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21 November, 2006

THOSE PESKY JEWS AGAIN: "PEAK-OIL" THEORY TAKES A DIVE

Ruining a good scare story

The Israeli process for producing energy from oil shale will cut its oil imports by one-third, and will serve as a guide for other countries with oil shale deposits, according to one company. A.F.S.K. Hom Tov presented its oil shale processing method on Tuesday, outside Haifa and just down the street from one of the country's two oil refinery facilities. "Because the patents for this process belong to (the company), Israel is the most advanced in the world in the effort to create energy from oil shale," Moshe Shahal, a Hom Tov legal representative and a former Israeli energy minister, told United Press International.

Shahal estimated that the company's Negev Desert facility would begin full-scale production in three to four years, while other countries with oil shale deposits will need five to six years to reach production. Oil shale is limestone rock that contains hydrocarbons, or fossil fuels -- about 20 percent of the amount of energy found in coal. Using the rock as a raw material and coating it with bitumen, a residue of the crude oil refining process, the company can produce natural gas, fuel, electricity, or a combination of the three. Older technologies squeezed the hydrocarbon material out of the rock, with extremely high pressure and at high temperatures.

According to Professor Ze'ev Aizenshtat, an oil shale expert, the Hom Tov process is more environmentally friendly than other methods of converting oil shale into energy. It also allows for more flexibility in the kind of fuel produced, produces less waste and operates at lower temperatures than other methods. Though the production process may be more environmentally friendly, the end product is still a fossil fuel, similar in quality to a high-grade diesel when in liquid form.

Israel's shale is low-quality, however -- its "caloric value" is only about 15 percent, while shale in other countries yields 20 percent, according to a report in BusinessWeek earlier this year. As a result, more Israeli shale is needed to produce the same amount of fuel. Hom Tov isn't worried, however. "This is a much lighter (substance) than what gradually comes out of an oil field," Aizenshtat told UPI, as Hom Tov company owners Israel Feldman and Shimon Kazansky posed for photographs with their fingers dipped in a plastic pitcher of the stuff. Because fewer refining processes are necessary with oil shale than with crude oil, the final product is a higher quality fuel at a lower price, Aizenshtat said.

The company estimates it will consume 6 million tons of oil shale and 2 million tons of refinery waste each year, for an annual production of 3 million tons of product. It would cost about $17 to produce a barrel of synthetic oil at the Hom Tov facility, meaning giant profit margins in a world of $45 to $60 per barrel crude. Yearly earnings are forecasted to be between $159 million and $350 million, Shahal said.

Israel has 15 billion tons of oil shale reserves. Jordan, on the other hand, has about 25 billion tons, and the oil shale in Jordan is of higher quality. Shahal met with Jordanian Energy Minister Azmi Khreisat earlier this year, to discuss setting up a plant there. The United States also has a giant reserve, mostly in Colorado, and Hom Tov sees potential for its patented process there.

The process, which Feldman and Kazansky developed in the mid-1990s, has lately attracted some high-powered investors, including Ofer Glazer -- the third husband of Israel's richest resident, billionaire Carnival Cruise heiress Shari Arison. "It's a kind of dream" to invest in Hom Tov, Glazer told UPI. "It's the type of investment where Israel needs the product, and it creates jobs." Glazer added that it will be good for Israel not to be dependent on "external sources" for its energy needs, saying that "those countries aren't exactly friendly (to Israel.)" As for his stake in the project, Glazer said he preferred "not to get into numbers."

Source



THE PRICE OF CLIMATE ALARMISM: "GREEN POLICIES THREATEN UK ECONOMY, MILLIONS OF JOBS"

British Airways has warned that businesses will quit Britain if the battle against global warming dictates the government's aviation policy and plans for a third runway at Heathrow airport are delayed.

Willie Walsh, BA's chief executive, said last night that millions of jobs would be affected if Heathrow was allowed to stagnate as an international flight hub. The department for transport is expected to update plans to build extra runways at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted airports when it publishes a progress report on its aviation white paper before Christmas.

Politicians and the environmental lobby have demanded action against the aviation industry, which is one of the fastest-growing contributors to carbon dioxide emissions and is under pressure to curb expansion plans. So far its response has been mixed. Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary has described calls for aviation taxes as "the usual horseshit", while Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic airline is forming a green aviation body.

Mr Walsh said in a speech at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London that Heathrow was losing its competitive edge to European rivals such as Frankfurt. He said its cramped conditions were putting off travellers while other flight hubs offered access to international destinations with fewer delays. BA has asked the government to hold a public consultation next year on whether there should be a third Heathrow runway, with a view to building it by 2015.

"In 25 years, Heathrow could be an aviation backwater - as relevant to the world economy of the mid 21st century as London's former East End docks. Even if we focus solely on Europe, we can see the threat to Heathrow's position over the next decade if nothing is done to increase runway capacity," he said.

If the rate of competitive decline continued, Heathrow's network of destinations would be nearly half the size of that offered by airports in Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam, which would affect the British economy and threaten millions of jobs, he said. "Without convenient access to markets, suppliers and investors, businesses cannot grow - and will simply relocate to centres that offer them the connectivity they need. Under present constraints, that means out of the UK," he said.

A 2km runway would increase the number of flights to and from Heathrow to 700,000 per year, up from 470,000, said Mr Walsh. A forthcoming study by Oxford Economic Forecasting is expected to back the case for a third runway by arguing that expansion at Heathrow would boost the economy. A report by the Treasury published three years ago said increased capacity at the airport would contribute o7.8bn to British gross domestic product.

"We cannot hope to maintain London's status as a premier league business centre, supporting millions of jobs across the country, unless we provide the world-class air links that businesses need in a global economy," Mr Walsh said.

His comments met with immediate criticism from the green lobby. Tony Bosworth, aviation campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said the government must rule out expansion of Heathrow as part of any drive to reduce carbon emissions.

Aviation accounts for 5.5% of British carbon emissions, but that could rise to a quarter by 2050 if no action is taken to curb airlines' emissions, according to a recent report from Oxford University.

"Aviation is the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide emissions in the UK. More runways will mean more emissions at a time when we are trying to make big cuts. If the government is serious about tackling climate change it must abandon its airport expansion plans," Mr Bosworth said.

The DfT backed a third runway in an aviation industry white paper three years ago. However, it said the runway should be moved to Gatwick if Heathrow's owner, BAA, was unable to reduce noise pollution and cut concentrations of nitrogen dioxide around the airport.

The BA chief executive reiterated the company's support for the EU carbon emissions trading scheme, which will put a cap on aviation emissions and charge airlines that exceed their quotas.

He said that blocking all the airport expansion proposals in the white paper, which also advocated a second runway at Stansted, would have a minimal effect on global warming. If all the proposals were implemented, global carbon emissions would increase by 0.03% by 2030.

Source



GM cottonseeds could feed world's starving millions

SCIENTISTS have genetically modified the cotton plant's naturally toxic seeds to turn them into a potential food source for millions of people. Researchers have found a way of reducing gossypol, a powerful toxin in the seeds, to a negligible level that allows them to be consumed by humans. At present they are thrown away or fed to cows.

Dr Keerti Rathore, a plant technologist at Texas Agricultural Experiment Station, which carried out the research, said enough cotton was already planted worldwide to supply the protein needs of 500m people. "The exciting finding is that we have been able to reduce gossypol to a level that is considered safe for human consumption," said Rathore, whose findings will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Further field and safety trials are needed but if successful the technique could turn out to be the "killer application" that supporters of GM technology have long hoped for. They believe environmentalists would find it hard to object to a crop with the potential to reduce world hunger on such a scale.

Gossypol is not just toxic but is also a powerful natural male contraceptive. The sperm of men who eat foods containing gossypol become deactivated. Cotton plants secrete the toxin into their stems, leaves and seeds because it affects pests in the same way, inhibiting their breeding and reducing their numbers.

Rathore and his colleagues got round this problem using a relatively new technique known as RNA interference, or RNAi, to suppress one of the key genes involved in producing gossypol. "Very few people realise that for every pound of cotton fibre the plant produces 1.6lb of seed," said Rathore. "Overall, the world produces 44m tons of cottonseed each year containing about 22% high-quality protein."

Scientists have created cotton plants without gossypol before, through conventional breeding techniques, but they were attacked by pests. Rathore's method strips gossypol from the seeds only, leaving the rest of the plant protected.

For farmers there will be a potential surge in the value of a crop that can be sold for food as well as clothing. Environmentalists, however, remain sceptical. They point to similar claims made for crops such as golden rice, which was genetically engineered to contain vitamin A. It subsequently emerged that people would need to eat huge amounts to gain any benefit. Sue Mayer, the director of GeneWatch UK, urged caution. "Poverty and hunger are complex problems caused by bad government, poor economies and war," she said. "It is not just a matter of finding a new wonder plant."

Source



FRUSTRATION AS CLIMATE CHANGE TALKS STALL

Representatives of 190 countries have been playing a diplomatic poker game at the UN Climate Change Summit in Nairobi for the past week, with almost none of them prepared to spell out what they intend to do about global warming.

Developed countries who have taken on targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol are reluctant to enter into further commitments after it expires in 2012 without indications that developing countries such as China are prepared to climb on board. Many of the 56 developed countries that have ratified the protocol are finding it difficult to achieve even the fairly minimal curbs on emissions required by Kyoto, and some of them - including Ireland - have fallen way behind in terms of meeting their commitments.

But China and other major players such as India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa are equally reluctant to sign up for cuts in emissions pending the outcome of a dialogue on how to deal with an issue that nearly everyone now accepts has become more urgent year by year.

Environment ministers, including Ireland's Dick Roche, will start arriving in Nairobi tomorrow for the "high-level segment" of the conference, which will be addressed by the British government's chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the recent major report on climate change.

The Stern review has injected a fresh impetus into the proceedings. Its central conclusion - that it would be much more economical to start making deep cuts in emissions within the next 10 years than to try to fix the problem later on - is widely, though not universally, accepted here.

But there is frustration over the lack of progress. Japanese ambassador Mutsuyoshi Nishimura, described climate change as a deadly serious business and said if countries were unwilling to discuss the stabilisation of emissions at this summit, he wanted to know when they would do so. "Our job starts by looking at a global long-term vision and whether it is aspirational or otherwise," Mr Nishimura told fellow delegates. "I will go home unless we are willing to send a global message to the world that the UN is moving to achieve stabilisation of the climate," he added.

Green Party TD Eamon Ryan, who has spent the past week at the conference and is returning to Dublin today, was equally frustrated. "The slow pace of progress is in direct contrast to the urgency with which this issue needs to be addressed," he said. "These are the most important set of negotiations in the history of humanity - far surpassing Versailles," Mr Ryan said. He also noted that the US delegation had barely featured in the talks so far, possibly reeling from last week's "thumping" for President Bush in the mid-term elections.

