EARTH RELIGION DISPLACES THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST

The founder of the faith focused all his attention on salvation. It seems a mite strange that all those who claim to follow him do not focus similarly: "My Kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36)

The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) is no longer the organization it was only a few years ago. Its Washington office has been trending green. Risk Policy Report wrote on October 25 that NAE had been planning soon to release a policy statement on global warming that would call for mandatory greenhouse gas controls. There is now more reason to hope that reason and NAE traditional values - rather than unproven science - will win the day.

NAE president, the Reverend Ted Haggard, commented in March 2005 to Laurie Goodstein, a reporter for the New York Times: "The question is, `Will evangelicals make a difference?' and the answer is, `The Senate thinks so.' We do represent 30 million people, and we can mobilize them if we have to."

Months earlier, NAE had issued "For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility," which included a plank on "creation care." It emphasized that government must fight "environmental degradation" and it drew the signatures from many evangelical leaders. Richard Cizik, NAE Vice President for Government Affairs, cited a biblical passage, Genesis 2:15, which states "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." He has been active in promoting a greener NAE stance on global warming and other environmental issues.

According to a recent article by New York Times reporter Michael Janofsky, the draft of the policy statement in support of a global warming policy favored by greens was supposed to be reviewed by NAE leadership. The NAE leadership vote, had it been unanimous in support of the draft, was to have been issued as a policy statement. If only a majority voted in support, it would have been released but only as "an evangelical statement on climate change."

NAE will be out of step with many leaders in the religious community if it supports mandatory reductions in greenhouse emissions. A new coalition called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA) has a membership that includes prominent leaders and thinkers in the Evangelical, Catholic and Jewish Faiths. The Reverend Dr. D. James Kennedy, president of Coral Ridge Ministries, is a member of the Advisory Council. Others include Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition; Father Richard John Neuhaus, president of the Institute on Religion & Public Life; Father Robert A. Sirico, president of the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty; and Dr. Marvin Olasky, professor of journalism and history at the University of Texas, Austin.

ISA maintains that too many religious leaders in recent years have let their desire to do good trample a clear-headed understanding of how, through the Judeo-Christian tradition, we are to relate to nature. ISA advisers were among those who issued the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship in April 2000 to clarify the relationship between man and his environment. Here are excerpts that distinguish between legitimate and false concerns regarding the environment:

While some environmental concerns are well founded and serious, others are without foundation or greatly exaggerated. Some well-founded concerns focus on human health problems in the developing world arising from inadequate sanitation, widespread use of primitive biomass fuels like wood and dung, and primitive agricultural, industrial, and commercial practices; distorted resource consumption patterns driven by perverse economic incentives; and improper disposal of nuclear and other hazardous wastes in nations lacking adequate regulatory and legal safeguards.

The problems cited above are not global in scope but can be dealt with through practical policies, including the use of market incentives to upgrade facilities and technologies. The fact is that global warming is a highly speculative theory and the draconian solutions advocated by environmentalists stand to have an adverse impact on the economies of the developed world. In short, the alarmism by the greens is an even greater threat to the economic security of the world than global warming. The Cornwall Declaration reminds us:

"Public policies to combat exaggerated risks can dangerously delay or reverse the economic development necessary to improve not only human life but also human stewardship of the environment. The poor, who are most often citizens of developing nations, are often forced to suffer in poverty with its attendant high rates of malnutrition, disease, and mortality; as a consequence, they are often the most injured by such misguided, though well-intended, policies.

The Cornwall Declaration concludes by saying its signers aspire to a world in which "widespread economic freedom" makes available more environmentally sound technologies, products and practices. Were that to occur, the world's population and its environment would be mutual beneficiaries.

The intent of the supporters of the Kyoto Treaty on global warming, which mandates emissions controls, is absolutely contrary to the intent of the Cornwall Declaration. Margot Wallstrom, European Union (EU) Commissioner for the Environment, has said: "[Global warming] is not a simple environmental issue where you can say it is an issue where scientists are not unanimous. This is about international relations, this is about economy, about trying to create a level playing field for big business throughout the world. You have to understand what is at stake and that is why it is serious."

Indeed, our country's adherence to the Kyoto Treaty would choke our economic engine, according to a study by Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, which is cited by Senator James M. Inhofe in a booklet, "The Facts and Science of Climate Change," issued by the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, a private consulting firm the founders of which were professors at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, estimates that implementation of the Kyoto Treaty would cost 2.4 million jobs; our country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) would be reduced by 3.2 percent; prices would rise for food, housing, heating.

A letter signed by prominent evangelical leaders will soon be sent urging NAE to refrain from taking any position on global warming. Many evangelicals believe there is no consensus on the climate issues and that NAE should instead focus on major issues upon which there is widespread Christian agreement - such as abortion, abstinence and AIDS prevention. At the same time ISA will work to galvanize prominent Jewish, Protestant and Catholic leaders to advocate the sound environmental principles of the Cornwall Declaration. I am pleased to say that Kyle Fisk, NAE executive administrator, called me recently and indicated his organization's willingness to cause NAE to refrain from issuing the global warming statement.

However, there is a vociferous and unrelenting faction within the evangelical community more concerned with global warming than upholding the sanctity of life and traditional marriage and addressing other truly important moral issues. They will not relent in their efforts, particularly if Reverend Haggard tries to reinstate NAE on a proper course in which it refrains from endorsing speculative science in regard to global warming and concentrates its efforts on the moral issues that most of its leading members view to be most important from biblical and moral perspectives.

Liberal foundations have been spending millions of dollars to cause people of deep faith - Jews and Christians - to become sidetracked from addressing important moral issues, diverting resources toward addressing a problem of science that is highly speculative and has divided the scientific community. Their effort had started to permeate the Washington leadership of a prominent evangelical organization.

Responsible leaders and the grassroots must start campaigning to assure that the leftward drift is completely halted and that its Washington leadership respects the wishes and values of the churches and congregations outside the Beltway. Let's hope the grassroots becomes motivated to halt this leftward drift on global warming and other issues. Otherwise we will be a much poorer nation both spiritually and materially.

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Bill Gates invests in ethanol

Smart move

Bill Gates seems to want a piece of the action when it comes to renewable energy. The billionaire's investment company, Cascade Investment, has agreed to invest $84 million in Pacific Ethanol which will help it finance construction of several planned fuel-additive plants on the West Coast. Cascade's investment gives Gates a 27% stake in Pacific Ethanol. Gates will be sharing the company with petroleum distributor SC Fuels, which owns the majority stake in the ethanol producer and is one of its biggest customers. It could be a lucrative investment, since federal law requires that the U.S. nearly doubles the amount of ethanol it uses annually to 7.5 billion in 2012 from 4 billion gallons in 2006.

More here

For background on ethanol as a solution to the "peak oil" non-problem, see here




Hostile Takeover of Fox News

AIM comments:

While Bob Woodward's belated acknowledgement of a secret source in the CIA leak case has attracted a lot of attention and criticism, another journalism scandal has come and seemingly gone involving the Fox News Channel (FNC). The "fair and balanced" network that usually gives conservatives a fair shake was taken over by radical environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr. and his liberal-left allies. Kennedy, a liberal lawyer and Democratic Party activist, became a "special correspondent" for an FNC special program on global warming that was so extreme as to be laughable. Kennedy was a star in the show.

This was new territory for FNC, which is frequently accused of being a propaganda organ of the Republican Party. Kennedy has written a book accusing President Bush of "crimes against nature" and "hijacking our democracy." He calls Bush "the most corrupt and immoral President that we have had in American history" and says that Bush policies spawned Hurricane Katrina. He implies that the Bush Administration is fascist or Nazi-like. Kennedy, who had previously criticized Fox News and other "right-wing media" for misinforming the American people on critical public policy issues, has apparently changed his opinion. But what is behind FNC giving a platform to Kennedy and his ilk?

It was almost the reverse of the situation decades ago when conservative Senator Jesse Helms was reported to be interested in taking over CBS News through a shareholder revolt and becoming Dan Rather's boss. That never happened, of course. In this case, the liberal-left managed to take over FNC, at least on a temporary basis, with the connivance of FNC chairman Roger Ailes, a long-time Republican. This astonishing media coup was greeted with cheers on the liberal-left while most conservatives remained silent, apparently afraid to say anything for fear of offending Ailes and getting blacklisted from future appearances on FNC.

At Accuracy in Media, where our founder Reed Irvine taught us to pursue truth no matter where it leads, the truth in this bizarre case has to be told. FNC's November 13 program on global warming, "The Heat is On," was a piece of junk_or more specifically, junk science. Indeed, Steven Milloy, publisher of junkscience.com, told AIM, "I am disappointed that almost no effort was made to qualify, balance and challenge the wild assertions of manmade catastrophic global warming. Even more disappointing was the program's effort to dismiss, diminish and denigrate those who question global warming alarmism." Milloy is being kind. The program was one-sided to the point of being comical. Viewers expecting a serious treatment of the issue found FNC offering up actors such as Alan Alda, dressed up in a tuxedo at a Hollywood premier, offering their thoughts on global warming as if they were "experts" on science, technology and energy issues.

