What environmental impact would there be if we had a hydrogen spill?
OK - its a trick question - It would be really expensive to clean up all that thick gooey hydrogen residue - right!
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Hydrogen fuel, may be five years away: Dr. Swamy
Dr. Subramanian Swamy
Kuwait, 19 May (Asiantribune.com):
Prosperity in the Gulf and dependence on Gulf will no longer be tied to oil for long. Forecasts of developing hydrogen fuel are growing optimistic... five years away from being materialized. Dr Subramaniam Swamy, a visiting Harvard University professor made his remarks during a forum held at the American University of Kuwait (AUK) recently.
Addressing officers and members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India-Kuwait Chapter (ICAI), Swamy pointed out that hydrogen fuel designed for transportation services have been discovered and can be used in five years' time.
The day is not far off when automobiles will no longer run on petrol; they will be run using hydrogen system. If it happens, it will be a great blow to most of West Asian countries and most of the oil producing countries like Venezuela," he said. With this issue, Dr Swamy said that India could offer intellectual services to west Asian neighbors, like sharing expertise in hardware and software technology.
A former Indian MP and a Union Cabinet Minister, Dr Swamy recognized the fact that at this point in time, West Asia is as important in terms of energy and that relationship should be maintained and strengthened. "There are tough issues and decisions to be made, like for example, how to deal with the issue of (nuclear) Iran.
He said, "The people of Iran are great; they are very open to friendship with others. Their people have enormous regard to Indians. Iran signed a Non-Proliferation Treaty but doesn't want to abide by it. India did not sign the treaty, we suffered for it, but we stood on our own feet," he said.
Dr Swamy reminisced India's great influence in Asia and also discussed ways and means to win back the position especially as it is strongly emerging as an economic power. Though their influence has minimized, Dr Swamy said that India's influence in South East Asia is evident. He provided an example of Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population, where India's influence can be witnessed in its currency.
"A Ganesha picture is embossed in the Indonesian Rupiah. I remember in 1997, when Indonesia experienced continuous decline of rupiah (value), somebody told the Finance minister there that if they place Ganesha's picture on the currency note, and the slide (in currency value) would stop. They did as proposed and the slide stopped," he said. In Thailand, according to Dr Swamy, one of the names of the king is Rama.
Their writings follow the Sanskrit technique, famously used in India.
Swamy also mentioned the famous speech by a Peking University professor at Harvard University on its 300 years of founding anniversary. "They invited speakers (it was in 1936) from all over the world. One of the speakers was a professor at Peking University where he spoke about a topic dear to China. The title of his speech was 'Indianization of China.' The speech described the influence of religion and how the Chinese had accepted many concepts from India," he said quoting the professor’s speech. Read more.
Monday, May 17, 2010
US Climate Bill on Life Support for 2010
You can beat it with a stick but it just won't die!
Prospects for passing a climate bill in 2010 have gone from slim to almost none, after the legislation's co-sponsor Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) withdrew his support on April 24. The remaining co-sponsors, Senators Kerry (D-MA) and Lieberman (I-CT), were forced to cancel an April 26th unveiling ceremony. Senator Graham is protesting a recent decision by Democrats to address immigration reform before the climate and energy which would effectively kill the climate bill's prospects for 2010. Democrats have quietly backed away from that position, but Senator Graham is still not supporting the climate bill. Polling data indicates that Democrats will perform better in the midterm elections if they address immigration.
The climate bill will not pass without the support of Senator Graham. There are 20 undecided Senators from Central and Mid-Atlantic States who opposed the climate legislation passed by the House of Representatives, and 17 of them are needed to pass a Senate version. These Senators represent states with an abundance of coal and natural gas, but limited wind and solar resources. Senator Graham was able to craft a Senate bill with incentives for offshore drilling and nuclear energy, which puts many of the undecided votes in play. We believe the climate bill is dead without an advocate from Senator Graham’s geographic region and political party.
Even if Senator Graham comes back to the table, the bill is still likely to fail because the time left in 2010 is inadequate. In the three months before the August recess, the highest priorities are Jobs legislation, Wall Street reform, the FY2011 budget and a Supreme Court Justice confirmation. Though the odds of passing a climate bill have been slim all year, the Senate was still poised to take a shot because the prospects are likely to be even weaker after the midterm elections. Even if immigration reform is put back on the shelf, it will still be very difficult to get a climate bill to President Obama’s desk by this August. It will require fast action on Wall Street reform, an uncontroversial Supreme Court justice nominee, and House members willing to abandon many provisions in their version of the climate bill.
If the Senate bill were to become law, it would be a positive for cleantech, but less so than the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House. Waxman-Markey includes an economy-wide cap and trade system, a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), and various provisions to advance smart grid and transmission infrastructure. The Senate’s version of cap and trade only applies to utilities beginning in 2012, with the manufacturing sector integrated by 2016. The federal RPS and other clean energy incentives exist in a Senate Energy committee bill and it is still up for discussion whether to add them to the climate bill.
Failure to pass a climate bill in 2010 will have consequences for various government entities. In the U.S., the Administration will increase efforts to unilaterally regulate greenhouse gas emissions, give renewable energy project developers access to public lands, and spend the stimulus bill funding which remains largely untapped. Congress will have to access its options after the midterm elections; an “energy only” bill is one possibility, but it is not favored by the Administration. State governments may look to increase or create new RPSs, but the challenge there will be enforcing the targets with electricity price increases. On the international scene, a failure to pass a U.S. climate bill may also lead to a failure in Mexico this December when the UN attempts to negotiate a binding global climate change agreement, just as it did in Copenhagen last December.
Robert Lahey is the Senior Legislative Analyst at Ardour Capital Investments, LLC, and can be reached at rlahey@ardourcapital.com. Founded in 2002, Ardour Capital is the leading research and investment-banking firm exclusively focused on energy technology, alternative energy and power, and clean & renewable technologies. Ardour Capital publishes in-depth company coverage and industry specific research. Ardour Capital offers private and public companies a full range of corporate finance, investment banking and capital market services. Ardour Global Indexes is a family of pure play alternative energy indexes that is the primary measure of cleantech equity performance. Read more.
Prospects for passing a climate bill in 2010 have gone from slim to almost none, after the legislation's co-sponsor Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) withdrew his support on April 24. The remaining co-sponsors, Senators Kerry (D-MA) and Lieberman (I-CT), were forced to cancel an April 26th unveiling ceremony. Senator Graham is protesting a recent decision by Democrats to address immigration reform before the climate and energy which would effectively kill the climate bill's prospects for 2010. Democrats have quietly backed away from that position, but Senator Graham is still not supporting the climate bill. Polling data indicates that Democrats will perform better in the midterm elections if they address immigration.
The climate bill will not pass without the support of Senator Graham. There are 20 undecided Senators from Central and Mid-Atlantic States who opposed the climate legislation passed by the House of Representatives, and 17 of them are needed to pass a Senate version. These Senators represent states with an abundance of coal and natural gas, but limited wind and solar resources. Senator Graham was able to craft a Senate bill with incentives for offshore drilling and nuclear energy, which puts many of the undecided votes in play. We believe the climate bill is dead without an advocate from Senator Graham’s geographic region and political party.
Even if Senator Graham comes back to the table, the bill is still likely to fail because the time left in 2010 is inadequate. In the three months before the August recess, the highest priorities are Jobs legislation, Wall Street reform, the FY2011 budget and a Supreme Court Justice confirmation. Though the odds of passing a climate bill have been slim all year, the Senate was still poised to take a shot because the prospects are likely to be even weaker after the midterm elections. Even if immigration reform is put back on the shelf, it will still be very difficult to get a climate bill to President Obama’s desk by this August. It will require fast action on Wall Street reform, an uncontroversial Supreme Court justice nominee, and House members willing to abandon many provisions in their version of the climate bill.
