More on the recent Asian brown cloud study

Yet again Greenie "scientists" go into reverse when it suits them. The science is only "settled" as long as it suits their foreordained conclusions. So why should anyone else believe the science is "settled"? The study and its conclusions are junk but the fact that the study can turn the "settled" science on its head with only a passing comment on that and still get published in a leading Greenie journal is the interesting part. The conclusion is obviously what matters and the science can be bent any way you like to suit that

Himalayan glaciers are melting - but not nearly as fast as the fanciful notion of global warming will have you believe. A new study in the Aug. 2 issue of the British science journal Nature found that the solid particles suspended in the atmosphere (called "aerosols") that make up "brown clouds" may actually contribute to warmer temperatures - precisely the opposite effect heretofore claimed by global warming alarmists. "These findings might seem to contradict the general notion of aerosol particles as cooling agents in the global climate system .," concluded the Nature news article summing up the study.

Based on data collected by unmanned aerial vehicles over the Indian Ocean, researchers from the University of California, San Diego and NASA reported not only that aerosols warmed temperatures, but they also increased atmospheric heating by 50 percent. This warming, they say, may be sufficient to account for the retreat of the Himalayan glaciers.

Putting aside the fact that the Himalayan glaciers have been retreating since 1780 - some 70 years before the onset of the current post-Little Ice Age warming trend and 100 years before the onset of significant global industrialization - full appreciation of the significance of the researchers' finding requires a brief trip down recent-memory lane, one, incidentally, that no media outlet reporting this finding bothered to make.

Global warming alarmism is rooted in the idea that ever-increasing manmade emissions of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, cause global temperatures to warm. This idea, however, doesn't match up very well against real-world observations. During the 20th century, for example, while manmade carbon dioxide emissions steadily increased from about 1940 to 1975, global temperatures cooled.

Global warming alarmists, such as the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), try to counter this observation by claiming that aerosol particles in the atmosphere - like soot and sulfates from fossil fuel combustion, and dust from volcanic eruptions - can mask the warming effect of greenhouse gases and cool the planet by reflecting solar radiation back into space. So then, which is it? Do aerosols cool or warm the planet? Can they do both? The correct answers to these questions are not as important as the fact that they are unanswered and will likely remain so for some time to come.

At the very moment that Congress considers enacting energy-price-raising and economy-killing legislation to regulate greenhouse gases based on the idea that human activity is harming global climate, the new aerosol study underscores (again) how little we understand whether and how human activities actually impact global climate. Consider other recent research that ought to give our arm-chair climatologists in Congress pause.

In May, researchers reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the rate of manmade carbon dioxide emissions was three times greater during 2000 to 2004 than during the 1990s. But while humans may be burning more fossil fuels than ever before, that ever-increasing activity isn't having any sort of discernible or proportionate impact on global temperatures.

In April, researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that forests in northern regions - those north of the line of latitude that runs through southern Cuba - will warm surface temperatures by an estimated 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.

Last October, Swedish researchers reported that cosmic-ray-caused changes in cloud cover over a five-year period can have 85 percent of the temperature effect alleged to have been caused by nearly 200 years of manmade carbon dioxide emissions. They estimated that the temperature effects of cloud cover during the 20th century could be as much as seven times greater than the alleged temperature effect of 200 years worth of additional carbon dioxide and several times greater than that of all additional greenhouse gases combined.

Would it be considered "piling on" to remind Congress that last year's hurricane season predictions - that is, a 95 percent chance of a very active season - turned out to be a total bust? If hurricane experts armed with supercomputers can't predict a regional storm season six months into the future, why would anyone think that they can project global climate trends for the next 100 years? These are just some of the things that climatologists have learned or have been proven wrong about in just the past year.

Given the myriad scientific holes in the manmade global warming hypothesis and allowing for the inevitable future discoveries about climate, it seems quite absurd for Congress to proceed on global warming as if, in Al Gore's words, "There is no longer any serious debate over the basic points that make up the consensus on global warming."

The new aerosol study doesn't show that climate alarmists may be just a little off course - it shows that they may be 180 degrees off. If manmade global climate change is something worth fretting over - and it's not at all clear that it is - the aerosol study opens up the possibility for an entirely new hypothesis for global warming with aerosols as the culprit. Yet up to now, the "consensus" crowd has portrayed aerosols in the opposite light as cooling agents. When so-called "consensus" can be that far off, it would seem that there's plenty of room for serious debate.

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The steamrollers of climate science

The IPCC is agenda-driven, not science-driven

Almost from the beginning, critics have attacked the Bush administration for the way it has dealt with science. In many areas - and emblematically in the case of climate change - well-qualified accusers have complained that the White House and its political appointees across the federal government have interfered with the work of scientists, misrepresented their findings and censored their public statements. Many of these cases are shocking - or at least they were, until people became inured to them. The administration's record on managing the government's own scientific efforts, and on respect for science more broadly, is awful.

So when the White House disagrees with most other governments in the world and expresses doubts about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that view is contemptuously dismissed as one more instance. To be sure, the administration has destroyed its own credibility on scientific integrity and has nobody to blame but itself.

For the rest of us, however, this is a pity - because to put it bluntly the IPCC deserves the administration's disdain. It is a seriously flawed enterprise and unworthy of the slavish respect accorded to it by most governments and the media. In the decisions which have already been made on climate-change mitigation, to say nothing of future decisions, the stakes are enormous. In guiding these momentous judgments, the flawed IPCC process has been granted, in effect, a monopoly of official wisdom. That needs to change and the IPCC itself must be reformed.

For a fully documented indictment, read the article by David Henderson in the current issue of World Economics. Mr Henderson, a distinguished academic economist and former head of economics at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has been tangling with the IPCC for some time. Five years ago, he and Ian Castles (a former chief of the Australian Bureau of Statistics) first drew attention to a straightforward error in the way emissions scenarios were being calculated. The projections had used long-range cross-country projections of gross domestic product that were based on exchange rates unadjusted for purchasing power. This mistake yielded projections for individual countries that were in some cases patently absurd. Far from acknowledging the point and correcting the projections, the IPCC treated these eminent former civil servants as uncredentialed troublemakers. Its head, Rajendra Pachauri, issued a prickly statement complaining about the spread of disinformation.

As Mr Henderson's new article makes clear, the episode was symptomatic of a wider pattern of error (often, in the case of economics, elementary error) and failure to correct it. How can this be possible? The IPCC prides itself on the extent of its network of scientific contributors and on its rigorous peer review. The problem is, although the contributors and peers are impressively numerous, they are drawn from a narrow professional circle. Expertise in economics and statistics is not to the fore; sympathetic clusters of co-authorship and pre-commitment to the urgency of the climate cause, on the other hand, are.

Add to this a sustained reluctance - and sometimes a refusal - to disclose data and methods that would allow results to be replicated. (Disclosure of that sort is common practice these days in leading scholarly journals). As a result, arresting but subsequently discredited findings - such as the notorious "hockey stick" chart showing the 1990s as the northern hemisphere's hottest decade of the millennium - are left to be challenged by troublesome outsiders.

Underlying it all is a pervasive bias. From the outset the IPCC network was fully invested in the idea that climate change is the most pressing challenge confronting mankind and that urgent action far beyond what is already in prospect will be needed to confront it. In the minds of the panel's leaders and spokesmen, this conviction justifies public pronouncements that often go beyond the analysis which the IPCC's own scientists have presented.

Speaking of the panel's Fourth Assessment Report, Mr Pachauri said: "I hope this will shock people and governments into taking more serious action." The rules under which the IPCC operates tell it to be "neutral with respect to policy" - and the reports themselves strive to comply. But statements such as that, and many more besides, align the institution and its network of scientists with a programme that goes much further than science alone dictates.

The IPCC may be right: climate change may indeed be mankind's biggest and most urgent challenge. It would be wrong to demand certainty before doing more. The scientific consensus, though not quite as strong as usually claimed, is surely strong enough to warrant a carbon tax or equivalent.

But if governments are to get the best advice, they need information and analysis from an open and disinterested source - or else from multiple dissenting sources. With the environmental risks calmly laid out, framing the right policies demands proper political accountability and a much wider range of opinion and expertise than the IPCC currently provides. One incompetent institution, committed to its own agenda, should never have been granted this degree of actual and moral authority over the science, over public presentation of the science and over calls for "more serious action" that go well beyond the science.

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Militant Islamic Group Joins Environmental Campaign in Indonesia

Post lifted from Jennifer Marohasy

Abu Bakar Bashir, the well known spiritual leader of militant Islamic group, Jemaah Islamiya, has now joined forces with Indonesia's largest environmental organisation, WALHI, to protest against US-based mining corporation Newmont.



from http://richardness.org/blog/walhisstrangebedfellows.php

I've previously written about the Buyat Bay saga - where Richard Ness and Newmont were accused of having polluted a fishing village and its fringing coral reef with mine tailings.

You may remember that the story made the front page of The New York Times and that five miners, including Australian Phil Turner, were arrested and thrown into a Jakarta jail in September 2004. Richard's son Eric runs a blog on the saga entitled `Watching My Dad's Trial'.