Milloy urged the program's viewers to check out climatologist Pat Michaels' review of the program on JunkScience.com. Michaels said the show was "more one-sided than anything I've seen in the entire sad history of climate change journalism." Milloy has contributed articles to the Fox News website that make mincemeat of some of the arguments that were made in favor of man-made global warming that peppered the FNC program. For example, an October 13 Milloy piece, "What Arctic Warming?," completely undermined the theory, which was stated as fact in the program, that human activity is melting the polar regions.

Marc Morano, a guest on FNC when he exposes the left, didn't get any invitations to go back on the network when he reported on CNSNews.com that FNC Chairman Ailes had approved the one-sided program after Kennedy "dragged" him to a lecture by former Vice President Al Gore on the topic. When asked about this, Ailes was unavailable for comment, Morano reported.

In advance of the show, the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) sent a letter to Ailes pleading for fair and balanced treatment of the issue. While the host for the special, Rick Folbaum, had written that "the vast majority of the scientific community says we're witnessing a unique and troubling kind of climate change" and that "no one can argue with this," CEI said that "Many scientists have gone on record disputing this, many of whom are readily available to tell you that science does not support global warming alarmism, and that no one can credibly predict climate change over the next century." A "disclaimer" was read before the show by a Fox News anchor justifying its slanted nature. She said, "Tonight we are presenting "The Heat is On." You'll hear primarily from those experts and citizens who believe that global warming is a crisis. Many people disagree with that statement. We will continue to investigate the science and hear from others in future Fox programming."

"The earth is sending out a desperate alarm," is how Folbaum began the program. The statement was made as viewers heard the "tick, tick, tick" of a loud clock, as if we were running out of time to save Mother Earth. Viewers saw thick smoke billowing from industrial smokestacks, a dead fish and traffic jams. It went from bad to worse. As noted by Dr. Michael R. Fox, who has 40 years of experience in the energy field, one of the silliest parts of the program was when FNC put forward an Indy race car driver as an energy expert. The driver favors the use of ethanol for race cars. "It's well known among energy experts that in most cases ethanol is NOT a net source of energy," Dr. Fox commented. "The reason for this is that it requires a great deal of energy to make a gallon of ethanol. In fact, it requires more energy to make a gallon of ethanol than can be obtained from burning the gallon of ethanol. Taken in its entirety, an ethanol fuel system is a net energy consumer." Near the end, Folbaum provided a free commercial for a radical environmental group led by Laurie David, a "global warming activist," and plugged her website.

But not only was the show biased, Kennedy was on FNC the day before the airing of the program to attack scientists who don't buy into his beliefs as "biostitutes." This smear was a clever play on the word "prostitute," suggesting that those opposing the Kennedy view have been paid off. The "fair and balanced" network had no one on to rebut Kennedy.

Dr. Fox asked, ".what is it about the green lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, which Fox News finds so appealing? Is he an energy expert? Or is he just a noisy Kennedy lawyer, unskilled in physics, chemistry, and engineering? And what is it about Laurie David, the self-appointed energy expert that Fox News found so appealing? What do these people know about climate, energy, and how energy is made, converted, and transported? What are their qualifications, and did Fox News look for anyone more qualified?"

Even more ridiculous, FNC offered Jeffrey Nachmanoff as an expert. He is the screenwriter behind "The Day After Tomorrow," the Hollywood production that depicts global warming producing tidal waves that envelop New York City. Folbaum said Nachmanoff was "alarmed by the message of his own movie" and now saves energy by installing high-efficiency light bulbs in his home.

Folbaum offered the most ridiculous comments of all, saying at the end of the slanted show that FNC was still fair and balanced. "It is our position here at Fox News to examine issues fairly and openly," he claimed. "We do not and will not advocate any position to our viewers. We report .You decide."

There has to be some rational explanation of what happened here. Did FNC chairman Ailes really find Al Gore persuasive? That's hard to believe. Or was putting on the program a clever strategy by Ailes? Did he realize that the environmentalists would make fools of themselves by going to extremes if he let them have the run of the network? The trouble with this theory, of course, is that the credibility of FNC was also damaged in the process.

Some observers think FNC turned its airtime over to Kennedy because he may be in a position to help or hurt them. It has been reported that Kennedy wants to run for high office in New York, where FNC parent News Corporation is based. FNC is said to be cozying up to New York Senator Hillary Clinton for the same reason.

Source

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

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

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

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NUKES GET THE NOD IN BRITAIN!

Tony Blair is rapidly moving from Greenie to realist while denying, of course, that he is doing any such thing

Britain will start building new civil nuclear power stations under plans backed by Tony Blair, The Times has learnt. Less than two years after a government paper called nuclear power an unattractive option, the Prime Minister has become convinced that building nuclear power stations is the only way to secure energy needs and meet obligations to reduce carbon emissions. In a controversial move, he wants planning procedures to be quickened so that the first stations could be under construction within ten years, far earlier than expected, advisers have told The Times.

After first promising a decision on new stations by the end of this Parliament, then by the end of next year, Mr Blair will face down critics and set up a government review within the next two weeks, asking it to reach conclusions by the early summer.

The stations would be built on existing sites in the hope of reducing public opposition and swifter planning and building procedures. They would involve the latest technology expected to be adopted soon in France and the US. Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary and the Cabinet's leading opponent of nuclear power, hinted yesterday that even she would back the move. In an interview with the BBC's Politics Show, she said that, although there were many problems with nuclear power, "I've always accepted we can't afford to close the door on nuclear."

But Mr Blair, who has been given private preliminary studies, believes that all the arguments point to nuclear power and has effectively made up his mind, according to authoritative sources. His decision is a remarkable U-turn.

The review, though headed by a senior figure from the Trade and Industry Department, will report to the Prime Minister and Alan Johnson, the Industry Secretary, and contain members from other departments and, crucially, from the Downing Street strategy unit. Critics will suspect that membership will be chosen to ensure a different conclusion to the last energy White Paper in 2003.

Britain's 12 nuclear power stations provide 22 per cent of the electricity. Unless they are replaced there will only be three stations left by 2020. Studies prepared for Mr Blair by Sir David King, his chief scientific adviser, and other advisers have convinced him that renewable forms of energy, such as wind and wave power, cannot fill the gap. As coal-fired and nuclear stations close they will have to be replaced by gas-fired electricity stations and Britain will soon become a net gas importer.

Mr Blair's advisers maintain that the debate should not be seen as a competition between nuclear power and "renewables", which the Government is committed to boosting.

The nuclear option is unlikely to be opposed by the Conservatives. David Willetts, the Shadow Industry Secretary, said at the party conference: "We must make the case for civil nuclear power to tackle the energy crisis with least damage to the environment.

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THE NUCLEAR NETTLE: LEADING ARTICLE FROM THE TIMES

Britain has, on the whole, been lucky with energy. North Sea oil and gas have helped provide the vast majority of power needs. This happy state has led many to bury their heads in the sand when it comes to future requirements. But if ever there was a time to scan the horizon, it is now.

North Sea energy stocks are dwindling. Oil prices have been volatile. Britain's nuclear and coal-fired plants are due for increasingly rapid decommissioning. And all this at a time when domestic energy demand is projected to rise just as Britain tries to cut its carbon emissions to those levels agreed at Kyoto. It is therefore encouraging that, as we report today, the government is at last prepared to grasp the nuclear nettle.

Nuclear energy is an emotive subject, and it was politically understandable, though democratically lamentable, that the Prime Minister wanted to avoid it until after this year's general election. But, stripped of emotion, the position is stark. Britain's 12 ageing nuclear power stations provide a fifth of the country's energy needs. Yet all but one will be out of business by 2023. Many coal-fired plants, which produce another 30 per cent, fall foul of Brussels rules on clean air and will also be shutting down over the next two decades. By then, Britain will need to find 50 gigawatts of new capacity. Given the lead time for any successor plants to be designed, approved and phased in, decisions need to be made in the next year or two.

One of the looming problems for the Government is self-made. It has allowed the vacuum over its nuclear policy to be filled by hopes for the possibilities of wind power and other renewables that are bit-part players. Those who believe giant turbines can close the energy gap are thinking with their hearts rather than their heads. Wind power, by definition, depends on the wind blowing not too weak and not too strong. Wind farms run well below their capacity, (around 15 per cent in Germany). And they are unlikely even to be up to the job of providing 10 per cent of our electricity by 2020, the Government's target.

There will inevitably be an ugly political battle, but it is winnable. The ace is climate change. For those concerned about global warming, nuclear power is the logical step. It is clean, carbon-free, and it is relatively cheap - up to a third of the price of fossil fuels and nearly half the price of wind power per kilowatt-hour. New pressurised water reactors produce a tenth of the waste of the current reactors, (though what to do with that waste needs to be addressed, as does the security of any new plants, given the new terrorist threat.) But shut-down technology should make another Chernobyl disaster impossible. If new reactors are sited at current power stations, planning battles with local communities will be minimised.

Mr Blair should continue to encourage renewable sources. The potential of wave power and tidal waters should be explored; and there must be much more research into making the storage of solar energy more efficient - Sharp, the Japanese electronics company, claims to be close to a breakthrough in this area. But in the meantime he should ask the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate to begin examining existing nuclear sites for future use. Nuclear reactors may not be what Mr Blair has in mind when he thinks of his legacy. But the next generation would thank him for this initiative.

