nations for the past decade are well acquainted with the language employed by Archbishop Migliore. It is the same as that which has been spouted by those seeking to force population control on developing nations by inciting fear of climate disaster and false promises of prosperity with from depopulation.
Joan Veon, a veteran UN expert who has reported on about 100 United Nations conferences explained what UN policy-makers mean when they use the term sustainable development. In 1992 during the UN World Summit on Sustainable Development Veon observed: "Sustainable development basically says there are too many people on the planet, that we must reduce the population."
Not only UN experts but also national leaders have admitted publicly that population control lies at the heart of plans to combat global warming. Last month China boasted that its one-child policy, which has been criticized by many nations for including forced abortion and sterilization, had reduced greenhouse gases. Speaking at a meeting in Oslo on the UN's Kyoto Protocol, Hu Tao of China's State Environmental Protection Administration said the one-child population control policy has slowed "global warming" by limiting the population to 1.3 billion. "This has reduced greenhouse gas emissions," he said.
In 2004 Russian presidential economic advisor Andrei Illarionov called the Kyoto Protocol - a UN sponsored treaty to reduce greenhouse gases - an "undeclared war against Russia" since it required depopulation. Quoting a British team of scientists and government officials Illarionov said, "As long as you reduce your population, you can meet the Kyoto Protocol requirements."
Recently population control advocates have become more open about their agenda. A report published May 7 by the Optimum Population Trust declared that the best "carbon-offset strategy" was to reduce the number of human beings and thus defeat the "global warming" phenomenon. "Population limitation should therefore be seen as the most cost-effective carbon offsetting strategy available to individuals and nations," read the report, A Population-Based Climate Strategy. "The most effective personal climate change strategy is limiting the number of children one has," the report says. "The most effective national and global climate change strategy is limiting the size of the population."
The stance of most of the pro-life movement regarding the environment was recently expressed by Czech President Vaclav Klaus in March of this year. "All of us are very much in favour of maximum environmental protection and protection of nature," he said in an interview with the Cato Institute. "But it has nothing in common with environmentalism, which is ideological and practically attacking our freedom." Environmentalism is, he said "a way of introducing new forms of statism, new forms of masterminding human society from above."
Should the Vatican wish to get into the game of prediction of man-made climate disasters perhaps they should revisit Biblical interpretations of natural disasters resulting from the sinfulness of mankind. The Biblical account of Noah's Ark describes the whole known population of the earth being drowned in a flood except for Noah and his family, who were faithful to God. To say nothing of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the flood was caused, teaches the Church, not by global warming, but by global sinning.
Source
A reminder about the limitations of rationality when dealing with Greenies
"Then came Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” (1968), in which he opened famously by saying, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death, in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Writing in Ramparts magazine, he went even further, “Hundreds of millions of people will soon perish in smog disasters in New York and Los Angeles…the oceans will die of DDT poisoning by 1979…the U.S. life expectancy will drop to 42 years by 1980, due to cancer epidemics.” Hepatitis and dysentery would sweep America by 1980 and nearly all of us would wear gas masks. Over 65 million Americans would starve in the 1980s, leaving only 22.6 million starved Americans alive in 1990. In 1990, he incredibly justified his claims as being right – a trait common to Doomsday prophets."
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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Monday, June 04, 2007
EU SPLIT BY BUSH'S GREEN CARD
EUROPE was yesterday struggling to decide whether George Bush, the US president, had experienced a road-to-Damascus conversion over the fight against climate change or was still dragging his heels. For some leaders, the announcement on Thursday that Mr Bush was seeking a meeting of the 15 leading greenhouse gas emitting countries was "groundbreaking", heralding a new approach by the United States to the whole issue. But others complained it was simply a restatement of the "classic US line" with no firm targets to cut emissions and prevent global warming.
Mr Bush became a hate-figure for environmentalists when he decided against implementing the Kyoto treaty [Rubbish! The U.S. Senate made that decision] on climate change in 2001, saying it would cost US jobs and wrongly excluded developing nations. In his speech on Thursday, the US president said he wanted the group of leading polluters, including the US, China, India and major European countries, to come up with a global target for carbon emissions but decide themselves how to reach that target.
On a visit to Finland, the EU Energy Commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, said the new statement was a major step in the right direction, representing "a completely new approach" for Mr Bush. "For me, it's very welcome and groundbreaking news," he said. He added that it was particularly important for the Group of Eight countries meeting next week.
However the Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, had a very different take to his energy counterpart on the significance of Mr Bush's comments. "The declaration by President Bush basically restates the US classic line on climate change - no mandatory reductions, no carbon trading and vaguely expressed objectives," he said. "The US approach has proven to be ineffective in reducing emissions."
The German environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said Mr Bush's announcement could be seen as progress only if it prepared the way for a United Nations pact to extend the Kyoto Protocol past 2012. "If it is an attempt to hamper such an international climate change agreement, then it is dangerous," he said. "The European Union and also the G8 should not be content with initiating a process that just means we'll have some vague agreements between ten or 15 countries in the world."
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, wants the G8 to agree now on a need for world cuts of about 50 per cent in emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. Her spokesman, Ulrich Wilhelm, said it was too early to predict the outcome of the G8. "I think we can say at this stage that it's going to be tough," he said.
FULL STORY here
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT: THE GUARDIAN DISCOVERS THAT KYOTO IS A SCAM
A Guardian investigation has found evidence of serious irregularities at the heart of the process the world is relying on to control global warming. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which is supposed to offset greenhouse gases emitted in the developed world by selling carbon credits from elsewhere, has been contaminated by gross incompetence, rule-breaking and possible fraud by companies in the developing world, according to UN paperwork, an unpublished expert report and alarming feedback from projects on the ground.
One senior figure suggested there may be faults with up to 20% of the carbon credits - known as certified emissions reductions - already sold. Since these are used by European governments and corporations to justify increases in emissions, the effect is that in some cases malpractice at the CDM has added to the net amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere...
FULL STORY here
Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved
More on the Guardian's road to Damascus -- revealing below major flaws in the global system designed to reduce emissions
[...] The carbon market's leading analysts, Point Carbon, recently calculated that this scheme handed out 170m too many EUAs. In the early days, nobody realised quite how badly the commission had miscalculated, and so the price of the EUAs was quite high, at up to EUR30 a tonne. But individual companies, particularly energy companies, rapidly saw they had millions of tonnes of EUAs that they didn't need, and so they sold their surplus, making huge profits. A 2005 report by IPA Energy Consulting found that the six UK electricity generators stood to earn some 800m pounds in each of the three years of the scheme.
A separate report by Open Europe, in July 2006, found that UK oil companies were also poised to make a lot of free money: 10.2m for Esso; 17.9m for BP; and 20.7m for Shell. And behind this profiteering, the environmental reality was that these major producers of carbon emissions were under no pressure from the scheme to cut emissions. At the other end of this EU market, smaller organisations like UK hospitals and 18 universities, who had been given far fewer EUAs, were forced to go out and buy them - while the price was still high. So, for example, the University of Manchester spent 92,500 pounds on EUAs. Now that the truth about the glut has been revealed, the university would be doing well if it managed to get 1,000 pounds for the lot of them.
FULL STORY here
RUSSIA CASHING IN ON EUROPE'S KYOTO-FOLLY: SEND ME YOUR BILLIONS
Russia this week gave a surprise green light to carbon trading under the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but needs to start approving actual projects to unlock a multi-billion dollar market. Russia is the single largest supplier of oil and gas to the European Union and also the world's third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases behind the United States and China. As a big player in both energy and climate change, it is well-placed to cash in on the sale of emissions cuts, or carbon credits, to other industrialised countries, but has long delayed implementing the necessary rules.
Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov signed a government decree on Monday defining guidelines. "If there were 50 steps, we're at step 49," said Arthur Houston, a Russia manager at London-listed carbon project developer Camco. "Now we need to know the final text of the decree, on how to apply. We're expecting that to be posted on the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade website over the next week."
The government would post the final draft on Friday, said a westerner working in Russia's embyronic carbon trading industry, who declined to be named. "This is the big one, it's what everyone's been waiting for for over a year and a half," said Abyd Karmali, a climate change consultant at ICF International.
Kyoto allows rich countries to meet caps on greenhouse gas emissions by investing in emissions-cutting projects in other countries, part of a $30 billion global carbon market. That market is meant to target cheapest emissions cuts and so cut the cost of fighting climate change. Russia could be a cheap source of credits for example by simply plugging holes in its vast network of gas pipelines, which currently leaks a potent greenhouse gas, methane.
Russia could sell up to 500 million tonnes of emissions cuts in carbon dioxide equivalent by 2012, estimated Karmali, which would value the market at $5 billion, assuming current prices. Carbon project developer the Russian Carbon Fund put the market size at up to 350 million tonnes, and underlined the need for further details and operation in practice. "This is an important step, it's something the market's been waiting for for some time, but one should not be fooled that it takes care of everything," said Morten Prehn Sorensen, chief climate change officer at RCF. "Details needs to be fleshed out, like where applications should be submitted. Markets will want to see it in operation and issued approvals."
Russia also needs U.N. approval to trade carbon, expected by early next year, and has already ordered from French firm Seringas the necessary registry software to log transactions, Sorensen said. But the carbon market needed to know when that registry would be up and running, said Shell's Garth Edward. "The government decision is the first step, now they need to operationalise that. The time frame for turning around applications is unclear," Edward added.
Under the Kyoto Protocol industrialised countries can either buy carbon credits from developing countries, under the pact's Clean Development Mechanism, or else from each other under Joint Implementation, as in the case of Russia.
Source
JAPAN REBUFFS EU ON KYOTO PACT
EU efforts to speed action on climate change took a blow on Tuesday when Japan refused to follow the EU line on how to establish a new international regime once the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. A statement from EU president Germany, which chaired a gathering of EU and Asian foreign ministers in Hamburg ahead of next week's meeting of Group of Eight (G8) leaders, said talks to establish a new regime should be completed by 2009.
But Japan said it could not accept a 2009 target, saying big polluters such as the United States, China and India should be included before any such target was set. "Japan cannot agree with this because we should think about how we can invite non-Kyoto members such as the U.S., China and India and others," Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mitsui Sakaba told reporters. "We should work first for the inclusion of those countries. Fixing the target should come much later."
Germany is leading a drive to persuade the United States to follow Europe's lead on climate change before a June 6-8 summit of the Group of Eight industrial nations. Chancellor Angela Merkel wants the G8 to agree concrete steps that would prepare the ground for an extension of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which commits signatories to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. "We need the Asians as well," said a spokeswoman for EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner. "Global warming is something that is global and we need all continents participating in the post-Kyoto plan."
Source
***************************************
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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
EUROPE was yesterday struggling to decide whether George Bush, the US president, had experienced a road-to-Damascus conversion over the fight against climate change or was still dragging his heels. For some leaders, the announcement on Thursday that Mr Bush was seeking a meeting of the 15 leading greenhouse gas emitting countries was "groundbreaking", heralding a new approach by the United States to the whole issue. But others complained it was simply a restatement of the "classic US line" with no firm targets to cut emissions and prevent global warming.
Mr Bush became a hate-figure for environmentalists when he decided against implementing the Kyoto treaty [Rubbish! The U.S. Senate made that decision] on climate change in 2001, saying it would cost US jobs and wrongly excluded developing nations. In his speech on Thursday, the US president said he wanted the group of leading polluters, including the US, China, India and major European countries, to come up with a global target for carbon emissions but decide themselves how to reach that target.
On a visit to Finland, the EU Energy Commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, said the new statement was a major step in the right direction, representing "a completely new approach" for Mr Bush. "For me, it's very welcome and groundbreaking news," he said. He added that it was particularly important for the Group of Eight countries meeting next week.
However the Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, had a very different take to his energy counterpart on the significance of Mr Bush's comments. "The declaration by President Bush basically restates the US classic line on climate change - no mandatory reductions, no carbon trading and vaguely expressed objectives," he said. "The US approach has proven to be ineffective in reducing emissions."
