MESSAGE FROM HONG KONG
After a few pink gins, perhaps
Mate, I live in Hong Kong. If you want an outlier for your global warming folks (and I reallly have no opinion either way vis-a-vis the rest of theplanet) but HK has added about 2 degrees Celsius in the last two decades, mainly through the building of an enormous amount of very tall buildings that block the normal wind patterns from cooling people as they should. A better heat island I dare you to find.
HK would tend, on a rather extreme scale, to suggest that readings from anywhere that tall buildings and bunches of concrete/heat-absorbing-bitumen exists cannot be taken as indicators of global warming; maybe global rapaciousness, but even that - as objectionable as it may be - is geographically confined.
The whole way this issue is being handled is completely wrong.
Sorry, BUT: Ask anyone if they give a rat's clitorus whether Tuvalu has any dry land in 100 years, even 10 years, and I would wager that unless it had direct access to the Chunnel you would hear a resounding 'Wha?!'
The bottom line is this: people don't care until it infringes upon their enjoyment of the planet.
Come to Hong Kong ... the place where Colonel Yang, one of the only bonafide Chinese astronauts, took a harbour cruise and had to have the view described to him. The harbour is only 1km wide in some places.
Don't argue about whether anthropogenic global warming is happening. That's a great topic for ologist barbecues. What about the fact that we can't see 3km? Isn't that infinitely worse? Why don't we concentrate on improving the view? Do that and everything flows from there.
(Name withheld to protect the guilty)
ERR.... YES
(From GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, L06718, 2006)
Long-term persistence in climate and the detection problem
Abstract
We have analyzed six recently reconstructed records (Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1999; Briffa, 2000; Esper et al., 2002; McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003; and Moberg et al., 2005) of the Northern Hemisphere temperatures and found that all are governed by long-term persistence. Due to the long-term persistence, the mean temperature variations ?(m, L) between L years, obtained from moving averages over m years, are considerably larger than for uncorrelated or short-term correlated records. We compare the values for ?(m, L) with the most recent temperature changes ?T i (m, L) in the corresponding instrumental record and determine the year i c where ?T i (m, L)/?(m, L) exceeds a certain threshold and the first year i d when this could be detected. We find, for example, that for the climatologically relevant parameters m = 30, L = 100, and the threshold 2.5, the values (i c , i d ) range, for all records, between (1976, 1990) for Mann et al. (1999) and (1988, 2002) for Jones et al. (1998). Accordingly, the hypothesis that at least part of the recent warming cannot be solely related to natural factors, may be accepted with a very low risk, independently of the database used.
A spoof, of course
CHURCH OF ENGLAND HYPOCRISY?
The Archbishop of Canterbury has been accused of hypocrisy for lecturing politicians on global warming while the Church of England reaps millions of pounds from shares in oil firms. Rowan Williams warned last week that climate change was a "huge moral problem" that could cause billions of deaths. He said politicians who reject changes will face "a heavy responsibility before God". He added that the shortage of fuel supplies for high-fuel economies - "heavy-car-using economies to put it bluntly" - will be a factor in destabilising global politics in the next decade.
But an audit of the Church Commissioners' investments shows its oil shares increased in value by œ46.9m last year. Its portfolio includes more than 12 million pounds of shares in Exxon Mobil, the American oil group blamed for the world's biggest environmental disaster when the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground off Alaska in 1989. The firm, which has funded research groups that claim climate change is a "myth", is appealing against a 2.8 billion pound fine for the spillage in the American courts.
Williams is chairman of the commissioners, who also have investments in BP worth 140 million and shares in Shell totalling 80 million. Another investment is BAA, the airports group, which has been partly blamed for the rise in carbon emissions because of the way it has encouraged cheap air travel.
Dan Lewis, of the Economic Research Council, a think tank, said: "If anyone wanted proof that for some people global warming has become a religion this is it. It is hilarious that the church has shares in Exxon." But John Reynolds, chairman of the Church of England's ethical advisory group, said: "The investments we have allow us to have an active dialogue with the oil companies about the environment." A spokeswoman for Lambeth Palace said: "The archbishop's leadership has never been about micro-management and investment decisions. It is more about leading by example."
The Sunday Times
REALITY CHECK: BRITAIN PLANS FURTHER EXPANSION OF AIRPORTS
British Greens hate air travel
Britons are set to take more than half a billion flights a year by 2030, with thousands of homes across the country facing greater increases in noise and pollution than the government has forecast. The air transport White Paper just two years ago predicted that passenger numbers would double by 2030. Now at least 10 airports plan to handle a growth even higher than that.
Ministers will also reveal tomorrow that politicians and civil servants fly the equivalent of 100,000 trips to New York every year on business as they launch a new promise to offset the carbon emissions of all flights by paying for schemes to reduce emissions from other sources.
The new growth figures mean the government faces an even tougher battle to curb greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change - less than a week after admitting it will miss its key target to tackle the problem. 'If people thought the airport growth forecasts in the White Paper were bad enough, they will be shocked to find out that even those can be exceeded so substantially and so quickly,' said Anthony Rae, a regional air campaigner for Friends of the Earth. 'If you go beyond the 480m to 500m-520m [passengers a year], we don't know what the upper limit would be, it simply makes the problems worse.'
The White Paper controversially set out dozens of schemes to expand and build new runways and terminals to accommodate a central forecast rise from 200m passengers a year to nearly 480m. The forecast included a range of 400m to 600m passengers, but the 480m figure has become the widely used benchmark. The report also acknowledged the environmental dangers of flying, but said aviation was 'essential' to the UK economy, and proposed expansion should be accompanied by measures to reduce air and noise pollution. The most high-profile and controversial proposal was to build another runway at Stansted Airport north of London, and another runway at either Heathrow or Gatwick, but dozens more regional schemes were also given the go-ahead.
Since then, research by Friends of the Earth shows airports at Newcastle, Teesside, Leeds-Bradford, Liverpool, Blackpool, Southampton, Edinburgh and Glasgow have submitted 'master plans' for future growth which predict passenger numbers will rise beyond the White Paper projections. In addition, Doncaster Airport, which was excluded from the White Paper, now forecasts up to 14.5m passengers by 2030, and Coventry, which was a very small operation two years ago, is planning for 2m. Together, these airports are planning for an additional 39m passengers a year at least, which would take the government forecast over 500m.
Research by the Stop Stansted Expansion group also shows the government target to increase air travel from regional airports to 40 per cent of the national total by 2030 was already reached last year - largely driven by no-frills airlines.
Nationally the increase in aviation emissions would not be enormous, and currently aviation contributes less than 5 per cent of all UK greenhouse gas emissions. But the sector is already the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. Aviation emissions are nearly three times more potent as greenhouse gases because they take place high in the atmosphere. Because of this, one report suggests aviation alone will use up the entire UK pledged carbon allowance in the second half of this century. A Department for Transport spokesman said the government 'stands by' its own forecasts, which were in a range of 400m-600m by 2030, and stressed that the more ambitious plans had not yet been approved. The scheme to pay to off-set the carbon emissions of all government flights will be launched by environment minister Elliot Morley, and is expected to cost more than 1 million pounds a year.
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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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
THE FULL TEXT OF A CENSORED LETTER
Britain's "Independent" newspaper is in fact Britain's no. 1 Greenie rag. But to save face, they do occasionally publish something that is not pro-Green. On April 1, they published a letter from Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. They published only the milder parts of the letter, however. Below is the full text of the original letter:
"Over the last few years your columns, and those of other leading British newspapers, have carried a steady stream of alarmist letters and articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Similar articles in international magazines, such as the current issue of Time, have acted to exacerbate the propaganda barrage which faces the public. Each such alarmist article is liberally larded with words such as if, may, might, could, probably, perhaps, likely, expected, projected or modelled - and many involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and principles, that they are akin to scientific nonsense.
The numerous letters that you have published so far in "Have your say on climate" exemplify the problem created by this alarmism, and by inadequate education systems, and it is not the problem of climate change. Almost without exception, your letter writers implicitly accept - as if they were articles of religious faith - that emissions of carbon dioxide are environmentally harmful, and that dangerous human-caused climate change is occurring.
The facts speak differently.
Carbon dioxide is a natural trace component of the atmosphere the presence of which carries many benefits. The two most important being that carbon dioxide encourages prolific plant growth, and probably also causes mild warming. ("Probably" because although the molecular properties of carbon dioxide make it one of a number of greenhouse gases, increasing its abundance causes both temperature positive and negative feedback loops, the balance of which remains unknown.) The latter fact notwithstanding, and despite a strong public impression otherwise, no simple or significant relationship has been established between the post-industrial increase in human emissions of carbon dioxide and increasing temperature.
Measurements from ground-based thermometers and independently from satellite and weather balloon sensors all agree (i) that a minor warming trend of a few tenths of a degree occurred during the last two decades of the 20th century, and (ii) that that trend has now flattened out. The warming occurred at a rate which is not known accurately but lies between 1 and 2 degrees C /century. Such rates fall comfortably within the multi-decadal warming and cooling rates of up to 3 degrees/century that occur commonly in the recent geological past. Ice core data from Greenland, and other geological data, show also that the magnitude of the late 20th century warming peak has been nearly matched or exceeded many times during climatic cycling in both the recent and deep geological past. Thus neither the rate nor the magnitude of late 20th century warming can yet be shown to be in any way unusual.
You are correct in identifying a huge problem with "climate change", but the problem is political, not environmental or scientific. The ineffectuality of the Kyoto Protocol now being apparent to all, climate policies in countries such as New Zealand (a Kyoto co-signatory with Britain) have descended to farce. One day a carbon tax is on, the next off. Politicians of all stripes reveal abysmal ignorance of the science of climate change on a daily basis. And that measures such as taxing farmers for farting cattle have been seriously entertained as public policy says it all.
A good place to start sorting out the mess would be to read again last year's House of Lords report on climate change, which contains much wise analysis, and at the same time to replace the government's evangelistic advisors on the matter with better versed persons."
Source
KYOTO NIGHTMARE: RUSSIA THREATENS TO HALT GAS SUPPLIES TO EUROPE
Russia's state-controlled natural gas monopoly Gazprom said on Wednesday, April 19, that if European Union countries continue to block its international ambitions it could redirect gas supplies to other markets. The move comes after the British Financial Times newspaper reported that the British government wanted to legislatively block Gazprom's acquisition of Britain's biggest gas supplier Centrica.
In a statement after a meeting between Alexei Miller, Gazprom's chief executive, and EU ambassadors, the company said: "It is necessary to note that attempts to limit Gazprom's activities in the European market and politicize questions of gas supply, which in fact are of an entirely economic nature, will not lead to good results."
As MosNews reported earlier this week, the Financial Times learned that the U.K. government had considered changing merger rules to block a potential takeover of Centrica, Britain's biggest gas supplier, by Gazprom.
Gazprom's CEO met ambassadors of the 25 EU states in Moscow on Tuesday, April 18, to discuss Gazprom's relations with Europe, and insisted the world's largest gas producer understood its responsibilities as supplier of a quarter of the EU's gas.
Wednesday's statement by Gazprom threatened to devote more of the company's supplies to fast-growing markets elsewhere if plans to expand in Europe - where it has ambitions to move into downstream gas distribution - were thwarted. "It should not be forgotten that we are actively familiarizing ourselves with new markets, such as North America and China. Gas producers in central Asia are also paying attention to the Chinese market. This is for a reason: competition for energy resources is growing," it said.
Gazprom said that, while it would fulfill its current contracts with European clients, any future relationship with these countries should take into account the Russian company's ambitions to move into the downstream markets. Sergei Kupriyanov, a spokesman for Gazprom, told the Financial Times: "We just want European countries to understand that we have other alternatives in terms of gas sales. We have a fast-growing Chinese market, and a market for liquefied natural gas in the U.S. If the European Union wants our gas, it has to consider our interests as well."
Gazprom's threats follow an outline agreement between Russia and China to supply the Chinese market with gas from Western Siberia, which is also the main source of gas for Europe. Given that Gazprom's reserves have been static for the past five years, the supply of gas to China will decrease the volume of gas available to European countries. Gazprom has made no secret of its ambition to supply up to 20 percent of the U.K.'s gas by 2015.
Other European countries have also expressed concerns about Gazprom's plans to take a share in their domestic markets. The EU earlier indicated it would be prepared to let Gazprom into its downstream market if Russia were to liberalize access to gas pipelines to other countries and independent producers - a prospect that Gazprom has ruled out.
MosNews, 20 April 2006
Report powers push for nuclear energy
A study by the West's energy watchdog is expected to show that expanding civil nuclear power offers the best hope of tackling global energy insecurity - a finding that would strengthen the hand of governments looking to build new reactors. The International Energy Agency, which represents 26 developed countries, is to support a study highly likely to make the case for greater reliance on nuclear power. The body is likely to conclude that nuclear power also offers the best solution for those governments wishing to meet emissions targets.
The agency's move comes as European concerns over the stability of Russian gas supplies intensify. This week Gazprom, the world's biggest gas producer, threatened to ship gas elsewhere if its European expansion plans were blocked. Earlier this year Moscow halted gas supplies to Ukraine in a price dispute, cutting the flow of gas to Europe for a brief period.
The industrialised developed world's energy watchdog is looking to nuclear power to guarantee security amid growing fears about the reliability of natural gas supplies, particularly out of Iran and Russia. IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said that security of supply and climate change were the main concerns in the years ahead: "We think security of supply will be a big problem." The decline of gas production in North America and in the North Sea would leave Europe and many other parts of the world hostage to a shrinking number of suppliers, reducing energy security, he warned.
Analysts said the IEA's study suggested backing for nuclear power was building up and could force an end to the decades of moratoriums and stalled reactor programs that followed the Chernobyl accident 20 years ago. One diplomat called the study a small step on the road to nuclear acceptance, while others noted that the de facto endorsement of nuclear by the IEA - which has never put its weight behind it - marked a major shift. All 26 members of the agency support the study, although their policies on nuclear power differ widely. Austria, Germany and Ireland oppose the use of nuclear fuel, while Spain, Britain, Italy and Sweden are reviewing whether to build new reactors. Britain is carrying out a review of energy needs that is expected to back building new nuclear power plants. The review is due to be completed by the northern summer.
The decision to allow the next World Energy Outlook, the IEA's flagship yearly publication, to analyse and probably support the use of nuclear power marks a big shift towards "the nuclear solution" by the world's developed countries. Andrew Wright, analyst at UBS, said: "The IEA is a respected, august body and when confronting opposition, national governments may well use the independent OECD agency (IEA) in support of their argument in favour of nuclear."
Europe has become increasingly reliant on gas from a few, increasingly distant suppliers as many of its nuclear reactors are near the end of their lives. Meanwhile, most of Iran's vast gas reserves remain untapped as its dispute with the West over Tehran's nuclear ambitions thwarts investment progress. The European Commission On Thursday urged Gazprom to stick to contractual commitments and warned it against threatening European supplies. The IEA, established after the 1970s oil shocks, is charged with advancing energy security and helping inform the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development on energy policy.
Source
REQUIEM FOR ENVIRONMENTALISM (From a rather surprising source)
Environmentalism is dead; long live the environment!
This pronouncement might seem a touch premature, especially to the 500 million people who will celebrate the 37th Earth Day this weekend-a collective "not dead yet" wheeze. However, these numbers mask the growing irrelevance of the environmentalist movement. Having lost its credibility with alarmist rhetoric and obsolete ideological ballast, the movement must develop a moderate discourse while challenging its previous assumptions and outdated theories.
The contemporary environmentalist movement faces a stark choice: change tactics or fade into irrelevance. Over the past decade, environmentalists have achieved few political victories and utterly failed to influence the general public. As indicated by a recent MIT study, the public knows little about environmental problems, and cares less. Out of 21 national and international issues, Americans ranked environmental problems 13th, well below terrorism, taxes, crime, and drugs.
Alarmism - the environmental movement's basic strategy - has led to this dead end. Since Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," the movement has been dominated by doomsday scenarios. Even on the first Earth Day in 1970, biologist George Wald predicted that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken" while the New York Times warned that "man must stop pollution and conserve his resources...to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction." Fortunately, such apocalyptic forecasts have repeatedly proven to be wrong.
Take biologist Paul Ehrlich's popular Malthusian broadside, "The Population Bomb." Farsighted Ehrlich predicted that a "population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make," causing world-wide famine and the death of "hundreds of millions of people" annually from starvation. Oops-in the subsequent 35 years, increased agricultural productivity exceeded population growth and the total amount of cultivated land barely increased.
Ehrlich is hardly alone; the environmental movement has spawned a remarkable number of would-be Cassandras. Between 1970 and 2006, global cooling predictions mysteriously morphed into global warming fears. Concerns about rampant Dodo-ism proved baseless: the rate of animal extinction in the U.S. has been declining since the 1930s, and only seven species have gone extinct since 1973. And rather than running out of resources, the world has experienced a commodity glut, with the prices of most metals and minerals dropping by 30 to 50 percent. The litany of failed apocalypses goes on.
