Pesky new study of malaria; scare debunked

Anybody who knows anything about the natural sciences knows how improbable are straight-line projections from known data.  Future changes will usually either approach an asymptote or even be parabolic.  But Greenie "scientists" love their straight-line projections.  It's so much easier to create a panic that way.

And a favorite linear projection is that as world temperatures get warmer so will malaria become more frequent.  They derive that theory from the fact that malaria is best known as a tropical disease. That its prevalence there might be due to poor public health measures in many tropical countries they do not consider.  I was born and bred in the middle of the tropics but malaria is unknown there because Australia is a modern Western country with modern Western public health measures.  There are a lot of blue eyes there too, if that helps you to get the picture.

Some researchers have however had a closer look at the actual facts about malaria prevalence and fitted a distressingly non-linear function to them.  They find that malaria actually FALLS as the temperature gets hot

The downside is that the most favorable temperature for malaria transmission is 25 degrees Celsius  -- about the average July temperature of NYC!  Clearly,  public health measures matter a lot more than temperature.  Wotta laugh the whole scare is!  Note that French malaria expert Paul Reiter has been pointing out the facts for years  -- JR.

Optimal temperature for malaria transmission is dramatically lower than previously predicted

Erin A. Mordecai et al.

Abstract

The ecology of mosquito vectors and malaria parasites affect the incidence, seasonal transmission and geographical range of malaria. Most malaria models to date assume constant or linear responses of mosquito and parasite life-history traits to temperature, predicting optimal transmission at 31 °C. These models are at odds with field observations of transmission dating back nearly a century. We build a model with more realistic ecological assumptions about the thermal physiology of insects. Our model, which includes empirically derived nonlinear thermal responses, predicts optimal malaria transmission at 25 °C (6 °C lower than previous models). Moreover, the model predicts that transmission decreases dramatically at temperatures > 28 °C, altering predictions about how climate change will affect malaria. A large data set on malaria transmission risk in Africa validates both the 25 °C optimum and the decline above 28 °C. Using these more accurate nonlinear thermal-response models will aid in understanding the effects of current and future temperature regimes on disease transmission.

Ecology Letters

Global cooling hits Britain!

Don't like the logic of the heading above?  It's more logical than saying that drought in parts of America proves global warming  -- though that's not saying much

Northern counties yesterday saw the first snow of winter and tonight temperatures in southern England are expected to fall to a chilly -3C.  Hundreds of gritters were on standby to treat roads around the country last night as forecasters warned some areas were as cold as Moscow.

As temperatures plummet towards freezing, the first snow fell in Northumberland today.  Milder temperatures will move in tomorrow, but widespread persistent rain and high winds means it will still be a day best spent in front of the fire.

There was snow on the ground in Scotland and Northumberland yesterday, leaving a dusting on fields and pavements as temperatures dipped below zero.

A Met Office spokesman said the snow was falling much earlier than last year, when snowflakes were not reported until December.

Charlie Powell, a spokesman for the Met Office said: 'Some parts of the country are as cold as Moscow today. Those in Northumberland are experiencing temperatures between 3 and 4C.

SOURCE




Mike’s Nobel Trick

By Mark Steyn

Last Monday, hockey-stick progenitor Michael Mann filed suit in DC Superior Court against me, NR, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Rand Simberg. I noticed on the press release (published on his Facebook page) that Dr Mann claimed to have been “awarded the Nobel Peace Prize“, and that on the complaint itself we are accused of the hitherto unknown crime of “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient“.

So my colleague Charles C W Cooke decided to call up the Nobel chaps in Oslo and ask them if Dr Mann was, in fact, a Nobel laureate:

*    Cooke: I was wondering, has Dr. Michael Mann ever won the Nobel Peace Prize?

*    Nobel Committee: No, no. He has never won the Nobel prize.

Thomas Richard also contacted the Norwegians and asked, “Was Prof Michael Mann ‘awarded’ a Nobel Prize of any sort at any time? Is he a Nobel Laureate as implied elsewhere in his legal brief?” He received the following email from Geir Lundestad, Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute:

*    Michael Mann has never been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In public, Dr Mann is a-huffin’ an’ a-puffin’ that this is just more smears from Koch-funded climate deniers. But, behind the scenes, a lot of quiet airbrushing of the record seems to be going on. Two days ago, his Penn State bio said he had been “co-awarded” the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, now merely that he “contributed… to the award” (whatever that means).

Over at Wikipedia, they’re arguing over ever more unwieldy rewrites. Editing a false legal complaint is trickier but by now someone may have snuck into the DC court clerk’s office with a gallon of White-Out and amended “defamation of a Nobel prize recipient” to “defamation of a man who received one of two thousand photocopies of a commemorative thank-you certificate run off at the IPCC branch of Kinko’s”.

So let’s see: A week ago, Michael Mann accused us of damaging his reputation – and seems to have made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. A week ago, he was a “Nobel prize recipient”. Now he’s not. Great work, Mike!

SOURCE




Obama War On Coal Key To Mitt Romney's Ohio Hopes                                              

Mitt Romney's battle for Ohio may come down to President Obama's "War on Coal."  Romney has gained on Obama in the crucial state. Before the Oct. 3 presidential debate, the RealClearPolitics average had Obama up 5.5 points in Ohio. It's now down to 2.1 points, with the most recent survey showing a tie.

The GOP hopeful could win without Ohio and its 18 electoral votes. Assuming he wins Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, which seems likely, he could reach 271 by taking New Hampshire, Colorado and Wisconsin.

But Romney would be bucking history. No Republican has ever won the White House without winning Ohio. With it, he only needs New Hampshire, where he has led some recent polls, to reach the minimum 270 electoral votes.

Romney's biggest liability is his opposition to the administration's auto bailout, a big issue to the car industry's heavy northeast portion of the Buckeye State. The Obama campaign has been hitting Romney with ads on that issue nonstop.

Romney's ace in the hole might be the 18 counties in Ohio that still produce coal. Obama's Environmental Protection Agency regulations targeting coal are not popular in those areas.

Thousands of signs in southeast Ohio read, "Stop The War On Coal. Fire Obama," according to Mark Weaver, a GOP strategist and part of Romney's legal team in the state.

The 18 coal counties gave Obama a margin of about 41,000 votes in 2008. If Romney could produce a five-point swing, he would win the region by roughly 10,000 votes.

The other advantage Romney may have is a lack of enthusiasm among 18- to 29-year-olds. In Ohio they voted 61%-36% in favor of Obama in 2008, a margin of 238,000 votes.

But polls show that the enthusiasm has faded. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that only 48% of those 18-29 had given quite a lot of thought to the 2012 election this year vs. 65% in 2008. Seventy-two percent said in 2008 that they were definitely voting vs. 63% this year, a drop of nine points. In 2004, Kerry won the Ohio youth vote over Bush by a smaller 56%-44%.

A drop of nine points in youth voter turnout with 2004 margins would reduce Obama's edge among Ohio millennials to about 104,000 votes.

"One piece of evidence for the decline in youth enthusiasm is that in the last several trips Obama has made to Ohio, most have been to a college town, trying to drum up support," said Weaver. "There just isn't the same fervor among millennials as there was four years ago."

Another challenge Obama faces is in Cuyahoga County, which contains Cleveland. Cuyahoga gave Obama his biggest vote margin in Ohio last time.

But voter registration is down 182,000 since 2008, a drop of more than 16%. That could cost Obama more than 40,000 votes if he wins Cuyahoga by the same percentage.

Nevertheless, there are still more than 74,000 people who work in the auto and related industries in Ohio. Romney's support for a bankruptcy reorganization instead of a bailout could hurt him with that demographic.

"The auto bailout creates an interesting dynamic because it puts in play some blue collar people who haven't supported Obama but may do so this time," said Matt Mayer, president of Opportunity Ohio, a conservative think tank.

SOURCE





Important Energy Questions Remain After Presidential Debates

The sparring over energy issues in the Presidential debates, particularly the first one at the University of Denver, underscored divergent viewpoints between the two candidates. The differences are particularly important here in Colorado, where we are home to ten of America’s 100 largest natural gas fields, and three of the 100 largest oil fields.

President Obama correctly noted that oil and natural gas production are higher than they’ve been in years, but Governor Romney countered that “all of the increase in natural gas and oil has happened on private land, not on government land.” He took the president to task for cutting the number of permits and licenses in half. In Colorado more than a third of the land is controlled by the federal government, so we found it alarming that the president did not answer to the fact that oil and gas production on federal lands dropped to record low levels.

When the president proposed new taxes on gas and oil that would ultimately be borne by consumers and cost job losses, Romney correctly took him to task for wasting tens of billions of taxpayer dollars on expensive and unreliable energy sources, whose failed corporate leaders were Obama campaign donors.

The debate spelled out clear differences, yet voters still deserve answers to questions that were not asked during the debates.

The Interior Department is expected to issue new regulations on hydraulic fracturing, a process that extracts oil and gas from shale rock deposits. Colorado’s shale oil deposits contain as much as 1 trillion barrels of recoverable oil – nearly as much as the entire world’s proven oil reserves. The federal rule will cost the industry an estimated $1.5 billion dollars while vesting authority to the federal government that had been reserved to the states for more than 60 years without a single instance of groundwater contamination.