The German environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency, said Mr Bush's announcement could be seen as progress only if it prepared the way for a United Nations pact to extend the Kyoto Protocol past 2012. "If it is an attempt to hamper such an international climate change agreement, then it is dangerous," he said. "The European Union and also the G8 should not be content with initiating a process that just means we'll have some vague agreements between ten or 15 countries in the world."
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, wants the G8 to agree now on a need for world cuts of about 50 per cent in emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. Her spokesman, Ulrich Wilhelm, said it was too early to predict the outcome of the G8. "I think we can say at this stage that it's going to be tough," he said.
FULL STORY here
WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT: THE GUARDIAN DISCOVERS THAT KYOTO IS A SCAM
A Guardian investigation has found evidence of serious irregularities at the heart of the process the world is relying on to control global warming. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which is supposed to offset greenhouse gases emitted in the developed world by selling carbon credits from elsewhere, has been contaminated by gross incompetence, rule-breaking and possible fraud by companies in the developing world, according to UN paperwork, an unpublished expert report and alarming feedback from projects on the ground.
One senior figure suggested there may be faults with up to 20% of the carbon credits - known as certified emissions reductions - already sold. Since these are used by European governments and corporations to justify increases in emissions, the effect is that in some cases malpractice at the CDM has added to the net amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere...
FULL STORY here
Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved
More on the Guardian's road to Damascus -- revealing below major flaws in the global system designed to reduce emissions
[...] The carbon market's leading analysts, Point Carbon, recently calculated that this scheme handed out 170m too many EUAs. In the early days, nobody realised quite how badly the commission had miscalculated, and so the price of the EUAs was quite high, at up to EUR30 a tonne. But individual companies, particularly energy companies, rapidly saw they had millions of tonnes of EUAs that they didn't need, and so they sold their surplus, making huge profits. A 2005 report by IPA Energy Consulting found that the six UK electricity generators stood to earn some 800m pounds in each of the three years of the scheme.
A separate report by Open Europe, in July 2006, found that UK oil companies were also poised to make a lot of free money: 10.2m for Esso; 17.9m for BP; and 20.7m for Shell. And behind this profiteering, the environmental reality was that these major producers of carbon emissions were under no pressure from the scheme to cut emissions. At the other end of this EU market, smaller organisations like UK hospitals and 18 universities, who had been given far fewer EUAs, were forced to go out and buy them - while the price was still high. So, for example, the University of Manchester spent 92,500 pounds on EUAs. Now that the truth about the glut has been revealed, the university would be doing well if it managed to get 1,000 pounds for the lot of them.
FULL STORY here
RUSSIA CASHING IN ON EUROPE'S KYOTO-FOLLY: SEND ME YOUR BILLIONS
Russia this week gave a surprise green light to carbon trading under the Kyoto Protocol to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but needs to start approving actual projects to unlock a multi-billion dollar market. Russia is the single largest supplier of oil and gas to the European Union and also the world's third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases behind the United States and China. As a big player in both energy and climate change, it is well-placed to cash in on the sale of emissions cuts, or carbon credits, to other industrialised countries, but has long delayed implementing the necessary rules.
Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov signed a government decree on Monday defining guidelines. "If there were 50 steps, we're at step 49," said Arthur Houston, a Russia manager at London-listed carbon project developer Camco. "Now we need to know the final text of the decree, on how to apply. We're expecting that to be posted on the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade website over the next week."
The government would post the final draft on Friday, said a westerner working in Russia's embyronic carbon trading industry, who declined to be named. "This is the big one, it's what everyone's been waiting for for over a year and a half," said Abyd Karmali, a climate change consultant at ICF International.
Kyoto allows rich countries to meet caps on greenhouse gas emissions by investing in emissions-cutting projects in other countries, part of a $30 billion global carbon market. That market is meant to target cheapest emissions cuts and so cut the cost of fighting climate change. Russia could be a cheap source of credits for example by simply plugging holes in its vast network of gas pipelines, which currently leaks a potent greenhouse gas, methane.
Russia could sell up to 500 million tonnes of emissions cuts in carbon dioxide equivalent by 2012, estimated Karmali, which would value the market at $5 billion, assuming current prices. Carbon project developer the Russian Carbon Fund put the market size at up to 350 million tonnes, and underlined the need for further details and operation in practice. "This is an important step, it's something the market's been waiting for for some time, but one should not be fooled that it takes care of everything," said Morten Prehn Sorensen, chief climate change officer at RCF. "Details needs to be fleshed out, like where applications should be submitted. Markets will want to see it in operation and issued approvals."
Russia also needs U.N. approval to trade carbon, expected by early next year, and has already ordered from French firm Seringas the necessary registry software to log transactions, Sorensen said. But the carbon market needed to know when that registry would be up and running, said Shell's Garth Edward. "The government decision is the first step, now they need to operationalise that. The time frame for turning around applications is unclear," Edward added.
Under the Kyoto Protocol industrialised countries can either buy carbon credits from developing countries, under the pact's Clean Development Mechanism, or else from each other under Joint Implementation, as in the case of Russia.
Source
JAPAN REBUFFS EU ON KYOTO PACT
EU efforts to speed action on climate change took a blow on Tuesday when Japan refused to follow the EU line on how to establish a new international regime once the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. A statement from EU president Germany, which chaired a gathering of EU and Asian foreign ministers in Hamburg ahead of next week's meeting of Group of Eight (G8) leaders, said talks to establish a new regime should be completed by 2009.
But Japan said it could not accept a 2009 target, saying big polluters such as the United States, China and India should be included before any such target was set. "Japan cannot agree with this because we should think about how we can invite non-Kyoto members such as the U.S., China and India and others," Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mitsui Sakaba told reporters. "We should work first for the inclusion of those countries. Fixing the target should come much later."
Germany is leading a drive to persuade the United States to follow Europe's lead on climate change before a June 6-8 summit of the Group of Eight industrial nations. Chancellor Angela Merkel wants the G8 to agree concrete steps that would prepare the ground for an extension of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which commits signatories to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. "We need the Asians as well," said a spokeswoman for EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner. "Global warming is something that is global and we need all continents participating in the post-Kyoto plan."
Source
***************************************
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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Sunday, June 03, 2007
OCEANIC EFFECTS ON CARBON CAPTURE/RELEASE STILL THEORETICAL
Absorbtion and release of carbon by the oceans is universally recognized as crucial to determining atmospheric levels of CO2 but the paper below reveals fundamental disagreements over what happens in the oceans. Popular language summary of latest paper given below followed by journal abstract:
Competition between degradation and preservation of organic matter in the sea and on the sea floor plays a central role in controlling how much oxygen is in the atmosphere, as well as how carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other elements are cycled through the biogeosphere. Because the quantity of carbon in marine sediments is huge, small differences in the balance between these processes can have large impacts, which has made this problem challenging to model. Rothman and Forney (p. 1325; see the Perspective by Middelburg and Meysman) now present a consistent model in which the intrinsic reactivity of organic material is constant and that the rate of decay depends on bacterial abundance. This explanation is fundamentally different from chemical models in which organic-matter degradation rates depend on intrinsic reactivity.
Physical Model for the Decay and Preservation of Marine Organic Carbon
By Daniel H. Rothman and David C. Forney
Degradation of marine organic carbon provides a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide, whereas preservation in sediments results in accumulation of oxygen. These processes involve the slow decay of chemically recalcitrant compounds and physical protection. To assess the importance of physical protection, we constructed a reaction-diffusion model in which organic matter differs only in its accessibility to microbial degradation but not its intrinsic reactivity. The model predicts that organic matter decays logarithmically with time t and that decay rates decrease approximately as 0.2 x t-1 until burial. Analyses of sediment-core data are consistent with these predictions.
Source
Fireplaces to be banned in California
Throwing a few logs on the fire on a nippy evening, or boosting a home's market appeal by advertising its wood-burning fireplace, could go the way of the coal chute and the ice box for many Southern Californians if newly proposed air quality regulations are adopted. As part of air pollution plans designed to meet federal deadlines, South Coast Air Quality Management District officials have proposed a ban on wood-burning fireplaces in all new homes in Los Angeles, Orange and portions of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. In addition, on winter days when pollution spikes, wood-fueled blazes in all fireplaces would be banned in highly affected areas. That could amount to about 20 days a year, district officials said. Another measure that would require closing off wood fireplaces or installing $3,600 pollution control devices before a home could be sold had been dropped as of late Thursday, an AQMD spokesman said.
Regulators say that with an estimated 5,400 premature deaths attributable to soot each year in the region, no source is too small to target. Numerous studies have shown that the fine particulate matter in soot sinks deep into the lungs, causing serious health problems. But critics, including homebuilders and real estate agents, say the regulations could hurt sales by robbing homes of one of their most enjoyable features. Air district staffers say a daily reduction of 192 tons of nitrogen oxides, an ingredient in harmful particulate pollution, is needed across the region to meet the Clean Air Act requirements, and that 7 tons of that could come from restrictions on fireplaces.
Barbara Burner, a Realtor for 25 years, said that with such a small amount of pollution at issue, she doesn't think the restrictions are merited. "A home is an emotional buy," said Burner, who works for Century 21 in Thousand Oaks and has three wood-burning fireplaces in her own home. "A fireplace - especially a beautiful fireplace, and what people normally mean by that is a wood-burning fireplace - it's the thing people like to have."
The fireplace rules are one piece of a plan also designed to reduce soot from diesel engines and ozone smog that AQMD's board will vote on today. "Our governing board will consider adopting their air quality plan, which includes more than three dozen measures," air district spokesman Sam Atwood said. "One of those measures would be for the first time to have a program that would reduce pollution from residential fireplaces and wood stoves."
The plan also includes truck-only lanes on the 710 and 15 freeways, and electric rail lines from Los Angeles' Westside to Ontario airport and from the ports to Inland Empire warehouses. Reducing paint thinner emissions and gas station and refinery leaks is also part of the host of proposed measures.
If the overall plan is approved, another vote is scheduled for September to finalize the fireplace regulation. "There aren't any easy rules left in terms of substantially reducing" fine particulate air pollution, said Jane Carney, a Riverside attorney and an AQMD board member. Riverside and other Inland Empire communities would likely be targeted by fire bans during cold winter months. Carney said there are "pretty obvious adverse impacts of wood smoke on pollution. If you stand close to a wood fire and breathe, you can feel it in your throat and in your lungs." Carney said that while she would listen to comments from the public and the building industry, attractive alternatives to wood fireplaces are available. "Let me tell you, the natural gas logs are wonderful," she said.
Carney also said she would consider even tougher measures to clean up fireplace pollution, such as a complete regional wintertime ban on wood fires. Air pollution regulations on fireplaces have been adopted in an estimated 50 counties, air districts or cities across the West, particularly in colder areas, said John Crouch of the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Assn.
Numerous trade groups oppose the fireplace measures. Mark Grey, environmental director for the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, said the group would especially oppose any ban on wood-burning fireplaces in new homes.
A fireplace is "a popular feature. People want to be able to have a wood fire at certain times of year, and the AQMD did not bring to us any data that would demonstrate that wood smoke emissions are significant," Grey said. "From the statistics that we can see, most . homes burn wood in their fireplaces twice a year - on Christmas Eve and during the Super Bowl." There are an estimated 1.9 million homes with fireplaces in Southern California out of about 5 million total housing units, regulators said.
Environmentalist Tim Carmichael, who heads the Coalition for Clean Air, said that while it was important to take every step possible to clean the region's air - still the most polluted in the nation - it would be difficult if not impossible to enforce any sort of ban on wintertime fires. "At some level we believe these sorts of controls need to be looked at, but . the big question is, is it enforceable?" Carmichael said. "Could you really get people to stop doing this?"
Atwood, the air district spokesman, said that with about 100 inspectors responsible for pollution sources ranging from oil refineries to gas stations, enforcement would be tough. But Crouch, of the hearth and patio association, said, "Given how far out of attainment the South Coast is for fine particulates, and the fact that wood burning is not as significant in Southern California as it is in, for instance, in Seattle or Denver or someplace colder, I think they've charted a reasonable regional path here."
