Polar bear chicanery

Jim Steele, an expert on surveys of animal populations, has applied his knowledge to surveys of polar bear populations, which Warmists are trying to make disappear.  It is a long essay which gives you everything you ought to know about the subject -- but the interesting thing is how much official reports are misleading.  I reproduce just that part below:

The Inuit claim “it is the time of the most polar bears.” By synthesizing their community’s observations they have demonstrated a greater accuracy counting Bowhead whales and polar bears than the models of credentialed scientists. To estimate correctly, it takes a village. In contrast the “mark and recapture” study, which claimed the polar bears along South Beaufort Sea were victims of catastrophic global warming and threatened with extinction, relied on the subjective decisions of a handful of modelers...

Amstrup diligently followed up his earlier study on the apparent survival of South Beaufort Bears using radio-collared bears over a 12-year period. It turned out that his high-end apparent survival estimate of 94% was still too low. If only natural deaths were used, polar bears had a 99.6 % biological survival rate.4 Most bears died at the hands of hunters. If death at the hands of hunters was also considered, then biological survival was still higher than apparent survival, but fell to 96.9%. In 2001 Amstrup concluded that the South Beaufort Sea population was increasing and the current hunting quotas insured a growing population.

Perhaps it was the growing pressure from adversarial lawsuits, and speculation that the polar bears were endangered from CO2 warming, but in a subsequent series of USGS publications coauthored by Amstrup, they suddenly emphasized the illusion of apparent survival and downplayed biological survival to suggest the polar bears were facing extinction. The study was far too short to reliably estimate survival. Still during the first three years of their “extinction” study, the researchers reported apparent survival ranging from 92‑99%574. The higher estimate was the same as the biological survival rates of Amstrup’s radio-collared bears. However apparent survival dropped dramatically for the last two years of the study.

The final years of a study always underestimate survival because newly marked are less likely to be observed a second time relative to bears marked in the first years of a study. Claiming “radiotelemetry captures present methodological difficulties” they oddly excluded radio-collared data from critical statistical tests! Despite knowing that biological survival rates had never rapidly changed before, and despite knowing more collared bears migrated outside their study area in 2004 and 2005, the USGS report argued polar bear survival had abruptly dropped from 96‑99% in 2003, down to 77% in 2004.6

In their first USGS report, the authors demonstrated high integrity in their analyses and were upfront about the problems of their models, writing, “the declines we observed in model-averaged survival rates may reflect an increase in the number of “emigrants” toward the end of the study, and not an actual decrease in biological survival”, and they noted male bears had exhibited unusually high transiency. When apparent survival rates were high, only 24% of the collared females had wandered outside the study area. In contrast during last two years of the study when apparent survival plummeted, the number of collared bears wandering outside the study area had nearly doubled to 47% in 2005 and 36% in 2006, but they never published their biological survival rates.

They chose to dismiss the high percentage of bears migrating out of the study area and subjectively chose to argue fewer captured bears meant more dead bears. The authors oddly argued that using 18 years of data the bears are eventually observed in the study area. In keeping with my human/supermarket analogy, it was the equivalent of labeling all your neighbors dead if you don’t see them in the market over a two year span, because over a ten year period you always see them at least once. We need Steve McIntyre to do a polar bear audit!

The dramatic drop in survival meant 400 bears suddenly died but there were no carcasses. To support their unprecedented claims, one USGS report emphasized in the abstract that subadult males showed reduced body condition and that was evidence of nutritional stress that lowered survival.

However if you read the results section and did some math, you discover that subadult males only represented 5% of all captures. The other 95% were stable or improving. In contrast, adult females represented about 34% of all captures, and despite being under the most stress due to an eight-month fast while giving birth and nursing their cubs, their body condition had improved. That good news wasn’t ever mentioned in the abstract, you had to search the results section: “There was no trend in mass of adult females during the study, but the mean BCI [body condition index] of females increased over time”.

Their abstract also implied “a decline in cub recruitment” to support their model’s uncharacteristic dip in survival rates. But that too was an illusion. Recruitment compares the number of cubs in the spring with the number of cubs in the fall. Using older studies their observed results found that the number of cubs per female had increased between 1982 and 2006 during the spring. This would be expected. When the female body condition increases, they usually produce more cubs. To counteract that good news, the authors then argued there was a decline in cubs during the fall, and thus a decline in recruitment. However they had not surveyed in the fall since 2001. They were using deceptive zombie data to support a bad model.

That is how global warming advocates counted bears to refute the claims of the Inuit. That was the driving evidence that led to the uplisting of the polar bear as threatened species. Based on such studies Dr. Derocher, chairman of the IUCN’s Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) warned, “It’s clear from the research that’s been done by myself and colleagues around the world that we’re projecting that, by the middle of this century, two-thirds of the polar bears will be gone from their current populations”.

More HERE





Saudi America:  Shale produces OIL too

U.S. producing more petroleum than: a) Saudi Arabia, and b) Europe, Central, and South America combined

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) released new data this week on international energy production for the month of March. For the fifth straight month starting last November, total petroleum production (crude oil and other petroleum products like natural gas plant liquids, leased condensate, and refined petroleum products) in “Saudi America” during the month of March (11.76 million barrels per day) exceeded petroleum production in Saudi Arabia (10.85 million barrels per day). Also for the fifth month in a row starting last November, “Saudi America”: a) took the top spot in March as the No. 1 petroleum producer in the world, and b) produced more petroleum in March than the combined output of all of the countries in Europe, Central America, and South America (11.32 million barrels per day in March), which has never happened in the history of EIA international petroleum data back to 1994.

More evidence that America’s shale energy revolution is taking us from “resource scarcity” to a new era of “resource abundance” as the US now consistently produces more petroleum than Saudi Arabia, has led the world in petroleum production for five straight months, and now produces more petroleum than all of the countries in Europe, Central America, and South America combined. This energy bonanza in the US — described as the “energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down” — would have been largely unthinkable even five years ago. But then thanks to revolutionary drilling techniques developed by America’s “petropreneurs,” we unlocked vast oceans of shale oil and gas across the US and are now the world’s No. 1 producer of petroleum for five months running.

SOURCE




   

How to Get Rich and Combat Global Warming

In his recent speech on climate change, President Barack Obama warned that "someday, our children and our children's children will look at us in the eye and they'll ask us, did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem and leave them a cleaner, safer, more stable world?"

He's probably right. Then they'll say, "Why the heck didn't you pass a carbon tax?" And we won't be able to give them a good reason.

That's because there is no good reason. A carbon tax, done the right way, is the closest thing you can get to a panacea. Refusing to enact it is like throwing out a winning lottery ticket.

By now, most scientists in the field agree that pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is not a healthy practice for the planet or its inhabitants. In 2010, a report from the National Academy of Sciences asserted, "Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for -- and in many cases is already affecting -- a broad range of human and natural systems."

The World Meteorological Organization reported this week that 2010 was the hottest year on record. It noted that "nearly 94 percent of reporting countries had their warmest decade in 2001-2010" -- while no country had a cooler-than-average decade. Polar ice is melting; oceans are rising; plants and animals are heading northward in search of cooler temperatures.

Gen. Philip Sheridan, if he were alive today, would have even more reason for his stated preference: "If I owned hell and Texas, I'd rent out Texas and live in hell." Before long, he might prefer the fiery pit to all sorts of places that once had congenial climes.

Although much of the damage is unavoidable, curbing the release of greenhouse gases would limit the severity of the problem. The United States has reduced its carbon dioxide output. But more is needed -- from the rest of the world, as well as from us -- to avert the worst scenario.

Obama paid tribute to the idea of making consumers and businesses pay more for fossil fuels in his 2013 State of the Union address, urging Congress "to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago." That option, "cap and trade," would have functioned like a carbon tax. But it has long since become radioactive among Republicans, who resist doing anything about global warming.

Eventually, they may pay a political price for insisting that atmospheric pollution is nothing to fear. Until then, the most pro-growth, free-market option around is off the table.

So the president will act to curb emissions as best he can through heavy-handed regulation and extravagant subsidies of "clean" energy. The trouble with these clumsy remedies, says economist Adele Morris of The Brookings Institution, is that they often impose higher costs than the benefits they yield.

They would not be needed if the government taxed fuels according to their environmental side effects. Raise the price of gasoline and Americans would buy more efficient cars, drive less and take the occasional bus. Make coal more expensive and businesses would switch to fuels that pollute less. These adjustments would occur through the natural operation of markets, a process that favors the cheapest solutions.

Wouldn't a carbon tax impose a heavy burden on individuals and the economy? Actually, we could cut carbon dioxide emissions by half over the next decade and a half with a tax that would not be onerous -- the equivalent of 16 cents per gallon of gasoline, rising by 4 percent over inflation each year.

This modest impact could be offset with cuts in other levies to keep the total tax load stable. Corporate and personal income taxes, along with payroll taxes, discourage things we want: investment and work. Cutting them would have a positive effect on the economy. A carbon tax, by contrast, would discourage something we don't want: harmful emissions that linger in the atmosphere for centuries.

This approach, concludes Morris, would "promote economic growth, reduce budget deficits, reduce redundant and inefficient regulation, reduce unnecessary subsidies and reduce the costs associated with climate change."

Our kids and grandkids will thank us if we take action against climate change. But if we do it in a way that leaves them richer instead of poorer, their gratitude will be even greater.

SOURCE





EPA Encourages Utility Controlled Refrigerators

At times of peak demand for electricity, do you want your refrigerator to run at the discretion of the power company?

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has revised its Energy Star energy-efficiency requirements for residential refrigerators, and it is encouraging the inclusion of “connected” features that respond to utility signals to curb their energy consumption.

The EPA announced the new requirements on June 27. Included is the optional “smart-grid” connection for customers to electronically connect their refrigerator or freezer with a utility provider.

"The updated requirements raise the bar for energy efficiency in these products and, for the first time, encourage manufacturers of Energy Star appliances to include optional 'connected' features," according to the EPA release.

The connection feature allow the utility provider to regulate the appliances' power consumption, “including curtailing operations during more expensive peak demand times.”

Currently, consumers must give permission for their appliances to respond to utility signals.

