If you've ever spent much time in Nevada, during the summer, and I have, then you'll listen to what this person has to say about global warming, drought, and man's effects.
Peter
Global Warming?
Who cares about cause? Something must be done!
By Vin Suprynowicz, writing from Nevada
For more than a thousand years, Christian doctrine had prescribed harsh punishment for anyone who made a false accusation of witchcraft. Since for obvious reasons it was pretty hard to actually prove your neighbor had made your cow go dry by hexing it with the evil eye, or that she flew around at night on a broomstick, this kept false accusations to a minimum.But in the 1480s the interestingly named Pope Innocent III changed all that with his bull "Summis Desideratis"; a couple of German shopkeepers published their Malleus Maleficarum -- the "Hammer of Witches" -- and the witch-hunts were on.
Anyone could turn in a neighbor on suspicion of consorting with demons, without fear of repercussions. Defendants had no right to confront or cross-examine their accusers. The church and state combined their powers to seize the suspects, split up their property and torture them into confessing.Traveling witch-finders were paid handsome fees for their supposed expertise in identifying witches by the presence of minor telltale blemishes on their skin. The growth of the industry was assured when the torturers decided they wouldn't stop inflicting pain until the victim had named a dozen members of her "coven" -- who could also be quickly rounded up, seized along with their property.
Why didn't anyone speak out against this madness? Here's the good part. Because if you were a "denier," that proved you must be under demonic influence, yourself. Care to view our instruments of torture? And so the madness grew. When sanity finally returned, in the 1700s, wise men started talking about "separating church and state," about defendants being "presumed innocent till proven guilty," about a "right to confront and cross-examine one's accusers." Just as importantly, the deductive methods of science were elevated above superstition.
New generations were taught it wasn't sufficient to notice a correlation between the old lady down the road waving her arms while mumbling under her breath and your cow going dry. You had to demonstrate there was some explanation within our understanding of the laws of physics for how one thing could cause the other. You had to demonstrate the presumed effect happened every time the presumed cause was present, that it never happened when the presumed cause was absent, and that there was no better alternative explanation.
It's not a perfect system. Government-funded science, in particular, tends to generate results curiously close to what the funding agencies are looking for. But note we're using the word "science" to refer to the ongoing skeptical testing of theories to see if they reliably predict real-world events. As soon as someone says, "It's been proved by science! No one must be allowed to question this any more!" they've warped the word "science" and are now using it to describe just another received religion, little different from "I read it in the Bible so I know it's true.
"Why does all this matter, in 2007? Just read a week's worth of letters to the editor. In recent days, you'll find readers writing in: "I am so tired of reading the letters and editorials that the Review-Journal prints disputing the science behind global warming. I no longer go fishing on Lake Mead because it has become too difficult to launch a boat. All my relatives in the Midwest talk about now are the mild winters and the extreme violent storms of the summers. Towns in Georgia are running out of water. And the glaciers are disappearing. And you keep printing stories from people who say, 'It's alright. It's cyclical!' Who cares whether it is or not? Who cares if we are causing it or not? Why can't we just agree that it is happening and that we have to work together to adapt to it! ...
"A Manhatten (sic) -type project that spent our tax dollars researching alternative energies that wean us from our oil addiction and that do not contribute to the Greenhouse effect would go a long way to helping us adapt no matter who is right! I'd like to go fishing again without having to wait 15,000 years!
"But if the reader agrees that burning fossil fuels may not be causing global warming, why spend billions of dollars and lower our standard of living to reduce a minimal "Greenhouse effect" that may not matter? Even if mean temperatures had increased 1 degree over the past 30 years -- and they have not -- does any responsible science explain how such a slight temperature increase could have caused lower water levels in Lake Mead?
Might not increased human water usage and the fact that rainfall here in the early 20th century was far above prehistoric norms be a more reasonable explanation? Might not warmer weather in the Pacific cause more evaporation, which could give us more rain? How could meeting all our current power needs with windmills or solar cells (ignoring the costs) possibly cause Lake Mead to fill with water? How could socking us with $5 billion in "carbon taxes" -- doubling the cost of turning on a light switch or pumping a gallon of gasoline, for starters -- cause Lake Mead to fill with water? What evidence is there that this would do any more good than rounding up 10,000 widows and burning them as witches?
Another reader recently wrote in: "The global warming debate is the best end run I have ever seen. Big Business cannot deny that it is polluting our planet. ... Big Business says, 'It's not all our fault. There are forest fires, volcanoes, sun flares, CO2 coming off the oceans and let's not forget the belching cows. Please don't forget the cows!' All the while the air, land and water are being polluted. The people dying from multiple forms of cancer and the asthmatic children going to the emergency rooms for breathing treatments and we aren't buying it." Global warming now causes cancer and childhood asthma? Doesn't this remind anyone else of the hysteria of the late 15th and 16th centuries, when every problem, global or local, could be blamed on the witches down the road consorting with demons and dancing naked in the moonlight, when the devil was seen to have the upper hand in his battle to take over the Earth from the godly, when no delays could be brooked? After all, the very fate of the Earth was at stake; if burning a few hundred more witches could help us turn the corner, who could possibly object?
Today, again, we're told that global warming "deniers" cannot be tolerated. Something must be done! What? What must be done? They don't seem so clear on that. Though if they succeed in pricing heat and air conditoning out of reach, thousands of people will die, make no mistake. In the 1970s, politically correct "left-centist" publications such as Newsweek were doing cover stories about the coming Ice Age. Polar bears are not vanishing; their populations have been growing for 25 years.