Michael Zammit Cutajar, the Maltese ambassador expertly chairing the important "ad hoc working group" on what happens after 2012, has drafted the text of a possible deal and spent the weekend holding informal talks with key delegates in the hope of making some progress today.

Source



Make poverty history: first by getting rid of the Greens

At U2's Sydney concerts last week, Bono urged the audience to text their names to a Make Poverty History phone number. Later he flashed the names on a big screen and sent a thank you text to all those mobile phones in Telstra Stadium. As an act of charity it doesn't come much easier, unless you count wearing wristbands. This is not to sneer at Bono for raising consciousness of the world's poor, or his audience for making a gesture. But as protesters and green activists gather in Melbourne this weekend to lay the usual blame for poverty on the greed of developed nations, a powerful new documentary shines light on a different villain.

Mine Your Own Business, which opens this week, shows that the "powerful group telling the world's poor how to live, how to work, even how to think" are not the world leaders gathered in Melbourne. They're not even wealthy multinational corporations, but wealthy multinational environment groups such as Greenpeace. "Upper-class Western environmentalists" are the greatest enemy of the world's poor, says the documentary's maker, self-described left-wing journalist Phelim McAleer, from Northern Ireland. He shows how environmental groups opposed to change and economic growth are trying to keep the developing world poor. "Poor but happy", is how they see it.

Posted to Romania by The Financial Times in 2000, McAleer covered the Greenpeace campaign to prevent the opening of a goldmine in the Transylvanian mountains. It changed his views on environmental activism. What he found in Rosia Montana was an impoverished village, with 75 per cent unemployment, little sanitation or running water and people desperate for jobs. It had been a mining town since Roman times but the last state-owned mine was closing and a Canadian company, Gabriel Resources, wanted to take over. It had promised to provide jobs, rebuild infrastructure and clean up pollution from old mines.

Early on McAleer acknowledges his film was part-funded by Gabriel Resources but says he retained editorial control. He interviews Francoise Heidebroek, a Belgian green activist who says villagers are better off being farmers and riding horses. But as the villagers explain, nothing grows except potatoes, and at minus 25 degrees they prefer cars and indoor toilets. Gheorghe Lucian, an unemployed miner, tells McAleer: "People have no food to eat. They don't have money for clothes . I know what I need - a job."

McAleer took Lucian to similar projects around the world, and interviewed activists such as Mark Fenn, World Wide Fund for Nature's American representative in southern Madagascar, who opposes a Rio Tinto mine in the impoverished fishing village of Fort Daupin, which would create 2000 jobs. "The quaintness, the small-town feeling will change," Fenn says. Fenn insists that Lucian doesn't really understand poverty. "How do we perceive who's rich, who's poor ." Fenn says. "I could put you with a family and you count how many times in a day that family smile . Then I put you with a family well off, in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile and measure stress . Then you tell me who is rich and who is poor." Underlining the hypocrisy, Fenn shows McAleer the luxury house he is building and catamaran he bought for $US30,000 ($39,000) - "a good price". As McAleer says, the average salary in the village is less than $US100 a month. But, "the indicators of wellbeing aren't housing, nutrition, health, education", says Fenn, although he sends his own children to school in South Africa.

The villagers tell McAleer the opposite. One says she wants her children to become "a midwife, a doctor, or an engineer". It's the same story in Chile where activists have halted a goldmine in the Andes. A young man tells McAleer: "I'm not asking for much, just a normal job." McAleer shows how progressives oppose progress and have become part of an "authoritarian world order", telling people in the developing world how they must live. He hopes his film will show well-meaning Westerners the consequences of their blind faith in the new "religion" of environmentalism. McAleer has been brought to Sydney this week by the conservative think tank, Institute of Public Affairs, for a screening on Wednesday night at the Dendy, East Circular Quay.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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20 November, 2006

What will we do when America's lights go out?

Soon after the widespread blackouts of 2003, the Electric Reliability Organization was etablished, and it recently issued its first report. That report makes for grim reading because the nation's electric power infrastructure is on the brink of collapse.

Misguided environmental regulations, green obstructionism and the NIMBY (Not-in-my-backyard) syndrome have combined to delay the construction of desperately needed new power plants and transmission lines. The result is an infrastructure that will soon be unable to meet the demands of the American economy. Policy makers must act now to re-empower America. The ERO projects that U.S. demand will increase by 141,000 megawatts (MW) over the next 10 years. Supply, however, will increase by only 57,000 MW, and that assumes that all currently proposed new facilities are approved and built. The system will be operating below the marginal capacity needed to ensure supply reliability at all times. In other words, in peak periods like heat waves, there won't be enough electricity to go around. Blackouts will inevitably result.

One key problem is the sheer difficulty in building new power plants in America today. Politically powerful green lobby groups object to the building of any new plant that does not use some form of renewable energy, yet renewable energy cannot meet demand for power on its own.

They also object to nuclear power stations because of their supposed danger, even though modern nuclear plants have an impeccable safety record. And they oppose coal-fired plants because of their alleged contribution to global warming.

To back up their objections, many environmental pressure groups generally have large budgets and huge teams of lawyers. One group boasted of having 75 lawyers working on a measure in California.

These groups are currently running a massive campaign in Texas to prevent the building of new coal-fired plants, without which the state will be patently unable to meet its needs. Transmission lines face even worse obstruction.

Meanwhile, utilities are prevented by regulation from using flexible pricing structures to incentivize efficient energy use. A highly regulated grid is not conducive to the efficient flow of electricity. This is why the ERO has recommended a series of reforms. Foremost among these is the removal of regulatory barriers to the building of new infrastructure. Power plants and transmission lines need to be built urgently; measures that facilitate green obstructionism must be repealed. Without this new capacity, the power supply system will fail.

Let us be clear about what that would mean. The electric power supply will be interrupted when it cannot meet demand. Lights will go out. Offices will cease to function. People will freeze or swelter. Elderly people will die. If sustained, this situation will severely damage the economy. Jobs will be lost. Health will suffer. The poor will get poorer. Flows of money from America to the developing world will shrink.

I remember as a young boy in England, huddling with my family round a coal fire that was our only source of heat and light (bar a few candles) during the power disruptions of the 1970s. A world without power is not a pleasant place.

One hundred years ago, the average Westerner had an annual income equivalent to $4,000. A man could only work somewhere he could walk to; a woman spent much of her life performing back-breaking domestic labor. Medical science, while advancing, was still almost medieval in its practical application. Much has changed in the last century, but in all cases the key to freeing us from these strictures has been widespread, affordable energy. A permanent flow of electricity has powered an explosion in wealth that has enabled millions to live long, fulfilling lives free from crushing hardship. The condition of life is no longer nasty, brutish and short.

It is a moral imperative to keep the power flowing. If our forefathers a century ago had worried about the side effects of using all that energy and set in place restrictions to stop it, millions - no, billions - would have suffered as a result.

Denied the technological advances that energy use enabled, we would live shorter lives and be doomed to labor - a poorer life in every sense. We should be thankful our ancestors chose not to legislate in our interests. Rather than worrying about our great-grandchildren, we should instead be worrying about our brothers and sisters. The lesson of the ERO report is that we must take measures now to ensure the power keeps flowing.

Source



U.N. CLIMATE TALKS GRIDLOCKED

U.N. talks on fighting climate change were gridlocked on their final day on Friday as organizers faced criticism of scant progress in aiding Africa and slowing global warming. Rich and poor countries are split at the 189-nation talks about how to extend the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, the main U.N. plan for fighting global warming, beyond 2012 to help avert climate change that could batter the world economy. After two weeks of meetings, about 70 environment ministers have agreed on some new ways to help Africa but are deadlocked on two issues -- a review of how effectively Kyoto is working and a proposal by Russia to allow new nations to sign up. "The two big issues are still open," said Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N. Climate Secretariat....

De Boer dismissed environmentalists' complaints that the 6,000 bureaucrats at the talks had achieved too little to help the poor amid U.N. projections of more droughts, heatwaves, famines and rising seas. "I think the conference has made very significant progress for developing countries," de Boer said, pointing to incentives to promote clean energy such as solar or wind power under a scheme that could channel $100 billion to poor nations by 2012. He also said the talks had set principles for a fund meant to help developing nations adapt to climate change. The fund is expected to grow sharply but is now worth just $3 million -- less than the $4 million cost of staging the Nairobi talks. "Rich countries should have achieved more at this conference and made more firm commitments to combat climate injustice," said Sharon Looremeta, a Kenyan Maasai leader of environmental group Practical Action.

She said many of the delegates were treating the meeting more as a holiday safari than a forum to confront what U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan called an "all-encompassing threat" in a speech to delegates on Wednesday.

Many backers of Kyoto see a planned review of the Protocol working as a possible prelude to getting more countries involved after 2012 -- especially big emitters led by the United States, China and India. But poorer states say the rich must continue to take the lead and President George W. Bush says he has no plans to rejoin Kyoto -- a scheme he views as an economic straitjacket.

A draft proposal by the chair of the meeting on Friday said commitments under Kyoto, obliging rich nations to cut emissions to 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012, "are not adequate" to fight climate change and proposes a full review in 2008. Kyoto nations account for just 30 percent of emissions of greenhouse gases and want a more global deal. Russia is proposing a new mechanism to allow countries outside Kyoto to volunteer to cut their emissions. Some backers of Kyoto fear that Moscow is mainly seeking to help former communist states to win big credits under Kyoto since their emissions have fallen sharply from 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Source



BRITAIN CONCEDES DEFEAT: POST-KYOTO DEAL IS OUT OF REACH

A global post-Kyoto agreement is still out of reach as the UN summit on climate change concludes its final day of talks in Nairobi, David Miliband admitted today. Speaking exclusive to Guardian Unlimited on the closing day of a fortnight of talks, the environment secretary said the summit had failed to gain sufficient momentum to agree a deal on greenhouse gas emissions because of a glaring "gap" between science and politics.

Mr Miliband lauded the significant progress made over adaptation funding for developing countries, and what he called a vigorous commitment to a works programme. But he said some "very difficult discussions" were still under way over the strength of international commitment to a deal. "Where the final drive of negotiations needs to take place over the next few hours concerns the ability to inject a new momentum in the long-term discussions of a global emissions deal," he said.