When the claims of pollution where investigated by The World Health Organisation and CSIRO they were found to be bogus - a hoax. You can read a summary of the saga in my latest piece for the IPA Review entitled Politics and the Environment in Indonesia. There are copies of both reports' at Eric's website.

Richard Ness and Newmont were cleared of all charges in April this year, but the finding has been appealed.

In her journalism master's thesis entitled 'Tall Tailings: Truth and Friction in the Buyat Mining Scandal' Canadian Kendyl Salcito suggested some of the key protagonists in the saga are members of the Islamic organisation known as Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Muhammad Al Khaththah, the leader of the Indonesian chapter of Hizb-ut Tahrir, appears in the above photograph with Abu Bakar Bashir.

It is perhaps not surprising that militant environmental and Islamic organisations are joining forces, they both believe that issues of poverty and corruption are a consequence of capitalism and the exploitation of people and natural resources by large multinational corporations. As a consequence many Islamic and environmental activists want to close down mining in Indonesia - at least the most efficient, high tec, modern systems of mining. Interestingly they are supported by activists from countries like Australia and Canada - countries that continue to enjoy a high standard of living as a consequence, at least in part, of capitalism and mining.





Chemist says Global warming is nature's doing

In the 1970s, some climatologists warned the world about global cooling. Now it's global warming. Then it was particulates in the air blocking the sun; now it's carbon dioxide forming a greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is now presented as the most dangerous greenhouse gas in the Earth's atmosphere, the primary cause of global warming. Some even call it a pollutant. With my education in physics and chemistry, I'd like to shed some light on this issue.

CO2 makes a very small contribution to the Earth's temperature. It is only 0.039 percent of the atmosphere. Nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor and argon comprise more than 99 percent of the atmosphere. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is not a particularly effective greenhouse gas. Out of the wide spectrum of radiation received from the sun, CO2 only absorbs energy from three very narrow levels.

Many people believe there is a difference between man-made CO2 and natural CO2. There is no difference. Carbon dioxide is comprised of one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms. CO2 is a natural, vital part of biological life. Ants, termites and decaying foliage account for the formation of most of the CO2. There are more than a quadrillion ants and termites. These also make a major contribution to other greenhouse gases, methane and ammonia.

CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by plant life. (The vast amount of CO2 is removed by algae in the oceans, not by land plants.) Chemists call it equilibrium. When large amounts of CO2 are created by volcanoes or forest fires, the metabolism of plant life increases and in a short time removes the CO2 from the air.

If there is less CO2 in the atmosphere, the metabolism of plant life slows down. Thus, the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere stay very close to a yearly average of 0.039 percent. Because of the dynamic nature of our atmosphere, CO2 levels are always rising or falling. Low levels follow high levels. Ice core sampling demonstrates that this equilibrium has been in place for millennia.

The gas most responsible for the Earth's temperature is water vapor, by far the most important greenhouse gas. Not only does water vapor account for 3 percent to 4 percent of the atmosphere, it also accepts energy from the sun in virtually all energy levels. Water vapor is thousands of times more responsible for temperature than CO2. Ask any climatologist; he will tell you that this is in fact the case.

The oceans control the level of water vapor in the atmosphere. Water vapor is also responsible for cooling the planet, forming the cloud layer and reflecting the sun's energy. Again, an equilibrium. True, the atmosphere may warm for a while, but this causes more water to leave the oceans and fill the atmosphere. Over time, this causes a denser cloud cover, cooling the Earth.

A common practice among climatologists is to treat the Earth as a closed system. But certain gasses do in fact leave our atmosphere. All gases of a molecular weight 18 or above tend to be held by the Earth's gravitational field. Water is molecular weight (mw)18 and CO2 is mw44. They stay on the Earth. Methane and ammonia, the predominant gases of animal life on the planet, leave the gravitational field and go off into space and out of our atmosphere because their molecular weights are 16 and 17, respectively. Presenting these as greenhouse gases does not give a complete picture of their presence in our atmosphere.

So the oceans control both the warming and the cooling of the earth. Man's contribution of these gases is almost not measurable compared to what nature produces. Humans, with all our cars and factories, account for less than 1 percent of the CO2 present at any one time. Furthermore, man does not control the water cycle. We simply are not that important. We can work to keep the Earth clean, but we cannot control the atmosphere. Many climatologists are aware of this but do not give this critical information to the public.

Global-warming activists believe mankind is altering the Earth's temperature. Although many know that man's contribution is negligible, it is not to their political advantage to reveal this fact. Climate scientists receive funding from the government to research causes of and solutions to man-made global warming. If the current warming were demonstrated to be the natural cycle, this funding would be cut.

The 1970s climatologists had incomplete data, believing we were plunging into an ice age. Predictions made now are equally apocalyptic. They again are based on climate models with incomplete data or, in some cases, deliberately withheld data.

We are now making costly political decisions based on the "fact" that human activity is causing the temperature to rise. Many politicians believe that human-caused global warming is real and that since this view is held by a "consensus of scientists," further study is unnecessary. Climatologists need to come forward without fear and give the public the truth. Carbon dioxide's contribution to global warming is minimal; water vapor is the great buffer for the Earth's temperature; the oceans control this process. Human beings have no measurable control over global temperatures.

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film but it is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.

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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Glaciers being allegedly lost to Asian Brown Cloud pollution

Complete and utter nonsense. Glaciers in the Western half of the Himalayas are actually GAINING mass. See also this post about the Siachen glacier. See also what Indian glaciologists say about their glaciers in general

The haze of pollution that blankets southern Asia is accelerating the loss of Himalayan glaciers, bequeathing an incalculable bill to China, India and other countries whose rivers flow from this source. In a study released by the British journal Nature, the investigators say the so-called Asian Brown Cloud is as much to blame as greenhouse gases for the warming observed in the Himalayas over the past half century. Rapid melting among the 46,000 glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, the third-largest ice mass on the planet, is already causing downstream flooding. But long-term worries focus more on the danger of drought, as the glaciers shrink.

The report triggered an appeal from UN Environment Program chief Achim Steiner, who urged the international community "to ever greater action" on tackling climate change. Researchers led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, used an innovative technique to explore the Asian Brown Cloud. The plume sprawls across South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia and the northern Indian Ocean. It spews from tailpipes, factory chimneys and power plants, forests or fields that are being burned for agriculture, and wood and dung which are burned for fuel.

Emissions of carbon gases are known to be the big drivers of global warming, but the role of particulate pollution, such as brown clouds, is unclear. Particulates, also called aerosols, cool the land or sea beneath them because they filter out sunlight, a process known as global dimming. But what they do to the air around them has been poorly researched. Some aerosols absorb sunlight and thus warm the atmosphere locally, while others reflect and scatter the light.

Professor Ramanathan's team used three unmanned aircraft fitted with 15 instruments to monitor temperature, clouds, humidity and aerosols. The remote-controlled craft carried out 18 missions in March 2006, flying in a vertical stack over the Indian Ocean. The planes flew simultaneously through the Brown Cloud at heights of 500m, 1500m and 3000m. They discovered that the cloud boosted the effect of solar heating on the air around it by nearly 50 per cent because its particles are soot, which is black and thus absorbs sunlight. The researchers crunched data from greenhouse gases and from the brown clouds in a computer model of climate change. The simulation estimated that, since 1950, South Asia's atmosphere has warmed by 0.25C per decade at altitudes ranging from 2000m to 5000m above sea level - the height where thousands of Himalayan glaciers are located.

As much as half of this warming could be attributed to the effects of brown clouds, Professor Ramanathan said. "It is frightening, but I also look at the positive side, because it shows a way out of the conundrum," he said. Roughly 60 per cent of the soot in South Asia comes from biofuel cooking and biomass burning, which could be eased by helping the rural poor get bottled gas or solar cookers, he said. Professor Ramanathan's data has been validated with measurements taken on the ground and in space by NASA.

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Torres Strait islands "at risk from global warming"

Groan! Islands -- including Pacific islands -- are rising and falling all the time. It is nothing to do with sea levels. Regard for the facts is a very low priority for the Green/Left. Reality does creep through, however. That the islands are sinking rather than the sea rising is mentioned a couple of times below

Authorities have ordered evacuation and relocation plans for more than 2000 people who face losing their land and livelihood from the invading sea. "These islands are sinking," Torres Shire Mayor Pedro Stephen said yesterday. "People are looking at options of building on stilts or even floating pontoons because of the rising sea levels. "And this is the heartbreaking thing, this generation or the next may have to leave behind all they have ever known, all because of global warming."

Scientists predict warmer sea temperatures (thermal expansion) and the meting of the ice caps will contribute to a sea-level rise of between 9cm and 88cm in the next 50 years. Some parts of the most vulnerable islands - Masig (Yorke), Poruma (Coconut), Warraber, Yam, Saibai and Boigu - are today less than 1m above sea level.

Mother-of-two Helen Mosby, 21, of Yorke Island, yesterday showed Brisbane's The Courier-Mail newspaper the dramatic impact of global warming on her island home. "You can see where the ocean has eaten up the road," said Ms Mosby walking with son Josiah, 5. "It is a big change, and it seems to be getting worse in the past two years or so." [During which time there has been NO global warming. There has been no rise in terrestrial temperature since 1998]

James Cook University's Dr Kevin Parnell, a coastal geomorphologist studying the sinking islands, said they would probably not disappear within a generation, but the threat was "not trivial". "There is the possibility of more frequent extreme events, like storm surge and high tides, causing the water to come up higher on to the land," he said.

