The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. Dissecting Leftism is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other sites viewable in China: Political Correctness Watch, Dissecting Leftism. The archive for this site is HERE. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing)
****************************************************************************************



21 October, 2005

THE LARGER CONTEXT FOR THE ENDLESS GREENIE DOOM-MONGERING

This is a longish essay by Wendell Krossa but it covers a lot of ground so I am not going to put anything else up here today. The essay includes brief reviews of several books

We appear to be building up toward another one of those historical peaks of fear, kind of like the building of a fever just before it breaks. All this scare-mongering of late points to something more fundamental about being human. Something a bit pathological.

Nietzsche spoke of the basic human mood or orientation- hating life or affirming it. The darker orientation of some people toward doom and gloom appears to be almost hardwired in human brains. Note, for instance, that fear is considered a primary emotion which is behind hate and aggression. All that nasty residual stuff exploding from the amygdala and related structures (the ancient reptilian brain).

Tom Robbins expressed something of the influence of this darker side of the human psyche on literature in his Harpers piece (Sept 2004) titled In Defiance of Gravity. Comparing comedy and despair in literature he said, "Comedy is deemed inferior to tragedy primarily because of the social prevalence of narcissistic pathology. In other words, people who are too self-important to laugh at their own frequently ridiculous behavior have a vested interest in gravity because it supports their illusions of grandiosity...many people are unable to function without such illusions". What has this produced in modern literature?

"Most of the critically lauded fiction of our time concentrates its focus on cancer, divorce, rape, racism, schizophrenia, murder, abandonment, addiction, and abuse. These things are rampant in our society and ought to be examined in fiction. Yet to trot them out in book after book, without the transformative magic of humor and imagination- let alone a glimmer of higher consciousness- succeeds only in impeding the advancement of literature and human understanding alike" (p.60-61).

And further, "Despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation. Taken out on others, depression becomes a weapon".

He points to something David Altheide expressed so well in his book Creating Fear- the pathological human orientation toward catastrophe, disaster, the morbid, and despair. Consequently, many people will insist that things are getting worse and worse despite overwhelming evidence of the objective reality that "most citizens are safer, healthier, living longer, and more secure in their environments than virtually any population in history" (p.42- his research is on the US but the same principles apply elsewhere). According to sociologist Altheide, many media outlets tend to respond to and feed this propensity toward the dark and despairing in humanity and have become, not truth seekers, but entertainers. Hence, while murder declined in the 1990s by 20% in the US, media reporting on murder increased by 600%.

Such media reporting promotes the sense that the world is out of control. Altheide notes those who have a stake in promoting fear- government, military, and even sociologists- and the rewards they reap, such as social control, support for policies, and continued income for programs.

So are we just animals and slavishly subject to this nasty little reptilian leftover that orients us too often to fear and despair? Three highly related responses- no, no, and no. We are human. We have a cortex. It is wired for hope, optimism and love (John Pfeiffer, The Emergence of Humankind). It makes us something entirely different from animals and heading in an entirely different direction from animal life.

The cortex, which mediates consciousness, enables us to pause, to step back from the moment, and to place local catastrophe, cruelty, and accident in the larger, long term context of developing life. This is the best antidote to fear/despair and it is exactly what Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource) and Bjorn Lomberg (The Skeptical Environmentalist), among others, have done. Simon says that researching the actual state of things is what saved him from his own depression. He refused to let his mental outlook- depressive- shape his research. Instead, his research and discovery of "the extraordinarily positive trends that have continued until now, and that can reasonably be expected to continue into the future" (p.xxxvii) changed and brightened his basic mood. And his depression never returned.

Another who has also wisely stepped back from fear to place events in a wider context is Luke Mitchell in his March 4/04 article called "A Run On Terror". The fear of terrorism has become "the animating principle of nearly every aspect of American public policy" when it ought to be on the level of concern of annual workplace accidents or drownings, both of which caused more deaths in 2001. As Mitchell says, this is not to dishonor the losses to those families but neither should their anguish eclipse that of others.

And better yet, step back even further and look at the greater universe story as set forth by Brian Swimme (The Universe Story), Harold Morowitz (The Emergence of Everything) and others. Progress is something far more fundamental to reality and life than just the positive trends of the past few centuries. From the moment of the Big Bang material reality began to organize from chaos toward order and from the simple toward the more complex. Emerging life followed this same trajectory from simple organisms to more complex and ordered ones. Now human society continues this trajectory in domestication or civilization. Some powerful organizing principle or impulse keeps us moving away from the random and chaotic toward the more ordered, reasoned, and humane. And as big kids now, it appears that we are becoming more and more responsible for this direction of life.

However one wishes to read this rising trajectory of reality and life, it can not be dismissed as just wishing for the best or whistling in the dark. It is hard nosed, rational fact that the universe and life are endlessly rising and progressing. And there are some 13.7 billion years of this evidence. It is the longest of the long term trends.

The rising trajectory of life in an evolving and rising universe (Big Bang- Simon Singh) resonates with the very structure of our cortex which, as noted above, is wired for hope. Perhaps then, hope, along with creativity and other features, defines ultimate reality.

The fundamental trajectory evident in the greater universe story- this trajectory of creativity, advance, and hope- will place us in touch with the Tibetan 'crazy wisdom' that Tom Robbins refers to in his article noted above. This is a form of playfulness that possesses "an unfailing capacity to arouse ridicule in those who crave certainty, reverence, and restraint...playfulness- a kind of divine playfulness intended to lighten man's existential burden and promote what Joseph Campbell called the 'rapture of being alive'". This playfulness says Robbins refuses to avert its gaze from the sorrows and injustices of the world, but insists on joy in spite of everything. It grasps the greater reality of rising, advancing, developing, and progressing life. So the ancient shaman quoted by Campbell was right then to urge us all, "Don't fear the universe". Don't fear life. Fear hinders the perception of what life is really about and it hinders human understanding and progress.

The orientation to fear and despair has found no more powerful expression than in Fall/apocalyptic mythology. And with the historical demise of such mythology, despair continues to find expression in newer more secular forms, including scientific ones.

This is evident in the article 'Waiting for the lights to go out'. It appears that the author, Brian Appleyard, is among the many who have fallen prey to one of the greatest deceptions ever foisted upon humanity- that of Fall/apocalyptic mythology. This mythology states that things were once better, sinful humanity has screwed things up, disaster is coming, and salvation is to be found in the denial of life and abundance; in a return to the 'moral superiority' of a simple, low-consumption lifestyle, preferably out in a mud hut in the bushes.

This barbaric and distorting mythology has darkened human consciousness like nothing else over human history. As in the case of this writer, it leads people to carefully select and quote experts that support your basic assumptions and orientation to despair. It shapes how people view reality and the evidence that they are willing to look at. This is why, despite the constraints of the scientific method, this mythology continues to influence scientific research. This is also why such science misses entirely the fundamental direction of the universe and life.

Appleyard's Fall perspective becomes clear in his comments on the fallenness and unredeemableness of human beings. "Our aggressive, tribal nature is hard-wired, unreformed and unreformable. Individually, we are animals and as animals incapable of progress". Pardon me, but what unmitigated nonsense.

Just look at the past twelve millennia of human existence. Note those early Sumerian attempts (Circa 2400 BCE) at democratic rule and rights for women. Remember those early Greek slave women advocating for individual liberty and rights (700 BCE). The story of humanity is so clearly a story of progression from the barbaric to the more humane.

The amygdala, along with its naughty friends hanging around there in the core brain, still influences us, but it does not define us as human. The cortex, with its more humanizing features, enables us to pause, to check the baser drives, and to choose more human response. The cortex, with its basic impulses and emotions, is what essentially defines us as human. This humanizing organ helps to explain the story of humanity as an unstoppable and irreversible trajectory of advance.

And no - progress is not built on a fragile foundation. Greg Easterbrook in his A Moment On The Earth blows this fragility-of-life idea out of the water. Life is exceedingly durable and resilient and nothing is more durable or resilient than human life with its consciousness. This amazing faculty of thought and reason enables us to now help nature out of the many dead ends that its chaotic and random impulses have gotten it into.

Brian Appleyard's apocalyptic stance is most evident in his reading of the world energy situation. Unfortunately, his mood and perspective lead him to miss entirely another fundamental feature of the universe and life- that of limitless generosity. Just recently the International Energy Agency issued its report, Resources to Reserves, Oil and Gas Technologies for the Energy Markets of the Future, which states that there are some 10 trillion barrels of oil in conventional reserves and some 10 trillion barrels of non-conventional. In Alberta alone the estimations are up to some 350 billion conventional barrels and possibly up to 2 trillion tar sands barrels. With current world consumption at 84 million barrels a day or 30.6 billion barrels a year, well, do the math. Sure, use will increase but so we will continue to make new discoveries and return to abandoned reserves that were uneconomical to extract at lower prices.

Wilfred Beckerman in his crisply argued A Poverty of Reason shows why sustainability ideology with its pessimistic outlook consistently misses world resource estimations by centuries and even millennia. Also remember, even with spikes in prices like the current oil spike, the overall long term trend in resource prices has been steadily downward.

This is not to dismiss the search for alternatives. As Beckerman says, it is silly to think we will continue with oil in the future. Along with this, remember Arthur C. Clarke's prediction that in some 50 years time we will have tapped into dark energy and accessed a limitless supply of energy.

Then I almost laughed out loud at the pessimism in the comments on exhausting new ideas. It reminds me of the US Patent Office clerk who stated in 1900, "Everything that can be invented, has been invented". Or the economist back in the mid-1800s who worried that with a limited supply of musical notes humanity would soon run out of new music. He should have lived to hear Enya's "Orinoco Flow" or "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong.

So yes, there is a positive function to death. It is a huge face saver.

And contrary to Stein's argument, increased population does not bring increased problems and increased disaster. As Simon (The Ultimate Resource) shows in his careful research on human population- increased population is the answer to our problems. It produces more Norman Borlaugs and Einsteins and many others who will find solutions that will lead us toward that better future that we all want. More human beings, means more human minds with more creative ideas and innovations. It's a simple addition thing.

"Perhaps we are close to the limit and the time of plenty is over". Well, this is about all that you can expect from the dark pessimism of sustainability ideology with its orientation to strict limits (A Poverty of Reason). It can advocate nothing other than limits because at core it is part of a greater anti-development and anti-progress ideology. See Alston Chase's excellent In A Dark Wood (one of the 100 best books of the last century) for a thorough treatment of the environmental expression of this anti-human ideology/mythology.