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GOOD SENSE ABOUT NUKES FROM FINLAND

AMID the frosty silver birches and firs of Olkiluoto island, off the west coast of Finland, the foundation pillars of one of the most improbable stuctures in Europe are starting to rise. The tangle of steel wires and concrete pylons emerging from a four-hectare hole is the germ of the continent's first nuclear reactor to be started since the Chernobyl accident of 1986, which tore apart public confidence in the power of the atom.

Finland, among the countries worst affected by fallout from the stricken Soviet power station, seems an unlikely candidate to lead a revival of the nuclear age. Yet in a nation that boasts 1.5 million saunas - one for every four people - and a vast, electricity-hungry paper industry, energy issues have acquired a high political profile. The Finns are no longer content to rely on imported gas, oil and coal for their power, or to pump out more and more of the greenhouse gases that are anathema to their environmentally conscious traditions. The nuclear option, they decided after a two-year national debate, has become least worst way of generating electricity cheaply and reliably.

The result is Olkiluoto 3, the third nuclear plant to be built on the island and the country's fifth, for which the foundation stone was laid in September by Paavo Lipponen, the former Prime Minister. When the 1,600 megawatt station begins operations in 2009, it will supply up to 10 per cent of Finland's electricity.

The Finnish example is now being keenly studied by British politicians, in search of clues to swinging the public behind an industry that has struggled to shed a reputation for accidents, pollution and an addiction to subsidies. It proves that even a sceptical public can be won over to a nuclear future - but also demonstrates many of the hurdles that Britain will have to cross if the Government is to secure popular support for a new generation of nuclear power stations.

Finnish government officials and executives of TVO, the consortium of major energy users that commissioned Olkiluoto 3, agree it is unlikely that the plans would have been approved by parliament - by a narrow margin of 107 votes to 92 - had not several conditions been met. Some of these would present Britain with few problems. Like Finland, Britain has several existing nuclear sites, with both the national grid infrastructure to support new plants and a sympathetic local population who are used to living with atomic energy. Significant improvements in reactor design since Chernobyl have also helped. The 2 billion pound European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) model, is also designed to be fail safe. "If there is a problem, the reaction will stop," Vincent Hertault, the safety manager, said.

Perhaps the most important factor in Finland's decision, however, was that the nation has taken firm steps to resolve the problem of long-term storage of waste. An underground repository for low and intermediate-level waste is already operating 100 metres below the surface at Olkiluoto, and work has begun nearby on an even deeper facility for high-level waste. Deep underground disposal was accepted as the only option, with even Green MPs backing the plans when the Finnish parliament voted by 159-3 to approve the store.

The Finnish experience suggests that transparency, public debate and genuinely open minds in Government are vital if the case for nuclear power is to be made

Source





GLOBAL WARMING ON MARS AND PLUTO TOO

Those damned Plutonians and their SUVs!

"Astrophysicists are scratching their heads about what's happening on the sun and in our solar system. Why has this so-called "Solar Minimum" been so active? It should be quiet now with very few sunspots because this is supposed to be the low point of the Sun's 11-year-sunspot cycle. But this week, there was a sunspot called 822 that's 87,000 miles across - the size of the planet Jupiter! Could it erupt with more powerful X-flares as has happened the past few months. Big flares threaten all the broadcast, global positioning and military satellites that now orbit our planet. As I've reported before in Earthfiles, the sun is not "normal." Is it warming up? Earth's North Pole and Mars's South Pole are melting at a surprisingly rapid rate. Even far out Pluto seems to show some melting. Is the sun a bigger player in all this than originally thought?

In September, NASA reported new evidence from Mars Orbiters that "for three Martian summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars's South Pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress." The Martian South polar ice cap shrinking has been accelerating since 1999 at a "prodigious rate," according to Michael Malin, Principal Investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera. Dr. Malin said, "The images documenting changes from 1999 to 2005 suggest the Martian climate is presently warmer - and perhaps getting warmer still - than it was several decades or even centuries ago."

Scientists are not sure if the Sun is getting hotter and heating up the entire solar system, including Mars, the Earth and even Pluto. Could there be other independent forces on Mars and Pluto we don't know about that are heating up those planets? If the Sun is warming up, on top of the carbon dioxide blanket that modern industry has created around Earth, how much more heat could the Sun be adding?

In October, scientists at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, released a solar study in which they concluded: "The Sun might have minimally contributed about 10% to 30% of the 1980 to 2002 Earth global surface warming. Greenhouse gases would still give a contribution, but not so strong as was thought. We don't know what the Sun will do in the future."

Another scientist who is trying to figure out what the Sun is doing and what effect it's going to have on Earth and the solar system is Sallie Baliunas, Chair of the Science Advisory Board, at the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, D. C. Dr. Baliunas is also an astrophysicist at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This week I asked Dr. Baliunas about the Solar Minimum that has not been so minimum, and what's happening on Mars and Pluto?

Interview with Sallie Baliunas, Ph.D., Astrophysicist, Chair of the Science Advisory Board, George C. Marshall Institute, Washington, D. C.; and Professor, Harvard University Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts:

"We don't know why the Sun has been so peculiar in the past few years. This cycle has not been the (normal) rule, though. We've had tremendous amounts of flare activity down at solar minimum. Part of the problem is that we see the Sun through a very limited lens of short time scales. We've been only able to study the Sun in detail above the atmosphere of the Earth through the spacecraft era, so not more than 40 years. We know the sun varies on time scales of seconds to eons, to billions of years. And we don't have all those well defined.

WOULD YOU SAY RIGHT NOW, FROM YOUR POINT OF VIEW, THAT THE SUN IS ACTING ODDLY?

(laughs) That's an excellent question. I would say the Sun always acts odd because we have such limited knowledge about it. What is normal for the Sun? During the 17th Century, almost 400 years ago, the Sun's magnetic field output was extraordinarily low for almost a century. That happens every few centuries. Is that odd? But it's not rare. The Sun right now is probably averaging over several decades is the most active it's been in 400 years. Is that odd? Yes. Is it rare? Probably not. There are indications of the Sun's magnetism going back through time and maybe 800 to 1200 years ago, the Sun might have been more active. So, what's normal for the Sun? I don't know.

COULD IT EXPLAIN GLOBAL WARMING IN AND OF ITSELF?

How does that look against the temperature records? It matches up pretty well with the beginning of the 20th Century. But it does not match up so well now. The surface temperature (of Earth) seems to have risen a little more dramatically than the Sun has in recent decades. So, in terms of a straightforward link between the two, an association between the Sun and Earth, it looks like the Sun has not been the cause of most of the late 20th Century warming. It could have made a contribution.

We've measured the Sun directly and we measure its total energy output. That's been measured by satellites for about 25 years now. So we know the Sun's energy output has been increasing with the magnetic cycle. We know right now because we're in a low point in that 11 year cycle that the Sun has backed off a little bit in its energy. But it's going to be on the rise again.

Over 25 years, there is evidence from some researchers that suggest there has been a subtle rise in the background and that also might contribute to the amount of energy the Earth receives. But in terms of Mars, one of the polar caps is pulling back the ice. The solar cap is melting back and has done some interesting layering and shelving there that can be measured by the satellites we currently have on Mars. Mars has - it's not clear that Mars is responding very quickly to these changes on the Sun because we don't have enough detailed measurements of Mars to say so. Mars has warmed and cooled in the past. When we look back at pictures of Mars, we see that events that have gone on where it looks like river gullies with subsurface frozen ice melting, coming up to the surface and causing some valleys and rills on Mars.

Pluto - boy, it's hard to say what's going on there! Pluto is probably very little effected by the amount of radiation the Sun puts out. For one reason, it's so far away. For another reason, we just don't understand what's happening on Pluto. There are probably a lot of chemical reactions, gas reactions, in its atmosphere. Pluto does have a highly eccentric orbit, but there you're talking about changes on timescales of thousands of years, not the 11 year cycle. So, it's not clear that they are all linked to the Sun in any direct way. But our view of the Sun is so limited in time that it gets hard to rule a lot of things out. It's worth looking at. It's a very good question.

IF THE SUN WERE NOT CAUSING WARMING ON MARS AND PLUTO, WHAT COULD CAUSE WARMING ON MARS AND PLUTO?

Mars has seasons, very long-term changes. There are changes in its atmosphere that occur on timescales of months. Dust storms crop up. We don't know why those dust storms crop up. Chemical reactions that shift energy around in the system and that the system finally responds. So, like the earth, the climate of Mars is complicated. There are changes going on many different timescales.

IS THERE ANY EVIDENCE THERE COULD BE SOME KIND OF INTERIOR HEATING ON MARS?

You look at the surface of Mars, there are the remnants of volcanoes. There are only older volcanoes now, the old shield volcanoes. But it looks like Mars might still have some seismic activity, but nothing like the drama we have here on Earth. So yes, there are internal changes on Mars. There are shifts in energy internally on Mars that are also going to crop up and interact with the climate system and cause some changes.

WOULD ANY OF THIS - SUN OR INTERNAL HEATING ON MARS - EXPLAIN WHY THERE'S GLACIAL ICE MELTING AT THE POLES?

Don't know. Right now, everybody is looking to see whether they think these changes are linked to the Sun. The first thing you ask is: do you see the Sun's well known 11 year cycle in the glacial ice pullback in the caps on Mars? The answer is: probably not. We've had enough information and it does not seem very well correlated with the Sun's very familiar 11 year cycle.

