Archive for the ‘Alarmism’ Category

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Earth Alarmism Day today celebrates human cowardice

April 22, 2015

This started in 1970 and not one of the many catastrophes predicted has come to pass. 22nd April 1970 is when environmentalism buried its frightened head and started humans down the path of subordinating their actions to the fear of imagined, future catastrophes.

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.”  Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day, 1970

“If present trends continue, the world will be … eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.” Kenneth E.F. Watt, in “Earth Day,” 1970.

“By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Paul Ehrlich, Speech at British Institute For Biology, September 1971.

“In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” Ehrlich, speech during Earth Day, 1970

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”  Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University, Earth Day 1970

Every year since has been the “last chance” to do something about some imagined, looming disaster. Each pending disaster has been based on some belief and the forecast is always for some future time such that no indicating parameters can be measured. Yet doomsayers and their predictions (which all fail) remain the darlings of the media looking for a sensational headline. For “scientists”, doomsaying which cannot be checked in their lifetimes is a certain way to get funding. Acid rain never did threaten the Black Forest. The ozone hole was not caused by man and healed itself. The ice age predicted in the 1970s did not happen. World-wide starvation did not occur. There are more species alive today than ever before (though it is not clear as to why that is a good thing).

Global warming has been absent for 2 decades while carbon dioxide emissions have almost doubled. Most of the global warming that has occurred falls within the bounds of natural variability (as a new paper recently showed). Most predictions about global warming have failed and none has ever been proven. The fantasised link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and significant global warming is well and truly broken. Even the link between man-made carbon dioxide emissions and carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is tenuous at best. Sea levels are not increasing any faster than since the end of the last ice age. Global ice coverage is currently at the highest for many years and all the variations in ice extent in modern times are within the bounds of natural variability. The acidity of the oceans is not showing any change beyond that of natural variability. Coral reefs are not dying out.

Population – sans immigration – is already in decline in China and most Western countries. By 2050 population will be in decline in India and by 2100 in the whole world.  In the 4 decades since 1970, world population has doubled from 3.5 billion to 7 billion and fewer people are dying of starvation. More people are being fed today than ever before. Fewer people are dying of disease (but more are dying in wars). In spite of industrial activity and its growth, longevity is increasing all over the world. Gene modified crops are feeding the world. Peak oil did not happen and neither did peak gas. With shale discoveries and the potential of methane hydrates, fossil fuels will be available to humankind for the best part of the next 1,000 years.

Here are some more of the alarmist predictions of that first Earth Day of Cowards in 1970. Paul Ehrlich sticks out as being one of the chief proponents of cowardice:

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”  George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….” Life Magazine, January 1970

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

“Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson

And all the headlines today read just the same. A celebration of cowardice. My faith is not in catastrophe but in human ingenuity to cope – and thrive – in whatever conditions may prevail. We will manage whether sea level is 100 m lower than today in another ice age or if it rises another 2 m. We will even survive a VEI 8 volcano eruption whenever it comes – and come it will. Primitive man thrived through a number of glacial periods and many greenings of the Sahara. I would prefer an Earth Day which celebrated the ingenuity of man – but that is not the stuff of headlines.

Without scepticism there is no science – only religious belief.

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Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Media, Science | 1 Comment »

Warm snow

April 17, 2015

Protesting Global Warming at the University of Colorado.

ffcu facebook page

ffcu facebook page

Daily Caller:

Global warming activists should probably start planning their protests for the summer because the second climate rally — within just days of a major one in Canada — has been buried in snow.

Student activists with Fossil Free CU have camped out the University of Colorado, staging a “sit in” meant to show the Board of Regents the group’s commitment to getting the school to divest its endowment of fossil fuel holdings.

The group’s Facebook page shows students braving the elements to convince the Board of Regents to ditch fossil fuels to fight global warming. Unfortunately for them, the “Gore effect” has kicked in and may blunt their arguments that the world is catastrophically warming.

