RUSSIA REJECTS EU UNILATERALISM
The Russian embassy in Ottawa is suggesting next week's G8 summit in Japan won't likely produce hard targets for cutting the world's greenhouse-gas emissions. Embassy official Sergey Khudyakov says Russia isn't ruling out firm reduction goals for the years 2020 and 2050 - but he adds the summit on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido isn't the place to set global targets.
Khudyakov says the role of the Group of Eight wealthy, industrialized nations is to hatch ideas to help the world solve the problem of climate change, not dictate global policy. He says the Russian position is closely aligned with the Canadian government's in opposing any pact that doesn't include the world's biggest polluters, like China and India.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has also said any climate change plan must also balance environmental and economic concerns. The G8 includes Britain, Canada, the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia.
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NASA Aerospace Engineer: 'Global warming to be recognized as a hoax'
The writer below, Dirck T. Hartmann, worked on the Apollo Space Program and many other significant NASA projects. He is a scientist/engineer/physicist now aged 87 but still clear and lucid
What is your carbon footprint? That is the wrong question to ask. A more meaningful question is--How much carbon dioxide does it take to grow the wheat required to produce a loaf of bread? Or--How much carbon dioxide does it take to grow the corn for the chicken feed required to produce a dozen eggs? Far from being a pollutant, man along with every animal on land, fish in the sea, and bird in the air is totally dependent on atmospheric carbon dioxide for his food supply.
Some politicians complain that the United States with only 3% of the world population uses 25% of the energy. But the clean carbon dioxide which we produce is increasing food production everywhere on earth. China, on the other hand, is building new power plants at a record rate using the abundant domestic supply of coal they have and has now passed the United States as the leading producer of carbon dioxide. Although their coal has a high sulfur content, they are building the new plants without any pollution controls. The sulfur dioxide which these power plants are releasing to the atmosphere, besides smelling like rotten eggs is, in sunlight, readily converted to sulfur trioxide, the highly soluble gas responsible for most acid rain.
Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, using energy from sunlight, convert carbon dioxide and water into high energy fuels. It is responsible for all the fuel that feeds forest fires, and for the rapid grow-back of fuel after a fire. But even with the hundreds of millions of tons of coal and the billions of barrels of oil and gasoline that are burned annually, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere remains about .04%.
It has been estimated that more than two hundred billion tons of atmospheric carbon are fixed yearly by photosynthesis, 10%to 20% by land plants, and the remaining 80%to 90% by plant plankton and algae in the ocean, which constantly resupply us with oxygen. Atmospheric carbon dioxide acts like a thermostat for plant growth, increases triggering vast blooms of ocean algae, and spurts in the rate of growth of land plants. As long as man burns coal and oil responsibly, that is with pollution controls that minimize the production of acid rain, the earth can never have too much carbon dioxide. The plants will not permit it.
Anyone who has lived in a desert area where the relative humidity is frequently below 5%, knows that dry air is a lousy green house gas. It can be 115 degrees F (46 degrees C) during the day yet cool off so rapidly that a sweater is needed two or three hours after sunset. Despite the heat sink of the ground with rocks hot enough to fry an egg, the heat is radiated rapidly away through the dry air to the clear night sky. Since dry desert air has about the same .04% concentration of carbon dioxide as air everywhere else, it is not credible to conclude that carbon dioxide is causing global warming. Water vapor is the most effective greenhouse gas by far. With high humidity, even without cloud cover, the night air cools at a rate so slow as to be nearly imperceptible, particularly if you are trying to sleep without air conditioning.
High humidity is the reason nights are so balmy in the tropics. At 100 degrees F and 100% relative humidity, water vapor accounts for only 2% of the atmosphere. It has a greater effect than all other greenhouse gases combined but, since it cannot be regulated, is rarely mentioned as a greenhouse gas.
If human activity is not the cause, why are the ice sheets on the earth poles receding? They are melting for the same reason that the polar caps on Mars are melting. For the 200 years or so that a record of sun spot activity has been kept, it has been observed that global temperatures on earth correlate closely with sun spot activity,very low activity corresponding to a mini ice age, and high activity to global warming.
Every second the sun converts 564 million tons of hydrogen into 560 million tons of helium, consuming its mass at the rate of 4 million tons per second. It has been doing this for 4.5 billion years and has about 4.5 billion years to go before all its hydrogen is used up. At that time it will have consumed less than 1% of its mass. This enormous solar furnace is responsible for climate change as well as all weather on earth.
The U.S. has a domestic supply of coal that is alone sufficient to meet our present power needs and projections for growth for at least 1,000 years, even without building any new nuclear power plants. Burning the coal responsibly and releasing the carbon locked up in it as clean carbon dioxide will benefit crop yields all over the earth. The great atmospheric patterns of air movements ensure a steady supply of carbon dioxide for crop growth, and a steady supply of oxygen for animals and people.
To increase the rate at which photosynthesis removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a respected scientist proposed to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, seeding the ocean to trigger algae blooms. This practical, inexpensive, highly effective means for sequestering carbon dioxide would benefit the food chain in the oceans and increase fish populations. But because it did not impose hardships, require trading carbon credits, punish the U.S. or any other nation, or require increased governmental control, the IPCC rejected it. The IPCC uses the hoax of man made global warming to increase its power and that of a corrupt, anti-American United Nations that has proven itself impotent in combating world wide acts of terrorism, genocide in Sudan, the real threat of nuclear proliferation in the mid-east from Iran and Syria, or human rights violations in China and Africa.
Our mainstream media uses every opportunity to hype the hoax of man made global warming by repeated reporting of data and events that appear to support it, and ignoring those that contradict it. When the NFC championship game In 2007 between the Packers and the New York Giants was played at Green Bay in record low temperatures and blizzard conditions, there was no mention of global cooling; nor was there any in 2007 when below freezing temperatures threatened the vegetable crops in the south and the citrus crops in Florida. The drought in California is the result of colder than normal conditions in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, and the fact that ocean temperatures along the Pacific coast have been falling for the last three years is never mentioned. But after hurricane Katrina we were fed a host of dire predictions which warned of the increasing severity of storms, the melting of the polar ice caps, and the flooding of coastal areas from rising sea level, if we do not drastically reduce the release of greenhouse gasses to combat global warming. Which greenhouse gasses is not specified. We already have pollution controls in the smokestacks of most power plants, steel mills, and factories that minimize the release of sulfur dioxide.
The only completely uncontrolled exhaust gas is carbon dioxide, and photosynthesis automatically controls its atmospheric concentration for us.
Three billion years ago when the earth's atmosphere was an unbreathable brew of noxious gases with almost no oxygen, a small green algae evolved in the ocean which, using the energy from sunlight over a few million years, completely altered the earth's atmosphere. This oceanic green algae, the first plant to use photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide and water into high energy fuel, was of course followed by the evolution of an almost limitless number and variety of carbon dioxide consuming plants.
Fortunately for mankind and all animals, fish,and birds, all of whom are totally dependent on plants, the oceanic green algae continues to perform its magic in the oceans of the earth today. Every three centuries all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and dissolved in the waters of the earth goes through the cycle photosynthesis, decay, photosynthesis, with the cycle constantly renewing the earth's supply of oxygen.
People on the left claim global warming is real, a threat to the continued existence of mankind, and the debate as to its cause is over! Although none of this is true, it nevertheless is what four of my grandchildren were taught in high school. Most politicians on the left have little respect for truth and no regard for clarity, and apparently many high school teachers reflect their views.
My oldest granddaughter just graduated from MIT, where she was spared the political rhetoric of the left on global warming. However Caltech's Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry, in an article titled "Powering the Planet"states "The carbon dioxide we produce over the next 40 years, and its associated effects will last for a timescale comparable to modern human history. This is why, within the next 20 years we either solve this problem or the world will never be the same."
This is nonsense. It ignores the more than 200 billion tons of carbon that is sequestered yearly through photosynthesis from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Since this has been known for 40 years, I can only assume he is politically motivated to make such a statement. Hopefully man made global warming will come to be recognized for the hoax It truly is.
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"Footprint" myths
As concern over global warming grows, urban planning advocates have jumped on the bandwagon by claiming cities should reduce their carbon footprints by investing more in transit and compact development. However, these claims are not supported by the data, most of which show that transit and dense development are no more environmentally friendly than autos and low-density suburbs.
This debate is an echo of efforts to reduce toxic air pollution, such as carbon monoxide and smog, which began in 1970. Some said we should encourage people to drive less and take transit more. Others said we should use new technologies to make the cars we drive cleaner.
Hindsight
Looking back, we now know that technical solutions were phenomenally successful: though we drive three times as much as we did in 1970, total auto emissions are down by about two thirds. Meanwhile, attempts to change people's lifestyles were miserable failures. Despite investing hundreds of billions in transit, the share of people and commuters riding transit has declined throughout the U.S.
A new study from the Brookings Institution ignores this history when it recommends that cities invest in transit and compact development to reduce their carbon footprints. On a per-passenger-mile basis, transit buses emit more greenhouse gases than an average SUV, and most light-rail lines emit more greenhouse gases than the average automobile. Denver's light rail is even worse than the average bus.
Meanwhile, data gathered by the Australian Conservation Foundation revealed that per-capita carbon emissions from people living in single-family homes are lower than people living in low-rise, mid-rise, and high-rise apartments and condos. This suggests that compact development will increase, not reduce, our carbon footprint.
Even to the extent that transit and compact development could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we have to ask: at what cost? A recent report published by McKinsey, the famous consulting firm, found that America could significantly reduce its total greenhouse emissions by investing in technologies that cost no more than $50 per ton of reduced emissions. Neither compact development nor transit would meet this cost test.
More efficient cars
Instead, McKinsey urged auto manufacturers to make cars out of lighter weight, energy-saving materials. This would pay for itself in lower fuel costs.
Traffic congestion causes motorists to waste nearly 3 billion gallons of fuel and spew 26 billion tons of CO2 into the air each year. Relieving that congestion by tolling freeways can reduce greenhouse emissions at practically no cost, while coordinating traffic signals on city streets will reduce emissions at a cost of about $11 per ton.
Transit improvements, however, will cost far more than $50 a ton. Converting buses to biodiesel, for example, costs nearly $200 per ton. Using buses with hybrid motors costs more than $1,000 a ton.
When you count the carbon footprint from building rail transit, rails almost always lose, especially in regions where fossil fuels are used to generate most electricity. The Minneapolis light rail is one of the more successful lines in the country (which isn't saying much). It operations produce less carbon emissions than the average auto, but at a cost of nearly $5,000 per ton-not counting the carbon emitted during construction.
Even in regions that rely on hydro and other renewable energy for electricity, rail transit loses when you count the carbon emissions from the feeder bus systems needed to support the rail lines. Transit systems in Portland, Sacramento, and other cities ended up consuming more energy and emitting more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, after they open new rail lines because of extensive, but little-used, feeder bus networks.
Nor is there any evidence that compact development can cost-effectively reduce CO2 emissions. One study found that compact development reduces emissions, but estimated the cost would be more than $60,000 per ton.
Again, better technology makes more sense than trying to change people's lifestyles. Homeowners can save more energy and greenhouse gas emissions by installing better installation than by moving into high-density developments. The concrete and steel needed to build mid-rise and high-rise apartments, for example, emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases.
If global warming is truly a problem, we can't waste resources trying to get people to make expensive and ineffective changes in their lifestyles. Anyone who recommends changing your lifestyle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without showing you that those changes are cost effective is wasting your time and money.
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AS GOES THE ECONOMY, SO GOES ENVIRONMENTALISM
If truth is the first casualty of war, then environmental concern is the first casualty of economic recession. Surveys of Canadian voters showed the environment to be their first or second concern in 1989-90. At that time, though, the economy was booming, pumping out tens of thousands of new jobs a month. A year-and-a-half later, with the economy locked in the worst recession in 60 years, government finances were imploding, jobs disappearing and foreclosure wolves circling, the environment vanished from the top 10.
There will always be a small, hard-core voter base motivated by eco-issues. They're not worried about losing their jobs in an environmentalist-driven recession. They know that if they get laid off from the alternative music store, they can always go clerk at the Gaia Vegan Market or Wiccans 'R' Us. But for most people, the environment is a luxury good -- easily expendable when their livelihoods and homes are threatened.
As with most other bad, but fashionable left-wing political ideas, Europe glommed onto carbon taxes before North America. But now that the worldwide credit crunch and commodity-price boom have hit the European economy, voter hostility to carbon taxes is growing-- rapidly.
Any Canadian political leader thinking an environmental tax on gasoline, home heating, air travel, electricity and construction materials would be a good idea, while Canada's manufacturing and tourism sectors are bleeding profusely, might want to take a lesson from Gordon Brown.
Mr. Brown succeeded Tony Blair as British prime minister last year. At the time, he and his Labour party were reasonably popular, well ahead of the opposition Tories in all major opinion polls.
Surfing the crest of "green" sentiment, Mr. Brown's government introduced a raft of environmental taxes and charges to show how eco-friendly and Earth-empathetic it was.
The average British motorist now pays nearly $2,000 in fuel taxes a year, the most in Europe. Tolls on roads and surcharges on vehicle purchases have risen, too, to discourage use of private automobiles and herd commuters onto public transportation.
Industrial energy costs have gone up as much as 20% (not counting recent rises in oil and natural gas), thanks to a new national carbon-trading scheme and green levies on factories and transportation. In all, British businesses now pay an estimated $45-billion annually in green fees and taxes. Nearly half of that sum has been added since 2001, a period during which, not coincidentally, the country has witnessed the loss of 1 million manufacturing jobs.
The Brown government even flirted with a campaign called "Zero Carbon Britain." Designed to reduce Britain's carbon emissions to zero by 2027, the plan would have meant an end to most air travel and the elimination of gasoline and diesel cars. Meat would been forbidden from most meals and an "armada" of wind turbines would have blighted nearly every square kilometre of British coastline.
Carbon "credit cards" would have been issued to every Briton. Each time the bearer purchased carbon-based fuels, he would have had to swipe his carbon card. If he ran out of credits before the end of the year, he would have had to buy more from people not using all of theirs.
Not surprisingly, after Mr. Brown's Labour party lost two safe seats (think of Canada's Liberals in Montreal's Outremont riding) in byelections last month -- the first byelection
wins for the rival Tories in 26 years -- the zero-carbon plan was shelved within two days. The government's own report estimating that the conversion of Britain to renewable energy would cost every family an additional $7,000 a year was a major issue during the campaign.
The situation is the same in other European countries:
-Denmark introduced a carbon tax in the mid-1990s and cut carbon emissions by 10%, but at the cost of one-quarter of that country's manufacturing jobs.
-France, also facing a sharp decline in jobs, is considering whether to jettison its commitment to the Kyoto accords or impose carbon tariffs on goods coming in from countries with no Kyoto carbon limits, such as China and India.
-Germany's Angela Merkel, who bills herself as the "Climate Chancellor," has recently been keeping a low profile, as last year's popular "green" initiatives have tightened the screw of this year's recession.
European politics are in turmoil because the environment is a good-times-only issue for voters, and good times are disappearing. Talk of a Canadian carbon tax should be tempered accordingly.
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Some plastic bag realities
By Justin King, chief executive of British supermarket, Sainsbury's
Data suggests that following the introduction of a bag levy in Ireland, polythene imports returned to original levels after an initial dip. This was partly due to an increase in the sale of polythene bin liners as people had previously used plastic bags. People are also said to have become used to the tax and now ask for plastic bags again.
Like many environmental issues, plastic, and its use in bags, is a complex problem. Customers are concerned about three key aspects: that a valued raw resource is being used (in this case oil); the environmental impact (or carbon effect) of the manufacture, transport and use of bags; and the impact of their disposal, whether in landfill or as litter.
The effect plastic has on the environment is a wider issue than the number of bags we use. For a start, not all bags are equal. Sainsbury's is still the only major retailer to have reduced the amount of plastic used to manufacture bags. Today we've also announced that our bags, currently made with 33pc recycled content and 10pc chalk, will by June use 50pc recycled content. In this way we have reduced the amount of plastic used. Last month Wrap acknowledged our 40pc reduction in our environmental impact to date versus an industry average of 14pc, and also ahead of the agreed 25pc target by the end of 2008.
If plastic is the demon then the bag is just one of many uses. For many customers, packaging is a bigger issue. Why would we wrap a cucumber in plastic or put apples in a bag? Well, because they last nearly two weeks longer. In April, Wrap research showed storing fruit and vegetables in their original plastic wrapping in the fridge makes them last significantly longer. It also retains the nutritional goodness of the food. So what's the bigger evil - food waste or packaging?
The environmental impact of the manufacture, distribution and use of plastic bags also busts another myth - that paper is the answer. An irony in Ireland following the levy was that many retailers introduced paper bags. Although they can degrade or rot in a compost heap, they are on average six times heavier than plastic bags and take up 10 times the space. They therefore need more fuel and vehicle space to transport than a plastic bag. A University of Winnipeg study concluded that in their manufacture "paper bags are twice as energy intensive as a plastic one". They're also weaker, especially when wet, so cannot be reused as often, so it's likely we could end up using even more.
What of plastic disposal? There are limited facilities in the UK for plastic recycling, no meaningful incentives for these to be established and no consistency between councils. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that if you live within reach of a Sainsbury's supermarket we'll get them recycled for you. Last year customers brought back 85m bags to be recycled. Surely action on recycling would be a better area for legislation? If all councils had a uniform approach to recycling how much easier life would be.
As I said, it's complex. Sainsbury's focuses on "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". Only take a disposable bag if you really need it, and fill it - it's been designed for the purpose. Reuse bags whenever you can. And when they've served you well - give them back. So I'm not saying plastic and bags are not an issue, but let's engage people in sensible debate to effect real and sustainable change. Surely that's the overall goal.
