Jim Hansen postpones the day of doom

But first he gives us a pleasant little surprise.  He confirms something that I have been repeating for some years now:  That the high surface temperature on Venus is not the result of runaway global warming but rather a simple adiabatic effect of the weight of the huge Venusian atmosphere.  Hansen writes:

"Venus today has a surface pressure of about 90 bars, compared with 1 bar on Earth. The Venus atmosphere is mostly CO2. The huge atmospheric depth and CO2 amount are the reason Venus has a surface temperature of nearly 500 degrees C."

But Hansen has invented a "get out of jail free" card for terrestrial warming called "Climate system inertia".  Now that past climate prophecies have been falsified by the temperature standstill of the last 17 years, there is an urgent need for Warmists to regroup.  And Hansen has done that by moving the goalposts.  He says that the climate is so slow to respond to input changes that it will takes centuries for the prophesied warming to occur.  That of course make his prophecies effectively unfalsifiable.  He writes:

"Climate system inertia means that it will take several centuries for the eventual extreme global warming mentioned above to occur, if we are so foolish as to burn all of the fossil fuel resources"

Why we should believe the new prophecies when the old ones have failed utterly, Hansen does not tell us.  But we should clearly be most wary of statements that are not only unproven but unprovable.

But Hansen will continue to have fun in his own little world with his assumptions and models -- JR.

More Hansen HERE




Warmist secrecy again

With the connivance of the British government

Can the Internet help climate scientists? Not everyone thinks so.

"The Internet is a double-edged sword," Met Office scientist Peter Stott told a London courtroom last week. "There's a whole cacophony of voices on blogs, people with different opinions and people very motivated to dig around. But not in the 'big picture' details, frankly. That is not helpful to getting an overall balanced assessment."

Stott had just been asked whether widespread online participation in the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment-of-the-science process might improve it. The open source software development principle, that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", came to mind.

The occasion was an Information Tribunal appeal brought by one-man information Inquisition David Holland. The retired Mancunian engineer's previous enquiries were seen by many as the catalyst for the famous "Climategate" email leaks.

"My interest in this was never to do with climate. I'm trained as an engineer, and I know the scientific method," Holland told El Reg in 2011, when he had sought access to large amounts of information from the British climate-science establishment - and was denied. Holland's FOI requests set off a catastrophic sequence of prevarication and obstruction by the responding scientists, which ultimately appears to have triggered the Climategate leaks and massive discomfort for all the researchers involved.

Now it's the turn of Peter Stott of the Met Office to come under Holland's microscope.

I actually felt a bit of human sympathy for Stott; you can bet he would have rather been somewhere else, and it transpires that Holland didn't actually want him there at all. Holland had wanted to cross-examine the head of the UK delegation to the IPCC, a Department of Environment and Climate Change official called David Warrilow, head of climate science and international evidence.

The procedural questions under the spotlight are Warrilow's bailiwick, not Stott's, but Holland was refused his man. Stott, we learned, had been pressganged into appearing by the Met Office's lawyers. Stott also had to defend his and allied organisations' refusal to disclose material on a basis - as we shall see - that's highly questionable. No intelligent person should have to waste his own time, or anyone else's time, defending the indefensible.

And the mere presence of a Met scientist is a bit of a red herring, as it's really the IPCC that is on trial; the case for the defence is being organised by the Treasury solicitor, paid for by you.

Judge Anisa Dhanji was not impressed by the defence's refusal to find someone so very germane to the case to stand up to cross-examination, and demanded that a written statement by Warrilow be included in the record.

So. Here we all were. Why was this happening, exactly?
The case for transparency

The IPCC is the United Nations organisation's process for providing climate advice to policy makers. Every few years it updates this advice, which takes the form of three gigantic reports: one assessing the physical basis (called Working Group 1, or WG1); another considering the impacts (WG2); and the third the mitigation options (WG3).

None of the groups does any original science. They're supposed to write fair summaries of the state of the science - although you'll notice that WG3 already plays with loaded dice: it is about "mitigation", not "adaptation" nor "economic costs" or even "low carbon technological innovation". Each of these groups writes three drafts in a rolling process before they're signed off as official UN policy.

What Holland is seeking the "zero order draft" – aka Draft No. 1 - of Working Group 1. He couldn't care less what's in it, but wants to establish the principle that citizens can see it. As it happens, much of this material is already all over the web. But as Judge Dhanji pointed out, that's by-the-by.

Holland justified his request on the twofold basis that the WG1 zero draft must, and should, be publicly available.

The "must" is the statutory obligation of the UK as a signatory to the Aarhus Convention, or to give it its full title, the "UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters" and by signing up to EC directive 2003/4/EC (PDF) the UK has obliged all of its environmental regulations to be consistent with the Convention. (Not every EU country is a signatory, but the UK is: perhaps a case of civil servants' Euro-enthusiasm coming back to bite them.)

The Met Office argued back that the ZOD is most precious, and if ZOD material were to be disclosed, counsel argued, there would be grave damage to the UK's "international relations". Like the Sneetches, British environment bureaucrats would be stranded on the beaches: shunned, ostracised, and cast into outer darkness. Nobody would want to play with British climate scientists any more.

Yet this particular reason for refusing ZOD is a relatively recent one. It came about in the aftermath of Climategate, and a succession of other climate-related -gates, after which the IPCC's processes came under much-expanded scrutiny. The Inter Academy Council, a panel of dons, made recommendations, amongst others.

The international-relations grounds for climate secrecy first surfaced in 2009 and was used as a reason to knock back FOI requests, from various people including Holland himself. Its origins appear to lie in a request from University of East Anglia climate scientist Tim Osborne in 2009 to IPCC WG1 co-chair Thomas Stocker, which you can read here. Osborne asked Stocker:

    "UEA must provide evidence to support its reasons for rejecting the original request. I've been asked if we can obtain a further statement about confidentiality ...

    ... it would be very supportive if someone who currently represents IPCC (or at least IPCC WG1) could indicate that this is also the view/position of the IPCC ...

    There are four specific items that we would ideally like to have you view on:

    (1) Does the IPCC WG1 expect authors to keep confidential the emails/correspondence/chapter text that they receive from fellow authors during the drafting process?

    (2) Would there be an adverse effect on the IPCC WG1 if we were to break this confidentiality? (Note that we might be forced to break it *during* the drafting of the next report)
 
 (3) Would there be an adverse effect on UEA's relationship with IPCC WG1?
 
  (4) In providing views on items (1)-(3), are they your personal view or can we say that they represent IPCC WG1 position?"

"Can we say that" is particularly revealing.

It's a common misconception - a sign of the media's deference to scientists, perhaps - that the IPCC consists of a properly appointed actual panel somewhere. As Stott cheerfully confirmed, beyond a small technical administrative support team called the TSU, there isn't really "an IPCC" at all. Self-selecting scientists kick off the assessment process, often gatekeeping material by their friends and colleagues, hard-green campaign groups etc.

From the Second Draft stage of the review process the room is full of government officials - the international bureaucracy effectively takes over. The rules are set by the participants, making it up as they go along, Lord of the Flies-style. The Osborne-Stocker exchange illustrates a normal example of one scientist colluding with another in an attempt to prevent the public finding out how the process works.

Stott described in court the process which allows any member of the public to "self-certify" as an Expert Reviewer and join the process at the First Order Draft (ie, the second) stage. He pointed out that Comments generated at this stage were made public last time.

This is true, but bear in mind that the IPCC went to great lengths to avoid Draft Review Comments actually being read last time around - "making public" the comments by depositing an un-indexed paper archive in a library in Massachusetts. In the internet era, that's tantamount to "burying them in a hole in the ground", says Holland. Today, the Comments are indeed officially released on the actual interwebs - but too late to stop errors being spotted, Holland retorted. He cited Glaciergate as an avoidable error.

"On the internet, half of what I've asked for is already there," said Holland. "It's extremely boring stuff, and contains nothing confidential. I can see no reason for it not being released."

Holland's other argument, the "should", is an ethical one. He cited the former IPCC head John Houghton who wrote, "for assessments that inform public policy it is essential that things are seen to be done: the assessment should be completely open and transparent". He contrasted this with "indefinite confidentiality" implicit in refusing access to the ZOD.