If the Senate bill were to become law, it would be a positive for cleantech, but less so than the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House. Waxman-Markey includes an economy-wide cap and trade system, a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), and various provisions to advance smart grid and transmission infrastructure. The Senate’s version of cap and trade only applies to utilities beginning in 2012, with the manufacturing sector integrated by 2016. The federal RPS and other clean energy incentives exist in a Senate Energy committee bill and it is still up for discussion whether to add them to the climate bill.
Failure to pass a climate bill in 2010 will have consequences for various government entities. In the U.S., the Administration will increase efforts to unilaterally regulate greenhouse gas emissions, give renewable energy project developers access to public lands, and spend the stimulus bill funding which remains largely untapped. Congress will have to access its options after the midterm elections; an “energy only” bill is one possibility, but it is not favored by the Administration. State governments may look to increase or create new RPSs, but the challenge there will be enforcing the targets with electricity price increases. On the international scene, a failure to pass a U.S. climate bill may also lead to a failure in Mexico this December when the UN attempts to negotiate a binding global climate change agreement, just as it did in Copenhagen last December.
Robert Lahey is the Senior Legislative Analyst at Ardour Capital Investments, LLC, and can be reached at rlahey@ardourcapital.com. Founded in 2002, Ardour Capital is the leading research and investment-banking firm exclusively focused on energy technology, alternative energy and power, and clean & renewable technologies. Ardour Capital publishes in-depth company coverage and industry specific research. Ardour Capital offers private and public companies a full range of corporate finance, investment banking and capital market services. Ardour Global Indexes is a family of pure play alternative energy indexes that is the primary measure of cleantech equity performance. Read more.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
GM sues over totaled hydrogen fuel pump
Robert Snell / The Detroit News
A not-so-funny thing happened to General Motors Co. two years ago when it tried transporting a pricey hydrogen fuel pump from Pennsylvania to California.
The semi crashed, destroying the $850,000 fuel station, which is essential to support hydrogen vehicles that produce no greenhouse gas emissions and require no petroleum.
Now, GM is suing the company hired to haul the pump, Romulus-based hauler CHAT of Michigan Inc., in U.S. District Court and wants $850,000 plus damages, costs and fees.
The crash happened when automakers, including GM, are trying to put more fuel cell vehicles on the road -- an endeavor hamstrung by high costs and a lack of refueling stations nationwide. There are only 68 fueling stations in the country, mostly in California, according to the National Hydrogen Association.
GM sued last week because the company has refused to accept responsibility for the crash and pay for the destroyed fuel pump, according to the lawsuit.
"GM has been trying for two years to recover the cost of the hydrogen refueler that was destroyed in this crash," GM spokesman Alan Adler said. "The incident delayed the rollout of Project Driveway -- the largest demonstration of fuel cell vehicles in the world -- by three to four months." Read more.
A not-so-funny thing happened to General Motors Co. two years ago when it tried transporting a pricey hydrogen fuel pump from Pennsylvania to California.
The semi crashed, destroying the $850,000 fuel station, which is essential to support hydrogen vehicles that produce no greenhouse gas emissions and require no petroleum.
Now, GM is suing the company hired to haul the pump, Romulus-based hauler CHAT of Michigan Inc., in U.S. District Court and wants $850,000 plus damages, costs and fees.
The crash happened when automakers, including GM, are trying to put more fuel cell vehicles on the road -- an endeavor hamstrung by high costs and a lack of refueling stations nationwide. There are only 68 fueling stations in the country, mostly in California, according to the National Hydrogen Association.
GM sued last week because the company has refused to accept responsibility for the crash and pay for the destroyed fuel pump, according to the lawsuit.
"GM has been trying for two years to recover the cost of the hydrogen refueler that was destroyed in this crash," GM spokesman Alan Adler said. "The incident delayed the rollout of Project Driveway -- the largest demonstration of fuel cell vehicles in the world -- by three to four months." Read more.
Hockey Sticks and “Climategate”: a Death of Scientific Integrity
by Dr. Martin Hertzberg
Dr. Martin Hertzberg of Copper Mountain, a retired research scientist and consultant in the causes and prevention of accidental fires and explosions, will present the above titled talk at this month’s meeting of the Café Scientifique. ...Global warmings result in an increase in atmospheric CO2 as warmed oceans emit their dissolved CO2. Global coolings result in a decrease in atmospheric CO2 as cooling oceans absorb atmospheric CO2. Temperature variations precede those CO2 variations by several hundred to a thousand years, thus indicating that it is the temperature variations that cause atmospheric CO2 changes and not the reverse. The human contribution to the cycle is trivial and furthermore the so-called “greenhouse effect”, touted as the mechanism by which atmospheric CO2 controls weather, has long been known to be devoid of physical reality. Accordingly, proposed measures of “carbon control” will have no effect on the weather but instead will seriously damage the Nation’s economy and the reliability of its electric generating capacity: a system that is currently working quite satisfactorily and is entirely independent of foreign sources of energy. Clearly, that system for supplying the Nation with its essential need for reliable electricity “ain’t broke”…and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Read more.
Dr. Martin Hertzberg of Copper Mountain, a retired research scientist and consultant in the causes and prevention of accidental fires and explosions, will present the above titled talk at this month’s meeting of the Café Scientifique. ...Global warmings result in an increase in atmospheric CO2 as warmed oceans emit their dissolved CO2. Global coolings result in a decrease in atmospheric CO2 as cooling oceans absorb atmospheric CO2. Temperature variations precede those CO2 variations by several hundred to a thousand years, thus indicating that it is the temperature variations that cause atmospheric CO2 changes and not the reverse. The human contribution to the cycle is trivial and furthermore the so-called “greenhouse effect”, touted as the mechanism by which atmospheric CO2 controls weather, has long been known to be devoid of physical reality. Accordingly, proposed measures of “carbon control” will have no effect on the weather but instead will seriously damage the Nation’s economy and the reliability of its electric generating capacity: a system that is currently working quite satisfactorily and is entirely independent of foreign sources of energy. Clearly, that system for supplying the Nation with its essential need for reliable electricity “ain’t broke”…and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Read more.
MORE CLIMATEGATE!? US Govt. agencies involved in Data Manipulation FRAUD!
reporting by John Coleman, KUSI News San Diego Meteorologist and founder of the Weather Channel BREAKING NEWS! CLIMATEGATE COMES TO THE UNITED STATES! MEET THE TWO MEN WHO HAVE DUG THROUGH SEVERAL LAYERS OF COMPUTER CODES TO UNCOVER MANIPULATION OF THE WORLD TEMPERATURE DATA TO SUPPORT THE CLAIMS OF GLOBAL WARMING. THIS IS A MAJOR CLIMATE SCANDAL INVOLVING UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. A computer programmer named E. Michael Smith and a Certified Consulting Meteorologist named Joseph D’Aleo join the program to tell us about their breakthrough investigation into the manipulations of data at the NASA Goddard Science and Space Institute at Columbia University in New York and the NOAA National Climate Data Center in Ashville, North Carolina. From John Coleman’s KUSI presentation called Global Warming The Other Side this is a portion of segment #4 here are links to them all Segment 1: CO2 does not cause significant warming of the earth www.kusi.com Segment 2: How AL GOre and the UN became involved in Global Warming www.kusi.com Segment 3: Debunking dire predictions www.kusi.com Segment 4: Breaking news Climategate comes to the USA www.kusi.com Segment 5: John Coleman’s Summation www.kusi.com If you’re new to the whole climate fraud scene I highly recommend you watch them. Read more.
Melting sea ice would cause sea levels to rise by 'hair's breadth'
Melting icebergs are causing sea levels to rise, scientists have discovered, but only by a hair's breadth every year.
