Internationally renowned Norwegian solar expert is a climate sceptic
Pal Brekke was second-in-command of the gigantic international solar research project SOHO. Now back in his home country of Norway, Dr Brekke is immersed in coordinating research and disseminating findings for the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo. He is bringing knowledge from his field of speciality into the climate debate, which has branded him as a climate bully in certain circles.
The vast majority of researchers concur that anthropogenic activity has affected the earth's climate. Dr Brekke is no exception. But he breaks rank with most climate researchers when he expresses doubt as to the actual extent of the impact of human activity.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) has determined that the earth's temperature has risen by about 0.7ΓΈ C since 1901. According to Dr Brekke, this time period coincides not only with an increase in human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, but also with a higher level of solar activity, which makes it complicated to separate the effects of these two phenomena. For this standpoint, he has been accused of being in the pocket of the powerful Norwegian petroleum industry and of being the mouthpiece for the country's least environmentally focused political forces.
Some climate researchers have told Dr Brekke that he is unqualified to put forth his opinion since he is not a climate researcher. Dr Brekke asks, "Just what makes someone a climate researcher? Couldn't someone who studies solar radiation also be considered a climate researcher?" Dr Brekke has published more than 40 scientific articles on the sun and on the interaction between the sun and the earth.
"We could be in for a surprise," he cautions. "It's possible that the sun plays an even more central role in global warming than we have suspected. Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time."
As much as SOHO has revolutionised our knowledge of the sun, a great deal about it remains unknown some 4.6 billion years after it first began to shine. Dr Brekke believes the future will bring surprising answers as to why solar activity varies and about the relationship between solar activity and the climate on earth.
This is a topic of interest to researchers in many countries. At CERN in Switzerland, 70 researchers are participating in a project to test a theory that cloud layer has a significant effect on the earth's temperature. The Danish researchers who developed the theory assert that greater solar activity allows less cosmic radiation to reach the earth's atmosphere, which in turn leads to the formation of fewer clouds. Subsequently, the earth is more exposed to solar radiation, leading to greater warming.
"There is much evidence that the sun's high-activity cycle is levelling off or abating. If it is true that the sun's activity is of great significance in determining the earth's climate, this reduced solar activity could work in the opposite direction to climate change caused by humans. In that case," contends Dr Brekke, "we could find the temperature levelling off or actually falling in the course of a 50-year period" - an assertion that provokes many climate researchers.
More here
Noted British weatherman dismisses global warming
John Kettley is one of the UK's iconic weathermen - he has even featured in a UK pop song which reached number 21 in the UK Singles Chart. Kettley used to work for the Met Office, but he is now famous as BBC Radio 5 Live's "intrepid weatherman", appearing mainly on `Breakfast' between 6 and 9 am. He is also an intrepid Yorkshireman, having been born in Todmorden in West Yorkshire, and, like all Yorkshiremen, he likes to tell it as it is, which is precisely what he has done today with respect to Britain's lousy summer weather [`Awful August has delayed this year's harvest but global warming is not to blame', Daily Mail, August 24]:
"Atrocious weather has seriously delayed the harvest this year ... But this is not a symptom of so-called `global warming'."
And: "These conditions are not unique and are more like the poor August weather Britain saw during the Twenties and Sixties. It is more likely a stark reminder that the warming trend we recorded in the last part of the 20th Century has now stalled."
Finally: "We are not suddenly about to be catapulted towards a Mediterranean climate [idiotic BBC 2 gardening programmes, please note]. We are surrounded by water, with the vast Atlantic Ocean to our west, while the jet stream and gulf stream will forever influence our daily weather and long-term climate."
Common sense at last. Thank goodness for down-to-earth forecasters like John. And thank goodness, too, for the parts of the BBC beyond BBC 1/2 and Radio 4. Like a Yorkshireman, these bits of the Beeb tend to tell it as it is, not as the bien pensant would have it be.
There is thus no cognitive dissonance [see: `Cognitive Dissonance' (August 19) and `More On Cognitive Dissonance' (August 20)] for John Kettley. This summer's dreadful weather, cold and wet, cannot be conveniently forced into the `global warming' cognition simply to ease the dissonance of our more PC media. It's time to call a spade a spade - or even a bloody shovel. It's time to call cooling - er - cooling.
And today? More chill rain in the morning.... It's just like my soggy visits to Torquay as a child. This scene is perfectly recaptured by Eleanor Mills [`The wind, the rain, the child-hating waiters...', The Sunday Times, August 24], as she describes her family's `summer' holiday this year in Dorset and on the British Riviera: "Last week I came back from my two-week summer holiday spent under growling grey skies, sheltering behind a windbreak, where my garment of choice wasn't my new swimming costume but a trusty North Face waterproof. Sunglasses? Pah. A sundress? Are you joking? I wore my thermals." Her five-year old neatly renamed Dorset, `Pour-set'.
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Ooops, There Goes Half the Ecological Footprint
It is based on many unsubstantiated assumptions -- and falsification of the anthropogenic warming theory alone undermines the basis for over one half of the posited effects
By Wendell Krossa
The Ecological Footprint model has been gaining acceptance across the globe as a government planning tool at federal, provincial/state, and even local/urban government levels. Advocates of the Ecological Footprint (EF) argue that it shows that humanity is "overshooting" the capacity of ecosystems to support our standards of living and we are heading for catastrophic environmental collapse.
Bill Rees, the originator of the EF, refers to a litany of supposed disasters to support his contention that the human enterprise is destroying nature and must be, not just halted, but actually reversed. He points to such things as massive species loss, forest devastation, pollution, overpopulation, soil degradation, agricultural decline, resource exhaustion (e.g. peak oil), and of course, potentially catastrophic global warming. Ozone depletion and acid rain also still hover in the background as occasional elements of his litany. This litany of disasters is employed to support his contention that we are using too much of nature's resources and must reverse this overshoot level of resource use. He claims that if all of humanity desires to attain to the current standard of living of the developed world then we would need several more earths. I've read estimates of from 2 to 4 more earths.
One of his critics noted that politicians tend to accept the EF model without taking a close look at its details (data, methods). Some advocates of the model, noting its weaknesses such as "calculations based on crude estimates", nonetheless dismiss such weaknesses as peripheral to the main purpose of the model. "Since the focus of the ecological footprint is heuristic- to awaken people, particularly those in more heavily industrialized societies, to their extensive resource use and its externalized costs- greater precision or detail might actually get in the way of this teaching goal". Did I actually read that? Yikes.
But what piqued my curiosity recently, especially as the model claims that we are seriously overshooting nature's ability to sustain us, was a statement by the co-developer of the EF- Mathis Wackernagel- that "Land for carbon absorption is the most significant globally, representing nearly half of humanity's total footprint" (Methods for Calculating National Ecological Footprint Accounts- available online). Rees has also stated in a paper here ("Ecological Footprints and Bio-Capacity: Essential Elements in Sustainability Assessment") that sequestration of CO2 makes up "half the global average eco-footprint and a greater proportion in high-income countries". His ecological footprint model is especially dependent on the anthropogenic warming hypothesis and the belief that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant that must be removed from the atmosphere.
I have argued with Bill Rees that his assumption that CO2 is a major factor in climate change and a primary forcing mechanism for climate modification is simply unproven. No consensus exists on this. There is no clear evidence to support this contention. I've sent him the recent APS paper by Lord Moncton and Roy Spencer's Senate Testimony, along with other research on CO2 and warming. Emerging evidence continues to undermine the AGW theory from many differing angles. It appears then that, ooops, there goes one half, and more, of the human ecological footprint.
What about the other elements of Rees's catastrophe litany that are used to validate the rest of his footprint model- for instance, forests? FAO Production Yearbooks show no serious decline in earth's forest cover over the past 60 years when the human population went from 2.5 billion to 6.3 billion and world GDP went from $4 trillion to over $40 trillion. During this massive increase in population and consumption, forest cover remained roughly stable at about 30% of land area. One would think, according to ecological footprint theory, that such expansion of the human enterprise would have had a much more notable `overshoot' impact on a resource like forests.
Also, the 1992 IUCN report uncovered no evidence of any species holocaust. Species losses appear to continue at low historical rates. Most species have survived past periods of massive change and upheaval such as glaciations, severe episodes of volcanism (with sudden cooling), and so on. They have adapted by migrating up and down mountain slopes and north and south over continents, as well as making other adaptations. So once again, on biodiversity, no evidence of overshoot. Now, if the litany of disasters is not as apocalyptic as he presents them then this undermines Rees's central contention that the human enterprise is destroying nature and needs to be halted or reversed. Bill responds by pointing to local situations of devastation and the loss of isolated species with the less than subtle presumption that these can be extrapolated out to characterize the overall world situation. Or he will argue that our current overshoot will suddenly hit an unexpected tipping point and massive collapse will then occur. This is hard to imagine as today across the world scientists and others are watching the varied elements of ecosystems more closely and thoroughly than at any previous time in history. Satellites observe 24/7. If evidence of overshoot is there, surely we will know about it.
He further dismisses suggestions that such technologies as hydroponic crop production can be employed to alleviate pressure on what he views as overstressed agricultural resources. Inputs to hydroponic agriculture are even higher than those to regular agriculture, he claims. When I argued that we are not exhausting agricultural resources but are actually using less land over time he again stated that this higher agricultural production that uses less land requires more inputs and the impending disaster is that we will soon exhaust these limited inputs of fertilizers. He also argued that GM technology and other agricultural advances will also run up against similar constraints and limits.
For every argument for technological advance he counters with a dark view of limited resources of some sort or other. Creative technological solutions do not fit his apocalyptic outlook which is heavily dependent on concepts of closed systems and strict resource limits and the dissipation, decline, and disorder produced in such systems by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as he employs it. The unlimited creativity of the human mind has no place in his model and is dismissed as a factor of limited impact. History proves him entirely wrong on this. The Green Revolution and Norman Borlaug's work is one good example here. Borlaug ignored Paul Erhlich's doom prophecies of massive famine and in a relatively short time had turned food shortages into agricultural abundance. The unlimited creativity of the human mind is the key factor that leaves doom scenarios with a 100 percent failure rate.
Rees also makes the following argument that we have improved our developed country environments at the cost of devastating the environment's of other countries. "There is a whole other point: China and now India are among the most polluted countries on Earth but much, if not most, of the worst pollution comes from particularly dirty processing and manufacturing industries that have migrated there from Europe, North America and Japan but continue to operate producing goods mostly for consumption in those countries. Result: The rich countries get cleaner, the developing countries and their populations pay the pollution costs. (This phenomenon is readily revealed in our ecological footprint analyses--much of the pollution in China represents the extra-territorial eco-footprints of the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc., not of China itself.) In short, Goklany, Beckerman, Lomborg and the like, select data to create a black and white and partial caricature of a very complex and grey-scale picture. This is dangerously delusional and grossly misleading". In my discussions with Rees I had been quoting research from Goklany, Lomberg, and Beckerman.
To be generous, one could grant that on varied points Rees expresses common sense concern over environmental issues. Obviously, we ought to try as much as possible to better understand our engagement of nature and the capacities of its varied resources that are essential to our living standards. Its just that this EF model has been constructed by an ecologist who is committed to halting and reversing the human enterprise to a level appropriate to what many view as environmental extremist visions- a much diminished human population living in a largely wilderness world at a much lower standard of living. Rees states plainly that the human enterprise, as it currently exists in developed countries, is unsustainable. He believes this to be so because he is committed to the concept of strict limits in closed systems and the primacy of the Second Law with its inevitable consequences of decay, dissipation, and decline. I have responded to Bill that the concept of closed systems is a human invention and not a natural fact. It is simply a "philosophical prejudice that has led to unsound long-term forecasts" (Julian Simon, Life Against The Grain, p.330). Simon has countered well the dismal philosophical prejudice of limited resources and closed systems that is promoted by doomsters like Bill Rees (see for instance Ultimate Resource or A Poverty of Reason by Wilfred Beckerman).
If you buy Rees's contention that our current developed world standards of living are unsustainable and all of humanity attaining these standards of living will require from 2 to 4 more earths, then you can see what diminished levels of living standards all of us would need to return to in order to live on just one of Rees's earths. Rees argues that most families could live on about $8,000 of annual income. I doubt he is trying to do this himself.
Other questionable assumptions that under-gird the EF model include the argument that humanity should be allowed access to only a strictly limited amount of natural resources because if we take more, then other species are denied access to those same resources (e.g. photosynthetic capacity). Wilfred Beckerman responds to this argument in his book Green Colored Glasses. Also, the contention is made that our excessive use of renewable resources is undercutting the ability of ecosystems to regenerate or replenish themselves and hence these systems are facing collapse.
While isolated species (e.g. cod in Eastern Canada) have been decimated, as noted above there is no evidence of overall collapse of larger ecosystems or general serious loss of biodiversity. Another contention is that of intergenerational equity. EF advocates argue that we must pass on to future generations an undiminished stock of natural capital. This ignores the fact that future generations will be much wealthier than we are and better able to solve any resource issues. They most likely will discover and access entirely new sources of energy to fuel the human enterprise. Arthur Clarke suggested that we would access dark energy in this century and have an unlimited source of energy. Again, researchers like Wilfred Beckerman have responded well to these questionable assumptions and presented the more complex elements surrounding these issues such as personal values/ideology and sense of aesthetics.
It is hard to take this ecological footprint model seriously because it seeks validation in an unsubstantiated litany of disasters to support its disturbing devaluation of the human enterprise. And then there is the political component- Rees views the free enterprise system as responsible for what he believes to be our current destructive overshoot and he zealously advocates central planning and state regulation to slow and reverse economic growth. Hence this telling quote at the end of some of his papers, "Mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon". Emphasis on coercion. As Wackernagel said in a video presentation on EF, "Aggressive sustainability initiatives are good for us". Even if we don't like them.
Despite the weaknesses of EF analysis, Rees has managed to promote awareness and acceptance of this planning model across the globe. His model claims to provide the factual basis for the sustainable development movement (what levels of human activity are ecologically sustainable). And it has now become a widely accepted belief in the public arena that the human footprint is too large and must be decreased in every way possible. As its influence grows, this model (its data details, methods, and assumptions) will have to be more closely looked at by capable researchers.
Note further that the debate continues over the Science paper which suggested that North America naturally absorbs perhaps all of its human emissions of CO2 (human emissions of CO2 in the US are estimated to be around 1.7 to 2.0 billion tons annually- 1.87 billion tons in 2004. See here). Pieter Tans is quoted as stating, "The North American land surface appears to be absorbing possibly as much as between one and two billion tons of carbon annually, or a sizable fraction of global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning". This appears to further weaken the ecological footprint arguments for fully one half of the human footprint to be allocated to CO2 sequestration. Bill Rees dismisses this evidence.
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Wind farms cause thousands of bats to die from trauma
Wind turbines pose a far more serious risk to bats than birds because their blades cause air pressure imbalances that can inflict fatal trauma. A six-week study at two wind farms in the eastern United States recorded 1,764 and 2,900 bat fatalities. Another American project found that bat deaths outnumbered bird deaths in Montana by two to one. Though death rates in Europe are generally lower than this, extensive bat casualties have been reported in Britain.
Birds die when they are struck by turning blades, but bats use echolocation to evade this danger. However, they are at much higher risk than birds of barotrauma - a condition caused by sudden drops in air pressure. In May Natural England, a government agency responsible for wildlife protection, acknowledged increasing concern about the impact of wind farms on bat populations, and called for more research to ascertain the level of risk.