The Yorke Island church - more than 50m inland from the high-tide mark -was last year inundated while more than 60m of land on Coconut Island has been consumed since 2000.

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A New Global Warming Hurricane

Post lifted from Riehl World. See the original for links

Looks like another headline grabbing opportunity for the Global Warming crowd: Altantic hurricanes 'doubling' as world warms up

A STUDY has found about twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago, largely as a result of greenhouse warming.

Yes, according to the National Center For Atmospheric Research, which has good reason to trump up Global Warming fears. What better way to drive more public funding for climate research given it's need for same and roots in and ties to the liberal academy. Now this below is from page 13 of a pdf from NOAA on the history of hurricanes.

Table 6, which lists hurricanes by decades since 1851, shows that during the forty year period 1961-2000 both the number and intensity of landfalling U.S. hurricanes decreased sharply. Based on 1901-1960 statistics, the expected number of hurricanes and major hurricanes during the period 1961-2000 was 75 and 28, respectively. But, in fact, only 55 (or 74%) of the expected number of hurricanes struck the U.S. with only 19 major hurricanes or 68% of that expected number. However, landfall activity during the 2000's has picked up significantly, and is now near the frequency seen in the very active 1940's. These increased landfalls are very different than the late 1990's, which showed average landfall frequencies despite having generally active seasons.

For an even clearer picture, go to page 16 of the pdf and you'll see that, as regards the Atlantic Basin, the peak numbers in hurricanes are spread throughout the last 150 or so years. There's no real trend for an increase as this new study suggests, unless you only look at certain decades and ignore other variables. Here's a screencap below.

Fortunately some scientists are already challenging this new study:

Not everyone agrees with its findings.

Many scientists say a natural cycle of warm waters in the Atlantic accounts for the surge in hurricanes since 1995.

One argument against global warming fuelling more hurricanes is that prior to 1970, many storms were undetected, meaning the level of tropical activity could have been just as intense in previous decades.

That is because 1970 was the first year satellites were used to monitor the globe.

Even more hurricanes were probably missed prior to 1944, when hurricane-hunter aircraft were first dispatched to investigate storms.

But Dr Holland and co-author Peter Webster, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, dispute that incomplete data records alone explain the sharp increase in tropical activity during the three time periods they studied since 1900.

They say tropical storm activity has increased by about 50 per cent from period to period, which they claim negates the natural cycle theory.

"These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes," Dr Holland said.

Sorry, but I have to fly - and I'm a Greenie

I HAVE had a somewhat strained conversation with a family relation about plane travel. I was working for Greenpeace Australia and said there were people who resisted flying because of its implications for global warming. My relation looked at me is if I were some kind of neanderthal dark-green fanatic trying to drag civilisation back to the dark ages. You've got to be kidding me, he said.

Now, I'm siding with the airline industry. After flying halfway around the world to escape the Australian winter, I wish to speak on behalf of those who care deeply about the environment, but refuse to stop flying. Here in Europe, the anti-flying lobby harasses people at airports and thrusts leaflets into your face. Several London travel agents have been attacked by protesters shouting that the travel industry is to blame for global warming. A week of action is planned at Heathrow airport with a day of action aimed at disrupting flights. There are even anti-flying websites, but in this highly emotional debate, it is important to consider the facts.

Sir Nicholas Stern, the British economist who wrote the Stern Report on global warming, says flying accounts for only 1.7 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. This is a tiny amount compared with the damage caused by deforestation (24 per cent) and shipping, road and train transport (18 per cent). That means if none of us ever sets foot inside a plane after tomorrow we would not stop global warming, although it might help.

And there is another side to all this. The Third World's dependence on tourism dollars is so great the economies of these countries face collapse if we stop flying there. Some of these countries also depend on Western health professionals routinely flying into their communities. For them it is a matter of life and death. Julia Francombe, the founder of a Kenyan clinic that flies in doctors from the UK to restore the eyesight of locals, says if the doctors "stop coming it will kill us".

The airline industry is rolling out fuel efficient aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner that cuts fuel use by 70 per cent over its old 727. Flying is an integral part of modern life and one wonders if the efforts of the environment lobby would not be better focused on forestry emissions and generally lowering industry and domestic consumption levels, rather than those who fly occasionally. It is simply wrong to suggest that flying is one of the key engines of global warming and unfair to point the finger at those who fly as being guilty of heinous crimes against the planet. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a plane to catch.

Source

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film but it is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.

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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Greenie fanaticism hits Poland

What is proposed is a viaduct (bridge) OVER a wildlife area, not a road through it -- but that is still not good enough for the Green EU bureaucracy

The European Commission is seeking a court order to prevent Poland re-starting work on a road through a protected wildlife area. The road - which carries traffic from Warsaw to Helsinki - goes through the Rospuda Valley - a peat-bog area that is home to rare plants and animals. Warsaw halted work for the bird-nesting season but plans to resume on 1 August. It says environmental damage would be minimal, because the plan is for a viaduct not a road at ground level.

"The EU is asking the European Court of Justice to issue an injunction to prevent irreversible damage to a unique environmental site," said Barbara Helfferich, spokeswoman for Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.

The Commission wants work suspended until the European Court decides whether the road - a 40km (25-mile) bypass around the town of Augustow - complies with strict EU environmental laws. The town is crossed every day by some 4,500 heavy goods vehicles on their way to and from the Lithuanian border.

The British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has complained the project puts at risk strongholds of lynx and wolf and "the most important European Union populations of two globally-threatened birds: the greater spotted eagle and aquatic warbler".

Commission officials say Poland could lose hundreds of millions of euros of funding for other stretches of the planned Via Baltica, from Warsaw to Helsinki, if it goes ahead with the Rospuda project. The Rospuda section is being built without EU funds, but Poland hopes Brussels will co-finance the construction of other parts.

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POPULATION CONTROL

Since the beginning of time, one of the clearest markers of an enlightened society has been the moral status it attaches to human life. And outwardly, at least, twenty-first-century Western societies express an unprecedented degree of respect for human life. For example, cultural and political institutions continually talk about the need to uphold human rights. The human rights narrative now shapes policymaking, both domestically and internationally. Many even argue that protecting human rights is a cross-border duty that should override the principle of national sovereignty. Our societies are also increasingly health-obsessed. The phenomenal growth in health expenditure in recent years shows just how much prosperous societies respect individual life today. Western societies will sometimes go to extraordinary lengths in their efforts to keep a premature baby alive or to prolong the life of elderly people or those who are chronically ill.

And yet, alongside the ethos of human rights and the development of heroic medicine, contemporary society appears estranged from its own humanity. To put it bluntly: it is difficult to celebrate human life in any meaningful way when people - or at least the growth of the number of people - are regarded as the source of the world's problems. Alongside today's respect for human life there is the increasingly popular idea that there is too much human life around, and that it is killing the planet.

The humanist impulse that once drove the development of the modern world has been replaced by a tendency to view humanity with suspicion, or even outright hostility. The vocabulary of our times - `human impact on the environment'; `ecological footprint'; `human consumption' - invokes a sense of dread over the active exercise of human life. Apparently, there are too many of us doing too much living and breathing. In a world where humanity is portrayed as a threat to the environment and to the very survival of the planet, human activity - from birth to consumption to procreation - is regarded as a mixed blessing. Consequently, our concern with preserving and improving the quality of life of some people sits uneasily with an increasingly shrill demand to prevent people from being born in the first place.

Today, many green-leaning writers and activists argue that population control is the best solution to the problems we face. This belief that there are `too many people' inhabiting the globe has reared its ugly head numerous times over the past 200 years. Since the times of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), a catastrophic vision of population growth causing the collapse of society has formed an important part of the culturally pessimistic outlook. Back in the eighteenth century it was predicted that population growth would lead to famine, starvation and death. Today's pessimists have raised the stakes further: they denounce population growth as a threat to biodiversity and to the very existence of the planet. Twenty-first-century Malthusians are not so much worried about an impending famine: they're more concerned that people are producing and consuming too much food and other commodities.

Where in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Malthusians warned that population growth threatened people with starvation, today's Malthusians denounce people for threatening the planet by consuming too much. As a result, contemporary Malthusianism has an unusually strident and misanthrophic streak. In the West, the population-control lobby castigates those who have large families for being environmentally irresponsible. Having children, especially lots of children, is now discussed as an `eco-crime' on a par with pollution. From this perspective, a new human life is seen as little more than another producer of carbon; new life is seen as a form of pollution. So it would be better, the Malthusians argue, if these new human lives did not exist at all. As one Malthusian crusader notes: `A non-existent person has no environmental footprint; the emission "saving" is instant and total.' (1) This preference for the non-existent over the existent speaks to a powerful anti-humanist sensibility. And it is not only eccentric and isolated misanthropes who value `non-existence' as being somehow morally superior to existence - rather, this outlook is symptomatic of a wider trend for devaluing the status of human life today.

