The Real Results of "Combating" Global Warming

March of the eco-imperialists

A leaflet from the charity Practical Action recently solicited donations for some "real cutting-edge technology" to give to African farmers: namely, a plough.

Ploughs might cut the earth, but they haven't been "cutting-edge technology" for more than 400 years. Nor have water pumps, operated by pulling on a rope or laboriously treading on a wooden platform, which are being pushed onto communities from Ghana to India by carbon-offsetting charities like Climate Care, as replacements for diesel-powered machinery. Some of the treadle pumps are even disguised as roundabouts to exploit child labour.

[...]

Eco-activists managed to slash €4bn worth of EU aid to Third World industries in 2007 alone. They have sabotaged World Bank funding for infrastructure projects, like a hydro-electric dam in Gujarat province, India, which would have provided power for 5,000 villages, industries and sewage-treatment works, irrigation for crops and clean water for 35m people - all because, as one activist said, it would "change the path of the river, kill little creatures along its banks and uproot tribal people"

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/44753,opinion,march-of-the-eco-imperialists

[...]
In March 2007 its leaders gathered in Brussels to adopt a package of measures designed to show that the EU was "leading the world on climate change". These ranged from stepping up the EU's "emissions trading scheme" to outlawing incandescent light bulbs. But they also included a mandatory target requiring 10 per cent of all EU transport fuel to come from biofuels by 2020 (which is why, since last April, 2.5 per cent of all fuel sold on British forecourts must be from "renewables").

In fact, it turns out there was something very odd about the inclusion of biofuels in this package. Internal European Commission documents show that, as late as January 2007, when officials were discussing that 10 per cent target, they saw it not as an answer to global warming but only as a way to increase the EU's "energy self-sufficiency". They were also aware that switching huge areas of farmland from food to fuel would drive up world food prices.

Indeed a 2006 report from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) had already suggested that for the EU to meet its 10 per cent target from home-grown biofuels would require a staggering 70 per cent of arable land to be taken out of food production, necessitating a huge increase in EU food imports. Even worse, by the end of 2006 the Commission was aware that the world was about to face a food shortage.

Yet, in attempting to show that enough acreage would be available to meet the new biofuels target, the officials indulged in "Enron accounting", using the same areas of land three times.

"Set aside" allocated for other industrial crops was re-allocated for emergency food production in the light of the "global food crisis; then, within a matter of weeks, redesignated for biofuel production. Yet, despite all this going on behind the scenes, when the EU's political leaders nodded through their "global warming" package in March 2007, biofuels were thrown in, seemingly without any questioning from the politicians, including Tony Blair.

In fact, it was at this point that, with startling speed, the backlash against biofuels – Stage Five of our story – suddenly erupted on all sides. Even before the EU had adopted its new target, the first criticism of biofuels was coming from those same environmental groups, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, which had once been their most fervent advocates.

Their particular focus was the damage being done in the Third World, not least by the clearing for biofuels of vast areas of rainforest in Brazil and Indonesia, inter alia endangering the survival of Borneo's orang-utans. Next to weigh in, as the world suddenly woke up to its serious food shortage, were all those experts pointing out that a significant reason for this was the vast area of food-growing land already diverted to biofuels, thus shrinking food stocks and driving up prices.

According to the World Bank's top economist, Don Mitchell, biofuels had been responsible for three-quarters of the 140 per cent rise in world food prices between 2002 and 2008. It was this that last October prompted Jean Ziegler, the UN's "special rapporteur on the right to food", to comment that biofuels could only bring "more hunger to the poor people of the world" and were a "crime against humanity".

Most alarming of all to the global warming lobby, however, was a succession of studies showing that, far from helping to cut global CO2 emissions, biofuel production can often give off much more CO2 than it saves – not least by disturbing huge quantities of carbon dioxide locked in the soil which, according to the University of Minnesota, could release "17 to 420 times more CO2" than is saved by the fuels themselves.
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All the news that's fit to scare
Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Record high temperatures on Baffin Island last month -- it hit 27C on July 21--have made the news around the world, as has the evacuation of 21 visitors from the island's Auyuittuq National Park. Fear that melt water from the park's glaciers might lead to flash flooding and landslides has been reported by everyone from AFP to the BBC as proof of the adverse side-effects of man-made climate change.

Meanwhile, it is barely reported outside Alaska that America's northernmost state is having a record cool summer.

If it reaches 19C in Anchorage today, it will be just the eighth time that's happened this summer. Indeed, this could be the first summer ever that Anchorage never hits 24C.

Auyuittuq is at 66 degrees north; Anchorage is at 61.

The Baffin story may be more significant than the Alaska one. But why are we hearing all about one and nothing about the other? You can bet that if Anchorage were suffering a record hot summer, it would be all over the news and presented--as the Baffin temperatures are -- as yet further proof of the dangerous impacts of global warming in the north.