Not that this history of crying wolf has chastened contemporary environmentalists. Activists and researchers still issue dire warnings with mind-numbing regularity. Just three weeks ago, a panic-stricken Time magazine story on global warming shouted, "Be Worried, Be Very Worried." Harping on worst-case scenarios like a 220-foot rise in the ocean's water level, the article more closely resembled "The Day After Tomorrow" than a serious report.
Although such scare mongering persists, it has reached the point of diminishing returns. Knowing the movement's track record of false alarms, the American public dismiss dire environmental warnings out of hand. Moreover, these alarming reports attract a disproportionate amount of media attention, discrediting the environmentalist movement twice over: First when the sensational predictions drown out more plausible reports, then again when the highly-publicized disaster fails to occur.
Contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. environment is getting healthier. The U.S. population has more than doubled since 1970, yet forest coverage has increased. Measurements of major air pollutants-sulfur, suspended particulates, and carbon monoxide-have registered declines of 15 to 75 percent. Likewise, the number of healthy rivers and lakes has roughly doubled since the first Earth Day, and Lake Erie, declared "dead" in the 1970s, now supports a healthy fishing industry. There are exceptions to this positive trend, but the overall direction is unmistakable: The U.S. natural environment is improving.
Of course, environmentalists claim credit for this trend. Alarmists can't lose: either doomsday comes true, or their warnings averted disaster. Certainly, part of the positive trend is due to activism and government regulations, but much of the change is a result of increased technological efficiency as well as longstanding trends that predate the rise of environmentalism.
Although the impact of the movement's past achievements is uncertain, its future success clearly depends on a fundamental reevaluation of long-unquestioned theories and policies. Doomsday warnings no longer shock the public into action; instead, environmentalists need to develop moderate arguments that don't depend on the 'stick' of calamity. This means abandoning Soviet-style "command-and-control" regulation, epitomized by the Kyoto Treaty, and exploring ideas, like the use of DDT, that are currently considered heretical.
Thus, on the 37th anniversary of Earth Day, the environmental movement is looking increasingly long in the tooth. Alarmist environmentalists have overshadowed moderate, careful researchers, and undermined the credibility of the entire movement. Until environmentalists cease depending on nightmare scenarios, they will fail to influence the public at large. Let the next generation of environmentalists begin to reestablish the movement's credibility by exploring currently heretical ideas and producing moderate, nuanced reports, even if they do not make for good press.
The Harvard Crimson, 20 April 2006
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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.
*****************************************
Britain's "Independent" newspaper is in fact Britain's no. 1 Greenie rag. But to save face, they do occasionally publish something that is not pro-Green. On April 1, they published a letter from Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. They published only the milder parts of the letter, however. Below is the full text of the original letter:
"Over the last few years your columns, and those of other leading British newspapers, have carried a steady stream of alarmist letters and articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Similar articles in international magazines, such as the current issue of Time, have acted to exacerbate the propaganda barrage which faces the public. Each such alarmist article is liberally larded with words such as if, may, might, could, probably, perhaps, likely, expected, projected or modelled - and many involve such deep dreaming, or ignorance of scientific facts and principles, that they are akin to scientific nonsense.
The numerous letters that you have published so far in "Have your say on climate" exemplify the problem created by this alarmism, and by inadequate education systems, and it is not the problem of climate change. Almost without exception, your letter writers implicitly accept - as if they were articles of religious faith - that emissions of carbon dioxide are environmentally harmful, and that dangerous human-caused climate change is occurring.
The facts speak differently.
Carbon dioxide is a natural trace component of the atmosphere the presence of which carries many benefits. The two most important being that carbon dioxide encourages prolific plant growth, and probably also causes mild warming. ("Probably" because although the molecular properties of carbon dioxide make it one of a number of greenhouse gases, increasing its abundance causes both temperature positive and negative feedback loops, the balance of which remains unknown.) The latter fact notwithstanding, and despite a strong public impression otherwise, no simple or significant relationship has been established between the post-industrial increase in human emissions of carbon dioxide and increasing temperature.
Measurements from ground-based thermometers and independently from satellite and weather balloon sensors all agree (i) that a minor warming trend of a few tenths of a degree occurred during the last two decades of the 20th century, and (ii) that that trend has now flattened out. The warming occurred at a rate which is not known accurately but lies between 1 and 2 degrees C /century. Such rates fall comfortably within the multi-decadal warming and cooling rates of up to 3 degrees/century that occur commonly in the recent geological past. Ice core data from Greenland, and other geological data, show also that the magnitude of the late 20th century warming peak has been nearly matched or exceeded many times during climatic cycling in both the recent and deep geological past. Thus neither the rate nor the magnitude of late 20th century warming can yet be shown to be in any way unusual.
You are correct in identifying a huge problem with "climate change", but the problem is political, not environmental or scientific. The ineffectuality of the Kyoto Protocol now being apparent to all, climate policies in countries such as New Zealand (a Kyoto co-signatory with Britain) have descended to farce. One day a carbon tax is on, the next off. Politicians of all stripes reveal abysmal ignorance of the science of climate change on a daily basis. And that measures such as taxing farmers for farting cattle have been seriously entertained as public policy says it all.
A good place to start sorting out the mess would be to read again last year's House of Lords report on climate change, which contains much wise analysis, and at the same time to replace the government's evangelistic advisors on the matter with better versed persons."
Source
KYOTO NIGHTMARE: RUSSIA THREATENS TO HALT GAS SUPPLIES TO EUROPE
Russia's state-controlled natural gas monopoly Gazprom said on Wednesday, April 19, that if European Union countries continue to block its international ambitions it could redirect gas supplies to other markets. The move comes after the British Financial Times newspaper reported that the British government wanted to legislatively block Gazprom's acquisition of Britain's biggest gas supplier Centrica.
In a statement after a meeting between Alexei Miller, Gazprom's chief executive, and EU ambassadors, the company said: "It is necessary to note that attempts to limit Gazprom's activities in the European market and politicize questions of gas supply, which in fact are of an entirely economic nature, will not lead to good results."
As MosNews reported earlier this week, the Financial Times learned that the U.K. government had considered changing merger rules to block a potential takeover of Centrica, Britain's biggest gas supplier, by Gazprom.
Gazprom's CEO met ambassadors of the 25 EU states in Moscow on Tuesday, April 18, to discuss Gazprom's relations with Europe, and insisted the world's largest gas producer understood its responsibilities as supplier of a quarter of the EU's gas.
Wednesday's statement by Gazprom threatened to devote more of the company's supplies to fast-growing markets elsewhere if plans to expand in Europe - where it has ambitions to move into downstream gas distribution - were thwarted. "It should not be forgotten that we are actively familiarizing ourselves with new markets, such as North America and China. Gas producers in central Asia are also paying attention to the Chinese market. This is for a reason: competition for energy resources is growing," it said.
Gazprom said that, while it would fulfill its current contracts with European clients, any future relationship with these countries should take into account the Russian company's ambitions to move into the downstream markets. Sergei Kupriyanov, a spokesman for Gazprom, told the Financial Times: "We just want European countries to understand that we have other alternatives in terms of gas sales. We have a fast-growing Chinese market, and a market for liquefied natural gas in the U.S. If the European Union wants our gas, it has to consider our interests as well."
Gazprom's threats follow an outline agreement between Russia and China to supply the Chinese market with gas from Western Siberia, which is also the main source of gas for Europe. Given that Gazprom's reserves have been static for the past five years, the supply of gas to China will decrease the volume of gas available to European countries. Gazprom has made no secret of its ambition to supply up to 20 percent of the U.K.'s gas by 2015.
Other European countries have also expressed concerns about Gazprom's plans to take a share in their domestic markets. The EU earlier indicated it would be prepared to let Gazprom into its downstream market if Russia were to liberalize access to gas pipelines to other countries and independent producers - a prospect that Gazprom has ruled out.
MosNews, 20 April 2006
Report powers push for nuclear energy
A study by the West's energy watchdog is expected to show that expanding civil nuclear power offers the best hope of tackling global energy insecurity - a finding that would strengthen the hand of governments looking to build new reactors. The International Energy Agency, which represents 26 developed countries, is to support a study highly likely to make the case for greater reliance on nuclear power. The body is likely to conclude that nuclear power also offers the best solution for those governments wishing to meet emissions targets.
The agency's move comes as European concerns over the stability of Russian gas supplies intensify. This week Gazprom, the world's biggest gas producer, threatened to ship gas elsewhere if its European expansion plans were blocked. Earlier this year Moscow halted gas supplies to Ukraine in a price dispute, cutting the flow of gas to Europe for a brief period.
The industrialised developed world's energy watchdog is looking to nuclear power to guarantee security amid growing fears about the reliability of natural gas supplies, particularly out of Iran and Russia. IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said that security of supply and climate change were the main concerns in the years ahead: "We think security of supply will be a big problem." The decline of gas production in North America and in the North Sea would leave Europe and many other parts of the world hostage to a shrinking number of suppliers, reducing energy security, he warned.
Analysts said the IEA's study suggested backing for nuclear power was building up and could force an end to the decades of moratoriums and stalled reactor programs that followed the Chernobyl accident 20 years ago. One diplomat called the study a small step on the road to nuclear acceptance, while others noted that the de facto endorsement of nuclear by the IEA - which has never put its weight behind it - marked a major shift. All 26 members of the agency support the study, although their policies on nuclear power differ widely. Austria, Germany and Ireland oppose the use of nuclear fuel, while Spain, Britain, Italy and Sweden are reviewing whether to build new reactors. Britain is carrying out a review of energy needs that is expected to back building new nuclear power plants. The review is due to be completed by the northern summer.
The decision to allow the next World Energy Outlook, the IEA's flagship yearly publication, to analyse and probably support the use of nuclear power marks a big shift towards "the nuclear solution" by the world's developed countries. Andrew Wright, analyst at UBS, said: "The IEA is a respected, august body and when confronting opposition, national governments may well use the independent OECD agency (IEA) in support of their argument in favour of nuclear."
Europe has become increasingly reliant on gas from a few, increasingly distant suppliers as many of its nuclear reactors are near the end of their lives. Meanwhile, most of Iran's vast gas reserves remain untapped as its dispute with the West over Tehran's nuclear ambitions thwarts investment progress. The European Commission On Thursday urged Gazprom to stick to contractual commitments and warned it against threatening European supplies. The IEA, established after the 1970s oil shocks, is charged with advancing energy security and helping inform the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development on energy policy.
Source
REQUIEM FOR ENVIRONMENTALISM (From a rather surprising source)
Environmentalism is dead; long live the environment!
This pronouncement might seem a touch premature, especially to the 500 million people who will celebrate the 37th Earth Day this weekend-a collective "not dead yet" wheeze. However, these numbers mask the growing irrelevance of the environmentalist movement. Having lost its credibility with alarmist rhetoric and obsolete ideological ballast, the movement must develop a moderate discourse while challenging its previous assumptions and outdated theories.
The contemporary environmentalist movement faces a stark choice: change tactics or fade into irrelevance. Over the past decade, environmentalists have achieved few political victories and utterly failed to influence the general public. As indicated by a recent MIT study, the public knows little about environmental problems, and cares less. Out of 21 national and international issues, Americans ranked environmental problems 13th, well below terrorism, taxes, crime, and drugs.
Alarmism - the environmental movement's basic strategy - has led to this dead end. Since Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," the movement has been dominated by doomsday scenarios. Even on the first Earth Day in 1970, biologist George Wald predicted that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken" while the New York Times warned that "man must stop pollution and conserve his resources...to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction." Fortunately, such apocalyptic forecasts have repeatedly proven to be wrong.
Take biologist Paul Ehrlich's popular Malthusian broadside, "The Population Bomb." Farsighted Ehrlich predicted that a "population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make," causing world-wide famine and the death of "hundreds of millions of people" annually from starvation. Oops-in the subsequent 35 years, increased agricultural productivity exceeded population growth and the total amount of cultivated land barely increased.
Ehrlich is hardly alone; the environmental movement has spawned a remarkable number of would-be Cassandras. Between 1970 and 2006, global cooling predictions mysteriously morphed into global warming fears. Concerns about rampant Dodo-ism proved baseless: the rate of animal extinction in the U.S. has been declining since the 1930s, and only seven species have gone extinct since 1973. And rather than running out of resources, the world has experienced a commodity glut, with the prices of most metals and minerals dropping by 30 to 50 percent. The litany of failed apocalypses goes on.
Not that this history of crying wolf has chastened contemporary environmentalists. Activists and researchers still issue dire warnings with mind-numbing regularity. Just three weeks ago, a panic-stricken Time magazine story on global warming shouted, "Be Worried, Be Very Worried." Harping on worst-case scenarios like a 220-foot rise in the ocean's water level, the article more closely resembled "The Day After Tomorrow" than a serious report.
Although such scare mongering persists, it has reached the point of diminishing returns. Knowing the movement's track record of false alarms, the American public dismiss dire environmental warnings out of hand. Moreover, these alarming reports attract a disproportionate amount of media attention, discrediting the environmentalist movement twice over: First when the sensational predictions drown out more plausible reports, then again when the highly-publicized disaster fails to occur.
Contrary to popular opinion, the U.S. environment is getting healthier. The U.S. population has more than doubled since 1970, yet forest coverage has increased. Measurements of major air pollutants-sulfur, suspended particulates, and carbon monoxide-have registered declines of 15 to 75 percent. Likewise, the number of healthy rivers and lakes has roughly doubled since the first Earth Day, and Lake Erie, declared "dead" in the 1970s, now supports a healthy fishing industry. There are exceptions to this positive trend, but the overall direction is unmistakable: The U.S. natural environment is improving.
Of course, environmentalists claim credit for this trend. Alarmists can't lose: either doomsday comes true, or their warnings averted disaster. Certainly, part of the positive trend is due to activism and government regulations, but much of the change is a result of increased technological efficiency as well as longstanding trends that predate the rise of environmentalism.
Although the impact of the movement's past achievements is uncertain, its future success clearly depends on a fundamental reevaluation of long-unquestioned theories and policies. Doomsday warnings no longer shock the public into action; instead, environmentalists need to develop moderate arguments that don't depend on the 'stick' of calamity. This means abandoning Soviet-style "command-and-control" regulation, epitomized by the Kyoto Treaty, and exploring ideas, like the use of DDT, that are currently considered heretical.
Thus, on the 37th anniversary of Earth Day, the environmental movement is looking increasingly long in the tooth. Alarmist environmentalists have overshadowed moderate, careful researchers, and undermined the credibility of the entire movement. Until environmentalists cease depending on nightmare scenarios, they will fail to influence the public at large. Let the next generation of environmentalists begin to reestablish the movement's credibility by exploring currently heretical ideas and producing moderate, nuanced reports, even if they do not make for good press.
The Harvard Crimson, 20 April 2006
***************************************
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.
*****************************************
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Scientists cool outlook on global warming
Global warming may not be as dramatic as some scientists have predicted. Using temperature readings from the past 100 years, 1,000 computer simulations and the evidence left in ancient tree rings, Duke University scientists announced yesterday that "the magnitude of future global warming will likely fall well short of current highest predictions."
Supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, the Duke researchers noted that some observational studies predicted that the Earth's temperature could rise as much as 16 degrees in this century because of an increase in carbon dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gases. The Duke estimates show the chances that the planet's temperature will rise even by 11 degrees is only 5 percent, which falls in line with previous, less-alarming predictions that meteorologists made almost three decades ago.
In recent years, much academic research has indicated otherwise, often in colorful terms and citing the United States as the biggest contributor to global warming. This month, a University of Toronto scientist predicted that a quarter of the planet's plants and animals would be extinct by 2050 because of rising temperatures. On Wednesday, two geophysics professors at the University of Chicago warned those who eat red meat that their increased flatulence contributes to greenhouse gases. Last year, Oregon State University research linked future "societal disruptions" with global warming, while the Carnegie Institution reported that the insulating influence of northern forests alone would raise the Earth's temperature by 6 degrees. In 2004, Harvard University scientists informed Congress that warming had doomed the planet to climatic "shocks and surprises."
The Duke research, however, found substantial ups and downs in the Earth's temperature before modern times, countering other studies that confine noticeable temperature increases to the industrialized era. Marked climate change in other centuries resulted from "external forcing," said the Duke findings, citing volcanic eruptions and other influences. "Our reconstruction supports a lot of variability in the past," said research director Gabriele Hegerl of Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.
Although her study found that the Earth is, indeed, warming, Ms. Hegerl discounts dire predictions of skyrocketing temperatures. The probability that the climate's "sensitivity" to greenhouse-gas levels would result in drastically higher temperatures is "substantially" reduced, she said. Ms. Hegerl and her four-member team based their conclusions on thermometer readings over the past century, along with "ancient climate records," including tree-ring studies and ice-core samples that revealed hot and cold spells and airborne particulates over a 700-year period. In addition, they created 1,000 computer-based weather simulations for the past 1,000 years. "Ancient and modern evidence suggest limits to future global warming," the study concluded. It was published in the journal Nature.