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The good old ocean acidity scare gets another outing in Australia
The writers below DO NOT believe in global warming. They only say they do. Why? Because warmer oceans are capable of holding LESS CO2. Open a bottle of Coke when it is warm and see how the gas surges out if you doubt it. And if the oceans have less CO2 in them, they contain less of the carbonic acid that the CO2 becomes while in solution! So the oceans would have a REDUCED tendency towards acidity under warming. The fact that corals etc. have survived much warmer periods in the earth's past is also conveniently not mentioned.
Now that Ross Garnaut's draft report has been released, most of the climate change debate in Australia will focus on the economic effects of any emissions trading scheme. However, there's another carbon problem, which will profoundly affect our oceans, that has received scant attention beyond a small band of marine scientists and is largely independent of global warming. The public, aware of the role of carbon dioxide in climate change, doesn't know of its function in acidifying the oceans and the hundreds of years that would be required for recovery.
Ocean acidification refers to the natural process whereby carbon dioxide dissolves in the sea, forming a weak carbonic acid. The ocean is a major sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide and has absorbed about 48 per cent of the CO2 emitted by human activities since the pre-industrial age. A recent report from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre claimed that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at its highest level in 650,000 years, and possibly 23 million years, and half has been dissolved in the oceans, making them more acidic.
Australia has a direct stake in the ocean acidification problem: it will affect every part of our marine environment. And our offshore estate has just become a lot bigger. Three months ago the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, while not accepting all bids, recognised Australia's claim to the continental shelf where it extends beyond our exclusive 200 nautical mile economic zone. This is a vast oceanic area: 2.5 million square kilometres, or 10 times the size of New Zealand and 20 times the size of Britain.
Rising levels of acidity in the oceans surrounding Australia could have a profound impact on marine industries and dire consequences for many Pacific Island communities, presenting strategic and humanitarian challenges.
Mounting levels of CO2 in the Southern Ocean has caused deep concern among scientists studying the long-term productivity of the world's oceans. Under conditions of increasing acidification, parts of the oceans will deteriorate and progressively become uninhabitable for certain types of plankton, central to the ocean food chain, and coral structures. The Southern Ocean is particularly important because it is very efficient at absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere: it's here where the first effects are being felt.
Ocean acidification is likely to have a cascading effect, reaching parts of the food chain such as fish and shellfish. Marine researchers are saying that a business-as-usual scenario of CO2 production will ultimately result in destruction of marine life on an enormous scale. Some shell-forming species will struggle to maintain or reproduce their vital shell structures and skeletons, which will have a direct effect on the ocean food web. Some species will decline, others will be displaced or will disappear, and patterns of fisheries will change, potentially threatening the food security of millions in the Asia-Pacific and damaging Australian fisheries economically.
Another study identified ocean acidification as a primary causal factor in common reef fish getting lost at sea during a crucial stage of their development. And rising acidification could also interfere with the respiration of fish, the larval development of marine organisms and the ability of oceans to absorb nutrients and toxins.
Coral reefs such as the Great Barrier Reef, which are hot spots of biodiversity, will suffer. Acidification will weaken coral structures and stunt coral growth, leading to a significant decline by the middle of this century. This will deprive parts of the Australian coastline of a natural protective barrier against the ocean, leading to greater threats from storm activity and cyclones.....
As the debate about who wins and who loses in the future Australian emissions trading regime intensifies, we should remember that with ocean acidification there will only be losers. Discovering the ecological effects of our souring oceans requires urgent action.
The authors above: Anthony Bergin is director of research programs at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Ross Allen is a research analyst at ASPI. The above are their personal views. It looks like both of them reply on others for a knowledge of chemistry and physics
More here
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Friday, July 04, 2008
THE AUSTRALIAN SCENE
Although their overall tone is one of climate panic, the Australian mass media do also give consistent coverage to skeptical viewpoints. Nonetheless, Australia's new centre-Left government is determined to burnish its Greenie credentials and is threatening very costly new policies. To try to pass the buck, they commissioned an "expert report" into what they should do. The report has now been released and makes proposals unlikely to be popular. The government has already said that it will not be bound by the recommendations of the report. Three articles below on what is happening at the moment
Climate scheme would cost plenty
Fuel prices would skyrocket under new plans to tackle climate change. However, poorer families would be cushioned from the full impact. The government's climate change guru, Professor Ross Garnaut has called for transport to be included in an emissions trading scheme, setting the stage for fuel prices to spiral far beyond those caused by the current oil crunch.
The distinguished economist today released a draft report he prepared for the federal and state Governments on climate change and the introductions of emissions trading. Prof Garnaut said low-income families should be compensated for higher fuel and power costs when the scheme was introduced. He also said the Government should make payments to emissions-intensive industries which could lose jobs overseas if they had to cope with higher costs.
Under emissions trading, a cap will be placed on the amount of carbon which can be emitted into the atmosphere. Companies will be able to purchase and trade permits which allow them to emit carbon gases. Prof Garnaut said as many industries should be included in the scheme as possible, including transport. He said the money the Government earned from the scheme should be spent on compensating low-income households and business.
``The direct price effects of the emissions trading scheme will be regressive,'' Prof Garnaut said. ``The effects will fall heavily on low-income households, so the credibility, stability, efficiency and longevity of the scheme require the correction of these regressive effects by other measures.'' Prof Garnaut said the coal industry should be given support to reduce carbon emissions and to develop technology which buried carbon gasses under ground.
He said international cooperation on fighting climate change was essential. ``The weight of scientific evidence tells us that Australians are facing risks of damaging climate change,'' Prof Garnaut said. ``The risk can be substantially reduced by strong and early action by all major economies. ``Without that action, it is probable that Australians, over the 21st century and beyond, will experience disruption in their prosperity and enjoyment of life, and to long-standing patterns in their lives.''
Source
Greenie laws harming agriculture
Brooke Milini is the third generation of his family to work at the Tully sugar mill and wants his children to have the opportunity to become the next generation. But as a worker and a union shop steward, he is worried about the impact of new laws to fight greenhouse gas emissions on his children's future jobs, his job and the jobs of fellow union members.
On the eve of the release of the Garnaut report on greenhouse gas emissions and as cabinet considers how to include agriculture in an emissions trading scheme, the threat to Mr Milini already exists. The National Farmers Federation warned yesterday that rigid and short-sighted greenhouse gas emissions rules could place agriculture "in serious jeopardy".
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union shop steward agrees with the NFF that an over-emphasis on reforestation to combat greenhouse gases could lead to reduced food production just as the world faces shortages and rising commodity prices.
Tax breaks for forests grown as "carbon sinks" so that greenhouse gas emitters can buy credits to offset emissions are alienating agricultural land and have been blamed for reducing water flows into the Murray-Darling river system. "The forests are expanding because of tax breaks and there's less land now for growing cane," Mr Milini said yesterday. Investors could afford to pay high prices for land to grow forests because of the tax advantages and outbid cane farmers. "Other crops are affected around here, bananas and other food, but it's mainly a threat to cane growing," he said.
In the past 18 months, 12 per cent of the cane paddocks in the Cairns region have been lost to managed-investment forestry schemes. With new laws passed last week encouraging even more forestry investment, the alienation of arable land is a trend sugar millers and farmers fear will end their industry. It is estimated the new laws, proposed by the previous government as evidence of action on greenhouse gas emissions, would lead to 81,500ha being sown as new carbon sink forests by 2011 when the Howard ETS was to come into being. "I have three children and I'd like them to be able to think about getting a job in the mill, which supplies a lot of work for the locals," Mr Milini said. "I'm worried about them and my union members. It's something that's always in the back of your head."
Yesterday, the NFF warned that wider food production here could be threatened as agriculture is included in an ETS under the Kyoto Protocol provisions, which "emphasise reforestation as the primary tool for sequestering carbon". "As the need for food production grows expotentially, we must ensure farming is not hamstrung in the process," NFF president David Crombie said. "It is imperative the international rules dictating Australia's ETS - determining domestic climate change policy and carbon markets to ensure compliance with the international policy regime and a future global carbon market - take full and reasonable account of Australia's needs," hesaid.
Nationals senator Ron Boswell said yesterday the failed Howard government forestry proposals demonstrated the need to get an ETS right.
Source
State government ignores Greenie hysteria
New $750 million coal-burning power station
Just two days before the Garnaut report on climate change is handed down, the Victorian Government has given the go-ahead to a new brown-coal power station in Latrobe Valley. Environmental campaigners said it was "complete madness" to approve the $750 million plant, but the Government said the station would use new technology that would slash greenhouse gas emissions.
The project is a joint venture between consortium HRL and Chinese power giant Harbin Power, and will receive funding of $100 million from the Federal Government and $50 million from the Victorian Government. Expected to begin operating in 2012/13, it will aim to boost Victoria's power capacity by just under 5 per cent.
"The $750 million HRL plant will use technology which has been developed right here in Victoria and is part of the new generation of clean coal power stations designed to slash greenhouse gas emissions," said the Energy Minister, Peter Batchelor. "The project uses a process called integrated drying gasification combined cycle (IDGCC) which can reduce emissions of CO2 from brown coal-fired power generation by 30 per cent and reduce water consumption by 50 per cent, compared to current best practice for brown coal power generation in the Latrobe Valley."
Greenpeace energy campaigner Simon Roz said investing in coal-fired power at this time was "complete madness" and a step back for Victoria. "It shows we have a long way to go before governments take the issue of climate change seriously," he said.
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New Study Finds Greenland Ice Melt 'not changing' and may be dropping
This peer reviewed new study in the journal Science puts yet another fork into the man-made global warming fear machine. See also July 2007 U.S. Senate Report: Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt
I have a story coming tonight in print on a new paper tracking the impact over time of those iconic drainpipes for meltwater forming each summer on the warming flanks of the vast Greenland ice sheet. Here's the nub, with varied reactions coming from glaciologists later:
One of the most vivid symbols of global warming used by scientists and campaigners to spur society to curb climate-warming emissions is photography of gushing rivers of meltwater plunging from the surface of Greenland's ice sheet into the depths.
Recent studies have shown these natural drainpipes, called moulins, can speed up the slow seaward march of the grinding ice by lubricating the interface with bedrock below. The faster that ice flows, the faster seas rise. Now, though, a new Dutch study of 17 years of satellite measurements of ice movement in western Greenland concludes that the speedup of the ice is a transient summertime phenomenon, with the overall yearly movement of the grinding glaciers not changing, and actually dropping slightly in some places, when measured over longer time spans.
The work, the authors and other experts caution, does not mean that more widespread surface melting could not eventually destabilize vast areas of the world's second-largest ice storehouse. But for the moment, the study, which is being published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, throws into question the notion that abrupt ice losses in Greenland are nigh. "The positive-feedback mechanism between melt rate and ice velocity appears to be a seasonal process that may have only a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the next decades," said the paper.
The study was led by Roderik S.W. van de Wal of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research of the University of Utrecht.
Source
Journal abstract follows:
Large and Rapid Melt-Induced Velocity Changes in the Ablation Zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet
By R. S. W. van de Wal et al.
Continuous Global Positioning System observations reveal rapid and large ice velocity fluctuations in the western ablation zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Within days, ice velocity reacts to increased meltwater production and increases by a factor of 4. Such a response is much stronger and much faster than previously reported. Over a longer period of 17 years, annual ice velocities have decreased slightly, which suggests that the englacial hydraulic system adjusts constantly to the variable meltwater input, which results in a more or less constant ice flux over the years. The positive-feedback mechanism between melt rate and ice velocity appears to be a seasonal process that may have only a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the next decades.
Science 4 July 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5885, pp. 111 - 113
BIG GREEN: Conservation Nonprofit Revenue tops $22.5 billion between 1998-2005
It is the Greens who are the "well funded" advocacy industry. See also U.S. Senate August 2007 report on the monumental funding advantage promoters of man-made climate fears enjoy over skeptics here
This past week, I aggregated IRS tax data for the top 50 revenue producing conservation nonprofit organizations. I documented over $22.5 billion dollars in combined revenue between 1998 and 2005. The combined assets of these organizations were approximately $8 billion in 2005. To help understand where revenue is flowing, I used a simple classification system.
Of little surprise, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is the top revenue generating conservation nonprofit. In 2005, TNC accounted for 25.6% of the revenue generated by the top 50 organizations.
The distribution of financial resources can give insight into conservation priorities. Does the allocation of conservation dollars over the eight year per period align with the conservation challenges we face? Are there nonprofit sectors over or under attended to? What does the division of revenue tell us about donors? About nonprofits? About the costs of various nonprofit activities?
Source
Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch: Global Warming Skeptic
While guest hosting Wednesday's "Morning Joe", former General Electric CEO Jack Welch condemned global warming, the very theory MSNBC has been peddling for years. GE, of course, owns MSNBC; the rebuke of MSNBC's favorite alarmist hypothesis came in a segment where hosts share noteworthy editorials. Welch decided to share an opinion piece from Tuesday's Wall Street Journal aptly titled "Global Warming As Mass Neurosis." Welch informed the audience that the article has "a lot of technical numbers here to show you that NASA overstated what's happening." Welch summarized the article by saying "And they got an argument that states that global warming is the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring"
After Jack's synopsis, co-host Pat Buchanan interjects his belief that global warming is "a neo-Marxist idea for the transfer of wealth and power." Jack Welch jumps in to agree saying "Right" Pat Buchanan then decides to carry his rebuke even further by saying "And at the end global elites, and they're, you know they're gonna to dictate to all of us because of this phony idea that we're all in some imminent danger. I agree with that 100%." Welch, the former GE CEO enthusiastically jumped in to agree saying "Absolutely!"
Later in the segment Mika Brzezinski did her best to put pressure on her former boss by saying "Alright, but I just want to say at some point this [global warming] is going to come back and haunt us if we don't address it, Jack." However `Neutron Jack' refused to cede his ground and sarcastically responded "We'll see."
What makes this vivacious segment so amusing is that as the former Chief Executive Officer of General Electric, Jack Welch, was once the head of a company that owns MSNBC. MSNBC is a network that hawks global warming mythology on a regular basis. Just two months ago Newsbusters profiled how MSNBC firebrand Chris Matthews was shocked by global warming skepticism. Apparently, Matthews never talked to his old boss about the subject.
More here
South African Scientist: 'There is no evidence man-made CO2 causes climate change'
(Dr. Kelvin Kemm, formerly a scientist at South Africa's Atomic Energy Corporation)
During 2008, have we seen many stories in the newspapers about 2007 being particularly warm as a result of global warming? During 2006, the doomsters were predicting that 2007 would be the hottest year on record, so why have we seen no reports about this? The answer is simple - 2007 turned out to be the coolest year for 30 years. It is also the case that there has been no global warming since 1998. In fact, since 1998, there has been steady cooling.
Even more dramatic is the fact that the most recent computer model predictions indicate that there will be no more global warming for the next ten years. But the doomsters say that, after this ten-year period, global warming will come back with a vengeance. Why? Certainly, mankind's production of carbon dioxide (CO2) has continued to increase since 1998 and will continue to increase, particularly since countries such as China and India say that their economic growth comes first, so they do not intend worrying too much about CO2 production.
I have repeatedly pointed out that there is little or no link between CO2 production by mankind and a rise in global temperature. In fact, indications are that it is the opposite - an increased temperature causes more CO2 to be ejected into the atmosphere. In the time of the Viking settlements on Greenland, about 1000 years ago, there was a period of warming. That is why the Viking settlements flourished and they could grow grapes and maize, which puzzled the archaeologists. Then it cooled, and the last Viking supply ship arrived at the settlements in 1410, after which it all froze up.
The world then experienced the Little Ice Age, during the time of Shakespeare and Jan van Riebeeck. The Thames froze over, and there was a period of economic decline, in comparison to the economic boom during the Medieval period of global warming. There was also an earlier warming period, known as the Roman Warming, during the period of Roman economic prosperity. All of this warming and cooling happened without any contribution from any man-made CO2.
Indications in our modern times are that the warming observed up to the end of 2006 has been due to a natural cycle in the intensity of the sun. This was, by all indications, the same source of warming of the Medieval and Roman Warming periods. But now South Africa wants to impose a carbon tax aimed at cutting South Africa's emission of greenhouse gases. I think this is wrong. The proposal is for a 2c/kWh tax to be imposed from September. This is expected to generate R4-billion a year for the National Treasury.
But the economics folks point out that this 2c tax translates into a 10% increase in the electricity cost. One of the reasons why South Africa uses a large amount of electricity is that we have major exports whose production is energy intensive, such as gold, steel and aluminium. We do not export watches like the Swiss, or computer software like the Irish, so to quote our per capita production of CO2 is stupid.
The tax, I am told, is to incentivise the use of renewable sources of power, such as wind, solar and hydro. This is crazy too. I am all in favour of wind and solar, but only if such sources can stand on their own two feet in economic competition to our coal-fired power. To fake the economics is to do damage to our exports, and to the lifestyle of every citizen.
There is little or no indication that man-made CO2 is causing any climate change. There has been no global warming since 1998. The warming that did happen during the twentieth century happened mainly between 1920 and 1940. The year 2007 was the coolest year for 30 years. For us to go with the flow, or dive into a panic mode, is crazy. Let us look after the health and welfare of our people first. This does not mean being irresponsible about any sources of pollution from industrial operations or any other activities. It means using genuine science, and not the scare tactics of world political manipulators, to come to really sensible conclusions.
Source
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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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Although their overall tone is one of climate panic, the Australian mass media do also give consistent coverage to skeptical viewpoints. Nonetheless, Australia's new centre-Left government is determined to burnish its Greenie credentials and is threatening very costly new policies. To try to pass the buck, they commissioned an "expert report" into what they should do. The report has now been released and makes proposals unlikely to be popular. The government has already said that it will not be bound by the recommendations of the report. Three articles below on what is happening at the moment
Climate scheme would cost plenty
Fuel prices would skyrocket under new plans to tackle climate change. However, poorer families would be cushioned from the full impact. The government's climate change guru, Professor Ross Garnaut has called for transport to be included in an emissions trading scheme, setting the stage for fuel prices to spiral far beyond those caused by the current oil crunch.