Then you ask: If not the 11 year cycle, which we know so much about, then what of the Sun is causing this (ice) pullback? Then the question is: While the Sun is active, we don't think that's a real direct source of heating. It's putting out a lot of flares, but they don't put out a lot of warmth, a lot of energy, that would melt ice.

So, it would require some unusual mechanisms on Mars and in the Mars climate system coming from the particles streaming from the Sun, or from some of the flares. That's very far out. There's not a good explanation right now.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE WORKING HYPOTHESES?

For the pullback of ice on Mars? Mars's climate is very dynamic, as the Earth's is. There are changes on most timescales. For example, we see windstorms kick up every few years on Mars and no one has a good explanation for those. When you kick up a lot of dust in the Mars atmosphere, you very much change the amount of energy in the system. Mars's climate system is poorly understood.

More here

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

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

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

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A GREENQUAKE: BRITS GIVING UP ON KYOTO PROTOCOL

In a very roundabout British way, of course

Britain is to open the door for other nations to abandon setting compulsory targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions: the principle at the heart of the Kyoto agreement to tackle climate change. Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, has told The Observer she is prepared to accept voluntary targets - a move hinted at this autumn by Tony Blair.

The news caused consternation among green campaigners last night. 'Voluntary targets are not worth the paper they are written on,' said Stephen Tindale, head of Greenpeace UK. 'Without mandatory targets [the Kyoto Protocol] is effectively dead.'

Beckett was speaking ahead of next week's climate change summit in Montreal where she will act as the UK and European Union negotiator in discussions on what is to follow the Kyoto agreement when it runs out in 2012. She said it would be impossible to achieve consensus on compulsory targets. She likened developed countries which insist that such targets be agreed by poorer developing nations to new imperialists. 'Such an approach would be utterly destructive to any kind of agreement,' she said. 'People would never engage in dialogue if they thought the outcome was preconceived and ... could hamper their development.'

Instead of compulsory national targets, future agreements could set targets for 'sectors' - potentially transport, domestic energy use or industry, or even individual commercial sectors. Another idea is voluntary targets. Beckett said: 'Targets will always have a very important role to play and will be part of a framework, but not everybody has to be in exactly the same position.' Pressed to explain, she added: 'I'm reluctant to go any further into it. There are people who might be outraged that anybody would consider a voluntary approach.'

But the Environment Secretary also dismissed the argument of the Prime Minister and the US that countries would not reduce emissions because this would damage economic growth. 'Actually, there's quite a lot of evidence to suggest you can do things to tackle climate change without damaging your economy,' she said. 'If you look at some major global companies that have started to take steps to tackle their own emissions, far from being economically damaging it's actually economically beneficial.'

Some commentators suggested yesterday that Beckett, who is admired for her firm stand on green issues, was raising the prospect of voluntary targets as a negotiating ploy to win support from the US and other countries reluctant to agree tough emissions reductions.

More here





Global Warming, Global Governance

The European Parliament this week adopted a resolution on a report authored by one of its MEPs. Entitled, "Winning the Battle Against Global Climate Change," it offers a new example of the institutionalized scare-mongering so characteristic of the current climate debate.

"Climate change is different from any other environmental problem we face. The main reason is that the climate system is non-linear in character, with positive feed-backs. Once we pass a certain level of green-house gas concentration (GHG) in the atmosphere, the whole system is likely to undergo drastic change. Globally intolerable impacts with disastrous consequences may occur, like annual material damages due to extreme weather events in the range of hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of millions of people being displaced, severe heat waves, large-scale change of crop and species distribution etc.

"Developing countries are likely to be the hardest hit. The poor are much more vulnerable to phenomena like floods, storms and droughts. In some regions a drier climate will lead to food production losses. Adding to that, large regions in the South will be seriously affected by rising sea levels. In spite of its different character, climate change is still mostly seen as an environmental problem and mainly the responsibility of the environment ministers. This has to change.

"Climate change has serious implications, not only for ecosystems, but for the economy as a whole, for public health, water and food security, migration etc."

This mindset is a fertile breeding ground for a quantum leap in international governance, shifting sovereignty from the national level to that of international organizations. In a way, they might promote a phoenix-like rebirth of earlier attempts, in the 1970s and 1980s, to establish an International Economic Order (NIEO), aimed at the "management of interdependence". These proposals encompassed a series of measures and reforms in the areas of raw materials, including oil, international trade, development aid, the international monetary system, science and technology, industrial development and the global food supply. They were the topic of a string of international negotiations, which took place in the second half of the 1970s in countless conferences organized by the UN, UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) and UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization).

It takes little imagination to see that all this would have resulted in a degree of government intervention - at both national and international level - which has never been equaled in the history of mankind. The whole project was characterized by a high level of international dirigisme. In other words, top-down control of the international economy by governments on the basis of international political decisions and implementation by international and national bureaucracies. Thus, what it all came down to was more government and less market. Ironically enough, the plan appeared at a time when serious defects were becoming visible in central economic control at national level, in particular in the Soviet Union and its satellite states with their command economies. In addition, the rise of the new economic liberalism at the beginning of the 1980s led to a trend reversal: more market and less government. As a result, all these proposals died a quiet death.

Nevertheless, supporters of a new world order remain convinced that they had solutions to many of the world's problems. But, in the absence of international political agreement, they were solutions in search of a suitable problem. Like a fire brigade that has spent years on tenterhooks in the station before finally being called out to extinguish a major fire, the advent of man-made global warming offered the adherents of world government a fresh chance.

But will their efforts this time be crowned with success? It does not seem likely. It has become clear that Kyoto's costs are excessively high and its benefits, in terms of net climate cooling, infinitesimal. Cost estimates for the first round of Kyoto, from now till 2012, are of the order of €500-billion to €1 trillion. The proponents of Kyoto have calculated (but never published) that this will result in a net cooling of less than 0.02 (two hundredths!) degrees Celsius in 2050. This is undetectable even with the most accurate thermometers of today. Moreover, the yearly fluctuations of temperatures are a multiple of this figure.

Many countries, including the US, Australia, China, India and Brazil, are unwilling to join the Kyoto approach of binding caps on carbon dioxide emissions in conjunction with tradable emission rights. Italy, which joined the first round of the treaty, has already announced it will drop out when this round ends in 2012. If this happens, Russia, which Europe bribed into Kyoto in exchange for European support of its membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO), will have a perfect alibi to back out as well.

At the July G8 Summit at Gleneagles, the world leaders failed to agree on a follow-up round, although many months earlier, summit host Tony Blair had billed this as a major issue. But after the summit Blair has hinted that Britain may pull out of attempts to draw up a successor to the Kyoto climate treaty because the economic price of cutting greenhouse gas emissions is too high. Rather than rely on global agreements to reverse rising greenhouse gas emissions, Blair appeared to place faith in science, technology and the free market - as President George W. Bush had in repudiating the Kyoto treaty in 2001.

Of course, Blair's admission has outraged environmentalists on both sides of the Atlantic, who lamented that it flied in the face of his promises made in the past two years. Moreover, they feared that it will effectively block the upcoming Ottawa talks on a new treaty to combat climate change. As Jonathan Brown, observed in The Independent, "Tony Blair came under concerted attack from leading environmental groups yesterday as he was accused of appearing 'indistinguishable' from George Bush on green issues. Green campaigners feel betrayed after Mr Blair made the environment a centrepiece of Britain's presidencies of the G8 and EU, both of which expire at the end of the year. They say the Prime Minister has actually undermined hard-fought gains, particularly on the Kyoto protocol, by questioning the need for binding targets on reducing emissions and by suggesting they might be incompatible with economic success."

All this does not augur well for the for the next Conference of the Parties (COP11) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which is due to take place from 28 November to 9 December 2005, in Montreal, where some 8,000 - 10,000 participants are expected. With the modesty which is so characteristic of the true believers, the organizers have already declared the conference to be a historic event. But it is more likely it will herald the demise of Kyoto.

Would it not be better to forget about the whole thing after all? Many would argue that this is totally inconceivable since so much political capital has been invested in the undertaking and since the population wants the governments to do "something" about the "'threat" of global warming. I suspect not. The aborted NIEO showed many similarities with Kyoto. It was an equally grandiose worldwide scheme which aimed at a considerable degree of global economic management or control, backed by enormous funds and a huge bureaucracy. It ultimately fell apart because it was ill-conceived and because it became abundantly clear that it did not serve the interests of the parties which were engaged in the process. The same might happen to Kyoto.

It could be argued that because of the flaws in its scientific underpinnings, its complexity and inconsistencies Kyoto will collapse under its own sheer weight. But in the mean time it may cause a lot of harm. It acts as a sword of Damocles, depressing the investment climate, especially in Europe. Therefore it is high time for Kyoto to be buried and to cover it with a tombstone carrying the epitaph: "Here lies a serious case of collective folly -- an exercise in modern day rain dancing ... and equally effective. RIP."

Source




WHO NOW FOR DDT

Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog

It seems that the World Health Organization (WHO) has finally accepted the quick, simple, cheap and safe solution to fighting malaria: DDT. But Africans still face a battle with environmentalists and trade blocs who oppose this demonized pesticide.

The WHO's Roll Back Malaria (RMB) started in 1998: millions of dollars later, a WHO report admits "malaria has got somewhat worse during this period." The real tragedy is that malaria would have got somewhat better if the WHO had adopted a sensible strategy from the start. Spraying the inside walls of residential buildings with DDT and other insecticides should be central to this. It prevents most mosquitoes from entering dwellings and it repels or kills those insects that do make it inside.

