Global Boiling

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=08...;show_article=1

<span style="font-size:18pt;line-height:100%"><span style="font-size:36pt;line-height:100%">Tax</span> means fewer travellers at main Dutch airport: report</span>

Some 50,000 fewer passengers are expected to use Amsterdam Schiphol airport, one of Europe's busiest, this summer <span style="font-size:18pt;line-height:100%">on account of a Dutch environmental tax on flights</span>, it was reported Saturday.

"We're expected zero growth in 2008, and in fact a decrease (in passenger numbers) in July and August," an airport spokesman was quoted as saying by the domestic ANP news agency.

The Netherlands is the only country that levies an environmental tax on flights departing the country -- 11.25 euros per passenger (17.75 dollars) for European destinations and 45 euros for intercontential points.

With higher fuel prices pushing up air fares worldwide, travel industry experts say the tax will hurt business at Schiphol and see many Dutch travellers go to nearby German airports instead.

 

^^^ utter morons. I guess they don't care if the airlines do well, which is fine if you're ant-capitalist. On the other hand, you're not much for the persons who aren't flying - their lifestyle is clearly changed for the worse.

 

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,2...7-25717,00.html

Doomed to a fatal delusion over climate change
Andrew Bolt
July 09, 2008 12:00am

PSYCHIATRISTS have detected the first case of "climate change delusion" - and they haven't even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.

Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon".

"A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."

(So have Alarmist of the Year Tim Flannery, Profit of Doom Al Gore and Sir Richard Brazen, but I digress.)

"The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies."

But never mind the poor boy, who became too terrified even to drink. What's scarier is that people in charge of our Government seem to suffer from this "climate change delusion", too.

Here is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday, with his own apocalyptic vision: "If we do not begin reducing the nation's levels of carbon pollution, Australia's economy will face more frequent and severe droughts, less water, reduced food production and devastation of areas such as the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu wetlands."

And here is a senior Sydney Morning Herald journalist aghast at the horrors described in the report on global warming released on Friday by Rudd's guru, Professor Ross Garnaut: "Australians must pay more for petrol, food and energy or ultimately face a rising death toll . . ."

Wow. Pay more for food or die. Is that Rudd's next campaign slogan?

Of course, we can laugh at this -- and must -- but the price for such folly may soon be your job, or at least your cash.

Rudd and Garnaut want to scare you into backing their plan to force people who produce everything from petrol to coal-fired electricity, from steel to soft drinks, to pay for licences to emit carbon dioxide -- the gas they think is heating the world to hell.

The cost of those licences, totalling in the billions, will then be passed on to you through higher bills for petrol, power, food, housing, air travel and anything else that uses lots of gassy power. In some countries they're even planning to tax farting cows, so there's no end to the ways you can be stung.

Rudd hopes this pain will make you switch to expensive but less gassy alternatives, and -- hey presto -- the world's temperature will then fall, just like it's actually done since the day Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth.

But you'll have spotted already the big flaw in Rudd's mad plan -- one that confirms he and Garnaut really do have delusions.

The truth is Australia on its own emits less than 1.5 per cent of the world's carbon dioxide. Any savings we make will make no real difference, given that China (now the biggest emitter) and India (the fourth) are booming so fast that they alone will pump out 42 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases by 2030.

Indeed, so fast are the world's emissions growing -- by 3.1 per cent a year thanks mostly to these two giants -- that the 20 per cent cuts Rudd demands of Australians by 2020 would be swallowed up in just 28 days. That's how little our multi-billions of dollars in sacrifices will matter.

And that's why Rudd's claim that we'll be ruined if we don't cut Australia's gases is a lie. To be blunt.

Ask Rudd's guru. Garnaut on Friday admitted any cuts we make will be useless unless they inspire other countries to do the same -- especially China and India: "Only a global agreement has any prospect of reducing risks of dangerous climate change to acceptable levels."

So almost everything depends on China and India copying us. But the chances of that? A big, round zero.

A year ago China released its own global warming strategy -- its own Garnaut report -- which bluntly refused to cut its total emissions.

Said Ma Kai, head of China's powerful State Council: "China does not commit to any quantified emissions-reduction commitments . . . our efforts to fight climate change must not come at the expense of economic growth."