The distinguished economist today released a draft report he prepared for the federal and state Governments on climate change and the introductions of emissions trading. Prof Garnaut said low-income families should be compensated for higher fuel and power costs when the scheme was introduced. He also said the Government should make payments to emissions-intensive industries which could lose jobs overseas if they had to cope with higher costs.
Under emissions trading, a cap will be placed on the amount of carbon which can be emitted into the atmosphere. Companies will be able to purchase and trade permits which allow them to emit carbon gases. Prof Garnaut said as many industries should be included in the scheme as possible, including transport. He said the money the Government earned from the scheme should be spent on compensating low-income households and business.
``The direct price effects of the emissions trading scheme will be regressive,'' Prof Garnaut said. ``The effects will fall heavily on low-income households, so the credibility, stability, efficiency and longevity of the scheme require the correction of these regressive effects by other measures.'' Prof Garnaut said the coal industry should be given support to reduce carbon emissions and to develop technology which buried carbon gasses under ground.
He said international cooperation on fighting climate change was essential. ``The weight of scientific evidence tells us that Australians are facing risks of damaging climate change,'' Prof Garnaut said. ``The risk can be substantially reduced by strong and early action by all major economies. ``Without that action, it is probable that Australians, over the 21st century and beyond, will experience disruption in their prosperity and enjoyment of life, and to long-standing patterns in their lives.''
Source
Greenie laws harming agriculture
Brooke Milini is the third generation of his family to work at the Tully sugar mill and wants his children to have the opportunity to become the next generation. But as a worker and a union shop steward, he is worried about the impact of new laws to fight greenhouse gas emissions on his children's future jobs, his job and the jobs of fellow union members.
On the eve of the release of the Garnaut report on greenhouse gas emissions and as cabinet considers how to include agriculture in an emissions trading scheme, the threat to Mr Milini already exists. The National Farmers Federation warned yesterday that rigid and short-sighted greenhouse gas emissions rules could place agriculture "in serious jeopardy".
The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union shop steward agrees with the NFF that an over-emphasis on reforestation to combat greenhouse gases could lead to reduced food production just as the world faces shortages and rising commodity prices.
Tax breaks for forests grown as "carbon sinks" so that greenhouse gas emitters can buy credits to offset emissions are alienating agricultural land and have been blamed for reducing water flows into the Murray-Darling river system. "The forests are expanding because of tax breaks and there's less land now for growing cane," Mr Milini said yesterday. Investors could afford to pay high prices for land to grow forests because of the tax advantages and outbid cane farmers. "Other crops are affected around here, bananas and other food, but it's mainly a threat to cane growing," he said.
In the past 18 months, 12 per cent of the cane paddocks in the Cairns region have been lost to managed-investment forestry schemes. With new laws passed last week encouraging even more forestry investment, the alienation of arable land is a trend sugar millers and farmers fear will end their industry. It is estimated the new laws, proposed by the previous government as evidence of action on greenhouse gas emissions, would lead to 81,500ha being sown as new carbon sink forests by 2011 when the Howard ETS was to come into being. "I have three children and I'd like them to be able to think about getting a job in the mill, which supplies a lot of work for the locals," Mr Milini said. "I'm worried about them and my union members. It's something that's always in the back of your head."
Yesterday, the NFF warned that wider food production here could be threatened as agriculture is included in an ETS under the Kyoto Protocol provisions, which "emphasise reforestation as the primary tool for sequestering carbon". "As the need for food production grows expotentially, we must ensure farming is not hamstrung in the process," NFF president David Crombie said. "It is imperative the international rules dictating Australia's ETS - determining domestic climate change policy and carbon markets to ensure compliance with the international policy regime and a future global carbon market - take full and reasonable account of Australia's needs," hesaid.
Nationals senator Ron Boswell said yesterday the failed Howard government forestry proposals demonstrated the need to get an ETS right.
Source
State government ignores Greenie hysteria
New $750 million coal-burning power station
Just two days before the Garnaut report on climate change is handed down, the Victorian Government has given the go-ahead to a new brown-coal power station in Latrobe Valley. Environmental campaigners said it was "complete madness" to approve the $750 million plant, but the Government said the station would use new technology that would slash greenhouse gas emissions.
The project is a joint venture between consortium HRL and Chinese power giant Harbin Power, and will receive funding of $100 million from the Federal Government and $50 million from the Victorian Government. Expected to begin operating in 2012/13, it will aim to boost Victoria's power capacity by just under 5 per cent.
"The $750 million HRL plant will use technology which has been developed right here in Victoria and is part of the new generation of clean coal power stations designed to slash greenhouse gas emissions," said the Energy Minister, Peter Batchelor. "The project uses a process called integrated drying gasification combined cycle (IDGCC) which can reduce emissions of CO2 from brown coal-fired power generation by 30 per cent and reduce water consumption by 50 per cent, compared to current best practice for brown coal power generation in the Latrobe Valley."
Greenpeace energy campaigner Simon Roz said investing in coal-fired power at this time was "complete madness" and a step back for Victoria. "It shows we have a long way to go before governments take the issue of climate change seriously," he said.
Source
New Study Finds Greenland Ice Melt 'not changing' and may be dropping
This peer reviewed new study in the journal Science puts yet another fork into the man-made global warming fear machine. See also July 2007 U.S. Senate Report: Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt
I have a story coming tonight in print on a new paper tracking the impact over time of those iconic drainpipes for meltwater forming each summer on the warming flanks of the vast Greenland ice sheet. Here's the nub, with varied reactions coming from glaciologists later:
One of the most vivid symbols of global warming used by scientists and campaigners to spur society to curb climate-warming emissions is photography of gushing rivers of meltwater plunging from the surface of Greenland's ice sheet into the depths.
Recent studies have shown these natural drainpipes, called moulins, can speed up the slow seaward march of the grinding ice by lubricating the interface with bedrock below. The faster that ice flows, the faster seas rise. Now, though, a new Dutch study of 17 years of satellite measurements of ice movement in western Greenland concludes that the speedup of the ice is a transient summertime phenomenon, with the overall yearly movement of the grinding glaciers not changing, and actually dropping slightly in some places, when measured over longer time spans.
The work, the authors and other experts caution, does not mean that more widespread surface melting could not eventually destabilize vast areas of the world's second-largest ice storehouse. But for the moment, the study, which is being published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, throws into question the notion that abrupt ice losses in Greenland are nigh. "The positive-feedback mechanism between melt rate and ice velocity appears to be a seasonal process that may have only a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the next decades," said the paper.
The study was led by Roderik S.W. van de Wal of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research of the University of Utrecht.
Source
Journal abstract follows:
Large and Rapid Melt-Induced Velocity Changes in the Ablation Zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet
By R. S. W. van de Wal et al.
Continuous Global Positioning System observations reveal rapid and large ice velocity fluctuations in the western ablation zone of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Within days, ice velocity reacts to increased meltwater production and increases by a factor of 4. Such a response is much stronger and much faster than previously reported. Over a longer period of 17 years, annual ice velocities have decreased slightly, which suggests that the englacial hydraulic system adjusts constantly to the variable meltwater input, which results in a more or less constant ice flux over the years. The positive-feedback mechanism between melt rate and ice velocity appears to be a seasonal process that may have only a limited effect on the response of the ice sheet to climate warming over the next decades.
Science 4 July 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5885, pp. 111 - 113
BIG GREEN: Conservation Nonprofit Revenue tops $22.5 billion between 1998-2005
It is the Greens who are the "well funded" advocacy industry. See also U.S. Senate August 2007 report on the monumental funding advantage promoters of man-made climate fears enjoy over skeptics here
This past week, I aggregated IRS tax data for the top 50 revenue producing conservation nonprofit organizations. I documented over $22.5 billion dollars in combined revenue between 1998 and 2005. The combined assets of these organizations were approximately $8 billion in 2005. To help understand where revenue is flowing, I used a simple classification system.
Of little surprise, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is the top revenue generating conservation nonprofit. In 2005, TNC accounted for 25.6% of the revenue generated by the top 50 organizations.
The distribution of financial resources can give insight into conservation priorities. Does the allocation of conservation dollars over the eight year per period align with the conservation challenges we face? Are there nonprofit sectors over or under attended to? What does the division of revenue tell us about donors? About nonprofits? About the costs of various nonprofit activities?
Source
Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch: Global Warming Skeptic
While guest hosting Wednesday's "Morning Joe", former General Electric CEO Jack Welch condemned global warming, the very theory MSNBC has been peddling for years. GE, of course, owns MSNBC; the rebuke of MSNBC's favorite alarmist hypothesis came in a segment where hosts share noteworthy editorials. Welch decided to share an opinion piece from Tuesday's Wall Street Journal aptly titled "Global Warming As Mass Neurosis." Welch informed the audience that the article has "a lot of technical numbers here to show you that NASA overstated what's happening." Welch summarized the article by saying "And they got an argument that states that global warming is the attack on capitalism that socialism couldn't bring"
After Jack's synopsis, co-host Pat Buchanan interjects his belief that global warming is "a neo-Marxist idea for the transfer of wealth and power." Jack Welch jumps in to agree saying "Right" Pat Buchanan then decides to carry his rebuke even further by saying "And at the end global elites, and they're, you know they're gonna to dictate to all of us because of this phony idea that we're all in some imminent danger. I agree with that 100%." Welch, the former GE CEO enthusiastically jumped in to agree saying "Absolutely!"
Later in the segment Mika Brzezinski did her best to put pressure on her former boss by saying "Alright, but I just want to say at some point this [global warming] is going to come back and haunt us if we don't address it, Jack." However `Neutron Jack' refused to cede his ground and sarcastically responded "We'll see."
What makes this vivacious segment so amusing is that as the former Chief Executive Officer of General Electric, Jack Welch, was once the head of a company that owns MSNBC. MSNBC is a network that hawks global warming mythology on a regular basis. Just two months ago Newsbusters profiled how MSNBC firebrand Chris Matthews was shocked by global warming skepticism. Apparently, Matthews never talked to his old boss about the subject.
More here
South African Scientist: 'There is no evidence man-made CO2 causes climate change'
(Dr. Kelvin Kemm, formerly a scientist at South Africa's Atomic Energy Corporation)
During 2008, have we seen many stories in the newspapers about 2007 being particularly warm as a result of global warming? During 2006, the doomsters were predicting that 2007 would be the hottest year on record, so why have we seen no reports about this? The answer is simple - 2007 turned out to be the coolest year for 30 years. It is also the case that there has been no global warming since 1998. In fact, since 1998, there has been steady cooling.
Even more dramatic is the fact that the most recent computer model predictions indicate that there will be no more global warming for the next ten years. But the doomsters say that, after this ten-year period, global warming will come back with a vengeance. Why? Certainly, mankind's production of carbon dioxide (CO2) has continued to increase since 1998 and will continue to increase, particularly since countries such as China and India say that their economic growth comes first, so they do not intend worrying too much about CO2 production.
I have repeatedly pointed out that there is little or no link between CO2 production by mankind and a rise in global temperature. In fact, indications are that it is the opposite - an increased temperature causes more CO2 to be ejected into the atmosphere. In the time of the Viking settlements on Greenland, about 1000 years ago, there was a period of warming. That is why the Viking settlements flourished and they could grow grapes and maize, which puzzled the archaeologists. Then it cooled, and the last Viking supply ship arrived at the settlements in 1410, after which it all froze up.
The world then experienced the Little Ice Age, during the time of Shakespeare and Jan van Riebeeck. The Thames froze over, and there was a period of economic decline, in comparison to the economic boom during the Medieval period of global warming. There was also an earlier warming period, known as the Roman Warming, during the period of Roman economic prosperity. All of this warming and cooling happened without any contribution from any man-made CO2.
Indications in our modern times are that the warming observed up to the end of 2006 has been due to a natural cycle in the intensity of the sun. This was, by all indications, the same source of warming of the Medieval and Roman Warming periods. But now South Africa wants to impose a carbon tax aimed at cutting South Africa's emission of greenhouse gases. I think this is wrong. The proposal is for a 2c/kWh tax to be imposed from September. This is expected to generate R4-billion a year for the National Treasury.
But the economics folks point out that this 2c tax translates into a 10% increase in the electricity cost. One of the reasons why South Africa uses a large amount of electricity is that we have major exports whose production is energy intensive, such as gold, steel and aluminium. We do not export watches like the Swiss, or computer software like the Irish, so to quote our per capita production of CO2 is stupid.
The tax, I am told, is to incentivise the use of renewable sources of power, such as wind, solar and hydro. This is crazy too. I am all in favour of wind and solar, but only if such sources can stand on their own two feet in economic competition to our coal-fired power. To fake the economics is to do damage to our exports, and to the lifestyle of every citizen.
There is little or no indication that man-made CO2 is causing any climate change. There has been no global warming since 1998. The warming that did happen during the twentieth century happened mainly between 1920 and 1940. The year 2007 was the coolest year for 30 years. For us to go with the flow, or dive into a panic mode, is crazy. Let us look after the health and welfare of our people first. This does not mean being irresponsible about any sources of pollution from industrial operations or any other activities. It means using genuine science, and not the scare tactics of world political manipulators, to come to really sensible conclusions.
Source
***************************************
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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Thursday, July 03, 2008
Nobel winners: No "consensus"
Much like every year since 1951, there has been another meeting (6/29-7/3) of Nobel prize winners in Lindau, Bavaria, Germany... Seven Nobel prize winners participated in a climate debate. How did it look like? Well, there may be a climate consensus among the high-school dropouts but there is none among the Nobel prize winners. There was one more difference. Many of the Nobel prize winners said, unlike the high-school dropouts, the following sentence: "I am no expert." ;-)
Ivar Giaever (Norway), the 1973 Nobel prize winner for superconductivity (he was essential to master electron tunneling in superconductors and shared the physics award with Esaki and Josephson), was asked how the world should tackle climate change. The following quote accurately matches the content but it was shortened and edited:
Ivar Giaever had done some "Google research" before the panel so he could also speak about 1998, 1934, 1921 as the warmest U.S. (where they have the best record) years in the 20th century, the hockey stick graph, the crucial role of the huge heat capacity of the oceans, the little ice age whose cause is unknown, and about the increase of "bulk" Greenland ice in the last century (by 2 meters at the center). Another panelist conjectured that this increase of ice was due to precipitation.
Giaever mentioned that it takes years to regain the energy that was needed to produce a solar panel; the precise number became a topic of a controversy. There is 500 years worth of coal in the U.S. He also warned that ice ages do happen and we might be just waiting for one (54:30). The temperature decrease could be 8 øC so maybe they should pollute more than they do! ;-) (The moderator argued that we can calculate there won't be an ice age for 40,000 years, a statement I can't confirm.)
And by the way, if people really cared about this problem, why don't they talk about one solution that we already have, namely nuclear energy?
And finally, we don't know what is the correct temperature. It could be 2 øC warmer or colder. I don't know but what I do know is that this is not the correct temperature. In the question period, he said that the chance the the warming is anthropogenic is not very large: it might be but it doesn't have to. In the question period, he was also asked whether it was a good idea to establish more efficient schemes of transportation of energy. Despite attempts to humiliate him, he sensibly insisted that it was only up to 10% of the energy which was a very small, unimportant number.
Entertainingly enough, his moral record was clear because, as he said, Norway only produces clean energy! Well, Norway is not quite perfect. In his very final contribution, he hated to say something bad about Norway but he sharply disagrees with his country that has allowed Al Gore to pick a Nobel peace prize (applause!).
The audience was chuckling throughout his contributions as if they were looking at the most entertaining heretic in their life. ;-) In the middle of the meeting, Giaever continued that he was not supporting pollution but even if climate change were man-made, we can't stop the usage of fossil fuels because the Chinese want to live in the same way as we do. And he doesn't see any results of the climate regulation efforts during the first decade when it was already supposed to materialize in Europe.
Other participants
As the video and Seed's websites reveal, many other statements at the meeting would be inconvenient for the high-school dropouts, too.
Hartmut Michel (Germany), a biochemist and the 1988 chemistry Nobel prize winner for crystallization of membrane proteins, urged the world to stop the biofuels immediately: the audience applauded to him. Biomass only captures 0.7-0.8% of the solar radiation, for biofuels it is 0.2%, and it would be much better to wait for good enough solar panels with 15% efficiency. Also, the biofuel technology leads to food shortages and the logging of rain forests. You shouldn't be suprised that Hartmut Michel was irritated when Ivar Giaever called the solar panels "unproductive" but as you can see, none of them would agree with the environmentalist "consensus". :-)
Not surprisingly, Carlo Rubbia (Italy), the 1984 winner of the physics Nobel prize for the experimental discovery of the W and Z bosons at CERN, promoted (although not enthusiastically) nuclear energy (and also solar energy). See his proposal to replace uranium by thorium - a text that uses some of the CO2-concerned language. He also said that the Earth is going through an extraordinary process today: every decade, the number of people gets multiplied [sic] by 1 billion! :-)
Well, I am afraid that if Rubbia's obvious mistake is fixed, the current era becomes pretty ordinary. Nevertheless, Rubbia says that it should "become impossible to say that we should continue with the business as usual" because the population is increasing [just like it has done for millenia]. Among the participants, Rubbia clearly turned out to be the ultimate hardcore, nearly Hansen-level alarmist. Rubbia (*1934) also thinks that he is not old! :-)
Nuclear waste was not discussed at all but nuclear weapons were mentioned as a dangerous by-product of the nuclear power plants: thorium doesn't allow for bombs. Moreover, 1 ton of thorium gives the same energy as 200 tons of uranium. There's so much of it that it makes no sense to call it "nonrenewable".
Concerning climate change, Klaus von Klitzing (Germany), the only 1985 physics Nobel prize winner for his discovery of the quantized Hall effect, argued that more research was needed. People have already changed the world in many ways and we simply do not know whether tripling of CO2 leads to any kind of instability. Moreover, he emphasized that the increasing population inevitably leads to increasing consumption of energy - the "energy problem" that is primary - and climate change is just a result and we clearly have to live with that. Thermonuclear fusion in a near future is unlikely and time constraints are essential. Sometimes, the government (EU) funding of energy research (solar etc.) is higher than necessary.