The Kyoto Protocol -- even if everyone signed it and met its terms, which would be an international first -- would reduce temperatures by only 0.04 degrees Celsius by 2100."The American people are fed up with the media for promoting the idea that former Vice President Al Gore represents the scientific 'consensus' that SUVs and the modern American way of life have somehow created a 'climate emergency' that only United Nations bureaucrats and wealthy Hollywood liberals can solve," said Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the outgoing chairman of the Environment & Public Works Committee, last year.
But how can you deny we've been cursed by the witches? Aren't the lakes drying up? Aren't there storms and wildfires everywhere? Don't children have cancer and asthma? Why can't we all just agree these things are happening, and start to round up and burn the witches? There's no time left to beat around the bush and wait for all this tedious testing of "causality"! Who cares what's causing it? Something must be done!
Source
Monday, November 19, 2007
With All The Hue and Cry About Carbon Emissions, Why Is Coal Still Going Strong?
It sounds to me, if you believe the following article in "The Economist", that a lot of people are not buying the theory that man is causing global warming because of carbon dioxide emissions. It seems all that is really being emitted by the United Nations IPCC is a lot of hot air. When it comes down to reality, nobody will really listen to a a failed ex-Vice President and some Hollywood celebrities looking for publicity.
When reality sinks in, when people realize the folly of trying to control global warming by limiting carbon dioxide emissions, when they realize the cost of such nonsense, they will dismiss the issue as just so much nonsense. As someone once said, "money talks and BS walks."
Peter
KING COAL STILL GOING STRONG
NO UTILITY with any respect for its shareholders' money, says Michael Morris, the boss of the biggest one in America, AEP, would build a heavily polluting coal-burning power station in America these days, for fear that it would become a liability if the government moved to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. Europe already has a cap on emissions, which is designed precisely to discourage dirty fuels such as coal. So why is it that utilities in both places are running their coal-fired plants at full throttle, have several new ones under construction and would like to build even more?
Using coal to generate electricity produces more greenhouse gases per resulting watt than using oil or natural gas, but coal is cheap. In countries where there are no limits on emissions and where demand for power is growing rapidly, such as India and China, coal is booming. Energy lore has it that in China a new coal-burning plant is fired up every week. What is certain is that China has become a net importer of coal for the first time this year. India's imports have been growing steadily for the past 20 years.
The International Energy Agency, an energy watchdog for rich countries, projects that demand for coal will grow by 2.2% a year until 2030—faster than demand for oil or natural gas. Coal-mining firms in Indonesia and Australia, the biggest exporters, are digging as fast as they can but are still struggling to cope with the surge in orders. Freighters are literally queuing up off Newcastle, Australia, the world's busiest coal port.
But poor and fast-growing places are not the only ones with a hunger for coal. In America, more coal-fired generation is being built than at any time in the past seven years, despite the threat of emissions caps, according to the Department of Energy. In Europe, several power companies are building new coal-fired plants, even though every tonne of carbon dioxide that they emit will require an expensive permit. For example, RWE, a German utility, plans to spend €6.2 billion ($9.1 billion) on three new coal-fired plants by 2012. One of them is already under construction.
All this has helped to push the price of coal steadily upwards in the past few years. Nonetheless, it has risen less quickly than that of oil or natural gas. Coal is now by far the cheapest of the common fuels for power stations relative to the amount of heat it generates when burnt (see chart). At the very least that is encouraging utilities to run their existing coal-fired plants flat out. But it is also prompting some to convert oil-fired plants to run on coal instead.
Enel, Italy's former electricity monopoly, has already performed one such refurbishment, and has two more under way, at a cost of €3.8 billion. Leonardo Arrighi, who supervises the firm's investments in generation, says it would like to build “more and more” coal-fired plants. In theory, the carbon price (in Europe) and the threat of one (in America) should dent this enthusiasm for coal. But in practice many utilities are betting that the disparity in fuel prices will outweigh the cost of extra permits to pollute.
At the moment such permits cost pennies in Europe, because governments handed out too many of them. Although there should be more of a shortage starting next year, the futures price would have to rise from the current 22 euros per tonne of carbon to over 30 per tonne to prompt a significant switch away from coal over the next two years, according to Henrik Hasselknippe of Point Carbon, a consultancy.
To be fair, many of the coal-fired power stations under construction in Europe and America are very efficient, and so emit less carbon per watt of output than existing plants. RWE and Enel both claim that their new plants will be among the most efficient in Europe. AEP is building a similar plant in America, which will remain profitable at carbon prices of up to $20 a tonne, according to Mr Morris. Meanwhile, many American firms are cancelling or delaying plans to build grubbier coal-fired plants until they have a clearer idea of future carbon prices.
Politicians in both Europe and America talk of carbon prices eventually being so high that coal-fired plants will be viable only if they capture their emissions and store them underground. But no such plants yet exist. Most of those under construction are not even “capture-ready”, as the industry jargon has it, since utilities do not consider the extra expense worthwhile. Even in Europe, with its steadily tightening emissions cap, much higher carbon prices or stricter regulation will be required to get utilities to build capture-ready plants, says John Krenicki, the head of the energy division at General Electric.
In fact, governments are sending out conflicting signals. Germany, for example, is making it easier to build new coal plants by granting them free emissions permits, even though it aims to reduce emissions to 40% below the 1990 level by 2020. Enel hopes to persuade the governments of Bulgaria and Romania to do the same. In America, the most prominent proposals for regulations to reduce emissions all involve generous hand-outs to the coal industry. For a supposedly dying breed, advocates of coal-fired generation still seem to have plenty of clout with Europe's and America's politicians.