For contemporary Malthusians, every new child is another pollutant: she may just be a baby now, but by the time she is 80 she will be responsible for the emission of 9.3 tonnes of CO2! So why worry about how much pollution your car causes? Apparently you should be far more concerned with limiting the size of the population. `Population limitation should.be seen as the most cost-effective carbon offsetting strategy available to individuals and nations', argues the dreary British-based population-control outfit, the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) (2). Once the emission of greenhouse gases is taken to be the defining feature of human activity, then it follows that controlling fertility is the ideal `carbon offsetting strategy'. `If we had half as many people, we wouldn't have much of a climatic warming problem', says Ric Oberlink of the US-based group Californians for Population Stabilization (3). And no doubt if the human species disappeared off the face of the Earth altogether, then the crisis of global warming would resolve itself and the planet would be very happy.

For Oberlink and his associates, global warming is a symptom of the far greater menace of population growth. `Global warming is a very serious problem, but it is a subset of the overpopulation problem', claims Oberlink. John Seager, president of Population Connection, the American campaign group that was formerly known as Zero Population Growth, also believes that the `underlying cause of global warming' is `human population growth' (4). The idea that population growth is the principal threat to the planet is widely disseminated through the mainstream media. While giving the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures earlier this year, the economist Jeffrey Sachs argued that `our planet is crowded to an unprecedented degree', and such overcrowding is `creating..unprecedented pressures on human society and on the physical environment' (5). This pessimistic view of population growth is so taken for granted that it is very rarely challenged in mainstream intellectual and cultural circles.

The catastrophic imagination in contemporary Western culture has encouraged the Malthusian lobby to target the very aspiration for procreation. Controlling fertility is now described as a duty rather than a matter of choice. `Couples making decisions about family size do so in the belief that it is a matter for them and their personal preferences alone', says the OPT, with incredulity (6). The idea that people should have the right to make choices about their family size is dismissed as an indefensible outrage against common sense.

This assault on the right to procreate is often intrusive, even coercive. Take the example of Rwanda. The world was horrified by the mass slaughter in Rwanda in 1994, during which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed. Yet it appears that, so far as the population-control lobby is concerned, there are still too many people living in Rwanda. As one headline earlier this year put it: `After so many deaths, too many births.' Apparently, `After the 1994 genocide, in which more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered, it seemed difficult to believe that overpopulation would ever be a problem. Yet Rwanda has long had more people than its meagre resources and small area can support.' Now, with the guidance of Western non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the Rwandan government is planning a sweeping population-control programme. From now on, everyone who visits a medical centre will be `counselled' about family planning (7). Experience shows that such `counselling' in reality means putting pressure on women to use contraception.

It is in poverty-stricken, insecure countries like Rwanda, where people lack the resources to assume even a modicum of control over their lives, that the truly inhumane nature of population-control policies becomes clear.

A cause in search of an argument

The distinctive feature of Malthusianism is its profound consciousness of limits. The fatalistic Malthusian outlook looks upon people as parasitic consumers whose appetites are limited only by the obstacles thrown up by nature. Malthus' Essay, which was written in 1798, was a reaction against the optimistic visions of humanity put forward by Enlightenment thinkers. For Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet and Godwin, people were not simply consumers - they were are also creative actors, innovators, producers. Thankfully, in the centuries since he wrote Essay and other works, Malthus' alarmist warnings have proven to be unfounded: food production has generally increased in line with population growth and there has not been a global famine. However, the fact that Malthus' predictions did not come true has not discouraged anti-humanists from pursuing the population-control project. They simply invent new reasons for why we must control population growth.

Over the past two centuries, a bewildering array of problems has been blamed on population growth. At various times, famine, poverty, the failure of Third World economies, instability, revolution, the spread of communism and the subordinate position of women have been linked to population growth (8). The approach of the population growth lobby is devastatingly simple: they take a problem and argue that it would diminish in intensity if there were fewer people. Such simplistic methodology is even used to account for the emergence of new forms of terrorism today.

The Malthusian fantasy about a `ticking population bomb' has been recycled in a new form - now rising population is said to give rise to real bombs in the form of Islamist terrorism. Apparently overpopulation creates a lot of poor, unemployed, discontented men; and many of them turn into troublemakers, which means that they can become canon fodder for terrorist networks; thus they end up on the wrong side of the `war on terror'. In the Seventies Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, argued that population growth in the South inexorably led to the triumph of communism. Today he has recycled this simplistic diagnosis to argue that population growth has led to the rise of international terrorism. Demographic factors are `likely contributors' to terrorism, he claims. Why? Because the `vast majority of terrorists are young males' and there are `huge numbers of boys under 15' in Muslim nations.

This idea that large numbers of young males equals a potential terrorist threat is systematically promoted by the supporters of population control. `It is impossible to ignore the link between rapid population growth and terrorism', says the director of the Population Coalition, a collection of population-control groups. In truth, it is the logic of the simpleton that sees a link between large numbers of young men and terrorism: population-control activists believe that because population is growing at the same time that new forms of terrorism are emerging, then they must be linked! If we took this view to its logical conclusion, then anything that coincides with current demographic patterns - whether it's Hurricane Katrina, the boom in property prices in London or the popularity of iPods - could be linked to population growth.

Prominent Malthusian organisations such as the Worldwatch Institute and the Population Institute have set out to repose population control as an effective counter-terrorist measure. Consider the Population Institute's study Breeding Insecurity: Global Security Implications Of Rapid Population Growth. It argues that `rapid population growth in developing countries creates national security problems, including civil unrest and terrorism'. The report cites a study by another Malthusian group, Population Action International, which claims that `youth bulges create instability and increase the likelihood for terrorism and civil unrest by as much as 50 per cent'. Fifty per cent might sound like a big number - but this is an entirely made-up figure, a figment of the Malthusian imagination which is obsessed with constructing a relationship between demographic growth and terrorism.

The obvious conclusion to be drawn from the `50 per cent' claim is that the threat of terrorism could be halved if only we implemented a vigorous programme of population control. Apparently the solution to the problem of terrorism is to stop `them' breeding. As the Population Institute's report concludes: `While family-planning programs will not create a more secure world on their own, they will go a long way toward reducing pressures on societies that lead to instability, unrest, and terrorism.'

Losing faith in the human

You don't have to be a sophisticated student of global politics to see through the simplistic and opportunistic arguments on security put forward by the new Malthusians. But then, the success of Malthusianism has never been down to the rigour or eloquence of its ideas. Rather, the success of Malthusian ideas depends on the strength of cultural pessimism at any given time. And today it is the loss of faith in the human potential, a fatalistic view of the future, which has rejuvenated the population-control crusade.

So powerful is cultural pessimism today that even the special quality of human life is now called into question. Today, pollution is seen as the principal feature and consequence of human existence. Indeed, today's neo-Malthusian thinking is far more dismal and misanthropic than the original version. For all his intellectual pessimism and lack of imagination, Thomas Malthus possessed a far more robust belief in humanity than do his contemporary followers. Although he shared today's cultural obsession with the limits of nature, he nonetheless expressed a conviction that humanity had a positive role to play. He argued that although `our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish.they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society, which before the late wild speculations on this subject, was the object of rational expectation' (9).

Malthus' reservations about the human potential were a product of his deep-seated hostility to the optimistic humanism of his intellectual opponents: Condorcet, Godwin and others. And yet, he made it clear that despite his pessimistic view of population growth `it is hoped that the general result of [my] inquiry is not such as to make us give up the improvement of human society in despair' (10).

In contrast to today's singularly pessimistic neo-Malthusians, Malthus' On The Principle of Population managed to convey a belief in humanity. Over the past two centuries, his followers have often tried to discourage people from the `wrong' classes and the `wrong races' from procreating - yet despite their prejudices they continued to affirm the special status of the human species (or at least certain sections of it). In some instances - for example, during the rise of the eugenic movement - rabid prejudice against so-called racial inferiors was combined with a belief in human progress.

By contrast, today's Malthusians share all the old prejudices and in addition they harbour a powerful sense of loathing against the human species itself. Is it any surprise, then, that some of them actually celebrate non-existence? The obsession with natural limits distracts society from the far more creative search for solutions to hunger or poverty or lack of resources. Worse still, by calling into question the special quality of the human, the population-control lobby seeks to corrode people's confidence in their ability to tackle the problems of the future. Human life should always be treated as precious and special. How can there possibly be too many of us?

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The Energy Bill That Isn't: Rep. Nick Rahall's Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act of 2007

It is no secret that congressmen frequently take liberties when assigning their bills attractive names that are not representative of the contents within. The "Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act of 2007" (H.R. 2377), sponsored by Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), is such an example of fraudulent advertising. Though the name implies it is designed to help meet America's growing energy needs, in reality, the bill is little more than an environmentalist wish list. One provision in the bill would obstruct the delivery of energy to areas of the country in most dire need of energy transmission upgrades by banning vast amounts of land from consideration for federally designated energy corridors. Another provision would lock up more federal, state and private land for the purpose of helping wildlife cope with "global warming."

Why Energy Corridors are Needed

The 2005 Energy Policy Act directed the Department of Energy (DOE) to study and identify regions of the country where electricity transmission is congested and constrained to the point it is adversely affecting consumers.1 In August 2006, DOE reported that both the Mid-Atlantic and Southwest regions are "critical congestion areas"2 where existing electricity transmission infrastructure is in most need of an upgrade.