Will Obama approve the new rules? Almost certainly since they are being drafted by his Administration. Romney has indicated he prefers leaving regulation to the various states as it has historically been administered.

Federal energy regulations have a direct impact on the lives of the 570 employees who work at Colorado’s two refineries, and earn more than $150,000 a year, on average. Significantly more workers are employed in the large gulf coast refinery regions and elsewhere, but a plethora of new government regulations are threatening their jobs as well as driving energy costs even higher.

For example, under new EPA rules, refiners must buy costly "waiver credits" if they don’t blend gasoline and diesel with a mandated amount of cellulosic biofuel. Yet no cellulosic ethanol even exists outside of a research laboratory.

It is expected that the EPA will move forward with its so-called Tier 3 rule, which would require even steeper cuts to sulfur levels in gasoline. The rule is coming despite the fact that refineries spent nearly $10 billion to reduce sulfur levels by 90 percent just since 2004, and despite the fact that steeper cuts could result in a 9 to 25 cents per gallon increase in the cost of manufacturing gasoline and lead to as many as seven additional refinery closures. Tier 3 is an excellent example of why both candidates should have been asked whether or not the costs of regulations should be taken into consideration along with the potential benefit.

The Obama Administration has been criticized for "the most anti-oil-and-gas record in U.S. history." On the other hand, Mitt Romney has made North American Energy Independence by 2020 the number one objective of his 5-point economic plan. Under Obama, permitting, leasing and production on federal lands declined.  Romney would streamline regulation restrictions and open more federal reserves both on and off shore to energy development.

Obama has exerted continually more federal control over energy resources. Romney’s plan would return authority to the states for federal lands within their borders as well as reaffirm that states have primacy when it comes to the regulation of production on private land.

Colorado’s future economic health and that of our nation is linked to our ability to safely develop our abundant energy resources. Ultimately, much of that ability depends on White House policies that balance costs with the benefits produced by corresponding regulations. Among the many stark contrasts between Obama and Romney, energy policy is one of the most obvious and significant to every American.

SOURCE




Australia:  Black politician  lashes Greenie protesters

THE first indigenous woman elected to an Australian parliament has come out swinging against Browse gas hub opponents, saying the Broome community is not divided over the proposal and it's only a small but vocal group causing all the fuss.

Outgoing Kimberley MLA Carol Martin has told the West Australian parliament that she supported a bill underpinning the Woodside-led Browse project because many indigenous people in the Kimberley region believed it would benefit them, not just state revenues.

Premier Colin Barnett has long argued that a land agreement signed with native title claimant groups, which included a substantial benefits package, was "the most significant act of self-determination by an Aboriginal group in Australian history".

Ms Martin agreed, saying Aboriginal people needed to take control of their own destiny.

The Kimberley's indigenous communities were still mired in abject poverty, she said, and they did not want to keep living with a welfare model that was not only humiliating and demoralising, but made some young people feel as if they did not have a future, leaving them contemplating suicide.

After being colonised by "the British", "do-gooders", "missionaries" and "industry", indigenous people were now being colonised by "the bloody greenies" who opposed the hub, who should "go and check the headstones".

"They have loud voices, they have the media on their side and they have bands," she said, referring to a recent, free John Butler concert in Broome that anti-hub activists said had been watched online by "tens of thousands in over 65 countries".

The organisers of the event did not ask the shire for a permit and interfered with an annual surf competition at Cable Beach, Ms Martin said.  "How disrespectful is that?" she asked.  "These people stuffed it up."

Those who attended the concert were not necessarily opponents of the gas hub, she said.

Ms Martin said she thought it was wrong that some activists had threatened Browse staff and police had been criticised for sending officers to Broome to protect them.

"The public has a right to know what is happening; these people are being assaulted on their way to work and at work.  "It is disgraceful. I do not support people who break the law, get arrested, and then stand as if they are some sort of martyr."

Ms Martin said the "200 people on the news" were not the 17,000 people who lived in the area.

Mr Barnett on Thursday said Ms Martin's speech was one of the most moving and passionate he'd heard in parliament.

It "might not suit the politically correct media that we have" and "an essentially urban, middle-class Australia".

"She talked about the famous, the rich and famous who would come to the Kimberly in a self-righteous way as if only they cared about the environment or only they cared about the whales or only they cared about the dinosaur footprints," he told parliament.

"And implicit in that is an attitude that we see too often ... that somehow this state is a redneck environment, that we don't care about heritage, that we don't care about the environment, and somehow we're not capable enough to look after marine life in the Kimberley."

SOURCE




Big fadeout for Greens in ACT

ACT is Australia's DC equivalent

The ACT Greens slipped into deeper electoral trouble last night with updated vote counting showing for the second night running that their leader Meredith Hunter is heading for defeat.

And history is against Ms Hunter in her Ginninderra electorate, where no independent or minor party MLA has ever lasted more than one term.

Last night's updated interim preference figures show the Greens heading for a near wipeout, losing three of the four seats they won in their historic 2008 showing.

Last night's update has Labor challenger Yvette Berry in front of Ms Hunter for the fifth seat in the northern electorate in a result that would see the new assembly made up of eight Labor MLAs, eight Liberals and the Greens still hanging on to balance-of-power with one member in the chamber.

In Molonglo, senior Labor frontbencher Simon Corbell was ahead, for the second night running, of fellow ALP challenger Meegan Fitzharris but the Liberals' education spokesman Steve Doszpot has fallen behind his party colleague, newcomer Elizabeth Lee.

Greens MLA Shane Rattenbury remains ahead of his colleague Caroline Le Couteur for the seventh Molonglo seat, and in Brindabella the Liberals' Andrew Wall still leads Green Amanda Bresnan for the fifth seat in the southern electorate.

Labor also nudged back into a narrow lead over the Canberra Liberals in the popular vote yesterday by just 55 votes across the territory, with 85,532 votes to the Liberals' 85,477.

Both Labor leader Katy Gallagher and her Liberals opponent Zed Seselja have claimed success in the popular vote as they have sought since Saturday's election to bolster their chances of forming government.

Vote counting will resume this morning and is not expected to be finished before tomorrow night, and it could even be Sunday before Ms Hunter and the other candidates in tight races know their fates.

But Ms Hunter's task in holding her seat is made more complex by the electoral history of the Ginninderra electorate.

Since its creation before the 1995 election, no independent or minor party MLA has managed to hold a seat in the Belconnen-based electorate for more than one term.

The first election, in 1995, established a pattern with the ALP and the Liberals each winning two seats and the final seat going to the Greens' Lucy Horodny.

Ms Horodny did not contest the 1998 election and independent Dave Rugendyke was elected in Ginninderra on a social conservative ticket.

In 2001 Mr Rugendyke was replaced by Australian Democrat Roslyn Dundas, who in turn was beaten in 2004 when Labor managed to get three MLAs elected in Ginninderra.

But in 2008, the ALP failed to retain their third spot and the final seat went to Ms Hunter, who now looks in grave danger of becoming another one-term MLA.

But Ms Dundas, now director of the ACT Council of Social Service, says she believes it is simply changing times that lie behind the inability of smaller players to last in Ginninderra.

"My election in 2001 was at a time when there was a real feel for a need to change and a focus on supporting women to get elected and a focus on big social issues that hadn't been treated in step with what the community was feeling," Ms Dundas said.

"But then in 2004, Jon Stanhope as chief minister did what party leaders do in seats, gathering more than 30 per cent of the votes, which made it hard for prefer-ences to flow to small parties.

"Then in 2008, we saw a reaction to [Labor] majority government which was then a swing back to the non-old parties … That's the great thing about democracy, new ideas will come forward and people will respond to those new ideas."

Ms Dundas says she believes the Greens now find themselves in such deep trouble because they failed to promote themselves as a party that had been in the Legislative Assembly for 17 years.

"There's been a Green in the ACT Parliament since 1995 … but the campaign they ran this year was much more short-term than that," she said.

SOURCE

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Mega pesky!  New study finds growth of Antarctic sea ice accelerated 53% since 2006

Evidence that there is nothing GLOBAL about the ice changes.  One might give it a pass if the changes at the two poles were at slightly different rates but large-scale OPPOSITE changes are a different matter. And the cooling is definitely NOT what the Warmists  predicted.  They predicted drastic warming in the Antarctic.  Another failed prophecy.  There is NO evidence that the Arctic changes are part of something global and every indication that they are purely local in origin

The steady and dramatic decline in the sea ice cover of the Arctic Ocean over the last three decades has become a focus of media and public attention. At the opposite end of Earth, however, something more complex is happening.

A new NASA study shows that from 1978 to 2010 the total extent of sea ice surrounding Antarctica in the Southern Ocean grew by roughly 6,600 square miles every year, an area larger than the state of Connecticut. And previous research by the same authors indicates that this rate of increase has recently accelerated, up from an average rate of almost 4,300 square miles per year from 1978 to 2006. [an increase of 53%/year between 1978-2010 vs. 1978-2006 rate]

"There's been an overall increase in the sea ice cover in the Antarctic, which is the opposite of what is happening in the Arctic," said lead author Claire Parkinson, a climate scientist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "However, this growth rate is not nearly as large as the decrease in the Arctic."