In an e-mail to CNSNews.com, the EPA said, “Today, utility initiatives with connected home appliances are mainly in the pilot stage. Product manufacturers and retailers may offer incentives for refrigerators or freezers with ‘connected’ features.”

“In the future, utilities may choose to offer incentives for customers to purchase products with ‘connected features’ and/or enroll such products in a demand response program,” the EPA says. “For example, one appliance manufacturer offered a limited time rebate for customers when they launched their line of smart appliances this spring.”

Manufacturers are encouraged to produce Energy Star appliances by earning tax credits up to $25 million.

“Manufacturers that build-in and certify optional ‘connected features’ will earn a credit towards meeting the Energy Star efficiency requirements,” according to an EPA e-mail to CNSNews.com.

The revised Energy Star refrigerator and freezer specifications will go into effect on September 15, 2014.

“We can all do our part in meeting the challenge of climate change,” says Janet McCabe, Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. “By choosing Energy Star appliances, families can save energy, save money, and reduce carbon pollution.”

SOURCE




Dictates From A Climate Change Alternate Universe

Quote of the Week:  “The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant.” Richard Lindzen

By Art Horn

The concept of an alternate universe is familiar to many people, especially those who read or view science fiction books or movies. An example of a storyline in an alternate universe would be the re-booting of the Star Trek franchise. In the production of the 2009 movie “Star Trek” JJ Abrams and company wanted to bring the Star Trek series back into the theaters but they wanted to do it in such a way that they could have the artistic freedom to craft stories that were not confined to the history of all the series and movies of the past several decades. The answer was to find a way to alter the “real” world and place the same characters, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the others into a new “alternate reality” that in some ways mirrors the familiar, traditional world but in other ways is radically different. There are parallels to this concept today, not in the movies but in the White House.

If the producers of the next Star Trek movie want some ideas as to how to craft a bizarre story that exists in an alternate universe they need look no farther than our own president. On Tuesday, June 25th, 2013 president Obama unwittingly revealed that while he appears to live in our universe, he actually does not. Some of the statement and declarations made in his “Climate Action Plan” are so strange and so out of touch with the reality that you and I live in, I can only conclude that our president is from and lives in an alternate reality.

In his Climate Action Plan the president states over and over again that we must reduce “carbon pollution.” In fact the phrase “carbon pollution” is mentioned 21 times. The term “carbon pollution” is an excellent example of what universe Obama lives in. In an alternate universe white can mean black, good can be bad, up can be down and so on. In Obama’s “reality” carbon is pollution. Carbon is a chemical element and is the fourth most abundant element in the universe. Who knew the universe is full of pollution! It is also present in all known life forms on earth. In the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass other than oxygen. We humans are carbon based life. In Obama’s alternate universe, all humans and all life forms are made of pollution. With the large amount of carbon in our bodies, if it were pollution, we would all be dead.

In the alternate universe that president Obama resides, what appears to be something in our reality is something very different in his. For instance, in his Climate Action Plan he states that carbon pollution from power plants, cars, trucks, trains, planes and everything that uses fossil fuels to make energy must be reduced. His reason for this is that the use of these fuels is changing the weather and ultimately the climate. Being that he is speaking to us from an alternate reality means he does not know that in our universe the term carbon pollution, translated into our reality, is actually carbon dioxide pollution. To many people the word carbon conjures up images of black chunks of coal, dirty and full of soot. The imagery of black carbon smoke filling the sky, fouling our water, covering the earth in a dark fog of unbreathable air and causing the seas to rise alarms and scares many people. This is all intentional.

What Obama is actually talking about, from his alternate universe point of view, is carbon dioxide gas, not black carbon. However, in his universe they are the same. Carbon dioxide is a gas, not a chunk of sooty coal. It has no color, no odor and is used by plants, trees and algae as food. The end result of this usage is to produce oxygen. The early plants that evolved in earth’s distant past produced enough oxygen by ingesting carbon dioxide to make our lives and all other living things possible. Life on earth, without carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, would cease to exist if it were eliminated. In Obama’s universe carbon dioxide means death, not life. Do you see what I’m getting at?

President Obama’s alternate universe is so different from our reality that life giving carbon dioxide is the same thing as mercury, arsenic and lead pollution. The very fact that the president insists that carbon (dioxide) is pollution is evidence that he has little concept of the reality you and I live in. Water vapor in the air causes most of the earth’s greenhouse effect. Will he next proclaim the water in the air is pollution? President Obama also appears to have no clue as to what is happening to the earth’s temperature. The president has stated that “temperature around the globe is increasing faster than was predicted even 10 years ago.” In the universe that you and I live in this is obviously not true and is frankly bizarre. There has been no acceleration of any temperature rise and in fact there has been no measured increase in global average surface temperature in at least 15 years and counting. and has clearly fallen since 2002 Apparently things look very different when you live in an alternate reality.

What is especially dangerous about being governed by someone who lives in an alternate reality is that he has the power to dictate what happens in our reality! The use of the word “dictate” is intentional since he has said “ If congress won’t act on climate change I will.” In our universe the founding fathers of the United States wrote the constitution to limit the power of any one branch of government so that the system has a number of checks and balances so that no branch of government becomes too powerful. In Obama’s alternate universe there is no congress or constitution, he is the sole power. Instead of going through congress he will use “executive orders” to bring his alternate universe view of climate change, and what needs to be done about it, to our reality.

In the land of the free and the home of the brave, capitalism has brought about the greatest economy the world has ever known, fueled by our ability to extract the vast natural resources at our disposal. In president Obama’s view from his alternate universe, this is bad and will destroy the earth. With his recent pronouncements it appears likely he will use executive power to impose a tax on everything that uses fossil fuels to increase the cost of using them and in doing so make them more and more expensive. His ultimate goal is to eliminate fossil fuel use.

In the universe you and I live in there is science. In science we have open discussions about theories. If a theory does not stand up to real world observations and experiments it is discarded and replaced with a new theory that must also go through the same evaluation. In Obama’s universe there is no science and no room for discussion. Speaking from is alternate universe pulpit on June 25th, 2013 Obama said “We don’t have time for a meeting of the flat earth society.” He went on to say “Sticking your head in the sand might make you feel safer, but it’s not going to protect you from the coming storm.” He may be correct. The storm is coming but it is not the one he is talking about. It is the storm of economic upheaval and the destruction of industries brought about by his dictates that we must be worried about.

In theory, if alternate universes exist, they are apparently operating independently of each other. In theory, if two universes come in contact with each other there could be severe consequences. President Obama seems determined to make that happen by pushing his alternate reality on all of us no matter what the real world data shows. To him the theory is reality, not the evidence.

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.  

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The latest paper from Swedish sea-level expert, Nils Axel Morner

SEA LEVEL CHANGES PAST RECORDS AND FUTURE EXPECTATIONS

by Nils-Axel Mörner

ABSTRACT

The history and development of our understanding of sea level changes is reviewed. Sea level research is multi-facetted and calls for integrated studies of a large number of parameters. Well established records indicate a post-LIA (1850–1950) sea level rise of 11 cm. During the same period of time, the Earth’s rate of rotation experienced a slowing down (deceleration) equivalent to a sea level rise of about 10 cm. Sea level changes during the last 40-50 years are subjected to major controversies. The methodology applied and the views claimed by the IPCC are challenged. For the last 40-50 years strong observational facts indicate virtually stable sea level conditions. The Earth’s rate of rotation records a mean acceleration from 1972 to 2012, contradicting all claims of a rapid global sea level rise, and instead suggests stable, to slightly falling, sea levels. Best estimates for future sea level changes up to the year 2100 are in the range of +5 cm ±15 cm.


ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT, VOLUME 24 No. 3 & 4 2013





Inhospitable Earth -- Compared to What?

You just can't out-gloom an environmentalist. The Atlantic invited some luminaries to answer the question, "How and when will the world end?" Some contributions were funny. Others simply plausible -- a volcanic eruption from underneath Yellowstone National Park is frightfully overdue. But only an environmentalist like Bill McKibben could be a killjoy about the apocalypse itself.

The environmental activist and writer declares the question moot: "In a sense, the world as we knew it is already over. We have heated the Earth, melted the Arctic and turned seawater 30 percent more acidic. The only question left is how much more fossil fuel we'll burn, and hence how unfamiliar and inhospitable we'll make our home planet."

It's difficult to imagine a more absurd overstatement. I'm not referring to the exaggerated claim the Arctic has "melted." And the acidification of the oceans is a real concern (though there's reason to believe it's not as bad as some say). But even Chicken Little wouldn't call it proof the world is already over.

What's truly ludicrous is McKibben's use of the word "inhospitable."

For something like 99 percent of human history, the world was really inhospitable. Strangers everywhere were greeted with bloodshed and attacked with cruelty. Dying from premature violence was more commonplace than dying from heart disease or cancer is today. In his classic, "War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage," Lawrence Keeley provides mountains of data documenting that modern humans live on a mountain of murder. In prehistoric societies, up to half of the population died from homicide, though 10 percent to 20 percent was closer to the norm.

In "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined," Steven Pinker shows that the world has become immeasurably more hospitable since the Industrial Revolution. Even World War II was an improvement. If the death toll had been equal to that of tribal societies, 2 billion lives would have been lost instead of a "mere" 60 million to 100 million. In the United States, violent crime is the lowest it's been in nearly half a century.

Of course, McKibben is speaking of the physical environment. But by any conceivable measure -- save, arguably, outdoor temperatures -- the Earth is a vastly more hospitable place for humanity thanks to the hard work of humanity. When Pilgrims came to North America, it was often described as an inhospitable wilderness. Malaria, smallpox and yellow fever decimated immigrants (not to mention untold millions of Native Americans). Backbreaking labor was the only means of subsistence for millions of Americans for generations. Drudgery and toil -- have you ever tried to churn butter? -- were necessary for even the simplest pleasures. And does anyone dispute the improved lot of blacks and women?

Ironically, as global warming fears have risen, America and the Earth have gotten more, not less, hospitable. Since 1990, global poverty has been cut in half, and since 1970, extreme poverty has dropped 80 percent.

Rich and poor alike are eating better, despite global population growth. According to UNICEF, more than 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources between 1990 and 2010. In the developing world, meat consumption has more than doubled since the 1990s (after having doubled already since the 1960s). That's because new technologies allow us to grow more with less. From 1940 to 2010, U.S. corn production quintupled while the land used for the crop shrunk.

"Globally," writes Matt Ridley, "the production of a given crop requires 65 percent less land than it did in 1961." And, he notes, the acreage required for all crops is falling 2 percent a year.

OK, things have gotten a wee bit warmer outside. But economic growth and innovation have made the world vastly more hospitable. We live longer, eat better, have more leisure time and have fewer deadly occupations. The environment in the developed world has gotten vastly cleaner, healthier and more enjoyable since the 1970s because rich countries can afford to make things more hospitable. We can only hope poor countries get similarly wealthy as quickly as possible.

Well, most of us can hope for such things. Others seem to think such gains come at too high a price.

SOURCE




The snow that  isn't vanishing

Ski resorts are concerned that global warming will reduce snowfall and hurt the skiing industry.

Skiing executive Auden Schendler said, “Aspen Skiing Company joined the climate declaration because if there is an industry that ought to care about climate change, it’s the ski industry.” The 2007 Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of a difficult future for the industry: “…snow cover area is projected to contract…mountainous areas will face glacier retreat, reduced snow cover and winter tourism…shifting of ski slopes to higher altitudes.”

There’s just one problem. Continental snowfall has been increasing. According to the Rutgers University Global Snow Laboratory, North American snowfall extent has been gradually rising over the last 40 years. The year 2010 showed the largest continental land area covered by winter snow since the data set began in 1967.

What makes otherwise sensible people fear that snow is disappearing when snowfall is actually increasing? It’s the ideology of Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate. Belief in this same ideology causes people to purchase light bulbs that are slow to light and to buy electric cars that can’t go very far. Climatism causes state governments to mandate erection of wind turbine towers that often stand idle.

But if snowfall is changing, why do people believe that government action can change such a climatic trend? In the fall of 2009, the mayor of Moscow declared that the Russian Air Force was now able to “keep it from snowing.” Five months later, in February of 2010, Moscow received 21 inches of snow in a single storm. Last winter, Moscow received the most snow in a century.

Nevertheless, we probably have bipartisan support in Congress for regulation of snowfall. Save the polar bears and the snow.

SOURCE





American Geophysical Union Scraps Science, Now Faith Based

I recently attended a 3-day science policy conference sponsored by the American Geophysical Union (AGU).  The AGU is an association of 62,000 scientists who study the Earth.  Although the conference was allegedly about science policy, it resembled a cross between a Scientology rally and a workshop for lobbyists from the Mohair Council of America.

The euphemisms for lobbying by people who aren't supposed to be lobbying are "communication" and "outreach."  The AGU believes, in a secular way, that God is on their side and the reason why they are being ignored, and not being given enough money, is that they haven't done enough communicating.  They think that if only the government understood the importance of their work, things would change for the better.  It absolutely never crosses their mind that if the government and the people understood what they are really doing, their money might be cut off.

What they are doing is howling at the moon that the sky is falling.  The president of the AGU, Carol Finn, who, incidentally, is employed by the federal government, opened the lobbying/communications workshop on the first day of the conference with this:

    "AGU's mission is to promote discovery ... for the benefit of humanity[.] ... I live in Colorado[.] ... [L]ast week's Black Forest fire ... was the worst wildfire in Colorado's history[.] ... I live in Boulder County[.] ... [T]he county and the city of Longmont have just outlawed fracking[.] ... [A]ll these communities need to be able to try to figure out how to balance energy development and putting drill rigs next to schools[.]"

The subtext here, repeated over and over at the conference, is that global warming causes forest fires and that hydrocarbon development is undesirable, if not dangerous.  But perhaps forest fires are started by matches.  Maybe hydrocarbon development is preferable to riding around on horses.

How trustworthy is an organization that claims to be organized for the "benefit of humanity," anyway?

The illogical thinking and ever-changing stories about global warming doom are puzzling.  What motivates the global warming proselytizers?  Is there a root belief that explains their behavior?  My suggestion is that their behavior is religious in nature and can be explained if we postulate that they believe in the following commandment:

"Thou shalt not add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere"

If you realize that the story is not really about global warming, but rather about changing the composition of the atmosphere, it becomes easy to understand why the believers are not disturbed by the fact that global warming, as measured by surface temperature, stopped 16 years ago.  They easily find other scientific theories to buttress their faith.  They ignore or discredit any science that challenges their faith.  They tell us that if we don't stop adding carbon dioxide to the air, we will have extreme weather and the oceans will become acidified.  The polar bears will die.  The wine will lose its flavor.  We will catch exotic diseases.

If one theory of doom is refuted, or becomes boring, there are plenty of others to take its place.  Embarrassing information, such as the fact that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere makes plants grow faster, with less water, is dismissed.  They say plants grow faster, but they are less nutritious, or they grow faster, but they deplete the soil of its nutrients.

What we have is an obsession with the evil of carbon dioxide -- a carbon cult.

The great majority of people who are members of the AGU are interested in science, not in a new religion centered on carbon.  They have not woken up to the fact that their organization has been infiltrated by a carbon cult.

The carbon cult formulation does explain a lot.  Chesterton's insight -- "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything" -- seems relevant in this discussion.  Compared to traditional religion, the carbon cult is naive and emotionally thin.

Missionaries for a well-organized religion are intensely practical and often extremely diligent.  Much of the science of linguistics has been created not by professors, but by Christian missionaries who want to learn the languages of illiterate peoples so that they can spread the gospel and translate the Bible.  Of course, they also have to devise an alphabet and teach the people to read the newly translated Bible.  Thus you have an example of the civilizing influence of Christianity.

What is the civilizing influence of missionaries who want to take practical sources of energy away from poor peoples?

The missionaries of the carbon cult are gradually becoming better-organized.  In the United States, religions are financed by their followers.  The government is not supposed to support religions financially, at least not if one religion is favored over another.  But the carbon cult masquerades as a scientific discipline, enabling it to receive government funding.  The carbon cult is financed partly by government support of science, and partly by the contributors to the big-budget environmental organizations.

The ability to influence government policy is as good as cash in the bank, and the ways in which influence over government policy can be turned into cash are endless.  For example, a few years ago, the natural gas industry gave $25 million to the Sierra Club for their "beyond coal" campaign that is trying to destroy the coal industry.  The natural gas people thought that the Sierra Club through its influence over the government would kill the coal industry, thereby helping the alternative fuel, natural gas.  The natural gas industry did not understand that you can't buy off ideological fanatics.  The Sierra Club later turned on its benefactor and launched an attack on fracking.  The Sierra Club is an important church in the carbon cult.

The AGU has received large contributions from, of all people, oil companies.  Global warming orator Bill McKibben, the leader of an organization whose purpose is to lower the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, said that the business plan of the oil companies is to wreck the Earth.  Carbon cultists consider fossil fuel companies to be extremely evil, but apparently they are willing to suspend that judgment when cash is available.  In this case the dictum attributed to Lenin seems relevant: "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."  Oil company executives are casting themselves in the role of the people to be hanged.

The first day of the AGU Science Policy Conference was devoted to an excellent tutorial on how to lobby the government and on how to present the doctrines of the carbon cult in an effective way.  The organizational structure of a typical congressional office was explained.  The attendees were treated to skits showing an effective and ineffective way to approach a congressional staffer.  The attendees were cautioned about the use of scientific jargon.  Susan Hassol, a prominent writer for the global warming establishment, made the point that the word aerosol should be banned.  To scientists, aerosols are small particles floating in the atmosphere, but to the public, they are aerosol spray cans and always will be.

The attendees were told to explain why the weather would be more extreme by comparing carbon dioxide to steroids.  If an athlete takes steroids, he will still play the game, but his performance will be more extreme.

One difference between a cult and a legitimate religion is that the cults usually hide their true nature.  The more bizarre the cult, the greater the imperative to hide its doctrines.  The general public must not be allowed to realize that the advocates of global warming alarmism are in reality making up the story to propagate a fanatical faith that carbon dioxide is bad.

The science behind global warming is very shoddy.  Yes, there is a nugget of real science buried in all the alarmist, made-up stuff.  Carbon dioxide does absorb infrared radiation, and increased carbon dioxide probably will warm the Earth by a small amount.  The mechanism is quite complicated, involving the atmospheric lapse rate and a slight relocation of the tropopause.

The complicated and jargon-laden science is reduced, by the missionaries of the carbon cult, for public consumption, to "carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping gas."  The formal predictions of global warming from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are the product of an opinion poll of computer models that disagree with each other and that have been manipulated to make them look better than they really are.  The carbon cultists accept those predications as serious and profound scientific truth, because the predictions provide support for their faith.

SOURCE




New British nuclear plant could be running by 2020

Britain could have a new nuclear reactor generating by 2020, the energy secretary has said, dismissing fears the timescale for the planned Hinkley Point plant had slipped further into the next decade.

EDF Energy has refused to give an up-to-date timetable for building reactors at the site in Somerset, which it originally planned to be producing power before the end of 2017.

Ed Davey told MPs that he did not recognise a claim that Hinkley wouldn’t be running until 2023. He said: “We are still hopeful we could see new nuclear generating in maybe 2020, 2021. I’m not going to say it will definitely be there because we haven’t signed a deal yet.”

The project, the costs of which are estimated to have risen to £14bn, will only proceed if the French-owned company can agree with the government over a decades-long contract to provide billions of pounds in subsidies.

Mr Davey said the two sides were yet to agree on the crucial 'strike price’ - a guaranteed price for the power Hinkley will produce, paid for through levies on consumer energy bills.

But he insisted the negotiations with EDF had been “going incredibly well” and were “very constructive”, despite the fact the French company had hoped to take an investment decision before the end of last year. Last week ministers offered EDF £10bn in financing guarantees as a sweetener for the project.

Centrica, which abandoned its 20pc stake in the project in February, stoked fears over possible delays to the project in May when chief executive Sam Laidlaw said that “instead of taking four to five years to build, EDF were telling us that it was going to take nine to 10 years to build”.