Source
YOU DON'T SAY: "CLIMATE MODELS OVERSTATE DROUGHTS"
It always was a crock to try to get around the fact that warmer seas give off more evaporation
There will be more flooding and less drought than has been forecast in widely used projections of global warming, according to a new study. The study using measurements taken by NASA weather satellites compared ocean rainfall from 1987 to 2006 to earlier climate model projections of what that precipitation would be. The models, based on physics equations, were found to be off the mark, according to the study released Thursday by the journal Science.
"The increase in global rainfall associated with global warming may be three times greater than currently predicted," says study lead author Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in Santa Rosa, Calif. In the last century, temperature records indicate average surface temperatures have risen roughly 1 degree, with a bigger increase, perhaps 3 to 7 degrees, projected by 2100. Global warming has become a hot scientific and political issue, focusing attention on the release of greenhouse gases, which retain heat in the atmosphere. Such gases include carbon dioxide, released when coal, oil and natural gas burn.
Projections have suggested that rainfall will rise in coming decades, but not as fast as temperature, leading to drier days and droughts worldwide. In February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cited studies showing "extreme drought increasing from 1% of present-day land area to 30% by the end of the century."
The new study suggests models are flawed, underestimating how increased humidity in a warmer climate produces more rain clouds, Wentz said by e-mail. The February IPCC report said global warming makes it "very likely" that storms bringing heavy rains will occur more often in coming decades. The satellite study shows rainfall falling in patterns that mirror IPCC projections, but in greater amounts.
FULL STORY here
Earth-Friendly Greens Camouflaging the Poor's Plight
"People are pollution" anyway, according to the Greens. Let the poor die!
Many people are aware that the world's poor desperately need economic development. Few realize, however, that a major obstacle to overcoming global poverty is the anti-development and anti-human environmental movement that camouflages itself under ubiquitous "Earth-friendly" shades of green. This lack of awareness is no accident. It's come about through a "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil" syndrome, where "evil" refers to the many ills of the modern environmental movement.
The syndrome is borne out by recent events related to the eye-opening documentary, "Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism," a film about environmentalist efforts to stop economic development in poverty-stricken regions around the world. The syndrome's "see no evil" aspect is exemplified by the efforts of Greenpeace and 80 other environmental organizations to block the movie from being shown in Romania (where much of the film was shot) and Washington, D.C. A Greenpeace official was invited to be a special guest at the film's Washington, D.C., premiere at the National Geographic Society headquarters. Instead of accepting the invitation, which included the opportunity to participate in a post-screening discussion panel, Greenpeace sent a letter to the Society expressing outrage at the decision to permit the film's screening. A Greenpeace-friendly newsletter demonstrated absurdly warped logic by asking a National Geographic spokesman whether the organization would rent out its facilities for the showing of a pro-Nazi propaganda film or a pornographic movie.
"I'm appalled by their demand to shut down the film," said Frayda Levy, president of the screening's co-sponsor, the Moving Picture Institute. "We invited [Greenpeace], but instead of joining us for a discussion, they display breathtaking narrow-mindedness. Regardless of whether you love or hate 'Mine Your Own Business,' it deserves to be seen. What makes them so afraid of this film?" Levy wondered in a media release.
The "hear no evil" aspect of the syndrome is demonstrated by the recent experiences of "MYOB" filmmakers at the International Finance Corp., the private finance arm of the World Bank. Though filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney declined comment, the IFC apparently had contacted them about hosting a screening of "MYOB" in the bank. The IFC finances a lot of large infrastructure projects and has had to wrestle with anti-development environmental groups that try to block those development efforts. Not only did the IFC invite the filmmakers to screen the documentary, it also offered as a form of payment to do what it did with Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," that is, purchase 200 DVDs and distribute them to local schools. McAleer and McElhinney jumped at the offer.
But a rather sheepish IFC official subsequently contacted the filmmakers and said that the bank had rethought its offer. The bank could only find the funds to buy 10 copies of "MYOB" and it had decided it would not distribute them to local schools. Instead, the bank would lend them internally to bank employees. A final condition was that the filmmakers were not allowed to tell anyone or announce to anyone that the IFC showed the film. After the screening, World Bank employees, on a one-by-one basis, reportedly commented to McAleer and McElhinney about how true "MYOB" was, but that they were not allowed to say so within the bank.
The syndrome's "speak no evil" aspect is exemplified by my recent personal experience with consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, which touts its support for "sustainable development" on its Web site. Concerned that the company was promoting a concept that has become an Orwellian eco-activist term for blocking all development opportunities no matter what the humanitarian costs, a shareholder group with which I am affiliated filed a related shareholder proposal with the company. In negotiations concerning the proposal, we asked Procter & Gamble to consider distributing copies of "MYOB" to its employees as a way of providing them an alternative viewpoint on "sustainable development" and to make a public statement to the effect that the company thought it was important to hear alternative viewpoints on environmental topics.
But while the company agreed to distribute copies of "MYOB" to its employees, it refused to make the public statement. Procter & Gamble's position was that it didn't want to be seen as endorsing a particular organization's point-of-view - an ostensibly reasonable position except that the company has previously publicly endorsed the viewpoints and mission of the Rainforest Alliance, an anti-development environmental group. Without the public acknowledgment, we doubted that the company was serious about the need for balanced views on sustainable development. Since negotiations collapsed, we'll be raising the issue with Procter & Gamble's CEO, Alan G. Lafley, at its annual shareholder meeting this fall.
The combination of intimidating environmentalists and intimidated organizations has resulted in a tragic absence of debate about the environmental monkey on the backs of the world's poor. Until we can at least talk about what environmental policies may be doing to developing nations - let alone debate these policies - we will have little hope of changing the lamentable state of affairs that has blocked life-saving economic development.
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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Absorbtion and release of carbon by the oceans is universally recognized as crucial to determining atmospheric levels of CO2 but the paper below reveals fundamental disagreements over what happens in the oceans. Popular language summary of latest paper given below followed by journal abstract:
Competition between degradation and preservation of organic matter in the sea and on the sea floor plays a central role in controlling how much oxygen is in the atmosphere, as well as how carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other elements are cycled through the biogeosphere. Because the quantity of carbon in marine sediments is huge, small differences in the balance between these processes can have large impacts, which has made this problem challenging to model. Rothman and Forney (p. 1325; see the Perspective by Middelburg and Meysman) now present a consistent model in which the intrinsic reactivity of organic material is constant and that the rate of decay depends on bacterial abundance. This explanation is fundamentally different from chemical models in which organic-matter degradation rates depend on intrinsic reactivity.
Physical Model for the Decay and Preservation of Marine Organic Carbon
By Daniel H. Rothman and David C. Forney
Degradation of marine organic carbon provides a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide, whereas preservation in sediments results in accumulation of oxygen. These processes involve the slow decay of chemically recalcitrant compounds and physical protection. To assess the importance of physical protection, we constructed a reaction-diffusion model in which organic matter differs only in its accessibility to microbial degradation but not its intrinsic reactivity. The model predicts that organic matter decays logarithmically with time t and that decay rates decrease approximately as 0.2 x t-1 until burial. Analyses of sediment-core data are consistent with these predictions.
Source
Fireplaces to be banned in California
Throwing a few logs on the fire on a nippy evening, or boosting a home's market appeal by advertising its wood-burning fireplace, could go the way of the coal chute and the ice box for many Southern Californians if newly proposed air quality regulations are adopted. As part of air pollution plans designed to meet federal deadlines, South Coast Air Quality Management District officials have proposed a ban on wood-burning fireplaces in all new homes in Los Angeles, Orange and portions of Riverside and San Bernardino counties. In addition, on winter days when pollution spikes, wood-fueled blazes in all fireplaces would be banned in highly affected areas. That could amount to about 20 days a year, district officials said. Another measure that would require closing off wood fireplaces or installing $3,600 pollution control devices before a home could be sold had been dropped as of late Thursday, an AQMD spokesman said.
Regulators say that with an estimated 5,400 premature deaths attributable to soot each year in the region, no source is too small to target. Numerous studies have shown that the fine particulate matter in soot sinks deep into the lungs, causing serious health problems. But critics, including homebuilders and real estate agents, say the regulations could hurt sales by robbing homes of one of their most enjoyable features. Air district staffers say a daily reduction of 192 tons of nitrogen oxides, an ingredient in harmful particulate pollution, is needed across the region to meet the Clean Air Act requirements, and that 7 tons of that could come from restrictions on fireplaces.
Barbara Burner, a Realtor for 25 years, said that with such a small amount of pollution at issue, she doesn't think the restrictions are merited. "A home is an emotional buy," said Burner, who works for Century 21 in Thousand Oaks and has three wood-burning fireplaces in her own home. "A fireplace - especially a beautiful fireplace, and what people normally mean by that is a wood-burning fireplace - it's the thing people like to have."
The fireplace rules are one piece of a plan also designed to reduce soot from diesel engines and ozone smog that AQMD's board will vote on today. "Our governing board will consider adopting their air quality plan, which includes more than three dozen measures," air district spokesman Sam Atwood said. "One of those measures would be for the first time to have a program that would reduce pollution from residential fireplaces and wood stoves."
The plan also includes truck-only lanes on the 710 and 15 freeways, and electric rail lines from Los Angeles' Westside to Ontario airport and from the ports to Inland Empire warehouses. Reducing paint thinner emissions and gas station and refinery leaks is also part of the host of proposed measures.
If the overall plan is approved, another vote is scheduled for September to finalize the fireplace regulation. "There aren't any easy rules left in terms of substantially reducing" fine particulate air pollution, said Jane Carney, a Riverside attorney and an AQMD board member. Riverside and other Inland Empire communities would likely be targeted by fire bans during cold winter months. Carney said there are "pretty obvious adverse impacts of wood smoke on pollution. If you stand close to a wood fire and breathe, you can feel it in your throat and in your lungs." Carney said that while she would listen to comments from the public and the building industry, attractive alternatives to wood fireplaces are available. "Let me tell you, the natural gas logs are wonderful," she said.
Carney also said she would consider even tougher measures to clean up fireplace pollution, such as a complete regional wintertime ban on wood fires. Air pollution regulations on fireplaces have been adopted in an estimated 50 counties, air districts or cities across the West, particularly in colder areas, said John Crouch of the Hearth, Patio and Barbecue Assn.
Numerous trade groups oppose the fireplace measures. Mark Grey, environmental director for the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, said the group would especially oppose any ban on wood-burning fireplaces in new homes.
A fireplace is "a popular feature. People want to be able to have a wood fire at certain times of year, and the AQMD did not bring to us any data that would demonstrate that wood smoke emissions are significant," Grey said. "From the statistics that we can see, most . homes burn wood in their fireplaces twice a year - on Christmas Eve and during the Super Bowl." There are an estimated 1.9 million homes with fireplaces in Southern California out of about 5 million total housing units, regulators said.
Environmentalist Tim Carmichael, who heads the Coalition for Clean Air, said that while it was important to take every step possible to clean the region's air - still the most polluted in the nation - it would be difficult if not impossible to enforce any sort of ban on wintertime fires. "At some level we believe these sorts of controls need to be looked at, but . the big question is, is it enforceable?" Carmichael said. "Could you really get people to stop doing this?"
Atwood, the air district spokesman, said that with about 100 inspectors responsible for pollution sources ranging from oil refineries to gas stations, enforcement would be tough. But Crouch, of the hearth and patio association, said, "Given how far out of attainment the South Coast is for fine particulates, and the fact that wood burning is not as significant in Southern California as it is in, for instance, in Seattle or Denver or someplace colder, I think they've charted a reasonable regional path here."
Source
YOU DON'T SAY: "CLIMATE MODELS OVERSTATE DROUGHTS"
It always was a crock to try to get around the fact that warmer seas give off more evaporation
There will be more flooding and less drought than has been forecast in widely used projections of global warming, according to a new study. The study using measurements taken by NASA weather satellites compared ocean rainfall from 1987 to 2006 to earlier climate model projections of what that precipitation would be. The models, based on physics equations, were found to be off the mark, according to the study released Thursday by the journal Science.
