Lowest level ever?
Does this sound plausible?
Arctic sea ice melted to its lowest level ever this week, shattering a record set in 2005 and continuing a trend spurred by human-caused global warming, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado said Thursday.
Compared to 2005, the previous record-low year for Arctic sea ice, this year has had a decrease of more than 386,100 square miles. The ice hit its lowest level Sunday, and refreezing has already begun in some places, according to satellite imagery used by the center.
Surely they mean “in recorded history,” or something like that. Surely this doesn’t include the periods when much of North America was lush tropical jungle with dinosaurs? I doubt that it includes the medieval warm period, during with Nordic settlements flourished on Greenland and Leif Erikson discovered Newfoundland and named it Vinland in reference to its lush vegetation?
I wish reporters would be more precise. Looking at the NSIDC site, it seems that the “lowest level ever” really means since 1979, which reflects the absurdly short time frame of this whole hysterical dialogue in historical perspective.
Ethanol: an end to the reign of error?
—“You mean there was no steak, no cream pies, no deep fat, no hot fudge?”—“Those were thought to be unhealthy, exactly the opposite of what we now know to be true.”
Sleeper, 1973
The heyday of ethanol may be soon over, if anyone is willing to forgo the ample political benefits of pretending they didn’t read this:
Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised.
So, the whole biofuel business appears to be worse than the disease, since most US biofuel is from corn, while most EU biofuel is from rapeseed.
Dr Dave Reay, of the University of Edinburgh, used the findings to calculate that with the US Senate aiming to increase maize ethanol production sevenfold by 2022, greenhouse gas emissions from transport will rise by 6 per cent.
This has led scientists to call for greater scrutiny of alternatives to fossil fuels. Might one also hope that it would lead to greater scrutiny of the convoluted computer models behind the global warming stampede itself? Don’t, so to speak, hold your breath.
Inconvenient truths
Pete DuPont has a review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book on global warming. There’s a lot to chew on here, but one nugget stands out to me. Remember all the talk about killer heat waves? No one talks about killer cold waves, or all the lives that might be saved by milder winters:
Global warming is supposedly killing people. The 35,000 deaths from the August 2003 European heat wave were, in Al Gore’s view, an example of what “will become much more common if global warming is not addressed.” But the actual data put things in perspective. Whereas 2,000 people died in the United Kingdom in that heat wave, last year the BBC reported that deaths caused by cold weather in England and Wales were about 25,000 each winter, and 47,000 a year, in the winters of 1998 to 2000. Similarly, in Helsinki, Finland, 55 people die each year from heat and 1,655 from cold. In Athens, Greece, a much warmer place, the deaths from excess heat are 1,376 each year and the deaths from cold 7,852. All told, Mr. Lomborg calculates that about 200,000 people die in Europe each year from excessive heat, and 1.5 million from excessive cold.
Ethanol is a gas
IHT has a good editorial on the ethanol nonsense, citing escalating grain prices that are causing economic and politic stress around the world. And the politics and pork of it drives the policy, with governments trying to favor their own producers. Add to that the environmental costs of raising the grain and processing it, and you get marginal benefits at enormous cost:
The economics of corn ethanol have never made much sense. Rather than importing cheap Brazilian ethanol made from sugar cane, the United States slaps a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on ethanol from Brazil. Then the government provides a tax break of 51 cents a gallon to American ethanol producers - on top of the generous subsidies that corn growers already receive under the farm program.
Corn-based ethanol also requires a lot of land. An OECD report two years ago suggested that replacing 10 percent of America’s motor fuel with biofuels would require about a third of the total cropland devoted to cereals, oilseeds and sugar crops.
Meanwhile, the environmental benefits are modest. A study published last year by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that after accounting for the energy used to grow the corn and turn it into ethanol, corn ethanol lowers emissions of greenhouse gases by only 13 percent.
Oh my, what courage
Enviros are up in arms that Atlantic City is planning on using a hardwood from Brazil to repair its famous boardwalk. Like, seriously up in arms:
That has protesters like Georgina Shanley vowing to do whatever it takes to stop the plan.
“We are considering stopping it physically from coming into Ocean City by standing in the middle of the road like that young man in Tiananmen Square in front of the tank,” she said. “It has to be stopped.”
Memo to Shanley: Those tanks at Tiananmen were loaded. You sound like you’re loaded. There’s a difference.
Brazil digs global warming
Brazil’s president is making it clear that he thinks everyone needs to do their share on global warming, and he is also making it clear what he means by that: buy Brazilian biofuels, please!
During his visits to Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, Silva used the opportunity to promote biofuels — Brazil is the world’s largest export[er] of ethanol — as a way of providing energy while cutting emissions from fossil fuels.”We all have to assume our share of the responsibility,” said Silva, appearing with Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg after talks. “In the Brazilian case, we have 32 years of experience in dealing with ethanol.
“It’s a renewable fuel. Much, much less polluting than any other fuel, creates more jobs and every time we grow a plant, we are diminishing the greenhouse effect.”
Memo to Silva: Most biofuels require huge amounts of diesel and fertilizers to grow. Also, growing plants does not destroy CO2. It sequesters it temporarily. When the plant decays or is destroyed — say, is harvested, distilled and turned into biofuels, with the refuse being burned or rotting — the CO2 you just sequestered is released again into the atmosphere.
But perhaps I should hold my peace. After all, this isn’t really about solving global warming: it’s about pumping up Brazilian exports and giving their customers a warm fuzzy.
Spam, spam, spam, spam, smamiddity spam
While it’s pretty much accepted in the US that biofuels have resulted in escalating grain prices, the axiom is less than axiomatic in Europe. A “senior EU environmental official” discounts speculation that rising tortilla prices in Mexico and pasta prices in Italy stem from biofuels. OK, he didn’t offer counterarguments, exactly, he just stipulated:
“Global price fluctuations in the grain markets have always existed, although we are for some, like wheat, at historic highs at the moment,” Steiner said at a news conference in Rome. “It would be somewhat premature to say that pasta costs more because there is biofuel grown in other parts of the world.”
Then he gets a wee bit defensive. See, if biofuels take the blame at the checkout, people may resist getting serious about … global warming. Thus, he adds:
On the other hand, the increasingly violent weather caused by global warming does pose a real danger to crops and to food supplies, particularly for the world’s poorest, Steiner said on the sidelines of a two-day national conference on climate change in Italy held at the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
“We should ask ourselves: are we getting single-minded about the biofuels issue instead of looking at the full spectrum of issues?”
Yeah, the full spectrum of issues. Like global warming, global warming, global warming, global warming, and uh, yeah, global warming:
Do cell phones kill honeybees?
No, apparently not. Then why are honeybees disappearing in the U.S.? Apparently the Israelis are to blame, as usual. Killjoys:
Last week, scientists reported having found a possible cause of the collapse of honeybee populations in the Untied States reported in the past year. What is interesting isn’t just the virus, called Israeli acute paralysis virus, but the use of new methods of genetic screening to determine what pathogens the bees in collapsed colonies had been exposed to. Researchers were able to quickly screen the DNA from all the organisms present in the bees and compare them with the DNA in genomic libraries, a catalog of known organisms. Bees from collapsed hives had the virus. Healthy bees did not.
So it’s not cell phones or genetically modified foods. Which must be very disappointing to the enviro-conspiracy nuts:
In some ways, this newly reported research seems all the more important given all the speculation about what has been killing off the honeybees. These hive losses have inspired a kind of myth-making or magical thinking about their possible environmental origins. The suspected culprits include genetically modified crops and cell phones, to name only two.
Upscale dumpster diving
The reporter in this article wants us to think that these people are bold innovators challenging our inhibitions by eating other people’s garbage. I just think they’re weird, but it’s a good insight into the mind of the twisted eco-freak:
For lunch in her modest apartment, Madeline Nelson tossed a salad made with shaved carrots and lettuce she dug out of a Whole Foods dumpster. She flavored the dressing with miso powder she found in a trash bag on a curb in Chinatown. She baked bread made with yeast plucked from the garbage of a Middle Eastern grocery store.
Nelson is a former corporate executive who can afford to dine at four-star restaurants. But she prefers turning garbage into gourmet meals without spending a cent. On this afternoon, she thawed a slab of pâté that she found three days before its expiration date in a dumpster outside a health food store. She made buttery chicken soup from another health food store’s hot buffet leftovers, which she salvaged before they were tossed into the garbage.
This easily conjure a Monty Python skit, with a critical mass of increasingly frustrated people waiting for a dwindling few traditional consumers to get tired of their pâté and throw it out.
Hey, this is America!
This radical enviro nut was surprised to learn that giving a crowd of people step by step instructions for making a Molotov cocktail and urging them to do it can get you in trouble:
Rod Coronado, who has advocated sinking whaling ships and destroying mink farms and animal research labs, was charged after a 2003 speech in which he showed a California audience how to make a Molotov cocktail out of an apple-juice jug.
“He has said things that are offensive, but he believed, perhaps naively, that under the First Amendment he had the right to say those things,” Gerald Singleton said in opening statements Tuesday.
The basic legal precedent here is Brandenburg v. Ohio, which very generously said that a bunch of KKK goons could say anything they wanted, as long as they weren’t poised to harm anyone. The two measures are imminence and incitement. It’s OK to incite, as long as it’s not imminent. I guess someone saw this as imminent:
… The prosecution said Coronado was urging listeners to start fires similar to one set that day at an unfinished condominium project in San Diego, which caused $50 million in damage, making it the costliest eco-terror attack in United States history.
The Kyoto lie continues
Powerline flags this on another AP report asserting the lie that the Bush administration killed Kyoto. Anyone who followed it at the time knew, of course, that the Senate voted 95-0, led by key Democrats, to reject that substance of that treaty before it was negotiated. Given this, the Clinton administration never even bothered to try to have it ratified. Bush didn’t kill Kyoto: he merely gave it a decent burial.
But the facts don’t fit the official narrative. So they must be bent accordingly. Here is the AP blundering onward in its casual and irresponsible lies:
Under the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton, the United States joined a U.N. meeting in Kyoto and agreed to the protocol. But the United States rejected it under the administration of President George W. Bush, Clinton’s successor.
“But don’t you realize, that’s where I sail.”
As Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit put it about global warming, “I’ll believe its a crisis when those who say it’s a crisis act like its a crisis.” We’ve all had a good laugh over the last few years over the outrageous carbon footprint of the likes of Al Gore and John Edwards, with their way-oversized homes and pool houses burning up the megawatts. We’ve also been amused at the hollywood celebrities, circling the globe in their private jets as they lecture the rest of us chumps. The other poster child of hypocrisy is none other than Ted Kennedy, whose already infamous explanation for opposing a wind farm off Cape Cod is beyond belief.
So, why aren’t wind turbines churning away in Nantucket Sound, and why aren’t Massachusetts leaders resting on their laurels, basking in the praise they would have received as innovators when it came to renewable energy?
Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb, authors of the new nonfiction work Cape Wind, might argue that it can all be summed up in the following statement from Massachusetts senior Senator Ted Kennedy: “But don’t you realize, that’s where I sail.”
Vatican buying carb indulgences
Centuries after they quit selling them, the Vatican is buying them. They’re purchasing a swath of new forest in Hungary that is going to make them the “first carbon neutral state,” which means they can go on heating their offices and driving their cars.
The efficacy of the indulgences, as Martin Luther pointed out nearly 500 years ago, is, to say the least, suspect:
Young forests - dominated by growing trees - soak up lots of carbon dioxide, but once the forests mature, they absorb far less, he said.
Also, “carbon credits” are not a hard currency like a euro or a Hungarian forint, but something far more nebulous, like a stock market future. There is no scientific system for predicting the exact carbon absorbing capacity of a project like the Vatican Forest, whose trajectory depends on rainfall, temperature and how fast trees grow.
“Planting forests will only compensate for a small fraction of emissions, even if you cover all of Hungary in young trees,” Galhidy said.
Gazdag acknowledges that carbon offsetting is not an exact science. “People have only been thinking about offsetting for about 10 years,” he said.
It’s all in the mind. A zen thing. Presumably, with a few more decades of thinking we’ll figure out how to make old forests keep absorbing carbon, and not dump it back as they decay.
Night of the living dead
Helena Andrews at Politico points out attention to a new environmental freak show narrated by that deep thinker Leonardo DiCaprio. From her analysis, it’s hard to tell what the point of this one is, other than to freak out the gullible. Judging from the comments, there is a real audience for this stuff–people who get off on being scared.
“Not only is it the 11th hour, it’s 11:59 and 59 seconds,” says another expert.
“The environment is going to survive,” says another expert. “We’re the ones who might not survive.”
If you give a moose a muffin …
… he’ll probably want some blueberry jam to put on it.
Become obsessed with controlling the uncontrollable, and you’ll probably want to put an end to chaos theory. And sooner or later you’ll be tracking down that SOB of a butterfly whose wings caused that devastating tornado.
Or, go after that farting moose:
During a single year, according to the latest research, a full-grown moose expels — from both ends of its body — the methane equivalent of 2100kg of carbon dioxide emissions. …
“To put it into perspective, the return flight from Oslo to Santiago in Chile leaves a carbon footprint of 880 kilos,” said biologist Reidar Andersen.
Blueberries seem to be a big part of the problem:
“Moose normally eat branches in the winter, a not particularly nutritious diet,” said Erling Solberg of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research. “But since snow has become so much rarer, they have access to wild blueberries.”
The result has been fatter moose that are more likely to break wind.
And they have also begun acting as if they were illegal immigrants in the America [calm down Fred Barnes, I was just kidding.]:
Last winter, there were reports of moose straying into towns in search of yet more food — eating Christmas decorations and smashing shop windows to reach displayed vegetables.
Geez.
Well said
Glen Reynolds quote is making the rounds, and now is on a bumper sticker. I’m not a bumper sticker kinda guy, but this one has serious merit. Buy it here.
Does this mean I’m green?
Presidential candidates are prostitutes, metaphorically speaking. They have to be. A candidate who simply told the truth about ethanol wouldn’t stand a chance in Iowa, and in a razor thin electoral space, Iowa can make all the difference. So they know that ethanol is crap, but they say what they have to say.
The cool thing about this is that, for once, I’m on the side of the angels: ironically, ethanol is feared and despised by some influential environmentalists:
But the proposals worry some environmentalists, livestock producers and economists, who fear that ethanol will do more harm than good. Producing that much corn pollutes the land, raises prices on everything from tortillas to movie popcorn and gives off more carbon dioxide than it conserves, they say.
The political craze for ethanol is “a little rash, a little foolhardy and very irresponsible,” says Michelle Perez, senior agriculture analyst for the Environmental Working Group.
But good luck with getting this truth out. Ethanol is a firmly entrenched and rare form of pork. It’s very beneficial to a narrow and powerful voting bloc, and it’s got this aura of sanctity that insulates it from attack.
It’s another example of how, when forced to choose, politicians embrace symbols over substance.
Consumer panic is what tiggers do best
In the Winnie the Pooh movies, Tigger is constantly “bouncing” the neighbors, to which they object, to which he replies, “bouncing is what Tiggers do best.”
So now the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland, CA is looking for a little cheap publicity by jumping on the “China is poisoning us with lead bandwagon.” They claim to have found, horrors, that certain bibs sold in Toys ‘R’ Us stores, have 3x the allowed lead levels in … baby bibs, of all things. They even give details, so you can freak out and run to the store with them:
The vinyl bibs, which feature illustrations of baseball bats and soccer balls and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh characters, are sold for less than $5 each under store-brand labels, including Especially for Baby and Koala Baby.
Tests this summer, financed by the Center for Environmental Health of Oakland, California, found lead as high as three times the level allowed in paint in several styles of the bibs purchased from both Toys ‘R’ Us and Babies ‘R’ Us stores in California.
A separate test by a laboratory hired by The New York Times of the same Toys ‘R’ Us bibs, purchased in Maryland, found a similar level of contamination.
But hold on. Let’s put this in perspective. First, U.S. standards are so protective I would be shocked if a 3X violation represented real risk. Second, there is question whether there is any violation at all. Toys ‘R’ Us did its own tests and found no violations, and the CPSC says it has as well:
Officials from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which regulates children’s products, said they agreed that lead had no place in bibs.
But their own recent tests of baby bibs on the market in the United States found that the lead, when present, was at levels low enough that a child chewing on or rubbing the bib would not get an unhealthy dose.
It’s always hard to parse this kind of thing. The panic industry in the enviro-media industrial complex has every incentive to overplay such a story. But China has no business exceeding the formal limits, if they are. Which seems a bit in doubt. However, U.S. limits on this sort of thing are generally so hyper-protective that a 3X probably represents no real risk.
Orangudiesel
I thought it was perverse when they drove up U.S. food prices by diverting corn to ethanol. Now in Borneo orangutans are facing genocide as their habitat is systematically raped to make way for palm oil plantations to produce biodiesel.
The first thing you learn in an economics class is that a functioning market sends price signals in all directions, and you can’t really be sure what they are saying to whom. The same also is clearly true of an artificial market–in this case the Gore-driven rush to produce and burn biodiesel, no matter what the real environmental costs are:
A common tactic, campaigners say, is for plantation firms to first burn the forest then buy up the degraded land for a pittance.
Wonder if all the Hollywood types patting themselves on the back for their offsets will stop to think now about unintended consequences. And whether the movement as a whole will stop to think about all the human unintended consequences of stifling development in poor countries.
The pain of the human children is as real as that of the orangutans.
[Via Blue Crab Boulevard. Read more.]
Cate, your greasy hair ain’t helpin things
Cate Blanchet is no longer washing her hair. I don’t even know who she is. Googling her, I realize I saw her in the Lord of the Rings films, and that she has a habit of flying private jets around the world.
“It’s great to see my children [Cate, you have children? You selfish anthropocentric slut!] engaged in these things, like when you put the water on when you put the toothbrush under the tap, you turn it off the minute you take it out and you don’t let the water run.”
The Australian star has also limited her car use and has switched her household power supply to green power.
She must be so brainwashed with the “think globally, act locally” cliché that she actually thinks the little things matter. They don’t. I know it is reassuring to lie to yourself that you can make a difference on the margins. You can’t.
Global warming may be caused by variations in the sun’s energy, and if so, good luck with that. If it is anthropogenic, it can only be addressed through enormous technological breakthroughs in electricity and in car engines. Token gestures toward wind or solar power aint gonna cut it. We’re talking massive changes in economies of scale. And we aren’t even close technologically. Not even close.
Finally, once we make these tech breakthroughs, we need to transmit these technologies to developing countries.
Global warming, if it is man made, cannot be addressed one greasy head at a time.