Earth's poles have very different geographies. The Arctic Ocean is surrounded by North America, Greenland and Eurasia. These large landmasses trap most of the sea ice, which builds up and retreats with each yearly freeze-and-melt cycle. But a large fraction of the older, thicker Arctic sea ice has disappeared over the last three decades. The shrinking summer ice cover has exposed dark ocean water that absorbs sunlight and warms up, leading to more ice loss.

On the opposite side of the planet, Antarctica is a continent circled by open waters that let sea ice expand during the winter but also offer less shelter during the melt season. Most of the Southern Ocean's frozen cover grows and retreats every year, leading to little perennial sea ice in Antarctica.

Using passive-microwave data from NASA's Nimbus 7 satellite and several Department of Defense meteorological satellites, Parkinson and colleague Don Cavalieri showed that sea ice changes were not uniform around Antarctica. Most of the growth from 1978 to 2010 occurred in the Ross Sea, which gained a little under 5,300 square miles of sea ice per year, with more modest increases in the Weddell Sea and Indian Ocean. At the same time, the region of the Bellingshausen and Amundsen Seas lost an average of about 3,200 square miles of ice every year.

Parkinson and Cavalieri said that the mixed pattern of ice growth and ice loss around the Southern Ocean could be due to changes in atmospheric circulation. Recent research points at the depleted ozone layer over Antarctica as a possible culprit. Ozone absorbs solar energy, so a lower concentration of this molecule can lead to a cooling of the stratosphere (the layer between six and 30 miles above Earth's surface) over Antarctica. At the same time, the temperate latitudes have been warming, and the differential in temperatures has strengthened the circumpolar winds flowing over the Ross Ice Shelf.

"Winds off the Ross Ice Shelf are getting stronger and stronger, and that causes the sea ice to be pushed off the coast, which generates areas of open water, polynyas," said Josefino Comiso, a senior scientist at NASA Goddard. "The larger the coastal polynya, the more ice it produces, because in polynyas the water is in direct contact with the very cold winter atmosphere and rapidly freezes." As the wind keeps blowing, the ice expands further to the north.

This year's winter Antarctic sea ice maximum extent, reached two weeks after the Arctic Ocean's ice cap experienced an all-time summertime low, was a record high for the satellite era of 7.49 million square miles, about 193,000 square miles more than its average maximum extent for the last three decades.

The Antarctic minimum extents, which are reached in the midst of the Antarctic summer, in February, have also slightly increased to 1.33 million square miles in 2012, or around 251,000 square miles more than the average minimum extent since 1979.

The numbers for the southernmost ocean, however, pale in comparison with the rates at which the Arctic has been losing sea ice -- the extent of the ice cover of the Arctic Ocean in September 2012 was 1.32 million square miles below the average September extent from 1979 to 2000. The lost ice area is euivalent to roughly two Alaskas.

Parkinson said that the fact that some areas of the Southern Ocean are cooling and producing more sea ice does not disprove a warming climate.

"Climate does not change uniformly: The Earth is very large and the expectation definitely would be that there would be different changes in different regions of the world," Parkinson said. "That's true even if overall the system is warming." Another recent NASA study showed that Antarctic sea ice slightly thinned from 2003 to 2008, but increases in the extent of the ice balanced the loss in thickness and led to an overall volume gain.
The new research, which used laser altimetry data from the Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), was the first to estimate sea ice thickness for the entire Southern Ocean from space.

Records of Antarctic sea ice thickness are much patchier than those of the Arctic, due to the logistical challenges of taking regular measurements in the fierce and frigid waters around Antarctica. The field data collection is mostly limited to research icebreakers that generally only travel there during spring and summer -- so the sole means to get large-scale thickness measurements is from space.

"We have a good handle of the extent of the Antarctic sea ice, but the thickness has been the missing piece to monitor the sea ice mass balance," said Thorsten Markus, one of the authors of the study and Project Scientist for ICESat-2, a satellite mission designed to replace the now defunct ICESat. ICESat-2 is scheduled to launch in 2016. "The extent can be greater, but if the sea ice gets thinner, the volume could stay the same."

SOURCE




Lies, Damn Lies And Green Statistics

Almost all predictions about the expansion and cost of German wind turbines and solar panels have turned out to be wrong – at least by a factor of two, sometimes by a factor of five

When Germany’s power grid operator announced the exact amount of next year’s green energy levy on Monday, it came as a shock to the country. The cost burden for consumers and industry have reached a “barely tolerable level that threatens the de-industrialization of Germany”, outraged business organisations said.

Since then politicians, business representatives and green energy supporters have been arguing about who is to blame for the “electricity price hammer”. After all, did not Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) promise that green energy subsidies would not be more than 3.6 cents per kilowatt hour?  How could Merkel be so wrong?

Now, however, the cost burden is rising by 50 percent – to 5.3 cents per kilowatt hour. German citizens have to support renewable energy by more than EUR 20 billion – instead of 14 billion Euros. How could Merkel be so wrong?

Finding an answer to this question is crucial for the progress and success of the green energy transition. Only then the Federal Government would ever get a grip on its most important mega-project.

A review of the green energy transition’s planning data is revealing. It turns out that almost all predictions about the expected additional expansion of wind turbines and solar panels were dramatically wrong, at least by a factor of two, sometimes by a factor of five.

However, if there was one thing which was even less accurate than the prediction of the tempo of expansion it was the estimates of the associated costs of this expansion.

Renewable energy has been completely miscalculated

Already three years ago, the Renewable Energy Agency examined more than 50 studies on the development of renewable energy sources to see if their predictions had come true. The results were devastating: All of Germany’s top research institutes, from the Prognos Institute, the Fraunhofer Institute and the Institute for Aerospace (DLR) to the Wuppertal Institute, had completely underestimated the expected contribution of renewable energy.

A Prognos study in 1998, for example, estimated that solar panels would provide 0.44 TWh electricity in 2020. In reality, photovoltaic supplied ten times as much in 2008.

In 2005, in a study for the Federal Economics Ministry, Prognos Institute forecasted the level of green energy generation for the year 2030. In reality, the level was reached in 2007, just two years after the publication of the study.

“Renewable energy must not be systematically miscalculated,” the former head of the Agency for Renewable Energies, Jörg Mayer, commented the findings of the report: “Major energy policy decisions depend on predictions.”

Green electricity levy was promised to cost just one Euro

The leader of the Green Party, Jürgen Trittin, proclaimed in 2004 that Germany’s green electricity law (EEG) would cost each household “only about one Euro per month – as much as a scoop of ice cream.” As Federal Minister of the Environment, Trittin then pursued the expansion of the most expensive green energy technologies such as solar photovoltaic and offshore wind power without any hesitation.

Given the poor quality of forecasting delivered by Germany’s research institutions, it was an almost forgivable mistake. In reality, the monthly EEG costs per household have increased almost twenty-fold compared to the amount proclaimed by Trittin.

Trittin’s successor, Sigmar Gabriel (Social Democrats, SPD), should have become suspicious, however. His ministry always relied on so-called reference scenarios produced by the German Institute for Aerospace (DLR) and an engineering firm: year after year they predicted a decrease in the number of the expensive solar panels in Germany – and were thus far removed from reality.

Sending out the wrong message

For 2007, the “reference scenario” expected an additional construction of 600 MW of solar panels in Germany. In reality, it was 1,270 MW – twice as much. And in 2010 7,400 MW of solar panels were installed; six times as much as estimated in the reference scenario used by the environment minister.

The message that politicians of all parties got from the studies by the ministry of the environment was as clear as it was wrong: the cost of solar subsidies are negligible, photovoltaics would remain a niche technology. Today, however, the hangover is hurting: Already, the subsidies for solar power alone add up to 110 billion Euros. They will have to be paid by consumers in the next 20 years.

In 2009, the Association of Renewable Energy (BEE) published a reassuring prognosis: “The delivery volume of electricity generated by renewable energy will decrease after 2013.” The statement was accompanied by statistics that suggested subsidies of 5.6 billion Euros in 2013. Another great error: In fact, with 20.36 billion Euros the figure was almost four times higher in 2012.

The environment minister’s secret

When it comes to the green energy costs per household, the stakeholders of the eco-industry also promised the consumers the earth: households would only be charged 1.4 cents per kilowatt hour in 2013 – a figure, which would decrease steadily thereafter and would amount to 6 cents in 2020. The reality shows a different picture: in 2013, consumers will be charged four times of what they had been promised by the green lobby.

After the most recent EEG price shock, Federal Environment Minister Peter Altmaier (Christian Democrat, CDU) announced a reform of the green electricity levy. The fixed feed-in tariffs may be abolished, the minister said in a ten-point paper: in return, the green electricity target for 2020 may be raised from 35 percent to 40 percent.

Given that all green energy forecasts have been off the mark by hundreds of percentage points after just three years it is unclear where the minister gets his confidence to believe that he will succeed.

SOURCE






Energy sources abundant

We've been told the world is running out of sources of energy, and we've been preached to about renewables and made to spend vast sums on them.

The oil, we are told, is running out, and they talk of 'peak oil.'  There are vast reserves of coal, but it pollutes more than we want, so the talk turns to renewables.  Biofuel from food grains lacks all sense or reason.  The farmers loved it, of course, and so probably did the politicians who collected their votes.  Poorer people who had to compete with Chelsea tractors for cheap food were less pleased.