Mr Miliband held out little hope that a firm international commitment would be ratified on the final day of talks. "That is where we have a real crunch point on some of the issues we have been discussing," he said. Mr Miliband refused to name recalcitrant countries, but he hinted that industrialised and developing countries alike were hesitant. The latter group feared they would be expected to make the same level of contributions as their wealthier neighbours, he said. "There are some richer countries who are concerned that that no country can have a free pass on this, and although not all countries will take on hard targets, every country needs to play some role. "That is the essential balance. The need [is] for a global deal in which every country plays a part, but the fact is that richer countries are going to be able to contribute more. "I am confident we can offer two cheers for this process. But the third cheer is going to rely on a real drive over the next year because 2007 is going to be a critical year for putting urgency and momentum into the drive for a global emissions deal."

The environment secretary added: "One of the reflections we will have is about the size of the gap between science and politics." It was a "real issue" that only the UK and Germany had set binding, long-term targets for reducing carbon emissions. Mr Miliband said the forthcoming G8 talks in Germany would provide an opportunity to revisit the need for "urgency and drive" in moving towards a new climate change agreement to operate after the current Kyoto commitments end in 2012.

The environment secretary declined to say whether a specific adaptation funding deal had been struck to help African countries cope with climate change, but he said general overseas aid should also be "carbon-proofed". "We have to make sure there is an adaptation fund, but we also have to make sure that aid policies are generally sustainable", he said.

Mr Miliband, who is due to close the Commons debate on the Queen's speech this Monday, said he would tell government colleagues they all had a "part to play" in delivering the climate change agenda. "From the prime minister to the chancellor and the foreign secretary, and me as environment secretary, every member of the cabinet has a role to play." Earlier this week, Mr Miliband scotched rumours of a rift with the chancellor, Gordon Brown, over planned environmental policies targeted at business.

Source



SHOCK! HORROR! EU STUDY WARMS TO TECHNOLOGICAL APPROACH TO CLIMATE-CHANGE

A recent EU-funded study shows that better use of technology can combat air pollution and lower the impact of those greenhouse gases not covered by the Kyoto Protocol.

The study, published in the journal "Environmental Science and Technology" on 15 November, compared the results of 26 models of atmospheric chemistry covering the entire global atmosphere.

In a challenge to policies championed by the EU, including the much-debated emissions trading scheme for CO2, it found that current international protocols and national legislation to reduce air pollution are not sufficient to reduce global warming.

The researchers said that this was because existing policies do too little to tackle other gases such as ozone. "Even with the legislation that is in place, the models showed that emissions would still increase," the Commission said.

The researchers believe better use of existing technology is necessary to minimise the negative impacts of ozone which contributes to global warming.

The EU, North American countries and Japan currently have laws establishing limits for the concentrations of ozone in the air and other countries in Asia and Latin America are introducing them. Internationally, there is a UN convention on long-range trans-boundary air pollution that identifies specific measures to be taken to reduce emissions of air pollutants such as ozone.

The study comes as environment ministers from around the world meet in Nairobi, Kenya, for an international conference on global warming. They are due to discuss possible action to combat climate change when the Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012.

Source



ANOTHER ECO-SCARE DEBUNKED AS WORLD'S FORESTS EXPAND

For years, environmentalists have been raising the alarm about deforestation. But even as forests continue to shrink in some nations, others grow - and new research suggests the planet may now be nearing the transition to a greater sum of forests.

A new formula to measure forest cover, developed by researchers at The Rockefeller University and the University of Helsinki, in collaboration with scientists in China, Scotland and the U.S., suggests that an increasing number of countries and regions are transitioning from deforestation to afforestation, raising hopes for a turning point for the world as a whole. The novel approach, published this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks beyond simply how much of a nation's area is covered by trees and considers the volume of timber, biomass and captured carbon within the area. It produces an encouraging picture of Earth's forest situation and may change the way governments size up their woodland resources in the future. "Instead of a skinhead Earth, we may enjoy a great restoration of forests in the 21st century," says study co-author Jesse Ausubel, director of The Rockefeller University's Program for the Human Environment.

The formula, known as "Forest Identity," considers both area and the density of trees per hectare to determine the volume of a country's "growing stock": trees large enough to be considered timber. Applying the formula to data collected by the United Nations and released last year, the researchers found that, amid widespread concerns about deforestation, growing stock has expanded over the past 15 years in 22 of the world's 50 countries with most forest cover. In countries where per capita gross domestic product exceeds $4,600 (roughly equal to the GDP of Chile), richer is greener. In about half the most forested countries, biomass and carbon also expanded. Earlier work showed that by the 1980s wooded areas in all major temperate and boreal forests were expanding.

Forest area and biomass are still being lost in such important countries as Brazil and Indonesia but an increasing number of nations show gains. The forests of Earth's two most populated nations no longer increase atmospheric carbon concentration: China's forests are expanding; India's have reached equalibrium.

The researchers found that among the 50 nations studied, forest area in percentage terms shrank fastest from 1990 to 2005 in Nigeria and the Philippines, and expanded fastest in Vietnam, Spain and China. Growing stock fell fastest in Indonesia, Nigeria and the Philippines, and increased fastest in the Ukraine and Spain. In absolute terms, Indonesia and Brazil experienced the greatest losses of both forested square kilometers and cubic meters of growing stock; China and the USA achieved the greatest gains. "For many years, the Earth has suffered an epidemic of deforestation. Now humans may help spread an epidemic of forest restoration," says Ausubel.

When forest transition occurs at a global level depends largely on Brazil and Indonesia, where huge areas of tropical forests are rapidly being cut and cleared. Encouragingly, in many other tropical areas forests are regrowing. Studies in Central America show tree cover in El Salvador grew one-quarter from 1992 to 2001. Forests are also recovering fast in the Dominican Republic in harsh contrast to deforested Haiti, on the same Caribbean island.

"The main obstacles to forest transition are fast-growing poor populations who burn wood to cook, sell it for quick cash and clear forest for crops," says study co-author Pekka E. Kauppi, of the University of Helsinki. "Harvesting biomass for fuel also forestalls the restoration of land to nature. Through paper recycling and a growing reliance on electronic communication, people help the transition by lessening demand for wood products."

In addition to the measurement of forest area and growing stock, the researchers offer a formula to calculate atmospheric carbon being stored incrementally in the trees of a given area, knowledge critical for mitigating climate change. A rapid forest transition on a global scale would mean that atmospheric carbon dioxide might not rise as fast as many fear.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************



19 November, 2006

A GOOD ONE FOR THE GREENIES

Antarctic disaster:

Certain moments stick in your head. Take, for example, the story of the Siberian ponies adrift on an Antarctic ice floe surrounded by killer whales. Something about the scene... lodged in the mind of Sidney Nolan, who painted a version of it when he returned from his own eight-day trip to Antarctica...

What had happened? Nolan explained it in a letter to Hal Missingham, director of the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney.... "Once, five of the ponies, covered in green rugs, were lost on an ice floe which drifted out to sea surrounded by killer whales (these whales are beautiful, black with ivory breast and lethal to everything). (Henry) Bowers and his party, on the floe with the ponies, managed to save one of the ponies after some awful moments. The episode was witnessed from the shore by either Wilson or Scott (I have forgotten which) through field glasses and tears. Anyway, it is roughly this moment I have tried to paint."

You can see why the scene might have affected Nolan. For starters, it was horrible to contemplate; it would have affected anyone. But it also had a particular quality - surreal, deadly happenings in an extreme, implacable setting - that Nolan seemed to relish...

More here

The only pesky thing is that the above all happened in 1911



GREENIE PROTOCOLS CLASH WITH ONE-ANOTHER

Delegates at a U.N.-backed climate change conference have deferred a deal to allow new refrigerant plants in China and India to get lucrative funding under the Kyoto global warming pact, a U.N. official said. "China, Brazil, Argentina and the European Union could not reach agreement," the official said on Tuesday, adding the next conference in 2007 would take up the issue.

Existing refrigerant plants produce as a by-product the super greenhouse gas HFC 23, but under Kyoto carbon trading rules factory owners can sell lucrative carbon credits by destroying this gas. It was the extension of these rules to new plants that delegates at the 189-country climate change conference in Nairobi could not agree on. Kyoto sets rich countries limits on emissions of greenhouse gases, but allows them to meet these targets by funding cuts in developing countries, spawning a carbon trade worth $5 billion in the last 20 months.

The destruction of HFC 23 has been by far the most lucrative of such trades. For example, the World Bank pocketed some 25 million euros ($32 million) in management fees alone this summer for arranging two landmark HFC 23 deals in China, where factories pledged to destroy some 130 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in an 800 million euro deal.

The sticking point on a deal for new plants was that these factories also produce HCFC 22, a gas which damages the earth's ozone layer, something which a separate pact, the Montreal Protocol, is meant to stop. Some delegates believed that Kyoto should not effectively give factories incentives to produce HCFC 22 by funding HFC 23 destruction. "That goes against the Montreal Protocol," said the official.

Source



MILTON FRIEDMAN AND THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS: A WARNING FROM HISTORY

My concern is with how "scientific consensus" is reached. In economics in the 1960's, there was a "scientific consensus," embedded in sophisticated macro-econometric models, that inflation reflected a competition over income shares, and that government policies to interfere with wage- and price-setting were the solution. Milton Friedman's contrary views were outside the "scientific consensus." By 1985 or so, the "scientific consensus" had shifted, in part because policies based on that consensus were tried in the 1970's, leading to the worst macroeconomic performance of the post-war period.

By the 1990's, large macro-econometric models had pretty much disappeared from the economics literature. The problem with macro-econometrics is that the models continually broke down out of sample. That is, a model estimated through 1969 would work terribly in predicting the early 1970's. A model estimated through 1975 would work terribly in predicting the late 1970's, and so on.

Milton Friedman's dissenting views of 1967 are close to the [global warming] consensus views today. I wish that climate-change models did not remind me so much of macro-econometric models. I wish that the contempt that the Left expresses for dissenting views in climate science did not remind me of the contempt that the Left expressed for Milton Friedman. And I wish that the debate over climate change were being waged over substance, rather than with type M arguments and on film. Movies are a propaganda medium, not an information medium.

I worry that the environmentalists are motivating themselves to stage a religious war over global warming. My guess is that mankind will not be well served by such a religious war.

Source



The Baptist and the Bootlegger: An unlikely coalition for climate control



The carbon traders, brokers, and consultants, the companies seeking wealth transfers, the climate bureaucrats, and last, but not least, environmental lobbyists are crawling all over the UN's Gigiri complex on the outskirts of Nairobi. Several years ago, Clemson University economist Bruce Yandle predicted that a classic Baptist and Bootlegger climate coalition would emerge in the wake of the Kyoto Protocol. And so it has. The idea of a Baptist and Bootlegger coalition is that both Baptists and Bootleggers support blue laws forbidding the sale of liquor. The Baptists favor blue laws because they are against sin and the Bootleggers because it creates a profitable market for them.