Source
Earth Day Information Center Cites Environmental Progress
Although many environmental organizations will strain to find the black lining in the silver cloud of environmental progress on the occasion of Earth Day, the Earth Day Information Center, a project of The National Center for Public Policy Research, is pleased to note environmental progress in many areas. Earth Day is Saturday, April 22.
"The air we breathe and the water we drink is substantially cleaner than it was at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970," said Peyton Knight, director of environmental and regulatory affairs for the National Center, adding, "Of course, good news on the environment, of which there is much, rarely makes the cut for the broadcast evening news."
The Earth Day Information Center notes that volatile organic compound emissions from cars and trucks, which are largely responsible for creating ground level ozone and smog, have declined 73.8 percent since 1970. In addition, between 1993 and 2002, aggregate emissions of the six principle air pollutants tracked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have declined 19 percent.
Cleaner air has made for good news on the acid rain front as well. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions - the main pollutants in the formation of acid rain - have been markedly reduced. Sulfur dioxide emissions in the electric power industry are down 38 percent from 1980 levels, and nitrogen oxide emissions for the entire power industry are 37 percent below 1990 levels according to the EPA.
The Center also notes that despite some claims to the contrary, the United States is gaining wetlands. "In 2002 and 2003, the United States gained a net average of 72,000 acres of wetlands each year," said Knight. The U.S. Department of Agriculture observes that net wetland acreage also grew at a rate of 26,000 acres per year between 1997 and 2001.
"The best way to ensure a healthier, cleaner world is to allow the power of human ingenuity to come to grips with environmental challenges confronting us," said National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen. "Technological innovation and well-protected property rights - not micro-management through bureaucratic fiat - will enable people the world over to live longer, healthier lives. Sadly, this message seems completely lost on an environmentalist establishment that is more concerned with fund-raising through fear-mongering than with providing common sense solutions," says Cohen, "The very things they attack, man-made chemicals, for example, have helped eradicate diseases, purify drinking water, create life-saving medicines and medical devices, and brought about countless other improvements in our daily lives."
Though progress has been made in clean air, water, and wetlands, there is at least one environmental issue area where advancement has been lacking: Endangered species recovery.
The House of Representatives approved the Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act last year, which aims to remove some of the barriers to species recovery that are present in the current Endangered Species Act. However, this reform effort has been met with strong resistance from the environmental community. "In the 33-year history of the Endangered Species Act, less than one percent of species listed as endangered or threatened under the Act have been recovered," notes Knight. "While most would consider a less-than-one-percent recovery rate a failure, many environmentalists apparently consider it good enough to continue the status quo."
Source
COMMENT ON THE MELTDOWN OF THE BBC CLIMATE CHANGE MODEL
A climate model program downloaded by thousands of PC users had an internal error that meant it overstated how hot the world might get. Oops.
Researchers behind a much-hyped climate model downloaded by hundreds of thousands of home PC users have had to admit that many of their results are wrong because of errors in the program. And it's not just their software that's flawed.
The software, produced by Oxford University in conjunction with a consortium of research institutions, was launched with great fanfare in February by the BBC. Around 200,000 people downloaded the programme, which runs in the background on PCs, each one working on one of thousands of very slightly different scenarios about how the world's climate might change in the future.
However, after two months it's been discovered that there were errors in a data file which was supposed to take account of particles in the atmosphere that suppress rising temperatures. Consequently, the world was - virtually, at least - getting too hot, too quickly.
The project's principal investigator, Dr Myles Allen, found a silver lining to this climate-modelling cloud. 'What we've seen in the runs is the unadulterated impact of global warming which means that all of the models have warmed up too fast', he told BBC News. 'At some point in the future, we may have done an experiment like this anyway.'
The real problem is not an individual cock-up in one computer program, but the excessive reliance on models in the broader debate about global warming.
That is not to say models are completely without value. It is reasonable to put together our best guesses as regards future trends like gas emissions, population change, solar outputs and so on with what we know about climate physics to produce some broad estimates about what might happen next. But these are sophisticated guesstimates, no more. They allow us to think through what are the parameters of the discussion; they do not represent viable predictions of the future.
There are many good reasons why the models will be inadequate, not the least being the possibility of bias, conscious or unconscious, in the initial setup. For one thing, the data we have will always be incomplete. Satellite measurements are better than they were in the past, but they only go back to the late Seventies. Before that, weather records are based on stations that were unevenly spread, with relative high concentrations in developed countries and relatively few over the 70 per cent of the Earth covered by water.
The physics of individual climate elements is not fully understood, particularly in relation to clouds; we don't know how much cloud will be produced in a warming world and what the net effect of that cloud will be. In addition, new announcements from research teams are made regularly about factors that hadn't been fully appreciated before.
Also, models are, by their very nature, simplifications of the real world. Consider a non-climate example: the Millennium Bridge in London. This was a relatively simple system to model. But when the bridge opened in June 2000 it had to be quickly closed again because the effect of people actually walking on it caused the whole thing to 'wobble'. So even engineers with far less complex problems than world climate to solve can get things badly wrong.
Which brings us to the bottom line in climate modelling. How can we test that the models actually work? Attempts to see how the models replicate the known temperature from the past are problematic because we know, given the inadequate coverage and mixed standard of ground-based weather stations in previous decades, that this temperature record is incomplete and almost certainly inaccurate. We could wait a few decades to see how real temperatures pan out, but that rather defeats the object of the exercise, especially if you believe we'll all be parched or drowned in a century's time.
So, we should accept the conclusions of climate models critically, and look into how other sources of experience agree or disagree with them. But unfortunately, this is not what happens. Instead, for reasons quite unrelated to climate science, each new set of results and each new report is leapt upon by one side or the other as confirmation of their own position.
Take the recent comments by Britain's chief scientific adviser to the government, Sir David King. On BBC Radio 4's Today programme he said, 'If you ask me where do we feel the temperature is likely to end up if we move to a level of carbon dioxide roughly twice the pre-industrial level - and the level at which we would be optimistically hoping we could settle - the temperature rise could well be in excess of three degrees celsius.'
This immediately sparked fevered discussion about how many millions - or billions - of people would be effected. In fact, the effect of that rise in carbon dioxide in isolation from other factors would be about one degree celsius. Whether the temperature would rise more than this depends on feedback effects that are still not properly understood. Plucking one figure out from a report as if there were any certainty about it is unhelpful.
The discussion, driven by excessive enthusiasm for one particular form of research, is one-sided and perverse. It is one-sided because it very often ignores the fact that societies adapt to changing circumstances. If the world did see a significant rise in temperature overnight, it is quite likely that there would be dramatic and negative consequences for many people - although equally, warmer weather would benefit other areas, too. However, over the course of the next century it is perfectly possible to change how land is used, to build flood defences and create proper water supply infrastructure, especially if societies become wealthier in the meantime. So anything that holds back development would cause far more problems than it would solve.
And the discussion is perverse because it ignores very major problems in the here and now in favour of flagging up some potential medium-term apocalypse. These are not just technical or scientific problems, either. Why is it, in the twenty-first century, that so much of the world lives such a marginal existence that changing weather patterns could prove disastrous for them? That is a political problem that has slipped a long way down the agenda in popular debate.
Most perversely of all, the discussion of climate science has become a political clash between, in the main, environmentalists on one side and free marketeers on the other - while political debate about the best future direction of society is left in the hands of climate modellers.
Spiked Online, 20 April 2006
Australia: Wind energy drops off the perch
Never mind the orange-bellied parrot. Wind energy, one of the ethical investment sector's great success stories over the past decade, has passed its peak. "It's not only peaked, it's stopped," says Garry Weaven, Australia's biggest wind farmer. Weaven chairs Industry Funds Management, which last year paid a hefty $788 million for the formerly-listed Pacific Hydro energy company. Weaven blames the federal Government, "so clearly operating at the behest of the aluminium and coal lobbies".
Wind currently supplies about 2 per cent of our annual electricity generation. That share was growing until late 2004, when the federal Government rejected calls to extend the national mandatory renewable energy (MRET) subsidy scheme beyond 2020. According to Babcock & Brown wind executive Miles George, it takes two years to build a wind farm and the 12 years left until 2020 simply aren't enough to make a return on investment. The climate change debate has shifted dramatically, with the focus now on nuclear rather than renewable energy.
Former NSW premier Bob Carr commented darkly last year: "You could have a wind farm across all of outback NSW that would kill every kookaburra but it wouldn't provide the base-load power we need." A fortnight ago federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell sparked a media frenzy when he blocked a proposed $220 million wind farm at Bald Hills in Victoria's Gippsland - ostensibly because it threatened the endangered orange-bellied parrot. That decision has called into question a $12 billion pipeline of wind projects proposed by companies including ANZ, Alinta, AGL, Pacific Hydro and various state utilities including the Tasmanian Government's Roaring 40s wind business.
You can almost hear John Howard laughing as greenies are forced to choose between climate change and protection of endangered species. But it's a false opposition. Weaven contrasts the destruction of 25 per cent of all species over the next 50 years under current climate change scenarios, with "killing the odd bird". He says there have been no endangered birds killed at Pacific Hydro wind farms and there are ways to reduce birdkill, like removing animal carcasses where birds of prey are present. The Australian Greens environment spokesman, WA Senator Rachel Siewert, cautiously agrees. "My understanding is it's not as much of an issue as was first thought."
Investors can still do well out of wind energy but all the growth is offshore. Babcock's $830 million Wind Partners vehicle has risen 31.6 per cent since it listed on 27 October 2005, from its $1.40 issue price per cent to $1.68 yesterday. Not a bad return, although the stock is well off its December $1.93 peak. Weaven says Pacific Hydro is also trading profitably and will deliver a return to its owner, the $1.9 billion IFM Australian Infrastructure Fund - in turn owned by about 2.5 million industry super fund members. He denies it overpaid: "Not one dollar in our valuation was based on new projects in Australia." But since the sale, according to AMP Capital Investors sustainability research manager Ian Woods, there is "no growth story" for investors looking for an Australian wind play. State governments - especially Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania - are promising support but that will be irrelevant if the federal Government steps in to block new wind farms, on whatever grounds.
Source
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is 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.
*****************************************
Global warming may not be as dramatic as some scientists have predicted. Using temperature readings from the past 100 years, 1,000 computer simulations and the evidence left in ancient tree rings, Duke University scientists announced yesterday that "the magnitude of future global warming will likely fall well short of current highest predictions."
Supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, the Duke researchers noted that some observational studies predicted that the Earth's temperature could rise as much as 16 degrees in this century because of an increase in carbon dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gases. The Duke estimates show the chances that the planet's temperature will rise even by 11 degrees is only 5 percent, which falls in line with previous, less-alarming predictions that meteorologists made almost three decades ago.
In recent years, much academic research has indicated otherwise, often in colorful terms and citing the United States as the biggest contributor to global warming. This month, a University of Toronto scientist predicted that a quarter of the planet's plants and animals would be extinct by 2050 because of rising temperatures. On Wednesday, two geophysics professors at the University of Chicago warned those who eat red meat that their increased flatulence contributes to greenhouse gases. Last year, Oregon State University research linked future "societal disruptions" with global warming, while the Carnegie Institution reported that the insulating influence of northern forests alone would raise the Earth's temperature by 6 degrees. In 2004, Harvard University scientists informed Congress that warming had doomed the planet to climatic "shocks and surprises."
The Duke research, however, found substantial ups and downs in the Earth's temperature before modern times, countering other studies that confine noticeable temperature increases to the industrialized era. Marked climate change in other centuries resulted from "external forcing," said the Duke findings, citing volcanic eruptions and other influences. "Our reconstruction supports a lot of variability in the past," said research director Gabriele Hegerl of Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.
Although her study found that the Earth is, indeed, warming, Ms. Hegerl discounts dire predictions of skyrocketing temperatures. The probability that the climate's "sensitivity" to greenhouse-gas levels would result in drastically higher temperatures is "substantially" reduced, she said. Ms. Hegerl and her four-member team based their conclusions on thermometer readings over the past century, along with "ancient climate records," including tree-ring studies and ice-core samples that revealed hot and cold spells and airborne particulates over a 700-year period. In addition, they created 1,000 computer-based weather simulations for the past 1,000 years. "Ancient and modern evidence suggest limits to future global warming," the study concluded. It was published in the journal Nature.
Source
Earth Day Information Center Cites Environmental Progress
Although many environmental organizations will strain to find the black lining in the silver cloud of environmental progress on the occasion of Earth Day, the Earth Day Information Center, a project of The National Center for Public Policy Research, is pleased to note environmental progress in many areas. Earth Day is Saturday, April 22.
"The air we breathe and the water we drink is substantially cleaner than it was at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970," said Peyton Knight, director of environmental and regulatory affairs for the National Center, adding, "Of course, good news on the environment, of which there is much, rarely makes the cut for the broadcast evening news."
The Earth Day Information Center notes that volatile organic compound emissions from cars and trucks, which are largely responsible for creating ground level ozone and smog, have declined 73.8 percent since 1970. In addition, between 1993 and 2002, aggregate emissions of the six principle air pollutants tracked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have declined 19 percent.
Cleaner air has made for good news on the acid rain front as well. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions - the main pollutants in the formation of acid rain - have been markedly reduced. Sulfur dioxide emissions in the electric power industry are down 38 percent from 1980 levels, and nitrogen oxide emissions for the entire power industry are 37 percent below 1990 levels according to the EPA.
The Center also notes that despite some claims to the contrary, the United States is gaining wetlands. "In 2002 and 2003, the United States gained a net average of 72,000 acres of wetlands each year," said Knight. The U.S. Department of Agriculture observes that net wetland acreage also grew at a rate of 26,000 acres per year between 1997 and 2001.
"The best way to ensure a healthier, cleaner world is to allow the power of human ingenuity to come to grips with environmental challenges confronting us," said National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen. "Technological innovation and well-protected property rights - not micro-management through bureaucratic fiat - will enable people the world over to live longer, healthier lives. Sadly, this message seems completely lost on an environmentalist establishment that is more concerned with fund-raising through fear-mongering than with providing common sense solutions," says Cohen, "The very things they attack, man-made chemicals, for example, have helped eradicate diseases, purify drinking water, create life-saving medicines and medical devices, and brought about countless other improvements in our daily lives."
Though progress has been made in clean air, water, and wetlands, there is at least one environmental issue area where advancement has been lacking: Endangered species recovery.
The House of Representatives approved the Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act last year, which aims to remove some of the barriers to species recovery that are present in the current Endangered Species Act. However, this reform effort has been met with strong resistance from the environmental community. "In the 33-year history of the Endangered Species Act, less than one percent of species listed as endangered or threatened under the Act have been recovered," notes Knight. "While most would consider a less-than-one-percent recovery rate a failure, many environmentalists apparently consider it good enough to continue the status quo."
Source
COMMENT ON THE MELTDOWN OF THE BBC CLIMATE CHANGE MODEL
A climate model program downloaded by thousands of PC users had an internal error that meant it overstated how hot the world might get. Oops.
Researchers behind a much-hyped climate model downloaded by hundreds of thousands of home PC users have had to admit that many of their results are wrong because of errors in the program. And it's not just their software that's flawed.
The software, produced by Oxford University in conjunction with a consortium of research institutions, was launched with great fanfare in February by the BBC. Around 200,000 people downloaded the programme, which runs in the background on PCs, each one working on one of thousands of very slightly different scenarios about how the world's climate might change in the future.
However, after two months it's been discovered that there were errors in a data file which was supposed to take account of particles in the atmosphere that suppress rising temperatures. Consequently, the world was - virtually, at least - getting too hot, too quickly.
The project's principal investigator, Dr Myles Allen, found a silver lining to this climate-modelling cloud. 'What we've seen in the runs is the unadulterated impact of global warming which means that all of the models have warmed up too fast', he told BBC News. 'At some point in the future, we may have done an experiment like this anyway.'
The real problem is not an individual cock-up in one computer program, but the excessive reliance on models in the broader debate about global warming.
That is not to say models are completely without value. It is reasonable to put together our best guesses as regards future trends like gas emissions, population change, solar outputs and so on with what we know about climate physics to produce some broad estimates about what might happen next. But these are sophisticated guesstimates, no more. They allow us to think through what are the parameters of the discussion; they do not represent viable predictions of the future.
There are many good reasons why the models will be inadequate, not the least being the possibility of bias, conscious or unconscious, in the initial setup. For one thing, the data we have will always be incomplete. Satellite measurements are better than they were in the past, but they only go back to the late Seventies. Before that, weather records are based on stations that were unevenly spread, with relative high concentrations in developed countries and relatively few over the 70 per cent of the Earth covered by water.