Wind farms have blighted our areas of natural beauty, are very expensive, and may not even contribute to environmental quality when their whole life pollution, including construction, is factored in.  Moreover there has to be back-up power for when winds prove unreliable.

Renewables are jacking up the fuel bills that customers complain of, despite their tiny contribution to total energy supply.  The big change to the equation has been the natural gas revolution, with hydraulic fracturing technology giving us access to reserves we knew about but could not previously tap.  We now have many decades, maybe hundreds of years, of reserve supplies.  And those reserves are not in politically sensitive or unstable areas.

Gas does emit carbon, but half that of the coal-fired power stations it can replace.  It is what will fuel our power stations.  It can even substitute for oil in transport if we move to electric vehicles using gas-generated electricity.  It is a fossil fuel, of course, but not in short supply.

Coming close on its heels is photo-voltaic power, with the price of the cells subject to a kind of Moore's Law that sees the prices tumbling steadily over the years.  Technology has thus already shown us the solution to the energy shortage.  Environmentalists oppose this solution, of course, because it does not necessitate the behavioural changes that they seek.

Note that a US coal-fired plant converts only about 33% of the potential energy to power.  An incandescent light-bulb is only about 3% efficient.  This makes coal to incandescent light only 1% efficient.  By contrast an LED powered by gas-generated electricity is 20% efficient – twenty times as much.  Technology like this is solving the problem.

SOURCE






Some food realities

We are told there won't be enough food for our increasing numbers, and that millions in poorer countries will starve.  In fact this will almost certainly not happen, and the world's future food supply is a source of optimism.

It was Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) who popularized this view in "An Essay on the Principle of Population." He stated that agricultural output increases in a linear (arithmetic) way, but that population does so in an exponential (geometric) way.  This means that large numbers must starve.

The Malthus view has not been borne out by events.  Our ability to use technology to increase food production has enabled food output to keep pace with population, even with the explosive growth of the 20th Century.  The use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides has boosted production per acre in ways he could not imagine.

The Green Revolution between the late 1940s and the 1970s, led by Norman Borlaug, saw the development of high-yield crop varieties, plus changes in agricultural infrastructure, and is reckoned to have saved more than a billion people from starvation.

A second Green Revolution is coming about based on genetic modification.  Desirable traits can be crossed between species, enabling plants to be bred that can overcome many of the limits of traditional agriculture.  Plants have already been developed to resist herbicides so that weeds can be killed without affecting food crops.  Even more exciting is the research under way to develop crop strains that will resist pests themselves without needing chemical assistance.

Researchers are developing crops that will thrive on marginal land, that can resist drought and temperature extremes, and that are saline tolerant.  This will open up to agriculture huge areas of land not presently suitable for crops.  Varieties are being produced that can fix atmospheric nitrogen and fertilize themselves in the way that legumes do.  Others are under way that incorporate vitamins to supplement unbalanced diets and reduce the health risks caused.

Yet more research is being done to create varieties that yield more food and less waste, enabling greater output per acre.  We will not need to cut down rainforests.  Our future food production should easily outpace the population increase, overturning the Malthusian pessimism.

Environmentalists whose agenda is behaviour change have raised scare campaigns over GM foods, yet GM crops have been in widespread use now for many years without adverse effects.  Far from posing a hazard to our future well-being, they stand to make a huge and positive contribution to it.

SOURCE




Shale phobia looking costly for Europe

Cheaper natural gas prices in the U.S. could spell trouble for European chemical companies, as their rivals across the Atlantic benefit from lower costs.

The U.S. shale-gas revolution has made natural gas roughly three times cheaper there than in Europe, and the U.S. chemical industry is reaping the benefits through cheaper energy and feedstock, leaving the European sector under the threat of increased competition.

"Production costs with shale gas are lower than anything we can achieve in the short term in Europe," said Harald Schwager, a member of the board of executive directors at German chemical giant BASF SE BAS.XE +0.83% . The rise in U.S. competition will first be palpable on highly energy-intensive products, but in the long term there is a risk that the whole supply chain will be hit, Mr. Schwager added.

The challenge comes as Europe is making key, strategic choices about its energy future, and dependence on natural gas, which is mainly imported, is likely to increase. Some countries—including Germany, its largest economy—have decided to phase out nuclear power and governments are being pressed to cut back in public funds for renewables to shore up budget deficits.

But Europe is divided on the development of its own shale gas potential: the likes of France and Bulgaria are opposed to it while Poland and others are keen to exploit it, mainly to reduce their dependence on Russian natural-gas imports.

Chemical plants have traditionally been built close to the markets for their products, as feedstock could be fetched from different parts of the world and investment in the region was considered safer than in other countries. But the energy price differential could alter that dynamic, especially as it hits an industry that is already facing sluggish demand in Europe due to the economic crisis.

"The threat is that the [U.S.] chemical industry attracts more investment and that goes to the expense of the EU industry," said Wim Hoste, an analyst specializing in chemical companies at KBC Securities in Brussels.

Companies are unlikely to decommission plants in Europe just to move them elsewhere given the high cost involved. But as production sites grow older and new demand emerges elsewhere, companies could consider producing in the U.S. and exporting to Europe.

SOURCE





British energy policy in a muddle

Next month, the coalition government in Britain intends to publish its new energy bill. The coalition partners, however, are increasingly at odds over the direction of the United Kingdom's energy policy. In view of growing antagonism, it remains unclear whether the bill can be salvaged or whether the increasing friction will lead to its delay.

Last week, British Prime Minister David Cameron bewildered MPs when he announced that energy suppliers would be forced by law to put customers on their cheapest energy tariffs. Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, contradicted the PM declaring that the government's new energy legislation would actually introduce something quite different to bring down energy costs - increased market competition. No wonder that the government's approach to energy legislation appears increasingly confused and frenzied.

Energy policy is one of the main economic battle grounds between the government's coalition partners. On energy policy, the Treasury has been increasingly at odds with the Department of Energy and Climate Change. This conflict has been growing between the Treasury and DECC ever since Chancellor George Osborne promised an end to Britain's unilateral decarbonisation targets.

The Chancellor has sent a clear signal that the government's ambition to restore the UK economy to health is overriding its desire to be the greenest government. He is adamant that the UK should no longer place too much emphasis on renewable energy and should adopt a new dash for gas. Cameron's recent reshuffle has certainly helped to pave the way for a new gas policy while Owen Paterson, the new Environment Secretary, has been widely reported to favour the rapid exploitation of shale gas. Yet, Davey is trying hard to safeguard the future of renewable energy subsidies.

In July, Osborne wrote to Ed Davey warning him that renewable energy was too expensive and that Britain should advance gas-fired electricity generation instead. Osborne stressed that the government "need to set out an approach which puts costs to consumers at the heart - we should be limiting support for low-carbon generation to a level the country can afford".

The DECC, on the other hand, has based the case for expanding green – and more expensive – energy in large part on their assumption that gas prices will inescapably rise in the future. This argument is no longer credible in the light of the growing international abundance of shale gas, not to mention the likely shale gas potential in Britain itself.

It will be interesting to see whether the coalition government will be able to overcome these conflicting and contradictory policy approaches in coming weeks. Davey claims the ultimate intention of the energy bill, expected to be published in November, was to "move from price setting by ministers to price discover by market". However, the draft energy bill - released earlier this year - was just as confused and inconsistent as Cameron's latest intervention. Unless these incongruities are disentangled and resolved, the energy bill will not provide investors with the certainty they require to make substantial investments.

This lack of clarity would inevitably lead to constant government amendments and continual intervention, further bewildering the energy sector. It is doubtful that an energy bill fudge would actually be workable, let alone economically viable. There is a growing risk that it will prove to be highly unpopular as the costs of these measures are likely to further inflate energy bills artificially. In this case, the crisis of energy policy making could quickly turn into a veritable government fiasco.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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UN climate change body worse than a delinquent teen

Talk about a case of mistaken identity.  Most people, if they know anything at all about the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), believe that it is made up of “the world’s leading scientists” at the peak of their careers.

Indeed, Donna Laframboise, an Ontario-based investigative journalist who wrote for the Toronto Star and was a member of the National Post’s editorial board, said she too had once assumed that the IPCC’s reports into climate change were written by the personification of “a meticulous, upstanding professional in business attire.”

Instead, after spending more than two years investigating just who is behind the IPCC, she came to the conclusion that the world’s “Climate Bible” is “produced by a slapdash, slovenly teenager who has trouble distinguishing right from wrong.”

That’s how she came up with the title for her book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert.

During a luncheon hosted by the Friends of Science and co-sponsored by the Frontier Centre on Wednesday at the Metropolitan Centre, Laframbois told the crowd of 300 that when she began the journey of writing her book, she set out intending to “examine arguments for and against dangerous, human-caused climate change.

“What I learned along the way turned me into a climate skeptic or — as I like to call myself these days — a climate rebel.”

And this rebel has a cause — to expose the real IPCC — to pull back the curtain, if you will, on this Wizard of Oz and expose — well, a phoney.