The “Gore effect” has made its mark this year on several protests, including a major one last week in Quebec City where thousands of demonstrators marched through snow and frigid weather. Earlier this year, a divestment protest at Yale University was cancelled due to “unfavorable weather conditions and other logistical issues,” according to organizers.

That AGW is a religion and a matter of faith – which ignores reality – is apparent. Alarmism and the antics of the unthinking acolytes indicates that there is something to be said for the notion that evolution is causing the dumbing-down of the human race. Alarmism is quite simply the subordination of actions to fear – which is my definition of cowardice. We probably reached peak intelligence as hunter-gatherers and the modern “welfare state” is most likely accelerating the decline.

If “intelligence” is an inherited characteristic – as it seems at least partially to be –  then it is only a matter of simple arithmetic that unless the “more intelligent” reproduce at a higher rate than those of “less intelligence” then the “average intelligence” of the population will inevitably decrease.

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Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Evolution | 4 Comments »

Fossil Fuels Will Save the World (Really)

March 17, 2015

Matt Ridley has an opinion piece in the WSJ which says many things far better than I can.

The environmental movement has advanced three arguments in recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources of energy will price them out of the marketplace; and (3) that we cannot afford the climate consequences of burning them.

These days, not one of the three arguments is looking very healthy. In fact, a more realistic assessment of our energy and environmental situation suggests that, for decades to come, we will continue to rely overwhelmingly on the fossil fuels that have contributed so dramatically to the world’s prosperity and progress. …….

The article is well worth reading. Fossil Fuels Will Save the World Ridley WSJ

Ground zero is that fossil fuels will eventually be replaced only when a cheaper, more reliable source of energy (electricity production) is found. There is no foreseeable “peak” for fossil fuels and availability is not a constraint. Solar and wind technologies have small, clear niches which they can well fill but practical and affordable energy storage is needed before they can be any significant source of our energy consumption. And Li-ion batteries will not cut it. As Ridley points out they provide about 1% of our energy consumption today while fossil fuels still reign supreme at about 87%. Nuclear power could make a severe dent in fossil fuel consumption, but only if the costs and the construction time due to the regulatory process can be drastically reduced – and that does not seem likely as long as alarmists and doom-sayers hold sway. (I estimate that around 30% of the capital cost of nuclear plants is unnecessary and due to CYA regulations which are driven by fear). Small, safe, pre-approved, modular, fifth-generation nuclear power plants could take-off but that requires many alarmists to give up their faith.

(As an aside, I observe that climate and energy politics have become the politics of fear, but I am an optimist and I expect the pendulum will swing to return to energy politics based on courage. It is a form of cowardice which drives energy politics today where I take cowardice to be actions subordinated to fear and courage to be fears subordinated to purposeful actions).

Perhaps fusion (probably hot rather than cold) will come – but a breakthrough is not in sight (though by definition breakthroughs are never generally in sight). We can fantasise that we will someday be able to tap into the gravitational energy of the solar system (which would be solar energy in another form). I don’t doubt that some new, cheap, energy source or energy conversion technique will appear – but until then fossil fuels will provide the basis for human development. And if we are on our way into a new ice age it is fossil fuel which will ensure our survival.

I dismiss the hypothesis – and it is still only a hypothesis – that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are of any significance for “global temperature”. In fact the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere (and man-made emissions are a tiny contributor to that) has a very small effect on “global temperature”. Instead it is “global temperature” which has a very large effect on carbon dioxide concentration through the balance of absorption and emission from the oceans and from the biosphere. Carbon dioxide concentration lags rather than leads “global temperature”. The sun and clouds and ocean currents and winds (also driven by the sun) dwarf any effects of carbon dioxide. The hypothesis looks broken considering that over the last 18 years man-made carbon dioxide emissions have increased sharply but “global temperature” has been static. Even the assumed “global warming” that is supposed to have taken place over the last 100 years are to a significant extent “manufactured” by “adjusting” temperature data and choosing weighting and averaging algorithms which are biased to show a pre-determined result. There is a shortage of “science” and far too much confirmation bias in what passes for “climate science” these days.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Coal, Development, Energy, Gas, Oil | 4 Comments »

Domesticating tigers to ensure their survival

March 1, 2015

Tigers cannot survive without human intervention. They are just not capable of handling the shrinking of their traditional habitats and the changing environment. They are not evolving fast enough. Traditional – and misguided – conservation is all about trying to maintain some limited habitats in which they can survive without change. That is a misguided policy just because it tries to freeze the tiger into a genetic dead-end in an artificially maintained habitat. The tiger reserves are then little more than large zoos.