Once again, von Klitzing and Giaever were certainly not the only ones whose skeptical inclinations couldn't be hidden. Even among the signatories of the pro-rational, anti-environmentalist 1992 Heidelberg Appeal, you find three members of the Lindau climate panel. Johann Deisenhofer, who won the 1988 chemistry prize with Michel and Huber as well, has signed it, too. As far as I can say, he tried not to say anything controversial at all. As a result, he didn't say anything I would find worth reporting.
Jack Steinberger, the 1988 physics Nobel prize winner for the discovery of muon neutrinos, argued that it was pointless to wait for thermonuclear fusion because Edward Teller already promised him the new source 53 years ago. It won't be ready in a foreseeable future. At the very end, someone asked what the scientists can do for politicians to follow their recommendations. Steinberger honestly said that the panel revealed disagreement about the scientists so what the politicians should "hear" is not obvious.
If you summarize the comments, 3/7 of the panelists could be classified either as downright skeptics or cryptoskeptics, the fourth one radically hates biofuels, and the fifth one thinks that there is a significant disagreement in the science community. The moderator and organizer, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber who is a local director and a member of the Inquisition Promoting Climate Change (IPCC) who boasted that he met James Hansen a week ago, obtained a similar number. So when a student asked whether the Nobel prize winners thought that men were behind climate change, he said that "there is a 60% probability that man is seriously behind climate change" and it is a problem that should be wrestled with.
However, Schellnhuber also used Pascal's Wager. If you think that there is a 60% probability that there won't be a crash, you won't enter the aircraft. ;-) Well, that's a good joke but not what I would call a rational conclusion of a complex panel debate.
More here
Penguin scare
This is all speculation. They have no idea what it's all about. Frog decline was similarly attributed but turned out to be fungal. Maybe this is too -- or viral. Who knows?
Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, penguins are sounding the alarm for potentially catastrophic changes in the world's oceans, a University of Washington biologist says. The culprits are global warming, oil pollution, depletion of fisheries and rampant coastline development, which threaten breeding habitats for many penguin species, she argues.
These factors are behind rapid population declines among the birds, said the university's Dee Boersma, an authority on penguins. "Penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world," she said. "The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins."
In a paper published in the JulyAugust edition of the research journal BioScience, Boersma notes there are 16 to 19 penguin species, and most penguins are at 43 sites, virtually all in the Southern Hemisphere.
For most of these colonies, population trends have been unclear, so few people realized that many penguins were suffering sharp population declines, Boersma said. She advocates an international effort to check on the largest colonies of each penguin species at least every five years.
Working with the Wildlife Conservation Society and colleagues, Boersma has studied the world's largest breeding colony of Magellanic penguins at Punta Tombo on Argentina's Atlantic coast. That population probably peaked at about 400,000 pairs between the late 1960s and early 1980s, and today is half that, she said.
There are similar stories from other regions. African penguins decreased from 1.5 million pairs a century ago to just 63,000 pairs by 2005, Boersma claimed. Galapagos Islands penguins, the only species whose range extends into the Northern Hemisphere, now number around 2,500, about a quarter of what their population was when Boersma first studied them in the 1970s.
Boersma recounts watching in 2006 as climate anomalies wreaked havoc on the same population of Emperor penguins featured in the popular 2005 film "March of the Penguins." The colony bred in the same place as in other years, where the ice is protected from the open sea and wind keeps snow from piling up and freezing the eggs. But in September, with the chicks just more than halfgrown, the adults apparently sensed danger and uncharacteristically marched the colony more than three miles to different ice.
The ice they chose remained intact the longest, but in late September a strong storm broke it up and the chicks were forced into the water, Boersma said. While the adults could survive, the chicks needed two more months of feather growth and buildup of insulating fat to be independent. The likely result, Boersma said, was a total colonywide breeding failure that year.
Global warming also appears to be key in the decline of Galapagos penguins, she said: as the atmosphere and ocean get warmer, El Nio Southern Oscillation events, which affect weather worldwide, seem to occur more often. During those times, ocean currents that carry the small fish that penguins eat are pushed farther away from the islands and the birds often starve or are left too weak to breed.
These problems raise the question of whether humans are making it too hard for other species to coexist, Boersma argued. Penguins in places like Argentina, the Falklands and Africa run rising risks of being fouled by oil, either from ocean drilling or because of petroleum discharge from passing ships, she continued. The birds' chances of getting oiled are also rising because they often have to forage much farther than before to find prey.
"As the fish humans have traditionally eaten get more and more scarce, we are fishing down the food chain and now we are beginning to compete more directly with smaller organisms for the food they depend on," she said. As the world's population continues to explode and more and more people live in coastal areas, the negative effects are growing for both marine and shorebased habitats used by a variety of species, Boersma added.
"I don't think we can wait. In 1960 we had three billion people in the world. Now it's 6.7 billion and it's expected to be eight billion by 2025," she said. "We've waited a very long time. It's clear that humans have changed the face of the Earth and we have changed the face of the oceans, but we just can't see it. We've already waited too long."
Source
Snow in July? Huge amounts of snow still blanket the Northern Rockies
With diesel smoke and white powder flying, heavy equipment operators worked furiously to remove enough snow to open the Going-to-the-Sun road, which connects the two sides of Glacier National Park and is usually open by the first week of June. But huge amounts of snow still blanket the Northern Rockies high country, in part because of record snowfalls in Montana this year, so the opening will not take place until Wednesday, the latest on record by a day, except for World War II when the road was not plowed at all....
"Snow in the mountains is money in the bank," Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana said. "The snow will melt and run into the streams through September. It's good for the fisheries and good for irrigation. "Mr. Schweitzer cited more good news from the state climatologist, who, he said, has forecast a cooler and wetter July than normal. Still, the governor said, even though things are better, "no matter what the weather is, we're never more than two weeks from a drought. "For now, residents feel they have some breathing room. "We got so much moisture in June, it released a pressure valve," said Lisa Bay, a rancher near Wolf Creek, Mont. "It was a grand sense of relief."
The situation is similar in Wyoming. Snowpack in the Bighorn Mountains, in the north central part of the state, is 79 percent higher than the 30-year average, and 112 percent above the average in the area drained by the Powder and Tongue Rivers. "Everything is up from average," said Leanne Stevenson, manager of natural resources and policy for the Wyoming Department of Agriculture. "A lot of what makes a difference is not how much, but how long it stays cool, and we actually had spring this year."
Because of the drought, she said, the 30-year snowpack average has dropped 20 percent over the last eight years.The heavy snows and elevated water levels have thrown an economy dependent on recreation into confusion.In Glacier National Park, some high-country hiking trails will not be open for weeks. In Yellowstone National Park, some backcountry areas are blocked by snow and some rivers are high and muddy....
More here
G8 SUMMIT: WHITE HOUSE RULES OUT UNILATERAL EMISSIONS TARGETS
The Group of Eight major industrialized countries meeting next week in Japan cannot by themselves set effective long-term world goals on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, the White House said on Tuesday. "With evidence mounting of rapidly rising emissions from emerging markets, action by the G8 alone would not be effective," said Dan Price, assistant to President George W. Bush for international economic affairs. "That's why we believe that all major economies and indeed all parties to the UN convention (on climate change) need to be part of the discussion on setting a long-term goal," Price said at a White House briefing.
Price acknowledged long-running international discussions of setting a global target to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent by 2050, but stopped short of saying an agreement on this goal was possible at the summit in Hokkaido, Japan.
More here
THE POINTLESS RUSH FOR A CARBON EMISSIONS PLAN
Assuming - however briefly - that Canada must impose carbon taxes, when would be the best time to do it? Stephane Dion says now. Right now. Yale University economist William Nordhaus says, well, slow down, friend. We have time. Let's do this thing properly.
Dr. Nordhaus takes global warming seriously, anticipating that it may well "cast a shadow over the globe for decades, perhaps centuries, to come." When he says centuries, he means centuries. In his highly sophisticated computer analysis of global warming strategies, he includes the option of doing nothing at all for 250 years - and found that it delivered the same result (measured in global emissions of carbon dioxide one century hence) as the Kyoto Protocol with or without the United States.
He includes, as well, a 50-year delay and got an intriguing assessment. Implement the right climate change strategy in 2055 and you still get - by 2105 - precisely the same reduction in CO2 that you get with the computer-designed "optimal strategy," a go-slow, go-frugal approach that begins modestly in the next decade and expands incrementally through the rest of the century.
In a brilliant analysis of carbon strategies - The Challenge of Global Warming: Economic Models and Environmental Policy, published last year - Dr. Nordhaus observes that the complexity of global warming rules out absolute certainty of any kind, whether academic or ideological. "Whatever goal we set will probably be incorrect." Given this caution, it is essential to adopt a strategy that can be quickly adapted to changing circumstances and changing technologies, he says.
Dr. Nordhaus notes that a single technological advance in 2050, or in 2100, could render redundant trillions of prematurely invested dollars. This is one of the reasons why the most aggressive climate change strategies - the celebrated Stern Review proposals, the controversial dictums espoused by Al Gore - badly flunk the Nordhaus computer analysis test.
More here
BRITAIN'S CLIMATE MADNESS
By Ruth Lea. Ruth was Director of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) for four years until November 2007. She is now Director of Global Vision, and a Non-Executive Director and Economic Advisor to the Arbuthnot Banking Group. Ruth is perhaps best known for having been the Head of the Policy Unit at the Institute of Directors (IoD)
On June 26, 2008, the Prime Minister unveiled his Government's renewable energy strategy for building a "low carbon economy". This will involve the building of 7,000 wind turbines (3,000 at sea, and 4,000 on land) by 2020, expand other renewable energy, such as micro-generation, tidal- and wave-power, and will require œ100bn of investment from the private sector (heavily subsidised by the consumer). Nuclear power will also be encouraged. The centre piece of the strategy is the planned expansion of wind turbines, which are almost universally disliked by those who have to live near to them. But, aesthetics aside, the strategy is unworkable, expensive, and irresponsible.
Absurd and Costly
There is not the faintest chance that 7,000 wind turbines can be constructed in this time, given the construction capacity restrictions and tight timetable. But, even if the turbines were built, this would not be the end of the matter. Britain would still require a considerable back-up of conventional electricity-generating capacity because the turbines would frequently produce no electricity at all, given the fluctuation in wind speeds. Paul Golby, Chief Executive of E.ON UK, has said that this back-up capacity would have to amount to 90% of the capacity of the wind turbines, if supplies were to be reliable. This would be an absurd, and costly, misallocation of resources, with the extra costs falling on households and businesses. But, costs apart, there is yet another problem. And that is whether the necessary back-up capacity is likely to be available.
The current Government has woefully neglected Britain's energy infrastructure, and much of Britain's current electricity-generating capacity is due for closure over the next 10 to 15 years. Most of Britain's ageing nuclear power stations are due to be decommissioned, and half of Britain's coal-fired power stations are due to be retired because of the EU's Large Combustion Power Directive (concerned with controlling emissions of, for example, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides). Under these circumstances, there is a very real risk that there will not be adequate conventional back-up capacity despite the Government's welcome acceptance of the need for nuclear power (there will inevitably be delays in construction) and the operation of new gas-fired capacity (which, incidentally, makes Britain unduly dependent on imports, as our own supplies are dwindling fast).
The prospect of power cuts is, therefore, all too real. Brutally, the lights could go out, and business and the public services, now so dependent on computers, would suffer. The folly of putting so many eggs in the basket of wind power is the height of irresponsibility.
The EU's Renewables Directive: Disproportionate Burden
The Government's `dash for wind' in order to develop a "low-carbon economy" is, of course, part of its climate-change policy of cutting carbon emissions in order to "combat global warming". Any expansion of nuclear power would also curtail carbon emissions, and, indeed, if one believes that a low-carbon economy is a good idea (perhaps for security reasons as well as `saving the planet'), one might ask why not allocate far more resources to nuclear power and far fewer to renewables.
Alas, this would not be permitted under the EU's 2008 Renewables Directive.(1) Under this Directive, the UK has agreed to meet 15% of its energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020. Whilst renewables include biomass, solar power, wind, wave/tide, and hydroelectricity, nuclear power is excluded. Insofar as the Renewables Directive is part of the EU's policy of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 20% by 2020 compared with 1990, this is perverse to say the least.
Whilst the UK has a 15% renewables target for 2020, just 1.5% of energy consumption was met by permissible renewables in 2006.(2) The UK has committed itself, therefore, to increase its renewables share ten-fold by 2020. With the possible exceptions of Malta and Luxembourg, the UK is faced with by far the greatest challenge in reaching its 2020 target. In addition, the unit costs in the UK are relatively high because Britain lacks access to cheap biomass resources in the electricity and heat sectors, and is placing greater reliance on high cost, expensive electricity technologies, such as wind (mainly) and wave/tidal. By contrast several EU countries are well-placed, including Austria, Finland, and Sweden, as are many of the central and eastern European countries.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that the UK is likely to carry a disproportionate burden of the costs of meeting the EU's 2020 renewables target. According to a study by P”yry Energy Consulting, the UK could carry around 20-25% of the total EU costs.(3) P”yry has estimated that the annual cost in 2020 could be around œ150 to 200 pounds per UK household, and the lifetime costs up to 2020 would be 1,800 pounds, even as high as 2,800, per UK household. These are significant sums, and they are likely to be under-estimates.
Given my earlier comment that the Government's plans for 7,000 wind turbines will not be achieved by 2020, there is no chance that we will meet the renewables target. (And, in any case, 7,000 turbines, even if built, are apparently inadequate for Britain to meet the 15% target.) The Government is living in fantasy-land - but it seems hell-bent on pursuing an energy policy which will be costly, will dangerously distort energy policy, and will leave the country vulnerable to black-outs.
The Economic Effects
Even if the lights stay on, it is clear that the Government's current strategy will lead to higher and less competitive energy prices in Britain, other things being equal. For households, especially low income and pensioner households, this will bite into general living standards. Businesses, especially energy intensive industries, will continue to lose competitiveness and will migrate overseas to, say, India or China. The Energy Intensive Users Group (EIUG) estimates that various `green measures' (the Renewables Obligation, the Climate Change Levy, and the costs of the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme) already account for a quarter of total energy costs for their members. The situation will surely deteriorate. Britain's chemicals, cement, and steel industries, to name but three, are likely to shrink, jobs will be lost, and the balance of payments will deteriorate. Yet this has barely been mentioned. Does no-one care?
Britain's Climate Change Bill: Economic Madness
As already mentioned, the EU has a 20% target for cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, compared with 1990. British legislators, however, seem to regard this self-flagellation as insufficiently painful. The Climate Change Bill, currently going through Parliament, includes legally-binding targets of a 60% reduction by 2050, and a 26 to 32% reduction by 2020, compared with 1990.
The Bill is predicated first on the assumptions that `global warming' is "dangerous" and is unquestionably mainly caused by anthropogenic carbon emissions. These assumptions are, of course, inherent in the work of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provided the quasi-scientific background for the path-breaking Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Secondly, they rely on Lord Nicholas Stern's report, based on the IPCC's apocalyptic projections of a frizzling planet, exhorting us to spend now to prevent this fate, or to fry and/or drown later.(4) Woe betide any foolish soul who dares to speak out against this orthodoxy.
But the notion that there is a scientific consensus on this matter is simply not true. Many scientists, though they risk their funding and the wrath of the Royal Society, are prepared to acknowledge that the sun has an infinitely greater role to play than humankind in climate change. Moreover, climate change in the form of modest warming is likely to be, on balance, economically beneficial. And, inconveniently for the doomsayers, there has been no `global warming' for a decade.
Secondly, the Bill simplistically assumes that climate change can be combated by cutting anthropogenic carbon emissions, as if there were a straightforward, bivariate and uni-causal relationship between carbon dioxide emissions (and concentrations) and temperature. Nothing, I am reliably informed, could be further from the truth.
Thirdly, the Bill chooses to ignore the fact that, whilst Britain attempts to decarbonise her economy, much of the rest of the world will not. Britain accounts for less than 2% of world anthropogenic carbon emissions, whilst China's emissions probably increase by more than our total every 1 to 2 years. We could, however, make our economy uncompetitive and curtail British people's economic freedoms and prosperity, satisfyingly so for the many critics of modern developed economies, by pursuing this policy. But where we lead, others will not follow - not even the other EU member states, if it suits them. It is economic madness.(5)
The Future
The Climate Change Bill will, however, be enacted. All the major political parties are supporting it. But, apart from its unfounded scientific assumptions and economic irresponsibility, it is already looking old-fashioned (there's nothing so old-fashioned as last year's fashions that have ceased to be fashionable) and irrelevant.
Two things are changing the debate. The first is the, already noted, absence of `global warming' since the end of the 20th century. People understand this. The second is the economy. Bill Clinton was right: "it's the economy, stupid". British living standards for many are now falling, and this changes people's priorities. Recent polls show that, first, the British people are sceptical about human-caused `global warming' despite all of the propaganda thrust at them and, secondly, they regard `green taxes' as little more than yet another excuse for Governments to tax them harder. The mood is changing. Politicians please take note.
Source
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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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Much like every year since 1951, there has been another meeting (6/29-7/3) of Nobel prize winners in Lindau, Bavaria, Germany... Seven Nobel prize winners participated in a climate debate. How did it look like? Well, there may be a climate consensus among the high-school dropouts but there is none among the Nobel prize winners. There was one more difference. Many of the Nobel prize winners said, unlike the high-school dropouts, the following sentence: "I am no expert." ;-)
Ivar Giaever (Norway), the 1973 Nobel prize winner for superconductivity (he was essential to master electron tunneling in superconductors and shared the physics award with Esaki and Josephson), was asked how the world should tackle climate change. The following quote accurately matches the content but it was shortened and edited:
"First of all, I didn't volunteer to be on this panel. Second of all, I am a skeptic, as I told you yesterday. Third of all, if I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around. The ozone hole width has peaked in 1993.