According to DOE, the Mid-Atlantic region's tenuous electricity supply is an especially urgent matter. Without increased transmission capacity, "reliability violations will occur" in the northern Virginia - Washington, D.C. - Baltimore area by 2011. The same is true for southeastern New York State. Northern New Jersey and central Pennsylvania would experience similar problems in 2014 and 2019 respectively.3

According to DOE, "[T]hese types of projections indicate an increasing risk of significant problems - such as involuntary service curtailments and even rolling blackouts."4 As it can take five to 10 years or longer just to clear regulatory hurdles and develop proposals for new transmission facilities,5 time is of the essence.

As DOE warns:

The Mid-Atlantic Critical Congestion Area is home to 55 million people (19 percent of the nation's 2005 population) and is responsible for $2.3 trillion of gross state product (18 percent of the 2005 gross national product). Given the large number of military and other facilities in this area that are extremely important to the national defense and homeland security, as well as the vital importance of this populous area to the nation as an economic center, any deterioration of the electric reliability or economic health of this area would constitute a serious risk to the well-being of the nation.6

The seriousness of the problem prompted DOE to designate two "National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors" in April 2007 for both the Mid-Atlantic region and Southwest region of the country, which is also in need of a critical upgrade. These National Corridors are geographic, interstate areas where necessary, additional transmission infrastructure could be built to solve the regions' congestion woes.

In practice, National Corridors serve three key purposes. One: They identify areas of the country where transmission problems are so urgent, and the affected areas are so vital to the country, that it is in the national interest for utilities and transmission providers to remedy the situation. Two: They serve as proposed, broad geographic locations where additional transmission facilities can be constructed, and encourage the identified regions to work together to solve the problem. And three: National Corridors clear the way for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to permit the construction of a new transmission facility inside the corridor should construction be blocked by a State government.7

As DOE Secretary Samuel Bodman states, these corridors "will help facilitate the infrastructure growth necessary to meet the demands of our growing economy."8 Considering the looming crisis in some regions, they could also help prevent a future disaster.

Rahall Bill Would Obstruct Energy Corridor Designations

The Rahall bill rescinds these proposed electric transmission corridors and seeks to prevent the designation of all future national energy corridors, including those designed to improve delivery of gas and oil, by banning any area within one mile of land that has been designated by federal or state government for "protection of scenic, natural, cultural, or historic resources"9 from consideration in a proposed corridor. According to Rahall's Natural Resources Committee office, this is meant to protect "special places" that "should not have pipelines running through or wires strung over."10

In practice, it would be difficult to thread a needle without touching any of these banned areas, let alone an electricity transmission or gas line. This sweeping ban would include every unit of the National Park Service, which comprise more than 83 million acres,11 as well as all 25 million acres in the Bureau of Land Management's National Landscape Conservation System,12 and all land within one mile of these lands. Add to this myriad other federal and state designated "scenic, natural, cultural, or historic" areas and it becomes virtually impossible to designate an energy corridor anywhere.

As if this was not enough, the Rahall bill would also ban any land considered a "sensitive ecological area, including any area that is designated as critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 or otherwise identified as sensitive or crucial habitat, including seasonal habitat, by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, by a State agency responsible for managing wildlife or wildlife habitat, or in a Federal or State land use plan"13 from consideration in a proposed energy corridor.

The need to upgrade America's energy infrastructure cannot be ignored. According to the Energy Information Administration's (EIA) 2007 "Annual Energy Outlook," electricity consumption is projected to increase 41 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2030.14 EIA also reports that "all electricity demand regions are expected to need additional, currently unplanned, capacity by 2030."15

While addressing our nation's energy needs is given a backseat in the "Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act," another provision in the bill indicates the environmental lobby is driving the bus.

Rahall Bill Would Create Wildlife Corridors

A separate provision in the Rahall bill would establish a "national strategy for assisting wildlife populations and their habitats in adapting to the impacts of global warming."16 Specifically, this would require the identification of all "species likely to be adversely affected by global warming" and require that these species' habitat or "potential habitat" be protected, acquired or restored to help them "build resilience to global warming." In addition, "habitat linkages" would be created to "facilitate the ability of wildlife to move within a landscape in response to the effects of global warming."17

A more reckless policy is difficult to imagine. This is a virtual blank check for the federal government to arbitrarily acquire private property and restrict property rights. A good indicator of the severe regulatory burden likely to result from such a broad species protection policy is the current burden associated with the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

Government often takes restrictive measures against property owners when implementing the ESA. As Jonathan Adler, director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, writes:

Under the ESA, individual Americans have been prevented from building homes, plowing fields, cutting trees, clearing brush and repairing fences--all on private land. The federal government has even barred private landowners from clearing firebreaks to protect their homes from fire hazards.18

In fact, the Rahall bill's species protection provision has the potential to be even worse than the ESA. The scientific data used to justify protecting a species under the ESA has oftentimes been lacking19 and the cause of controversy.20 For instance, the Preble's Meadow Jumping Mouse continues to receive protection under the ESA despite a 2005 U.S. Interior department proposal to remove the mouse from the list in light of evidence that the Preble's Mouse is not taxonomically distinguishable from another, more common species of mouse.21 As a result, 31,000 acres in Colorado and Wyoming remain subject to ESA restrictions22 that have prevented property owners from using their land.23

The science surrounding the hypothetical threat that "global warming" poses to a species is likely to be even less certain and more controversial considering global warming theory itself is hypothetical. Regulators need only claim that a species is "likely to be adversely affected by global warming" to justify acquiring property or property rights to protect that species, even if the species is abundant and thriving.

Public access to federal lands would also be jeopardized by a provision in the Rahall bill that mandates "climate change adaptation strategies for wildlife and its habitat" be incorporated into the management plans of all federal lands administered by the Department of Interior and the Forest Service.24 For example, under the ESA, all federal agencies, including the National Park Service, are required to avoid any actions that might disturb endangered species' habitat.25 Last year, public access to a portion of Channel Islands National Park was temporarily closed to accommodate a breeding population of ESA-protected pelicans.26 Similar restrictions on public land could occur under the Rahall bill under the pretense of protecting species and habitat for "climate change adaptation."

Considering all of this, it is not surprising the Rahall "energy bill" is receiving high praise from groups such as Defenders of Wildlife27 and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the latter of which approves of 95 percent of the bill's contents.28 Both groups have consistently promoted rigid enforcement of the ESA and have opposed reform efforts designed to help alleviate the ESA's burden on landowners.

The "wildlife and global warming" provision in the Rahall bill would also be a formidable weapon in environmentalists' already extensive legal arsenal. Environmental organizations have demonstrated an enthusiasm for filing lawsuits under federal species protection laws that have resulted in stymied public works projects and have even restricted military training operations. For example, a coalition of environmental groups sued government to restrict the amount of dammed water flowing into the Missouri River, ostensibly to protect endangered birds and fish, causing economic hardship in the region.29 The Natural Resources Defense Council has sued under the ESA to protect species' habitat at the expense of military training operations at Camp Pendleton and Miramar Marine bases in California.30

Conclusion

Despite its name, the Energy Policy Reform and Revitalization Act would obstruct vital energy infrastructure improvements needed to address America's rapidly growing energy needs. It would also spawn the creation of an expansive new wildlife and species protection program, predicated on the hypothetical threat of global warming, which would result in increased federal land acquisition and infringements upon property rights.

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Hawaii plantsman confounds Greenies

Keith Robinson is a REAL Greenie. He has a green thumb with endangered plants and a belief that the `green' tactics used by the environmental establishment are irrelevant to conservation

Nowhere does the logic of federal environmental policy seem more mismatched to endangered-species preservation than on Hawaii, an ecological anomaly 2,500 miles from the U.S. mainland. About as near to Washington as Albania--actually Albania is closer--the Hawaiian archipelago is the most remote and isolated ecosystem on Earth and a virtual command center of endangered species. Of 743 officially designated endangered plants in the United States, Hawaii has more than one-third of them. And nowhere is there a greater threat to the survival of these species than the aggressive land-lockdown tactics of the national environmental-preservation organizations, their lawyers and their fund-raisers.

But these environmental activists and regulators never have met anyone quite like Keith Robinson, the fifth-generation descendent of the legendary Sinclair family who arrived in Hawaii from New Zealand in the 1860s. Keith and his brother, Bruce, are joint owners of the seventh-largest Hawaiian island, Niihau, known throughout the state as kupu, or forbidden. Purchased for $10,000 in gold in 1872, the 72-square-mile island has been preserved from outside contact for 130 years. Niihau islanders trace their ancestry to before contact by Capt. James Cook in 1778. School and church services are held in native Hawaiian, and travel to the Forbidden Island is by personal invitation of the Robinsons only.

The Robinsons' astonishing preservation of Hawaiian language and traditions on Niihau is mirrored by Keith Robinson's commitment to endangered indigenous plants. The family also holds some 50,000 acres on Kauai--breathtaking jungle-clad mountains, towering waterfalls and tropical forest that look like critical habitat for the likes of King Kong. (Indeed, Jurassic Park was filmed on Robinson lands, and the helicopter used in the opening scenes was Robinson's Niihau shuttle.)