"The increase in global rainfall associated with global warming may be three times greater than currently predicted," says study lead author Frank Wentz of Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in Santa Rosa, Calif. In the last century, temperature records indicate average surface temperatures have risen roughly 1 degree, with a bigger increase, perhaps 3 to 7 degrees, projected by 2100. Global warming has become a hot scientific and political issue, focusing attention on the release of greenhouse gases, which retain heat in the atmosphere. Such gases include carbon dioxide, released when coal, oil and natural gas burn.
Projections have suggested that rainfall will rise in coming decades, but not as fast as temperature, leading to drier days and droughts worldwide. In February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) cited studies showing "extreme drought increasing from 1% of present-day land area to 30% by the end of the century."
The new study suggests models are flawed, underestimating how increased humidity in a warmer climate produces more rain clouds, Wentz said by e-mail. The February IPCC report said global warming makes it "very likely" that storms bringing heavy rains will occur more often in coming decades. The satellite study shows rainfall falling in patterns that mirror IPCC projections, but in greater amounts.
FULL STORY here
Earth-Friendly Greens Camouflaging the Poor's Plight
"People are pollution" anyway, according to the Greens. Let the poor die!
Many people are aware that the world's poor desperately need economic development. Few realize, however, that a major obstacle to overcoming global poverty is the anti-development and anti-human environmental movement that camouflages itself under ubiquitous "Earth-friendly" shades of green. This lack of awareness is no accident. It's come about through a "See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil" syndrome, where "evil" refers to the many ills of the modern environmental movement.
The syndrome is borne out by recent events related to the eye-opening documentary, "Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism," a film about environmentalist efforts to stop economic development in poverty-stricken regions around the world. The syndrome's "see no evil" aspect is exemplified by the efforts of Greenpeace and 80 other environmental organizations to block the movie from being shown in Romania (where much of the film was shot) and Washington, D.C. A Greenpeace official was invited to be a special guest at the film's Washington, D.C., premiere at the National Geographic Society headquarters. Instead of accepting the invitation, which included the opportunity to participate in a post-screening discussion panel, Greenpeace sent a letter to the Society expressing outrage at the decision to permit the film's screening. A Greenpeace-friendly newsletter demonstrated absurdly warped logic by asking a National Geographic spokesman whether the organization would rent out its facilities for the showing of a pro-Nazi propaganda film or a pornographic movie.
"I'm appalled by their demand to shut down the film," said Frayda Levy, president of the screening's co-sponsor, the Moving Picture Institute. "We invited [Greenpeace], but instead of joining us for a discussion, they display breathtaking narrow-mindedness. Regardless of whether you love or hate 'Mine Your Own Business,' it deserves to be seen. What makes them so afraid of this film?" Levy wondered in a media release.
The "hear no evil" aspect of the syndrome is demonstrated by the recent experiences of "MYOB" filmmakers at the International Finance Corp., the private finance arm of the World Bank. Though filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney declined comment, the IFC apparently had contacted them about hosting a screening of "MYOB" in the bank. The IFC finances a lot of large infrastructure projects and has had to wrestle with anti-development environmental groups that try to block those development efforts. Not only did the IFC invite the filmmakers to screen the documentary, it also offered as a form of payment to do what it did with Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," that is, purchase 200 DVDs and distribute them to local schools. McAleer and McElhinney jumped at the offer.
But a rather sheepish IFC official subsequently contacted the filmmakers and said that the bank had rethought its offer. The bank could only find the funds to buy 10 copies of "MYOB" and it had decided it would not distribute them to local schools. Instead, the bank would lend them internally to bank employees. A final condition was that the filmmakers were not allowed to tell anyone or announce to anyone that the IFC showed the film. After the screening, World Bank employees, on a one-by-one basis, reportedly commented to McAleer and McElhinney about how true "MYOB" was, but that they were not allowed to say so within the bank.
The syndrome's "speak no evil" aspect is exemplified by my recent personal experience with consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, which touts its support for "sustainable development" on its Web site. Concerned that the company was promoting a concept that has become an Orwellian eco-activist term for blocking all development opportunities no matter what the humanitarian costs, a shareholder group with which I am affiliated filed a related shareholder proposal with the company. In negotiations concerning the proposal, we asked Procter & Gamble to consider distributing copies of "MYOB" to its employees as a way of providing them an alternative viewpoint on "sustainable development" and to make a public statement to the effect that the company thought it was important to hear alternative viewpoints on environmental topics.
But while the company agreed to distribute copies of "MYOB" to its employees, it refused to make the public statement. Procter & Gamble's position was that it didn't want to be seen as endorsing a particular organization's point-of-view - an ostensibly reasonable position except that the company has previously publicly endorsed the viewpoints and mission of the Rainforest Alliance, an anti-development environmental group. Without the public acknowledgment, we doubted that the company was serious about the need for balanced views on sustainable development. Since negotiations collapsed, we'll be raising the issue with Procter & Gamble's CEO, Alan G. Lafley, at its annual shareholder meeting this fall.
The combination of intimidating environmentalists and intimidated organizations has resulted in a tragic absence of debate about the environmental monkey on the backs of the world's poor. Until we can at least talk about what environmental policies may be doing to developing nations - let alone debate these policies - we will have little hope of changing the lamentable state of affairs that has blocked life-saving economic development.
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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Saturday, June 02, 2007
We beat global warming!
Post lifted from Don Surber. See the original for links
London Daily Mail: "Freak snow, freezing temperatures and tropical storms across Europe are making the Bank Holiday washout here look almost pleasant. In Spitzing in Germany, locals have been forced to wrap up after ten centimetres [4 inches] of snow brought out the snowploughs for the first time this year."
Bloomberg: " Argentina rationed electricity to companies and severed natural gas supplies to Chile as a cold wave prompted record demand for electricity in South America's second-largest economy. The temperature in many parts of Argentina fell below freezing yesterday, pushing electricity demand to a record 18,300 megawatts, according to the country's energy regulator. Argentina cut shipments of gas to Chile to meet the surge in demand, forcing their neighbor to rely on residual gas in the pipeline."
From South Africa's IOL: "Dozens of people were feared killed in remote parts of north-western Nepal after the areas were hit by a freak snow storm, officials said on Tuesday."
Denver Post: "A sudden storm dropped heavy rain and up to 4 inches of hail on the metro area, enough to turn streets white"
What the hell has happened? Is global warming a lie? Or did we just beat it by Al Gore planting all those Guilt Trees in Kenya? I say it is the latter. We did end Global Cooling in the 1970s by switching from Right Guard spray-on to a roll-on. Boy, are we something else or aren't we?
Global Warming Hysteria is a National Security Issue
Recently in the news several retired US generals, came out in favor of using defense resources for fighting the effects of global warming. The news media only carried it for a day or so, but it raised some potent strategic issues that should be discussed. In a news release dated April 15, 2007, the leader of the group, Retired Marine Corps General Zinni turned climatologist and claimed that the US must stop global warming. The group argues that conflicts will be ignited because of the affects of droughts, famines, floods, and hurricanes brought on by human caused global warming, and America must become a constructive force in ending it.
A question for these generals
Why should we rely on strategic guidance from these men who, over the last 20 years, misguided the military in a focus on total war with a conventional enemy? Prior to 1989 this was an understandable orientation, but post-Persian Gulf War 1991 the threat evolved sharply toward asymmetric warfare as the preferred method of waging war against the US and the west. While the true emerging threat was in asymmetric war or terrorism, these climatologist generals were focused on, and caused the military to devote manpower and resources mostly to massed armored and mechanized formations rolling through the Folda Gap in Germany, along with strategic bombing.
These same generals resisted addressing the rising threat of urban warfare, terrorist warfare, and other "hugging" methods of combat that mitigated the might of a technologically advanced and superiorly resourced and trained military's overmatch capabilities.
While General Zinni preached containment of Iraq in the late 1990s, Al Qaeda prepared and launched several attacks from General Zinni's area of responsibility in the central region. Now the very generals that were derelict in their duties to recognize the rise of Islamic Fascism want us to heed their dire predictions on unproven theories of human-caused global warming? They had their chance in the 90s to recognize and prepare the military that they controlled for the true threat of asymmetric warfare, but they ignored it. They should have no reasonable expectation of us listening to their advice on anything.
To be sure, droughts, famines, floods, hurricanes and other climate related disasters could cause conflict that might draw in the United States, but these are is not the main risks we face. These retired generals are making the same mistake in singing on to the global warming hysteria as they did with emergence of asymmetric warfare and terrorism in the 90s. They identify the blatantly obvious first order effects, but predictably do not even try and conceder the second and third order effects of their proposed actions.
The real National Security risk: hyped and unproven man made global warming.
If we, as a nation, divert our economy to fight the phantom threat of the man-made global warming myth, our belligerent competitors around the world will benefit. Administering the prescriptions offered to combat global warming is a kin to throwing trillions of dollars down the drain. Think of China. China would be more than happy to see us divert any part of our economy from capitalism to fighting global warming in a fruitless effort. Wasting those resources gives China a way to speed its efforts to catch and surpass us as the preeminent world power.
Our economy and security are dependant on growth. Every dollar wasted on global warming takes away from the growth of our economy and allows China, and other belligerent conventional competitors, to close the gap. China is delighted to promote the myth that American must stop growing to preserve our environment; not because they care for the environment, but because they see it as an opportunity to catch us on the world stage, while they are exempt from the same restrictions under the Kyoto Accords.
The same can be said for any peer competitor, but more importantly for any asymmetric competitor of ours. How long will it be before we hear Al Qaeda (AQ), or other terrorist groups, chastise the US for environmental reasons, or accuse the US of taking more than our share of the world's resources?
Why would AQ pretend to care for the environment?
AQ and groups like them, indeed all of our enemies, understand that we can't be defeated through military means, but only through manipulation of information in their favor. They seek to influence the American people to turn the people against the policies of the US government, and ultimately against the US government itself with civil strife. The worldwide fanaticism surrounding global warming right now is obvious to our enemies as a source of leverage against us. AQ will use this irrational fear to affect the way the people of the world view the US a country and world leader, but more importantly to influence how our citizens view their own country.
If school teachers in America are able to turn kids against their parents for hurting the environment, then how much easier will it be for clever belligerent countries and terrorist groups to be able to use environmental issues like global warming to manipulate one of the most emotional and divisive issues that confront our country today?
So the next time one hears of one of our enemies chastising the US with regard to global warming, remember that it is not out of a concern for the environment, it is an effort to cripple the US and lessen our influence, and ultimately destroy us. Likewise, the next time you hear one of these retired general preach to us about something military (let alone environmental issues), remember that these are the same men that totally dropped the ball on their watch in the 90s, during the rise of the use of terrorism as a weapon of asymmetric warfare.
Source
Serious Words To Think About
Post lifted from Blue Crab. See the original for links
There is more than enough hyperventilation going on right now about global warming or global climate change or whatever you want to call it. But NPR interviews NASA Administrator Michael Griffin who makes an excellent point that really requires a bit of thought:
Earth's climate has varied - widely - through the years. Greenland got its name because when it was discovered it was actually green. The original colonists there died off when the climate changed and it got very, very cold. It was not the ice-swept desolation it mostly is today. 10,000 years ago, the glaciers reached well into the heartland of America. 2,000 years ago, North Africa, now desert, was the grain basket for the Roman Empire.
Who is to say this particular climate, at this very moment, is the be-all and end-all of perfection? Al Gore and his sycophants? The UN with its staggering record of incompetence? Really?
"I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take". Think about that. Seriously.
THE SUSPECT MATHS OF ENERGY-SAVING STREET LIGHTING
Westminster City Council is doing its bit to save the planet by installing energy-saving street lamps in every thoroughfare in the borough, the BBC reports. The bold initiative follows a "successful trial" of the 1,000 pounds-a-pop Furyo Lanterns on Harrow Road which saved "on an average day", enough juice to light a house for two days and cut carbon emissions on the test highway by 0.28 tonnes over three weeks.
The bulbs in question apparently "reflect light in a much stronger way meaning low wattage bulbs can be used" and boast "solar microchips" which flick on the switch as required, replacing the traditional timer. Councillor Alan Bradley of Westminster Council trumpeted: "Not only will these lights make a significant difference to the environment, but they save money too. These changes are vital and will help preserve our heritage and the city for everyone to enjoy for generations to come."