EDF is thought to have extended the timetable for Hinkley after a reactor in France took longer than expected, and after the Fukushima disaster.

SOURCE




Why a bet on shale gas will transform Britain

Forget the scare stories - we can cut carbon emissions and boost our economic fortunes

The Government last week published the British Geological Survey’s estimate of 1,300 trillion cu ft of natural gas stored within the shale rock deep beneath northern England. It is becoming clearer that the potential to transform our energy provision lies underneath our feet.

If only 10 per cent of northern England’s shale resources can be extracted, that would meet the UK’s current gas demand for more than 40 years. And at today’s prices, it would have a market value of almost £1 trillion, without considering the gas and oil deposits elsewhere in the country.

Some people argue we should generate more electricity using renewables instead of falling back on fossil fuels. After all, the Government has confirmed that renewables’ share of generation (around 9.6 per cent) will continue to grow. Decarbonising electricity generation is a key part of our energy policy.

But electricity generation accounts for only about a third of UK gas consumption. The remaining two thirds is taken up in heating our homes, firing our cookers and fuelling industry. So even if all our electricity demand could be generated without gas we would, without domestic shale gas, increasingly rely on expensive and potentially insecure imported gas. Clearly, gas and renewables will both form part of our energy mix for a long time to come.

There are other compelling reasons for us to be exploring for and developing shale gas. First, as a nation, we need sustained economic growth, the key to which is job creation. Britain’s recent performance in this regard, particularly for young people, has been very poor. However, in a recent report, the Institute of Directors predicts that shale gas development could create 74,000 new jobs, spanning geology, drilling, accounting, IT, and construction.

Second, communities will benefit financially. The prospect of them receiving £100,000 for every exploration well site that is hydraulically fractured, in addition to one per cent of revenues from future shale gas production, is fantastic news. More than £1 billion over a 20 to 30-year production period could be returned to Lancastrian communities in the Bowland Basin licence area alone.

The third point is that shale gas will make a major contribution to the Exchequer. In real terms, Deloitte estimates tax revenues from North Sea production will decline from £11.2 billion in 2011-12 to £3.7 billion in 2017-18. Onshore gas production could fill that gap, providing money to pay for health care, education, defence and other public services.

Predictions of production sites proliferating across densely populated areas are wide of the mark. Within 20 to 30 years, a successful Lancashire development could have up to 100 production sites in commercial operation across 1,200 square km. But put them together, these sites – each the size of a football pitch – would cover a total area of two sq km. After drilling and hydraulic fracturing operations are finished, each site would only contain a few low-rise processing facilities, together with valves and pipes inside units the size of post boxes, with the site screened by trees.

Of course, not everyone shares our belief about the potential of shale gas, but as long as the debate involves scientific data, that’s fine with us. There’s no place for ill-founded assertions about industrialisation, major earthquakes, contaminated drinking water or cancer, to name just some of the outcomes we hear propagated as “inevitable”. Britain has the engineering, health, safety and environmental expertise, together with a robust regulatory framework, to develop shale resources safely. To suggest that as a country we are incapable of doing this and must rely on the Middle East, Russia, North Africa or elsewhere to supply our gas is ill-judged.

We should also be wary of an artificial split between shale gas and renewables. Together, they represent the best opportunity we have to bring down the UK’s carbon emissions while maintaining competitiveness. There is little evidence from the US that shale gas undermines the case for investment in renewables, as long as the government and the electorate want them.

We need to demolish unfounded scare stories and tackle red tape so as to generate long-lasting benefits for the UK through the safe and responsible extraction of shale gas. Let’s start by stripping away guesswork, so we can understand exactly how much gas stored in shale rocks thousands of feet underground can be recovered.

Right now, we are on the verge of a historic opportunity to transform the UK’s energy supplies and economic fortunes for decades to come. Success means a stronger Britain, with better opportunities for our children, and lasting economic and environmental benefits for all.

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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Murry Salby: climate science innovator replicated

Swedish climate scientist Pehr Björnbom discusses below his recent replication of the work of Dr. Murry Salby, finding that temperature, not man-made CO2, drives CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

Murry Salby is a highly qualified and well-respected professor, academic teacher, and climate scientist. He has a series of innovative talks challenging the leading circles representing the IPCC sanctioned culture of consensus in climate science. He presents startling research that fundamentally questions the established views of the IPCC consensus. An important hypothesis that he advances is that the atmospheric CO2 rate of change is a function of only the global temperature changes and that this may explain the increase in carbon dioxide from pre-industrial times. This result was I able to reproduce, in a report given here.

One of the big talking points in climate science circles is interest in Murry Salby's lecture in Hamburg recently:

It is in this lecture he presents the hypothesis that the rate of change in carbon dioxide concentration in the air follows an equation that only depends on temperature change . There is enough information in the preferred order to be able to reconstruct Murry Salby's theory in detail, as I have done in the report Reconstruction of Murry Salby's theory that carbon dioxide increase is temperature driven . My reconstruction can be summarized in the following figure where the projected path of carbon dioxide compared with the observed from Mauna Loa since 1959 and before that carbon dioxide levels from an ice core.



The correspondence between the calculated and observed values ​​is excellent if not perfect. It should be noted that Murry Salby made ​​a much more detailed analysis than me with a thorough discussion.

The Murry Salbys theory agrees well with the observed data is of course no guarantee that the theory is also consistent with reality. But this shows that the arguments given in the IPCC reports are not as solid as is often claimed. I have considered these arguments in a previous blog post Is the IPCC argument for carbon dioxide increase due to human emissions sustainable? . There are other theories that give similar results as in the figure above, such as that of Dr. Gosta Pettersson.

What my reconstruction, however, quite clearly shows is that Murry Salby's reconstruction results are reliable. Murry Salby is on firm ground when he says that his hypothesis agrees with observations of how carbon dioxide levels have increased since 1850.

Much more HERE





Malthus lives!

Have the guys below never heard of Thomas Malthus or Paul Ehrlich?  You'd think that anyone with any knowledge of the relevant history would be embarrassed to spout the bunkum below but when you live in a little Green/Left bubble, any nonsense is possible.

We actually have whole CONTINENTS where food productivity is way below what is possible -- Australia and Africa for a start.  And note that China's embrace of the market has turned that crowded country into a net food EXPORTER.  I could go on...

Contrast the Malthusian nonsense below with the more reality-based article following it

It’s a question that keeps crop scientists up at night: How are we possibly going to feed the world over the next few decades?  After all, consider what we’re up against: The global population is expected to swell from 7 billion today to 9.6 billion by 2050. The rising middle class in China and India is eating more meat than ever. And this is all happening at a time when we’re setting aside a greater slice of farmland for biofuels and trying not to cut down any more forests (which exacerbates climate change). Doing this in a sustainable manner is tricky.

In theory, there’s a simple solution here: The world’s farmers will just need to get better at squeezing more productivity out of existing farmland. Crop yields have been steadily improving since the advent of synthetic fertilizer and modern agricultural techniques. So those yields will just need to keep improving in the years to come.

But there’s a big problem: This isn’t happening. Or at least, it’s not happening fast enough. A recent peer-reviewed study in the journal PLOS ONE found that crop yields haven’t been rising at a sufficient pace to meet projected demand by 2050.

In the U.S. Midwest, wheat yields per acre have been rising at a decent 2 percent per year. But in parts of India or Eastern Europe, they’ve basically flat-lined. The same holds true for other crops: “China, India and Indonesia are witnessing rice yield increases of only 0.7%, 1.0%, and 0.4% improvement per year,” the paper notes.

There are two big reasons why yield gains could be stagnating, explained Jonathan Foley, an agricultural expert at the University of Minnesota, in an interview we did a few months back. “In many parts of the world, we haven’t seen enough investment in agriculture because of economics or policies or institutions,” he said. Many former Soviet states, say, could improve their yields through better fertilizer use. They just aren’t doing it.

But in some parts of the world, there’s a more worrisome prospect — farmers are doing everything they can to squeeze more productivity out of their farmland, but they’re starting to hit a biological “wall,” a limit on how much yields can keep rising.

And this is all a worry even before we start talking about global warming, which creates its own set of issues. Scientists like David Lobell have found evidence that extreme heat waves could hurt crop yields in the decades ahead, outweighing the benefits of warmer temperatures. And if climate change brings more frequent droughts — as some researchers expect — that would make a further dent. Australia’s wheat yields, for one, have stagnated in recent years thanks to an extended dry period.  [He obviouly has not heard about all our floods of the last few years]

“Feeding nine billion people in a truly sustainable way,” Foley concludes, “will be one of the greatest challenges our civilization has ever faced.”

SOURCE



Climate change 'will boost British farmers’



Climate change will be good for British farming, according to Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, with exotic crops such as melons already thriving.

In a speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, she said that, although problems such as droughts would become more frequent, warmer weather would also mean a longer growing season and less frost damage, allowing the introduction of crops such as peaches, maize and sunflowers. Already 10,000 melons are expected to be harvested in Kent this year.

Mrs Spelman said farmers must “seize the opportunities” of increased production as well as preparing for more droughts and floods by building reservoirs and drains. “Climate change could mean reduced water availability. Also, soil moisture deficits, heat stress on animals, floods, droughts and the loss of some of the best agricultural land,” she said. “It could also bring longer growing seasons, reduced frost damage, and the opportunity to introduce new crops and livestock species.”

An advice service for farmers will offer tips on how to adapt to climate change such as the kind of crops they can plant and new breeds of sheep and cows that do well in a warmer climate. Farmers are also being encouraged to use water more efficiently through new irrigation methods and produce their own energy through solar power and from animal waste.

A study commissioned by the conference from the Scottish Agricultural College even suggested that the boost from a warmer climate could help Britain compete in the global market as production was reduced elsewhere.

Mrs Spelman warned that British agriculture would struggle in the future against emerging economies such as Brazil and China, but expertise in food safety, technology and adapting to climate change could be exported.

Last year was the second warmest year on record in the UK, with droughts in the South East and Anglia lasting into December. The Met Office predicts that the number of households under “water stress” will increase to almost a quarter of the population by 2100 as the average temperature rises by up to 3C in the South. Over the same period, an estimated 96 per cent of agricultural land will become more suitable for crops.