In mainland Europe, noctules, common pipistrelles and Nathusius's pipistrelles are most commonly recorded as casualties of wind farms. These species are listed by Natural England as high risk, together with Leisler's bats.
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Tim Blair has a laugh at the Warmists
I've fallen for an older woman. The oldest, in fact. Mother Nature, in the form of planet Earth, is about 4.5 billion years old. Way older than even Madonna. She's not exactly a looker, either, what with her girth of 40 million metres and mass of 12 billion tonnes. Frankly, Nature's the type of unconventional gal that Mt Isa's mayor John Molony might have been thinking about when he invited "beauty challenged" women to seek love in his female-needy town. Planet Earth doesn't just have stretch marks. She's got planar rock fracture fault lines all the way from South Australia to South America.
But she's also pretty hot. And getting hotter, if certain scientists and politicians are to be believed. Hot girls always attract bad press, and Mother Nature is no exception. Last week this saucy sphere was blamed for the death of Colette the whale. "Nature must be allowed to take its course," reported the Los Angeles Times. Closer to home, the Batemans Bay Post Star wrote: Nature is cutting its losses. So terribly cold! Reading these Colette-killing slurs, you'd almost think Mother Nature is just a kind of nebula-formed sun-orbiting Roberta Williams with tectonic plates. But to me she's much, much more than that.
Looks aren't everything. A sense of humour is sexy, and Mother Nature has the cutest joke sensibility since Dorothy Parker. Just like Parker - the celebrated New York writer and wiseass - Mother Nature reserves her cruellest jokes for those who seek to be closest to her. She's irresistible, this massive mother. When then-PM of Britain Tony Blair tried to cozy up to Mother Nature in 2005, he was repaid with chilling scorn. "Why does it always snow when I'm going to talk about global warming?" asked the puzzled PM, following a series of cursed commentaries. That's just the way Mother Nature rolls, Tone.
Ask Al Gore about it. Al's been trying to love it up with Ms Earth for years, but he routinely cops a wet and cold slap to the chops for his trouble. In 2004, Gore delivered a speech on global warming in New York City. Instead of welcoming his help, Mother Nature turned on one of the coldest days in the city's history. Gore was ridiculed even more than usual, which is one hell of lot of ridicule.
Thereafter, no matter where Gore takes his global warming message, awful cold seems to follow. He appeared in Australia two years ago for a series of global warming talks and somehow provoked snow in November. Mother Nature hates a suck-up. To this day, wherever unseasonable cold strikes, someone online will immediately ask: Is Al Gore in town?
Poor Tim Flannery. He's one of Mother Nature's most dedicated suitors, yet the elderly orb makes fun of him at every chance. She appears to single him out for special cruelty. On June 11, 2005, the ABC reported Flannery's prediction that the ongoing drought could leave Sydney's dams dry in just two years. Two years later, to the very day, the ABC ran this news item: "Sydney's largest dam, Warragamba, has received 43mm of rain since Thursday, while the region's smaller dams got a better soaking, including the Upper Nepean which got 108mm." The torrent of rain was so great that water restrictions have been lifted.
Flannery also predicted deadly dam-drying doomspells in Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth. In every city, great dam-filling rainfall followed. Five months ago, for example, Flannery announced: "The water problem is so severe for Adelaide that it may run out of water by early 2009." Mother Nature's response was 15 rainy days in a row beginning on July 30, the longest stretch since 1891. Even if no more rain falls, Adelaide's dams (now 61 per cent full) won't run dry until August 2010, going by current useage rates. This is what Old Lady Nature does to people who like her. Ain't she wicked?
The latest case of Mother meanness is so beautiful its almost transcendent. Earlier this year a film company shot a global warming-themed telemovie in Sydney. Scorched - starring Georgie Parker, Cameron Daddo and Vince Colosimo - is meant to depict events in 2012, when there has been no rain for 240 days and the whole place is toast. So the production crew went out looking for hot, horrible locations. Cue Mother Earth and that playful sense of humour. "It began raining in Sydney and didn't stop," reports online movie mag Urban Cinefile.
Scorched director Tony Tilse couldn't believe it. "Unfortunately, it was like Ireland," he said. "Everything became green, the trees were blossoming." How dreadful. Mother Nature had one more trick up her ample sleeve. Noting that Scorched goes to air on August 31, Mother turned on our coldest August in a decade. Folks tuning in to this heatwave horror show will be shivering as they watch, and not because of fear. Who knows what this cosmic comedienne will get up to next? Like the lady herself, you can bet it will be big.
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JOB LOSSES AN UNDERPLAYED BUT POTENT ISSUE IN AUSTRALIAN CLIMATE POLICY
A PHENOMENON of the increasingly tense debate on the Rudd Government's carbon policies is the unwillingness of the protagonists to quantify the risk for Australian workers.
The headline-grabbing Business Council statement on companies endangered by the proposed approach does not do so. Nor have its previous statements on the issue. Rudd Government ministers, not surprisingly, do not do so, although their frequent assurances that the policies will be economically responsible are a dog-whistle attempt to signal to workers (voters) that their interests are in mind. No trade union statement, even those expressing concern, does so. Not even leading federal Opposition spokesmen, Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt, attempt to quantify how many jobs might be in the firing line.
The environmental activists, who have been quick to rail against the BCA and other critics of carbon charges, naturally never mention this point, although they will try to claim job opportunities for their radical programs. The Greens are in the van of trying to paint over the economic threats by claiming that lost jobs in energy-intensive industry will be replaced in "clean" businesses. They bolster this by pointing to the high voter concern about global warming and support for programs that will deliver abatement.
However, recent polling by Essential Media Communications showing that 72 per cent of the people it interviewed supported the introduction of emissions trading also showed that half of those polled admit they do not know what it is.
It would seem a fair guess that these voters also don't know that Australian energy-intensive firms in the firing line of high carbon charges directly employ more than 165,000 people in the food and beverage industry, 64,000 in textiles, clothing and footwear, more than 162,000 in pulp and paper making and printing, 35,000 in non-metallic minerals production, more than 2000 in liquefied natural gas processing, about 100,000 in the petroleum, plastics and chemicals industries, more than 141,000 in metals production, 195,000 in manufacturing of equipment and machinery and about 60,000 in other factories.
This adds up to 924,000 workers and is a Howard government calculation used and accepted earlier this decade in talks on greenhouse gas abatement with both business and environmental non-government organisations. It is now several years out of date. The energy-intensive manufacturing sector claims that the total number today is actually about 1.1 million.
These are people directly employed by trade-exposed, energy-intensive companies. Many more are the beneficiaries of jobs that flow from the output of these TEEI companies. The large plastics business Qenos, for example, says in its submission to Ross Garnaut that it employs 800 people in Melbourne and Sydney and its products are the key material for downstream manufacturers employing another 10,000.
There is no way of knowing how many of these jobs - direct and indirect - will be lost under a high carbon cost regime, but recently announced redundancies in Australian manufacturing are a guide to how difficult it is for local businesses to compete against lower operating costs overseas. What's missing in the Australian carbon debate is the upfront acknowledgement of the big extra risk inherent in driving up power and gas bills that make up a substantial part of energy-intensive firms' operating costs.
None of the claims by the environmental movement and others about what a costly energy revolution could deliver in new jobs exceeds about a quarter of a million people, and this over a much longer time frame than the next few years, which is when new carbon taxes would affect existing businesses, especially those vulnerable to global cost pressures.
In this context, it is interesting to reflect on the views of Ian Macdonald, Minister for State Development, Energy, Minerals Resources and Primary Industries in NSW, who has the largest energy and energy-intensive constituency after federal ministers.
In a virtually unreported meeting with trade-exposed industries in Sydney in June, Macdonald said: "The wrong (emissions trading) policy framework could be disastrous for the economic prosperity of this state and the country." He told 150 industry participants in the meeting that it is of concern to the NSW Government that they could be forced to carry substantial extra costs when there are a number of other factors causing upward pressure on electricity prices and, he said, it was looking as if emissions trading could double power prices in the eastern seaboard electricity market.
NSW manufacturers, the largest factory sector in the country, employ more than 300,000 people, contribute $31 billion to the national economy and earn $10 billion annually in export revenue. "I shudder to think how the wealth and job-creating industries of NSW will cope," Macdonald told the meeting. The Rudd Government, he warned, "has to devise the scheme carefully so as not to send the economy in to freefall".
Macdonald's argument is that, while an emissions trading scheme is necessary to help drive Australia's greenhouse gas abatement, "it must not cause havoc to wealth-creating industries."
The task force the states employed in 2006-07 to study emissions trading, Macdonald pointed out, highlighted the importance of providing adjustment assistance to energy-intensive, trade-exposed industry.
If the core issue, as Macdonald told the meeting of trade-exposed industries is "jobs, jobs and more jobs", then the present advertising campaign to sell federal greenhouse gas policies is more about misleading and deceiving the public than helping it to make an informed judgment. A company behaving like that would be in breach of the Trade Practices Act.
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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Tuesday, August 26, 2008
The REAL motivations of Warmists on vivid display
Warmist are worried about all the CO2 in the air -- right? So any technology that removes lots of CO2 would be welcomed by them with open arms -- Right? WRONG! That would take away their best excuse for destroying modern civilization -- which is their REAL aim. They just hate modern life and seek to impose that on everybody else in any way they can. See below:
Scientists at Columbia University are developing a carbon dioxide (CO2) scrubber device that removes one ton of CO2 from the air every day. While some see the scrubber as an efficient and economical way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, many environmentalists are opposing the technology because it allows people to use fossil fuels and emit carbon in the first place.
Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner, who is leading the research team, believes producing a large number of CO2 scrubbers can keep to a minimum any rise in atmospheric CO2 without the economically painful elimination of inexpensive energy sources. "I'd rather have a technology that allows us to use fossil fuels without destroying the planet, because people are going to use them anyway," Lackner told the June 1 London Telegraph.
Environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace have consistently opposed similar technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration, because they do not address what they see as the root of the problem. On May 5, for example, the activist groups Students Promoting Environmental Action and Save Our Cumberland Mountains demonstrated in Knoxville, Tennessee against carbon sequestration. Repeatedly citing a Greenpeace position paper, they argued eliminating the use of coal, not reducing atmospheric CO2, should be society's primary goal. "Our position is we need to start phasing out coal as soon as possible," said Cathie Bird of Save Our Cumberland Mountains. "Carbon capture and storage does not make coal clean," read a banner hoisted by protesters.
Leading energy analysts agreed with the scientists, rather than the protesters. "If CO2 emission reduction is a goal, then investigating and investing in strategies for capitalizing on our existing infrastructure efficiently and effectively makes more sense than throwing away reasonable options simply because they don't align with a political philosophy about our energy economy," said Amy Kaleita, an environmental policy fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
"This is just one more piece of evidence that environmentalists aren't concerned about solving a problem," said Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. "Every problem, as they see it, is one way to restrict people's lifestyles, and if you come up with a technological fix that can solve a problem but doesn't require sacrifice and lets us go about our business the way we were before, they're not happy about it, even if it solves the problem.
"Now, I don't know about whether this technology will solve global warming," said Burnett, "but let's say it is cost-effective, and let's assume for the sake of argument that global warming is a real, serious problem that needs to be solved. Then I would argue that this technology may be a good thing."
"I think the question is, what is the objective?" asked Erin Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in an interview for this article. "For me, the objective is reducing the harmful effects of climate change. It is going to be extremely challenging to reduce CO2 levels to the point where we can stabilize the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at, say, 550 ppm (parts per million), and this is only a mild goal.
"Most environmentalists would like to see a much more stringent goal," Baker added. "If we want to have a reasonable chance of achieving this goal, then we need to consider a portfolio of technologies in order to achieve this. This means keeping CCS (carbon capture and storage), nuclear, and biofuels, for instance, on the table.
"If we have some kind of major breakthrough in solar technologies and electricity storage technologies, then we won't need to rely so heavily on these other technologies. But if we don't have any breakthroughs and we refuse to use our full arsenal, we will most likely fail to combat climate change and cause economic hardships, especially for the most vulnerable.
"I am not necessarily advocating a full-scale implementation of any of these technologies, but rather that we continue to [research and develop] a wide range of technologies, and not flat-out reject any possibilities," Baker said.
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Global cooling gains momentum among scientists
Two weeks ago, after writing about the possibility that the Earth may actually be entering a cooling phase, I braced myself for a torrent of icy missives from the global warming crowd suggesting that the heat must have fried my noggin.
By the way, it is very difficult to discuss global cooling in the midst of a summer when temperatures are hovering around 100 degrees and crops are wilting. As one friend and colleague from the sweltering Southwest noted after reading the column, "Please send some of that cooling this way."
However, one response opened my eyes to the growing community of global warming skeptics out there, most of them merited scientists. I thought it might be worth presenting their thoughts - a little equal time if you will. Marc Marono, a global warming skeptic who works for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works, sent me these excerpts from a U.S. Senate report.
Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev are so convinced that global temperatures will cool within the next decade they have placed a $10,000 wager with a United Kingdom scientist to prove their certainty. The criteria for the $10,000 bet will be to compare global temperatures between 1998 and 2003 with those between 2012 and 2017. The loser will pay up in 2018, according to an April 16, 2007, article in Live Science.
Australian engineer Peter Harris says that the Earth is nearing the end of the typical interglacial cycle and is due for a sudden cooling climate change. "Based on this analysis we can say that there is a 94 percent probability of imminent global cooling and the beginning of the coming ice age. "Climate is becoming unstable," Harris went on to say. "Most of these major natural processes that we are witnessing now are interdependent and occur at the end of each interglacial period, ultimately causing sudden long-term cooling."
Oleg Sorokhtin, merited scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute, says to "stock up on fur coats and felt boots! Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. "Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change, Sorokhtin said. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man's influence on nature is a drop in the ocean."
Canadian climatologist Timothy Ball said, "If we are facing (a crisis) at all, I think it is that we are preparing for warming when it is looking like we are cooling. We are preparing for the wrong thing."
On the impact of carbon dioxide on global temperature, United Kingdom astrophysicist Piers Corbyn said, "There is no evidence that carbon dioxide has ever driven or will ever drive world temperatures and climate change. Worrying about carbon dioxide is irrelevant."
So there you have it folks - solid evidence from the other side of the global warming fence and critical thinking I'm sure you won't hear much about outside this space. To be honest, I'm not sure which global weather consequence is more daunting - to be ice fishing in Florida or planting cotton in Maine. But politicians and the popular press should speak out for the resumption of genuine, open debate on climate change. Global warming is not necessarily a foregone conclusion.
Source
Climate Similar to the 1800s Within the Next 15 Years: First Stage of Global Cooling During 2008/09
In the peer reviewed book "Global Warming-Global Cooling, Natural Cause Found", meteorologist and climate researcher David Dilley utilizes nearly a half million years of data linking long term gravitational cycles of the moon explain the recent global warming, rises in carbon dioxide levels, and for 2200 global warming cycles during the past half million years.
The gravitational cycles are called the Primary Forcing Mechanism for Climate (PFM), and act like a magnet by pulling the atmosphere's high pressure systems northward or southward by as much as 3 or 4 degrees of latitude from their normal seasonal positions, and thus causing long-term shifts in the location of atmospheric high pressure systems.