The physics of individual climate elements is not fully understood, particularly in relation to clouds; we don't know how much cloud will be produced in a warming world and what the net effect of that cloud will be. In addition, new announcements from research teams are made regularly about factors that hadn't been fully appreciated before.
Also, models are, by their very nature, simplifications of the real world. Consider a non-climate example: the Millennium Bridge in London. This was a relatively simple system to model. But when the bridge opened in June 2000 it had to be quickly closed again because the effect of people actually walking on it caused the whole thing to 'wobble'. So even engineers with far less complex problems than world climate to solve can get things badly wrong.
Which brings us to the bottom line in climate modelling. How can we test that the models actually work? Attempts to see how the models replicate the known temperature from the past are problematic because we know, given the inadequate coverage and mixed standard of ground-based weather stations in previous decades, that this temperature record is incomplete and almost certainly inaccurate. We could wait a few decades to see how real temperatures pan out, but that rather defeats the object of the exercise, especially if you believe we'll all be parched or drowned in a century's time.
So, we should accept the conclusions of climate models critically, and look into how other sources of experience agree or disagree with them. But unfortunately, this is not what happens. Instead, for reasons quite unrelated to climate science, each new set of results and each new report is leapt upon by one side or the other as confirmation of their own position.
Take the recent comments by Britain's chief scientific adviser to the government, Sir David King. On BBC Radio 4's Today programme he said, 'If you ask me where do we feel the temperature is likely to end up if we move to a level of carbon dioxide roughly twice the pre-industrial level - and the level at which we would be optimistically hoping we could settle - the temperature rise could well be in excess of three degrees celsius.'
This immediately sparked fevered discussion about how many millions - or billions - of people would be effected. In fact, the effect of that rise in carbon dioxide in isolation from other factors would be about one degree celsius. Whether the temperature would rise more than this depends on feedback effects that are still not properly understood. Plucking one figure out from a report as if there were any certainty about it is unhelpful.
The discussion, driven by excessive enthusiasm for one particular form of research, is one-sided and perverse. It is one-sided because it very often ignores the fact that societies adapt to changing circumstances. If the world did see a significant rise in temperature overnight, it is quite likely that there would be dramatic and negative consequences for many people - although equally, warmer weather would benefit other areas, too. However, over the course of the next century it is perfectly possible to change how land is used, to build flood defences and create proper water supply infrastructure, especially if societies become wealthier in the meantime. So anything that holds back development would cause far more problems than it would solve.
And the discussion is perverse because it ignores very major problems in the here and now in favour of flagging up some potential medium-term apocalypse. These are not just technical or scientific problems, either. Why is it, in the twenty-first century, that so much of the world lives such a marginal existence that changing weather patterns could prove disastrous for them? That is a political problem that has slipped a long way down the agenda in popular debate.
Most perversely of all, the discussion of climate science has become a political clash between, in the main, environmentalists on one side and free marketeers on the other - while political debate about the best future direction of society is left in the hands of climate modellers.
Spiked Online, 20 April 2006
Australia: Wind energy drops off the perch
Never mind the orange-bellied parrot. Wind energy, one of the ethical investment sector's great success stories over the past decade, has passed its peak. "It's not only peaked, it's stopped," says Garry Weaven, Australia's biggest wind farmer. Weaven chairs Industry Funds Management, which last year paid a hefty $788 million for the formerly-listed Pacific Hydro energy company. Weaven blames the federal Government, "so clearly operating at the behest of the aluminium and coal lobbies".
Wind currently supplies about 2 per cent of our annual electricity generation. That share was growing until late 2004, when the federal Government rejected calls to extend the national mandatory renewable energy (MRET) subsidy scheme beyond 2020. According to Babcock & Brown wind executive Miles George, it takes two years to build a wind farm and the 12 years left until 2020 simply aren't enough to make a return on investment. The climate change debate has shifted dramatically, with the focus now on nuclear rather than renewable energy.
Former NSW premier Bob Carr commented darkly last year: "You could have a wind farm across all of outback NSW that would kill every kookaburra but it wouldn't provide the base-load power we need." A fortnight ago federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell sparked a media frenzy when he blocked a proposed $220 million wind farm at Bald Hills in Victoria's Gippsland - ostensibly because it threatened the endangered orange-bellied parrot. That decision has called into question a $12 billion pipeline of wind projects proposed by companies including ANZ, Alinta, AGL, Pacific Hydro and various state utilities including the Tasmanian Government's Roaring 40s wind business.
You can almost hear John Howard laughing as greenies are forced to choose between climate change and protection of endangered species. But it's a false opposition. Weaven contrasts the destruction of 25 per cent of all species over the next 50 years under current climate change scenarios, with "killing the odd bird". He says there have been no endangered birds killed at Pacific Hydro wind farms and there are ways to reduce birdkill, like removing animal carcasses where birds of prey are present. The Australian Greens environment spokesman, WA Senator Rachel Siewert, cautiously agrees. "My understanding is it's not as much of an issue as was first thought."
Investors can still do well out of wind energy but all the growth is offshore. Babcock's $830 million Wind Partners vehicle has risen 31.6 per cent since it listed on 27 October 2005, from its $1.40 issue price per cent to $1.68 yesterday. Not a bad return, although the stock is well off its December $1.93 peak. Weaven says Pacific Hydro is also trading profitably and will deliver a return to its owner, the $1.9 billion IFM Australian Infrastructure Fund - in turn owned by about 2.5 million industry super fund members. He denies it overpaid: "Not one dollar in our valuation was based on new projects in Australia." But since the sale, according to AMP Capital Investors sustainability research manager Ian Woods, there is "no growth story" for investors looking for an Australian wind play. State governments - especially Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania - are promising support but that will be irrelevant if the federal Government steps in to block new wind farms, on whatever grounds.
Source
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is 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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Saturday, April 22, 2006
Time to consult a prophet, rather than profits
Comment by Andrew Bolt on recent pontifications from trendy Australian business leaders
When six business bosses lecture you piously on climate change, mind your wallet. Last Friday the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change warned -- repent! -- that "climate change is real". It had asked someone in the CSIRO, joined with the Australian Conservation Foundation, and settled what even the world's climate experts can't agree on. We face doom. A small rise in temperature will mean "97 per cent of the (Great Barrier) Reef could be bleached". We'll lose nearly half our cattle and other livestock through pests, heat and diseases. Rain won't fall yet storms will devastate forests, because "the tendency to more extreme weather events is well established in the scientific literature". We now had to slash our gas emissions, and even give cows vaccines to stop farting, so "we will have more time to adapt to a harder and more varied climate".
Naturally The Age, which has got green religion, reported all these claims as facts from impartial authorities. But now for real story. As I reported last week, the Great Barrier Reef will probably increase with warmer seas, say scientists from the CSIRO and Australian Institute of Marine Science. And if warmer weather indeed causes more pests, scientists are sure to find yet more cures -- the real secret to healthier stock. As for warming causing more extreme weather, a British House of Lords committee, which grilled 40 experts last year, concluded: "There is uncertainty and controversy about the underlying data required to substantiate this claim". Certainly hurricane centres, such as the World Meteorological Organisation, insist hurricanes are not getting worse through warming.
What's more, there is fierce argument over how much warming is even caused by man. Only last week, 60 top experts in climate science and related disciplines sent a letter to the Canadian PM saying "global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise' ".
Even if climate change is man-made, there is nothing Australia can do to change it in any way we could measure. Our emissions will be dwarfed by India's and China's for a start. So we're being sold snake oil that won't solve a problem that might well not be our fault. It might not even be a problem. The House of Lords report even suggested we might not be worse off with warming, on the whole, given how much better plants will grow.
So why might the six businesses say such wild things? Well, they include IAG and Swiss Re, two insurance groups who sure have a policy for nervous you. Then there's the paper recycler Visy, the gas (rather than dirty coal) power company Origin, the gimme-cash Westpac and BP, which changed its name from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum to make you think you're actually filling your car with flowers. Still want to believe we're doomed? At least consult a prophet, rather than profits.
THE GREEN SCARE
Post lifted from Attack Machine
Liberals fancy themselves rationalists, free-thinkers unimpeded by religious doctrine. Which is amusing when you watch them get strident over environmental issues. I had a friend instantly reach a boil when I dared question the dogma of human-created global warming. And that was all I was doing, questioning.
Jonah Goldberg writes about Al Gore and his new film, An Inconvenient Truth::
And dissenters pay a heavy price.
April 22 will be "Earth Day" and Chicken Little Marxists Have The Platform
Post lifted from Alain's newsletter
This Saturday, hundreds of thousands of left-of-center environmental activists will gather in parks around the U.S. to hear Earth Day speakers rail against capitalism and President Bush for failing to sign the Kyoto Treaty on the environment. Unfortunately, the Chicken Little brigade will undoubtedly monopolize media coverage this weekend.
The Earth Day speakers will do what they have done every year since 1970 when the first Earth Day was held: They will trash America as the fountain of all pollution; call for more government regulation of businesses; and continue fighting against energy independence for our nation. Ironically, on the first Earth Day, radical environmentalists were ranting about the alleged coming dangers of "global cooling." Today, they're ranting about global warming. So, which is it? As we will see, the jury is still out on how to interpret complex and incomplete scientific data on global climate changes.
To understand what will happen this Saturday, it is important to know the history of Earth Day. One of the founders of Earth Day was anti-Vietnam War activist John McConnell who proposed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969 that a day be set aside in the spring for Earth Day. His fellow anti-Vietnam War and environmental activists chose April 22nd as Earth Day.
Maybe it was pure coincidence that April 22, 1970, was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lenin, the first brutal dictator of the Soviet Union. But anti-Vietnam War activists at the time were more aligned with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union than they were concerned about American soldiers dying overseas. It is quite possible that this day was set for April 22 to honor their Marxist icon.
One of the leaders of Earth Day was David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth. Brower was described by one biographer as an "Archdruid," who treated the environment as a religion. In later years, Brower traveled to Nicaragua to show support for the Sandinistas, a Fidel Castro-aligned terrorist movement. The current head of Earth Day is Denis Hayes, who was the national coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970. Hayes was interviewed by the National Resources Defense Council and told the organization that his greatest concern is "Human population growth ... we are squeezing other species into extinction at a catastrophic rate. But because the population issue is inextricably linked to such political third rails as immigration, abortion, racism, religious objections to contraception, and Social Security, our politicians resolutely ignore it."
Hayes' Earth Day efforts have been recently joined by a so-called "moderate" evangelical group called the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), which is calling upon Congress to pass legislation to reduce carbon monoxide emissions in the atmosphere. The far-left "evangelical" Pastor Jim Wallis, has also joined the ranks of the Chicken Little brigade.
However, an alternative Christian group, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA), (of which Traditional Values Coalition is a member) has risen up to challenge the "Chicken Little" predictions being made by Earth Day advocates and the poorly advised EEN. The ISA urges that such Chicken Little scenarios be rejected in favor of factual analyses of climate change and whether or not global warming is actually harmful or helpful to the environment.
In a research paper published by the ISA, one scientist argues convincingly that global warming or increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may enhance agricultural productivity throughout the world! In short, climate change may actually help reduce world hunger. Another environmental expert, Paul Driessen, argues that if America signs the Kyoto treaty, the poor and needy will be needlessly harmed. Why? Because by increasing the cost of doing business due to environmental restrictions, many companies will raise prices-thus harming the poor. In addition, many low-paying jobs could be lost due to high production costs-and these quite often impact minorities. (Driessen is a policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death.)
In fact, more than 17,000 scientists have signed the Oregon Petition, a statement that challenges the belief that man-made emissions have contributed to overall global warming. They urged the United States to reject the Kyoto Protocol!
The Earth Day Chicken Little brigade will have the public platform this Saturday to rant against capitalism and humans "squeezing other species into extinction," but science is not on their side. And, fortunately, more and more voices of reason are being heard in the debate over world climate change-and what really needs to be done to solve whatever real environmental problems the world may face. The answer is certainly not to be found in the Marxist-driven proposals of Earth Day activists. Individuals truly concerned about the environment would be wise to read materials produced by the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, the Heartland Institute, and the Acton Institute.
BBC GETS IT BADLY WRONG BUT NO WORRY!
A "major error" has been discovered in the world's biggest online climate prediction project, backed by the BBC. The fault in a Climateprediction.net model launched in February causes temperatures in past climates to rise quicker than seen in real observations. The program, which runs on users' computers when they are idle, aims to generate forecasts of climate change.
The project scientists have now fixed the fault and say the data collected so far is still useful. "At some point in the future, we may have done an experiment like this anyway," Myles Allen, principal investigator of the project told the BBC News website. "People have not been wasting their time."
Climateprediction.net was established more than two years ago, but a new computer model was launched in February this year in collaboration with BBC Four TV. The simulation is more sophisticated than previous versions and provides the scientists, they say, with a more accurate representation of the real world, including an ocean that interacts with the atmosphere. The experiment uses "distributed computing", in which the combined power of numerous PCs is tapped rather than using a single supercomputer. Each participant downloads a program that runs unique climatic simulations from 1920 to 2080 to build a picture of the possible range of outcomes.
The error in the climate models has been traced to a file that is responsible for introducing man-made sulphate emissions into the atmosphere. Sulphate particles reflect sunlight back into space causing a cooling of the atmosphere, in a phenomenon known as "global dimming". "What we've seen in the runs is the unadulterated impact of global warming which means that all of the models have warmed up too fast," Dr Allen said.
The problem was picked up by scientists when a handful of the 200,000 people that have downloaded the program reached the end of the simulation. An announcement by Nick Faull, project coordinator of Climateprediction.net, was posted on the website's message board as soon as the scientists realised that the experiment would have to be started again. "I regret to announce that we've recently discovered a major error in one of the files used by the climate model," it read.
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.
*****************************************
Comment by Andrew Bolt on recent pontifications from trendy Australian business leaders
When six business bosses lecture you piously on climate change, mind your wallet. Last Friday the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change warned -- repent! -- that "climate change is real". It had asked someone in the CSIRO, joined with the Australian Conservation Foundation, and settled what even the world's climate experts can't agree on. We face doom. A small rise in temperature will mean "97 per cent of the (Great Barrier) Reef could be bleached". We'll lose nearly half our cattle and other livestock through pests, heat and diseases. Rain won't fall yet storms will devastate forests, because "the tendency to more extreme weather events is well established in the scientific literature". We now had to slash our gas emissions, and even give cows vaccines to stop farting, so "we will have more time to adapt to a harder and more varied climate".
Naturally The Age, which has got green religion, reported all these claims as facts from impartial authorities. But now for real story. As I reported last week, the Great Barrier Reef will probably increase with warmer seas, say scientists from the CSIRO and Australian Institute of Marine Science. And if warmer weather indeed causes more pests, scientists are sure to find yet more cures -- the real secret to healthier stock. As for warming causing more extreme weather, a British House of Lords committee, which grilled 40 experts last year, concluded: "There is uncertainty and controversy about the underlying data required to substantiate this claim". Certainly hurricane centres, such as the World Meteorological Organisation, insist hurricanes are not getting worse through warming.
What's more, there is fierce argument over how much warming is even caused by man. Only last week, 60 top experts in climate science and related disciplines sent a letter to the Canadian PM saying "global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural 'noise' ".
Even if climate change is man-made, there is nothing Australia can do to change it in any way we could measure. Our emissions will be dwarfed by India's and China's for a start. So we're being sold snake oil that won't solve a problem that might well not be our fault. It might not even be a problem. The House of Lords report even suggested we might not be worse off with warming, on the whole, given how much better plants will grow.
So why might the six businesses say such wild things? Well, they include IAG and Swiss Re, two insurance groups who sure have a policy for nervous you. Then there's the paper recycler Visy, the gas (rather than dirty coal) power company Origin, the gimme-cash Westpac and BP, which changed its name from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum to make you think you're actually filling your car with flowers. Still want to believe we're doomed? At least consult a prophet, rather than profits.
THE GREEN SCARE
Post lifted from Attack Machine
Liberals fancy themselves rationalists, free-thinkers unimpeded by religious doctrine. Which is amusing when you watch them get strident over environmental issues. I had a friend instantly reach a boil when I dared question the dogma of human-created global warming. And that was all I was doing, questioning.
Jonah Goldberg writes about Al Gore and his new film, An Inconvenient Truth::
Now, it's true that Earth has gotten warmer -- one degree since the 19th century -- and it will probably get warmer still. And it's probably true that human activity plays a significant part in all that. But it's also true that we don't have a clear picture of what's happening now, never mind what will happen. Just ask the 60 climatologists from around the world who wrote Canada's prime minister that "observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future." But that's all beside the point to Gore & Co., who say the time for debate is over. And if you disagree, get ready for the witch hunt. Major news media have gone after scientists who argue there's still time to study global warming rather than plunge into some half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.
As Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT, recently lamented in the Wall Street Journal: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse. Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."