If tigers are to survive they must change within themselves. They need to adapt genetically. They have to adapt and move on. To change is to be alive. Not to change is to die. And a species which will not change “deserves” to go extinct. Traditional “conservation” is temporary and unsustainable. Conservation is stagnation.

I have long felt that real conservation must consist of helping threatened species to adapt genetically, not just freeze them into an artificial, temporary and unsustainable habitat. Of course changing a species genetically means that the unchanged species disappears. But that’s life.

Genetic adaptation – not stagnating conservation – is the way to help threatened species

So this apparently bizarre suggestion by a State Minister in Madhya Pradesh is not as crazy as it may first sound. A true, sustainable survival of tigers requires that they adapt such that they can continue living among humans without threatening humans. And that may well be a form of “humanisation” if not of “domestication”.

Deccan Herald: In a bizarre suggestion, a senior Madhya Pradesh minister has sought a law that allows people to domesticate or keep as pets big cats like lions and tigers for their conservation.

Animal Husbandry, Horticulture and Food Processing Minister Kusum Mehdele, in a proposal sent to the state’s forest department, has cited legal provisions in some African and South-East Asian countries like Thailand which have helped bring about an increase in the population of the big cats.

Noting that there are various projects in the country for conservation of tigers, the minister, however, said that although crores of rupees have been spent on these projects, there has been no surprising increase in tiger numbers.

In Thailand and some other nations, there is a legal recognition to people for keeping tigers and lions as pets, she said, adding the number of such animals is increasing in a surprising way in these countries.

If such a possibility can be thought over, then necessary action should be undertaken and guidelines passed on, she said in the proposal sent to state Forest Minister Gaurishankar Shejwar in September last year.

The suggestion has, of course, been ridiculed by the traditional “conservationists” who are all into trying to keep the tiger and its world unchanged – frozen in an artificial environment which is unsustainable.

Indian claims of the recovery of tiger numbers may be overestimated:

Data released in January suggested India was home to 30 per cent more tigers than four years ago, with numbers rising from 1,706 in 2010 to 2,226 in 2014. Now conservation experts from the University of Oxford, the Indian Statistical Institute and the Wildlife Conservation Society have cast doubt on the assertion, suggesting the statistics were the result of a flawed method commonly used in censuses of tigers and other rare wildlife.

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Posted in Alarmism, Conservation, Genetics, India | 1 Comment »

Pachauri feels the heat

February 27, 2015

The Pachauri train wreck continues – a harbinger of what is to come with the global warming orthodoxy. It is now becoming clear that “much of the supposed “global warming” is due to the use of “adjusted” temperatures to cool the past!” He has been asked to resign from the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change, barred from entering his own offices and directed not to leave the country.

The sooner the IPCC is disbanded the better.

TOI: TERI chief R K Pachauri, accused in a sexual harassment case, is learnt to have been asked by the Centre to resign from the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change.
Sources said if Pachauri doesn’t leave the council on his own, the PMO would have to replace him by reconstituting the body.
Pachauri, who stepped down from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment levelled by a junior woman colleague, has taken leave from the Delhi-based renewable energy and sustainable development thinktank TERI.
He was on Thursday barred from entering his office premises by a Delhi court which granted him interim protection from arrest till March 27. He was also restrained from contacting TERI’s staff, witnesses in the case and the complainant and directed not to leave the country without prior permission of the court.
Pachauri’s anticipatory bail application will be taken up on March 27.