Moreover, global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only those who are correct are important. We don't really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money [question period]," he referred to a lecture about poverty by Hans Rosling (Sweden) that heavily relied on my favorite Gapminder: well, he is the director of the Gapminder Foundation.
Ivar Giaever had done some "Google research" before the panel so he could also speak about 1998, 1934, 1921 as the warmest U.S. (where they have the best record) years in the 20th century, the hockey stick graph, the crucial role of the huge heat capacity of the oceans, the little ice age whose cause is unknown, and about the increase of "bulk" Greenland ice in the last century (by 2 meters at the center). Another panelist conjectured that this increase of ice was due to precipitation.
Giaever mentioned that it takes years to regain the energy that was needed to produce a solar panel; the precise number became a topic of a controversy. There is 500 years worth of coal in the U.S. He also warned that ice ages do happen and we might be just waiting for one (54:30). The temperature decrease could be 8 øC so maybe they should pollute more than they do! ;-) (The moderator argued that we can calculate there won't be an ice age for 40,000 years, a statement I can't confirm.)
And by the way, if people really cared about this problem, why don't they talk about one solution that we already have, namely nuclear energy?
And finally, we don't know what is the correct temperature. It could be 2 øC warmer or colder. I don't know but what I do know is that this is not the correct temperature. In the question period, he said that the chance the the warming is anthropogenic is not very large: it might be but it doesn't have to. In the question period, he was also asked whether it was a good idea to establish more efficient schemes of transportation of energy. Despite attempts to humiliate him, he sensibly insisted that it was only up to 10% of the energy which was a very small, unimportant number.
Entertainingly enough, his moral record was clear because, as he said, Norway only produces clean energy! Well, Norway is not quite perfect. In his very final contribution, he hated to say something bad about Norway but he sharply disagrees with his country that has allowed Al Gore to pick a Nobel peace prize (applause!).
The audience was chuckling throughout his contributions as if they were looking at the most entertaining heretic in their life. ;-) In the middle of the meeting, Giaever continued that he was not supporting pollution but even if climate change were man-made, we can't stop the usage of fossil fuels because the Chinese want to live in the same way as we do. And he doesn't see any results of the climate regulation efforts during the first decade when it was already supposed to materialize in Europe.
Other participants
As the video and Seed's websites reveal, many other statements at the meeting would be inconvenient for the high-school dropouts, too.
Hartmut Michel (Germany), a biochemist and the 1988 chemistry Nobel prize winner for crystallization of membrane proteins, urged the world to stop the biofuels immediately: the audience applauded to him. Biomass only captures 0.7-0.8% of the solar radiation, for biofuels it is 0.2%, and it would be much better to wait for good enough solar panels with 15% efficiency. Also, the biofuel technology leads to food shortages and the logging of rain forests. You shouldn't be suprised that Hartmut Michel was irritated when Ivar Giaever called the solar panels "unproductive" but as you can see, none of them would agree with the environmentalist "consensus". :-)
Not surprisingly, Carlo Rubbia (Italy), the 1984 winner of the physics Nobel prize for the experimental discovery of the W and Z bosons at CERN, promoted (although not enthusiastically) nuclear energy (and also solar energy). See his proposal to replace uranium by thorium - a text that uses some of the CO2-concerned language. He also said that the Earth is going through an extraordinary process today: every decade, the number of people gets multiplied [sic] by 1 billion! :-)
Well, I am afraid that if Rubbia's obvious mistake is fixed, the current era becomes pretty ordinary. Nevertheless, Rubbia says that it should "become impossible to say that we should continue with the business as usual" because the population is increasing [just like it has done for millenia]. Among the participants, Rubbia clearly turned out to be the ultimate hardcore, nearly Hansen-level alarmist. Rubbia (*1934) also thinks that he is not old! :-)
Nuclear waste was not discussed at all but nuclear weapons were mentioned as a dangerous by-product of the nuclear power plants: thorium doesn't allow for bombs. Moreover, 1 ton of thorium gives the same energy as 200 tons of uranium. There's so much of it that it makes no sense to call it "nonrenewable".
Concerning climate change, Klaus von Klitzing (Germany), the only 1985 physics Nobel prize winner for his discovery of the quantized Hall effect, argued that more research was needed. People have already changed the world in many ways and we simply do not know whether tripling of CO2 leads to any kind of instability. Moreover, he emphasized that the increasing population inevitably leads to increasing consumption of energy - the "energy problem" that is primary - and climate change is just a result and we clearly have to live with that. Thermonuclear fusion in a near future is unlikely and time constraints are essential. Sometimes, the government (EU) funding of energy research (solar etc.) is higher than necessary.
Once again, von Klitzing and Giaever were certainly not the only ones whose skeptical inclinations couldn't be hidden. Even among the signatories of the pro-rational, anti-environmentalist 1992 Heidelberg Appeal, you find three members of the Lindau climate panel. Johann Deisenhofer, who won the 1988 chemistry prize with Michel and Huber as well, has signed it, too. As far as I can say, he tried not to say anything controversial at all. As a result, he didn't say anything I would find worth reporting.
Jack Steinberger, the 1988 physics Nobel prize winner for the discovery of muon neutrinos, argued that it was pointless to wait for thermonuclear fusion because Edward Teller already promised him the new source 53 years ago. It won't be ready in a foreseeable future. At the very end, someone asked what the scientists can do for politicians to follow their recommendations. Steinberger honestly said that the panel revealed disagreement about the scientists so what the politicians should "hear" is not obvious.
If you summarize the comments, 3/7 of the panelists could be classified either as downright skeptics or cryptoskeptics, the fourth one radically hates biofuels, and the fifth one thinks that there is a significant disagreement in the science community. The moderator and organizer, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber who is a local director and a member of the Inquisition Promoting Climate Change (IPCC) who boasted that he met James Hansen a week ago, obtained a similar number. So when a student asked whether the Nobel prize winners thought that men were behind climate change, he said that "there is a 60% probability that man is seriously behind climate change" and it is a problem that should be wrestled with.
However, Schellnhuber also used Pascal's Wager. If you think that there is a 60% probability that there won't be a crash, you won't enter the aircraft. ;-) Well, that's a good joke but not what I would call a rational conclusion of a complex panel debate.
More here
Penguin scare
This is all speculation. They have no idea what it's all about. Frog decline was similarly attributed but turned out to be fungal. Maybe this is too -- or viral. Who knows?
Like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, penguins are sounding the alarm for potentially catastrophic changes in the world's oceans, a University of Washington biologist says. The culprits are global warming, oil pollution, depletion of fisheries and rampant coastline development, which threaten breeding habitats for many penguin species, she argues.
These factors are behind rapid population declines among the birds, said the university's Dee Boersma, an authority on penguins. "Penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world," she said. "The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins."
In a paper published in the JulyAugust edition of the research journal BioScience, Boersma notes there are 16 to 19 penguin species, and most penguins are at 43 sites, virtually all in the Southern Hemisphere.
For most of these colonies, population trends have been unclear, so few people realized that many penguins were suffering sharp population declines, Boersma said. She advocates an international effort to check on the largest colonies of each penguin species at least every five years.
Working with the Wildlife Conservation Society and colleagues, Boersma has studied the world's largest breeding colony of Magellanic penguins at Punta Tombo on Argentina's Atlantic coast. That population probably peaked at about 400,000 pairs between the late 1960s and early 1980s, and today is half that, she said.
There are similar stories from other regions. African penguins decreased from 1.5 million pairs a century ago to just 63,000 pairs by 2005, Boersma claimed. Galapagos Islands penguins, the only species whose range extends into the Northern Hemisphere, now number around 2,500, about a quarter of what their population was when Boersma first studied them in the 1970s.
Boersma recounts watching in 2006 as climate anomalies wreaked havoc on the same population of Emperor penguins featured in the popular 2005 film "March of the Penguins." The colony bred in the same place as in other years, where the ice is protected from the open sea and wind keeps snow from piling up and freezing the eggs. But in September, with the chicks just more than halfgrown, the adults apparently sensed danger and uncharacteristically marched the colony more than three miles to different ice.
The ice they chose remained intact the longest, but in late September a strong storm broke it up and the chicks were forced into the water, Boersma said. While the adults could survive, the chicks needed two more months of feather growth and buildup of insulating fat to be independent. The likely result, Boersma said, was a total colonywide breeding failure that year.
Global warming also appears to be key in the decline of Galapagos penguins, she said: as the atmosphere and ocean get warmer, El Nio Southern Oscillation events, which affect weather worldwide, seem to occur more often. During those times, ocean currents that carry the small fish that penguins eat are pushed farther away from the islands and the birds often starve or are left too weak to breed.
These problems raise the question of whether humans are making it too hard for other species to coexist, Boersma argued. Penguins in places like Argentina, the Falklands and Africa run rising risks of being fouled by oil, either from ocean drilling or because of petroleum discharge from passing ships, she continued. The birds' chances of getting oiled are also rising because they often have to forage much farther than before to find prey.
"As the fish humans have traditionally eaten get more and more scarce, we are fishing down the food chain and now we are beginning to compete more directly with smaller organisms for the food they depend on," she said. As the world's population continues to explode and more and more people live in coastal areas, the negative effects are growing for both marine and shorebased habitats used by a variety of species, Boersma added.
"I don't think we can wait. In 1960 we had three billion people in the world. Now it's 6.7 billion and it's expected to be eight billion by 2025," she said. "We've waited a very long time. It's clear that humans have changed the face of the Earth and we have changed the face of the oceans, but we just can't see it. We've already waited too long."
Source
Snow in July? Huge amounts of snow still blanket the Northern Rockies
With diesel smoke and white powder flying, heavy equipment operators worked furiously to remove enough snow to open the Going-to-the-Sun road, which connects the two sides of Glacier National Park and is usually open by the first week of June. But huge amounts of snow still blanket the Northern Rockies high country, in part because of record snowfalls in Montana this year, so the opening will not take place until Wednesday, the latest on record by a day, except for World War II when the road was not plowed at all....
"Snow in the mountains is money in the bank," Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana said. "The snow will melt and run into the streams through September. It's good for the fisheries and good for irrigation. "Mr. Schweitzer cited more good news from the state climatologist, who, he said, has forecast a cooler and wetter July than normal. Still, the governor said, even though things are better, "no matter what the weather is, we're never more than two weeks from a drought. "For now, residents feel they have some breathing room. "We got so much moisture in June, it released a pressure valve," said Lisa Bay, a rancher near Wolf Creek, Mont. "It was a grand sense of relief."
The situation is similar in Wyoming. Snowpack in the Bighorn Mountains, in the north central part of the state, is 79 percent higher than the 30-year average, and 112 percent above the average in the area drained by the Powder and Tongue Rivers. "Everything is up from average," said Leanne Stevenson, manager of natural resources and policy for the Wyoming Department of Agriculture. "A lot of what makes a difference is not how much, but how long it stays cool, and we actually had spring this year."
Because of the drought, she said, the 30-year snowpack average has dropped 20 percent over the last eight years.The heavy snows and elevated water levels have thrown an economy dependent on recreation into confusion.In Glacier National Park, some high-country hiking trails will not be open for weeks. In Yellowstone National Park, some backcountry areas are blocked by snow and some rivers are high and muddy....
More here
G8 SUMMIT: WHITE HOUSE RULES OUT UNILATERAL EMISSIONS TARGETS
The Group of Eight major industrialized countries meeting next week in Japan cannot by themselves set effective long-term world goals on curbing greenhouse gas emissions, the White House said on Tuesday. "With evidence mounting of rapidly rising emissions from emerging markets, action by the G8 alone would not be effective," said Dan Price, assistant to President George W. Bush for international economic affairs. "That's why we believe that all major economies and indeed all parties to the UN convention (on climate change) need to be part of the discussion on setting a long-term goal," Price said at a White House briefing.
Price acknowledged long-running international discussions of setting a global target to cut greenhouse emissions by 50 percent by 2050, but stopped short of saying an agreement on this goal was possible at the summit in Hokkaido, Japan.
More here
THE POINTLESS RUSH FOR A CARBON EMISSIONS PLAN
Assuming - however briefly - that Canada must impose carbon taxes, when would be the best time to do it? Stephane Dion says now. Right now. Yale University economist William Nordhaus says, well, slow down, friend. We have time. Let's do this thing properly.
Dr. Nordhaus takes global warming seriously, anticipating that it may well "cast a shadow over the globe for decades, perhaps centuries, to come." When he says centuries, he means centuries. In his highly sophisticated computer analysis of global warming strategies, he includes the option of doing nothing at all for 250 years - and found that it delivered the same result (measured in global emissions of carbon dioxide one century hence) as the Kyoto Protocol with or without the United States.
He includes, as well, a 50-year delay and got an intriguing assessment. Implement the right climate change strategy in 2055 and you still get - by 2105 - precisely the same reduction in CO2 that you get with the computer-designed "optimal strategy," a go-slow, go-frugal approach that begins modestly in the next decade and expands incrementally through the rest of the century.
In a brilliant analysis of carbon strategies - The Challenge of Global Warming: Economic Models and Environmental Policy, published last year - Dr. Nordhaus observes that the complexity of global warming rules out absolute certainty of any kind, whether academic or ideological. "Whatever goal we set will probably be incorrect." Given this caution, it is essential to adopt a strategy that can be quickly adapted to changing circumstances and changing technologies, he says.
Dr. Nordhaus notes that a single technological advance in 2050, or in 2100, could render redundant trillions of prematurely invested dollars. This is one of the reasons why the most aggressive climate change strategies - the celebrated Stern Review proposals, the controversial dictums espoused by Al Gore - badly flunk the Nordhaus computer analysis test.
More here
BRITAIN'S CLIMATE MADNESS
By Ruth Lea. Ruth was Director of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) for four years until November 2007. She is now Director of Global Vision, and a Non-Executive Director and Economic Advisor to the Arbuthnot Banking Group. Ruth is perhaps best known for having been the Head of the Policy Unit at the Institute of Directors (IoD)
On June 26, 2008, the Prime Minister unveiled his Government's renewable energy strategy for building a "low carbon economy". This will involve the building of 7,000 wind turbines (3,000 at sea, and 4,000 on land) by 2020, expand other renewable energy, such as micro-generation, tidal- and wave-power, and will require œ100bn of investment from the private sector (heavily subsidised by the consumer). Nuclear power will also be encouraged. The centre piece of the strategy is the planned expansion of wind turbines, which are almost universally disliked by those who have to live near to them. But, aesthetics aside, the strategy is unworkable, expensive, and irresponsible.
Absurd and Costly
There is not the faintest chance that 7,000 wind turbines can be constructed in this time, given the construction capacity restrictions and tight timetable. But, even if the turbines were built, this would not be the end of the matter. Britain would still require a considerable back-up of conventional electricity-generating capacity because the turbines would frequently produce no electricity at all, given the fluctuation in wind speeds. Paul Golby, Chief Executive of E.ON UK, has said that this back-up capacity would have to amount to 90% of the capacity of the wind turbines, if supplies were to be reliable. This would be an absurd, and costly, misallocation of resources, with the extra costs falling on households and businesses. But, costs apart, there is yet another problem. And that is whether the necessary back-up capacity is likely to be available.
The current Government has woefully neglected Britain's energy infrastructure, and much of Britain's current electricity-generating capacity is due for closure over the next 10 to 15 years. Most of Britain's ageing nuclear power stations are due to be decommissioned, and half of Britain's coal-fired power stations are due to be retired because of the EU's Large Combustion Power Directive (concerned with controlling emissions of, for example, sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides). Under these circumstances, there is a very real risk that there will not be adequate conventional back-up capacity despite the Government's welcome acceptance of the need for nuclear power (there will inevitably be delays in construction) and the operation of new gas-fired capacity (which, incidentally, makes Britain unduly dependent on imports, as our own supplies are dwindling fast).
The prospect of power cuts is, therefore, all too real. Brutally, the lights could go out, and business and the public services, now so dependent on computers, would suffer. The folly of putting so many eggs in the basket of wind power is the height of irresponsibility.
The EU's Renewables Directive: Disproportionate Burden
The Government's `dash for wind' in order to develop a "low-carbon economy" is, of course, part of its climate-change policy of cutting carbon emissions in order to "combat global warming". Any expansion of nuclear power would also curtail carbon emissions, and, indeed, if one believes that a low-carbon economy is a good idea (perhaps for security reasons as well as `saving the planet'), one might ask why not allocate far more resources to nuclear power and far fewer to renewables.
Alas, this would not be permitted under the EU's 2008 Renewables Directive.(1) Under this Directive, the UK has agreed to meet 15% of its energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020. Whilst renewables include biomass, solar power, wind, wave/tide, and hydroelectricity, nuclear power is excluded. Insofar as the Renewables Directive is part of the EU's policy of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 20% by 2020 compared with 1990, this is perverse to say the least.
Whilst the UK has a 15% renewables target for 2020, just 1.5% of energy consumption was met by permissible renewables in 2006.(2) The UK has committed itself, therefore, to increase its renewables share ten-fold by 2020. With the possible exceptions of Malta and Luxembourg, the UK is faced with by far the greatest challenge in reaching its 2020 target. In addition, the unit costs in the UK are relatively high because Britain lacks access to cheap biomass resources in the electricity and heat sectors, and is placing greater reliance on high cost, expensive electricity technologies, such as wind (mainly) and wave/tidal. By contrast several EU countries are well-placed, including Austria, Finland, and Sweden, as are many of the central and eastern European countries.
It is, therefore, unsurprising that the UK is likely to carry a disproportionate burden of the costs of meeting the EU's 2020 renewables target. According to a study by P”yry Energy Consulting, the UK could carry around 20-25% of the total EU costs.(3) P”yry has estimated that the annual cost in 2020 could be around œ150 to 200 pounds per UK household, and the lifetime costs up to 2020 would be 1,800 pounds, even as high as 2,800, per UK household. These are significant sums, and they are likely to be under-estimates.