And dissenters pay a heavy price.
In Vanity Fair, writer Mark Hertsgaard alleges that Frederick Seitz, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences and the former president of the prestigious Rockefeller University, was a shill for, of all things, the tobacco industry. A press release by the National Environmental Trust proclaims: "Scientist Who Spearheaded Attacks on Global Warming Also Directed $45M Tobacco Industry Effort to Hide Health Impacts of Smoking". Seitz, a giant in American science, says this is all "ridiculous, completely wrong." Now 94, Seitz explained to TCSDaily.com that R.J. Reynolds had given Rockefeller University $5 million a year for basic research. Seitz says he directed the money toward non-tobacco-related efforts in the study of prions (the virus-like proteins that cause mad cow disease), tuberculosis and other diseases. Prion researcher Stanley Prusiner thanked both R.J. Reynolds and Seitz in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
But Gore & Co. aren't troubled by such details because the smears are all for a good cause. That's why Gore saw nothing wrong in bullying dissident climate change scientists when he was a senator or waging a mean-spirited campaign to discredit the work of his old mentor, Harvard oceanographer Roger Revelle, because Revelle thought alarmism was unwarranted.
Hence the irony of the title An Inconvenient Truth. It is the GREEN scare that has no patience for inconvenient truths. For example, Gore blames the disappearing snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro on global warming, but a 2003 study in Nature identified the clear-cutting of surrounding moisture-rich forests as the culprit.
In the famously fact-checked New Yorker, Editor David Remnick pens a love letter to Gore in which he laments that Earth will "likely be an uninhabitable planet" if we don't heed Gore's jeremiads. Oh ... come ... on!
April 22 will be "Earth Day" and Chicken Little Marxists Have The Platform
Post lifted from Alain's newsletter
This Saturday, hundreds of thousands of left-of-center environmental activists will gather in parks around the U.S. to hear Earth Day speakers rail against capitalism and President Bush for failing to sign the Kyoto Treaty on the environment. Unfortunately, the Chicken Little brigade will undoubtedly monopolize media coverage this weekend.
The Earth Day speakers will do what they have done every year since 1970 when the first Earth Day was held: They will trash America as the fountain of all pollution; call for more government regulation of businesses; and continue fighting against energy independence for our nation. Ironically, on the first Earth Day, radical environmentalists were ranting about the alleged coming dangers of "global cooling." Today, they're ranting about global warming. So, which is it? As we will see, the jury is still out on how to interpret complex and incomplete scientific data on global climate changes.
To understand what will happen this Saturday, it is important to know the history of Earth Day. One of the founders of Earth Day was anti-Vietnam War activist John McConnell who proposed to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969 that a day be set aside in the spring for Earth Day. His fellow anti-Vietnam War and environmental activists chose April 22nd as Earth Day.
Maybe it was pure coincidence that April 22, 1970, was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lenin, the first brutal dictator of the Soviet Union. But anti-Vietnam War activists at the time were more aligned with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union than they were concerned about American soldiers dying overseas. It is quite possible that this day was set for April 22 to honor their Marxist icon.
One of the leaders of Earth Day was David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth. Brower was described by one biographer as an "Archdruid," who treated the environment as a religion. In later years, Brower traveled to Nicaragua to show support for the Sandinistas, a Fidel Castro-aligned terrorist movement. The current head of Earth Day is Denis Hayes, who was the national coordinator for the first Earth Day in 1970. Hayes was interviewed by the National Resources Defense Council and told the organization that his greatest concern is "Human population growth ... we are squeezing other species into extinction at a catastrophic rate. But because the population issue is inextricably linked to such political third rails as immigration, abortion, racism, religious objections to contraception, and Social Security, our politicians resolutely ignore it."
Hayes' Earth Day efforts have been recently joined by a so-called "moderate" evangelical group called the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), which is calling upon Congress to pass legislation to reduce carbon monoxide emissions in the atmosphere. The far-left "evangelical" Pastor Jim Wallis, has also joined the ranks of the Chicken Little brigade.
However, an alternative Christian group, the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance (ISA), (of which Traditional Values Coalition is a member) has risen up to challenge the "Chicken Little" predictions being made by Earth Day advocates and the poorly advised EEN. The ISA urges that such Chicken Little scenarios be rejected in favor of factual analyses of climate change and whether or not global warming is actually harmful or helpful to the environment.
In a research paper published by the ISA, one scientist argues convincingly that global warming or increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may enhance agricultural productivity throughout the world! In short, climate change may actually help reduce world hunger. Another environmental expert, Paul Driessen, argues that if America signs the Kyoto treaty, the poor and needy will be needlessly harmed. Why? Because by increasing the cost of doing business due to environmental restrictions, many companies will raise prices-thus harming the poor. In addition, many low-paying jobs could be lost due to high production costs-and these quite often impact minorities. (Driessen is a policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death.)
In fact, more than 17,000 scientists have signed the Oregon Petition, a statement that challenges the belief that man-made emissions have contributed to overall global warming. They urged the United States to reject the Kyoto Protocol!
The Earth Day Chicken Little brigade will have the public platform this Saturday to rant against capitalism and humans "squeezing other species into extinction," but science is not on their side. And, fortunately, more and more voices of reason are being heard in the debate over world climate change-and what really needs to be done to solve whatever real environmental problems the world may face. The answer is certainly not to be found in the Marxist-driven proposals of Earth Day activists. Individuals truly concerned about the environment would be wise to read materials produced by the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, the Heartland Institute, and the Acton Institute.
BBC GETS IT BADLY WRONG BUT NO WORRY!
A "major error" has been discovered in the world's biggest online climate prediction project, backed by the BBC. The fault in a Climateprediction.net model launched in February causes temperatures in past climates to rise quicker than seen in real observations. The program, which runs on users' computers when they are idle, aims to generate forecasts of climate change.
The project scientists have now fixed the fault and say the data collected so far is still useful. "At some point in the future, we may have done an experiment like this anyway," Myles Allen, principal investigator of the project told the BBC News website. "People have not been wasting their time."
Climateprediction.net was established more than two years ago, but a new computer model was launched in February this year in collaboration with BBC Four TV. The simulation is more sophisticated than previous versions and provides the scientists, they say, with a more accurate representation of the real world, including an ocean that interacts with the atmosphere. The experiment uses "distributed computing", in which the combined power of numerous PCs is tapped rather than using a single supercomputer. Each participant downloads a program that runs unique climatic simulations from 1920 to 2080 to build a picture of the possible range of outcomes.
The error in the climate models has been traced to a file that is responsible for introducing man-made sulphate emissions into the atmosphere. Sulphate particles reflect sunlight back into space causing a cooling of the atmosphere, in a phenomenon known as "global dimming". "What we've seen in the runs is the unadulterated impact of global warming which means that all of the models have warmed up too fast," Dr Allen said.
The problem was picked up by scientists when a handful of the 200,000 people that have downloaded the program reached the end of the simulation. An announcement by Nick Faull, project coordinator of Climateprediction.net, was posted on the website's message board as soon as the scientists realised that the experiment would have to be started again. "I regret to announce that we've recently discovered a major error in one of the files used by the climate model," it read.
More here
***************************************
Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is 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.
*****************************************
Friday, April 21, 2006
A CLIMATE SCEPTIC IN BEIJING
An email from Vincent Gray (vinmary.gray@paradise.net.nz) to Benny Peiser:
From March 2nd to March 15th I was a Visiting Scholar at the Beijing Climate Center. It is situated in the midst of a vast complex comprising the Chinese Meteorological Service in the North West of Beijing, just North of the zoo. The buildings are large, modern and impressive, and it is evident that the whole service commands considerable prestige both locally and internationally..
I and my wife were supplied with a comfortable two-bedroom flat with new furniture and furnishings, which included fridge, phone, TV, microwave and kitchen, An exceedingly inexpensive restaurant and local shops were close.
I was welcomed by the Director General of the Beijing Climate Center, Dr Wenjie Dong, who had evidently been reading my material. I was asked to give three lectures over the fortnight which were received by an appreciative audience of fifty (for the first) to twenty five (for the third). The final banquet was chaired by the Vice-Director of the Beijing Meteorological Administration, Mr Xu Xiaofeng, who subsequently appeared on TV on behalf of World Meteorological Day.
I was introduced to several staff members and two of them gave me their recent reprints, in English, from Acta Meteorologica Sinica.
The most interesting of these serves to indicate how their opinions are evolving.. It was:
ZHOU Zongci, DING Yihui, LUO Yong, and WANG Shaowu, "Recent Studies on Attributions of Climate Change in China" , Acta Meteorologica Sinica 2005, Vol 19, 389-400.
You may be aware that when annual mean surface temperatures for the continental USA are subjected to a comprehensive correction procedure called "Homogeneity Adjustment" the resulting sequence shows only very modest overall warming (less than 1°C) for the period 1900 to 2000. They point out that such a comprehensive adjustment is not possible anywhere else in the world because nobody else has the large number of stations and reliable records for comparison purposes.
We also know (apart from people like Kevin Trenberth) that the published global surface record is biased upwards, as shown by recent statistical studies by McKitrick and Michaels ( Climate Research 2004 26 159-173, for land-based data) and Christy, Parker et al (Geophysical Research Letters 2001 28, 183-186, for sea-surface temperatures)
Now, Zhou et al have carried out a "homogeneity adjustment" on weather station measurements for China from 1900 to 1998.for temperature and precipitation. The corrected temperature showed a fluctuating behaviour with a peak in 1943 and a similar figure in 1998. No evidence of significant "global warming". Please note that this adjusted record has been endorsed by Phil Jones of the UK Hadley Centre.
On top of that, they have identified a large number of natural events which have influenced annual fluctuations. They conclude: "The signals produced by the human activities such as greenhouse gases and "brown clouds" likely play the role for the patterns. But the physical feedbacks and mechanisms still keep ambiguous and vague. More researches should be carried out in future to solve this issue"
It is evident that if comprehensive "homogeneity adjustment" could be carried out for the whole of the global surface record there would be little remaining "global warming" which could be attributed to the influence of greenhouse gas increases.
It might also be noted that the second author of this paper, DING Yihui, was one of the eight Chief Editors of "Climate Change 2001, and he is Co-Chair of Working Group I of the IPCC.
UTTER NITWITS
Unsurprising for the exhibitionists of Greenpeace, though
Two U.S. explorers plan to start a four-month summer expedition to the North Pole next month to gather information on the habitat of an animal they believe could be the first victim of global warming -- the polar bear. Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen plan to travel 1,100 miles by foot and canoe over the Arctic Ocean to test the depth and density of the ice in summer in a mission sponsored by Greenpeace, the environmental group said on Thursday. According to some scientific predictions, the Arctic Ocean could become ice-free in the summer within a hundred years. Polar bears cannot survive without sea ice and the U.S. government said in February it would consider whether the bears should be protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Unusually heavy snow and ice last year forced Dupre and Larsen to call off a similar mission, but they now plan to launch Project Thin Ice 2006 -- Saving the Polar Bear on May 1 from Canada, traveling to the North Pole and then back to Greenland.
"Last year I came face to face with a polar bear and while I was scared, I also felt a deep respect for the fact that I was in this bear's territory and that it was global warming that was forcing this magnificent creature toward the brink of extinction," Dupre said in a statement. Polar bears are losing weight as their hunting grounds melt away, making it harder for them to hunt seals, experts say. The polar bear population fell 14 percent to just 950 in the 10 years to 2004, according to Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Source. The vanishing bear myth is of course an old one which I have reported about on a number of occasions previously. See for example here and here
GREENIE EXTREMISTS AS DANGEROUS RELIGIOUS FANATICS
Article by Cathy Young:
It started early in March when Eric Pianka, an ecologist at the University of Texas who was named Texas Distinguished Scientist of 2006, gave a speech at a meeting of the Texas Academy of Sciences, filled with dire warnings about the fate of humanity and the earth. About a month later, Forrest M. Mims III, chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science, posted an article about the event in a Web magazine called The Citizen Scientist. He asserted that Pianka advocated the death of more than 5 billion people from a virus for the cause of saving the planet -- to enthusiastic applause from the audience.
Mims's allegation, picked up by a local Texas newspaper, The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, caused quite a stir on the Internet and a flood of angry e-mails to the Texas Academy of Sciences and the University of Texas. Meanwhile, William Dembski, a philosophy professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leading champion of intelligent design, proudly announced that he had alerted the Department of Homeland Security to a possible Pianka plot to infect people with a deadly virus.
Meanwhile, many scientists, academics, and liberal bloggers have rallied to the defense of Pianka, who, they say, was not advocating apocalypse but simply delivering a warning about the disastrous consequences of humanity's profligate ways. They see him as a victim of a smear by creationists (Mims is also an intelligent design proponent) who want to portray mainstream science as evil and by right-wingers who want to portray liberal academics as loony extremists.
But while Pianka's critics may be seriously biased and lacking in credibility, this does not quite get Pianka himself off the hook. No, there is no reason to believe that he advocated actively bringing about an epidemic that would kill billions of people. Rather, he asserts that because of overpopulation, we are on the brink of a major epidemic that will wipe out 80 to 90 percent of humanity. And he seems to regard this as a good thing.
Texas Lutheran University senior and biology major Brenna McConnell, who was present at Pianka's speech, corroborated this on her (now-deleted) blog, where she expressed agreement with Pianka: ''He's a radical thinker, that one! I mean, he's basically advocating for the death of all but 10 percent of the current population! And at the risk of sounding just as radical, I think he's right."
And here is an excerpt from another recent Pianka speech, the transcript of which was made public by the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise: ''I think that right now has got to be just about the most interesting time ever and you get to see it, and, hopefully, a few are gonna live through it. . . . Things are gonna get better after the collapse because we won't be able to decimate the earth so much. And, I actually think the world will be much better when there's only 10 or 20 percent of us left."
It would be tempting to dismiss Pianka as an isolated crank. Unfortunately, an apocalyptic, human-hating mentality is a strain that has long been present in environmentalism. In 1989, David Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service, wrote in the Los Angeles Times: ''We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth. . . . Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
Most Americans are environmentalists in the sense that they like clean air, clean water, and the preservation of wilderness areas. But for many, environmentalism has become a secular religion with its own fanatics. Some speak of nature's wrath in transparently religious terms. Vanity Fair essayist James Wolcott has rhapsodized on his website about the destructive power of hurricanes as payback for ''the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature," concluding, ''The gods are not pleased."
It's quite true that mistrust of science is all too common in American society, and the flames of this hostility are fanned by the religious right. But we should also beware of zealots in scientific garb who can only give ammunition to the enemies of science and reason.
Green/Left dam-phobia costs Queenslanders
But even the costly alternative does not please the unpleasable Greenies
Water authorities have begun planning for a second desalination plant as the long-running drought tightens its grip on southeast Queensland. The proposal, which would complement the Gold Coast's plans for a desalination plant, is being described as a "contingency option" in SEQWater's regional drought strategy. The plans were revealed as the Beattie Government battled Opposition attacks over its failure to construct any new dams to bring relief to the state's parched southeast.
Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg yesterday vowed to begin building the proposed Wyaralong Dam near Beaudesert in his first year in government if he won the next election. The Government is investigating two new dam sites in the southeast corner, but the Premier's office would not comment on the matter last night. Officially, the Government continues to focus on conserving water, relying on tighter restrictions, recycled water pipelines, a water grid, water main repairs and pressure reductions to ensure dams remain above 10 per cent. Water Minister Henry Palaszczuk's spokesman said the desalination issue remained under review. SEQWater said a decision about the second plant was due in June.
The Gold Coast City Council plans to build a desalination plant at Tugun to supply 110 million litres of water a day. The plant is expected to cost about $1 billion to build and operate. The second plant, generating 120 million litres a day, would be one of the largest in Australia. But there is no detail yet on where it could be constructed. The first plant is slated for completion by June 2008; the second by March 2009.
Queensland Conservation Council officer Henry Boer said greater community consultation was needed because the plants had environmental impacts and were costly. "These plants use a lot of electricity and have high greenhouse gas emissions," he said. "They are by far the most expensive supply option and the public will have to pay through their water bills." Redlands Mayor Don Seccombe said he was also opposed to the plants, citing cost and premature timing.
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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An email from Vincent Gray (vinmary.gray@paradise.net.nz) to Benny Peiser:
From March 2nd to March 15th I was a Visiting Scholar at the Beijing Climate Center. It is situated in the midst of a vast complex comprising the Chinese Meteorological Service in the North West of Beijing, just North of the zoo. The buildings are large, modern and impressive, and it is evident that the whole service commands considerable prestige both locally and internationally..
I and my wife were supplied with a comfortable two-bedroom flat with new furniture and furnishings, which included fridge, phone, TV, microwave and kitchen, An exceedingly inexpensive restaurant and local shops were close.