A presentation by the English Wine Producers association warned that so many vineyards were being planted because of warmer weather that there was a risk that England would lose its reputation for only high quality wine

SOURCE





Climate change science has become an expensive smokescreen

SIGNING off as "Mr FOIA", the person who leaked the emails from East Anglia University that came to be known as "Climategate" and that drew a line in the snow at the Copenhagen Climate Summit recently released to a select few the password to the files containing 220,000 emails.

He didn't expect the remaining emails to hold big surprises and observed, "Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had a good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far."  Indeed it is.

That so many scientists have found it necessary to mislead us on anthropogenic global warming is an admission of political intent and the absence of a strong scientific case.

Since the release of the original Climategate emails, more revelations have come to light to support this contention.

The Delinquent Teenager exposed how non-government organisations such as Greenpeace and WWF, captured the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The book provides irrefutable evidence that what had once been accepted as the "gold standard" of climate science was nothing of the sort.

There was a second release of damaging Climategate emails and alarmist headlined research that had to be hastily withdrawn (without headlines) for want of rigour. There was another hockey stick that admitted groundless data and dire warnings of extreme weather events without evidence that a new normal had begun.

Despite this, the voices of alarm and authority have been unable to hide the reality that, statistically, there has been no increase in global temperatures since 1997, despite an 8.3 percent rise in atmospheric CO2. For those who want to cite warming in some records, all datasets agree there has been none since 2000. In fact since 2002 a slight cooling has been observed. Who knew? Well, not the warmist scientists.

Indeed, the ABC reported: "A study forecasts that global warming will set in with a vengeance after 2009, with at least half of the following five years expected to be hotter than 1998, which was the warmest year on record." Wrong. Even recent claims of an "angry" Australian summer were not validated by satellite data.

Roy Spencer, from the University of Alabama, compared 73 warming predictions to actual data across 34 years. Ending in 2012, he found an extraordinary discrepancy between what the models predicted and the actual observations of satellites and balloons. The predictions were all strongly biased to the upside. As he commented, "I frankly don't see how the IPCC can keep claiming that the models 'are not inconsistent with the observations'. Any sane person can see otherwise."

Scientists have long searched for a "hot spot" in the atmosphere. When it could not be found, some said it must be in the oceans. Yet, since the deployment in 2003 of 3000 Argo floats (the acme of ocean temperature measurement), researchers still haven't found it.

While CO2 may be a greenhouse gas, it seems that natural forces dominate climate change, not mankind's emissions. Henrik Svensmark's theory of cosmoclimatology (the role of cosmic rays) may be right.

With such mounting evidence it is hard to remain agnostic. Yet, rather than undertake a thorough rethink of US climate change policy, President Barack Obama prefers to champion discredited research to justify more initiatives that will squander the US's newly found natural gas competitiveness. He ignores the experience of Germany, the world's emissions abatement champion.

Germans discovered wind power generates only 17 per cent of plated capacity and juggling intermittent wind and solar power through the grid causes costly supply interruptions that offset CO2 savings. To ensure reliability and having shunned further nuclear investment, Germany is now building coal and gas-fired power stations.

But even with the world's second highest household electricity prices, it will probably miss its 2020 EU targets. Worse, German business is becoming less competitive despite alleged inadmissible subsidies for energy intensive industries. German corporations pay 2.2 times more for electricity than their US counterparts.

But it's not easy to stop a trillion-dollar juggernaut with facts. Any supranational emission reduction scheme that enforces conformity, provides generous subsidies, centralises authority, reduces competition, entrenches privilege for bureaucrats and the political class, and offers taxpayer-funded trips for the faithful to exotic locations will be strongly defended while the visible hardships these policies inflict are casually dismissed.

This is the world of climate change. The science has become an expensive smokescreen behind which vested interests hide.

Sooner or later, though, the laws of economics, which are more certain than the laws of anthropogenic global warming, will prevail and determine the sustainability of these gestures. Once upon a time legislators could justify the need to enforce reductions in CO2 emissions. Today we know these policies are based on back-to-the-drawing-board science and we have firsthand knowledge of their growth-slowing, economy-distorting, job-destroying impact.

In the meantime, the UN is claiming damages for "climate injustice with a human rights dimension" inflicted by wicked Western "polluters" on poor developing countries.

It wants huge financial compensation. Legitimate or not, any such claim of injustice pales in comparison to the ongoing harm and callous indifference shown by wealthy governments towards their own people.

This, is the greatest moral challenge of our time.

SOURCE





Why the MSM Is Stupid About AGW

stupidmediaThe mainstream media’s coverage of President Obama’s recent speech about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was worse than bad, it was tragic. You have to search far and wide to find a news article that mentioned that many scientists – most, we argue – think the science behind the man-made global warming campaign is inconclusive at best. This poor reporting was deliberate: we sent MSM reporters a collection of reactions to the President’s speech that they could easily have used to include the views of skeptical climate scientists. Other think tanks did likewise.

A friend who follows the climate debate closely asked, “Why can’t we make any progress with the MSM?” Here are my top four reasons:

(1) We ARE making some progress. The Economist, New York Times, and Nature all published serious “walk back” articles in the past few weeks.  Global warming is getting less and less news coverage as readers and editors realize this movement has passed through its “broken wave” period and is now receding.

(2) 99% of reporters who cover environment and global warming are environmentalists – it really is their religion. They aren’t going to some day just “change their mind” about global warming. Most will die or retire still being true believers.

(3) The MSM is shrinking fast, measured by ad revenue and circulation, and even faster measured by credibility and influence. The reporters left behind in the MSM are under-achievers, folks without transferrable skills. (Environmental reporters were already on the bottom rung of a short ladder, so you can imagine what a talentless lot remains.) As newspapers die, their reporting gets worse and worse. In the case of environment reporting, that means more and more shrill.

(4) Business publications, such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, view environment issues as a contest between two industries (fossil and renewable) with environmentalists (white hats) siding with the renewables. That’s the paradigm you see in every WSJ business story about global warming. We – meaning free-market thinkers and skeptical scientists — simply don’t exist for these reporters because we don’t fit into their paradigm.  In their world, we can ONLY be “front groups” for the fossil fuel industry. Any good reporter would research that claim and find it to be laughably false, but see #3.

SOURCE





British hospitals to run on their emergency diesels?

Which are very inefficient compared to reticulated power  -- and produce lots more CO2!

Here's an extraordinary story from Friday

"NHS hospitals are being asked to cut their power demand from the National Grid as part of a government attempt to stave off power blackouts, which the energy watchdog Ofgem warns could arrive as early as 2015.

According to one energy company, four hospitals have already signed up to a deal under which they will reduce demand at peak times by using diesel-fired generators."

So in order to save the planet from the perils of carbon dioxide, we are going to run major power users on diesel generators. Canny, Mr Davey, canny.

The sheer idiocy of the situation the environmentalists in DECC have got us in to is almost unbelievable. I see no alternative to closing the whole department.

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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Denial is not just a river in Egypt

Denial is not just  a river in Egypt

Sigmund Freud identified denial as one of the maladaptive defence mechanisms that people use to cope with unwelcome truths.  And few people can have as many unwelcome truths to face as Warmists -- starting with the fact that there IS no warming going on.

So what do you do when you are an elderly Irish engineer fronting a "renewable" power company which depends on Warmist scare stories for most of it business?  You put on a nice suit and assure people with great aplomb that "There's no such thing as a climate change skeptic".

Almost the whole of the conservative side of politics ceases to exist with the wave of a hand!  I doubt that Freud ever saw a case of denial on that scale!

You can hear that good ol' Irish charmer (Eddie O’Connor, Ceo of Mainstream Renewable Power) right here:



Everything he says is either irrelevant or false but he says it well

SOURCE





The "shrinking" scare again

Every now and again this one pops up:  Animals (including us) are allegedly going to shrink as the earth gets warmer.  We may become hobbits!  The grain of truth in the scare is that nutritional deficiency does stunt growth.  But to assume that a warmer world will have less food is heroic.  And in fact during very warm  periods in the geologic past we had the dinosaurs -- some of whom were very large indeed.  We have no land animals of that size today. From Paleontology we could well argue that warming will make us LARGER!

The authors below do try to attach some data to their theory but appear to have looked at temperature only -- embracing the blissful fallacy that correlation is causation.  They overlook third and fourth factors that might intervene in the relationship -- for instance the proliferation of species -- large and small -- in warmer climates.  More species should mean more competition for food so members of any given species may get less of it.  These guys are just not serious scientists.  But which Warmists are?

America’s cattle herds will shrink – not in number, but in weight and yield – as the climate warms, according to new research that delivers an ominous warning for farmers.

An extensive study of bison − those great wild cattle that evolved to graze the prairies of North America − has confirmed that animals from warmer, drier grasslands weigh considerably less on average than those from cool, wet ranges.

Joseph Craine, a researcher from Kansas State University’s Division of Biology, reports in the Public Library of Science journal PloS One that he analysed weight, age and sex data from 290,000 animals in 22 herds throughout the US.

He found that the average seven-year-old male bison in South Dakota weighed 856kg (around 1900lbs), while counterparts in Oklahoma clocked in at 596kg (1300lbs).

The difference in mean annual temperature between the two ranges was 11°C, and the two sets of values told an ominous story of change in a warming world − not just for wild bison, but also for domestic cattle.

The research is in line with other findings this year. As reported in January, evidence from 55 million years ago − when the world warmed by 6°C – was unearthed during drilling in the National Science Foundation’s Bighorn Basin Coring Project in Wyoming. It indicated that animal size tended to dwindle with rising temperatures, almost certainly in response to changes in nutritional value.

The implication that mammals could dwarf and humans shrink towards hobbit-like stature under a changing climate was tragically confirmed by a study of body heights among children in north-east Brazil.

In response to near-starvation conditions, children who were brought up on a diet of rats, snakes and cacti reached an average adult size of only 1.35 metres (4ft 6ins).

SOURCE



Corn crop would not be reduced by the Warmist temperature rise

Discussing: Butler, E.E. and Huybers, P. 2013. Adaptation of US maize to temperature variations. Nature Climate Change 3: 68-72.

