"About 70 percent to 75 percent of the time a weak El Nino will deliver the goods in terms of above-normal heating demand and cold weather. It’s pretty good odds."Geez, will somebody please go hit Al Gore over the head will a frozen tuna?
Phil Chapman is a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who became the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut. He pens a comprehensive article in today's Australian about the danger of the coming ice age:
All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.
Chapman admits that one year of cooling does not a trend make, but then he turns to sunspot activity. According to SOHO, the latest cycle of sunspots (No. 24) failed to begin on schedule (sometime shortly after March of last year).
The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
Again, Chapman admits that there may not be a causal connection between last year's precipitous temperature drop and No. 24's late start. But given the grim consequences of another mini-ice age, he warns us to start planning now. Lack of action could prove fatal:
The interglacial we have enjoyed throughout recorded human history, called the Holocene, began 11,000 years ago, so the ice is overdue. We also know that glaciation can occur quickly: the required decline in global temperature is about 12C and it can happen in 20 years.
The next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1000 years. On the other hand, it must be noted that the cooling in 2007 was even faster than in typical glacial transitions. If it continued for 20 years, the temperature would be 14C cooler in 2027.
By then, most of the advanced nations would have ceased to exist, vanishing under the ice, and the rest of the world would be faced with a catastrophe beyond imagining.
Australia may escape total annihilation but would surely be overrun by millions of refugees. Once the glaciation starts, it will last 1000 centuries, an incomprehensible stretch of time.
Global warming we could deal with. In fact, it would open up more farm land and expand the habitable area on the Earth.
But an ice age is another thing altogether.
So please, for the future of humanity, everyone go out and buy a huge (non-hybrid) SUV and fire up the smudge pots. In the meantime, I think I'll invest in some acreage on the equator. Hmm, I wonder what a small plantation in the Brazilian rain forest goes for these days.
Last month, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that supermarkets will be given a year to end their reliance on "single use" plastic bags. After that they face a fine of 5p or more for each plastic bag they give to customers.
Further, in an effort to force retailers to "go green", if the shop charges customers for plastic bags they will be required to publish how they use the proceeds. This measure is designed to put public pressure on the retailers to use the money for environmental causes.
Brown, of course, is from the Labour Party which occupies the point to the left of what passes for the middle of the political spectrum outside of the US. In other words, he would be perfectly happy cozying up to the Pelosis and Nadars of the US.
Conservatives responded to Brown's announcement by showcasing Labour's hypocrisy: over the last 2 years the government has purchased almost 1.3 million plastic bags emblazoned with departmental logos at a cost of over 91 million pounds. Eric Pickles, shadow communities and local government secretary, said:
“While Gordon Brown lectures the public on the environment, his own ministers are fuelling Britain’s throw-away culture.”
But it actually much worse than mere hypocrisy. Please read on.
The campaign to "ban the bag" was recently fueled by photographs in the UK Daily Mail. One showed a sea turtle swimming along side some plastic bags which the article claims:
Cut to the haunting image of a sea turtle, thousands of miles away, struggling through the deep ocean waters as discarded plastic bags wrap themselves around its flippers and body.
The turtle hardly seems entangled, but such is the rhetoric associated with this campaign. Worse, a second photograph shows a turtle apparently eating a bag.
These majestic animals are dying in alarming numbers because they mistake the flimsy translucent bags - which could in theory come from British supermarkets - for jellyfish, a key element of their diet.
The article had more photos, and even more inflammatory rhetoric. In response, environmental groups and publicity-seeking celebrities have flocked to embrace the campaign.
But what is the truth behind these claims?
First, Brown has long called plastic bags "one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste." Yet UK's DEFRA (Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs) website unequivocally contradicts this "fact" with real facts:
Second is the "single use" component of the war on plastic retail bags. The aforementioned DEFRA site states that "80% of UK consumers currently re-use their plastic bags at least once for a variety of purposes – such as bin liners, nappy sacks or lunch bags." Confirming this is the experience in Ireland: when a tax was placed on plastic bags in Ireland there was a massive increase of 300 to 500% in the sale of plastic refuse bags and bin liners! Note that these bags are thicker and heavier than plastic retail bags (see the next point below) and therefor the "green footprint" is much heavier. [Note to politicians: ever hear of the law of unintended consequences?]
Third, there are a whole lot of reasons to continue using plastic bags at grocery stores, from reducing energy to fighting shoplifting. And did you know that today's plastic bags use 70% less plastic than they did 20 years ago, yet are just as strong?
Fourth, the "science" used to support the fight against plastic is really the result of a a misrepresentation of a scientific study. That is, a boldfaced lie:
The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.
Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags”.
The figure was latched on to by conservationists as proof that the bags were killers. For four years the “typo” remained uncorrected. It was only in 2006 that the authors altered the report, replacing “plastic bags” with “plastic debris”. But they admitted: “The actual numbers of animals killed annually by plastic bag litter is nearly impossible to determine.”
In a postscript to the correction they admitted that the original Canadian study had referred to fishing tackle, not plastic debris, as the threat to the marine environment.
Regardless, the erroneous claim has become the keystone of a widening campaign to demonise plastic bags.
That's right, there is no scientific evidence to support the outrageous claims of the granola-chomping, mantra-chanting, tree-sitting crowd (and a lot to discount it), yet the British government has embraced the plastic bag myth. As a result British taxpayer dollars pounds will be wasted and retail prices will rise, all for nothing.
Sounds a lot like the governmental embrace of global warming, doesn't it?
From IBD, Waving The Flag Of Fear:
One day after the United Nations issued a doomsday report on global warming, it admits it has grossly exaggerated the seriousness of the AIDS problem. The cycle of fear-mongering at the U.N. continues. . . .
Remember the 1980s, when we were told that AIDS was a nondiscriminatory disease destined to wipe out large segments of the population and bring untold ruin to humanity?
When Life magazine declared on its cover in 1985 that "Now No One Is Safe From AIDS"? When the new Black Plague, worse than the first, was upon us? Who could forget Oprah Winfrey's dire warning that a fifth of heterosexuals would be dead by 1990? . . .
Global warming fear-mongering is likely to fall by the wayside in the next decade or so when it becomes obvious that the charlatans have been wrong. That won't be the end, however; global warming will be replaced by a wild exaggeration that sounds even more threatening.
Read it all, remembering ZPG from the 70's because the Earth would be overrun with people if we didn't stop having babies, the "we'll be out of oil by the year 2000" from the 60's, and every other crackpot idea you've heard from the alarmists.
Whoa, here's a poll to make you think:
Almost two-thirds of the world's people say there must be urgent action to tackle global warming, a poll for the BBC World Service showed on Tuesday.
Then again, two-thirds of the world's people are illiterate, live in huts and cook over dung fires. Listen to them on matters of global policy? I don't think so. *
*Before I get flamed, this was literary exaggeration to make a point. In actuality, a report was recently released that claimed that for the first time in history half the world population is urban. But just because they live in the "big city", it doesn't mean that they aren't ignorant savages. [Heh]
Somebody needs to call Al Gore. Maybe he can explain this:
The 2007 hurricane season may be less severe than forecast due to cooler-than-expected water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, private forecaster WSI Corp said on Tuesday.
