Need to know????

[Michael Larson]

Biofuels: Seldom is so much spent to achieve so little
John Clinkard

Late in 2007, we here at the Economic Snapshot revisited the topic of biofuels and reviewed a brief analysis by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which questioned whether the cost of producing biofuels outweighed the benefits.

In July 2008, the OECD published a more in-depth analysis of biofuels. It concluded that, in OECD countries, biofuel policies are not only costly but also ineffective in reducing greenhouse gases and improving energy security. The OECD report also found that the increased production of biofuels had a significant impact on world crop prices.

Without exception, the production of biofuels in the United States, Canada and the European Union is highly dependent on public funding.

[Michael Larson]

[Brian A. MacNeish]

Originally Posted by mlarson

THere was a bit of a fight about the installation of a test windmill in northern Nova Scotia last year that one of our Canadian superstars, local girl Anne Murray, stuck her 2 cents into because it was near (2-3 miles) her summer home. The mill is near the coast but not on it. When I was supervising a gov't low income energy retrofit pilot contract last year, I had the opportunity to drive right by it. (it's about 100 feet off the road.) There was a brisk wind and vey little sound from the unit.

A few weeks later she was interviewed on a local phone-in radio program about her oppostion to the project. Most callers were in favour of the windmill. I tried to get a call in but couldn't get through. My comment was to be: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". These units are a beautiful site!! I'd have'em near my backyard.......but not a nuclear plant!! (Although we'll have to build a few to help us through the transition period to sensible energy supply and comsumption!!)

[Michael Larson]

Nuclear power IS a sensible energy supply.

[Michael Larson]

This a keeper to have around when you talk to others about global climate change and what should be done about it.

Monckton’s litany

Christopher, Viscount Monkton of Brenchley, is a good scholar and a fine writer. This clever recital pulls no punches but you may feel like responding 'amen' (at least you might…if you were a 'dissenter')

• Canute couldn’t stop sea level rising. Officials can’t stop it either.
• Even if global temperature has risen, it has risen in a straight line at a natural 0.5 °C/century for 300 years since the Sun recovered from the Maunder Minimum, long before we could have had any influence (Akasofu, 2008 ).
• Even if warming had sped up, now temperature is 7C below most of the past 500m yrs; 5C below all 4 recent inter-glacials; and up to 3C below the Bronze Age, Roman & mediaeval optima (Petit et al., 1999; IPCC, 1990).
• Even if today’s warming were unprecedented, the Sun is the probable cause. It was more active in the past 70 years than in the previous 11,400 (Usoskin et al., 2003; Hathaway et al., 2004; IAU, 2004; Solanki et al., 2005).
• Even if the sun were not to blame, the UN’s climate panel has not shown that humanity is to blame. CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did in 1750 (Keeling & Whorf, 2004).
• Even if CO2 were to blame, no “runaway greenhouse” catastrophe occurred in the Cambrian era, when there was ~20 times today’s concentration in the air. Temperature was just 7 C warmer than today (IPCC, 2001).
• Even if CO2 levels had set a record, there has been no warming since 1998. For 7 years, temperatures have fallen. The Jan 2007-Jan 2008 fall was the steepest since 1880 (GISS; Hadley; NCDC; RSS; UAH: all 2008 ).
• Even if the planet were not cooling, the rate of warming is far less than the UN imagines. It would be too small to cause harm. There may well be no new warming until 2015, if then (Keenlyside et al., 2008 ).
• Even if warming were harmful, humankind’s effect is minuscule. “The observed changes may be natural” (IPCC, 2001; cf. Chylek et al., 2008; Lindzen, 2007; Spencer, 2007; Wentz et al., 2007; Zichichi, 2007; etc.).
• Even if our effect were significant, the UN’s projected human fingerprint – tropical mid-troposphere warming at thrice the surface rate – is absent (Douglass et al., 2004, 2007; Lindzen, 2001, 2007; Spencer, 2007).
• Even if the human fingerprint were present, climate models cannot predict the future of the complex, chaotic climate unless we know its initial state to an unattainable precision (Lorenz, 1963; Giorgi, 2005; IPCC, 2001).
• Even if computer models could work, they cannot predict future rates of warming. Temperature response to atmospheric greenhouse-gas enrichment is an input to the computers, not an output from them (Akasofu, 2008 ).
• Even if the UN’s imagined high “climate sensitivity” to CO2 were right, disaster would not be likely to follow. The peer-reviewed literature is near-unanimous in not predicting climate catastrophe (Schulte, 2008 ).
• Even if Al Gore were right that harm might occur, “the Armageddon scenario he depicts is not based on any scientific view”. Sea level may rise 1 ft to 2100, not 20 ft (Burton, J., 2007; IPCC, 2007; Moerner, 2004).
• Even if Armageddon were likely, scientifically-unsound precautions are already starving millions as biofuels, a “crime against humanity”, pre-empt agricultural land, doubling staple cereal prices in a year. (UNFAO, 2008 ).
• Even if precautions were not killing the poor, they would work no better than the “precautionary” ban on DDT, which killed 40 million children before the UN at last ended it (Dr. Arata Kochi, UN malaria program, 2006).
• Even if precautions might work, the strategic harm done to humanity by killing the world’s poor and destroying the economic prosperity of the West would outweigh any climate benefit (Henderson, 2007; UNFAO, 2008 ).
• Even if the climatic benefits of mitigation could outweigh the millions of deaths it is causing, adaptation as and if necessary would be far more cost-effective and less harmful (all economists except Stern, 2006).
• Even if mitigation were as cost-effective as adaptation, the public sector – which emits twice as much carbon to do a given thing as the private sector – must cut its own size by half before it preaches to us (Friedman, 1993).
• Therefore, extravagant, futile schemes by the State and its organs to mitigate imagined “global warming” will have no more effect than King Canute’s command to the tide not to come in and wet the Royal feet.
• We must get the science right or we shall get the policy wrong. There is no manmade “climate crisis”. It is a non-problem. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

Address by The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to the Local Government Association, Bournemouth, 3 July 2008. Thanks to Dr Benny Peiser's newsletter where this was first published.

References: Many of the references are spelled out in full in Monkton's recent article in the letters of the American Physical Society.
Posted on 07/18 at 10:58 PM.

[Michael Larson]

In the face of mounting evidence that man made global warming is not occurring the advocates have become even more shrill.

On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is extinction

There's no 'adaptation' to such steep warming. We must stop pandering to special interests, and try a new, post-Kyoto strategy

We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous. Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of our extinction.
The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about 120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather would become extreme and unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die.

more sillyness

[Michael Larson]

Better be careful Brian.
Is there scientific consensus on this?

Pollution killing 21,000 Canadians this year: report

OTTAWA, Aug 13 (AFP) Aug 14, 2008
Air pollution this year will kill more than 20,000 Canadians, the Canadian Medical Association said Wednesday in a report.The research on the human costs of pollution and pollution-related diseases estimated that around 21,000 people in Canada will die from breathing in toxic substances drifting in the air this year.

By 2031, short term exposure to air pollution will claim close to 90,000 lives in Canada, while long-term exposure will kill more than 700,000, the report said.

"Ontario and Quebec residents are the worst hit Canadians, with 70 percent of the premature deaths occurring in Central Canada, even though these two provinces comprise only 62 percent of Canada's population," the report said.

Not all the blame for air pollution falls on Canada, however.
"Canada gets a fair bit of pollution from the American midwest, which drifts north, comes across through Ontario and continues right on through to Quebec," CMA legal advisor Ted Boadway told reporters at the report's presentation.

The national economy, air pollution will top eight billion dollars in 2008, and by 2031 it will go over 250 billion, the report said.

[Brian A. MacNeish]

Originally Posted by mlarson

.
Is there scientific consensus on this?
Yes, if you speak to the lung asociation and others, including doctors, involved with asthma, I'd think you'd find a concensus. I've heard this type of announcement for years. You're the first to question it.

Pollution killing 21,000 Canadians this year: report

"Better be careful Brian"
Well, Michael, it used to be said that at times of the year, the Maritimes were the tailpipe of North America. We would get air flows from central Canada, the steel belt/Ohio valley coal fired power plants and from cities along the eastern seaboard. In 1973-4, I attended a lecture put on by an air quality researcher about LTRAP (Long Range Transport of Air Pollution) and a study they did of a Hurricane from its birth in the midAtlantic with little to no pollution in the air through the Caribbean up the east coast until it was dropping acidified rain on the maritimes!!! (that's why for a while we in eastern canada were liming lakes to keep PH levels up so fish populations would survive to support others in the local ecosystem that preyed on them)

Thank god, the steel belt became the rust belt! I don't think they've built many/any new coal fired powerplants (the big move is to gas fired while decomissioning coal plants). Things have gotten better in the Maritimes; we haven't had any really bad smog alerts for many years; a few smoke days a few years back from forest fires in Quebec/Ontario.

[Michael Larson]

Brian, you're hilarious.

Care to tell us how they know it's 21,000 deaths?

Maybe they could send them funeral plannig guides.

[Brian A. MacNeish]

Originally Posted by mlarson

Brian, you're hilarious.

Care to tell us how they know it's 21,000 deaths?

Maybe they could send them funeral plannig guides.

Well, Michael, I guess the guidlines for radon levels in housing and the action levels are just as hilarious!!


Thursday, January 13, 2005
Surgeon General Releases National Health Advisory On Radon

U.S. Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona warned the American public about the risks of breathing indoor radon by issuing a national health advisory today.

"Indoor radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the United States and breathing it over prolonged periods can present a significant health risk to families all over the country"

Radon gas in the indoor air of America's homes poses a serious health risk. More than 20,000 Americans die of radon-related lung cancer every year.

Should we take action or say that its only a statistic and they can be made to lie!!

[Michael Larson]

The research on the human costs of pollution and pollution-related diseases estimated that around 21,000 people in Canada will die from breathing in toxic substances drifting in the air this year.

By 2031, short term exposure to air pollution will claim close to 90,000 lives in Canada, while long-term exposure will kill more than 700,000, the report said.

"Ontario and Quebec residents are the worst hit Canadians, with 70 percent of the premature deaths occurring in Central Canada, even though these two provinces comprise only 62 percent of Canada's population," the report said.

I find the numbers a hoot.

I guess they have very good crystal balls up their in Canada.

They are meant to scare people into action and little else.

[Michael Larson]

Category:The Arctic ice that didn't melt as promised.

Arctic ice refuses to melt as orderedBy Steven Goddard
Published Friday 15th August 2008 10:02 GMT

Just a few weeks ago, predictions of Arctic ice collapse were buzzing all over the internet. Some scientists were predicting (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...orth-pole.html) that the "North Pole may be ice-free for first time this summer". Others predicted (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_7696460.htm) that the entire "polar ice cap would disappear this summer".

The Arctic melt season is nearly done for this year. The sun is now very low above the horizon and will set for the winter at the North Pole in five weeks. And none of these dire predictions have come to pass. Yet there is, however, something odd going on with the ice data. (click the Title Link to Read)

Ice at the Arctic: 2007 and 2008 snapshots

[George A. H. Luck]

"if you speak to the lung asociation and others, including doctors, involved with asthma, I'd think you'd find a concensus."

Michael, it is always a good thing to ask the people who will benefit the most ( $$$ ) for their independent and unbiased opinions . Most Canadians are well aware of how the left try to scare us into giving them more money.

[Michael Larson]

George, It's almost always about the money, whether you're T. Boone Pickens, Al Gore or your favorite global warming scientist looking for grant money to continue his career.

Only money from Big Oil, Big Nuclear, or Big coal is considered evil though as they try to save their industries by selling useful products to all.

Of course we all know that "government" money is pure, unadulterated and free from political considerations.

[Brian A. MacNeish]

Originally Posted by gluck

"if you speak to the lung asociation and others, including doctors, involved with asthma, I'd think you'd find a concensus."

Michael, it is always a good thing to ask the people who will benefit the most ( $$$ ) for their independent and unbiased opinions . Most Canadians are well aware of how the left try to scare us into giving them more money.

SO that's who you consider the left!!!! This weekend the LEFT raised $1.2 million for breast cancer research here in poor Halifax. Ask your wife (if you still or ever had one) if she considers the people here out-to-lunch leftists!