Not to mention the small matter of compliance with Aarhus.

The IPCC's defence was twofold: the ZOD work needed to be kept from the public because the participants were learning the ropes, and because it offered a sanctity of private thought required for this vital education. Exposing the scientists to the public at this stage would be like mocking a Learner Driver for knocking over the traffic cones. This would be horribly cruel, defence argued.

"The Zero Order Draft is a training document we can take to a few people to tell us 'are we on the right lines here?' 'have we learned to write a document?' The lessons we learn we can then take on to produce the first First Order Draft to formal review," Stott said.

Judge Dhanji wondered what the harm was?

Stott replied:

"Well the issue can and does get misused and misrepresented as representative of the IPCC assessment. We've had that in the past with leaked drafts."

And again: "it's an internal document for our own internal use, we can expose our ignorance, expose our learning process, to learn how to write a document. That's the distinction between ZOD and the other drafts," he replied.

"Things that are said in the name of the IPCC during process may come back to haunt them in that people who disagree with the IPCC may scour material for inconsistency," he declared.

Defence counsel raised these concerns, which obliged Judge Dhanji to castigate him for coaching Stott.

"Too much leading," she warned.

Bear in mind that nothing in IPCC rules actually specifies that the ZOD stage is sacrosanct. Participants may prefer it, but rules is rules. Or not.

So Stott answered questions he couldn't, at one point offering his not-so-expert opinion on International Relations.

"It's a bit hypothetical, isn't this?" he replied at one point - surely the truest words spoken all day.

In contrast to the most recent climate-science-related FOI hearing I attended in October (Newbery vs the BBC), the judge was scrupulously exact with both parties, while the two lay judges actively engaged with very good questions, clearly intended to improve their understanding.

In Newbery's case, they asked no questions, and merely scowled. It later transpired that one of the lay judges was a former local government official whose huge redundancy payoff had only been exposed through FOI requests. The other was a former Labour councillor who had received money for campaigning on climate change - and whose views on "deniers" were well known.

It'll be interesting to see the Tribunal's decision in due course



EU leaders in a hole over energy costs

The costs of Warmist policies are becoming embarrassing

EU leaders will grapple with controversial issues including shale gas development and climate change mitigation at an energy summit on 22 May, documents obtained by EurActiv show.

As agreed at the 14-15 March summit (see background), EU leaders will meet to discuss how to lower energy prices and so improve the Union’s industrial competitiveness.

According to the draft guidelines for the summit conclusions, prepared by the services of Council President Herman Van Rompuy, the EU heads of state intend to focus on “key aspects” of energy policy aimed at boosting growth, productivity and employment to help overcome the effects of the economic crisis.

“High energy prices and costs hamper European competitiveness,” the document says. It invites discussion on how Europe could stay competitive globally and bring down energy prices at a time when Europe is facing massive investment shortfalls in energy infrastructure and generation capacity.

Van Rompuy’s services also call on the EU leaders to discuss ways of further increasing energy efficiency, developing "indigenous resources" and facilitating investment. The Commission will be tasked with developing a “predictable climate and energy policy framework post-2020”.

Re-thinking climate policies

An analysis of energy-price costs in member states will be requested from the EU executive by the end of 2014, highlighting the EU’s competitiveness with its global counterparts.

Competitiveness, in the EU energy policy context, translates into a re-thinking of the Union’s climate policies.

Recently, the powerful employers’ group BusinessEurope called on European Commission President José Manuel Barroso to radically shift the EU's energy policy away from climate change mitigation towards cost-competitiveness and security of supply. [more]

The Draft Conclusions say that the EU's goal is to ensure “a level playing field for business and industry”, so they can compete in the global marketplace, having regard inter alia to the impact of carbon leakage”.

“Carbon leakage" is jargon for the relocation of European businesses abroad because of the comparative advantage they may gain from looser climate regimes.

Shale gas

Leaders are also expected to task the Commission to assess a “more systematic recourse to indigenous sources of energy, both conventional and unconventional”.

Unconventional sources usually refers to shale gas, which many believe has triggered an industrial revival in the USA, but is viewed with suspicion by several EU countries.

Regarding conventional resources, several EU countries are exploring offshore fields for gas and oil, their industrial partners being companies from the USA or Israel. The Commission has rarely played a part in these ventures.

Van Rompuy’s services say that they aim at establishing a regular exchange of information between EU countries on “major national energy decisions with a possible impact on other member states”.

Although the document gives no details, sources told EurActiv that it primarily covers upcoming decisions on new nuclear plant builds. Austria, which decided not to develop nuclear energy, has complained about potential health and environmental risks from the Mochovce and Temelín nuclear plants, sited just across the border in neighbouring Slovakia.

Large sections of the Conclusions appear in brackets or underlined, which means that countries still have to give final assent to the wording. As an example, the “positive effects” of the unbundling provisions of the Third Energy package are praised “generally”, indicating a lack of unanimity.

More HERE



Cheap natural gas prompts U.S. states to sour on renewables

More than half the states with laws requiring utilities to buy renewable energy - including Arizona - are considering ways to pare back those mandates after a plunge in natural gas prices brought on by technology that boosted supply.

Sixteen of the 29 states with renewable portfolio standards are considering legislation that would reduce the need for wind and solar power, according to researchers backed by the U.S. Energy Department. North Carolina lawmakers may be among the first to move, followed by Colorado and Connecticut.

The efforts could benefit U.S. utilities such as Duke Energy and PG&E as well as Exxon Mobil, the biggest U.S. oil producer, and Peabody Energy Corp., the largest U.S. coal mining company. Those companies contributed to at least one of the lobby groups pushing the change, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a Madison, Wis.-based nonprofit group. It would hurt wind turbine maker Vestas Wind Systems and First Solar Inc., which develops solar farms.

"We're opposed to these mandates, and 2013 will be the most active year ever in terms of efforts to repeal them," said Todd Wynn, task force director for energy of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a lobby group pushing for the change. "Natural gas is a clean fuel, and regulators and policymakers are seeing how it's much more affordable than renewable energy."

Hydraulic-fracturing technology opened aging reservoirs for natural gas drilling, driving prices down about 72 percent from their record 2005 high. That's making more expensive wind and solar power projects harder for utility regulators to justify, according to ALEC and its allies, which include the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

"The shale revolutions are not just having ramifications politically and economically in the U.S. but also around the world," said Michael Liebreich, chief executive officer of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. "In 17 years, not that far away, we could reach peak energy use. This is not generally accepted."

Killing support for renewable-energy policies threatens sales at companies from wind-turbine makers General Electric and Siemens to SolarCity Corp., the San Mateo, Calif.-based rooftop energy developer.

The push at the state level replicates efforts in Washington. Opposition from Republican lawmakers delayed the extension of a federal tax credit for wind power, prompting Vestas, the biggest turbine maker after GE, to fire 10 percent of its workforce at two Colorado factories.

"There haven't been any outright repeals yet, but we've seen some watering-down," said Justin Barnes, senior policy analyst at the North Carolina Solar Center. "Activity against renewable portfolio standards has been increasing in the past year. Their arguments are mostly on cost."

The Raleigh, N.C.-based research group is supported by the Energy Department and operates the DSIRE database of state incentives.

U.S. investment in renewable power and energy efficiency fell 54 percent last year to $4.5 billion as government support waned, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The level may slip again this year if states dilute their requirements, which have pushed utilities to contract power from renewable providers and scale-back use of coal- and natural gas-fired generation.

ALEC wants to repeal state mandates, arguing that the free market is a better way to determine the most cost-effective source of power, Wynn said. It typically drafts model legislation for state lawmakers to use as a blueprint when drafting bills, including the Electricity Freedom Act, which was published in October.

More HERE




Global warming off the hook as cause of earthquakes

One religion replaced by another

 Women who wear revealing clothing and behave immorally are responsible for earthquakes, this is what a senior Iranian cleric has to say.

The cleric's unusual explanation for quakes follows the prediction made by the country's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that a quake is certain to rock Tehran and many of its 12 million inhabitants should relocate to save their lives.

Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi told the country's media that women who do not dress in dignified manner "lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society".