Research by Mr. Dilley shows a near 100 percent correlation between the PFM gravitational cycles to the beginning and ending of global warming cycles. Global warming cycles began right on time with each PFM cycle during the past half million years, as did the current warming which began 100 years ago, and it will end right on time as the current gravitational cycle begins its cyclical decline.
Global temperatures have cooled during the past 12 months. During 2008 and 2009 the first stage of global cooling will cool the world's temperatures to those observed during the years from the 1940s through the 1970s. By the year 2023 global climate will become similar to the colder temperatures experienced during the 1800s.
Mr. Dilley of Global Weather Oscillations has found seven different types of recurring gravitational cycles ranging from the very warm 460,000 year cycle down to a 230year recurring global warming cycle. All of the gravitational cycles coincide nearly 100 percent with 2200 global warming events during the past half million years. This includes the earth's current warming cycle which began around the year 1900, and the first stage of global cooling that will begin during 2008 and 2009.
The release of the book "Global Warming- Global Cooling, Natural Cause Found" culminates 19 years of research clearly linking gravitational cycles as the cause for fluctuations within the earth's climate. The book is available as an electronic e-Book on this website. The author David Dilley is a meteorologist and climate researcher with Global Weather Oscillations Inc. (GWO), former meteorologist with the National Weather Service, and co-host of the radio program "the Politically Incorrect Weather Guys" airing weekly on RadioEarNetwork.com, an internet streaming radio program. Read more here. He also believes a moderate El Nino will occur this fall. See here.
Source
Russian Tanks Signal a "New Energy War"
"Russia's adventure in Georgia has been described as a `warlet,' a contained firing spree that wound up and down within a week. But to Europe's energy markets, it was the equivalent of wide-scale carpet bombing," writes Eric Reguly in Britain's Global and Mail on August 15th. "Before the Georgian crisis, Europe seemed to be doing all the right things, with little Georgia at the centre of a sensible energy diversification plan. A column of Russian tanks wrecked that strategy in an instant . . . a new energy war is about to begin."
Since the Russian tank attacks, Europe's energy position is far worse than America's. Europe's North Sea oil and gas are waning, and its marginal coal mines have long been shut down. Europe's been importing lots of gas, 40 percent of it from Russia. Georgia was threatening to allow another gas pipeline that Russia wouldn't control-so Vlad the Assailer demonstrated that he can control Caspian-region gas exports whenever he chooses to send tanks.
Europe now urgently wants a long-term partnership with the big undeveloped oil and gas deposits in Libya, Tunisia and the rest of North Africa. Alarmingly, Russia's Gazprom last month offered to buy all of Libya's gas exports.
The U.S. is now trapped, however, in the crossfire between Russian military/economic aggression, Moslem extremism and European energy starvation. We will soon be enormously grateful for our opportunity to drill off our own coasts and in our own ANWR, to import our Alaskan gas through a new pipeline, to tap Appalachia's big, tough gas deposits-and to add more of our own nuclear power. France, Finland and Eastern Europe are already building more nuclear plants, and Germany's Angela Merkel may block the German nuclear phase-out.
Solar and wind power will be built too, but so far they've been expensive, erratic and severely disappointing. Biofuels actually aggravate both global food shortages and greenhouse gas emissions.
Canada's Athabasca Tar Sands, one of the world's largest petroleum reservoirs, got a visit last week from U.S. billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. The Athabasca is also in a strategically secure location for the U.S.-400 miles north of Montana. Eco-activists have lately campaigned against the tar sands, calling it "the worst project on earth" because of the CO2 released as the heavy oil is produced. However, CO2 has had a weak correlation with earth's temperature changes-only 22 percent since 1860.
Fortunately, the earth's temperatures are now continuing to decline; more and more clearly separating CO2 emissions from climate change. The first five months of 2008 have been the coolest in at least five years, continuing the cooler trend of the past 18 months. The cooling was predicted by a 2000 downturn in the sunspot index, which has a strong, ten-year-lagged correlation with our temperature history.
The Greens have recommended non-polluting tidal power, but are opposing one of the world's outstanding tidal-power opportunities on Britain's Severn River. The Severn has a 40-foot daily tide range. A ten-mile dam across the Bristol Channel would emit no CO2 or radiation, while producing as much electricity as three nuclear power stations for the next 200 years. The eco-activists are unhappy about the loss of local mud flats which would force shore birds to relocate.
It now looks as though the West must choose between relocating some shore birds and seeing lots more Russian tanks monopolize the world's energy supplies.
Source
Bulls**t Watch - Rising Sea to Drown 600,000 Australian Homes
A real sea-level rise of a few centimetres becomes a prophesied rise of metres! Comments below from Australian rural publication "Agmates"
The Courier Mail and ABC radio continues on with its Climate Change scare mongering and hence register on our Bulls**t Watch. The headline screams “Homes at Risk from rising sea”. in todays Courier Mail. Online the headline reads: “Sea level rise from climate change ‘underestimated’.”
And again on ABC Radio: “Australian expert says sea levels to rise four metres”
In both the Courier Mail Report and the ABC they quote:
Are you alarmed yet? Don’t be - Below is a graph showing actual sea level rises from 1991 to 2005.
And in the last 12 months sea levels have actually fallen almost 10mm.
Since global warming plateaued in 2001 sea levels have risen just 5mm or so in 7 years. Even the alarmist IPCC reports predicts sea levels will rise 50cm by 2100.
Here is a graph of sea level changes over the last 24,000 years. The graph shows that sea levels in Australia have risen 20 metres or so in the last 8,000 years.
And in the last 128 years they have risen less than 20cm.
It’s difficult to take scientists seriously who make such outlandish predictions of sea levels rising 1-4 metres in the next 90 years. Those claims immediatley register on the Agmates Bulls**t meter.
Source
Australia: Party balloons banned -- for the "environment"
The simple magic of helium balloons has been popped - councils all over Sydney are banning them. One kill-joy council ranger even attempted to stop a toddler playing with a balloon at a local festival. The bureaucrat from Canada Bay Council threatened a priest handing a helium balloon to two-year-old Lewis Sylvester at the Five Dock Ferragosto festival last week. The ranger rounded on the priest with the terse warning: "I've already told you once. You can't hand out those balloons, it's an offence."
Lewis's father Phil Sylvester, a 2GB radio producer for the Chris Smith program, couldn't believe his ears. Canada Bay is among the increasingly officious councils that have outlawed helium balloons. Marrickville and Willoughby have banned them while Manly and Waverley have gone a step further and banned both helium and regular balloons. Sutherland Council, meanwhile, provides their own biodegradable balloons at events.
Under the Protection of the Environment Operations Act it is an offence to release 20 or more "lighter than air" balloons at the same time, with a fine of $200 for an individual and $400 for a corporation.
Source
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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Warmist are worried about all the CO2 in the air -- right? So any technology that removes lots of CO2 would be welcomed by them with open arms -- Right? WRONG! That would take away their best excuse for destroying modern civilization -- which is their REAL aim. They just hate modern life and seek to impose that on everybody else in any way they can. See below:
Scientists at Columbia University are developing a carbon dioxide (CO2) scrubber device that removes one ton of CO2 from the air every day. While some see the scrubber as an efficient and economical way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide, many environmentalists are opposing the technology because it allows people to use fossil fuels and emit carbon in the first place.
Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner, who is leading the research team, believes producing a large number of CO2 scrubbers can keep to a minimum any rise in atmospheric CO2 without the economically painful elimination of inexpensive energy sources. "I'd rather have a technology that allows us to use fossil fuels without destroying the planet, because people are going to use them anyway," Lackner told the June 1 London Telegraph.
Environmental activist groups such as Greenpeace have consistently opposed similar technologies, such as carbon capture and sequestration, because they do not address what they see as the root of the problem. On May 5, for example, the activist groups Students Promoting Environmental Action and Save Our Cumberland Mountains demonstrated in Knoxville, Tennessee against carbon sequestration. Repeatedly citing a Greenpeace position paper, they argued eliminating the use of coal, not reducing atmospheric CO2, should be society's primary goal. "Our position is we need to start phasing out coal as soon as possible," said Cathie Bird of Save Our Cumberland Mountains. "Carbon capture and storage does not make coal clean," read a banner hoisted by protesters.
Leading energy analysts agreed with the scientists, rather than the protesters. "If CO2 emission reduction is a goal, then investigating and investing in strategies for capitalizing on our existing infrastructure efficiently and effectively makes more sense than throwing away reasonable options simply because they don't align with a political philosophy about our energy economy," said Amy Kaleita, an environmental policy fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
"This is just one more piece of evidence that environmentalists aren't concerned about solving a problem," said Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. "Every problem, as they see it, is one way to restrict people's lifestyles, and if you come up with a technological fix that can solve a problem but doesn't require sacrifice and lets us go about our business the way we were before, they're not happy about it, even if it solves the problem.
"Now, I don't know about whether this technology will solve global warming," said Burnett, "but let's say it is cost-effective, and let's assume for the sake of argument that global warming is a real, serious problem that needs to be solved. Then I would argue that this technology may be a good thing."
"I think the question is, what is the objective?" asked Erin Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in an interview for this article. "For me, the objective is reducing the harmful effects of climate change. It is going to be extremely challenging to reduce CO2 levels to the point where we can stabilize the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at, say, 550 ppm (parts per million), and this is only a mild goal.
"Most environmentalists would like to see a much more stringent goal," Baker added. "If we want to have a reasonable chance of achieving this goal, then we need to consider a portfolio of technologies in order to achieve this. This means keeping CCS (carbon capture and storage), nuclear, and biofuels, for instance, on the table.
"If we have some kind of major breakthrough in solar technologies and electricity storage technologies, then we won't need to rely so heavily on these other technologies. But if we don't have any breakthroughs and we refuse to use our full arsenal, we will most likely fail to combat climate change and cause economic hardships, especially for the most vulnerable.
"I am not necessarily advocating a full-scale implementation of any of these technologies, but rather that we continue to [research and develop] a wide range of technologies, and not flat-out reject any possibilities," Baker said.
Source
Global cooling gains momentum among scientists
Two weeks ago, after writing about the possibility that the Earth may actually be entering a cooling phase, I braced myself for a torrent of icy missives from the global warming crowd suggesting that the heat must have fried my noggin.
By the way, it is very difficult to discuss global cooling in the midst of a summer when temperatures are hovering around 100 degrees and crops are wilting. As one friend and colleague from the sweltering Southwest noted after reading the column, "Please send some of that cooling this way."
However, one response opened my eyes to the growing community of global warming skeptics out there, most of them merited scientists. I thought it might be worth presenting their thoughts - a little equal time if you will. Marc Marono, a global warming skeptic who works for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works, sent me these excerpts from a U.S. Senate report.
Russian solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev are so convinced that global temperatures will cool within the next decade they have placed a $10,000 wager with a United Kingdom scientist to prove their certainty. The criteria for the $10,000 bet will be to compare global temperatures between 1998 and 2003 with those between 2012 and 2017. The loser will pay up in 2018, according to an April 16, 2007, article in Live Science.
Australian engineer Peter Harris says that the Earth is nearing the end of the typical interglacial cycle and is due for a sudden cooling climate change. "Based on this analysis we can say that there is a 94 percent probability of imminent global cooling and the beginning of the coming ice age. "Climate is becoming unstable," Harris went on to say. "Most of these major natural processes that we are witnessing now are interdependent and occur at the end of each interglacial period, ultimately causing sudden long-term cooling."
Oleg Sorokhtin, merited scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute, says to "stock up on fur coats and felt boots! Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. "Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change, Sorokhtin said. "Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man's influence on nature is a drop in the ocean."
Canadian climatologist Timothy Ball said, "If we are facing (a crisis) at all, I think it is that we are preparing for warming when it is looking like we are cooling. We are preparing for the wrong thing."
On the impact of carbon dioxide on global temperature, United Kingdom astrophysicist Piers Corbyn said, "There is no evidence that carbon dioxide has ever driven or will ever drive world temperatures and climate change. Worrying about carbon dioxide is irrelevant."
So there you have it folks - solid evidence from the other side of the global warming fence and critical thinking I'm sure you won't hear much about outside this space. To be honest, I'm not sure which global weather consequence is more daunting - to be ice fishing in Florida or planting cotton in Maine. But politicians and the popular press should speak out for the resumption of genuine, open debate on climate change. Global warming is not necessarily a foregone conclusion.
Source
Climate Similar to the 1800s Within the Next 15 Years: First Stage of Global Cooling During 2008/09
In the peer reviewed book "Global Warming-Global Cooling, Natural Cause Found", meteorologist and climate researcher David Dilley utilizes nearly a half million years of data linking long term gravitational cycles of the moon explain the recent global warming, rises in carbon dioxide levels, and for 2200 global warming cycles during the past half million years.
The gravitational cycles are called the Primary Forcing Mechanism for Climate (PFM), and act like a magnet by pulling the atmosphere's high pressure systems northward or southward by as much as 3 or 4 degrees of latitude from their normal seasonal positions, and thus causing long-term shifts in the location of atmospheric high pressure systems.
Research by Mr. Dilley shows a near 100 percent correlation between the PFM gravitational cycles to the beginning and ending of global warming cycles. Global warming cycles began right on time with each PFM cycle during the past half million years, as did the current warming which began 100 years ago, and it will end right on time as the current gravitational cycle begins its cyclical decline.
Global temperatures have cooled during the past 12 months. During 2008 and 2009 the first stage of global cooling will cool the world's temperatures to those observed during the years from the 1940s through the 1970s. By the year 2023 global climate will become similar to the colder temperatures experienced during the 1800s.
Mr. Dilley of Global Weather Oscillations has found seven different types of recurring gravitational cycles ranging from the very warm 460,000 year cycle down to a 230year recurring global warming cycle. All of the gravitational cycles coincide nearly 100 percent with 2200 global warming events during the past half million years. This includes the earth's current warming cycle which began around the year 1900, and the first stage of global cooling that will begin during 2008 and 2009.
The release of the book "Global Warming- Global Cooling, Natural Cause Found" culminates 19 years of research clearly linking gravitational cycles as the cause for fluctuations within the earth's climate. The book is available as an electronic e-Book on this website. The author David Dilley is a meteorologist and climate researcher with Global Weather Oscillations Inc. (GWO), former meteorologist with the National Weather Service, and co-host of the radio program "the Politically Incorrect Weather Guys" airing weekly on RadioEarNetwork.com, an internet streaming radio program. Read more here. He also believes a moderate El Nino will occur this fall. See here.
Source
Russian Tanks Signal a "New Energy War"
"Russia's adventure in Georgia has been described as a `warlet,' a contained firing spree that wound up and down within a week. But to Europe's energy markets, it was the equivalent of wide-scale carpet bombing," writes Eric Reguly in Britain's Global and Mail on August 15th. "Before the Georgian crisis, Europe seemed to be doing all the right things, with little Georgia at the centre of a sensible energy diversification plan. A column of Russian tanks wrecked that strategy in an instant . . . a new energy war is about to begin."
Since the Russian tank attacks, Europe's energy position is far worse than America's. Europe's North Sea oil and gas are waning, and its marginal coal mines have long been shut down. Europe's been importing lots of gas, 40 percent of it from Russia. Georgia was threatening to allow another gas pipeline that Russia wouldn't control-so Vlad the Assailer demonstrated that he can control Caspian-region gas exports whenever he chooses to send tanks.
Europe now urgently wants a long-term partnership with the big undeveloped oil and gas deposits in Libya, Tunisia and the rest of North Africa. Alarmingly, Russia's Gazprom last month offered to buy all of Libya's gas exports.