Given my earlier comment that the Government's plans for 7,000 wind turbines will not be achieved by 2020, there is no chance that we will meet the renewables target. (And, in any case, 7,000 turbines, even if built, are apparently inadequate for Britain to meet the 15% target.) The Government is living in fantasy-land - but it seems hell-bent on pursuing an energy policy which will be costly, will dangerously distort energy policy, and will leave the country vulnerable to black-outs.
The Economic Effects
Even if the lights stay on, it is clear that the Government's current strategy will lead to higher and less competitive energy prices in Britain, other things being equal. For households, especially low income and pensioner households, this will bite into general living standards. Businesses, especially energy intensive industries, will continue to lose competitiveness and will migrate overseas to, say, India or China. The Energy Intensive Users Group (EIUG) estimates that various `green measures' (the Renewables Obligation, the Climate Change Levy, and the costs of the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme) already account for a quarter of total energy costs for their members. The situation will surely deteriorate. Britain's chemicals, cement, and steel industries, to name but three, are likely to shrink, jobs will be lost, and the balance of payments will deteriorate. Yet this has barely been mentioned. Does no-one care?
Britain's Climate Change Bill: Economic Madness
As already mentioned, the EU has a 20% target for cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, compared with 1990. British legislators, however, seem to regard this self-flagellation as insufficiently painful. The Climate Change Bill, currently going through Parliament, includes legally-binding targets of a 60% reduction by 2050, and a 26 to 32% reduction by 2020, compared with 1990.
The Bill is predicated first on the assumptions that `global warming' is "dangerous" and is unquestionably mainly caused by anthropogenic carbon emissions. These assumptions are, of course, inherent in the work of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provided the quasi-scientific background for the path-breaking Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Secondly, they rely on Lord Nicholas Stern's report, based on the IPCC's apocalyptic projections of a frizzling planet, exhorting us to spend now to prevent this fate, or to fry and/or drown later.(4) Woe betide any foolish soul who dares to speak out against this orthodoxy.
But the notion that there is a scientific consensus on this matter is simply not true. Many scientists, though they risk their funding and the wrath of the Royal Society, are prepared to acknowledge that the sun has an infinitely greater role to play than humankind in climate change. Moreover, climate change in the form of modest warming is likely to be, on balance, economically beneficial. And, inconveniently for the doomsayers, there has been no `global warming' for a decade.
Secondly, the Bill simplistically assumes that climate change can be combated by cutting anthropogenic carbon emissions, as if there were a straightforward, bivariate and uni-causal relationship between carbon dioxide emissions (and concentrations) and temperature. Nothing, I am reliably informed, could be further from the truth.
Thirdly, the Bill chooses to ignore the fact that, whilst Britain attempts to decarbonise her economy, much of the rest of the world will not. Britain accounts for less than 2% of world anthropogenic carbon emissions, whilst China's emissions probably increase by more than our total every 1 to 2 years. We could, however, make our economy uncompetitive and curtail British people's economic freedoms and prosperity, satisfyingly so for the many critics of modern developed economies, by pursuing this policy. But where we lead, others will not follow - not even the other EU member states, if it suits them. It is economic madness.(5)
The Future
The Climate Change Bill will, however, be enacted. All the major political parties are supporting it. But, apart from its unfounded scientific assumptions and economic irresponsibility, it is already looking old-fashioned (there's nothing so old-fashioned as last year's fashions that have ceased to be fashionable) and irrelevant.
Two things are changing the debate. The first is the, already noted, absence of `global warming' since the end of the 20th century. People understand this. The second is the economy. Bill Clinton was right: "it's the economy, stupid". British living standards for many are now falling, and this changes people's priorities. Recent polls show that, first, the British people are sceptical about human-caused `global warming' despite all of the propaganda thrust at them and, secondly, they regard `green taxes' as little more than yet another excuse for Governments to tax them harder. The mood is changing. Politicians please take note.
Source
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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.
*****************************************
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
The Arctic: See for yourself
The MODID satellites provide near real-time visible/actual photos of the Artic Ocean from space (ie they are not the computer program generated graphics from the NSIDC.)
Here is a good sat picture of the North Pole from today - June 29, 2008 (ie. there is lots of melting to go yet before the Pole is ice-free for the few weeks of the year predicted.)
And see the NorthWest Passage (upside down but still frozen solid.)
Source. (Comment 116)
STATISTICAL REVIEW OF WORLD ENERGY 2009
An email from Hermann G W Burchard, Dept of Mathematics, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078 [burchar@math.okstate.edu]
An interesting resource on energy reserves from a global perspective can be found in "Statistical Review of World Energy 2008" by BP. The report was mentioned in a presentation based on it at Rice University by Mark Finley, BP America general manager for global energy markets, hosted by Amy Myers Jaffe, assoc. director, Baker Institute for Public Policy (on C-SPAN2 June 24, rerun June 30).
The talk was quite informative: Global reserves are good for 40 years in oil and natural gas, 150 years in coal. Charts showed that oil reserves, while expected to decline (peak oil), instead have been going up year after year. Most interesting in this regard, during the Q&A following the talk was Mark Finley's response to an unrelated question that in recent years the deep water discoveries of oil have been most signifcant in raising reserve estimates.
This should make it easier for Floridians and others to a accept offshore drilling. Rigs will be over the horizon past continental shelves. My ears perked up when I heard "deep water." Those regions would be nearer the Earth's mantle where presumably we have lots of abiotic petroleum from the primordial solar nebula (see recent find by NASA of hydrocarbons on Saturn's moon Titan).
With a tendency of continental margins to run parallel to very deep subsidence basins (geoclines), increased seepage of oil from the mantle into accesible strata may be expected to occur. By contrast, sedimentary deposits in the abyssal plane of oceans primarily are fossil-poor clastic sediments, such as turbidites and volcanics, with few organic remains from ancient fossils, because the ocean floor is being recycled at a fairly rapid clip by plate tectonics.
Amazing: Global warming questioned on popular Australian TV show
Channel 9s "Sunday" show. Video links at the source given below
The theory of anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming has become an unchallengeable fact, a piece of black letter law almost unique in the world of science.
Proponents of the theory say the time for scientific debate is over. It would irresponsible to fund any further research into counter views on the relationship between elevated levels of carbon dioxide and a rise in temperatures since the mid-1970s.
It's regarded as career suicide for scientists to advocate any counter view of the causes of global warming, let alone deny the orthodox consensus view as adopted by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
However, there is a school of thought that our knowledge of climate systems is as yet insufficient to be so conclusive on the causes of global warming.
Today Sunday examines the political consensus building that has portrayed global warming as the most urgent crisis humankind has ever faced.
Skeptics point to the gaps in the knowledge base and the flaws in the measurement of vital climate and weather data upon which the consensus is based.
Social researchers also highlight the dangers of conducting science as a form of religion, divided into believers and deniers.
They warn that as governments prepare to make expensive policy decisions, such as carbon emissions trading schemes, this consensus may not reflect the best science.
Source. Andrew Bolt comments here
GLACIAL FIND POURS COLD WATER ON CLIMATE DISASTER THEORY
University of Canterbury research indicating a glacial ridge in the South Island was formed by a landslide could pour cold water on evidence that climate change happened simultaneously around the world. Professor Jamie Shulmeister, who worked on the research with Associate Professor Tim Davies and honours student Daniel Tovar, said the discovery was made as a result of a study of the Waiho Loop glacial moraine.
Professor Shulmeister said there had been huge scientific debate on the climatic implications of the Waiho Loop. Located 100m above the plains on the foreland of the Franz Josef Glacier in South Westland, between the township and the sea, the glacial moraine had been the focus of much international research. The Waiho Loop moraine was widely used as evidence for direct inter-hemispheric linkage in climate change. "But these new findings suggest the loop - which sits near the South Island's Alpine fault line - was the result of a landslide, not climate change."
Professor Shulmeister said a moraine was a ridge that marked the end of an earlier glacier limit. Scientists had believed the Waiho Loop moraine was created during a brief cold snap about 13,000 years ago that also affected Europe and North America. The sudden climatic event had inspired the Hollywood blockbuster movie The Day After Tomorrow, he said. But no one had ever studied the Waiho Loop sediments. "When graduate student Dan Tovar had a look, he discovered to our surprise that it was mainly made up of a rock type known as greywacke, which is different from the rocks that make up all the other moraines in front of the Franz Josef Glacier."
Professor Shulmeister said greywacke occurred about 13km up the valley from the Loop. All the other moraines were predominantly composed of schist which outcropped near Franz Josef township. "The greywacke was also rather more angular than the rocks in the other moraines, suggesting it had not been transported in water or at the base of a glacier."
As a result of the study, Professor Shulmeister's team believes a large landslide dumped a huge volume of rock on top of the glacier, causing it to advance and, when the advance stopped, the moraine was created. Professor Shulmeister said the findings, to be published this week in the international science journal Nature Geoscience, were like "throwing a cat among the palaeoclimate pigeons".
Source. See also here
TWENTY YEARS OF DEMAGOGUERY
He made a prediction and it did not happen. Fair enough, that is how science progresses, but any relationship between the Hansen phenomenon and science is rather remote. His latest calling down of fire and brimstone is upon the wicked oil executives, who are allegedly stoking up infidel opposition to the true gospel of the global warming catastrophe to come.
That this is not true is evident from the greener-than-thou advertisements put out by that industry. They know a good racket when they see one and if there are a few billion taxpayers' dollars on offer they want their share of them. They are, however, likened to the tobacco giants who so misled the public. Yes those were liars; but so were their opponents, led by the EPA, and they turned out to be better at it.
The current big lie is that all the sceptical commentators are in the pay of the nefarious industry. Hansen's answer to it all is to call for an inquisition (he is a bit late into that game, by about five years). "May you have what you wish for" is an ancient curse and it would be satisfying to see Hansen have his day in court.
The reason that Monty Python's dead parrot so rapidly became a dead metaphor is that it encapsulates the modern political phenomenon of lying with a straight face, when all parties involved know that it is a lie (It's not a constitution, it is just a treaty). So now, when we are told that Global Warming isn't dead, it's just restin', we accept it as just a normal part of the political process. Formerly it would have been regarded as an example of the fifth of Langmuir's laws of bad science.
It is quite extraordinary that this sort of activity should fester within the world's most notable scientific and engineering organisation. Anyone who has had the misfortune to have been reluctantly involved with such a weirdo will feel the embarrassment for all those genuine professionals whose ingenuity, among many other achievements, put a man on the moon.
They obviously tried to subject him to some sort of control, quite properly in a tax-funded, non-academic institution, which led to his wild claim to being censored. He must be the least censored person on the planet, thanks to his friends in high places.
Perhaps the world will one day be grateful to the brave band of volunteers, who have at last got together to provide an audit of the activities of such fanatics. Owing to the efforts of the likes of Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts, we have been able to penetrate the unscientific veil of secrecy behind which they brew their spells and hokum.
Not only are the standards of software production and maintenance way, way below the standards officially embraced by NASA, some of the procedures are unbelievably bizarre, including even the Orwellian process of systematically rewriting the past. A phenomenon indeed!
Source
Global Warming as Mass Neurosis
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in. What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").
But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.
So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore - population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations - and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.
And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?
As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.
Source
***************************************
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.
*****************************************
The MODID satellites provide near real-time visible/actual photos of the Artic Ocean from space (ie they are not the computer program generated graphics from the NSIDC.)
Here is a good sat picture of the North Pole from today - June 29, 2008 (ie. there is lots of melting to go yet before the Pole is ice-free for the few weeks of the year predicted.)
And see the NorthWest Passage (upside down but still frozen solid.)
Source. (Comment 116)
STATISTICAL REVIEW OF WORLD ENERGY 2009
An email from Hermann G W Burchard, Dept of Mathematics, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078 [burchar@math.okstate.edu]
An interesting resource on energy reserves from a global perspective can be found in "Statistical Review of World Energy 2008" by BP. The report was mentioned in a presentation based on it at Rice University by Mark Finley, BP America general manager for global energy markets, hosted by Amy Myers Jaffe, assoc. director, Baker Institute for Public Policy (on C-SPAN2 June 24, rerun June 30).
The talk was quite informative: Global reserves are good for 40 years in oil and natural gas, 150 years in coal. Charts showed that oil reserves, while expected to decline (peak oil), instead have been going up year after year. Most interesting in this regard, during the Q&A following the talk was Mark Finley's response to an unrelated question that in recent years the deep water discoveries of oil have been most signifcant in raising reserve estimates.
This should make it easier for Floridians and others to a accept offshore drilling. Rigs will be over the horizon past continental shelves. My ears perked up when I heard "deep water." Those regions would be nearer the Earth's mantle where presumably we have lots of abiotic petroleum from the primordial solar nebula (see recent find by NASA of hydrocarbons on Saturn's moon Titan).
With a tendency of continental margins to run parallel to very deep subsidence basins (geoclines), increased seepage of oil from the mantle into accesible strata may be expected to occur. By contrast, sedimentary deposits in the abyssal plane of oceans primarily are fossil-poor clastic sediments, such as turbidites and volcanics, with few organic remains from ancient fossils, because the ocean floor is being recycled at a fairly rapid clip by plate tectonics.
Amazing: Global warming questioned on popular Australian TV show
Channel 9s "Sunday" show. Video links at the source given below
The theory of anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming has become an unchallengeable fact, a piece of black letter law almost unique in the world of science.
Proponents of the theory say the time for scientific debate is over. It would irresponsible to fund any further research into counter views on the relationship between elevated levels of carbon dioxide and a rise in temperatures since the mid-1970s.
It's regarded as career suicide for scientists to advocate any counter view of the causes of global warming, let alone deny the orthodox consensus view as adopted by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
However, there is a school of thought that our knowledge of climate systems is as yet insufficient to be so conclusive on the causes of global warming.
Today Sunday examines the political consensus building that has portrayed global warming as the most urgent crisis humankind has ever faced.
Skeptics point to the gaps in the knowledge base and the flaws in the measurement of vital climate and weather data upon which the consensus is based.
Social researchers also highlight the dangers of conducting science as a form of religion, divided into believers and deniers.
They warn that as governments prepare to make expensive policy decisions, such as carbon emissions trading schemes, this consensus may not reflect the best science.
Source. Andrew Bolt comments here
GLACIAL FIND POURS COLD WATER ON CLIMATE DISASTER THEORY
University of Canterbury research indicating a glacial ridge in the South Island was formed by a landslide could pour cold water on evidence that climate change happened simultaneously around the world. Professor Jamie Shulmeister, who worked on the research with Associate Professor Tim Davies and honours student Daniel Tovar, said the discovery was made as a result of a study of the Waiho Loop glacial moraine.
Professor Shulmeister said there had been huge scientific debate on the climatic implications of the Waiho Loop. Located 100m above the plains on the foreland of the Franz Josef Glacier in South Westland, between the township and the sea, the glacial moraine had been the focus of much international research. The Waiho Loop moraine was widely used as evidence for direct inter-hemispheric linkage in climate change. "But these new findings suggest the loop - which sits near the South Island's Alpine fault line - was the result of a landslide, not climate change."
Professor Shulmeister said a moraine was a ridge that marked the end of an earlier glacier limit. Scientists had believed the Waiho Loop moraine was created during a brief cold snap about 13,000 years ago that also affected Europe and North America. The sudden climatic event had inspired the Hollywood blockbuster movie The Day After Tomorrow, he said. But no one had ever studied the Waiho Loop sediments. "When graduate student Dan Tovar had a look, he discovered to our surprise that it was mainly made up of a rock type known as greywacke, which is different from the rocks that make up all the other moraines in front of the Franz Josef Glacier."
Professor Shulmeister said greywacke occurred about 13km up the valley from the Loop. All the other moraines were predominantly composed of schist which outcropped near Franz Josef township. "The greywacke was also rather more angular than the rocks in the other moraines, suggesting it had not been transported in water or at the base of a glacier."
As a result of the study, Professor Shulmeister's team believes a large landslide dumped a huge volume of rock on top of the glacier, causing it to advance and, when the advance stopped, the moraine was created. Professor Shulmeister said the findings, to be published this week in the international science journal Nature Geoscience, were like "throwing a cat among the palaeoclimate pigeons".
Source. See also here
TWENTY YEARS OF DEMAGOGUERY
He made a prediction and it did not happen. Fair enough, that is how science progresses, but any relationship between the Hansen phenomenon and science is rather remote. His latest calling down of fire and brimstone is upon the wicked oil executives, who are allegedly stoking up infidel opposition to the true gospel of the global warming catastrophe to come.
That this is not true is evident from the greener-than-thou advertisements put out by that industry. They know a good racket when they see one and if there are a few billion taxpayers' dollars on offer they want their share of them. They are, however, likened to the tobacco giants who so misled the public. Yes those were liars; but so were their opponents, led by the EPA, and they turned out to be better at it.
The current big lie is that all the sceptical commentators are in the pay of the nefarious industry. Hansen's answer to it all is to call for an inquisition (he is a bit late into that game, by about five years). "May you have what you wish for" is an ancient curse and it would be satisfying to see Hansen have his day in court.
The reason that Monty Python's dead parrot so rapidly became a dead metaphor is that it encapsulates the modern political phenomenon of lying with a straight face, when all parties involved know that it is a lie (It's not a constitution, it is just a treaty). So now, when we are told that Global Warming isn't dead, it's just restin', we accept it as just a normal part of the political process. Formerly it would have been regarded as an example of the fifth of Langmuir's laws of bad science.
It is quite extraordinary that this sort of activity should fester within the world's most notable scientific and engineering organisation. Anyone who has had the misfortune to have been reluctantly involved with such a weirdo will feel the embarrassment for all those genuine professionals whose ingenuity, among many other achievements, put a man on the moon.
They obviously tried to subject him to some sort of control, quite properly in a tax-funded, non-academic institution, which led to his wild claim to being censored. He must be the least censored person on the planet, thanks to his friends in high places.
Perhaps the world will one day be grateful to the brave band of volunteers, who have at last got together to provide an audit of the activities of such fanatics. Owing to the efforts of the likes of Steve McIntyre and Anthony Watts, we have been able to penetrate the unscientific veil of secrecy behind which they brew their spells and hokum.