The central focus of 12th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is carbon markets and how to expand them. All of the sessions that I attended here featured at least some talk about carbon markets by prominent bureaucrats, industry lobbyists and the environmental lobbyists. And according to them, carbon markets will whiten your teeth and freshen your breath, put a sparkle in your eye, a spring in your step, slim you down and vastly improve your sex life. Or at least fatten their bottom lines by saving the planet.

One Green "Baptist," Matthias Duwe, from the Climate Action Network, explained his group's support for carbon markets by saying, "Environmental effectiveness is what counts. What we want is absolute reductions in emissions. Sending signals to business is secondary." In other words, they are against environmental sin and they think that carbon markets will help stamp out the sin of emitting noxious greenhouse gases. Right beside him on the panel sat an earnest climate Bootlegger, Kate Hampton, a policy advisor to a British merchant bank that has established the $1 billion Climate Change Capital fund that invests in carbon markets. She thinks there's plenty of money to be made if the politicians and bureaucrats set stringent limits on how much carbon companies can emit. Hampton aptly described the European Union's Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) as a "policy-driven market."

And that's a pretty good description. After all, carbon trading came into existence solely as a result of the Kyoto Protocol. Carbon markets are created by imposing a cap on the emissions of greenhouse gases that are believed to contribute to recent global warming then allocating permits for the amount that can be emitted. A carbon market was selected as a way to manage carbon emissions instead of carbon taxes which Duwe pointed out the EU discussed for ten years and it got nowhere with them.

Carbon markets allow governments to set actual limits on emissions and then let the private sector figure out the most cost-effective ways to reduce emissions. This is done at the cost of some volatility-the price for emissions permits can go up and down steeply and quite rapidly. Carbon taxes, on the other hand, offer the possibility of a stable price, but at the cost of flexibility in figuring out the cheapest ways to cut emissions. Another downside for global warming activists like Duwe is that taxes do not specify actual reductions.

Although a climate Baptist, Duwe does appreciate that a carbon market sends the signal to business that "every unit of carbon dioxide that goes out the window is a unit that could be sold." In other words, if a company can reduce its emissions below its allocation, it can make money by selling its remaining allocation to another company. Of course, a company can also make windfall profits if the government allocates it more permits for emissions than it actually needs.

So are carbon markets here to stay? Here in Nairobi, climate Baptists and Bootleggers and their bureaucratic facilitators constantly repeat the mantra that no matter what, the European Union will have a carbon market after the Kyoto Protocol comes to an end in 2012. Really and truly it will, it will! To a cynic they begin to sound like they are whistling past the graveyard. In fact, activists began distributing a T-shirt today emblazoned with the slogan "Mind the Gap." The "gap" they fear is the one that might open up between 2012 when the Kyoto Protocol ends and whatever other climate treaty follows. Carbon investors and traders could fall into the "gap" never to emerge again, that is, they could lose faith that governments mean seriously to impose carbon limits and stop putting up money to abate carbon emissions. The "gap" is what carbon market advocates call the continuity problem.

Hampton pointed out that what happens after Kyoto matters because if emitters-especially big power and industrial companies--don't believe that carbon will have a price in the future, they will not invest in long term expensive low carbon infrastructure. According to Hampton, Germany is slated to replace 20 percent of its energy infrastructure by 2012. Power generators will not choose more costly lower carbon technologies unless they think that it will save them money in the long run. Hampton says, "It really is policy and regulation that drive investment. The lack of a long term carbon signal undermines business's ability make rational decisions on investment."

All of the climate coalition members were eager to explain the precipitous drop in carbon prices in the ETS in May as growing pains. It turns out that most European governments allocated more emission permits than there were actual emissions. When the actual level of emissions was verified in May and it turned out that companies emitted 66 million tons of carbon less than allowed in 2005. This provoked, as they say, a correction of about 50 percent. Of course, both the climate Baptists and Bootleggers are keen to get climate bureaucrats to more strongly restrict the number of permits that are issued in the future. That would give the climate Baptists lower emissions they want and the climate Bootleggers the higher prices they crave. A win/win for everyone, except for perhaps the hapless consumers who have to pay more for the energy and products they buy.

If Europe does go it alone with its carbon market, Europe's manufacturers will argue that they can't compete with foreign companies that don't have to pay for their carbon. Already the European Commission has convened a High Level Group to consider imposing border taxes to level the playing field. Hampton warned, "What signal does this send--that carbon markets are so onerous that you have to build a fortress around yourself." Nevertheless, she did note that such countervailing CO2 import tariffs could be compatible with World Trade Organization rules. She pointed out that after the United States banned ozone depleting chemicals in the 1970s, it began imposing tariffs on such imports and no one objected that it violated free trade rules.

All of the participants on the UN conference side panels are impatient to get the United States to join the carbon market. However, the World Resource Institute's Jonathan Pershing said, "I don't think that there will be a common integrated market in the next commitment period." The next commitment period means between 2012 and 2020.

On the other hand, Hampton declared, "This is the decade in which we will find out if the world is capable of setting and reaching goals that will keep the rise in average temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius." And if that happens, the planet may benefit, but the climate Baptists and Bootleggers certainly will.

Source



Australia's sardine trains: How to get people out of their cars?

Almost 22,000 additional passengers a day are squeezing on to southeast Queensland Citytrains compared with four years ago. The burgeoning passenger numbers - the equivalent of almost eight million extra trips a year - comes despite the fact no extra train carriages have hit the tracks since 2001. Transport Minister Paul Lucas yesterday played down the increasingly crowded train services, saying the Government was well advanced with its plans to address booming demand. Mr Lucas said more than $500 million was being spent building an additional 44 three-car train sets which would be rolled out over the next three years.

He said from the initial 24 trains, eight would service the Gold Coast, three the Sunshine Coast while the remaining 13 would go into service across Brisbane. "The Beattie Government has invested massively in rolling stock on the Citytrain network," Mr Lucas said.

However, Coalition transport spokesman Vaughan Johnson said the extra trains were "too little, too late". "The Government knows the population has been exploding in the southeast corner," he said. "They should have been delivering between four and six three-car sets every year to meet demand."

Queensland Rail's annual report for 2005-06 reveals only four additional train carriages in total were added to the statewide network last financial year, taking the total rolling stock to 666. However, none of the extra trains was built for the Citytrain network. Two of the carriages went into service on the company's heritage excursions while the other two were added to Traveltrain services where passenger numbers are plummeting.

Queensland Rail figures show the Citytrain network had 144 three-car trains sets and eight four-car sets in 2001-02. In 2005-06, the only change has been the loss of one of the three-car sets to an accident several years ago. Over the same period, the number of Citytrain passenger trips increased from 45 million to 53 million following a jump in trip numbers of 4.5 million over the next 12 months.

However, Mr Lucas said the growth in Citytrain had not just come in peak times. "That growth in passenger trips has come from a number of sectors including free travel to and from major sporting events, new late night and early morning services, off-peak trips made easier through integrated ticketing under TransLink, as well as increased trips to and from work," Mr Lucas said.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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18 November, 2006

BURN DOWN THOSE TREES! THEY CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING!

Forest fires can help to reduce global warming, despite generating tonnes of carbon dioxide, a study has found. Scientists looking at the effect of fires in boreal (northern coniferous) forests found that in the long term the loss of trees means that more sunlight is reflected away from the Earth. This is because more snow, which is highly reflective, is able to cover the ground.

There is a similar effect when new trees start growing their light green leaves, which reflect better than dark foliage. "The reflectivity effect in the long run is larger than the carbon effect," Michelle Mack, of the University of Florida, said.

Boreal forests, which account for 14.5 per cent of land surface, are thought to contain 30 per cent of all the CO2 held by plants and soils. It had been feared that dryness caused by global warming would increase the frequency of fires. The findings, the researchers say, mean that plans to cut CO2 emissions by planting trees and preventing fires need to be reassessed

Source

Journal abstract follows:

The Impact of Boreal Forest Fire on Climate Warming

J. T. Randerson et al.

We report measurements and analysis of a boreal forest fire, integrating the effects of greenhouse gases, aerosols, black carbon deposition on snow and sea ice, and postfire changes in surface albedo. The net effect of all agents was to increase radiative forcing during the first year (34 ~ 31 Watts per square meter of burned area), but to decrease radiative forcing when averaged over an 80-year fire cycle (-2.3 ~ 2.2 Watts per square meter) because multidecadal increases in surface albedo had a larger impact than fire-emitted greenhouse gases. This result implies that future increases in boreal fire may not accelerate climate warming.

Al Gore rains on his own party

Andrew Bolt comments, from Victoria, Australia

Al Gore flies in to warn about global warming and -- he's done it again! -- Victoria gets snow in November. Call it the Gore Effect -- the uncanny ability of the world's most famous global warming alarmist to cool any place he tours. You see, this has happened to the former US vice-president and narrator of An Inconvenient Truth rather a lot.

It was first noticed in Boston in 2004, when Gore was due to give a big speech in Boston on the imminent danger of the world frying. Bingo! The city had its coldest temperatures in almost 50 years. Same story with his speech that year in New York -- delivered in near-record low temperatures.

Or look over at New Zealand, which has just finished hosting another Gore tour. It's bad enough that the place was just emerging from one of its wettest and coldest winters on record. Now the local papers report: "An unusually cold October has left Southland dairy farmers struggling."

Of course, it's not just Gore who can bring a chill just by talking about global warming. A fortnight ago we read this in a Sydney newspaper: "Thousands of people have marched through central Sydney, ignoring wet and windy weather to protest against global warming." Of course, I won't make the mistake of the alarmists and claim one freak of weather disproves or proves an entire theory. Weather changes, and always has, which is a truth so many city people seem to have forgotten in this frenzy of fear.

But long-term, there is some good news. Since the big scare of 1998 -- said to be the hottest year since the Middle Ages -- the world's temperatures have fallen slightly and stayed there. Australia's temperature this year is lower than last year's. Now there are some facts to warm you.

Source



Greenie madness metastasizes: They now want to CREATE pollution



If the sun warms the Earth too dangerously, the time may come to draw the shade. The "shade" would be a layer of pollution deliberately spewed into the atmosphere to help cool the planet. This over-the-top idea comes from prominent scientists, among them a Nobel laureate. The reaction here at the U.N. conference on climate change is a mix of caution, curiosity and some resignation to such "massive and drastic" operations, as the chief U.N. climatologist describes them.

The Nobel Prize-winning scientist who first made the proposal is himself "not enthusiastic about it." "It was meant to startle the policy makers," said Paul J. Crutzen, of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. "If they don't take action much more strongly than they have in the past, then in the end we have to do experiments like this."