According to Sedighi, the only way to escape the disaster is to take refuge in religion and adapt to Islam's moral codes.

Seismologists have predicted a major earthquake in Tehran in the near future. Tehran is located on several fault lines, including one more than 50 miles long, although it hasn't suffered any major quake in the last 180 years.

SOURCE




Australia's swamps not up to snuff, according to Greenies

Murray-Darling Basin lakes and the Coorong lagoons in South Australia would be deemed critically endangered under a new global system to rank the conservation status of ecosystems in the same way as threatened species.

In a paper published in the journal PLoS ONE on Thursday, a team of international scientists will outline the proposed system, which would act as a companion to the global "red list" of threatened species managed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Under the new system, conservation ratings would be given to ecosystems - a collection of plants and animals that exist in an area of land or water that interact - from critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable, near threatened and least concern.

Instead of deeming an ecosystem extinct, as in an animal, they would instead be classified "collapsed". Examples of ecosystems include coral reefs, forests and lakes.

The team studied 20 ecosystems around the world to test the ecosystem red list. Eight were in Australia, including the Coorong lagoons, the swamps, marshes and lakes of the Murray-Darling Basin, and coolibah-black box woodlands.
Advertisement

The researchers found one collapsed ecosystem among the 20 studied - the Aral Sea, in Central Asia. Once one of the largest lakes in the world, the Aral Sea was drained for irrigation in the 1960s and has since nearly disappeared

In Australia, the Coorong lagoons, near the mouth of the Murray, were found to be critically endangered.

Professor David Keith, of the University of NSW, a lead author of the paper, said the Coorong scored the rating because of the pace of fish species and vegetation decline, along with a rise in salinity, during the millennium drought between 2000 and 2010.

He said heavy rains in recent years had given Australia a second chance to better manage the lagoons.

The lakes, swamps and marshes of the Murray-Darling were deemed endangered to critically endangered, while coolibah-black box woodlands were classified endangered.

Professor Keith said the new ranking system was important because not enough was known about most of the world's plant and animal species. "Globally, only 3 per cent of species have so far been assessed for their status; we don't know much about the remainder yet," he said.

"What the ecosystem assessment does is step back to a more general assessment that includes some consideration of all the species that are components of those systems.  "So it is a more general way of casting the net across a much wider set of biodiversity and the species that make up an ecosystem."

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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The current Warmist "explanation" of the temperature plateau of recent years

Below you have it:  The greedy deep ocean is gobbling up all the heat.  The warming is somehow bypassing the surface of both the land and the oceans and building up in the ocean deeps.  It is an extraordinarily improbable theory.  How does the warming slip past both the land and the ocean surface?  And does not warm water rise?  According to the ordinary laws of physics, it should be the surface where you find all the heat.  No wonder it is only a few "dyed-in-the-wool" Warmists who are pushing this one

There are periods when the ocean heats up more quickly than the surface, and other periods when the surface heats up more quickly than the oceans. Right now we're in a period of fast ocean warming and overall, global warming is continuing at a very fast pace.

The confusion on this subject lies in the fact that only about 2 percent of global warming is used in heating air, whereas about 90 percent of global warming goes into heating the oceans (the rest heats ice and land masses). But humans live at the Earth's surface, and thus we tend to focus on surface temperatures. Over the past 10–15 years, Earth's surface temperature has continued to rise, but slowly. At the same time, the warming of the oceans – and the warming of the Earth as a whole – has accelerated.

This was the conclusion of a scientific paper I co-authored last year, in which our team found more overall global warming (of the oceans, air, land, and ice combined) over the past 15 years than during the prior 15 years. Just recently, another paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the warming of the oceans since the turn of the century has been the most sustained in the past 50 years. They also found that, consistent with my team's research, about 30% of overall global warming has gone into the deep oceans below 700 meters due to changing wind patterns and ocean currents. This accelerated deep ocean warming is also unprecedented in the past 50 years.

We often hear from the media that the (surface air) warming has slowed or paused over the past 15 years. This isn't a puzzle; climate scientists are well aware of several contributing factors, as a recent Reuters article – "Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown" – eventually discussed. The accelerated warming of the oceans is likely the main contributor.

During years with La Niña events, more heat is transferred to the oceans, and surface temperatures are relatively cool as a result. The opposite is true during El Niño years. During the 1990s, there were more El Niño than La Niña events, which resulted in more surface air warming. One of the strongest El Niño events of the century happened in 1998, which not coincidentally was 15 years ago.

When people say 'no warming in 15 years', they're cherry picking the timeframe to begin in an abnormally hot year. It's like arguing that your car must have broken down because it hasn't moved in the 15 seconds while you've been stopped at a red light. The argument selects a short timeframe that's not representative of the whole.

Since 2000, there has been a preponderance of La Niña events, which has acted to temporarily bury more global warming in the oceans. A new study published in Nature Climate Change found that by taking into account the short-term changes caused by factors like El Niño and La Niña cycles, they could accurately forecast the slowed warming at the surface several years in advance. The paper concluded:

    "Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown."

More HERE




Melanie Phillips reflects





Scientists hint that global cooling is the new pollution risk

Just in time for the cooler spring that has swept the nation — complete with unseasonal snow in the Rockies region — scientists with the University of Manchester said pollution actually brings on climate cooling, not warming.

The logic is that manmade pollutants make clouds brighter, and that impacts how sunlight is allowed to shine — and that brings about cooler temps, scientists say, TG Daily reported.

“We discovered that organic compounds such as those formed from forest emissions or from vehicle exhausts, affect the number of droplets in a cloud and hence its brightness, so affecting climate,” said one study author, Gordon McFiggans, from the University of Manchester's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, in TD Daily.

The findings come as various regions around the nation are reporting near-record low temperatures for the spring months.

The Star-Telegram in Texas, for instance, reported that Friday brought record lows of 39 degrees. And in both March and April, temperatures for the North Texas region hit the lowest levels in three years. More than a foot of snow fell in the Rockies region last week, and Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin were also hit with record snowfall levels for May over the past few days

SOURCE




Anybody see any problems with 24 unelected people behind closed doors allocating $100 billion of public climate hoax money each year?

UN climate fund risks becoming 'a closed bank', warns NGO

    It is estimated that by 2020 it will be channelling US$100 billion a year in climate finance to developing countries – to help arrest the advance of climate change whilst adjusting to its effects.
    ...
    The 24 men and women at the GCF’s helm could emerge as a new brand of world leaders.

    They are not democratically elected, yet will be managing vast sums of public money, destined for projects that will in some way or other affect all of us.
    ...
    The March board meeting took place at Germany’s Foreign Office, a tightly guarded building with a strict door policy – UNFCCC-accredited organisations only.

    Present were the board, their alternates and advisers, and four additional participants – two so-called active observers representing civil society – one from developing countries and developed countries respectively – and two from the private sector...Active observers – each acting in the name of half of the world’s citizenry – received key official documents a day or two in advance.

SOURCE



Not much has changed in polar bear country since the sea ice maximum

Lots of ice everywhere – even in Hudson Bay. A bit less ice in the Barents Sea (north of Norway) than there was two months ago at the sea ice maximum March 15 (see Fig. 1 below compared to the extent at May 5 in Fig. 2: both from NSIDC). But there is still quite a bit around Svalbard – that group of islands between NE Greenland and NW Norway (see Fig. 3 below a MASIE image, where this situation is more apparent).

Polar bears are eating and mating at this time of year – and right now, they have a huge, circumpolar ice platform for those activities.

More HERE  (See the original for graphics etc.)



Australia: Small taxpayers suffer because of bad carbon tax bet.  Lifting the tax-free threshold would have greatly helped the poor

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet has confirmed the 2015 tax cut associated with the carbon trading scheme will not go ahead because of the drop in the carbon price in Europe.

Mr Combet says the Government know thinks the carbon price will not be as high as the $29 per tonne originally forecast.

He says that means there will not be a need to increase the tax free threshold as promised.

"Those tax cuts were were to be in the order of a $1.59 per week for most people earning up to $80,000 a year," he said.

"I say they're deferred, because when the carbon price rises again in the future, those tax cuts will still be implemented at that point in time.

Last month the price of carbon in Europe plunged as much as 45 per cent after the European Parliament rejected an emergency plan that would have forced companies to pay more for polluting.