The U.S. is now trapped, however, in the crossfire between Russian military/economic aggression, Moslem extremism and European energy starvation. We will soon be enormously grateful for our opportunity to drill off our own coasts and in our own ANWR, to import our Alaskan gas through a new pipeline, to tap Appalachia's big, tough gas deposits-and to add more of our own nuclear power. France, Finland and Eastern Europe are already building more nuclear plants, and Germany's Angela Merkel may block the German nuclear phase-out.
Solar and wind power will be built too, but so far they've been expensive, erratic and severely disappointing. Biofuels actually aggravate both global food shortages and greenhouse gas emissions.
Canada's Athabasca Tar Sands, one of the world's largest petroleum reservoirs, got a visit last week from U.S. billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. The Athabasca is also in a strategically secure location for the U.S.-400 miles north of Montana. Eco-activists have lately campaigned against the tar sands, calling it "the worst project on earth" because of the CO2 released as the heavy oil is produced. However, CO2 has had a weak correlation with earth's temperature changes-only 22 percent since 1860.
Fortunately, the earth's temperatures are now continuing to decline; more and more clearly separating CO2 emissions from climate change. The first five months of 2008 have been the coolest in at least five years, continuing the cooler trend of the past 18 months. The cooling was predicted by a 2000 downturn in the sunspot index, which has a strong, ten-year-lagged correlation with our temperature history.
The Greens have recommended non-polluting tidal power, but are opposing one of the world's outstanding tidal-power opportunities on Britain's Severn River. The Severn has a 40-foot daily tide range. A ten-mile dam across the Bristol Channel would emit no CO2 or radiation, while producing as much electricity as three nuclear power stations for the next 200 years. The eco-activists are unhappy about the loss of local mud flats which would force shore birds to relocate.
It now looks as though the West must choose between relocating some shore birds and seeing lots more Russian tanks monopolize the world's energy supplies.
Source
Bulls**t Watch - Rising Sea to Drown 600,000 Australian Homes
A real sea-level rise of a few centimetres becomes a prophesied rise of metres! Comments below from Australian rural publication "Agmates"
The Courier Mail and ABC radio continues on with its Climate Change scare mongering and hence register on our Bulls**t Watch. The headline screams “Homes at Risk from rising sea”. in todays Courier Mail. Online the headline reads: “Sea level rise from climate change ‘underestimated’.”
“THE speed at which the climate is changing has been significantly underestimated, with thousands of Australian homes potentially at risk from rising sea levels, a conference has heard.
Ports, harbours and airports situated near the ocean are also vulnerable to the immediate effects of climate change, said keynote speaker Jo Mummery. Preliminary modelling has found that if there is a rise in sea levels, 269,505 houses could be at risk in NSW and 2,875 houses in the NT.”
And again on ABC Radio: “Australian expert says sea levels to rise four metres”
“Dr Jo Mummery, from the Department of Climate Change, told the delegation that if sea levels rose just one metre - exclusive pockets of the Gold Coast would be completely washed out. She says if water enters a 200 metre buffer zone almost 559,000 residential buildings would be affected across the country.”
In both the Courier Mail Report and the ABC they quote:
“The head of the climate change unit at the Australian National University and science adviser to the federal Government, Professor Will Steffen, says he believes the scientific community is underestimating the speed at which the climate is changing. “The evidence over the past 12 to 18 months suggests that we have underestimated how fast this aspect of the earth’s system can change,” he said.”
Are you alarmed yet? Don’t be - Below is a graph showing actual sea level rises from 1991 to 2005.
And in the last 12 months sea levels have actually fallen almost 10mm.
Since global warming plateaued in 2001 sea levels have risen just 5mm or so in 7 years. Even the alarmist IPCC reports predicts sea levels will rise 50cm by 2100.
Here is a graph of sea level changes over the last 24,000 years. The graph shows that sea levels in Australia have risen 20 metres or so in the last 8,000 years.
And in the last 128 years they have risen less than 20cm.
It’s difficult to take scientists seriously who make such outlandish predictions of sea levels rising 1-4 metres in the next 90 years. Those claims immediatley register on the Agmates Bulls**t meter.
Source
Australia: Party balloons banned -- for the "environment"
The simple magic of helium balloons has been popped - councils all over Sydney are banning them. One kill-joy council ranger even attempted to stop a toddler playing with a balloon at a local festival. The bureaucrat from Canada Bay Council threatened a priest handing a helium balloon to two-year-old Lewis Sylvester at the Five Dock Ferragosto festival last week. The ranger rounded on the priest with the terse warning: "I've already told you once. You can't hand out those balloons, it's an offence."
Lewis's father Phil Sylvester, a 2GB radio producer for the Chris Smith program, couldn't believe his ears. Canada Bay is among the increasingly officious councils that have outlawed helium balloons. Marrickville and Willoughby have banned them while Manly and Waverley have gone a step further and banned both helium and regular balloons. Sutherland Council, meanwhile, provides their own biodegradable balloons at events.
Under the Protection of the Environment Operations Act it is an offence to release 20 or more "lighter than air" balloons at the same time, with a fine of $200 for an individual and $400 for a corporation.
Source
***************************************
For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
*****************************************
Sunday, August 24, 2008
KANGAROO FOLLY - OR WHY SCIENTISTS SHOULD NOT JUMP FIELDS
By New Zealander Nicholas Sault [nicholas@e-writers.co.nz]. Received via email
Dr George Wilson of the Australian Wildlife Services has told thousands of his Australian farmers they should ditch farming cattle and sheep and start farming kangaroo in a big way (see here). The reason? - yes, you got it, kangaroos don't fart and belch methane like cattle and sheep.
That may be the case, but does this boffin really think that overnight you can ditch 12,000 years of domestication, and replace hundreds of millions of relatively easy-to-manage, relatively docile animals with wild animals? Even though he is a scientist, he is obviously one of those people I encounter often, who really have no comprehension of the scale of things. The reason cattle and sheep farming is so big is because these animals can be mass farmed - farmers have the feed, the fencing and the handling down to a tee. Introduce a new animal out of the bush, and you have to start learning and domesticating from scratch.
A case in point from my own country is deer farming. Deer have been farmed for decades in New Zealand, but venison is still little more than a curiosity, a meal you might have in a posh restaurant on your anniversary. Deer are the most skittish of the cloven hoofed brigade. They are extremely difficult to handle, difficult to keep confined and difficult to move. In most cases, when he wants to move cattle or sheep from one field to another, the farmer simply opens the gate and the animals, tired of their current location, just go walkabouts into their fresh new field.
I have seen deer farmers on their farm bikes chasing their deer around for hours, trying to round them up into a bunch to move them. They don't respond to dogs, and it can be quite laughable to see the lengths farmers go to move them around. Also, I have my own experience with farming exotic animals. Emu became a fad in the 1990s in New Zealand, and I still shudder at the memory of nights when I could hear the tall fences screaming, and the fixings working loose from the fence posts, as the highly excitable birds decided as a mass that they wanted to go walkabouts (or runabouts, actually). Worse than that was going out next morning and finding one of giant birds didn't make it and got tangled in the fence, almost totally de-feathering itself in the process.
Like deer and the equally exotic ostrich, emu never caught on with a people in love with roasts and barbecues. All of these exotic meats are low-fat. That was our marketing strategy - get people to eat red meat that is low in fat. But that low-fat content of the meat means that you need some skill in cooking, and time to stand over it to make sure it is not over-cooked. You can't shove a joint of ostrich in the oven and go watch the Olympics 10,000 meters track race; you have to watch it. Same with the barbecue. Take your eyes off this meat for a minute and you might as well be eating beef jerky for lunch.
In reality, deer farming has only survived in New Zealand because millions of Asian men imagine they can get their sex drives going by consuming ground-up deer antler. Hundreds of emu and ostrich farmers went bust in New Zealand simply because the meat just didn't catch on. It was expensive and difficult to cook correctly. Added to that was the sheer difficulty in farming the critters.
From an economic viewpoint, emu, ostrich and deer are browsers and cannot obtain most of their nutrients from the field, as is the case with cattle and sheep in this part of the world. The supplementary feed is very expensive, requiring a premium on the shelf price of the meat. So when the supermarkets come back to you and say "hey, we put it on the shelves for a month, but it's not selling", you tend to get very dismayed (and poor).
Then there's the slaughter (gosh the list goes on). When you spook skittish animals, they fill their blood streams with adrenaline, which is pumped into the muscle making it extremely hard. The resulting meat is as tough as old boots, literally.
When I farmed cattle, the happy chappies used to waltz onto the truck as if going to pastures new rather than to slaughter. To lessen the stress on emu, we planned to have mobile slaughter trucks, so the birds did not have to travel. The industry failed long before that ever eventuated, but lets get real. If you are going to replace the mass market of cattle and sheep with a relatively wild, unpredictable animal like a kangaroo, you'd need slaughter trucks the size of the Queen Mary to go around to the each of the farms. Well, I think I proved the point here. Boffins, please do not get into the habit of expounding outside your field of expertise.
UK Scientist: Recent weather is 'stark reminder' global warming 'has now stalled'
By UK atmospheric scientist John Kettley, formerly of the Met Office and the Fluid Dynamics Department at the Bracknell headquarters
Atrocious weather has seriously delayed the harvest this year - by now oil seed rape, barley and oats should already have been gathered. The delay could mean either a loss in yield or drop in quality, with a subsequent fall in income for farmers for the second year running.
But this is not a symptom of so-called `global warming'. These conditions are not unique and are more like the poor August weather Britain saw during the Twenties and Sixties. It is more likely a stark reminder that the warming trend we recorded in the last part of the 20th Century has now stalled. Globally, 1998 remains the warmest of the last 150 years.
Of course, we have seen very hot months in the UK recently, but we should be under no illusion about global warming. We are not suddenly about to be catapulted towards a Mediterranean climate. We are surrounded by water, with the vast Atlantic Ocean to our west, while the jet stream and gulf stream will forever influence our daily weather and long-term climate.
So, this year's Sixties-style August has seen bad weather in many places. Northern Ireland suffered particularly from serious flooding last weekend, but it has been the cumulative affect of cool, wet and dull conditions which has really hampered farmers' progress.
For every loser there are always winners. Lerwick in Shetland has largely stayed north of the rain-bearing jet stream and in the past week alone saw almost 40 hours of sunshine. Further south, mainland Scotland was not so blessed, as storms brought 2in (50mm) of heavy rain to many places, including Edinburgh, on Wednesday and Thursday. There will be more rain for the west of Scotland in the next few days, but at long last much of the country can look forward to a change in fortune. Late August should see warm picnic weather - which I think will last through September, in line with recent years.
Source
Forecasting based on climate change is delusional
More realism in the Irish press
THE IDEA seems to be taking hold that climate change will render the Irish weather more predictable and that we'll never see a dry August day again. Anyone who has lived more than a week or two in this country knows that this is delusional.
The Minister for the Environment has been going about the place, a Jeremiah in Wellingtons, shaking his head at the rising flood waters and implying that all this could have been avoided if people had listened to him before. Various meteorologists have been trotted out in the media to explain that this year's August rain is due to precipitation over Newfoundland, itself the consequence of greenhouse gases.
I am momentarily struck by the idea that Newfoundland will in the future acquire a significance in Irish life equivalent to the shadow cast in the past by our nearest neighbour. But experience tells me that, in a month or two, everyone will have stopped talking about Newfoundland, the media having found an expert with an even scarier theory about something else.
The main role of media nowadays is to market scares which cause us to worry for a while and then move on to a different problem. If society is not consumed with fear about being wiped out by some new disease, it is fretting about nuclear Armageddon, a meltdown in house prices or, as in recent weeks, the climate apocalypse.
This process has little about it that one could call rational. Very often, the scare rapidly evaporates without trace, leaving behind a total information vacuum and no sense of closure.
Remember, for instance, Sars, an exotic disease with flu-like symptoms that a few years ago claimed a number of lives, mainly in Hong Kong, and which for several weeks gripped the Irish media and consequently Irish society with a profound morbidity? At one point, reports of a single case in D£n Laoghaire caused people to avoid the town for weeks. And yet, for five years now, there has been no talk of Sars at all. The subject rapidly disappeared from the news pages and bulletins, and most of us have since hardly given it a thought.
Bird flu. It's just a year or two since we went around all a-flutter because the "experts" were telling us to be very afraid. But for many months now there has been no talk at all about bird flu or its dire consequences for western civilisation. The newest references to be found on the internet are more than a year old and there is no sense that the saga has either ended or was understood. Bird flu just sort of went away, but nobody has been fingered for creating a spurious scare.
I'm not suggesting that climate change is a similarly phantom phenomenon. Undoubtedly the trend is real and, for the moment, advancing. But it is noticeable in much media discussion of the subject that, most of the time, only the ideologically committed claim to know what is happening. Green politicians, for example, are enjoying the opportunity for head-shaking and tut-tutting, implying that everything they've ever said must now be re-examined.
The scientists, however, are noticeably more circumspect. An excellent article in the current edition of New Scientist says that the science of forecasting on the basis of climate change is still in its infancy. The equations are so complex and the variables so numerous that the sensible scientists say they just don't know. Yes, the earth is warming. Yes, this will have an effect on future weather patterns. But many aspects of the matter are poorly understood and nobody can say with certainty how things will play out. Natural variability remains a far more powerful factor than anything to do with global changes.
And variability is the middle-name of Irish weather. The Spanish, by and large, can predict tomorrow's weather; we in Ireland can predict that tomorrow's weather will take us by surprise. John Gormley seems to be on safe ground when he predicts that we will have more rainfall in the future, but if I were him I wouldn't put my shirt on it.
Contrary to the current mood, therefore, I confidently predict that, one August, sometime in the next few years, we will be complaining about the heat and praying for rain. This is our fate and our nature. Our weather is so unpredictable that we never seem even to claim ownership of any particular element, in the way the Spanish lay claim to sun or the Eskimos to snow.
Without the variability of our weather patterns, God knows what we would talk about. My 12-year-old daughter often remarks on the way we go about when it is raining, all scrunched up against the drops as though we have never encountered a shower before. Despite what outsiders might conclude about the dampness of our climate, we greet every new rain cloud with shudders of outrage and dismay, as though this is the last thing we expected to happen.
The forecast, therefore, is for the Irish weather to remain predictably unpredictable. It will rain and occasionally stop. Everything else is speculation.
Source
Wind Jammers
Once again, there's no such thing as a happy Greemie. They are just enemies of anything that is rational
In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.
To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.
Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.
In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."
California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.
Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.
Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.
In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.
Source
'This is going to be catastrophic' - Farmers' Almanac says cold winter ahead
Households worried about the high cost of keeping warm this winter will draw little comfort from the Farmers' Almanac, which predicts below-average temperatures for most of the U.S. "Numb's the word," says the 192-year-old publication, which claims an accuracy rate of 80 to 85 percent for its forecasts that are prepared two years in advance.
The almanac's 2009 edition, which goes on sale Tuesday, says at least two-thirds of the country can expect colder than average temperatures, with only the Far West and Southeast in line for near-normal readings.
"This is going to be catastrophic for millions of people," said almanac editor Peter Geiger, noting that the frigid forecast combined with high prices for heating fuel is sure to compound problems households will face in keeping warm.