In the words of Butler and Huybers (2013), "high temperatures are associated with reduced crop yields, and predictions for future warming have raised concerns regarding future productivity and food security." More specifically, they note that "global maize yields are forecast to decline in response to increasing temperature, particularly as the upper range of growing season temperatures becomes hotter," citing Schlenker and Roberts (2006), Easterling et al. (2007), Lobell and Field (2007), Battisti (2009), Lobell et al. (2011) and Roberts and Schlenker (2011).

However, they caution that "the extent to which adaptation can mitigate such heat-related losses remains unclear," and they thus proceed to present some much-needed clarity on this subject by empirically demonstrating how maize is locally adapted to hot temperatures across a subset of 1,013 US counties, after which they used this spatial adaptation "as a surrogate for future adaptation," noting that "US corn hybrids have a product half-life of about 4 years, suggesting sufficiently rapid turnover to adapt to decadal changes in climate."

With the help of this adaptation phenomenon, the two researchers determined that (1) "losses to average US maize yields from a 2°C warming would be reduced from 14% to only 6%," and that (2) "loss in net production is wholly averted." As for a few specifics on the matter, they indicate that under the 2°C warming scenario, "Minnesota stands to increase yields by 11%; the yield losses from northern Ohio west to northern Missouri are nearly eliminated; and North Carolina, Georgia and east Texas reduce losses from 49% without adaptation to 39% with it."

In the concluding paragraph of their report, Butler and Huybers write that "losses to US maize yield from increased temperature," such as those suggested by Schlenker and Roberts (2006, 2009), "are almost certainly overestimated if adaptation is not accounted for." But if it is a part of the analysis, their work suggests that there could well be no net loss in productivity across the entire corn-production region.

SOURCE





Checking models against the data shows that  they are too poor to base policy on

Discussing:  Koumoutsaris, S. 2013. What can we learn about climate feedbacks from short-term climate variations? Tellus A 65: 10.3402/tellusa.v65i0.18887.

Writing as background for his work, Koumoutsaris (2013) says that "currently, global climate models disagree in their estimates of feedbacks, and this is one of the main reasons for uncertainty in future climate projections," citing Bony et al. (2006). And he further indicates that "in order to unveil the origin of these inter-model differences, model simulations need to be evaluated against observations of present climate," which is what he proceeds to do.

More specifically, Koumoutsaris estimated "the feedbacks from water vapor, lapse-rate, Planck, surface albedo and clouds, using models and observations based on the climate response over the last 30 years," which short-term feedbacks "result both from external changes in the forcing (due to greenhouse gas increases, volcanic and industrial aerosol emissions) and internal climate variations (mostly due to ENSO variability)."

And what did he learn?

In the words of the Swiss scientist, "the CMIP3 models show a much larger interdecile range for all short-term feedbacks in comparison to the long-term ones," which he says "is also the case for the three models with the most realistic ENSO representation," citing van Oldenborgh et al. (2005)." He also indicates that the models have difficulty capturing "the position and magnitude of ENSO teleconnection patterns." In addition, he reports that "the uncertainty in the cloud feedback, using a combination of reanalysis and satellite data, is still very large."

Koumoutsaris concludes that his several analyses indicate that "important aspects of the ENSO variability are still poorly understood and/or simulated." And in the case of cloud feedback, he says that it is difficult to come to "any firm conclusion" ... even on the sign of the feedback.

And when these phenomena are so poorly simulated - even to the point where the direction of change of one of them remains unknown - it should be clear to all that the climate-modeling enterprise still has a long, long way to go before it can be considered good enough to serve as a basis for energy policy decisions that are already dictating various aspects of human behavior.

SOURCE




The Cost of War – on Coal

War always has a cost.  The War on Coal declared last Tuesday by Barack Obama is no different.  The costs will be real, substantial, and be felt in every American household.

Barack Obama says there is no more time to wait around for Congress to act.  Seeking the once fashionable Consent-of-the- Governed would take too long.  The President ridiculed those with dissenting opinions – including a growing number within the scientific community; "We don't have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society," he said in his speech at Georgetown University.

The "Flat Earthers" apparently include 16 of the most highly credentialed environmental scientists in the world who jointly penned an editorial in the June 28, 2013 Wall Street Journal explaining that, "There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy."

Obama justifies both his unilateral action and cost of the War on Coal with the same explanation Progressives use for virtually every item on their agenda.  We simply must "combat this threat on behalf of our kids."  It's always for the children, isn't it?

As we said in a post yesterday, "Obama's new War is a war against ourselves.  Virtually all of the coal is domestically produced supporting American jobs, families and communities, and providing a huge portion of the affordable energy necessary to support citizens and businesses throughout the nation."

A team of Heritage Foundation Scholars analyzed and quantified the cost of Obama's War on Coal for just the first years from 2015-2030.  Led by David W. Kreutzer, Ph.D., Research Fellow for Energy Economics and Climate Change, the Heritage scholars confirmed our assertions from yesterday's blog post.  Obama's war "with no compelling scientific argument" to justify it, will most certainly have tangible, harmful consequences for every American citizen.

Here's a link to the entire Heritage report, and below is a key excerpt with the summary findings:

While it may not be clear exactly which policies will be used, it seems clear that zeroing-out coal-fired electric power plants is a goal of this Administration’s environmental team. This paper will analyze the economic impact of setting such a target. We look at the first 16 years of a 20-year phase-out of coal power: 2015–2030.

The analysis shows significant economic losses extend beyond the obvious areas of coal mining and power generation. In particular, we find that by 2030:

* Employment falls by more than 500,000 jobs;

* Manufacturing loses over 280,000 jobs;
                 
* A family of four’s annual income drops more than $1,000 per year, and its total income drops by $16,500 over the period of analysis;
                 
* Aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) decreases by $1.47 trillion;
                 
* Electricity prices rise by 20 percent;
                 
* Coal-mining jobs drop 43 percent; and
                 
* Natural gas prices rise 42 percent.

SOURCE





Australian government underplays effect of carbon tax on households and businesses while overstating its environmental benefit

THE Federal Government has underplayed the effect of the carbon tax on households and businesses while overstating the environmental benefit.

The cost-of-living impact in the first 12 months of the tax will be a rise of 0.7 per cent, according to Westpac and NAB - exactly what Federal Treasury forecast.

Westpac senior economist Huw Mackay said: "I think consumers are probably pleasantly surprised by how modest the impost is."

But not modest enough for the Government.

It says in a new report, "How Australia's carbon price is working One Year On", that "Westpac and National Australia Bank economists have estimated that the carbon price has increased the Consumer Price Index by just 0.4 per cent".

The report, which bizarrely has an American family on the cover, continues: "This means the Household Assistance Package has left many millions of Australian families better off financially."

A Government spokesman on Climate Change said it was not misleading to use the 0.4 per cent figure even though it related to a period before the tax began.

Meanwhile, manufacturers, construction firms and service providers say profits have cooled due to Australia's effort to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2C.

"For most businesses the high fixed carbon tax has so far reduced profitability rather than encouraging change, while squeezing product development, innovation and jobs growth," said Innes Willox, CEO of the Australian Industry Group, which represents more than 60,000 businesses.

But the government report says: "Since the carbon price started, Australia's manufacturing industry has been investing in new equipment to improve energy efficiency and pollution."

These investments are "cleaning up Australian manufacturing and generating big savings for business".

The report also says there has been a five per cent decline in carbon pollution per unit of electricity because the tax has made greener power "more competitive when compared to higher-polluting coal-fired electricity generation".

"As a result, electricity generation is switching away from high-polluting fuels like brown coal."

Renewable energy output was up 30 per cent, it says. Generation from coal was down 14 per cent.

National Generators Forum executive director Tim Reardon said energy from coal was down "largely due to unforeseen technical outages". The increase in hydro was "due to a wet season - there's been no additional build".

The carbon price would need to be more than $100 per tonne to change the economics of generation, Mr Reardon said.

Energy Supply Association CEO Matthew Warren said: "If we didn't have a carbon price we would still see a drop in emissions."

Coalition spokesman on "Climate Action" Greg Hunt said: "If elected, the carbon tax will be repealed and won't make a second anniversary."

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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From reason to freedom

From reason to freedom

Last I heard there were over a million blogs in existence -- and they all differ in various ways.  This blog is mainly what might be called a "collation" blog:  I gather together each day what seems to me to be the latest news and thinking about a particular topic and present it all together in one place.  For time-poor readers that can be convenient.

In doing so, however, I take an expansive view of the "fair usage" provisions of copyright law and that view could be challenged.  But it rarely is  -- and for an excellent reason:  Most of the people whose writings I recycle WANT their thoughts to be as widely seen as possible.  They even see it as a compliment to have their writings reproduced.

But there are exceptions to every rule and it is remarkable that the only two exceptions I can recollect came from libertarian blogs.  Why is that remarkable?  Because libertarians are normally most scornful of the idea of intellectual property.  As I do, they welcome anybody to reuse their work free of charge, let or hindrance as a matter of principle.

The blog listed in the heading to this post is however one of the aberrant blogs.  Click on the link and you will most likely get a great steaming heap of abuse aimed at me because I have recycled a few of his posts in the past.

A curious thing is that the blogger, M.J. Taylor, does not ordinarily identify himself on his blog nor does he provide an email address where he can be contacted.  And even curioser is that I have never received from him any email objection to my use of his material.  Had I been aware of his objections, I would have deleted him from my reading immediately -- which I have now done.  I will recycle nothing more of his.

UPDATE: I have had a number of emails commenting on the illiteracy and illogic of Mr. Taylor's fulmination. He can't be very bright.



Thwarting America’s crude awakening

The American “shale boom” is poised to revolutionize global energy markets. It could transform the nation from a longtime net oil importer into an export powerhouse. Consider that the 2012 increase in U.S. crude oil production, announced last week, was the largest not just in U.S. history but the world.

To help this transformation, a bipartisan swath of federal and state officials is pressing for new infrastructure, like the Keystone XL pipeline, to move a glut of domestic oil from the center of North America to Gulf ports. This is a crucial step, but unless Congress reforms archaic restrictions on crude oil exports, all that black gold’s going nowhere.