Finally, the refusal to accept apocalyptic mythology has nothing to do with being Pollyanna-like. It has everything to do with cold, hard, rational fact and the long term trends of life. This is not to deny recurring catastrophe, setback, downturn and the rest of the pornography of human suffering. But such things do not define the overall trajectory or nature of life.

Also remember how repeatedly apocalyptic has misled even the brightest minds. Remember Paul Ehrlich trying to panic the public about food production and mass starvation back in the 1970s. Fortunately, Nobel winner Norman Borlaug (arguably the greatest living human being) refused to listen to Erlich's doomsterism and went out to father the Green Revolution and save the hundreds of millions that Ehrlich predicted would die. He has been credited with saving the lives of possibly 1 billion human beings. Environmental doomsters continue to dog him about his use of fertilizers and try to stop various foundations from funding his work.

In conclusion, I would argue that progress is much more than just a modern Enlightenment fad. It has to do with what the universe is fundamentally about. It was certainly there long before conscious humans came on the scene. So it is more than something that we just cottoned on to a few centuries ago in relation to technological innovations and such.

As noted above, progress has a long and well established history, even in the human species. Steven LeBlanc (Constant Battles) and Paul Seabright (In The Company Of Strangers) together have given an interesting overview of our progress. LeBlanc exposes the archeological myths of noble savages to show the nasty pre-civilized past of humanity. Then Seabright shows how developing trust and trade between people led to the formation of modern civilization and the benefits of modern human societies. We have been steadily moving from barbarity to a more humane existence and we have been doing this for multiple millennia. This was long before we even understood what progress was all about. We have just been following that basic, universal impulse for something better; an impulse that appears to be fundamental to all the universe and life.

Focusing on the longer term context will shed more light on what life and humanity is all about, rather than just picking on reverse-type spikes here and there. Remember the scientist noted by Lomberg who argued from a short term counter trend in the 1990s that TB was getting worse (Skeptical Environmentalist, p.24). Lomberg exposed his conclusions with the longer term trend of TB declining. Let's not sink too far into our present moment that we miss the greater overall story of life.

Life in many elements is not yet perfect and progress may not be automatic, but we are doing better and better all the time. In this regard I have some interesting articles on such things as the historical trend in violence (Manuel Eisner's research), the democratic trend, war (Douglas Todd), and similar material. It's available here.

And just today we read of the release of the "Human Security Report" which corroborates Eisner's research on the historical decline in violence (from 20 homicides per 100,000 people in the 1300s to only 1 per 100,000 today). Kelly Patterson ('Global warfare less deadly', National Post, Oct.18/05) says that the popular misconception that we live in an increasingly violent world can be blamed on the media. All forms of political violence have been decreasing by significant percentages and only terrorism has increased but it accounts for only a tiny fraction of the annual death toll. Other security experts claim the terrorist impulse has no long term future.

Once again - enough of the despair of Fall/apocalyptic mythology. This writer, Brian Appleyard, has taken the dark orientation of an archaic mythology of despair and tried to fashion just another Johnny-come-lately version of the same old, same old. No matter how scientific it is made out to be, Fall/apocalyptic misses entirely the rising trends of life.

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

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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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



20 October, 2005

PRIVATE HIGH TECH SOLVES A RESOURCE SHORTAGE

An Israeli-led consortium is completing the world’s largest, most technologically advanced and economical water desalination plant, a project that backers say could influence prospects for Mideast peace and development of arid regions worldwide. The $250 million plant will produce 100 million cubic meters of water a year in two identical, adjacent facilities from water drawn from the Mediterranean Sea, sufficient to provide 5 percent of the water consumed in Israel. One desalination unit here is complete, and a second unit is expected to be finished by the end of the year.

Lance Johnson, manager of large desalination projects at Dow Chemical Co. — which makes the membranes at the center of the process — said output will equal “500 million half-liter size bottles of water a day — a lot of water.” Israeli officials have quietly begun talks with the Palestinian Authority about the possibility of increasing the plant’s production to 120 million cubic meters a year, with 20 million cubic meters to be shipped to Gaza, 5 miles away. “After this plant is in operation, people will realize it’s much cheaper to build this kind of plant than fight for water in the Middle East,” said Gustavo Kronenberg, general manager of the VID Desalination Co. and the man in charge of the plant’s construction.

The project is being developed by VID, a joint venture made up of IDE Technologies and Elran Infrastructures, both of Israel, and Veolia Water of France. The Israeli government will take ownership of the facility after 25 years. Aiman Jarrar, head of the Palestinian Water Authority’s regulatory directorate, said Gaza residents need affordable water. “The Palestinians realize that one of the solutions of water shortage in Gaza strip is desalination,” Jarrar said in an e-mail.....

Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Israel’s infrastructure minister, said the country has embarked on a five-year plan to develop desalination plants capable of creating 300 million cubic meters of water. Israel uses 600 million cubic meters of water annually for human consumption and another 1.3 billion or so for agriculture and industry. The Ashkelon plant is coming on line just as Israel has begun to focus on developing its vast Negev desert region. The bulk of the water produced in Ashkelon will be shipped to the Negev, and some will go to Jerusalem, Kronenberg said.

The plant will be the world’s largest facility producing water through reverse osmosis, a type of filtering process. Currently, only about 20 percent of worldwide desalination involves reverse osmosis, but membranes developed in recent years have made the process more economical. In fact, as the technology improved, the Israelis doubled the Ashkelon plant’s planned capacity. In 1999, when planning for the project began, the estimated cost of producing water had fallen from $1 per cubic meter to 70 cents. Kronenberg said the Ashkelon plant will produce water at 53 cents per cubic meter, which he called “the lowest price ever seen for desalinated water.”

Three pipes extending more than a half-mile into the sea take in water about 45 feet below the surface, where it’s clearest. The incoming water is routed to two desalination units located just north of a huge, coal-fired power plant whose smokestacks loom over Israel’s southern Mediterranean coast. Pulled by gravity, the seawater is filtered through layers of sand. Additives and cartridge filters remove suspended particles larger than 10 microns. The seawater then is routed to a pumping chamber, where its pressure is elevated. Half of that water flows through special membranes and becomes potable. The remaining brine, under high pressure, is used to help boost the pressure of incoming seawater — helping to dramatically reduce the energy needed for the process.....

More here



DAVID KING, THE FAILED TINPOT HITLER

(Post lifted from the Adam Smith blog)

Dr Alister McFarquhar asks whatever happened to our Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King? Jonathan Leake tells us in the Times. Sir David is one of two senior government figures calling for a green tax system to force individuals and firms to cut energy consumption. The other, worryingly, is Elliot Morley, an environment minister. In Montreal in November a successor to the Kyoto treaty on climate change will be sought if possible for when it expires in 2012.

The hope must be that they fail. Firm leadership from the US fortunately put an end to the Kyoto madness of spending billions to cut our growth. The US-led proposal of effective technological solutions will achieve far better results, and since Blair effectively signed off from Kyoto last month, looks like the way forward in future.

What the illustrious Sir David wants is personal energy quotas for all of us, rather like ration books. If we drive a lot or take airplane flights, we'll have to buy unused quota points from others. The aim is to control emissions by forcing people to use less energy. King doesn't go into detail for fear of "angering the Treasury," but Morley spells out a 'growing interest' in imposing carbon quotas on people.

Neither of them says how much of global warming is part of a natural geophysical and solar cycle, and how much is man-made. Nor do they tell us what proportion of the latter element is caused by energy use, as opposed to activities like farming. Both assume that humankind has to use less energy, and think energy or carbon taxes are the only way forward. Both overlook the very real possibility that emissions might be controlled not by using less energy, but by using cleaner energy, and developing technologies which address the problems.

You might drive people with sticks such as carbon taxes and energy ration books, but carrots are usually more successful. The carrots might include incentives to develop cleaner energy use, and perhaps lower taxes on the forms which pollute less. That is what worked for unleaded fuel. The kind of restrictive, authoritarian thinking which produced Kyoto and ideas like personal energy quotas is fortunately looking well past its sell-by date; and the same is true of Sir David King and Elliot Morley.



Chewing Up Enviro-myths

(Post lifted from Cheat-Seeking Missiles)

I've laughed with frustration when, on the one hand, environmentalists say grazing is extremely damaging to the environment and must be banned on federal lands, and on the other, they call some century-old cattle ranch pegged for development a pristine ecosystem that must be saved.

Now the publication Conservation Biology has a study that's probably quite close to the truth: cattle are good for the environment.

Before the greenies amoung you actually turn green, take a moment to consider biological history. Before ranchers came to the west, there were large grazing animals all over the place -- buffalo, elk, and so forth. They interfaced with the land just as cows do.

They are no longer with us, and with their departure, an important aspect of natural ecosystem balancing disappeared. Cows replace this function quite efficiently:

Cattle grazing could help endangered species

There may be a surprise in store for environmentalists - removing cattle grazing could actually be damaging to the environment

There may be a surprise in store for environmentalits - removing cattle grazing could actually be damaging to the environment. An article published in the latest issue of Conservation Biology finds that cattle grazing plays an important role in maintaining wetland habitat necessary for some endangered species. Removing cattle from grazing lands in the Central Valley of California could, inadvertently, degrade the vernal pool habitat of fairy shrimp and tiger salamanders.

Cattle grazing influences the rates of evaporation which work together with climate to determine the depth and duration of wetland flooding. Cattle have been grazing in the land for roughly 150 years and have become a naturalized part of the ecosystem. "In practical terms, this means that grazing may help sustain the kinds of aquatic environments endangered fairy shrimps need to survive," author Christopher R. Pyke states.

The authors looked at 36 vernal pools on two different geologic formations on a 5000-ha ranch in eastern Sacramento County, California. Their experiments found that removal of grazing reduced the duration of wetland flooding by an average of 50 days per year.

Their simulations show that climate change could compound these impacts, potentially, leaving endangered fairy shrimp and tiger salamanders without enough time to mature before their temporary aquatic environments disappear.

"Consequently, land managers can play an important role in climate change impacts, i.e. they can exacerbate or ameliorate, the local impacts of global change," Pyke adds. Conservationists may find that grazing is not always a negative factor, and it presents real opportunities to adapt to climate variability and climate change..

The study is published in the October issue of Conservation Biology

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

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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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



19 October, 2005

THE LATEST SCARE: INNOVATION DROUGHT!