The almanac predicts above-normal snowfall for the Great Lakes and Midwest, especially during January and February, and above-normal precipitation for the Southwest in December and for the Southeast in January and February. The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions should be getting an unusually wet or snowy February, the almanac said.
The forecasts, which are spelled out in three- and four-day periods for each region, are prepared by the almanac's reclusive prognosticator Caleb Weatherbee, who uses a secret formula based on sunspots, the position of the planets and the tidal action of the moon.
Weatherbee's outlook is borne out by e-mail comments that the almanac has received in recent days from readers who have spotted signs of nature that point to a rough winter, Geiger said. The signs range from an abundance of acorns already on the ground to the frequency of fog in August.
The almanac's winter forecast is at odds with that of the National Weather Service, whose trends-based outlook calls for warmer than normal temperatures over much of the country, including Alaska, said Ed O'Lenic, chief of the operations branch at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.
While he wouldn't comment specifically on the almanac's ability to forecast the weather two years from now, O'Lenic said it's generally impossible to come up with accurate forecasts more than a week in advance. "Of course it's possible to prepare a forecast with any lead time you like. Whether or nor that forecast has any accuracy or usable skill is another question," he said.
Source
Climate response must protect jobs: Getting too far ahead on an ETS is bad economic policy
An editorial from "The Australian" about the Australian government's Warmist obsessions:
(Kevin Rudd does look a bit like Tintin)
It is neither desirable nor remotely feasible, Ross Garnaut wrote in his interim report in June, "to seek to lower the climate change risk by substantially slowing the rise in living standards anywhere, least of all in developing countries." As Professor Garnaut noted, Australians would not accept such an approach. This is why the Business Council of Australia's "real world" analysis of the economic consequences of the Rudd Government's proposed emissions trading scheme is so effective and devastating.
It reveals that even with the Government's proposed compensation, three firms of the 14 companies that opened their books to Port Jackson Partners for the analysis would face a carbon cost so high they would close. Four others would be forced to review operations to remain viable after losing between 32 per cent and 63 per cent of pre-tax earnings. Many potential investments would be canned.
The companies, with annual revenues ranging from $90 million to more than $3 billion, are in cement manufacturing, petroleum refining, steel making, sugar milling and zinc and nickel refining. On average, the ETS would reduce their pre-tax earnings by 22 per cent, with the worst-affected suffering a 136 per cent reduction. The ETS will apply to 1000 Australian companies, each producing more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon pollution a year.
The ramifications of the BCA analysis are clear. Giving more compensation to trade-exposed high-emitters to stop them going broke or taking their businesses and jobs off shore would reduce the amount of compensation available to others. But without it, new investment and business growth would be decimated and unless remedied, growth in living standards would be substantially slowed - precisely the scenario Professor Garnaut acknowledged was unacceptable.
The analysis for the electricity generating sector, too, is sobering, warning that a 10 per cent emissions reduction target by 2020 involves a "major risk" to power supply and a lift in retail prices of 25 to 40 per cent.
It is hardly surprising, overall, that the report canvasses the notion that a less ambitious 2020 emissions target may be required. The Australian has argued consistently that a small nation such as Australia, emitting just 1 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases, is powerless alone to change global warming. This is why it would be foolish to jump ahead of the world in cutting emissions and compromising living standards.
At the same time, we need to assure the world of our willingness to co-operate in international efforts. The 2010 start-up of the ETS is one way of doing so. Another would be a broad-based carbon tax levied on fuel producers, sooner rather than later, at a realistic level, while concurrently gearing up for an eventual ETS to start at the same time that the world's largest industrial nations - including the US, China and India - introduce similar schemes.
Former Labor leader Mark Latham, writing in The Australian Financial Review this week, canvassed the benefits of the Government levying a carbon tax on fuel producers. The advantages, Mr Latham said, would be: "It is comprehensive in coverage and immediate in impact, as companies pass on the new costs to consumers." In its paper, the BCA canvassed a fixed carbon price of $10 to $20 a tonne. Some senior figures in the Government agree, at least in private, that this would be a more prudent approach than a more extravagent plan that would be rich in green symbolism but poor for the economy.
Opinions polls, including Newspoll, have showed consistently that a majority of Australians is prepared to pay more for energy, including petrol and electricity, to help curb global warming. Given this sentiment, a carbon tax with as few exemptions as possible would spread the economic impact of cutting emissions as broadly as possible, standing the best chance of protecting jobs and growth.
The BCA report acknowledged as much. A fixed carbon price of $10 to $20 a tonne, it argued, until an effective global agreement was finalised, would avoid the problem of trade exposed intensive industries investment needing to be outside a cap until there is a world scheme. It would also addresses the issue of potentially volatile emission prices.
There is also merit in the BCA's call for a more modest target for reducing emissions by 2020. A goal of a 10 per cent reduction from the 2000 level instead of the 2010 level might be more realistic, or even a target of holding them steady at 2000 levels.
While the ACTU and environmental groups dismissed the BCA concerns, the Rudd Government cannot afford such irresponsibility. The Government cannot go it alone on climate change without business, and it knows it. Wayne Swan has promised close scrutiny of the BCA's case. The Treasurer must also take on board the concerns of the Minerals Council of Australia and the warnings from the natural gas, cement and petrol refining sectors about the potential impact of the ETS. The ETS was the preferred option in the Government's green paper, but it does not preclude alternatives, including a simple, low-level carbon tax and waiting until our major trading partners adopt an ETS. Achieving a sound balance between climate and economic protection has emerged as the Government's big test.
Source
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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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By New Zealander Nicholas Sault [nicholas@e-writers.co.nz]. Received via email
Dr George Wilson of the Australian Wildlife Services has told thousands of his Australian farmers they should ditch farming cattle and sheep and start farming kangaroo in a big way (see here). The reason? - yes, you got it, kangaroos don't fart and belch methane like cattle and sheep.
That may be the case, but does this boffin really think that overnight you can ditch 12,000 years of domestication, and replace hundreds of millions of relatively easy-to-manage, relatively docile animals with wild animals? Even though he is a scientist, he is obviously one of those people I encounter often, who really have no comprehension of the scale of things. The reason cattle and sheep farming is so big is because these animals can be mass farmed - farmers have the feed, the fencing and the handling down to a tee. Introduce a new animal out of the bush, and you have to start learning and domesticating from scratch.
A case in point from my own country is deer farming. Deer have been farmed for decades in New Zealand, but venison is still little more than a curiosity, a meal you might have in a posh restaurant on your anniversary. Deer are the most skittish of the cloven hoofed brigade. They are extremely difficult to handle, difficult to keep confined and difficult to move. In most cases, when he wants to move cattle or sheep from one field to another, the farmer simply opens the gate and the animals, tired of their current location, just go walkabouts into their fresh new field.
I have seen deer farmers on their farm bikes chasing their deer around for hours, trying to round them up into a bunch to move them. They don't respond to dogs, and it can be quite laughable to see the lengths farmers go to move them around. Also, I have my own experience with farming exotic animals. Emu became a fad in the 1990s in New Zealand, and I still shudder at the memory of nights when I could hear the tall fences screaming, and the fixings working loose from the fence posts, as the highly excitable birds decided as a mass that they wanted to go walkabouts (or runabouts, actually). Worse than that was going out next morning and finding one of giant birds didn't make it and got tangled in the fence, almost totally de-feathering itself in the process.
Like deer and the equally exotic ostrich, emu never caught on with a people in love with roasts and barbecues. All of these exotic meats are low-fat. That was our marketing strategy - get people to eat red meat that is low in fat. But that low-fat content of the meat means that you need some skill in cooking, and time to stand over it to make sure it is not over-cooked. You can't shove a joint of ostrich in the oven and go watch the Olympics 10,000 meters track race; you have to watch it. Same with the barbecue. Take your eyes off this meat for a minute and you might as well be eating beef jerky for lunch.
In reality, deer farming has only survived in New Zealand because millions of Asian men imagine they can get their sex drives going by consuming ground-up deer antler. Hundreds of emu and ostrich farmers went bust in New Zealand simply because the meat just didn't catch on. It was expensive and difficult to cook correctly. Added to that was the sheer difficulty in farming the critters.
From an economic viewpoint, emu, ostrich and deer are browsers and cannot obtain most of their nutrients from the field, as is the case with cattle and sheep in this part of the world. The supplementary feed is very expensive, requiring a premium on the shelf price of the meat. So when the supermarkets come back to you and say "hey, we put it on the shelves for a month, but it's not selling", you tend to get very dismayed (and poor).
Then there's the slaughter (gosh the list goes on). When you spook skittish animals, they fill their blood streams with adrenaline, which is pumped into the muscle making it extremely hard. The resulting meat is as tough as old boots, literally.
When I farmed cattle, the happy chappies used to waltz onto the truck as if going to pastures new rather than to slaughter. To lessen the stress on emu, we planned to have mobile slaughter trucks, so the birds did not have to travel. The industry failed long before that ever eventuated, but lets get real. If you are going to replace the mass market of cattle and sheep with a relatively wild, unpredictable animal like a kangaroo, you'd need slaughter trucks the size of the Queen Mary to go around to the each of the farms. Well, I think I proved the point here. Boffins, please do not get into the habit of expounding outside your field of expertise.
UK Scientist: Recent weather is 'stark reminder' global warming 'has now stalled'
By UK atmospheric scientist John Kettley, formerly of the Met Office and the Fluid Dynamics Department at the Bracknell headquarters
Atrocious weather has seriously delayed the harvest this year - by now oil seed rape, barley and oats should already have been gathered. The delay could mean either a loss in yield or drop in quality, with a subsequent fall in income for farmers for the second year running.
But this is not a symptom of so-called `global warming'. These conditions are not unique and are more like the poor August weather Britain saw during the Twenties and Sixties. It is more likely a stark reminder that the warming trend we recorded in the last part of the 20th Century has now stalled. Globally, 1998 remains the warmest of the last 150 years.
Of course, we have seen very hot months in the UK recently, but we should be under no illusion about global warming. We are not suddenly about to be catapulted towards a Mediterranean climate. We are surrounded by water, with the vast Atlantic Ocean to our west, while the jet stream and gulf stream will forever influence our daily weather and long-term climate.
So, this year's Sixties-style August has seen bad weather in many places. Northern Ireland suffered particularly from serious flooding last weekend, but it has been the cumulative affect of cool, wet and dull conditions which has really hampered farmers' progress.
For every loser there are always winners. Lerwick in Shetland has largely stayed north of the rain-bearing jet stream and in the past week alone saw almost 40 hours of sunshine. Further south, mainland Scotland was not so blessed, as storms brought 2in (50mm) of heavy rain to many places, including Edinburgh, on Wednesday and Thursday. There will be more rain for the west of Scotland in the next few days, but at long last much of the country can look forward to a change in fortune. Late August should see warm picnic weather - which I think will last through September, in line with recent years.
Source
Forecasting based on climate change is delusional
More realism in the Irish press
THE IDEA seems to be taking hold that climate change will render the Irish weather more predictable and that we'll never see a dry August day again. Anyone who has lived more than a week or two in this country knows that this is delusional.
The Minister for the Environment has been going about the place, a Jeremiah in Wellingtons, shaking his head at the rising flood waters and implying that all this could have been avoided if people had listened to him before. Various meteorologists have been trotted out in the media to explain that this year's August rain is due to precipitation over Newfoundland, itself the consequence of greenhouse gases.
I am momentarily struck by the idea that Newfoundland will in the future acquire a significance in Irish life equivalent to the shadow cast in the past by our nearest neighbour. But experience tells me that, in a month or two, everyone will have stopped talking about Newfoundland, the media having found an expert with an even scarier theory about something else.
The main role of media nowadays is to market scares which cause us to worry for a while and then move on to a different problem. If society is not consumed with fear about being wiped out by some new disease, it is fretting about nuclear Armageddon, a meltdown in house prices or, as in recent weeks, the climate apocalypse.
This process has little about it that one could call rational. Very often, the scare rapidly evaporates without trace, leaving behind a total information vacuum and no sense of closure.
Remember, for instance, Sars, an exotic disease with flu-like symptoms that a few years ago claimed a number of lives, mainly in Hong Kong, and which for several weeks gripped the Irish media and consequently Irish society with a profound morbidity? At one point, reports of a single case in D£n Laoghaire caused people to avoid the town for weeks. And yet, for five years now, there has been no talk of Sars at all. The subject rapidly disappeared from the news pages and bulletins, and most of us have since hardly given it a thought.
Bird flu. It's just a year or two since we went around all a-flutter because the "experts" were telling us to be very afraid. But for many months now there has been no talk at all about bird flu or its dire consequences for western civilisation. The newest references to be found on the internet are more than a year old and there is no sense that the saga has either ended or was understood. Bird flu just sort of went away, but nobody has been fingered for creating a spurious scare.
I'm not suggesting that climate change is a similarly phantom phenomenon. Undoubtedly the trend is real and, for the moment, advancing. But it is noticeable in much media discussion of the subject that, most of the time, only the ideologically committed claim to know what is happening. Green politicians, for example, are enjoying the opportunity for head-shaking and tut-tutting, implying that everything they've ever said must now be re-examined.
The scientists, however, are noticeably more circumspect. An excellent article in the current edition of New Scientist says that the science of forecasting on the basis of climate change is still in its infancy. The equations are so complex and the variables so numerous that the sensible scientists say they just don't know. Yes, the earth is warming. Yes, this will have an effect on future weather patterns. But many aspects of the matter are poorly understood and nobody can say with certainty how things will play out. Natural variability remains a far more powerful factor than anything to do with global changes.
And variability is the middle-name of Irish weather. The Spanish, by and large, can predict tomorrow's weather; we in Ireland can predict that tomorrow's weather will take us by surprise. John Gormley seems to be on safe ground when he predicts that we will have more rainfall in the future, but if I were him I wouldn't put my shirt on it.
Contrary to the current mood, therefore, I confidently predict that, one August, sometime in the next few years, we will be complaining about the heat and praying for rain. This is our fate and our nature. Our weather is so unpredictable that we never seem even to claim ownership of any particular element, in the way the Spanish lay claim to sun or the Eskimos to snow.
Without the variability of our weather patterns, God knows what we would talk about. My 12-year-old daughter often remarks on the way we go about when it is raining, all scrunched up against the drops as though we have never encountered a shower before. Despite what outsiders might conclude about the dampness of our climate, we greet every new rain cloud with shudders of outrage and dismay, as though this is the last thing we expected to happen.
The forecast, therefore, is for the Irish weather to remain predictably unpredictable. It will rain and occasionally stop. Everything else is speculation.
Source
Wind Jammers
Once again, there's no such thing as a happy Greemie. They are just enemies of anything that is rational
In this year's great energy debate, Democrats describe a future when the U.S. finally embraces the anything-but-carbon avant-garde. It turns out, however, that when wind and solar power do start to come on line, they face a familiar obstacle: environmentalists and many Democrats.
To wit, the greens are blocking the very transmission network needed for renewable electricity to move throughout the economy. The best sites for wind and solar energy happen to be in the sticks -- in the desert Southwest where sunlight is most intense for longest, or the plains where the wind blows most often. To exploit this energy, utilities need to build transmission lines to connect their electricity to the places where consumers actually live. In addition to other technical problems, the transmission gap is a big reason wind only provides two-thirds of 1% of electricity generated in the U.S., and solar one-tenth of 1%.