Source
When reality sinks in, when people realize the folly of trying to control global warming by limiting carbon dioxide emissions, when they realize the cost of such nonsense, they will dismiss the issue as just so much nonsense. As someone once said, "money talks and BS walks."
Peter
KING COAL STILL GOING STRONG
NO UTILITY with any respect for its shareholders' money, says Michael Morris, the boss of the biggest one in America, AEP, would build a heavily polluting coal-burning power station in America these days, for fear that it would become a liability if the government moved to limit emissions of greenhouse gases. Europe already has a cap on emissions, which is designed precisely to discourage dirty fuels such as coal. So why is it that utilities in both places are running their coal-fired plants at full throttle, have several new ones under construction and would like to build even more?
Using coal to generate electricity produces more greenhouse gases per resulting watt than using oil or natural gas, but coal is cheap. In countries where there are no limits on emissions and where demand for power is growing rapidly, such as India and China, coal is booming. Energy lore has it that in China a new coal-burning plant is fired up every week. What is certain is that China has become a net importer of coal for the first time this year. India's imports have been growing steadily for the past 20 years.
The International Energy Agency, an energy watchdog for rich countries, projects that demand for coal will grow by 2.2% a year until 2030—faster than demand for oil or natural gas. Coal-mining firms in Indonesia and Australia, the biggest exporters, are digging as fast as they can but are still struggling to cope with the surge in orders. Freighters are literally queuing up off Newcastle, Australia, the world's busiest coal port.
But poor and fast-growing places are not the only ones with a hunger for coal. In America, more coal-fired generation is being built than at any time in the past seven years, despite the threat of emissions caps, according to the Department of Energy. In Europe, several power companies are building new coal-fired plants, even though every tonne of carbon dioxide that they emit will require an expensive permit. For example, RWE, a German utility, plans to spend €6.2 billion ($9.1 billion) on three new coal-fired plants by 2012. One of them is already under construction.
All this has helped to push the price of coal steadily upwards in the past few years. Nonetheless, it has risen less quickly than that of oil or natural gas. Coal is now by far the cheapest of the common fuels for power stations relative to the amount of heat it generates when burnt (see chart). At the very least that is encouraging utilities to run their existing coal-fired plants flat out. But it is also prompting some to convert oil-fired plants to run on coal instead.
Enel, Italy's former electricity monopoly, has already performed one such refurbishment, and has two more under way, at a cost of €3.8 billion. Leonardo Arrighi, who supervises the firm's investments in generation, says it would like to build “more and more” coal-fired plants. In theory, the carbon price (in Europe) and the threat of one (in America) should dent this enthusiasm for coal. But in practice many utilities are betting that the disparity in fuel prices will outweigh the cost of extra permits to pollute.
At the moment such permits cost pennies in Europe, because governments handed out too many of them. Although there should be more of a shortage starting next year, the futures price would have to rise from the current 22 euros per tonne of carbon to over 30 per tonne to prompt a significant switch away from coal over the next two years, according to Henrik Hasselknippe of Point Carbon, a consultancy.
To be fair, many of the coal-fired power stations under construction in Europe and America are very efficient, and so emit less carbon per watt of output than existing plants. RWE and Enel both claim that their new plants will be among the most efficient in Europe. AEP is building a similar plant in America, which will remain profitable at carbon prices of up to $20 a tonne, according to Mr Morris. Meanwhile, many American firms are cancelling or delaying plans to build grubbier coal-fired plants until they have a clearer idea of future carbon prices.
Politicians in both Europe and America talk of carbon prices eventually being so high that coal-fired plants will be viable only if they capture their emissions and store them underground. But no such plants yet exist. Most of those under construction are not even “capture-ready”, as the industry jargon has it, since utilities do not consider the extra expense worthwhile. Even in Europe, with its steadily tightening emissions cap, much higher carbon prices or stricter regulation will be required to get utilities to build capture-ready plants, says John Krenicki, the head of the energy division at General Electric.
In fact, governments are sending out conflicting signals. Germany, for example, is making it easier to build new coal plants by granting them free emissions permits, even though it aims to reduce emissions to 40% below the 1990 level by 2020. Enel hopes to persuade the governments of Bulgaria and Romania to do the same. In America, the most prominent proposals for regulations to reduce emissions all involve generous hand-outs to the coal industry. For a supposedly dying breed, advocates of coal-fired generation still seem to have plenty of clout with Europe's and America's politicians.
Source
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Arctic Melting Caused By Natural Changes In Ocean Circulation.....Not Global Warming
Hold your horses......put a cork in the frantic effort to limit carbon dioxide emissions.......it seems Arctic melting is not being caused by man's activities. Another of many new studies shows the same thing.......the climate changes......weather changes........ice melts and forms again, it is part of natural cycles way beyond our control. Read the article. Question the science. Argue politics, but facts are facts.
Peter
New finding: Arctic melting caused by change in ocean circulation
Global warming over the past decade or so isn't all about coal, gasoline and other greenhouse gases, space scientists said Tuesday. Melting Arctic Ocean sea ice may have been caused by a reversal in the ocean's circulation that had been going on for about a decade, scientists from NASA and the University of Colorado said. Whether that reversal in direction was caused in large part by warmth generated by greenhouse gas is a question for another day.
The scientists used both deep-sea pressure gauges and NASA's twin satellites, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, to measure tiny changes in the weight of columns of water from the surface to the ocean bottom, between 2002 and 2006. The two GRACE satellites travel in tandem and monitor tiny hair's-breadth changes in Earth's gravity field caused by the movement of water. Meanwhile, the pressure gauges on the sea floor directly measure water pressure there.