I was welcomed by the Director General of the Beijing Climate Center, Dr Wenjie Dong, who had evidently been reading my material. I was asked to give three lectures over the fortnight which were received by an appreciative audience of fifty (for the first) to twenty five (for the third). The final banquet was chaired by the Vice-Director of the Beijing Meteorological Administration, Mr Xu Xiaofeng, who subsequently appeared on TV on behalf of World Meteorological Day.
I was introduced to several staff members and two of them gave me their recent reprints, in English, from Acta Meteorologica Sinica.
The most interesting of these serves to indicate how their opinions are evolving.. It was:
ZHOU Zongci, DING Yihui, LUO Yong, and WANG Shaowu, "Recent Studies on Attributions of Climate Change in China" , Acta Meteorologica Sinica 2005, Vol 19, 389-400.
You may be aware that when annual mean surface temperatures for the continental USA are subjected to a comprehensive correction procedure called "Homogeneity Adjustment" the resulting sequence shows only very modest overall warming (less than 1°C) for the period 1900 to 2000. They point out that such a comprehensive adjustment is not possible anywhere else in the world because nobody else has the large number of stations and reliable records for comparison purposes.
We also know (apart from people like Kevin Trenberth) that the published global surface record is biased upwards, as shown by recent statistical studies by McKitrick and Michaels ( Climate Research 2004 26 159-173, for land-based data) and Christy, Parker et al (Geophysical Research Letters 2001 28, 183-186, for sea-surface temperatures)
Now, Zhou et al have carried out a "homogeneity adjustment" on weather station measurements for China from 1900 to 1998.for temperature and precipitation. The corrected temperature showed a fluctuating behaviour with a peak in 1943 and a similar figure in 1998. No evidence of significant "global warming". Please note that this adjusted record has been endorsed by Phil Jones of the UK Hadley Centre.
On top of that, they have identified a large number of natural events which have influenced annual fluctuations. They conclude: "The signals produced by the human activities such as greenhouse gases and "brown clouds" likely play the role for the patterns. But the physical feedbacks and mechanisms still keep ambiguous and vague. More researches should be carried out in future to solve this issue"
It is evident that if comprehensive "homogeneity adjustment" could be carried out for the whole of the global surface record there would be little remaining "global warming" which could be attributed to the influence of greenhouse gas increases.
It might also be noted that the second author of this paper, DING Yihui, was one of the eight Chief Editors of "Climate Change 2001, and he is Co-Chair of Working Group I of the IPCC.
UTTER NITWITS
Unsurprising for the exhibitionists of Greenpeace, though
Two U.S. explorers plan to start a four-month summer expedition to the North Pole next month to gather information on the habitat of an animal they believe could be the first victim of global warming -- the polar bear. Lonnie Dupre and Eric Larsen plan to travel 1,100 miles by foot and canoe over the Arctic Ocean to test the depth and density of the ice in summer in a mission sponsored by Greenpeace, the environmental group said on Thursday. According to some scientific predictions, the Arctic Ocean could become ice-free in the summer within a hundred years. Polar bears cannot survive without sea ice and the U.S. government said in February it would consider whether the bears should be protected under the Endangered Species Act.
Unusually heavy snow and ice last year forced Dupre and Larsen to call off a similar mission, but they now plan to launch Project Thin Ice 2006 -- Saving the Polar Bear on May 1 from Canada, traveling to the North Pole and then back to Greenland.
"Last year I came face to face with a polar bear and while I was scared, I also felt a deep respect for the fact that I was in this bear's territory and that it was global warming that was forcing this magnificent creature toward the brink of extinction," Dupre said in a statement. Polar bears are losing weight as their hunting grounds melt away, making it harder for them to hunt seals, experts say. The polar bear population fell 14 percent to just 950 in the 10 years to 2004, according to Greenpeace and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Source. The vanishing bear myth is of course an old one which I have reported about on a number of occasions previously. See for example here and here
GREENIE EXTREMISTS AS DANGEROUS RELIGIOUS FANATICS
Article by Cathy Young:
It started early in March when Eric Pianka, an ecologist at the University of Texas who was named Texas Distinguished Scientist of 2006, gave a speech at a meeting of the Texas Academy of Sciences, filled with dire warnings about the fate of humanity and the earth. About a month later, Forrest M. Mims III, chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science, posted an article about the event in a Web magazine called The Citizen Scientist. He asserted that Pianka advocated the death of more than 5 billion people from a virus for the cause of saving the planet -- to enthusiastic applause from the audience.
Mims's allegation, picked up by a local Texas newspaper, The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, caused quite a stir on the Internet and a flood of angry e-mails to the Texas Academy of Sciences and the University of Texas. Meanwhile, William Dembski, a philosophy professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a leading champion of intelligent design, proudly announced that he had alerted the Department of Homeland Security to a possible Pianka plot to infect people with a deadly virus.
Meanwhile, many scientists, academics, and liberal bloggers have rallied to the defense of Pianka, who, they say, was not advocating apocalypse but simply delivering a warning about the disastrous consequences of humanity's profligate ways. They see him as a victim of a smear by creationists (Mims is also an intelligent design proponent) who want to portray mainstream science as evil and by right-wingers who want to portray liberal academics as loony extremists.
But while Pianka's critics may be seriously biased and lacking in credibility, this does not quite get Pianka himself off the hook. No, there is no reason to believe that he advocated actively bringing about an epidemic that would kill billions of people. Rather, he asserts that because of overpopulation, we are on the brink of a major epidemic that will wipe out 80 to 90 percent of humanity. And he seems to regard this as a good thing.
Texas Lutheran University senior and biology major Brenna McConnell, who was present at Pianka's speech, corroborated this on her (now-deleted) blog, where she expressed agreement with Pianka: ''He's a radical thinker, that one! I mean, he's basically advocating for the death of all but 10 percent of the current population! And at the risk of sounding just as radical, I think he's right."
And here is an excerpt from another recent Pianka speech, the transcript of which was made public by the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise: ''I think that right now has got to be just about the most interesting time ever and you get to see it, and, hopefully, a few are gonna live through it. . . . Things are gonna get better after the collapse because we won't be able to decimate the earth so much. And, I actually think the world will be much better when there's only 10 or 20 percent of us left."
It would be tempting to dismiss Pianka as an isolated crank. Unfortunately, an apocalyptic, human-hating mentality is a strain that has long been present in environmentalism. In 1989, David Graber, a research biologist with the National Park Service, wrote in the Los Angeles Times: ''We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the earth. . . . Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along."
Most Americans are environmentalists in the sense that they like clean air, clean water, and the preservation of wilderness areas. But for many, environmentalism has become a secular religion with its own fanatics. Some speak of nature's wrath in transparently religious terms. Vanity Fair essayist James Wolcott has rhapsodized on his website about the destructive power of hurricanes as payback for ''the havoc mankind has wreaked upon nature," concluding, ''The gods are not pleased."
It's quite true that mistrust of science is all too common in American society, and the flames of this hostility are fanned by the religious right. But we should also beware of zealots in scientific garb who can only give ammunition to the enemies of science and reason.
Green/Left dam-phobia costs Queenslanders
But even the costly alternative does not please the unpleasable Greenies
Water authorities have begun planning for a second desalination plant as the long-running drought tightens its grip on southeast Queensland. The proposal, which would complement the Gold Coast's plans for a desalination plant, is being described as a "contingency option" in SEQWater's regional drought strategy. The plans were revealed as the Beattie Government battled Opposition attacks over its failure to construct any new dams to bring relief to the state's parched southeast.
Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg yesterday vowed to begin building the proposed Wyaralong Dam near Beaudesert in his first year in government if he won the next election. The Government is investigating two new dam sites in the southeast corner, but the Premier's office would not comment on the matter last night. Officially, the Government continues to focus on conserving water, relying on tighter restrictions, recycled water pipelines, a water grid, water main repairs and pressure reductions to ensure dams remain above 10 per cent. Water Minister Henry Palaszczuk's spokesman said the desalination issue remained under review. SEQWater said a decision about the second plant was due in June.
The Gold Coast City Council plans to build a desalination plant at Tugun to supply 110 million litres of water a day. The plant is expected to cost about $1 billion to build and operate. The second plant, generating 120 million litres a day, would be one of the largest in Australia. But there is no detail yet on where it could be constructed. The first plant is slated for completion by June 2008; the second by March 2009.
Queensland Conservation Council officer Henry Boer said greater community consultation was needed because the plants had environmental impacts and were costly. "These plants use a lot of electricity and have high greenhouse gas emissions," he said. "They are by far the most expensive supply option and the public will have to pay through their water bills." Redlands Mayor Don Seccombe said he was also opposed to the plants, citing cost and premature timing.
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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Thursday, April 20, 2006
THE OLD DENTAL AMALGAM SCARE
Part of the mercury phobia. I have got plenty of dental amalgam in my mouth and at age 62 I still seem to be doing OK! Maybe having mercury in your head makes you disbelieve hysterical claims! That conclusion is as logical as many other claims you see in this field
Two long-awaited, government-funded studies found no evidence that dental fillings containing mercury can cause IQ-lowering brain damage or other neurological problems in children. Children with such fillings were no more likely than other youngsters to suffer such problems, the researchers found. Some experts found the findings powerfully reassuring. But the studies are unlikely to end the fierce debate over the long-term effects of what are known as amalgam fillings, and some advocates bitterly accused the researchers of conducting unethical experiments on children.
Amalgam fillings, also called silver fillings, are made of mercury and other metals and have been used by dentists for more than a century. But their use has dropped in recent years as more and more doctors switch to resin composite fillings, which are considered more appealing because they are white. Some advocacy groups and dentists have long contended that the mercury in fillings can leach into the body and cause harmful neurological effects, including autism.
The latest studies were published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. "We didn't see any indications of harm to these kids," said Dr. Timothy DeRouen, a University of Washington professor of biostatistics and dental public health sciences, who led a study of 507 children, ages 8 to 10, in Portugal to determine if mercury fillings had any neurological effects. "And we tested them repeatedly over seven years."
The other study, led by Dr. Sonja McKinlay of the New England Research Institutes, looked at the effect on intelligence, memory and other mental functions, and kidney function. It involved 534 children in New England, ages 6 to 10. McKinlay said she is confident that such fillings are safe for children in this age group, in large part because the youngsters were given far more amalgam than the average American child gets. "If there was no sign of any health problems from this study in these kids with all this amalgam in their mouths ... you know it is going to be safe for kids in the same age group in the rest of the country because they are getting much less exposure," she said. McKinlay also said that while the study revealed children with the mercury fillings had higher mercury levels in their urine, there was no evidence they had a higher incidence of kidney damage.
Neither study examined autism. Dr. David Bellinger, an author of the New England study, said that autism so rare that it wouldn't be expected to be found among the number of children studied. Also, any children with autism would have been eliminated from the study, as would other children with prior neurological disorders.
The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research funded the studies. "From a scientific point of view, it gives us the confidence that these findings are not equivocal and the similarity suggests that the results are real," said Dushanka Kleinman, the institute's deputy director. An American Dental Association official said the studies offer convincing confirmation of what previous studies have said. "This will give patients the reassurance they are making a safe and good choice," said Dr. Frederick Eichmiller, director of the ADA's Paffenbarger Research Center.....
Charlie Brown, counsel for Consumers for Dental Choice, an advocacy group pushing to end the use of mercury in dental fillings, said both studies ignore research that indicates mercury causes a host of physical and mental problems. Brown blasted both studies as unethical, saying that children or their guardians were never told of the potential risks of the mercury fillings. [Proving mercury harmless is unethical!]
More here
Confronting the New Misanthropy
The big question today is not whether humans will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our faith in humanity will survive it, says former Marxist Frank Furedi
Discussions about the future increasingly tend to focus on whether humans will survive. According to green author and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable'.
More and more books predict there will be an unavoidable global catastrophe; there is James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, and Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilisations. Kunstler's book warns that 'this is a much darker time than 1938, the eve of World War II'. In the media there are alarming stories about a mass 'die-off' in the near future and of cities engulfed by rising oceans as a consequence of climate change.
Today we don't just have Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but an entire cavalry regiment of doom-mongers. It is like a secular version of St John's Revelations, except it is even worse - apparently there is no future for humanity after this predicted apocalypse. Instead of being redeemed, human beings will, it seems, disappear without a trace.
Anxieties about human survival are as old as human history itself. Through catastrophes such as the Deluge or Sodom and Gomorrah, the religious imagination fantasised about the end of the world. More recently, apocalyptic ideas once rooted in magic and theology have been recast as allegedly scientific statements about human destructiveness and irresponsibility. Elbowing aside the mystical St John, Lovelock poses as a prophet-scientist when he states: 'I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news..' Today, the future of the Earth is said to be jeopardised by human consumption, technological development or by 'man playing God'. And instead of original sin leading to the Fall of Man, we fear the degradation of Nature by an apparently malevolent human species.
All of today's various doomsday scenarios - whether it's the millennium bug, oil depletion, global warming, avian flu or the destruction of biodiversity - emphasise human culpability. Their premise is that the human species is essentially destructive and morally bankrupt. 'With breathtaking insolence', warns Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, 'humans have taken the stores of carbon that Gaia buried to keep oxygen at its proper level and burnt them'.
Human activity is continually blamed for threatening the Earth's existence. Scare stories about the scale of human destruction appear in the media and are promoted by advocacy groups and politicians. For example, it was recently claimed that human activity has reduced the number of birds and fish species by 35 per cent over the past 30 years. That story was circulated by the environmentalist news service Planet Ark and picked up by the mainstream media, and widely cited as evidence that human action causes ecological destruction. Our engagement with nature is frequently described as 'ecocide', the heedless and deliberate destruction of the environment. In short, humanity's attempt to domesticate nature is discussed as something akin to genocide or the Holocaust. The title of Franz Broswimmer's polemic Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species captures this sense of loathing towards humanity. According to Jared Diamond, 'ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as the threat to global civilisations'.
Increasingly, the term 'human impact' is associated with pollution, wanton destruction and the stripping bare of the Earth's assets. Former US vice president Al Gore is concerned that the 'power of technologies now at our disposal vastly magnifies the impact each individual can have on the natural world', causing a 'violent destructive collision between our civilisation and the Earth'. Over the past 400 years, the human impact on the world, which led to the humanisation of nature, was celebrated by Western culture - these days, human ingenuity is regarded ambiguously or even suspiciously.
Indeed, the very idea of civilisation is presented as a force for ecological destruction. 'Civilisations have been destroying the living systems of the Earth for at least 5,000 years', says one misanthrophic account. According to some environmentalists, humans are a 'foreign negative element', even a 'cancer on the environment'. For radical environmentalists, the degradation of nature stems from our species' belief in its unique qualities. Such a belief - dubbed 'anthropocentrism' - is openly denounced for endangering the planet. Human-centred ideology, which views nature from the perspective of its utility for people, is said to be destroying the environment. And this tendency to depict humans as parasites on the planet is not confined to any small circle of cultural pessimists. Michael Meacher, Britain's former minister for the environment, has referred to humans as 'the virus' infecting the Earth's body.
Western culture's estrangement from its humanity
The rising popularity of a term like 'ecological footprint' shows how much resonance the association of normal human activity with destruction has today. This term, which implies that having an impact on the environment is necessarily a bad thing, is rarely criticised for its misanthropic assumptions. On TV and in film and popular culture, the development of civilisation, and particularly the advance of science and technology, is depicted as the source of environmental destruction and social disintegration. The idea that civilisation is responsible for the perils we face today depicts the human species as the problem, rather than as the maker of solutions. And the most striking manifestation of this anti-humanism is the belief that, if the Earth is to survive, there will have to be a significant reduction in the number of human beings.
The Malthusian objective of reducing populations is alive and kicking. For deep ecologists, the issue is straightforward - their starting point, as spelled out by leading ecologists Arne Naess and George Sessions in 1984, is that a 'substantial reduction in human population is needed for the flourishing of non-human life'. Numerous commentators embrace these Malthusian sentiments. 'The current world population of 6.5 billion has no hope whatsoever of sustaining itself at current levels, and the fundamental conditions of life on Earth are about to force the issue', warns Kunstler. The Australian academic David McNight has tried to reconcile neo-Malthusianism with his version of 'new humanism', arguing that 'creating a sustainable society based on human values will necessitate stopping the growth of human population and accepting limits on human material desire'.
If anything, today's neo-Malthusian thinking is far more dismal and misanthropic than the original thing. For all his intellectual pessimism and lack of imagination, Thomas Malthus believed in humanity far more than his contemporary followers do. He argued, in his book On The Principle of Population, that although 'our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish.they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society, which before the late wild speculations on this subject, was the object of rational expectation'. Malthus' reservations about the human potential were influenced by a hostility to the optimistic humanism of his intellectual opponents, including Condorcet and Godwin. Nevertheless, despite his pessimistic account of population growth, he said 'it is hoped that the general result of the inquiry is not such as not to make us give up the improvement of human society in despair'.