Living as we do amid contant technological advances it is hard not to laugh at the latest scare but let's have a quick look anyway. The author concerned seems to recognize that the easy and obvious scientific problems have now been solved so the remaining problems are harder and take longer to solve but he still seems to see that inevitability as a catastrophe. His basic premise seems to be that we HAVE to innovate to stay prosperous etc but he offers no proof for such an absurd claim. Given the projected falling populations in the developed world, we would in fact arguably have MORE resources per head in the future than we do now -- without a single further innovation.

The whole article could do with a good fisking, as it is so full of demonstrably dubious assumptions ("peak oil", for instance), but perhaps one final point: Even if all innovation were suddenly to cease tomorrow, just making more use of what we already know would enable huge increases in living standards etc. -- increased use of nuclear power or decreased use of agricultural protectionism being just two obvious instances of that. The topic is being discussed on Majority Rights at the moment for anybody who wants to see a few further thoughts on the matter

Jonathan Huebner is an amiable, very polite and very correct physicist who works at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He took the job in 1985, when he was 26. An older scientist told him how lucky he was. In the course of his career, he could expect to see huge scientific and technological advances. But by 1990, Huebner had begun to suspect the old man was wrong. "The number of advances wasn't increasing exponentially, I hadn't seen as many as I had expected - not in any particular area, just generally."

Puzzled, he undertook some research of his own. He began to study the rate of significant innovations as catalogued in a standard work entitled The History of Science and Technology. After some elaborate mathematics, he came to a conclusion that raised serious questions about our continued ability to sustain progress. What he found was that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873 and has been declining ever since. In fact, our current rate of innovation - which Huebner puts at seven important technological developments per billion people per year - is about the same as it was in 1600. By 2024 it will have slumped to the same level as it was in the Dark Ages, the period between the end of the Roman empire and the start of the Middle Ages.

The calculations are based on innovations per person, so if we could keep growing the human population we could, in theory, keep up the absolute rate of innovation. But in practice, to do that, we'd have to swamp the world with billions more people almost at once. That being neither possible nor desirable, it seems we'll just have to accept that progress, at least on the scientific and technological front, is slowing very rapidly indeed.

Huebner offers two possible explanations: economics and the size of the human brain. Either it's just not worth pursuing certain innovations since they won't pay off - one reason why space exploration has all but ground to a halt - or we already know most of what we can know, and so discovering new things is becoming increasingly difficult. We have, for example, known for over 20 years how cancer works and what needs to be done to prevent or cure it. But in most cases, we still have no idea how to do it, and there is no likelihood that we will in the foreseeable future.

Huebner's insight has caused some outrage. The influential scientist Ray Kurzweil has criticised his sample of innovations as "arbitrary"; K Eric Drexler, prophet of nanotechnology, has argued that we should be measuring capabilities, not innovations. Thus we may travel faster or access more information at greater speeds without significant innovations as such.

Huebner has so far successfully responded to all these criticisms. Moreover, he is supported by the work of Ben Jones, a management professor at Northwestern University in Illinois. Jones has found that we are currently in a quandary comparable to that of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: we have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Basically, two centuries of economic growth in the industrialised world has been driven by scientific and technological innovation. We don't get richer unaided or simply by working harder: we get richer because smart people invent steam engines, antibiotics and the internet. What Jones has discovered is that we have to work harder and harder to sustain growth through innovation. More and more money has to be poured into research and development and we have to deploy more people in these areas just to keep up. "The result is," says Jones, "that the average individual innovator is having a smaller and smaller impact."

Like Huebner, he has two theories about why this is happening. The first is the "low-hanging fruit" theory: early innovators plucked the easiest-to-reach ideas, so later ones have to struggle to crack the harder problems. Or it may be that the massive accumulation of knowledge means that innovators have to stay in education longer to learn enough to invent something new and, as a result, less of their active life is spent innovating. "I've noticed that Nobel-prize winners are getting older," he says. "That's a sure sign it's taking longer to innovate." The other alternative is to specialise - but that would mean innovators would simply be tweaking the latest edition of Windows rather than inventing the light bulb. The effect of their innovations would be marginal, a process of making what we already have work slightly better. This may make us think we're progressing, but it will be an illusion.

If Huebner and Jones are right, our problem goes way beyond Windows. For if innovation is the engine of economic progress - and almost everybody agrees it is - growth may be coming to an end. Since our entire financial order - interest rates, pension funds, insurance, stock markets - is predicated on growth, the social and economic consequences may be cataclysmic.

Is it really happening? Will progress grind to a halt? The long view of history gives conflicting evidence. Paul Ormerod, a London-based economist and author of the book Why Most Things Fail, is unsure. "I am in two minds about this. Biologists have abandoned the idea of progress - we just are where we are. But humanity is so far in advance of anything that has gone before that it seems to be a qualitative leap."

For Ormerod, there may be very rare but similar qualitative leaps in the organisation of society. The creation of cities, he believes, is one. Cities emerged perhaps 10,000 years ago, not long after humanity ceased being hunter-gatherers and became farmers. Other apparently progressive developments cannot compete. The Roman empire, for example, once seemed eternal, bringing progress to the world. But then, one day, it collapsed and died. The question thus becomes: is our liberal-democratic-capitalist way of doing things, like cities, an irreversible improvement in the human condition, or is it like the Roman empire, a shooting star of wealth and success, soon to be extinguished?

Ormerod suspects that capitalism is indeed, like cities, a lasting change in the human condition. "Immense strides forward have been taken," he says. It may be that, after millennia of striving, we have found the right course. Capitalism may be the Darwinian survivor of a process of natural selection that has seen all other systems fail.

Ormerod does acknowledge, however, that the rate of innovation may well be slowing - "All the boxes may be ticked," as he puts it - and that progress remains dependent on contingencies far beyond our control. An asteroid strike or super-volcanic eruption could crush all our vanities in an instant. But in principle, Ormerod suspects that our 200-year spree is no fluke.

This is heartily endorsed by the Dutch-American Joel Mokyr, one of the most influential economic historians in the world today. Mokyr is the author of The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena, two books that support the progressive view that we are indeed doing something right, something that makes our liberal-democratic civilisation uniquely able to generate continuous progress. The argument is that, since the 18th-century Enlightenment, a new term has entered the human equation. This is the accumulation of and a free market in knowledge. As Mokyr puts it, we no longer behead people for saying the wrong thing - we listen to them. This "social knowledge" is progressive because it allows ideas to be tested and the most effective to survive. This knowledge is embodied in institutions, which, unlike individuals, can rise above our animal natures. Because of the success of these institutions, we can reasonably hope to be able, collectively, to think our way around any future problems. When the oil runs out, for example, we should have harnessed hydrogen or fusion power. If the environment is being destroyed, then we should find ways of healing it. "If global warming is happening," says Mokyr, "and I increasingly am persuaded that it is, then we will have the technology to deal with it."

More here



NATURAL DISASTERS HAVE ALWAYS EVOKED THEOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS

And there are few schools of thought more theological than "Global Warming"

TSUNAMI, HURRICANE, DROUGHT AND now earthquake and flood. In a single year, the Earth has buckled and lashed out, piling calamity on catastrophe to the point where humanity inevitably asks whether the catalogue of disasters is natural, in the sense of random and routine, or whether these are evidence of a pattern: either global warming, government failure, or God's wrath.

Writers have always responded to the Earth's cruelties in this way, searching for an explanation of the forces that lie beyond human control. The biblical flood was evidence of a divine intention to cleanse the world of sin. In medieval Europe, as Norman Cohen has shown, plague and devastation prompted millennial movements, since they presaged Apocalypse and, therefore, redemption. The California earthquake of 1906 led to a sharp rise in religious fundamentalism.

In our own time, there are those who have seen Hurricane Katrina as punishment for the sins of New Orleans, Sodom on the Mississippi. Others allocated the sin elsewhere, in man's alleged mismanagement of nature. In the aftermath of Katrina, Germany's environment minister declared: "The American President has closed his eyes to the economic and human damage that natural catastrophes such as Katrina - in other words, disasters caused by a lack of climate protection measures - can visit on his country."

Sales of apocalyptic literature have grown hugely in recent times: the doom boom is nigh. While scientists give warning of scientific disaster - Atlantic hurricanes, a new European ice age as the Gulf Stream dies, the disintegration of the Antarctic ice shelf - others foresee Apocalypse, Armageddon and Rapture, the bodily ascent to Heaven of the saved. A recent poll in Newsweek showed that some 55 per cent of Americans believe in the Rapture, and more than a third believe that the world will end as predicted in the Book of Revelation. The 12 novels in the Left Behind series of Christian apocalyptic fiction have sold more than 63 million copies.

Alongside the religious and scientific responses to natural disaster lies another, humanist, tradition. This surveys the devastation and finds not God's vengeance but man's powerlessness and, perhaps, his courage amid the implacable elements. The tempest puts man in his place in the natural world, like mighty King Lear humbled by the weather:

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout."

The best modern example of this genre is Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, an essay in fear telling the story of the great hurricane that struck America's Eastern Seaboard in October 1991, and the fate of the swordfish boat Andrea Gail, lost 500 miles from land. Junger brilliantly evokes sea weather, "the smell of ocean so strong that it can almost be licked off the air."

Simon Winchester has mined a rich seam of literary post-disaster reconstruction. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (2003) describes the worst volcanic eruption in known history, when Krakatoa vaporised, generating immense tsunamis, engulfing entire towns in hot ash, and forming islands of pumice in a hot sea. The shock waves travelled seven times around the globe, but some of the more intriguing reverberations were political and religious. Winchester argues that the Dutch abandonment of its Indonesian colonies in the wake of the calamity turned many towards radical Islam. The latest explosion in Bali can thus be traced, in part, back to that devastating eruption of 1883. Winchester's latest book, A Crack in the Edge of the World: The Great American Earthquake of 1906, is published this month. In a similar vein, it describes the time when the Earth suddenly yawned across San Francisco, toppling buildings, igniting firestorms and crumbling to dust, in less than a minute, a significant part of the American Dream.

These authors owe a debt to Daniel Defoe. On November 26, 1703, England and Wales were struck by a devastating hurricane which ripped across the country, killing 8,000 people, hurling cows into trees, scything down forests and destroying a fifth of the royal fleet. In The Storm, reissued on the 300th anniversary with an excellent introduction by Richard Hamblyn, Defoe gathered together eyewitness accounts and scientific evidence. A factual work of reportage, The Storm brought out the themes that would resonate in Defoe's later writings (most notably Robinson Crusoe) and in modern accounts of natural calamity: collective suffering, individual resilience and the implacable might of nature.