So far so good. However, the Beeb says that if Westminster replaces all of its 29,000 street lights, it will save "up to 20,000 pounds every year". Since the cost of the new, whale-hugging illumination is 29 million, it will therefore recoup its outlay in a mere 1,450 years. Westminster council says it has "no fixed timetable for installing the lamps", and given the amortisation period on this particular project, we suggest there's no need to rush.
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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Post lifted from Don Surber. See the original for links
London Daily Mail: "Freak snow, freezing temperatures and tropical storms across Europe are making the Bank Holiday washout here look almost pleasant. In Spitzing in Germany, locals have been forced to wrap up after ten centimetres [4 inches] of snow brought out the snowploughs for the first time this year."
Bloomberg: " Argentina rationed electricity to companies and severed natural gas supplies to Chile as a cold wave prompted record demand for electricity in South America's second-largest economy. The temperature in many parts of Argentina fell below freezing yesterday, pushing electricity demand to a record 18,300 megawatts, according to the country's energy regulator. Argentina cut shipments of gas to Chile to meet the surge in demand, forcing their neighbor to rely on residual gas in the pipeline."
From South Africa's IOL: "Dozens of people were feared killed in remote parts of north-western Nepal after the areas were hit by a freak snow storm, officials said on Tuesday."
Denver Post: "A sudden storm dropped heavy rain and up to 4 inches of hail on the metro area, enough to turn streets white"
What the hell has happened? Is global warming a lie? Or did we just beat it by Al Gore planting all those Guilt Trees in Kenya? I say it is the latter. We did end Global Cooling in the 1970s by switching from Right Guard spray-on to a roll-on. Boy, are we something else or aren't we?
Global Warming Hysteria is a National Security Issue
Recently in the news several retired US generals, came out in favor of using defense resources for fighting the effects of global warming. The news media only carried it for a day or so, but it raised some potent strategic issues that should be discussed. In a news release dated April 15, 2007, the leader of the group, Retired Marine Corps General Zinni turned climatologist and claimed that the US must stop global warming. The group argues that conflicts will be ignited because of the affects of droughts, famines, floods, and hurricanes brought on by human caused global warming, and America must become a constructive force in ending it.
A question for these generals
Why should we rely on strategic guidance from these men who, over the last 20 years, misguided the military in a focus on total war with a conventional enemy? Prior to 1989 this was an understandable orientation, but post-Persian Gulf War 1991 the threat evolved sharply toward asymmetric warfare as the preferred method of waging war against the US and the west. While the true emerging threat was in asymmetric war or terrorism, these climatologist generals were focused on, and caused the military to devote manpower and resources mostly to massed armored and mechanized formations rolling through the Folda Gap in Germany, along with strategic bombing.
These same generals resisted addressing the rising threat of urban warfare, terrorist warfare, and other "hugging" methods of combat that mitigated the might of a technologically advanced and superiorly resourced and trained military's overmatch capabilities.
While General Zinni preached containment of Iraq in the late 1990s, Al Qaeda prepared and launched several attacks from General Zinni's area of responsibility in the central region. Now the very generals that were derelict in their duties to recognize the rise of Islamic Fascism want us to heed their dire predictions on unproven theories of human-caused global warming? They had their chance in the 90s to recognize and prepare the military that they controlled for the true threat of asymmetric warfare, but they ignored it. They should have no reasonable expectation of us listening to their advice on anything.
To be sure, droughts, famines, floods, hurricanes and other climate related disasters could cause conflict that might draw in the United States, but these are is not the main risks we face. These retired generals are making the same mistake in singing on to the global warming hysteria as they did with emergence of asymmetric warfare and terrorism in the 90s. They identify the blatantly obvious first order effects, but predictably do not even try and conceder the second and third order effects of their proposed actions.
The real National Security risk: hyped and unproven man made global warming.
If we, as a nation, divert our economy to fight the phantom threat of the man-made global warming myth, our belligerent competitors around the world will benefit. Administering the prescriptions offered to combat global warming is a kin to throwing trillions of dollars down the drain. Think of China. China would be more than happy to see us divert any part of our economy from capitalism to fighting global warming in a fruitless effort. Wasting those resources gives China a way to speed its efforts to catch and surpass us as the preeminent world power.
Our economy and security are dependant on growth. Every dollar wasted on global warming takes away from the growth of our economy and allows China, and other belligerent conventional competitors, to close the gap. China is delighted to promote the myth that American must stop growing to preserve our environment; not because they care for the environment, but because they see it as an opportunity to catch us on the world stage, while they are exempt from the same restrictions under the Kyoto Accords.
The same can be said for any peer competitor, but more importantly for any asymmetric competitor of ours. How long will it be before we hear Al Qaeda (AQ), or other terrorist groups, chastise the US for environmental reasons, or accuse the US of taking more than our share of the world's resources?
Why would AQ pretend to care for the environment?
AQ and groups like them, indeed all of our enemies, understand that we can't be defeated through military means, but only through manipulation of information in their favor. They seek to influence the American people to turn the people against the policies of the US government, and ultimately against the US government itself with civil strife. The worldwide fanaticism surrounding global warming right now is obvious to our enemies as a source of leverage against us. AQ will use this irrational fear to affect the way the people of the world view the US a country and world leader, but more importantly to influence how our citizens view their own country.
If school teachers in America are able to turn kids against their parents for hurting the environment, then how much easier will it be for clever belligerent countries and terrorist groups to be able to use environmental issues like global warming to manipulate one of the most emotional and divisive issues that confront our country today?
So the next time one hears of one of our enemies chastising the US with regard to global warming, remember that it is not out of a concern for the environment, it is an effort to cripple the US and lessen our influence, and ultimately destroy us. Likewise, the next time you hear one of these retired general preach to us about something military (let alone environmental issues), remember that these are the same men that totally dropped the ball on their watch in the 90s, during the rise of the use of terrorism as a weapon of asymmetric warfare.
Source
Serious Words To Think About
Post lifted from Blue Crab. See the original for links
There is more than enough hyperventilation going on right now about global warming or global climate change or whatever you want to call it. But NPR interviews NASA Administrator Michael Griffin who makes an excellent point that really requires a bit of thought:
"Michael Griffin NASA Administrator has told America's National Public Radio that while he has no doubt a trend of global warming exists "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with."
In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep that will air in Thursday's edition of NPR News' Morning Edition, Administrator Griffin explains: "I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."
Earth's climate has varied - widely - through the years. Greenland got its name because when it was discovered it was actually green. The original colonists there died off when the climate changed and it got very, very cold. It was not the ice-swept desolation it mostly is today. 10,000 years ago, the glaciers reached well into the heartland of America. 2,000 years ago, North Africa, now desert, was the grain basket for the Roman Empire.
Who is to say this particular climate, at this very moment, is the be-all and end-all of perfection? Al Gore and his sycophants? The UN with its staggering record of incompetence? Really? "I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take".
Earth's climate has varied - widely - through the years. Greenland got its name because when it was discovered it was actually green. The original colonists there died off when the climate changed and it got very, very cold. It was not the ice-swept desolation it mostly is today. 10,000 years ago, the glaciers reached well into the heartland of America. 2,000 years ago, North Africa, now desert, was the grain basket for the Roman Empire.
Who is to say this particular climate, at this very moment, is the be-all and end-all of perfection? Al Gore and his sycophants? The UN with its staggering record of incompetence? Really?
"I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take". Think about that. Seriously.
THE SUSPECT MATHS OF ENERGY-SAVING STREET LIGHTING
Westminster City Council is doing its bit to save the planet by installing energy-saving street lamps in every thoroughfare in the borough, the BBC reports. The bold initiative follows a "successful trial" of the 1,000 pounds-a-pop Furyo Lanterns on Harrow Road which saved "on an average day", enough juice to light a house for two days and cut carbon emissions on the test highway by 0.28 tonnes over three weeks.
The bulbs in question apparently "reflect light in a much stronger way meaning low wattage bulbs can be used" and boast "solar microchips" which flick on the switch as required, replacing the traditional timer. Councillor Alan Bradley of Westminster Council trumpeted: "Not only will these lights make a significant difference to the environment, but they save money too. These changes are vital and will help preserve our heritage and the city for everyone to enjoy for generations to come."
So far so good. However, the Beeb says that if Westminster replaces all of its 29,000 street lights, it will save "up to 20,000 pounds every year". Since the cost of the new, whale-hugging illumination is 29 million, it will therefore recoup its outlay in a mere 1,450 years. Westminster council says it has "no fixed timetable for installing the lamps", and given the amortisation period on this particular project, we suggest there's no need to rush.
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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Friday, June 01, 2007
More Greenpeace deception
No admission below that global temperatures went both up and down in the 20th century and that the 60s were one of the cold periods. And glacial expansion and contraction is mainly a function of variations in precipitation (rainfall/snowfall), anyway
MOUNT Everest is suffering the effects of climate change with a picture released for the first time showing devastating effects. The image taken last month shows a dramatically different landscape to photos taken in the same spot almost 40 years ago. In a picture taken in 1968, the Middle Rongbu glacier skirts through the mountain valley with the peaks above thickly covered with snow. But almost exactly the same shot taken this year by a Greenpeace team reveals much barer peaks and a scarcely visible glacier.
Greenpeace said the radical changes are due to the effects of climate change. "The degradation of the Everest environment and glacial retreat is, Greenpeace believes, a direct result of climate change," a spokeswoman said.
A team travelled to Everest last month to see the Middle Rongbu glacier and compare its current state to how it was according to photos taken in 1968. The photo had to be taken approximately 1km away from the 1968 viewpoint instead because the glacier has retreated so much in the past 40 years. Greenpeace estimate it has moved back by 2km, raising fears millions will soon be at risk because of the Rongbu glaciers' important role as a water source to China and India's rivers.
Source
Greenies attack bottled water
I think it's a crock myself but only because it is rarely any better than reticulated water. But each to his own
world's fastest-growing beverage is a boon to the industry but a bust for the environment and for the more than 1 billion people worldwide who lack access to clean drinking water, according to a new Vital Signs Update from the Worldwatch Institute.
Excessive withdrawal of natural mineral or spring water to produce bottled water has threatened local streams and groundwater, and the product consumes significant amounts of energy in production and shipping. Millions of tons of oil-derived plastics, mostly polyethylene terephthalate (PET), are used to make the water bottles, most of which are not recycled. Each year, about 2 million tons of PET bottles end up in landfills in the United States; in 2005, the national recycling rate for PET was only 23.1 percent, far below the 39.7 percent rate achieved a decade earlier.
"Bottled water may be an industry winner, but it's an environmental loser," says Ling Li, a fellow with the Institute's China Program who authored the update. "The beverage industry benefits the most from our bottled water obsession. But this does nothing for the staggering number of the world's poor who see safe drinking water as at best a luxury, and at worst, an unattainable goal." An estimated 35-50 percent of urban dwellers in Africa and Asia lack adequate access to safe potable water, according to Worldwatch's State of the World 2007 report.
Consumers in industrial countries choose to drink bottled water for taste and convenience, while in developing countries, unreliable and unsafe municipal water supplies have driven the growth in consumption. Yet many poorer people who seek improved drinking water supplies cannot afford the bottled version. Bottled water can be between 240 and 10,000 times more expensive than tap water; in 2005, sales in the United States alone generated more than $10 billion in revenue.
Global consumption of bottled water more than doubled between 1997 and 2005, securing the product's place as the world's fastest-growing commercial beverage. The United States remains the largest consumer of bottled water, but among the top ten countries, India has nearly tripled its consumption, while China more than doubled its consumption between 2000 and 2005.
In industrial countries with highly regulated water supplies, tap water has been proven to be just as safe, or safer, than its commercial counterpart. In the United States, regulations concerning bottled water are generally the same as for tap water, but are weaker for some microbial contaminants. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates bottled water at the federal level, permits the product to contain certain levels of fecal matter, whereas the Environmental Protection Agency does not allow any human waste in city tap water. Bottled water violations are not always reported to the public, and in most cases the products may be recalled up to 15 months after the problematic water was produced, distributed, and sold.