These restrictions not only contradict global trade rules and national trade and energy policies, they also threaten to derail the American energy revolution. Yet, unlike similar restrictions on natural gas, almost no one in Washington is talking about them.

In a free market, the answer to the key question of where to sell all this new American oil would be simple: wherever demand takes it. Unfortunately, the U.S.crude oil market is anything but free.

Instead, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 authorized an export licensing system that, though intended to address temporary conditions, remains in place. It prohibits almost all crude oil exports — even in this time of abundant supply.

Exports today require a license from the Commerce Department that, except for shipments to Canada and a few other narrow circumstances, is only approved if the proposed transaction is “consistent with the national interest.”

Non-Canadian exports of U.S. crude oil are effectively banned. No license applications were approved under the “national interest” exception between 2000 and mid-2012, and subsequent data confirms that this unfortunate streak remains intact.

This de facto ban creates a host of problems. First, by curtailing exports and subjecting license approvals to the whims of bureaucrats, the current system slows domestic production, breeds economic distortions, discourages investment and destabilizes energy markets.

U.S. oil producers, for example, lose an estimated $10 billion a year due to their inability to sell crude in foreign markets. They’ve also spent hundreds of millions of dollars building “mini-refineries” in the Midwest and Gulf region to circumvent the current restrictions and export a slightly processed, cheaper product — leaving another $1.7 billion in potential profit on the table.

As Rube-Goldbergian as this sounds, producers have few alternatives, given that U.S. oil consumption has collapsed in recent years and building new refinery capacity is virtually impossible in many “environmentally friendly” states. These problems prompted the head of the International Energy Agency to warn recently that U.S. export restrictions put the “American oil boom” at risk.

Second, the export licensing system raises serious concerns under global trade rules. The World Trade Organization generally prohibits members from imposing export restrictions — including “discretionary” licensing systems or those that result in long delays. The U.S. system appears to do both. The executive branch alone decides on what is in the “national interest.” At least six pending license applications — first reported last fall — still haven’t been granted. It also could be legally and politically difficult in this case for the U.S. government to assert WTO-sanctioned defenses for national security, conservation or temporary supply shortages.

Third, the oil export restrictions are at odds with some other Obama administration policies. Restricting oil exports, most obviously, undermines the president’s National Export Initiative, the goal of which is to double U.S. exports between 2010 and 2014. . It also contradicts Obama’s advocacy of other energy exports — particularly renewables and nuclear power.

Using export restrictions to suppress input prices and help downstream industries contradicts the longstanding U.S. policy of classifying other countries’ use of similar measures as “unfair” subsidies subject to countervailing duties. The export ban also exposes U.S. exports of oil-based products to “copycat” duties in other markets.

Finally, Washington has long opposed restrictive and opaque export licensing systems at the WTO — speaking out, most recently, against Chinese restrictions on exports of raw materials and “rare earth” elements. The U.S. licensing system contradicts these positions and undermines multilateral efforts to combat such measures.

Given these problems, it’s clear that the current crude oil export licensing system needs to go. Congressional supporters of the U.S. energy boom must lead the charge.

If advocates really want to develop our vast energy resources and expand the economy, they should craft a licensing policy that reflects the new energy landscape and the immense U.S. export potential.

They’d also be restoring some overall coherence to U.S. trade and energy policy — and avoiding potentially embarrassing trade conflicts. If they ignore these restrictions, and their many flaws, the nascent U.S. oil boom could be snuffed out

SOURCE



Obama promises an end to cheap energy

By Marita Noon

A few months ago, in his State of the Union address, President Obama proudly pledged to tackle climate change  —  despite opposition from Republicans. To date, precious little action to combat climate change has been seen from the White House  —  which pleases most Republicans and angers the Left.

Environmental activists are some of Obama’s most ardent supporters, but they are frustrated and losing patience with the president. He hasn’t been definitive on killing the Keystone pipeline; as the Washington Post reports, he’s “fallen back from the broad clean energy agenda he envisioned when he first took office”  —  even to the point of supporting natural gas exploration and recently approving Liquefied Natural Gas export terminals that will increase demand by shipping U.S. natural gas to foreign markets; and he seems to have acquiesced to a fossil fuel future by proposing adaptations to make “coastal communities more resistant to increasingly severe storms and floods.”

The environmental community wants to see bold steps toward a fossil-fuel free future.

Michael Brune, executive director for the Sierra Club, groused: “On climate, we’re worse off than we were when the President’s second term started.”

Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), is calling on the President to “outline exactly how he plans to combat global warming by 2016.”

In a new campaign being launched by the NRDC, filmmaker Robert Redford states: “Four months ago, President Obama spoke of our obligations to combat climate change, saying failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.” Ads from the NRDC feature Redford challenging Obama to live up to the “courage of his convictions.”

Even those within his own party are pressuring the president.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) has called climate change “the issue of our time.” He believes that Obama should announce the implementation of strong regulatory steps that will “revive this great issue.” Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) recently pushed the President to oppose the pipeline — despite polling that shows the vast majority of the public supports it: “I encouraged him to follow through on the correct policy position, suggesting polling numbers aren’t always in support of smart policy.”

With his base is looking for immediate remedies, his popularity is plunging, and more negative news is hitting the airwaves every day, an announcement — as Whitehouse wants — of “strong regulatory steps” to “revive this great issue” could be advisable. It would give environmentalists the aggressive action they are itching for and divert the discussion from the various scandals plaguing his presidency.

Instead, when the White House made a decision to raise the social cost of carbon emissions by 60 percent — which will have a costly impact on the economy with wide-ranging implications for everything from power plants to the Keystone pipeline  —  there were no optics: no fanfare, no press conference, no announcement.

Tucked into a rule about microwave ovens’ efficiency standards (With everything going on in the world, we are worrying about microwave ovens?) is an increase in the figure the government uses to weigh costs and benefits of proposed regulations. The “so-called social cost of carbon” represents the “approximate losses from global warming such as flood damage and diminished crops.” The Daily Caller describes this social cost of carbon dioxide emissions as “a monetary estimate of the damages caused by carbon emissions” that “all federal agencies must use when formulating regulations.”

The White House Office of Management and Budget raised the cost of a metric ton of carbon from the current $23.80 to $38.00 in 2015 — which gives the administration “justification to be more aggressive than they otherwise would be,” explained Jeff Holmstead, air quality chief at the Environmental Protection Agency under President George W. Bush.

It seems that this “determination” was intended as appeasement to Obama’s agitated base while not damaging his falling popularity — though it probably fails at both.

Frank Ackerman, an economist at Tufts University who published a book about the economics of global warming, calls the social cost of carbon “the most important number you’ve never heard of.” According to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, he said: “This is a very strange way to make policy about something this important.” And added, “The Obama Administration ‘hasn’t always leveled with us about what is happening behind closed doors.’”

Why bury “something this important” in an afternoon announcement about something that is virtually insignificant? The answer, I believe, is found in a small piece of the Washington Post story cited previously. Apparently, the White House’s own research found that when Obama, in his State of the Union speech, “vowed to act on climate change if Congress refused to do so,” a focus group’s “favorability” rating “plummeted.” White House transcripts reveal that Obama knows that “the politics of this are tough.”

At an April fundraising event at the San Francisco home of billionaire and environmental activist Tom Steyer, Obama defended his lack of action on climate change: “If you haven’t seen a raise in a decade, if your house is still $25,000, $30,000 underwater … you may be concerned about the temperature of the planet, but it’s probably not rising to your number one concern.”

As a result, his Organizing for America team — “formed to advance the president’s second term agenda” — has been laying the “groundwork with the American public before unveiling a formal climate strategy.” Teasing out the increase in the social cost of carbon was likely part of the strategy, intended to test the waters ahead of the planned climate announcements from the White House.

Likewise, his comments in Berlin, where he reintroduced the subject, calling climate change “the global threat of our time.” The next day, headlines read: “Obama to renew emissions push.” It is believed that the new “measures to tackle climate change” will “effectively ban new coal-fired power plants” — to which I add, will effectively ban “cheap electricity.”

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that U.S. power generation is, once again, using more coal — reversing the trend toward natural gas: “A flood of inexpensive natural gas led to the highest ever use of that fuel for electricity generation while coal-fired electricity fell to its lowest level in a quarter-century.”

Natural gas prices have been creeping higher and have pushed an increased use of coal in attempt to keep electricity costs as low as possible — after all, progressives and career environmentalists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhous, of the Breakthrough Institute, posit: cheap electricity is a public good and a human right that has saved the forests, produced more food on less land, and lifted incomes.

Wait, wait, wait! Regular readers of my affordable energy advocacy should give pause here. It is not me saying that cheap electricity is a basic human right — though I believe it, it is Shellenberger and Nordhous whose own biographies describe them as “leading global thinkers on energy, climate, security, human development, and politics” and whose book, Breakthrough, has been called “the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.”

In a treatise, which I believe should be required reading for everyone, titled: “Has there been a great progressive reversal? How the Left abandoned cheap electricity,” they outline a historic shift that’s taken the Left from being champions of the poor to being “developed-world progressives, comfortably ensconced in their own modernity.”

They explain: 80 years ago, “The best forests had been cut down to use as fuel for wood stoves. Soils were being rapidly depleted of nutrients, resulting in falling yields and a desperate search for new croplands. Poor farmers were plagued by malaria and had inadequate medical care. Few had indoor plumbing and even fewer had electricity.” Cheap electricity changed all that and Senator Al Gore, Sr., fought for it.

Today, “Environmentalists demand that we make carbon-based energy more expensive” and the Left calls it “a threat to the planet and harmful to the poor.” Shellenberger and Nordhous state: “In the name of democracy it now offers the global poor not what they want — cheap electricity — but more of what they don’t want, namely intermittent and expensive power” which “offers the poor no path to the kinds of high-energy lifestyles Western environmentalists take for granted.”

Believers in anthropogenic global warming, they acknowledge that “modernization” does have “side effects,” but they believe that these are problems that can be “dealt with.” Shellenberger and Nordhous state: “In the name of democracy it now offers the global poor not what they want — cheap electricity — but more of what they don’t want, namely intermittent and expensive power” which “offers the poor no path to the kinds of high-energy lifestyles Western environmentalists take for granted.”