In his trademark green hard hat and rusted-out Nissan pickup, Robinson is the plain-speaking, hands-on manager of his Kauai Wildlife Reserve, a self-described "outlaw operation" that for nearly 20 years has preserved some of the most endangered species on Earth. A typical day for Robinson can involve a backbreaking 18-hour trek into remote canyons to retrieve or care for a rare species, a grueling and single-minded enterprise for the 60-year-old.

I give Keith tremendous credit, says John Fay, a biologist with the endangered-species program for the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) in Washington. "He has done something truly remarkable with minimal resources. I visited his reserve probably 10 years ago, and I remember going over my notes later and realizing he was personally the guarantor of probably a dozen species of endangered plants."

Robinson's assessment of his successes is characteristically blunt: "My private, one-man Hawaiian endangered-species reserve is based on hard work, independent thought and old-fashioned moral standards. This combination worked just fine for America's Founding Fathers, and it still works well on the rare occasions when it is tried today."

Through the years Robinson has donated cuttings and seeds to state and private environmental organizations, but he has little patience for them today. "During the last 30 years," he says, "Hawaii's environmental establishment has become totally corrupt, motivated primarily by a lust for money and power. Now they have found that they can use the U.S. Endangered Species Act to seize zoning control of huge tracts of land, on the pretext that these areas are `critical habitat' for endangered species."

Earlier this year critical-habitat designations were proposed for more than 60,000 acres on Kauai as a result of a 1997 lawsuit brought by Earthjustice --an environmental law firm formerly known as the Sierra Club Defense Fund --against the FWS. And according to Hawaii state forester Michael Buck, these designations "are just the beginning of a process that will systematically designate similar lands throughout the state that could encompass up to 500,000 acres--or one-eighth of the land area of the entire state of Hawaii."

Robinson claims these designations are based on a systematic deception of the public. "Environmental extremists are wasting large sums of public money in expensive and completely useless habitat listings," he says. "The real truth is that Hawaii's endangered plants are biologically incompetent. This is the final, immutable, all-encompassing, result-determining reality of all propagation work with these species. They evolved for millions of years in benign isolation, where there were no significant threats or competition. Thus they lost their biological efficiency and were rapidly overwhelmed when thousands of efficient and aggressive species were introduced that evolved in the savage competition of continental ecosystems."

He continues, "They will relentlessly continue to decline to extinction in the wild, no matter how much alleged `critical habitat' is designated by lines drawn on maps. Meanwhile, the environmental establishment has created a weird mixture of quackery, propaganda, supposition and wishful thinking, and have been so misled by it that they are almost totally unable to grow healthy populations of Hawaii's rarest plants. The only way they can be saved is by growing them in intensively managed and cultivated reserves, where they can be constantly protected."

These strong charges are backed not only by the record of his private preserve but by what Robinson describes as "a fantastic and incredible episode": the successful propagation of what the FWS has called "the rarest plant in the world." The beautiful Kokia cookei is native to the north coast of Molokai, but by the beginning of the 20th century, only a single tree was known to exist in the wild. This perished in 1918.

According to conventional wisdom, K. cookei declined to the brink of extinction because of habitat conversion, introduced grazing animals, loss of native pollinators and seed predation by insect larvae. For the last several decades the species has been kept alive by grafting it onto the rootstocks of two other extremely rare sister species. Kept alive, but no more. But in just two years since Robinson secretly obtained cuttings of Kokia cookei, he has managed to bring them to flower, and in the last few months, to produce seeds. He currently is nursing some three-dozen seedlings in a remote, undisclosed location.

The accomplishment is breathtaking. "People sometimes ask me what I think is the single most endangered species on Earth, and I answer Kokia cookei," Fay says. "It is in effect just `half' a species, because it is grafted to a related stock. If Keith has managed to propagate Kokia cookei as you have described, he has cracked one of the major barriers. The suspicion was that the gene pool was simply depleted."

For Robinson, this breakthrough only reinforces the doubts he has about the tactics, competence and credibility of the environmental establishment. "As a result of extensive work with the closely related sister species, I believed that there was no problem with pollinators or self-compatibility," he says. "Most endangered Hawaiian plant species got that way because they are biologically incompetent, and metabolic inefficiency is usually a major component of that. There are very effective ways to solve that problem, but you have to do a tremendous amount of extremely hard physical work in the process--and the entire environmental establishment has always been intensely allergic to hard physical work."

Robinson explains, "To grow Kokia cookei from seed, for example, I had to spend several hours a day, for some 20 to 30 days, intensively cultivating the plants with a magnifying glass, tweezers, a matchstick and an eyedropper. If I had allowed even a couple of tiny ants to wander around on the seedlings, there is an excellent chance the plants would not have survived. And that is only one part of one phase of the work that was required to grow this one Hawaiian endangered species."

He adds, "When I first started growing endangered Hawaiian plants, I soon found out that the published scientific data is extremely inaccurate. And unlike the government and environmental groups, I relied on common sense instead of voodoo science, I learned from my mistakes instead of endlessly repeating them, and I worked far harder than they were willing to."

More here

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film but it is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.

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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Latest Scientific Studies Refute Fears of Greenland Melt

The July 27-29 2007 U.S. Senate trip to Greenland to investigate fears of a glacier meltdown revealed an Arctic land where current climatic conditions are neither alarming nor linked to a rise in man-made carbon dioxide emissions, according to many of the latest peer-reviewed scientific findings. Recent research has found that Greenland has been warming since the 1880's, but since 1955, temperature averages at Greenland stations have been colder than the period between 1881-1955.

A recent study concluded Greenland was as warm or warmer in the 1930's and 40's and the rate of warming from 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than the warming from 1995-2005. One 2005 study found Greenland gaining ice in the interior higher elevations and thinning ice at the lower elevations. In addition, the often media promoted fears of Greenland's ice completely melting and a subsequent catastrophic sea level rise are directly at odds with the latest scientific studies. These studies suggest that the biggest perceived threat to Greenland's glaciers may be contained in unproven computer models predicting a future catastrophic melt.

As a representative of Environment & Public Works Committee Ranking Member, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), I made the trek to the Arctic Circle with the Senate delegation (LINK) to the land the Vikings once farmed during the Medieval Warm Period.

Senators and their staff viewed majestic giant glaciers and icebergs in the Kangia Ice Fjord and in Disko Bay via helicopter, boat and on foot, during the three day 24 hours of daylight trip which began in the Arctic city of Kangerlussuaq, Greenland.

In an informational handout, participants of the Senate trip to Greenland were shown a depiction of coastal flooding that illustrated what would happen if most of the ice on Greenland was to melt and sea levels rose nearly 20 feet. The handout on Greenland was written by UN scientist Dr. Richard B. Alley, who is also a professor of Geosciences at Penn State University and traveled with the Senate delegation. Dr. Alley noted that the illustration of coastal flooding was not a forecast or a prediction, but merely an illustration of what could happen.

Dr. Alley's handout stated in part, "We don't think Greenland could melt completely in less than many centuries, but it might get warm enough this century to start complete melting."

During the trip, a Danish scientist and Danish government officials appealed to the U.S. government to act now to address global warming and used the prospect of Greenland melt fears as a wake up call for such action. But the very latest research reveals massive Greenland melt fears are not sustainable. According to a survey of some of the latest peer-reviewed scientific reports, current Greenland temperatures are neither alarming nor linked to a rise in man-made carbon dioxide emissions.

Sampling of Recent Scientific Studies:

1) A 2006 study by Danish researchers from Aarhus University found that "Greenland's glaciers have been shrinking for the past century, suggesting that the ice melt is not a recent phenomenon caused by global warming." Glaciologist Jacob Clement Yde explained that the study was "the most comprehensive ever conducted on the movements of Greenland's glaciers, according to an August 21, 2006 article in Agence France-Presse. "Seventy percent of the glaciers have been shrinking regularly since the end of the 1880's," Yde explained. [EPW Blog note: 80% of man-made CO2 emissions occurred after 1940. Niels Tvis Knudsen of Aarhus University co-authored the paper.

2) A 2006 study by a team of scientists led by Petr Chylek of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Space and Remote Sensing Sciences found the rate of warming in 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than that in 1995-2005, suggesting carbon dioxide `could not be the cause' of warming.

"We find that the current Greenland warming is not unprecedented in recent Greenland history. Temperature increases in the two warming periods (1920-1930 and 1995-2005) are of similar magnitude, however the rate of warming in 1920-1930 was about 50% higher than that in 1995-2005," the abstract of the study read.

The peer-reviewed study, which was published in the June 13, 2006 Geophysical Research Letters, found that after a warm 2003 on the southeastern coast of Greenland, "the years 2004 and 2005 were closer to normal being well below temperatures reached in the 1930's and 1940's." The study further continued, "Almost all post-1955 temperature averages at Greenland stations are lower (colder climate) than the (1881-1955) temperature average."

In addition, the Chylek led study explained, "Although there has been a considerable temperature increase during the last decade (1995 to 2005) a similar increase and at a faster rate occurred during the early part of the 20th century (1920 to 1930) when carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases could not be a cause. The Greenland warming of 1920-1930 demonstrates that a high concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is not a necessary condition for a period of warming to arise. The observed 1995-2005 temperature increase seems to be within natural variability of Greenland climate. A general increase in solar activity [Scafetta and West, 2006] since 1990's can be a contributing factor as well as the sea surface temperature changes of tropical ocean [Hoerling et al., 2001]."