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Patchy’s gone – joins the growing line of privileged sexual predators

February 24, 2015

There will be those who say that Pachauri’s resignation from the IPCC for sexual harassment charges will not hurt the IPCC. After all the transgressions of the Chairman are not necessarily those of others in the IPCC.

But they would be wrong.

The privileged arrogance of Pachauri parallels the privileged arrogance of the IPCC. Pachauri’s sleaze is now being exposed. The IPCC sleaze was revealed with Climategate. And glaciergate and global-ice-gate and global-warming-hiatus-gate and Kilimanjaro-gate. But with so many people in the IPCC the sleaze was spread thin. And we hear now that much of the supposed “global warming” is due to the use of “adjusted” temperatures to cool the past! The sleaze increases. Now even climate itself is denying the global warming /climate change creed.

pachauri grapples mail today http://epaper.mailtoday.in/443860/mt/Mail-Today-February-21-2015#page/2/1

pachauri grapples mail today

I remain hopeful that wallowing in the IPCC sleaze will eventually reach a critical level and become unacceptable. The Mail Today carries details of the “creepy” nature of Pachauri’s harassment. He sounds like a love-sick teenager.

(I met him a few times back in 2000 when we were considering engaging TERI for a project. Partly because of the lack of impact he had, we engaged another party).

FirstPost:

The Daily Mail (Mail Today), has published a detailed report on the interaction between Pachauri and 29-year-old research associate who has sued him for sexual harassment. The several text messages and emails exchanged suggest that Pachauri was relentless in his pursuit of the woman, and had on one occasion embraced her and even tried to kiss her.

When the woman ticked him off saying that such behaviour would not be entertained, he played a miffed teenager complaining that an act spurred by ‘love’ has been misunderstood by the victim as a case of sexual misdemeanour.

“Please you are not to grab me and or kiss me,” the complainant told Pachauri in a text.

To which Pachauri replied, “I wish you would see the difference between something tender and something tender and loving and something crass and vulgar. So I shall slink away and withdraw.” 

It’s a bit of a horrifying image, but you can almost picture Pachauri pouting and crying ‘not fair’.

In another email Pachauri says, “I find it now very difficult to hug you. What haunts me are your words from the last time that I ‘grabbed’ your body. That would apply to someone who would want to molest you. I loved you in the soul, mind, heart…”

While you might be shocked at the audacity of a man, who has been asked to back off by a woman for sexual misbehaviour, Pachauri’s defence will probably strike a chord with many in India.

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Fossil fuel use still growing and will provide over 80% of global energy in 2035

February 20, 2015

The BP Energy Outlook for 2035 is out.

  • In absolute terms total energy usage will grow 37%.
  • Two-thirds of the increase in demand is met by fossil fuels. Roughly one-third of the increase in energy demand is provided by gas, another third by oil and coal together, and the final third by non-fossil fuels.
  • In 2035 fossil fuels will still provide 81% of the world’s energy (down from 86% in 2013).

It is fortunate that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are of little significance for global warming since man-made carbon dioxide emissions will increase by over 50% in the next 20 years. But it is unfortunate that the global warming/extreme climate lobby will continue to waste precious resources in attacking something quite irrelevant. So far a massive increase in emissions has caused no global warming for over 18 years. perhaps the fanaticism will decline after another 20 years (probably when the current crop of “climate scientists” have retired).

BP Energy Outlook 2035

BP Energy Outlook 2035

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Net global warming?

February 19, 2015

Climate is the integral of local weather across space and time. This is only weather of course as the bitter cold sweeps across the eastern US.

The coldest outbreak of the season is pushing south into the eastern United States this week. Temperatures will be running as low as 30 to 40 degrees below normal across the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic on Friday morning. Thursday night’s departure from normal temperatures is shown above in Celsius. tropicaltidbits.com via Washington Post

 

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Predatory owls cause alarm in Oregon

February 14, 2015

Bush’s Pasture Park, Salem, Oregon

Warning for predatory owls - Bush's Pasture park, Salem Oregon

Warning for predatory owls – Bush’s Pasture park, Salem Oregon

 

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Solar Cycle 24 passes maximum? Low sunspot numbers and climate cooling indicated for next two cycles

February 11, 2015

It is not completely certain but it does look like Solar Cycle 24 has just passed its maximum. The maximum was initially expected to be reached in late 2012 and gradually drifted to late 2013. Now it would seem that this may not have occurred till late 2014.  While the minima at the beginnings of SC 23 and 24 seem to have been c. 12 years apart, the maxima are closer to 14 years apart.