In fact, we had to get used to more gas from China, not less: "It is quite inevitable that during this (industrialisation) stage, China's energy consumption and CO2 emissions will be quite high."

Last month, India likewise issued its National Action Plan on Climate Change, and also rejected Rudd-style cuts.

The plan's authors, the Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change, said India would rather save its people from poverty than global warming, and would not cut growth to cut gases.

"It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of wellbeing to its people."

The plan's only real promise was in fact a threat: "India is determined that its per capita greenhouse gas emissions will at no point exceed that of developed countries."

Gee, thanks. That, of course, means India won't stop its per capita emissions (now at 1.02 tonnes) from growing until they match those of countries such as the US (now 20 tonnes). Given it has one billion people, that's a promise to gas the world like it's never been gassed before.

So is this our death warrant? Should this news have you seeing apocalyptic visions, too?

Well, no. What makes the Indian report so interesting is that unlike our Ross Garnaut, who just accepted the word of those scientists wailing we faced doom, the Indian experts went to the trouble to check what the climate was actually doing and why.

Their conclusion? They couldn't actually find anything bad in India that was caused by man-made warming: "No firm link between the documented (climate) changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established."

In fact, they couldn't find much change in the climate at all.

Yes, India's surface temperature over a century had inched up by 0.4 degrees, but there had been no change in trends for large-scale droughts and floods, or rain: "The observed monsoon rainfall at the all-India level does not show any significant trend . . ."

It even dismissed the panic Al Gore helped to whip up about melting Himalayan glaciers: "While recession of some glaciers has occurred in some Himalayan regions in recent years, the trend is not consistent across the entire mountain chain. It is, accordingly, too early to establish long-term trends, or their causation, in respect of which there are several hypotheses."

Nor was that the only sign that India's Council on Climate Change had kept its cool while our Rudd and Garnaut lost theirs.

For example, the Indians rightly insisted nuclear power had to be part of any real plan to cut emissions. Rudd and Garnaut won't even discuss it.

The Indians also pointed out that no feasible technology to trap and bury the gasses of coal-fired power stations had yet been developed "and there are serious questions about the cost as well (as) permanence of the CO2 storage repositories".

Rudd and Garnaut, however, keep offering this dream to make us think our power stations can survive their emissions trading scheme, when state governments warn they may not.

In every case the Indians are pragmatic where Rudd and Garnaut are having delusions -- delusions about an apocalypse, about cutting gases without going nuclear, about saving power stations they'll instead drive broke.

And there's that delusion on which their whole plan is built -- that India and China will follow our sacrifice by cutting their throats, too.

So psychiatrists are treating a 17-year-old tipped over the edge by global warming fearmongers?

Pray that their next patients will be two men whose own delusions threaten to drive our whole economy over the edge as well.

Join Andrew on blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt

 

^^^ First case? LOL. It's already a mass delusion.

 

"The planet is fine, the people are fucked!"

Exactly

R.I.P.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Chutney @ Jul 9 2008, 08:52 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Denny Crane @ Jul 9 2008, 10:23 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>"The planet is fine, the people are fucked!"

Exactly

R.I.P.</div>
That's one of my favourite clips of his. I feel strongly about limiting how much we damage the environment, but the man is f'n right. No matter how hard people try to spin it as a selfless act, this environmental awareness and concern is motivated purely out of self-interest. None of us want to be stuck in a polluted environment or have to deal with the Earth's reaction to us.
</div>

Well, I'm selfish, too, on two counts.

First, I don't want to sit around in the dark without air conditioning and all the other neat things electricity makes possible. Second, I don't want to breath polluted air all the time (I'm not talking about CO2 here).

 

First, this gets back to your misuse of CO2 and water vapor as contributing causes to greenhouse effect. The more a % of the atmosphere that's CO2 has literally nothing to do with planet temperature. Thanks for clearing that up!

Second, do you see the key words "known to be" and "probably" in your second quote?

I find this to be funny:

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/ve...greenhouse.html

"The greenhouse effect by itself could not account for the conditions that we find on Venus. "

And

http://www.astronomynotes.com/solarsys/s9.htm

"On Venus, the super-abundance of CO2 in its atmosphere is responsible for the huge greenhouse effect."