Not only are the standards of software production and maintenance way, way below the standards officially embraced by NASA, some of the procedures are unbelievably bizarre, including even the Orwellian process of systematically rewriting the past. A phenomenon indeed!
Source
Global Warming as Mass Neurosis
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it's time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in. What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA's Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of "99% confidence").
But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world's oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that "80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters," according to a report by NPR's Richard Harris.
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.
So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore - population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations - and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.
And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Finally, there is a psychological explanation. Listen carefully to the global warming alarmists, and the main theme that emerges is that what the developed world needs is a large dose of penance. What's remarkable is the extent to which penance sells among a mostly secular audience. What is there to be penitent about?
As it turns out, a lot, at least if you're inclined to believe that our successes are undeserved and that prosperity is morally suspect. In this view, global warming is nature's great comeuppance, affirming as nothing else our guilty conscience for our worldly success.
In "The Varieties of Religious Experience," William James distinguishes between healthy, life-affirming religion and the monastically inclined, "morbid-minded" religion of the sick-souled. Global warming is sick-souled religion.
Source
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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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Tuesday, July 01, 2008
BRITISH GOVERNMENT FORCED INTO GREEN TAX CLIMBDOWN
Plans to hit millions of motorists with backdated road tax rises of up to 245 pounds are being axed to head off a Labour revolt next week. Chancellor Alistair Darling has privately assured backbenchers that he will 'fix' the problem in his autumn pre-Budget report. The decision would mark another U-turn following the Government's humiliation over the 10p tax crisis.
Under proposals which will start to kick in next year, nearly 18million motorists - seven out of ten - will pay more to run their cars by 2010, depending on their greenhouse gas emissions. Rebel MPs are unhappy that the increases - sold as an environmental measure - will apply retrospectively to all vehicles bought between 2001 and 2006. Some 48 Labour backbenchers have signed a Commons motion demanding a rethink.
Parts of the vehicle excise duty shake-up will be debated in the Commons on Wednesday and there were fears that the rebels would seize the opportunity to demand the reforms are dumped. But, in a sign that Mr Darling has been forced to review the policy during private meetings, it appeared last night that they will not make a move.
More here
UN IPCC MAN-MADE EMISSIONS GROSSLY OVERSTATED
Reports by the US Dept of Energy (DOE) indicate that 97% of the annual carbon dioxide emissions come from Nature itself. The report also indicates that more than 98% of all the carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed again by Nature.
What does this mean?
It means that since the start of the Industrial Revolution the increase in carbon dioxide levels of about 103ppmv are 97% due to Nature itself, that is to say that only about 3ppmv of that increase is due to man-made emissions. The absorption by Nature of 98.5% of all carbon dioxide also means that of the annual man-made carbon dioxide emissions, only 1.5% stays behind in the atmosphere - 346 million tonnes in 2004, which is the equivalent of just 0.04% of the total annual carbon dioxide emissions by Nature and mankind combined.
Irrespective of its residence time or the absolute quantities, it shows that Nature is not only the main driver of carbon dioxide emissions but also that Nature is perfectly capable of dealing with those emissions, both natural and man-made.
UN IPCC is shown to have grossly overestimated the amount of man-made carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and has also grossly underestimated the amount of carbon dioxide that Nature absorbs and Nature can not distinguish man-made carbon dioxide from the naturally occurring variety. Immediate demands should be made of the UN IPCC to stop its advice to Policymakers for drastic carbon dioxide emission reductions and all carbon trading schemes should be abandoned.
UN IPCC advice is destroying economies around the world for no reason and neither emission reductions nor carbon trading will have any effect whatsoever on the naturally occurring carbon dioxide cycle. The greenhouse hypothesis - what most climatologists call "the basic science" - offers a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. What passes for climate science today is mostly science fiction.
Source
The church of green
A kind of irrational nature worship separates environmentalism from the more fair-minded approach of conservationism
I admit it: I'm no environmentalist. But I like to think I'm something of a conservationist. No doubt for millions of Americans this is a distinction without a difference, as the two words are usually used interchangeably. But they're different things, and the country would be better off if we sharpened the distinctions between both word and concept. At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It's a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. "If you look carefully," author Michael Crichton famously observed, "you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths."
Environmentalism's most renewable resources are fear, guilt and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic past. John Muir, who laid the philosophical foundations of modern environmentalism, described humans as "selfish, conceited creatures." Salvation comes from shedding our sins, rejecting our addictions (to oil, consumerism, etc.) and demonstrating through deeds an all-encompassing love of Mother Earth. Quoth Al Gore: "The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
I heard Gore on NPR the other day. He was asked what he made of evangelical pastor Joseph Hagee's absurd comment that Hurricane Katrina was God's wrath for New Orleans' sexual depravity. Naturally, Gore chuckled at such backwardness. But then the Nobel laureate went on to blame Katrina on man's energy sinfulness. It struck me that the two men were not so different. If only canoodling residents of the Big Easy had adhered to "The Greenpeace Guide to Environmentally Friendly Sex."
Environmentalists are keen to insist that their movement is a secular one. But using the word "secular" no more makes you secular than using the word "Christian" automatically means you behave like a Christian. Pioneering green lawyer Joseph Sax, for example, describes environmentalists as "secular prophets, preaching a message of secular salvation." Gore too has often been dubbed a "prophet." It's no surprise that a green-themed California hotel provides Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" right next to the Bible and a Buddhist tome.
Whether it's adopted the trappings of religion or not, my biggest beef with environmentalism is how comfortably irrational it is. It touts ritual over reality, symbolism over substance, while claiming to be so much more rational and scientific than those silly sky-God worshipers and deranged oil addicts.
It often seems that displaying faith in the green cause is more important than advancing the green cause. The U.S. government just put polar bears on the threatened species list because climate change is shrinking the Arctic ice where they live. Never mind that polar bears are in fact thriving -- their numbers have quadrupled in the last 50 years. Never mind that full implementation of the Kyoto protocols on greenhouse gases would save exactly one polar bear, according to Danish social scientist Bjorn Lomborg, author of the 2007 book "Cool It!"
Yet about 300 to 500 polar bears could be saved every year, starting right now, Lomborg says, if there were a ban on hunting them in Canada. What's cheaper, trillions to trim carbon emissions or paying off the Canadians to stop killing polar bears?
Plastic grocery bags are being banned all over the place, even though they require less energy to make or recycle than paper ones. The whole country is being forced to subscribe to a modern version of transubstantiation, whereby corn is miraculously transformed into sinless energy even as it does worse damage than oil.
Conservation, which shares roots and meaning with conservatism, stands athwart this mass hysteria. Yes, conservationism can have a religious element to it as well, but that element stems from the biblical injunction to be a good steward of the Earth, rather than a worshiper of it. But stewardship involves economics, not mysticism.
Economics is the study of choosing between competing goods. Environmentalists view economics as the enemy because cost-benefit analysis is thoroughly unromantic. Lomborg is a heretic because he treats natural-world challenges like economic ones, seeking to spend money where it will maximize good, not just good feelings among environmentalists.
Many self-described environmentalists are in fact conservationists. But the environmental movement wins battles by blurring this distinction, arguing that all lovers of nature must follow their lead. At the same time, many people open to conservationist arguments, like hunters, are turned off by even reasonable efforts because they do not want to give aid and comfort to "wackos."
In the broadest sense, the environmental movement has won. Americans are "green" in that they are willing to spend a lot to keep their country ecologically healthy, which it is. But now it's time to save the environment from the environmentalists.
Source
Beware green zealots
Comment from Australia
A fanatic, George Santayana famously said, is someone who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim. With July shaping up as climate change policy month, a good dose of fanaticism seems likely to come our way. Nowhere is the fanatic's touch more apparent than in the confused notion of an emissions reduction budget, the idea that there is a fixed quantum of emissions reduction we should achieve by a given date, with the result that if we reduce a bit less in one area, we will have to reduce by more elsewhere.
Reducing Australia's greenhouse emissions is not a goal in its own right; it is merely a way of trying to deal with the risks of potentially harmful climate change. How much we should devote to that goal depends on the costs and benefits involved. If the costs increase relative to the benefits, only the fanatic redoubles his efforts.
The fallacy involved is manifest in the debate about how trade exposed, emissions-intensive activities should be dealt with. It has become increasingly evident that if Australia, acting unilaterally, imposes a carbon tax on these activities, global emissions will not be reduced. Rather, they will simply shift to other countries, decreasing our welfare (as we have a comparative advantage in those activities) and welfare worldwide. As a result, without an international framework that would prevent emissions flight, putting a carbon tax on trade exposed, emissions-intensive activities serves no useful purpose.
Now, a rational person, faced with that fact, adjusts the target to reflect the greater cost of achieving it. If the target that would have been set in a world where emissions flight could not occur were to reduce emissions by, say, 20 per cent through a period of years, that person, faced with the reality of an emissions flight risk, would discount that target to some lower level.
In contrast the fanatic, acting as if the target had come from God, leaves the target unchanged and, if anything is conceded to the activities that could most readily move elsewhere, inflicts greater punishment on those that have the least scope to escape their clutches. This response is doubly perverse. To begin with, the economic cost of achieving any given emissions reduction target increases more than proportionately with the severity of the reduction being sought: doubling the target inflicts more than twice the cost. As a result, increasing the extent of the reduction sought from those activities that are least footloose makes the cost of any overall reduction all the greater. These added costs then are compounded by an increased distortion in resource allocation between the activities that are exempt and the now more heavily taxed ones that are not.
There is an additional, deeper reason the fanatic's response is perverse. The problem of emissions flight merely highlights the absence of an effective and comprehensive regime for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the absence of such a regime, abatement in Australia, no matter how great, will have no direct impact on the risk of harmful climate change. The only reason for undertaking that abatement is the possibility that it will assist such a regime to come into place. However, whether abatement in Australia would have a "demonstration effect" internationally, and if so to what extent, is highly uncertain. Even if such an effect did exist, there is little reason to think the effect will be much greater if we pursue abatement at home with greater intensity.
As a result, a rational decision-maker would give the possibility of such an effect a low weight and one that justified an abatement effort that was, at most, modest.
This is all the more so as increasing the extent of present abatement reduces our ability to respond should an effective international regime not come into place. In that event, if those concerned about climate change are correct, we would have to invest in ways of living that are less vulnerable to unfavourable climatic conditions. Our capacity to undertake those investments without painful reductions in consumption depends on our wealth.
As a result, if there is a likelihood that harmful climate change will nonetheless occur, we should be responding not by reducing our incomes but by increasing them and accumulating precautionary savings. In that scenario, bearing greater abatement costs now will not reduce costs in the future but merely increase the future pain.
The desirability of focusing on raising our capacity to adjust by increasing incomes is made greater by the distribution of the costs and benefits of the various options.
At best, pursuing "demonstration effects" makes the world as a whole better off if it succeeds; but if it fails, its only consequence is to make Australians poorer.
In contrast, increasing our wealth so as to increase our capacity to innovate and adjust, should such adjustment be needed, seems highly likely to make Australians better off regardless of the ultimate outcome.
The case for abatement beyond a very modest level, consistent with a low carbon tax, therefore seems economically untenable. Moreover, anything that makes the marginal costs of abating now higher, or the community's willingness to bear those costs now lower, should induce us to reduce our overall abatement effort rather than sticking by some inherently arbitrary target.
Consequently, a heavy burden of proof should be placed on those who advocate ambitious fixed targets to be pursued with the ferocity of latter-day Savonarolas.
Reducing emissions is not an act in a morality play but a decision that has to be made by trading off benefits and sacrifices. Moreover, the community must be given a full opportunity to assess those benefits and sacrifices and decide whether they are worth bearing.
As a result, whatever recommendations are made by the Garnaut review or the Government's green paper must be backed by estimates of those recommendations' costs, and the modelling underpinning those estimates needs to be fully disclosed. If all we get is moralising waffle, the community will legitimately conclude that this particular emperor has no clothes. Should that occur, the Government will have no one to blame but itself when its proposals run into strong and sustained opposition.
Source
BRITAIN: VERY WINDY IDEAS
Since Gordon Brown on Thursday launched what he called "the greatest revolution in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear power", centred on building thousands of new wind turbines, let us start with a simple fact. Nothing conveys the futility of wind power more vividly than this: that all the electricity generated by the 2,000 wind turbines already built in Britain is still less than that produced by a single medium-sized conventional power station. There are nearly 50 nuclear, gas or coal-fired power plants in Britain today each of which produces more electricity in a year than all those 2,000 turbines put together.
I make no apology for returning to this subject because the "100 billion pound green energy strategy" published last week, by what is now laughably known as the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), contains not only many smaller deceptions and self-deceptions but one so great that almost everyone has fallen for it. The starting point is the EU's requirement that, to combat the "threat of climate change", we must drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, chiefly by building thousands more wind turbines.
It is quite clear from the paper that BERR's officials know we haven't the faintest hope of meeting our EU target in this way. So its number-crunchers have been working overtime to squeeze down the amount of energy we source from wind to the lowest figure it thinks can be made to sound plausible. Until last week BERR had been claiming that our EU requirement meant that we must generate 38 per cent of our electricity from renewables, the largest contribution coming from 11,000 offshore turbines, representing 33 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. But all this has changed dramatically. They now talk only about the need to meet 32 per cent of our total EU renewables target through our methods of electricity generation, with only 32 per cent of that needing to come from wind - and that, they say, can be done with a mere 7,000 new offshore and onshore turbines.
However, our present generating capacity is 76GW. By 2020, on projected demand, to replace one third of one third of our capacity with wind power would mean generating an average of 10GW. And herein lies the central misconception which bedevils the entire debate. Because of the wind's intermittency, turbines generate on average at less than a third of their capacity. Thus to contribute 10GW would need 30GW of capacity, which would require up to twice as many turbines as ministers are talking about - needing to be erected at a rate of more than four every working day between now and 2020.
In practical terms, even if they grossly bend the planning rules (as MPs voted for last week), there isn't the remotest chance that anything like this number of turbines could be built in time to meet their target. For instance, the world only has five of the giant barges that can install monster turbines offshore - and for more than half the year our weather conditions make installation impossible anyway.
But in addition we should also need to build at least 20 new conventional power stations simply to provide back-up for all the times when the wind is not blowing - at a time when, within seven years, we already stand to lose 40 per cent of our existing generating capacity through the closure of almost all our ageing nuclear power plants and half our major coal and oil-fired power stations (due to the crippling cost of complying with an EU anti-pollution directive).
It is a total mess. The reality is that, thanks to the dithering and wishful thinking of our politicians, it may already be too late to avert that breakdown of our electricity supply which would be one of the most serious disasters Britain has ever faced. And, ironically, no one at present looks more likely to inherit this mess than David Cameron - whose only response to last week' s pie-in-the-sky from Gordon Brown was to say that the Government should have been building all those useless windmills years ago.
Source
British green energy plan 'will force more families into fuel poverty'
More families will be driven into fuel poverty as a push to generate more electricity from "green" sources like wind, wave and solar power sharply increases household fuel bills, the Government has said. Electricity bills could rise by 13 per cent and gas prices could go up by as much as 37 per cent as consumers are made to pay more to subsidise green energy production, ministers said in a new Renewable Energy Strategy. The move away from fossil fuels is likely to cause an increase in energy bills
At current levels, green tariffs make up around 14 per cent of average domestic electricity bills and 3 per cent of average gas bills. Those tariffs will have to increase as ministers bid to wean Britain off fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. "Our policies to encourage renewable energy deployment in line with our 2020 goals will add further to energy bills," the strategy paper says. "Reflecting some of the costs of tackling climate change through energy prices means that prices more closely reflect the true social, economic and environmental costs of climate change."
By 2020, the document estimates that the full raft of new green energy proposals could increase domestic electricity bills by between 10 per cent and 13 per cent. Gas bills could rise by 18 per cent to 37 per cent. Petrol prices could go up by 4 per cent. Campaigners say that 4 million households are currently in fuel poverty, having to spend 10 per cent or more of their total income on electricity and gas. The Renewable Energy Strategy says: "It is likely that the measures we need to use to increase renewable energy will add to the challenges we face in combating fuel poverty."
Government officials said that the fuel bill increases were based on the assumption that world oil prices will average around $70, roughly half their current level. Were oil prices to stay above that level, the added cost of green energy would be smaller, because of the savings involved in cutting oil use.
John Hutton, the Industry Secretary, said the fuel bill increases were "reasonable and modest" while the cost of doing nothing to cut greenhouse gas emissions would be high. "Is the era of cheap energy over? We all know it is, and that presents us with some pretty stark choices we have to make," he said. "This is the time to make a decisive shift to a low-carbon economy."
Alan Duncan, the Conservative shadow business secretary, endorsed the Government's plan, but said ministers should go further. He said: "After a series of painful and reluctant U-turns, it seems like the Government is at last coming round to our vision of a greener Britain."
The shift to green power will mean 7,000 more wind turbines being built -often in the face of local opposition - across the countryside and around the coastline. The renewable energy strategy was presented by Gordon Brown, who pledged to break Britain's dependence on oil and to convert the country to a greener way of life.
The Prime Minister said the government's commitment to a target of producing 15 per cent of the country's energy from renewable sources by 2020 amounted to a green revolution in the making. "It will be the most dramatic change in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear power," he told an energy conference in London.
Meeting the 15 per cent target will cost the UK economy between œ5 billion and œ6 billion a year, according to Mr Hutton's department. The Government published its energy strategy as Lord Stern, the former Treasury economist who called on the world to spend 1 per cent of its wealth fighting climate change said the price of averting environmental disaster had now doubled to 2 per cent.
Source
Comment from Julian Morris [julian@policynetwork.net], Executive Director, International Policy Network, London. See www.policynetwork.net
According to this story in the Telegraph, Stern's estimate of the cost of taking action to reduce carbon emissions was out by 100%.