Over the past two centuries, Malthus' followers often disparaged people who came from the 'wrong classes' or the 'wrong races' - but despite their prejudices they affirmed the special status of the human species. In some instances, such as the eugenic movement, rabid prejudice against so-called racial inferiors combined with a belief in human progress. Today's neo-Malthusians share the old prejudices, but in addition they harbour a powerful sense of loathing against the human species itself.
It's worth recalling that Malthus justified ringing the alarm bells about demographic growth on the basis that the human race lacked the capacity and ingenuity to feed itself. Today, the anti-natalist lobby decries the fact that humanity has become all too successful at reproducing itself - and human ingenuity and development are depicted as the greatest threat to the wellbeing of the planet.
The loss of faith in humanity is strikingly expressed in the stigma attached to speciesism. Speciesism is the sin of elevating humanity above other species. Those who invented this Orwellian-sounding word think humans do not possess any morally unique qualities and people are no better than other lifeforms. They argue that those who claim a special or a higher status for humans are no better than those who talk about racial or male superiority. Animal rights activist Peter Singer defines speciesism as 'a prejudice or attitude of bias towards the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species'. Although speciesism has not yet entered the vernacular, the assumption that it is wrong to prioritise humans over animals has become mainstream. Animal experimentation is increasingly seen as a crime and the boundary dividing humans from animals has become more and more porous. As Josie Appleton has pointed out on spiked, many people take DNA as 'their measure of moral value'. And since studies indicate that people share some 98.4 per cent of their DNA with chimpanzees, they claim that as proof of moral equivalence between humans and apes.
The new misanthropy
Our declining faith in humanity might be most clearly expressed in apocalyptic thinking about the environment, but it pervades everyday life. So it is frequently assumed that people have emotional deficits. We are described as having addictive personalities, or we're seen as 'damaged' or 'scarred for life'. Human relations come with health warnings. We don't simply pollute the environment, it seems, but also one another. We talk about 'toxic relationships', 'toxic parents' and 'toxic families'. Indeed, scare stories about the risks of human relationships are often very similar to discussions about the environment.
Susan Forward, author of Toxic Parents, compares the effects of bad parenting to 'invisible weeds that invaded your life in ways you never dreamed of'. Apparently parents emit poisonous substances which contaminate their kids in much the same way that humans pollute the environment. There is virtually a new genre of literature on the apparently poisonous nature of human relationships. There are books titled Toxic Bachelors, Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable, Toxic Relationships And How To Change Them, Toxic Friends, Toxic Coworkers: How To Deal With Dysfunctional People On The Job and Toxic Stress - all of which send the same misanthropic message about relationships as neo-Malthusians spread about population and the environment. And the metaphor is not confined to relationships. Public institutions also come with the toxic-warning label; consider these book titles: Toxic Churches: Restoration from Spiritual Abuse, Toxic Work, The Allure of Toxic Leaders and Toxic Psychiatry.
This reinterpretation of human relations as toxic is driven by a moralising impulse. Pollution traditionally involved an act of defilement and desecration; in previous times, to pollute was to profane, to stain, to sully, to corrupt. But when moral defilement is anticipated and depicted as being normal, pollution becomes a routine form of behaviour - with important implications for how we view humans.
Misanthropy has a profound influence on public policy and political debate. Back in the Fifties sociological research found that there was a clear correlation between how society viewed people and the prevailing political attitudes. One study of individuals' views of human nature suggested they were shaped by political attitudes in general. So attitudes towards the democratic ideal of free speech are directly influenced by whether we believe people are capable of making an intelligent choice between competing views. 'The advocate of freedom of speech is likely to believe that most men are not easily deceived, are not swayed by uncontrolled emotions, and are capable of sound judgement', noted this 1950s study. This implied a high level of faith in humanity. In contrast, 'the individual with low faith in people tends to believe in suppression of weak, deviant, or dangerous groups'. The study concluded that the 'individual's view of human nature would appear to have significant implications for the doctrine of political liberty'. People who viewed human nature positively tended to be more tolerant towards free speech and social experimentation. People who saw humans as being driven by narrow self-interest, greed and other destructive passions were inclined to support measures that curbed freedom.
Today, the growth of censorship, the criminalisation of thought by the enactment of so-called hate crimes legislation and speech codes, and the widespread frowning upon causing offence to individuals and groups is underpinned by the idea that people cannot be trusted to make up their minds about controversial subjects. Today's censorious imperative is driven by a paternalistic and negative view of human nature, and by a lack of faith in people's capacity to discriminate between right and wrong.
Not since the Dark Ages has there been so much concern about the malevolent passions that afflict humanity. Panics about Satanic abuse have erupted on both sides of the Atlantic, and throughout the Western world there is a morbid expectation that virtually every home contains a potential abuser. Predatory monsters are seen everywhere. People regard others with a suspicion that would have been rare just a few decades ago. Parents wonder whether the daycare centre workers looking after their children can be trusted; in schools, children with bruises arouse teachers' suspicion about their parents' behaviour, while parents wonder whether any physical contact between their child and his or her teacher is permissible. In Britain, any adult employee who might come into contact with children has to undergo a police check, and sections of the child protection industry believe this police vetting should be extended to the university sector, too.
The obsession with abuse is not confined to relationships between adults and children. All interactions that involve emotions, physicality or sexuality are labelled as potentially abusive. 'Peer abuse' is seen as one of the key problems of our time; others demand action against 'elder abuse'; and for good measure alarms have been raised about 'pet abuse' and 'chicken abuse'.
Renewing our faith in people
How we view humanity really matters. If we insist on seeing humans as morally degraded parasites, then every significant technical problem from the millennium bug to the avian flu will be feared as a potential catastrophe beyond our control. Today's intellectual pessimism and cultural disorientation distracts the human imagination from confronting challenges that lie ahead. All the talk about human survival expresses a crisis of belief in humanity - and that is why the real question today is not whether humanity will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our belief in humanity can survive it.
Despite Western culture's profound sense of estrangement from its human sensibilities, individuals possess an unprecedented potential for influencing the way they live their lives. It is only now that significant sections of the public have real, meaningful choice and control. We must reinvigorate the belief in autonomy and self-determination, and recognise that we have moved from the Stone Age to a time when people's transformative potential is a remarkable force.
We also know that history does not issue any guarantees. Purposeful change is a risky enterprise. But whether we like it or not, taking risks in order to transform our lives and ourselves is one of our most distinct human qualities. That is why, instead of worrying about our 'ecological footprint', we should take all the steps necessary for moving towards a better future.
Misanthropy threatens to envelop us in a new Dark Age of prejudice where we become scared of ourselves. In such conditions, we have two choices: we can renounce the human qualities that have helped to transform the world and resign ourselves to the culture of fatalism that prevails; or we can do the opposite. Instead of abandoning faith in humanity we can turn our creative energies towards taking control of our futures. Instead of being preoccupied with 'what will happen to us' we should search for answers to the question: 'What needs to be done to humanise the future?'
Human beings are not angels; on a bad day they are capable of evil deeds. But the very fact that we can designate certain acts as evil shows that we are capable of rectifying acts of injustice. And on balance we aspire to do good. Contrary to the fantasies of romantic primitivism, civilisation and development have made our species more knowledgeable and sensitive about the workings of nature. The aspiration to improve the conditions of life - the most basic motive of people throughout the ages - is one that has driven humanity from the Stone Age through to the twenty-first century.
If believing in the human potential is today labelled 'anthropocentrism' and 'speciesism', then I wholeheartedly plead guilty to subscribing to both of those views.
Running Out of Oil? History, Technology and Abundance
Are we running out of oil? That's what the doomsayers say. We are past our (Hubbert's) peak and it's downhill from here. War, famine, pestilence, perhaps even extinction - those are the apocalyptic scenarios posited by folks predicting the oil age is over and the era of stringency is nigh. Whether we are running out of oil or not, one thing we're certainly not short of is people who claim that we are.
The good news about this bad news is that, historically, the doomsayers have always been wrong. Almost since the first discoveries of oil in the U.S. in 1859, people have been saying we're running out. In 1874, the state geologist of the nation's leading oil producer, Pennsylvania, warned the U.S. had enough oil to last just four years. In 1914, the federal government said we had a ten-year supply. The government announced in 1940 that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half. The Club of Rome made similar claims in the 1970s. President Carter famously predicted in 1977 that unless we made drastic cuts in our oil consumption, "Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil - from any country, at any acceptable price." And so it goes today, where a slew of books and Web sites make fantastic claims about dwindling supplies of crude.
The chief problem with those who say the world is running out is that they have always looked at the issue the wrong way. Questions about energy supply shouldn't be thought of in terms of how much is available, but in terms of how good mankind is at finding and extracting it. In the years after Col. Drake discovered oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, on the eve of the Civil War, wildcatters could only drill down several hundred feet. If we were confined to relying solely upon the technology available in the 19th century - or, for that matter, the tools available just three decades ago - then yes, quite possibly we could be looking at the end of oil.
But we don't use those outmoded technologies. Advances in seismology and engineering have placed well within our grasp supplies of oil previously considered inaccessible. Today they are easily and economically recoverable. Today's drills don't stop at a couple hundred feet. They bore miles into the earth. They travel laterally as well, so that a well dug in one spot might recover oil underneath locations miles away. Because of directional drilling, today one derrick can do the work that once took dozens, reducing the surface footprint of oil extraction. Energy companies today can drill far offshore, too, in very deep water. They recover deposits that doomsayers of the past thought would be impossible to get at.
Other technologies and advanced processes have boosted the recovery rates of fields thought to be tapped out. The Kern River Field near Bakersfield, California, for instance, pumped nearly 30,000 barrels per day throughout much of the first decade of the 20th century. After 1910, production declined for the next 40 years. The field was nearly abandoned. Innovations like pressurized steam and hot water injections changed that. Production at the Kern River field steadily ramped up after 1960, and the field has produced more than 125,000 barrels of oil per day since 1980. Recent estimates suggest Kern River still holds an additional one billion barrels of recoverable reserves.
That example mirrors the larger trend about oil. In 1970, experts believed the world had 612 billion barrels of proved reserves. Over the next three decades, more than 767 billion barrels would be pumped. Did we use up all the world's oil and then some? Hardly. Conservative estimates today place the world's provable oil reserves at 1.2 trillion barrels. New deposits of oil haven't been created. It's just that human ingenuity has come up with ways to get hard-to-reach deposits.
Expect that trend of increasing reserves to continue. Earlier this month the Department of Energy released a set of reports suggesting that enhanced 21st century oil recovery techniques might quadruple the amount of recoverable oil in the United States. DOE predicted that carbon sequestration technologies that inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs could soon add perhaps 89 billion barrels to the 21.4 billion barrels of proven reserves. More fantastically, government researchers found that "in the longer term, multiple advances in technology and widespread sequestration of industrial carbon dioxide could eventually add as much as 430 billion new barrels."
The same goes for Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer. The Saudis have 261 billion barrels of proven reserves. A year and a half ago, the Saudi energy minister suggested that number was way too small. "There are big chances to increase the kingdom's producible reserves by 200 billion barrels," he said. "This will come either through new discoveries or through increasing production from known deposits."
Questions about global oil supplies also must take into account unconventional sources of oil, like Canada's tar sands or shale oil in Colorado. These offer the promise of many hundreds of billions of additional barrels of oil that are currently extractable using today's technology. Processes for shale and tar sand oil generally are more expensive than conventional oil drilling. If crude oil were trading at $20 per barrel, investment in such extraction would not be viable. With the global price of crude trading above $60, however, they are attractive economically.
None of this is to suggest the world won't run out of oil one day. That could happen. It just isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Source
ANOTHER GREEN CONSENSUS-MYTH DEBUNKED
The notion that mangroves offered some protection from the deadly force of tsunamis was wrong, and such a mistaken belief could lead to a greater loss of life in coastal villages, researchers say.
The results of a study published in this month's Estuarine and Coastal Shelf Science journal disputes claim the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami's toll was lower in villages surrounded by mangroves when the earthquake-spawned waves struck.
The study re-analysed data from Indian research and said it was the height and distance of a village from the shore which protected it, rather than its surrounding vegetation. It found that mangroves offered little or no protection from a tsunami.
The Courier Mail, 5 April 2006
Benny Peiser comments:
"Wait a second. Whatever happened to the scientific consensus?
"As the clear-up from the Asian tsunami starts and the full damage is assessed, there is growing consensus among scientists, environmentalists and Asian fishing communities that the impact was considerably worsened by tourist, shrimp farm and other industrial developments which have destroyed or degraded mangrove forests and other natural sea defences. Reports this week from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia suggest the worst damage has been in places with no natural protection from the sea and that communities living behind intact mangrove forests in particular were largely spared."
(From The Guardian, 6 January 2005)"
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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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Part of the mercury phobia. I have got plenty of dental amalgam in my mouth and at age 62 I still seem to be doing OK! Maybe having mercury in your head makes you disbelieve hysterical claims! That conclusion is as logical as many other claims you see in this field
Two long-awaited, government-funded studies found no evidence that dental fillings containing mercury can cause IQ-lowering brain damage or other neurological problems in children. Children with such fillings were no more likely than other youngsters to suffer such problems, the researchers found. Some experts found the findings powerfully reassuring. But the studies are unlikely to end the fierce debate over the long-term effects of what are known as amalgam fillings, and some advocates bitterly accused the researchers of conducting unethical experiments on children.
Amalgam fillings, also called silver fillings, are made of mercury and other metals and have been used by dentists for more than a century. But their use has dropped in recent years as more and more doctors switch to resin composite fillings, which are considered more appealing because they are white. Some advocacy groups and dentists have long contended that the mercury in fillings can leach into the body and cause harmful neurological effects, including autism.
The latest studies were published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. "We didn't see any indications of harm to these kids," said Dr. Timothy DeRouen, a University of Washington professor of biostatistics and dental public health sciences, who led a study of 507 children, ages 8 to 10, in Portugal to determine if mercury fillings had any neurological effects. "And we tested them repeatedly over seven years."
The other study, led by Dr. Sonja McKinlay of the New England Research Institutes, looked at the effect on intelligence, memory and other mental functions, and kidney function. It involved 534 children in New England, ages 6 to 10. McKinlay said she is confident that such fillings are safe for children in this age group, in large part because the youngsters were given far more amalgam than the average American child gets. "If there was no sign of any health problems from this study in these kids with all this amalgam in their mouths ... you know it is going to be safe for kids in the same age group in the rest of the country because they are getting much less exposure," she said. McKinlay also said that while the study revealed children with the mercury fillings had higher mercury levels in their urine, there was no evidence they had a higher incidence of kidney damage.
Neither study examined autism. Dr. David Bellinger, an author of the New England study, said that autism so rare that it wouldn't be expected to be found among the number of children studied. Also, any children with autism would have been eliminated from the study, as would other children with prior neurological disorders.
The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research funded the studies. "From a scientific point of view, it gives us the confidence that these findings are not equivocal and the similarity suggests that the results are real," said Dushanka Kleinman, the institute's deputy director. An American Dental Association official said the studies offer convincing confirmation of what previous studies have said. "This will give patients the reassurance they are making a safe and good choice," said Dr. Frederick Eichmiller, director of the ADA's Paffenbarger Research Center.....
Charlie Brown, counsel for Consumers for Dental Choice, an advocacy group pushing to end the use of mercury in dental fillings, said both studies ignore research that indicates mercury causes a host of physical and mental problems. Brown blasted both studies as unethical, saying that children or their guardians were never told of the potential risks of the mercury fillings. [Proving mercury harmless is unethical!]
More here
Confronting the New Misanthropy
The big question today is not whether humans will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our faith in humanity will survive it, says former Marxist Frank Furedi
Discussions about the future increasingly tend to focus on whether humans will survive. According to green author and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable'.
More and more books predict there will be an unavoidable global catastrophe; there is James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, and Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilisations. Kunstler's book warns that 'this is a much darker time than 1938, the eve of World War II'. In the media there are alarming stories about a mass 'die-off' in the near future and of cities engulfed by rising oceans as a consequence of climate change.
Today we don't just have Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but an entire cavalry regiment of doom-mongers. It is like a secular version of St John's Revelations, except it is even worse - apparently there is no future for humanity after this predicted apocalypse. Instead of being redeemed, human beings will, it seems, disappear without a trace.
Anxieties about human survival are as old as human history itself. Through catastrophes such as the Deluge or Sodom and Gomorrah, the religious imagination fantasised about the end of the world. More recently, apocalyptic ideas once rooted in magic and theology have been recast as allegedly scientific statements about human destructiveness and irresponsibility. Elbowing aside the mystical St John, Lovelock poses as a prophet-scientist when he states: 'I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news..' Today, the future of the Earth is said to be jeopardised by human consumption, technological development or by 'man playing God'. And instead of original sin leading to the Fall of Man, we fear the degradation of Nature by an apparently malevolent human species.