And what of the study, released in July by Switzerland's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, that shows European temperatures, at least, have risen in large part because of efforts over the past 30 years to clean the continent's skies?

Christian Ruckstuhl and 12 coauthors found that of the 1C rise in temperature in Europe over the last three decades, "at least half of the warming" is attributable to a reduction of aerosols, such as sulphur dioxide and black soot particles. As Europeans have cleaned up their smokestacks and tailpipes, and as dirty old Soviet-era East European plants have been modernized to Western standards, more sunlight has penetrated the continent's atmosphere and warmed things up a bit.

In other words, environmentalism is causing global warming. As ecoadvocates have won tighter clean-air regulations, their efforts have been rewarded with brighter days (a good thing), but also warmer temperatures.

But you may not have heard about this little piece of climate-change news.

Nor may you have heard about conclusions by University of Guelph environmental biologist Jonathan Newman and his graduate student Anna Mika. Last week, Prof. Newman and Ms. Mika warned other researchers to use results from the UN's 31 climate computers with great caution.

Apparently, if you are using these computer models (the data sources on which all of the UN's climate doom and gloom rests) to determine what will happen to human or animal populations for the next century, or to forecast the spread of disease or pests and so on, the answer you get will vary according to which computer you use.

"These models are the basis on which all research in climate change is done," Prof. Newman said in a press release. Yet despite using two computers --one Canadian, one British -- that both predicted the same future climate, "we basically got opposite answers" about the potential impact on insect spread "when we should have gotten the same answer."

No predictions of future climate-related catastrophes are reliable enough for use in making public policy "unless they are run through many models," according to Prof. Newton, and then only if most of the models are in rough agreement.

Or how about the discovery last month by NASA that at least 70% of global warming to date is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the pattern of ocean currents and cloud formation connected with the El Nino and La Nina phenomena?

Or the paper by Gilbert Compo and Prashant Sardeshmukh of the Climate Diagnostics Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that concludes, "the recent worldwide land warming has occurred largely in response to a worldwide warming of the oceans rather than as a direct response to increasing greenhouse gases." Where were the main-stream news stories about that?

Could the oceans have warmed due to human activity and then warmed the land? Perhaps a little, say Messrs. Compo and Sardeshmukh. But natural changes in ocean temperatures could account for all the warming, even without any effect from greenhouse gases.

Why is it we hear only the Baffin stories and not the clean air/faulty climatecomputers/ ocean warmingones? Surely it's not because environmentalists and the journalists who cover them refuse to see any news except the news that confirms their biases.

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=702679

Barack Obama will classify carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant that can be regulated should he win the presidential election on Nov. 4, opening the way for new rules on greenhouse gas emissions.

The Democratic senator from Illinois will tell the Environmental Protection Agency that it may use the 1990 Clean Air Act to set emissions limits on power plants and manufacturers, his energy adviser, Jason Grumet, said in an interview. President George W. Bush declined to curb CO2 emissions under the law even after the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the government may do so.

Green Shift failure worries Suzuki

By MICHAEL OLIVEIRA The Canadian Press
Thu. Oct 16 - 4:18 PM

TORONTO — It’s disconcerting that the Liberals’ disastrous showing at the polls and whispered calls for Stephane Dion’s resignation may dissuade politicians from putting the environment at the forefront of future election campaigns, renowned scientist and author David Suzuki said Wednesday.

Dion’s Green Shift carbon tax plan was the centrepiece of the Liberal campaign platform, but it never resonated with voters, mostly because Dion failed to properly articulate its merits to Canadians, environmentalists say.

Suzuki said he now fears the next Liberal leader won’t be as bold as Dion was with environmental policy, and Canada may go through another 20 years of inaction before another prime minister treats environmental crises seriously again.

It was 20 years ago that former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney and his environment minister, Lucien Bouchard, warned Canadians about the dire threat posed by global warming, and yet two decades later, little has been accomplished to slow climate change, Suzuki said.

"I interviewed Lucien two months after he was appointed and I asked him what the most important issue facing us was. And his answer was immediate: global warming. His exact words were: ‘It threatens the survival of our species, we have to act now,’ " Suzuki recalled.

"Can you imagine, in 1988 the scientific community was absolutely convinced humans were causing (global warming), politicians had responded and nothing has happened and now it’s 20 years later?"

Suzuki said Canadians missed a great opportunity to register a vote for the environment given that few, if any, major parties in the past have ever highlighted the issue so strongly in their campaigns.

"I don’t think there’s ever been a more stark choice in terms of the environment," he said, adding that he believes the environment vote ended up being split among all the opposition parties.

He also said he was disappointed that Prime Minister Stephen Harper was quick to attack the Green Shift plan rather than debating the merits of a cap-and-trade system.