Carbon permits dropped to as little as 2.63 euros ($3.34) a tonne, and German power prices for next year fell to their lowest level since 2007.

At the time Mr Combet said the upcoming budget would need to take the EU price plunge into account.

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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The Soviet-style Royal Society

Their support for global warming is widely quoted.  Interesting to see how they arrive at their conclusions

Last week, the Royal Society announced the list of new appointments to the fellowship for 2013. For climate geeks the only familiar name that of Imperial's Joanna Haigh, who specialises in the solar influence on climate and who, to the best of my knowledge, has not been associated with any kind of activism. I've spotted one other climate scientist, but not one I've come across before.

Unfortunately, the society seems to have got itself into a bit of a pickle over its decision to elevate Prince Andrew to the fellowship too.

Jonathan Leake, who broke the story in the Sunday Times (paywalled), noted that the election involved a ballot paper that only allowed existing fellows to vote in favour or to abstain. Apparently only 11% of the electorate voted in favour of the prince, with "a huge number" abstaining.

Leake has also got a choice quote from Lord May, who expresses his "dismay" at the vote and says that:  "This is not the way to run an election. A ballot where you can only say yes is a bad idea and should be changed."

This takes a certain amount of chutzpah from the noble lord, who chose to retain this "bad idea" of an electoral system when he was in charge of the Royal Society.

Such Soviet-style shenanigans were mentioned in my Nullius in Verba report in connection with the election of Lord Rees as president, with Rees's the only name on the ballot paper. The electoral practices of the society have no doubt been central to its corruption by political activists.

Update:  Christopher Booker notes the appearance of Joanna Haigh in his report on the BBC:

    "Another BBC documentary about which the Climategate emails are very revealing was one called Meltdown: A Global Warming Journey (2006). When this was being shot, its producer Jonathan Renouf emailed Keith Briffa, one of Jones’s senior colleagues at the CRU, clearly expecting to be filming him the following day for what was intended to be a key sequence in the programme. He explained that his presenter Paul Rose, a scientist, was going to pose as someone dubious about the warming theory because he was troubled by talk of the Mediaeval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. What Renouf wanted was a sequence in which Briffa would explain how climate history had been dramatically rewritten by Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ graph, all but eliminating the MWP and showing how in recent years, in a way which could only be due to man-made global warming, temperatures had soared to levels quite unprecedented in the past 1,000 years.Briffa’s job, the producer went on, would be to "prove" to Paul that what we're experiencing now is NOT just another of those natural fluctuations we've seen in the past. The hockey stick curve is a crucial piece of evidence because it shows how abnormal the present period is - the present warming is unprecedented in speed and amplitude, something like that. This is a very big moment in the film when Paul is finally convinced of the reality of man made global warming.

    In fact, for whatever reason, Briffa did not appear in the finished programme (which can still be seen on YouTube). Instead his part as the ‘talking head’ climate scientist was played by a young professor from Imperial College, Joanna Haigh. She went through precisely the routine Renouf had outlined to Briffa, enabling Rose to pose initially as something of a sceptic who, after hearing the argument, at last finds the evidence for man-made global warming wholly convincing. This is a formula with which we have become familiar in these pages; but rarely do we get such an insight into how calculatedly the BBC is prepared to stage such a charade, to put over the point the programme makers have wanted to make all along"

SOURCE




Does Big Green care about people or nature?

It's nothing new to see Big Green figures deploring the fact that people exist. Back in 1974, the elite Club of Rome published "Mankind at the Turning Point" with its infamous motto, "The Earth has a cancer and the cancer is man."

Today it has become routine for some well-funded Big Green group to block life-saving projects supposedly to save some allegedly threatened creature. In a previous column, I detailed a particularly outrageous example: a campaign that stopped an approved life-saving gravel road between two remote Alaska towns because it might annoy some geese.

The towns are Kings Cove, with the state's largest salmon processing plant, and Cold Bay, which has the only reliable medical evacuation airport in the region. Lack of an all-weather road between them has contributed to 11 deaths. Congress and President Obama had approved a carefully crafted Kings Cove-Cold Bay road plan and a gift of land for a wildlife refuge for the geese.

The culprits that killed the road were led by Rodger Schlickeisen (2011 compensation: $364,000), former president of Defenders of Wildlife (2011 assets: $35.3 million). Defenders spent $4 million on direct mail and $899,000 on telemarketing for a "get out the comments" campaign that cowed the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service into stopping the road.

Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, had only one parting word for them: "Shameful."

Last week, Montana rancher Bill Hoppe awoke one day, walked to a river bank, and "all I could see were dead sheep," he told a reporter. There were 19 in all, five ewes and 14 lambs killed by two wolves, according to the evidence. "The grandkids, those were their sheep, their lambs," Hoppe said. "They had a lot of them named, could catch them,"

Hoppe has lived in Paradise Valley his whole life. Wolves had never attacked his livestock before. Hoppe blames the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for caving in to Big Green pressure groups to stop controlling wolf populations.

Steve Kelly of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies said, "Anyone in the sheep business knows it's not a good place to raise sheep."

I spoke about Kelly's crass remark with Frank DuBois, who was a deputy assistant secretary of interior under President Reagan.

DuBois told me, "The Hoppe family has been around for five generations, but this guy comes hippity skipping in with the audacity to tell him how to run his business and doesn't give a twit about the grandkids' sheep. Somebody needs to tell Kelly the Paradise Valley is not a 'good place' to raise little enviros. There are better places, although I can't think of one right now."

There is a saying that wildlife's worst predator is wildlife biologists. That has certainly been the case with jaguars in the American Southwest, where the big cats, largest in the Western Hemisphere, have long been considered extinct because settlers pushed them back to their core range in Mexico.

The last known female jaguar in the U.S. was killed in 1963, attracted by a predator call and shot by a Fish & Wildlife contract sniper, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

Then, on Feb. 18, 2009, a male jaguar known as Macho B (Macho A had disappeared years earlier) was captured in a wire snare set by Emil McCain, a subcontractor for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. Game and Fish personnel tranquilized Macho B, attached a radio collar to him, and released him.

Twelve days later, the jaguar was observed ailing, was recaptured, diagnosed as terminally ill from kidney failure, and euthanized. McCain pleaded guilty to violating the Endangered Species Act and his superior in Arizona Game and Fish was fired for lying to federal investigators.

SOURCE  




Congress working to strip presidential land grab power

If you think national monuments are statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, welcome to the crazy catalog of federal land grabbing tools.

These "monuments" are actually large areas that are supposed to be small, and can be created out of thin air by the president with the stroke of a pen.

This extraordinary power has been abused by presidents of both political parties time and again to bypass Congress in creating national park-size units -- a congressional power -- at his own whim to satisfy his Big Green constituents.

But parks are expensive to operate and monuments are budgeted like second-class citizens -- and they block resource use.

Members of Congress last week held a hearing on nine separate bills to rein in the president's national monument proclamations by requiring congressional approval or requiring a public National Environmental Policy Act comment process before taking effect.

National monuments are the brainchild of Teddy Roosevelt, the Rough Rider, who, as president, peddled his idea to Congress by pleading with members to stop the looting, desecration and destruction of Native American sites in the Southwest such as Chaco Canyon and Cliff Palace.

Congress fell for it and gave the president proclamation power in the Antiquities Act of 1906, an intentionally broad piece of legislation to set aside "historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest."

So TR rode roughshod over Westerners far and wide by designating 18 national monuments that should have gone through Congress as national parks, such as the Grand Canyon and Washington State's Mount Olympus (which Congress later designated parks), and only six of the 18 were major Native American sites.

Private property captured in national monument boundaries was not seized, but owners could sell to the feds if they wanted to -- and the caretaker National Park Service had ways to make them want to do so.

However, the private property rights to grazing, logging and mining within federal lands were seized. This enraged the locals, who were not consulted.

President Obama recently proclaimed five new national monuments without much local objection. Congress seems OK with that, but fears waiting for his other shoe to drop, largely because of a very bad experience with the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton.

Clinton established 19 national monuments covering more than five million acres and expanded three others, all except one designated in Clinton's last year as president.