Only last week, Duke Energy and American Electric Power announced a $1 billion joint venture to build a mere 240 miles of transmission line in Indiana necessary to accommodate new wind farms. Yet the utilities don't expect to be able to complete the lines for six long years -- until 2014, at the earliest, because of the time necessary to obtain regulatory approval and rights-of-way, plus the obligatory lawsuits.
In California, hundreds turned out at the end of July to protest a connection between the solar and geothermal fields of the Imperial Valley to Los Angeles and Orange County. The environmental class is likewise lobbying state commissioners to kill a 150-mile link between San Diego and solar panels because it would entail a 20-mile jaunt through Anza-Borrego state park. "It's kind of schizophrenic behavior," Arnold Schwarzenegger said recently. "They say that we want renewable energy, but we don't want you to put it anywhere."
California has a law mandating that utilities generate 20% of their electricity from "clean-tech" by 2010. Some 24 states have adopted a "renewable portfolio standard," while Barack Obama wants to impose a national renewable mandate. But the states, with the exception of Texas, didn't make transmission lines easier to build, though it won't prevent them from penalizing the power companies that fail to meet an impossible goal.
Texas is now the wind capital of America (though wind still generates only 3% of state electricity) because it streamlined the regulatory and legal snarls that block transmission in other states. By contrast, though Pennsylvania's Democratic Governor Ed Rendell adopted wind power as a main political plank, he and Senator Bob Casey are leading a charge to repeal a 2005 law that makes transmission lines slightly easier to build.
Wind power has also become contentious in oh-so-green Oregon, once people realized that transmission lines would cut through forests. Transmissions lines from a wind project on the Nevada-Idaho border are clogged because of possible effects on the greater sage grouse. Similar melodramas are playing out in Arizona, the Dakotas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, West Virginia, northern Maine, upstate New York, and elsewhere.
In other words, the liberal push for alternatives has the look of a huge bait-and-switch. Washington responds to the climate change panic with multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidies for supposedly clean tech. But then when those incentives start to have an effect in the real world, the same greens who favor the subsidies say build the turbines or towers somewhere else. The only energy sources they seem to like are the ones we don't have.
Source
'This is going to be catastrophic' - Farmers' Almanac says cold winter ahead
Households worried about the high cost of keeping warm this winter will draw little comfort from the Farmers' Almanac, which predicts below-average temperatures for most of the U.S. "Numb's the word," says the 192-year-old publication, which claims an accuracy rate of 80 to 85 percent for its forecasts that are prepared two years in advance.
The almanac's 2009 edition, which goes on sale Tuesday, says at least two-thirds of the country can expect colder than average temperatures, with only the Far West and Southeast in line for near-normal readings.
"This is going to be catastrophic for millions of people," said almanac editor Peter Geiger, noting that the frigid forecast combined with high prices for heating fuel is sure to compound problems households will face in keeping warm.
The almanac predicts above-normal snowfall for the Great Lakes and Midwest, especially during January and February, and above-normal precipitation for the Southwest in December and for the Southeast in January and February. The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions should be getting an unusually wet or snowy February, the almanac said.
The forecasts, which are spelled out in three- and four-day periods for each region, are prepared by the almanac's reclusive prognosticator Caleb Weatherbee, who uses a secret formula based on sunspots, the position of the planets and the tidal action of the moon.
Weatherbee's outlook is borne out by e-mail comments that the almanac has received in recent days from readers who have spotted signs of nature that point to a rough winter, Geiger said. The signs range from an abundance of acorns already on the ground to the frequency of fog in August.
The almanac's winter forecast is at odds with that of the National Weather Service, whose trends-based outlook calls for warmer than normal temperatures over much of the country, including Alaska, said Ed O'Lenic, chief of the operations branch at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center.
While he wouldn't comment specifically on the almanac's ability to forecast the weather two years from now, O'Lenic said it's generally impossible to come up with accurate forecasts more than a week in advance. "Of course it's possible to prepare a forecast with any lead time you like. Whether or nor that forecast has any accuracy or usable skill is another question," he said.
Source
Climate response must protect jobs: Getting too far ahead on an ETS is bad economic policy
An editorial from "The Australian" about the Australian government's Warmist obsessions:
(Kevin Rudd does look a bit like Tintin)
It is neither desirable nor remotely feasible, Ross Garnaut wrote in his interim report in June, "to seek to lower the climate change risk by substantially slowing the rise in living standards anywhere, least of all in developing countries." As Professor Garnaut noted, Australians would not accept such an approach. This is why the Business Council of Australia's "real world" analysis of the economic consequences of the Rudd Government's proposed emissions trading scheme is so effective and devastating.
It reveals that even with the Government's proposed compensation, three firms of the 14 companies that opened their books to Port Jackson Partners for the analysis would face a carbon cost so high they would close. Four others would be forced to review operations to remain viable after losing between 32 per cent and 63 per cent of pre-tax earnings. Many potential investments would be canned.
The companies, with annual revenues ranging from $90 million to more than $3 billion, are in cement manufacturing, petroleum refining, steel making, sugar milling and zinc and nickel refining. On average, the ETS would reduce their pre-tax earnings by 22 per cent, with the worst-affected suffering a 136 per cent reduction. The ETS will apply to 1000 Australian companies, each producing more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon pollution a year.
The ramifications of the BCA analysis are clear. Giving more compensation to trade-exposed high-emitters to stop them going broke or taking their businesses and jobs off shore would reduce the amount of compensation available to others. But without it, new investment and business growth would be decimated and unless remedied, growth in living standards would be substantially slowed - precisely the scenario Professor Garnaut acknowledged was unacceptable.
The analysis for the electricity generating sector, too, is sobering, warning that a 10 per cent emissions reduction target by 2020 involves a "major risk" to power supply and a lift in retail prices of 25 to 40 per cent.
It is hardly surprising, overall, that the report canvasses the notion that a less ambitious 2020 emissions target may be required. The Australian has argued consistently that a small nation such as Australia, emitting just 1 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases, is powerless alone to change global warming. This is why it would be foolish to jump ahead of the world in cutting emissions and compromising living standards.
At the same time, we need to assure the world of our willingness to co-operate in international efforts. The 2010 start-up of the ETS is one way of doing so. Another would be a broad-based carbon tax levied on fuel producers, sooner rather than later, at a realistic level, while concurrently gearing up for an eventual ETS to start at the same time that the world's largest industrial nations - including the US, China and India - introduce similar schemes.
Former Labor leader Mark Latham, writing in The Australian Financial Review this week, canvassed the benefits of the Government levying a carbon tax on fuel producers. The advantages, Mr Latham said, would be: "It is comprehensive in coverage and immediate in impact, as companies pass on the new costs to consumers." In its paper, the BCA canvassed a fixed carbon price of $10 to $20 a tonne. Some senior figures in the Government agree, at least in private, that this would be a more prudent approach than a more extravagent plan that would be rich in green symbolism but poor for the economy.
Opinions polls, including Newspoll, have showed consistently that a majority of Australians is prepared to pay more for energy, including petrol and electricity, to help curb global warming. Given this sentiment, a carbon tax with as few exemptions as possible would spread the economic impact of cutting emissions as broadly as possible, standing the best chance of protecting jobs and growth.
The BCA report acknowledged as much. A fixed carbon price of $10 to $20 a tonne, it argued, until an effective global agreement was finalised, would avoid the problem of trade exposed intensive industries investment needing to be outside a cap until there is a world scheme. It would also addresses the issue of potentially volatile emission prices.
There is also merit in the BCA's call for a more modest target for reducing emissions by 2020. A goal of a 10 per cent reduction from the 2000 level instead of the 2010 level might be more realistic, or even a target of holding them steady at 2000 levels.
While the ACTU and environmental groups dismissed the BCA concerns, the Rudd Government cannot afford such irresponsibility. The Government cannot go it alone on climate change without business, and it knows it. Wayne Swan has promised close scrutiny of the BCA's case. The Treasurer must also take on board the concerns of the Minerals Council of Australia and the warnings from the natural gas, cement and petrol refining sectors about the potential impact of the ETS. The ETS was the preferred option in the Government's green paper, but it does not preclude alternatives, including a simple, low-level carbon tax and waiting until our major trading partners adopt an ETS. Achieving a sound balance between climate and economic protection has emerged as the Government's big test.
Source
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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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Saturday, August 23, 2008
Northern Greenland glaciers showing fractures, large break; Is it global warming or natural?
The article below by Newsweak's Seth Borenstein is amusing. Even Greenie scientists he consulted would not buy into any scare but he nonetheless does his best to attribute a glacial breakup to global warming. Borenstein is an old Warmist from way back. See e.g. here. Also see real story on Greenland here.
In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday. And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year. If it does worsen and other northern Greenland glaciers melt faster, then it could speed up sea level rise, already increasing because of melt in sourthern Greenland. [Pesky fact: 91% of earth's glacial ice is in Antarctica so any likely melts in Greenland would add only inches to sea level]
The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500 square mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier. "The pictures speak for themselves," said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University who spotted the changes while studying new satellite images. "This crack is moving, and moving closer and closer to the front. It's just a matter of time till a much larger piece is going to break off.... It is imminent."
The chunk that came off the glacier between July 10 and July 24 is about half the size of Manhattan and doesn't worry Box as much as the cracks. The Petermann glacier had a larger breakaway ice chunk in 2000. But the overall picture worries some scientists. "As we see this phenomenon occurring further and further north - and Petermann is as far north as you can get - it certainly adds to the concern," said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado.
The question that now faces scientists is: Are the fractures part of normal glacier stress or are they the beginning of the effects of global warming? "It certainly is a major event," said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally [A prominent Warmist] in a telephone interview from a conference on glaciers in Ireland. "It's a signal but we don't know what it means." It is too early to say it is clearly global warming, Zwally said. Scientists don't like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern.
University of Colorado professor Konrad Steffen, who returned from Greenland Wednesday and has studied the Petermann glacier in the past, said that what Box saw is not too different from what he saw in the 1990s: "The crack is not alarming... I would say it is normal."
However, scientists note that it fits with the trend of melting glacial ice they first saw in the southern part of the massive island and seems to be marching north with time. Big cracks and breakaway pieces are foreboding signs of what's ahead. Further south in Greenland, Box's satellite images show that the Jakobshavn glacier, the fastest retreating glacier in the world, set new records for how far it has moved inland. That concerns Colorado's Abdalati: "It could go back for miles and miles and there's no real mechanism to stop it."
Source
Skeptical view of climate change gets an airing in major Irish newspaper
Article below by William Reville, professor in the biochemistry Department, Faculty of Science, at the University College Cork, in Cork, Ireland.
Global warming/climate change is a very serious and important issue. It has been under scientific investigation since 1986 by the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC declares global warming is a fact and it is driven largely by emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities (IPCC Report 2007 - www.ipcc.ch/). I have reported the IPCC reports uncritically in this column, but a growing number of scientists are now presenting evidence that contradicts the IPCC position and I will give you a flavour of their position in this article.
Some scientists always disputed the findings of the IPCC but I dismissed this largely as expert opinion hired by the international oil industry. However, it is now clear that many eminent scientists, who are not beholden to vested interests, disagree with the IPCC (eg physicist Freeman J Dyson who argues that the modelling methods used by IPCC are not nearly discriminating enough to reliably predict future climate conditions). The American Physical Society recently issued a statement to say: "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming since the Industrial Revolution."
The IPCC is a huge UN effort, supported by governments, and enlists the efforts of a great many scientific experts. Why would anyone doubt its findings? Well, critics charge the following: First, IPCC is an activist/ political enterprise whose agenda is to control emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and concentrates exclusively on evidence that might point towards human induced climate change. Second, leading IPCC scientists reflect the positions of their governments, or seek to persuade their governments to adopt the IPCC position. Third, a small group of activists wrote the all-important Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for the four IPCC reports to-date. SPMs are revised and agreed by the member governments. The thousands of scientists who do the scientific work have no direct influence on these selective summaries. Fourth, large professional and financial rewards go to scientists who are willing to slant scientific facts to suit the IPCC agenda.
Two things strike me about these charges. First, if they are true it is amazing that no whistle-blower has emerged from among the large ranks of IPCC. Second, why does IPCC not strenuously rebut these charges?
The US Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) was set up "to base environmental policy on sound science rather than exaggerated fears". However, it has been accused of being influenced by the oil industry. SEPP has published scientific evidence (Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate, S Fred Singer ed. The Heartland Institute, 2008) - www.sepp.org/publications/ NIPCC_final.pdf - to illustrate that 20th-century global warming is not the once-off phenomenon of recent historical times claimed by the IPCC, and that most of the current warming is the result of natural and uncontrollable variations in solar activity and very little is being caused, or could be caused, by human emissions of greenhouse gases. The SEPP also claims that we have little to fear from global warming since human civilisation always fared better during warmer than during colder periods.
If critics of IPCC are right, global warming is inevitable and we should now concentrate our efforts on planning how to live in a warmer world. If we were travelling by bus through the middle of a dangerous continent, where the only safe regions were coastal, and we noticed the bus was almost out of petrol, we would be much better advised to immediately start planning how to survive in the interior than to spend our time frantically searching for a gallon of petrol reportedly hidden on a nearby farm.
If IPCC is correct, we must take immediate steps to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions or we face awful consequences from global warming. Of course, it is important to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels anyway because of their relative scarcity, and this reduction would automatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions. If the critics are correct, any crash programme of reducing gas emissions would be a costly step that would have little or no effect on global warming but would divert funds away from fighting battles we could win - disease, poverty, etc.
Climate and weather are very complex physical phenomena and, as a biochemist, I am unable to critically adjudicate on the competing scientific claims of IPCC and its critics. IPCC represents the mainstream majority scientific position and, in the absence of very persuasive contrary evidence, I must support it. But, the growing scepticism does catch the eye and should not be ignored. It is also embarrassing to witness each side accuse the other of dishonesty. Scientists from both sides must come together to resolve this matter.
Source
Climate change - is it really that dire?
CLIMATE change is typically discussed in terms of foreboding and predictions of catastrophe: droughts, famines, hurricanes and floods - even plagues of jellyfish! The threat of climate change" has become a political cliche, justifying innumerable and often onerous regulations.
The claimed threat rests on two key propositions deriving from United Nations reports: that global temperatures are determined mainly by carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and that human activity, especially the use of fossil fuels, is increasing these to historically high and dangerous levels. But as research continues and understanding grows, things look less straightforward - and less dire.
Existing doubts about a simple link between temperature and carbon dioxide were reinforced by a paper given at Bayreuth University last month. This reported that during at least three substantial periods in the last 200 years carbon dioxide levels have equalled or exceeded those prevailing today, although temperatures were lower.
On the second point, subsequent studies indicate that the United Nations report substantially underestimated natural contributions to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, consequently exaggerating those attributable to human activity. A report that the contribution from human activity is much less than the UN suggested has been endorsed by 31,000 scientists, many more than advised the UN.
Finally, it has been argued that warmer temperatures and higher levels of carbon dioxide improve plant growth. The point is emphasised in a report by a scientific team led by Professor Fred Singer, the founder of the US weather satellite service, and confirmed by Nasa satellite surveys which show a substantial increase in global vegetation cover over the last couple of decades. The impact of a changing climate on farming and forestry may, therefore, be less threatening than is popularly suggested - and may even be beneficial.
Source
IPCC Author Selection Process Plagued by Bias, Cronyism
The selection of authors for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose 2007 assessment report is often referred to as the definitive consensus regarding climate science, has been riddled with bias and cronyism, falling far short of the broad scientific consensus by which IPCC describes itself, reports a new study by the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI).