"The prime minister is my prime minister too, he’s everyone’s prime minister, and for him during an election to simply encounter a carbon tax proposal by saying, ‘This is insane,’ or ‘This is crazy,’ that really diminishes the discussion about a very serious issue," he said.

"I was shocked that he said that and that it was the end of discussion."

Environmental Defence executive director Rick Smith said it’s unfair to connect the Liberals’ poor election results with a rejection of the Green Shift since the campaign got sidetracked without environmental issues being fully debated.

"This election, to be blunt about it, was not about the environment, it was about the personality of two men," he said.

"And in the last couple weeks, there’s been very volatile, very scary market activity that’s been scaring the bejesus out of people."

Environmentalists generally said politicians shouldn’t abandon the idea of a national carbon tax as long as they can sell it better than Dion did.
________________________________________________________________________

COMMENTS
(56)

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peterJames wrote:
dear "dr" suzuki: it wasnt just about the personalities of 2 men. it was about the millions and millions of canadians who dont want to have to pay ANOTHER tax when such things HAVE NOT worked in other places they have been tried. you say "Canadians missed a great opportunity to register a vote for the environment" . now we are all bad because we didnt fall down and thank god for your UNWANTED advice. i think thats what the real problem is here. the election was also a vote on policies that you and the liberals have come up with. we stated through our votes that we KNOW that this idea has failed elsewhere. we KNOW that the biggest polluters have REFUSED to participate. we also KNOW that as long as this is the case there is NOTHING that we can possibly do that would make even the slightest difference. we could shut down our entire economy, stop every single process or vehicle that uses carbon and freeze to death in the coming winter and we KNOW that china would make it up in a week. you are really p!ssed off that the great unwashed masses have AGAIN told you that we dont want or care for your advice. we are NOT willing to pay grossly higher prices for carbon so you can crow to the rest of the world about how much we are suffering. we are also not willing to pay money in some ridiculous carbon trading scheme so some monkey in the bahamas can get richer for something he doesnt need. conservatives govern us. liberals RULE us. your type only gets its way when we are ruled.

voiceofreality wrote:
What Suzuki doesn't get is that the vote against the green shaft was a vote against him too. He should go away. We don't need or want him either.

beejay wrote:
What Suzuki is worried about is not the environment but the fact that he may not get any more commercials from Conserve NS.....what a sham he is!

LIFE SUCKS wrote:
well why didn't david suzuki publically endorse ms. may,if he is all hot about green shift then,or support dion,the one where the idea came from anyway.horse is out and gone david,let it go too.

TJBaker wrote:
I am not sure why this is? Does Suzuki not believe that people are still interested in getting alternative clean burning fuels when they are made available to them. Don't forget in the Maritimes we are still dependant on wood, coal, and oil. You can thank our governments for that. Oh yeah no ethanol pumps here either as far as I know. I believe the push for change of fuels and our habits will still be sought out. This being done without the crippling green shift tax making it possible for families to eat more than 4 out of 7 days a week. Enough enviromongering.

wayne moores wrote:
The media and the enviro kooks missed the major message of this election. There was a resounding NO to Dion/May/Suzuki/Gore and all the other fanatics who want to implode the economy for thier cusade to "save the planet". I laughed out loud when Suzkie said imagine 20 years and nothing has happened. Exactly, and 20 more years and nothing else will have happened. It is quite evident that the electorate has just put a sock in Suzukie's exaust pipe. Dion is falling on his sword today and that should be a message to all politicials. Ask the people of BC how they now feel about their carbon tax.

Frunk wrote:
People just do not believe your "chicken little" crap David. Anyone with any intelligence knows that carbons are only a small part of the problem. The cap ice has been melting for 5000 years and will continue until it all disappears even if we return to the caves like you seem to think we came from. Get a life, man will continue to improve the environment as best he can and that is a fact.

Jackson wrote:
There is still an opportunity for the current parliament to act on the environment. If the Liberals, the NDP, and the Bloc truly care about the environment, they will put aside their ideological differences, form a coalition majority government and act now. In my opinion, the best possible environmental policy could be formed with input from multiple parties. Just don't put Dion in charge.