Source
Greenie dam frenzy ratchets up
Al Gore has been hectoring Americans to pare back their lifestyles to fight global warming. But if Mr. Gore wants us to rethink our priorities in the face of this mother of all environmental threats, surely he has convinced his fellow greens to rethink theirs, right?
Wrong. If their opposition to the Klamath hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest is any indication, the greens, it appears, are just as unwilling to sacrifice their pet causes as a Texas rancher is to sacrifice his pickup truck. If anything, the radicalization of the environmental movement is the bigger obstacle to addressing global warming than the allegedly gluttonous American way of life...
But tearing down the Klamath dams, the last of which was completed in 1962, will do more harm than good at this stage. These dams provide cheap, renewable energy to 70,000 homes in Oregon and California. Replacing this energy with natural gas -- the cleanest fossil-fuel source -- would still pump 473,000 tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. This is roughly equal to the annual emissions of 102,000 cars.
Given this alternative, one would think that environmentalists would form a human shield around the dams to protect them. Instead, they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to tear them down because the dams stand in the way of migrating salmon. Environmentalists don't even let many states, including California, count hydro as renewable.
They have rejected all attempts by PacifiCorp, the company that owns the dams, to take mitigation steps such as installing $350 million fish ladders to create a salmon pathway. Klamath Riverkeeper, a group that is part of an environmental alliance headed by Robert Kennedy Jr., has sued a fish hatchery that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife runs -- and PacifiCorp is required to fund -- on grounds that it releases too many algae and toxic discharges. The hatchery produces at least 25% of the chinook salmon catch every year. Closing it will cause fish populations to drop further, making the demolition of the dams even more likely.
But the end of the Klamath won't mean the end of the dam saga -- it is the big prize that environmentalists are coveting to take their antidam crusade to the next level...
Large hydro dams supply about 20% of California's power (and 10% of America's). If they are destroyed, California won't just have to find some other way to fulfill its energy needs. It will have to do so while reducing its carbon footprint to meet the ambitious CO2 emission-reduction targets that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set. Mr. Schwarzenegger has committed the Golden State to cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 -- a more stringent requirement than even in the Kyoto Protocol.
The effect this might have on California's erratic and overpriced energy supply has businesses running scared. Mike Naumes, owner of Naumes Inc., a fruit packing and processing business, last year moved his juice concentrate plant from Marysville, Calif., to Washington state and cut his energy bill in half. With hydropower under attack, he is considering shrinking his farming operations in the Golden State as well. "We can't pay exorbitant energy prices and stay competitive with overseas businesses," he says.
Bruce Hamilton, Sierra Club's deputy executive director and a longtime proponent of such a mandate, refuses to even acknowledge that there is any conflict in closing hydro dams while fighting global warming. All California needs to do to square these twin objectives, he maintains, is become more energy efficient while embracing alternative fuels. "We don't need to accept a Faustian bargain with hydropower to cut emissions," he says.
This is easier done in the fantasy world of greens than in the real world. If cost-effective technologies to boost energy efficiency actually existed, industry would adopt them automatically, global warming or not.
As for alternative fuels, they are still far from economically viable. Gilbert Metcalf, an economist at Tufts University, has calculated that wind energy costs 6.64 cents per kWh and biomass 5.95 kWh -- compared to 4.37 cents for clean coal. Robert Bradley Jr., president of the Institute for Energy Research, puts these costs even higher. "Although technological advances have lowered alternative fuel prices in recent years, these fuels still by and large cost twice as much as conventional fossil fuels," he says.
But suppose these differentials disappeared. Would the Sierra Club and its eco-warriors actually embrace the fuels that Mr. Hamilton advocates? Not if their track record is any indication. Indeed, environmental groups have a history of opposing just about every energy source.
Their opposition to nuclear energy is well known. Wind power? Two years ago the Center for Biological Diversity sued California's Altamont Pass Wind Farm for obstructing and shredding migrating birds. ("Cuisinarts of the sky" is what many greens call wind farms.) Solar? Worldwatch Institute's Christopher Flavin has been decidedly lukewarm about solar farms because they involve placing acres of mirrors in pristine desert habitat. The Sierra Club and Wilderness Society once testified before Congress to keep California's Mojave Desert -- one of the prime solar sites in the country -- off limits to all development. Geothermal energy? They are unlikely to get enviro blessings, because some of the best sites are located on protected federal lands.
Greens, it seems, always manage to find a problem for every environmental solution -- and there is deep reason for this... Thus, even in the face of a supposedly calamitous threat like global warming, environmentalists can't bring themselves to embrace any sacrifice -- of salmons or birds or desert or protected wilderness. Its strategy comes down to pure obstructionism -- on full display in the Klamath dam controversy. Yet, if environmentalists themselves are unwilling to give up anything for global warming, how can they expect sacrifices from others? If Al Gore wants to do something, he should first move out of his 6,000 square-foot Nashville mansion and then make a movie titled: "Damn the salmon."
Source
Greenie claims reflect their times
It is strange, at a time when the social construction of science is an established idea (Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he describes science's progress through `paradigms', is on every undergraduate's reading list) that nobody thinks to look at the social construction of global warming theories. Global warming science is being produced in highly febrile times; and history tells us that the more the political temperature rises, the more science's view of nature is distorted.
If you look at the dates on the citations in Six Degrees that deal with carbon feedback cycles, global emissions scenarios or the impact of temperature rises on agriculture and ecosystems, then you'll see that the majority of them date from 2004-2006. It was only very recently that scientists started running the models on which Six Degrees is based, predicting the collapse of ecosystems and wild feedback loops that would take us from two degrees to apocalypse. Why was this? If we trace the development of scientific theories about global climate, we can see how they shift in predictable relation to the preoccupations of the time - which suggests that a similar thing could be occurring now.
The assumption for much of the twentieth century was that the climate system was stable, and that it would adjust to absorb imbalances. One past director general of the UK meteorology office stated: `The atmosphere is a robust system with a built-in capacity to counteract any perturbation.' (1) Where opinion differed from this, it did so in highly predictable ways, in direct relationship not to the shiftings of the planet but to the shiftings of the political zeitgeist.
We find that in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, as the world seemed to be poised on a knife's edge and total destruction a possibility, a number of climate scientists - at the same time and independently of each other - discovered instabilities in the climate system. In 1964, one ice expert discovered instability in the Antarctic, which he said `provides the "flip-flop" mechanism to drive the Earth into and out of an ice age' (2). Others came to the same conclusion, and the `flip-flop mechanism' was the subject of scientific meetings and conferences.
In the 1970s, in the context of the global slowdown and the end of the easy years of the postwar boom, climate scientists started to predict that the climate would become harsher in future. One oceanographer predicted that the `amiable climate' we had been used to would give way to a new ice age. A Time magazine article summed up that scientists disagreed over whether there would be `runaway glaciation' or `runaway deglaciation', but what was certain was that `the world's prolonged streak of exceptionally good climate has probably come to an end - meaning that mankind will find it harder to grow food' (3). So a society in the grip of the energy crisis finds that in the future it will be `harder to grow food'.
We can also see political concerns imprinted on scientists' theories of the Earth's past. In the 1980s, scientists formulated the theory that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by the striking of a giant asteroid. One scientist at the time noted that such theories should be measured not just by the facts of nature, but also against the concerns of the age. `[The asteroid theory] commanded belief because it fit with what we are prepared to believe.. Like everyone else...I carry within my consciousness the images of mushroom clouds.. [It] feels right because it fits so neatly into the nightmares that project our own demise.' (4)
Fast forward to the early twenty-first century, when scientists decided that the climate system was fragile and subject to dramatic and irreversible shifts. In 2001, one academy declared: `Geoscientists are just beginning to accept and adapt to the new paradigm of highly variable climate systems.' (5) The phrase everybody started to use was `tipping point', meaning the point where the Earth's system would reach its `limit' and tip over into an irreversible change. (This was particularly the case after the 2004 Hollywood hit, The Day After Tomorrow, which envisaged the onset of a global freeze in a matter of hours.) The question many scientists started asking of nature was `what is its tipping point?'. At what point would the Arctic and Antarctic go into irreversible meltdown? At what point would the carbon cycle go into reverse? At what point would this or that ecosystem collapse? When would extreme weather events start to increase?
Scientists started to carry out impact studies, and they started to look at feedback cycles. These are loaded concepts: impact - showing the damaging effect of temperature rise on ecosystems - and feedback - the inbuilt instabilities that could lead to `runaway' change. Nature was viewed as fragile, interconnected, and liable to spin away dramatically beyond our control. In 2005, one Russian scientist predicted an `ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climactic warming' (6). It is these studies, then, that form the references at the back of Lynas' book, and which provide the basis for his claims of the meltdown that will occur at two degrees.
You don't have to be Thomas Kuhn to read the (mixed) metaphors here. We're hitting the `ecological buffers', says Lynas, `fiddling with the earth's thermostat'. Once feedback starts, `the accelerator will be jammed, and there will be nothing we can do to cut the speed of climate change'. `[N]o one can say for sure where this tipping point might lie, but it stands to reason that the harder we push the climate, the closer we are likely to get to the edge of this particular cliff.' Just as in the 1980s asteroid theories felt `right' because of the images scientists carried in their consciousnesses, so now, too, the political climate colours models of nature. We can see how social anxieties - a fear of change, a sense of the fragility of things - guide the questions that scientists ask, and the kinds of theories that ring true.
That doesn't mean, of course, that these theories are incorrect. Every theory of nature to some extent draws its metaphors from the society of the time. In Darwin's theories of natural selection we see something of the individualistic market society of the nineteenth century, with individual organisms fighting it out and the `fittest' surviving. In the early twentieth century, when political opinion shifted away from competition and towards social reform, biologists started to focus on the cooperative relationships between organisms, founding the science of ecology and posing theories of selection `for the good of the species'. Science must draw its models from society, because after all scientists are human beings not machines; science is a model of nature reconstructed in our heads. This is not a source of inaccuracy, but the essence of intellectual enterprise: nature cannot be accessed `in the raw' but always must be described with words and reconstituted in thought.
As a rule of thumb, the more self-critical the science, and the more it tests itself against reality, the more accurate it will be. If all theories draw their metaphors from society, some do so justifiably - in a way that grasps nature's real operation - and some do in a way that merely distorts and mystifies. So, as it happens, Darwin was right and the `good of the species' theorists were wrong: their theory was based merely on wishful thinking, on how they wanted nature to behave rather than how it really did. The thing that separated Darwin from others was his systematic testing: he spent years closely scrutinising species, measuring his ideas against the evidence before his eyes. Even in his Origin of Species he raised all the facts that did not fit into his theory, and sought to adapt his ideas in order to explain them.
The less self-reflective the science, and the more it is founded on political and moral campaigns, the less reliable it is likely to be. And in Lynas, we see how global warming science has become a foil for a whole series of political and moral agendas, a way of discussing everything from the sins of consumerism to human arrogance. Outlining the effects of a four degrees rise in temperature, Lynas writes: `Poseidon [God of the sea] is angered by arrogant affronts from mere mortals like us. We have woken him from a thousand-year slumber, and this time his wrath will know no bounds.' Not only Poseidon and Gaia but also terms such as `Mother Nature' and `nature's revenge' have slipped into everyday discussion about climate change. Darwin did not, so far as we know, give names of Gods to his finches. When scientific concepts start to be discussed in such emotional terms, it suggests that they say more about wish than reality.
The scope for climatology to slip into fantasy is heightened by the fact that it is a relatively open and uncertain field. Time and again in the twentieth century, climate scientists noted how shaky their art was. It was a case of one man, one model, and everybody thought that theirs was the right one. Today's models include many interacting factors that are incompletely understood, and different models can produce drastically different results. Lynas quotes a couple of studies that found that global warming will lead to increased rainfall in the Sahel, meaning higher crop yields, but another study that found severe drought. (Needless to say, he favours the drought scenario.) When Oxford University's ClimatePrediction.net project asked people to download and run climate models on their home computer, each with tiny differences from the next, the results came back between three degrees and 11 degrees warming, for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Even when scientists' models agree, this could just as much indicate commonly held assumptions - for example, notions of `tipping points' - rather than scientific truth.