How can this be? Isn't Bush still in charge wreaking havoc?
Tennessee representative Stacey Campfield authors the best resolution I've ever seen.
This is an absolute must read!
Courtesy of NASA, a historical perspective on global warming. In the following graphs, the dotted line represents the present global average temperature of about 15° C (59° F) [which is far too cold for my taste].
It looks like we are coming out of an ice age, an event that happens about once every 100,000 years.
A closer look at just the last ten thousand years or so (modern times, in geological terms) reinforces this perspective.
Note that while the birth of man predates the beginning of the Holocene epoch by more than a hundred thousand years, it is this period that saw modern man's transition from a tribal savage to the builder of civilizations. The natural warming cycle created an environment that was favorable to Homo sapiens sapiens' success.
Zooming in even closer shows that even with our huge belching factories and miles of chugging SUVs, we haven't managed to bring up the temperature to when dudes used to ride around in steel suits and heavy wool underwear:
The most recent small drop in average temperature caused the Little Ice Age of 1500-1700 AD, which history describes. Mountain glaciers advanced in Europe and rivers like the Thames in England froze solid, which doesn't happen now.
Hmmm, I wonder if the fact that the sun is warming again up has anything to do with our little temperature "problem". I heard a rumor that the sun somehow influences our weather.
Image from Global Warming Art.com, which notes:
It is widely believed that the low solar activity during the Maunder Minimum and earlier periods may be among the principle causes of the Little Ice Age. Similarly, the Modern Maximum is partly responsible for global warming, especially the temperature increases between 1900 and 1950. Residual warming due to the sustained high level of activity since 1950 is believed responsible for 16 to 36% of recent warming.
Hat Tip to Say Anything, who quips:
It’s almost like the globe has been getting warmer and colder for hundreds of thousands of years with or without humans being around to cause problems.
Weird huh?
Update: Yet another scientist questions the models used for calculating man's impact, saying that cosmic rays have a larger impact than previously believed. Hat Tip to Bill Hobbs, who links to yet another explanation.
So says Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) in remarks concerning the results of a report by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set to be published next February:
A United Nations study due for release early next year will reportedly lower estimates of mankind's impact on the earth's climate by 25 percent, a development a leading climate change skeptic in the U.S. Senate says will pour "cold water" on "global warming alarmism."
Welcome to the club, Senator. Those of us with an understanding of the scientific method have been sceptics since the beginning.
An auto research firm collected detailed data for two years and was able to calculate the real cost of a vehicle, converting it to "dollars per lifetime mile" to make it easy to understand and compare vehicles.
They found these to be the Energy Cost per Mile:
The most expensive car to operate is the luxurious Maybach from Mercedes Benz, costing the owner an average of $11.58 per mile (not surprising given the $300K+ purchase price). The cheapest is the ungliest Toyota ever built, the Scion xB, at just $0.48 per mile.
We believe this kind of data is important in a consumer's selection of transportation. Basing purchase decisions solely on fuel economy or vehicle size does not get to the heart of the energy usage issue.
Ah yes, one of those "feel good" decisions that doesn't turn out so well in the long run. Yet lots of liberals are happily humming along in their tiny hybrids. (Personally, I'd take a Hummer, but not that wimpy H3 — I want the real thing.)
Hat tip to NRO's Jonah Goldberg, who notes:
It seems to me that pro-hybrid car types would make the argument that they're trying to create a market for new technologies which would bring these energy costs down and would help wean us of our "addiction" to foreign oil. Both of those are good arguments but this study — and this is just one study — does seem to undercut some of the sanctimony we occassionally hear about how hybrids are good for the environment right now.
What pollutes more than aerospace manufacturing, apparel, hotels and semiconductor manufacturing? According to a new university study, making movies pollutes:
Special effects explosions, idling vehicles, teams of workers building monumental sets and other aspects of the Hollywood movie business contribute to Los Angeles' poor air quality, a university study finds. The film and television industry and associated activities make a larger contribution to air pollution in the five-county Los Angeles region than almost all five other sectors researched, according to the study by the University of California at Los Angeles. ... Only petroleum manufacturing produced more emissions.
And while some limousine liberals drive trendy electric cars, don't look for any of them to insist on making green movies that do away with huge, expensive sets and special effects.
Remember the hysterical rantings of "scientists" and "experts" in the aftermath of Katrina that the heavy hurricane season was just the beginning? That human occupation and thoughtless exploitation of the planet was causing global warming and so hurricanes would continue to batter our coastlines in escalating numbers and increased ferocity?
There was even the "Bush is to blame" delirium happening.
Flash forward to today:
Tropical storm Paul has been upgraded to hurricane status as it moves towards Baja California.
Paul, as in "P", as in the 16th letter of the alphabet.
Meanwhile, in the Atlantic, what we we on? Isaac? That would be nine storms so far this year. Anyone even hear anything about Alberto? Beryl? Chris, Debby, Enesto, Florence, Gordon or Helene?
I didn't think so. Those would be the names of the eight previous Atlantic storms this year.
This time last year we were in the midst of Wilma.
This hurricane season isn't over yet, but yeah, the "experts" strike out again. Heard anything from the Gorebot recently?
Environmentalists, repeatedly rejected by the democratic process and unable to pass the Kyoto Protocol or their radical agenda, are doing what liberals invariably do when defeated in the marketplace of ideas: turning to the courts.I would think of something clever in the "what's next" category, but how can I? There's nothing left! Human waste, farts, and now breath are all considered pollution by these morons.On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to review Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, in which environmental lobbies and twelve activist states petition the Court to label everyday carbon dioxide a "pollutant" and compel the EPA to regulate it.
That's right – carbon dioxide, the clear, odorless, non-toxic, natural substance that we exhale with every breath and that plants require to flourish, is now a "pollutant," according to environmentalists. Plaintiffs thus seek to impose the Kyoto Protocol via litigation, superseding the electoral process and imposing tremendous costs upon the American economy.
Technorati Tags: Kyoto Protocol, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, Tree-hugging Whackos, Enviroweenies, Environmentalists.
“The very aggressive way we went about it - I have to fault myself on this, because I’m the one that directed it, turned out to be a much more serious problem than the oil was. We were killing more things - I mean we were really killing things with the steaming hot water that we were blasting on the shoreline; the oil wasn’t anywhere near that effective at causing things to be killed, so that all of our sites were much better off for not having been cleaned up for a period of years.So why do we need groups like ELF when we have the U.S. government that bows down to extremist tree hugging hysteria?“After a decade, things began to level out to where you weren’t able to tell which area had been cleaned up and which hadn’t; for a period of ten years though, the places that were cleaned up were in a lot worse shape.”
Technorati Tags: Oil Spills, Environmental Terrorism, Environmental Extremism, Tree Hugging Hysteria, Exxon Valdez.
So the next time you pass a hippie, kick his ass, because he's more to blame for high gas prices than Exxon is.Indeed, after years of obstructing every means of energy production, the Democrats have suddenly embraced the issue because it's another "blame Bush" mallet. Leave it to The American Thinker to remind us:
Oh really?Wizbang! also weighs in on this topic.
- This is the party that stopped the nation building nuclear plants.
- This is the party that toyed with carbon taxes.