"The close agreement between the North Pole pressure gauges and GRACE data demonstrates GRACE's potential for tracking world ocean circulation," said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, who co-authored the study that appears in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The weight of a column of water in the ocean is influenced by such things as the height of the ocean's surface and its salinity. A saltier ocean is heavier and circulates differently than one with less salt.
The scientists found a 10-millibar decrease in water pressure at the bottom of the Ocean at the North Pole between 2002 and 2006. That is equal to removing the weight of four inches of water from the ocean, Wahr said. That much drop in water pressure suggests that the Arctic Ocean changed back to a clockwise circulation, the scientists said. The Arctic Ocean had been circulating clockwise prior to 1990, but had been turning counterclockwise in the 1990s. The change was sparked by a weakened Arctic Oscillation, which reduced the amount of salt in the upper ocean near the North Pole. That slightly decreased the weight of a column of water, changing the water's circulation direction.
"Our study confirms that many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming," said project leader James Morrison of the University of Washington's Polar Science Center Applied Physics Laboratory. The Arctic Oscillation was fairly stable until about 1970, but has varied on an approximate 10-year time scale since then. It was turning strongly counterclockwise in the 1990s, during which time the Arctic Ocean lost a lot of its ice, prompting many scientists to view the changes as evidence of an ongoing climate shift.
The fact that it can change every decade or so indicates how short-term the oscillations can be, Morrison said. In fact, the Arctic Ocean circulation seemed to have shifted again in the winter of 2006-07, commensurate with the lowest ice expanse in recorded history. While there is no direct connection between global warming and the Arctic Oscillation, most climate models predict the oscillation will become more strongly counterclockwise in the future, Morrison said. "The events of the 1990s may well be a preview of how the Arctic will respond over longer periods of time in a warming world," he said
Source
Peter
New finding: Arctic melting caused by change in ocean circulation
Global warming over the past decade or so isn't all about coal, gasoline and other greenhouse gases, space scientists said Tuesday. Melting Arctic Ocean sea ice may have been caused by a reversal in the ocean's circulation that had been going on for about a decade, scientists from NASA and the University of Colorado said. Whether that reversal in direction was caused in large part by warmth generated by greenhouse gas is a question for another day.
The scientists used both deep-sea pressure gauges and NASA's twin satellites, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, to measure tiny changes in the weight of columns of water from the surface to the ocean bottom, between 2002 and 2006. The two GRACE satellites travel in tandem and monitor tiny hair's-breadth changes in Earth's gravity field caused by the movement of water. Meanwhile, the pressure gauges on the sea floor directly measure water pressure there.
"The close agreement between the North Pole pressure gauges and GRACE data demonstrates GRACE's potential for tracking world ocean circulation," said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, who co-authored the study that appears in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters. The weight of a column of water in the ocean is influenced by such things as the height of the ocean's surface and its salinity. A saltier ocean is heavier and circulates differently than one with less salt.
The scientists found a 10-millibar decrease in water pressure at the bottom of the Ocean at the North Pole between 2002 and 2006. That is equal to removing the weight of four inches of water from the ocean, Wahr said. That much drop in water pressure suggests that the Arctic Ocean changed back to a clockwise circulation, the scientists said. The Arctic Ocean had been circulating clockwise prior to 1990, but had been turning counterclockwise in the 1990s. The change was sparked by a weakened Arctic Oscillation, which reduced the amount of salt in the upper ocean near the North Pole. That slightly decreased the weight of a column of water, changing the water's circulation direction.
"Our study confirms that many changes seen in upper Arctic Ocean circulation in the 1990s were mostly decadal in nature, rather than trends caused by global warming," said project leader James Morrison of the University of Washington's Polar Science Center Applied Physics Laboratory. The Arctic Oscillation was fairly stable until about 1970, but has varied on an approximate 10-year time scale since then. It was turning strongly counterclockwise in the 1990s, during which time the Arctic Ocean lost a lot of its ice, prompting many scientists to view the changes as evidence of an ongoing climate shift.
The fact that it can change every decade or so indicates how short-term the oscillations can be, Morrison said. In fact, the Arctic Ocean circulation seemed to have shifted again in the winter of 2006-07, commensurate with the lowest ice expanse in recorded history. While there is no direct connection between global warming and the Arctic Oscillation, most climate models predict the oscillation will become more strongly counterclockwise in the future, Morrison said. "The events of the 1990s may well be a preview of how the Arctic will respond over longer periods of time in a warming world," he said
Source
Friday, November 16, 2007
Food For Fuel.......Insanity
Here is another example of the law of "Unintended Consequences". Growing plants to produce fuel is stupidity taken to its ultimate extreme. The following article says it clearly.
Peter
Biofuels Could Kill More People Than the Iraq War
By George Monbiot.
It's pleasing to reproduce something reasonably realistic from the original Moonbat. As long as he is condemning something he appears to be happy. It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava.
The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums. This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN's special rapporteur, as "a crime against humanity."
Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel: the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels -- made from wood or straw or waste -- become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people's mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.
Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels "might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further." This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls "a very serious crisis." Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it.
With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline. The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren't entirely to blame -- by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand -- but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices.
They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and -- as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced last week -- keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500 billion kilometer mark for the first time last year. But it doesn't matter: we just have to change the fuel we use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people being pushed off their land remain unheard.In principle, burning biofuels merely releases the carbon they accumulated when they were growing. Even when you take into account the energy costs of harvesting, refining and transporting the fuel, they produce less net carbon than petroleum products.