Over the last few decades, however, the WHO and various NGOs have deliberately discouraged the use of DDT, egged on by western environmentalists who claim it is dangerous. However, Namibia, Botswana, Mozambique and SA have experienced tremendous success by using DDT. DDT is what eradicated malaria in the southern US and Mediterranean Europe in the mid-20th century. There has never been any evidence of harm to humans or animals: one of its proponents, J Gordon Edwards, used to eat spoonfuls of it at lectures and he died this year whilst hiking, at 85.

This week the WHO said it would make DDT part of its malaria campaign. But Africa faces still faces numerous hidden barriers, such as NGOs and western governments refusing to fund supplies of DDT or threatening to ban exports from areas where it is used. The European Union threatened Uganda this year with bans on agricultural exports if it started using DDT against malaria, even though such very limited use was allowed by a little-publicized WHO rule and by the 2004 Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants.

These types of barriers will continue to be used against African produce in Europe and the US by governments and environmentalists unless the WHO publicly and noisily takes the side of malaria victims. Africans must demand that RBM's plans include DDT, plus a campaign to counter the opposition of western governments, NGOs, and environmentalist pressure groups. Millions of African lives depend on it.





Australian greenhouse emissions up


Goodie! A sign of our rapid economic growth on all fronts. And a bit of extra carbon dioxide will be good for our crops. To them carbon dioxide is food.

Australian greenhouse gas emissions have increased 23 per cent over the last 13 years, prompting environmental campaigners to call for urgent action. A report prepared by the Bonn-based United Nations Climate Change secretariat and released this week ahead of the international climate conference in Montreal later this month warned that the western world was losing its grip on the climate change problem. The report, covering the period between 1990 and 2003, found Australia's greenhouse gas emissions had risen 23.3 per cent on 1990 levels.

The Australian Government's target is to limit emissions increases to 108 per cent of 1990 levels over the period 2008-2012. A spokeswoman for Environment Minister Ian Campbell said the Australian emissions figure was misleading because it failed to take into account changes in land use. "The fact remains that Australia through the Government's $1.8 billion package of measures to address climate change is one of a handful of countries in the world on track to meet its Kyoto targets through domestic action alone," she said. Australia has refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol....

The UN report reveals Australia is far from the worst offender with a number of nations which have ratified the Kyoto protocol recording greater increases in greenhouse emissions. Spain topped the list with a 41.7 per cent increase, followed by Monaco (37.8), Portugal (36.7) and Greece (25.9). The United States, which also has not ratified Kyoto, reported increased emissions of 13.3 per cent, while New Zealand, a Kyoto signatory, performed only slightly better than Australia with a 22.5 per cent increase. [Note that the huge manufacturing industries of China are not mentioned. They are "exempt". So we would be "saving the planet" by transferring all our industries to China, apparently!]

UN researchers found that overall in the industrialised world, greenhouse gas emissions were down 5.9 per cent in 2003 compared to the 1990 levels. The major reductions were achieved in central and eastern Europe in the early 1990s when polluting communist era industries were shut down as countries restructured their economies. The best performer was Lithuania which recorded a decrease of 66.2 per cent.

More here

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

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

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

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

SIR DAVID KING: GLOBAL AGREEMENT ON CO2 EMISSION CUTS IS "UNREALISTIC"

What a backdown from Britain's most ardent global warmer! It shows he just says whatever he thinks Tony Blair wants to hear

Worldwide interest in the threat from greenhouse gases has undergone a "massive change", the government's chief scientific adviser has said. Sir David King told the Commons Environmental Audit Committee he had noticed a "culture change" in attitudes to pollution in the last two years. But this had to be translated into a greater international effort. Sir David warned of rising sea levels and melting ice caps if global warming was allowed to worsen.

He told MPs no government in the world would switch off its power stations to maintain carbon dioxide levels below 400 parts per million, if this seemed to threaten the country's economy. He said that globally, if carbon dioxide was to be kept below 550 parts per million, there would need to be a reduction of CO2 by 2050 of between 60% and 65%. But this would mean getting a worldwide agreement to cutbacks in fossil fuel, which was "unrealistic".

Sir David said: "We are not anticipating that Africa and India will reduce their emissions, let alone reduce them by that amount over that period of time. "If we could maintain China, India, and Brazil to a relatively low growth in emissions, we'd be doing rather well." However, environmentalists had "managed to achieve something of a culture change. I'm not saying that we're all the way there. "But certainly when I went out to Australia a few weeks ago, there was an enormous amount of interest in climate change. It got a lot of media attention. "So climate change is very much up there and people are considering it."

Source




Poverty: The killer that matters most

A new study by a University of Wisconsin - Madison research group has concluded that global warming is causing the deaths of about 150,000 people each year. Part of the research draws upon World Health Organization (WHO) estimates from a few years ago that addressed warming-related increases in malaria, diarrhea, flood related fatalities, and drought-related malnutrition. Poor countries, especially those in Africa, are noted to be, by far, the most affected. This new study will likely be a hot topic at the next U.N. climate conference to be held in Montreal in early December, at which representatives from countries around the world will discuss future policy responses to increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from the use of fossil fuels.

Coincidently, at the same time this study was released, I happened to be at the Ugandan Embassy in Washington D.C. The Ambassador to the U.S. from Uganda, Edith Ssempala, spoke forcefully and passionately about the negative influence that western policies have had on her people. Due to the unintended negative consequences of policies that the wealthier countries of the world have adopted, Africans continue to die by the millions each year.

But the policies the Ambassador was criticizing had nothing to do to with global warming. What is killing Africans in greatest numbers is poverty, and international trade policies that prevent Africans from protecting themselves from diseases that are easily preventable. The Ambassador mentioned pressure from environmentalists in wealthy nations that has prevented the construction of hydroelectric dams in Africa, denying electricity to millions of people. Two billion of the Earth's inhabitants still do not have access to electricity, leading to massive death tolls from problems such as food-borne illnesses (due to a lack of refrigeration) and pneumonia brought on by breathing air contaminated by the burning of dung or wood for heat and cooking. Anyone that has had to suffer through a loss of electricity for any length of time becomes quickly aware of how necessary electricity is for daily life.

Worries over death tolls from global warming is a case of misplaced concern and priorities. Stop using fossil fuels tomorrow and see how many people die within one month. Sure, that is an extreme example, but it raises a valid point. Even if warming does indeed cause an increase in malaria-related deaths, is it better to go ahead and use what works (safely!) to rid humanity of the disease, or to instead punish the world's production of wealth in our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? One thing history has taught us is that wealthier is healthier. As they say, those that haven't learned the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

The Ugandan Ambassador was particularly critical of westerners that have a romantic view of how Africans should live, as if the simpler life is a preferable one. How many people in the industrialized world with this view would be willing to trade places? There is a reason poor countries are much more concerned with achieving a decent standard of living than whether there might be some environmental consequences. Haven't you ever wondered why environmental concerns are almost exclusively restricted to people with a good standard of living? Those that have access to abundant refrigerated food, clean water, and health care? They can afford to spend some of their wealth to reduce pollution. Much of the world can not. As it is, many areas of poor countries have been mostly deforested as people forage for wood to cook and heat with. Is this what environmentalists want? Also, the poorest countries have the greatest rates of population growth. Is this what environmentalists want?

But, you might argue, doesn't the generation of wealth increase certain risks (e.g. global warming)? Sure! But the possibility that you might choke to death on your food doesn't keep you from eating. When environmentalists don't mention that the benefits of wealth generation far outweigh the risks, they are at best supremely naive, or at worst dishonest and inhumane. It has been calculated by many reputable economists that the cost of doing anything substantial about global warming far exceeds the cost of adaptation to it. I am not suggesting that we do nothing, only that we be smart about what we do. And if we are truly interested in solving the global warming problem (to the extent that one exists), technological advancement is the only way to achieve large greenhouse gas reductions. And guess what it takes to make those technological advancements? Wealth.

The whole DDT issue is a good example of stupid environmental policy. Insiders say the de facto ban on DDT was the result of politics, not of overriding human health and environmental concerns. Threats of trade bans on countries that dare to use DDT, one of the safest and most effective insecticides available, have contributed to over one million malaria-related deaths each year in Africa. Literally hundreds of millions of people contract the disease each year. While the knee-jerk hostility to DDT is now increasingly being realized to be bad policy (the reinstitution of DDT use in South Africa has reduced malaria deaths there by about 95%), it is but one example of how disinformation spread by well-meaning environmentalists lead to massive human suffering.

Gradually, though, the tide is turning. More and more politicians, such as Tony Blair, are realizing that it is impractical to ask people to suffer economically for unmeasurable reductions in future levels of global warming. Governmental representatives (such as those that will attend the Montreal conference next month) that make a career out of finding new ways in which to restrict the freedom of people around the world to serve one another as they wish through market economies can not be allowed to succeed in implementing ill-conceived solutions to environmental problems. Or, as one man from South Africa put it, Africans should not be forced to suffer simply so rich tourists can drive by in their air-conditioned Land Rovers and take pictures of their quaint way of life.

Source





BRITISH GREENIE TANTRUMS

Greenpeace protested by dumping tonnes of coal outside Downing Street. 'We've blockaded Downing Street with coal because Tony Blair has failed on climate change', said executive director Stephen Tindale. 'They told us things can only get better, but Blair's burning more coal than ever, our CO2 emissions have gone up, he's set to miss his own global warming targets and now it seems he's trying to kill off the Kyoto Protocol.'

The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) has also gone on the attack. 'Despite the huge difference in historic rhetoric on the key issues of climate change and the control of hazardous chemicals, the actual negotiating position of the prime minister becomes daily less discernable from that of US President George W Bush', said campaigns director Andrew Lee.

These campaign groups are not alone in their concern. Lord Robert May, president of the Royal Society, has spent much of the past year making increasingly dramatic statements on climate change policy. As the BBC's Roger Harrabin noted on the Today programme recently, 'Lord May, if you have been following his utterings of the past year or so, has been getting more and more and more shrill on the issue of climate change. He is sounding like a desperate man. But he is shouting and shouting, and people aren't hearing'.

They have good reason to be worried. It had been widely assumed that Kyoto would be the first of a series of agreements setting tough targets to reduce greenhouse emissions. However, the cost of implementing even this treaty, which is widely recognised to be no better than a starting-point even by its most ardent supporters, is now starting to cause alarm.

The New Labour government smugly announced that Britain would set even tougher targets for itself than Kyoto demanded; yet it now seems likely that Britain will fail to reach those self-imposed goals, or even the Kyoto targets. As Baroness Byford noted in a House of Lords debate on the subject last week, 'At Kyoto, the British government agreed to reduce UK carbon dioxide emissions by 12.5 per cent by 2012. Since 1997, UK emissions have risen by 5.5 per cent, and that increase steepened by 1.5 per cent in the last six months of 2004 and by 2.5 per cent in the first half of this year.'

Having spent a fortune promoting renewable energy, particularly wind power - about œ1billion in subsidies are expected over the next five years - and having imposed a Climate Change Levy on homes and businesses making energy use more expensive, there seems to be less and less stomach for imposing the kind of additional burdens that would enable the UK to meet the targets it set itself only a few years ago.

If the fears of climate scientists are confirmed, significant climate change will happen anyway regardless of whether the Kyoto targets are met. In fact, as 'skeptical environmentalist' Bjorn Lomborg has noted elsewhere on spiked, even if you accept the worst fears about climate change, setting targets about carbon emissions is likely to be a horrendously expensive way of achieving very little. 'Despite our intuition that we naturally need to do something drastic about such a costly global warming, economic analyses show that it will be far more expensive to cut CO2 emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures', Lomborg argues.

Therefore, a shift towards adaptation rather than prevention as the basis of policy seems to be underway. The Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) last week announced a consultation into existing preparations for climate change. Environment minister Elliot Morley commented: 'Climate change is happening and it will impact on all organisations across the country. The government is aiming to put together an adaptation strategy to assist in this planning. But first we need to know what is already in hand.'

Whether or not there really will be substantial climate change remains unknown. But warmer weather, if it comes, should be balanced against all the other competing demands placed on society that are not given privileged status. As it happens, Blair is still banging the drum about the dangers of climate change - all he has suggested is a change in the way it is tackled.

But even this change of emphasis threatens to downgrade the status of environmental campaigns. Their response is tantamount to a child's tantrum at being ignored.

Source




Mobile phones no health risk: WHO

The World Health Organisation has a simple message for people who think mobile phone transmissions or their signal emitting base stations are making them sick. Televisions and radios pose more of a risk.

The organisation's Mike Repacholi said signals from mobile phone base stations were generally less powerful than those from TV and radios. People had been exposed to these for decades. He said people were generally scared by new technology but after $250 million worth of research had been carried out over 10 years there was still no evidence that mobile phone masts posed a substantial health risk.

Dr Repacholi was in Melbourne this week for a two-day workshop during which the latest findings relating to radio frequency fields were discussed.

Source

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

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

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

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

US GOVERNMENT PUSHES CARBON SEQUESTRATION NONSENSE

Implicitly admitting that carbon emissions are a problem but providing a distraction from worse nonsense

The Bush administration will use a United Nations climate change meeting in Canada to tout a voluntary plan to store heat-trapping gases underground, an Energy Department official said on Wednesday.

Environmental groups said the administration will try to derail any attempt at the Montreal meeting to set mandatory targets to extend the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012, when its first phase ends. Kyoto requires developed nations to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent from 1990 levels by 2008-2012. Carbon dioxide is one of several gases blamed for climate change that is melting glaciers and raising sea levels. The United States, the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, shunned the Kyoto pact, saying it would be too costly to the U.S. economy.

The White House prefers a voluntary, multi-national plan to sequester and store carbon dioxide. The plan would include most European Union nations, India and Saudi Arabia. It would encourage nations to separate carbon dioxide from industrial emissions and pipe it into geologic formations or deep beneath the ocean floor for permanent storage, an Energy Department official said.....

Montreal could provide a crucial start of negotiations for a new round of emission cuts, according to environmental groups. But "the United States wants to block this process from starting," said David Doniger, a climate change expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Look for the U.S. to use a variety of strategies to try to veto consensus," Doniger said, such as lining up Middle Eastern OPEC countries and India in favor of voluntary approaches.

A major source of greenhouse gases comes from burning fossil fuels like crude oil and coal. "There's got to be a better and cheaper way to do this" than mandatory cuts envisioned by Kyoto, said John Grasser, an Energy Department spokesman. "That's why sequestration is taking off -- it might be our ace in the hole." Doniger said he is "bullish" on sequestration technology, but it must be accompanied by specific carbon cuts.....

Sequestration projects have been shown to work. Some 5 million tons of carbon dioxide were successfully stored in a oilfield in Canada while doubling the field's crude oil recovery rate in a multinational project...

U.S. lawmakers' attempts to require cuts in American emissions have repeatedly failed in Congress.

More here





Dawkins on GM crops: Don't Turn Your Back On Science

This is science author Richard Dawkins's reply to a lecture that Prince Charles gave in May 2000 about "Sustainable Development"

Your Royal Highness,

Your Reith Lecture saddened me. I have deep sympathy for your aims, and admiration for your sincerity. But your hostility to science will not serve those aims; and your embracing of an ill-assorted jumble of mutually contradictory alternatives will lose you the respect that I think you deserve. I forget who it was who remarked: 'Of course we must be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.' Let's look at some of the alternative philosophies which you seem to prefer over scientific reason. First, intuition, the heart's wisdom 'rustling like a breeze through the leaves'. Unfortunately, it depends whose intuition you choose. Where aims (if not methods) are concerned, your own intuitions coincide with mine. I wholeheartedly share your aim of long-term stewardship of our planet, with its diverse and complex biosphere.

But what about the instinctive wisdom in Saddam Hussein's black heart? What price the Wagnerian wind that rustled Hitler's twisted leaves? The Yorkshire Ripper heard religious voices in his head urging him to kill. How do we decide which intuitive inner voices to heed? This, it is important to say, is not a dilemma that science can solve. My own passionate concern for world stewardship is as emotional as yours. But where I allow feelings to influence my aims, when it comes to deciding the best method of achieving them I'd rather think than feel. And thinking, here, means scientific thinking. No more effective method exists. If it did, science would incorporate it.

Next, Sir, I think you may have an exaggerated idea of the naturalness of 'traditional' or 'organic' agriculture. Agriculture has always been unnatural. Our species began to depart from our natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as recently as 10,000 years ago - too short to measure on the evolutionary timescale.

Wheat, be it ever so wholemeal and stoneground, is not a natural food for Homo sapiens. Nor is milk, except for children. Almost every morsel of our food is genetically modified - admittedly by artificial selection not artificial mutation, but the end result is the same. A wheat grain is a genetically modified grass seed, just as a pekinese is a genetically modified wolf. Playing God? We've been playing God for centuries!

The large, anonymous crowds in which we now teem began with the agricultural revolution, and without agriculture we could survive in only a tiny fraction of our current numbers. Our high population is an agricultural (and technological and medical) artifact. It is far more unnatural than the population-limiting methods condemned as unnatural by the Pope. Like it or not, we are stuck with agriculture, and agriculture - all agriculture - is unnatural. We sold that pass 10,000 years ago.

Does that mean there's nothing to choose between different kinds of agriculture when it comes to sustainable planetary welfare? Certainly not. Some are much more damaging than others, but it's no use appealing to 'nature', or to 'instinct' in order to decide which ones. You have to study the evidence, soberly and reasonably - scientifically. Slashing and burning (incidentally, no agricultural system is closer to being 'traditional') destroys our ancient forests. Overgrazing (again, widely practised by 'traditional' cultures) causes soil erosion and turns fertile pasture into desert. Moving to our own modern tribe, monoculture, fed by powdered fertilisers and poisons, is bad for the future; indiscriminate use of antibiotics to promote livestock growth is worse.

Incidentally, one worrying aspect of the hysterical opposition to the possible risks from GM crops is that it diverts attention from definite dangers which are already well understood but largely ignored. The evolution of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria is something that a Darwinian might have foreseen from the day antibiotics were discovered. Unfortunately the warning voices have been rather quiet, and now they are drowned by the baying cacophony: 'GM GM GM GM GM GM!'