SC24 2015 January From NASA Hathaway

SC24 2015 January From NASA Hathaway

The length of Solar Cycles is thought to be linked to the solar activity to be expected in the following 2 cycles. Periods much longer than the average of 11.2 years seem to lead to decreased subsequent activity, lower sunspot numbers and also lower global temperatures.

Solheim et al predicted lower sunspot activity and cooler times during SC 24. Now it would seem this will also be the prevailing paradigm through SC25 and perhaps even SC26. Another two decades of reduced sunspot activity and a global cooling carried by the ocean cycles would seem to be on the cards.

Abstract

Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend is found between the length of a cycle and the average temperature in the same cycle, but a significant negative trend is found between the length of a cycle and the temperature in the next cycle. This provides a tool to predict an average temperature decrease of at least 1.0ºC from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 for the stations and areas analyzed. We find for the Norwegian local stations investigated that 25–56% of the temperature increase the last 150 years may be attributed to the Sun. For 3 North Atlantic stations we get 63–72% solar contribution. This points to the Atlantic currents as reinforcing a solar signal.

They write:

The length of a solar cycle is determined as the time from the appearance of the first spot in a cycle at high solar latitude, to the disappearance of the last spot in the same cycle near the solar equator. However, before the last spot in a cycle disappears, the first spot in the next cycle appears at high latitude, and there is normally a two years overlap. The time of the minimum is defined as the central time of overlap between the two cycles (Waldmeier, 1939), and the length of a cycle can be measured between successive minima or maxima. A recent description of how the time of minimum is calculated is given by NGDC (2011): “When observations permit, a date selected as either a cycle minimum or maximum is based in part on an average of the times extremes are reached in the monthly mean sunspot number, in the smoothed monthly mean sunspot number, and in the monthly mean number of spot groups alone. Two more measures are used at time of sunspot minimum: the number of spotless days and the frequency of occurrence of old and new cycle spot groups.”

It was for a long time thought that the appearance of a solar cycle was a random event, which means that each cycle length and amplitude were independent of the previous. However, Dicke (1978) showed that an internal chronometer has to exist inside the Sun, which after a number of short cycles, reset the cycle length so the average length of 11.2 years is kept. Richards et al. (2009) analyzed the length of cycles 1610–2000 using median trace analyses of the cycle lengths and power spectrum analyses of the O–C residuals of the dates of sunspot maxima and minima. They identified a period of 188±38 years. They also found a correspondence between long cycles and minima of number of spots. Their study suggests that the length of sunspot cycles should increase gradually over the next ~75 years. accompanied by a gradual decrease in the number of sunspots.

An autocorrelation study by Solanki et al. (2002) showed that the length of a solar cycle is a good predictor for the maximum sunspot number in the next cycle, in the sense that short cycles predict high Rmax  and long cycles predict small Rmax. They explain this with the solar dynamo having a memory of the previous cycle’s length.

Assuming a relation between the sunspot number and global temperature, the secular periodic change of SCL may then correlate with the global temperature, and as long as we are on the ascending (or descending) branches of the 188 year period, we may predict a warmer (or cooler) climate.

It was also demonstrated (Friis-Christensen and Lassen, 1992, Hoyt and Schatten, 1993 and Lassen and Friis-Christensen, 1995) that the correlation between SCL and climate probably has been in operation for centuries. A statistical study of 69 tree rings sets, covering more than 594 years, and SCL demonstrated that wider tree-rings (better growth conditions) were associated with shorter sunspot cycles (Zhou and Butler, 1998).

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