When she started looking into the IPCC, she was told repeatedly by august scientific publications, newspapers and the chairman of the IPCC himself, Rajendra Pachauri, that the IPCC is made up of the world’s top scientists and best experts and that any information that is not peer reviewed is discarded from the report.

Most people just accept these statements as fact.

So what did Laframbois find? Yes, “a number of talented and experienced scientists have indeed helped to write IPCC reports over the years. The problem is that many other IPCC authors don’t come close to being leading scientists at the top of their profession,” said Laframbois to the crowd made up of many geologists, geophysicists and astrophysicists.

On the screen, Laframbois flashed the photos of three “20-somethings,” who were lead authors and even co-ordinating lead authors of entire chapters of the IPCC Climate Bible that directs the governments of 185 countries into actions like raising gasoline prices, imposing carbon taxes and the like.

Richard Klein, for instance, was 23 in 1992 when he completed his master’s degree in geography and worked as a Greenpeace campaigner. Two years later, he was a lead author for the IPCC. Since 1994, he has been a lead author for six IPCC reports, and beginning in 1997, he was promoted to co-ordinating lead author — the IPCC’s most senior author role — at the age of 28. “That’s six years prior to him completing his PhD. Neither his youth nor his thin academic credentials prevented the IPCC from regarding him as one of the world’s top experts,” she said.

Laurens Bouwer was a lead author for the IPCC in 1999-2000, BEFORE earning his master’s degree in 2001.

The most egregious example is Sari Kovats. In 1994, Kovats was one of 21 people “in the entire world selected to work on the first IPCC chapter” looking into the affects of climate change on human health.

But she wasn’t anywhere near being one of the world’s top scientists or experts in her field. Indeed, she didn’t publish her first academic paper until three years after she acted as an “expert” and she didn’t earn her PhD until 2010 — a whopping 16 years after being tagged as one of the top 21 experts in the world.

And it gets worse. The IPCC is filled with environmental activists, not objective scientists measuring data and coming to conclusions.

Among a list of people she cites, Laframbois notes that Jennifer Morgan spent several years as the World Wildlife Fund’s chief spokesperson on climate change and then in 2010 the IPCC appointed her “to work on a report it describes as objective, rigorous and balanced.”

Indeed, two-thirds of the chapters of the IPCC’s Assessment Report 4 included at least one WWF affiliated scientist. Two-thirds! Laframbois calls that a “full-scale invasion.”

“This is the equivalent of a judge in a murder trial — a judge who’s supposed to be neutral and impartial — partying with the prosecution team in the evening while the trial’s going on during the day,” said Laframbois.

It’s important to note here that while a columnist with the Toronto Star, it was Laframbois who questioned the science that convicted Guy Paul Morin of murder. Years later, she was proved right when DNA evidence exonerated the innocent man in 1995 of killing a child.

Pachauri has often claimed that the IPCC relies only on peer-reviewed research and material and says all non-peer reviewed work should be thrown “into the dust bin.” Laframbois conducted an audit to see if that’s indeed the case. It is not. Laframbois found that 21 out of 44 chapters in the 2007 IPCC report used less than 60 per cent peer reviewed material. Pachauri should follow up and throw the entire report into the dustbin. So should the world.

By the end of her talk, Laframbois was shown to be understated by calling the IPCC a delinquent teenager. More like a dangerous mob boss with a knack for fraud and hijacking. Time to lock him up.

SOURCE





Obama Washington Wink-Winking like crazy at EPA

President Obama is among the slickest practitioners ever of the Washington Wink-Wink -- what professional politicians in both parties do when they say one thing while planning to do something else entirely.

There was, for example, Obama's 2008 campaign promise to "cut the federal deficit in half." And that "net federal spending cut" he would achieve by the end of his first term? Anybody think he didn't know then that his first term would explode the deficit and spending to historic highs?

Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., the ranking minority member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, sees more of the same from Obama on the Environmental Protection Agency front, which the Oklahoma Republican described in a detailed report he issued yesterday.

Here's the first wink: "Obama has spent the past year punting on a slew of job-killing EPA regulations that will destroy millions of American jobs and cause energy prices to skyrocket even more," Inhofe said. "From greenhouse gas regulations to water guidance to the tightening of the ozone standard, the Obama-EPA has delayed the implementation of rule after rule because they don't want all those pink slips and price spikes to hit until after the election."

For the second wink, Inhofe quotes Obama's former White House environmental czar Carol Browner, who recently reassured impatient environmentalists with these words: "I can tell you, having spent two years in the White House with the president, that this is not a fad. The president believes deeply in these issues ... there is no doubt in my mind this will be a big part of his to-do list and he will remain committed in the next four years."

In other words, Browner was saying, just wait, because Obama fears he might not get re-elected if he went ahead with his EPA plans before the election.

Here are just a few of many examples cited by Inhofe of costly new Obama-inspired regulations that EPA will impose on the economy after Nov. 6:

 *  Greenhouse gas regulations, including the infamous "cow tax." The EPA will finalize proposed regulations that will virtually eliminate coal use in electricity generation, thus driving consumer electric bills sky-high. This cluster of new regulations will also impose an annual fee on farmers for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted by their animals. The EPA estimates that 37,000 farms and ranches will have to pay on average a $23,000 annual "cow tax."

 *  New regulations will so severely reduce permissible ozone emissions that the EPA estimates the cost to the economy will be $90 billion per year. Other studies put the cost as high as $1 trillion. Split the difference between the estimates, and the result still means the loss of millions of jobs.

 *  New Tier III regulations will cut permissible sulfur emissions by two-thirds. That will add as much as 9 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas, according to Inhofe.

 *  The EPA's new coal ash regulation will cost as much as $110 billion over two decades and destroy more than 300,000 jobs, mostly in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Missouri.

This week, the Columbia Journalism Review and Pro Publica released a report stating that Obama has proved more secretive in some respects than his immediate predecessor in the Oval Office, George W. Bush. One of those quoted by CJR/PP is Society of Environmental Journalists President Ken Ward Jr., a staff reporter for the Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette, who tweeted this yesterday: "The Obama EPA is the most difficult to get information and answers out of that I've covered in 20 years."

That's the kind of transparency we get from politicians who do the Washington Wink-Wink.

SOURCE




Recycled water raises safety concerns

This winter, an Arizona ski resort, Snowbowl, will be the first to use treated sewage water, and sewage water alone, to make manmade snow. Recycling’s usually a good thing, but opponents of the plan worry about chemicals left in the snow, and an August report by a civil and environmental engineer says that the recycled water, already used for irrigation in Flagstaff green spaces, may contain antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

As Virginia Tech’s Amy Pruden describes in an unpublished report, covered by The New York Times Green blog, her group tested reclaimed water from various green spaces irrigated by Flagstaff’s recycled water and found five of the eight antibiotic resistance genes that they were testing for. These genes allow disease-causing bacteria, such as Staphylococcus aureus, to flourish despite antibiotic treatments. It’s unclear whether the bacteria in the wastewater that contain these genes are disease-causing, but growing them in a dish to find out is the next step, Pruden told the Times. Finding antibiotic-resistant bugs in the water would shift concern to alarm, she said.

Pruden is not the first researcher to be concerned about the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in effluent from wastewater treatment plants. A University of Michigan lab previously found that wastewater treatment plants were a source of antibiotic-resistant bugs. The plants foster bacterial growth to break down organic matter, then treat the effluent with ultraviolet light or chlorine to kill bacteria before discharging the wastewater, but the treatment doesn’t kill all microorganisms.

Nothing has changed in response to the findings yet, but Pruden has been appointed to an advisory panel in Flagstaff that will decide how to respond to the possibility of having antibiotic resistant bacteria in water already used for irrigation. Snowbowl plans to start spraying manmade snow around Thanksgiving

SOURCE




Get orf our land! (or how my village blew away a 140ft turbine)

By James Delingpole

Two months ago my family and I finally moved out of the Big City and into paradise – a pretty rented cottage on a 2,500-acre estate in Northamptonshire with lakes, Capability Brown parkland, a 12th Century church, a ruined Elizabethan haunted house, an 18th Century walled garden and an ancient bluebell wood teeming with badgers, bats, deer and rare birds.

But what we didn’t know was that there was a snake in the garden: a planning application for an ugly 140ft wind turbine on the hill overlooking our new idyll.

The first I heard of it was when a woman called Sue accosted me at the Fawsley village fayre. ‘We’re so glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘Now you can help lead our fight against the wind turbine!’

Flattering though this was, I had  to explain that I’m a troublemaker not an organiser. Sure, I could help out with an angry article, but if she wanted a leader she’d have to look elsewhere. Run a campaign? I can scarcely run a bath.

But from that moment on our paradise felt lost. Every time I went for a walk I couldn’t help glancing up at that hill, wondering how it would look when the wind turbine came. I thought of the sunrises it would blight, the low-frequency noise, the birds and bats it would slice and dice, and the hundreds of thousands of pounds going into the landowner’s pocket while the neighbours had their landscape ruined.

A fortnight ago, our worst fears came true. Sue emailed me to say the turbine had been recommended for approval by the planning officer. With only a week before the meeting when a decision would be made, we had left it too late. Only 12 people had written to object and planning approval was surely now a formality. ‘If only we’d put up more resistance earlier,’ said Sue.