The law the British government passed a fortnight ago -- by 2010, 5% of our road transport fuel must come from crops -- will, it claims, save between 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year. It derives this figure by framing the question carefully. If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find that they cause more warming than petroleum.
A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas -- nitrous oxide -- which is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of over 80% of the world's biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.
More here
Peter
Biofuels Could Kill More People Than the Iraq War
By George Monbiot.
It's pleasing to reproduce something reasonably realistic from the original Moonbat. As long as he is condemning something he appears to be happy. It doesn't get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava.
The government has allocated several thousand hectares of farmland to ethanol production in the county of Lavumisa, which happens to be the place worst hit by drought. It would surely be quicker and more humane to refine the Swazi people and put them in our tanks. Doubtless a team of development consultants is already doing the sums. This is one of many examples of a trade described last month by Jean Ziegler, the UN's special rapporteur, as "a crime against humanity."
Ziegler took up the call first made by this column for a five-year moratorium on all government targets and incentives for biofuel: the trade should be frozen until second-generation fuels -- made from wood or straw or waste -- become commercially available. Otherwise the superior purchasing power of drivers in the rich world means that they will snatch food from people's mouths. Run your car on virgin biofuel and other people will starve.
Even the International Monetary Fund, always ready to immolate the poor on the altar of business, now warns that using food to produce biofuels "might further strain already tight supplies of arable land and water all over the world, thereby pushing food prices up even further." This week the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation will announce the lowest global food reserves in 25 years, threatening what it calls "a very serious crisis." Even when the price of food was low, 850 million people went hungry because they could not afford to buy it.
With every increment in the price of flour or grain, several million more are pushed below the breadline. The cost of rice has risen by 20% over the past year, maize by 50%, wheat by 100%. Biofuels aren't entirely to blame -- by taking land out of food production they exacerbate the effects of bad harvests and rising demand -- but almost all the major agencies are now warning against expansion. And almost all the major governments are ignoring them.They turn away because biofuels offer a means of avoiding hard political choices.
They create the impression that governments can cut carbon emissions and -- as Ruth Kelly, the British transport secretary, announced last week -- keep expanding the transport networks. New figures show that British drivers puttered past the 500 billion kilometer mark for the first time last year. But it doesn't matter: we just have to change the fuel we use. No one has to be confronted. The demands of the motoring lobby and the business groups clamouring for new infrastructure can be met. The people being pushed off their land remain unheard.In principle, burning biofuels merely releases the carbon they accumulated when they were growing. Even when you take into account the energy costs of harvesting, refining and transporting the fuel, they produce less net carbon than petroleum products.
The law the British government passed a fortnight ago -- by 2010, 5% of our road transport fuel must come from crops -- will, it claims, save between 700,000 and 800,000 tonnes of carbon a year. It derives this figure by framing the question carefully. If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find that they cause more warming than petroleum.
A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas -- nitrous oxide -- which is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of over 80% of the world's biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.
More here
Get Your Heads Out Of The Clouds......What Is Really Causing Global Warming
Here is the latest from a leading scientist and skeptic of the gloom and doom being propagated by the true believers of man-caused global warming. Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, hands down. Dr. Roy Spencer claims we do not know even a hint of enough about the behavior of clouds and their effects on weather, not to mention climate, to understand the effects of carbon dioxide emissions.
Shall we sell our souls to the devil based on nebulous Al Gorian hyped-up political science? I don't think so.
Peter
Cloudy Days on the Global Warming Front
Advocates of anthropogenic global warming want you to believe that the science is settled and there is nothing left to debate. But this is the opposite of the truth; in fact, climate science is in its infancy and virtually every proposition relating to it is controversial.
A case in point: the computer programs that tell us that human activity will lead to catastrophic warming assume that warmer temperatures will give rise to more high-altitude clouds, which in turn will trap heat in the earth's atmosphere and create a positive feedback loop. Recent research suggests, however, that increasing temperatures will have the opposite effect, reducing the incidence of high-altitude clouds and thereby creating a safety valve rather than reinforcing the original warming. The research was published in Geophysical Research Letters by Roy W. Spencer, William D. Braswell, John R. Christy and Justin Hnilo:
The widely accepted (albeit unproven) theory that manmade global warming will accelerate itself by creating more heat-trapping clouds is challenged this month in new research from The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Instead of creating more clouds, individual tropical warming cycles that served as proxies for global warming saw a decrease in the coverage of heat-trapping cirrus clouds, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UA Huntsville's Earth System Science Center.
"All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases," he said. "That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space."
As the Earth's surface warms - due to either manmade greenhouse gases or natural fluctuations in the climate system - more water evaporates from the surface. Since more evaporation leads to more precipitation, most climate researchers expected increased cirrus cloudiness to follow warming. "To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Spencer said.
"The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming." "The role of clouds in global warming is widely agreed to be pretty uncertain," Spencer said. "Right now, all climate models predict that clouds will amplify warming. I'm betting that if the climate models' 'clouds' were made to behave the way we see these clouds behave in nature, it would substantially reduce the amount of climate change the models predict for the coming decades."
The team analyzed six years of data from four instruments aboard three NASA and NOAA satellites. The researchers tracked precipitation amounts, air and sea surface temperatures, high and low altitude cloud cover, reflected sunlight, and infrared energy escaping out to space. When they tracked the daily evolution of a composite of fifteen of the strongest intraseasonal oscillations they found that although rainfall and air temperatures would be rising, the amount of infrared energy being trapped by the cloudy areas would start to decrease rapidly as the air warmed. This unexpected behavior was traced to the decrease in cirrus cloud cover.