Many saw the storm of 1703 as God's vengeance. A year earlier, the Archbishop of Dublin, William King, had declared that "earthquakes, storms, thunder, deluges and inundations . . . are sometimes sent by a just and gracious God for the punishment of mankind".

The turning point would come a few years later, with the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed a third of a great European city, killed tens of thousands and undermined theological certainty.

Voltaire, most famously, reacted with a rationalist's fury, rejecting the notion that such suffering fitted some scheme of divine justice. In Candide, he would savage the philosopher Leibniz's placid insistence that "all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds

More here

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

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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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



18 October, 2005

THE FADING OF THE GREENS

Only half a decade ago the future of Europe looked greener than ever before. Green parties were part of the governments of five European countries, pushing the environment closer to the forefront of policy-making. "Some had the impression that a luminous sunflower was hanging in the grey sky," wrote Juan Behrend, the former secretary general of the Green federation in the European parliament. But that era is now over.

With the cementing of a grand coalition in Germany this week, Greens have lost their last toehold in western European government, and their most recognisable figure, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, is out of office. And this at a time, says Mr Behrend, when "the current climate is asking for Green politics".

Having been ejected from government in Finland, France, Italy, Belgium and now Germany, it would be no surprise if the Greens' optimism, like the imaginary sunflower, had wilted. "These are setbacks, clearly, in every case. Greens are not now shaping policy," says Hubert Kleinert, once a German Green MP, now a political scientist. That ties their fortunes closely to the left, he says, as "it does make the parties of the centre-left very dependent on the Greens". For Prof Kleinert, being out of power gives greens a chance to rethink their allegiances, including the possibility of entering coalitions with centre-right parties like Germany's CDU. It could be a divisive debate, as "the feeling of the Greens' leaders is surely more to the middle, but the feeling of the base is more left-wing".

But other commentators say there is no need for Greens to panic. They are part of Romano Prodi's left-wing alliance expected to challenge hard in Italy's elections next year, and are likely to form part of the left-wing bloc competing in France in 2007. "Greens have shown they can be serious politicians, can hold cabinet office and can be trusted, and these will count if their time comes again," says Dr Neil Carter of the University of York.

But what about environmental policies? With no Green ministers now at cabinet tables, or at EU ministerial meetings, will there be no-one to push ecological considerations? The Green Party in Germany was instrumental in forming that country's policy of shutting down nuclear energy, and its huge increase in the use of renewable energy. Are these achievements now at risk? Prof Rootes thinks not, as these ideas are now "entrenched" in the political mainstream.

Mr Behrend says that people across Europe realise the importance of environmental protection, and they will not allow any political party to neglect that in its policy making. "Green politics and sustainability are not just post-materialistic dreams," he says. "They are hard politics that we're going to have to face in the coming years

Source



ELECTRICITY FROM COAL BECOMING "GREENER"

Popular wisdom is that wind power is the best choice for electricity generation, especially if the goal is to reduce the emissions of mercury, SO2, NOx, or CO2. However, in a paper published on ES&T's Research ASAP website, researchers report that consumers in Texas paid about 5.7 cents per kilowatt hour (›/kWh) more for renewable power in 2002 than if the same power had been produced by state-of-the-art coal-powered plants designed to reduce these 4 significant air pollutants.

The analysis, conducted by Katrina Dobesova from the University of Economics, Prague, and Jay Apt and Lester Lave from Carnegie Mellon University's Electricity Industry Center, examined the cost of renewable power in Texas, the U.S.'s largest power producer. The state has enacted a tough renewable portfolio standard (RPS), which requires that utilities obtain a certain percentage of their power from renewable sources. The authors focused on wind power, because it provided 87% of Texas's renewable capacity in 2002. The state also produces a lot of air pollution: In 2002, Texas was the origin of 10% of the U.S.'s mercury, 19% of its CO2, and 14% of its NOx emissions.

The study found that the same pollution reductions could be reached more cheaply with an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plant that uses carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) than with wind power. Combined-cycle plants that use pulverized coal or natural gas and include CCS could obtain achieve the same costs. There are 11 IGCC plants operating in the U.S. and 112 in the world, Apt says.

The District of Columbia and 20 U.S. states have enacted some form of renewable policy for electricity generation, the authors say. Most RPS proponents favor non-fossil-fuel energy sources, Apt suggests. Several state legislatures are debating new RPSs right now.

As part of the analysis, the researchers considered the cost incurred by utilities for "fill-in power"-the energy usually bought from coal- or natural-gas-powered plants when the wind doesn't blow. Texas wind turbines spin about one-third of the time on average, Apt explains. This means that utilities must purchase power for the other two-thirds of the time. These costs had been previously estimated at 1.1 ›/kWh, Apt says. Other factors that played an important role in their calculations included the federal wind-energy production tax credit for renewable energy, which they calculated as 1.8 ›/kWh, and the loss of power as it moves along transmission lines from wind turbines typically located far from major cities, which they peg at 0.9 ›/kWh.

In the end, Dobesova, Apt, and Lave conclude that an energy policy that is broader than an RPS might provide society with the least expensive, and least polluting, energy source. "Legislation like that enacted in Pennsylvania includes IGCC [technology] and thus addresses directly the issue of carbon control within the framework of a politically palatable mechanism," the three write.

More here



THE SUN "BREATHES"

Another blow at the popular misconception of the sun as invariant. A note from Oliver K. Manuel, Professor of Nuclear Chemistry University of Missouri

A new paper from UCLA and Stanford uses helioseismology data collected over a 9 year period to confirm stratification of the Sun, even at shallow depths >0.005 Ro. "We have found a variability of the "helioseismic" radius in antiphase with the solar activity, with the strongest variations of the stratification being just below the surface around 0.995 Rsun. Besides, the radius of the deeper layers of the Sun, between 0.975 Rsun and 0.99 Rsun changes in phase with the 11-year cycle."

The new paper documents that the Sun is variable and "breathes" on an 11 year cycle, with anti-correlated radius changes above and below 0.99 Ro like the anti-correlated radius changes in our chest and stomach during breathing. See here. Michael Mozina reported evidence of shallow stratification of the Sun earlier this year in images from NASA's SOHO satellite and Trace satellite programs. The UCLA/Stanford paper follows close on the heels of a paper co-authored by Mozina which posits that the Sun is a magnetic plasma diffuser with rigid, iron-rich structures (See Figs. 14 and 15) below its fluid photosphere.

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

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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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



17 October, 2005

BACKGROUND TO THE STERN REVIEW

An email to Benny Peiser from David Henderson (zapf_zenda@hotmail.com). David Henderson CMG was formerly Head of the Economics and Statistics Department of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In 1985 he gave the BBC Reith Lectures. Currently he is a Visiting Professor at the Westminster Business School in London

Over the past three years I and an Australian colleague, Ian Castles, have presented and developed a critique of the treatment of economic issues by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Panel, through its Chairman, has dismissed us as purveyors of disinformation and described us as 'so-called "two independent commentators"'.

A feature that we have consistently stressed in our critique is the strange and culpable failure of treasuries and finance ministries to involve themselves in questions of climate change and policies relating to it. Despite the large amounts that are at stake, these ministries, including Her Majesty's Treasury, have been content to leave the economic aspects to be dealt with exclusively, as they have seen fit, by environmental departments and agencies. Whitehall showed no interest in what we had written.

But in April 2004 Lord Taverne asked in the House of Lords 'Whether [the Government] are satisfied with the economic and statistical work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change'. On behalf of the government, Baroness Farrington replied:

'My Lords, we are satisfied that the economic work of the IPCC is the most comprehensive assessment available. We note that it represents consensus between governments based on careful analysis'.

This, long-established official position remained unchallenged until this summer, when a new element appeared on the scene. The new element is an impressive report, entitled 'Economic Aspects of Climate Change', from the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, a high-powered body. The report was unanimous. In the opening paragraph of the Abstract, the Committee 'calls on the Government to give HM Treasury a more extensive role, both in examining the costs and benefits of climate change and presenting then to the United Kingdom public, and in the work of the [IPCC].'

The decision to launch the Stern Review was almost certainly prompted by this and other criticisms of the official government line, as also of the IPCC, voiced by the Select Committee. Does the decision imply that government polices on climate change have been, or are about to be, radically recast? In my view, this is not the case. All the same, the government has shifted its position in one important respect, though without saying so. The complacent words that her officials put into the mouth of Baroness Farrington in April last year, as quoted above, have been tacitly eaten. If the IPCC's handling of economic issues was truly beyond challenge, the Stern Review would have no point. By commissioning the review, and by suggesting that it could contribute usefully to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report which was launched almost two years ago, a British government has conceded for the first time that the IPCC process is less than wholly authoritative and could be improved from outside. This is a welcome though belated development.



YOU CAN'T WIN WITH THE GREENIES

A property owner who took political hack hot air about renewable energy sources seriously decided to power a new olive oil processing plant she's building on her property with a 210 foot tall windmill. What could possibly be wrong with that? Everything, according to the pinheads on the Marin County (Mexifornia) planning commission who voted it down by a 6-to-1 margin.

Everyone at the meeting made approving noises about the renewable energy scheme, a concept they fervently supported...in the abstract. But, the usual suspects - especially the windmill-building property owner's neighbors - whined that this all too real renewable energy source was too damn big, would probably be too damn loud, and worst of all it's gonna exact a heavy toll on Tweety and all his avian pals. Too big? It's a whopper but, since it's not on the whiners' property, so damn what? Killing Tweety and his pals? That's the way the cookie crumbles. Too loud? A loud windmill? I way don't think so Tim, not that it's any of the whiners' business.

The final fun fact here is that the Marin County lefties already approved another windmill, but it's just a puny critter that measures a mere 80 feet. This just in! Hypocrisy is alive and kicking in Marin County, but property rights are on life support.

(From post of Oct 11 on Pig Blog)



RECENT DISASTER DEATHS MAINLY A NUMBERS GAME

Nature was pretty chaotic around the beginning of last century too

"NINETY-NINE years ago this December, one of the greatest - and certainly most famous - natural disasters to hit the Western world struck the Californian boomtown of San Francisco. A massive earthquake measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale wrenched a gash in the Earth's crust, along the San Andreas fault line. Thousands of buildings were destroyed, and perhaps 3000 people killed.

This was not the only natural disaster that year. In his book, A Crack In The Edge Of The World, Simon Winchester labels it as the "most ill-behaved of times in the entire century". A series of earthquakes struck, hitting places as diverse as Taiwan, the Caribbean island of St Lucia and Ecuador. As a result of the latter quake, a 10m tsunami pounded the Ecuadorian coasts and several hundred were killed.