- This is the party of Al Gore, now right in the middle of publicizing An Inconvenient Truth, "by far the most terrifying movie you will ever see."
- This is the party that won't let oil companies prospect for oil off the left and right coasts.
- This is the party whose activists prevented the US from building new petroleum refineries.
- This is the party that filibusters against drilling for oil in an arctic wilderness that just happens to be right next to a major oil pipeline with spare capacity.
What is disturbing is when Republicans act like Democrats and try to blame big oil, urging investigations. That's because they don't want you to know that they, our political servants desperate to hang on to their positions, are to blame. The are responsible for decades of poor energy policies and millions of dollars wasted in uneconomical "alternate energy" research. Yet tax revenues from the oil industry has continued to climb.
FACT: "Big oil" makes just nine cents profit on a gallon of gas today.
FACT: "Big oil" has averaged just 5.8 cents profit on a gallon of gas over the last five years. [HT Glen Dean via Gut Rumbles]
FACT: Government taxes rake in an average of 46 cents on every gallon of gas, 18.4 cents of which goes to the federal government.
FACT: "Big oil" paid in taxes more than three times what they earned in profits from 1977 to 2004:
According to Department of Energy data, from 1977 to 2004, federal and state governments extracted $397 billion by taxing the profits of the largest oil companies and an additional $1.1 trillion in taxes at the pump. In today's dollars, that's $2.2 trillion - enough to buy a Toyota Prius for every household in the nation.FACT: From 1977 to 2004, major U.S. oil companies' domestic profits totaled just $643 billion, while state and federal taxes on gasoline and diesel totaled an astounding $1.34 trillion [HT to TaxProf Blog]. As the Tax Foundation points out, profits taken by "big oil" are highly volatile, while taxes garnered at the gas pump has never retreated:
Click for larger image
FACT: The blending of ethanol mandated by the federal government is a fawning concession to farmers at the very real expense of the American consumer. Ethanol:
FACT: The Unites States has the most complex regulations for blending gasoline on the planet.
FACT: China may be drill 50 miles off the Florida coast, as may be Spain, Canada and others by working with Cuba, yet exploration and development is forbidden off the Florida coast:
FACT: Mexico has discovered ten billion barrels of crude 60 miles off the Mexican coast, yet American companies are forbidden to search hundreds of miles of our coastline.
What have we done to deserve such poor treatment at the hands of our elected servants?
Other random related notes:
And oh, by the way, Exxon's "excessive" earnings were 7 percent higher in the first quarter -- exactly the same percentage growth as the 7 percent announced by media company E.W. Scripps Co. And former Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll recently noted that the average newspaper profit margin remains 19.5 percent.Is it time for an “excess profits tax” on media owners?
Technorati Tags: Gas Prices, Big Oil, Energy Policy, Energy, Gasoline, Free Markets, Democrat Obstructionism, Screwed by the Government.
Fifteen of the deaths occured in western Tennessee as tornados ripped through five counties near Memphis (Dyer, Carroll, Haywood, Gibson and Fayette) — but not Shelby County where Memphis is located. Eight deaths were from Gibson County alone where 1,200 buildings were damaged. It is also where the capricious storm showed its nature:
"By the time the (tornado) sirens started going off, it was at our back door," Sisk said today. "I didn't hear a train sound, I heard a roaring."She and the children ran into a closet.
"The next thing I knew, everything was falling apart," Sisk said.
The tornado blew apart the home and flung the Sisks into their yard, where they huddled in the grass until it passed over. Sisk said she watched as the tornado hit and damaged the Jimmy Dean Foods sausage plant across the street.
Nothing remained of Sisk's wood-frame home today except for the concrete steps.
A nearby house was destroyed, and Sisk said she had been told the elderly couple who lived there had died. Another neighbor's home was sitting on the lawn, blown about 30 feet off its foundation.
Virtually every building in Marmaduke, Arkansas suffered damage, with an astounding 50% of them destroyed. Half the town has been evacuated over safety concerns of such as gas leaks.The National Weather Service reports that every county in southwest Ohio suffered damage. Christian County in Kentucky has declared a state of emergency as rescue crews struggle to clear roadways and restore power.
Softball sized hail was reported in several places across Arkansas. About 300,000 people remain without power today, with businesses closed and families trying to pick up their lives again.
Technorati Tags: Thunderstorms, Hail, Tornados, Storms, Storm Damage, Weather.
They produce about 10 to 30 percent of the annual methane found in the atmosphere, according to researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany. ...So even as European countries consistently fail to meet their commitments for cutting carbon dioxide, plants are making certain we keep having warm winters in America. But wait, there's more!"Significant methane emissions from both intact plants and detached leaves were observed ... in the laboratory and in the field," Dr Frank Keppler and his team said in a report in the journal Nature.
Methane, which is produced by city rubbish dumps, coal mining, flatulent animals, rice cultivation and peat bogs, is one of the most potent greenhouse gases in terms of its ability to trap heat.
Concentrations of the gas in the atmosphere have almost tripled in the last 150 years. About 600 million tonnes worldwide are produced annually.
The scientists said their finding is important for understanding the link between global warming and a rise in greenhouse gases.
Keppler and his colleagues discovered that living plants emit 10 to 100 times more methane than dead plants.Q: What has changed in the last 150 years? A: America has been becoming more green! Yep, the Indians must have known what they were doing when they burned land to clear it for farming.Scientists had previously thought that plants could only emit methane in the absence of oxygen.
The answer to stopping global warming is obvious — cut down the rain forests and do more strip mining!
The economic repercussions will be enormous. A study released by the International Council for Capital Formation (iccfglobal.org) this month looked at the impact on four European countries — Germany, Spain, the U.K. and Italy — of purchasing emissions credits. The firm conducting the study, Global Insight, assumed that the cost of buying the credits would be passed on to consumers in the form of higher energy prices.On a related note, a study shows that there has been a 30% reduction in the currents that carry warm water past Europe. These warm currents give Europe it's balmy weather and it is feared that the reduction will plunge the continent into a mini-ice age.The result — an average decline of almost two percentage points in annual GDP for the four countries. Since these nations are currently growing at less than 1 percent a year, they would be plunged into recession. Jobs and capital would go elsewhere; total annual employment losses in the four countries would be 1.5 million.
Of course, the article goes on to say that scientists are unsure "if the change is temporary or signals a long-term trend", that the "team's findings leave a lot unexplained" and that "nobody is clear on what has gone wrong."
In other words, scientists are still unable to come up with climate models that explain current or past conditions. Yet there are those that want to base national economic policy on them.
And by the way, the country that was the target of global criticism when we rejected the Kyoto insanity is the country that is doing the best:
Meanwhile, even though it hasnt ratified Kyoto, the United States is doing better than countries that have (including, over the past three years, many in Europe), in large part because market forces are driving businesses and individuals to use energy more efficiently.
The U.S. is pushing its markets-and-technology approach through the creation of multilateral pacts such as the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate set up in July by the U.S. and Australia - two Kyoto boycotters - plus India, China, South Korea and Japan.Kyoto won't expire until 2013, but countries are already looking for ways out.A senior official of the U.S. embassy in Ottawa said a Canadian federal cabinet minister "indicated interest" in Canada participating in this partnership. ...