He made last-minute designations of more than a million acres as national monuments, but had created the 1.7 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah in 1996 during his re-election campaign against Republican Bob Dole.

Clinton didn't know about the Utah area before he was scheduled to make the proclamation -- in Arizona, at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, to keep Utah's Republican members of Congress in the dark until it was too late.

The president was blindsided by White House official Kathleen McGinty, who colluded with Big Green advocates to pass off a fake letter making it look like the president wanted Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt to help prepare the designation -- isolating its enormous deposit of privately owned low-sulfur coal.

The fraud was not discovered until after Clinton made the proclamation, when House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Don Young, R-Alaska, obtained a subpoena and federal marshals seized Katie McGinty's documents and email records. I covered the story at the time in a report available here.

Is there some similar Machiavellian plot afoot in the bowels of the White House today? Better to strip the power before Big Green pulls some strings and makes us sorry we didn't.

SOURCE  





Scottish wind farms paid £1 million to SHUT DOWN down for one day

Wind farm companies operating in Scotland were paid more than £1 million to shut down their turbines for a single day last month, it has emerged.

A total of £1,146,614 was handed out to the operators of 13 Scottish wind farms, including almost £300,000 for a development built on land owned by the Duke of Roxburghe.

The money, which ultimately comes from electricity consumers’ bills, was given to wind farm companies to compensate them for not producing power during periods of high generation and low demand.

This can happen when it is too windy so as not to overload the National Grid. Anti-wind farm campaigners fear the payments will only increase thanks to Alex Salmond’s drive for a large expansion in the number of turbines north of the Border.

According to figures provided by the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a charity that publishes information on the energy sector, more than £1 million in such “constraint payments” were paid out on April 29.

The largest sum paid out on that date was £348,349, which was to shut off the Crystal Rig II wind farm operated by energy company Fred Olsen in East Lothian.

However, the second-largest beneficiary was the Fallago Rig Wind Farm run by EDF on land it rents from Roxburghe in the Lammermuir Hills. The French energy firm was handed more than £296,000 to shut down the turbines, which only started generating electricity at the end of January.

Murdo Fraser, a Conservative MSP and a prominent wind farm critic, said: “People struggling with rising electricity bills and growing levels of fuel poverty will be astonished to learn that millions are being paid to companies for power which isn’t even being used.

“This illustrates yet again the folly of the SNP government’s wind energy policy.”

Dr John Constable, the REF's director, said: “Constraint payments to wind are well in excess of the lost subsidy income, suggesting that the industry is taking advantage of the difficulties that they cause on the network.

“While perfectly legal, this is clearly unfair, and the regulator Ofgem needs to step in to protect the consumer.”

According to the REF figures, enough wind-generated electricity to power 10,000 homes was “dumped” by the National Grid last month. A total of £3.6 million of constraint payments were made to wind farm companies in April, the highest monthly total since September 2011.

EDF charged between £89 to £149 for every megawatt hour (MWh) of energy that was not produced, compared to £50 per MWh the company would have received for selling it.

Although the Duke of Roxburghe will not benefit from the constraint payments, a recent book by Struan Stevenson, a Tory MEP, suggested the landowner could receive up to £1.5 million per year in rent.

A spokesman for EDF said the constraint payments reflected the costs and lost revenues from shutting down the turbines.

He added: “All generators are required to have commercial agreements in place with the National Grid. These agreements cover periods when the Grid instructs generators to temporarily decrease the power they generate.”

A spokesman for the National Grid said the payments spiked while maintenance was carried out. A spokesman for Roxburghe refused to comment on its "commercial agreement" with EDF.

SOURCE




Sacrifice!  Give all your meat to the great god Moloch global warming.  Vegetarianism rules!

In case you missed the news, humanity spent the Earth Day week reaching another sad milestone in the history of catastrophic climate change: For the first time, measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million—aka way above what our current ecosystem can handle.

Here's the good news, though: The fastest way to reduce climate change shouldn't seem impossible, because it requires no massive new investments, technological breakthroughs or long-term infrastructure projects. According to data compiled by former World Bank advisers Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, it just requires us all to eat fewer animal products.

In their report, Goodland and Anhang note that when you account for feed production, deforestation and animal waste, the livestock industry produces between 18 percent and 51 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Add to this the fact that producing animal protein involves up to eight times more fossil fuel than what's needed to produce an equivalent amount of non-animal protein, and you see that climate change isn't intensified only by necessities like transportation and electricity. It is also driven in large part by subjective food preferences—more precisely, by American consumers' unnecessary desire to eat, on average, 200 pounds of meat every year.

If you find it demoralizing that we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers, here's that good news I promised: In their report, Goodland and Anhang found that most of what we need to do to mitigate the climate crisis can be achieved “by replacing just one quarter of today’s least eco-friendly food products”—read: animal products—“with better alternatives.” That's right; essentially, if every fourth time someone craved, say, beef, chicken or cow milk they instead opted for a veggie burger, a bean burrito or water, we have a chance to halt the emergency.

In light of that, I'm sure some conservatives will read this column and send me email smugly pledging to eat even more meat than they already do, just to make some incoherent point about freedom. What they will really be proving, though, is that no matter how straightforward a climate change solution may be, we will never be able to combat the crisis until everyone is willing to sacrifice just a little bit, and nobody pretends ecological survival is anything other than what is: an apolitical, transpartisan priority.

SOURCE




Environmentalists Killing US Economy

Last month, Earth Day came and went. Perhaps you missed hearing about it. For 2013, the theme was “The Face of Climate Change.” Other than a change in the Post Office cancellation mark on your letters from the usual wavy lines, to the four stick-like wind turbines and a sun symbol, there was little note of what was once an event celebrated by 20 million Americans. Tim Wagner, Utah representative for the Sierra Club’s Our Wild America Campaign, groused: “Media coverage of global warming has virtually disappeared.”

According to EarthDayCentral.com, one of the goals of Earth Day is to help you “Discover what you can do to save the environment.”

Perhaps, people no longer see the need for planetary salvation.

The Christian Science Monitor offered an Earth Day 2013 report card on global warming. The author starts with: “When Earth Day observances first began in 1970, Cleveland had recently doused a pollutant-fueled fire on a section of the Cuyahoga River. Cities were often shrouded in thick blankets of smog. And large portions of Lake Erie were so fouled by industrial, farm, and sewage runoff that sections of the 241-mile-long lake were pronounced dead.” And later, he reports: “Since that first Earth Day, the air over major cities is cleaner. Lake Erie is healthier. So is the Cuyahoga River, which groups in Cleveland would like to turn into a centerpiece of urban life. The improvements have come with ‘yes, but...’ as other environmental challenges have elbowed their way to the fore. But for the most part, tools are in place to deal with them.”

As Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, explains, the ‘80s ushered in the age of environmental extremism. The basic issues, for which he and Greenpeace fought, had largely been accomplished, and the general public was in agreement with the primary message. In order for the environmentalists to remain employed, they had to adopt ever more extreme positions. Moore says: “What happened is environmental extremism. They’ve abandoned science and logic altogether.” Their message today is “anti:” anti-human, anti-science, anti-technology, anti-trade and globalization, anti-business and capitalism, and ultimately, anti-civilization.

Moore’s view helps understand how the environmental movement has gone from trying to save the planet to killing the US economy.

The American economy has some basic problems. We need more well-paid jobs, increased revenue, and our trade balance is out of whack. Each of these issues could be easily addressed, but environmentalists are doing everything they can to kill potential solutions. Three such examples are coal mining and exporting; natural gas extraction and conversion to liquefied natural gas (LNG) that can then be exported; and the Keystone pipeline—all of which face extreme opposition from environmentalists.

COAL

The US has the world’s largest economically recoverable coal resources—with more than one-fourth of the world’s reserves. Unfortunately, our policies have stymied growth in the mining industry. Bill Bissett, President of Kentucky Coal Association, told me: “Our industry is accustomed to market fluctuations and competition with other fuel sources, but having a federal government place additional regulations on one geographic region (Eastern KY and WV) and one industry (coal mining) is absolutely unfair.”

Last month, environmental groups (including the Sierra Club and Greenpeace) sent a letter to newly-confirmed Interior Secretary Sally Jewell calling for a moratorium on the leasing of federal lands for coal mining in the Powder River Basin (PRB) of Montana and Wyoming—which accounts for about forty percent of US coal reserves. The results of a recent lease sale in Wyoming, offers insight regarding the economic importance of leasing these federal lands for coal mining. Peabody Coal paid nearly $800 million to the US Government for the rights to expand an existing coal mine and maintain their current workforce. The $800 million was a “bonus payment” and gives them the right to lease the coal and pay 12.5% of the sales price as a royalty. According to data from the Bureau of Land Management, 13 active coal mines in the Wyoming portion of the PRB alone, employ more than 6800 workers.

While, as Bissett addressed, policy under this administration has harshly singled out coal and the coal miners for punishment, coal’s low cost and abundance continues to make it a highly preferential fuel for power generation in developing countries like China and India. And, as I’ve previously written, even Europe is increasing its use of coal for electricity generation, as they’ve discovered the prohibitively high cost of renewables. In 2011, exports to European and Asian markets represented 76% of total US coal exports—up 31% compared to 2010.

Currently, US coal is easily shipped to Europe from ports on the east coast, but the US is missing out on the important Asian market—now being met by more expensive Australian competitors—due to infrastructure opposition from environmental groups. In the Los Angeles Times (LAT), Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org and a legend in the world of climate activism, wrote: “Those exports can’t really take off, however, unless West Coast ports dramatically expand their deepwater loading capacity. …. Environmentalists are trying desperately to block the port expansion.”

Addressing the situation, the Wall Street Journal states: “there are now no major coal exporting facilities on the US West Coast. Washington State, with its proximity to coal-rich Wyoming and Montana, is seen as the best place to start.” PRB coal is being shipped to China and India through Vancouver. Additionally, the countries’ needs are being filled by Australian and Indonesian coal—so environmentalists’ fears that shipping US coal will undermine “everything we've accomplished,” as Sierra Club spokesman David Graham-Caso says, are wrong.

The coal is being shipped and used—but the US is losing out on the jobs (which would be mostly union jobs), the revenue, and the benefit to the trade deficit. The LAT/McKibben piece cites KC Golden, policy director of Seattle’s Climate Solutions group: “Can you imagine standing at the mouth of the Columbia River, watching ships sail in from Asia carrying solar panels and electric car batteries and plasma TVs, passing ships from America carrying coal?” Worse, can you imagine all those goods coming in—manufactured using Australian coal-fueled electricity, and nothing going out? That’s what we have now.

A report from the Energy Policy Research Foundation states: “US production will merely replace higher cost production. … Neither net world coal combustion nor GHG emissions will change as a result of an expansion of US coal exports.” The report concludes: “The higher net value received is in effect a wealth transfer from foreign consumers to US producers and the national economy. This net gain to the national economy shows up in higher returns to invested capital, greater employment opportunities from expanded investment, higher revenues to state, local and federal governments, and higher lease values on coal reserves from federal and state lands.”

But environmental groups don’t want this “net economic gain to the national economy.” Apparently, they’d prefer that we continue to borrow from China’s Australian coal-fueled economy.

LNG

LNG faces a similar problem. Natural gas was once the favored choice of environmentalists—until privately funded hydraulic fracturing (or high pressure drilling) advancements made it plentiful and, consequently cheap. The low-cost fuel snatched away the fossil fuel-free dream that seemed to be almost within reach. Now environmentalists oppose natural gas as well. The Sierra Club’s Beyond Natural Gas site claims: “Increasing reliance on natural gas displaces the market for clean energy.”

Many countries want US natural gas. Unlike coal, natural gas cannot just be put on a ship and sent to the awaiting customer. It must first be liquefied—hence the term LNG. The liquefaction process requires costly facilities, which, for economic reasons, need a large customer base—many with which the US does not have free trade agreements (though the Energy Department can permit them, provided it determines that such ventures are consistent with the public interest). The International Business Times, on March 1, 2013, reports that: “As of this date, 17 applications for multibillion-dollar facilities to turn the commodity into liquefied natural gas, or LNG, for export are under review by the Energy Department.” Let’s hope they don’t take as many years and as many reviews as the Keystone pipeline.

LNG exports could have a tremendous positive impact on the US economy. A recent IHS global insight report concluded that LNG exports would “result in the creation of over 100,000 direct, indirect, and economy wide jobs and have an immediate economic impact resulting in $3.6 to $5.2 billion in potential annual revenues.”

And, LNG exporting would not only create jobs and increase revenue, it would also reduce trade deficits. A just-released report from the Rio Grande Foundation states: “The United States currently runs a $6 billion trade deficit with Japan. That nation is particularly eager to import LNG from the US due to the nuclear accident at Fukushima.”

Once again, environmentalists oppose jobs, revenue, and trade-deficit reduction. Earlier this year, more than 40 groups and individuals took out a half page ad in the New York Times that said: “Exporting Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to overseas markets will mean more drilling and fracking on US land, which are dirty and dangerous practices.”

KEYSTONE

Like coal mining and export, natural gas extraction, liquefaction, and export, the Keystone pipeline would create thousands of union jobs and increased service employment in supporting communities; benefit local and state economies, and provide additional revenues to the federal coffers; and help balance the trade deficit, as some of the refined product would be exported. But once again, environmental opposition has targeted the pipeline—causing delay after delay that has now postponed the economic benefit of the pipeline.

Last week, Russ Girling, TransCanada, CEO, said: “I believe that those that are fundamentally opposed to our pipeline are getting louder and more shrill as we move towards a decision.” He announced that the potential start date must be moved from the previously planned late 2014 or early 2015 to late 2015.

The Keystone pipeline saga is the same song, another verse.

These are just three current examples of how the influence of environmental organizations is driving policy in the name of planetary salvation that is, in reality, resulting in economic devastation that could lead to humanity’s ultimate starvation. Environmental motivations are less about saving the planet and more about killing the global economy—while enriching themselves at taxpayers’ expense.

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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Plenty more where that came from



The list of faltering or already failed Green Energy companies:

Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
Solyndra ($535 million)*
Beacon Power ($43 million)*
Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
SunPower ($1.2 billion)
First Solar ($1.46 billion)
Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
Amonix ($5.9 million)
Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
Abound Solar ($400 million)*
A123 Systems ($279 million)*
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
Johnson Controls ($299 million)
Schneider Electric ($86 million)
Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
ECOtality ($126.2 million)
Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
Range Fuels ($80 million)*
Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
GreenVolts ($500,000)
Vestas ($50 million)
LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
Navistar ($39 million)
Satcon ($3 million)*
Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*

More HERE





The disgraceful episode of Lysenkoism brings us global warming theory

Trofim Lysenko became the Director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef Stalin.  He was an advocate of the theory that characteristics acquired by plants during their lives could be inherited by later generations stemming from the changed plants, which sharply contradicted Mendelian genetics.  As a result, Lysenko became a fierce critic of theories of the then rising modern genetics.

Under Lysenko’s view, for example, grafting branches of one plant species onto another could create new plant hybrids that would be perpetuated by the descendants of the grafted plant.  Or modifications made to seeds would be inherited by later generations stemming from that seed.  Or that plucking all the leaves off of a plant would cause descendants of the plant to be leafless.

Lysenkoism was “politically correct” (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with certain broader Marxist doctrines.  Marxists wanted to believe that heredity had a limited role even among humans, and that human characteristics changed by living under socialism would be inherited by subsequent generations of humans.  Thus would be created the selfless new Soviet man.

Also Lysenko himself arose from a peasant background and developed his theories from practical applications rather than controlled scientific experiments.  This fit the Marxist propaganda of the time holding that brilliant industrial innovations would arise from the working classes through practical applications.  Lysenko’s theories also seemed to address in a quick and timely manner the widespread Soviet famines of the time arising from the forced collectivization of agriculture, rather than the much slower changes from scientific experimentation and genetic heredity.

Lysenko was consequently embraced and lionized by the Soviet media propaganda machine.  Scientists who promoted Lysenkoism with faked data and destroyed counterevidence were favored with government funding and official recognition and award.  Lysenko and his followers and media acolytes responded to critics by impugning their motives, and denouncing them as bourgeois fascists resisting the advance of the new modern Marxism.

The V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced on August 7, 1948 that thenceforth Lysenkoism would be taught as the only correct theory.  All Soviet scientists were required to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenkoism.  Ultimately, Soviet geneticists resisting Lysenkoism were imprisoned and even executed.  Lysenkoism was abandoned for the correct modern science of Mendelian genetics only as late as 1964.

The Theory of Man Caused Catastrophic Global Warming

This same practice of Lysenkoism has long been under way in western science in regard to the politically correct theory of man caused, catastrophic, global warming.  That theory serves the political fashions of the day in promoting vastly increased government powers and control over the private economy.  Advocates of the theory are lionized in the dominant Democrat party controlled media in the U.S., and in leftist controlled media in other countries.  Critics of the theory are denounced as “deniers,” and even still bourgeois fascists, with their motives impugned.

Those who promote the theory are favored with billions from government grants and neo-Marxist environmentalist largesse, and official recognition and award.  Faked and tampered data and evidence has arisen in favor of the politically correct theory.  Is not man-caused, catastrophic global warming now the only theory allowed to be taught in schools in the West?

Those in positions of scientific authority in the West who have collaborated with this new Lysenkoism because they felt they must be politically correct, and/or because of the money, publicity, and recognition to be gained, have disgraced themselves and the integrity of their institutions, organizations and publications.

The United States Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) is supposed to represent the best science of the U.S. government on the issue of global warming.  In January, the USGCRP released the draft of its Third National Climate Assessment Report.  The first duty of the government scientists at the USGCRP is to produce a complete picture of the science of the issue of global warming, which is what the taxpayers are paying them for.  But it didn’t take long for the Cato Institute to do the job of the USGCRP with a devastating line by line rebuttal, The Missing Science from the Draft National Assessment on Climate Change, Center for the Study of Science, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2012, by Patrick J. Michaels, Paul C. Knappenberger, Robert C. Balling, Mary J. Hutzler & Craig D. Idso.

Check it out for yourself if you dare.  Both publications are written to be accessible by intelligent laymen.  See which one involves climate science and which one involves political science.

All the climate alarmist organizations simply rubber stamp the irregular Assessment Reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  None of them do any original science on the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  But the United Nations is a proven, corrupt, power grabbing institution.  The science of their Assessment Reports has been thoroughly rebutted by the hundreds of pages of science in Climate Change Reconsidered, and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, both written by dozens of scientists with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, and published by the Heartland Institute, the international headquarters of the skeptics of the theory of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.

Again, check it out for yourself.  You don’t have to read every one of the well over a thousand pages of careful science in both volumes to see at least that there is a real scientific debate.

The editors of the once respected journals of Science and Nature have abandoned science for Lysenkoism on this issue as well.  They have become as political as the editorial pages of the New York Times.  They claim their published papers are peer reviewed, but those reviews are conducted on the friends and family plan when it comes to the subject of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  There can be no peer review at all when authors refuse to release their data and computer codes for public inspection and attempted reconstruction of reported results by other scientists.  They have been forced to backtrack on recent publications relying on novel, dubious, statistical methodologies not in accordance with established methodologies of complex statistical analysis.

Formerly respected scientific bodies in the U.S. and other western countries have been commandeered by political activist Lysenkoists seizing leadership positions.  They then proceed with politically correct pronouncements on the issue of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming heedless of the views of the membership of actual scientists.  Most of what you see and hear from alarmists regarding global warming can be most accurately described as play acting on the meme of settled science.  The above noted publications demonstrate beyond the point where reasonable people can differ that no actual scientist can claim that the science of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming has been settled or that there is a settled “consensus” that rules out reasonable dissent.

Indeed, 31,487 U.S. scientists (including 9,000 Ph.Ds) with degrees in atmospheric Earth sciences, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science have signed a statement that reads: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” See here.  Some consensus.

Real science, of course, is not a matter of “consensus,” but of reason, with skepticism at its core.

The Decline and Fall of the Theory of Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming

The alarmist claims of the UN’s IPCC are ultimately based not on scientific observations, but on unvalidated climate models and their projections of future global temperatures on assumptions of continued increases in carbon dioxide emissions resulting from the burning and use of fossil fuels.  The alarmists are increasingly in panic because the past projections of the models are increasingly divergent from the accumulating actual temperature records.  Those models are not real science, but made up science.  And no way we are abandoning the industrial revolution as the Sierra Club is hoping based on model fantasies and fairy tales.

The Economist magazine, formerly in lockstep with the Lysenkoists, shocked them with a skeptical article in March that began with this lede:

    “OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, ‘the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade. . . .’”

Reality is not complying with the alarmism of the UN’s global warming models, just as it refused to do for Trofim Lysenko.  Remember all that hysteria about melting polar ice caps and the disappearing ice floes for the cute polar bears?  As of the end of March, the Antarctic ice cap was nearly one fourth larger than the average for the last 30 years.  The Arctic ice cap had grown back to within 3% of its 30 year average.  (The formerly declining Arctic ice was due to cyclically warm ocean currents).  Global sea ice was greater than in March, 1980, more than 30 years ago, and also above the average since then.

Remember the alarm about the rising sea level?  Yeah, that has been rising, as it has been since the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago.  Just exactly as it has been, at the same rate.  And anyone you know that has been scared by this alarmist propaganda has been successfully played by whatever media the fool has been relying on.

More HERE




Al Gore in Hollywood

Joe Biden must have dressed up in his best Al Gore, Jr. suit for a Beverly Hills global warming pep rally, as the man who “invented the Internet” bemoaned that a modern day Thomas Paine would struggle to get his pamphlet “Common Sense” to the masses today due to the high cost of television airtime.

Is this the same Al Gore, who used his influence to get his environmentalist television station  Current TV carried by most major cable networks, only to sell this access to Al Jazeera, which is owned by the Emir of Qatar?

Apparently, the Hollywood crowd is not as disillusioned with Gore who made a cool $100 million on the deal to sell television access to U.S. markets to the very Middle Eastern oil interests as his former staff at Current TV where the sense of betrayal was palpable when the sale was announced.

Beyond the obvious hypocrisy of the politician who would have been president if he had only won his home state of Tennessee, the very fact that Mr. High Tech apparently hasn’t noticed that the printing press has been replaced by this little www thing is stunning.

In 1776 when Thomas Paine wrote and published “Common Sense,” it went viral selling almost 100,000 copies at a time when the colonies only had 2.5 million people.  This made the pamphlet the largest selling book in the history of the U.S. on a per capita basis.

And the 48-page booklet was a game changer.  By writing in a style that was familiar to the average colonist and using familiar Biblical references to the God fearing populace, Paine’s work transformed American attitudes toward independence laying the groundwork for Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence that was finalized just six months later.

George Trevelyan’s History of the American Revolution highlighted the importance of Paine’s work writing: “It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting [...] It was pirated, parodied and imitated, and translated into the language of every country where the new republic had well-wishers. It worked nothing short of miracles and turned Tories into Whigs.”

Today, Paine would not have been limited to a printing press or a television broadcast, his work would be a viral YouTube video that would reach millions based upon its powerful message and presentation.

The proof of the power of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter is all around us.  Just one year ago, with zero money spent on promotion, the video “If I wanted America to fail” took many in the nation by storm with more the 2.6 million people viewing it — all due to the power of the message and presentation.

For the self-proclaimed “Inventor of the Internet” to not have a clue that his “child” had become the ultimate democratization of communications and was changing the world reveals just how out of touch he has become.

The fact that the professionally vacuous of Hollywood could erupt in applause at the “great” man’s musings about the good old days when Johannes Gutenberg was king reflects just how far out of touch they both are.

Of course, Al Gore is too cool to be stuck in a printing press world when everyone else is tweeting.  That’s why I wouldn’t be surprised if, after the diamond encrusted crowd departed, Joe Biden pulled off his Al Gore Halloween mask and laughed out loud at the rubes of Rodeo Drive who bought his drivel.

SOURCE





The U.S. Has Much, Much More Gas and Oil Than We Thought

So the EPA is trying to stop it being accessed

The United States has double the amount of oil and three times the amount of natural gas than previously thought, stored deep under the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, according to new data the Obama administration released Tuesday.