Still Nature had more: Vesuvius, the most famous volcano in the world, erupted, belching and burning and killing 150 or so unfortunate Italians living on its flanks. No wonder some saw these catastrophes as proof of a geological conspiracy.

Now, almost a century later, one would be forgiven for thinking we are witnessing another period of geological and meteorological misbehaviour. The most recent temper tantrums started in January last year, when the ancient fortified city of Bam in Iran was flattened by a major quake, killing tens of thousands. On Boxing Day came the worst natural disaster in recent years. A massive quake off the coast of Sumatra generated a series of immense tsunamis that probably killed more than a third of a million people. And finally, last weekend, the great faultlines that underlie the Himalaya mountains rumbled again, sending death and destruction across the beautiful valleys of Kashmir. Yesterday, seven days after the massive earthquake, Pakistan called off rescue operations to focus on relief efforts.

Add to this Hurricane Katrina (and half a dozen of her ugly sisters) and it is tempting to see a pattern - to wonder if Earth, is taking her revenge on humanity for a century or more of profligacy, pollution and over-population.

Tempting, perhaps, but wrong. For despite the catastrophes we have witnessed, the Earth is no more unstable than it ever has been. So what is going on? The Earth has not changed, but we have. The mathematics of demography mean natural disasters are killing more and more, and will continue to do so for decades. The human population has increased almost exponentially during the past 100 years. When San Francisco was hit back in 1906, the world's population was just 1.6 billion. In recent times, tens of millions of people a year have been added.

And it just so happens that many, if not most, of those souls live in some of the most vulnerable areas of the planet - along the great earthquake faults of Asia and South America or on the tropical floodplains of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. We have built gargantuan, jerry-built cities of concrete - the teetering, shabby low-rise cement towns that stretch from the Levant to India. When the ground shakes, they fall like houses of cards.

It never used to be like this. Back in 1893, the Dutch East Indies island of Krakatoa exploded, with the force of several thermonuclear bombs. This was probably the most dramatic geological event of recent times, yet despite the effects (huge tsunamis washing the coast of Indonesia and South-East Asia) the death toll was estimated at 38,000 - bad, but scarcely a tenth of that in the great Asian earthquake and the tsunami of last year. The people back then weren't lucky; there were just fewer of them to be killed.

The same is true of the devastation caused by the extreme weather we have witnessed in recent years. After the horrors of Katrina and Rita, it is tempting to believe that hurricanes are gaining in strength and frequency. In fact, meteorological records show there have been rather fewer hurricanes in the past 50 years than in the preceding half-century - we are only now seeing an upswing in what is probably a natural cycle.

But in one sense, hurricanes are getting worse. The reason is not the storms themselves - it is simply that more people live in areas in their path. Natural disasters of all kinds will always be with us. They are dramatic, and make us wake up and take notice that the Earth is not always as benign as we would like to believe. Unless whole communities could be persuaded to relocate away from such disaster zones - an utterly impractical proposition - there is nothing we can do to avert such epic disasters, save put in place tighter building controls and better planning.

As a species, homo sapiens has been incredibly successful. But sometimes we will inevitably pay the price for this success, as earthquakes, storms and volcanoes wreak havoc on human habitation. That is not the Earth's revenge. It is simply the price we pay for living on an inherently unstable planet.

Source

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

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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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



16 October, 2005

TEFLON UNDER ATTACK: FOR THE USUAL BOGUS REASONS

(I was tempted to say: "But the charges won't stick"!). The real reason Greenies have for the attack is that teflon is so widely used that attacking it offers the maximum prospect of disrupting the everyday lives of ordinary people

The uncanny ability of President Ronald Reagan to deflect public criticism won him the nickname, "The Teflon President." Ironically, now it is Teflon itself that is facing the heat, as anti-chemical groups and trial attorneys have joined forces to cook up controversy over a product that has become one of America's most trusted consumer icons, as well as an integral part of our language, like Thermos and Kleenex.

The radical Environmental Working Group has charged that the billions of meals worldwide prepared every day on Teflon cookware are being contaminated with "Teflon toxins," and two Florida-based law firms have filed a $5 billion class-action suit in eight states against the manufacturer, DuPont, for "failing" to warn consumers about the product's alleged dangers. But, like many product-safety scares these days, these charges are bogus. And that really fries us.

The truth is that an EPA advisory panel has recommended more testing of a chemical known as PFOA, which is used to make non-stick coatings and numerous other products, including those trademarked as Teflon. However, both Teflon and PFOA have been the subject of numerous studies, and there is not a shred of evidence that either poses a human health risk.

Only when tested at very high doses on mice and rats, has PFOA been shown to cause cancer, but under the EPA's current policy, such questionable animal data are enough to classify the chemical as a "likely human carcinogen." That high-dose test methodology is unreliable, though, because it is totally irrelevant to real world exposures. In fact, a wide spectrum of naturally occurring chemicals -- including many that are common constituents of our diet -- also cause cancer in lab animals at high doses. At the very low doses to which humans are actually exposed, most natural and synthetic chemicals are completely harmless.

Most compelling of all, PFOA is not present in the actual non-stick cookware coating -- including pots and pans coated with Teflon. A recent peer-reviewed published study confirmed that there is no detectable consumer exposure to PFOA through Teflon-coated cookware. Even the chronically over-cautious European Food Safety Administration recently dismissed the trumped up concerns and allowed the continued use of non-stick coatings in cookware. Studies in Denmark and China also have also confirmed Teflon's safety. Finally, the risk-averse U.S. EPA has stated quite clearly that it "does not believe there is any reason for consumers to stop using any consumer or industrial related products" as a result of their ongoing investigation into PFOA.

That should be the end of the story. But the persuasive evidence against any injury caused by Teflon doesn't faze attorney Alan Kluger. "I don't have to prove that it causes cancer," he said. "I only have to prove that DuPont lied in a massive attempt to continue selling their product."

What's going on here? The typical formula used in these big class action suits is to trump up some bogus health claim, demand a quick settlement, and then cut and run before the facts are weighed in litigation. The lawyers know they can count on people's fear of chemicals and their natural concern for the health of their families to generate public outrage. Teflon has been around for half a century and is ubiquitous.

As toxicologist and president of the American Council on Science and Health Dr. Elizabeth Whelan has pointed out, "Teflon, probably more than any industrial product, is the poster child of modern technology, one that has made our lives easier and more enjoyable." It is precisely the product's "stellar success story [that] makes it a very ripe target for those who spew chemical-phobia in their crusade to eliminate the tools modern industrial chemistry has given us -- pesticides, pharmaceuticals, food additives, and more."

Another factor in pursuing bogus claims is that the plaintiffs' lawyers know they can often count on a major corporation like DuPont to capitulate in order to protect its reputation. In 2004, for example, the company paid an $82 million out-of-court settlement to the residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia, who alleged that PFOA from a nearby DuPont plant had tainted their water supplies -- in spite of the lack of any supportive evidence. In fact, a University of Pennsylvania study examined neighbors of the Parkersburg claimants who used the same water source and found no harmful effects. We hope that this time DuPont fights to the bitter end to expose this class action charade....

Distortion and manipulation of science by self-styled consumer groups in pursuit of political agendas and by voracious plaintiffs' attorneys looking for the next big score erodes our society's capacity to innovate and prosper. It jeopardizes safe and beneficial products and harms manufacturers and their employees. In the absence of persuasive evidence vetted by experts, consumers should reject the attacks on Teflon, as well as on other essential products like vaccines, pesticides, medical drugs, and many others. The charges just won't stick.

More here



BRITISH GOVERNMENT IS SLOWLY TURNING THE SHIP OF STATE AWAY FROM "KYOTO"

Let me predict right now that Greenies will soon be calling the new body, "The Stern Gang"

The Chancellor announced on 19 July 2005 that he had asked Sir Nicholas Stern to lead a major review of the economics of climate change, to understand more comprehensively the nature of the economic challenges and how they can be met, in the UK and globally. The Terms of Reference for the review have now been announced and are annexed to this Press Notice. A call for evidence has also been issued.

The review will be taken forward jointly by the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury, and will report to the Prime Minister and Chancellor by Autumn 2006. It takes place within the context of existing national and international climate change policy. The announcement of this review is a further demonstration of the importance which this Government attaches to the issue of climate change, and follows its decision to make climate change a priority for the UK Presidencies of the G8 and EU.

Sir Nicholas is Head of the Government Economic Service, and has also been appointed today as Adviser to the Government on the economics of climate change and development. He said: "I am delighted to be taking on the challenge of conducting this review of the economics of climate change. Climate change is one of the most serious issues facing the world in the 21st century. In order to tackle it whilst also promoting a dynamic, equitable and sustainable global economy, we will need to have a deep understanding of the economics of this complex problem. That is what I hope this Review can achieve"

Sir Nicholas is today asking interested stakeholders in the UK and the rest of the world, including academic, private sector, scientific, NGO and other experts, to submit evidence to the Review. Evidence on all areas relevant to the Terms of Reference will be welcomed. The deadline for evidence to be submitted is 9 December 2005.

More here



Planet endures hottest month since 1880

You've read the headline now read the story:

"September was the hottest month recorded on the planet Earth since 1880, US weather trackers said overnight. The global temperature was 0.63 degree C above the mean going back to 1880, when the first reliable instrument recordings were available, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, part of the US Commerce Department.

Earth's second-hottest month was September 2003, but September 2005 was only the fourth-hottest month ever for the United States, NOAA said.

This year, the US state of Louisiana had its hottest September in 111 years. The US Gulf Coast was battered by the first of two hurricanes on August 29, during a particularly active tropical storm season".

More here

So although we appear to be amid a period of slight warming, the warming is so slight (less than one degree above the average for the last 125 years) that what was true of the earth as a whole was not true of the USA nor of Louisiana. In other words, if you are looking at tiny variations in temperature, what the hottest period is varies from place to place. How surprising! If you keep looking hard enough at even a series of random numbers you will always find unusual bits here and there -- particularly if you are looking at only a tiny fragment of the total sequence -- and records going back only 125 years are a VERY tiny fragment of the earth's temperature history -- a history which proxy measurements show to be highly variable. And in months when the temperature is below average, do we hear: "Earth cools down"? I think not.