That doesn't mean that global warming doesn't exist, but it does mean that many of these predictive models currently being produced are likely to be extremely inaccurate, verging on total fantasy. Any form of science that is morally and politically loaded, and involves putting large numbers of variables into a computer to predict changes for 50 years hence that cannot be tested, is going to be distorted. While the world's climate does appear to have warmed - the earth is on average 0.7 degrees warmer than it was 150 years ago, before large-scale industrialisation - it's a fair leap from 0.7 degrees to apocalypse. As a non-climatologist, it seems logical to me that carbon dioxide emissions will cause global warming in some form - but if global warming meltdown starts in eight years' time, I will eat my copy of Six Degrees, appendices and all. That is a conviction founded not on an analysis of Geophysical Research Letters, but on a consideration of the circumstances in which such science is produced.
Today's preoccupation with fragility and collapse means that models take a one-sided view of nature. Feedback cycles can indeed increase atmospheric carbon dioxide, and some soils do give out methane when they warm. But feedback cycles also work the other way, too, with plants and the sea absorbing some of the extra CO2 we add to the atmosphere (indeed, for much of the 1990s, climate science was preoccupied with the question of `missing' CO2; that is, CO2 added to the atmosphere by industry that appeared to have disappeared). And while ecosystems do sometimes collapse - there have been rapid climate shifts and mass extinctions in the past - they also adapt and change, and new species benefit from the decline of the old (when the Earth was warmer, trees grew in the Antarctic). When there are rapid paradigm shifts of this kind, when scientists one year assume that nature is stable and the next that it is not, this is probably due not to a change in nature but to a change in society.
To recap, it is perhaps political rather than scientific analysis that can help us to understand the bias that underlies today's climate science. The notion of nature as fragile and subject to collapse is a relatively recent one, which is likely to owe more to the anxious zeitgeist than to climate realities. There are two more aspects of Six Degrees that are worth discussing. First, its notion that tackling climate change is an historic challenge; and second, its idea that global warming holds within it moral lessons, for humanity and for individuals. These help to explain why the idea of global warming is now so compelling and has come to dominate public life. For it provides, not just an expression of anxiety, but also a way out of that anxiety: a way of reframing the big issues of historical purpose and personal morality.
When global warming becomes so laden with moral meaning, it becomes difficult to approach it as an environmental problem - to work out to what degree it is a problem, and what would be the most appropriate response.....
When Guy Callender stood up in front of the Royal Society in the 1930s and suggested that the temperature rise of the nineteenth-century was due to burning fossil fuels, he painted a very positive picture. Indeed, in the 1950s the Soviet Union hatched plans to increase warming, by spreading soot on the Siberian snow to absorb heat and even by setting fire to unused coal seams. Other scientists thought that global warming would have a negative effect on human welfare, but this was not a political or moral divide, and they used dry terms such as `inadvertent climate modification'. The questions were: was it happening?; would its effect be good or bad?; what measures should be put in place in response? Guilt didn't come into it.
Here's the rub: when an environmental problem becomes a generational mission, nobody wants very much to solve it. Lynas criticises the notion that `the white knight of technology will come riding to the rescue' - this is in fact `the most pervasive and enduring form of denial'. There is no `miracle energy cure', says Lynas. Indeed, you often hear environmentalists say that the hopes of a `silver bullet' to solve global warming is merely `avoiding' the question. Avoiding how? What they mean is that it is not energy production that must change; it is us. Global warming is not a problem to be solved; it is a lesson to be lived.
We need a new school of thought in the global warming debate, which is founded not on scientific facts but on political critique. It is only this that can explain the way in which the issue is framed, or its hold over social life and public debate. Lynas' books suggest the attraction of the global warming issue has little to do with environmental problems. Instead, global warming appears to provide answers to life's big questions, offering a new kind of historic mission and a new structure for personal morality.
Only global warming doesn't really answer any of these big questions - it shuts them down, solving the problem of meaning by abolishing meaning itself. As we look forward to 2050, we could hope to find some more profound answers to the riddle of existence than that measured in the rise and fall of carbon atoms. We could also hope to find some more sensible (but, possibly, less dramatic) solutions to any environmental challenges we face.
We need to strip drama from climatology, and add drama to our lives. The question of how we live should be subject to mass, passionate debate, and Geophysical Research Letters should be left in the basement of the Radcliffe Science Library for the consultation of specialists.
Much more here
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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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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No admission below that global temperatures went both up and down in the 20th century and that the 60s were one of the cold periods. And glacial expansion and contraction is mainly a function of variations in precipitation (rainfall/snowfall), anyway
MOUNT Everest is suffering the effects of climate change with a picture released for the first time showing devastating effects. The image taken last month shows a dramatically different landscape to photos taken in the same spot almost 40 years ago. In a picture taken in 1968, the Middle Rongbu glacier skirts through the mountain valley with the peaks above thickly covered with snow. But almost exactly the same shot taken this year by a Greenpeace team reveals much barer peaks and a scarcely visible glacier.
Greenpeace said the radical changes are due to the effects of climate change. "The degradation of the Everest environment and glacial retreat is, Greenpeace believes, a direct result of climate change," a spokeswoman said.
A team travelled to Everest last month to see the Middle Rongbu glacier and compare its current state to how it was according to photos taken in 1968. The photo had to be taken approximately 1km away from the 1968 viewpoint instead because the glacier has retreated so much in the past 40 years. Greenpeace estimate it has moved back by 2km, raising fears millions will soon be at risk because of the Rongbu glaciers' important role as a water source to China and India's rivers.
Source
Greenies attack bottled water
I think it's a crock myself but only because it is rarely any better than reticulated water. But each to his own
world's fastest-growing beverage is a boon to the industry but a bust for the environment and for the more than 1 billion people worldwide who lack access to clean drinking water, according to a new Vital Signs Update from the Worldwatch Institute.
Excessive withdrawal of natural mineral or spring water to produce bottled water has threatened local streams and groundwater, and the product consumes significant amounts of energy in production and shipping. Millions of tons of oil-derived plastics, mostly polyethylene terephthalate (PET), are used to make the water bottles, most of which are not recycled. Each year, about 2 million tons of PET bottles end up in landfills in the United States; in 2005, the national recycling rate for PET was only 23.1 percent, far below the 39.7 percent rate achieved a decade earlier.
"Bottled water may be an industry winner, but it's an environmental loser," says Ling Li, a fellow with the Institute's China Program who authored the update. "The beverage industry benefits the most from our bottled water obsession. But this does nothing for the staggering number of the world's poor who see safe drinking water as at best a luxury, and at worst, an unattainable goal." An estimated 35-50 percent of urban dwellers in Africa and Asia lack adequate access to safe potable water, according to Worldwatch's State of the World 2007 report.
Consumers in industrial countries choose to drink bottled water for taste and convenience, while in developing countries, unreliable and unsafe municipal water supplies have driven the growth in consumption. Yet many poorer people who seek improved drinking water supplies cannot afford the bottled version. Bottled water can be between 240 and 10,000 times more expensive than tap water; in 2005, sales in the United States alone generated more than $10 billion in revenue.
Global consumption of bottled water more than doubled between 1997 and 2005, securing the product's place as the world's fastest-growing commercial beverage. The United States remains the largest consumer of bottled water, but among the top ten countries, India has nearly tripled its consumption, while China more than doubled its consumption between 2000 and 2005.
In industrial countries with highly regulated water supplies, tap water has been proven to be just as safe, or safer, than its commercial counterpart. In the United States, regulations concerning bottled water are generally the same as for tap water, but are weaker for some microbial contaminants. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which regulates bottled water at the federal level, permits the product to contain certain levels of fecal matter, whereas the Environmental Protection Agency does not allow any human waste in city tap water. Bottled water violations are not always reported to the public, and in most cases the products may be recalled up to 15 months after the problematic water was produced, distributed, and sold.
Source
Greenie dam frenzy ratchets up
Al Gore has been hectoring Americans to pare back their lifestyles to fight global warming. But if Mr. Gore wants us to rethink our priorities in the face of this mother of all environmental threats, surely he has convinced his fellow greens to rethink theirs, right?
Wrong. If their opposition to the Klamath hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest is any indication, the greens, it appears, are just as unwilling to sacrifice their pet causes as a Texas rancher is to sacrifice his pickup truck. If anything, the radicalization of the environmental movement is the bigger obstacle to addressing global warming than the allegedly gluttonous American way of life...
But tearing down the Klamath dams, the last of which was completed in 1962, will do more harm than good at this stage. These dams provide cheap, renewable energy to 70,000 homes in Oregon and California. Replacing this energy with natural gas -- the cleanest fossil-fuel source -- would still pump 473,000 tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. This is roughly equal to the annual emissions of 102,000 cars.
Given this alternative, one would think that environmentalists would form a human shield around the dams to protect them. Instead, they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to tear them down because the dams stand in the way of migrating salmon. Environmentalists don't even let many states, including California, count hydro as renewable.
They have rejected all attempts by PacifiCorp, the company that owns the dams, to take mitigation steps such as installing $350 million fish ladders to create a salmon pathway. Klamath Riverkeeper, a group that is part of an environmental alliance headed by Robert Kennedy Jr., has sued a fish hatchery that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife runs -- and PacifiCorp is required to fund -- on grounds that it releases too many algae and toxic discharges. The hatchery produces at least 25% of the chinook salmon catch every year. Closing it will cause fish populations to drop further, making the demolition of the dams even more likely.
But the end of the Klamath won't mean the end of the dam saga -- it is the big prize that environmentalists are coveting to take their antidam crusade to the next level...
Large hydro dams supply about 20% of California's power (and 10% of America's). If they are destroyed, California won't just have to find some other way to fulfill its energy needs. It will have to do so while reducing its carbon footprint to meet the ambitious CO2 emission-reduction targets that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set. Mr. Schwarzenegger has committed the Golden State to cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 -- a more stringent requirement than even in the Kyoto Protocol.
The effect this might have on California's erratic and overpriced energy supply has businesses running scared. Mike Naumes, owner of Naumes Inc., a fruit packing and processing business, last year moved his juice concentrate plant from Marysville, Calif., to Washington state and cut his energy bill in half. With hydropower under attack, he is considering shrinking his farming operations in the Golden State as well. "We can't pay exorbitant energy prices and stay competitive with overseas businesses," he says.
Bruce Hamilton, Sierra Club's deputy executive director and a longtime proponent of such a mandate, refuses to even acknowledge that there is any conflict in closing hydro dams while fighting global warming. All California needs to do to square these twin objectives, he maintains, is become more energy efficient while embracing alternative fuels. "We don't need to accept a Faustian bargain with hydropower to cut emissions," he says.
This is easier done in the fantasy world of greens than in the real world. If cost-effective technologies to boost energy efficiency actually existed, industry would adopt them automatically, global warming or not.
As for alternative fuels, they are still far from economically viable. Gilbert Metcalf, an economist at Tufts University, has calculated that wind energy costs 6.64 cents per kWh and biomass 5.95 kWh -- compared to 4.37 cents for clean coal. Robert Bradley Jr., president of the Institute for Energy Research, puts these costs even higher. "Although technological advances have lowered alternative fuel prices in recent years, these fuels still by and large cost twice as much as conventional fossil fuels," he says.
But suppose these differentials disappeared. Would the Sierra Club and its eco-warriors actually embrace the fuels that Mr. Hamilton advocates? Not if their track record is any indication. Indeed, environmental groups have a history of opposing just about every energy source.
Their opposition to nuclear energy is well known. Wind power? Two years ago the Center for Biological Diversity sued California's Altamont Pass Wind Farm for obstructing and shredding migrating birds. ("Cuisinarts of the sky" is what many greens call wind farms.) Solar? Worldwatch Institute's Christopher Flavin has been decidedly lukewarm about solar farms because they involve placing acres of mirrors in pristine desert habitat. The Sierra Club and Wilderness Society once testified before Congress to keep California's Mojave Desert -- one of the prime solar sites in the country -- off limits to all development. Geothermal energy? They are unlikely to get enviro blessings, because some of the best sites are located on protected federal lands.