"This will help encourage the U.S. to take part in discussions about the post-Kyoto regime," said one Canadian official speaking on a promise of anonymity. ...
But a report this week to Prime Minister Paul Martin praised the Asia-Pacific partnership "as a very compelling model for the kind of framework agreement that Canada could explore" and recommends Canada give "serious consideration" to joining."
In other news of global warming, Europe is in the grips of an unprecedented cold snap:
A sudden winter freeze gripped parts of northern Europe, with heavy snowfalls cutting power, cancelling football matches and spreading air and road traffic chaos. ...A Duesseldorf airport spokesman said 36 flights had to be redirected and 25 were cancelled.
"I have been working at the airport for 11 years and I cannot remember something like this ever happening before," spokesman Torsten Hiermann said.
Fun Global Warming Facts:
The fact is that while the North American continent emits about 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon every year, North American carbon sinks actually absorb 1.7 billion tons of atmospheric carbon every year. North America is therefore a net consumer of carbon dioxide. The same is not true of the European nations, who essentially see their emissions cleaned up by North American or other carbon sinks.(More from MnKurmudge&DCKid.)
Federal officials say the plan, effective in about a month, is designed to reduce the number of what is often called the nation`s 'newest urban pigeons.' ...Yipee! A nice, fat Canadian goose for Christmas!The plan will allow farmers, property owners and public health officials to kill geese by various methods, including hunting, with state approval but without federal permits, the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer said.
Truth is, this is a rare success story in the long and controversial life of the Endangered Species Act. The list of endangered and threatened species is currently contains 1,161 entries. Only 18 have ever been delisted and 9 went extinct anyway.
With 600 bears, Yellowstone has the largest population of grizzlies in the lower 48 states. On the other hand, Alaska has over 30,000 grizzlies.
But Louisa Wilcox, who directs the Natural Resources Defense Council's wild bears project, said delisting would place the grizzlies' critical habitat in jeopardy. The bears range over nearly 9 million acres in and around the national park, she said, but the administration's proposal only covers a 6 million-acre habitat.Rhode Island (with a population of over 1 million people) is 1.28 million acres so the administration is protecting an area that is over 4½ times the size of a state! Environmentalists say this isn't enough, grizzlies need an area the size of New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, Washington DC — and another Delaware!
The problem is the bear population has grown large enough and is ranging far enough that that elk hunters are starting to experience "conflicts". Evironmentalists, of course, would say that hunters shouldn't be hunting. Red State Americans disagree because we know what to do when man and predators come into conflict.
Speaking of conflict, pets are being carried off by coyotes in Studio City, a suburb of LA.
NBC4's Robert Kovacik said the incidents serve as an important reminder to residents to keep their pets indoors and not to put pet food outside.Animal Control authorities also recommend that people carry something to make a loud noise while walking their dogs, in case they need to scare off an attacking coyote.
That loud noise idea sounds great. I'd recommend a Kimber .45 Compact Carry. If the noise doesn't scare a coyote off, I'm sure the lead projectile entering his brain pan would take care of the problem.In fact, being a Red State American, if I lived in Studio City I'd probably finally let AlphaWife get the dog she's always talking about. Something tasty looking, like a little weiner dog. I'd be glad to walk the little fella in coyote country as long as I had one of my noisemakers. I even have a name for the little guy — "Bait".
Caribou herds in Alaska’s existing North Slope drilling areas have actually increased in size since drilling began. Caribou around the Prudhoe Bay oilfield increased from about 3,000 in the 1970s to over 32,000 today. The Porcupine herd, which occupies the ANWR areas currently blocked from drilling, decreased in the same period. If they were truly concerned about the caribou, logically the Sierra Club should be demanding more drilling, not less.
Heh! How true.
And it seems that the socialist "gas cap" designed to control prices isn't doing what it was supposed to do:
After the cap was imposed, the volatility of Hawai'i gas prices increased ten-fold. During that time period that Hawai'i prices traversed a 75-cent range, the national average moved within a 44-cent range.
Most models of global warming indicate that the Greenland ice might melt within thousands of years if warming continues.Oh dear, time to buy real estate on high ground!
To the amazement of the scientific community, Europe capitulated and backed away from immediate restraints on a growing American economy.Bush . . . misunderestimated again.Bush won agreement from the G-8 that the world should await further scientific conclusion rather than rush unwise decisions that could deflate economic growth and lose jobs.
Together with the rout of pro-Kyoto forces in the U.S. Senate two weeks ago, the outcome at Gleneagles constitutes a major energy triumph for Bush when he had seemed headed for defeat.
Emissions of greenhouse gases rose by 1.5% across all of Europe from 2002 to 2003, according to the latest audit. The result marks a disappointing turnaround after levels fell by 0.5% during 2002.The figures, compiled by the European Environment Agency, show that the 15 core European Union nations pumped out an extra 53 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2003 - a 1.3% hike over 2002. ...
The rise is a blow to efforts to meet the targets set by the Kyoto Treaty, which calls for countries to reduce their greenhouse-gas outputs, relative to 1990 levels, by an average of 5% by 2012. The study shows that 2003 emissions in Europe were 1.7% lower than 1990 levels. Averaged over the past five years, levels have been 2.9% below the 1990 mark, which doesn't hit short-term targets for reductions.
The National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center reported Wednesday that only 129 tornadoes struck the USA last month. There were more than 500 in May of both last year and 2003.Over the past decade, an average of 1,274 tornadoes a year struck the nation. For the first five months of this year, the count is 365, far below normal.
In another twist, Oklahoma, in the heart of “Tornado Alley” and home to the prediction center, had zero tornadoes in May, a new record.
Five people have died in tornadoes since Jan. 1, matching the lowest total recorded. In 1992, there were five tornado deaths, and none in April or May.
Wrong, it's the Kilauea volcano:
Since it began erupting on Jan. 3, 1983, the volcano has been sending an average of 1,000 metric tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere each day, according to the Hawaii chapter of the American Lung Association.This is 6,000 times the amount emitted by a major industrial polluter on the mainland, making Kilauea the nation's top producer of sulfur dioxide.
The sulfur dioxide from Kilauea reacts with other chemicals in the air to form a hazy, naturally occurring pollution known locally as "vog," or volcanic smog. When the lava enters the ocean, concentrations of hydrochloric acid are also formed.
The Japanese are taking the whole thing quite seriously, however. Now that it is apparent that they are falling far short of the goals needed for the Kyoto Protocol, they've decided to reduce the need for air conditioning in the summer by going business casual. That's right: according to the Japanese no neckties means lower energy costs.
Update: The Best Headline Award for the scientific journal bias story goes to the Spoons Experience with "SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS" MY GREENHOUSE-GAS-EMITTING ASS!
Kinda says it all right there, doesn't it?
The touchy-feely Clinton administration rolled over to the tree huggers and killed 80% of logging in national forests in states covering our entire eastern seaboard. All to save an owl has been seen happily nesting in a Kmart sign.And yet, the spotted owl's population decline continues at twice the expected rate:
Scientists are not sure what is causing the declines, but possible factors include invasion of the spotted owl's habitat by the barred owl, an aggressive cousin from Canada that often drives them off, Lint said. Habitat lost to past logging, as well as wildfires, climate changes and insect infestations are also factors, he said.How often can liberal's say, "No humans were harmed in the execution of this policy"? How devestating when that policy is a waste of time to begin with?The plan also failed to provide the expected timber supply and replace lost timber jobs with jobs in small towns near federal forest lands as promised, said Thomas Quigley, director of the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station.
"Many of the impacts were different than predicted," he said.
The informed reader will know that this is not new information. I had a much more extensive post back in October 2003 and again in June 2004. Funny how this keeps cropping up.
Professor Ray Cas of Monash University's School of Geosciences notes that Sumatra is the site of the world's largest supervolcano — site of the caldera that now houses Lake Toba on Indonesia's island of Sumatra.
On the 1st of April the professor expressed consern that the quakes could cause stresses that can hasten the eruption of the slumbering supervolcano.
Today, Sumatra island's Mount Talang started pumping out volcanic ash, prompting the evacuation of 26,000 people. The alert status has been raised from "beware" to the top alert level.
Scientists have warned of increased seismic activity in Indonesia as the plates that make up the earth's crust adjust following the magnitude 9 earthquake in December that triggered massive tsunami waves across the Indian Ocean.Talang is near the Toba caldera, so concern is understandable. 75,000 years ago the Toba supervolcano erupted with a force 3,000 times greater than the 1980 Mount St. Helens erruption, possibly leading to the extinction of all human species except a small population from which emerged modern man (known as the Toba catastrophe theory).
To put things into perspective:
Kind of puts that whole Kyoto Protocol thing into perspective, doesn't it?
Here is the truth about global warming: it is an anti-capitalist agenda, a Machiavellian political plot and a convenient rumour started by bungling Japanese pineapple farmers. It is a front for paranoia about immigration, an incitement to civil war, and the reason that the world's attention was distracted from the risk of a tsunami. And it hasn't killed as many people as Hitler or Stalin.
"Instead of driving us to the brink of environmental disaster, human intervention and technology progress will be seen as vital activities that have unintentionally delayed the onset of a catastrophic ice age."It was 20 bloody degrees when I went to work this morning. More of you people should buy an SUV!
While in D.C. we picked up Express, a free paper cranked out by the Washington Post, and found a fascinating but little-reported item. It fingers the worst polluter in the P.C.-crazed Evergreen State of Washington.Just think what a real erruption will kick out. But hey, let's ruin our economy because it's us that is causing global warming.Can you guess what is the worst polluter in that Left Coast state? It's not Boeing. It's not a paper mill. It's not any one of those awful jobs-producing industries.
The culprit is Mount St. Helens, "pumping out 50 to 250 tons of sulfur dioxide gas a day since it began erupting in October," Express confides. "At peak, that's more than double the amount from all of the state's industries combined."
This, of course, is from the same scientific community who can't build a predictive model that can account for what is actually happening, much less for what will happen.
And now it seems that they were wrong:
"Our analysis suggests that ocean warming will foster considerably faster future rates of coral reef growth that will eventually exceed pre-industrial rates by as much as 35 percent by 2100," McNeil said in a statement Monday.Big surprise."Our finding stands in stark contrast to previous predictions that coral reef growth will suffer large, potentially catastrophic, decreases in the future."
The story of a South Pacific island which launches a multimillion pound lawsuit against the US, and green terrorists who plot to manufacture a series of earthquakes, underwater landslides and tsunamis to prove that global warming is happening, has an unusual denouement: a 14-page bibliography and a five-page authorial note explaining his extreme scepticism about global warming.Don't you just love the scare quotes around Crichton's "facts"? In fact, read the whole article. The author's bias is so thick you have no choice but to laugh.Crichton fills his latest with graphs and "facts" against global warming. Rather than warning readers about the dangers of dinosaurs, nanotechnology or rising Japanese power, he bolsters his argument by citing the work of prominent climate change sceptics, including the political scientist Bjorn Lomberg.
"The current near-hysterical preoccupation with safety is at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism," he concludes.
The deal, described by one source as “Kyoto-lite”, would involve scientific agreement on the scale and nature of the threat, as well as an international programme to develop the technology needed for renewable energy and the reduction of carbon emissions.Meanwhile, a "leading climate scientist" says that agreements like Kyoto will be useless:
The struggle by developed countries to cut back their emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas, will always be overtaken by the rising new emissions of the developing nations, led by China and India, who are not parties to the Kyoto treaty, said Professor Wallace Broecker of Columbia University, New York.Broecker has a point: the number of cars in China increased 80% from 2002 to 2003, and that's with only 0.3% of the population owning cars. This will explode as the middle class grows. Add to that the increasing industrial activity and the annual 10%-plus growth in demand for oil will continue.Only radical new technologies for extracting carbon dioxide directly from the air would halt global warming, said the professor, who is regarded as one of the fathers of climate change studies....
He said: "What you guys are tinkering around with in Kyoto is just a drop in the bucket."
Oh, and all that life probably means there's some rather significant oil fields under the ice. Those eco-Chicken Littles that have been telling us for the last 50 years that we'll be running out of oil in the near future just keep getting wronger and wronger.
For all you pessimists out there that think the ecowhackos will have to be right sooner or later, let me just point out that the moon seems to have an abundence of helium-3, which can be used in fusion reactors:
"Just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the US for one full year."With private space travel becoming a reality, commerce is sure to follow. Sign me up!
If the junk-science whackos are right and humans are responsible for global warming, this means that we are using oil to generate energy which makes the earth more warm and melts the icecaps so we can get to even more oil so we can generate even more energy which will make the earth even more warm and who knows -- that may even expose more oil fields so we can generate even more energy to make the earth even warmer!
I have a couple of observations.
First is that I'm from Texas. I hate the cold. I hate everything about it. I hate the shivering, the ache of the muscles in my back as it tightens up to resist the cold, the searing frost that makes its way through your sinuses, even the unnatural sterility of a snow-covered landscape.
Give me heat. 100+ with 80% humidity is perfect for yard work. I want to sweat. Sweating is natural. Shivering is misery. If I should find myself in hell once I die, I have no doubt that it will be a horrible frozen place and Satan will be more like Jack Frost than the red-colored devil popularized in art.
Second is this quote from a post made on January 4th of this year:
It's January and I'm in shorts, sitting outside with a perfectly chilled glass of wine*, blogging, and surfing.Third, it is November and yesterday I mowed my lawn. In a tee-shirt. Did I mention that it is now November?Life is good.
Life is good.
Fourth, Memphis is 331 feet above sea level. Heck, even the mighty Mississippi River is 188 feet above sea level way up here. And we are on a bluff. Even in the worst case scenario of a 200-foot rise the only thing that would flood around here would be Arkansas and who would miss that?
Now 'scuse me. I have to go fill up my SUV.
A GAPING hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica appears to have shrunk by about 20 per cent from last year’s record-breaking size, scientists said today.Experts in New Zealand said their measurements backed up satellite data showing the hole peaked at about nine million square miles compared with 11 million square miles in 2003.
Madhav Khandekar has been studying weather patterns for 47 years, mostly for Environment Canada, and his conclusion is that it's the perception that has changed. More people and global television mean that freak events are less likely to escape detection, and do more damage because of the higher value of what's in their path. The weather itself isn't getting any worse.
Heat waves like those that have hit Paris and Chicago in recent years are likely to get worse, roasting more and more cities with ever-higher temperatures, climate researchers predicted on Thursday.Let me tell you about August in Memphis. It's hot. And I'm not talking desert hot; I'm talking oppressive heat with air so laden with humidity that you can see the wind start to steam as it comes out of the trees into the full glare of the sun. I'm talking hot so hot that you stagger a step when you walk outside because the heat takes you by surprise, no matter how ready you think you are.While some may like it hot, the forecast means misery for many, and hotter weather can affect crops, drive up fuel prices and can kill the old and weak. The heat wave that hit France a year ago killed an estimated 15,000 people.
A similar heat wave that hit the U.S. Midwest last year damaged the corn and soy crops, and 739 people died in a head wave that broiled Chicago in 1995.
You get it? August in Memphis is miserable.
Let's take a look at the seven-day forecast:
Today's imitation of fall temperatures tied a new low overnight at Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport when the gauge hit 47 degrees, matching the record set for this date in 1968.That follows a record cold day Tuesday that included temperatures 16 degrees below normal in the metro area....
Brace yourselves for the possibility we won't reach the lowest high temperature for a day on record, either. With a forecast between 60 and 65 degrees, we could come in under the record cold high for Aug. 11 is 65 degrees in 1964.
The first paper looks at temperature readings at various heights in the Earth's atmosphere over the past 20 years against what the leading computer models predicted. According to the study, the computer models indicate that temperatures in the upper atmosphere should be rising; yet the opposite is happening.The second study took various temperature readings from weather balloons and satellites — data provided by the National Center for Atmospheric Research — to try to rectify a longtime gap between temperatures recorded at ground level and temperatures recorded by other satellites. That gap amounts to about one degree.
According to the study, the new temperature readings seem to back up the other satellite readings and show an Earth about a degree cooler than ground-level readings had found. Both those sources indicate that the planet is getting warmer, but to a far less degree than noted by surface thermometers.
Douglass said the holes pointed to by his studies are fatal flaws in the notion that human activity — from industrial smokestacks to car exhaust — is causing global warming.
A small cruise ship catering to eco-tourists was seriously damaged after running aground in the Aleutian IslandsThe accident Saturday night punctured the 340-foot Clipper Odyssey's forward fuel tank and forced 153 people to abandon ship, a Coast Guard official said Sunday. There were no reports of injuries.
Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer Roddy Corr said about 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel spilled from the ruptured tank, as was some waste water. He said swift currents dispersed the spilled fluid before it could be cleaned up.
"This is our coldest summer for a long time," researcher Stein Kristiansen told newspaper Aftenposten. Southern Norway, he says, has been plagued by "unstable air masses" that provide the foundation for bad weather.If it's any consolation, Oslo isn't alone with its disappointing weather. Northern Europe in general has experienced cooler temperatures than normal and lots of rain. Up north, however, it continues to be nice.
Finnmark, for example, has enjoyed temperatures in the mid-20s (around 74F). The water, however, remains too chilly for most swimmers.
The Foothill fire near Santa Clarita, about 22 miles northwest of Los Angeles, has charred 5,710 acres and prompted the evacuation of 1,600 homes since it started on Saturday, a Los Angeles County fire spokesman said.Fire officials traced the blaze's source to a red-tailed hawk that apparently was electrocuted by power lines and fell to the ground, igniting brush that has not burned since 1962.
"The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."Could it be the sun? Is it greenhouse gases? Is it both? Who is to say?
"It shows that there is enough happening on the solar front to merit further research. Perhaps we are devoting too many resources to correcting human effects on the climate without being sure that we are the major contributor."..."The Sun's radiance may well have an impact on climate change but it needs to be looked at in conjunction with other factors such as greenhouse gases, sulphate aerosols and volcano activity," he said. The research adds weight to the views of David Bellamy, the conservationist. "Global warming - at least the modern nightmare version - is a myth," he said. "I am sure of it and so are a growing number of scientists. But what is really worrying is that the world's politicians and policy-makers are not.
"Instead, they have an unshakeable faith in what has, unfortunately, become one of the central credos of the environmental movement: humans burn fossil fuels, which release increased levels of carbon dioxide - the principal so-called greenhouse gas - into the atmosphere, causing the atmosphere to heat up. They say this is global warming: I say this is poppycock."
Scientists, conservationists and timber industry representatives gathered Tuesday for a review of research conducted since the spotted owl was declared a threatened species in 1990 all expressed frustration at gaps in the existing knowledge of what is causing the bird's population to decline, and what can be done to protect it.Those damn scientists again. They'll probably suggest razing some towns or something.
After six years of regulations and restrictions that have cost builders, local governments and landowners an estimated $100 million, new research suggests the "threatened" Preble's mouse in fact never existed. It instead seems to be genetically identical to the Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse, which is considered common enough not to need protection.'Nuff said.
It's official: the world is getting darker. Scientists are now agreed that as cloud cover and particles in the atmosphere increase, the amount of radiation reaching us from the Sun is falling. And while some are nervous to raise the idea, they think the effect may help protect us from global warming.The phenomenon, called global dimming, has been quietly discussed in scientific circles for the past decade or so. Since the late 1950s, scientists have observed a 2-4% reduction in the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth's surface, thought to be caused by particles and clouds in the atmosphere scattering the light. ...
In fact, Roderick sees global dimming as part of a negative feedback loop working against global warming. Burning fossil fuels not only increases carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere; it also pumps tiny particles into the air. Meanwhile higher temperatures increase the amount of cloud cover. The clouds and particles help to block the Sun's rays, and the scattered light they allow through actually boosts plants' absorption of carbon dioxide, the principle greenhouse gas. This would help to keep carbon dioxide levels stable, argues Roderick, protecting the planet from runaway global warming.
"Diffuse light is like putting plants on steroids," Roderick explains. Scattered light takes a zigzag path, bathing every part of a plant's leaves in light instead of just one surface. Even if the overall amount of light is lower, this can increase the plant's rate of photosynthesis and more carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere.
The most likely causes of ice ages are changes in Earth’s orbit and orientation. The tilt of Earth’s axis increases and decreases over a 41,000-year cycle. A relatively large tilt generally leads to hotter summers and colder winters. Meanwhile, the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun varies on a 96,000-year cycle. When the orbit is at its most elliptical, the amount of sunlight hitting Earth increases and decreases more intensely over the year. Finally, Earth’s axis wobbles on a 26,000-year cycle. Its changing direction alters the season when Earth is closest to the sun. Major ice ages over the last 1.6 million years have occurred when the variables line up to give the Northern Hemisphere the least amount of summer warmth. At those times, snows from previous winters do not melt completely, eventually accumulating into miles-thick ice sheets. The ice advances, then retreats when the Northern Hemisphere begins to experience particularly warm summers again. The last ice age ended 11,000 years ago. Most interglacial periods have persisted for 10,000 to 15,000 years, so it seems likely that a new ice age will begin, but perhaps not for thousands of years. Human-caused global warming may prevent or stall the next ice age, although no one knows how much of a factor this will be.Why haven't I heard this before?
Hat tip to non-blogging Advised by Wolves.
"While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that, in the presence of his large financial contributors, he is a moral coward -- so weak that he seldom if ever says 'no' to them on anything -- no matter what the public interest might mandate," Gore said.Reaction to the speech was certainly not universally positive:
But the National Center for Public Policy Research, one of Gore's many critics, said "the speech is full of demagoguery, misleading statements, formulations intended to deceive, unsupported allegations of wrongdoing and hypocrisy."The Comparative Enterprise Institute had this to say:"From a scientific and environmental perspective, Al Gore's speech today should be ignored. No serious policy person could give the speech Al Gore gave today," said Amy Ridenour, the center's president.
Gore’s acceptance of alarmist global warming predictions, opposition to technologies as basic as the internal combustion engine, and comparisons of environmental degradation to Nazism earned him a great deal of deserved criticism while he held office and during his run for presidency in 2000. So radical were his assessments of the state of the natural world and recommendations for fixing it they inspired a popular website which challenged readers to read several passages of text and guess whether they were from Earth in the Balance or the manifesto of the “Unabomber,” Theodore Kaczynski—a task which confounded many of the site’s visitors.Perhaps it is Al Gore who is the real moral coward.
Congress has passed a bill that promises to spend $760 million each and every year in efforts to keep these disasters from happening again.
The bipartisan-crafted bill will streamline environmental reviews and the judicial process for forest-thinning projects on 20 million acres of federal land while giving local foresters more input to determine which land near communities is susceptible to fires.At least 50% of the money is to be spent on forests near homes, a move designed to save property and lives. But, of course, environmentalists say that this bill is a "giant gift" to the timber industry.
Lefties don't believe in win-win, unless the only side that wins are Democrats and Greens. Capitalism is evil, and the end cannot justify the means if the means includes using market forces.
Bernard L. Cohen, in his 1990 book, "The Nuclear Energy Option," estimated deaths from the entire nuclear fuel cycle were about 0.3 per gigawatt of energy produced per year. Whereas, Cohen continued, a single, 1,000-megawatt coal-fired power plant causes 25 fatalities, 60,000 cases of respiratory disease, $12 million in property damage and nitrogen oxides emissions equivalent to driving 20,000 cars each year.Cohen, a professor emeritus of Physics and of Environmental and Occupational Health at the University of Pittsburgh, said he concluded that nuclear power is more than 1000 times better than coal burning, based on the number of deaths caused. Even solar power is ten times worse than nukes, he said, based on the coal burning required to produce the materials.
Now Japanese scientists claim to have found a new species of whales.
There are so many whales that we are even finding new ones. So much for the "save the whales" crowd. Drill 'em for oil, I say!
[Please don't send me hate mail. This was written with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Well, kinda firm somewhere in the vicinity of my cheek anyway.]
"If we're really serious about clean air, I think we're going to have to build more nuclear plants and do more natural gas exploration."
The problem is that Altamont Pass is home to the world's largest nesting population of golden eagles.
Hmmm . . . a large concentration of beautiful, proud birds and thousands of whirling blades of death. Did no one see a potential problem here?
Did I mention that this is in California?
At the center of the issue is the renewal of permits for more than 1,500 of the turbines. County officials (made up of local residents that get benefit from the turbines) have voted to approve the permits.
Arguing for the permits are SeaWest Wind Power and Florida-based FPL Energy, the wind farm operators, and several local landowners who depend on the money they receive from leasing their land to the wind farmers.
Opposing the renewal (and thus the renewed operation of the turbines) are:
Imagine that -- the great whirling blades of death kill without regard to species.
There was no mention as to why the studies had not already been completed (like maybe during the first decade of the turbines operation) nor how long the turbines should remain idle while the work is completed and the study results analyzed.
BTW, the Californians for Renewable Energy which opposes revving up the pollution-free energy sources also "opposes plans for two 1,100 megawatt natural gas-fired power plants in eastern Alameda County".
Big surprise there. I wonder how they would feel about a nice, pollution-free nuclear power plant.
Never mind.
A protected species of bird is endangering rare species of fish.
Protection of the birds (black cormorants) is working - the population has "ballooned" to over 6,000.
And they are feeding on rare fish species such as grayling and pearl fish, which are unique to the region, German officials said.Sweet!"The problem is that a protected bird is eating protected fish," a spokesman for the Bavarian environment ministry said this week.
In an effort to save the poor fish, the government of Bavaria is asking permission from the federal government to allow them to play God reduce the cormorant population by "shooting them or taking their eggs."
The Bavarian bird protection group are on one side, with fishermen on the other:
"My fishery loses some 40 tons of fish a year to the cormorants," said Holmer Lex, 75, who owns a fishery on the Chiemsee. "We only produce 90 tons a year."And all those pseudo-ethical environmentalist tree-huggers caught in the middle.
Lovely.
Hat tip to James Taranto.
Engineering and transportation exports say that Daley's premise is baloney because the roads are designed to carry tractor-trailers that are much, much heavier:
They argued that there is virtually no difference between the road damage caused by a 5,401-pound Lexus LX-470 or a 5,070-pound Toyota Sequoia, and the wear and tear caused by a 3,950-pound Ford Crown Victoria, a 4,049-pound Cadillac Deville or a Mercedes Benz S-Class that weighs 4,200 pounds."That much extra weight is not going to cause any more damage than a regular passenger vehicle. You'd have to weigh what a truck weighs -- at least double the weight of an SUV" to cause additional wear and tear, said Sidney Guralnick, a distinguished professor of civil and architectural engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus and his fellow Senate Democrats are saying that when it comes to forest health, it is either their way or the highway.Baucus, Feinstein and Daschle are among the Democrats that are telling the House that a bill going to committee can only have one acceptable "compromise" between the Senate and House versions - it must be "virtually identical" to the Senate passed bill.
Meanwhile, a poll shows that few voters consider environmental policies when choosing a candidate:
"Other issues such as the economy and Iraq and the war on terrorism far outrank the environment as the most important issue voters are thinking about," said polling expert Karlyn Bowman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who acknowledged that a small number of voters can make the difference in a close race.Not documented is how voters feel about obstinate obstructionism. Somehow I don't think that it is a trait that is particularly endearing to voters."That doesn't tell us what will happen on Election Day, of course, but at this point, there is no indication that the environment will be a top issue for voters," Bowman said.
Norway reports a record early start for winter:
Several ski resorts opened over the weekend and even some hills in the Oslo area were luring snowboarders and skiers. Record cold temperatures and snow-making machines made it all possible.
The Spotted Owl is protected on ten million acres of land, including 2.4 million acres of "old growth" forest. The environmentalists caused the loss of 22,000 logging jobs in the Northwest, devastating entire communities, ruining lives and families, razing an industry.Scientists knew it would take decades to reverse the owl's plight in Washington, Oregon and northern California. But the latest owl population studies on the Olympic Peninsula and in the central Cascade Mountains show owl numbers down 50 percent to 60 percent over the past 10 years.But why? Well, in addition to a couple of bad winters, ol' Spotty is getting some competition:"There has been a precipitous decline in the owl population in areas of Washington state, including the Olympic Peninsula and Cle Elum study areas," said Martin Raphael, chief research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station in Olympia.
"There's no place the owl population is doing worse than in Washington state," said Dave Werntz, science director for the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance, a nonprofit wildlands advocacy group. "We could lose the owl in its northern range. It's teetering on the brink."
But habitat isn't the only issue. The barred owl, a relative newcomer to the forests of the Northwest, also appears to be raising havoc with the spotted owl, competing for its habitat, eating some of the same prey, and perhaps even killing spotted owls.Yep, the barred owl been heading west for quite a few years. Funny how the "experts" didn't see this coming.
So what do the weenies greenies want now? Why, more land to be declared off limits, of course:
Forest activists point to the owl's demise as evidence that the federal land reserves alone aren't enough to save the owl. They said owl protection on 10 million acres of state and private land is inadequate -- too much timber is being cut.One can only speculate how many millions of acres would be "adequate". Perhaps everything outside of San Francisco and New York City?
Hat tip to Four Right Wing Wackos, who blogs this with much more passion than I.
Update: Raging Dave over at Four Right Wing Wackos accurately points out that the 10 million acres set aside for the spotted owl is equal to 15,625 square miles, or roughly the size of Vermont and Connecticut combined, with a third of Rhode Island thrown in for good measure.
It is also 50% larger than the combined acreage of all the National Parks in existence today.
What I regard as most significant about the Moscow meeting is the choice of words by Russian politicians. They refer to Kyoto as "scientifically flawed" — not just "fatally flawed" as George Bush called it. It is a real breakthrough because it makes skepticism about the underlying science respectable — and indeed encourages scientists to speak out and question many of the assertions that have long been taken for granted by the press and the public.
Skeptics of global warming should come to this Eskimo village on the Arctic Ocean, roughly 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. It's hard to be complacent about climate change when you're in an area that normally is home to animals like polar bears and wolverines, but is now attracting robins.Kristof should visit Memphis, where we are completing our mildest summer that I can remember and where hummingbirds have arrived weeks earlier than usual. Picking one place and using it as an example isn't just bad science, it's bad reporting and piss-poor debating tactics.
The Office of Naval Research warns that "one plausible outcome" is that the summer Arctic ice cap will disappear completely by 2050.Yes, and one plausible scenario of the future is that the sun will explode and we'll all die in a rush to get into the nearest spaceship.
But seriously, what the Office of Naval Research says is:
The global climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) project a stronger warming over the Arctic Ocean than over any other area of the Northern Hemisphere. However, the Arctic warming is highly seasonal, and it varies widely among the nine models used by the IPCC.In other words, there seems to be a warming trend that seems to be affecting the Arctic Ocean more than other areas, but the science is so immature that the nine models deemed good enough to be used by the government can't agree on what is really happening.
The model-to-model scatter of precipitation change is even greater than the scatter of the temperature changes. Changes in evapotranspiration have yet to be evaluated.... To our knowledge, there have been no evaluations of changes in cloudiness and radiative fluxes over the Arctic in the climate projections of global models.There many, many variables, some of which are not even included in the models.
It is important to note that in terms of 55-85 deg. N zonal averages, temperatures around 1970 were below average. Hence, what we've really seen is (in part) a recovery from anomalously cold conditions. It also appears that from 1920-1940, Arctic temperatures rose even more sharply than in the past several decades.How important is that, and why haven't we seen it before?
The Office of Naval Research paper continues:
Predicting the future climate is risky. Climate is known to be variable on "all time scales." Trends that appear for, say, a decade may or may not persist into the next decade. Climate models make predictions based on an insufficient representation of important physics and chemistry.Yet it goes on to perform that very prediction. But even this caveat is not enough:
Models are not fully credible. When run to "predict" past observations, different models show different biases, so their projections into the future are of uncertain validity.None of these statements appear in Kristof's column. Why am I not surprised?
There was all sorts of talk that this place was sterilized. I remember walking out here after the fires and it was like walking on the moon," says Renkin, a fire ecologist at Yellowstone. "Every step put up this little cloud of ash."An excellent article, full of hope and discovery.He climbs nimbly over felled trees and around young green lodgepoles about waist-high. The soil once deemed dead is home to a burgeoning young forest full of healthy trees, plants and plenty of rodents, bugs and birds.
Renkin pats a young tree. "These guys are enjoying life. They're really robust," he says.
Oil rigs off the California coast provide crucial refuge for over-fished rockfish and other fish, and could aid efforts to rebuild depleted stocks, according to a recently released study from the University of California, Santa Barbara.Wonder if the Sierra Club will embrace this . . .The study, by UCSB marine biologists Milton Love, Donna Schroeder and Mary Mishimoto, found the off-shore rigs act as artificial reefs, offering fish essential breeding and nursery grounds.
California is like a wildlife refuge for Greens and eco-terrorists. It is a state in which the mere rumor of a sighting of a mythological reptile can stop construction of human infrastructure (like airports). It is a state which has banned oil exploration and new drilling (I bet you didn't know California had oil, did you?), put a stop to building nuclear power plants, and has vast windmill farms that provide less than 2% of California's power needs.
Yes, the federal government has given us the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. But that isn't enough for California, which felt compelled to pass the California Environmental Quality Act, the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act, the California Endangered Species Act, the Forest Practices Act, the California Coastal Act and a plethora of Fish and Game streambed alteration requirements.
You would think that a such a Paragon of Leftists Environmental Behavior would be one of the cleanest, most natural places on Earth. And you would be wrong.
The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (or US PIRG as they like to be called) is a radical left-wing environmental watchdog organization. You would think that such a group would look kindly towards California, like a displaced immigrant looks fondly towards his motherland (or fatherland, or homeland). Yet this bunch of kooks organization has done a study of the nation's metropolitan areas called "Danger in the Air: Unhealthy Levels of Smog in 2002" which ranked each area according to the highest number of days of unhealthy air pollution levels from 2000 to 2002.
The top five cities are all in California. Quick geography lesson: Houston is not in California.
Two environment groups -- the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Detroit Project -- argue that America needs an SUV that can get 40 miles per gallon, but say the problem is that "Detroit won't build it."Hey morons! Detroit won't build it because the public won't buy it! With gas at current prices (or even double current prices) I'm going to wrap as much steel around me as I can afford to protect me from the idiots they give drivers licenses to. (Trivial Factoid: In Tennessee, literacy is not a requirement for getting a drivers license).
If you are worried about the environment, why not get behind something like thermal depolymerization, which basically turns just about any carbon-based material (like garbage or even raw sewage) into oil?
Perhaps national attention to terrorism and the war in Iraq, along with poor economic conditions, has diverted public attention from the administration's environmental record -- despite the continuing efforts of environmental proponents to highlight it.I, on the other hand, wonder how much of the population remembers the out-of-control forest fires that burned hundreds of thousands of acres and generated as much greenhouse gas as a volcanic explosion, and also knows that decades of over-the-top environmentalist protectionism was responsible for creating the conditions that led to the fires. Perhap's Gallop should do a poll on that!
It's funny how computer models that can't predict current weather trends account are used to make global policy (see Kyoto Treaty), yet a study that suggests that the sun has gotten brighter over the last 20 years is "spurious".