"Global warming theory says warming will generally be accompanied by more rainfall," Spencer said. "Everyone just assumed that more rainfall means more high altitude clouds. That would be your first guess and, since we didn't have any data to suggest otherwise ..." There are significant gaps in the scientific understanding of precipitation systems and their interactions with the climate, he said. "At least 80 percent of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems.
"Until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming, I don't believe we can know how much of our current warming is manmade. Without that knowledge, we can't predict future climate change with any degree of certainty.
"That's a remarkable quote: "Everyone just assumed" that more rainfall means more high altitude clouds. That is the level of scientific certainty on which claims of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming rest.
Source
Shall we sell our souls to the devil based on nebulous Al Gorian hyped-up political science? I don't think so.
Peter
Cloudy Days on the Global Warming Front
Advocates of anthropogenic global warming want you to believe that the science is settled and there is nothing left to debate. But this is the opposite of the truth; in fact, climate science is in its infancy and virtually every proposition relating to it is controversial.
A case in point: the computer programs that tell us that human activity will lead to catastrophic warming assume that warmer temperatures will give rise to more high-altitude clouds, which in turn will trap heat in the earth's atmosphere and create a positive feedback loop. Recent research suggests, however, that increasing temperatures will have the opposite effect, reducing the incidence of high-altitude clouds and thereby creating a safety valve rather than reinforcing the original warming. The research was published in Geophysical Research Letters by Roy W. Spencer, William D. Braswell, John R. Christy and Justin Hnilo:
The widely accepted (albeit unproven) theory that manmade global warming will accelerate itself by creating more heat-trapping clouds is challenged this month in new research from The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Instead of creating more clouds, individual tropical warming cycles that served as proxies for global warming saw a decrease in the coverage of heat-trapping cirrus clouds, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in UA Huntsville's Earth System Science Center.
"All leading climate models forecast that as the atmosphere warms there should be an increase in high altitude cirrus clouds, which would amplify any warming caused by manmade greenhouse gases," he said. "That amplification is a positive feedback. What we found in month-to-month fluctuations of the tropical climate system was a strongly negative feedback. As the tropical atmosphere warms, cirrus clouds decrease. That allows more infrared heat to escape from the atmosphere to outer space."
As the Earth's surface warms - due to either manmade greenhouse gases or natural fluctuations in the climate system - more water evaporates from the surface. Since more evaporation leads to more precipitation, most climate researchers expected increased cirrus cloudiness to follow warming. "To give an idea of how strong this enhanced cooling mechanism is, if it was operating on global warming, it would reduce estimates of future warming by over 75 percent," Spencer said.
"The big question that no one can answer right now is whether this enhanced cooling mechanism applies to global warming." "The role of clouds in global warming is widely agreed to be pretty uncertain," Spencer said. "Right now, all climate models predict that clouds will amplify warming. I'm betting that if the climate models' 'clouds' were made to behave the way we see these clouds behave in nature, it would substantially reduce the amount of climate change the models predict for the coming decades."
The team analyzed six years of data from four instruments aboard three NASA and NOAA satellites. The researchers tracked precipitation amounts, air and sea surface temperatures, high and low altitude cloud cover, reflected sunlight, and infrared energy escaping out to space. When they tracked the daily evolution of a composite of fifteen of the strongest intraseasonal oscillations they found that although rainfall and air temperatures would be rising, the amount of infrared energy being trapped by the cloudy areas would start to decrease rapidly as the air warmed. This unexpected behavior was traced to the decrease in cirrus cloud cover.
"Global warming theory says warming will generally be accompanied by more rainfall," Spencer said. "Everyone just assumed that more rainfall means more high altitude clouds. That would be your first guess and, since we didn't have any data to suggest otherwise ..." There are significant gaps in the scientific understanding of precipitation systems and their interactions with the climate, he said. "At least 80 percent of the Earth's natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems.
"Until we understand how precipitation systems change with warming, I don't believe we can know how much of our current warming is manmade. Without that knowledge, we can't predict future climate change with any degree of certainty.
"That's a remarkable quote: "Everyone just assumed" that more rainfall means more high altitude clouds. That is the level of scientific certainty on which claims of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming rest.
Source
Let's Not Throw Our Hard-Earned Money Away On The Global Warming Folly......
First of all, I argue that carbon dioxide emissions are not causing global warming. This is supported by abundant, sound scientific evidence. Secondly, just a few countries reducing carbon dioxide emissions can have no effect on a GLOBAL problem; and thirdly, the cost of pursuing this folly is astronomical, in the Trillions of dollars. Let's stop this insanity.
Peter
Climate Change Bill Has a Cost: $494 a Year for Every U.S. Man, Woman and Child
What's another $500 taken out of your paycheck over the course of a year? It probably isn't much to global warming alarmists like Al Gore, but that's what it could cost you if legislation pending in the U.S. Senate is passed into law. Does that $500 have your attention? Well, multiply that times every member of your immediate family.
According to a November 11 Washington Times editorial, a bill introduced in the Senate by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) that would require companies to scale back greenhouse-gas emissions could cost Americans $4 trillion to $6 trillion over the next 40 years. If that bill were passed and made law, the tax would cost every man, woman and child - more than 303 million Americans - $494 a year, a significant burden on the U.S. economy.
If you're not yet skeptical of this global warming initiative, listen to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who warns the effects of carbon caps would be limited unless imposed globally. He said in his book, "The Age of Turbulence," that caps imposed only on the United States could be detrimental.
"There is no effective way to meaningfully reduce emissions without negatively impacting a large part of an economy," Greenspan wrote. "Net, it is a tax. If the cap is low enough to make a meaningful inroad into CO2 emissions, permits will become expensive and large numbers of companies will experience cost increases that make them less competitive. Jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained."
Source
Peter
Climate Change Bill Has a Cost: $494 a Year for Every U.S. Man, Woman and Child
What's another $500 taken out of your paycheck over the course of a year? It probably isn't much to global warming alarmists like Al Gore, but that's what it could cost you if legislation pending in the U.S. Senate is passed into law. Does that $500 have your attention? Well, multiply that times every member of your immediate family.
According to a November 11 Washington Times editorial, a bill introduced in the Senate by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Warner (R-Va.) that would require companies to scale back greenhouse-gas emissions could cost Americans $4 trillion to $6 trillion over the next 40 years. If that bill were passed and made law, the tax would cost every man, woman and child - more than 303 million Americans - $494 a year, a significant burden on the U.S. economy.
If you're not yet skeptical of this global warming initiative, listen to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who warns the effects of carbon caps would be limited unless imposed globally. He said in his book, "The Age of Turbulence," that caps imposed only on the United States could be detrimental.
"There is no effective way to meaningfully reduce emissions without negatively impacting a large part of an economy," Greenspan wrote. "Net, it is a tax. If the cap is low enough to make a meaningful inroad into CO2 emissions, permits will become expensive and large numbers of companies will experience cost increases that make them less competitive. Jobs will be lost and real incomes of workers constrained."
Source
University Students Begin To Hear The Truth.......
Now it seems students at our major colleges (In this case Colgate University) are beginning to hear that there is some debate about the causes of global warming. The mainstream media is getting the message, students are starting to ask questions, and the man-caused global warming true believers and being called out. Things are looking up.
Peter
Lindzen says Chill out: Global Warming skeptic speaks at Colgate University,
NYStudents and faculty crowded into the Henshaw Lecture Room in Lathrop Hall on Thursday afternoon to hear a controversial lecture by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology Richard Lindzen. Colgate Professor of Political Science, Presidential Scholar and Director of the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization Robert Kraynak, who introduced Lindzen, explained that the original title of the lecture had been "Global Warming: Science and Moral Responsibility" but that he and Lindzen had come up with a better one: "Global Warming: Who's to Blame, Human Activities or Natural Causes?"
Lindzen is one of the most noted and prolific detractors from what Kraynak described as the "popular wisdom of global warming." Lindzen began by saying that he had "always assumed that talking about the weather was a source of boredom." He then began to explain his real concern that too much alarmism surrounds the topic of global climate change. His first goal: to debunk Al Gore.
He recalled that all schools in the United Kingdom had recently been required to show Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. He noted that a judge ruled that all presentations of the movie be accompanied by a presentation of critiques and explanations of some of the movie's scientific exaggerations. Lindzen cited one of Gore's statements in that film that a melting of the icecaps at either Greenland or West Antarctica would result in a sea level rise of 20 feet "in the near future." The judge, according to Lindzen, said, "this remark was distinctly alarmist" and that Gore's predicted result would take millennia to come about.
Lindzen called Gore's statement that "warming is real and caused by humans," a "masterful example of creative ambiguity." "The points of agreement [on warming] have no discernable connection to the alarm," Lindzen said. "If it turns out that we don't have warming or that it is not due to man, that has implications that the association of alarm with greenhouse gas emissions is baseless."
His next point questioned both the derivation and meaning of the popular model of the "hockey stick" graph of weather change, which shows a dramatic increase in temperature rise in recent history. "Even if you call that [rise] unprecedented, it is still too small to suggest alarm," Lindzen said. After bringing up the scientific inaccuracies in inferences Gore drew from a different graph in his book, Lindzen moved to a different argument against the catastrophic consequences that some predict will come as a result of global warming. "Any prediction of catastrophe is extremely unlikely," Lindzen said.
He cited the panic in the 1970s over the prediction of catastrophic American famine in the 1980s, which turned out to be false, as well as the infamous prediction of the Y2K disaster. "These predictions of catastrophe come up episodically and they are always wrong because they have wrong linkages," Lindzen said.
He then projected a model of the linkages leading from cause -- carbon dioxide emissions -- to effect -- disastrous warming effects -- in global warming and noted that the likelihood of each affecting the next was tiny, and that, in the end, the probability of any major effect of global warming was "astronomically small."
Lindzen also brought up how the media has manipulated scientific fact and consensus to promote global warming. He then went into a very scientific debunking of the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gases, concluding that, "from a religious point-of-view, the Earth is well-designed." He compared the attribution of global warming to greenhouse gases to the intelligent design theory. "We can't think of anything else, so there must be an intelligent designer," he said."
"There is nothing happening in nature that suggests anything urgent," Lindzen said. He then described all of the agendas of people who would be harmed "if you suddenly heard that there was no such thing as harmful global warming," including the Nobel Prize Committee, which recently gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, the environmental movement and science, alternative energy, the United Nations, trial lawyers "looking to make carbon the next tobacco" and individuals who have adopted this issue as a personal cause. "The alarmist dogmas of the past 20 years are almost certainly false or misleading," Lindzen said in conclusion.
A panel of three Colgate professors, Professor of Geography Adam Burnett, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Ephraim Woods and Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies Bob Turner were then allowed to ask Lindzen questions, followed by a question-and-answer session for students. "I think it's good to have folks on campus that have a strong point of view," Woods said. "But [Lindzen] doesn't engage in a discussion very well. He is very quick to reject some pieces of data as bad science or somehow contrived when they don't meet with his point of view."