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

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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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



16 October, 2005

WOW! TOP BRITISH POLITICIAN CALLS FOR ABOLITION OF THE IPCC

Lord Nigel Lawson recently testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works -- testifying on the Kyoto Protocol and assessing the status of efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Lord Lawson is a former Chancellor of the Exchequer [i.e. Treasurer, Finance minister] in the British government. A seat in the House of Lords is permanent so members can speak their minds without fear or favour. And Tony Blair's reforms have greatly enhanced the authority and expertise of the House. How annoying for Leftists that the world's most "anachronistic" parliamentary body should also arguably be the wisest -- not that Leftists would admit it, of course. The text of Lord Lawson's very comprehensive statement is below:

"I am grateful for your invitation to testify before you today. I am aware that you have been provided with the Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs on The Economics of Climate Change in advance of these proceedings, so I intend simply to summarise our key findings and to provide some commentary of my own. By way of background, the Economic Affairs Committee is one of the four permanent investigative committees of the House of Lords, and fulfils one of the major roles of our second chamber as a forum of independent expertise and review of all UK government activity. It is composed of members of all three main political parties. Its climate change report, which was agreed unanimously, was published on 6 July 2005, just ahead of the G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland. In summary, the Committee concluded that:

* The Government should give the UK Treasury a more extensive role, both in examining the costs and benefits of climate change policy and presenting them to the public, and also in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC);

* There are concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, and the influence of political considerations in its findings;

* There are significant doubts about the IPCC's scenarios, in particular the high emissions scenarios, and the Government should press it to change its approach;

* Positive aspects of global warming have been played down in the IPCC reports: the IPCC needs to reflect in a more balanced way the costs and benefits of climate change;

* The Government should press the IPCC for better estimates of the monetary costs of global warming damage and for explicit monetary comparisons between the costs of measures to control warming and their benefits;

* A more balanced approach to the relative merits of adaptation and mitigation is needed, with far more attention paid to adaptation measures;

* UK energy and climate change policy appears to be based on dubious assumptions about the roles of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and the costs to the UK of achieving its objectives have been poorly documented, and the Government, with much stronger Treasury involvement, should review and substantiate the cost estimates involved and convey them in transparent form to the public;

* Current UK nuclear power capacity should be retained;

* International negotiations on climate change reduction will prove ineffective because of the preoccupation with setting emissions targets. The Kyoto Protocol makes little difference to rates of warming, and has a na‹ve compliance mechanism which can only deter countries from signing up to subsequent tighter emissions targets. Any future Protocols might be more fruitfully based on agreements on technology and its diffusion.

I cannot of course speak for the Committee as a whole, but my own understanding of the issue is clear:

* The IPCC's consistent refusal to entertain any dissent, however well researched, which challenges its assumptions, is profoundly unscientific;

* Although its now famous "hockey stick" chart of temperatures over the last millennium, which inter alia featured prominently in the UK Government's 2003 Energy White Paper, is almost certainly a myth, the IPCC refuses to entertain any challenge to it;

* The IPCC's scenarios exercise, which incidentally incorporates a a demonstrably fallacious method of inter-country economic comparisons, manifests a persistent upward bias in the likely amount of carbon dioxide emissions over the next hundred years. For example, a combination of steadily increasing energy efficiency and the growth of the less energy-intensive service economy has led to a steadily declining rate of growth of carbon dioxide emissions over the past 40 years: all the IPCC's scenarios unaccountably assume an abrupt reversal of this established trend.

So why is the IPCC so adamant that it will not revisit its conclusions? It may be that they are so profoundly concerned about the perils of global warming that the darkest possible picture is painted in order to secure urgent action. There may also be the inevitable institutional characteristic of making the problem more serious than it is in order to command greater attention. This too may be a consequence of the way research funding is administered - it is a cold, isolated world for the climate change contrarian in the modern scientific community.

Whichever reason - and I suspect it may be both - the IPCC's absolutist position is unhelpful. The world faces a number of other, and arguably more imminent, challenges and competing claims on resources: the threats from nuclear proliferation and international terrorism, and the need for humanitarian aid for the world's poorest, are obvious examples. Choices always have to be made, and they need to be based on rational assessment.

So far as climate change is concerned, I am not qualified to pronounce on the science. While it seems clear to me, as a layman, that - other things being equal - increasing carbon dioxide emissions will, in time, warm the planet, I note that the science of climate change is uncertain and that reputable scientists hold greatly differing views about the rate at which such warming is likely to occur - which in any case is not simply a matter of the science: it depends just as much on the likely rate of future economic growth and the pattern and nature of that growth. The key question, which is not a matter for scientists at all, is what should be done about such global warming as may occur.

* There are two possible approaches, which are not of course mutually exclusive: mitigation, that is, seeking to stabilize and if possible reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and adaptation, that is to accept that the climate may well be warming, and to take action to counter any harmful consequences that may flow from this.

* The IPCC and its acolytes make only the most perfunctory acknowledgment of adaptation. Their estimates of the damage from global warming are based on the assumption that very little adaptation occurs, and focus almost exclusively on the need for mitigation. In my view, however, the most important conclusion of the House of Lords report is that adaptation needs to take centre stage. . * Numerous studies have shown that adaptation is the more cost-effective option, which is hardly surprising. Not only is that the way in which we normally come to terms with climatic vagaries, but there are benefits as well as costs from global warming. There are, of course, regional variations: in northern Europe, for example, including Britain, for the rest of this century the benefits are likely to exceed the costs, whereas for the tropics the reverse is the case. But adaptation, which implies pocketing the benefits while acting to diminish the costs, has obvious attractions.

* The four principal costs potentially involved in global warming are damage to agriculture and food production, water shortage, coastal flooding (as sea levels rise), and - allegedly - malaria:

o In the case of agriculture, adaptation, much of which will occur autonomously, that is, without the need for government action, would consist of cultivating areas which have hitherto been too cold to be economic and, in other cases, switching to crops better suited to warmer climates.

o In the case of water shortage, there is massive wastage of water at the present time, and ample scope for water conservation measures - which incidentally would also help on the farming front.

o The most serious likely cost is that caused by coastal flooding of low-lying areas, where government action is clearly required, in the form of the construction of effective sea defences - as the Dutch, incidentally, put in place more than 500 years ago. With modern technology this becomes an admittedly expensive but nonetheless highly cost-effective option.

o Finally, as to malaria - which leading malaria experts, whom the IPCC was careful to exclude from its deliberations, argue is in any event unrelated to temperature, noting that the disease was endemic in Europe until the 17th century - the means of combating if not eradicating this scourge are well established.

* By contrast, the Kyoto and emissions caps and targets approach seems a most unattractive option:

o Even if the existing Kyoto targets were attained they would make little if any difference to the predicted rate of global warming. Kyoto's importance is presented as a first step to other, stiffer future agreements. But this is pie in the sky.

o The developing countries, including major contributors to future carbon dioxide emissions such as China and India are - and are determined to remain - outside the process.

o Since the only sanction against non-compliance with Kyoto (which is likely to be widespread) is even stricter targets in any successor agreement, the realism of this approach is even harder to detect.

o In addition, even if targets were achievable, the cost of reaching them would be horrendous. Essentially, it would work by raising the cost of carbon-based energy to the point where carbon-free energy sources, and other carbon saving measures, become economic. For Kyoto-style mitigation to be seriously effective, it would involve a substantially greater rise in energy prices than anything we have yet seen despite recent spikes.

o The real cost of this approach is not so much dearer energy as the reduced rate of world economic growth which this would imply. It is far from self evident, not least for the developing countries, that over the next hundred years a poorer but cooler world is to be preferred to a richer but warmer one. Nor should it be overlooked that the Kyoto strategy requires the present and next generation to sacrifice their living standards in order to benefit more distant generations who are projected in any event to be considerably better off.

* Mitigation can however, be a desirable complement to adaptation. Far better than the Kyoto approach is additional support for research into reduced carbon technologies of all kinds, thus bringing forward the time when at least some of these technologies may become economic. A nation which performs relatively well in terms of cutting back emissions is bound to lose out competitively whereas a nation which achieves a technological breakthrough is likely to benefit competitively.

In conclusion, I believe that the IPCC process is so flawed, and the institution, it has to be said, so closed to reason, that it would be far better to thank it for the work it has done, close it down, and transfer all future international collaboration on the issue of climate change, where the economic dimension is clearly of the first importance, to the established Bretton Woods institutions.

It is profoundly important that all governments, most importantly their Treasury departments, make their own independent and rigorous economic analysis of the issue. At the time the Lords committee was taking evidence this, for whatever reason, had not happened in the UK. I very much hope that, following our report, it will. We appear to have entered a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is profoundly disquieting. It must not be allowed to prevail."

Source



More scientific wisdom bites the dust

It used to be gospel among astrophysicists that comets were made of ice with a bit of dust in them. The Tempel 1 mission is now however accepted as having shown the opposite -- that comets are dust with a bit of ice in them. No doubt that theory will be abandoned in due course too. And there is probably no such thing as a typical comet anyway -- if the Jovian and Saturnian moons are any criterion.

The new conclusion is of course something of a boost for those "wacky" old astrobiologists -- as is this finding:

"Organic chemicals that play a crucial role in the chemistry of life are common in space, a study by NASA researchers has found. These chemicals are "prevalent throughout the universe," said Douglas Hudgins of NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, chief author of a study detailing the findings in the Oct. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. "NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has shown complex organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. are found in every nook and cranny of our galaxy."

Science just is not the right place for dogma -- though you would never guess it from reading what some scientists say. I wonder how that other astrophysical maverick, Andrew Prentice, fared with predictions about Tempel 1? I cannot find anything online.



HISTORY'S FIRST MAJOR "GREEN" POLITICAL PARTY

When we note in Greenies their Leftism, their romanticism about a mythical natural past, their misanthropy, their disregard for facts and reason and their willingness to lie and deceive in their quest for power, it should be noted that all those things were characteristic of a "Green" 1930s political party too -- the National Socialist German Worker's party -- generally abbreviated as the "Nazi" party. The Nazis were as Green as they were socialist and they reveal the sort of tyranny we could expect if the Green/Left of today rose to unrestricted power. Below is just one excerpt from a comprehensive and fully referenced article on the prewar German "Greens":

"It is frequently pointed out that the agrarian and romantic moments in Nazi ideology and policy were in constant tension with, if not in flat contradiction to, the technocratic-industrialist thrust of the Third Reich's rapid modernization. What is not often remarked is that even these modernizing tendencies had a significant ecological component. The two men principally responsible for sustaining this environmentalist commitment in the midst of intensive industrialization were Reichsminister Fritz Todt and his aide, the high-level planner and engineer Alwin Seifert.