"The IPCC is a single-interest organization, whose charter directs it to assume that there is a human influence on climate, rather than to consider whether the influence may be negligible," lead author John McLean, an Australian researcher, observes in the study.
The study documents that instead of seeking input from a wide array of scientists representing a broad swath of the scientific community, IPCC's climate science assessment is dominated by a small clique of alarmists who frequently work closely with each other outside the IPCC process.
Focusing on chapter 9 of IPCC's latest assessment--the crucial chapter asserting greenhouse gases are the primary cause of the Earth's modest recent warming and predicting a substantial acceleration of warming in the near future--McLean reports, "More than two-thirds of all authors of chapter 9 of the IPCC's 2007 climate-science assessment are part of a clique whose members have co-authored papers with each other and, we can surmise, very possibly at times acted as peer-reviewers for each other's work. Of the 44 contributing authors, more than half have co-authored papers with the lead authors or coordinating lead authors of chapter 9.
"It is no surprise, therefore, that the majority of scientists who are skeptical of a human influence on climate significant enough to be damaging were unrepresented in the authorship of chapter 9, most of whose authors were climate modelers unwilling to admit that their models are neither accurate nor complete," McLean observes.
Two coordinating lead authors were in charge of establishing the procedures and overseeing the substance of chapter 9's final product, the SPPI study notes. The two coordinating lead authors and seven additional lead authors selected the 44 contributing authors for the chapter.
The two coordinating lead authors for chapter 9 were neither objective nor willing to seek broad representation in the selection of contributing authors, the SPPI study documents. One of the two lead authors is a staffer for the environmental activist group Environment Canada, and the other is an alarmist from Duke University who previously co-authored papers with at least 12 of the 44 contributing authors selected for chapter 9.
Of the 53 coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and contributing authors chosen to write chapter 9, 41 co-authored papers together ... which they then cited in the IPCC final report. In short, a close-knit group of IPCC authors cited their own prior work to justify their alarmist assertions, and then passed this off as the "broad consensus" of the scientific community, the SPPI study shows.
Disturbingly, at least eight of the authors had previously co-authored articles with Environment Canada's Francis Zwiers, raising serious concerns about their objectivity. Scientists and scientific papers that dispute and contradict the assertions of this close-knit group of alarmists were frequently and predictably ignored by them.
Moreover, lead authors frequently chose their subordinates to compose the report. For example, Peter Stott of the British government's Hadley Center for Forecasting was chosen as a lead author, and then eight additional Hadley Center staffers were chosen to work under him as contributing authors of chapter 9.
Far from ensuring a wide range of opinions from a broad cross-section of scientists, more than 20 percent of the chapter 9 contributing editors consisted of staff from the Hadley Center working in a supervisor/subordinate structure.
Of the remaining contributing authors, 23 also had pre-existing work relationships with each other. For example, two Duke University staffers were chosen to be lead authors. Coordinating lead author Gabriele Heger, who would supervise them for IPCC, was also from Duke University.
All told, 32 of the 53 chapter 9 authors had pre-existing and ongoing relationships with other authors as coworkers, supervisors, or subordinates. That is in addition to the previously documented 41 of 53 authors having previously co-authored papers together.
"This network of relationships between most of the authors of chapter 9 demonstrates a disturbingly tight network of scientists with common research interests and opinions. The contrast between this close-knit network and the IPCC's stated claim to represent a global diversity of views is remarkable and does not augur well for the impartiality or reliability of chapter 9's conclusions," the study noted.
As a result, the study summarizes, "Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modelers, as if such claims were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community. On the evidence presented here, the IPCC's selection of its chapter authors is so prejudiced towards a predetermined outcome that its entire process is valueless, its scientific assessment of the climate meaningless, and its conclusions useless."
"The McLean analysis of the processes of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report supports prior criticisms of IPCC processes and results," said Robert Ferguson, president of the Science and Public Policy Institute. "We now have a better understanding of how the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report 'hockey stick' fiasco, in which bogus statistical data was presented to support a nonexistent warming record, was allowed to occur," Ferguson noted. "That is to say, the UN's IPCC is a political organization feigning science as a cover for its political ends. "The UN's careful selection of layers of like-minded 'authors' for the critical chapter 9 shows it quite successfully counted on a small clique of authors avoiding any meaningful peer review of their assertions," Ferguson said.
Source
Kingsnorth: a camp of uncritical conformity
The British 'climate campers' pose as radical - yet their disdain for consumerism and love of sustainability makes them little different from Prime Minister Brown
Environmental activists have built a climate camp near a power station in Kingsnorth, south-east England, to protest against plans for a new coal-fired plant. Yet Britain's energy infrastructure is heading rapidly for obsolescence, and the British authorities need to start building coal-fired plants now if we are to avoid a shortfall in energy supply. That is of little concern to the climate campers, however - they would positively embrace a fall in energy supply, and the austerity that would follow.
Britain is facing a double whammy of competing problems in terms of electricity generation. For one thing, the ageing stock of power stations currently in use - particularly the nuclear plants - is reaching the end of its life. The amount of electricity generated by these plants will decline sharply over the next 10 years as the plants are decommissioned.
At the same time, there is a widespread desire to reduce the amount of CO2 being produced. One way this might be done is by increasing the proportion of energy we get from low-carbon renewable sources: wind, solar and wave power, in particular. These may supply - if all goes to plan - around 20 per cent of Britain's electricity by 2020 (and that's being ambitious).
But if the nuclear stations, which currently supply more than 20 per cent of our electricity, are not replaced, then Britain will still need to find about 80 per cent of its electricity supplies from non-renewable sources. That mostly means by burning fossil fuels - gas and coal - with all of their accompanying CO2 emissions. Even if the current stock of nuclear stations could be replaced in the next 10 years, there would still be a massive shortfall in electricity supply that must continue to be met by fossil fuels. And the government's one viable plan to replace the ageing nuclear stations - by flogging the company that owns the plants to French power company EDF - has just gone belly-up.
Whatever happens with nuclear and renewables, we're facing a severe shortfall in power in the future unless we use fossil fuels. What we need are more power stations that use reliable technology as soon as possible. Reducing CO2 emissions will simply have to wait. As David Porter, chief executive of the Association of Electricity Producers, pointed out in the Guardian: `If we want diversity of supply - not being overdependent on one fuel, such as gas - and security of supply, we need coal for the foreseeable future.' Paul Golby, head of E.ON, the company that wants to build the new coal-fired plant at Kingsnorth, was blunter still: `The climate campers believe that a combination of wind and wave power and increased energy efficiency will be enough to bridge the gap. But that is simply unrealistic.'
The climate campers' blinkered attitude is not surprising, since meeting the needs of consumers is not very high on their list of priorities. In fact, some of them seem to believe that an `energy crunch' is just the sort of useful thing that might halt our mindless consumption.
One climate camper, Isabelle Michel, told BBC TV's Newsnight: `One of the most important things we need to do is to learn to reduce consumption. I think one of the reasons for saying that nuclear is necessary and renewables will not be enough is if we look at maintaining the levels of consumption or even increasing the levels of consumption - because that's the mentality. So we need more, more, more.' Another protester, Kevin Smith, bemoaned `the madness of trying to maintain a world of perpetual economic growth in a world of finite resources'.
This has always been the most fundamental tenet of environmentalism: that economic growth is a bad thing. We humans should reduce our `ecological footprint' and learn to make do with less because resources are finite - and apparently, as we expand our impact on the planet, we are squeezing out other living things that are just as worthy of existence as we are. This is in direct contradiction to any notion of progress, to the idea that through the development of society and technology, we can generate greater quantities of material wealth that allow us to live longer, healthier, more comfortable and potentially freer lives.
Despite what the anti-growth greens might claim, it's not as if we live in a world where everyone has a private jet and dines on foie gras. The current fuel and food prices are reminding many of us of how little spare cash we really have, even in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world. For the billions in the world who live on less than one dollar per day, environmentalists' demand to `reduce consumption' and `halt economic growth' must sound like a sick joke. Behind environmentalists' various debates about energy supply, coal, nuclear and renewables, there lurks their central moralistic belief system: humans are nothing special, in fact they are destructive, and it is high time they learned to live on less.
What is particularly sickening, given the pressing needs of humanity both at home and abroad, is that the climate camp in Kingsnorth is being presented as the cutting edge of radical protest. When so little else is happening politically, an assortment of slick green campaigners, lentil-eating hippies, misguided, idealistic students and assorted middle-aged oddballs has come to be seen as the touchstone of anti-establishment politics.
In fact, these climate campaigners are very far from anti-establishment. With sustainability at the heart of every government policy, the government shares most of the ideas espoused at Kingsnorth right now. Telling people to tighten their belts and put up with less is an idea that politicians have been keen to stress for centuries, while reducing our impact on the planet is the nearest thing to a `big idea' that the political class possesses today. Indeed, it is hard to tell the difference between Isabelle Michel's demand that we rein in consumption and Gordon Brown's recent advice that we should avoid being wasteful by throwing away our food. From the very top of government right through to the edgy green protest movement, there is a consensus that the greedy, thoughtless masses are demanding too much.
The problem for our political leaders - and the source of charges of hypocrisy from the green movement - is that this sustainability-obsessed outlook must live side-by-side with the need to make society work. And that means addressing practical challenges such as making sure the lights work when you hit the switch, that food gets produced and can be delivered to the shops, and so on. The result of this clash between a low-horizons outlook and the practical need to keep British society chugging along is the kind of administrative paralysis we have seen at the heart of the New Labour government.
If practicality versus ideology is proving a problem for the government, it is starting to generate cracks in the green movement, too. Underpinning green thought is a moral distaste for the vulgarity of consumption, which has an almost religious passion to it: fire and brimstone millenarianism meets monkish self-denial. But even greens want to eat, travel, receive medical treatment, and get an education. And these things require a highly developed society that uses up resources and are a constant reminder of the need for humanity to control Nature.
This paradox within environmentalism is best reflected in the current debate about nuclear power. Those greens who are concerned with climate change above all else can see why nuclear, a low-carbon technology, makes sense in the current `emergency'; most famously, Gaia theorist James Lovelock supports the introduction of nuclear power as a way of `saving the planet'. Other greens, however, would rather see society grind to a halt than allow the construction of one more nuclear power station. So some environmentalists can only put the case for nuclear from the scaremongering standpoint that if we don't go nuclear the world will end - while others oppose nuclear on the basis of unfounded fears about waste and risk, which illustrates their deeply selective attitude towards `scientific evidence'.
These debates paint a pretty unpleasant picture of where society stands at present. Contemporary debate is dominated by fearmongering about global warming and nuclear energy on one side, and anti-consumerist moralism on the other. The end result is crippling indecision rather than a clear-cut vision of how people's needs and desires can be met now, and how their lives can be improved in the future. If this carries on much longer, we might need to get used to the lights going out.
Source
A new Greenie excuse for protecting old houses
In rather devious reasoning, Australia's National Trust calls for 'wasted energy' demolition tax
The National Trust in South Australia is calling for a tax on the energy it says is wasted when a building is knocked down. Ian Stephenson from the National Trust says pre-1920 buildings have a thick wall mass and therefore a lot of stored energy, making them energy stable. He says research shows that if these buildings are demolished, it will take 60 years to get the energy equation back to zero. "They should probably be introducing a tax for energy waste - if you want to knock a building down, if you want to waste that energy, then you have to make a payment for it," he said.
But the Property Council's Nathan Paine says introducing such a tax would have negative repercussions for people looking to buy a house. "If we suddenly introduce significant increased costs on new homes, that will actually drive houses to an unaffordable level and that will actually lock another generation out, so we actually have to look at this in a holistic sense," he said.
Source
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For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.
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The article below by Newsweak's Seth Borenstein is amusing. Even Greenie scientists he consulted would not buy into any scare but he nonetheless does his best to attribute a glacial breakup to global warming. Borenstein is an old Warmist from way back. See e.g. here. Also see real story on Greenland here.
In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier, scientists said Thursday. And that's led the university professor who spotted the wounds in the massive Petermann glacier to predict disintegration of a major portion of the Northern Hemisphere's largest floating glacier within the year. If it does worsen and other northern Greenland glaciers melt faster, then it could speed up sea level rise, already increasing because of melt in sourthern Greenland. [Pesky fact: 91% of earth's glacial ice is in Antarctica so any likely melts in Greenland would add only inches to sea level]
The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500 square mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier. "The pictures speak for themselves," said Jason Box, a glacier expert at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University who spotted the changes while studying new satellite images. "This crack is moving, and moving closer and closer to the front. It's just a matter of time till a much larger piece is going to break off.... It is imminent."
The chunk that came off the glacier between July 10 and July 24 is about half the size of Manhattan and doesn't worry Box as much as the cracks. The Petermann glacier had a larger breakaway ice chunk in 2000. But the overall picture worries some scientists. "As we see this phenomenon occurring further and further north - and Petermann is as far north as you can get - it certainly adds to the concern," said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado.
The question that now faces scientists is: Are the fractures part of normal glacier stress or are they the beginning of the effects of global warming? "It certainly is a major event," said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally [A prominent Warmist] in a telephone interview from a conference on glaciers in Ireland. "It's a signal but we don't know what it means." It is too early to say it is clearly global warming, Zwally said. Scientists don't like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern.
University of Colorado professor Konrad Steffen, who returned from Greenland Wednesday and has studied the Petermann glacier in the past, said that what Box saw is not too different from what he saw in the 1990s: "The crack is not alarming... I would say it is normal."
However, scientists note that it fits with the trend of melting glacial ice they first saw in the southern part of the massive island and seems to be marching north with time. Big cracks and breakaway pieces are foreboding signs of what's ahead. Further south in Greenland, Box's satellite images show that the Jakobshavn glacier, the fastest retreating glacier in the world, set new records for how far it has moved inland. That concerns Colorado's Abdalati: "It could go back for miles and miles and there's no real mechanism to stop it."
Source
Skeptical view of climate change gets an airing in major Irish newspaper
Article below by William Reville, professor in the biochemistry Department, Faculty of Science, at the University College Cork, in Cork, Ireland.
Global warming/climate change is a very serious and important issue. It has been under scientific investigation since 1986 by the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC declares global warming is a fact and it is driven largely by emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities (IPCC Report 2007 - www.ipcc.ch/). I have reported the IPCC reports uncritically in this column, but a growing number of scientists are now presenting evidence that contradicts the IPCC position and I will give you a flavour of their position in this article.
Some scientists always disputed the findings of the IPCC but I dismissed this largely as expert opinion hired by the international oil industry. However, it is now clear that many eminent scientists, who are not beholden to vested interests, disagree with the IPCC (eg physicist Freeman J Dyson who argues that the modelling methods used by IPCC are not nearly discriminating enough to reliably predict future climate conditions). The American Physical Society recently issued a statement to say: "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming since the Industrial Revolution."
The IPCC is a huge UN effort, supported by governments, and enlists the efforts of a great many scientific experts. Why would anyone doubt its findings? Well, critics charge the following: First, IPCC is an activist/ political enterprise whose agenda is to control emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, and concentrates exclusively on evidence that might point towards human induced climate change. Second, leading IPCC scientists reflect the positions of their governments, or seek to persuade their governments to adopt the IPCC position. Third, a small group of activists wrote the all-important Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for the four IPCC reports to-date. SPMs are revised and agreed by the member governments. The thousands of scientists who do the scientific work have no direct influence on these selective summaries. Fourth, large professional and financial rewards go to scientists who are willing to slant scientific facts to suit the IPCC agenda.
Two things strike me about these charges. First, if they are true it is amazing that no whistle-blower has emerged from among the large ranks of IPCC. Second, why does IPCC not strenuously rebut these charges?
The US Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) was set up "to base environmental policy on sound science rather than exaggerated fears". However, it has been accused of being influenced by the oil industry. SEPP has published scientific evidence (Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate, S Fred Singer ed. The Heartland Institute, 2008) - www.sepp.org/publications/ NIPCC_final.pdf - to illustrate that 20th-century global warming is not the once-off phenomenon of recent historical times claimed by the IPCC, and that most of the current warming is the result of natural and uncontrollable variations in solar activity and very little is being caused, or could be caused, by human emissions of greenhouse gases. The SEPP also claims that we have little to fear from global warming since human civilisation always fared better during warmer than during colder periods.
If critics of IPCC are right, global warming is inevitable and we should now concentrate our efforts on planning how to live in a warmer world. If we were travelling by bus through the middle of a dangerous continent, where the only safe regions were coastal, and we noticed the bus was almost out of petrol, we would be much better advised to immediately start planning how to survive in the interior than to spend our time frantically searching for a gallon of petrol reportedly hidden on a nearby farm.
If IPCC is correct, we must take immediate steps to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions or we face awful consequences from global warming. Of course, it is important to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels anyway because of their relative scarcity, and this reduction would automatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions. If the critics are correct, any crash programme of reducing gas emissions would be a costly step that would have little or no effect on global warming but would divert funds away from fighting battles we could win - disease, poverty, etc.
Climate and weather are very complex physical phenomena and, as a biochemist, I am unable to critically adjudicate on the competing scientific claims of IPCC and its critics. IPCC represents the mainstream majority scientific position and, in the absence of very persuasive contrary evidence, I must support it. But, the growing scepticism does catch the eye and should not be ignored. It is also embarrassing to witness each side accuse the other of dishonesty. Scientists from both sides must come together to resolve this matter.
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Climate change - is it really that dire?
CLIMATE change is typically discussed in terms of foreboding and predictions of catastrophe: droughts, famines, hurricanes and floods - even plagues of jellyfish! The threat of climate change" has become a political cliche, justifying innumerable and often onerous regulations.
The claimed threat rests on two key propositions deriving from United Nations reports: that global temperatures are determined mainly by carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, and that human activity, especially the use of fossil fuels, is increasing these to historically high and dangerous levels. But as research continues and understanding grows, things look less straightforward - and less dire.
Existing doubts about a simple link between temperature and carbon dioxide were reinforced by a paper given at Bayreuth University last month. This reported that during at least three substantial periods in the last 200 years carbon dioxide levels have equalled or exceeded those prevailing today, although temperatures were lower.
On the second point, subsequent studies indicate that the United Nations report substantially underestimated natural contributions to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, consequently exaggerating those attributable to human activity. A report that the contribution from human activity is much less than the UN suggested has been endorsed by 31,000 scientists, many more than advised the UN.
Finally, it has been argued that warmer temperatures and higher levels of carbon dioxide improve plant growth. The point is emphasised in a report by a scientific team led by Professor Fred Singer, the founder of the US weather satellite service, and confirmed by Nasa satellite surveys which show a substantial increase in global vegetation cover over the last couple of decades. The impact of a changing climate on farming and forestry may, therefore, be less threatening than is popularly suggested - and may even be beneficial.
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IPCC Author Selection Process Plagued by Bias, Cronyism
The selection of authors for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose 2007 assessment report is often referred to as the definitive consensus regarding climate science, has been riddled with bias and cronyism, falling far short of the broad scientific consensus by which IPCC describes itself, reports a new study by the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI).
"The IPCC is a single-interest organization, whose charter directs it to assume that there is a human influence on climate, rather than to consider whether the influence may be negligible," lead author John McLean, an Australian researcher, observes in the study.
The study documents that instead of seeking input from a wide array of scientists representing a broad swath of the scientific community, IPCC's climate science assessment is dominated by a small clique of alarmists who frequently work closely with each other outside the IPCC process.
Focusing on chapter 9 of IPCC's latest assessment--the crucial chapter asserting greenhouse gases are the primary cause of the Earth's modest recent warming and predicting a substantial acceleration of warming in the near future--McLean reports, "More than two-thirds of all authors of chapter 9 of the IPCC's 2007 climate-science assessment are part of a clique whose members have co-authored papers with each other and, we can surmise, very possibly at times acted as peer-reviewers for each other's work. Of the 44 contributing authors, more than half have co-authored papers with the lead authors or coordinating lead authors of chapter 9.
"It is no surprise, therefore, that the majority of scientists who are skeptical of a human influence on climate significant enough to be damaging were unrepresented in the authorship of chapter 9, most of whose authors were climate modelers unwilling to admit that their models are neither accurate nor complete," McLean observes.
Two coordinating lead authors were in charge of establishing the procedures and overseeing the substance of chapter 9's final product, the SPPI study notes. The two coordinating lead authors and seven additional lead authors selected the 44 contributing authors for the chapter.
The two coordinating lead authors for chapter 9 were neither objective nor willing to seek broad representation in the selection of contributing authors, the SPPI study documents. One of the two lead authors is a staffer for the environmental activist group Environment Canada, and the other is an alarmist from Duke University who previously co-authored papers with at least 12 of the 44 contributing authors selected for chapter 9.
Of the 53 coordinating lead authors, lead authors, and contributing authors chosen to write chapter 9, 41 co-authored papers together ... which they then cited in the IPCC final report. In short, a close-knit group of IPCC authors cited their own prior work to justify their alarmist assertions, and then passed this off as the "broad consensus" of the scientific community, the SPPI study shows.
Disturbingly, at least eight of the authors had previously co-authored articles with Environment Canada's Francis Zwiers, raising serious concerns about their objectivity. Scientists and scientific papers that dispute and contradict the assertions of this close-knit group of alarmists were frequently and predictably ignored by them.
Moreover, lead authors frequently chose their subordinates to compose the report. For example, Peter Stott of the British government's Hadley Center for Forecasting was chosen as a lead author, and then eight additional Hadley Center staffers were chosen to work under him as contributing authors of chapter 9.
Far from ensuring a wide range of opinions from a broad cross-section of scientists, more than 20 percent of the chapter 9 contributing editors consisted of staff from the Hadley Center working in a supervisor/subordinate structure.
Of the remaining contributing authors, 23 also had pre-existing work relationships with each other. For example, two Duke University staffers were chosen to be lead authors. Coordinating lead author Gabriele Heger, who would supervise them for IPCC, was also from Duke University.
All told, 32 of the 53 chapter 9 authors had pre-existing and ongoing relationships with other authors as coworkers, supervisors, or subordinates. That is in addition to the previously documented 41 of 53 authors having previously co-authored papers together.
"This network of relationships between most of the authors of chapter 9 demonstrates a disturbingly tight network of scientists with common research interests and opinions. The contrast between this close-knit network and the IPCC's stated claim to represent a global diversity of views is remarkable and does not augur well for the impartiality or reliability of chapter 9's conclusions," the study noted.
As a result, the study summarizes, "Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modelers, as if such claims were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community. On the evidence presented here, the IPCC's selection of its chapter authors is so prejudiced towards a predetermined outcome that its entire process is valueless, its scientific assessment of the climate meaningless, and its conclusions useless."
"The McLean analysis of the processes of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report supports prior criticisms of IPCC processes and results," said Robert Ferguson, president of the Science and Public Policy Institute. "We now have a better understanding of how the IPCC 3rd Assessment Report 'hockey stick' fiasco, in which bogus statistical data was presented to support a nonexistent warming record, was allowed to occur," Ferguson noted. "That is to say, the UN's IPCC is a political organization feigning science as a cover for its political ends. "The UN's careful selection of layers of like-minded 'authors' for the critical chapter 9 shows it quite successfully counted on a small clique of authors avoiding any meaningful peer review of their assertions," Ferguson said.
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Kingsnorth: a camp of uncritical conformity
The British 'climate campers' pose as radical - yet their disdain for consumerism and love of sustainability makes them little different from Prime Minister Brown
Environmental activists have built a climate camp near a power station in Kingsnorth, south-east England, to protest against plans for a new coal-fired plant. Yet Britain's energy infrastructure is heading rapidly for obsolescence, and the British authorities need to start building coal-fired plants now if we are to avoid a shortfall in energy supply. That is of little concern to the climate campers, however - they would positively embrace a fall in energy supply, and the austerity that would follow.
Britain is facing a double whammy of competing problems in terms of electricity generation. For one thing, the ageing stock of power stations currently in use - particularly the nuclear plants - is reaching the end of its life. The amount of electricity generated by these plants will decline sharply over the next 10 years as the plants are decommissioned.
At the same time, there is a widespread desire to reduce the amount of CO2 being produced. One way this might be done is by increasing the proportion of energy we get from low-carbon renewable sources: wind, solar and wave power, in particular. These may supply - if all goes to plan - around 20 per cent of Britain's electricity by 2020 (and that's being ambitious).
But if the nuclear stations, which currently supply more than 20 per cent of our electricity, are not replaced, then Britain will still need to find about 80 per cent of its electricity supplies from non-renewable sources. That mostly means by burning fossil fuels - gas and coal - with all of their accompanying CO2 emissions. Even if the current stock of nuclear stations could be replaced in the next 10 years, there would still be a massive shortfall in electricity supply that must continue to be met by fossil fuels. And the government's one viable plan to replace the ageing nuclear stations - by flogging the company that owns the plants to French power company EDF - has just gone belly-up.
Whatever happens with nuclear and renewables, we're facing a severe shortfall in power in the future unless we use fossil fuels. What we need are more power stations that use reliable technology as soon as possible. Reducing CO2 emissions will simply have to wait. As David Porter, chief executive of the Association of Electricity Producers, pointed out in the Guardian: `If we want diversity of supply - not being overdependent on one fuel, such as gas - and security of supply, we need coal for the foreseeable future.' Paul Golby, head of E.ON, the company that wants to build the new coal-fired plant at Kingsnorth, was blunter still: `The climate campers believe that a combination of wind and wave power and increased energy efficiency will be enough to bridge the gap. But that is simply unrealistic.'
The climate campers' blinkered attitude is not surprising, since meeting the needs of consumers is not very high on their list of priorities. In fact, some of them seem to believe that an `energy crunch' is just the sort of useful thing that might halt our mindless consumption.
One climate camper, Isabelle Michel, told BBC TV's Newsnight: `One of the most important things we need to do is to learn to reduce consumption. I think one of the reasons for saying that nuclear is necessary and renewables will not be enough is if we look at maintaining the levels of consumption or even increasing the levels of consumption - because that's the mentality. So we need more, more, more.' Another protester, Kevin Smith, bemoaned `the madness of trying to maintain a world of perpetual economic growth in a world of finite resources'.
This has always been the most fundamental tenet of environmentalism: that economic growth is a bad thing. We humans should reduce our `ecological footprint' and learn to make do with less because resources are finite - and apparently, as we expand our impact on the planet, we are squeezing out other living things that are just as worthy of existence as we are. This is in direct contradiction to any notion of progress, to the idea that through the development of society and technology, we can generate greater quantities of material wealth that allow us to live longer, healthier, more comfortable and potentially freer lives.
Despite what the anti-growth greens might claim, it's not as if we live in a world where everyone has a private jet and dines on foie gras. The current fuel and food prices are reminding many of us of how little spare cash we really have, even in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world. For the billions in the world who live on less than one dollar per day, environmentalists' demand to `reduce consumption' and `halt economic growth' must sound like a sick joke. Behind environmentalists' various debates about energy supply, coal, nuclear and renewables, there lurks their central moralistic belief system: humans are nothing special, in fact they are destructive, and it is high time they learned to live on less.
What is particularly sickening, given the pressing needs of humanity both at home and abroad, is that the climate camp in Kingsnorth is being presented as the cutting edge of radical protest. When so little else is happening politically, an assortment of slick green campaigners, lentil-eating hippies, misguided, idealistic students and assorted middle-aged oddballs has come to be seen as the touchstone of anti-establishment politics.
In fact, these climate campaigners are very far from anti-establishment. With sustainability at the heart of every government policy, the government shares most of the ideas espoused at Kingsnorth right now. Telling people to tighten their belts and put up with less is an idea that politicians have been keen to stress for centuries, while reducing our impact on the planet is the nearest thing to a `big idea' that the political class possesses today. Indeed, it is hard to tell the difference between Isabelle Michel's demand that we rein in consumption and Gordon Brown's recent advice that we should avoid being wasteful by throwing away our food. From the very top of government right through to the edgy green protest movement, there is a consensus that the greedy, thoughtless masses are demanding too much.
The problem for our political leaders - and the source of charges of hypocrisy from the green movement - is that this sustainability-obsessed outlook must live side-by-side with the need to make society work. And that means addressing practical challenges such as making sure the lights work when you hit the switch, that food gets produced and can be delivered to the shops, and so on. The result of this clash between a low-horizons outlook and the practical need to keep British society chugging along is the kind of administrative paralysis we have seen at the heart of the New Labour government.
If practicality versus ideology is proving a problem for the government, it is starting to generate cracks in the green movement, too. Underpinning green thought is a moral distaste for the vulgarity of consumption, which has an almost religious passion to it: fire and brimstone millenarianism meets monkish self-denial. But even greens want to eat, travel, receive medical treatment, and get an education. And these things require a highly developed society that uses up resources and are a constant reminder of the need for humanity to control Nature.
This paradox within environmentalism is best reflected in the current debate about nuclear power. Those greens who are concerned with climate change above all else can see why nuclear, a low-carbon technology, makes sense in the current `emergency'; most famously, Gaia theorist James Lovelock supports the introduction of nuclear power as a way of `saving the planet'. Other greens, however, would rather see society grind to a halt than allow the construction of one more nuclear power station. So some environmentalists can only put the case for nuclear from the scaremongering standpoint that if we don't go nuclear the world will end - while others oppose nuclear on the basis of unfounded fears about waste and risk, which illustrates their deeply selective attitude towards `scientific evidence'.
These debates paint a pretty unpleasant picture of where society stands at present. Contemporary debate is dominated by fearmongering about global warming and nuclear energy on one side, and anti-consumerist moralism on the other. The end result is crippling indecision rather than a clear-cut vision of how people's needs and desires can be met now, and how their lives can be improved in the future. If this carries on much longer, we might need to get used to the lights going out.
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A new Greenie excuse for protecting old houses
In rather devious reasoning, Australia's National Trust calls for 'wasted energy' demolition tax
The National Trust in South Australia is calling for a tax on the energy it says is wasted when a building is knocked down. Ian Stephenson from the National Trust says pre-1920 buildings have a thick wall mass and therefore a lot of stored energy, making them energy stable. He says research shows that if these buildings are demolished, it will take 60 years to get the energy equation back to zero. "They should probably be introducing a tax for energy waste - if you want to knock a building down, if you want to waste that energy, then you have to make a payment for it," he said.
But the Property Council's Nathan Paine says introducing such a tax would have negative repercussions for people looking to buy a house. "If we suddenly introduce significant increased costs on new homes, that will actually drive houses to an unaffordable level and that will actually lock another generation out, so we actually have to look at this in a holistic sense," he said.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