Shellenberger and Nordhous close their eye-opening commentary by stating that the 1.3 billion people who lack cheap grid electricity should get it. “It will dramatically improve their lives, reduce deforestation, and make them more resilient to climate impacts. … Any effort worthy of being called progressive, liberal, or environmental, must embrace a high energy planet.”

Their logic is tough to dispute. While I do not agree that global warming is a manmade crisis, I certainly support their conclusions about the importance of cheap energy as a human right and public good.

This whole line of reasoning, begs some questions:

*    Why did the left abandon cheap energy? (Remember, in California, it was the rich, white Democrat representatives who voted to ban fracking while the black and Hispanics, in districts in need of jobs, didn’t vote for the ban.)

*    Why is the Obama administration willing to make policy that will cause its favorability rating to “plummet,” raise the price of energy, and disproportionately hurt the poor?

*   Why does America continue subsidies that emphasize activity rather than outcomes and continue to follow the failed energy policies of socialist Europe?

Your answers to these questions should scare you and bring another question to your mind: How do we stop this and save America?

SOURCE




The message of Britain's shale gas is: scrap the Climate Act

The news that we have such rich shale-gas reserves makes a further mockery of our energy policy

Who could doubt that the Almighty has a sense of humour when, on the very day headlines were filled with warnings that our electricity system is now in such a parlous state that we can soon expect power cuts and electricity “rationing”, we were also told that Britain is now sitting on what has been called “by far the biggest shale gas basin in the world”.

There may have been some journalistic licence in how the two reports from which these claims derived were written. Even so, the cautious predictions of the British Geological Survey confirmed that Britain has a potential shale-gas resource as significant as the oil and gas we found in the North Sea, and enough to meet all the UK’s energy needs for many decades to come.

The point about these two contrasting announcements is that they highlight more starkly than ever the barely credible shambles successive governments have made of our national energy policy, how ludicrously skewed it has become by their obsession with global warming and the delusion that, by cutting down our “carbon emissions”, we can somehow change the Earth’s climate.

The Government’s current policy, as I have repeatedly explored here, is twofold.

On one hand, it is based on building tens of thousands of useless and ludicrously expensive wind turbines, made possible only by forcing us to pay double or treble the normal cost of the pitiful amount of electricity they so unreliably produce. On the other, by taxes and regulations designed to make “renewables” seem competitive, they plan to double the cost of any power from other sources, whether fossil fuels or nuclear. In short, they want to make our electricity more expensive than anywhere else in the world.

Then, just as they have cobbled this crazy joke of a policy together, we discover that we are sitting on what is potentially the world’s largest resource of a fuel so cheap that it has halved the price of gas across the Atlantic in just five years.

The last time I observed that the Almighty must have a sense of humour was in October 2008 when, just as our MPs were voting almost unanimously for Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act, committing us to economic suicide by cutting CO2 emissions by 80 per cent in 40 years, the first October snow was falling in London for 74 years.

We will not see an end to this insanity until our politicians recover their senses, struggle back into the real world and strike that Act from the statute book.

SOURCE




Dirty tricks of the the fracking deniers: How Green zealots peddle cynical propaganda to stop Britain mining £3trillion of shale gas...enough to keep the lights on for 141 YEARS

Green pressure group Friends of the Earth is preparing a bitter legal battle to try to block Britain’s trillion-pound shale gas bonanza.

It wants to prevent any exploitation of this vast new reserve of cheap, clean energy forever and is already fighting to stop all exploratory test drilling.

But an investigation by The Mail on Sunday suggests that the group’s campaign is based on alarmism, spreading highly misleading claims about shale gas’s supposed dangers.

Last week the organisation issued an ‘action guide’ for activists, advising them how to stop shale gas extraction – known as ‘fracking’ – by manipulating the planning system.

It leaves no doubt as to its purpose: ‘The ultimate aim of our fracking campaign is that we stop it!’

Disclosure of FoE’s plans comes in the wake of a British Geological Survey (BGS) report, which revealed that the UK’s reserves are truly staggering – potentially enough to reverse economic decline and to turn the country into a net exporter of energy, competing with states such as Qatar.

It estimates that around 1,329 trillion cubic ft of gas and oil are held within Northern England’s Bowland shale alone – just one of six such geological ‘basins’ in the UK.

Conservative assessments say about ten per cent of this should be commercially recoverable – worth, at current gas prices, £1 trillion, and enough to meet all the UK’s gas consumption needs for 47 years, based on current demand.

It is equivalent to Qatar’s entire gas production for 36 years, or one and half-times as much as all the gas extracted from the North Sea since 1970.

Last week, Chancellor George Osborne suggested communities where there was fracking should be given a levy of one per cent of revenues. On that basis, Bowland would be given a £10 billion boost.

But industry experts believe the eventual percentage recoverable is likely to be much higher – perhaps as much as 30 per cent – worth £3 trillion and enough to last 141 years.

In the US large-scale fracking since 2005 has caused energy prices to plummet, sparked economic recovery and cut greenhouse gas emissions to levels last seen in 1990. Fracking there usually recovers about 18 per cent of the gas the rock contains.

Chris Wright, chief executive of Liberty Resources, one of America’s biggest investors in shale gas and oil, said that in Britain, the shale beds are more than a mile thick, as opposed to a few hundred feet in the US.

Commenting on the first fracking test well drilled by the firm Cuadrilla two years ago, he said: ‘The data looked very encouraging’. He added that in the US, estimates of the size of reserves had been continually revised upwards once drilling began and technology improved.

Meanwhile Nigel Smith, co-author of the British Geological Survey’s report, told The Mail on Sunday that there is ‘a lot more gas’ offshore in the Irish and North Seas  – perhaps a further ten times as much.

He added some of this could be exploited without the need for offshore drilling platforms, by drilling horizontally from sites on land.

Later this year the geologists are  to publish their assessment of the Wessex basin, which runs from Kent to Dorset.  Further reserves are being investigated in Somerset, South Wales, Scotland and County Fermanagh.

However, FoE is determined to try to stop this energy revolution.  Helen Rimmer, its North West England staff campaigner, said: ‘It’s a  fossil fuel that we don’t need. It would be better to keep it in the ground.’  Instead, she said, Britain should invest only in renewables, such as wind turbines.

Underlying the FoE campaign is its obsession with global warming – despite a modern, gas-fuelled power plant emitting less than half the carbon dioxide of a coal plant.

‘We need to consider the climate impact,’ Ms Rimmer said. ‘We think fracking is incompatible with our  carbon targets. It’s completely the wrong direction for our energy.’

FoE’s principal weapons in its bid to stop fracking are challenging Cuadrilla and other firms through the planning process – even for short-term test drills – and via the Environment Agency which issues permits.

But report by Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering last year concluded that with deep fracking this risk is 'very low'.

FoE officials admit that these formal challenges are likely to be only the first stage in a tactic designed to stop any fracking until at least 2015: if the EA and councils do issue permissions to drill, they will face challenges in the courts through judicial review.  Jake White, from FoE’s legal department, said: ‘There could well be no further activity before the Election.’

He also admitted that although FoE was concerned about ‘local impacts’ such as the possible effect on bird life, its real concern was the climate.

However, some of the claims being made by FoE in its legal letters are extremely contentious, and may require expert witnesses and days of testimony in court.

For example, FoE says that earthquakes triggered by fracking may cause wells to leak, contaminating water supplies.

Yet two tremors that halted UK fracking two years ago were too small to cause damage, and were weaker than tremors commonly triggered by coal mining. In millions of US fracking operations, there has never been a powerful quake.

FoE says a EU directive demands that unless it can be proved beyond reasonable doubt there is no risk to groundwater and aquifers, permission must not be granted.

However, last year a report by the Royal  Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering said the risk of contamination was ‘very low’ when, as in Britain, fracking takes place deep below ground.

FoE’s claims about greenhouse gases are also misleading. It has repeatedly asserted that even though gas-fuelled electricity produces less carbon dioxide than coal, the overall greenhouse impact is greater, because methane escapes during fracking, and methane’s greenhouse impact is greater than carbon dioxide’s.
fracking graphic

Yet this rests on a single, hotly disputed study, which other scientists have criticised as ‘deeply flawed’.

Moreover, in the early days in America, flowback water, which may contain methane, was sometimes stored in open ponds, but UK rules forbid this, so greatly reducing the scope for gas emissions.

Ultimately, the FoE hopes the courts will rule that fracking was ‘inconsistent with climate policy’ – and so render it unlawful permanently.

But if fracking produces cheap power, it will mean that alternatives such as wind power will be increasingly expensive in comparison.

Environment Secretary Owen Paterson said: ‘The gas volumes in the survey are astounding: this is a natural bonanza which we must grasp.  ‘Rather than be persuaded by scare tactics, we need to look at  the facts.

‘Do we really want to deny the British public a clean, affordable, home-grown energy supply which could free us from dependency on unstable regimes and which would give a huge boost to our industry?’

SOURCE




Ryanair CEO blames notion of global warming on “environmental loonies”

“Mixed with his routine invective and only a single passing use of the f-word,” O’Leary’s comments appear at the end of a long article about “737s, acquisitions and taxes.”

“Michael O’Leary, the devil-may-care head of Ireland-based European budget airline Ryanair, made his first Air Show appearance in Paris this past week, and lived up to his reputation for colorful language and unmediated disrespect for government bureaucrats” says this story in the Seattle Times.

“O’Leary, arguably the most hard-nosed operator in the airline world…. offered nuggets of wisdom on the state of the airline world, mixed with his routine invective and only a single passing use of the f-word.

“On the European Union plan to introduce a carbo- emissions tax on airlines…. He began by deriding the notion of global warming, which he blamed on “environmental loonies” and “a bunch of incompetent European politicians taxing Europe’s consumers so that they can do something about climate change.”

“It would be better to address real issues such as European unemployment by promoting tourism, he said.

“Instead of trying to solve nonexistent issues like climate change, why don’t you actually get young people in Europe back to work?”

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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