In announcing the new data in a conference call, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell also said the administration will release within weeks draft rules to regulate hydraulic fracturing, technology that has come under scrutiny for its environmental impact but that is essential to developing all of this energy.

“These world-class formations contain even more energy-resource potential than previously understood, which is important information as we continue to reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign sources of oil,” Jewell said in a statement.

The formations, called Bakken and Three Forks, span much of western North Dakota, the northern tip of South Dakota and the northeastern tip of Montana. The last time the United States Geological Survey assessed this area for its oil and gas reserves was in 2008. But that assessment did not include the Three Forks formation, which explains the substantial increase in the estimates. USGS estimates that these two formations together hold 7.4 billion barrels of undiscovered—but technically recoverable—oil and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

The estimates were requested by Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., in early 2011. “This is clearly great news for North Dakota and great news for the nation,” Hoeven said in a statement. “It will further serve to enhance our state’s role as an energy powerhouse for the nation.”

The energy boom’s impact on North Dakota’s economy is undeniable. The state has the lowest unemployment in the country, at 3.3 percent.

These estimates don’t necessarily represent oil and gas resources that could be immediately developed or are even recoverable right now. Many factors must align to compel companies to access energy resources, including prices and environmental regulations.

Nonetheless, the data add more hard evidence of America’s energy boom, which was largely unimaginable just seven years ago. The estimates also underline the opportunities, including economic benefits and energy security, and the challenges, especially President Obama’s commitment to tackle climate change, that come with a major fossil-fuel boom.

“Combined with recent declines in oil consumption, foreign-oil imports are less than 40 percent of oil consumed in America,” Jewell said. “That’s the lowest level since 1988.”

Jewell also announced the department will release “within weeks” reworked, draft rules requiring stricter regulations on hydraulic-fracturing operations. She said the earlier version of the draft rules generated enough comments—roughly 100,000—to prompt the administration to allow for a second round of public input.

The symbolic importance of these rules could have a greater impact than their substantive effect. The regulations apply to oil and gas production only on federal lands, a small portion of the total amount of oil and gas produced in the U.S. According to the Interior Department, 11 percent of the natural gas produced in the country is on public lands, as is 5 percent of the oil.

The rules will provide a marker for states to implement individual regulations and for Congress to debate legislation that could create a federal standard.

“We must develop our domestic energy resources armed with the best available science,” Jewell said. “This unbiased, objective information will help private, nonprofit, and government decision-makers at all levels make informed decisions about the responsible development of these resources.”

SOURCE




New Green Scam: Climate Adaptation Specialists — 50,000 in the next decade

“As recently as a decade ago, the word “adaptation” was as dirty as coal in the environmental community.”

Salon.com reports in “Getting Rich Off Global Warming“:

    “I predict there will be 30,000 to 50,000 climate and adaptation professionals in the next decade or so, up from the current low-single-digit thousands,” said Kreeger. “Already we’re seeing environmental studies and MBA programs integrate climate-related work. The ACCO will set standards and provide services, same as any other professional association.” In October, Kreeger will host a three-day “Climate Strategies Forum” at D.C.’s Wardman Park Hotel. Platinum sponsorships cost $25,000 and include a full-page program ad and a speaking slot."

SOURCE




Baffled German Government Concedes! “Global Warming Has Stopped…Warming Pause Is Remarkable…Unexpected”

Green Radio of the Umweltbundesamt – UBA - (German Federal Department of the Environment) recently had a radio interview with Henrik Kirchhof, some climate expert for the UBA I guess. Topic: Why has there been no warming in 15 years?

The host of the interview starts by telling the audience that “climate scientists have come under pressure because the average temperature indeed has not risen in 15 years“. Kirchhof:

    "In the years leading up to the year 2000, the temperature curve rose very sharply. But since then it isn’t rising so, in fact it’s not rising at all, the curve. The average temperature has stagnated at a very high level – we sort of have a plateau, and that during a time when CO2 emissions have risen considerably.”

Kirchhof then claims the 15-year period of stagnation is indeed relatively short, and, to add authority to this, Prof. Jochem Marotzke of the warmist Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg provides an audio comment:

    "What we are seeing here is a relatively short-term fluctuation, If one really wants to know how CO2 and global temperature are related, then you have to look at a longer time period.”

Marotzke refuses to say how long, though. We do know that CO2 was at about 280 ppm for 1000 years before the Industrial Revolution, and that during this time the global temperature fluctuated more than 1°C (in sync with solar activity). Of course Marotzke only wants to go back to 1900, as beyond that there is no correlation with CO2.

Kirchhof then adds (my emphasis):

    "…there is no doubt about the greenhouse effect, but even so this warming pause is remarkable because the climate scientists with all their models did not expect this.”

At this point Kirchhof of Green radio of the German Federal Department of the Environment are finally admitting that there are suddenly many more unknowns than they first thought, that the warmist scientists are indeed baffled, and that the science is not settled after all.

At the 2-minute mark, a somewhat surprised host is forced to ask how can it be that the temperature has not risen even though more CO2 is being emitted into the atmosphere. Here Kirchhof, in summary, admits they don’t know why:

    "Yeah, that’s the big question. The scientists here are not completely sure. But there are many possible explanations.”

Many possible explanations? That means they don’t have freaking clue! When it comes to complex systems like climate, it takes years and years of analyses and observation to untangle it all.

Kirchhof:

    "A big role may be played by the oceans, which possibly are absorbing more heat, and so the additional heat is no longer being taken up by the atmosphere but instead is moving into the water. This can be measured. However if these surface water temperatures increased sharply until 15 years ago but now have stagnated, then it means that the ocean is absorbing more heat than it did before. You can suspect this, it’s very plausible, but you cannot prove it because of methodology reasons, says Jochem Marotzke.”

Marotzke:

    "The problem is, although it is plausible, and it is in principle in agreement with model calculations, the problem is that we do not have enough good measurements from the past to say: ‘Ah, back then the deep oceans absorbed less heat and today it is taking in more heat. These observations are simply missing.”

It makes us wonder with so much missing data and so many unknowns, how could they even have dared to think the science was settled a few years ago? Suddenly they tell us they don’t know squat, that they are completely baffled, and that they are scrambling for explanations!

The host then asks Kirchhof if there are other possible explanations. Kirchhof:

    "Yes. For example they have measured that the stratosphere has gotten drier. And when there is less water vapor up there in the stratosphere, then less heat is radiated back down. However, the scientists who have found this out have themselves said this effect is too small and only accounts for a quarter of the stopped warming.”

They can’t find the heat. Unknowns, mysteries, surprises…such is the life of a closed-minded climate scientist. But apart from all that, they are sure of the science.

The host then asks about the remaining three quarters of the heat. Kirchhof plays the aerosol card, which the IPCC loves to play whenever cooling isn’t supposed to happen, like from 1945 to 1975:

    "Yes. there’s also a third theory that sounds plausible for laypeople, namely that more dust particles, ‘dirt’ in everyday terms, is high up in the atmosphere. As a result, less solar radiation reaches the Earth and so as a whole it gets cooler.”

Kirchhof then goes on to say that Chinese and Indian power plants may be to blame for this, and says that polluting the atmosphere is not the way to solve climate change.

The host then brings up the excellent question of how long a pause in warming is necessary before climate scientists really have to rethink their science. Kirchhof:

    "There are in fact prognoses that this plateau could go on another five years, and if that indeed occurs, and meteorologist Jochem Marotzke also says the same, then there is something seriously wrong with the models, also when certain fluctuations cannot be precisely forecast.”

Five more years and all their arguments will disappear. And in ten years the climate scientists are going to be left standing there looking like total asses – because it’s not going to get warmer for another 30 years. The PDO, AMO and sun are all now beginning their cold phases simultaneously. One only needs to look at the past winters to see the first indications. If one major volcano blows then we are very likely back to the Little Ice Age conditions of the 17th century.

Amazingly, the alarmist scientists are looking at everything except what’s really obvious: the sun. Solar activity during the 20th century was at it’s highest level in 500 or more years, but today it is at its lowest level in some 200 years. Gee, you think that could matter? The data clearly show that it did in the past.

More HERE

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

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