The CRU mini-scandal has gotten an lot of press, at least in the slice of the blogs regularly read by myself, two examples here and here are not unrepresentative. There are two facets of this little kerfuffle that might be noted. Read the rest of this entry
I’ve saved a boatload of links about the whole Climate Research Unit e-mail and document leak, but today I came across an article by the aptly-named author Christopher Booker that distills the issue down to 3 salient points.
There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.
They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.
And it ain’t a happy day for the CRU. True, this is a cybercrime, and the perpetrator(s) should be brought to justice. But equally as big is the contents of the >1000 e-mails and >3800 documents.
The Hadley Climate Research Unit has confirmed the hack, so this is not a hoax, and global-warming-skeptic sites like "Watts Up With That" and Andrew Bolt of Australia’s Herald-Sun newspaper are sifting through the data, finding some rather compromising evidence. Some include details on how temperature data was manipulated, to frustration that the climate models didn’t predict the current global temp decline, to attempts to obfuscate data released via a Freedom of Information request. Bolt has been updating his post frequently and has a dozen examples so far.
As the Wall St. Journal says, "Well, this should get interesting."
True, this could all be a major hoax, but with Hadley confirming the breach, and with 61 megabytes of data having been dumped (i.e. a vast amount), this is sounding very real. Stay tuned.
No, not as in golfing. I’m going to be quite busy this week, so blog posts this week will consist mostly of a collection of links that I happen across.
John Mark Reynolds, writing at the Evangel blog, wonders about that prediction that Christians would become a fringe political force if they stuck with their position on same-sex marriage. This after Maine, of all places, upheld traditional marriage. Not mentioned is that the House of Representatives barely squeaked out a health care bill (passing it with only 2 votes to spare) only after a provision was added that prevented abortion from being covered by it. Wasn’t that supposed to be a losing issue, too?
October, 2009 was the 3rd coldest October recorded in the US. Can we officially chuck those computer climate models and just admit we don’t really know what’s going on with climate, and thus should refrain from making pronouncements on what is or isn’t changing it?
Racist graffiti, and Al Sharpton isn’t all over CNN denouncing it? Oh, wait, it’s anti-white graffiti. Well then, nothing to see here.
Attorney General Eric Holder is endorsing extending provisions of the Patriot Act including roving wiretaps. It’s one thing to talk it down when you’re not in the hot seat. It’s another thing entirely when it’s your responsibility, eh?
The European Union, as a whole, could sink underneath the waves of debt very soon, having total debt equaling 100% of its annual gross domestic product. A special commission "discovered" that a major reason is the socialist pensions and healthcare that the government guarantees. And we want to follow them into this whirlpool?
And finally, the legacy of Major Nidal Malik Hasan, and a musing about whether or not political correctness will allow a candid and honest public discussion, or if more people will die at the PC altar.
A brand new film from the Cornwall Alliance for Stewardship of Creation entitled Not Evil Just Wrong takes a critical look at the claims made by global warming fearmongers and attempts to separate the facts from fiction. Which is worse: the (alleged) problem or the proposed solutions? Click the video below to see the trailer.
Hat tip: Chuck Colson
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
So what on Earth is going on?
The article continues on, referring to to Sun output and ocean cycles, and how the climate models didn’t predict this, even though the guys who program the models say they took all this into consideration.
My point is not to debate what is or isn’t heating or cooling the planet, but rather to point out that there is so much that governments around the world want to legislate based on these climate models, while these models are failing in their near-term predictions. But that doesn’t stop Al Gore from his itinerant preaching, nor the climate scientists from insisting that, never mind the past decade, now it’s going to get warmer, nor governments from trying to save us with new taxes based on models that aren’t predicting properly.
No, instead we’re pushing all our chips in based on buggy climate software.
No country with nuclear power today has solved the waste disposal problem. The preferred solution being sought today is to disperse the waste in repositories hundreds of meters below the earth’s surface. The (perceived) absence of success in this area is a dominant obstacles that the nuclear industry faces. Last Friday, I after a discussion of nuclear energy started, with a lot of half-remembered data on my side and in order to stop that feature of the conversation, I dug up on the net an authoritative report on the “future of nuclear energy.” These papers are in pdf form:
In the discussion last night (on this post) waste seemed the dominant topic. As noted, that post last night was a summary (of a summary). So I’m going to delve in to the report’s waste chapter for more grist. Read the rest of this entry
Last Friday, I after a discussion of nuclear energy started, with a lot of half-remembered data on my side and in order to stop that feature of the conversation, I dug up on the net an authoritative report on the “future of nuclear energy.” These papers are in pdf form:
Anyhow, I’m going to attempt summarize the summary. Please bring up any points on which further elaboration would be useful. Read the rest of this entry
This weekend I’m going to read these documents prior to a post on nuclear power. Any and all are invited to read them to so that our discussion might be more informed.
The summary begins:
At least for the next few decades, there are only a few realistic options for reducing carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation:
- increase efficiency in electricity generation and use;
- expand use of renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal;
- capture carbon dioxide emissions at fossil-fueled (especially coal) electric generating plants and permanently sequester the carbon; and
- increase use of nuclear power.
The goal of this interdisciplinary MIT study is not to predict which of these options will prevail or to argue for their comparative advantages. In our view, it is likely that we shall need all of these options and accordingly it would be a mistake at this time to exclude any of these four options from an overall carbon emissions management strategy. Rather we seek to explore and evaluate actions that could be taken to maintain nuclear power as one of the significant options for meeting future world energy needs at low cost and in an environmentally acceptable manner.
Argonne has a short paper out outlining a “green” energy solution that looks more plausible than any I’ve seen for a while. If you take “carbon” seriously (I don’t but I’m in something of a minority on that) you should read this. If you don’t, however, and do take peak oil or oil independence seriously then you should still read it.
For Green Freedom the basic idea is that you take a nuclear power plant for its supply of electricity and steam. With that you use a potassium/carbon compound CO2 + water + hydrogen via electrolysis to combine in a process that produces methanol which is then in turn further processed to a synthetic gasoline. Basically the nuclear reaction/energy drives a reaction reclaming carbon and O2 from the air to form that gas, which is then burned in cars re-releasing that carbon back to the atmosphere in a completely carbon neutral process. It is not of course energy/lite, but that isn’t the point here.
The paper suggests some economics, but basically a price point for gasoline right about where it is now, makes installation of new plants feasible.
Of course the anti-nuclear stance of the left is a religious position, data on Gen III and Gen IV nuclear power generation will be of no interest or use in discussions.
Mr DeLong points to a plot that the anthropogenic global warming proponents are pushing. He’s also pointed to a big “inflection point” of industrialization and its economic effects in his pdf on “slouching toward utopia”. One wonders if he can put two and two together and get four … and connect the two. It seems if you believe anthropogenic global warming began at the same time as industrialization … the obvious conclusion is that to “restore” the climate the industrial revolution has to be renounced. All the factories, power plants, cars and all have to be forgone. A return to the pre-industrial age is a necessity. One wonder if he really wants to do that. My guess is … no. But if you believe the first and the second is clearly in that chain of logic causally connected then the conclusion seems inescapable. To paraphrase Mr DeLong, “How can any person who believes in anthropogenic global warming participate in a non-agrarian non-carbon neutral non-self-sustaining lifestyle?” It seems clear if you are blogging about global warming you are a hypocrite and a willing contributor to the problem. Since the conclusion that pre-industrial population levels is inescapable for the true anthropogenic global warming believer for us to have a reasonable chance of returning to pre-1850/1870 carbon output. Killing off 6 billion or so people, now that will truly take a real far thinking progressive mentality.
Of course this leads to the same problem as the one facing Mr Obama and his nuclear weapon-free world pipe dream. How do you disarm if there are bad men in the world. The same is true for industrial capacity. How can you disarm your factories and your multi-trillion dollar economy if the other guy doesn’t do it as well? Oh, wait … you can’t.
And because you cannot, there is of course only one way out of this problem … and it is that we need an alternative source of power, of which right now there is only one. Nuclear (fission) power is the only viable alternative to coal and oil based power generation with our current levels of power consumption. And … oddly enough nobody on the left is talking about that. Oddly enough as well, Gen-IV reactor designs are almost have nothing in common with those of the Rickover water cooled variety.
A new peer-reviewed study claims that "[v]irtually all changes in global atmospheric temperatures in the late 20th century were the result of nature rather than human activity".
Yeah, that "settled" science continues to get unsettled.
“It goes against the orthodoxy,” said climate scientist Chris de Freitas of New Zealand’s Auckland University. The new findings called into question the politically-correct, politically-motivated assumptions driving the climate change debate, he said.
De Freitas and Australian scientists John McLean and Bob Carter reported that at least 80 percent of climate variability tracked over the past half a century could be attributed to internal climate-system factors including the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) Pacific warming phenomenon and its cooling twin, La Nina.
This left little room for human-caused factors like emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called greenhouse gases. Intermittent volcanic activity, producing significant cooling, was found to have been a factor.
The paper was published Thursday, following a six-month peer review process, in the American Geophysical Union’s Journal of Geophysical Research.
All of our efforts trying to stem this may be for naught.
I value gas mileage highly in my choice of automobile. In fact, one of the implicit criteria I had in obtaining new cars lately is that my “new” car should get better mileage than the one it replaces. My current car I drive is a 2000 manual transmission Honda Insight. It gets “officially” 61/71 mpg city/highway. My experience is that in temperate weather on dry pavement I get about 65/80 … but any drop in conditions or the thermometer drops the milage as low as 52/62 respectively.
Anyhow, here’s the question. How many years will I have to wait until a replacement vehicle costing under $25k that gets better mileage will be available. The only other criteria I have is that it at least seat two with some luggage and when I’m alone can fit me with my bike (wheels removed). The Insight can do this handily. 2012? 2015? Or never?
So, what’s your guess? When will there be an alternative out there which meets those criteria?
My friend John Murdoch, a conservative writer who is also concerned about climate change, has written a perceptive critique of his interchange with Al Gore at a Climate Project training. As I have written, the development of a total life ethic, recognizing the threats to life of both abortion and environmental degradation, is elevating to our Christian witness and could effectively batttle both offenses.
John confronted Gore about the disconnection of the these life issues. He writes:
Face to face with Al Gore, the meaning of life was on my mind as well. I raised the credibility gap created by invoking the plight of future generations to advocate global warming legislation while elsewhere lauding Roe v. Wade which blocks protections for the unborn of today.
Gore stated that abortion “is best dealt with in a way that leaves the principle responsibility to those most affected by it.” (The developing child was notably absent from his “most affected” list.) Stressing that disagreement “doesn’t keep [him] from seeking common ground,” Gore closed by expressing hope that many would be willing to “join together to address global warming, a common threat to born and unborn.”
Gore’s batting one for two. The life issue extends beyond the womb, but it certainly extends to it as well.
Leroy Barber, a new friend who is president of the innovative Mission Year program that facilitates the placement of suburban Christians to live and minister in urban comunities, has an interesting take on the importance of healthier environments in urban settings. See his post on “greening the hood.”