Moreover if, as I expect, the dire prophecies of GM doom fail to materialise, the feeling of let-down may spill over into complacency about real risks. Has it occurred to you that our present GM brouhaha may be a terrible case of crying wolf?

Even if agriculture could be natural, and even if we could develop some sort of instinctive rapport with the ways of nature, would nature be a good role model? Here, we must think carefully. There really is a sense in which ecosystems are balanced and harmonious, with some of their constituent species becoming mutually dependent. This is one reason the corporate thuggery that is destroying the rainforests is so criminal.

On the other hand, we must beware of a very common misunderstanding of Darwinism. Tennyson was writing before Darwin but he got it right. Nature really is red in tooth and claw. Much as we might like to believe otherwise, natural selection, working within each species, does not favour long-term stewardship. It favours short-term gain. Loggers, whalers, and other profiteers who squander the future for present greed, are only doing what all wild creatures have done for three billion years.

No wonder T.H. Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, founded his ethics on a repudiation of Darwinism. Not a repudiation of Darwinism as science, of course, for you cannot repudiate truth. But the very fact that Darwinism is true makes it even more important for us to fight against the naturally selfish and exploitative tendencies of nature. We can do it. Probably no other species of animal or plant can. We can do it because our brains (admittedly given to us by natural selection for reasons of short-term Darwinian gain) are big enough to see into the future and plot long-term consequences. Natural selection is like a robot that can only climb uphill, even if this leaves it stuck on top of a measly hillock. There is no mechanism for going downhill, for crossing the valley to the lower slopes of the high mountain on the other side. There is no natural foresight, no mechanism for warning that present selfish gains are leading to species extinction - and indeed, 99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are extinct.

The human brain, probably uniquely in the whole of evolutionary history, can see across the valley and can plot a course away from extinction and towards distant uplands. Long-term planning - and hence the very possibility of stewardship - is something utterly new on the planet, even alien. It exists only in human brains. The future is a new invention in evolution. It is precious. And fragile. We must use all our scientific artifice to protect it.

It may sound paradoxical, but if we want to sustain the planet into the future, the first thing we must do is stop taking advice from nature. Nature is a short-term Darwinian profiteer. Darwin himself said it: 'What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horridly cruel works of nature.' Of course that's bleak, but there's no law saying the truth has to be cheerful; no point shooting the messenger - science - and no sense in preferring an alternative world view just because it feels more comfortable. In any case, science isn't all bleak. Nor, by the way, is science an arrogant know-all. Any scientist worthy of the name will warm to your quotation from Socrates: 'Wisdom is knowing that you don't know.' What else drives us to find out?

What saddens me most, Sir, is how much you will be missing if you turn your back on science. I have tried to write about the poetic wonder of science myself, but may I take the liberty of presenting you with a book by another author? It is The Demon-Haunted World by the lamented Carl Sagan. I'd call your attention especially to the subtitle: Science as a Candle in the Dark .






Thin Green Line Is Bad Science

Comment by Debra Saunders

There is a myth in the American media. It goes like this: The good scientists agree that global warming is human-induced and would be addressed if America ratified the Kyoto global warming pact, while bad, heretical scientists question climate models that predict Armageddon because they are venal and corrupted by oil money.

A Tuesday Open Forum piece in The San Francisco Chronicle, written by a UC Berkeley journalism professor and a UC Berkeley energy professor, provides a perfect example of this odd view that all scientists ascribe to a common gospel: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N.-sponsored group of more than 2,000 scientists from more than 100 countries, has concluded that human activity is a key factor in elevated carbon-dioxide levels and rising temperatures and sea levels that could prove catastrophic for tens of millions of people living along Earth's coastlines."

The piece also cited research by "Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at UC San Diego, who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on climate change published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 and could not find a single one that challenged the scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is real."

The authors then attacked best-selling author Michael Crichton because Crichton accepted an invitation to testify from Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., "who is heavily supported by oil and gas interests" and who -- horrors -- dared to ask whether the global-warming scare is a hoax. That is the sort of McCarthyist guilt by association that one would not expect to encounter in the name of science.

Crichton spoke at an Independent Institute event Tuesday night with three apostate scientists. It's odd that Oreskes couldn't find a single article that didn't follow the thin green line on global warming. Panelist and Colorado State University professor of atmospheric science William M. Gray, a hurricane authority, announced that he thinks that the biggest contributor to global warming is the fact that "we're coming out of a little ice age," and that the warming trend will end in six to eight years.

Said Gray, sagely, "Consensus science isn't science." No lie. In fact, it's a bizarre argument. Why do global-warming believers keep pushing this everyone-agrees line when consensus uber alles is so, well, unacademic? The ideal should not be scientists who think in lockstep, but those in the proud mold of the skeptic, who takes a hard look at the data and proves conventional wisdom wrong.

Independent Institute President David Theroux hailed that trait in this year's winner of Nobel Prize for medicine, Barry Marshall, who believed ulcers were caused by bacteria, when the establishment knew that Marshall's theory was "preposterous" -- except that Marshall turned out to be right.

Crichton focused on the many times that fad science has been wrong. Remember Y2K? Ho-hum. The population-bomb scare? Yawn. Then there's Yellowstone, the national park that declined due to rangers' misbegotten (and often fatal for the wildlife) conviction that they knew what was best for the animals -- in this case, they killed wolves and overprotected elk until the whole ecosystem suffered.

On Tuesday, Inhofe issued a statement from Capitol Hill that noted how scientists with independent views don't get on too well with the IPCC. Witness Chris Landsea of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who resigned from the IPCC this year because he believed an IPCC top hurricane scientist wrongly linked severe hurricanes to global warming. As a result, he wrote, "the IPCC process has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost."

I've seen this when covering failed educational fads: Curriculum boards chase out the free thinkers, then smugly announce that all the experts agree with them -- so they must be right.

Source




BOOMING INDIA IS UNLIKELY TO AGREE TO EMISSION CAPS

Comment from NEW DELHI

"India is unlikely to agree to any emission caps in the next phase of the Kyoto Protocol because of its expanding energy-hungry economy, but analysts say developed nations will continue to pile pressure on the nation.

Asia's third-largest economy and home to about a sixth of humanity has some of the most polluted cities in the world, many of them continually shrouded in eye-stinging smog of noxious fumes from cars and industry. Its growing energy needs are only expected to increase along with pollution levels in the next few decades, despite growing fears that global warming will spare no one.

The Kyoto climate change pact requires developed nations to cut their emissions of heat-trapping gases by 5.2 percent from 1990 levels by 2008-2012. The United States and Australia refused to ratify the pact and developing nations, such as China and India are exempt from emissions caps all four countries say threaten economic growth. China's appetite for oil and coal is even greater than India's.

Both are likely to come under pressure to do more to curb emissions growth when they join officials from 150 countries in Montreal for a U.N. climate change summit. The Montreal meeting from November 28 will help shape the Kyoto Protocol after its first phase ends in 2012, but disagreement is rife and hopes of progress slim.

"There is no way that anybody can expect countries like India to cap their emissions for the next 20-25 years," said S.K. Joshi, a senior official in the environment ministry. "We welcome the talks among the parties for the second commitment period strictly in accordance with the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. The issue of entitlements has to be addressed and the countries that have agreed to take on commitments under the protocol have to show demonstrable progress.""

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

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

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

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SOLAR INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE MORE SIGNIFICANT THAN THOUGHT

(From Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics: "Regional sun-climate interaction" by A. Kilcik. In press, 2005.)

Abstract:

It is a clear fact that the Earth's climate has been changing since the pre-industrial era, especially during the last three decades. This change is generally attributed to three main factors: greenhouse gases (GHGs), aerosols, and solar activity changes. However, these factors are not all-independent. Furthermore, contributions of the above-mentioned factors are still disputed. We sought whether a parallelism between the solar activity variations and the changes in the Earth's climate can be established. For this, we compared the solar irradiance model data reconstructed by J. Lean to surface air temperature variations of two countries: USA and Japan. Comparison was carried out in two categories: correlations and periodicities. We utilized data from a total of 60 stations, 18 in USA and 42 in Japan. USA data range from 1900 to 1995, while Japan data range from 1900 to 1990. Our analyses yielded a 42 per cent correlation for USA and a 79 per cent for Japan between the temperature and solar irradiance. Moreover, both data sets showed similar periodicities. Hence, our results indicate marked influence of solar activity variations on the Earth's climate.

1. Introduction:

It is known that the solar radiation output changes periodically and also that it affects the Earth and near-space environment in various ways, such as the formation of aurora, adverse effects on satellites and communications, etc. Considering the historical evolution of climate changes on Earth, the cold period lasting from the second half of the 17th century to the beginning of the 18th century (1645-1715) is called Little Ice Age, and the corresponding period of practically no activity on the solar surface, Maunder Minimum. Contrary to this, the positive "Medieval Warm Period" (12th-14th centuries) appears to be less distinct; evidence, mostly from Western Europe, did not suggest that this was a global phenomenon (Mann et al., 1999). During this period, temperatures had been about 0.2 øC warmer than compared to 15th-19th centuries, but rather below those of mid-20th century (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2001). This might have arisen from higher solar activity, as claimed by Eddy (1976).