Todt was "one of the most influential National Socialists," directly responsible for questions of technological and industrial policy. At his death in 1942 he headed three different cabinet-level ministries in addition to the enormous quasi-official Organisation Todt, and had "gathered the major technical tasks of the Reich into his own hands." According to his successor, Albert Speer, Todt "loved nature" and "repeatedly had serious run-ins with Bormann, protesting against his despoiling the landscape around Obersalzberg." Another source calls him simply "an ecologist." This reputation is based chiefly on Todt's efforts to make Autobahn construction—one of the largest building enterprises undertaken in this century—as environmentally sensitive as possible.

The pre-eminent historian of German engineering describes this commitment thus: "Todt demanded of the completed work of technology a harmony with nature and with the landscape, thereby fulfilling modern ecological principles of engineering as well as the 'organological' principles of his own era along with their roots in voelkisch ideology." The ecological aspects of this approach to construction went well beyond an emphasis on harmonious adaptation to the natural surroundings for aesthetic reasons; Todt also established strict criteria for respecting wetlands, forests and ecologically sensitive areas. But just as with Arndt, Riehl and Darre, these environmentalist concerns were inseparably bound to a voelkisch-nationalist outlook. Todt himself expressed this connection succinctly: "The fulfillment of mere transportation purposes is not the final aim of German highway construction. The German highway must be an expression of its surrounding landscape and an expression of the German essence."

Todt's chief advisor and collaborator on environmental issues was his lieutenant Alwin Seifert, whom Todt reportedly once called a "fanatical ecologist." Seifert bore the official title of Reich Advocate for the Landscape, but his nickname within the party was "Mr. Mother Earth." The appellation was deserved; Seifert dreamed of a "total conversion from technology to nature," and would often wax lyrical about the wonders of German nature and the tragedy of "humankind's" carelessness. As early as 1934 he wrote to Hess demanding attention to water issues and invoking "work methods that are more attuned to nature." In discharging his official duties Seifert stressed the importance of wilderness and energetically opposed monoculture, wetlands drainage and chemicalized agriculture. He criticized Darre as too moderate, and "called for an agricultural revolution towards 'a more peasant-like, natural, simple' method of farming, 'independent of capital'."

With the Third Reich's technological policy entrusted to figures such as these, even the Nazis' massive industrial build-up took on a distinctively green hue. The prominence of nature in the party's philosophical background helped ensure that more radical initiatives often received a sympathetic hearing in the highest offices of the Nazi state. In the mid-thirties Todt and Seifert vigorously pushed for an all-encompassing Reich Law for the Protection of Mother Earth "in order to stem the steady loss of this irreplaceable basis of all life." Seifert reports that all of the ministries were prepared to co-operate save one; only the minister of the economy opposed the bill because of its impact on mining.

But even near-misses such as these would have been unthinkable without the support of Reich Chancellor Rudolf Hess, who provided the "green wing" of the NSDAP a secure anchor at the very top of the party hierarchy. It would be difficult to overestimate Hess's power and centrality in the complex governmental machinery of the National Socialist regime. He joined the party in 1920 as member #16, and for two decades was Hitler's devoted personal deputy. He has been described as "Hitler's closest confidant," and the Fuehrer himself referred to Hess as his "closest advisor." Hess was not only the highest party leader and second in line (after Goering) to succeed Hitler; in addition, all legislation and every decree had to pass through his office before becoming law.

An inveterate nature lover as well as a devout Steinerite, Hess insisted on a strictly biodynamic diet—not even Hitler's rigorous vegetarian standards were good enough for him—and accepted only homeopathic medicines. It was Hess who introduced Darre to Hitler, thus securing the "green wing" its first power base. He was an even more tenacious proponent of organic farming than Darre, and pushed the latter to take more demonstrative steps in support of the lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise. His office was also directly responsible for land use planning across the Reich, employing a number of specialists who shared Seifert's ecological approach.

With Hess's enthusiastic backing, the "green wing" was able to achieve its most notable successes. As early as March 1933, a wide array of environmentalist legislation was approved and implemented at national, regional and local levels. These measures, which included reforestation programs, bills protecting animal and plant species, and preservationist decrees blocking industrial development, undoubtedly "ranked among the most progressive in the world at that time." Planning ordinances were designed for the protection of wildlife habitat and at the same time demanded respect for the sacred German forest. The Nazi state also created the first nature preserves in Europe.

Along with Darre's efforts toward re-agrarianization and support for organic agriculture, as well as Todt and Seifert's attempts to institutionalize an environmentally sensitive land use planning and industrial policy, the major accomplishment of the Nazi ecologists was the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz of 1935. This completely unprecedented "nature protection law" not only established guidelines for safeguarding flora, fauna, and "natural monuments" across the Reich; it also restricted commercial access to remaining tracts of wilderness. In addition, the comprehensive ordinance "required all national, state and local officials to consult with Naturschutz authorities in a timely manner before undertaking any measures that would produce fundamental alterations in the countryside."

Although the legislation's effectiveness was questionable, traditional German environmentalists were overjoyed at its passage. Walter Schoenichen declared it the "definitive fulfillment of the voelkisch-romantic longings," and Hans Klose, Schoenichen's successor as head of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, described Nazi environmental policy as the "high point of nature protection" in Germany. Perhaps the greatest success of these measures was in facilitating the "intellectual realignment of German Naturschutz" and the integration of mainstream environmentalism into the Nazi enterprise."

Much more here

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

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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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



15 October, 2005

STUPID IRISH

I haven't heard of any other country paying for their breaches of this nonsensical treaty

Ireland could face a total bill of between EUR500 million and EUR600m for failing to meet its greenhouse gas limits under the Kyoto Protocol. But the Government yesterday said it would only have to pay EUR280m once a series of gas-cutting measures were introduced. A report commissioned by the Department of Environment found Ireland significantly in breach of its limits under the Kyoto agreement.

The legally binding treaty sets Ireland to a greenhouse gas emission limit of 13% above 1990 levels by the first commitment period 2008-2012. The report estimates that Ireland will produce 8.1 million more tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum than it is supposed to under the protocol. The Government plans to pay for the violation through an emissions trading system, under which countries breaching their limits can buy credits from countries below their limits. The consultants estimate the average price of carbon in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme will be EUR15 for the period 2008 and 2012. This would lead to an annual bill of EUR121m and a total bill of EUR607m over the five-year period.

The consultants said a range of cost-effective 'abatement' measures would be possible, reducing emissions by 1.34 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per annum. This would mean Ireland would produce 6.8 million extra tonnes per annum - resulting in an annual bill of EUR102m and a total bill of EUR510m. A spokesperson for the Department of Environment said the Government would only have to buy 3.7 million carbon credits per year between 2008-2012. He said this would be achieved by emission reductions in the non-trading sectors of the economy, participation by Irish industry in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and the purchase of carbon emission credits. "The figure of 3.7 million credits is not being revised upwards on the basis of the preliminary projections and the State will not be expected to purchase 8.142 million tonnes of credits per annum," he said. He said this would result in an annual cost to the exchequer of EUR55.5m and a total cost of EUR277.5m. Green Party spokesperson for Finance Dan Boyle TD said the Government continued to be negligent in failing to put in place fiscal measures targeted at those who have created our level of carbon dependency.

Source



BRITISH TORIES WIMP OUT AGAIN

Britain's main opposition parties are uniting today to call for a tough new policy for tackling climate change. The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are seeking cross-party consensus on countering global warming and new measures to cut greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide which cause it. The Lib-Con pact has been prompted by evidence of rapid climate change advances, such as this year's record melting of the Arctic sea ice, and by a sense that Britain's climate policy is starting to drift. UK CO2 emissions, which are meant to be going down, have gone up for three years in a row, and recent comments by Tony Blair have prompted questions of his commitment to the Kyoto protocol, the international climate change treaty.

The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives believe the situation is so serious, and the time for action so limited, that normal party politics should be put aside. They want the three main parties to unite around a common position on global warming, which would involve a more rigorous approach to tackling CO2 emissions. They suggest there should be compulsory annual cuts in greenhouse gases, and that an independent body be established to monitor emissions. The idea of a cross-party initiative has come from Norman Baker, the Liberal Democratenvironment spokesman, and it has been accepted by his Tory counterpart, Oliver Letwin. In a Commons debate on climate change today they will make their case for unity.

Margaret Beckett, the Environment Secretary, described the idea as interesting. But she told Mr Baker: "The Conservative positions on a number of key issues, their leadership election, and your own ongoing review of all Liberal Democrat policy means that this would not be an easy discussion."

Government sources said that a fortnight ago Mrs Beckett wrote to Mr Letwin, pointing out that John Redwood, the Tories' spokesman for deregulation, recently said that "the fashionable media have decided that climate change is one of the biggest challenges to mankind, but they ignore the fact that the earth has lived through hotter times than today."

Mr Baker said he was disappointed in Mrs Beckett's response. "It looks to me as if the Government is finding reasons not to agree, rather than accept a degree of common ground and build on that."

Mr Letwin said: "Since this is the biggest environmental threat - and one of the biggest problems of any kind - facing humanity at present, it is right that the UK should develop a new approach which is based on cross-party consensus."....

Britain's CO2 emissions - along with those of many other European countries - have been steadily going up, largely because of a switch from burning gas in power stations, to cheaper but more carbon-rich coal. The Government accepts that as things stand it will not meet its target of cutting CO2 emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010, and has instituted a review of its climate change programme to try and achieve this. The Government is confident it will hit its Kyoto target of cutting UK greenhouse gases by 12.5 per cent by 2010.

Source



MILLENNIAL-SCALE CLIMATE VARIATION AT CHESAPEAKE BAY, USA

From CO2 Science Magazine, 12 October 2005

What was done:

As scientists seek to determine the climatic impacts of rising anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, it is critical that they first obtain a firm understanding of the forcings and feedback factors that contribute to earth's natural climate variability. Only then can they honestly assess the likelihood that an anthropogenic influence may be evident in historical temperature data. Consequently, and in an attempt to advance our knowledge of natural climate variability, Willard et al. utilized pollen assemblages identified in four sediment cores extracted from the mainstem of the USA's Chesapeake Bay as a proxy for the winter temperature of this region over the past 10,000 years.

What was learned:

Multi-taper harmonic and power spectral analyses of the pollen data revealed five highly significant centennial- to millennial-scale oscillations with periods of 148, 177, 282, 521 and 1429 years, the troughs of the latter of which oscillations are temporally correlated with relatively prolonged minima in Pinus abundance and represent winter temperature declines of up to 2øC. The most recent such minimum was associated with the Little Ice Age and represented a two-stage event. The first and more severe low-temperature stage occurred between 650 and 550 years BP, while the second occurred between 450 and 350 years BP. With respect to the cause of the 1429-year millennial-scale oscillation, Willard et al. note that the climate cycle correlates well with a similar-scale cycle of solar activity evident in cosmogenic isotope records. In addition, they say it is well correlated with proxy climate cycles found in records from Greenland, the North Atlantic and Alaska, which have also been shown to be correlated with cyclical changes in solar activity.

What it means:

Evidence for an approximate 1500-year solar-driven climate cycle continues to grow, suggesting to us that the warming that has occurred since the end of the last cold stage of the Little Ice Age is most likely natural in origin.

Reference:

Willard, D.A., Bernhardt, C.E., Korejwo, D.A. and Meyers, S.R. 2005. Impact of millennial-scale Holocene climate variability on eastern North American terrestrial ecosystems: pollen-based climatic reconstruction. Global and Planetary Change 47: 17-35.

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

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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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



14 October, 2005

DECEITFUL GREENIE PROPAGANDA FROM "SCIENTIST" REDFORD

Apparently the email below has been widely circulated. The absurdities I have highlighted in red show that the email is meant for true believers only. Nowhere is it mentioned that only about 1% of the ANWR is proposed for drilling. And the "massive oil spills still devastating the Gulf Coast" are pure fiction of course. How desperate Hollywood actors are to be taken seriously! And how ably they reveal why they are NOT worth taking seriously

From: "Robert Redford, NRDC Action Fund"
Subject: Don't let the Arctic Refuge become Katrina's next victim
Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 15:02:35 -0400 (EDT)

Dear NRDC Action Fund Supporter,
The Bush Administration and Congressional leaders are shamelessly exploiting Hurricane Katrina as the latest excuse to hand over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil industry. Given the massive oil spills still devastating the Gulf Coast, it defies belief that our leaders are rushing headlong to hand over America's greatest wildlife sanctuary to the oil lobby. Instead of making America more energy efficient -- the fastest way to meet our energy needs and avoid oil supply shocks -- they would sponsor yet another corporate raid on our natural heritage.

This cynical exploitation of a national tragedy has revealed, as nothing else could, the complete bankruptcy of President Bush's pro-polluter energy policies -- policies inspired by nineteenth-century oil barons. Five years of coddling the oil industry has given us higher gas prices and left us more vulnerable than ever to oil shortages -- not to mention oil spills, air pollution, despoiled public lands, and catastrophic global warming.

You and I must not let the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge become the next preventable casualty of this president's failed policies. Within the next few weeks, Congress will cast its make-or-break vote on a Budget Reconciliation Bill that would allow oil drilling in the Arctic Refuge. I urge you to pour your heart and soul into defeating that bill. If you've alerted five friends to the urgency of this effort, mobilize five more: http://www.nrdcactionfund.org/redfordarctic/tellafriend.asp

Make a donation so that the NRDC Action Fund can run ads mobilizing the public in key Congressional districts: https://www.nrdcactionfund.org/arcticad/donate.asp

Write a personal, hand-written letter to your Representative: http://www.nrdcactionfund.org/redfordarctic/arcticvoters.asp

Please do what it takes to win. Because all the beauty and wildness we've worked so hard to protect over the past 30 years could be lost in a single day. We can win this fight, but only if we build overwhelming public pressure on Congress one person at a time. Thank you for joining with me to make it happen.

Sincerely,
Robert Redford
NRDC Action Fund

WARMER ATMOSPHERE = WARMER OCEANS?

An interesting email from a reader below. Any thoughts from other readers?

As you may remember, I have posted often about global warming, arguing (as you so often do) that while global warming may indeed be occuring, the cause or causes are yet unknown. I saw your post today on Greenie Watch about global warming, and it again got me to thinking about a post I hope to one day write regarding the thermal inertia of water.

So often we hear that because of human activity and expulsion of "greenhouse gasses" from our industries that the atmosphere is heating up. That is the basic argument, of course, of the GW fanatics. They usually go on to argue that since the atmosphere is heating up, that the polar ice caps and the oceans are heating up. The recent spate of strong hurricanes has given them what they believe is strong evidence of the heating of oceans.

I am not a climatologist, nor even a scientist, but I do have at least a rudmentary grasp of logic. I know that the thermal inertia of water is much, much higher than that of the atmosphere. Therefore to suggest that the atmosphere is heating the water is, to me, ludicrous (sp?). To further inconvenience the GW fanatics, only the surface of the water contacts the atmosphere. Without significant churning and upwelling, the water just below the surface will not be affected by what happens on the surface.

Again, I am no scientist, but I would guess that the thermal inertia of water is many, many times that of atmosphere, and the surface of the earth is 80% water, as I seem to recall from my 7th grade science class. Assuming all that is true, I would therefore argue that if the atmosphere is getting warmer, that either the water was getting warmer FIRST, or that the sun is warming the atmosphere, as some recent research has shown. In simpler terms, the oceans affect the atmosphere, not the other way around.



INFLUENTIAL AUSTRALIAN LEFTIST ARGUES FOR NUCLEAR POWER

Deep divisions within the Labor Party on the nuclear power issue surfaced again yesterday when a Federal Labor MP appeared before the uranium industry arguing the case for nuclear power as a solution to climate change. Speaking at the Australian Uranium Conference in Fremantle, shadow minister for industry and resources Martin Ferguson said the debate about nuclear power had been swept under the carpet for too long. He said it was time for Australians to engage in a debate about the "strategic importance of Australia's uranium resources, not only for our nation, but for the global community, and particularly, the fast growing countries of the Asia-Pacific Partnership".

The partnership includes Australia, the United States, China, Japan, India and South Korea, and the Federal Government is working on an agreement to develop "clean" technological solutions to climate change as an alternative to Kyoto.

Mr Ferguson said Australia was the second biggest exporter of uranium in the world and with the planned expansion of the Olympic Dam in South Australia, we would become the biggest in a few years. "Whether we like it or not, Australia is undeniably part of the global nuclear cycle," he said.

Mr Ferguson said despite Labor's commitment to Kyoto, it was necessary to consider other initiatives such as nuclear power to address climate change. "We supply almost one-quarter of the world's mined uranium and export to three countries within the partnership - Japan, the United States and South Korea," he said. "It is clear that, with the likely growth in nuclear power capacity around the world, uranium will be in greater and greater demand." Labor's three mines uranium policy prohibits the expansion of uranium mining in Australia.

Opposition Leader Kim Beazley's spokesman, Colin Campbell, said while Labor supported uranium exports to China, it was against a further expansion and did not see nuclear power as the solution to climate change. "The Labor Party does not support the establishment of a nuclear power industry in Australia," he said. "But it recognises that many countries are following that (nuclear power) path."

Labor MP Peter Garrett - who has previously come out strongly against using nuclear power as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions - said Mr Ferguson's speech appeared to dismiss Kyoto. "My understanding of Labor's current policy is that Kyoto is a fundamental part of any national response to climate change and it is perplexing if it is downplayed in any discussion about energy policy," he said.

Shadow minister for the environment Anthony Albanese said Labor's view on addressing climate change was to ratify Kyoto, not to use nuclear power. "Labor's position is clear. We are opposed to a nuclear power industry. We think Australia is as far into the nuclear cycle as we want to go," Mr Albanese said.

Source

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

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 Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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



13 October, 2005

WHAT HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING IN THE REAL WORLD?

As distinct from those dinky "models"? Surely temperatures don't vary NATURALLY! News from Britain:

The Government has summoned industrialists and generating companies to an emergency meeting next month amid fears of an energy crisis if Britain suffers a harsh winter. Long-distance forecasters are predicting that the country is facing its coldest weather for a decade, putting lives at risk and forcing businesses to lay off workers. The CBI said that there were only 11 days’ gas held in reserve. In comparison, other European countries keep an average of 55 days in reserve. The Met Office has already put the energy industry, the NHS and the Government on high alert. Now there are fears that Britain could run out of fuel. Sir Digby Jones, the Director-General of the CBI, said: “If we have a cold winter, we are going to throw the switch; businesses will shut down.”

The National Grid has identified emergency measures to ensure that power is maintained to homeowners. Under the plans, manufacturers who use large amounts of gas for industrial processes would be required to shut down factories on very cold days. Britain has not had a particularly cold winter for ten years, but some experts believe that temperatures over the coming months could plummet as low as the winters of the 1970s.

Paul Simons, The Times weatherman, said that the shift in temperature was influenced by a phenomonon known as North Atlantic Oscillation, or NAO, influenced by a lowpressure system over Iceland and high pressure over the warm Azores islands in the sub-tropical Atlantic. When the Icelandic pressure rises and the Azores pressure dips, Britain catches blasts of bitterly cold air. He said: “In the 1940s the NAO turned negative and brought some of the coldest European winters of the 20th century, including the bitter freezes that helped to defeat Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Another bout of negative NAOs in the 1960s included the worst winter for more than 200 years, when homes were buried under snow and ice floes drifted in the English Channel. “The Met Office is forecasting a negative NAO this winter. Although they cannot tell how severe the weather will be, the past ten winters had such ridiculously mild weather that even an average British winter will come as a rude shock.”

Last week Ofgem and National Grid Transco gave warning that gas supplies were at their lowest for ten years. The energy market regulator said that large industrial users and gas-fired power stations would be switched off in the event of a severe winter. Gas is used to fuel around two fifths of the country’s power stations. Malcolm Wicks, the Energy Minister, said: “It’s not about switching off the domestic customers but there could be problems for industry.” The National Grid has not imposed compulsory measures to conserve power supplies since the blackouts caused by the miners’ strikes during the 1970s

Source



PUTTING POSSIBLE SEA-LEVEL RISES INTO PERSPERCTIVE

Post lifted from World Climate Report

Global sea level rise figures prominently in most climate doom and gloom stories. And, not surprisingly, good news is either ignored or mis-reported.

First, a little history. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated, in its Third Assessment Report (2001), that between 1990 and 2100, the global average sea level will rise somewhere between 3.5 and 34.6 inches, with a central value of 18.9 inches. Of course, the values falling near the low end of the range are usually left out of global warming scare stories, while the values near the high end are prominently featured (e.g. see here and here)

A couple of recent modeling studies demonstrate that those who have said that estimates near the low end of the UN’s huge range (i.e., us) are probably right. Using the high resolution version of the climate model