Serious people are taking Crutzen's idea seriously. This weekend, NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., hosts a closed-door, high-level workshop on the global haze proposal and other "geoengineering" ideas for fending off climate change.

In Nairobi, meanwhile, hundreds of delegates were wrapping up a two-week conference expected to only slowly advance efforts to rein in greenhouse gases blamed for much of the 1-degree rise in global temperatures in the past century. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol requires modest emission cutbacks by industrial countries - but not the United States, the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, because it rejected the deal. Talks on what to do after Kyoto expires in 2012 are all but bogged down.

When he published his proposal in the journal Climatic Change in August, Crutzen cited a "grossly disappointing international political response" to warming. The Dutch climatologist, awarded a 1995 Nobel in chemistry for his work uncovering the threat to Earth's atmospheric ozone layer, suggested that balloons bearing heavy guns be used to carry sulfates high aloft and fire them into the stratosphere. While carbon dioxide keeps heat from escaping Earth, substances such as sulfur dioxide, a common air pollutant, reflect solar radiation, helping cool the planet.

Tom Wigley, a senior U.S. government climatologist, followed Crutzen's article with a paper of his own on Oct. 20 in the leading U.S. journal Science. Like Crutzen, Wigley cited the precedent of the huge volcanic eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991. Pinatubo shot so much sulfurous debris into the stratosphere that it is believed it cooled the Earth by .9 degrees for about a year. Wigley ran scenarios of stratospheric sulfate injection - on the scale of Pinatubo's estimated 10 million tons of sulfur - through supercomputer models of the climate, and reported that Crutzen's idea would, indeed, seem to work. Even half that amount per year would help, he wrote. A massive dissemination of pollutants would be needed every year or two, as the sulfates precipitate from the atmosphere in acid rain. Wigley said a temporary shield would give political leaders more time to reduce human dependence on fossil fuels - the main source of greenhouse gases. He said experts must more closely study the feasibility of the idea and its possible effects on stratospheric chemistry.

Nairobi conference participants agreed. "Yes, by all means, do all the research," Indian climatologist Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the 2,000-scientist U.N. network on climate change, told The Associated Press. But "if human beings take it upon themselves to carry out something as massive and drastic as this, we need to be absolutely sure there are no side effects," Pachauri said.

Philip Clapp, a veteran campaigner for emissions controls to curb warming, also sounded a nervous note, saying, "We are already engaged in an uncontrolled experiment by injecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere." But Clapp, president of the U.S. group National Environmental Trust, said, "I certainly don't disagree with the urgency."

In past years scientists have scoffed at the idea of air pollution as a solution for global warming, saying that the kind of sulfate haze that would be needed is deadly to people. Last month, the World Heath Organization said air pollution kills about 2 million people worldwide each year and that reducing large soot-like particles from sulfates in cities could save 300,000 lives annually. American geophysicist Jonathan Pershing, of Washington's World Resources Institute, is among those wary of unforeseen consequences, but said the idea might be worth considering "if down the road 25 years, it becomes more and more severe because we didn't deal with the problem."

By telephone from Germany, Crutzen said that's what he envisioned: global haze as a component for long-range planning. "The reception on the whole is more positive than I thought," he said. Pershing added, however, that reaction may hinge on who pushes the idea. "If it's the U.S., it might be perceived as an effort to avoid the problem," he said. NASA said this weekend's conference will examine "methods to ameliorate the likelihood of progressively rising temperatures over the next decades." Other such U.S. government-sponsored events are scheduled to follow.

Source



AN ASSESSMENT OF KYOTO: EUROPE'S PERFORMANCE, CALIFORNIA DREAMING, TRADE WARS AND WAITING FOR GODOT

For non-literary people, the reference to Godot is a reference to a play by Samuel Beckett, called "Waiting for Godot". Godot never turns up

In late October 2006 the European Commission issued a report, "Greenhouse Gas Emission Trends and Projections in Europe 2006". This most-recent in a series, issued coincident with the annual Kyoto Protocol negotiations, revealed continued worsening of Europe's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions profile, and announced that the "EU must take immediate action on Kyoto targets". This report is the best source for tracking Europe's Kyoto progress, and provides critical insight into the ever-changing numbers and official assumptions underlying EU claims to be the "world leader" in addressing the issue of climate change. This Policy Note assesses its meaning.

Europe's Kyoto promise, as originally ratified by the EU-15 individually, was to lower each of the nations' GHG emissions to 8% below 1990 levels by 2010. Making the most of the 1990 baseline that they insisted guide Kyoto, the EU subsequently modified these promises with a "Burden Sharing Agreement" (BSA). This internal understanding collectively capitalized on and distributed emission reductions arising from two political decisions preceding and unrelated to Kyoto: the UK's "dash to gas", and shutting much inefficient East German manufacturing capacity after German reunification.

Despite such internal arrangements, other built-in advantages described, infra, and Kyoto's "mechanisms", Europe is struggling to meet even its re-engineered promise of an 8% overall collective reduction. Possibly as a result of such looming problems, Europe appears to have finally turned a corner from routine issuance of triumphalist rhetoric about its purported success, to tempering such claims and offering exhortative calls for expedited action. The October EU report represents a new, positive step in that direction.

This most recent report is also important, however, for what it shows about the internal numbers constituting such an assessment, given Europe's growing emission increases and fading chances to comply under Kyoto in a straightforward manner.

In this context, the following Policy Note addresses emerging topics likely to take the stage at the "COP-12" talks in Nairobi, Kenya this month. Europe's performance is unlikely to suddenly become a hot topic at these talks, which generally are directed at specific haggling over terms such as "Supplementarity" and the rhetoric aimed at the non-Party U.S. Regardless, Europe's self-proclaimed role as "world leader" in climate change policy demands that this Note provide an updated assessment of Europe's emissions.

The topics addressed herein likely to emerge in Nairobi include idea of a "privileged partnership" for California so as to allow the UK/Europe to purchase GHG "credits" from a Kyoto non-Party - and the political accommodation this would require. Also addressed is Europe's idea of imposing border adjustments on energy intensive products from countries that do not ration CO2 emissions, thereby starting a "climate" trade war. Finally, this Note comments on the UNFCCC proposal of delaying talks seeking deeper "post-2012" Kyoto commitments, purportedly to wait for a different U.S. administration though long-expected as an inevitable result of Kyoto's own troubles.

FULL ANALYSIS here



Snow falls in subtropical Queensland, Australia

Drat that global warming!



Snow has fallen in southern Queensland. Granite Belt residents say snow flakes and sleet fell for between 10 and 15 minutes at about 10:30am along the border between Queensland and New South Wales. Mobile Mechanic Paul Verri has lived in the Stanthorpe area for 28 years and says he has never seen snow this late in the year. "More sleet and light rain," he said. "We've got a couple of cars parked outside and there's flakes on the cars, just an odd isolated scutter. "I guess I've never seen it before this time of the year." Senior forecaster with the Bureau of Meteorology, Craig Mitchell, says cold air from Victoria and New South Wales triggered the snow. He says such cold temperatures in November are rare. "I think it's pretty unusual, especially now that we're nearing summer time," he said. "To get that cold outburst with temperatures to the extreme that we're currently seeing at the moment would put it down to a pretty unusual sort of weather event." The Bureau of Meteorology says the last time snow or sleet was reported this late in the year was in early October 1941.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************



17 November, 2006

"Africa's Schoolchildren Should Not Have to Study by Candlelight" says African-U.S. NGO Coalition

Gathering of Nairobi Schoolchildren Dramatizes Need for Affordable Energy

With only about ten percent of sub-Saharan Africa able to enjoy the enormous benefits of electricity, dozens of schoolchildren from the Kariobangi South Primary School in Nairobi participated this morning in a candlelight ceremony to dramatize the millions of children forced to do their homework by candlelight. (To see photos of the event go to: www.nationalcenter.org/ClimateChangeChildren.html). "If we want our African children to be able to have hope for the future, they must have electricity, especially in the rural areas where there is much need," said Rosemary Segero, a native Kenyan who is president of the African International Foundation.

The event was held at the All Africa Conference of Churches as part of the U.N.'s COP-12 conference on climate change. The NGOs are concerned that developing nations, which already suffer from immense poverty and energy deprivation, will eventually bear the burden of Kyoto-style controls if a worldwide reduction in emissions is to be achieved. "It is unconscionable for wealthy, developed countries to deny the benefits of affordable electricity to the developing world," said David Rothbard, president of the Washington, D.C. based Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). "When citizens of nations like Malawi only have five percent of their country electrified, the nations of the world must make reliable, affordable electricity a top priority."

David Ridenour, vice president of The National Center for Public Policy Research, explained why the Kyoto Protocol is destined to be carried on the backs of the poor: "Carbon dioxide emissions are necessary for industrial, medical and technological advancement. Once developing nations are brought into the Kyoto compact, the European Union will continue to use its wealth to purchase more and more emissions credits. This will allow Europeans to continue to live the lifestyles to which they are accustomed while condemning the developing world to a future of hardship and poverty."

CFACT advisor Pastor Abdul Sesay, a native of Sierra Leone, summed up the sentiment, saying: "People in Africa and developing nations deserve the opportunity to create better, healthier lives for themselves and future generations. Sadly, it seems Kyoto Protocol supporters are willing to support a treaty that would deny them a basic necessity like affordable electricity. How many more must go hungry and die before Western leaders understand that this is not a political game?"

The African International Foundation advocates educational opportunities for youth as a means of saving children from crime, violence and sex trafficking. The National Center for Public Policy Research is a non-partisan, non-profit educational foundation based in Washington, DC and founded in 1982; CFACT is a non-profit public interest organization that promotes market-based and technological solutions to issues relating to environment and development.

Source



MERCURY CRAZE THREATENS BAROMETERS

Only safe for the moment



The centuries-old British craft of barometer-making has won a reprieve from a European Union ban on the use of toxic metal in measuring devices. Although the mercury thermometer is being consigned to history, barometer production and restoration, kept alive by three British companies, survived thanks to a lobbying campaign at the European Parliament. MEPs voted by 327 to 274 yesterday for an amendment exempting manufacturers from the ban. They were persuaded that the last producers could do more to protect the environment if they were allowed to stay in business, offering recycling and repair services.

However, European green campaigners vowed to carry on their fight to outlaw the mercury barometer along with the thermometer, the manometer and the sphygmomanometer (for measuring blood pressure), all of which, under the EU directive, are no longer to be made.