Greens, it seems, always manage to find a problem for every environmental solution -- and there is deep reason for this... Thus, even in the face of a supposedly calamitous threat like global warming, environmentalists can't bring themselves to embrace any sacrifice -- of salmons or birds or desert or protected wilderness. Its strategy comes down to pure obstructionism -- on full display in the Klamath dam controversy. Yet, if environmentalists themselves are unwilling to give up anything for global warming, how can they expect sacrifices from others? If Al Gore wants to do something, he should first move out of his 6,000 square-foot Nashville mansion and then make a movie titled: "Damn the salmon."
Source
Greenie claims reflect their times
It is strange, at a time when the social construction of science is an established idea (Thomas Kuhn's 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he describes science's progress through `paradigms', is on every undergraduate's reading list) that nobody thinks to look at the social construction of global warming theories. Global warming science is being produced in highly febrile times; and history tells us that the more the political temperature rises, the more science's view of nature is distorted.
If you look at the dates on the citations in Six Degrees that deal with carbon feedback cycles, global emissions scenarios or the impact of temperature rises on agriculture and ecosystems, then you'll see that the majority of them date from 2004-2006. It was only very recently that scientists started running the models on which Six Degrees is based, predicting the collapse of ecosystems and wild feedback loops that would take us from two degrees to apocalypse. Why was this? If we trace the development of scientific theories about global climate, we can see how they shift in predictable relation to the preoccupations of the time - which suggests that a similar thing could be occurring now.
The assumption for much of the twentieth century was that the climate system was stable, and that it would adjust to absorb imbalances. One past director general of the UK meteorology office stated: `The atmosphere is a robust system with a built-in capacity to counteract any perturbation.' (1) Where opinion differed from this, it did so in highly predictable ways, in direct relationship not to the shiftings of the planet but to the shiftings of the political zeitgeist.
We find that in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, as the world seemed to be poised on a knife's edge and total destruction a possibility, a number of climate scientists - at the same time and independently of each other - discovered instabilities in the climate system. In 1964, one ice expert discovered instability in the Antarctic, which he said `provides the "flip-flop" mechanism to drive the Earth into and out of an ice age' (2). Others came to the same conclusion, and the `flip-flop mechanism' was the subject of scientific meetings and conferences.
In the 1970s, in the context of the global slowdown and the end of the easy years of the postwar boom, climate scientists started to predict that the climate would become harsher in future. One oceanographer predicted that the `amiable climate' we had been used to would give way to a new ice age. A Time magazine article summed up that scientists disagreed over whether there would be `runaway glaciation' or `runaway deglaciation', but what was certain was that `the world's prolonged streak of exceptionally good climate has probably come to an end - meaning that mankind will find it harder to grow food' (3). So a society in the grip of the energy crisis finds that in the future it will be `harder to grow food'.
We can also see political concerns imprinted on scientists' theories of the Earth's past. In the 1980s, scientists formulated the theory that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by the striking of a giant asteroid. One scientist at the time noted that such theories should be measured not just by the facts of nature, but also against the concerns of the age. `[The asteroid theory] commanded belief because it fit with what we are prepared to believe.. Like everyone else...I carry within my consciousness the images of mushroom clouds.. [It] feels right because it fits so neatly into the nightmares that project our own demise.' (4)
Fast forward to the early twenty-first century, when scientists decided that the climate system was fragile and subject to dramatic and irreversible shifts. In 2001, one academy declared: `Geoscientists are just beginning to accept and adapt to the new paradigm of highly variable climate systems.' (5) The phrase everybody started to use was `tipping point', meaning the point where the Earth's system would reach its `limit' and tip over into an irreversible change. (This was particularly the case after the 2004 Hollywood hit, The Day After Tomorrow, which envisaged the onset of a global freeze in a matter of hours.) The question many scientists started asking of nature was `what is its tipping point?'. At what point would the Arctic and Antarctic go into irreversible meltdown? At what point would the carbon cycle go into reverse? At what point would this or that ecosystem collapse? When would extreme weather events start to increase?
Scientists started to carry out impact studies, and they started to look at feedback cycles. These are loaded concepts: impact - showing the damaging effect of temperature rise on ecosystems - and feedback - the inbuilt instabilities that could lead to `runaway' change. Nature was viewed as fragile, interconnected, and liable to spin away dramatically beyond our control. In 2005, one Russian scientist predicted an `ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climactic warming' (6). It is these studies, then, that form the references at the back of Lynas' book, and which provide the basis for his claims of the meltdown that will occur at two degrees.
You don't have to be Thomas Kuhn to read the (mixed) metaphors here. We're hitting the `ecological buffers', says Lynas, `fiddling with the earth's thermostat'. Once feedback starts, `the accelerator will be jammed, and there will be nothing we can do to cut the speed of climate change'. `[N]o one can say for sure where this tipping point might lie, but it stands to reason that the harder we push the climate, the closer we are likely to get to the edge of this particular cliff.' Just as in the 1980s asteroid theories felt `right' because of the images scientists carried in their consciousnesses, so now, too, the political climate colours models of nature. We can see how social anxieties - a fear of change, a sense of the fragility of things - guide the questions that scientists ask, and the kinds of theories that ring true.
That doesn't mean, of course, that these theories are incorrect. Every theory of nature to some extent draws its metaphors from the society of the time. In Darwin's theories of natural selection we see something of the individualistic market society of the nineteenth century, with individual organisms fighting it out and the `fittest' surviving. In the early twentieth century, when political opinion shifted away from competition and towards social reform, biologists started to focus on the cooperative relationships between organisms, founding the science of ecology and posing theories of selection `for the good of the species'. Science must draw its models from society, because after all scientists are human beings not machines; science is a model of nature reconstructed in our heads. This is not a source of inaccuracy, but the essence of intellectual enterprise: nature cannot be accessed `in the raw' but always must be described with words and reconstituted in thought.
As a rule of thumb, the more self-critical the science, and the more it tests itself against reality, the more accurate it will be. If all theories draw their metaphors from society, some do so justifiably - in a way that grasps nature's real operation - and some do in a way that merely distorts and mystifies. So, as it happens, Darwin was right and the `good of the species' theorists were wrong: their theory was based merely on wishful thinking, on how they wanted nature to behave rather than how it really did. The thing that separated Darwin from others was his systematic testing: he spent years closely scrutinising species, measuring his ideas against the evidence before his eyes. Even in his Origin of Species he raised all the facts that did not fit into his theory, and sought to adapt his ideas in order to explain them.
The less self-reflective the science, and the more it is founded on political and moral campaigns, the less reliable it is likely to be. And in Lynas, we see how global warming science has become a foil for a whole series of political and moral agendas, a way of discussing everything from the sins of consumerism to human arrogance. Outlining the effects of a four degrees rise in temperature, Lynas writes: `Poseidon [God of the sea] is angered by arrogant affronts from mere mortals like us. We have woken him from a thousand-year slumber, and this time his wrath will know no bounds.' Not only Poseidon and Gaia but also terms such as `Mother Nature' and `nature's revenge' have slipped into everyday discussion about climate change. Darwin did not, so far as we know, give names of Gods to his finches. When scientific concepts start to be discussed in such emotional terms, it suggests that they say more about wish than reality.
The scope for climatology to slip into fantasy is heightened by the fact that it is a relatively open and uncertain field. Time and again in the twentieth century, climate scientists noted how shaky their art was. It was a case of one man, one model, and everybody thought that theirs was the right one. Today's models include many interacting factors that are incompletely understood, and different models can produce drastically different results. Lynas quotes a couple of studies that found that global warming will lead to increased rainfall in the Sahel, meaning higher crop yields, but another study that found severe drought. (Needless to say, he favours the drought scenario.) When Oxford University's ClimatePrediction.net project asked people to download and run climate models on their home computer, each with tiny differences from the next, the results came back between three degrees and 11 degrees warming, for a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Even when scientists' models agree, this could just as much indicate commonly held assumptions - for example, notions of `tipping points' - rather than scientific truth.
That doesn't mean that global warming doesn't exist, but it does mean that many of these predictive models currently being produced are likely to be extremely inaccurate, verging on total fantasy. Any form of science that is morally and politically loaded, and involves putting large numbers of variables into a computer to predict changes for 50 years hence that cannot be tested, is going to be distorted. While the world's climate does appear to have warmed - the earth is on average 0.7 degrees warmer than it was 150 years ago, before large-scale industrialisation - it's a fair leap from 0.7 degrees to apocalypse. As a non-climatologist, it seems logical to me that carbon dioxide emissions will cause global warming in some form - but if global warming meltdown starts in eight years' time, I will eat my copy of Six Degrees, appendices and all. That is a conviction founded not on an analysis of Geophysical Research Letters, but on a consideration of the circumstances in which such science is produced.
Today's preoccupation with fragility and collapse means that models take a one-sided view of nature. Feedback cycles can indeed increase atmospheric carbon dioxide, and some soils do give out methane when they warm. But feedback cycles also work the other way, too, with plants and the sea absorbing some of the extra CO2 we add to the atmosphere (indeed, for much of the 1990s, climate science was preoccupied with the question of `missing' CO2; that is, CO2 added to the atmosphere by industry that appeared to have disappeared). And while ecosystems do sometimes collapse - there have been rapid climate shifts and mass extinctions in the past - they also adapt and change, and new species benefit from the decline of the old (when the Earth was warmer, trees grew in the Antarctic). When there are rapid paradigm shifts of this kind, when scientists one year assume that nature is stable and the next that it is not, this is probably due not to a change in nature but to a change in society.
To recap, it is perhaps political rather than scientific analysis that can help us to understand the bias that underlies today's climate science. The notion of nature as fragile and subject to collapse is a relatively recent one, which is likely to owe more to the anxious zeitgeist than to climate realities. There are two more aspects of Six Degrees that are worth discussing. First, its notion that tackling climate change is an historic challenge; and second, its idea that global warming holds within it moral lessons, for humanity and for individuals. These help to explain why the idea of global warming is now so compelling and has come to dominate public life. For it provides, not just an expression of anxiety, but also a way out of that anxiety: a way of reframing the big issues of historical purpose and personal morality.
When global warming becomes so laden with moral meaning, it becomes difficult to approach it as an environmental problem - to work out to what degree it is a problem, and what would be the most appropriate response.....
When Guy Callender stood up in front of the Royal Society in the 1930s and suggested that the temperature rise of the nineteenth-century was due to burning fossil fuels, he painted a very positive picture. Indeed, in the 1950s the Soviet Union hatched plans to increase warming, by spreading soot on the Siberian snow to absorb heat and even by setting fire to unused coal seams. Other scientists thought that global warming would have a negative effect on human welfare, but this was not a political or moral divide, and they used dry terms such as `inadvertent climate modification'. The questions were: was it happening?; would its effect be good or bad?; what measures should be put in place in response? Guilt didn't come into it.
Here's the rub: when an environmental problem becomes a generational mission, nobody wants very much to solve it. Lynas criticises the notion that `the white knight of technology will come riding to the rescue' - this is in fact `the most pervasive and enduring form of denial'. There is no `miracle energy cure', says Lynas. Indeed, you often hear environmentalists say that the hopes of a `silver bullet' to solve global warming is merely `avoiding' the question. Avoiding how? What they mean is that it is not energy production that must change; it is us. Global warming is not a problem to be solved; it is a lesson to be lived.
We need a new school of thought in the global warming debate, which is founded not on scientific facts but on political critique. It is only this that can explain the way in which the issue is framed, or its hold over social life and public debate. Lynas' books suggest the attraction of the global warming issue has little to do with environmental problems. Instead, global warming appears to provide answers to life's big questions, offering a new kind of historic mission and a new structure for personal morality.
Only global warming doesn't really answer any of these big questions - it shuts them down, solving the problem of meaning by abolishing meaning itself. As we look forward to 2050, we could hope to find some more profound answers to the riddle of existence than that measured in the rise and fall of carbon atoms. We could also hope to find some more sensible (but, possibly, less dramatic) solutions to any environmental challenges we face.
We need to strip drama from climatology, and add drama to our lives. The question of how we live should be subject to mass, passionate debate, and Geophysical Research Letters should be left in the basement of the Radcliffe Science Library for the consultation of specialists.
Much more here
***************************************
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 generally 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
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