The Earth climate system has shown irregular changes during the second half of the 20th century, especially for the last three decades. Interest to this subject is therefore continuously increasing. Since the climate system depends on many parameters, such as evaporation, wind, pressure, rainfall, temperature, etc., climate change phenomenon is a very complex problem and the contribution of each parameter to this change is not clear. This change is generally attributed by many scientists including Hegerl et al. (1997) and Lean and Rind (1996) to the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases (GSGs) and aerosols in the atmosphere due to human activity. Among others, Santer et al. (1996), and Wigley et al. (1997) claim that solar forcing and anthropogenic forcing together are enough to explain overall warming trend. Another point due to Crowley (2000) is that the Earth climate system would have been controlled by the Sun before the pre-industrial era, but later anthropogenic effects began to dominate.

To show the Sun-climate connection, many indicators have been used in the literature. For the Sun, these are sunspot numbers (Chambers, 1878), sunspot areas (Nordo, 1955; Dixey, 1924), sunspot decay rates (Hoyt, 1979), solar rotation rates (Sakurai, 1977), solar cycle lengths (Friis-Christensen and Lassen, 1991), geomagnetic aa indices (Cliver and Boriakoff, 1998), solar irradiance changes (Pap, 2002; Floyd et al., 2002; Douglass et al., 2004), solar radius through solar irradiance (Rozelot, 2001), long-term solar activity data obtained from 14C, and 10Be isotope concentrations (Beer et al., 1988). These data sets are compared with climatic parameters such as surface temperature, rainfall, lake level, and air pressure. Amongst these, "temperature is the most commonly, and presumably the most accurately, measured parameter" (Hoyt and Schatten, 1997). Some of these solar activity data sets have shown good agreement with climate parameters, such as the length of the solar cycle and geomagnetic aa index.

2. Data and reduction:

We considered the solar irradiance as a reliable indicator of solar activity. However, observational solar irradiance data exist only since 1978. Hence, solar irradiance data acquired from the World Data Center (WDC) were compared to the data of Ca plage areas and sunspot areas (acquired from National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC)) which are indications of solar chromosphere and photosphere, respectively. Besides, we used surface temperature data acquired from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) for analyses. We selected the temperature data according to the following criteria: presence of a minimum of 10 stations on selected regions and availability of uninterrupted monthly temperature data from these stations. Since USA and Japan have better long-term instrumental temperature data than most of the other countries, we used only these two countries' temperature data sets, the temperature being a climate indicator. In this study, temperature data sets covering the period 1900-1990 for Japan and 1900-1995 for USA were selected. These time interval selections are based on the coverage of both pre-industrial and fast-industrial growth era witnessed in these periods (Wiscombe, 1995; Tett et al., 1999). Monthly temperature data were used to obtain the annual mean values for each station. Station averages were then used to obtain the country-wide temperature data for each country. To satisfy equality of station heights and surface areas for both countries, data from only 18 stations of USA and 42 stations of Japan have been used in this study (see Fig. 1). Station heights vary between 3 and 497 m for USA and between 2 and 611 m for Japan.

[...]

5. Conclusion:

We know that a great deal of effort has been put to determine the effects of solar variability on the Earth's climate, and that, to explain the effects of all relevant factors in climate change, one needs to consider a model on a scale of decades to centuries. For the time being, proposed models are not yet of sufficient accuracy to permit any verification (Rozelot, 2001). This study is more a "heuristic" guide to the determination of the principal factors controlling our climate system. We obtained different correlation coefficients between temperatures and solar irradiance depending on the region considered, although we obtained almost identical periodicities for all data sets. Despite the fact that we only used the three-step running average smoothing technique, we obtained a fairly high correlation. On the other hand, our results suggest that atmospheric aerosols have more dominant effect on the Earth's climate than GHGs. Moreover, the existence of similar periodicities for all data sets point out that periodicities in the solar activity manifest themselves in periodic variations on the Earth's surface temperature with almost identical periods. However, prominence of this influence is suppressed by increasing concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere.

(The Doi (permanent) address for the full article above is here)




A Greenie Flop in Queensland, Australia

A "Green" project killed by Greenie fussing over almost everything to do with it. Excerpt from here:

"A power plant touted by the State Government as pioneering renewable energy generation is a multimillion-dollar flop. The troubled Rocky Point co-generation plant in the Woongoolba-Jacobs Well area south of Brisbane is expected to be sold at a fraction of its cost. The power plant - which uses sugarcane and timber waste to produce electricity - has cost its government-owned operator Stanwell Corp tens of millions of dollars since it was commissioned three years ago. It was worth $60 million when it opened in 2002 but is now valued at $7.5 million.

The plant had been forced to write down nearly $48 million, or about 80 per cent of its original value, as Stanwell Corp struggles against operating issues not planned for in the original design. The Rocky Point project cut Stanwell Corp's overall after-tax profit by more than $7.4 million to $29.4 million last financial year, a 28 per cent drop on its 2003-04 result.

Rocky Point also faced legal action by environmental authorities over its alleged role in allowing contaminated water to flow into the Logan River, leading to the death of a substantial amount of fish. The company has since upgraded its wastewater treatment facilities....

The Rocky Point plant also attracted a $3 million Commonwealth "renewable energy showcase" grant to help pay for its construction, which involved importing a steam turbine and generator from Germany. At the time it was commissioned, it was the largest co-generation facility of its type in Australia, powering the equivalent of 18,000 homes a year.

Promotional material produced by Stanwell boasts that the biomass industry had "extended the life of sugar farms in the Woongoolba area and ensured the viability of the Rocky Point sugar mill for another 20 years". The plant uses bagasse, or waste cane fibre, from the privately owned Rocky Point sugar mill, as well as council green waste, sawdust and woodchips. It also produces steam and electricity to power the sugar mill....

Stanwell chief executive Gary Humphrys yesterday issued a statement saying the plant's operational problems had to do with the processing of fuel and the disposal of waste water and ash. He said the requirement to store waste water and ash were "not planned in the original project design"."





A FACE-SAVER FOR THE DOOMED KYOTO TREATY?

An international panel including corporate and government officials who have been involved in climate-treaty negotiations has called for a broader version of the Kyoto Protocol, one that might include the Bush administration's voluntary approach to combating global warming. Its report, released here yesterday by the nonprofit Pew Center on Global Climate Change, calls for negotiators to revise the 1997 treaty to allow some countries to choose alternatives to international regulations that assign each country a quota and a timetable to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases thought to be contributing to climate change. Officials from the U.S., Japan, the United Kingdom and China were among the panel's members.

The next round of talks on the future of the treaty are slated to begin in two weeks at the United Nations' convention on climate change in Montreal.

The Pew Center's report endorses the Bush administration's gradual and voluntary reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions, in proportion to economic output, as one of a number of new approaches that might be used in 2012 when the treaty's current regulatory regime expires.

The Bush administration, however, said it isn't interested in an early renegotiation of the protocol. "We don't think initiating these discussions at this time is going to be productive," said one U.S. official, who underlined the administration's preference for voluntary efforts outside the treaty.

Charles Holliday Jr., chairman and chief executive of DuPont Co., one of five corporations involved in the Pew-sponsored study, said his company is "very much aligned" with the report's recommendations. He said the approach to climate change emphasizes the need for new technology and flexibility that will allow executives "to grow a business while addressing a societal need."

In signing the Kyoto Protocol, 38 industrial nations agreed to reduce their emissions from 1990 levels by an average 5.2% during the period from 2008 to 2012. One of the treaty's problems is that the globe's two largest emitters of man-made carbon dioxide, the U.S. and China, aren't subject to its controls. Another issue is that some of the protocol's most enthusiastic backers, including Canada, the U.K. and Italy, have recently been increasing their emissions, making it more difficult for them to meet the 2012 targets.

One of the leaders of the effort to broaden the treaty's reach and to experiment with more "flexible" controls is British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Echoing a complaint made previously by President Bush, Mr. Blair recently said that some governments "fear" that external controls would harm their economies. "We need to find a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem," Mr. Blair said earlier this month. Afterward, his aides insisted the U.K. wasn't abandoning the treaty's targets and timetables.

The U.S. and Australia are among 40 nations that haven't joined the Kyoto treaty, and Canadian leaders will make an effort in Montreal to draw them into a broader agreement to curb emissions, outside the treaty's framework. China has ratified the treaty, but, as a developing nation, isn't subject to its emission controls. If some countries shift away from specific reductions and timetables after 2012, it could become more difficult to trade emissions credits, which allow countries and companies to reduce their obligations by financing cheaper emissions controls elsewhere, often overseas.

Source




IS THIS THE ULTIMATE IN GREENIE NUTTINESS?

Or his he just setting them all a good example?

"A leading Brazilian environmentalist has died after setting fire to himself during a demonstration. Francisco Anselmo de Barros was protesting on Saturday against the construction of alcohol factories in the Pantanal marsh region. He died in intensive care a day later. He had suffered burns of more than 90% after wrapping himself in a burning duvet, the authorities said.

Mr Barros had dedicated his life to fighting for the environment. As president of the Foundation for the Conservation of Nature in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, he had fought against the establishment of factories in the Pantanal basin since the early 1980s, when two were constructed there. Mr Barros argued that the burning of sugar cane would have a catastrophic effect on the area...."

(Sugarcane was burnt before harvesting for over a century every year in tropical Australia -- to protect the cane-cutters from disease and vermin -- and no-one found any problems with it. It was discontinued only when mechanical harvesters came in)

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

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

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

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