Philip Collins, owner of Barometer World in Merton, Devon, which employs five staff, said: "For once it was a victory for the little guy." His campaign, backed by the Federation of Small Businesses and the Conservative MEP Martin Callanan, argued that the barometer industry accounted for a tiny fraction of mercury compared with thermometer production. Annual usage for thermometers and other medical devices was put at more than 25 tonnes in Europe compared with 60kg for new and repaired barometers. "The idea of the directive is to stop mercury getting into the environment - but if people like us are put out of business, people who break their barometer will have nowhere to go for repairs and it is more likely to end up as waste," Mr Collins said. "Some barometers we make sell for 2,000 pounds - they do not get thrown away if they break, they get repaired." His signature barometer is the Admiral Fitzroy, named after the first head of the Met Office, who used mercury measurements to produce the first published weather forecast, which appeared in The Times on July 31, 1861.

Matthew Knowles, of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: "This vote has prevented the strange situation where more mercury would have entered the environment in the name of green policies." Mr Callanan said that safety warnings and controls would allow the continuation of barometer manufacturer and repair, safeguarding jobs at eight producers around Europe. He added: "Mercury does need to be controlled, but banning the household barometer is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. "The barometer industry in the UK may be small, but it is a tradition that harks back to our maritime roots. A ban would see the end of the tradition of barometer-making begun in the mid-1600s when mercury barometers were introduced."

However, yesterday's development was only the first reading of the directive. When it returns to MEPs in six months, Greens will try again to have new barometers outlawed.

The Swedish Green MEP Carl Schlyter said yesterday: "The decision of the European Parliament to exempt barometers from an EU ban on measuring devices risks completely derailing this legislative proposal on this highly toxic substance. "It is a disgrace that a handful of small producers should be able to hold public health to ransom by de facto blocking an agreement on the phase-out of mercury, and it is irresponsible of those MEPs who have pushed for this."

Source



PEAK OIL SCARE TAKES A HIT

Global oil production will increase for at least the next 25 years as new drilling and refining techniques make it possible to tap heretofore untouchable reserves, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, the consulting firm run by Daniel Yergin. The world probably has 3.7 trillion barrels of oil left, more than twice the estimates of geologists and analysts such as Matthew Simmons, of the investment bank Simmons & Co., who argue global output is close to a peak, said Peter Jackson, director of oil-industry research for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm. ``The peak-oil theory causes confusion and can lead to inappropriate actions and turn attention away from the real issues,'' Jackson said in remarks prepared for a conference call today with analysts, investors and reporters. ``Oil is too critical to the global economy to allow fear to replace careful analysis about the very real challenges.''

The late geologist M. King Hubbert, working for a unit of Royal Dutch Shell Plc, first put forward in 1956 the theory that output from a specific oil deposit or region would peak and then start to decline following a predictable curve. His ideas have gained currency as oil prices tripled in the past five years and producers struggled to keep pace with rising demand in China. The theory is ``misleading'' and based on incomplete data, according to today's report from Cambridge Energy. Worldwide oil production will rise by more than 50 percent to about 130 million barrels a day around 2030 before output plateaus, the report said. Yergin, the firm's founder, wrote ``The Prize,'' a Pulitzer-winning history of the oil industry.

When global crude output begins to fall around 2050, the decline probably will be gradual, giving policy makers, industry and energy producers time to develop new alternatives to petroleum-based fuels, the report said.

Peak Oil Study Group

The Association for the Study of Peak Oil estimates the world has 1.46 trillion barrels of oil left and that production will peak in 2010, according to the group's November newsletter. The group's leaders include British geologist Colin Campbell, who helped popularize the peak-oil theory with his 1997 book, ``The Coming Oil Crisis.'' An August report from Cambridge Energy that took issue with the peak-oil theory was criticized by the President of the peak oil association, Kjell Aleklett, as a money-making vehicle based on proprietary data that the firm was unwilling to submit to impartial scientific review. Aleklett said Cambridge Energy analysts were too optimistic about the ability of big producers including Saudi Arabia to increase output.

U.S. Representatives Roscoe Bartlett, a Maryland Republican, and Thomas Udall of New Mexico, formed the House Peak Oil Caucus to promote the theory among lawmakers. Bartlett and Udall endorse the peak oil association's prediction that output will start declining after 2010. ``There is not much time to act,'' Udall, a Democrat, told a House Energy and Commerce Committee panel in December. ``Since oil provides about 40 percent of the world's energy, a peak in global oil production will be a turning point in human history.''

Refiners have used about 1.08 trillion barrels of crude since the birth of the petroleum industry in Pennsylvania in 1859, according to Cambridge Energy. Undiscovered fields probably hold 758 billion barrels, followed by 704 billion trapped inside a very hard type of rock known as shale, and 662 billion in the Middle East, according to the report. The rest of the firm's 3.7 trillion barrel total comes from untapped reserves in the deepest seas, the Arctic and places such as Canada's tar sands and Venezuela's Orinoco basin.

``This is the fifth time that the world is said to be running out of oil,'' Yergin said in an e-mailed statement. ``Each time -- whether it was the `gasoline famine' at the end of World War I or the `permanent shortage' of the 1970s -- technology and the opening of new frontier areas has banished the specter of decline.''

Oil prices have climbed 24 percent in the past two years and touched an all-time high of $78.40 a barrel in July. Economic growth in China, India and the U.S. has boosted demand while hurricanes and militant attacks crimped production in some regions, including the Gulf of Mexico and West Africa. Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which advises governments, oil companies and financial institutions on energy issues, is not the only skeptic of the peak-oil theory. Stuart McGill, a senior vice president who oversees Exxon Mobil Corp.'s oil and gas business, dismissed the peak theory in a Nov. 1 interview as being without merit. Irving, Texas-based Exxon is the world's biggest oil company, pumping more crude than every member of OPEC except Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Source



Does Hollywood cause global warming?

I no more believe in man's ability to destroy the Earth via global warming than I do in the Tooth Fairy. But I respect the right of those who worship at the altar of Global Warming. It is a religion of peace. Like the Holy Rollers who used to preach at Public Square in Cleveland in my youth, the Global Warming Cult truly believes that Man's Sins Will Cause The Destruction Of Our Planet.

As with Scientology, Kabbalah and the American version of Buddhism, this Cult of Impending Doom has captured the attention of the film industry. Which has the heathen in me snickering over this report in the LA Times today that Hollywood is a major polluter in the LA area. The subheadline to the story could apply to the major manufacturer in every city:

UCLA report says the movie and TV industry is a major generator of Southland pollution. An economist cautions that more rules may drive filming out of state.

Save Hollywood from pollution regulations. The story said the report found Hollywood "emits a whopping 140,000 tons a year of ozone and diesel particulate pollutant emissions from trucks, generators, special effects earthquakes and fires, demolition of sets with dynamite and other sources." By comparison, the John Amos plant which I can see from my back yard emits about 120,000 tons of SO2 and NOx a year. It is the nation's 10th largest coal-fired electricity plant.

The irony is all this blowing up of things comes in movies like "The Day After Tomorrow" -- flicks meant to scare us into believing -- truly believing -- that every forest fire, every hurricane, every blizzard and every tsunami is a prepayment for man's Sin Against Nature. But to get around the nasty little business of destroying the planet in order to save the planet, Hollywood plants trees. That's right. To get around the obvious hypocrisy, you plant a tree and pretend everything is the same as it ever was. Reported KNBC-TV in LA:

The makers of the film "The Day After Tomorrow" paid $200,000 to plant trees and for other steps to offset the estimated 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions caused by vehicles, generators and other machinery used in production.

It is sort of like buying a Hybrid to offset the SUV in the garage, which is only used on weekends. That is sort of like being partially pregnant. Hollywood is recycling and is reusing. And studies like this tend to be aimed more at headlines than at science. Hollywood employs 252,000 people and generates $29 billion a year. That works out to a little more than a half-ton of pollution per employee and about a hundred bucks of revenue per pound of pollution. That's the trade off. Every act of man creates pollution. I am pretty sure God worked this into his calculation when He created the universe.

Source



Australia reacts to French global warming threat

Australia has hit back at France over its threat to impose a tax on industrial goods from countries that ignore the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Prime Minister John Howard described the plan as "silly", while the mass-circulation Daily Telegraph headlined its report: "Back off, Frogs". Running across a picture of a French nuclear bomb explosion in the Pacific in 1971, a subheading read: "The French did this to our backyard and they have de Gaulle to attack us on Kyoto."

Australia, like the United States, has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on reducing the emission of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. Howard's conservative government says compliance would harm the economy and complains that the pact fails to impose similar curbs on pollution by major developing countries such as China and India.

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said Monday he would push with European partners for a carbon tax on industrial goods from countries that ignore the Kyoto Protocol. "That is a thoroughly silly proposal and utterly out of touch with reality," Howard told reporters. "Mind you, (Villepin) does come from a country that is known for imposing high trade barriers against other countries like Australia."

The Kyoto protocol requires industrialised countries to reduce emissions of six greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent by 2008-2012 compared with their 1990 levels. UN-sponsored talks are underway in Nairobi to reshape the agreement for the period after 2012 and include rapidly developing economies not bound by the original text.

Villepin said France would present EU members with concrete proposals in the first quarter of 2007 to tax industrial imports from countries that snub Kyoto Protocol requirements after 2012. "Europe must use all its weight" to counter "environmental dumping", he said.

Despite his dismissive comments and a continuing refusal to ratify Kyoto, Howard has recently signalled a major policy shift as Canberra scrambles to counter criticism of its environmental policy. He has proposed a "new Kyoto" and said Tuesday he would back launching an international carbon trading scheme to fight global warming when he meets leaders at this weekend's APEC summit in Vietnam. Carbon trading is the centrepiece of the Kyoto pact, which proposes a system under which rich countries are allotted caps for their pollution but which only Europe has begun embracing. If countries come in under target they can sell any surplus to partners who are above their emissions goal.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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16 November, 2006

CONSENSUS IS NONSENSUS IN SCIENTIFIC MATTERS

The concept of consensus means little more than a majority of opinions on a given matter. In politics this is the best we can do in making decisions to proceed with political actions. In the scientific world consensus is meaningless, and often unscientific, and worse, often wrong. Even the act of seeking such a consensus as a form of proof is not science.

In the legal community there are standards of evidence which are equally unsatisfactory in settling scientific issues, such as"preponderance of evidence" or "beyond a reasonable doubt". In matters of law these are about the best we can do, short of confessions, but in scientific disputes it is inappropriate. Scientific disputes must be settled by evidence, the data, the facts, and not through verbal skills, political intimidation, or suppression of unpleasant evidence. Nor can they be settled by computer predictions, since these results are not evidence either.

Author Michael Crichton himself an MD., captured the situation very well, as he showed in this lecture at Caltech about the dangers of "consensus science": "I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had. Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics...In addition, let me remind you that the track record of the consensus is nothing to be proud of."