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent - The Telegraph
By Louise Gray, Environment Correspondent - The Telegraph
Researchers at the University of Leeds calculate that around 1.5 million Titanic-sized icebergs each year are melting into the sea every year in the Arctic and Antarctic. This is causing sea level to rise by just 49 micrometers per year - around a hair's breadth.
At that rate it would take 200 years for the oceans to rise by 1cm as a result of melting sea ice. If all the floating ice in the world melted it would cause sea levels to rise by just 4cm. In comparison if all the ice on land melted it would cause a rise of 70m. Sea levels will also rise as the oceans get warmer because of thermal expansion. Read more.
Climategate Update
by sakerfa
(Investors) – IPCC’s River Of Lies
Global Warming: Another shoe has dropped from the IPCC centipede as scientists in Bangladesh say their country will not disappear below the waves. As usual, the U.N.’s climate charlatans forgot one tiny detail.
It keeps getting worse for the much-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which seems to have built its collapsing house of climate cards on sand or, more specifically, river sediment. Read More Here
(Bloomberg) – Deutsche Bank, RWE Raided in German Probe of CO2 Tax (Update2)
German prosecutors searched Deutsche Bank AG and RWE AG in a raid on 230 offices and homes nationwide to investigate 180 million euros ($238 million) of tax evasion linked to emissions trading. Read More Here
(Climate-Skeptic) – This is Science?
This looks like something a bunch of grad students might have dreamed up in a 10-minute brainstorming session over a few beers. Read More Here
(C3Headlines) – EU Research Finds No Increase In Severe Storms – Contradicts AGW Model Predictions
Global warming alarmists and the climate models have long predicted that the frequency of severe storms would increase. Data worldwide indicates otherwise and a new study by an EU researcher confirms this. Read More Here
(ClimateBasics) – The Science of Global Warming in Perspective
History of AGW Fraud. For most of the twentieth century, scientists were unconcerned about global warming, because carbon dioxide saturates (saturation explained ) and cannot do more heating. Whatever CO2 did in the past, adding more CO2 cannot change anything. But then global warming was dug up by environmentalists, and rationalizers took another look at the science and said, maybe saturation does not occur at the top of the atmosphere. As time went on, every element of the science was contrived to promote global warming alarmism. History of AGW Fraud, by Marc Sheppard. Read more
(Investors) – IPCC’s River Of Lies
Global Warming: Another shoe has dropped from the IPCC centipede as scientists in Bangladesh say their country will not disappear below the waves. As usual, the U.N.’s climate charlatans forgot one tiny detail.
It keeps getting worse for the much-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which seems to have built its collapsing house of climate cards on sand or, more specifically, river sediment. Read More Here
(Bloomberg) – Deutsche Bank, RWE Raided in German Probe of CO2 Tax (Update2)
German prosecutors searched Deutsche Bank AG and RWE AG in a raid on 230 offices and homes nationwide to investigate 180 million euros ($238 million) of tax evasion linked to emissions trading. Read More Here
(Climate-Skeptic) – This is Science?
This looks like something a bunch of grad students might have dreamed up in a 10-minute brainstorming session over a few beers. Read More Here
(C3Headlines) – EU Research Finds No Increase In Severe Storms – Contradicts AGW Model Predictions
Global warming alarmists and the climate models have long predicted that the frequency of severe storms would increase. Data worldwide indicates otherwise and a new study by an EU researcher confirms this. Read More Here
(ClimateBasics) – The Science of Global Warming in Perspective
History of AGW Fraud. For most of the twentieth century, scientists were unconcerned about global warming, because carbon dioxide saturates (saturation explained ) and cannot do more heating. Whatever CO2 did in the past, adding more CO2 cannot change anything. But then global warming was dug up by environmentalists, and rationalizers took another look at the science and said, maybe saturation does not occur at the top of the atmosphere. As time went on, every element of the science was contrived to promote global warming alarmism. History of AGW Fraud, by Marc Sheppard. Read more
Climategate fallout: poll finds voters increasingly doubtful on AGW
From MND
Voters continue to show less worry about global warming.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 54% of voters still believe global warming is a serious problem, but that’s down eight points from a year ago. The new numbers includes 29% who consider it very serious, a number, too, that has been inching down in recent months.
But 43% now say global warming is not serious, including 21% who say it is not at all serious. The number who say global warming is not serious at all is at its highest level measured in regular tracking in over a year. The overall number of voters who question the seriousness of global warming crossed into the 40s for the first time in January.
Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters say global warming is caused by long-term planetary trends, while only 33% blame human activity. These results are identical to those found last month.
Belief that human activity is the primary cause of global warming has declined significantly. In April 2008, the numbers were nearly the mirror image of the current findings. At that time, 47% blamed human activity, while only 34% named long-term planetary trends as the reason for climate change.
Many voters also continue to believe their president has different views on the topic than they do. Most (55%) say President Obama believes global warming is caused by human activity, while only 15% think the president blames long-term planetary trends.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it’s in the news, it’s in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
The decline in voter concern comes despite the failed UN effort in December to produce an international treaty aimed at limiting the human activity that Obama and others consider the primary cause of global warming. At that time, most Americans (52%) said there continues to be significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming.
Fifty-nine percent (59%) also said it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Read more.
Voters continue to show less worry about global warming.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 54% of voters still believe global warming is a serious problem, but that’s down eight points from a year ago. The new numbers includes 29% who consider it very serious, a number, too, that has been inching down in recent months.
But 43% now say global warming is not serious, including 21% who say it is not at all serious. The number who say global warming is not serious at all is at its highest level measured in regular tracking in over a year. The overall number of voters who question the seriousness of global warming crossed into the 40s for the first time in January.
Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters say global warming is caused by long-term planetary trends, while only 33% blame human activity. These results are identical to those found last month.
Belief that human activity is the primary cause of global warming has declined significantly. In April 2008, the numbers were nearly the mirror image of the current findings. At that time, 47% blamed human activity, while only 34% named long-term planetary trends as the reason for climate change.
Many voters also continue to believe their president has different views on the topic than they do. Most (55%) say President Obama believes global warming is caused by human activity, while only 15% think the president blames long-term planetary trends.
(Want a free daily e-mail update? If it’s in the news, it’s in our polls). Rasmussen Reports updates are also available on Twitter or Facebook.
The decline in voter concern comes despite the failed UN effort in December to produce an international treaty aimed at limiting the human activity that Obama and others consider the primary cause of global warming. At that time, most Americans (52%) said there continues to be significant disagreement within the scientific community over global warming.
Fifty-nine percent (59%) also said it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming. Read more.
Going after the Mann
From Don Surber
Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, made his move toward a Climategate lawsuit by demanding that the University of Virginia turn over documents related to when Michael “Hide the Decline” Mann worked for that state institution.
From Courteney Stuart: “If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.”
Yikes.
Cuccinelli is just in the first stages of whatever legal action — if any — he takes.
From Courtenay Stuart: “Among the documents Cuccinelli demands are any and all emailed or written correspondence between or relating to Mann and more than 40 climate scientists, documents supporting any of five applications for the $484,875 in grants, and evidence of any documents that no longer exist along with proof of why, when, and how they were destroyed or disappeared.
“The Attorney General has the right to make such demands for documents under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a 2002 law designed to keep government workers honest.”
If he does file a lawsuit, this would be the first case brought against Chicken Little Inc. following the disclosure that the predictions of doom forecast by the Nobel-winning IPCC were a pack of lies. Cuccinelli, 41, took office in January and has, as Courtenay Stuart pointed out, “directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform.”
His health care lawsuit differs from the one 14 states signed up for.
If he succeeds on these counts, Cuccinelli may be the most important attorney general since William Wirt.