"To summarize, we find no direct evidence to support the claims that the Greenland ice sheet is melting due to increased temperature caused by increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide." The co-authors of the study were M.K. Dubey of Los Alamos National Laboratory and G. Lesins, Dalhousie University in Canada.

3) An October 2005 study in the journal Science found Greenland's higher elevation interior ice sheet growing while lower elevations ice is thinning. According to a November 8, 2005 article in European Research, "An international team of climatologists and oceanographers, led by the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center (NERSC) in Norway, estimates that Greenland's interior ice sheet has grown, on average, 6cm per year in areas above 1 500m between 1992 and 2003." Lead author, Ola M. Johannessen of NERSC "says the sheet growth is due to increased snowfall brought about by variability in regional atmospheric circulation, or the so-called North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)," according to the article.

4) A February 8, 2007 peer-reviewed paper published in Science found two of Greenland's largest glaciers have "suddenly slowed, bringing the rate of melting last year down to near the previous rate," according to the New York Times blog (2-8-07). The report found that the Kangerdlugssuaq glacier's "average thinning over the glacier during the summer of 2006 declined to near zero, with some apparent thickening in areas on the main trunk." (LINK) University of Washington's Applied Physics Laboratory researcher Ian Howat, the lead author of the report, explained "Greenland was about as warm or warmer in the 1930's and 40's, and many of the glaciers were smaller than they are now." "However, it does suggest that large variations in ice sheet dynamics can occur from natural climate variability," Howat, also a researcher with the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center, explained. "Special care must be taken in how these and other mass-loss estimates are evaluated, particularly when extrapolating into the future because short-term spikes could yield erroneous long term trends," Howat cautioned.

5) A July 6, 2007 study published in the journal Science about Greenland by an international team of scientists found DNA "evidence that suggests the frozen shield covering the immense island survived the Earth's last period of global warming," according to a Boston Globe article. (6-6-07) According to the article, the study indicates "Greenland's ice may be less susceptible to the massive meltdown predicted by computer models of climate change, the main author (Eske Willerslev, professor of evolutionary biology at University of Copenhagen) said in an interview. "This may have implications for how the ice sheets respond to global warming. They may withstand rising temperatures," Willerslev said. The article explained, "The discovery of organic matter in ice dating from half -a-million years ago offers evidence that the Greenland ice sheet remained frozen even during the Earth's last `interglacial period' - some 120,000 years ago - when average temperatures were 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are now." Willerslev addressed scary computer model predictions of a massive Greenland melt. "[The study] suggests a problem with [computer] models" that predict melting ice from Greenland could drown cities and destroy civilizations, Willerslev said. The study found "Greenland really was green, before Ice Age glaciers enshrouded vast swaths of the Northern Hemisphere.somewhere between 450,000 and 800,000 years ago," according to the article.

6) Climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaels of University of Virginia and the Virginia State climatologist wrote the scenario promoted by former Vice President Al Gore and others showing Greenland's ice melting and raising sea levels by 20 feet is not supported anywhere in scientific literature, not even by the United Nations. "Where is the support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)] Policymakers Summary from the United Nations. Under the [IPCC's] medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore's film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent," Michaels wrote in a February 23, 2007 article. "According to satellite data published in [the journal] Science in November 2005," Michaels wrote, "Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century." "Nowhere in the traditionally [peer-reviewed] refereed scientific literature do we find any support for Gore's [Greenland melt] hypothesis," Michaels concluded.

7) Geologist Morten Hald, an Arctic expert at of the University of Tromso in Norway has also questioned the reliability of computer models predicting a melting Arctic. The main problem is that these models are often based on relatively new climate data. The thermometer has only been in existence for 150 years and information on temperature which is 150 years old does not capture the large natural changes," Hald, who is participating with a Norwegian national team in Arctic climate research, said in a May 18, 2007 article. The article continued, "Professor Hald believes the models which are utilized to make prognoses about the future climate changes consider paleoclimate only to a minor degree." "Studies of warm periods in the past, like during the Stone Ages can provide valuable knowledge to understand and tackle the warmer climate in the future," Hald explained.

8) Polar expert Ivan Frolov, the head of Russia's Science and Research Institute of Arctic and Antarctic Regions, said atmospheric temperature would have to much higher to make continental glaciers melt. "Many hundred years or 20-30 degree temperature rise would have made glaciers melt," Frolov said in a December 14, 2006 Russian news article. Frolov noted that currently Greenland's and Antarctic glaciers have the tendency to grow. The article explained, "Frolov says cooling and warming periods are common for our planet - temperature fluctuations amounted to 10-12 degrees. However, such fluctuations haven't caused glaciers to melt. Thus, we shouldn't be afraid they melt today."

9) In addition, current climate fears tends to ignore the fact that the Vikings arrived in Greenland around 1000 A.D. and found it to be habitable settlement that they farmed for hundreds of years. A 2003 Harvard University study found the Earth was warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period from about 800 to 1300 A.D. without modern SUV's or man-made CO2 emissions. The Vikings abandoned Greenland when the Little Ice Age took hold.

10) Another problem for predictions of catastrophic sea level rise due to polar ice melt is Antarctica is not cooperating with the man-made catastrophic global warming models. "A new report on climate over the world's southernmost continent shows that temperatures during the late 20th century did not climb as had been predicted by many global climate models," reads the February 15, 2007 press release announcing the findings of David Bromwich, professor of professor of atmospheric sciences in the Department of Geography, and researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University. (See: Antarctic temperatures disagree with climate model predictions)

"It's hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now," Bromwich explained. The release explains that Bromwich's research team found "no increase in precipitation over Antarctica in the last 50 years. Most models predict that both precipitation and temperature will increase over Antarctica with a warming of the planet."

Top UN Scientist Explains Why Climate Models Predictions Are Failing

Recently, a top UN scientist publicly conceded that climate computer model predictions are not so reliable after all. Dr. Jim Renwick, a lead author of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, admitted to the New Zealand Herald in June 2007, "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well."

A leading scientific skeptic of global warming fears, Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, former CEO of the Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, took the critique of climate models that predict future doom a step further. Tennekes wrote on February 28, 2007, "I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society."

Ivy League geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack of the University of Pennsylvania noted "for most of Earth's history, the globe has been warmer than it has been for the last 200 years. It has rarely been cooler," Giegengack said according to a February 2007 article in Philadelphia Magazine. The article continued, "[Giegengack] says carbon dioxide doesn't control global temperature, and certainly not in a direct linear way."

Climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball explained that one of the reasons climate models fail is because they overestimate the warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. Ball described how CO2 stabilizes in the atmosphere and its warming impact diminishes. "Even if CO2 concentration doubles or triples, the effect on temperature would be minimal. The relationship between temperature and CO2 is like painting a window black to block sunlight. The first coat blocks most of the light. Second and third coats reduce very little more. Current CO2 levels are like the first coat of black paint," Ball explained in a June 6, 2007 article in Canada Free Press.

New data is revealing what may perhaps be the ultimate inconvenient truth for climate doomsayers: Global warming stopped in 1998.

Dr. Nigel Calder, co-author with physicist Henrik Svensmark of the 2007 book "The Chilling Stars: A New Theory on Climate Change," explained in July 2007:

"In reality, global temperatures have stopped rising. Data for both the surface and the lower air show no warming since 1999. That makes no sense by the hypothesis of global warming driven mainly by CO2, because the amount of CO2 in the air has gone on increasing. But the fact that the Sun is beginning to neglect its climatic duty - of battling away the cosmic rays that come from `the chilling stars' - fits beautifully with this apparent end of global warming."

Perhaps the conversion of many former scientists from believers in man-made global warming to skeptics and the new peer-reviewed research is why so many proponents of a climatic doom have resorted to threats and intimidation in attempting to silence skeptics. (See: EPA EPA to Probe E-mail Threatening to `Destroy' Career of Climate Skeptic)

One final note: To many residents of Greenland, a little warming may not be that bad. A June 7, 2007 Washington Post article detailed how Greenland's residents were "cheering' on warming. "I can keep the sheep out two weeks longer to feed in hills in the autumn. And I can grow more hay. The sheep get fatter," said one resident.

Source





DEEP GREEN STILL NOT GREEN ENOUGH IN BRITAIN

Once again we see that there's no such thing as a happy Greenie

In an age obsessed with environmental sustainability, Tony Wrench and his partner Jane Faith would appear to be beyond reproach. Their eco-home was made with local materials, its electricity supplied by solar and wind power and its heat kept in by a turf roof and straw insulation. They compost their sewage using a reed bed and make do without a fridge or washing machine. But the couple have been told to demolish their beloved home - because it isn't green enough.

The single-room roundhouse, based on a Celtic layout, is set in a protected part of the Pembrokeshire coast and has been refused planning permission because it "failed to make a positive environmental impact". The couple, who grow their own food and make a modest living from music and woodcraft, feel they are being victimised despite doing more than most to reduce their carbon footprint. The Hobbit House, as locals in Brithdir Mawr, near Newport, have dubbed it, is destined for demolition unless given a last-minute reprieve by the Welsh Assembly.