Quite often advances in knowledge of natural science have not been led by the bureaucrats in power, but instead by a minority point of view, and in some cases by an individual such as Galileo. Even though Galileo had plotted the positions of the moons of Jupiter in his notebook, even though his telescope was available to any in authority to check, no one did. The "consensus" views of the powerful had to be maintained. And Galileo therefore suffered at the hands of powerful authorities for his heresies.

Going against the prevailing dogmas of the government authorities has been difficult, dangerous, and even deadly. The many sackings of the library in Alexandria reflect a general anti-knowledge view of the world by the powerful, from the Romans to the Christians, to the Muslims (See here). The torture and burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno, a contemporary of Galileo, for defending the heretical heliocentric theory of the Universe, was a 17th century example of dealing with minority views.

The finding of the cause of puerperal fever (bed infection) by Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1800s, a killer of thousands of women during childbirth, led to his scorn and isolation by the medical community, those powerful "experts", of the times. He found that the extremely high rates of death among women were being caused by the failure of attending physicians to wash their hands between autopsies and childbirth activities, transmitting the disease as they did so. He paid a terrible price for his findings. He was scorned by the medical profession, suffered a mental breakdown, and died in an institution. So much for skeptics. His life-saving discovery was not appreciated until after his death. Thousands died needlessly, thanks to arrogance.

The global warming debate has turned similarly ugly. A scientific consensus has been achieved, it is claimed, the results are in, it is claimed, so it is now time to repress the skeptics and put them out of business. On October 27, 2006 U.S. Senators John D. Rockefeller IV and Olympia Snowe co-authored a request to Exxon Mobil to end financial assistance to those awful skeptics. They were recommending that their relatively small support for skeptical scientists be terminated by Exxon Mobil.

Let's not forget that tens of billions of dollars have been spent by the US government and foundations in support of the global warming theory and the good Senators do not call for ending that. This is a scientific issue and cannot be resolved by voting, or the development of consensus, or the censorship of scientists with differing and challenging questions. Nor can the science be advanced by the repression of information adverse to the global warmers beliefs. This isn't a courtroom game where adverse evidence is inadmissible.

The skeptics are being isolated, dismissed, attacked, and defunded (burning at the stake hasn't been openly mentioned yet, but Nuremburg-type trials have. They are asking hard questions, as they should, which aren't being answered by the modelers, as they should.

The U.S. government has had a poor record in resolving scientific disputes. Furthermore, the resulting unscientific government policies have been harmful, costly, and deadly (such as the EPA DDT ban, the proposed EPA chlorine ban, exaggerations of harmful effects of low level radiation, acid rain, etc). In fact the 9000 pages of expert testimony given at the 1972 EPA hearings on DDT were ignored. This resulted in the DDT ban with the resulting millions of deaths from malaria that could have been easily controlled by DDT. The EPA continues with the 34 year DDT ban continues to this today.

Let's be clear: the acquisition of knowledge of the natural sciences has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics, of polite agreements on where to plant the daisies, or where to build the library. Letters from US Senators to silence critics is a familiar display of totalitarian instincts, a rather un-American activity we should think. Serious scientists should welcome criticism, and many have in the past. Hypotheses are to be examined, modified, or abandoned, while knowledge is advanced, understanding improved. But it is not welcomed these days, which is, sadly, a most unscientific situation. When Michael Crichton said that "Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled", he was right. When it comes to the natural sciences consensus is not science, and science is not consensus.

Source



MICHAEL CRICHTON ON CLIMATE CONFORMISTS

(An email from Michael Crichton to Bob Ferguson [bferguson@farns9.iserver.net] of Center For Science and Public Policy)

One of the great proofs of fantasy in the current state of global warming is that climate conformists simultaneously hold two contradictory world views. The first is that the debate is over, there are no skeptics, and that everyone of moral fiber and decent intellect has agreed that climate change is primarily caused by human carbon dioxide emissions. The only holdouts are a handful of individuals with too much back hair who are paid by oil companies, but they are few in number, scientifically discredited, and no one listens to them.

The second belief is that what prevents action on global warming is the skeptics. This same handful of dimwits has somehow managed to halt progress of every country in the world on a global problem, and has stymied the entire planet.

How have the skeptics managed this feat? They have succeeded because they have managed to get equal time in the press. And about this there can be no question. Otherwise very intelligent observers have come to this conclusion. And why not. I need not remind you how many movies, TV specials, and magazine cover stories have featured the skeptical point of view. Dozens and dozens.

Personally, I blame the skeptics for the failure of European nations to meet their Kyoto targets. If the skeptics hadn't been such naysayers, countries like Spain and Canada wouldn't be so far from their targets.



WORLD LEADERS MEET TO DISCUSS IMPROBABLE SOLUTIONS TO A QUESTIONABLE PROBLEM THAT MAY NOT BE SOLVABLE

Over 5000 climate change negotiators from 189 countries began meeting last week in Nairobi, Kenya and will end their deliberations on November 17. The goal of the 12th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP-12) and the second Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (MOP-2) is to begin the process of figuring out what to do about greenhouse gas emissions after the Kyoto Protocol commitment period ends in 2012. The Kyoto Protocol obliges 35 industrialized nations to cut their domestic emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The Kyoto Protocol applies to countries that emit about 30 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. The United States, which emits about 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, and Australia have not signed the Protocol.

Some recent studies argue that greenhouse gas emissions must be slashed almost immediately in order to achieve the UNFCCC's goal of avoiding "dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." For example, the Left-leaning British Institute for Public Policy Research issued an alarming report last week claiming that humanity has "only ten years to save the planet." The IPPR asserts that "global emissions of CO2 peak within ten years and fall by 70 to 80 per cent by 2050, we will face an unacceptable risk of causing a rise of more than 2øC, which would result in dangerous and irreversible impacts."

Just how difficult (and how unlikely) that goal is was underlined by the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2006 which was also issued last week. The WEO 2006 projected that with current policies world energy demand would be 50 percent greater than today in 2030 and emissions of carbon dioxide would rise by 55 percent above current levels. Even if the world adopted all of the IEA's proposals for investing in nuclear power, biofuels, renewables, and increased energy efficiency, world demand for energy would still increase by 37 percent and carbon dioxide emissions would be 39 percent higher in 2030. The WEO 2006 also predicts that China will surpass the United States as the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by 2010. In addition, researchers at the Global Carbon Project report that emissions of the chief greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, grew 4 times faster between 2000 and 2005 than they did in the 1990s, rising from 0.8 percent per year to 3.2 percent per year. This occurred, in part, because China is building coal-fired electric generation plants at a rate of one every 3 to 4 days.

Two weeks ago-just before the climate change delegates gathered in Nairobi-- the British government issued the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change that offered a scenario in which unmitigated climate change would result in the loss of between 5 and 20 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2100. The report concluded that this could be avoided by spending 1 percent (about $450 billion) per year of world GDP today to keep greenhouse gas concentrations below 550 parts per million (ppm). This provoked a spate of headlines warning that the battle to prevent climate change must begin now. The alarming conclusions of the Stern Review are have been challenged by, among others, skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg and Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Interestingly, the British business magazine The Business reports that a leaked draft of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change upcoming Fourth Assessment Report calculates that achieving the goal of limiting greenhouse gases to 550 ppm could cost as much as 5 percent of global GDP. If the IPCC's calculations are correct, the article notes, "they open up the possibility that the British proposals would cost as much as they save, making them redundant." Of course, trying to predict global GDP a century from now is probably even harder than trying to predict global average temperatures in 2106.

The first meeting of the Kyoto Protocol signatories in Montreal, Quebec last year required that negotiations to set tougher caps on greenhouse gas emissions after 2012 begin at the Nairobi meeting. It appears that negotiators are unlikely to agree to any such new goals by the end of the week. Part of the reason is that the world is waiting to see how U.S. policy might change when Kyoto-rejectionist President George W. Bush leaves office after 2008. In addition, the big developing countries like China, India and Brazil are resisting the imposition of binding limits on their emissions. Without them, any man-made climate change would be delayed by just a few years.

Source



New UN Children's Book Promotes Global Warming Fears to Kids

Nairobi, Kenya - A new United Nations children's book promoting fears of catastrophic manmade global warming is being promoted at the UN Climate Change Conference in Kenya. The books main character, a young boy, is featured getting so worried about a coming manmade climate disaster that he yells "I don't want to hear anymore!" The new children's book, entitled "Tore and the Town on Thin Ice" is published by the United Nations Environment Programme and blames "rich countries" for creating a climate catastrophe.

The book is about a young kid named Tore who lives in an Arctic village. Tore loses a dog sled race because he crashes through the thinning ice allegedly caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions. The book features colorful drawings and large text to appeal to young children. After the boy loses the dog sled race, he is visited by "Sedna, the Mother of the Sea" in a dream. The "Sea Mother" informs the boy in blunt terms that the thinning ice that caused his loss in the dog sled race was due to manmade global warming. "I'm the one who created and cares for the sea creatures - whales and walruses, seals and fish," the "Sea Mother" explained to the boy. The "Sea Mother" then tells the boy she will educate him about the reason the ice is thinning.

The morning after his dream, Tore sets out on a quest for knowledge about the dangers of catastrophic manmade global warming. A "snowy owl" informs Tore that "the planet's heating up" and that both the Arctic and Antarctica "are warming almost twice as fast as elsewhere." [EPW Note: The Arctic, according to the International Arctic Research Center was warmer during the 1930's than today and both the journals Science and Nature have published studies recently finding - on balance - Antarctica is both cooling and gaining ice.]

The "snowy owl" tells Tore that winning dog sledding races "might not be your top worry" and the owl instead tells the boy that "lots of things are changing fast. Some people who hunt for a living are already going hungry because a lot of seals and walruses are heading north." The "snowy owl" also asserts that "the great ice cap here in Greenland-mountains of snow and ice up to about four kilometers thick-is thawing." [EPW Note: A 2005 study by a scientist named Ola Johannessen and his colleagues showed that the interior of Greenland is gaining ice and mass.]

Next, a polar bear informs Tore that it is hungry because the ice is too thin to stand on and hunt and the bear says that other bears have "starved" because the sea ice went out to sea. The polar bear adds, "We may not have much of a future." [EPW Note: In May of 2006, biologist Dr. Mitchell Taylor from the Arctic government of Nunavut, a territory of Canada, noted that "Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present." http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1146433819696&call_pageid=970599119419 ] The polar bear concludes by telling Tore, "It looks like many animals and fish and birds will go extinct-die out-during your lifetime, partly because of changes in climate."