All of today's various doomsday scenarios - whether it's the millennium bug, oil depletion, global warming, avian flu or the destruction of biodiversity - emphasise human culpability. Their premise is that the human species is essentially destructive and morally bankrupt. 'With breathtaking insolence', warns Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, 'humans have taken the stores of carbon that Gaia buried to keep oxygen at its proper level and burnt them'.
Human activity is continually blamed for threatening the Earth's existence. Scare stories about the scale of human destruction appear in the media and are promoted by advocacy groups and politicians. For example, it was recently claimed that human activity has reduced the number of birds and fish species by 35 per cent over the past 30 years. That story was circulated by the environmentalist news service Planet Ark and picked up by the mainstream media, and widely cited as evidence that human action causes ecological destruction. Our engagement with nature is frequently described as 'ecocide', the heedless and deliberate destruction of the environment. In short, humanity's attempt to domesticate nature is discussed as something akin to genocide or the Holocaust. The title of Franz Broswimmer's polemic Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species captures this sense of loathing towards humanity. According to Jared Diamond, 'ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as the threat to global civilisations'.
Increasingly, the term 'human impact' is associated with pollution, wanton destruction and the stripping bare of the Earth's assets. Former US vice president Al Gore is concerned that the 'power of technologies now at our disposal vastly magnifies the impact each individual can have on the natural world', causing a 'violent destructive collision between our civilisation and the Earth'. Over the past 400 years, the human impact on the world, which led to the humanisation of nature, was celebrated by Western culture - these days, human ingenuity is regarded ambiguously or even suspiciously.
Indeed, the very idea of civilisation is presented as a force for ecological destruction. 'Civilisations have been destroying the living systems of the Earth for at least 5,000 years', says one misanthrophic account. According to some environmentalists, humans are a 'foreign negative element', even a 'cancer on the environment'. For radical environmentalists, the degradation of nature stems from our species' belief in its unique qualities. Such a belief - dubbed 'anthropocentrism' - is openly denounced for endangering the planet. Human-centred ideology, which views nature from the perspective of its utility for people, is said to be destroying the environment. And this tendency to depict humans as parasites on the planet is not confined to any small circle of cultural pessimists. Michael Meacher, Britain's former minister for the environment, has referred to humans as 'the virus' infecting the Earth's body.
Western culture's estrangement from its humanity
The rising popularity of a term like 'ecological footprint' shows how much resonance the association of normal human activity with destruction has today. This term, which implies that having an impact on the environment is necessarily a bad thing, is rarely criticised for its misanthropic assumptions. On TV and in film and popular culture, the development of civilisation, and particularly the advance of science and technology, is depicted as the source of environmental destruction and social disintegration. The idea that civilisation is responsible for the perils we face today depicts the human species as the problem, rather than as the maker of solutions. And the most striking manifestation of this anti-humanism is the belief that, if the Earth is to survive, there will have to be a significant reduction in the number of human beings.
The Malthusian objective of reducing populations is alive and kicking. For deep ecologists, the issue is straightforward - their starting point, as spelled out by leading ecologists Arne Naess and George Sessions in 1984, is that a 'substantial reduction in human population is needed for the flourishing of non-human life'. Numerous commentators embrace these Malthusian sentiments. 'The current world population of 6.5 billion has no hope whatsoever of sustaining itself at current levels, and the fundamental conditions of life on Earth are about to force the issue', warns Kunstler. The Australian academic David McNight has tried to reconcile neo-Malthusianism with his version of 'new humanism', arguing that 'creating a sustainable society based on human values will necessitate stopping the growth of human population and accepting limits on human material desire'.
If anything, today's neo-Malthusian thinking is far more dismal and misanthropic than the original thing. For all his intellectual pessimism and lack of imagination, Thomas Malthus believed in humanity far more than his contemporary followers do. He argued, in his book On The Principle of Population, that although 'our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish.they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society, which before the late wild speculations on this subject, was the object of rational expectation'. Malthus' reservations about the human potential were influenced by a hostility to the optimistic humanism of his intellectual opponents, including Condorcet and Godwin. Nevertheless, despite his pessimistic account of population growth, he said 'it is hoped that the general result of the inquiry is not such as not to make us give up the improvement of human society in despair'.
Over the past two centuries, Malthus' followers often disparaged people who came from the 'wrong classes' or the 'wrong races' - but despite their prejudices they affirmed the special status of the human species. In some instances, such as the eugenic movement, rabid prejudice against so-called racial inferiors combined with a belief in human progress. Today's neo-Malthusians share the old prejudices, but in addition they harbour a powerful sense of loathing against the human species itself.
It's worth recalling that Malthus justified ringing the alarm bells about demographic growth on the basis that the human race lacked the capacity and ingenuity to feed itself. Today, the anti-natalist lobby decries the fact that humanity has become all too successful at reproducing itself - and human ingenuity and development are depicted as the greatest threat to the wellbeing of the planet.
The loss of faith in humanity is strikingly expressed in the stigma attached to speciesism. Speciesism is the sin of elevating humanity above other species. Those who invented this Orwellian-sounding word think humans do not possess any morally unique qualities and people are no better than other lifeforms. They argue that those who claim a special or a higher status for humans are no better than those who talk about racial or male superiority. Animal rights activist Peter Singer defines speciesism as 'a prejudice or attitude of bias towards the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species'. Although speciesism has not yet entered the vernacular, the assumption that it is wrong to prioritise humans over animals has become mainstream. Animal experimentation is increasingly seen as a crime and the boundary dividing humans from animals has become more and more porous. As Josie Appleton has pointed out on spiked, many people take DNA as 'their measure of moral value'. And since studies indicate that people share some 98.4 per cent of their DNA with chimpanzees, they claim that as proof of moral equivalence between humans and apes.
The new misanthropy
Our declining faith in humanity might be most clearly expressed in apocalyptic thinking about the environment, but it pervades everyday life. So it is frequently assumed that people have emotional deficits. We are described as having addictive personalities, or we're seen as 'damaged' or 'scarred for life'. Human relations come with health warnings. We don't simply pollute the environment, it seems, but also one another. We talk about 'toxic relationships', 'toxic parents' and 'toxic families'. Indeed, scare stories about the risks of human relationships are often very similar to discussions about the environment.
Susan Forward, author of Toxic Parents, compares the effects of bad parenting to 'invisible weeds that invaded your life in ways you never dreamed of'. Apparently parents emit poisonous substances which contaminate their kids in much the same way that humans pollute the environment. There is virtually a new genre of literature on the apparently poisonous nature of human relationships. There are books titled Toxic Bachelors, Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable, Toxic Relationships And How To Change Them, Toxic Friends, Toxic Coworkers: How To Deal With Dysfunctional People On The Job and Toxic Stress - all of which send the same misanthropic message about relationships as neo-Malthusians spread about population and the environment. And the metaphor is not confined to relationships. Public institutions also come with the toxic-warning label; consider these book titles: Toxic Churches: Restoration from Spiritual Abuse, Toxic Work, The Allure of Toxic Leaders and Toxic Psychiatry.
This reinterpretation of human relations as toxic is driven by a moralising impulse. Pollution traditionally involved an act of defilement and desecration; in previous times, to pollute was to profane, to stain, to sully, to corrupt. But when moral defilement is anticipated and depicted as being normal, pollution becomes a routine form of behaviour - with important implications for how we view humans.
Misanthropy has a profound influence on public policy and political debate. Back in the Fifties sociological research found that there was a clear correlation between how society viewed people and the prevailing political attitudes. One study of individuals' views of human nature suggested they were shaped by political attitudes in general. So attitudes towards the democratic ideal of free speech are directly influenced by whether we believe people are capable of making an intelligent choice between competing views. 'The advocate of freedom of speech is likely to believe that most men are not easily deceived, are not swayed by uncontrolled emotions, and are capable of sound judgement', noted this 1950s study. This implied a high level of faith in humanity. In contrast, 'the individual with low faith in people tends to believe in suppression of weak, deviant, or dangerous groups'. The study concluded that the 'individual's view of human nature would appear to have significant implications for the doctrine of political liberty'. People who viewed human nature positively tended to be more tolerant towards free speech and social experimentation. People who saw humans as being driven by narrow self-interest, greed and other destructive passions were inclined to support measures that curbed freedom.
Today, the growth of censorship, the criminalisation of thought by the enactment of so-called hate crimes legislation and speech codes, and the widespread frowning upon causing offence to individuals and groups is underpinned by the idea that people cannot be trusted to make up their minds about controversial subjects. Today's censorious imperative is driven by a paternalistic and negative view of human nature, and by a lack of faith in people's capacity to discriminate between right and wrong.
Not since the Dark Ages has there been so much concern about the malevolent passions that afflict humanity. Panics about Satanic abuse have erupted on both sides of the Atlantic, and throughout the Western world there is a morbid expectation that virtually every home contains a potential abuser. Predatory monsters are seen everywhere. People regard others with a suspicion that would have been rare just a few decades ago. Parents wonder whether the daycare centre workers looking after their children can be trusted; in schools, children with bruises arouse teachers' suspicion about their parents' behaviour, while parents wonder whether any physical contact between their child and his or her teacher is permissible. In Britain, any adult employee who might come into contact with children has to undergo a police check, and sections of the child protection industry believe this police vetting should be extended to the university sector, too.
The obsession with abuse is not confined to relationships between adults and children. All interactions that involve emotions, physicality or sexuality are labelled as potentially abusive. 'Peer abuse' is seen as one of the key problems of our time; others demand action against 'elder abuse'; and for good measure alarms have been raised about 'pet abuse' and 'chicken abuse'.
Renewing our faith in people
How we view humanity really matters. If we insist on seeing humans as morally degraded parasites, then every significant technical problem from the millennium bug to the avian flu will be feared as a potential catastrophe beyond our control. Today's intellectual pessimism and cultural disorientation distracts the human imagination from confronting challenges that lie ahead. All the talk about human survival expresses a crisis of belief in humanity - and that is why the real question today is not whether humanity will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our belief in humanity can survive it.
Despite Western culture's profound sense of estrangement from its human sensibilities, individuals possess an unprecedented potential for influencing the way they live their lives. It is only now that significant sections of the public have real, meaningful choice and control. We must reinvigorate the belief in autonomy and self-determination, and recognise that we have moved from the Stone Age to a time when people's transformative potential is a remarkable force.
We also know that history does not issue any guarantees. Purposeful change is a risky enterprise. But whether we like it or not, taking risks in order to transform our lives and ourselves is one of our most distinct human qualities. That is why, instead of worrying about our 'ecological footprint', we should take all the steps necessary for moving towards a better future.
Misanthropy threatens to envelop us in a new Dark Age of prejudice where we become scared of ourselves. In such conditions, we have two choices: we can renounce the human qualities that have helped to transform the world and resign ourselves to the culture of fatalism that prevails; or we can do the opposite. Instead of abandoning faith in humanity we can turn our creative energies towards taking control of our futures. Instead of being preoccupied with 'what will happen to us' we should search for answers to the question: 'What needs to be done to humanise the future?'
Human beings are not angels; on a bad day they are capable of evil deeds. But the very fact that we can designate certain acts as evil shows that we are capable of rectifying acts of injustice. And on balance we aspire to do good. Contrary to the fantasies of romantic primitivism, civilisation and development have made our species more knowledgeable and sensitive about the workings of nature. The aspiration to improve the conditions of life - the most basic motive of people throughout the ages - is one that has driven humanity from the Stone Age through to the twenty-first century.
If believing in the human potential is today labelled 'anthropocentrism' and 'speciesism', then I wholeheartedly plead guilty to subscribing to both of those views.
Running Out of Oil? History, Technology and Abundance
Are we running out of oil? That's what the doomsayers say. We are past our (Hubbert's) peak and it's downhill from here. War, famine, pestilence, perhaps even extinction - those are the apocalyptic scenarios posited by folks predicting the oil age is over and the era of stringency is nigh. Whether we are running out of oil or not, one thing we're certainly not short of is people who claim that we are.
The good news about this bad news is that, historically, the doomsayers have always been wrong. Almost since the first discoveries of oil in the U.S. in 1859, people have been saying we're running out. In 1874, the state geologist of the nation's leading oil producer, Pennsylvania, warned the U.S. had enough oil to last just four years. In 1914, the federal government said we had a ten-year supply. The government announced in 1940 that reserves would be depleted within a decade and a half. The Club of Rome made similar claims in the 1970s. President Carter famously predicted in 1977 that unless we made drastic cuts in our oil consumption, "Within ten years we would not be able to import enough oil - from any country, at any acceptable price." And so it goes today, where a slew of books and Web sites make fantastic claims about dwindling supplies of crude.
The chief problem with those who say the world is running out is that they have always looked at the issue the wrong way. Questions about energy supply shouldn't be thought of in terms of how much is available, but in terms of how good mankind is at finding and extracting it. In the years after Col. Drake discovered oil at Titusville, Pennsylvania, on the eve of the Civil War, wildcatters could only drill down several hundred feet. If we were confined to relying solely upon the technology available in the 19th century - or, for that matter, the tools available just three decades ago - then yes, quite possibly we could be looking at the end of oil.
But we don't use those outmoded technologies. Advances in seismology and engineering have placed well within our grasp supplies of oil previously considered inaccessible. Today they are easily and economically recoverable. Today's drills don't stop at a couple hundred feet. They bore miles into the earth. They travel laterally as well, so that a well dug in one spot might recover oil underneath locations miles away. Because of directional drilling, today one derrick can do the work that once took dozens, reducing the surface footprint of oil extraction. Energy companies today can drill far offshore, too, in very deep water. They recover deposits that doomsayers of the past thought would be impossible to get at.
Other technologies and advanced processes have boosted the recovery rates of fields thought to be tapped out. The Kern River Field near Bakersfield, California, for instance, pumped nearly 30,000 barrels per day throughout much of the first decade of the 20th century. After 1910, production declined for the next 40 years. The field was nearly abandoned. Innovations like pressurized steam and hot water injections changed that. Production at the Kern River field steadily ramped up after 1960, and the field has produced more than 125,000 barrels of oil per day since 1980. Recent estimates suggest Kern River still holds an additional one billion barrels of recoverable reserves.
That example mirrors the larger trend about oil. In 1970, experts believed the world had 612 billion barrels of proved reserves. Over the next three decades, more than 767 billion barrels would be pumped. Did we use up all the world's oil and then some? Hardly. Conservative estimates today place the world's provable oil reserves at 1.2 trillion barrels. New deposits of oil haven't been created. It's just that human ingenuity has come up with ways to get hard-to-reach deposits.
Expect that trend of increasing reserves to continue. Earlier this month the Department of Energy released a set of reports suggesting that enhanced 21st century oil recovery techniques might quadruple the amount of recoverable oil in the United States. DOE predicted that carbon sequestration technologies that inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs could soon add perhaps 89 billion barrels to the 21.4 billion barrels of proven reserves. More fantastically, government researchers found that "in the longer term, multiple advances in technology and widespread sequestration of industrial carbon dioxide could eventually add as much as 430 billion new barrels."
The same goes for Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil producer. The Saudis have 261 billion barrels of proven reserves. A year and a half ago, the Saudi energy minister suggested that number was way too small. "There are big chances to increase the kingdom's producible reserves by 200 billion barrels," he said. "This will come either through new discoveries or through increasing production from known deposits."
Questions about global oil supplies also must take into account unconventional sources of oil, like Canada's tar sands or shale oil in Colorado. These offer the promise of many hundreds of billions of additional barrels of oil that are currently extractable using today's technology. Processes for shale and tar sand oil generally are more expensive than conventional oil drilling. If crude oil were trading at $20 per barrel, investment in such extraction would not be viable. With the global price of crude trading above $60, however, they are attractive economically.
None of this is to suggest the world won't run out of oil one day. That could happen. It just isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Source
ANOTHER GREEN CONSENSUS-MYTH DEBUNKED
The notion that mangroves offered some protection from the deadly force of tsunamis was wrong, and such a mistaken belief could lead to a greater loss of life in coastal villages, researchers say.
The results of a study published in this month's Estuarine and Coastal Shelf Science journal disputes claim the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami's toll was lower in villages surrounded by mangroves when the earthquake-spawned waves struck.
The study re-analysed data from Indian research and said it was the height and distance of a village from the shore which protected it, rather than its surrounding vegetation. It found that mangroves offered little or no protection from a tsunami.
The Courier Mail, 5 April 2006
Benny Peiser comments:
"Wait a second. Whatever happened to the scientific consensus?
"As the clear-up from the Asian tsunami starts and the full damage is assessed, there is growing consensus among scientists, environmentalists and Asian fishing communities that the impact was considerably worsened by tourist, shrimp farm and other industrial developments which have destroyed or degraded mangrove forests and other natural sea defences. Reports this week from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Malaysia suggest the worst damage has been in places with no natural protection from the sea and that communities living behind intact mangrove forests in particular were largely spared."
(From The Guardian, 6 January 2005)"
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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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Jim Hansen and his twin