Maybe I'm confused, or maybe there's the perfect example of Al Gore's consensus among scientists.

How about this article from National Geographic?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...rs-warming.html

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says
Kate Ravilious
for National Geographic News
February 28, 2007

Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory.

Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Get an overview: "Global Warming Fast Facts".)

Mars, too, appears to be enjoying more mild and balmy temperatures.

In 2005 data from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide "ice caps" near Mars's south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row.

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

"The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars," he said.
(more at the link)</div>

Wait, there is more at the link worth reading:

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Abdussamatov remains contrarian, however, suggesting that the sun holds something quite different in store.

"The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years."</div>

And there are tens of thousands of articles on the Internet like this one:

http://technorati.com/posts/A45mEz2X%2FYu%...n6purc67Vy5A%3D

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Earth Slated to Continue Cooling

The earth hasn't warmed any in the last decade, a trend that is likely to continue: When the United Nations World Meteorological Organization recently reported that global temperatures had not risen since 1998, the explanation given by WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud was that the cool spell was the effect of the Pacific Ocean's La Nina current, "part of what we call 'variability.' " Well, oops, the Earth will do it again. According to a report by German researchers published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, shifting Atlantic ocean currents will cool parts of North America and Europe over the next decade as well.</div>

But here's a really important issue in the mix, perhaps the most important of all (back to the article about Abdussamatov):

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>Abdussamatov's work, however, has not been well received by other climate scientists.
(My note: danger, danger, Will Robinson! Stepping on toes of the scientific community with the truth isn't good for your funding!)

"His views are completely at odds with the mainstream scientific opinion," said Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at England's Oxford University.

"And they contradict the extensive evidence presented in the most recent IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report."
(My note: the IPCC report has little to do with science and everything to do with geopolitics; the results aren't scientific results, they are whatever the panel voted on)

Amato Evan, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, added that "the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."</div>

Wait a second, "The solar irradiance began to drop in the 1990s, and a minimum will be reached by approximately 2040," Abdussamatov said. "It will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in 15 to 20 years."

And

"the idea just isn't supported by the theory or by the observations."

makes Amato Evan look like a fool, no?

 

I do think CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it's not hard to prove. Take a jar and pump it full of CO2 and seal it, and put it in the sun; it'll get hotter than a jar filled with regular air. What that doesn't prove is that increasing the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere by .000003 is going to raise temperatures in any measurable way.

Regarding Mars and Mercury, I almost edited my previous post to explain it. The answer is that planetary temperature systems are complex processes.

Mercury has no atmosphere to speak of, like our moon. You'd expect the surface temperature to be whatever the sun's heat is at its distance and nothing more. It has a molten core, but I do not believe there is any active vulcanism there in the past 4B years to contribute to the warming of the planet. All it is is the sun, and like an astronaut on a space walk, one side is very hot, and one is very cold.

Mars has a thin atmosphere and is obviously much further away. It does appear to have active vulcanism, which will warm the planet, and the winds that make the fairly famous sandstorms there redistribute heat from the sunlit side to the dark side - something that Mercury has no similar process.

Venus has winds that are 1000 MPH or more that redistribute heat to the dark side of the planet as well as sufficient atmospheric pressure to raise the temperature significantly, world-wide.

So the answer to your question is a complicated one. Earth is closer to the Sun AND has a much higher atmospheric pressure than Mars; it's warmer.

As for volcanism on Venus, you threw wikipedia at me, and it's misleading or flat-out wrong.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/...80404114325.htm

Search For Active Volcanoes On Venus In High Gear

ScienceDaily (Apr. 8, 2008) — ESA’s Venus Express has measured a highly variable quantity of the volcanic gas sulphur dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus. Scientists must now decide whether this is evidence for active volcanoes on Venus, or linked to a hitherto unknown mechanism affecting the upper atmosphere.

The search for volcanoes is a long-running thread in the exploration of Venus. “Volcanoes are a key part of a climate system,” says Fred Taylor, a Venus Express Interdisciplinary Scientist from Oxford University. That’s because they release gases such as sulphur dioxide into the planet’s atmosphere.

On Earth, sulphur compounds do not stay in the atmosphere for long. Instead, they react with the surface of the planet. The same is thought to be true at Venus, although the reactions are much slower, with a time scale of 20 million years.