At this point something in me snapped. There are things worth fighting for, and for me this was one of them. Come what may, the dragon must be slain.

What you don’t realise until you’ve fought one of these wind applications is just how grotesquely rigged the system is in favour of the developer.

Apply to your council’s planning department for a slightly bigger than normal conservatory and they’ll likely turn you down flat. On the other hand, propose to erect a noisy, gleaming white industrial wind turbine twice the height of the tallest oak tree.....

Incredibly, it’s the developer (not the council) who gets to commission all the expert environmental, architectural, acoustic and ecological surveys assessing the proposed turbine’s impact. Is it any surprise that these surveys generally tend to find in favour of the person who has paid for them – of course there won’t be any noise, the bats will do fine, and the turbine will meld   perfectly into the landscape.

Worse still, under current planning law, the presumption is in favour of renewable energy schemes. In other words, unless you can prove that the adverse effects of a turbine will ‘significantly and demonstrably’ outweigh its supposed carbon-reduction benefits, then the application is likely to be approved regardless of how strongly the local community objects.

This cruel injustice is spreading heartbreak, misery and fear across our land. The length of Britain – from the Stopit Meddon campaign in North Devon to once-wild and unspoilt Orrin in Ross-shire, Scotland – small groups are engaged in desperate battles to spare their cherished patch of the countryside from ruin.

All they want is peace. Instead, they’re having their nerves shredded, their spare time eaten up, and their savings exhausted in a frantic guerrilla war against ruthless, powerful developers with bottomless pockets and an insatiable appetite for the vast subsidies wind farms attract.

How to win against so mighty a foe? Simple. You have to call on the same reserves of courage, ingenuity, determination and raw cunning that in the past helped us see off the Spanish Armada, Napoleon’s navy and  Hitler’s Luftwaffe. I’m not exaggerating. Truly, the Blitz spirit is alive and well in your nearest anti-wind-farm campaign group.

A few urgent phone calls later and our entire community was mobilised. From the lord of the manor to the lowliest tenant, from the village’s two resident hot-shot barristers to the former bass guitarist from Echo And The Bunnymen, from the children at the village school to the woodsman on the estate, everyone was determined to do their bit.

By the weekend before the hearing our position had changed from totally hopeless to not-entirely futile. Our crack team had spotted any number of serious flaws in the planning application. Nearly every conservation body going had raised objections, including  English Heritage.

Quite why the planning officer had decided to override these objections – and in a protected landscape area too – was a mystery.

A mystery, it turned out, that the council’s planning committee found as baffling as we did. At a packed meeting  – preceded by a demonstration  by the village’s placard-wielding children – we were first astonished, then almost tearful with gratitude, as one by one the members of the planning committee at Daventry District Council stood up to say how appalled they were that such a blight was even being considered  in an area so beautiful and unspoilt. They rejected the idea by nine votes to one.

I’d love to end the story at the glorious pub celebration where  jubilant villagers – many of whom had never met until we were united through struggle – toasted the wisdom of those councillors and the power of local democracy. But sadly I can’t.

Since then I’ve heard the landowner is going to appeal against the decision and try to force through a wind turbine that no one (except him) wants and which will disfigure our neighbourhood.

Our community’s plight is by no means an unusual one.  Something has gone badly awry with both our energy policy and our planning laws. Is anyone at Westminster listening?

SOURCE





Shooting down the locovores

Is locally grown produce as green as its proponents think it is?  Or are they just loco?

Today we're going to be politically incorrect again and point our skeptical eye at another sacred cow: Locally grown produce. Particularly in the United States, but in many other countries as well, one of the newest and fastest growing market segments is locally grown produce. The claims are that locally grown produce is less wasteful of fuel because it doesn't need to be delivered over long distances; it's fresher for the same reason; and it supports a small local organic farmer instead of an immoral megacorporation that sources food from cheap overseas producers.

I discussed one of these claims, about local delivery burning less fuel, in a May 2009 entry on SkepticBlog.org. It must have been pretty inflammatory, because it generated a huge number of comments. Most of them followed this pattern: The commenter begrudgingly agreed with the mathematics of the delivery question, but then claimed that I missed the point completely because the real reason to like locally grown produce has nothing to do with a low carbon footprint of minimal delivery miles. I'm not sure I buy that — virtually everyone I've ever asked says that's what locally grown is all about — but hey, I'm fair, we'll give them all a voice here.

First, let's give a brief overview of the mathematics of local delivery. Think of the traveling salesman problem. This is where you speckle a map with all sorts of random locations. The traveling salesman's problem is to find the shortest possible driving route, called a tour, that visits each of the locations. It's among the most computationally difficult problems in mathematics. But there's a cool piece of free software by Michael LaLena that finds one efficient solution using a genetic algorithm. Try to stump it with a pattern of hundreds of dots that you think will be hard to connect, and the software blows your mind with a surprisingly simple tour that visits all the locations.

Many years ago I did some consulting for a company that was then called Henry's Marketplace, a produce retailer built on the founding principles of locally grown food. Henry's had evolved from a single family fruit stand into a chain of stores throughout southern California and Arizona that sold produce from small, local farmers. Part of what I helped them with was the management of product at distribution centers. This sparked a question: I had assumed that their "locally grown produce" model meant that they used no distribution centers. What followed was a fascinating lesson where I learned part of the economics of locally grown produce.

In their early days, they did indeed follow a true farmers' market model. Farmers would either deliver their product directly to the store, or they would send a truck out to each farmer. As they added store locations, they continued practicing direct delivery between farmer and store. Adding a store in a new town meant finding a new local farmer for each type of produce in that town. Usually this was impossible: Customers don't live in farming areas. Farms are usually located between towns. So Henry's ended up sending a number of trucks from different stores to the same farm.

Soon, Henry's found that the model of minimal driving distance between each farm and each store resulted in a rat's nest of redundant driving routes crisscrossing everywhere. What was intended to be efficient, local, and friendly, turned out to be not just inefficient, but grossly inefficient. Henry's was burning huge amounts of diesel that they didn't need to burn. So, they began combining routes. This meant fewer, larger trucks, and less diesel burned. They experimented with a distribution center to serve some of their closely clustered stores. The distribution center added a certain amount of time and labor to the process, but it still accomplished same-day morning delivery from farm to store, and cut down on mileage tremendously. Henry's added larger distribution centers, and realized even better efficiency. Today their model of distributing locally grown produce, on the same day it comes from the farm, is hardly distinguishable from the model of any large retailer.

Compare the traveling salesman's simplified tour to a tangle of crisscrossing bicycle spokes, and the inefficiency of direct delivery between farm and store becomes acutely clear. If we want to minimize the carbon footprint of the entire food cycle, eliminating direct delivery is the easiest place to make the biggest gains. So, right off the bat, the main reason most people prefer locally grown produce is shot down, and shot down in big flames. But let's turn to the SkepticBlog commenters and see what people had to say.

As did a number of readers, Ian pointed out that you have to consider the total price. Not just the cost of distribution, but also the cost of the retailer's wholesale purchase. Total them all up, and in some cases it might be cheaper to buy from ridiculously far away:

"...Wal-Mart [buys] fruit from South Africa, coffee from Kenya, etc. Flying this produce around the world is clearly using more fuel than even an inefficient model for distributing food locally. The efficiency comes not from reducing fuel usage, but from paying significantly less for the produce."

This was underscored by another poster, "Old White Guy":

"As someone who spent a good chunk of his life controlling distribution for several large companies, I can say the only thing that matters is getting the product to the point of sale as inexpensively as possible. If that [means] the cheapest wine in the store comes from another continent, so be it."

This suggests that it some cases, huge container-sized purchases might still be cheaper for the large retailer, even though their delivery produces a lot of wasteful emissions, and their production might be with some god-awful third-world high-pollution child-labor dogs-and-cats-living-together environmental disaster. That might be true in some cases, but those would be the exception, not the rule.

Most of the time, produce is cheaper from those countries because the native growing conditions are much better for that particular crop. Tomatoes flourish in Spain but require heated greenhouses in the United Kingdom, and so the overall energy efficiency of growing them in Spain and transporting them overseas to the UK is actually better.

A number of people who disagreed with my article repeatedly referenced Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan devotes one of the book's four sections to the practices of holistic cattle farmer Joel Salatin. One of Salatin's rules is that, in the interest of a minimum carbon footprint, he won't ship his beef at all; customers have to drive to him to pick it up. While I applaud Salatin for having the right idea and the right motivations, I don't believe he thought through this particular point very critically.

Salatin should instead design practices that more directly address his desire: He should allow only shipments that use a minimum amount of fuel per pound of beef delivered. Instead, he adopts a rule that might put hundreds of cars and vans on the road, each delivering only a few pounds of beef. Salatin's solution is emotionally satisfying and makes for a fine sound bite, but its underlying science is flawed and counterproductive to his stated goals.

The elephant in the room on Joel Salatin's farm is that his near-total self-sufficiency methods require an outrageous 550 acres to support only 100 head of cattle and a herd of pigs, plus some turkeys and chickens.