The child is described "at a loss for words" after hearing this grim news and just "stare[s] at the polar bear." After a whale appears to present more climate fear, the boy finally screams, "Listen, I've had all the bad news I can stand. Our world is melting. Polar bears are starving and all sorts of animals won't survive. I don't want to hear anymore!" The whale responds, "That's the spirit! Get good and angry. You'll need all that energy to make a difference." The whale then goes on to describe computer model projections of massive coastal flooding in the future and the potential destruction of human life in coastal areas because of the projected sea level rise. [EPW note: Many scientists dispute the notion that mankind has created a climate doomsday. See: ( http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777 )]

The whale continues, telling the child that more hurricanes and "other things you call `natural disasters' are on their way, too - and they're getting harsher." [EPW Note: The relationships between global warming and hurricanes is currently under debate, with the great majority of scientists believing there is little connection. For instance, 2006 was anticipated to be a record year for Hurricanes, but turned out to be one of the calmest seasons in many, many years.] Finally Tore has had enough and asks, "Is there anything at all a kid like me can do?" The "Sea Mother" tells him of the dangerous effects that an oil and gas based energy system has on the climate and the "Sea Mother" singles out the industrialized world as the cause of her predicted climate catastrophe. "Rich countries use-and waste-an awful lot of energy. Huge cars. Too many cars instead of efficient trains and buses," the "Sea Mother explains to Tore. [EPW Fact: Several developing world nations will soon pass the U.S. in greenhouse gas emissions. China alone will pass the U.S. in emission in 2009. ]

Finally the "Sea Mother" tells Tore that the solution to the climate crisis can begin in his Arctic village by "setting up solar panels to get electricity from the sun, and modern windmills to capture the energy of the wind." The book ends with a section answering the question "What can you do?" The books answer includes such suggestions as "Join or create an environmental club," "only drive cars if you must," and "write to your political leaders."

Source



LEAVING ON A JET PLANE, CLIMATOLOGISTS HIT THE SKIES TO TALK GLOBAL WARMING

A group of climate scientists from the UK's Met Office have flown to Nairobi to meet colleagues from around the world to discuss climate research and present their most recent findings. They have taken with them an imaginatively titled report detailing the predicted effect climate change will have on the developing world (It's called "Effects of climate change on developing countries"). The report is based on climate models running on PRECIS, a regional climate modelling system developed by the Met Office to run on personal computers.

The Met Office's Dr Vicky Pope will set out the main conclusions of their research: the likely increases in areas affected by extreme drought from three per cent of the globe to 30 per cent by 2100, and severe drought increasing from eight per cent to 40 per cent of the planet. In news that will no doubt confuse climate change sceptics like Jeremy Clarkson, their models also predict some areas will have a lower incidence of drought if the planet gets hotter.

However, nowhere in the government announcement of the visit is there a calculation of the amount of carbon that will be produced by sending all these climatologists to Nairobi, when they could all have stayed home and had a video conference instead. Tch tch. [The climatologists are not stupid: they know where the good weather is in November]

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Pages are here or here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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15 November, 2006

GREENIES NOW ATTACKING CHRISTMAS CELEBRATIONS

If the green campaigners manage to change the habits of the nation, it will be popcorn and fruit, not glittering baubles, dangling from the branches of Christmas trees this year. Traditional tree decorations are all under fire from environmental campaigners attempting to change the colour of Christmas from white to green. Even the fairy will be missing, as she has been condemned as an eco-hazard. Campaigners want the fairies, stars, tinsel and baubles that usually adorn the tree to be replaced with edible decorations that can be given to the birds when Christmas is over. And forget about the annual trip to see grandma. For a really green Christmas the car should be left in the garage and "kith and kin" wished seasons greetings over the internet.

Tree lights, cards and wrapping paper are also targeted as wasteful in the guidance on how to have a green Christmas. Advice contained in the Green Guide to Christmas urges the public to use fewer lights, turn off those that remain during the day and to recycle Christmas cards. Wrapping paper could, the guide suggests, be replaced with tin foil that can be used later in the kitchen, or with old newspapers, magazines or brown paper. Artificial trees ought to be eschewed in favour of the real thing. "Our favourite option is to buy a new fir tree with its roots still attached from an ecologically sustainable source and plant it in your garden after Christmas," says the report issued by Green Guide. "Do this every year until you have a mini forest in your backyard." They recognised that planting rows of trees over the years was not feasible for all householders but said that unwanted firs could be composted in the new year.

Of tree and other decorations, they say: "Many of the decorations available in high street stores have been treated chemically to colour the paper or are made out of nonbiodegradable substances. "Avoid anything which cannot be recycled or has not been made from recycled materials. Use edible tree decorations that can be given to garden birds afterwards, like popcorn and cranberry strings."

Amid growing concerns about global warming being caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the guide urges restraint on energy consumption. "Increasingly there are options for you to both reduce the amount of energy you use and to seek out more sustainable sources," it says. "What really lies at the heart of the issue is the need for us to make a cultural change. We need to stop assuming that we can go on as we are indefinitely."

Muslim leaders joined their Christian counterparts yesterday in criticising politicians and town hall leaders who want to play down Christmas. The Christian Muslim Forum said that right-wing extremism was being fuelled by attempts to remove religion from the festival, such as Birmingham's decision to rename its celebrations Winterval. The forum said: "The desire to secularise religious festivals is offensive to both of our communities. Those who use the fact of religious pluralism as an excuse to de-Christianise British society unthinkingly become recuiting agents for the extreme Right."

Source



World's forests making a comeback

MANY of the world's forests appear to be making a comeback, and some are more thickly forested now than they were nearly 200 years ago, according to a new study published today. The United States and China had the greatest gain in forests over the last 15 years, while Brazil and Indonesia lost the most, according to the study published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The research by an international team took a new look at what makes a forest. Rather than defining it simply as the area covered with trees, the scientists also considered how big the trees were - how many of them were large enough to be considered timber, also known as growing stock - how thickly they grew and how much atmospheric carbon was tied up in them.

Releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere spurs global warming. Trees absorb carbon dioxide. As well, the scientists took into account the amount of organic material, known as biomass, present in the forest. By this standard, the researchers found that despite widespread concerns about deforestation, the number of timber-size trees increased from 1990 to 2005 in 22 of the 50 countries with the most forest.

The reasons to care about healthy forests are legion: forests foster biodiversity, anchor soil, slow erosion, and, when trees are allowed to grow to timber size, contribute to the economy in the form of lumber and paper. In the United States, the transition from deforestation to reforestation took place first in the northeastern state of Connecticut in the early 1900s. Some states, including Texas, made the change only in 2002. "The United States is doing quite well, but we've done quite well for a period of time," said co-author Roger Sedjo of the Washington-based group Resources for the Future. "Our forests have been more or less stable for the last 100 years." Other countries made the transition much earlier: Denmark's shift came in 1810, France in the 1830s, Switzerland in the 1860s, Portugal by 1870, Scotland in the 1920s and European Russia in the 1930s.

Mr Sedjo said the transition often came when countries began to prosper, and were better able to put policies in place that preserved forested land. Almost every country with a per capita gross domestic product over $US4600 has moved to reforestation, the study found.

Why are the forests returning? Co-author Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station noted a set of events that seem to feed on each other. When countries protected forests, they could grow. At the same time, when farmland was preserved, farmers were less likely to encroach on forests, Mr Waggoner said. In Europe, timber imports, energy technology, and economic development that sent country people to the cities also played a role, Mr Waggoner said. As farm technologies improved, farming concentrated on fertile lands and left marginally fertile forests alone, even as urban migration depleted rural populations.

Source



POMBO DEFEAT IN CALIFORNIA NOT A GREENIE VICTORY

There's a line between political spin and outright deception. Environmental organizations crossed over that line in their post-election analysis of House Resources Committee Chairman Rep. Richard Pombo's re-election defeat. Defenders of Wildlife and the League of Conservation Voters, among other environmental groups, want people to believe that Mr. Pombo's defeat was a referendum on his environmental record. As a Defenders of Wildlife President Rodger Schlickeisen noted in a press statement, "Pombo's defeat... serves as notice that extreme anti-environmental positions can be an extreme liability on the campaign trail."

But Mr. Pombo's environmental record wasn't discussed much on the campaign trail. Although Green groups committed millions to defeating Congressman Pombo, they gave environmental policy the metaphoric equivalent of the Heisman (named after the famous Heisman Trophy pose). While Pombo's efforts to fix the Endangered Species Act, overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act, and promote U.S. energy independence by opening part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf to environmentally-responsible oil exploration came up during the campaign, they were largely incidental to the Greens' efforts.

Instead of focusing on these issues, the Greens' commercials and other campaign material focused -- largely unfairly -- on Pombo's ethics. Those fed up with Washington scandals found in Pombo a convenient target and took their frustrations out on him. Other incumbents -- including those who have been staunch allies of the Greens -- were swept out of office for the same reason. Rep. Jim Leach, who received a mere 27 percent rating from the League of Private Property Voters (LPPV) -- kind of the antithesis of the League of Conservation Voters -- lost re-election. So too did Lincoln Chafee (LPPV rating: 33), Nancy Johnson (LPPV rating: 36), Sue Kelly (LPPV rating: 18) and Michael Fitzpatrick (LPPV rating: 36). Are we to believe this was a referendum on their environmental positions, too?

No. Richard Pombo and these other members did not lose on environmental issues. As for the power of environmentalists and their message... The only way environmentalists can win is through issues other than their own. As long as that's true, they're not winners. They're losers.

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Global warming may kill most birds: WWF

We heard recently that most fish were going to die out. Now it's birds. Shades of Paul Ehrlich. That birds are highly mobile and can just shift latitude without trouble seems to be ignored. Birds that are "missing" from a given area will most likely just have moved elsewhere

Unchecked climate change could drive up to 72 per cent of the world's bird species into extinction but the world still has a chance to limit the losses, a new report says. From migratory insect-eaters to tropical honeycreepers and cold water penguins, birds are highly sensitive to changing weather conditions and many are already being affected badly by global warming, the WWF study said. "Birds are the quintessential 'canaries in the coal mine' and are already responding to current levels of climate change," said the report, launched at a United Nations conference in Kenya on ways to slow warming.

"Birds now indicate that global warming has set in motion a powerful chain of effects in ecosystems worldwide," WWF said. "Robust evidence demonstrates that climate change is affecting birds' behaviour - with some migratory birds even failing to migrate at all." In the future, it said, unchecked warming could put large numbers of species at risk, with estimates of extinction rates as high as 72 per cent, "depending on the region, climate scenario and potential for birds to shift to new habitats". It said the "more extreme scenarios" of extinctions could be prevented if tough climate protection targets were enforced and greenhouse gas emissions cut to keep global warming increases to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Already in decline in Europe and the United States, many migratory birds were now missing out on vital food stocks that are appearing earlier and earlier due to global warming, wi