Some scientists have argued that the large proportion of sulphur dioxide found by previous space missions at Venus is the ‘smoking gun’ of recent volcanic eruptions. However, others maintain that the eruptions could have happened around 10 million years ago and that the sulphur dioxide remains in the atmosphere because it takes such a long time to react with the surface rocks.

New observations from Venus Express showing rapid variations of sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere have revived this debate.

The SPICAV (Spectroscopy for Investigation of Characteristics of the Atmosphere of Venus) instrument analyses the way starlight or sunlight is absorbed by Venus’s atmosphere. The absorbed light tells scientists the identity of the atoms and molecules found in the planet’s atmosphere. This technique works only in the more tenuous upper atmosphere, above the clouds at an altitude of 70–90 km. In the space of a few days, the quantity of sulphur dioxide in the upper atmosphere dropped by two-thirds.

Jean-Loup Bertaux, Service d’Aeronomie du CNRS, Verrières-le-Buisson, is the Principal Investigator for SPICAV. “I am very sceptical about the volcanic hypothesis,” he says. “However, I must admit that we don’t understand yet why there is so much SO2 at high altitudes, where it should be destroyed rapidly by solar light, and why it is varying so wildly.”

 

Heh...

I think we're likely to see warming no matter what we do. It's tilting at windmills to try and fight it, since it's a natural process.

There are things that man is doing that is not helping things, but those are on the order of paving more and more land (asphalt is 95% efficient at absorbing heat!) or massively cutting down the rain forests, or dumping chemicals like CFCs in the air (where there is an unnatural chemical reaction unleashed on components of the atmosphere).

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (Lavalamp @ Jul 10 2008, 02:22 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}></div><div class='quotemain'>Well I agree that burning down to clear cut forests also is like a double dose. Because not only does it create CO2, but those same trees would remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

Could they pave roads white, or would that make it to difficult to drive on, due to reflected light.

I know CFCs mess up Ozone, but I dont know the impact it would have on global temperature. I now more UV radiation gets through to the ground though, because I forget if Ozone reflects UV radiation or absorbs it, but somehow it stops it.</div>

It's too bad they can't figure out how to make solar panels out of asphalt. As I said, it's 95% efficient, while solar panels are like 15% efficient (and a waste of time, money, and effort).

A lot of the highways here in Vegas are concrete or some other similar material. But in general, paving over the landscape does make the ground absorb more heat...

CFCs are scary. Trying to explain it in layman's terms... The chemical reaction is something like a chain reaction; when the CFC combines with the ozone molecules, there's a leftover free radical CFC to combine again. So just a little CFC destroys a LOT of ozone layer.

The ozone hole was a big thing a few years back. Ozone filters the UV and heat from the sun, so more of it reaches the ground where the hole is. Guess where the hole was? (It's gotten way smaller over time). It was over the poles.... so there's another reason the ice caps melt that has nothing to do with CO2.

Regarding the stuff you got from wikipedia last night, about % of contribution to greenhouse effect. For starters, we want a greenhouse effect, or the earth would cold like mars. Then there's the issue of the Earth being a really big place with a huge variety of weather and atmospheric conditions depending where you are. The range of numbers they give are because there's 4% water vapor in the air (or less) in some places - like here in Vegas where it's really hot or at the poles - while there's 99% (or 100% where it rains) in others. Taking some midrange value doesn't begin to make sense of what the numbers really mean.

They do try to model the climate, but that is an absurd proposition. Not only are the variables really just a best guess, there's no way you can consider everything. It's absurd because the systems are as complex and infinite in their variables as there are molecules or atoms involved. The true test of modeling software is that you should be able to reproduce actual values measured in the past, and the models that claim global warming do not do that or even close.

 

Here's a stunner.

http://www.dailytech.com/Myth+of+Consensus...rticle12403.htm

Blog: Science Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate

"Considerable presence" of skeptics

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible."

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,"There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity -- the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause -- has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton's paper an "expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and "extensive errors"

In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, "I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC's 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central 'climate sensitivity' question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method."

According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, "in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low."

Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain's Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth's recent warming. "In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years ... Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth."