Claim that 'climate change is the cholera of our era' ridiculed as 'load of garbage' by renowned disease expert
A May 25, 2009 article in the UK Times warning that "climate change is the cholera of our era" has raised the ire of an internationally known disease expert formerly of the UN IPCC.
"The article is a rehash of a similar load of garbage unloaded in 1996, plus (identical wording) other writings of the past, including, I suspect, IPCC," Dr. Paul Reiter told Climate Depot.
Reiter is a malaria expert formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control.
The UK Times article, by Professor Sir Muir Gray is Public Health Director of the Campaign for Greener Healthcare, alleges that man-made global warming is a greater threat to mankind than the scourge of cholera -- an acute diarrheal illness-- which killed an nearly 3000 people in Zimbabwe alone earlier this year. A May 26, 2009 article from VOA reveals cholera cases are expected to reach 100,000 in Zimbabwe alone.
Muir wrote in the UK Times: "In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era — fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution." "Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate change's threat to health," Muir added.
But Reiter, was blunt in his rebuttal to Muir's article in the UK Times. "They have cherry picked without remorse. I have huge response to my article in Malaria Journal. Yet these peddlers of garbage quote a 1998 model by two activists whose work is ridiculed by those of us who work in this field," Reiter continued. "What the hell can we do? I am flabbergasted that this can go on, and on, and on," Reiter, who is featured in the U.S. Senate Report of more than 700 dissenting scientists of man-made global warming, concluded.
Reiter was also formerly with the UN IPCC and was so appalled at UN IPCC process that he threatened legal action to get his name removed from the reports.
SOURCE
Obama's energy chief wants to paint the world white to fight climate change
As unrealistic as Warmism generally. Another product of "modelling". Still, it would be a lot less harmful than other Warmist proposals
AS a weapon against global warming, it sounds so simple and low-tech that it could not possibly work. But the idea of using millions of buckets of whitewash to avert climate catastrophe has won the backing of one of the world's most influential scientists. Steven Chu, the Nobel prize-winning physicist appointed by US President Barack Obama as Energy Secretary, wants to paint the world white.
A global initiative to change the colour of roofs, roads and pavements so that they reflect more of the Sun's light and heat could play a big part in containing global warming, he said yesterday. Speaking at the opening of the St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium in London, for which The Times is media partner, Professor Chu said that this approach could have a vast impact.
By lightening paved surfaces and roofs to the colour of cement, it would be possible to cut carbon emissions by as much as taking all the world's cars off the roads for 11 years, he said. Building regulations should insist that all flat roofs were painted white, and visible tilted roofs could be painted with "cool-coloured" paints that looked normal, but which absorbed much less heat than conventional dark surfaces.
Roads could be lightened to a concrete colour so they would not dazzle drivers in bright sunlight. "I think with flat-type roofs you can't even see, yes, I think you should regulate," Professor Chu said.
Pale surfaces reflect up to 80 per cent of the sunlight that falls on them, compared with about 20 per cent for dark ones, which is why roofs and walls in hot countries are often whitewashed. An increase in pale surfaces would help to contain climate change both by reflecting more solar radiation into space and by reducing the amount of energy needed to keep buildings cool by air-conditioning.
Professor Chu said his thinking had been influenced by Art Rosenfeld, a member of the California Energy Commission who drove through tough new building rules in the state. Since 2005 California has required all flat roofs on commercial buildings to be white; the measure is being expanded to require cool colours on all residential and pitched roofs.
Dr Rosenfeld is also a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, of which Professor Chu was director. Last year Dr Rosenfeld and two colleagues from the laboratory, Hashem Akbari and Surabi Menon, calculated that changing surface colours in 100 of the world's largest cities could save the equivalent of 44billion tonnes of carbon dioxide - about as much as global carbon emissions are expected to rise by over the next decade.
Professor Chu said: "There's a friend of mine, a colleague of mine, Art Rosenfeld, who's pushing very hard for a geo-engineering we all believe will be completely benign, and that's when you have a flat-top roof building, make it white.
"Now, you smile, but he's done a calculation, and if you take all the buildings and make their roofs white and if you make the pavement more of a concrete type of colour rather than a black type of colour, and you do this uniformly ... it's the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars on the road for 11 years."
The US needed to increase its investment in clean energy research, he said, citing high-tech industries that spent 10 to 20 per cent of their income on research. The US was spending $US1trillion on generating electricity, but "nothing like" the $US 100billion to $US200 billion on research that would meet that standard, he said.
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Why I am a Climate Realist
By Dr Willem de Lange, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Waikato in New Zealand -- specialising in coastal oceanography.
In 1996 the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Second Assessment Report was released, and I was listed as one of approximately 3000 “scientists” who agreed that there was a discernable human influence on climate.
I was an invited reviewer for a chapter dealing with the economic impact of sea level rise on small island nations. In keeping with IPCC procedures, the chapter was written and reviewed in isolation from the rest of the report, and I had no input into the process after my review of the chapter draft. I was not asked if I supported the view expressed in my name, and my understanding at the time was that no evidence of a discernable human influence on global climate existed.
The chapter I reviewed dealt primarily with the economic consequences of an assumed sea level rise of 1 m causing extensive inundation. My response was that I could not comment on the economic analysis, however, I disagreed with the initial assumptions, particularly the assumed sea level rise in the stated time period. Further, there was good evidence at the time that sea level rise would not necessarily result in flooding of small island nations, because natural processes on coral atolls were likely to raise island levels.
The IPCC Second Assessment Report assessed sea level rise by AD 2100 as being in the range 0.20-0.86 m, with a most likely value of 0.49 m (less than half the rate assumed for the economic analysis). Subsequent research has demonstrated that coral atolls and associated islands are likely to increase in elevation as sea level rises. Hence, the assumptions were invalid, and I was convinced that IPCC projections were unrealistic and exaggerated the problem.
Following the release of IPCC Second Assessment Report I also co-authored the sea level rise section of the New Zealand impact report, and same section for a revised report following the release of IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001). The third report followed the trend of decreasing sea level rise projections evident in sea level rise literature, with a most likely projection of 0.44 m. However, some extreme scenarios were added at a late stage of the review process to give a wider range of projections from 0.09-0.88 m. There was little support in the literature for these extremes, and my view was that a range of 0.31-0.49 m was more reasonable. I also expected future projections to be lower.
For the New Zealand 2001 report, I was asked to state that sea level rise was accelerating, or at least could be accelerating. However, my own research and published literature shows that sea level fluctuates at decadal time scales. Therefore, although there was an increase in the rate of sea level rise around 1998, I expected sea level rise to slow and reverse early in the 21st Century. The underlying long-term trend, however, was likely to decrease, and there were some tide gauge data to indicate that it had started to do so. In the 1980s, the New Zealand rate was 1.8 mm per year. By 1990, it was 1.7 mm per year, and by 2001 it was 1.6 mm per year. These changes are small, and were not enough to prove that sea level rise was slowing. However, they clearly did not show that sea level rise was accelerating.
After 2001, published studies continued to project lower global sea level rises over the 21st Century, and several reported a slowing of the rate of rise during the 20th Century. Shortly before the IPCC Assessment Report 4 was published I undertook a literature review of all sea level studies, which: projected lower levels than the IPCC Third Assessment Report review; indicated a slowing of the rate of sea level rise; emphasised the role of decadal scale fluctuations; and there was concern about the discrepancy between satellite and tide gauge sea level measurements. It was recognised that, although satellite sensing gives a better overall measurement of global sea level, satellites reported twice the rate of sea level rise being measured at the coast. It was evident that satellite data could not be combined with tide gauge data.
The IPCC Assessment Report 4 report emphasises a single paper, which was not available when I conducted my review, which spliced the satellite data onto the tide gauge data to “find” acceleration in sea level rise over the period of satellite measurement. This is being used to imply that global sea level rise is accelerating due to global warming (now renamed Climate Change). The satellite data only covered the period of increasing sea level associated with decadal cycles, and the known discrepancy between satellite trends and tide gauge trends was not corrected for. This is poor science comparable to the splicing of proxy and instrument data in the infamous Hockey Stick graph, and the splicing of ice core and instrumental CO2 measurements to exaggerate the changes.
Despite therefore finding accelerating sea level rise, the latest IPCC assessment projects lower sea level rises than the previous ones. The methodology used to report the projections was changed to make comparisons harder, but the range of 0.18-0.59 m equates to a most likely rise of around 0.39 m. The IPCC Assessment Report 4 also included an extra 0.20 m allowance for uncertainties associated with destabilisation of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Caps. Various groups have speculated that the collapse of these Ice Caps could produce a much higher additional sea level rise. In contrast, published studies that have specifically studied this contribution have concluded that given the worst possible scenarios, the maximum extra contribution is 0.18 m. Hence, the IPCC Assessment Report 4 allowance is a very conservative upper bound.
What has sea level actually done so far this century? There have been large regional variations, but the global rate has slowed and is currently negative, consistent with measured ocean cooling. Claims to the contrary are exaggerations and not realistic.
So, given my understanding of oceanography, what do I believe about climate change? Firstly climate change is real, and has occurred on Earth for at least 4 billion years – as long as an atmosphere and oceans have existed. Climate change occurs in cycles at various time scales, with the shorter time scales known as weather (by convention the distinction is 35 years). Trying to stop or control climate change is akin to stopping ocean tides. Secondly, I believe human activities affect climate, otherwise why would I bother with a mortgage. The climate inside my house is different to the climate that would exist if my house were gone.
There are many ways human activities affect climate on a small scale. Interestingly the concentration of CO2 is not one of them (CO2 are often elevated inside buildings). As the size of the area considered increases, the impact of human activities decreases. As the latest IPCC report notes, there is no convincing evidence of the impact of CO2 (or any other human influence on climate) at a continental scale. Yet, they say that the impact of a CO2 (and other gases treated as effective CO2) is the dominant driver of climate at a global scale and will have catastrophic consequences. This conclusion I strongly disagree with. Why?
It is frequently pointed out that the Earth is approximately 32°C warmer than it would be without an atmosphere due to the Greenhouse Effect. This is misleading, as the climate system responsible for this extra warmth includes many components. Important ones omitted in most discussions are clouds and oceans. About 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, which absorbs sunlight and warms up. The oceans retain heat better than land, and, while slow to warm up, they cool slowly and warm the surroundings (a maritime climate).
Considering the available data, it is clear that the oceans warmed over the 20th Century by about the same amount as the atmosphere. This agreement should not be entirely surprising as 70 percent of the mean global air temperature comes from over oceans. The inconvenient truth that is generally ignored, is that the atmosphere is not capable of warming the oceans to any significant degree – 99.9 percent of ocean heat is derived from sunlight at wavelengths less than 3 microns. The balance is mostly from heat leaking from the interior of the Earth. The Greenhouse Effect involves a delay in the loss of infra-red radiation at wavelengths greater than 5 microns.
What does this mean for climate change? It means that variations in the amount of sunlight reaching the oceans will control the rate at which the oceans warm. This is influenced at long time scales by changes in the Earth’s orbit. At short time scales there are changes in the amount of sunlight associated with the sunspot cycle. These changes are small, but due to the ability of the oceans to store heat it may be possible to have a cumulative effect as sunspot cycles wax and wane. However, the main control is the amount of cloud and ice cover. Clouds and sea ice reflect sunlight before it can be absorbed by the oceans, and is referred to as albedo. Albedo changes have a greater influence on climate than the Greenhouse Effect, and are usually invoked to produce the catastrophic consequences of “Climate Change” (aka Accelerated Global Warming).
Oceans lose heat through evaporation (53 percent), infra-red radiation (41 percent) and conduction (6 percent). The Greenhouse Effect can slow the loss of the infra-red radiation, thereby warming the atmosphere but not the oceans. However, evaporation accounts for more than half the heat loss. Evaporation produces clouds, and hence there is a feedback loop – warming the oceans results in more evaporation, producing more clouds, which increases albedo, which cools the oceans. This is exactly what was observed during The Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA COARE) that was set up to investigate the Pacific Warm Pool – the warmest ocean water in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean. COARE also found that rainfall would cool the ocean surface, so increased evaporation producing rain is another feedback loop.
What does this have to do with the 20th Century? Well the observed climate change is consistent with variations in albedo and associated ocean warming and cooling, suggesting that it is just a natural cycle. This pattern of behaviour is evident in palaeoclimate data for most of the last 10,000 years. None of this is simulated in climate models. Instead they focus on the 20th Century increase in CO2, CH4 and a few other greenhouse gases. The increasing concentrations correlate well with global temperature. This is taken as proof that the greenhouse effect is driving temperature.
However, it is also correct that changing ocean temperatures affect the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere. At annual and 2-7 year time scales it is clear that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is strongly driven by the ocean. At longer time scales it is also clear that the concentration of greenhouse gases lags behind, and therefore is driven by, temperature. Once again the oceans are the likely control on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The IPCC position requires that for 50-100 year periods everything works in reverse, which still showing an oceanic influence at shorter time periods. It is more likely that the warming of the oceans since the Little Ice Age is a major contributor to the observed increase in CO2. Carbon isotopic ratios indicate that while there is a contribution from the burning of fossil fuels, it is of the order 1-5 percent of the increase.
So, I am a climate realist because the available evidence indicates that climate change is predominantly, if not entirely, natural. It occurs mostly in response to variations in solar heating of the oceans, and the consequences this has for the rest of the Earth’s climate system. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis runaway catastrophic climate change due to human activities.
SOURCE
Feds plan $4 billion for “green jobs”
That good ol' generous American taxpayer again
Some $4 billion from President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus plan that was budgeted to renovate public housing will be spent to create so-called "green jobs" by making the dwellings more energy efficient. Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan was making the announcement Tuesday in Denver at a meeting of Obama's Middle Class Task Force.
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, another task force member, also will announce that $500 million from the stimulus is becoming available to train workers for these jobs. That sum includes $50 million for communities battered by job losses and restructuring in the auto industry.
Both Donovan and Solis also were announcing that their departments are working together to make it easier for public housing residents to find training programs or a green job.
The task force, which includes several other Cabinet secretaries, has been working since January to highlight policies and practices to help improve the standard of living of the middle class, an income group that suffered as the economy faltered.
The meeting at the Denver Science Museum, where Obama signed the stimulus plan into law three months ago, was being held to outline different ways government departments are working together to steer the middle class toward green jobs.
These jobs, broadly defined as related to helping the environment, pay up to 20% more than other jobs, are more likely to be union jobs and are more likely to be held by men, less so by minorities and people who live in cities, according to a report the task force issued in February. These jobs also are ones that cannot be easily transferred overseas.
Obama has pushed greening the economy — reducing dependence on foreign energy sources, developing domestic alternatives and easing the effects of climate change — as ways to help pull the economy out of its worst downturn since the Great Depression.
Donovan said Monday that the investment in public housing will help meet several goals: improving the quality of public housing, reducing energy costs for residents and the government, and creating jobs for people who live in the units and in the surrounding community. "A whole set of things can repay investments in a short period of time," Donovan said in an interview. Replacing windows, insulation, appliances and even light bulbs are among the possible renovations.
Jared Bernstein, the task force executive director, said the panel's agenda complements Obama's. "By boosting the green economy, you're promoting green energy and clean production at the same time that you're generating green jobs," Bernstein, who is also Vice President Joe Biden's chief economist, said Monday in an interview. Biden is in charge of the task force.
The energy, education and labor secretaries also were set to announce a partnership to help link the unemployed with jobs, training and education opportunities.
SOURCE
GLOBAL WARMING ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Three current articles below
"Prodos", global warming and the CIS
"Prodos" is a flamboyant Melbourne libertarian of Greek extraction who has done some good work in publicizing libertarian ideas but who is in my view a bit too sensationalist for me to take much notice of. For that reason, I don't think I have ever linked to any of his writings. On his occasional blog, however, he has recently put up an attack on Greg Lindsay, head of the Sydney-based "Centre for Independent Studies" claiming that Greg is a supporter of global warming. Greg is an old friend of mine and I was one of the first donors to CIS so when Gerry Jackson of Brookes News sent me a link to the Prodos article, I immediately emailed Greg expressing amazement that he had fallen for such humbug.
Greg emailed back noting that he has NEVER personally taken any position at all on global warming but referred me to a post on the subject by John Humphreys, which in turn links to his CIS monograph on the subject.
The work of CIS is to offer scholarly contributions to public policy debates from a free-market viewpoint and CIS publications often get respectful mentions in the press. And on this occasion, Humphreys took as a starting point the apparent intention of both major Australian political parties to implement global warming laws of some sort. From that point he set out to argue for the least harmful set of laws that could be adopted.
And that is what Prodos objects to. He thinks that CIS should just oppose all global warming laws and thus have no influence on what laws are adopted. I think Prodos's ego has run away with him. He thinks that his own approach is the only defensible one, whereas it is my view that you are more likely to defeat the enemy if you attack him from all sides. And the currently-proposed Warmist laws would certainly be a major enemy of Australia's prosperity. So I welcome the CIS approach and deplore the narrow-minded hostility of Prodos towards an organization that is much more influential than he is. And putting a picture of Greg Lindsay at the top of his post when Greg has never said a word in public about the subject is just plain dishonest.
Global Warming Pauses
By His Eminence Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
The tide on climate change is starting to turn. The Australian government is becoming more cautious. It is rare to read a new book likely to make a huge difference to public opinion. Professor Ian Plimer's 500 page book with 2300 footnotes "Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: The Missing Science" is such a book. 30,000 copies were sold in its first month.
Plimer is not a climate change denier, because history shows the planet is dynamic and the climate is always changing, sometimes drastically. Ice Ages have come and gone and we don't know why. History has seen glaciers at the equator and at one time Scandinavia was under 5 kilometres of ice. Sea levels have been 130 metres lower than today. Some consolation comes from the fact that ice sheets predominated for only 20 per cent of the earth's history.
Plimer demonstrates that a considerable amount of scientific evidence has been produced to counter the still predominant view that human activity, especially through industry, has polluted the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, which will produce disastrous climate changes including a rise in temperature, a melting of the ice caps and rising sea levels.
Contrary evidence is already changing the debate. Australia, with its tiny economy, is no longer aiming to lead the world. The threat of massive job losses and increasing awareness of new evidence will provoke even greater caution in the future.
Originally we were warned about the "greenhouse effect"; then it was "global warming", followed in turn by "climate change". Now we talk about reducing the "carbon footprint". The light is dawning and 30 per cent of scientists are sceptics or deniers.
Non-scientists should not blindly follow expert opinion and this includes Plimer. To the extent we can, we should examine their evidence. While it is still early days in the debate, Plimer's critics have been heavy with the abuse and short on counter evidence.
We should also look back at history for more accurate information and ignore computer models of the long-term future. Climate models making claims for decades into the future cannot work, because we do not know enough about many factors which influence weather, such as the level of activity of the sun, the earth's orbit and wobbles, the level of cloud cover, volcanoes.
One basic claim of Plimer is that an increase of carbon dioxide does not cause temperature rises, but might follow such rises. What do we make of these facts? The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to rise, but the world's temperature has not risen since 1998. In Roman times and in the Medieval Warming (900 - 1300 A.D.) temperatures were higher than today by five and six degrees Celsius. No industries then! In different Ice Ages the earth's atmosphere contained five and ten times the amount of carbon dioxide today.
Evidence shows the wheels are falling from the climate catastrophe bandwagon.
SOURCE
New election needed to pass Warmist laws
VOTERS are closer to an early election after every federal political party yesterday manoeuvred to ensure the defeat of the emissions trading scheme. Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull raised the stakes yesterday by proposing the Government defer the vote of its ETS legislation until after global climate change talks in December. But he failed to secure numbers in the Senate, which means the legislation will be brought on in June and defeated.
With the gun now half-cocked and the Bill set for defeat, the second and final trigger for a double dissolution will be sounded if the legislation is re-introduced within three months and voted down again. The election is due in November next year but can be held as late as April 2011. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Mr Turnbull and all the cross-benchers have lined up for a game of chicken, warning they would be willing to go to an early election if they cannot get what they want on climate change.
Greens deputy leader Christine Milne, who wants the Bill defeated in exchange for greater mitigation, said the Government's policy stance was untenable and she was ready for an early election. "If the Coalition and the Independent Senators have a three-month delay or a six-month delay, it is dead as far as the Government is concerned . . . (and) let's bring it (an election) on," she said.
Mr Turnbull said he would give Mr Rudd a bi-partisan mandate to take to the meeting in Copenhagen so he could argue for targets of 5-25 per cent and urged him to wait for the advancing US legislation next year. But he said he would not vote for it in its current form. He also outlined a plan to set up a Government-authorised voluntary carbon market from January so business could start banking carbon credits.
Despite knowing the Bill is set for defeat, Mr Rudd has refused to delay it and accused Mr Turnbull of being at the mercy of climate change sceptics within his own party. Independent Senator Nick Xenophon will not support the Coalition's ploy to delay the Bill and wants the vote in August or September, but he has no support. He also plans to defeat it in its current form. Family First's Steve Fielding, who does want the Bill delayed, will vote against the "dog of a policy" when it is introduced in the week beginning June 15.
At the heart of Mr Turnbull's position of trying to delay the Bill until after Copenhagen is his untenable position of trying to unite his party.
SOURCE
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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Half-witted British doctor says climate change is the cholera of our era
See below. He of all people should know that cold (as in winter) kills a lot more people than warmth (as in summer). He should be celebrating warming if it were public health that concerned him. But Professor Sir Muir Gray is obviously an establishment figure who is just doing his best to uphold establishment beliefs. He didn't get a knighthood for rocking the boat
In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era — fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution. And just as doctors led the Victorian campaign, so the medical profession should be in the vanguard of this new revolution in public health.
The front page of The Lancet of May 16 says it all: “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” This prestigious journal, which usually gives no more than ten pages to vitally important clinical research, made space for a 39-page report.
Climate change will hit the poorest nations hardest, but it will affect us too. In the summer of 2003, la canicule, an unexpected heatwave, killed 14,000 elderly people in France. Rising temperatures will bring that type of problem to our shores. Our health services will be put under pressure by severe weather and floods. But it is the global effects that will hit us, and especially our children and grandchildren, because of the effect that climate change will have on world food and water supplies; millions of climate refugees will disrupt the borders of even an island nation.
Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate change’s threat to health. That proposition will instantly provoke a hostile reaction from the diminishing band of climate-change sceptics. But as a doctor of 40 years’ standing who has been involved in running public health services for 30 years, I know that the evidence is good enough to make action, not inaction, the sensible choice. An empirical view of the data shows that delay will not just increase the amount of preventable harm, it may take us past a point of no return.
So the medical profession must accept responsibility in the campaign for change. However, with a few notable exceptions, doctors are effectively silent on the health threat that will come to define our age. My fellow doctors cannot just leave this issue to their leaders, to the presidents of the Royal Colleges and to the members of the Climate and Health Council. They should be active in their local communities, where they are known and respected, using their influence to press for national and international action.
Leaders, no matter how great, must have courage and a mandate to act. What is needed, for instance, is for 20 or 30 MPs to collar Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, as he rushes across the lobby and say: “Three [or more] doctors have been to my surgery in the last month warning me about the concern that they and their patients have about climate change — that’s more doctors than have ever come to see me about the NHS or even their pay. They tell me the medical profession is clear what needs to be done.”
“Why do I never get letters from doctors about smoking?” an MP asked me when I was the secretary of Action on Smoking and Health. “Why do I get more letters on animal welfare than human health?” Why indeed. The medical profession is too silent, and sometimes too apathetic. Fortunately, many of today’s medical students and young doctors have fire in their bellies and are taking to the streets demanding action. Their older colleagues should join them and use their influence. Perhaps, they could try some “collar-and-tie” direct action — those doctors who own shares should be at AGMs demanding that companies clean up their environmental acts.
But the medical profession needs to put its own house in order too. I was in a hospital last month that is doubling its electricity supply “to meet demand”, with no thought about the future. Sometimes the NHS is not unlike Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, keen to reform others while her own children were scalded through neglect.
The NHS is gigantic and has a carbon footprint that is nearly one twentieth of the whole UK’s footprint — 1.3 million staff each with their own footprint, the drugs bought, the buildings, the transport, the water and the food, too much of it thrown away. Now is the time for the profession to mobilise and show the passion that took them into medical school but is then so often extinguished.
In December in Copenhagen, the vital United Nations Climate Change Conference meets. Unfortunately, British MPs are distracted, so the medical profession has a duty to act to make the politicians focus on it.
A recent summit meeting of leading doctors at the British Medical Association unanimously agreed that the need for action is essential. However, battles are not won in headquarters but by the troops on the front line. So I would like to see 90 per cent of doctors making environmentally friendly personal changes; half of doctors signing the Climate and Health Council pledge; and at least one in 20 doctors lobbying their MPs face-to-face. What more appropriate place than a constituency surgery could there be for a doctor to tell his or her MP that the medical profession thinks that urgent treatment is needed?
SOURCE
A Closer Look at Climate Change and the IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is widely regarded in the media as the ultimate authority on climate change. Created by two divisions of the United Nations, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, its pronouncements are received as if they come down from Mount Olympus or Mount Sinai. The common presumption is that the IPCC has assembled the best scientific knowledge. Let’s take a closer look at this organization to see whether it merits such uncritical deference.
The IPCC’s Feb. 2007 report stated: It is “very likely” that human activity is causing global warming. Why then, just two months later, did the Vice Chair of the IPCC, Yuri Izrael, write, “the panic over global warming is totally unjustified;” “there is no serious threat to the climate;” and humanity is “hypothetically … more threatened by cold than by global warming?”
IPCC press releases have warned about increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, yet Dr. Vincent Gray, a member of the IPCC’s expert reviewers’ panel asserts, “There is no relationship between warming and [the] level of gases in the atmosphere.”
A 2001 IPCC report presented 245 potential scenarios. The media publicity that followed focused on the most extreme scenario, prompting the report’s lead author, atmospheric scientist Dr. John Christy, to rebuke media sensationalism and affirm, “The world is in much better shape than this doomsday scenario paints … the worst-case scenario [is] not going to happen.”
Clearly, the IPCC does not speak as one voice when leading scientists on its panel contradict its official position. The solution to this apparent riddle lies in the structure of the IPCC itself. What the media report are the policymakers’ summaries, not the far lengthier reports prepared by scientists. The policymakers’ summaries are produced by a committee of 51 government appointees, many of whom are not scientists.
The policymakers’ summaries are presented as the “consensus” of 2,500 scientists who have contributed input to the IPCC’s scientific reports. “Consensus” does NOT mean that all of the scientists endorse the policymakers’ summaries. In fact, some of the 2,500 scientists have resigned in protest against those summaries. Other contributing scientists, such as the individuals quoted above, publicly contradict the assertions of the policymakers’ summaries.
To better understand the “consensus” presented in the policymakers’ summaries, it is helpful to be aware of the structure of the IPCC. Those who compose the summaries are given considerable latitude to modify the scientific reports. Page four of Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work states: “Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group of the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter.” In other words, when there is a discrepancy between what the scientists say and what the authors of the policymakers’ summaries want to say, the latter prevails.
Here is a specific example: One policymakers’ summary omitted several important unequivocal conclusions contained in the scientists’ report, including, “No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of observed climate change] to anthropogenic [i.e., man-made] causes,” and “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.” These significant revisions were made, according to IPCC officials quoted in Nature magazine, “to ensure that it [the report] conformed to a policymakers’ summary.”
Elsewhere, Rule 3 of IPCC procedures states: “Documents should involve both peer review by experts and review by governments.” In practice, IPCC sometimes bypasses scientific peer review, and the policymakers’ summaries reflect only governmental (political) review. This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the IPCC is a political, not a scientific, entity. It is the “Inter-GOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change,” not a “global SCIENTISTS’ panel.”
Also, “consensus” is a political phenomenon, a compromise, whereas scientific truth is not subject to obtaining a political majority. (Actually, 31,000 scientists have signed a petition protesting the “consensus” that human activity is dangerously altering the Earth’s climate. Consider that against the 2,500 scientists cited by IPCC—many of whom publicly refute IPCC’s press releases.)
To its credit, the IPCC debunks many of the alarmist exaggerations of radical greens. However, its scientific authority remains irreparably compromised by political tampering. When a U.S. State Department official writes to the co-chair of the IPCC that “it is essential that … chapter authors be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner,” the political character of IPCC is plain.
The sponsors of the IPCC, the United Nations, and liberal American politicians all share the goal of reducing Americans’ wealth by capping our consumption of energy with a binding international climate change treaty. They are willing to resort to scientific fraud to further their goal. In the words of Al Gore’s ally, former Under-Secretary of State Tim Wirth, “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing” by reducing Americans’ consumption of fossil fuels. Keep that in mind whenever the IPCC is cited in support of a climate treaty
SOURCE
Windfarms a security threat
The body that monitors UK airspace is seeking a solution to the potentially disastrous problem of commercial and military aircraft disappearing in radar blackout zones caused by wind farms. National Air Traffic Services (Nats) has asked Raytheon, the American defence company, to design the world's first system for allowing radar to see through wind farm interference. The cost of the £5 million project is expected to be picked up by the wind energy industry.
Wind farm turbines create a Doppler effect as they turn, which shows up on radar screens. As the area and number of these wind farms has increased, the number of radar blackout zones has also risen. Aircraft passing through the area can disappear in the blackout and air traffic controllers can lose their exact position. The Royal Air Force is concerned that enemy bombers or other aircraft could hide behind interference from offshore wind farms and approach Britain undetected.
A Nats spokesman said: “We have a duty to safeguard our operations, so in the past we have objected to the development of a number of wind farms that threaten aircraft safety. We need a system that can eliminate this problem.”
Raytheon has been asked to create a software system that will filter out the wind farm noise from other radar signals. This will effectively allow air traffic controllers to see through the wind farms. The company, which is the largest manufacturer of radar systems in the world, hopes to complete the project by the end of next year. Once completed, it will also be deployed in the Netherlands.
Andy Zogg, vice-president of command and control systems at Raytheon, said: “As the number of wind farms grows, there are more and more of these radar black holes. They show up as clutter on the radar screen and the concern is that aircraft approaching from behind the turbines or flying over them cannot be seen.”
Brian Smith, general manager of Raytheon Canada, said: “Our work will be to develop the algorithms that allow us to discriminate between turbines and aircraft. It is called clutter erasure.”
The Government has identified wind power as a key to reducing reliance on carbon dioxide producing energy sources. Europe's largest onshore wind farm opened last week at Whitelee in Scotland. The 140 turbines cover an area of 55 square kilometres and are each 110 metres high. The wind farm will generate enough electricity to power 250,000 homes.
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Britain wastes huge sums on windmills while the need for reliable electicity supplies becomes ever more urgent and costly
On a barren hillside outside Glasgow, dozens of wind turbines are spinning in the breeze as Britain's largest onshore wind park starts to generate electricity. With 140 turbines producing enough power to supply tens of thousands of homes, it is among the largest and most vivid symbols of the Government's drive to replace Britain's collection of ageing coal, gas and oil-fired power stations with a cleaner, greener alternative.
But this effort to transform Britain's energy industry, which is being propelled by tough new emissions rules and by the sheer decrepitude of much of the network, does not come cheap and has profound implications for consumers.
The site, at Whitelee on Eaglesham Moor, has cost ScottishPower, its developer, £300 million, but this is a tiny fraction of what will be required to upgrade Britain's power network. According to Ernst & Young, the total cost of doing so and meeting tough targets to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020 will be no less than £233.5 billion. Although some of that burden is likely to be shared with power companies, the figure, divided among the UK's 26million households, implies a total bill of up to £8,977 each — or £598 a year for the next 15 years.
Tony Ward, power and utilities partner at Ernst & Young, said that about half of the total, or £112 billion, will need to be spent building new supplies of renewable energy, including vast new offshore wind parks - each many times the size of Whitelee — as well as biomass-fired power stations, tidal and wave-energy projects.
Britain must also renew almost all of its ageing nuclear power plants, which account for about 20 per cent of the country's electricity supply, a project that is expected to add £38.4 billion to the cost. A further £28 billion or so will have to be poured into the grid to build a transmission network capable of supporting new reactors and remote wind parks sited as far north as the Shetlands and in the North Sea. This excludes the cost of building new coal-fired stations equipped with carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), bolstering the UK's gas storage facilities, new gas-fired power plants and a rollout of “smart meters” in every home and business in the country.
Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, whose company will be at the centre of this effort, said: “It's very clear from the renewables and new nuclear stations being planned that there is going to be a need for a substantial increase in investment to build a modern, 21st-century grid.”
He expects National Grid alone to spend up to £5 billion a year from 2012 and he is already drawing up plans for a network of seabed cables feeding renewable electricity from Scotland to consumers in the South, as well as sweeping reinforcements to conventional high-voltage lines that criss-cross the country.
Craig Lowrey, director of markets for EIC, the energy consultancy, said: “These are massive investments — we are talking about potentially the biggest investment programme in Britain's history. But if the Government is serious about meeting its emissions targets, it needs to make people understand the true scale of these costs.”
Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish & Southern Energy, Britain's second-largest utility, takes a similar view: “In the long term, the unit price of energy is going to have to go up significantly. We are going to have to produce energy in a greener and more secure way and that will cost money.”
Ernst & Young's figures might underestimate the total expense because they do not include regular maintenance costs, Mr Marchant said, suggesting that a figure of £300 billion could be closer to the mark. However, he is optimistic that dramatic improvements in energy efficiency could mean that consumer bills will remain stable or even fall in the long term.
The fear is that in Britain's liberalised energy market this tidal wave of required investment simply will not materialise.
Dr Lowrey believes that, under its current structure — which relies on market forces plus consumer-funded incentives designed to boost investment in renewable energy — the scale of investment needed is unlikely either to meet expectations or to be allocated in the way that the Government or society wants. It is a concern that has been compounded in recent months by a collapse in funding that has accompanied the credit crunch and the plunging value of the pound, forcing up the cost of imported power-generating equipment.
The falling prices of oil, coal and gas have also undermined the economic rationale of many investments in more costly, alternative forms of energy. “There is a need for greater intervention to make this investment a reality,” Dr Lowrey said. “We need a guiding hand from government.”
SOURCE
Climate Change Act: Now the world faces its biggest ever bill
One of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to "stop climate change", observes Christopher Booker.
One measure of the fantasy world now inhabited by our sad MPs was the mindless way that they nodded through, last October, by 463 votes to three, by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever to go through Parliament. This was the Climate Change Act, obliging the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to reduce Britain's "carbon emissions" by 2050 to 20 per cent of what they were in 1990 – a target achievable only by shutting down most of the economy.
Such is the zombie state of our MPs that they agreed to this lunatic measure without the Government giving any idea of what this might cost. Only one, Peter Lilley, raised this question, and it was he who, last month, alerted me to the fact that the minister, Ed Miliband, had at last slipped out a figure on his website (without bothering to tell Parliament). The Government's estimate was £404 billion, or £18 billion a year, or £760 per household every year for four decades.
Such figures, produced by a computer model, are, of course, meaningless. But one of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to "stop climate change".
Last week I dined with Professor Bob Carter, a distinguished Australian paleoclimatologist, who has been trying to alert politicians in Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand to the scarcely believable cost of these proposals. He gave me a paper he presented to a committee of New Zealand MPs. China and India, as the price of their participating in the UN's planned "Kyoto Two" deal to be agreed in Copenhagen next December, are demanding that developed countries, including Britain, should pay them 1 per cent of their GDP, totalling up to more than $300 billion every year.
Africa is putting in for a further $267 billion a year. South American countries are demanding hundreds of billions more. In the US, the latest costing of President Obama's "cap and trade" Bill is $1.9 trillion, a yearly cost to each US family of $4,500.
Meanwhile, as Mr Obama's Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, babbles on the BBC's Today programme about how the world's energy needs can be met by wind and solar power (for which, he assured us, we would need to cover only 5 per cent of the planet's deserts with solar panels), a study shows that for every job created in Spain's "alternative energy industry" since 2000, 2.2 others have been lost. (Mr Obama talks about creating "five million green jobs" in the US.)
Last week the BBC and various newspapers excitably greeted the opening by Alex Salmond of Whitelee, "Europe's largest onshore wind farm", 140 giant 2.3 megawatt turbines covering 30 square miles of moorland south-east of Glasgow. It was happily reported that these would "generate" 322MW of electricity, "enough to power every home in Glasgow". They won't, of course, do anything of the kind. Due to the vagaries of the wind, this colossal enterprise will produce only 80MW on average, a quarter of its capacity and barely enough to keep half Glasgow's lights on.
It really is time people stopped recycling the thoroughly bogus propaganda claims of the wind industry in this way. Any journalist who still falls for these lies by confusing turbines' "capacity" with their actual output is either thoroughly stupid or dishonest. The truth is that the 80MW average output of "Europe's largest wind farm" is only a fraction of that of any conventional power station, at twice the cost. For this derisory amount of power, the hidden subsidy to Whitelee over its 25-year life will, on current figures, be £1 billion, paid by all of us through our electricity bills.
Truly, our world has gone off its head, and no one seems to notice – not least those wretched MPs who allow all this to happen without having the faintest idea what is going on.
On May 15, the Guardian’s famed environmental crusader George Monbiot triumphantly posted on his blog an item headed “How to disprove Christopher Booker in 26 seconds”. This was the time, he claimed, it took him to discover how the figures that I had reported on the melting of Arctic ice were wrong.
Guardian groupies piled in to congratulate him, calling for my editor to sack me. Then one or two suggested he should look again at what I wrote. Three hours later, a disclaimer appeared at the top of his blog: “Whoops – looks like I’ve boobed. Sorry folks”. The Great Moonbat conceded that he had been looking at the wrong figures. Still, it was good of him to admit it – and at least his blog ended up with an impressive 514 comments.
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ELECTRIC CARS ONLY VIABLE WITH $70 BILLION GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS
Electric cars have a big role to play in reducing the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but it's going to cost a lot, according to a new report. It could even push automakers into further trouble. For electric and hybrid vehicles to achieve their environmental potential, the world's governments will need to step in with high levels of financial support for consumers and industry, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group, a management consulting firm. And the cost savings in fuel won't be nearly enough to provide the incentive without that government cash.
Electric vehicles could realistically make up a significant fraction of the world's car market in the foreseeable future, but not nearly a majority, according to BCG. "The costs of creating an automotive market dominated by electric and hybrid cars are prohibitively high," said the report. Under what BCG calls the "most likely" scenario - where oil costs about $150 a barrel and governments enforce existing CO2 regulations - about 11 million hybrid and 3 million electric vehicles will be sold globally in 2020. Even then, they will make up just 28% of those sold in the word's biggest markets.
But even that level of market penetration will require governments in Europe alone to spend about $70 billion in industry support, BCG said. In return, a relatively small amount - about $6 billion - would be saved by switching vehicles from oil-based fuel to electricity. The numbers would be similar for the United States, said Xavier Mosquet, one of the report's authors.
Most of that money would go to help the auto industry engineer and manufacturer the vehicles and to provide cash incentives to offset their high costs to consumers. These investments will require a firm commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, according to the report, regardless of cost.
If cost-effectiveness were the goal, improving the performance of today's internal combustion engines would be the best option. Using technologies like turbocharging and advanced fuel injection to boost engine output would cost between $70 and $140 per car for each percentage point of CO2 reduction, according to the report. A 20% improvement in fuel efficiency would cost about $1,200 per vehicle.
Partly or fully electric cars can achieve much greater efficiency, but at much higher costs. For every percentage point decease in C02, a hybrid or electric car would cost about $140 to $280 more to produce. BCG estimates that a hybrid car today costs about $7,000 more to produce than a similar non-hybrid, but that that cost will come down to about $4,000 by 2020. By that time, with a cost of $130 to $160 per percentage improvement in CO2 emissions, hybrid cars will become an economical solution compared to further development of non-hybrid engines.
Plug-in vehicles of various types - plug-in only, plug-in hybrids and range-extended plug-in vehicles - present greater cost challenges because of they need expensive batteries. BCG estimates that by 2020, when battery costs will have come down, a battery for an electric car with an 80 mile range will still cost about $14,000. While some consumers will pay more for electric cars even if they don't make it up in fuel savings, most won't, the report said. That means government incentives to make up the price difference.
More HERE
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See below. He of all people should know that cold (as in winter) kills a lot more people than warmth (as in summer). He should be celebrating warming if it were public health that concerned him. But Professor Sir Muir Gray is obviously an establishment figure who is just doing his best to uphold establishment beliefs. He didn't get a knighthood for rocking the boat
In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era — fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution. And just as doctors led the Victorian campaign, so the medical profession should be in the vanguard of this new revolution in public health.
The front page of The Lancet of May 16 says it all: “Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” This prestigious journal, which usually gives no more than ten pages to vitally important clinical research, made space for a 39-page report.
Climate change will hit the poorest nations hardest, but it will affect us too. In the summer of 2003, la canicule, an unexpected heatwave, killed 14,000 elderly people in France. Rising temperatures will bring that type of problem to our shores. Our health services will be put under pressure by severe weather and floods. But it is the global effects that will hit us, and especially our children and grandchildren, because of the effect that climate change will have on world food and water supplies; millions of climate refugees will disrupt the borders of even an island nation.
Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate change’s threat to health. That proposition will instantly provoke a hostile reaction from the diminishing band of climate-change sceptics. But as a doctor of 40 years’ standing who has been involved in running public health services for 30 years, I know that the evidence is good enough to make action, not inaction, the sensible choice. An empirical view of the data shows that delay will not just increase the amount of preventable harm, it may take us past a point of no return.
So the medical profession must accept responsibility in the campaign for change. However, with a few notable exceptions, doctors are effectively silent on the health threat that will come to define our age. My fellow doctors cannot just leave this issue to their leaders, to the presidents of the Royal Colleges and to the members of the Climate and Health Council. They should be active in their local communities, where they are known and respected, using their influence to press for national and international action.
Leaders, no matter how great, must have courage and a mandate to act. What is needed, for instance, is for 20 or 30 MPs to collar Ed Miliband, the Climate Change Secretary, as he rushes across the lobby and say: “Three [or more] doctors have been to my surgery in the last month warning me about the concern that they and their patients have about climate change — that’s more doctors than have ever come to see me about the NHS or even their pay. They tell me the medical profession is clear what needs to be done.”
“Why do I never get letters from doctors about smoking?” an MP asked me when I was the secretary of Action on Smoking and Health. “Why do I get more letters on animal welfare than human health?” Why indeed. The medical profession is too silent, and sometimes too apathetic. Fortunately, many of today’s medical students and young doctors have fire in their bellies and are taking to the streets demanding action. Their older colleagues should join them and use their influence. Perhaps, they could try some “collar-and-tie” direct action — those doctors who own shares should be at AGMs demanding that companies clean up their environmental acts.
But the medical profession needs to put its own house in order too. I was in a hospital last month that is doubling its electricity supply “to meet demand”, with no thought about the future. Sometimes the NHS is not unlike Dickens’s Mrs Jellyby, keen to reform others while her own children were scalded through neglect.
The NHS is gigantic and has a carbon footprint that is nearly one twentieth of the whole UK’s footprint — 1.3 million staff each with their own footprint, the drugs bought, the buildings, the transport, the water and the food, too much of it thrown away. Now is the time for the profession to mobilise and show the passion that took them into medical school but is then so often extinguished.
In December in Copenhagen, the vital United Nations Climate Change Conference meets. Unfortunately, British MPs are distracted, so the medical profession has a duty to act to make the politicians focus on it.
A recent summit meeting of leading doctors at the British Medical Association unanimously agreed that the need for action is essential. However, battles are not won in headquarters but by the troops on the front line. So I would like to see 90 per cent of doctors making environmentally friendly personal changes; half of doctors signing the Climate and Health Council pledge; and at least one in 20 doctors lobbying their MPs face-to-face. What more appropriate place than a constituency surgery could there be for a doctor to tell his or her MP that the medical profession thinks that urgent treatment is needed?
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A Closer Look at Climate Change and the IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is widely regarded in the media as the ultimate authority on climate change. Created by two divisions of the United Nations, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, its pronouncements are received as if they come down from Mount Olympus or Mount Sinai. The common presumption is that the IPCC has assembled the best scientific knowledge. Let’s take a closer look at this organization to see whether it merits such uncritical deference.
The IPCC’s Feb. 2007 report stated: It is “very likely” that human activity is causing global warming. Why then, just two months later, did the Vice Chair of the IPCC, Yuri Izrael, write, “the panic over global warming is totally unjustified;” “there is no serious threat to the climate;” and humanity is “hypothetically … more threatened by cold than by global warming?”
IPCC press releases have warned about increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, yet Dr. Vincent Gray, a member of the IPCC’s expert reviewers’ panel asserts, “There is no relationship between warming and [the] level of gases in the atmosphere.”
A 2001 IPCC report presented 245 potential scenarios. The media publicity that followed focused on the most extreme scenario, prompting the report’s lead author, atmospheric scientist Dr. John Christy, to rebuke media sensationalism and affirm, “The world is in much better shape than this doomsday scenario paints … the worst-case scenario [is] not going to happen.”
Clearly, the IPCC does not speak as one voice when leading scientists on its panel contradict its official position. The solution to this apparent riddle lies in the structure of the IPCC itself. What the media report are the policymakers’ summaries, not the far lengthier reports prepared by scientists. The policymakers’ summaries are produced by a committee of 51 government appointees, many of whom are not scientists.
The policymakers’ summaries are presented as the “consensus” of 2,500 scientists who have contributed input to the IPCC’s scientific reports. “Consensus” does NOT mean that all of the scientists endorse the policymakers’ summaries. In fact, some of the 2,500 scientists have resigned in protest against those summaries. Other contributing scientists, such as the individuals quoted above, publicly contradict the assertions of the policymakers’ summaries.
To better understand the “consensus” presented in the policymakers’ summaries, it is helpful to be aware of the structure of the IPCC. Those who compose the summaries are given considerable latitude to modify the scientific reports. Page four of Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC Work states: “Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group of the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter.” In other words, when there is a discrepancy between what the scientists say and what the authors of the policymakers’ summaries want to say, the latter prevails.
Here is a specific example: One policymakers’ summary omitted several important unequivocal conclusions contained in the scientists’ report, including, “No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of observed climate change] to anthropogenic [i.e., man-made] causes,” and “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.” These significant revisions were made, according to IPCC officials quoted in Nature magazine, “to ensure that it [the report] conformed to a policymakers’ summary.”
Elsewhere, Rule 3 of IPCC procedures states: “Documents should involve both peer review by experts and review by governments.” In practice, IPCC sometimes bypasses scientific peer review, and the policymakers’ summaries reflect only governmental (political) review. This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, the IPCC is a political, not a scientific, entity. It is the “Inter-GOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change,” not a “global SCIENTISTS’ panel.”
Also, “consensus” is a political phenomenon, a compromise, whereas scientific truth is not subject to obtaining a political majority. (Actually, 31,000 scientists have signed a petition protesting the “consensus” that human activity is dangerously altering the Earth’s climate. Consider that against the 2,500 scientists cited by IPCC—many of whom publicly refute IPCC’s press releases.)
To its credit, the IPCC debunks many of the alarmist exaggerations of radical greens. However, its scientific authority remains irreparably compromised by political tampering. When a U.S. State Department official writes to the co-chair of the IPCC that “it is essential that … chapter authors be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner,” the political character of IPCC is plain.
The sponsors of the IPCC, the United Nations, and liberal American politicians all share the goal of reducing Americans’ wealth by capping our consumption of energy with a binding international climate change treaty. They are willing to resort to scientific fraud to further their goal. In the words of Al Gore’s ally, former Under-Secretary of State Tim Wirth, “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing” by reducing Americans’ consumption of fossil fuels. Keep that in mind whenever the IPCC is cited in support of a climate treaty
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Windfarms a security threat
The body that monitors UK airspace is seeking a solution to the potentially disastrous problem of commercial and military aircraft disappearing in radar blackout zones caused by wind farms. National Air Traffic Services (Nats) has asked Raytheon, the American defence company, to design the world's first system for allowing radar to see through wind farm interference. The cost of the £5 million project is expected to be picked up by the wind energy industry.
Wind farm turbines create a Doppler effect as they turn, which shows up on radar screens. As the area and number of these wind farms has increased, the number of radar blackout zones has also risen. Aircraft passing through the area can disappear in the blackout and air traffic controllers can lose their exact position. The Royal Air Force is concerned that enemy bombers or other aircraft could hide behind interference from offshore wind farms and approach Britain undetected.
A Nats spokesman said: “We have a duty to safeguard our operations, so in the past we have objected to the development of a number of wind farms that threaten aircraft safety. We need a system that can eliminate this problem.”
Raytheon has been asked to create a software system that will filter out the wind farm noise from other radar signals. This will effectively allow air traffic controllers to see through the wind farms. The company, which is the largest manufacturer of radar systems in the world, hopes to complete the project by the end of next year. Once completed, it will also be deployed in the Netherlands.
Andy Zogg, vice-president of command and control systems at Raytheon, said: “As the number of wind farms grows, there are more and more of these radar black holes. They show up as clutter on the radar screen and the concern is that aircraft approaching from behind the turbines or flying over them cannot be seen.”
Brian Smith, general manager of Raytheon Canada, said: “Our work will be to develop the algorithms that allow us to discriminate between turbines and aircraft. It is called clutter erasure.”
The Government has identified wind power as a key to reducing reliance on carbon dioxide producing energy sources. Europe's largest onshore wind farm opened last week at Whitelee in Scotland. The 140 turbines cover an area of 55 square kilometres and are each 110 metres high. The wind farm will generate enough electricity to power 250,000 homes.
SOURCE
Britain wastes huge sums on windmills while the need for reliable electicity supplies becomes ever more urgent and costly
On a barren hillside outside Glasgow, dozens of wind turbines are spinning in the breeze as Britain's largest onshore wind park starts to generate electricity. With 140 turbines producing enough power to supply tens of thousands of homes, it is among the largest and most vivid symbols of the Government's drive to replace Britain's collection of ageing coal, gas and oil-fired power stations with a cleaner, greener alternative.
But this effort to transform Britain's energy industry, which is being propelled by tough new emissions rules and by the sheer decrepitude of much of the network, does not come cheap and has profound implications for consumers.
The site, at Whitelee on Eaglesham Moor, has cost ScottishPower, its developer, £300 million, but this is a tiny fraction of what will be required to upgrade Britain's power network. According to Ernst & Young, the total cost of doing so and meeting tough targets to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020 will be no less than £233.5 billion. Although some of that burden is likely to be shared with power companies, the figure, divided among the UK's 26million households, implies a total bill of up to £8,977 each — or £598 a year for the next 15 years.
Tony Ward, power and utilities partner at Ernst & Young, said that about half of the total, or £112 billion, will need to be spent building new supplies of renewable energy, including vast new offshore wind parks - each many times the size of Whitelee — as well as biomass-fired power stations, tidal and wave-energy projects.
Britain must also renew almost all of its ageing nuclear power plants, which account for about 20 per cent of the country's electricity supply, a project that is expected to add £38.4 billion to the cost. A further £28 billion or so will have to be poured into the grid to build a transmission network capable of supporting new reactors and remote wind parks sited as far north as the Shetlands and in the North Sea. This excludes the cost of building new coal-fired stations equipped with carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), bolstering the UK's gas storage facilities, new gas-fired power plants and a rollout of “smart meters” in every home and business in the country.
Steve Holliday, chief executive of National Grid, whose company will be at the centre of this effort, said: “It's very clear from the renewables and new nuclear stations being planned that there is going to be a need for a substantial increase in investment to build a modern, 21st-century grid.”
He expects National Grid alone to spend up to £5 billion a year from 2012 and he is already drawing up plans for a network of seabed cables feeding renewable electricity from Scotland to consumers in the South, as well as sweeping reinforcements to conventional high-voltage lines that criss-cross the country.
Craig Lowrey, director of markets for EIC, the energy consultancy, said: “These are massive investments — we are talking about potentially the biggest investment programme in Britain's history. But if the Government is serious about meeting its emissions targets, it needs to make people understand the true scale of these costs.”
Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish & Southern Energy, Britain's second-largest utility, takes a similar view: “In the long term, the unit price of energy is going to have to go up significantly. We are going to have to produce energy in a greener and more secure way and that will cost money.”
Ernst & Young's figures might underestimate the total expense because they do not include regular maintenance costs, Mr Marchant said, suggesting that a figure of £300 billion could be closer to the mark. However, he is optimistic that dramatic improvements in energy efficiency could mean that consumer bills will remain stable or even fall in the long term.
The fear is that in Britain's liberalised energy market this tidal wave of required investment simply will not materialise.
Dr Lowrey believes that, under its current structure — which relies on market forces plus consumer-funded incentives designed to boost investment in renewable energy — the scale of investment needed is unlikely either to meet expectations or to be allocated in the way that the Government or society wants. It is a concern that has been compounded in recent months by a collapse in funding that has accompanied the credit crunch and the plunging value of the pound, forcing up the cost of imported power-generating equipment.
The falling prices of oil, coal and gas have also undermined the economic rationale of many investments in more costly, alternative forms of energy. “There is a need for greater intervention to make this investment a reality,” Dr Lowrey said. “We need a guiding hand from government.”
SOURCE
Climate Change Act: Now the world faces its biggest ever bill
One of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to "stop climate change", observes Christopher Booker.
One measure of the fantasy world now inhabited by our sad MPs was the mindless way that they nodded through, last October, by 463 votes to three, by far the most expensive piece of legislation ever to go through Parliament. This was the Climate Change Act, obliging the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change to reduce Britain's "carbon emissions" by 2050 to 20 per cent of what they were in 1990 – a target achievable only by shutting down most of the economy.
Such is the zombie state of our MPs that they agreed to this lunatic measure without the Government giving any idea of what this might cost. Only one, Peter Lilley, raised this question, and it was he who, last month, alerted me to the fact that the minister, Ed Miliband, had at last slipped out a figure on his website (without bothering to tell Parliament). The Government's estimate was £404 billion, or £18 billion a year, or £760 per household every year for four decades.
Such figures, produced by a computer model, are, of course, meaningless. But one of the mysteries of our time is how impossible it is to interest people in the mind-boggling sums cited by governments all over the world as the cost of the measures they wish to see taken to "stop climate change".
Last week I dined with Professor Bob Carter, a distinguished Australian paleoclimatologist, who has been trying to alert politicians in Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand to the scarcely believable cost of these proposals. He gave me a paper he presented to a committee of New Zealand MPs. China and India, as the price of their participating in the UN's planned "Kyoto Two" deal to be agreed in Copenhagen next December, are demanding that developed countries, including Britain, should pay them 1 per cent of their GDP, totalling up to more than $300 billion every year.
Africa is putting in for a further $267 billion a year. South American countries are demanding hundreds of billions more. In the US, the latest costing of President Obama's "cap and trade" Bill is $1.9 trillion, a yearly cost to each US family of $4,500.
Meanwhile, as Mr Obama's Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary, Stephen Chu, babbles on the BBC's Today programme about how the world's energy needs can be met by wind and solar power (for which, he assured us, we would need to cover only 5 per cent of the planet's deserts with solar panels), a study shows that for every job created in Spain's "alternative energy industry" since 2000, 2.2 others have been lost. (Mr Obama talks about creating "five million green jobs" in the US.)
Last week the BBC and various newspapers excitably greeted the opening by Alex Salmond of Whitelee, "Europe's largest onshore wind farm", 140 giant 2.3 megawatt turbines covering 30 square miles of moorland south-east of Glasgow. It was happily reported that these would "generate" 322MW of electricity, "enough to power every home in Glasgow". They won't, of course, do anything of the kind. Due to the vagaries of the wind, this colossal enterprise will produce only 80MW on average, a quarter of its capacity and barely enough to keep half Glasgow's lights on.
It really is time people stopped recycling the thoroughly bogus propaganda claims of the wind industry in this way. Any journalist who still falls for these lies by confusing turbines' "capacity" with their actual output is either thoroughly stupid or dishonest. The truth is that the 80MW average output of "Europe's largest wind farm" is only a fraction of that of any conventional power station, at twice the cost. For this derisory amount of power, the hidden subsidy to Whitelee over its 25-year life will, on current figures, be £1 billion, paid by all of us through our electricity bills.
Truly, our world has gone off its head, and no one seems to notice – not least those wretched MPs who allow all this to happen without having the faintest idea what is going on.
On May 15, the Guardian’s famed environmental crusader George Monbiot triumphantly posted on his blog an item headed “How to disprove Christopher Booker in 26 seconds”. This was the time, he claimed, it took him to discover how the figures that I had reported on the melting of Arctic ice were wrong.
Guardian groupies piled in to congratulate him, calling for my editor to sack me. Then one or two suggested he should look again at what I wrote. Three hours later, a disclaimer appeared at the top of his blog: “Whoops – looks like I’ve boobed. Sorry folks”. The Great Moonbat conceded that he had been looking at the wrong figures. Still, it was good of him to admit it – and at least his blog ended up with an impressive 514 comments.
SOURCE
ELECTRIC CARS ONLY VIABLE WITH $70 BILLION GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS
Electric cars have a big role to play in reducing the world's greenhouse gas emissions, but it's going to cost a lot, according to a new report. It could even push automakers into further trouble. For electric and hybrid vehicles to achieve their environmental potential, the world's governments will need to step in with high levels of financial support for consumers and industry, according to a report by the Boston Consulting Group, a management consulting firm. And the cost savings in fuel won't be nearly enough to provide the incentive without that government cash.
Electric vehicles could realistically make up a significant fraction of the world's car market in the foreseeable future, but not nearly a majority, according to BCG. "The costs of creating an automotive market dominated by electric and hybrid cars are prohibitively high," said the report. Under what BCG calls the "most likely" scenario - where oil costs about $150 a barrel and governments enforce existing CO2 regulations - about 11 million hybrid and 3 million electric vehicles will be sold globally in 2020. Even then, they will make up just 28% of those sold in the word's biggest markets.
But even that level of market penetration will require governments in Europe alone to spend about $70 billion in industry support, BCG said. In return, a relatively small amount - about $6 billion - would be saved by switching vehicles from oil-based fuel to electricity. The numbers would be similar for the United States, said Xavier Mosquet, one of the report's authors.
Most of that money would go to help the auto industry engineer and manufacturer the vehicles and to provide cash incentives to offset their high costs to consumers. These investments will require a firm commitment to reducing greenhouse gases, according to the report, regardless of cost.
If cost-effectiveness were the goal, improving the performance of today's internal combustion engines would be the best option. Using technologies like turbocharging and advanced fuel injection to boost engine output would cost between $70 and $140 per car for each percentage point of CO2 reduction, according to the report. A 20% improvement in fuel efficiency would cost about $1,200 per vehicle.
Partly or fully electric cars can achieve much greater efficiency, but at much higher costs. For every percentage point decease in C02, a hybrid or electric car would cost about $140 to $280 more to produce. BCG estimates that a hybrid car today costs about $7,000 more to produce than a similar non-hybrid, but that that cost will come down to about $4,000 by 2020. By that time, with a cost of $130 to $160 per percentage improvement in CO2 emissions, hybrid cars will become an economical solution compared to further development of non-hybrid engines.
Plug-in vehicles of various types - plug-in only, plug-in hybrids and range-extended plug-in vehicles - present greater cost challenges because of they need expensive batteries. BCG estimates that by 2020, when battery costs will have come down, a battery for an electric car with an 80 mile range will still cost about $14,000. While some consumers will pay more for electric cars even if they don't make it up in fuel savings, most won't, the report said. That means government incentives to make up the price difference.
More HERE
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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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Monday, May 25, 2009
Roast lamb threatens the planet
Tomatoes too! And don't mention booze! But Coca Cola and chocolate are OK. All of which shows what absurdities you end up with when you start from silly assumptions
GIVE up lamb roasts and save the planet. Government advisers are developing menus to combat climate change by cutting out "high carbon" food such as meat from sheep, whose burping poses a serious threat to the environment. Out will go kebabs, greenhouse tomatoes and alcohol. Instead, diners will be encouraged to consume more potatoes and seasonal vegetables, as well as pork and chicken, which generate fewer carbon emissions.
"Changing our lifestyles, including our diets, is going to be one of the crucial elements in cutting carbon emissions," said David Kennedy, chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change. Kennedy has stopped eating his favourite doner kebabs because they contain lamb. A government-sponsored study into greenhouse gases found that producing 2.2lb of lamb released the equivalent of 37lb of carbon dioxide.
The problem is because sheep burp so much methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Cows are only slightly better behaved. The production of 2.2lb of beef releases methane equivalent to 35lb of CO2 Tomatoes, most of which are grown in heated glasshouses, are the most "carbon-intensive" vegetable, each 2.2lb generating more than 20lb of CO2 Potatoes, in contrast, release only about 1lb of CO2 for each 2.2lb of food. The figures are similar for most other native fruit and vegetables.
"We are not saying that everyone should become vegetarian or give up drinking but moving towards less carbon intensive foods will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve health," said Kennedy.
The climate committee is analysing emissions from farming and will suggest measures to reduce them. However, it has concluded that people will have to change their habits.
Alcoholic drinks are another significant contributory factor, with the growing and processing of crops such as hops and malt into beer and whisky helping to generate 1.5% of the nation's greenhouse gases.
The Carbon Trust, a government-funded firm, is working with food and drink companies to calculate the "carbon footprints" of products - sometimes with surprising results. Coca-Cola, for example, generates only about half the greenhouse gas emissions of Innocent's "smoothies". Cadbury's chocolate generates about 4«lb of CO2 for every 2.2lb eaten - less than half that from the same weight of chicken.
SOURCE
"Philanthropist" means "lover of people". But the very rich ones despise people and want fewer of them. They seem embarrassed about it though
But it's all "For the environment", of course. Note that according to that logic, Westerners are the big polluters and users of resources -- so it is you and I that they hate and want to get rid of as soon as possible. No wonder they tried to keep their meeting secret!
SOME of America's leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world's population and speed up improvements in health and education. The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America's wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey. These members, along with Gates, have given away more than œ45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.
They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires' aides were told they were at "security briefings". Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. "We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different - maybe because they don't want to be seen as a global cabal," he said.
Some details were emerging this weekend, however. The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an "umbrella cause" that could harness their interests. The issues debated included reforming the supervision of overseas aid spending to setting up rural schools and water systems in developing countries. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.
This could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values. Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation. [He's probably right about that] At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he had made similar points. "Official projections say the world's population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion," Gates said then.
Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than œ2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to "discuss how to increase giving" and they intended to "continue the dialogue" over the next few months.
Another guest said there was "nothing as crude as a vote" but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat. "This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers," said the guest. "They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming."
Why all the secrecy? "They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government," he said.
SOURCE
Warmist challenges Pielke Sr. to a debate. Pielke accepts
Amusing to see if the Warmist follows through. Pielke does not deny global warming via CO2 but suspects that it is a minor effect. He is a fully qualified meteorologist
There is part one of an interview with Professor Stephen Schneider regarding global warming and climate change issues published on Examiner.com on May 24 2009. It is titled "The global warming debates: Stephen Schneider" and is written by Thomas Fuller who is the San Francisco Policy Environmental Policy Examiner reporter. This interview is an excellent example of the failure to present a balanced presentation of the climate science issues.
The reporter asked the following question
"More specifically, the principal skeptic websites (Watt's Up With That, Climate Skeptic, Climate Audit and Climate Science) that I look at regularly seem to think they are winning the day. They think data is coming in that questions the established paradigm."
First, the reporter erroneously presented my perspective as a "skeptic" website.
Steve Schneider, unfortunately, chose not only to fail to correct this error, but demeaned the scientific value of these websites.
His reply is
"They have been thinking that as long as I have observed them and they have very few mainstream climate scientists who publish original research in climate refereed journals with them-a petroleum geologist's opinion on climate science is a as good as a climate scientists opinion on oil reserves. So petitions sent to hundreds of thousands of earth scientists are frauds. If these guys think they are "winning" why don't they try to take on face to face real climatologists at real meetings-not fake ideology shows like Heartland Institute-but with those with real knowledge-because they'd be slaughtered in public debate by Trenberth, Santer, Hansen, Oppenheimer, Allen, Mitchell, even little ol' me. It's easy to blog, easy to write op-eds in the Wall Street Journal."
On the first issue, the characterization of my website as a "skeptic website" is completely inaccurate. In 2006, Andy Revkin of the New York Times also erroneously described me as a "climate skeptic", and after confronting him on this mistake (see), the New York Time published a correction (see). My views on climate science, hardly those of a climate skeptic (which I consider a perjorative characterization of my perspective), are summarized, for example, in my weblogs
Summary Of Roger A. Pielke Sr's View Of Climate Science
Roger A. Pielke Sr.'s Perspective On The Role Of Humans In Climate Change
Roger A. Pielke Sr.'s Perspective On Adaptation and Mitigation
and in my House subcommittee testimony in 2008; see:
Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2008: A Broader View of the Role of Humans in the Climate System is Required In the Assessment of Costs and Benefits of Effective Climate Policy. Written Testimony for the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Hearing "Climate Change: Costs of Inaction" - Honorable Rick Boucher, Chairman. June 26, 2008, Washington, DC., 52 pp.
More importantly, I am disappointed that Steve Schneider personally attacked the websites that are listed. I have quite a bit of respect for Dr. Schneider's past work [e.g. his book Genesis Strategy is an excellent example of why we need a resource-based, bottom-up assessment of vulnerability, as has been discussed in our peer reviewed papers (e.g. see) and books (e.g. see)].
However, his casual denigration of each of the websites, Watt's Up With That, Climate Skeptic, Climate Audit and Climate Science (each of whose contributions to the discussion of climate science are informative and very valuable) represents a failure to engage in constructive scientific debate.
This cavalier dismissal of these websites illustrates that instead of evaluating the soundness of their scientific evidence, the authors of these websites, who provide a much needed broader viewpoint on climate science, are insulted. This is not the proper way to discuss scientific issues.
I would be glad to debate Dr. Schneider (or any of the other individuals who are listed).
I also challenge them to refute in the professional literature (and in a debate) the numerous peer reviewed articles and national (e.g. see) and international climate assessments (e.g. see) that present scientific evidence that conflicts with the narrow perspective on climate science that Steve Schneider is representing.
SOURCE (See the original for links)
Skepticism heard in N. Ireland Parliament
On Thursday 21 May 2009, at Stormont, Belfast, Dutch scientist Hans Schreuder, who now lives in East Anglia, told the Northern Ireland Climate Change Committee that there is no evidence for global warming or climate change being man-made. Quoting from eminent scientists world-wide, Mr Schreuder dismissed the entire climate alarmist scenario. From his testimony, these quotes:
"[...] the longstanding paradigm says that because of trace gases like CO2, the atmosphere heats the earth. But this isn't true."
"Any and all evidence that has ever been presented to support the idea that carbon dioxide has an effect on global temperatures has been biased, opinionated and based on an agenda that pre-emptively dismissed alternative explanations."
"Computer simulations regard the earth as a flat disk, without North or South Pole, without the Tropics, without clouds and bathed in a 24 hour haze of sunshine. The reality is two icy poles and a tropical equatorial zone, with each and every square metre of our earth receiving an ever varying and different amount of energy from the sun, season to season and day to day. This reality is too difficult to input to a computer. Did you realise that?"
"If carbon dioxide really is such a danger to mankind, as the US Environmental Protection Agency would have us believe, then the upcoming Olympic Games should be cancelled, as well as all other big sporting events, as well as all road transport and all air transport and all coal- and gas-fired powerstations should be shut down. Clearly there is no need for such drastic action and clearly carbon dioxide is not dangerous at all."
"The above makes a mockery of saying that today's level is unprecedented."
"As a further rebuttal of the influence of carbon dioxide over the climate, the alleged IPCC greenhouse effect is a non-existent effect. No greenhouse, whether made from glass, plastic, cardboard or steel will reach a higher inside temperature due to the magic of re-radiated infrared energy. If it did, engineers would have long ago been able to design power stations made from air, mirrors and glass, extracting more energy out of it than was put into it - if only!"
"The periodicity in the data and the unequivocal solar linkage were not even addressed. This is not science. The whole climate change issue is about to fall apart. Heads will roll."
"Any and all schemes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are futile in terms of having an effect on global temperatures or the climate and any and all carbon trading exchanges are a fraudulent exercise amounting to no more than hidden taxation."
Above is a press release from Schreuder [hans@ilovemycarbondioxide.com]. Full presentation here
Comment on the above received by email:
Courtesy of Prof. Ian Plimer, let me offer you another conundrum. The earth is approx 3.5bn years old. For half of this almost unimaginable span of time, its atmosphere was largelydevoid of O2, a statement which is scientifically uncontentious, I believe. O2 now accounts for roughly 21% by volume whilst poor old CO2 languishes at all of 0.03%.
Question - why?
Answer - because the rise of green plants and photosynthesis have sequestered carbon from CO2 and left behind good ole oxygen. Before green plants, was there a runaway greenhouse effect? To be sure, there was not - in fact, repeatedly the opposite, namely glaciation. All very odd, but for the true believer irrelevant!
FUTURE WINTERS MAY BE COLDER
It was the year 1799, during the "Dalton Minimum" when the sun was quiet that George Frederick Bollinger led a group of early pioneers from North Carolina to establish early settlements in Missouri. They hoped to cross their largest obstacle, the Mississippi River, on the ice, frozen solid in mid-winter.
The pioneers and their wagon train moved westward a few miles each day, making and breaking camp each night, fording the small streams and floating across the larger ones on rafts which they made from the nearby trees, following roads that were barely trails through forests and valleys.
They arrived on the east bank of the Mississippi River opposite St. Genevieve in late December, pitched camp and explored potential river crossings. St. Genevieve is located about a hundred miles downstream from Saint Louis. Winter had come early and the Mississippi river was already covered with ice. It was bitterly cold. They determined the ice was not yet thick enough to support a crossing of ox-carts and covered wagons. Daily the thickness of the ice was measured and then on December 31, a chopped hole in the ice indicated thickness well over two feet. They tested the ice by making a few trips across on foot and horseback. The believed the ice was thick enough to support a loaded wagon.
As a test, a wagon was selected to be driven across with no one riding and the driver would walk ahead watching the ice and leading his team. The trip across and back to camp was made without the ice cracking and preparations were made for an early crossing New Years Day.
The next morning final preparations were made to break camp and all supplies were loaded. The weather remained bitter cold with dark skies overhead and light snow falling, but the decision had been made to cross and there was no turning back. The group was devout German Reformed Protestants and they gathered together in the early cold gray dawn to seek guidance from their God for a safe crossing.
The cracking of whips like pistol shots rang out over the heads of the oxen to coax them out onto the ice; the crossing had began. All that were able, walked to lighten the loaded wagons, keeping a safe distance from the wagons, which were also spaced far apart to lessen the danger of breaking the ice. The crossing was made successfully with no mishaps, except extremely cold hands and feet.
The townsfolk of St. Genevieve had built a large fire to welcome and warm these new settlers. Safely across the Mississippi, they were relieved of their crossing fears and enjoyed the local hospitality. They exchanged news from the East for information of what they might expect ahead. Needed supplies were purchased and even the weather abated a little as the sun broke through the clouds. They settled along the Whitewater River where the soil was rich.
We are transitioning into Solar Cycle (SC) 24 and the sun has become fairly quiet. During most of the last century (SC 16-23) the sun has been in a "Grand Maxima". As a result the Earth has experience warming. But with SC 24 the sun is again changing states. From the peak year 1998, the lower Troposphere temperatures globally have already fallen around 1/2 degree Celsius. This is despite the fact that during that same time period, atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen 5% from 367 ppm to 386 ppm. Several solar scientist are predicting the sun will slide into a "Dalton Minimum" event in SC 25, about a decade from now. If that happens, the Earth will experience some bitterly cold winters for several decades.
The winters may once again resemble the winters 200 years ago during the time of the early pioneers. Imagine for a minute the west fork of the White River near Bloomfield, Indiana freezing into a block of ice two feet thick.
SOURCE
Australian carbon plan will cause jobs carnage
THERE is a surreal aspect to the present debate about the accuracy of short to mid-term economic growth forecasts contained in the recent budget. As this debate plays out, the 76 members of the Australian Senate are preparing for a crucial vote next month on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a policy initiative the Government has described as the most substantial economic reform of the Australian economy for decades.
Yet those 76 senators will have to make their decisions on this once-in-a-generation reform without the benefit of any detailed forecasts of the scheme's short and medium-term impact. While the Government describes its Treasury modelling as the most comprehensive ever attempted, the analysis provides no forecasts on the sectoral or regional employment impacts over the first decade of the CPRS. None at all. The Treasury analysis provides intricate detail about the shift in employment shares between sectors in 2050, but nothing about what the scheme will mean for jobs in key Australian sectors between now and 2020.
Senior Treasury officials admitted this week that a limitation of its modelling is that it "doesn't capture all the transitional elements". For those unfamiliar with bureaucratic eco-jargon, a "transitional element" means someone losing their job.
In other words, the Government's premier economic agency officially has no clear sense about the near-term employment impact. This is economic policy-making with a blindfold on.
The minerals sector considers this sort of economic risk-taking is unwise at best. So we asked Australia's most experienced economic forecaster -- Brian Fisher -- to assess the impact on employment in the sector that produces about 50per cent of Australia's exports. Fisher -- a former executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics -- used the same Treasury assumptions and the same data sources used in the Treasury modelling. Unlike the Treasury, he took into account the global financial crisis. It is a sober, straightforward analysis. The results are even more sobering.
The CPRS scheme will shed 23,510 jobs in the minerals sector by 2020 and more than 66,000 by 2030. These are direct jobs. All minerals sectors will be affected, whether in coal mining, gold and base metals, alumina refining, mining services, copper, zinc, lead and aluminium smelting and so on. No state, or the Northern Territory, will be spared, no mining region will be untouched. The impact on regional Australia will be severe, including thousands of jobs in the Illawarra and the Hunter in NSW, the Bowen Basin in Queensland, remote regions in Western Australia, including the Pilbara and Kalgoorlie, South Australia, Victoria's Latrobe Valley, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
You can add to these numbers the jobs of the council workers, the school teachers, the nurses, gardeners, and employees in the hundreds of small businesses in the towns and communities that service these mining regions.
Not surprisingly, I consider these numbers should prompt a Government re-think of its CPRS legislation.
In particular, the Government has made one basic mistake. It decided that raising revenue was more important than establishing a sensible measured transition to an emissions trading scheme. It decided to auction 70 to 75 per cent of its permits from the outset of the scheme.
It is a mistake that puts the Australian scheme at odds with the European scheme and the one being developed by Barack Obama's Democratic Party in the US. The present draft of the US legislation will auction only 15 per cent of permits; that compares with 70 to 75 per cent in Australia.
That emphasis on revenue raising is at the core of the threat to job losses in Australian industry. It will mean that the CPRS will cost the mining industry $10 billion in the first five years, a cost none of our international competitors will bear. Over time, as the new analysis shows, that means a steady drain of jobs out of the industry, and out of the regional communities that depend on it.
Repairing the mistake in the CPRS will not weaken the environmental integrity of the scheme. Allocating permits without charge will not make a scheme less environmentally rigorous than if all permits are sold. But don't take my word for it. The head of the Pew Centre on Global Climate Policy (and former Clinton administration climate negotiator) Eileen Claussen told a recent congressional hearing that the "free allocation (of permits) provides the same economic incentive to reduce emissions as does an auction".
There is a simple solution. Let's do what the Europeans and Americans are doing. Let's phase in the auctioning of permits. Such an approach will establish a carbon price signal without putting the economy into reverse. It will reward firms who reduce their emissions. It will also raise sufficient revenue to ensure low and fixed income earners are not economically disadvantaged. There is no need for special treatment or compensation for certain sectors: the burden of the new scheme will be spread evenly across the economy.
We'd also have a better chance of meeting those economic growth forecasts that are front and centre of the present political debate.
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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Tomatoes too! And don't mention booze! But Coca Cola and chocolate are OK. All of which shows what absurdities you end up with when you start from silly assumptions
GIVE up lamb roasts and save the planet. Government advisers are developing menus to combat climate change by cutting out "high carbon" food such as meat from sheep, whose burping poses a serious threat to the environment. Out will go kebabs, greenhouse tomatoes and alcohol. Instead, diners will be encouraged to consume more potatoes and seasonal vegetables, as well as pork and chicken, which generate fewer carbon emissions.
"Changing our lifestyles, including our diets, is going to be one of the crucial elements in cutting carbon emissions," said David Kennedy, chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change. Kennedy has stopped eating his favourite doner kebabs because they contain lamb. A government-sponsored study into greenhouse gases found that producing 2.2lb of lamb released the equivalent of 37lb of carbon dioxide.
The problem is because sheep burp so much methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Cows are only slightly better behaved. The production of 2.2lb of beef releases methane equivalent to 35lb of CO2 Tomatoes, most of which are grown in heated glasshouses, are the most "carbon-intensive" vegetable, each 2.2lb generating more than 20lb of CO2 Potatoes, in contrast, release only about 1lb of CO2 for each 2.2lb of food. The figures are similar for most other native fruit and vegetables.
"We are not saying that everyone should become vegetarian or give up drinking but moving towards less carbon intensive foods will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve health," said Kennedy.
The climate committee is analysing emissions from farming and will suggest measures to reduce them. However, it has concluded that people will have to change their habits.
Alcoholic drinks are another significant contributory factor, with the growing and processing of crops such as hops and malt into beer and whisky helping to generate 1.5% of the nation's greenhouse gases.
The Carbon Trust, a government-funded firm, is working with food and drink companies to calculate the "carbon footprints" of products - sometimes with surprising results. Coca-Cola, for example, generates only about half the greenhouse gas emissions of Innocent's "smoothies". Cadbury's chocolate generates about 4«lb of CO2 for every 2.2lb eaten - less than half that from the same weight of chicken.
SOURCE
"Philanthropist" means "lover of people". But the very rich ones despise people and want fewer of them. They seem embarrassed about it though
But it's all "For the environment", of course. Note that according to that logic, Westerners are the big polluters and users of resources -- so it is you and I that they hate and want to get rid of as soon as possible. No wonder they tried to keep their meeting secret!
SOME of America's leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world's population and speed up improvements in health and education. The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.
Described as the Good Club by one insider it included David Rockefeller Jr, the patriarch of America's wealthiest dynasty, Warren Buffett and George Soros, the financiers, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, and the media moguls Ted Turner and Oprah Winfrey. These members, along with Gates, have given away more than œ45 billion since 1996 to causes ranging from health programmes in developing countries to ghetto schools nearer to home.
They gathered at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan on May 5. The informal afternoon session was so discreet that some of the billionaires' aides were told they were at "security briefings". Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. "We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different - maybe because they don't want to be seen as a global cabal," he said.
Some details were emerging this weekend, however. The billionaires were each given 15 minutes to present their favourite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an "umbrella cause" that could harness their interests. The issues debated included reforming the supervision of overseas aid spending to setting up rural schools and water systems in developing countries. Taking their cue from Gates they agreed that overpopulation was a priority.
This could result in a challenge to some Third World politicians who believe contraception and female education weaken traditional values. Gates, 53, who is giving away most of his fortune, argued that healthier families, freed from malaria and extreme poverty, would change their habits and have fewer children within half a generation. [He's probably right about that] At a conference in Long Beach, California, last February, he had made similar points. "Official projections say the world's population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive healthcare, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion," Gates said then.
Patricia Stonesifer, former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives more than œ2 billion a year to good causes, attended the Rockefeller summit. She said the billionaires met to "discuss how to increase giving" and they intended to "continue the dialogue" over the next few months.
Another guest said there was "nothing as crude as a vote" but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat. "This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers," said the guest. "They need to be independent of government agencies, which are unable to head off the disaster we all see looming."
Why all the secrecy? "They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government," he said.
SOURCE
Warmist challenges Pielke Sr. to a debate. Pielke accepts
Amusing to see if the Warmist follows through. Pielke does not deny global warming via CO2 but suspects that it is a minor effect. He is a fully qualified meteorologist
There is part one of an interview with Professor Stephen Schneider regarding global warming and climate change issues published on Examiner.com on May 24 2009. It is titled "The global warming debates: Stephen Schneider" and is written by Thomas Fuller who is the San Francisco Policy Environmental Policy Examiner reporter. This interview is an excellent example of the failure to present a balanced presentation of the climate science issues.
The reporter asked the following question
"More specifically, the principal skeptic websites (Watt's Up With That, Climate Skeptic, Climate Audit and Climate Science) that I look at regularly seem to think they are winning the day. They think data is coming in that questions the established paradigm."
First, the reporter erroneously presented my perspective as a "skeptic" website.
Steve Schneider, unfortunately, chose not only to fail to correct this error, but demeaned the scientific value of these websites.
His reply is
"They have been thinking that as long as I have observed them and they have very few mainstream climate scientists who publish original research in climate refereed journals with them-a petroleum geologist's opinion on climate science is a as good as a climate scientists opinion on oil reserves. So petitions sent to hundreds of thousands of earth scientists are frauds. If these guys think they are "winning" why don't they try to take on face to face real climatologists at real meetings-not fake ideology shows like Heartland Institute-but with those with real knowledge-because they'd be slaughtered in public debate by Trenberth, Santer, Hansen, Oppenheimer, Allen, Mitchell, even little ol' me. It's easy to blog, easy to write op-eds in the Wall Street Journal."
On the first issue, the characterization of my website as a "skeptic website" is completely inaccurate. In 2006, Andy Revkin of the New York Times also erroneously described me as a "climate skeptic", and after confronting him on this mistake (see), the New York Time published a correction (see). My views on climate science, hardly those of a climate skeptic (which I consider a perjorative characterization of my perspective), are summarized, for example, in my weblogs
Summary Of Roger A. Pielke Sr's View Of Climate Science
Roger A. Pielke Sr.'s Perspective On The Role Of Humans In Climate Change
Roger A. Pielke Sr.'s Perspective On Adaptation and Mitigation
and in my House subcommittee testimony in 2008; see:
Pielke Sr., Roger A., 2008: A Broader View of the Role of Humans in the Climate System is Required In the Assessment of Costs and Benefits of Effective Climate Policy. Written Testimony for the Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality of the Committee on Energy and Commerce Hearing "Climate Change: Costs of Inaction" - Honorable Rick Boucher, Chairman. June 26, 2008, Washington, DC., 52 pp.
More importantly, I am disappointed that Steve Schneider personally attacked the websites that are listed. I have quite a bit of respect for Dr. Schneider's past work [e.g. his book Genesis Strategy is an excellent example of why we need a resource-based, bottom-up assessment of vulnerability, as has been discussed in our peer reviewed papers (e.g. see) and books (e.g. see)].
However, his casual denigration of each of the websites, Watt's Up With That, Climate Skeptic, Climate Audit and Climate Science (each of whose contributions to the discussion of climate science are informative and very valuable) represents a failure to engage in constructive scientific debate.
This cavalier dismissal of these websites illustrates that instead of evaluating the soundness of their scientific evidence, the authors of these websites, who provide a much needed broader viewpoint on climate science, are insulted. This is not the proper way to discuss scientific issues.
I would be glad to debate Dr. Schneider (or any of the other individuals who are listed).
I also challenge them to refute in the professional literature (and in a debate) the numerous peer reviewed articles and national (e.g. see) and international climate assessments (e.g. see) that present scientific evidence that conflicts with the narrow perspective on climate science that Steve Schneider is representing.
SOURCE (See the original for links)
Skepticism heard in N. Ireland Parliament
On Thursday 21 May 2009, at Stormont, Belfast, Dutch scientist Hans Schreuder, who now lives in East Anglia, told the Northern Ireland Climate Change Committee that there is no evidence for global warming or climate change being man-made. Quoting from eminent scientists world-wide, Mr Schreuder dismissed the entire climate alarmist scenario. From his testimony, these quotes:
"[...] the longstanding paradigm says that because of trace gases like CO2, the atmosphere heats the earth. But this isn't true."
"Any and all evidence that has ever been presented to support the idea that carbon dioxide has an effect on global temperatures has been biased, opinionated and based on an agenda that pre-emptively dismissed alternative explanations."
"Computer simulations regard the earth as a flat disk, without North or South Pole, without the Tropics, without clouds and bathed in a 24 hour haze of sunshine. The reality is two icy poles and a tropical equatorial zone, with each and every square metre of our earth receiving an ever varying and different amount of energy from the sun, season to season and day to day. This reality is too difficult to input to a computer. Did you realise that?"
"If carbon dioxide really is such a danger to mankind, as the US Environmental Protection Agency would have us believe, then the upcoming Olympic Games should be cancelled, as well as all other big sporting events, as well as all road transport and all air transport and all coal- and gas-fired powerstations should be shut down. Clearly there is no need for such drastic action and clearly carbon dioxide is not dangerous at all."
"The above makes a mockery of saying that today's level is unprecedented."
"As a further rebuttal of the influence of carbon dioxide over the climate, the alleged IPCC greenhouse effect is a non-existent effect. No greenhouse, whether made from glass, plastic, cardboard or steel will reach a higher inside temperature due to the magic of re-radiated infrared energy. If it did, engineers would have long ago been able to design power stations made from air, mirrors and glass, extracting more energy out of it than was put into it - if only!"
"The periodicity in the data and the unequivocal solar linkage were not even addressed. This is not science. The whole climate change issue is about to fall apart. Heads will roll."
"Any and all schemes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are futile in terms of having an effect on global temperatures or the climate and any and all carbon trading exchanges are a fraudulent exercise amounting to no more than hidden taxation."
Above is a press release from Schreuder [hans@ilovemycarbondioxide.com]. Full presentation here
Comment on the above received by email:
Courtesy of Prof. Ian Plimer, let me offer you another conundrum. The earth is approx 3.5bn years old. For half of this almost unimaginable span of time, its atmosphere was largelydevoid of O2, a statement which is scientifically uncontentious, I believe. O2 now accounts for roughly 21% by volume whilst poor old CO2 languishes at all of 0.03%.
Question - why?
Answer - because the rise of green plants and photosynthesis have sequestered carbon from CO2 and left behind good ole oxygen. Before green plants, was there a runaway greenhouse effect? To be sure, there was not - in fact, repeatedly the opposite, namely glaciation. All very odd, but for the true believer irrelevant!
FUTURE WINTERS MAY BE COLDER
It was the year 1799, during the "Dalton Minimum" when the sun was quiet that George Frederick Bollinger led a group of early pioneers from North Carolina to establish early settlements in Missouri. They hoped to cross their largest obstacle, the Mississippi River, on the ice, frozen solid in mid-winter.
The pioneers and their wagon train moved westward a few miles each day, making and breaking camp each night, fording the small streams and floating across the larger ones on rafts which they made from the nearby trees, following roads that were barely trails through forests and valleys.
They arrived on the east bank of the Mississippi River opposite St. Genevieve in late December, pitched camp and explored potential river crossings. St. Genevieve is located about a hundred miles downstream from Saint Louis. Winter had come early and the Mississippi river was already covered with ice. It was bitterly cold. They determined the ice was not yet thick enough to support a crossing of ox-carts and covered wagons. Daily the thickness of the ice was measured and then on December 31, a chopped hole in the ice indicated thickness well over two feet. They tested the ice by making a few trips across on foot and horseback. The believed the ice was thick enough to support a loaded wagon.
As a test, a wagon was selected to be driven across with no one riding and the driver would walk ahead watching the ice and leading his team. The trip across and back to camp was made without the ice cracking and preparations were made for an early crossing New Years Day.
The next morning final preparations were made to break camp and all supplies were loaded. The weather remained bitter cold with dark skies overhead and light snow falling, but the decision had been made to cross and there was no turning back. The group was devout German Reformed Protestants and they gathered together in the early cold gray dawn to seek guidance from their God for a safe crossing.
The cracking of whips like pistol shots rang out over the heads of the oxen to coax them out onto the ice; the crossing had began. All that were able, walked to lighten the loaded wagons, keeping a safe distance from the wagons, which were also spaced far apart to lessen the danger of breaking the ice. The crossing was made successfully with no mishaps, except extremely cold hands and feet.
The townsfolk of St. Genevieve had built a large fire to welcome and warm these new settlers. Safely across the Mississippi, they were relieved of their crossing fears and enjoyed the local hospitality. They exchanged news from the East for information of what they might expect ahead. Needed supplies were purchased and even the weather abated a little as the sun broke through the clouds. They settled along the Whitewater River where the soil was rich.
We are transitioning into Solar Cycle (SC) 24 and the sun has become fairly quiet. During most of the last century (SC 16-23) the sun has been in a "Grand Maxima". As a result the Earth has experience warming. But with SC 24 the sun is again changing states. From the peak year 1998, the lower Troposphere temperatures globally have already fallen around 1/2 degree Celsius. This is despite the fact that during that same time period, atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen 5% from 367 ppm to 386 ppm. Several solar scientist are predicting the sun will slide into a "Dalton Minimum" event in SC 25, about a decade from now. If that happens, the Earth will experience some bitterly cold winters for several decades.
The winters may once again resemble the winters 200 years ago during the time of the early pioneers. Imagine for a minute the west fork of the White River near Bloomfield, Indiana freezing into a block of ice two feet thick.
SOURCE
Australian carbon plan will cause jobs carnage
THERE is a surreal aspect to the present debate about the accuracy of short to mid-term economic growth forecasts contained in the recent budget. As this debate plays out, the 76 members of the Australian Senate are preparing for a crucial vote next month on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a policy initiative the Government has described as the most substantial economic reform of the Australian economy for decades.
Yet those 76 senators will have to make their decisions on this once-in-a-generation reform without the benefit of any detailed forecasts of the scheme's short and medium-term impact. While the Government describes its Treasury modelling as the most comprehensive ever attempted, the analysis provides no forecasts on the sectoral or regional employment impacts over the first decade of the CPRS. None at all. The Treasury analysis provides intricate detail about the shift in employment shares between sectors in 2050, but nothing about what the scheme will mean for jobs in key Australian sectors between now and 2020.
Senior Treasury officials admitted this week that a limitation of its modelling is that it "doesn't capture all the transitional elements". For those unfamiliar with bureaucratic eco-jargon, a "transitional element" means someone losing their job.
In other words, the Government's premier economic agency officially has no clear sense about the near-term employment impact. This is economic policy-making with a blindfold on.
The minerals sector considers this sort of economic risk-taking is unwise at best. So we asked Australia's most experienced economic forecaster -- Brian Fisher -- to assess the impact on employment in the sector that produces about 50per cent of Australia's exports. Fisher -- a former executive director of the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics -- used the same Treasury assumptions and the same data sources used in the Treasury modelling. Unlike the Treasury, he took into account the global financial crisis. It is a sober, straightforward analysis. The results are even more sobering.
The CPRS scheme will shed 23,510 jobs in the minerals sector by 2020 and more than 66,000 by 2030. These are direct jobs. All minerals sectors will be affected, whether in coal mining, gold and base metals, alumina refining, mining services, copper, zinc, lead and aluminium smelting and so on. No state, or the Northern Territory, will be spared, no mining region will be untouched. The impact on regional Australia will be severe, including thousands of jobs in the Illawarra and the Hunter in NSW, the Bowen Basin in Queensland, remote regions in Western Australia, including the Pilbara and Kalgoorlie, South Australia, Victoria's Latrobe Valley, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
You can add to these numbers the jobs of the council workers, the school teachers, the nurses, gardeners, and employees in the hundreds of small businesses in the towns and communities that service these mining regions.
Not surprisingly, I consider these numbers should prompt a Government re-think of its CPRS legislation.
In particular, the Government has made one basic mistake. It decided that raising revenue was more important than establishing a sensible measured transition to an emissions trading scheme. It decided to auction 70 to 75 per cent of its permits from the outset of the scheme.
It is a mistake that puts the Australian scheme at odds with the European scheme and the one being developed by Barack Obama's Democratic Party in the US. The present draft of the US legislation will auction only 15 per cent of permits; that compares with 70 to 75 per cent in Australia.
That emphasis on revenue raising is at the core of the threat to job losses in Australian industry. It will mean that the CPRS will cost the mining industry $10 billion in the first five years, a cost none of our international competitors will bear. Over time, as the new analysis shows, that means a steady drain of jobs out of the industry, and out of the regional communities that depend on it.
Repairing the mistake in the CPRS will not weaken the environmental integrity of the scheme. Allocating permits without charge will not make a scheme less environmentally rigorous than if all permits are sold. But don't take my word for it. The head of the Pew Centre on Global Climate Policy (and former Clinton administration climate negotiator) Eileen Claussen told a recent congressional hearing that the "free allocation (of permits) provides the same economic incentive to reduce emissions as does an auction".
There is a simple solution. Let's do what the Europeans and Americans are doing. Let's phase in the auctioning of permits. Such an approach will establish a carbon price signal without putting the economy into reverse. It will reward firms who reduce their emissions. It will also raise sufficient revenue to ensure low and fixed income earners are not economically disadvantaged. There is no need for special treatment or compensation for certain sectors: the burden of the new scheme will be spread evenly across the economy.
We'd also have a better chance of meeting those economic growth forecasts that are front and centre of the present political debate.
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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Sunday, May 24, 2009
How sensitive is the climate to rises in CO2?
The sensitivity question is of course central. Lord Monckton answers that question at length but I like the following excerpt. Note that CO2 doubling is a fairly extreme scenario if we take into account doubts about proxy measures from the past and the levels tabulated from actual past measurements by Prof. Beck. Monckton's calculations predict a temperature rise of just over one degree from a CO2 doubling
Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish theoretical chemist and Nobel laureate, provided the first respectable quantification of climate sensitivity to a CO2 doubling in a paper of 1906, published in Vol. 1 No. 2 of the Journal of the Royal Nobel Institute, of which the relevant conclusion is reproduced in facsimile and in translation below –
Arrhenius, like many more recent commentators on the IPCC’s calculations, does not accord the same very high values to temperature feedbacks as does the IPCC itself. Also, the IPCC has chosen the highest value for the Planck parameter that occurs in the mainstream literature, and there are good theoretical reasons for the conclusion that its chosen value is excessive.
Making appropriate adjustments for these apparent exaggerations by the IPCC, I calculate that true climate sensitivity may well be as little as 1.1 K at CO2 doubling.
Furthermore, one must make allowance for the fact that atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising at only half the rate predicted by the IPCC, even though CO2 emissions are rising at the higher end of the IPCC’s expectations. This is because, as the IPCC’s 2001 report admits, the IPCC is unable to add up the Earth/troposphere “carbon budget” to within a factor of two of the right answer.
The hydrosphere and biosphere – perhaps through increased rates of photosynthesis – are taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and “fixing” it faster than the IPCC had expected. Figure 1 illustrates the discrepancy
CO2 concentration is rising, but well below IPCC predictions
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Report states there is no anthropogenic global warming
In May 2006 we were told, with the most alarming language possible, that humans were causing the planet to warm with their use of Carbon based fuels. We must follow all of the recommendations of the IPCC report coming out in 2007 or humanity's existence on earth would end. We were told that we must do something now, in order to prevent the deaths of untold millions, and the loss of humanity’s very ability to survive on earth. We must start taxing "Global warming Gasses" in order to stop their production, no matter the human cost!
It’s a complete lie. The IPCC – the International Panel on Climate Change is a committee with an agenda, and one it was pre-programmed to execute. It was designed from the outset, from its very beginnings to come up with a specific result. This is in direct contradiction to every principle of real science, the aim of which is to describe reality as it is, not reality as one wishes it to be.
To illustrate this, in 1995 the IPCC completely ignored Satellite evidence, very clear evidence, that there was no warming according to a report from the Heartland Institute Released in 2008. The full pdf. is titled Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate The institute claims, and is backed by anecdotal reports that the IPCC changed portions of the text of its report to make it appear that humans were the cause of the warming they artificially detected, or in other words, manufactured. Also attributed to the Heartland Institute’s report, the IPCC ignored further data confirming the lack of warming – if not showing a slight cooling – that became available after the May 2006 deadline.
The report the column speaks of is the NIPCC. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. A completely independent examination of all the evidence available in published peer-reviewed literature. They included every single piece or evidence available to them, positive and negative, they did not select research that proved their predetermined result as the IPCC did. They went through everything. Their conclusion, there is no human caused global warming.
“The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the scientists – in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed the twentieth century showed ‘unusual warming’ based on the now-discredited hockey-stick graph. The latest IPCC report, published in 2007, completely devaluates the climate contributions from changes in solar activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence”
For anyone who has any sort of intellectual honesty at all, the report from the Heartland Institute is a MUST read. Dr. Fred S. Singer who conceived and directed the NIPCC project is an honored and decorated scientist. His Raison d'être is truth, not political machinations, or power. He is deeply concerned by the absolute mis-use of science in what has now become a multi-billion dollar business, that is based on what amounts to a hoax.
"The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC [IPCC-AR4 200 "When new errors and outright falsehoods were observed in the initial drafts of AR4(The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC [IPCC-AR4 2007]), SEPP [Science and Environmental Policy Project] set up a ‘Team B’ to produce an independent evaluation of the available scientific evidence. While the initial organization took place at a meeting in Milan in 2003, ‘Team B’ was activated only after the AR4 SPM appeared in February 2007. It changed its name to NIPCC and organized an international climate workshop in Vienna in April 2007."
This group of scientists, who have looked at all available evidence, from satellite to very unreliable ground temperature readings to historical records, concludes correctly; if Human governments are going to be institution policies that will drastically affect the lives of its citizens, and the Waxman-Markley Cap and trade energy bill is without a doubt just that, then it must be utterly certain of the science that backs the supporting reasons for the existence of the legislation.
This report states unequivocally that there is zero evidence of man-made global warming. We are about to kill a Nation, literally for hot air that does not exist.
But wait, there more: In an article titled Proved: there is No Climate Crisis written by Robert Ferguson July 15th 2008, he reports on mathematical proof “that there is no “climate crisis”.
“Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.”
"Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered demonstrates that later this century a doubling of the concentration of CO2 compared with pre-industrial levels will increase global mean surface temperature not by the 6 °F predicted by the IPCC but, harmlessly, by little more than 1 °F. Lord Monckton concludes – “… Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no ‘climate crisis’ at all. … The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.” "
Considering the likely ramifications of Waxman-Markley Cap and trade energy bill, indeed, we must have the fortitude to re-examine honestly all of the information available to us.
For those of you who believe whole heartedly in Man-made Global warming, then these reports are a must read for you. They are peer reviewed documents based in fact. If you are supporting legislation that will wreck such economic devastation not only on your fellow Americans but also on yourself, it should be read so that you can counter those who do not believe in global warming caused by man. Because you will have some explaining to do. Be cautioned however, upon reading them, you will find yourself starting to realize that you have been had. On a Global scale.
Human caused Legislation like the Waxman-Markley Cap and trade energy bill will do more harm to more people in a year, than human caused Global Warming will in the next century. It is nothing short of a massive money stealing scheme made by our Governement to pay for the whorish excesses of the last 6 months. Now that is an inconvenient truth.
SOURCE
Climate bill 'badly flawed' -- 'It would be difficult to implement even in Sweden' -- 'It's not too late to change our minds'
Something very important has been happening this week -- more important, if you can believe it, than what Nancy Pelosi knew about waterboarding or why Kris Allen scored his upset victory on "American Idol."
I refer to the marathon committee markup on Capitol Hill of a monster piece of legislation that promises to reduce by 83 percent over the next 40 years the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere from American cars, power plants and factories.
There remains a robust argument over whether the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 represents a crucial step in preserving life as we know it. But there is no question that there are few pieces of legislation that are likely to have a more profound effect on the U.S. economy. It would bring about dramatic changes in the relative prices of energy and goods produced by energy-hungry industries. It would redistribute trillions of dollars in business sales and household income and generate hundreds of billions in government revenue. And it would represent the most dramatic extension of government's regulatory powers into the workings of the economy since the early days of the New Deal.
For all that, there are probably not more than a few hundred people who really understand what's in this legislation, how it would work and what its impact is likely to be. As it moves through the legislative process, it's worthy of closer attention.
Given the bill's scope and complexity, just getting it out of committee is a monumental achievement on the part of its principal authors, Democrats Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts. To do so, they had to make numerous compromises and concessions to powerful special interests and regional voting blocs that would be most affected by the transition to a system in which companies and consumers are forced to pay, indirectly, for the environmental damage they cause. Waxman and Markey are wily and experienced politicians, so it is a fair assumption that the bill their committee passed last night in a 33-25 vote is pretty close to what the U.S. political system is now willing to accept.
The other thing to say about it is that it is a badly flawed piece of public policy. It is so broad in its reach and complex in its details that it would be difficult to implement even in Sweden, let alone in a diverse and contentious country like the United States. It would create dozens of new government agencies with broad powers to set standards, dole out rebates and tax subsidies, and pick winning and losing technologies, even as it relies on newly created markets with newly created regulators to set prices and allocate resources. Its elaborate allocation of pollution allowances and offsets reads like a parody of industrial policy authored by the editorial page writers of the Wall Street Journal. The opportunities for waste, fraud and regulatory screwup look enormous.
To test my reaction to the House bill, I called Paul Portney, an old friend and the former president of Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank that brings economic rigor and a market sensibility to environmental issues. Portney is now dean of the University of Arizona's business school.
As Portney explained it, there are three basic approaches to reducing carbon emissions. The simplest is to impose a carbon tax that would raise prices so much that households and businesses would use less energy from coal, oil and natural gas. Proceeds from the tax could be rebated to consumers or used for other government purposes.
Another is the cap-and-trade system that would limit carbon emissions and require companies that produce or use carbon energy to buy carbon emission credits from the government or an open market.
A third approach would use a command-and-control model in which government would set carbon emission standards for power plants and factories, and energy-efficiency standards for cars, buildings and appliances, while favoring other energy sources with tax breaks and subsidies.
The problem with the House bill, Portney said, is that to satisfy the various political constituencies and exigencies, it wound up using all three approaches. The result is an unwieldy compromise with lots of belt-and-suspenders redundancy.
The Waxman-Markey bill may be the best bill that the political system can produce, and surely it is far preferable to doing nothing. But now that we know what a climate-change bill looks like when it is jury-rigged to accommodate all the special interests, maybe Americans will be willing to reconsider one of the cleaner, simpler approaches -- a carbon tax with all the revenue rebated to households, for example, or a cap-and-trade system that generates enough revenue to erase the national debt, or even a tough new regulatory regime requiring businesses to produce more fuel-efficient cars, buildings and appliances.
It's not too late to change our minds.
SOURCE
Climate change “morality”
The climate “crisis” is a “moral issue that requires serious debate,” Al Gore proclaimed in an April 27 AlGore.com blog post. His conversion to the Anglo-American tradition of robust debate came a mere three days after the ex-VP refused to participate in a congressional hearing with Lord Christopher Monckton, former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Republicans had invited Monckton to counter Gore’s testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
But Gore froze like a terrified deer in headlights, and Chairman Henry Waxman told the UK climate expert he was uninvited. Their hypocritical cowardice simply reflects a recognition that their entire energy rationing crusade would collapse if they ever allowed real debate.
Monckton would have focused on the science. But is morality that truly requires serious debate. Climate Armageddon claims are being used to justify malignant policies that have no rational basis.
Global average temperatures stabilized in 1998 and have even cooled slightly, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. Except in its Western Peninsula, Antarctica is gaining ice. Arctic ice is seasonably normal. Land-based temperature data have been corrupted by air conditioner exhausts and other heat sources.
Scientists are hard-pressed to point to long-term state or country climate trends that differ from historic experience and can reasonably be linked to anthropogenic global warming. Merely asserting that obesity causes warming or increased house cat populations are due to warming does not make it so.
Even more devastating to alarmist claims, long-held assumptions about the deep Atlantic counter-current below the Gulf Stream (the so-called “conveyor belt”) have been rendered inoperable by recent studies. Those assumptions are a fundamental component of climate models and their scary worst-case scenarios about alleged planetary crises. The models and GIGO scenarios are now even more questionable. Yet, they’re constantly portrayed as “evidence” – “proof” that immediate, drastic action is required to avert disaster. Nonsense. Climate changes and their causes are complex, our knowledge is still limited, and the inputs and assumptions are deficient.
Climate models are no more reliable than computer predictions of future Super Bowl winners and scores. Their Frankenstein scenarios are no more valid as a basis for law and policy than the special effects in Day After Tomorrow or Jurassic Park.
Worse, even the 942-page Waxman-Markey climate bill’s absurd target – a 17% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 and 83% by 2050 – would have no detectable benefits, even if CO2 does cause climate change. Research climatologist Paul “Chip” Knappenberger calculates that even these draconian measures would result in global temperatures rising a mere 0.1 degrees F less by 2050 than doing nothing, mostly because Chinese and Indian emissions would quickly dwarf America’s job-killing reductions.
Perhaps that’s why China and South Africa want developed nations to slash carbon emissions 40% by 2020 – and give poor countries $200 billion annually, to help them cope with global warming’s imagined disasters. Bolivia wants $700 billion a year. Our children will get the bill for that, too.
None of this apparently matters to congressional leaders, Climate Action Partnership members or other professional alarmists and rent seekers. If anything, it has spurred them into even hastier action, to transform America’s energy and economic system, regardless of the consequences. Waxman-Markey was approved by the E&C Committee May 21 on a 95% party-line vote.
Above all, they want to replace vile hydrocarbons with wind power. That would require $$$ billions in taxpayer subsidies; hundreds of thousands of turbines, across millions of acres of scenic land, habitats and sea lanes; thousands of miles of transmission lines and towers; and billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper and fiberglass – plus raw materials and natural gas for backup generators.
Spain’s experience should be cautionary, but probably won’t be. According to a study by Dr. Gabriel Calzada, Spanish taxpayers spent $800,000 for each new job in the wind turbine industry (mostly installing towering turbines) – and destroyed 2.2 regular jobs for each “green” job, primarily because pricey “renewable” electricity forced companies to lay off workers, to stay in business.
A recent Lauer Johnson Research poll found 78% of respondents saying even a $600 per year increase in utility bills would be a “hardship.” They should be so lucky.
Compared to no cap-and-tax regime, Waxman-Markey would cost the United States a cumulative $9.6 trillion in real GDP losses by 2035, according to an updated study by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. The bill would also cost an additional 1.1 million jobs each year, raise electricity rates 90% after adjusting for inflation, cause a 74% hike in inflation-adjusted gasoline prices, and add $1,500 to the average family’s annual energy bill, says Heritage.
The Congressional Budget Office says the poorest one-fifth of families could see annual energy costs rise $700 – while high income families could see their costs rise $2,200 a year. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein estimates that the average person could pay an extra $1,500 per year for energy. MIT says household energy costs could climb $3,000 per year. Where will families find that extra cash? “What do I tell a single mom, making $8 an hour?” asked North Carolina congressman (and Congressional Black Caucus member) G. K. Butterfield.
That was a few days before he and his Democrat colleagues voted against amendments to Waxman-Markey that would have suspended the punitive law if electricity prices go up more than 10% after inflation, unemployment reaches 15% or gasoline prices hit $5. What will he tell that single mom?
Eco-activists gleefully predict that oil, gas and coal companies, utilities, vehicles and investors are destined for extinction. No wonder lobbyists have descended on Washington – over 2,300 of them just on climate change: 4.4 per member of Congress.
Some are getting $400-$850 an hour for their skill in promoting mandates, subsidies, legal measures to hobble competitors, and cap-tax-and-trade versions of the mortgage derivatives market. Al Gore alone boasts of having received $300 million (from unnamed sources) to trumpet alarmism and draconian legislation.
Colleges, scientists, activists, unions and companies receive billions in taxpayer money, to hype climate chaos claims, intimidate skeptics and lobby Congress. African bureaucrats get millions from the UN (and thus US taxpayers) to hype climate disaster claims that keep millions of Africans impoverished and deprived of the life-enhancing benefits of reliable, affordable electricity.
President Obama says the Bush Administration “made decisions based upon fear, rather than foresight, and all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.” He and his Democrat allies in Congress should take that critique to heart on global warming.
As it stands, this Congress is rapidly shaping up to be the most unethical, immoral and dictatorial in history. When the people finally rebel, it won’t be a pretty sight.
SOURCE
Nutty radiation scare in Scotland
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has defended the need for radiation testing at Dalgety Bay beach, following claims the contamination found there could be natural. Monitoring has been carried out on the foreshore for several years and it is widely accepted the heightened radium levels come from the remains of aircraft dials burnt and emptied out after the war.
However, pro-nuclear campaigner Neil Craig (55) believes the paint blamed for the problem is water-soluble and would have dissolved over time. He said, “SEPA are still maintaining this claim to have tested such sub-microscopic particles and proven them to be paint containing radium. “It seems like kicking an argument when it is down to mention that the original radium paint was water- soluble, so that even if a fraction of a gram had been there 64 years ago it would be long gone, Scotland not having a desert climate. “In any case, the fact is that the level of radiation is so much lower than background radiation elsewhere in Scotland. “Yet SEPA are allowed to spend probable millions on such pointless nonsense.
“This is indicative of the way false fears have been used, worldwide, for bureaucratic eco-empire building.”
Radium-based luminescent paint was typically made by mixing a radium salt, zinc sulphide and a carrier material such as varnish or lacquer. SEPA claim test results and circumstantial evidence point to the radiation being man-made and the solubility of the paint could have been altered during burning. A spokesperson said, “The radionuclide analysis of particles at Dalgety Bay showed that they contained radium and its associated daughters. “The lack of high concentrations of the higher members of the uranium-238 series is consistent with the radium being of man made origin.
“It is possible that the action of burning of luminised dials can produce a diverse range of chemical forms, each of which has a differing potential for absorption and uptake by man. “This change and resultant variability in the chemical composition caused by burning also affects the solubility, and this could be a reason why the residues of the radium are still being detected after all this time.”
Over the years many items have been recovered from the beach, including dials and a vial of active material. Small particles or flakes found there are similar to those described by a former employee who worked where the instruments were made. In March the MoD submitted its action plan to the SEPA after a survey found the radiation could provide a dose higher than safe limits. It was agreed to have additional monitoring and clearer warning signs.
Plans to cover part of the beach with a protective membrane were submitted to Fife Council by the Defence Estates department this week. The blanket will be used for a programme of identification and removal, to establish where particles are coming from.
SOURCE. (H/T Neil Craig).
Malaria, Politics and DDT
The U.N. bows to the Greenies
In 2006, after 25 years and 50 million preventable deaths, the World Health Organization reversed course and endorsed widespread use of the insecticide DDT to combat malaria. So much for that. Earlier this month, the U.N. agency quietly reverted to promoting less effective methods for attacking the disease. The result is a victory for politics over public health, and millions of the world's poor will suffer as a result.
The U.N. now plans to advocate for drastic reductions in the use of DDT, which kills or repels the mosquitoes that spread malaria. The aim "is to achieve a 30% cut in the application of DDT worldwide by 2014 and its total phase-out by the early 2020s, if not sooner," said WHO and the U.N. Environment Program in a statement on May 6.
Citing a five-year pilot program that reduced malaria cases in Mexico and South America by distributing antimalaria chloroquine pills to uninfected people, U.N. officials are ready to push for a "zero DDT world." Sounds nice, except for the facts. It's true that chloroquine has proven effective when used therapeutically, as in Brazil. But it's also true that scientists have questioned the safety of the drug as an oral prophylactic because it is toxic and has been shown to cause heart problems.
Most malarial deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where chloroquine once worked but started failing in the 1970s as the parasite developed resistance. Even if the drugs were still effective in Africa, they're expensive and thus impractical for one of the world's poorest regions. That's not an argument against chloroquine, bed nets or other interventions. But it is an argument for continuing to make DDT spraying a key part of any effort to eradicate malaria, which kills about a million people -- mainly children -- every year. Nearly all of this spraying is done indoors, by the way, to block mosquito nesting at night. It is not sprayed willy-nilly in jungle habitat.
WHO is not saying that DDT shouldn't be used. But by revoking its stamp of approval, it sends a clear message to donors and afflicted countries that it prefers more politically correct interventions, even if they don't work as well. In recent years, countries like Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia have started or expanded DDT spraying, often with the help of outside aid groups. But these governments are also eager to remain in the U.N.'s good graces, and donors typically are less interested in funding interventions that WHO discourages.
"Sadly, WHO's about-face has nothing to do with science or health and everything to do with bending to the will of well-placed environmentalists," says Roger Bate of Africa Fighting Malaria. "Bed net manufacturers and sellers of less-effective insecticides also don't benefit when DDT is employed and therefore oppose it, often behind the scenes."
It's no coincidence that WHO officials were joined by the head of the U.N. Environment Program to announce the new policy. There's no evidence that spraying DDT in the amounts necessary to kill dangerous mosquitoes imperils crops, animals or human health. But that didn't stop green groups like the Pesticide Action Network from urging the public to celebrate World Malaria Day last month by telling "the U.S. to protect children and families from malaria without spraying pesticides like DDT inside people's homes."
"We must take a position based on the science and the data," said WHO's malaria chief, Arata Kochi, in 2006. "One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual spraying. Of the dozen or so insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT." Mr. Kochi was right then, even if other WHO officials are now bowing to pressure to pretend otherwise.
SOURCE
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The sensitivity question is of course central. Lord Monckton answers that question at length but I like the following excerpt. Note that CO2 doubling is a fairly extreme scenario if we take into account doubts about proxy measures from the past and the levels tabulated from actual past measurements by Prof. Beck. Monckton's calculations predict a temperature rise of just over one degree from a CO2 doubling
Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish theoretical chemist and Nobel laureate, provided the first respectable quantification of climate sensitivity to a CO2 doubling in a paper of 1906, published in Vol. 1 No. 2 of the Journal of the Royal Nobel Institute, of which the relevant conclusion is reproduced in facsimile and in translation below –
"In aehnliche Weise berechne ich, dass eine Verminderung des Kohlensaeuregehalts zur Haelfte oder eine Zunahme desselben auf den doppelten Betrag Temperaturaenderungen von -1.5 C bzw. +1.6 C entsprechen wuerde"
“Likewise, I calculate that a halving or doubling of the CO2 concentration would be equivalent to changes of temperature of –1.5 K or +1.6 K respectively.”
Arrhenius, like many more recent commentators on the IPCC’s calculations, does not accord the same very high values to temperature feedbacks as does the IPCC itself. Also, the IPCC has chosen the highest value for the Planck parameter that occurs in the mainstream literature, and there are good theoretical reasons for the conclusion that its chosen value is excessive.
Making appropriate adjustments for these apparent exaggerations by the IPCC, I calculate that true climate sensitivity may well be as little as 1.1 K at CO2 doubling.
Furthermore, one must make allowance for the fact that atmospheric CO2 concentration is rising at only half the rate predicted by the IPCC, even though CO2 emissions are rising at the higher end of the IPCC’s expectations. This is because, as the IPCC’s 2001 report admits, the IPCC is unable to add up the Earth/troposphere “carbon budget” to within a factor of two of the right answer.
The hydrosphere and biosphere – perhaps through increased rates of photosynthesis – are taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and “fixing” it faster than the IPCC had expected. Figure 1 illustrates the discrepancy
CO2 concentration is rising, but well below IPCC predictions
More HERE (See the original for links, graphics etc.)
Report states there is no anthropogenic global warming
In May 2006 we were told, with the most alarming language possible, that humans were causing the planet to warm with their use of Carbon based fuels. We must follow all of the recommendations of the IPCC report coming out in 2007 or humanity's existence on earth would end. We were told that we must do something now, in order to prevent the deaths of untold millions, and the loss of humanity’s very ability to survive on earth. We must start taxing "Global warming Gasses" in order to stop their production, no matter the human cost!
It’s a complete lie. The IPCC – the International Panel on Climate Change is a committee with an agenda, and one it was pre-programmed to execute. It was designed from the outset, from its very beginnings to come up with a specific result. This is in direct contradiction to every principle of real science, the aim of which is to describe reality as it is, not reality as one wishes it to be.
To illustrate this, in 1995 the IPCC completely ignored Satellite evidence, very clear evidence, that there was no warming according to a report from the Heartland Institute Released in 2008. The full pdf. is titled Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate The institute claims, and is backed by anecdotal reports that the IPCC changed portions of the text of its report to make it appear that humans were the cause of the warming they artificially detected, or in other words, manufactured. Also attributed to the Heartland Institute’s report, the IPCC ignored further data confirming the lack of warming – if not showing a slight cooling – that became available after the May 2006 deadline.
The report the column speaks of is the NIPCC. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. A completely independent examination of all the evidence available in published peer-reviewed literature. They included every single piece or evidence available to them, positive and negative, they did not select research that proved their predetermined result as the IPCC did. They went through everything. Their conclusion, there is no human caused global warming.
“The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the scientists – in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed the twentieth century showed ‘unusual warming’ based on the now-discredited hockey-stick graph. The latest IPCC report, published in 2007, completely devaluates the climate contributions from changes in solar activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence”
For anyone who has any sort of intellectual honesty at all, the report from the Heartland Institute is a MUST read. Dr. Fred S. Singer who conceived and directed the NIPCC project is an honored and decorated scientist. His Raison d'être is truth, not political machinations, or power. He is deeply concerned by the absolute mis-use of science in what has now become a multi-billion dollar business, that is based on what amounts to a hoax.
"The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC [IPCC-AR4 200 "When new errors and outright falsehoods were observed in the initial drafts of AR4(The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC [IPCC-AR4 2007]), SEPP [Science and Environmental Policy Project] set up a ‘Team B’ to produce an independent evaluation of the available scientific evidence. While the initial organization took place at a meeting in Milan in 2003, ‘Team B’ was activated only after the AR4 SPM appeared in February 2007. It changed its name to NIPCC and organized an international climate workshop in Vienna in April 2007."
This group of scientists, who have looked at all available evidence, from satellite to very unreliable ground temperature readings to historical records, concludes correctly; if Human governments are going to be institution policies that will drastically affect the lives of its citizens, and the Waxman-Markley Cap and trade energy bill is without a doubt just that, then it must be utterly certain of the science that backs the supporting reasons for the existence of the legislation.
This report states unequivocally that there is zero evidence of man-made global warming. We are about to kill a Nation, literally for hot air that does not exist.
But wait, there more: In an article titled Proved: there is No Climate Crisis written by Robert Ferguson July 15th 2008, he reports on mathematical proof “that there is no “climate crisis”.
“Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.”
"Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered demonstrates that later this century a doubling of the concentration of CO2 compared with pre-industrial levels will increase global mean surface temperature not by the 6 °F predicted by the IPCC but, harmlessly, by little more than 1 °F. Lord Monckton concludes – “… Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no ‘climate crisis’ at all. … The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.” "
Considering the likely ramifications of Waxman-Markley Cap and trade energy bill, indeed, we must have the fortitude to re-examine honestly all of the information available to us.
For those of you who believe whole heartedly in Man-made Global warming, then these reports are a must read for you. They are peer reviewed documents based in fact. If you are supporting legislation that will wreck such economic devastation not only on your fellow Americans but also on yourself, it should be read so that you can counter those who do not believe in global warming caused by man. Because you will have some explaining to do. Be cautioned however, upon reading them, you will find yourself starting to realize that you have been had. On a Global scale.
Human caused Legislation like the Waxman-Markley Cap and trade energy bill will do more harm to more people in a year, than human caused Global Warming will in the next century. It is nothing short of a massive money stealing scheme made by our Governement to pay for the whorish excesses of the last 6 months. Now that is an inconvenient truth.
SOURCE
Climate bill 'badly flawed' -- 'It would be difficult to implement even in Sweden' -- 'It's not too late to change our minds'
Something very important has been happening this week -- more important, if you can believe it, than what Nancy Pelosi knew about waterboarding or why Kris Allen scored his upset victory on "American Idol."
I refer to the marathon committee markup on Capitol Hill of a monster piece of legislation that promises to reduce by 83 percent over the next 40 years the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere from American cars, power plants and factories.
There remains a robust argument over whether the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 represents a crucial step in preserving life as we know it. But there is no question that there are few pieces of legislation that are likely to have a more profound effect on the U.S. economy. It would bring about dramatic changes in the relative prices of energy and goods produced by energy-hungry industries. It would redistribute trillions of dollars in business sales and household income and generate hundreds of billions in government revenue. And it would represent the most dramatic extension of government's regulatory powers into the workings of the economy since the early days of the New Deal.
For all that, there are probably not more than a few hundred people who really understand what's in this legislation, how it would work and what its impact is likely to be. As it moves through the legislative process, it's worthy of closer attention.
Given the bill's scope and complexity, just getting it out of committee is a monumental achievement on the part of its principal authors, Democrats Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts. To do so, they had to make numerous compromises and concessions to powerful special interests and regional voting blocs that would be most affected by the transition to a system in which companies and consumers are forced to pay, indirectly, for the environmental damage they cause. Waxman and Markey are wily and experienced politicians, so it is a fair assumption that the bill their committee passed last night in a 33-25 vote is pretty close to what the U.S. political system is now willing to accept.
The other thing to say about it is that it is a badly flawed piece of public policy. It is so broad in its reach and complex in its details that it would be difficult to implement even in Sweden, let alone in a diverse and contentious country like the United States. It would create dozens of new government agencies with broad powers to set standards, dole out rebates and tax subsidies, and pick winning and losing technologies, even as it relies on newly created markets with newly created regulators to set prices and allocate resources. Its elaborate allocation of pollution allowances and offsets reads like a parody of industrial policy authored by the editorial page writers of the Wall Street Journal. The opportunities for waste, fraud and regulatory screwup look enormous.
To test my reaction to the House bill, I called Paul Portney, an old friend and the former president of Resources for the Future, a Washington think tank that brings economic rigor and a market sensibility to environmental issues. Portney is now dean of the University of Arizona's business school.
As Portney explained it, there are three basic approaches to reducing carbon emissions. The simplest is to impose a carbon tax that would raise prices so much that households and businesses would use less energy from coal, oil and natural gas. Proceeds from the tax could be rebated to consumers or used for other government purposes.
Another is the cap-and-trade system that would limit carbon emissions and require companies that produce or use carbon energy to buy carbon emission credits from the government or an open market.
A third approach would use a command-and-control model in which government would set carbon emission standards for power plants and factories, and energy-efficiency standards for cars, buildings and appliances, while favoring other energy sources with tax breaks and subsidies.
The problem with the House bill, Portney said, is that to satisfy the various political constituencies and exigencies, it wound up using all three approaches. The result is an unwieldy compromise with lots of belt-and-suspenders redundancy.
The Waxman-Markey bill may be the best bill that the political system can produce, and surely it is far preferable to doing nothing. But now that we know what a climate-change bill looks like when it is jury-rigged to accommodate all the special interests, maybe Americans will be willing to reconsider one of the cleaner, simpler approaches -- a carbon tax with all the revenue rebated to households, for example, or a cap-and-trade system that generates enough revenue to erase the national debt, or even a tough new regulatory regime requiring businesses to produce more fuel-efficient cars, buildings and appliances.
It's not too late to change our minds.
SOURCE
Climate change “morality”
The climate “crisis” is a “moral issue that requires serious debate,” Al Gore proclaimed in an April 27 AlGore.com blog post. His conversion to the Anglo-American tradition of robust debate came a mere three days after the ex-VP refused to participate in a congressional hearing with Lord Christopher Monckton, former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Republicans had invited Monckton to counter Gore’s testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
But Gore froze like a terrified deer in headlights, and Chairman Henry Waxman told the UK climate expert he was uninvited. Their hypocritical cowardice simply reflects a recognition that their entire energy rationing crusade would collapse if they ever allowed real debate.
Monckton would have focused on the science. But is morality that truly requires serious debate. Climate Armageddon claims are being used to justify malignant policies that have no rational basis.
Global average temperatures stabilized in 1998 and have even cooled slightly, despite steadily rising CO2 levels. Except in its Western Peninsula, Antarctica is gaining ice. Arctic ice is seasonably normal. Land-based temperature data have been corrupted by air conditioner exhausts and other heat sources.
Scientists are hard-pressed to point to long-term state or country climate trends that differ from historic experience and can reasonably be linked to anthropogenic global warming. Merely asserting that obesity causes warming or increased house cat populations are due to warming does not make it so.
Even more devastating to alarmist claims, long-held assumptions about the deep Atlantic counter-current below the Gulf Stream (the so-called “conveyor belt”) have been rendered inoperable by recent studies. Those assumptions are a fundamental component of climate models and their scary worst-case scenarios about alleged planetary crises. The models and GIGO scenarios are now even more questionable. Yet, they’re constantly portrayed as “evidence” – “proof” that immediate, drastic action is required to avert disaster. Nonsense. Climate changes and their causes are complex, our knowledge is still limited, and the inputs and assumptions are deficient.
Climate models are no more reliable than computer predictions of future Super Bowl winners and scores. Their Frankenstein scenarios are no more valid as a basis for law and policy than the special effects in Day After Tomorrow or Jurassic Park.
Worse, even the 942-page Waxman-Markey climate bill’s absurd target – a 17% reduction in US carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 and 83% by 2050 – would have no detectable benefits, even if CO2 does cause climate change. Research climatologist Paul “Chip” Knappenberger calculates that even these draconian measures would result in global temperatures rising a mere 0.1 degrees F less by 2050 than doing nothing, mostly because Chinese and Indian emissions would quickly dwarf America’s job-killing reductions.
Perhaps that’s why China and South Africa want developed nations to slash carbon emissions 40% by 2020 – and give poor countries $200 billion annually, to help them cope with global warming’s imagined disasters. Bolivia wants $700 billion a year. Our children will get the bill for that, too.
None of this apparently matters to congressional leaders, Climate Action Partnership members or other professional alarmists and rent seekers. If anything, it has spurred them into even hastier action, to transform America’s energy and economic system, regardless of the consequences. Waxman-Markey was approved by the E&C Committee May 21 on a 95% party-line vote.
Above all, they want to replace vile hydrocarbons with wind power. That would require $$$ billions in taxpayer subsidies; hundreds of thousands of turbines, across millions of acres of scenic land, habitats and sea lanes; thousands of miles of transmission lines and towers; and billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper and fiberglass – plus raw materials and natural gas for backup generators.
Spain’s experience should be cautionary, but probably won’t be. According to a study by Dr. Gabriel Calzada, Spanish taxpayers spent $800,000 for each new job in the wind turbine industry (mostly installing towering turbines) – and destroyed 2.2 regular jobs for each “green” job, primarily because pricey “renewable” electricity forced companies to lay off workers, to stay in business.
A recent Lauer Johnson Research poll found 78% of respondents saying even a $600 per year increase in utility bills would be a “hardship.” They should be so lucky.
Compared to no cap-and-tax regime, Waxman-Markey would cost the United States a cumulative $9.6 trillion in real GDP losses by 2035, according to an updated study by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. The bill would also cost an additional 1.1 million jobs each year, raise electricity rates 90% after adjusting for inflation, cause a 74% hike in inflation-adjusted gasoline prices, and add $1,500 to the average family’s annual energy bill, says Heritage.
The Congressional Budget Office says the poorest one-fifth of families could see annual energy costs rise $700 – while high income families could see their costs rise $2,200 a year. Harvard economist Martin Feldstein estimates that the average person could pay an extra $1,500 per year for energy. MIT says household energy costs could climb $3,000 per year. Where will families find that extra cash? “What do I tell a single mom, making $8 an hour?” asked North Carolina congressman (and Congressional Black Caucus member) G. K. Butterfield.
That was a few days before he and his Democrat colleagues voted against amendments to Waxman-Markey that would have suspended the punitive law if electricity prices go up more than 10% after inflation, unemployment reaches 15% or gasoline prices hit $5. What will he tell that single mom?
Eco-activists gleefully predict that oil, gas and coal companies, utilities, vehicles and investors are destined for extinction. No wonder lobbyists have descended on Washington – over 2,300 of them just on climate change: 4.4 per member of Congress.
Some are getting $400-$850 an hour for their skill in promoting mandates, subsidies, legal measures to hobble competitors, and cap-tax-and-trade versions of the mortgage derivatives market. Al Gore alone boasts of having received $300 million (from unnamed sources) to trumpet alarmism and draconian legislation.
Colleges, scientists, activists, unions and companies receive billions in taxpayer money, to hype climate chaos claims, intimidate skeptics and lobby Congress. African bureaucrats get millions from the UN (and thus US taxpayers) to hype climate disaster claims that keep millions of Africans impoverished and deprived of the life-enhancing benefits of reliable, affordable electricity.
President Obama says the Bush Administration “made decisions based upon fear, rather than foresight, and all too often trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.” He and his Democrat allies in Congress should take that critique to heart on global warming.
As it stands, this Congress is rapidly shaping up to be the most unethical, immoral and dictatorial in history. When the people finally rebel, it won’t be a pretty sight.
SOURCE
Nutty radiation scare in Scotland
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has defended the need for radiation testing at Dalgety Bay beach, following claims the contamination found there could be natural. Monitoring has been carried out on the foreshore for several years and it is widely accepted the heightened radium levels come from the remains of aircraft dials burnt and emptied out after the war.
However, pro-nuclear campaigner Neil Craig (55) believes the paint blamed for the problem is water-soluble and would have dissolved over time. He said, “SEPA are still maintaining this claim to have tested such sub-microscopic particles and proven them to be paint containing radium. “It seems like kicking an argument when it is down to mention that the original radium paint was water- soluble, so that even if a fraction of a gram had been there 64 years ago it would be long gone, Scotland not having a desert climate. “In any case, the fact is that the level of radiation is so much lower than background radiation elsewhere in Scotland. “Yet SEPA are allowed to spend probable millions on such pointless nonsense.
“This is indicative of the way false fears have been used, worldwide, for bureaucratic eco-empire building.”
Radium-based luminescent paint was typically made by mixing a radium salt, zinc sulphide and a carrier material such as varnish or lacquer. SEPA claim test results and circumstantial evidence point to the radiation being man-made and the solubility of the paint could have been altered during burning. A spokesperson said, “The radionuclide analysis of particles at Dalgety Bay showed that they contained radium and its associated daughters. “The lack of high concentrations of the higher members of the uranium-238 series is consistent with the radium being of man made origin.
“It is possible that the action of burning of luminised dials can produce a diverse range of chemical forms, each of which has a differing potential for absorption and uptake by man. “This change and resultant variability in the chemical composition caused by burning also affects the solubility, and this could be a reason why the residues of the radium are still being detected after all this time.”
Over the years many items have been recovered from the beach, including dials and a vial of active material. Small particles or flakes found there are similar to those described by a former employee who worked where the instruments were made. In March the MoD submitted its action plan to the SEPA after a survey found the radiation could provide a dose higher than safe limits. It was agreed to have additional monitoring and clearer warning signs.
Plans to cover part of the beach with a protective membrane were submitted to Fife Council by the Defence Estates department this week. The blanket will be used for a programme of identification and removal, to establish where particles are coming from.
SOURCE. (H/T Neil Craig).
Malaria, Politics and DDT
The U.N. bows to the Greenies
In 2006, after 25 years and 50 million preventable deaths, the World Health Organization reversed course and endorsed widespread use of the insecticide DDT to combat malaria. So much for that. Earlier this month, the U.N. agency quietly reverted to promoting less effective methods for attacking the disease. The result is a victory for politics over public health, and millions of the world's poor will suffer as a result.
The U.N. now plans to advocate for drastic reductions in the use of DDT, which kills or repels the mosquitoes that spread malaria. The aim "is to achieve a 30% cut in the application of DDT worldwide by 2014 and its total phase-out by the early 2020s, if not sooner," said WHO and the U.N. Environment Program in a statement on May 6.
Citing a five-year pilot program that reduced malaria cases in Mexico and South America by distributing antimalaria chloroquine pills to uninfected people, U.N. officials are ready to push for a "zero DDT world." Sounds nice, except for the facts. It's true that chloroquine has proven effective when used therapeutically, as in Brazil. But it's also true that scientists have questioned the safety of the drug as an oral prophylactic because it is toxic and has been shown to cause heart problems.
Most malarial deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where chloroquine once worked but started failing in the 1970s as the parasite developed resistance. Even if the drugs were still effective in Africa, they're expensive and thus impractical for one of the world's poorest regions. That's not an argument against chloroquine, bed nets or other interventions. But it is an argument for continuing to make DDT spraying a key part of any effort to eradicate malaria, which kills about a million people -- mainly children -- every year. Nearly all of this spraying is done indoors, by the way, to block mosquito nesting at night. It is not sprayed willy-nilly in jungle habitat.
WHO is not saying that DDT shouldn't be used. But by revoking its stamp of approval, it sends a clear message to donors and afflicted countries that it prefers more politically correct interventions, even if they don't work as well. In recent years, countries like Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia have started or expanded DDT spraying, often with the help of outside aid groups. But these governments are also eager to remain in the U.N.'s good graces, and donors typically are less interested in funding interventions that WHO discourages.
"Sadly, WHO's about-face has nothing to do with science or health and everything to do with bending to the will of well-placed environmentalists," says Roger Bate of Africa Fighting Malaria. "Bed net manufacturers and sellers of less-effective insecticides also don't benefit when DDT is employed and therefore oppose it, often behind the scenes."
It's no coincidence that WHO officials were joined by the head of the U.N. Environment Program to announce the new policy. There's no evidence that spraying DDT in the amounts necessary to kill dangerous mosquitoes imperils crops, animals or human health. But that didn't stop green groups like the Pesticide Action Network from urging the public to celebrate World Malaria Day last month by telling "the U.S. to protect children and families from malaria without spraying pesticides like DDT inside people's homes."
"We must take a position based on the science and the data," said WHO's malaria chief, Arata Kochi, in 2006. "One of the best tools we have against malaria is indoor residual spraying. Of the dozen or so insecticides WHO has approved as safe for house spraying, the most effective is DDT." Mr. Kochi was right then, even if other WHO officials are now bowing to pressure to pretend otherwise.
SOURCE
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Jim Hansen and his twin