"You get the feeling that it does not matter what you do, they will always say `no'," Mr Wrench said. "We are doing everything we possibly can to reduce our carbon footprint. It is about as low as we can get and it demonstrates that an environmentally sustainable lifestyle is possible." He added: "This house is so beautiful to be in, and the garden so fruitful and bursting with life of all kinds, that I still cannot believe that in a world of such environmental spoilation and with spreading patches of such ugliness, there are still people paid to work on having this home demolished. What low impact proposal will ever withstand this level of nit-picking?" said Mr Wrench, a wood turner.

The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority ruled that the dwelling would have a negative impact on dormice, bats and invertebrates. An ecologist's report concluded that if permission were granted, the home would cause, "severe degradation of the National Park landscape".

Mr Wrench, 61, plans to appeal against the decision, the latest step in a ten-year legal battle. He spent 3,000 pounds building the home a decade ago using local materials and insulating it with straw. A study confirmed that their carbon footprint was just a fraction of the national average, but the park authority says that is still not good enough.

Ifor Jones, the authority's head of conservation, admitted that the rules were strict, but said that they applied to everyone. He said: "Yes, we do have high hurdles, but it is important that any development enhances the environment, rather than detracts from it. In this instance the location of the roundhouse and vegetable garden within an area of semi-natural vegetation, comprising woodland edge and unimproved wet grassland, is considered to have had negative impacts."

Source





Environmentalist population growing out of control

Another lofty lecture for us peasants reported below. Post lifted from Bishop Hill. See the original for links

A couple of weeks ago a body calling itself the Optimum Population Trust called for families in the UK to limit themselves to a single child. The Times had this to say:

Britain's birthrate, growing at its fastest for nearly 30 years - at 1.87 children per couple - is, says the author of its report, Professor John Guillebaud, an environmental liability. "Each new UK birth, through the inevitable resource consumption and pollution that UK affluence generates, is responsible for about 160 times as much climate-related environmental damage as a new birth in Ethiopia."

Professor Guillebaud has three children. As does Sir Crispin Tickell, a patron of the Trust. The majority of the other patrons, and Prof Guillebaud's co-chair, Val Stevens, have two children each.




Just Drill, Baby: Congress's energy policies would hinder America's economy

America's domestic oil production is declining, importation of oil is rising, and gasoline is more expensive. The government's Energy Information Administration reports that U.S. crude oil field production declined to 1.9 billion barrels in 2005 from 3.5 billion in 1970, and the share of our oil that is imported has increased to 60% from 27% in 1985. The price of gasoline has risen to $3.02 this month from $2 in today's dollars in 1985.

Washington politicians will tell you this is an "energy crisis," but America's energy challenges are far more political than substantive. First, we are not running out of oil. In 1920 it was estimated that the world supply of oil was 60 billion barrels. By 1950 it was up to 600 billion, and by 1990 to two trillion. In 2000 the world supply of oil was estimated to be three trillion barrels.

The U.S. has substantial supplies of oil and gas that could be accessed if lawmakers would allow it, but they frequently don't. A National Petroleum Council study released last week reports that 40 billion barrels of America's "recoverable oil reserves are off limits or are subject to significant lease restrictions"--half inshore and half offshore--and similar restrictions apply to more than 250 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (We consume about 22 trillion cubic feet a year.)

Access to the 10 billion barrels of oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve has been prohibited for decades. Some 85 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas exist on the Outer Continental Shelf, but a month ago the House again, as it did last year, voted down an amendment that would have allowed the expansion of coastal drilling for oil and natural gas. All of which leaves the U.S. as the only nation in the world that has forbidden access to significant sources of domestic energy supplies.

Then the Senate voted in June to mandate a reduction in projected future oil usage of 10 million barrels a day, or 35%, which, since our domestic oil production is declining, means less imports. In other words, Congress wants to block drilling for more American oil while at the same time blocking the importation of oil--not a rational energy policy.

On the other side of the coin is the need for more refineries to produce the oil products we need: gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and plastics. Twenty-five years ago we had 254 oil refineries; today there are just 145 (although they are a bit more productive) since we haven't built a new refinery in America for 30 years.

Then there is nuclear power, America's largest pollution-free source of energy. One hundred four nuclear plants supply about 20% of our electricity, and we could build many more. As President Bush pointed out two weeks ago, "Our country has not ordered a new nuclear power plant since the 1970s." He recommends that we build three new nuclear plants a year to meet our energy needs. But new nuclear plants have been continually opposed by the liberal establishment that now controls Congress.

Finally, there is coal, the second-largest supplier of world energy after oil. At current consumption levels, America has more than a 100-year supply of it, but mining is difficult and burning it emits significant carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Proposed controls and fees on carbon dioxide emissions are already significantly reducing the use of coal. Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that two dozen of the 150 new coal-fired electrical plants planned to be built have recently been cancelled.

Oil, natural gas and nuclear power are the indispensable energy resources to insure the prosperity of America's economy. But that is not what the congressional leadership thinks. So if we mustn't drill offshore for oil or natural gas, or build nuclear power plants, what is the politically correct action Congress intends to take?

Increasing ethanol subsidies for farmers is at the top of the list. Ethanol is a politically hot energy substance produced from crops like corn, soybeans, sunflowers and switch grass. Current law requires 7.5 billion gallons to be produced by 2012; the new Senate bill would increase that to 36 billion by 2022.

But ethanol is not a good gasoline substitute. It takes some seven gallons of oil to produce eight gallons of corn-based ethanol--diesel fuel for the tractors to plant and harvest the corn, pesticides to protect it, and fuel for trucks to transport the ethanol around the country. So there is not much energy gain, nor with all the gasoline involved does it help with global warming by reducing carbon dioxide emissions. And ethanol yields one-third less energy per gallon than gasoline, so that mileage per gallon of ethanol-blended auto fuel is less than gasoline mileage.

Ethanol is a politically popular subsidized product. Producers get a 51-cent-a-gallon subsidy and are protected from international ethanol imports by a 2.5% tariff and an ethanol import duty of 54 cents a gallon. These subsidies have brought more than 100 American ethanol refineries into operation, and another six dozen are going to be built, which has nearly doubled the price of corn, raised the cost of beef and other corn-fed livestock, and increased the cost of milk and corn syrup for soft-drink manufacturers.

Then there are all the other energy ideas Congress wishes to adopt--better energy efficiency for washers, driers, boilers, motors and refrigerators; greater fuel efficiency for cars; and more use of wind, solar and geothermal power generation. Good ideas all--especially more fuel-efficient automobiles--but not substantively or immediately very helpful in meeting the challenge of increasing America's energy supplies to keep our economy, jobs and prosperity increasing.

To do that we must build many more nuclear power plants and increase our drilling for oil and gas. The NPC report says it takes 15 to 20 years from exploration until production begins, and it costs $3 billion to build an average 120,000-barrel-a-day oil refinery. That is just the opposite of the current congressional policy of reducing oil use, blocking access to existing domestic oil reserves, not increasing nuclear power generation, and touting ethanol as another subsidy for farmers.

Source




Hurricanes: Another Royal Society beatup

They should be renamed the Propaganda Society. There's been a real desperation to link hurricanes with global warming but the facts have been pesky. But they keep trying

A study has found about twice as many Atlantic hurricanes form each year on average than a century ago, largely as a result of greenhouse warming. It also notes the proportion of major hurricanes to less intense systems has increased significantly. The study concludes that warmer seas and altered wind patterns are increasing the number of tropical systems. That differs from previous studies, which assert global warming is boosting the strength of hurricanes, but not necessarily the frequency. "Even a quiet year by today's standards would be considered normal or slightly active compared to the average year in the early part of the 20th century," said co-author Greg Holland, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

The study was due to be published online late yesterday by the Royal Society of London, Britain's leading academy of science. Based on a statistical analysis, it shows that from 1900 to 1930 an average of six tropical systems formed in the Atlantic, including four hurricanes and two tropical storms. From 1930 to 1940, that increased to an average of 10 systems a year, including five hurricanes and five tropical storms. And from 1995 to 2005, that climbed to 15 systems, including eight hurricanes and seven tropical storms. Those increases correlate with sea surface temperatures, which have risen about 1.3C in the past 100 years, the study says.

Not everyone agrees with its findings. Many scientists say a natural cycle of warm waters in the Atlantic accounts for the surge in hurricanes since 1995. One argument against global warming fuelling more hurricanes is that prior to 1970, many storms were undetected, meaning the level of tropical activity could have been just as intense in previous decades. That is because 1970 was the first year satellites were used to monitor the globe. Even more hurricanes were probably missed prior to 1944, when hurricane-hunter aircraft were first dispatched to investigate storms.

But Dr Holland and co-author Peter Webster, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, dispute that incomplete data records alone explain the sharp increase in tropical activity during the three time periods they studied since 1900. They say tropical storm activity has increased by about 50 per cent from period to period, which they claim negates the natural cycle theory. "These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes," Dr Holland said.

Source

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film but it is in fact an absolute gift to climate atheists. What the paper says was of course all well-known already but the concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years really is invaluable. And the one fact that the paper documents so well -- that solar output is on the downturn -- is also hilarious, given its source. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards.

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