If the British government proceeds with its various plans to subsidise so-called 'renewables' it would divert vast resources into activities that result in fewer improvements in efficiency and productivity. It may create 'green' jobs but these would be at the expensive of higher value-added white and blue jobs. It would also, as the story notes, lead to increased 'fuel poverty' (i.e. people who are already poor would be forced to spend a higher proportion of their income on fuel and/or risk illness and death by not heating their homes sufficiently).
I also note that today's newspapers carry the sad story of an elderly gentleman who committed suicide after reading that the budget would make him poorer.
I find it difficult to believe that the Tories want to go further! How many jobs do they want to destroy? How much welfare-enhancing growth do they want to prevent? How many poor people do they want to force into fuel poverty or even suicide?
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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.
*****************************************
Plans to hit millions of motorists with backdated road tax rises of up to 245 pounds are being axed to head off a Labour revolt next week. Chancellor Alistair Darling has privately assured backbenchers that he will 'fix' the problem in his autumn pre-Budget report. The decision would mark another U-turn following the Government's humiliation over the 10p tax crisis.
Under proposals which will start to kick in next year, nearly 18million motorists - seven out of ten - will pay more to run their cars by 2010, depending on their greenhouse gas emissions. Rebel MPs are unhappy that the increases - sold as an environmental measure - will apply retrospectively to all vehicles bought between 2001 and 2006. Some 48 Labour backbenchers have signed a Commons motion demanding a rethink.
Parts of the vehicle excise duty shake-up will be debated in the Commons on Wednesday and there were fears that the rebels would seize the opportunity to demand the reforms are dumped. But, in a sign that Mr Darling has been forced to review the policy during private meetings, it appeared last night that they will not make a move.
More here
UN IPCC MAN-MADE EMISSIONS GROSSLY OVERSTATED
Reports by the US Dept of Energy (DOE) indicate that 97% of the annual carbon dioxide emissions come from Nature itself. The report also indicates that more than 98% of all the carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed again by Nature.
What does this mean?
It means that since the start of the Industrial Revolution the increase in carbon dioxide levels of about 103ppmv are 97% due to Nature itself, that is to say that only about 3ppmv of that increase is due to man-made emissions. The absorption by Nature of 98.5% of all carbon dioxide also means that of the annual man-made carbon dioxide emissions, only 1.5% stays behind in the atmosphere - 346 million tonnes in 2004, which is the equivalent of just 0.04% of the total annual carbon dioxide emissions by Nature and mankind combined.
Irrespective of its residence time or the absolute quantities, it shows that Nature is not only the main driver of carbon dioxide emissions but also that Nature is perfectly capable of dealing with those emissions, both natural and man-made.
UN IPCC is shown to have grossly overestimated the amount of man-made carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and has also grossly underestimated the amount of carbon dioxide that Nature absorbs and Nature can not distinguish man-made carbon dioxide from the naturally occurring variety. Immediate demands should be made of the UN IPCC to stop its advice to Policymakers for drastic carbon dioxide emission reductions and all carbon trading schemes should be abandoned.
UN IPCC advice is destroying economies around the world for no reason and neither emission reductions nor carbon trading will have any effect whatsoever on the naturally occurring carbon dioxide cycle. The greenhouse hypothesis - what most climatologists call "the basic science" - offers a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. What passes for climate science today is mostly science fiction.
Source
The church of green
A kind of irrational nature worship separates environmentalism from the more fair-minded approach of conservationism
I admit it: I'm no environmentalist. But I like to think I'm something of a conservationist. No doubt for millions of Americans this is a distinction without a difference, as the two words are usually used interchangeably. But they're different things, and the country would be better off if we sharpened the distinctions between both word and concept. At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It's a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. "If you look carefully," author Michael Crichton famously observed, "you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths."
Environmentalism's most renewable resources are fear, guilt and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic past. John Muir, who laid the philosophical foundations of modern environmentalism, described humans as "selfish, conceited creatures." Salvation comes from shedding our sins, rejecting our addictions (to oil, consumerism, etc.) and demonstrating through deeds an all-encompassing love of Mother Earth. Quoth Al Gore: "The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."
I heard Gore on NPR the other day. He was asked what he made of evangelical pastor Joseph Hagee's absurd comment that Hurricane Katrina was God's wrath for New Orleans' sexual depravity. Naturally, Gore chuckled at such backwardness. But then the Nobel laureate went on to blame Katrina on man's energy sinfulness. It struck me that the two men were not so different. If only canoodling residents of the Big Easy had adhered to "The Greenpeace Guide to Environmentally Friendly Sex."
Environmentalists are keen to insist that their movement is a secular one. But using the word "secular" no more makes you secular than using the word "Christian" automatically means you behave like a Christian. Pioneering green lawyer Joseph Sax, for example, describes environmentalists as "secular prophets, preaching a message of secular salvation." Gore too has often been dubbed a "prophet." It's no surprise that a green-themed California hotel provides Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" right next to the Bible and a Buddhist tome.
Whether it's adopted the trappings of religion or not, my biggest beef with environmentalism is how comfortably irrational it is. It touts ritual over reality, symbolism over substance, while claiming to be so much more rational and scientific than those silly sky-God worshipers and deranged oil addicts.
It often seems that displaying faith in the green cause is more important than advancing the green cause. The U.S. government just put polar bears on the threatened species list because climate change is shrinking the Arctic ice where they live. Never mind that polar bears are in fact thriving -- their numbers have quadrupled in the last 50 years. Never mind that full implementation of the Kyoto protocols on greenhouse gases would save exactly one polar bear, according to Danish social scientist Bjorn Lomborg, author of the 2007 book "Cool It!"
Yet about 300 to 500 polar bears could be saved every year, starting right now, Lomborg says, if there were a ban on hunting them in Canada. What's cheaper, trillions to trim carbon emissions or paying off the Canadians to stop killing polar bears?
Plastic grocery bags are being banned all over the place, even though they require less energy to make or recycle than paper ones. The whole country is being forced to subscribe to a modern version of transubstantiation, whereby corn is miraculously transformed into sinless energy even as it does worse damage than oil.
Conservation, which shares roots and meaning with conservatism, stands athwart this mass hysteria. Yes, conservationism can have a religious element to it as well, but that element stems from the biblical injunction to be a good steward of the Earth, rather than a worshiper of it. But stewardship involves economics, not mysticism.
Economics is the study of choosing between competing goods. Environmentalists view economics as the enemy because cost-benefit analysis is thoroughly unromantic. Lomborg is a heretic because he treats natural-world challenges like economic ones, seeking to spend money where it will maximize good, not just good feelings among environmentalists.
Many self-described environmentalists are in fact conservationists. But the environmental movement wins battles by blurring this distinction, arguing that all lovers of nature must follow their lead. At the same time, many people open to conservationist arguments, like hunters, are turned off by even reasonable efforts because they do not want to give aid and comfort to "wackos."
In the broadest sense, the environmental movement has won. Americans are "green" in that they are willing to spend a lot to keep their country ecologically healthy, which it is. But now it's time to save the environment from the environmentalists.
Source
Beware green zealots
Comment from Australia
A fanatic, George Santayana famously said, is someone who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim. With July shaping up as climate change policy month, a good dose of fanaticism seems likely to come our way. Nowhere is the fanatic's touch more apparent than in the confused notion of an emissions reduction budget, the idea that there is a fixed quantum of emissions reduction we should achieve by a given date, with the result that if we reduce a bit less in one area, we will have to reduce by more elsewhere.
Reducing Australia's greenhouse emissions is not a goal in its own right; it is merely a way of trying to deal with the risks of potentially harmful climate change. How much we should devote to that goal depends on the costs and benefits involved. If the costs increase relative to the benefits, only the fanatic redoubles his efforts.
The fallacy involved is manifest in the debate about how trade exposed, emissions-intensive activities should be dealt with. It has become increasingly evident that if Australia, acting unilaterally, imposes a carbon tax on these activities, global emissions will not be reduced. Rather, they will simply shift to other countries, decreasing our welfare (as we have a comparative advantage in those activities) and welfare worldwide. As a result, without an international framework that would prevent emissions flight, putting a carbon tax on trade exposed, emissions-intensive activities serves no useful purpose.
Now, a rational person, faced with that fact, adjusts the target to reflect the greater cost of achieving it. If the target that would have been set in a world where emissions flight could not occur were to reduce emissions by, say, 20 per cent through a period of years, that person, faced with the reality of an emissions flight risk, would discount that target to some lower level.
In contrast the fanatic, acting as if the target had come from God, leaves the target unchanged and, if anything is conceded to the activities that could most readily move elsewhere, inflicts greater punishment on those that have the least scope to escape their clutches. This response is doubly perverse. To begin with, the economic cost of achieving any given emissions reduction target increases more than proportionately with the severity of the reduction being sought: doubling the target inflicts more than twice the cost. As a result, increasing the extent of the reduction sought from those activities that are least footloose makes the cost of any overall reduction all the greater. These added costs then are compounded by an increased distortion in resource allocation between the activities that are exempt and the now more heavily taxed ones that are not.
There is an additional, deeper reason the fanatic's response is perverse. The problem of emissions flight merely highlights the absence of an effective and comprehensive regime for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the absence of such a regime, abatement in Australia, no matter how great, will have no direct impact on the risk of harmful climate change. The only reason for undertaking that abatement is the possibility that it will assist such a regime to come into place. However, whether abatement in Australia would have a "demonstration effect" internationally, and if so to what extent, is highly uncertain. Even if such an effect did exist, there is little reason to think the effect will be much greater if we pursue abatement at home with greater intensity.
As a result, a rational decision-maker would give the possibility of such an effect a low weight and one that justified an abatement effort that was, at most, modest.
This is all the more so as increasing the extent of present abatement reduces our ability to respond should an effective international regime not come into place. In that event, if those concerned about climate change are correct, we would have to invest in ways of living that are less vulnerable to unfavourable climatic conditions. Our capacity to undertake those investments without painful reductions in consumption depends on our wealth.
As a result, if there is a likelihood that harmful climate change will nonetheless occur, we should be responding not by reducing our incomes but by increasing them and accumulating precautionary savings. In that scenario, bearing greater abatement costs now will not reduce costs in the future but merely increase the future pain.
The desirability of focusing on raising our capacity to adjust by increasing incomes is made greater by the distribution of the costs and benefits of the various options.
At best, pursuing "demonstration effects" makes the world as a whole better off if it succeeds; but if it fails, its only consequence is to make Australians poorer.
In contrast, increasing our wealth so as to increase our capacity to innovate and adjust, should such adjustment be needed, seems highly likely to make Australians better off regardless of the ultimate outcome.
The case for abatement beyond a very modest level, consistent with a low carbon tax, therefore seems economically untenable. Moreover, anything that makes the marginal costs of abating now higher, or the community's willingness to bear those costs now lower, should induce us to reduce our overall abatement effort rather than sticking by some inherently arbitrary target.
Consequently, a heavy burden of proof should be placed on those who advocate ambitious fixed targets to be pursued with the ferocity of latter-day Savonarolas.
Reducing emissions is not an act in a morality play but a decision that has to be made by trading off benefits and sacrifices. Moreover, the community must be given a full opportunity to assess those benefits and sacrifices and decide whether they are worth bearing.
As a result, whatever recommendations are made by the Garnaut review or the Government's green paper must be backed by estimates of those recommendations' costs, and the modelling underpinning those estimates needs to be fully disclosed. If all we get is moralising waffle, the community will legitimately conclude that this particular emperor has no clothes. Should that occur, the Government will have no one to blame but itself when its proposals run into strong and sustained opposition.
Source
BRITAIN: VERY WINDY IDEAS
Since Gordon Brown on Thursday launched what he called "the greatest revolution in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear power", centred on building thousands of new wind turbines, let us start with a simple fact. Nothing conveys the futility of wind power more vividly than this: that all the electricity generated by the 2,000 wind turbines already built in Britain is still less than that produced by a single medium-sized conventional power station. There are nearly 50 nuclear, gas or coal-fired power plants in Britain today each of which produces more electricity in a year than all those 2,000 turbines put together.
I make no apology for returning to this subject because the "100 billion pound green energy strategy" published last week, by what is now laughably known as the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR), contains not only many smaller deceptions and self-deceptions but one so great that almost everyone has fallen for it. The starting point is the EU's requirement that, to combat the "threat of climate change", we must drastically reduce our CO2 emissions, chiefly by building thousands more wind turbines.
It is quite clear from the paper that BERR's officials know we haven't the faintest hope of meeting our EU target in this way. So its number-crunchers have been working overtime to squeeze down the amount of energy we source from wind to the lowest figure it thinks can be made to sound plausible. Until last week BERR had been claiming that our EU requirement meant that we must generate 38 per cent of our electricity from renewables, the largest contribution coming from 11,000 offshore turbines, representing 33 gigawatts (GW) of capacity. But all this has changed dramatically. They now talk only about the need to meet 32 per cent of our total EU renewables target through our methods of electricity generation, with only 32 per cent of that needing to come from wind - and that, they say, can be done with a mere 7,000 new offshore and onshore turbines.
However, our present generating capacity is 76GW. By 2020, on projected demand, to replace one third of one third of our capacity with wind power would mean generating an average of 10GW. And herein lies the central misconception which bedevils the entire debate. Because of the wind's intermittency, turbines generate on average at less than a third of their capacity. Thus to contribute 10GW would need 30GW of capacity, which would require up to twice as many turbines as ministers are talking about - needing to be erected at a rate of more than four every working day between now and 2020.
In practical terms, even if they grossly bend the planning rules (as MPs voted for last week), there isn't the remotest chance that anything like this number of turbines could be built in time to meet their target. For instance, the world only has five of the giant barges that can install monster turbines offshore - and for more than half the year our weather conditions make installation impossible anyway.
But in addition we should also need to build at least 20 new conventional power stations simply to provide back-up for all the times when the wind is not blowing - at a time when, within seven years, we already stand to lose 40 per cent of our existing generating capacity through the closure of almost all our ageing nuclear power plants and half our major coal and oil-fired power stations (due to the crippling cost of complying with an EU anti-pollution directive).
It is a total mess. The reality is that, thanks to the dithering and wishful thinking of our politicians, it may already be too late to avert that breakdown of our electricity supply which would be one of the most serious disasters Britain has ever faced. And, ironically, no one at present looks more likely to inherit this mess than David Cameron - whose only response to last week' s pie-in-the-sky from Gordon Brown was to say that the Government should have been building all those useless windmills years ago.
Source
British green energy plan 'will force more families into fuel poverty'
More families will be driven into fuel poverty as a push to generate more electricity from "green" sources like wind, wave and solar power sharply increases household fuel bills, the Government has said. Electricity bills could rise by 13 per cent and gas prices could go up by as much as 37 per cent as consumers are made to pay more to subsidise green energy production, ministers said in a new Renewable Energy Strategy. The move away from fossil fuels is likely to cause an increase in energy bills
At current levels, green tariffs make up around 14 per cent of average domestic electricity bills and 3 per cent of average gas bills. Those tariffs will have to increase as ministers bid to wean Britain off fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. "Our policies to encourage renewable energy deployment in line with our 2020 goals will add further to energy bills," the strategy paper says. "Reflecting some of the costs of tackling climate change through energy prices means that prices more closely reflect the true social, economic and environmental costs of climate change."
By 2020, the document estimates that the full raft of new green energy proposals could increase domestic electricity bills by between 10 per cent and 13 per cent. Gas bills could rise by 18 per cent to 37 per cent. Petrol prices could go up by 4 per cent. Campaigners say that 4 million households are currently in fuel poverty, having to spend 10 per cent or more of their total income on electricity and gas. The Renewable Energy Strategy says: "It is likely that the measures we need to use to increase renewable energy will add to the challenges we face in combating fuel poverty."
Government officials said that the fuel bill increases were based on the assumption that world oil prices will average around $70, roughly half their current level. Were oil prices to stay above that level, the added cost of green energy would be smaller, because of the savings involved in cutting oil use.
John Hutton, the Industry Secretary, said the fuel bill increases were "reasonable and modest" while the cost of doing nothing to cut greenhouse gas emissions would be high. "Is the era of cheap energy over? We all know it is, and that presents us with some pretty stark choices we have to make," he said. "This is the time to make a decisive shift to a low-carbon economy."
Alan Duncan, the Conservative shadow business secretary, endorsed the Government's plan, but said ministers should go further. He said: "After a series of painful and reluctant U-turns, it seems like the Government is at last coming round to our vision of a greener Britain."
The shift to green power will mean 7,000 more wind turbines being built -often in the face of local opposition - across the countryside and around the coastline. The renewable energy strategy was presented by Gordon Brown, who pledged to break Britain's dependence on oil and to convert the country to a greener way of life.
The Prime Minister said the government's commitment to a target of producing 15 per cent of the country's energy from renewable sources by 2020 amounted to a green revolution in the making. "It will be the most dramatic change in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear power," he told an energy conference in London.
Meeting the 15 per cent target will cost the UK economy between œ5 billion and œ6 billion a year, according to Mr Hutton's department. The Government published its energy strategy as Lord Stern, the former Treasury economist who called on the world to spend 1 per cent of its wealth fighting climate change said the price of averting environmental disaster had now doubled to 2 per cent.
Source
Comment from Julian Morris [julian@policynetwork.net], Executive Director, International Policy Network, London. See www.policynetwork.net
According to this story in the Telegraph, Stern's estimate of the cost of taking action to reduce carbon emissions was out by 100%.
If the British government proceeds with its various plans to subsidise so-called 'renewables' it would divert vast resources into activities that result in fewer improvements in efficiency and productivity. It may create 'green' jobs but these would be at the expensive of higher value-added white and blue jobs. It would also, as the story notes, lead to increased 'fuel poverty' (i.e. people who are already poor would be forced to spend a higher proportion of their income on fuel and/or risk illness and death by not heating their homes sufficiently).
I also note that today's newspapers carry the sad story of an elderly gentleman who committed suicide after reading that the budget would make him poorer.
I find it difficult to believe that the Tories want to go further! How many jobs do they want to destroy? How much welfare-enhancing growth do they want to prevent? How many poor people do they want to force into fuel poverty or even suicide?
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Jim Hansen and his twin