More HERE




LA Times confirms: Environmental regulations killing Californians at the pump

Last week, we editorialized:

There has not been a major new oil refinery built in the United States since the Marathon Garyville Refinery was built in Louisiana in 1977. True, our existing refinery capacity is higher today than it was 30 years ago, but all that refining is being done at 137 refineries today, versus 254 refineries 30 years ago.

Fewer refineries means more miles of pipe must be built and maintained, and it also means bigger problems whenever a key refinery goes down. That is exactly what happened this fall in California, when the Richmond Exxon refinery caught fire and the Kettleman-Los Medanos pipeline was contaminated. With two key delivery system points at reduced capacity, and without other refineries and pipelines to back them up, gas prices shot up almost a full dollar from $3.73 in the first week of July to $4.65 today.

In other words, Californians are now suffering at the pump because they have let their energy infrastructure become too fragile. Instead of developing the resources closest to them (including the more than 300 million barrels of oil sitting off of California’s coast in the Pacific Ocean), California has chosen to become dependent on other states for its oil supply. And instead of building a diverse group of smaller refineries and shorter pipelines, California relies on a big dog that can suddenly take ill.

Today, The Los Angeles Times reports:

The Golden State’s gasoline market is essentially closed. The state’s strict clean-air rules mandate a specially formulated blend used nowhere else in the country. Producers in places such as Louisiana or Texas could make it, but there are no pipelines to get it to the West Coast quickly and cheaply....

Shielded from outside competition, these refiners benefit from keeping supplies tight. Even as gasoline consumption has declined in California in recent years because of high unemployment and increased vehicle fuel efficiency, refiners have been able to keep prices about 35 cents a gallon higher than the rest of the country. At the same time, the number of refineries operating in California has declined to just 14 today from 27 in the early 1980s....

In other states, such as Texas, independent, non-branded stations make up as much as 50% of the market, creating more competition. But California’s independent stations are the first to suffer when there’s a hiccup in the state’s fragile supply chain...

As the number of refineries shrinks, the chances that an outage could create disruptive shortages and painful price hikes increases.

“The fragility of the refining system makes California really vulnerable to spikes,” said Carl Larry, president of consulting firm Oil Outlooks & Opinions. “What happened this month looks like the result of a hurricane. But there are no hurricanes in California.”

Back to our editorial:

Americans will face a choice this November. They can go down the path California has chosen, a path of less oil development, fewer refineries and higher gas prices. Or they can let the market build a robust energy infrastructure that will create thousands of construction jobs now and keep energy prices low for decades. Depending on the choice they make, $7 gas could really be just four more years away.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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A small personal note

On this blog I put up posts that are supportive of climate skepticism and also posts that criticize Warmist writings.  I am however not sure how often in future I myself will be writing critiques of Warmist articles.

Such articles are ubiquitous.  They pop up all around the place all the time.  They are an unending stream of rage.  And all have one unquestioned underlying premise:  That the earth is undergoing substantial warming.  That the evidence shows no recent warming at all somehow seems to escape their notice.  So every word they write is reduced to ashes by their failure to attend to the most basic "fact" that their house of cards is built upon.

And in a sense they cannot be blamed for their carelessness about the basic facts that they rely on. The official climate authorities in America, Britain and Australia constantly stress how hot recent years have been.  You hear of some recent year being "the fifth hottest on record",  "the third highest on record" etc. etc.

But those statements do not mention BY HOW MUCH the years differ from one another.  And in fact the years nearly all differ by ONLY HUNDREDTHS of one degree, an almost unimaginably tiny amount.  You can see that even in the heavily cherry-picked data here -- from NOAA.  So even the official Warmist figures are in fact about as good a set of evidence as one could reasonably ask for to show complete temperature stasis.  So a lot of people have been fooled badly.  They have taken true but trivial statements as implying quite the opposite of what they do.

And I just don't have it in me to point that out day after day  -- JR




The REALLY inconvenient truths about global warming

The "Daily Mail" is not backing down

Last week The Mail on Sunday provoked an international storm by publishing a new official world temperature graph showing there has been no global warming since 1997.

The figures came from a database called Hadcrut 4 and were issued by the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University.

We received hundreds of responses from readers, who were overwhelmingly critical of those climate change experts who believe that global warming is inevitable.

But the Met Office, whose lead was then followed by climate change campaigners, accused The Mail on Sunday of cherry-picking data in order to mislead readers. It even claimed it had not released a ‘report’, as we had stated, although it put out the figures from which we drew our graph ten days ago.

Another critic said that climate expert Professor Judith Curry had protested at the way she was represented in our report. However, Professor Curry, a former US National Research Council Climate Research Committee member and the author of more than 190 peer-reviewed papers, responded: ‘A note to defenders of the idea that the planet has been warming for the past 16 years. Raise the level of your game. Nothing in the Met Office’s statement ... effectively refutes Mr Rose’s argument that there has been no increase in the global average surface temperature for the past  16 years.

‘Use this as an opportunity to communicate honestly with the public about what we know and what we don’t know about climate change. Take a lesson from other scientists who acknowledge the “pause”.’

The Met Office now confirms on its climate blog that no significant warming has occurred recently: ‘We agree with Mr Rose that there has only been a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century.’

Here, we answer some of the key questions on climate change – and invite readers to make their own choice ....

Q. Is the world warming or not?

A. The Hadcrut 4 figures that show a ‘pause’ in warming lasting nearly 16 years are drawn from more than 3,000 measuring stations on land and at sea. Hadcrut 4 is one of several similar global databases that reveal the same thing: that since January 1997 there has been no statistically significant warming of the Earth’s surface.

Between 1980 and the end of 1996, the planet warmed at a rate close to 0.2 degrees per decade. Since then, says the Met Office, the trend has been a much lower 0.03 degrees  per decade.

However, world average temperature measurements are subject to an error of plus or minus 0.1 degrees, while any attempt to calculate a trend for the period 1997-2012 has an in-built statistical error of plus or minus 0.4 degrees. The claim that there has been any statistically significant warming for the past 16 years is therefore unsustainable.

Q. Did The Mail on Sunday ‘cherry-pick’ data to disguise an underlying warming trend?

A. Some critics claim this newspaper misled readers by choosing start and end dates that hide the continued warming.

In fact, we looked at the period since 1997 because that’s when the previous warming trend stopped, and our graph ended in August  2012 because that is the last  month for which Hadcrut 4 figures were available.

In April, the Met Office released figures up to the end of 2010 – an extremely warm year – which meant it was able to say there had been a statistically significant warming trend after 1997, albeit a very small one. However, 2011 and 2012 so far have been much cooler, meaning the trend has disappeared. This may explain why the updated figures were issued last week without a media fanfare.

Q. But isn’t it true that the  science is ‘settled’?

A. Some scientists say the pause is illusory – if you strip out the effects of El Nino (when the South Pacific gets unpredictably warmer by several degrees), and La Nina (its cold counterpart), the underlying warming trend remains. Both phenomena have a huge impact on world weather.

Other experts point out one of the biggest natural factors behind  the plateau is the fact that in 2008 the temperature cycle in the Pacific flipped from ‘warm mode’, in which it had been locked for the previous 40 years, to ‘cold mode’, meaning surface water temperatures fell. A cold Pacific cycle causes fewer and weaker El Ninos, and more, stronger La Ninas.

Prof Curry said that stripping out these phenomena made ‘no physical sense’. She added that natural phenomena and the CO2 greenhouse effect interact with each other, and cannot meaningfully be separated. It’s not just that the ‘cold mode’ has partly caused the plateau.

According to Prof Curry and others, the previous warm Pacific cycle and other natural factors, such as a high solar output, accounted for some of the warming seen before 1997 – some say at least half of it.

Other scientists say that heat has somehow been absorbed by the waters deep in the oceans. However, the evidence for this is contested, and there are no historical records with which to compare recent deepwater readings.

In the wake of the pause, the scientific ‘consensus’ looks much less  settled than it did a few years ago.

More HERE



No Underlying Global Warming In Recent Years

David Whitehouse:

In the debate about the significance of the observed global annual average temperature standstill – whose duration now stands at the past 16 years – some have argued that it has little climatic significance. Not only is it shorter than the canonical thirty years used as the minimum to deduce climatic effects, it is also unimportant because the underlying decadal rate of warming is close to the IPCC’s estimate/prediction of 0.2 deg C per decade, and that this rate of warming has remained unchanged over the past thirty years. Thus it is maintained that global warming has not stopped even though there may be a pause in the temperature increase, or as the UK Met Office put it, a recent lower rate of warming. What we have seen in the past 16 years is therefore just variation in the rate of warming and that the underlying rate of global warming is as significant today as it has always been.


The evidence for this is the average global temperature for the past three decades. The UK Met Office in their State of the Climate brochure use an oft-repeated graph that shows this underlying increase in warming.Click on all images to enlarge.











It is obvious there is no pause. It is essentially this data that the head of the UK Met Office, John Hirst, used in a recent lecture. Global warming is taking place at precisely the rate expected.


But there is another way to look at this data.


Firstly, the data in the Met Office graph has been cherry-picked through the process of dividing it into decades. As I have said before the climate knows nothing of a decade which is a time interval that ultimately comes from the number of fingers we have. Imposing arbitrary points on the data set, like taking the start at 1980 and producing data for the 80s, 90s and 00s, is also cherry-picking and has the disadvantage of throwing away the most recent data. There is a different way to look at this data.


Let us look at the last three decades average global temperature but update the Met Office graph to Hadcrut4 (it used Hadcrut3). You will notice it is essentially the same showing a steady increase – the unchanging underlying rate of global warming.





Now, bearing in mind the imposed constraint in the Met Office approach of decades with arbitrary start and end points, take the same Hadcrut4 data but this time use all the available data and work backwards in 5-year integrations.





You will see it tells a very different story. There is now no consistent increase in temperature seen in the data. The mid-point in the Met Office graph is now seen to be the average of the two rather different middle points. What is apparent is that the data show the global temperature has changed between two levels. Each level, of fifteen years, is within one sigma of its mean, and the two levels are two sigma apart. A trendline drawn through the data is clearly unsatisfactory, as this diagram shows.





The data, displayed this way, reveal that far from showing a steady underlying rate of warming the global temperature has had two standstills, with curiously, the 1998 super El Nino delineating them.


These two ways of looking at the Hadcrut4 data (with the cherry-picking considerations) bring out differing aspects but averaging over a decade is giving a misleading impression of what the data actually shows – a well known problem with averaging. The global warming of the past thirty years – the current warm period – does not show an underlying constant rate. Temperature standstills are the norm.


Finally, it has been said that the 16-year standstill observed in the Hadcrut4 data since 1997 has been cherry-picked with its start and end dates. This is not so, the period is simply the answer to the question how far back does one have to go to see significant warming taking the errors into account. In fact, start and end dates are irrelevant, only its duration is important, not where it occurs in the dataset.


SOURCE





First time climate ignored in Presidential debates since 1984

Has Al Gore's Life Been in Vain?

It is very surprising to see three presidential debates and one Vice Presidential debate pass without a single mention of climate change. This is the first time this has happened since global warming hit the national stage in 1988.

Global warming activists are justifiably outraged by this. After all, Obama declared in April of this year to Rolling Stone that he would make global warming a key campaign issue in 2012. Obama let down a key part of his political base by going silent on climate.
What happened? How did climate change get reduced to a comedic punch line in the 2012 presidential campaign?

The answer is clear. The man-made global warming fear movement never overcame having a partisan figure like Al Gore being its public face and suffered from having the scandal ridden and distrusted UN IPCC as the source of its science.

Adding to these woes is the global economic slowdown and the fact that the Climategate scandal had massive consequences on public opinion and there was a collapse of the UN climate treaty talks.

In addition, the continued disintegration of the warmists climate claims by real world data and in the peer-reviewed literature make attempting to scare the public into climate 'action' virtually impossible.

Perhaps the most important factor in the climate silence in 2012 presidential race was a result of the forced vote in the House of Representatives to pass a cap-and-trade bill in 2009 which helped fuel the rise of the Tea Party movement in the U.S. No longer could a politician regurgitate the standard global warming claims of consensus and the need to 'act' without facing laughter and derision from angry crowds.

It is finally time to say RIP man-made global warming fears in U.S. politics?"

More HERE





Scorning the propaganda of fear

When a celebrated French philosopher from the centre left assails the “despotic” politics of environmental fear he should expect a dressing down from his climate change-conscious comrades.

But Pascal Bruckner has incited such fury with a diatribe against green prophesiers of imminent planetary ruin, the reaction has surprised even this veteran of the trans-Atlantic culture wars.

“The planet is sick. Man is guilty of having destroyed it. He must pay,” is how Bruckner caustically portrays the received wisdom on environmental “sin” and damnation in his latest book Le fanatisme de l’Apocalypse (The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse).

“Consider .... the famous carbon footprint that we all leave behind us,” he writes in his introduction. “What is it, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of original sin, of the stain that we inflict on our Mother Gaia by the simple fact of being present and breathing?”

Subtitled Sauver la Terre, punir l’Homme (Save the Earth, Punish Human Beings) the book rails against a peculiar Western malady. Yes, concerns about the environment are legitimate, Bruckner asserts, but catastrophisme is transforming us all into children “put in a panic in order to be better controlled”.

It is a feistier-than-usual polemic for Bruckner, a leading member of France’s “new philosophers” who emerged from the 1970s left with searing critiques of Marxism. Later this year, it will be published in English as Fanaticism of the Apocalypse by Polity, Cambridge, translated by Steven Rendall.

As the Jesuit-educated philosopher sees it, extreme climate change alarmism, with its warning bells chiming “The end of the world is nigh, repent ye”, represents a worrying new doctrine of ideological purity that even has totalitarian overtones.

Worst of all, Bruckner argues, these “political commissars of carbon” have “betrayed the best of causes” and turned the discourse of ecological terror into the “dominant ideology of Western society”.

Dividing his argument into three sections, provocatively titled “The Seduction of Disaster”; “The Anti-progress Progressives”; and “The Great Ascetic Regression”, Bruckner scorns the peddlers of the “propaganda of fear”.

It is a muscular thesis delivered in typical elegant Bruckner style, citing philosophers, playwrights, novelists, political theorists and green activists from Martin Heidegger to Goethe, Moliere, Gustave Flaubert, Hannah Arendt, and France’s Yves Cocher.

However since the book appeared in French late last year, Bruckner has been pilloried in certain quarters as a reactionary turncoat aiding the worst climate change deniers. He has seen some publications that traditionally laud his work decry Fanaticism of the Apocalypse as hedonistic, deluded and dangerous.

“Le Monde devoted four pages to say to what extent my book was bad, false and full of lies, which is rather curious,” Bruckner says, with a slight edge to his voice, as we are ushered into an upper room in his local cafe, Le Progres, in the Marais neighbourhood of Paris. When his last book, The Paradox of Love, a reflection on the vicissitudes of the modern God of “Amour”, was released in 2009, it was critically acclaimed and became a bestseller.

“But I took a risk,” he explains of his latest controversial work. “It was [written in] a fit of anger. I went against today’s dominant ideas. There is widespread ‘greenwashing’ including in our thinking. The dominant passion of our time is fear.”

One blistering assessment, in Liberation newspaper, was headed “The Fanaticism of Denial”. The article accused Bruckner of being a pleasure-addled baby boomer stuck in pre-global warming nostalgia for the insouciant Trente Glorieuses, the 30 years of postwar French prosperity before the 1970s petrol shock.

The philosopher insists he cannot be classified as a climate change negationist – in fact the opposite, because he decries the virulent strain of denial among US Tea Party radicals and even mainstream Republicans.

“I do not attack ecology per se,” Bruckner says of his book. “I attack that degraded religion which emerges from it and turns into a culture of fear, hatred of progress and well-being.

“Why must we renounce all the joys of life under the pretext of global warming?”

More HERE




Australia:  Another "Green" firm folds -- messily

The Federal Court is being asked to decide who owns more than $600,000 worth of solar credits left after a Canberra renewable energy firm went into administration earlier this year.

Enviro Friendly Products owed more than $750,000 when it went into administration in January.

Liquidator Worrells Solvency and Forensic Accountants wants the court to direct how to deal with the solar credits, known as STCs.

Issued by the Commonwealth government's Clean Energy Regulator, they are trading at a little over $30 a certificate and collectively are worth more than $600,000.

Klaus Matthaei, one of 260 customers issued with certificates, said customers included pensioners who had borrowed money to buy solar panels or solar hot water systems and still had quite a lot to pay back.

In documents filed with the court, Mr Matthaei has raised concerns that many customers were unaware of the court proceedings, and that he had tracked down 59 other customers who had little idea of what was happening.

Also, Mr Matthaei said 15,000 STCs worth $475,000 were missing and those funds should be reimbursed before any other creditors were paid.

He told the court the remaining STCs should be treated as separate from the assets of Enviro Friendly Products and administered by the eligible beneficiaries and the profits distributed among them.

"The cost of the missing STCs should be claimed from the liquidation of the company and if necessary from the assets of the directors," he said in his statement to the court.

Mr Matthaei told The Canberra Times he and his wife spent about $24,000 on panels and believed they would get back $8000 from the credits over 18 months.

Worrells Solvency partner Stephen Hundy said customers were entitled to a certain number of certificates depending on the size of solar hot water or solar panel systems they bought.

They had been given the option of assigning their rights to an agent.

EFP was a registered agent and some of those rights could have been assigned to the company to create certificates.

He said the company indicated to customers they would register the 21,000 certificates and hold them on the customers' behalf, even though they were registered in the company's name.

"The first thing we need the court to find or direct, is whether they were certificates held in trust for the customers.

"As the liquidator, we're not putting any positions forward, we have simply put facts before the court and provided options how to deal with certificates, and because different customers are affected in different ways.

"Some no longer have certificates in the system. Some still have them in the system, in the company's name."

Mr Hundy told The Canberra Times earlier this year factors contributing to the demise of Enviro Friendly Products included changes to the ACT government's feed-in-tariff scheme, which ended abruptly in May.

At the time the government said the feed-in tariff contributed to growth in the ACT solar market, and interest was mostly driven by the high level of assistance from the federal government's solar credits program.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL  and EYE ON BRITAIN.   My Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Graphics hotlinked to this site sometimes have only a short life and if I host graphics with blogspot, the graphics sometimes get shrunk down to illegibility.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here and here

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