OBAMA KICKS CLIMATE BILL INTO THE LONG GRASS

The White House signalled on Monday it could wait until 2010 for major climate change legislation to move through the U.S. Congress as long as it fulfilled President Barack Obama's criteria for tackling global warming. When asked when the president wished to see movement on a climate bill, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs left a time frame wide open.

"If we had significant legislation that began to address climate change ... whether that's this year or next year I think both of us would agree that that's a big change that we would welcome," Gibbs said, referring to the president. He said the bill would have to allow the United States to spend even more money investing in alternative energies to ensure the country was not adding to the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.

Obama has spent the first month of his young administration focusing on lifting the United States out of a deep recession. He has put forward proposals to shore up the financial industry and stem home foreclosures while promising action on health care reform. Though investing in renewable energy is a key part of Obama's $787 billion stimulus bill, the administration has kept quiet about its other environmental goals for this year.

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Greenie emissions plan for Australia set to be scuppered

The Federal Government's emissions trading scheme is heading for defeat in the Senate before it is even debated as independent Nick Xenophon and the Nationals' Barnaby Joyce rule out supporting the policy even with amendments. Senator Xenophon, who passed the Government's $42 billion stimulus package only after winning $1 billion in measures for the Murray-Darling Basin, told The Age he would vote against the scheme in its present form. But Senator Xenophon said he would not trade his vote for more money for the Murray-Darling or other programs, because he has fundamental problems with the design of the scheme.

Instead, Senator Xenophon is backing an alternative cap-and-trade program based on a Canadian model, which has been previously ruled out by Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. Senator Wong said in a speech on Friday that the Government would not delay nor change the details of its proposed cap-and-trade system.

If Senator Xenophon votes against the scheme, the Government will have to get the Opposition's support to pass it. However, Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce believes "there are not enough amendments" to fix the scheme, and indicated the Nationals would reject the scheme outright. Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull is still waiting on economic research scheduled to be delivered this week before determining the Liberal Party's position.

Senator Joyce told The Age "it didn't matter" what the Coalition policy would be because he would be asked to vote on the Government's proposal. "And I cannot back it because it will throw people out of their jobs and their homes and do incredible damage to the Australian economy," he said.

Senior Liberal sources said yesterday there was disagreement in the joint party room on what policy the Opposition should take, with support from many members of the Liberal back bench to vote against the Government's scheme outright rather than seeking to amend it.

An industry source close to the Liberal Party said "they (the Coalition) have no policy really, but they have made a decision to get on the front foot after the disaster that was last week and so they are talking about climate change probably more than they would like at this moment".

Mr Turnbull and environment spokesman Greg Hunt indicated yesterday that the Opposition would present policies that contain emissions cuts greater than the 5 to 15 per cent range by 2020 announced by the Government last year, but would not say if they would support an emissions trading scheme. Mr Turnbull is backing a range of other emissions reduction programs such as biochar offsets, energy efficiency in buildings and international forestation measures, which can be implemented into an emissions trading scheme or run as independent programs. The Liberals and the Greens are proposing a Senate inquiry to replace the House of Representatives inquiry that Treasurer Wayne Swan shut down on Thursday.

The Greens have proposed 13 terms of reference for the inquiry, including investigation into the adequacy of the Rudd Government's 2020 targets. But the Coalition and Greens, who need to join forces to establish the Senate inquiry, last night had not agreed to the terms. The Government is expected to release draft legislation for the emissions scheme this week.

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FORGET KYOTO II: WHY CHINA WILL NEVER ACCEPT BINDING EMISSIONS CUTS

Because those they sell their stuff to are the ones really responsible for the emissions

The full extent of the west's responsibility for Chinese emissions of greenhouse gases has been revealed by a new study. The report shows that half of the recent rise in China's carbon dioxide pollution was caused by the manufacturing of goods for other countries - particularly developed nations such as the UK. Last year, China officially overtook the US as the world's biggest CO2 emitter. But the new research shows that around a third of all Chinese carbon emissions are the result of producing goods for export.

The research, due to be published in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, underlines "off-shored emissions" as a key unresolved issue in the run up to this year's crucial Copenhagen summit, at which world leaders will attempt to thrash out a deal to replace the Kyoto protocol.

Developing countries are under pressure to commit to binding emissions cuts in Copenhagen. But China is resistant, partly because it does not accept responsibility for the emissions involved in producing goods for foreign markets.

Under Kyoto, emissions are allocated to the country where they are produced. By these rules, the UK can claim to have reduced emissions by about 18% since 1990 - more than sufficient to meet its Kyoto target. But research published last year by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) suggests that, once imports, exports and international transport are accounted for, the real change for the UK has been a rise in emissions of more than 20%.

China, as the world's biggest export manufacturer, is key to explaining this kind of discrepancy. According to Glen Peters, one of the authors of the new report at Oslo's Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research, around 9% of total Chinese emissions are now the result of manufacturing goods for the US, and around 6% are from producing goods for Europe. Academics and campaigners increasingly say responsibility for these emissions lies with the consumer countries.

Dieter Helm, professor of economics at Oxford University, said "focusing on consumption rather than production of emissions is the only intellectually and ethically sound solution. We've simply outsourced our production. If you add foreign manufacturing emissions to the transport emissions of bringing things from abroad, and you consider the lower energy efficiency and greater use of coal in China, then the result is hugely significant."

By contrast, the Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc), argues that these "embedded emissions" in Chinese-produced goods are "not the UK's emissions; the UK calculates and reports its emissions according to the internationally agreed criteria set out by the UN." However, Decc admitted to the Guardian that "the footprint associated with the UK's consumption has risen".

More here





AL GORE RETRACTS ON DISASTER-WARMING CLAIM

Leading to a VERY interesting question

Andy Revkin at the New York Times asked Al Gore's office for their comments on Gore's use of data from CRED in Belgium in recent versions of his talk to illustrate the impacts of human-caused climate change on disasters. In response, Gore's office has said that they will pull the slide, as it does not have a scientific foundation.

Kudos to Al Gore who has demonstrated a commitment to scientific accuracy in his presentation. However there are still some issues with their response. Here is how Gore's office responded to Revkin as related at Dot Earth (please visit their site for embedded links):

"I can confirm that historically, we used Munich Re and Swiss Re data for the slide show. This can be confirmed using a hard copy of An Inconvenient Truth. (It is cited if you cannot recall from the film which is now several years old!). We became aware of the CRED database from its use by Charles Blow in the New York Times (May 31, 2008). So, it's a very new addition.

We have found that Munich Re and other insurers and their science experts have made the attribution. I'm referring you particularly to their floods section/report [link, link] Both of these were published in a series entitled "Weather catastrophes and climate change-Is there still hope for us."

We appreciate that you have pointed out the issues with the CRED database and will make the switch back to the data we used previously to ensure that there is no confusion either with regards to the data or attribution.

As to climate change and its impacts on storms and floods, the IPCC and NOAA among many other top scientific groups have indicated that climate change will result in more extreme weather events, including heat waves, wildfires, storms and floods. As the result of briefings from top scientists, Vice President Gore believes that we are beginning to see evidence of that now.

Switching from the CRED dataset to Munich Re (and Swiss Re) data does not solve the basic problem. As we found in an expert workshop organized in 2006 with Munich Re - The Munich Re dataset has exactly the same problems as the CRED dataset. Attribution of the role of greenhouse gas driven climate change in the increasing economic costs of disasters has yet to occur. So using a different dataset does not address the underlying problem. So when Al Gore's office says . . .

We have found that Munich Re and other insurers and their science experts have made the attribution.

. . . they are either cherry picking the selective views of a few people or simply mistaken. The scientific workshop that I co-organized with Peter Hoeppe of Munich Re concluded the following, with unanimous agreement among participants (PDF):

"Because of issues related to data quality, the stochastic nature of extreme event impacts, length of time series, and various societal factors present in the disaster loss record, it is still not possible to determine the portion of the increase in damages that might be attributed to climate change due to GHG emissions.

We also published this view in Science: Bouwer, L.M., Crompton, R.P., Faust, E., H”ppe, P., and Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2007. Confronting Disaster Losses, Science, Vol. 318, November 2, p. 753. (PDF).

So while Gore's office was right to pull the CRED information from their talk as lacking a scientific basis, the continuing reliance on data from Munich Re does not solve the basic issue, which is that attribution of the increasing toll of disasters to human-caused climate change remains speculative at best and not supported by science. To the contrary, increasing societal exposure and growing wealth in vulnerable locations are the overwhelming drivers of the increasing losses, a conclusion well supported by many studies. Here is a test to see how far Gore is willing to go in maintaining standards of accuracy in his talk.

Now that Gore has admitted that including the slide based on CRED data was a mistake, it raises a more fundamental question: How could it be that Al Gore presented obviously misleading information before a large audience of the world's best scientists, which was then amplified in a press release by AAAS, and none of these scientists spoke up?

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DIVIDED BRITISH GREENS: CLIMATE ANGST TRUMPS NUCLEAR HYSTERIA

Britain must build new nuclear power stations if it is to meet climate change targets, according to leading environmentalists.

It is the first time the green lobby has decided to embrace the technology after years of opposition. Campaigners have traditionally been against nuclear power because of the fear of proliferation of weapons and the problem of disposing of waste. However with Britain facing a major energy crisis in the next few years - as coal-fired power stations and old nuclear power stations close down - and with the UK Government committed to cutting greenhouse gases by 80 per cent by 2050, many in the environmental movement are changing their minds. They argue that while nuclear power still has problems, climate change is a greater threat and that nuclear is a better option for keeping the lights on than building new coal-fired power stations.

The four leading environmentalists who have come out in favour of nuclear power are Stephen Tindale, former director of Greenpeace; Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury, the chairman of the Environment Agency; Mark Lynas, author of the Royal Society's science book of the year, and Chris Goodall, a Green Party activist and prospective parliamentary candidate. Mr Tindale, who described his turn-around as a "religious conversion", said many more in the environment movement think "nuclear power is not ideal but it's better than climate change".

Around 10 power stations could be built in the UK in the next 30 years. The Government is currently consulting on sites that might be suitable for new nuclear stations and companies have expressed interest in starting to build in 2013, with the first plants coming on stream in 2018.

However environmental groups remained adamant that nuclear power can't solve the problem of climate change. Greenpeace argue that even if new nuclear stations are built it will not stop countries like China and India burning huge amounts of coal and the only way to reduce the threat of climate change is to improve efficiency and revolutionise energy generation with cheap and green renewables.

A spokesman for Greenpeace said: "Imagine if the billions wasted on the nuclear industry had been spent instead on energy efficiency and renewable energy. Then we'd really be matching our big problems with big solutions."

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Big sharks right in Sydney harbour -- thanks to the Greenies

All sharks are now "protected" species in Australia



When we arrived about 10.45am Justin handed over one of the frigate mackerel his clients had just caught. With its blood red, oily flesh it was perfect shark bait. We did not use berley - mashed fish flesh, called chum in the US, and designed to attract sharks. Al rigged a stout gamefishing rod and reel filled with about a kilometre of 24kg strength line, attached a wire trace and smallish hook, and cast out a fillet of the frigate. Around us the little tuna - looking like lime green bullets - continued to feed, sometimes spearing half out of the water in their enthusiasm for their own tiny prey. The rod and reel are more at home chasing giant fish in the deep, many kilometres out to sea. But we were 10-15m from shore and our depth sounder read just 8m of flat bottom, with a drop-off to deeper water nearby.

Maybe 15 minutes later we knew something else besides frigate mackerel was out hunting. A bloke fishing in a tinny next to us cruised by and said: "I think I just saw a decent shark, just over in the really shallow water" as he pointed to the sandy shores less than 2m deep. Builders on shore, with the advantage of elevation enabling them to look deep into the water, waved and kept pointing to the same spot.

Within half an hour a brown shadow slid past the stern. About 1.8m long, it had the shape and colour of a bull shark. We also missed two tentative bites from what were most likely sharks. They do not always smash their prey and can be delicate feeders. Then, after only an hour drifting with the outgoing tide, and with Clifton Gardens' netted swimming enclosure a few hundred metres away, the fillet of frigate was swallowed. Line poured from the reel. "This is a shark, and it's a pretty big one," said Al.

The shark headed into the shipping channel, unstoppable. Half an hour after hook-up and the shark was still moving westwards, forcing us to motor at up to 10km/h. An hour after hook-up the shark appeared to be aiming for Garden Island, where navy diver Paul de Gelder was attacked on January 11. We manoeuvred our boat to try to force the shark towards the surface. Nothing seemed to be working until, finally, it swam into shallower water and began to tire.

An hour and a half after hook-up, with little warning, it gave up and could be led boatside. It made one last surge, a thick, broad, tan-coloured head breaching the surface, snow white teeth flashing in the sun, cream belly glowing, tail slapping the water. "It's a bloody big bull shark!" Al shouted.

Just as we were about to put a NSW Fisheries gamefish tag into its shoulders the shark's teeth overcame the wire trace and it was gone, leaving an upwelling of boiling water 2m across. We called it as a bull shark between 2.7m and 3m long. NSW Fisheries scientists will study photos of the shark. State Primary Industries Minister Ian Macdonald told The Daily Telegraph yesterday: "It is of a similar size to the one involved in the attack on the diver."

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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THE MONACO DECLARATION

An email below from Mark Duchamp [save.the.eagles@gmail.com], Director, Climate Change and Alternative Energies, Iberica 2000

The oceans' acidity scare is back, embodied in the Monaco Declaration:

"...more than 150 leading experts warned that the world's oceans are becoming more acidic as a result of absorbing ever-increasing amounts of CO2."

"Surface ocean pH has already dropped by 0.1 units since the beginning of the Industrial revolution, exposing marine organisms to a rate of acidification that scientists believe has not been seen for many millions of years."

Dear me! Didn't corals appear in the oceans over 500 millions years ago, when there was 10 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere than there is today, and global temperature was 8 or 9 degrees warmer?

And if the world's climate were to resume its warming, aren't the oceans supposed to RELEASE more CO2 than they absorb?






Some Greenie rage

Horror that a major publisher of scientific journals supports Sen. Inhofe financially. Amusing that the writer below identifies himself as a "Questionable authority" (It's the name of his blog). Who am I to disagree? His rundown of Inhofe's sins certainly displays questionable authority. That "blasting Tom Brokaw's objectivity on the climate change issue" is a sin is certainly questionable. I think I would have called it an unquestionable truth!

There is little doubt that if there is any one person serving in the United States Senate who can be identified as anti-science, it is Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe. He's called global warming a "hoax", tried to pass a novelist off as a climate-change expert at a Senate hearing, and referred to the work of the IPCC as a "corruption of science". He had Senate committee staffers issue a press release blasting Tom Brokaw's objectivity on the climate change issue. We're talking about a sitting Senator who has been such a consistent and vocal opponent of science that the president of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science once referred to him - in an editorial in the journal Science - as a "conspiracy theorist".

Reed Elsevier is one of the leading - if not the leading - publishers of scientific journals. They make profits on the scale of thousands of dollars a minute selling these journals to libraries so that scientists can read them. They have, I'd suggest, some motivation to keep from pissing scientists off any more than necessary.

Which is why I was almost surprised to discover that Reed Elsevier Inc. gave Senator Inhofe $16,500 in 2008, with $3,000 of that coming right from their own Political Action Committee. It's nice to know that Reed Elsevier is always ready to stand behind scientists. With a knife in their hand.

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IS OBAMA FOLLOWING BUSH'S CLIMATE POLICY?

Canadians going gaga over Barack Obama need to get a grip. He is not going to change the world. He is not going to right all wrongs. Indeed, his whirlwind visit to Ottawa this week underlines the new U.S. president's innate conservatism.

Take the one concrete measure that came out of his Thursday meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper - a Canada-U.S. decision to look into carbon capture as a solution to global warming. This does not signify Harper's willingness to endorse an Obama-sponsored get-tough approach to climate change. Rather, it represents the opposite - Obama's willingness to sign on to Harper's search (much criticized by Canadian environmentalists) for a miraculous new technology that would allow oil refineries and coal plants to keep polluting and then permanently store the resultant carbon emissions underground.

The U.S. president, in a veiled criticism of the Kyoto Accord on climate change, also noted that no solution to global warming can be found unless China and India are drawn in. This has been Harper's position all along. It was also that of former U.S. president George W. Bush.

None of this is to say that Obama is Bush redux. He isn't. But the differences between the two have been greatly overdrawn.

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UK CLIMATE POLICY: BETWEEN GREEN SPIN AND ECONOMIC REALPOLITIK

Britain's efforts to cut carbon emissions have been hampered by government infighting and a reluctance to stand up to industry, according to the UK's former climate change minister. Elliot Morley, head of the new energy and climate change select committee, said tensions between different government departments had undermined moves to cut greenhouse gas pollution. Policies to cut carbon and help the environment were dismissed inside Whitehall as "idealistic and not giving enough attention to the pragmatic needs of industry", he said.

In an interview with the Guardian, Morley, a minister in the environment department Defra from 2003 to 2006, said: "I think there has been a failure to get complete cross-government buy-in." He added: "Defra did its best, but unless you get action from all the other ministries including the Treasury, you're never going to get anywhere." Crucial changes to building standards to make homes more energy efficient were delayed because of industry lobbying, he said.

Last year's government restructure to form a new Department of Energy and Climate Change will make a "huge difference" but will not solve the problem. "No one department is going to be able to deliver the kind of change that we need."

He said government squabbling had derailed efforts to reduce UK carbon dioxide emissions by 20% by 2010 - a key Labour target from the 1997 manifesto which ministers have admitted they will miss. Carbon dioxide emissions have risen by 0.3% since Labour came to power, though Britain remains on track to meet a separate greenhouse gas target under the Kyoto protocol.

"It came down to this argument about the costs to industry, which is what the energy people thought was their priority," Morley said. "Defra would sometimes be presented as a department that was too idealistic and not giving enough attention to the pragmatic needs of industry."

Morley praised the UK's "ground breaking" climate change bill, which commits the government to binding carbon reduction targets, but said there had been significant failures elsewhere. "Why on earth are we still building hospitals without combined heat and power? The answer is the tendering process and the private finance initiative."

He said it was "impossible to say" if he lost his ministerial role because of his doubts over on nuclear power. He is "sceptical" that nuclear can deliver more power than renewables for the same cost.

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REVIEW: James Lovelock, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning

Until recently, we were told that the scientific community was in broad agreement about climate change. But, in the last few weeks, open warfare has broken out between experts presenting serious, evidence-based research and hysterical alarmists like James Hansen, who seem hell-bent on destroying the global economy through eye-wateringly expensive and totally unnecessary "emergency measures".

Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, recently called on scientists and journalists to stop misleading the public with "claim and counter-claim". Pope says there is little evidence to support claims that Arctic ice has reached a tipping point and could disappear within a decade or so, as some reports have suggested: "The record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather, with summer ice increasing again over the next few years."

In a recent wide-eyed rant in the Guardian last week, James Hansen branded coal-fired power plants "factories of death". But Hansen, the global warming lobby's most celebrated cheerleader, has now been called "an embarrassment to NASA". His work has been branded "unscientific". Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., former director of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, recently accused him of "megalomania" and of "scientific authoritarianism". Others say he has "lost the plot".

In fact, as long ago as June 2008, Dr. Nicholas Drapela from Oregon State University Chemistry Department wrote: "My dear colleague Professor Hansen, I believe, has finally gone off the deep end. When you have dedicated the bulk of your career to a cause, and it turns out the cause has been proven false, most people cannot bring themselves to admit the truth. [His claims] contain neither reason nor truth."

But there is a greater, more sacred cow that even the most strident climate sceptics seem reluctant to attack: James Lovelock. Lovelock is responsible for the now-famous Gaia hypothesis, which is predicated on the idea that each of the planet's systems exist in intricate symbiosis with one another. Or, in his words, Gaia is "a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet".

Sounds nice, doesn't it? But this isn't really a "hypothesis" at all: it's just a highfalutin' way of saying we shouldn't cut down so many trees and we shouldn't burn so much coal. The problem with Lovelock's theory is that he presents it as a scientific position, when really it's not even cargo cult stuff: Gaia is a perfectly pleasant metaphor for the dangers of abusing the natural world, but to posit his "cybernetic system" as a serious theory is to invite ridicule.

Perhaps realising - as James Hansen surely now does, if only privately - that the planet might just make it through the twenty-first century intact after all, Lovelock has switched focus in his new book. Now it's only humanity that's at risk. The planet will look after itself. All that saving the planet stuff was just a sales pitch: what we really need to be doing is saving the human race.

Controversially, Lovelock says nuclear power is the only viable way of generating enough energy to meet future demand. But in doing so, he overlooks - or ignores - the fact that even sustainable power is unsustainable. According to New Scientist, "The most advanced 'renewable' technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources." In other words, the green lobby could be about to rob the planet of irreplaceable natural assets.

After close reading of this slender volume, I can offer no sensible summary of it, save to say that the climate lobby is clearly struggling to come up with new and inventive ways to keep the "industry" going. But I can offer some advice. Do not purchase The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Do not read it. Do not tell your friends about it. Do not, in short, do anything to attract further attention to this silly - though I'm sure lucrative - drivel. "Future generations" will thank you. The publishers tell me this is Lovelock's "final word" on the environmental problems humanity will face in the twenty-first century. We can be grateful, at least, for that.

SOURCE





Tasmanian health fear if climate heats up

This would be a most amusing article if it were not so dishonest and stupid. Quite aside from the basic fact that warm weather is better for you than cold weather (a lot more people die in winter than die in summer), the article is about Tasmania, which has a cool climate. And even under pessimistic assumptions, Tasmania would warm up only to the point where its climate is like Queensland today. And, writing as I do from Queensland, I can assure you that Queensland is flourishing in every way! We are not even suffering from bushfires

TASMANIA faces an ominous and burgeoning epidemic of chronic disease in its climate change future, the State's Director of Public Health said yesterday. Dr Roscoe Taylor said the spectre of an influenza pandemic was also very real. The foreseeable risks to health worldwide had been documented, he said, but Tasmania faced its share of public health concerns brought about after events that could only be attributed to climate change.

He said the increased frequency of extreme weather would cause physical injury and psychological instability, as the population became anxious about storm, drought or extreme heat events. "With changes in Tasmania's weather patterns, we will see more severe weather events," he said. "An ageing population of people living with chronic medical conditions might not readily cope with heat stress."

Longer term, Dr Taylor said drought would threaten reliable, nutritious food sources and water supply. "There are significant threats to public health and nutrition when our natural food sources are affected with seasonal interruptions," he said.

The extreme weather would also bring social isolation and anxiety. "There will be community anxiety about the future. We have to be careful not to transfer our own fears on to our children. "We have to give them a sense that they can minimise the risks and do something about the future."

Very real evidence of climate change across Tasmania's water supply was already playing itself out, he said. "We are seeing the impact of climate change on our water supply with increased and longer algal blooms," he said. "At Ross the population has had to seek alternative water supplies because of an ongoing blue-green algae outbreak, and on King Island blooms are appearing in the water catchment dams. "There are marine coastal blooms in the Huon and Statewide they are extending and lasting longer.

"These are subtle but definite effects of climate change. "It would appear that water scarcity is likely to persist, and a range of adaptation measures will be required to ensure the viability of communities and food supplies in the longer term."

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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Obama to ration CO2

What happens when you put ignoramuses in charge of a government

President Barack Obama's climate czar said Sunday the Environmental Protection Agency will soon issue a rule on the regulation of carbon dioxide, finding that it represents a danger to the public. The White House is pressing Congress to draft and pass legislation that would cut greenhouse gases by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050, threatening to use authority under the Clean Air Act if legislators don't move fast enough or create strong enough provisions.

Carol Browner, Obama's special advisor on climate change and energy, also said the administration is seeking to establish a national standard for auto emissions that could mean tougher efficiency mandates for auto makers. The new standard could be fashioned after strict proposals developed in California that would limit greenhouse gas emissions - initiatives that car makers have vigorously fought. The comments - the first by the administration on the topic - could lead to another blow for beleaguered car companies such as General Motors (GM) and Ford (F) that are already tottering.

"EPA's going to look at Mass. Vs. EPA and will make an endangerment finding," Browner told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview. The Supreme Court ordered the EPA in the Mass. Vs. EPA case to determine if carbon dioxide endangered public health or welfare. "The next step is a notice of proposed rulemaking" for new regulations on CO2 emissions, Browner said on the sidelines of the National Governors Association meeting, one of her first public appearances since the inauguration.

Browner declined to say exactly when the EPA would issue the finding or rulemaking, but EPA chief Lisa Jackson has indicated it could be on April 2, the anniversary of Mass Vs. EPA. Obama EPA chief Lisa Jackson said earlier in the month that her office would soon begin drafting rules for regulating CO2. The agency has been intensely reviewing and updating an existing endangerment finding made last year by agency officials - but blocked by the previous administration - that found carbon dioxide threatened human welfare.

Officially recognizing that carbon dioxide is a danger to the public would trigger regulation of the greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, refineries, chemical plants, cement firms, vehicles and any other emitting sectors across the economy. Industry fears it could shut down the economy, not only preventing plants from operating and spurring a dramatic retooling of the energy sector but also pushing up costs and hurting the international competitiveness for a raft of sectors. Environmentalists, meanwhile, say action by the administration is required by law and need to pressure lawmakers to act.

But Browner said the administration prefers that Congress draft legislation rather than CO2 to be regulated under the Clean Air Act because lawmakers could develop a bill that could more deftly regulate the greenhouse gas through a cap- and-trade system. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday he aims to pass a climate change bill by the end of the summer, and Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., head of the panel responsible for drafting a CO2 bill, said he wanted a bill approved by the Memorial Day holiday in May.

Browner also declined to say what the administration's target date for Congress to pass a climate bill before accelerating the Clean Air Act rulemaking, but she called Waxman's schedule an "aggressive" one. "In the next several weeks we will begin to see the shape of legislation...( and) we will work with Congress as they shape it," she later told a group of Western Governors.

The climate czar dismissed critics of fast, stringent climate change laws who have said that the existing financial crisis would only be exacerbated by putting a premium on emitting carbon dioxide. She said businesses hoping to invest in CO2 mitigation projects needed more certain policy signals to plow cash into projects and companies, and that the rulemaking process would create a buffer for action and compliance.

Critics of putting an expensive premium on carbon say that such a schedule may be overly optimistic given the global financial crisis and the ramifications that putting a cap on greenhouse gases would have across nearly every sector of the economy. Tough action too fast, they say, not only could curb manufacturing and create an energy crisis by halting new power plant construction, but also could force a rapid migration of businesses overseas to cheaper energy climes.

Specifically, Obama wants an economy-wide law - instead of just some major emitting sectors - and to auction off 100% of the emission credits, which analysts say could exponentially increase the cost of emitting, as well as the pay-off for low-carbon projects.

Browner also said the administration had directed the EPA and the Department of Transportation to develop a national policy for auto emissions. The DOT is currently developing new auto efficiency standards, but the White House and the EPA are currently considering a request from California to implement their own much stricter standards, which consider greenhouse gas emissions rather than just fuel efficiency and are likely to be followed in a more that a dozen other states. The administration could seek to implement the California standards or a negotiated version of them across the country, however, Browner indicated. "We need a unified national policy when it comes to clean vehicles," Browner told the governors, adding that the Department of Transportation and EPA needed to cooperate and determine the impact of both conventional pollution and greenhouse gas emissions and give auto makers the time and policy direction necessary to re-tool their plants. "Both agencies have to meet their responsibilities...we're just trying to figure out how do you do it in a way that the car companies have a clear ( mandate)," Browner told reporters after the event.

Car makers have expressed concern not only about the costs of meeting the tough new standards, but also having to make cars that have to meet two different mandates.

Separately, Browner said the administration was also going to create an inter-agency task force to site a new national electricity transmission grid to meet both growing demand and the President's planned renewable energy expansion. Siting has been a major bottleneck to renewable growth, and lawmakers and administration officials have said they're likely to seek greater federal powers that would give expanded eminent domain authorities.

SOURCE

Some comments on the above from various sources:

1). What's tragic is that we're heading into carbon rationing for no justifiable pretext at ALL. This isn't food or fuel or anything that has obvious value. It's a trace gas. Right now you're inhaling 24 times more ARGON than carbon dioxide, for crying out loud. Ration this trace gas and neither the atmosphere nor global temperatures will know the difference. But people will starve and die and millions will live in misery. For what? For what?

2). Such a decision is irrational and misguided ipso facto, in addition to being economically devastating. Let alone that there is no evidence of CO2 causing global warming, there's no evidence that the increasing amount is principally ours.

3). Since this decision was signaled during the campaign, then after Obama's election, then by appointing Browner and the others, it would seem likely that the markets have already taken it into account and declined accordingly. But perhaps not: even the savviest investors have had a lot of news to take into account; and the potential effects of regulating CO2 under the Clean Air Act are complex and uncertain. It may thus be the case that as the reality approaches and becomes clearer, the stock market will make a major correction downward. A 7000 Dow Industrials may look very good in a few months. As Chris Horner has suggested to CEI's global warming team, we should be out front explaining over and over that this is going to cause enormous fundamental economic damage. The economy cannot recover on the basis of permanent energy-rationing regulations. The medicine they seem eager to give us will force us to live at a lower level of economic activity for as long as the energy diet lasts.

4). 94% of the carbon in the atmosphere has the same isotopic signature as the natural background.
6% signals an organic origin, fossil fuels included.
3% is what the IPCC itself says man is contributing.
Yet all the talk is about amputating the human fraction while no one is willing to mention what a small fraction it is. I'm afraid that if this hysteria does succeed, it will be because it wasn't fundamentally opposed.





Stop the CO2 Madness!

When The New York Times publishes a story, as it did on February 19, regarding the next step in the Obama administration's intention to destroy the U.S. economy, it's a very good idea to pay attention.

"E.P.A. Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide" was the headline of John M. Broder's article. "The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to act for the first time to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists blame for the warming of the planet, according to top Obama administration officials."

Those "top Obama administration officials" are unnamed and so too are the "scientists" claiming that the planet is "warming." For the record, although you will never read this in The New York Times, the planet is NOT warming. It is COOLING. It has been cooling for a decade now and it is no secret to meteorologists who track the day to day temperatures or climatologists who study long term trends.

On March 8-10, more than 500 of those scientists who dispute the vast global warming hoax will meet in New York for a second international conference on climate change sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a non-profit, free market think tank.

Joining those scientists and others will be Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic and current president of the European Union. Also participating will be American astronaut, Dr. Jack Schmitt, Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and other leading scientists who have led the effort to shed the light of truth on the global warming hoax.

You can be sure of one thing. They will all continue to be attacked as crazies denying the "consensus" that Al Gore is always braying about. Science is not about "consensus", it is about reproducible facts. All the "facts" about melting glaciers, dramatically rising sea levels, and other claims by the GW crowd have been refuted.

The claims of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the basis for the Kyoto Protocols to limit carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have been demolished repeatedly but the mainstream press refuses to report this, nor the fact that the IPCC is a political, not scientific, entity designed to advance the global warming hoax. Many of the scientists initially enticed to participate have since resigned. The vast bulk, easily 80% or more of those cited as IPCC members are not scientists who deal with issues of climate.

The IPCC's claims have been based entirely on computer models. This in itself should have raised flags long ago. These models, as Hans Schreuder, an analytical chemist, has pointed out, "regard the earth as a flat disk bathed in a constant 24 hour haze of sunlight, without north and south poles, without clouds, and without any relationship to the real planet we live on."

The claim that rising levels of carbon dioxide are responsible for a global warming that is not happening is entirely without scientific merit and, if for no other reason, should not be the basis for implementing EPA regulation of so-called "greenhouse gas" emissions under the Clean Air Act.

While it is true that there has been an increase in CO2 since the end of the last mini-ice age that lasted from 1500 to 1850, there is no research that demonstrates CO2 and an increase in the Earth's temperature has any relationship. What warming occurred was entirely natural. Indeed, CO2, at less than 400 parts per million by volume, cannot influence atmospheric temperature or climate in any measurable way.

CO2 represents just 0.038% of the Earth's atmosphere. The dominant factors in the Earth overall temperature are the Sun, the oceans, and even clouds.

If the U.S. weather service climate models are unable to predict changes in the weather by more than a week's time, why would anyone believe that the IPCC's models could predict it twenty, fifty or a hundred years from now?

Despite this, the EPA is tasked to impose regulations on CO2 emissions that would wreck the economy by requiring a "cap-and-trade" of "carbon credits" that would impact every single business and industrial activity. The European Union tried this and it has proved a massive failure and a huge drag on its economy.

Carbon dioxide is not a "pollutant" as the Supreme Court has ruled. How can the Earth's second most vital gas, other than oxygen, be a pollutant? Not one single piece of vegetation on Earth could exist without CO2. Without vegetation, no animal life including our own could exist on Earth.

The notion that the EPA would regulate it is preposterous. It is absurd. It is criminal. It is immoral. It has no basis whatever in the actual science of the world's climate. It is based on a massive, global hoax masterminded by the United Nations and carried out by charlatans such as Al Gore and NASA's James Hansen.

It is, however, the vehicle for the political control of the world's economy that would fulfill the United Nation's global government schemes and, if enacted here in America, would mark the destruction of an economy that is the engine of the world's economy, despite its current difficulties.

The Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years. The assertion that human beings and/or industrial activity have any effect on its atmosphere is an instrument of fascism.

SOURCE






Wind jobs vs coal jobs revealed to be 'bogus comparison'?

Yesterday's FT had a largely forgettable op-ed by Al Gore and Ban Ki-Moon on green aspects of economic stimulus packages. However, it did have this interesting statement that caught my attention:

In the US, there are now more jobs in the wind industry than in the entire coal industry.

First, is this in fact true? Second, if it is true, how can it be that wind can ever be cost competitive with coal? Consider that coal, according to the US EIA was responsible for generating 155,000 thousand megawatt-hours of energy production in November, 2008. Wind was responsible for 1,300 thousand megawatt hours. This means that the US saw about 120 times as much energy produced from coal as wind. If it takes more employees to generate 0.8% of the energy as coal produces, how can it ever be cost competitive?

Something does not add up. Someone please explain this.

OK, a diligent reader writes in with the explanation:

Gore and Moon are using misleading, bogus information, as documented by the Christian Science Monitor. Here is an excerpt from the CSM:

Earlier this week, Fortune's eco-blog, Green Wombat, ran a story under the headline, "Wind jobs outstrip the coal industry." Blogger Todd Woody cites new report from the American Wind Energy Association that about 85,000 people are now employed by the wind power industry, up from 50,000 a year ago. Mr. Woody then says that "the coal industry employs about 81,000 workers," citing a 2007 report from the Department of Energy. Woody calls this comparison "a talking point in the green jobs debate."

The story was republished on the Huffington Post, cited by Mother Jones magazine, and has been bouncing around the green blogosphere for the past few days. But it's a bogus comparison. According to the wind energy report, those 85,000 jobs in wind power are as "varied as turbine component manufacturing, construction and installation of wind turbines, wind turbine operations and maintenance, legal and marketing services, and more." The 81,000 coal jobs counted by the Department of Energy are only miners. Their figure excludes those who haul the coal around the country, as well as those who work in coal power plants.

It is a good thing that it is not true, as the CSM write, "If it really took that many people to provide so little wind energy, it would never become competitive with fossil fuels."

SOURCE

SOME GREENIE NEWS FROM AUSTRALIA

Three articles below:

Major Australian political parties in climate of confusion

MALCOLM Turnbull's new focus on greenhouse gas reduction policy is simply a diversion from internal problems in the opposition, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says. The Opposition leader - who has been fending off renewed speculation about the ambitions of Peter Costello - has seized on the Government's emissions trading scheme (ETS) policy, flagging a Senate inquiry to replace the one the Government axed last week.

But today Liberal MPs were unwilling to define their policy with frontbencher Christopher Pyne telling ABC Television: "Everything's on the table.'' Emissions trading spokesman Andrew Robb was also reluctant to provide more details. "We will specify that in clearer terms later on,'' he said, when asked for a specific reduction target. Queensland backbencher Stuart Robert was happy to attack the Government, but unable to offer clear advice on where the Opposition was heading. "The Government's ETS will cost jobs,'' Mr Robert said in Canberra.

Mr Turnbull has also signalled a more ambitious greenhouse gas reduction target than the Government's 5-15 per cent by 2020, and a less complex scheme for achieving the target. The Government has dismissed the new stance, saying it is a mirage.

However the Government is also grappling with what the final shape of its emissions policy will be. Senator Wong says the Government has always acknowledged the need for additional policies to its planned emissions trading scheme. But turning Australia from one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the world to a low-pollution one requires the "hard'' economic reform of an ETS.

"Mr Turnbull knows this,'' Senator Wong said. The only reason he is walking away from the ETS is because of deep divisions in the Liberal Party, she said. "Many ... simply do not want to take action on climate change.''

Tasmanian Labor MP Dick Adams said he leant toward starting with a lower reduction target. "We can't go about sending our capital offshore and therefore costing us one hell of a lot of jobs. "I'm a minimalist in this debate, let's start, let's get a scheme out there and then let's deal with that over a period of years.''

South Australian Government backbencher Amanda Rishworth said it was hard to believe anything the Opposition said about climate change. "I don't believe what Malcolm Turnbull does say because he's dealing with a party that is filled with climate change sceptics.'' [Heartening news!]

SOURCE






Warmist laws to butcher Australian farm production

The nation's agricultural output would be slashed by $2.4 billion a year by 2020 under Kevin Rudd's carbon pollution reduction scheme. Losses to the farming sector would balloon to $10.9 billion a year by 2030, driven by production declines of more than 25 per cent in the beef and wool industries, a report by the Centre for International Economics has found. The forecasts are based on the federal Government's White Paper assumption that agriculture will have to pay for its emissions by 2016.

The study, prepared for the Australian Farm Institute in conjunction with Australian Wool Innovation and Dairy Australia, finds the sheepmeats, pork and dairy sectors will also be hit hard, with production drops by 2030 of 21 per cent, 10.4 per cent and 8.1 per cent respectively. Producers will experience a big rise in ETS-related costs even before agriculture's inclusion in the scheme because of increased energy, fertiliser and transport costs, the study finds.

The increased cost of Australian products is expected to cause export volumes to decline. Exports of beef and sheep are projected to decline by 14 per cent and 10 per cent respectively by 2030 if agriculture is included in an emissions trading scheme. David Pearce, of the Centre for International Economics, said the research body had been surprised by the size of the fallout expected to hit the livestock-based industries of beef, sheepmeat, wool and dairy. "There is a cost increase for the cropping industries but nowhere near as big as for the meat-based," he said. "One of the key things we show is that agriculture will be affected by the scheme whether or not it is a participant. "Parts of agriculture are energy intensive; they use inputs which involve energy, fertilisers, chemicals; they also use a lot of transport in order to shift commodities around the country."

Peter Heelan, 52, who runs cattle at his Ulcanbah Station, 90km from Clermont in central Queensland, said he knew one thing about the Prime Minister's ETS: it was going to cost him money, which could not be worse timed following the floods and droughts that had hit rural Australia in recent years. "Everyone in the bush is hoping the ETS will go away," Mr Heelan said. "We're at the end of the line. We can't pass it on but everything will be passed on to us - the cost of electricity, transport, any fodder you've got to buy, it's all likely to rise. "The ETS will send some people to the wall. I'm sure a lot of bush people have large debts after floods and droughts. Things are tight enough as they are."

Australian Farm Institute head Mick Keogh said the report showed the impact of the emissions trading scheme would be far greater than the projected slowdown under the unlikely worst case scenarios developed by Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics. "The biggest threat to agriculture over the next half century is not climate change, it is climate change policy," Mr Keogh said, adding that the ETS had the potential to do profound and long-lasting damage to the sector. "Even the most conservative projection of 9 per cent reduction in the beef industry by 2020 represents $1.5 billion reduction in output, which would lead to a significant loss of job opportunities and major changes to regional economies," Mr Keogh said. "That would amount to a massive change in rural communities."

SOURCE






Increased croc danger due to protection

A different Battle of the Boyne

Dangerous saltwater crocodiles may be expanding into new territory in southern Queensland under a "huge recovery" in numbers, experts have warned. One world-renowned crocodile expert believes Queensland needs to reconsider culling, with increased sightings of maneater-sized reptiles in southern parts of the state. Prominent researchers Professor Grahame Webb, from Darwin, and Professor Gordon Grigg, from the University of Queensland, said the state's existing crocodile management plan was "inadequate". They say there is insufficient data about crocodile movements and numbers.

But Environmental Protection Agency director-general Terry Wall hit back, saying that since November last year, the EPA had responded quickly and effectively to more than 40 separate crocodile reports and incidents around the state [Not counting those who got killed and eaten by crocs, I guess]. "There is no evidence of crocodile populations expanding beyond the accepted range, the southerly extreme of which is the Boyne River," Mr Wall said. "Crocodiles do, from time to time, turn up south of the Boyne and a large animal was shot in the Logan River south of Brisbane in 1905. This is a rare occurrence." He denied there had been any explosion in saltwater crocodile numbers, saying "available data showed population recovery was slow" due to predators eating eggs, the low survival rate of hatchlings and illegal fishing.

But the experts say there has been too little research. Professor Webb, head of the United Nations crocodile specialists group, said claims of a static population were "nonsense". "There has been a huge recovery in population," he said, suggesting it might be time to bring back the gun.

His comments come amid heated debate over culling after the death of crocodile attack victim Jeremy Doble, 5, who was taken by a 4.3m crocodile on the Daintree River on February 8. His parents, Steve and Sharon Doble, who operate crocodile tours, asked that the animal not be harmed. It will be sold to a crocodile farm.

Professor Webb said many Queenslanders appeared to be croc-huggers. "They are a large and dangerous predator that extends up and down the east coast of Queensland," Professor Webb said. "There is nothing wrong with removing crocs by shooting or culling because their populations are robust. "Crocs cause the biggest problem when they suddenly appear in areas, when they are moving around trying to find new territory." Professor Webb said that while the climate and terrain of the Northern Territory and parts of Cape York was ideal for crocodiles, they were known to move as far south as Coffs Harbour in New South Wales.

University of Queensland Emeritus Professor of Zoology Gordon Grigg, who is writing a book on crocodile biology, said the EPA needed to do more regular surveys. "We've had sporadic surveys and I think we'd be better if they were done more frequently," he said. "The EPA needs to know a lot more about the animals, where they are, what numbers, and where they can be in possible conflict with humans." Only then could informed decisions be made about how to handle them.

He said reports of resident crocs in the state's southeast should not be dismissed. "It is certainly not impossible, salties would not be able to breed and raise young as far south as Coffs Harbour or Brisbane, but certainly a largish croc is able to come down this far south. "I suspect if they did come this far they'd be lost, they'd have swum the wrong way, they'd be strays."

Professor Craig Franklin, of the University of Queensland, said humans were encroaching more and more on crocodile territory as people ventured more into their zone. "In the end we have to learn to live alongside crocodiles as we will never completely remove them," he said. "My fear is that people who believe a cull is the solution will ultimately lead people into a false sense of security, simply because you might remove them for the short term, but next week, next month or next year another one will appear in the system."

Estuarine crocodiles, also known as salties, are protected nationally and listed as "vulnerable" in Queensland. Hunting was banned in 1971. It is estimated there are up to 80,000 wild crocodiles around Australia. In 2007, an EPA vessel-based survey of 47 Queensland rivers stretching from the Endeavour River near Cooktown to the Burnett River near Bundaberg, identified 289 crocodiles of varying sizes. The next study is set down for late this year.

Under the latest EPA estuarine crocodile management plan released last month, authorities are allowed to remove up to 50 problem crocodiles a year from the wild to be placed in captive crocodile facility. Last year seven were removed, compared with 12 the previous year. All crocodiles trapped south of the Boyne are removed from the wild. Satellite tracking of three large male crocodiles, between 3m and 4m long, shows the prehistoric creatures can swim up to 30km a day.

One relocated croc swam 400km in 20 days, displaying an impressive homing instinct by returning to within metres of its former territory on the other side of Cape York Peninsula in a single journey. [So much for all the good that relocating them does]

SOURCE

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Don't Count on 'Countless' Green Jobs

Obama is an economic illiterate. Moving people from productive jobs to less productive ones is what his proposals add up to and that hikes costs for everyone

In signing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act this week in Denver, President Barack Obama claimed that the law -- which among other things will ramp up funding for renewable energy development -- is "laying the groundwork for new green energy economies that can create countless well-paying jobs." This statement follows promises he made during his campaign for the presidency. Mr. Obama said, for example, that he'd create as many as five million such jobs by investing over $150 billion over 10 years on wind, solar, biofuels and other renewable energy sources.

He's also proposed a federal "renewable portfolio standard" that would require 25% of our electricity to come from clean sources -- a mandate that would boost demand for windmills, solar farms, and other clean but expensive technologies (nuclear power, however, would be excluded). This transformed energy economy, Mr. Obama said at a campaign debate in Nashville, Tenn., last October, would be an "engine of economic growth" to rival the computer.

If the green-jobs claim sounds too good to be true, that's because it is. There's an unavoidable problem with renewable-energy technologies: From an economic standpoint, they're big losers. Renewables simply cannot produce the large volumes of useful, reliable energy that our economy needs at attractive prices, which is exactly why government subsidizes them. The subsidies involved are considerable. The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in early 2008 that the government subsidizes solar energy at $24.34 per megawatt-hour (MWh) and wind power at $23.37 per MWh. Yet even with decades of these massive handouts, as well as numerous state-level mandates for utilities to use green power, wind and solar energy contribute less than 1% of our nation's electricity.

Compare the subsidies to renewables with those extended to natural gas (25 cents per MWh in subsidies), coal (44 cents), hydroelectricity (67 cents), and nuclear power ($1.59). These are the energy sources (along with oil, which undergirds transportation) that do the heavy lifting in our energy economy.

The alternative technologies at the heart of Mr. Obama's plan, relying on mandates and far greater handouts, will inevitably raise energy prices -- and high power prices are job killers. Industries that make physical products, whether cars or chemicals or paper cups, are energy-intensive and gravitate to low-cost-energy locales.

With some of the highest electricity prices in the country, California and New York have hemorrhaged manufacturing jobs. California-based Google houses its massive server farms in states like North Carolina and Oregon, which have lower electricity costs. Policies that drive up energy costs nationwide, as Mr. Obama intends, will inevitably drive more manufacturing jobs overseas.

What about jobs in the traditional industries currently supplying Americans with reliable, affordable energy? The American Petroleum Institute reports that the oil and gas industry employs 1.6 million Americans. Coal mining directly and indirectly supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, according to the National Mining Association and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A radical plan to transform our energy economy will put an untold number of these men and women out of work.

Digging deeper each month to pay for expensive renewable energy, consumers will have less to save or spend in other areas of the economy. Killing jobs in efficient industries to create jobs in inefficient ones is hardly a recipe for economic success. There may be legitimate arguments for taking dramatic steps to fight climate change. Boosting the economy isn't one of them.

SOURCE






California's 'Green Jobs' Experiment Isn't Going Well

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was all smiles in 2006 when he signed into law the toughest anti-global-warming regulations of any state. Mr. Schwarzenegger and his green supporters boasted that the regulations would steer California into a prosperous era of green jobs, renewable energy, and technological leadership. Instead, since 2007 -- in anticipation of the new mandates -- California has led the nation in job losses.

The regulations created a cap-and-trade system, similar to proposed federal global-warming measures, by limiting the CO2 that utilities, trucking companies and other businesses can emit, and imposed steep new taxes on companies that exceed the caps. Since energy is an input in everything that's produced, this will raise the cost of production inside California's borders.

Now, as the Golden State prepares to implement this regulatory scheme, employers are howling. It's become clear to nearly everyone that the plan's backers have underestimated its negative impact and exaggerated the benefits. "We've been sold a false bill of goods," is how Republican Assemblyman Roger Niello, who has been the GOP's point man on environmental issues in the legislature, put it to me.

The environmental plan was built on the notion that imposing some $23 billion of new taxes and fees on households (through higher electricity bills) and employers will cost the economy nothing, while also reducing greenhouse gases. Almost no one believes that anymore except for the five members of the California Air Resources Board (CARB). This is the state's air-quality regulator, which voted unanimously in December to stick with the cap-and-trade system despite the recession. CARB justified its go-ahead by issuing what almost all experts agree is a rigged study on the economic impact of the cap-and-trade system. The study concludes that the plan "will not only significantly reduce California's greenhouse gas emissions, but will also have a net positive effect on California's economic growth through 2020."

This finding elicited a chorus of hallelujahs from environmental groups. The state finally discovered a do-good policy that pays for itself. Californians can still scurry around in their cars, heat up their Jacuzzis, and help save the planet. But there was a problem. The CARB had commissioned five economists from around the country to critique this study. They panned it.

Harvard's Robert Stavins, chairman of the federal Environmental Protection Agency's economic advisory committee under Bill Clinton, told me that "None of us knew who the other reviewers were, but we all came up with almost the same conclusion. The report was severely flawed and systematically underestimated costs." Another reviewer, UCLA Prof. Matthew E. Kahn, a supporter of the new regulations, criticized the "free lunch" aspect of the report. "The net dollar costs of each of these regulations is likely to be much larger than is reported," he concluded. Mr. Stavins points out that if these regulations are a net boon for businesses and the economy, "why would you need to impose regulations like cap and trade?"

The Sacramento Bee, which has editorialized in support of the new regulations, was aghast at CARB's twisted science. We have to "be candid about the real costs of the transition," a cautionary editorial advised. "Energy prices will rise, and major capital investment will be needed in public transit and new transmission lines. Industries that are energy intensive will move elsewhere."

The green lobby has lectured us for years that global warming is all about the sanctity of science. Those who question the "scientific consensus" on catastrophic atmospheric changes are belittled as "deniers." Now, in assessing the costs, the greens readily cook the books and throw good science out the window. "To most of the most strident supporters of this legislation," says Mr. Niello, "the economic costs don't really matter anyway, because we are supposedly facing an environmental apocalypse."

Mr. Schwarzenegger fits into that camp. He recently declared: "I recommend very strongly that we move forward . . . . You will always have people saying this will lose jobs."

Meanwhile, the state is losing jobs, a lot of them. California's unemployment rate hit 9.3% in December, up from 4.9% in December 2006. There are now 1.5 million Californians out of work. The state has the fourth-highest housing foreclosure rate in the nation, has lost more businesses than any state in recent years, and is facing a $40 billion deficit. With cap and trade firmly in place, the economic situation is only likely to get worse.

Other states are plundering the Golden State's industries by convincing businesses to pick up stakes and move out before the cap-and-trade earthquake hits. Governors and Washington politicians who want to reduce their "carbon footprint," but are worried about the more immediate crises of cascading unemployment, unbalanced budgets, and the housing-market collapse, would be wise not to follow California's lead. Green policies have a tendency to push states into the red.

SOURCE







Something else that is not in the "models"

Earth's Cracks May Contribute to Global Warming

Whether devastating faults, dank caves or mud cracks on a drying desert plain, Earth's surface is riddled with fractures. Now a new study had found that the cracks exhale large quantities of gas, perhaps enough to affect global warming. Noam Weisbrod of Ben Gurion University of the Negev and a team of researchers monitored a crack about 2 meters long (6.5 feet) and 1 meter (3.3 feet) deep for two years in the Negev Desert is Israel. Each night, they watched as warm air in the crack drew water vapor out of the surrounding rock, and lifted it into the cold evening air.

If air in the crack is just 7 degrees warmer than the ambient temperature, it is buoyant enough to rise out of any crack in the ground bigger than 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) across, bringing with it any gases that leak out of the surrounding soil or rock. But the team was surprised to find that the crack they studied gave off water vapor up to 200 times faster than areas without fractures.

"Sometimes we go for walks at night, and you put your face over the mouth of a cave and you can feel a warm wind coming out," Weisbrod said. "Usually it's a nice hot wind in the cold air."

Like carbon dioxide, water vapor is a greenhouse gas that plays a crucial role in the way Earth's atmosphere traps heat from the sun. Though the team only measured water vapor, Weisbrod said it's likely that cracks also regularly emit elevated amounts of CO2 and nitrogen oxides.

This doesn't only happen in extremely dry areas, he added. The Negev is arid, but roughly equivalent in dryness to the area around Los Angeles, Calif., the American southwest, and many regions around the world. Fractures are common in soils and rocks in wet regions as well, Dan Yakir of the Weizman Institute of Science said.

Taken as a whole, emissions from fractures in the uppermost meter of the planet's crust may make a significant contribution to greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But Weisbrod stressed it's too early to make such a conclusion; the team only studied one crack in detail out of millions. "This has the potential to be important globally," Yakir said. "The biosphere soaks up 30 percent of the carbon, and soil respiration is a very large part of that. If cracks remove CO2 from soils much faster than usual, it's important. But this study is only a first step."

SOURCE







Former IPCC lead editor: Co2 disaster is allegedly coming, but we might not actually see the evidence until 2040

This follows the No. 1 rule of good prophecy: Make sure that you put the prophesied event far enough in the future so that you will be dead before they find out that you were wrong. Background on John T. Houghton (born 1931): Sir John Theodore Houghton FRS CBE was the co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) scientific assessment working group. He was the lead editor of first three IPCC reports. He was professor in atmospheric physics at the University of Oxford, former Chief Executive at the Met Office and founder of the Hadley Centre.

The expert who dubbed global warming a "weapon of mass destruction" will present the scientific evidence for global warming and outline the actions required to halt climate change at a public event in St Andrews this week.

Meteorologist Sir John Houghton predicts that disaster awaits if action is not taken to combat man-made global warming. He will explore the moral and theological obligations that he believes we should all address....

Talking in advance of the lecture, Sir John explained, "One cabinet minister asked me, "When's all this going to happen?" I replied that in 20 or 30 years we can expect to see some large effects. "Oh" he said, "that's OK, it'll see me out". But it won't see his children or grandchildren out."

SOURCE






Opposing view on global warming will be aired

'Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant,' noted skeptic will tell audience at UT.

For Barney Groten, a retired business and technology consultant who lives in Southwest Austin, taking potshots at global warming remains a largely underground pursuit. In the face of scientific consensus about global warming and its causes, he has written a treatise aimed at puncturing holes in climate change science, which he says is overblown and alarmist. He and a like-minded club of contrarians search Web sites for signs of environmental hypocrisy, say the mainstream media never gives them a fair shake and shoot sarcasms about Al Gore via e-mail.

But he stops short of broadcasting his views to the general public. "I try not to bring it up," Groten, 75, says. "One doesn't want to be a bore about something-you-understand-and-the-other-guy-doesn't sort of thing."

This afternoon at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas, a skeptic standard-bearer, S. Fred Singer, will deliver a talk titled "Nature - Not Human Activity - Rules the Climate." "Evidence shows human influence is not detectable. And natural effect is quite large," Singer said he will tell his audience. Singer, the founder of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, has traveled the country as a climate-change naysayer.

He is "regarded with reverence," said Dan Miller, a publisher at the Heartland Institute, which puts out a newsletter asserting no scientific consensus on global warming and gets money from energy corporations. "He has been in this battle, in the trenches for a long time. He's a warrior of epic proportions on this issue." Asked about his military metaphors, Miller said: "We're under attack by a lot of alarmists."

At issue is the relationship between carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas emitted by automobiles and power plants, and global warming. "Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and any attempt to control emissions is an inappropriate use of money," Singer said in a telephone interview from Virginia, where he's based.

Climate scientists, however, hold that carbon dioxide emissions have a significant effect on a changing climate. A 2007 climate change study by an international group of scientists found that "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" and said with "very high confidence" that the net impact of "human activities since 1750 has been one of warming."

Atmospheric and climate scientists at UT and Texas A&M University have said that temperatures will rise in Texas, coastal communities are at risk from rising sea levels in the Gulf, and weather conditions are likely to include more severe droughts and flooding. Many of them have asked lawmakers to address the issue, but Texas, the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the nation, has no official climate-change policy. Gov. Rick Perry has said there is scientific doubt about whether people are responsible for climate change.

Some Austinites are also dubious about carbon dioxide regulation. "The government is concerned about CO2, a colorless, odorless gas that makes my plants grow," said Matt Szekely, a 38-year-old software engineer who lives in North Austin and describes himself as a pragmatist. "I'm not riding around crushing salamanders in a Hummer." As far as these skeptics are concerned, they are the last realists in Austin. To them, the holes in theories about man-made contributions to global warming are as plain as clouds in the sky.

"I don't think anybody who understands it and is intellectually equipped well enough to stand back from it will disagree," said Skip Cameron, 69, who became interested in weather through his amateur radio hobby and lives in Northwest Austin. He decries the "prostitution of science" on climate change and the "dearth of media coverage of alternative opinions."

But most scientists who specialize in atmospheric and climate science say there are not two sides to the argument. Rong Fu, a UT climate science professor who reviewed Singer's 2008 paper on climate change that has the same title as his talk, said Singer cherry-picks and misuses data and cites works that were not peer-reviewed. "He's not doing firsthand research, and he does not have regular communication with the rest of the climate research community," she said. "I'm not sure he's even on the fringe."

But she said she thought his talk would be "healthy for the academic environment" and said she was encouraging students to go listen. Chip Groat, the acting dean of the Jackson School, said that discussions of climate change can be "strongly emotional and not technical." "With discussions of climate change and human impacts, it's sometimes a matter of, 'Do you accept what the science is telling you?' or 'What do you believe, almost as a matter of faith or religious belief?'" Groat said.

SOURCE





Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd isolated on emissions trading scheme

The Rudd Government is increasingly isolated on the emissions trading scheme, with business supporters demanding further concessions to mitigate its immediate impact and green groups and the Coalition intensifying their attacks. A day after the Government was forced to confirm publicly it was sticking by its plans to introduce an ETS in July next year, after cancelling an inquiry into the scheme, the Opposition accused the Government of being divided on the issue and the Business Council of Australia said more action was needed to reduce its impact on business during the economic crisis. Opposition climate change spokesman Greg Hunt said indecision and internal division were behind Thursday's decision to dump a House of Representatives inquiry into the ETS.

The BCA, which gave guarded approval to Labor's plans last year, now says the Government has to find a way to minimise the initial cost of the scheme if it comes into effect in July next year. Policy director Maria Tarrant said the economic crisis meant "the Government has to think of a way to minimise the scheme's impact in the early years after its introduction on July 1 2010". "There are likely to be big questions as to whether companies will have the cash flow to buy the permits they need, or invest in the emission-reducing technologies they need at that time and still remain viable," Ms Tarrant said. "It could put many companies' ongoing operations at extreme risk."

With green criticism intensifying, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong yesterday warned environmentalists the ETS was their best chance to see an early reduction in Australian greenhouse gas emissions. Green groups have argued the scheme's lack of ambition and already generous industry compensation means it is fatally flawed. Senator Wong said: "We have a chance now to reduce Australia's emissions next year or, if we fail, to simply allow our emissions to grow. The most responsible thing to do, even in this economic environment, is to start the hard task of reducing our emissions right now."

Australia Institute executive director Richard Denniss and others have advanced the argument that an ETS means an individual's or state's efforts to voluntarily reduce emissions have no impact on the country's total level of greenhouse gas, and that a carbon tax would be a better answer. But Senator Wong rejected those arguments as well. "If you are serious about climate change a carbon tax is not the answer," Senator Wong told The Weekend Australian.

But the federal Coalition appears to be hardening in its opposition to the scheme. And the Australian Industry Group agrees the Government needs to "look at every option" to ameliorate the early costs, warning the effects of the economic crisis risk "fracturing any consensus around this issue".

Among options being canvassed by industry groups are a plan advocated by Professor Ross Garnaut for a low fixed price on carbon in the first two years of the scheme, offering trade-exposed industries all their permits for free in first few years, starting the scheme as a "dry run" without actually charging for permits and offering industries exemptions or holidays from the cost of the renewable energy target.

Coalition emissions trading spokesman Andrew Robb told Sky news yesterday the scheme was a "total failure". And Australian Industry Group chief executive Heather Ridout said the global financial crisis had "amplified the negative effects of the emissions trading scheme many times over".

Executives from Virgin Blue also told the Senate fuel and energy committee yesterday they were "deeply concerned about the planned timing of the introduction" of the emissions trading scheme. "Even in the most benign circumstances, the (emissions trading scheme) is effectively a tax on investment and growth," said Virgin Blue general manager Simon Thorpe.

The Government is drafting its legislation. It says it intends to try to pass it through both houses of parliament by June, but most observers believe debate will continue later in the year. The Greens have said they are willing to negotiate with the Government over the legislation, but also believe the scheme as it stands is deeply flawed.

SOURCE

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"THE GUARDIAN" AND THE REAL 'CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS'

An email from Dr. David Whitehouse [me@davidwhitehouse.com]

There is a good example of seeing what you want to see in climate data, cherry picking convenient data, spin and downright misrepresentation in today's media. Normally one ignores such stuff. It's obvious that when some 'media commentators', especially those without a science background and an extremist attitude, temporarily run out of strident rhetoric they turn towards the old standby of bashing 'climate change deniers' - the very phrase of which shows the bias and stupidity of their language and the unscientific nature of their outlook.

To wit, look at George Monbiot in today's Guardian. He talks of myths about climate change being promulgated in the media by manic and distorting commentators. The obvious comment about black kettles and pots comes to mind. A lot more scientific rigour is needed to support such a case and I can't decide if he is just sloppy with his figures or cavalier with them.

In proving that there is no recent standstill in global average temperatures Monbiot quotes the most recent WMO statement, but he does so selectively and not fairly, passing over their figure 2 which originates from the Met Office. Now look at this and tell me if there is no qualitative change in the data for the past ten years. To say there isn't would really make one a 'climate change denier.' Note the green data point at the end.

The WMO's figure 2 is here. Note that 2008 is tenth in the list of warmest years but that the top ten warmest years are all within each others error bars, i.e. statistically formally indistinguishable, that is (for Monbiot's benefit) unchanging.

Of course, if one then says, but look at the longer trend, over the past 50 years as quoted by Monbiot there is an obvious warming trend (which nobody denies.) But this is comparing apples and oranges. Monbiot wants to deny the past decade temperature stasis (no longer a minority view among scientists) by talking about data over a longer period and not sticking to the point. He's not the only one. In a press release the Met Office says that, "Over the past ten years global temperatures have warmed more slowly than the long-term trend."

On the face of it this is true but it does not tell the whole story, far from it. The Met Office performs a cunning sleight of hand in discussing the effects of El Nino and La Nina and volcanic eruptions on global average temperatures. Then they use 'trend lines' in recent temperature data to prove the point but ignore the effect of those very factors. Ignoring volcanic eruptions in the 1990's and the strong 1998 El Nino, coupled with a judicious choice of trend line duration and no error bars presents a very misleading case, turning the statistical flatness of the global average temperature since 2001 into a slight rise.

No undergraduate student turning in a report with such a shoddy disregard for statistics and misrepresentation of data would get away with this. Monbiot moans about George Will's writing in the Washington Post. Personally I don't think there is much difference between them.




"Cryosphere Today" slips in a bit of bias too

They did at one stage feature a quote from Al Gore so, although they are broadly honest, there is no doubt where their sympathies lie. An email from a reader below:

Since last summer (when the hysteria about sea ice 'loss' was all over the news) I have been checking daily the Daily Sea Ice maps at Cryosphere Today. For the first several months the Daily Sea Ice web page contained the following two sentences below the maps:

Historic snow cover data not displayed on these images. Snow cover data is displayed only for most recent dates

On about Sept 3 or 4, 2008, the people at Cryosphere Today tucked a third sentence in between the two dealing with snow cover data to yield the following:

Historic snow cover data not displayed on these images. Sea ice concentrations less than 30% are not displayed in these images. Snow cover data is displayed only for most recent dates

The fact that Cryosphere Today had been representing all sea ice below 30% as open sea struck me as intellectually dishonest especially since the sea ice concentration legend on the upper left of each map has always shown a continuous spectrum of colors from 100% down to 0%.





A gross insult

Comment from Prof. Brignell in Britain

A greenie propaganda website has published a list of leading deniers. Why have Number Watch and its author been left out of this roll of honour? Admittedly Number Watch deals with a wide variety of nonsense in addition to global warming, but is it too much to expect some acknowledgement for the thought and effort that went into, for example, the essays?

Of course the propagandists got the story arse about face as they usually do. Marc Moreno does not send us original material. We send it to him and he kindly operates as a clearing house to keep the rest of us informed as to what others are saying. Note the ageism contained in the accusation "Others are aging scientists with strong conservative beliefs, motivating them to challenge action on global warming not because they disbelieve its existence, but because they are ideologically opposed to regulation of pollution." There are two main reasons that so many of us are old:

We were trained in the era when all scientists were taught to be sceptics (about everything) rather than believers.

We are retired and therefore not subject to blackmail within institutions that rely on handouts from state propaganda machines. Many younger scientists would speak out if they did not live in a climate of fear and the threat of careers without research grants.

It is an even more ludicrous than usual to claim that we are ideologically opposed to the regulation of pollution. Many of us were active in opposing real pollution when it was a problem (your bending author, for example, gave much time and money long ago to the cause of water purity, when our post-war rivers were a disaster area). What we do not accept is that carbon, the basis of all life on earth, is pollution.

As for having strong conservative beliefs, the political position of this site and its author has been clearly stated. Now that words like conservative and liberal have completely changed their meaning, anyone who does not conform to the authoritarian message is vilified as a conservative.

Ad hominem attacks are symptomatic of campaigners who are aware that they have lost the intellectual argument. This is a big attack by big losers.

SOURCE (See the original for links)





Mathematical models do get it badly wrong

Amid all the hand-wringing about financial systems in meltdown mode, the subject of modeling hasn't gotten a lot of notice. Banks and other financial institutions employed legions of Ph.D. mathematicians and statistics specialists to model the risks those firms were assuming under a variety of scenarios. The point was to avoid taking on obligations that could put the company under. Judging by the calamity we are now living through, one would have to say those models failed miserably. They did so despite the best efforts of numerous professionals, all highly paid and with a lot of intellectual horsepower, employed specifically to head off such catastrophes.

What went wrong with the modeling? That's a subject of keen interest to engineers who must model the behavior and risks of their own complicated systems. Insights about problems with the mathematics behind financial systems come from Huybert Groenendaal, whose Ph.D. is in modeling the spread of diseases. Groenendaal is a partner and senior risk analyst with Vose Consulting LLC in Boulder, a firm that works with a wide variety of banks and other companies trying to mitigate risks. "In risk modeling, you use a lot of statistics because you want to learn from the past," says Groenendaal. "That's good if the past is like the future, but in that sense you could be getting a false sense of security."

That sense of security plays directly into what happened with banks and financial instruments based on mortgages. "It gets back to the use of historical data," says Groenendaal. "One critical assumption people had to make was that the past could predict the future. I believe in the case of mortgage products, there was too much faith in the idea that past trends would hold."

Therein lies a lesson. "In our experience, people have excessive confidence in their historical data. That problem isn't unique to the financial area," says Groenendaal. "You must be cynical and open to the idea that this time, the world could change. When we work with people on models, we warn them that models are just tools. You have to think about the assumptions you make. Models can help you make better decisions, but you must remain skeptical."

Did the quantitative analysts who came up with ineffective financial models lose their jobs in the aftermath? Groenendaal just laughs at this idea. "I have a feeling they will do fine. If you are a bank and you fire your whole risk-analysis department, I don't think that would be viewed positively," he says.

Interestingly enough, Groenendaal suggests skepticism is also in order for an equally controversial area of modeling: climate change. "Climate change is similar to financial markets in that you can't run experiments with it as you might when you are formulating theories in physics. That means your skepticism should go up," he says. We might add there is one other similarity he didn't mention: It is doubtful anyone was ever fired for screwing up a climate model.

SOURCE







Pro-Heathrow demo challenges Carbon Cult killjoys

Cheap flights for all

As eco warriors descend on Parliament this afternoon to protest against the expansion of Heathrow, an obscure counter demonstration will be taking place. It's quite unusual: Modern Movement will be demonstrating in favour of something, not against it: cheap travel. "What we want to counter is the small number of green campaigners who are making a lot of noise on this issue, and who are making it seem like reducing the number of people who can fly is the biggest struggle of the century," says student Alex Hochuli, who co-founded the new group. "The majority of people aspire to travel, love travelling, and want to have more of that."

Hochuli says he's against the "moralisation of flying" and points out that even if you take CO2 seriously as an catalyst for Thermageddon, flying contributes only 3 per cent of UK carbon emissions. So it's hardly worth objecting to on rational grounds. What could it be, then?

There's more than a whiff of snobbery about environmental objections to mass travel. In a TV show tonight, the toff historian Tristram Hunt (son of Lord Hunt of Chesterton, a climate modeller) mourns the age of motoring before the working class got behind the wheel. "As the working classes gained access to the motor car, they celebrated their mobility by buying up plots of land in beauty spots and coastal resorts across the south coast," he wrote on Monday. Oh no! "The historicism, aestheticism and idiosyncrasy of motoring were abandoned."

Today, plebs enjoying cheap flights cause a similar revulsion amongst the pious Green bourgeoise. Hochuli also has a sideswipe at the budget airlines for not doing enough to promote the cause of mind-broadening travel opportunities, in an interview here.

But while snobbery is a plays a large part of the eco warriors rhetoric, it can't explain it all. Try on this thought experiment. Suppose for the sake of argument that cheap flights are bad, and many internal flights are unnecessary, and instead we decided to build a Maglev train service linking British cities. What a wonderful thing that would be. Who do you think would be the first to object to it?

The anti-flying campaign reflects a deep hostility to modernity and progress. The earliest "ecological" thinking early in the 19th Century was to inspire the mystical "blood and soil" movements in Germany, which held that science was evil. From there, it's hard to escape the circular argument that anything that improves our lot is bad for the planet, and must be discouraged.

SOURCE







Greens: Keep Africa poor to control climate

A study in this week's Nature (Feb. 19. Summary here) reports that African forests are an important carbon sink -- and although the researchers acknowledge that they don't really understand the phenomenon, they nevertheless conclude that African forests be put off limits to development. At the end of the study, the researchers write,

African tropical forests are providing important ecosystem services by storing carbon and being a carbon sink, thereby reducing the rate of increase of atmospheric CO2. With adequate protection these forests are likely to remain large carbon stores in the longer term. Securing this service will probably require formalizing and enforcing land rights for forest dwellers, alongside payments for ecosystem services to those Estimated carbon stocks and their annual increase for African tropical forest living near forested areas. Whether remaining intact forests will continue to sequester carbon, become neutral, or become a net source of carbon in the future is highly uncertain. Improved monitoring and modelling of the tropical environment is required to better understand this trajectory.

But if Africans can't harvest and monetize their own natural resources -- as we in the West have done -- Africa is likely to stay poor and sick. Nature could have edited this study down to: "Sinks should sink Africa."

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

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