By the way, Democrats asked him how much his legal challenge of Obamacare would cost Virginia. Cuccinelli replied in a press release: $350 — and then added “If the suit is successful, the savings to the Commonwealth of Virginia alone is estimated by the governor’s office to be about $1.1 billion from 2015-2022. This is because if the health care reform act remains law, Virginia would realize an additional $1.1 billion in costs for the new Medicaid requirements called for in the act. This savings figure does not take in to account the tax and fee savings to individuals and businesses if the federal law is struck down as unconstitutional.”
He gets it.
Meanwhile, from Fox News: Michael Mann, “The Penn State climate professor who has silently endured investigations, hostile questioning, legislative probes and attacks by colleagues has finally spoken out. He says he’ll sue the makers of a satirical video that’s a hit on You Tube.”
That settles it. Of course I must post the video — with an earworm warning: Read more.
Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, made his move toward a Climategate lawsuit by demanding that the University of Virginia turn over documents related to when Michael “Hide the Decline” Mann worked for that state institution.
From Courteney Stuart: “If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.”
Yikes.
Cuccinelli is just in the first stages of whatever legal action — if any — he takes.
From Courtenay Stuart: “Among the documents Cuccinelli demands are any and all emailed or written correspondence between or relating to Mann and more than 40 climate scientists, documents supporting any of five applications for the $484,875 in grants, and evidence of any documents that no longer exist along with proof of why, when, and how they were destroyed or disappeared.
“The Attorney General has the right to make such demands for documents under the Fraud Against Taxpayers Act, a 2002 law designed to keep government workers honest.”
If he does file a lawsuit, this would be the first case brought against Chicken Little Inc. following the disclosure that the predictions of doom forecast by the Nobel-winning IPCC were a pack of lies. Cuccinelli, 41, took office in January and has, as Courtenay Stuart pointed out, “directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform.”
His health care lawsuit differs from the one 14 states signed up for.
If he succeeds on these counts, Cuccinelli may be the most important attorney general since William Wirt.
By the way, Democrats asked him how much his legal challenge of Obamacare would cost Virginia. Cuccinelli replied in a press release: $350 — and then added “If the suit is successful, the savings to the Commonwealth of Virginia alone is estimated by the governor’s office to be about $1.1 billion from 2015-2022. This is because if the health care reform act remains law, Virginia would realize an additional $1.1 billion in costs for the new Medicaid requirements called for in the act. This savings figure does not take in to account the tax and fee savings to individuals and businesses if the federal law is struck down as unconstitutional.”
He gets it.
Meanwhile, from Fox News: Michael Mann, “The Penn State climate professor who has silently endured investigations, hostile questioning, legislative probes and attacks by colleagues has finally spoken out. He says he’ll sue the makers of a satirical video that’s a hit on You Tube.”
That settles it. Of course I must post the video — with an earworm warning: Read more.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
My Declaration in the Wall Street Journal Today
I submit that we need our philosophers more than ever in these times of uncertainty. Individuals require beacons of conviction that will put their actions into a moral context. The realm of principle is the greatest advantage that libertarians have over the emotional and pragmatic left. Acting in a practical manner is the default position for people that wish to survive and prosper in a free society, but by its nature it can lead to ambiguity and experimentation – in short pragmatism. We require principles that can be defended by the Western concept of reason in order to know why we must fight those who would impose the concept of the “common good” upon us. Read more.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Climategate Investigation
By Dexter Wright
Last month, while the American media were distracted by the health care vote in Congress, the British Parliament published the results of its investigation into East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that has been at the center of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) controversy. It seems that many were hoping that no one would read this report, at least not beyond the milquetoast executive summary.
Buried deep within the report is a compelling piece of evidence. In volume two, there is a memorandum submitted as evidence from Lord Lawson of Blaby, chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was in response to four very significant questions from the investigating committee. This memo confirms the claims by many global warming skeptics that the scientists at CRU were trying to hide data and silence the skeptics. The questions asked by the investigative committee are as follows:
We believe that there is compelling evidence both independent of the leaked email exchanges and arising from those emails to suggest that the answers to (ii), (iii) and (iv) above are clearly 'yes'.
However, Lord Lawson chooses his words more carefully in answering the smoking-gun question at the top of the list:
Last month, while the American media were distracted by the health care vote in Congress, the British Parliament published the results of its investigation into East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that has been at the center of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) controversy. It seems that many were hoping that no one would read this report, at least not beyond the milquetoast executive summary.
Buried deep within the report is a compelling piece of evidence. In volume two, there is a memorandum submitted as evidence from Lord Lawson of Blaby, chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was in response to four very significant questions from the investigating committee. This memo confirms the claims by many global warming skeptics that the scientists at CRU were trying to hide data and silence the skeptics. The questions asked by the investigative committee are as follows:
(i) Have the CRU scientists been manipulating the raw surface temperature data in a way that is less than wholly objective and dispassionate?Lord Lawson's response to these questions is damning:
(ii) Have they refused dissenting scientists and/or other outsiders with a bona fide interest in global warming access to the raw data, contrary to the proper canons of scientific research and to the demands of scientific integrity?
(iii) Have they been improperly seeking to avoid answering Freedom of information Act requests?
(iv) Have they actively sought to prevent papers by dissenting scientists, statisticians, or other informed commentators from being peer-reviewed and/or published, again contrary to the proper canons of scientific research and to the demands of scientific integrity?
We believe that there is compelling evidence both independent of the leaked email exchanges and arising from those emails to suggest that the answers to (ii), (iii) and (iv) above are clearly 'yes'.
However, Lord Lawson chooses his words more carefully in answering the smoking-gun question at the top of the list:
Moreover, we are disturbed by the CRU scientists' treatment of the so-called divergence problem. That is the fact that, for that period of time where both a proxy global temperature series and a recorded global temperature series are available, the two series markedly diverge. This clearly suggests either that the proxy series is unreliable or that the recorded series is unreliable (or possibly both: the point is that they cannot both be true). The CRU scientists' attempt to hide the problem by concealing the divergence demonstrates, we believe, a lack of integrity.Integrity is at the very heart of the AGW debate -- not just the integrity of the discredited scientists involved, but also the integrity of the data used by the CRU. For many years, the global warming skeptics have been citing that the differing data sets are not in agreement and have asked the simple question "why?" Their assertion has always been that until a scientific explanation for the differences is found, there can be no definitive conclusion concerning AGW. This question was always avoided by the now-discredited Dr. Jones, who headed up the CRU. But finally, some light has been shed onto the question of integrity of the data. In this same memo, Lord Lawson clarifies some of the confusion concerning the differing data sets:
[T]here are, in fact, four (not two) other international data sets, all based in the United States. Two of them - NASA and NOAA - are neither wholly independent of each other (unsurprisingly, since they are both US Government agencies) nor wholly independent of the CRU set, as indeed some of the leaked emails indicates. The third, and fourth, which -- unlike CRU, NASA and NOAA - use not surface weather stations but satellite observations, are compiled by the University of Alabama at Hunstville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Systems (RSS). They are entirely independent of the CRU. They use the same satellite data as each other but different methodology and produce similar results to each other, which differ from those of the CRU.It seems that the only reliable data sets are satellite-derived data. However, those data were not used in the Nobel Prize-winning U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). So the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to a report which was compiled by discredited scientists using discredited data. Does this discredit the Nobel Committee? Read more.
Man steals electricity with meat hook
I didn't know you could do this - but this guy did it.
The man attached a cable to the meat hook and tossed it onto an overhead power line. He then drew power from the transmission line to his home, located about 150 meters away.
"I've never seen anything like this in my 34-year-career," said Friedrich-Wilhelm Lach, chief executive of regional utility Ueberlandwerke Leinetal GmbH, told Reuters. "It's incredibly dangerous and utterly stupid."
An employee of the utility noticed the meat hook during a routine check. Lach said the man was lucky he is still alive and warned copycats not to try it: "It will kill you," he said. Read more.
(Reuters) - German police are investigating a man for theft after he siphoned electricity off a high-voltage overhead transmission line for one month with the help of an ordinary meat hook, authorities said on Tuesday.
The 36-year old man from Sibbesse in Lower Saxony concocted the plan to steal electricity after the power company cut him off for failure to pay his bills, police said.
The man attached a cable to the meat hook and tossed it onto an overhead power line. He then drew power from the transmission line to his home, located about 150 meters away.
"I've never seen anything like this in my 34-year-career," said Friedrich-Wilhelm Lach, chief executive of regional utility Ueberlandwerke Leinetal GmbH, told Reuters. "It's incredibly dangerous and utterly stupid."
An employee of the utility noticed the meat hook during a routine check. Lach said the man was lucky he is still alive and warned copycats not to try it: "It will kill you," he said. Read more.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Apocalypse soon - Steyn
By Mark Steyn
In 1968, in his best-selling book The Population Bomb, scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."
In 1972, in their influential landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States incredible as it may seem, confidently predicted that "we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade."
Now, in 2002, with enough oil for a century and a half, the planet awash in cut-price minerals, and less global famine, starvation and malnutrition than ever before, the end of the world has had to be rescheduled. The latest estimated time of arrival for the apocalypse is 2032. Last week, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction of 70% of the natural world in 30 years, mass extinction of species, and the collapse of human society in many countries ... More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95% of people in the Middle East with severe problems ... 25% of all species of mammals and 10% of birds will be extinct ..." Etc., etc., for 450 pages. But let's cut to the chase: As The Guardian's headline writer put it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."
Ah, yes. The end of the world's nighness is endlessly deferred but the blame rests where it always has. With us - with what the UN calls "the current 'markets first' approach." Klaus Toepfer, the UN Environment Program executive director, believes that "under the 'markets first' scenario the environment and humans did not fare well."
Really? The "markets first" approach was notable by its absence in, say, Eastern Europe, where government regulation of every single aspect of life resulted in environmental devastation beyond the wildest fantasies of the sinister Bush-Cheney-Enron axis of excess. Fortunately in Communist Romania there was very little clear-cut logging because Ceausescu had the tree. But in Iraq, the report points out, 30% of arable land has had to be abandoned because of bad irrigation practices. Those crazy speculators on the Baghdad Stock Exchange with their Thatcherite economics will kill you every time, eh?
But what's this? "In richer countries water and air pollution is down, species have been restored to the wild, and forests are increasing in size." So the environment's better in rich countries? Rich countries with ... market economies?
Thirty years after the first doom-mongering eco-confab in Stockholm, it should be obvious even to the UN frequent-flyer crowd: Markets aren't the problem, but the solution to the problem. The best way to clean up the neighbourhood is to make people wealthier. To do that, you need free markets, democracy, the rule of law and public accountability. None of those things exist in the Middle East, which is the real reason they'll be taking communal showers once a month in 2032.
Since 1970, when the great northern forest was being felled to print Paul Ehrlich best-sellers, the U.S. economy has swollen by 150%; automobile traffic has increased by 143%; and energy consumption has grown 45%.
During this same period, air pollutants have declined by 29%, toxic emissions by 48.5%, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3%, and airborne lead by 97.3%. For anywhere other than Antarctica and a few sparsely inhabited islands, the first condition for a healthy environment is a strong economy. President Carter and the other apocalyptic prognosticators of the Seventies made a simple mistake: In their predictions about natural resources, they failed to take into account the natural resourcefulness of the market. The government regulates problems, but the market solves them. So if, as Kyoto does, you seek to punish capitalism in the West and restrict it in the developing world, you'll pretty much guarantee a poorer, dirtier, unhealthier planet.
I'd like to be an "environmentalist," really I would. I spend quite a bit of my time in the environment and I'm rather fond of it. But these days "environmentalism" is mostly unrelated to the environment: It's a cult, and, like most cults, heavy on ostentatious displays of self-denial, perfectly encapsulated by the time-consuming rituals of "recycling," an activity of no discernible benefit other than as a communal profession of faith.
Think globally, act locally, they say. But, in fact, environmentalists, like most cultists, are crippled by tunnel vision. "As long as we believe that our biggest threat is terrorism, we will never be truly prepared," wrote Carl Russell of Bethel, Vermont, to The Valley News after September 11th. "Humans are behaving like all living organisms whose habitat becomes depleted of necessary resources. Global warming, pollution, soil depletion, plant and animal extinction etc., are all signs of environmental degradation, too complex for most of us to agree on, let alone find solutions to. Our subconscious reflex to this lack of control is anxiety. Anger, intolerance and violence, however inappropriate, are common expressions of anxiety." Osama bin Laden might have thought he was ordering his boys into action because he hates America, but subconsciously he was merely acting out, however inappropriately, his anxieties about plant extinction.
"We are going through a maturing process for the human species, and for the Earth," concluded Mr. Russell. "Human lives have been lost and devastated, but our connections go deeper than that. Think of our Earth." So September 11 was about soil depletion? Wow. That's what I call a root cause.
In fact, the eco-cultists and the Islamofascists share the same Year Zero: 1492, the year not just of the "tragedy of Andalucia" - the fall of Moorish Spain that Osama's always boring on about -- but also of the most cataclysmic setback for the global environment. As Kenneth Branagh solemnly intoned, narrating the documentary The Last Show On Earth, "It was Columbus, 500 years ago, who heralded the modern age of discovery and environmental destruction." Hmm. Remind me again what was it he discovered.
And who knows what the Columbuses of tomorrow are planning to wreck? This weekend, Professor Rick Steiner proposed that the moon be designated a UN World Heritage Site, even though, technically, it's out of this world. But the point is: Think globally, act lunarly. As far as I know, there's not a lot of development planned for up there, though a British men's magazine recently announced plans to screen a giant image of Jennifer Lopez's bottom on the surface of the moon. J. Lo's butt would be visible from anywhere on earth without a telescope. So what's new? But, if Professor Steiner has his way, this sort of commercial exploitation would be forbidden. As Nick Denton commented on his Web site, "The moon is an airless, lifeless, pockmarked ball of rock. I would far rather industrial development took place off-planet, or in Antarctica, for that matter. English meadows, or California redwood forests, are far more valuable to me than a wasteland that most human beings will never visit. And, if anyone is worried that development will spoil the view of the full moon, we can always put the industrial zone on the far side."
Well, here's my prediction for 2032: Jean Chretien will be the oldest serving Prime Minister in Commonwealth history. Other than that, I'm inclined to be cautious. But, at the risk of scaremongering, let me say this: unless we change our ways the world faces a future ... where things look pretty darn good. If we change our ways along the lines advocated by the UN, all bets are off. As the great Australian wag Tim Blair puts it, "If the UN's doomsday scenario turns out to be correct, I'll donate every single thing I own in 2032 to the UN and Secretary-General Chelsea Clinton-Mathers. If the UN turns out to be wrong - man, what are the odds of that? - I get France. Deal, Kofi?"
Personally, I'm inclined to be more charitable. Looking back on all the doomsday extrapolations of 30 years ago, the economists Charles Maurice and Charles Smithson pointed out that, if you were to extrapolate from 1970s publishing trends, there would now be 14 million different doomsday books, or more than half as many books as in the entire Library of Congress. But there aren't. The Seventies doomsday book went the way of the trolley car and the buggy whip. So we should cherish these 450 pages of apocalyptic UN eco-guff. Like the peregrine falcon, despite all the odds, the doomsday book is still hanging in there.
Well, I've changed my mind a bit since that breezy penultimate paragraph: The world faces a future that looks pretty darn bad - not for any of the reasons touted by the eco-crowd but by the one problem no progressive soul gives a thought to: the self-extinction of the civilization that's done most for human progress and prosperity. As for the climate-change cult, it's had a rough year, but it's still done an awful amount of damage. Here's my column from Earth Day two years ago:
Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.”
Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of “climate change.” But let’s take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately one degree. That’s the “war”: one degree.
If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn’t exactly Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in preemptive war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.
So let’s cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more trees than we did a hundred or two hundred years ago. My town is over 90 percent forested. Any more trees and I’d have to hack my way through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St Albans I found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker “TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH.” Very funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch of Route Seven there’s nothing to see north, south, east, or west but maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It’s on every measure other than tree cover that Vermont’s kaput.
So where exactly do Time magazine’s generals want to plant their tree? Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It’s all these third-world types monkeying around with their rain forests who decline to share the sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the tree. In the Time iconography, the tree is Old Glory and it’s a flag of eco-colonialism. Read more.
In 1968, in his best-selling book The Population Bomb, scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines - hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."
In 1972, in their influential landmark study The Limits to Growth, the Club of Rome announced that the world would run out of gold by 1981, of mercury by 1985, tin by 1987, zinc by 1990, petroleum by 1992, and copper, lead, and gas by 1993.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States incredible as it may seem, confidently predicted that "we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade."
Now, in 2002, with enough oil for a century and a half, the planet awash in cut-price minerals, and less global famine, starvation and malnutrition than ever before, the end of the world has had to be rescheduled. The latest estimated time of arrival for the apocalypse is 2032. Last week, the United Nations Global Environmental Outlook predicted "the destruction of 70% of the natural world in 30 years, mass extinction of species, and the collapse of human society in many countries ... More than half the world will be afflicted by water shortages, with 95% of people in the Middle East with severe problems ... 25% of all species of mammals and 10% of birds will be extinct ..." Etc., etc., for 450 pages. But let's cut to the chase: As The Guardian's headline writer put it, "Unless We Change Our Ways, The World Faces Disaster."
Ah, yes. The end of the world's nighness is endlessly deferred but the blame rests where it always has. With us - with what the UN calls "the current 'markets first' approach." Klaus Toepfer, the UN Environment Program executive director, believes that "under the 'markets first' scenario the environment and humans did not fare well."
Really? The "markets first" approach was notable by its absence in, say, Eastern Europe, where government regulation of every single aspect of life resulted in environmental devastation beyond the wildest fantasies of the sinister Bush-Cheney-Enron axis of excess. Fortunately in Communist Romania there was very little clear-cut logging because Ceausescu had the tree. But in Iraq, the report points out, 30% of arable land has had to be abandoned because of bad irrigation practices. Those crazy speculators on the Baghdad Stock Exchange with their Thatcherite economics will kill you every time, eh?
But what's this? "In richer countries water and air pollution is down, species have been restored to the wild, and forests are increasing in size." So the environment's better in rich countries? Rich countries with ... market economies?
Thirty years after the first doom-mongering eco-confab in Stockholm, it should be obvious even to the UN frequent-flyer crowd: Markets aren't the problem, but the solution to the problem. The best way to clean up the neighbourhood is to make people wealthier. To do that, you need free markets, democracy, the rule of law and public accountability. None of those things exist in the Middle East, which is the real reason they'll be taking communal showers once a month in 2032.
Since 1970, when the great northern forest was being felled to print Paul Ehrlich best-sellers, the U.S. economy has swollen by 150%; automobile traffic has increased by 143%; and energy consumption has grown 45%.
During this same period, air pollutants have declined by 29%, toxic emissions by 48.5%, sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3%, and airborne lead by 97.3%. For anywhere other than Antarctica and a few sparsely inhabited islands, the first condition for a healthy environment is a strong economy. President Carter and the other apocalyptic prognosticators of the Seventies made a simple mistake: In their predictions about natural resources, they failed to take into account the natural resourcefulness of the market. The government regulates problems, but the market solves them. So if, as Kyoto does, you seek to punish capitalism in the West and restrict it in the developing world, you'll pretty much guarantee a poorer, dirtier, unhealthier planet.
I'd like to be an "environmentalist," really I would. I spend quite a bit of my time in the environment and I'm rather fond of it. But these days "environmentalism" is mostly unrelated to the environment: It's a cult, and, like most cults, heavy on ostentatious displays of self-denial, perfectly encapsulated by the time-consuming rituals of "recycling," an activity of no discernible benefit other than as a communal profession of faith.
Think globally, act locally, they say. But, in fact, environmentalists, like most cultists, are crippled by tunnel vision. "As long as we believe that our biggest threat is terrorism, we will never be truly prepared," wrote Carl Russell of Bethel, Vermont, to The Valley News after September 11th. "Humans are behaving like all living organisms whose habitat becomes depleted of necessary resources. Global warming, pollution, soil depletion, plant and animal extinction etc., are all signs of environmental degradation, too complex for most of us to agree on, let alone find solutions to. Our subconscious reflex to this lack of control is anxiety. Anger, intolerance and violence, however inappropriate, are common expressions of anxiety." Osama bin Laden might have thought he was ordering his boys into action because he hates America, but subconsciously he was merely acting out, however inappropriately, his anxieties about plant extinction.
"We are going through a maturing process for the human species, and for the Earth," concluded Mr. Russell. "Human lives have been lost and devastated, but our connections go deeper than that. Think of our Earth." So September 11 was about soil depletion? Wow. That's what I call a root cause.
In fact, the eco-cultists and the Islamofascists share the same Year Zero: 1492, the year not just of the "tragedy of Andalucia" - the fall of Moorish Spain that Osama's always boring on about -- but also of the most cataclysmic setback for the global environment. As Kenneth Branagh solemnly intoned, narrating the documentary The Last Show On Earth, "It was Columbus, 500 years ago, who heralded the modern age of discovery and environmental destruction." Hmm. Remind me again what was it he discovered.
And who knows what the Columbuses of tomorrow are planning to wreck? This weekend, Professor Rick Steiner proposed that the moon be designated a UN World Heritage Site, even though, technically, it's out of this world. But the point is: Think globally, act lunarly. As far as I know, there's not a lot of development planned for up there, though a British men's magazine recently announced plans to screen a giant image of Jennifer Lopez's bottom on the surface of the moon. J. Lo's butt would be visible from anywhere on earth without a telescope. So what's new? But, if Professor Steiner has his way, this sort of commercial exploitation would be forbidden. As Nick Denton commented on his Web site, "The moon is an airless, lifeless, pockmarked ball of rock. I would far rather industrial development took place off-planet, or in Antarctica, for that matter. English meadows, or California redwood forests, are far more valuable to me than a wasteland that most human beings will never visit. And, if anyone is worried that development will spoil the view of the full moon, we can always put the industrial zone on the far side."
Well, here's my prediction for 2032: Jean Chretien will be the oldest serving Prime Minister in Commonwealth history. Other than that, I'm inclined to be cautious. But, at the risk of scaremongering, let me say this: unless we change our ways the world faces a future ... where things look pretty darn good. If we change our ways along the lines advocated by the UN, all bets are off. As the great Australian wag Tim Blair puts it, "If the UN's doomsday scenario turns out to be correct, I'll donate every single thing I own in 2032 to the UN and Secretary-General Chelsea Clinton-Mathers. If the UN turns out to be wrong - man, what are the odds of that? - I get France. Deal, Kofi?"
Personally, I'm inclined to be more charitable. Looking back on all the doomsday extrapolations of 30 years ago, the economists Charles Maurice and Charles Smithson pointed out that, if you were to extrapolate from 1970s publishing trends, there would now be 14 million different doomsday books, or more than half as many books as in the entire Library of Congress. But there aren't. The Seventies doomsday book went the way of the trolley car and the buggy whip. So we should cherish these 450 pages of apocalyptic UN eco-guff. Like the peregrine falcon, despite all the odds, the doomsday book is still hanging in there.
Well, I've changed my mind a bit since that breezy penultimate paragraph: The world faces a future that looks pretty darn bad - not for any of the reasons touted by the eco-crowd but by the one problem no progressive soul gives a thought to: the self-extinction of the civilization that's done most for human progress and prosperity. As for the climate-change cult, it's had a rough year, but it's still done an awful amount of damage. Here's my column from Earth Day two years ago:
Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of the U.S. Marine Corps raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.”
Where to begin? For the last ten years, we have, in fact, been not warming but slightly cooling, which is why the eco-warriors have adopted the all-purpose bogeyman of “climate change.” But let’s take it that the editors of Time are referring not to the century we live in but the previous one, when there was a measurable rise of temperature of approximately one degree. That’s the “war”: one degree.
If the tree-raising is Iwo Jima, a one-degree increase isn’t exactly Pearl Harbor. But General Stengel wants us to engage in preemptive war. The editors of Time would be the first to deplore such saber-rattling applied to, say, Iran’s nuclear program, but it has become the habit of progressive opinion to appropriate the language of war for everything but actual war.
So let’s cut to the tree. In my corner of New Hampshire, we have more trees than we did a hundred or two hundred years ago. My town is over 90 percent forested. Any more trees and I’d have to hack my way through the undergrowth to get to my copy of Time magazine on the coffee table. Likewise Vermont, where not so long ago in St Albans I found myself stuck behind a Hillary supporter driving a Granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker “TO SAVE A TREE REMOVE A BUSH.” Very funny. And even funnier when you consider that on that stretch of Route Seven there’s nothing to see north, south, east, or west but maple, hemlock, birch, pine, you name it. It’s on every measure other than tree cover that Vermont’s kaput.
So where exactly do Time magazine’s generals want to plant their tree? Presumably, as in Iwo Jima, on foreign soil. It’s all these third-world types monkeying around with their rain forests who decline to share the sophisticated Euro-American reverence for the tree. In the Time iconography, the tree is Old Glory and it’s a flag of eco-colonialism. Read more.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
This Earth Day, Thank Big Oil
What about the benefits of oil?
This Earth Day, take a moment to thank the Greens’ biggest punching bag: Big Oil.
Most of us think of oil simply as the stuff that puts gasoline in our car. But oil, thanks to the ingenuity of the oil industry, does so much more. For one, it’s the building block for thousands of petroleum products — everything from Blu-Ray discs to asphalt to stitches to lipstick. And it provides the safest, most powerful, most convenient fuel, not only for automobiles but for the freighters, jets, trucks, and industrial machinery that power our global economy.
Oil makes every aspect of our lives better. For instance, say you’re fixing yourself a quick, All-American breakfast: eggs, bacon, fruit, and toast. What does that have to do with oil? Everything.
For example, you take for granted that the ingredients will be fresh and healthy. But for most of history people have often had to live with moldy vegetables and spoiled meat, because they lacked the refrigerator you have — a refrigerator with an oil-based, plastic interior that resists moisture and bacteria (imagine if it were made of wood!), not to mention the plastic packaging that keeps the bacon unspoiled and tasty and the bread fresh. If you’re frying the eggs and bacon with a coated pan for speed and easy clean-up, that’s a coating engineered from oil — which is also the material used for the insulated power cords that keeps you safe from the potentially deadly electricity flowing to your toaster and refrigerator.
And your breakfast is not only prepared and preserved with oil, it was grown with oil. Food today is dirt-cheap by historical standards only because of industrial-scale farming using industrial farm equipment powered by the cheapest, most concentrated, most abundant fuel: oil (usually diesel). Oil is also the base of the fertilizer and pesticides that have dramatically increased crop yields and lowered food prices.
Finally, your eggs, bacon, fruit and bread were transported to you — not just from your local grocery store (for pennies) via your gasoline-powered automobile, but from around the world. Once upon a time, you could only get food that was grown within walking or buggy distance. Now, even if you live on an island (say, Manhattan) you can dine on apples from Washington state, eggs from Iowa, oranges from California, and pineapple from Hawaii — all thanks to our fast, cheap, oil-powered transportation network that makes possible all of world trade.
Remember this when you hear calls to cut — and even renounce — our use of oil, because of its supposed impact on the climate. Then ask yourself: why do we never hear what life would be like without oil? What does that reveal about the attackers of oil? Is their anti-oil agenda compatible with human progress and prosperity?
To learn more about the ideas driving the attacks against oil and the value of this resource, visit “In Defense of Oil.” Read more.
Give it up Michael! This is not a winner.
I think he is issuing a threat - shades of Stéphane Dion - it should seal the fate of Michael Ignatieff.
Statement by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff on Earth Day
...A future Liberal government will put in place a credible, achievable climate and clean energy plan that will create jobs and make our economy – and our country – one of the cleanest and most competitive in the world.
The Liberals seem hell-bent on destroying the country any why they can. If it isn't the environment it will be immigration or taxation to pay for "social fairness".
Statement by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff on Earth Day
...A future Liberal government will put in place a credible, achievable climate and clean energy plan that will create jobs and make our economy – and our country – one of the cleanest and most competitive in the world.
The Liberals seem hell-bent on destroying the country any why they can. If it isn't the environment it will be immigration or taxation to pay for "social fairness".
Happy Earth Day? Thank Capitalism
by Jerry Taylor
Earth Day (April 22) is traditionally a day for the Left -- a celebration of government's ability to deliver the environmental goods and for threats about the parade of horribles that will descend upon us lest we rededicate ourselves to federal regulators and public land managers. This is unfortunate because it's businessmen -- not bureaucrats or environmental activists -- who deserve most of the credit for the environmental gains over the past century and who represent the best hope for a Greener tomorrow.
Indeed, we wouldn't even have environmentalists in our midst were it not for capitalism. Environmental amenities, after all, are luxury goods. America -- like much of the Third World today -- had no environmental movement to speak of until living standards rose sufficiently so that we could turn our attention from simply providing for food, shelter, and a reasonable education to higher "quality of life" issues. The richer you are, the more likely you are to be an environmentalist. And people wouldn't be rich without capitalism.
Wealth not only breeds environmentalists, it begets environmental quality. There are dozens of studies showing that, as per capita income initially rises from subsistence levels, air and water pollution increases correspondingly. But once per capita income hits between $3,500 and $15,000 (dependent upon the pollutant), the ambient concentration of pollutants begins to decline just as rapidly as it had previously increased. This relationship is found for virtually every significant pollutant in every single region of the planet. It is an iron law.
Given that wealthier societies use more resources than poorer societies, such findings are indeed counterintuitive. But the data don't lie. How do we explain this?
The obvious answer -- that wealthier societies are willing to trade-off the economic costs of government regulation for environmental improvements and that poorer societies are not -- is only partially correct. In the United States, pollution declines generally predated the passage of laws mandating pollution controls. In fact, for most pollutants, declines were greater before the federal government passed its panoply of environmental regulations than after the EPA came upon the scene.
Much of this had to do with individual demands for environmental quality. People who could afford cleaner-burning furnaces, for instance, bought them. People who wanted recreational services spent their money accordingly, creating profit opportunities for the provision of untrammeled nature. Property values rose in cleaner areas and declined in more polluted areas, shifting capital from Brown to Green investments. Market agents will supply whatever it is that people are willing to spend money on. And when people are willing to spend money on environmental quality, the market will provide it.
Meanwhile, capitalism rewards efficiency and punishes waste. Profit-hungry companies found ingenious ways to reduce the natural resource inputs necessary to produce all kinds of goods, which in turn reduced environmental demands on the land and the amount of waste that flowed through smokestacks and water pipes. As we learned to do more and more with a given unit of resources, the waste involved (which manifests itself in the form of pollution) shrank.
This trend was magnified by the shift away from manufacturing to service industries, which characterizes wealthy, growing economies. The latter are far less pollution-intensive than the former. But the former are necessary prerequisites for the latter.
Property rights -- a necessary prerequisite for free market economies -- also provide strong incentives to invest in resource health. Without them, no one cares about future returns because no one can be sure they'll be around to reap the gains. Property rights are also important means by which private desires for resource conservation and preservation can be realized. When the government, on the other hand, holds a monopoly on such decisions, minority preferences in developing societies are overruled (see the old Soviet block for details).
Furthermore, only wealthy societies can afford the investments necessary to secure basic environmental improvements, such as sewage treatment and electrification. Unsanitary water and the indoor air pollution (caused primarily by burning organic fuels in the home for heating and cooking needs) are directly responsible for about 10 million deaths a year in the Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the planet today.
Capitalism can save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the environmental organizations combined.
Finally, the technological advances that are part and parcel of growing economies create more natural resources than they consume. That's because what is or is not a "natural resource" is dependent upon our ability to harness the resource in question for human benefit. Resources are therefore a function of human knowledge. Because the stock of human knowledge increases faster in free economies than it does in socialist economies, it should be no surprise that most natural resources in the western world are more abundant today than ever before no matter which measure one uses.
This is not to say that government regulations haven't had an impact or aren't occasionally worthwhile. It is to say, however, that free markets are an ally -- not an enemy -- of Mother Earth. The Left, accordingly, has no special claim on Earth Day. Read more.
The Global-Warming Tax
Climategate, Copenhagen, Snowmageddon in the nation's capital, the EPA ruling that CO2 endangers us all, and Senate Republicans pushing for a global-warming tax. Has it been a great run-up to Earth Day, or what?
Never has a public-policy agenda been pursued with so little regard for scientific fact or for public opinion. In March, 48 percent of Americans agreed that global warming, while real, is exaggerated. When Gallup first asked this question in 1997, only 31 percent thought the threat exaggerated.
Despite this shift in sentiment, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and John Kerry (D., Mass.) and President Obama insist upon ramming a new global-warming tax (called a "fee") through the Senate. The bill is slated to be introduced next week, and vulnerable Democrats — weary already from the pugilistic health-care debate — are fleeing the legislation in droves.
And for the measure's primary backers, the backdrop of recent developments on the climate-science landscape could not possibly be less fortuitous.
Climategate revealed that a small but influential coterie of climate scientists did everything they could to present messy global-warming data as a "nice tidy story," meticulously crafted to "hide the decline" in tree-ring-based temperatures. (I use quotes because those are the words of the warming-alarmist scientists themselves.)
The fact is that tree rings are pretty poor indicators of annual warmth, especially in recent years. Dendrochronologists call this the "divergence" problem (cynics call it other names). Phil Jones, the central figure in Climategate, actually eliminated the "divergence" rather than "hiding the decline."
The amount of "explained variance" or statistical correlation between rings and temperatures during the summer growing season tends to run about 40 percent. That means more than half of the temperature changes for a fraction of the year (and even more for the entire year) are unexplained.
The famous "Hockey Stick" temperature history, by Penn State's Michael Mann, is composed largely of marginally explanatory tree-ring data, which he subjected to a statistical analysis that produces different results depending on what portion of the data is chosen to represent the average condition. If there are 1,000 years of data, and one uses only the last 100 years to calculate the average against which to measure all the other years, that will help to produce an upward-pointing "hockey stick." Using all of the data to form an average will give a smoother result.
Last week, David Hand, president of the Royal Statistical Society, acknowledged that "the particular technique they used exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick. Had they used an appropriate technique, the size of the blade of the hockey stick would have been smaller. . . . The change in temperature is not as great over the 20th century compared to the past as suggested by the Mann paper."
That revelation was accessible to the public, but not through the American legacy media. Sophisticated Internet sites such as climateaudit.org, wattsupwiththat.com, and rankexploits.com are creating a parallel universe to that of the refereed science literature, largely in response to the obviously manipulated peer-review process evinced in the Climategate e-mails.
The data on these sites are every bit as technical as those in the standard literature. The sites' contents would be published in such literature if some of the Climategate scientists weren't so pathologically thin-skinned, and didn't attempt to quash everyone and everything that deviates from their catechism.
As Climategate unfolded, so began the fiasco in Copenhagen, where global warming froze. The environmental world expected the December summit to produce a global commitment to specific reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions. President Obama famously barged in on a meeting of Brazil, South Africa, India, and China — and fled prematurely with nothing, hopping on Air Force one to reach Washington before the first of the season's three blizzards did. Read more.
Never has a public-policy agenda been pursued with so little regard for scientific fact or for public opinion. In March, 48 percent of Americans agreed that global warming, while real, is exaggerated. When Gallup first asked this question in 1997, only 31 percent thought the threat exaggerated.
Despite this shift in sentiment, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and John Kerry (D., Mass.) and President Obama insist upon ramming a new global-warming tax (called a "fee") through the Senate. The bill is slated to be introduced next week, and vulnerable Democrats — weary already from the pugilistic health-care debate — are fleeing the legislation in droves.
And for the measure's primary backers, the backdrop of recent developments on the climate-science landscape could not possibly be less fortuitous.
Climategate revealed that a small but influential coterie of climate scientists did everything they could to present messy global-warming data as a "nice tidy story," meticulously crafted to "hide the decline" in tree-ring-based temperatures. (I use quotes because those are the words of the warming-alarmist scientists themselves.)
The fact is that tree rings are pretty poor indicators of annual warmth, especially in recent years. Dendrochronologists call this the "divergence" problem (cynics call it other names). Phil Jones, the central figure in Climategate, actually eliminated the "divergence" rather than "hiding the decline."
The amount of "explained variance" or statistical correlation between rings and temperatures during the summer growing season tends to run about 40 percent. That means more than half of the temperature changes for a fraction of the year (and even more for the entire year) are unexplained.
The famous "Hockey Stick" temperature history, by Penn State's Michael Mann, is composed largely of marginally explanatory tree-ring data, which he subjected to a statistical analysis that produces different results depending on what portion of the data is chosen to represent the average condition. If there are 1,000 years of data, and one uses only the last 100 years to calculate the average against which to measure all the other years, that will help to produce an upward-pointing "hockey stick." Using all of the data to form an average will give a smoother result.
Last week, David Hand, president of the Royal Statistical Society, acknowledged that "the particular technique they used exaggerated the size of the blade at the end of the hockey stick. Had they used an appropriate technique, the size of the blade of the hockey stick would have been smaller. . . . The change in temperature is not as great over the 20th century compared to the past as suggested by the Mann paper."
That revelation was accessible to the public, but not through the American legacy media. Sophisticated Internet sites such as climateaudit.org, wattsupwiththat.com, and rankexploits.com are creating a parallel universe to that of the refereed science literature, largely in response to the obviously manipulated peer-review process evinced in the Climategate e-mails.
The data on these sites are every bit as technical as those in the standard literature. The sites' contents would be published in such literature if some of the Climategate scientists weren't so pathologically thin-skinned, and didn't attempt to quash everyone and everything that deviates from their catechism.
As Climategate unfolded, so began the fiasco in Copenhagen, where global warming froze. The environmental world expected the December summit to produce a global commitment to specific reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions. President Obama famously barged in on a meeting of Brazil, South Africa, India, and China — and fled prematurely with nothing, hopping on Air Force one to reach Washington before the first of the season's three blizzards did. Read more.
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