"I thought that he made a very compelling argument," first-year Mike Abrahamson, who attended the lecture on suggestion from a professor, said. "I would say as someone who knows very little about the science on either side that it was very convincing." "It's nice that we now have viewpoints from both extreme sides of the issue," first-year Alyssa Perez said, referring to the lecture and to The Weather Makers, the required reading for incoming first-years. "Now I'd like to hear from someone more in the middle of the issue."
"I think this lecture helped a lot," Director of Summer Programs and Lecturer in University Studies Matt Leone, who suggested the lecture to his students, including Abrahamson and Perez, said. "Lindzen is an extraordinarily adept meteorologist. He is clearly very knowledgeable and passionate about his subject...This is the kind of thing that matters a lot. I can't be convinced one way or another because I'm not a scientist, but I do feel as a citizen that I should do my best to understand the subject as best I can."
Source
Peter
Lindzen says Chill out: Global Warming skeptic speaks at Colgate University,
NYStudents and faculty crowded into the Henshaw Lecture Room in Lathrop Hall on Thursday afternoon to hear a controversial lecture by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology Richard Lindzen. Colgate Professor of Political Science, Presidential Scholar and Director of the Center for Freedom and Western Civilization Robert Kraynak, who introduced Lindzen, explained that the original title of the lecture had been "Global Warming: Science and Moral Responsibility" but that he and Lindzen had come up with a better one: "Global Warming: Who's to Blame, Human Activities or Natural Causes?"
Lindzen is one of the most noted and prolific detractors from what Kraynak described as the "popular wisdom of global warming." Lindzen began by saying that he had "always assumed that talking about the weather was a source of boredom." He then began to explain his real concern that too much alarmism surrounds the topic of global climate change. His first goal: to debunk Al Gore.
He recalled that all schools in the United Kingdom had recently been required to show Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. He noted that a judge ruled that all presentations of the movie be accompanied by a presentation of critiques and explanations of some of the movie's scientific exaggerations. Lindzen cited one of Gore's statements in that film that a melting of the icecaps at either Greenland or West Antarctica would result in a sea level rise of 20 feet "in the near future." The judge, according to Lindzen, said, "this remark was distinctly alarmist" and that Gore's predicted result would take millennia to come about.
Lindzen called Gore's statement that "warming is real and caused by humans," a "masterful example of creative ambiguity." "The points of agreement [on warming] have no discernable connection to the alarm," Lindzen said. "If it turns out that we don't have warming or that it is not due to man, that has implications that the association of alarm with greenhouse gas emissions is baseless."
His next point questioned both the derivation and meaning of the popular model of the "hockey stick" graph of weather change, which shows a dramatic increase in temperature rise in recent history. "Even if you call that [rise] unprecedented, it is still too small to suggest alarm," Lindzen said. After bringing up the scientific inaccuracies in inferences Gore drew from a different graph in his book, Lindzen moved to a different argument against the catastrophic consequences that some predict will come as a result of global warming. "Any prediction of catastrophe is extremely unlikely," Lindzen said.
He cited the panic in the 1970s over the prediction of catastrophic American famine in the 1980s, which turned out to be false, as well as the infamous prediction of the Y2K disaster. "These predictions of catastrophe come up episodically and they are always wrong because they have wrong linkages," Lindzen said.
He then projected a model of the linkages leading from cause -- carbon dioxide emissions -- to effect -- disastrous warming effects -- in global warming and noted that the likelihood of each affecting the next was tiny, and that, in the end, the probability of any major effect of global warming was "astronomically small."
Lindzen also brought up how the media has manipulated scientific fact and consensus to promote global warming. He then went into a very scientific debunking of the sensitivity of climate to greenhouse gases, concluding that, "from a religious point-of-view, the Earth is well-designed." He compared the attribution of global warming to greenhouse gases to the intelligent design theory. "We can't think of anything else, so there must be an intelligent designer," he said."
"There is nothing happening in nature that suggests anything urgent," Lindzen said. He then described all of the agendas of people who would be harmed "if you suddenly heard that there was no such thing as harmful global warming," including the Nobel Prize Committee, which recently gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, the environmental movement and science, alternative energy, the United Nations, trial lawyers "looking to make carbon the next tobacco" and individuals who have adopted this issue as a personal cause. "The alarmist dogmas of the past 20 years are almost certainly false or misleading," Lindzen said in conclusion.
A panel of three Colgate professors, Professor of Geography Adam Burnett, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Ephraim Woods and Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies Bob Turner were then allowed to ask Lindzen questions, followed by a question-and-answer session for students. "I think it's good to have folks on campus that have a strong point of view," Woods said. "But [Lindzen] doesn't engage in a discussion very well. He is very quick to reject some pieces of data as bad science or somehow contrived when they don't meet with his point of view."
"I thought that he made a very compelling argument," first-year Mike Abrahamson, who attended the lecture on suggestion from a professor, said. "I would say as someone who knows very little about the science on either side that it was very convincing." "It's nice that we now have viewpoints from both extreme sides of the issue," first-year Alyssa Perez said, referring to the lecture and to The Weather Makers, the required reading for incoming first-years. "Now I'd like to hear from someone more in the middle of the issue."
"I think this lecture helped a lot," Director of Summer Programs and Lecturer in University Studies Matt Leone, who suggested the lecture to his students, including Abrahamson and Perez, said. "Lindzen is an extraordinarily adept meteorologist. He is clearly very knowledgeable and passionate about his subject...This is the kind of thing that matters a lot. I can't be convinced one way or another because I'm not a scientist, but I do feel as a citizen that I should do my best to understand the subject as best I can."
Source
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