Winston Smith wrote:
"Green shift carbon tax pan", or as I like to call it; LETS MAKE UP A BOGUS TAX AND SAY IT WILL CHANGE THE WEATHER PLAN.

adamsmith wrote:
Oh, here we go...So, Suzuki mentions that we are in for another 20 years of inaction and this would be a grave mistake to our environment. Well, according to the article, we have already had 20 years of 'inaction', but I am waiting for someone to show me the 'devestaing effects' of this inaction. Mr. Suzuki has his own sef-interest at work here - nothing more nothing less. If the politicians get involved and do whatever it is these scientists want what happens. Well, first of all they receive massive amounts of taxpayers money in the form of grants, tax-payer funded programs and so on. So, in effect keeping scientists in high demand and well paid. It is also interesting how he mentions that Harper, by not debating the merits of a cap and trade system is doing a major disservice to Canadians. Well, Mr. Suzuki, not everyone is as self-interested I believe it is you and those like you who proclaim the 'DEBATE IS OVER' when it comes to the argument of global warming and the impact of human activity. I have spent quite some time researching this and have yet to see the inconclusive evidence that golbal warming is mostly man made. Then we can take that one more step and say if it IS man made, what if anything can we do about it and finally if it man made and we can do something about it, where is the evidence that we even need to? ..................

adamsmith wrote:
Why won't anyone remind these comtemporary alarmist's of the scientific community of the 70s? When there was global cooling and an imminent ice age and how the plan of action for the day was to take coal and spread all across the glaciers so it could melt them!!! This is nothing more than self-interested groups trying to make a buck. I have no problem with making money, just raise your own capital like the rest of the world does and keep your hands out of mine! Especially when the debate is FAR FROM OVER!

Suzuki said he now fears the next Liberal leader won’t be as bold as Dion was with environmental policy, and Canada may go through another 20 years of inaction before another prime minister treats environmental crises seriously again.

Lorne Gunter: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof
Posted: October 20, 2008, 3:26 PM by Kelly McParland
Lorne Gunter, Full Comment

In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.

Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures -- they're going down, not up.
On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to "a negative PDO" or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs -- El Ninos -- produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones -- La Ninas -- produce below average ones.

Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as "solar minimums" magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded -- none -- and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. "This is no coincidence," he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate.

Also in September, American Craig Loehle, a scientist who conducts computer modelling on global climate change, confirmed his earlier findings that the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago did in fact exist and was even warmer than 20th-century temperatures.

Prior to the past decade of climate hysteria and Kyoto hype, the MWP was a given in the scientific community. Several hundred studies of tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediment, ice cores and early written records of weather -- even harvest totals and censuses --confirmed that the period from 800 AD to 1300 AD was unusually warm, particularly in Northern Europe.

But in order to prove the climate scaremongers' claim that 20th-century warming had been dangerous and unprecedented -- a result of human, not natural factors -- the MWP had to be made to disappear. So studies such as Michael Mann's "hockey stick," in which there is no MWP and global temperatures rise gradually until they jump up in the industrial age, have been adopted by the UN as proof that recent climate change necessitates a reordering of human economies and societies.

Dr. Loehle's work helps end this deception.
Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, "It's practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling," as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an "almost exact correlation" between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost "no correlation at all with CO2."

An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, "Man-made global warming is junk science," explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year "equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration ... This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun's radiation. This is an insignificantly small number."

Other international scientists have called the manmade warming theory a "hoax," a "fraud" and simply "not credible."
While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month.

For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA's eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, "variations in global temperatures since 1978 ... cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide."

Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years -- the period corresponding to reduced solar activity -- all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared.

It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn't any global warming.

http://www.nationalpost.com/893554.bin

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calmage wrote:Well...
In Suzuki's defense...

If nothing else...his "chicken little' type squawking has helped jump start the green movement that will one day have to take over for our dwindling supplies of natural resources and their resultant pollution.

I have always hated the waste and decadent overuse of non-renewable resources .. just cause we could..
Yes... we should be building more fuel efficent houses and auto's. Yes.. we should walk more and drive less... for our own good health. Yes.. we should recycle and refuse to landfill our homes with piles of junk just cause we're looking for happiness in things rather than as a spiritual culture that gets the big picture.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do every action ever taken on this planet by the creatures that God gave choice to. And far too many times... the sentient creatures on this planet choose the wrong way.

So.. I guess what I'm saying is that it's not a global warming battle...

Bottom line... It's a battle against good and evil.. right and wrong.

it's a clash of ideologies

calmage wrote:

it's a clash of ideologies

... which can also be a matter of good and evil..

calmage wrote:
Granted D'man...
We are no doubt going to have rampant waste and impracticalities on our journey to save the earth from ourselves..

Quite frankly... as I watched that Frontline documentary on big corps and their rampant disregard for the greening of the earth.. my one and only thought was that we're basicly screwed.

calmage wrote:Mankind will NEVER get it's shit together, and we will eventually collapse globally as the left battles right and the greenies battle the capitalists.
We'll be so busy ping ponging off the global walls that salvation will slip right through the middle, and we will see civilization collapse under it's own waste and missuse.

calmage wrote:
I pray that doesn't happen for at least 4 or 5 generations so that myself and my daughter can enjoy what this universe has to offer...

But.. our decendants will no doubt be faced with returning to pioneer status as our infrastructure and enviroment collapse around us globally.

I wish them well.