Archive for the ‘Environment’ Category
April 4, 2012
The environmental and conservation movements lost their way when they moved to imposing their vision of the world onto others by fashioning people rather than fashioning a world to suit the needs of people. They started – in a formal sense – perhaps 60 – 70 years ago with the best of motives but became heavily politicised through the 80’s and since then have been more concerned about moulding people to fit their world view rather than serving the needs of human development. The environment – in some idealised and pristine form – even without man has been priorotised instead of being the surroundings to meet the needs of humans. Biodiversity has been made into a false god and human development has been condemned as a demon. Alarmism has been used as the vehicle for imposing change.
An article in Breakthrough Journal is causing a few waves. This essay is full of “common sense” but what makes it noteworthy is that its authors – Peter Kareiva, Robert Lalasz and Michelle Marvier – are all senior figures in The Nature Conservancy. Common sense from the environmental and conservations “movements” has been sadly absent in recent times.The essay is posted at the Breakthrough Journal and the Journal’s publicity states:
“By its own measures, conservation is failing. Biodiversity on Earth continues its rapid decline. We continue to lose forests in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There are so few wild tigers and apes that they will be lost forever if current trends continue. Simply put, we are losing many more special places and species than we’re saving.”
So begins a searing indictment by the unlikeliest of sources: Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest conservation organization. …. Conservationists need to work with development, not condemn it as leading to the end of nature. In truth, nature’s resilience has been overlooked, its fragility “grossly overstated.” Areas blasted by nuclear radiation are bio-diverse. Forest cover is rising in the Northern Hemisphere even as it declines globally. ….
And it’s time to stop prioritizing being alone over being with others.
The essay itself is well worth reading and selected extracts are reproduced below:
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Tags:Anthropocene, Biodiversity, Conservation movement, Environmentalism, Nature Conservancy, Peter Kareiva
Posted in Alarmism, Biodiversity, Conservation, Development, Environment | Comments Off on Conservation movement’s focus is anachronistic and counterproductive – Peter Kareiva, Chief Scientist of the The Nature Conservancy.
March 9, 2012
Karoo, South Africa: image Wikipedia
The Karoo is a semi-desert natural region of South Africa with two main sub-regions – the Great Karoo in the north and the Little Karoo in the south. The region is known to contain shale-gas deposits some 4,000m below the surface but the extent of the deposits have yet to be fully investigated.
Now Econometrix has published a new report on the potential for growth that Karoo shale gas could provide. The report is supported by Shell who are planning to explore the deposits. A pdf version of the report is available from Shell here: Karoo Shale Gas Report – February 2012
To put quantitities in perspective the 485 trillion cubic feet of gas (14 trillion cubic metres) thought to be in the Karoo compares with 25 trillion cubic metres in China and about 13 trillion cubic metres in the US. (The Age of Gas: China has enough shale gas for 200 years).
IOL, South Africa reports:
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Tags:Karoo, Natural gas, Royal Dutch Shell, Shale gas, shale gas reserves, South Africa
Posted in Business, Energy, Environment, South Africa | Comments Off on South Africa could join the shale gas band-wagon
March 7, 2012
“Green” is also the colour of slime.
Subsidies are fundamentally corrupting.
Instead of promoting the commercialisation of a nascent technology (whether for later job creation or for pursuing policy goals), they lead more often than not to companies just maximising the subsidies they can get. And very often the vast amounts taken from tax money end up in the pockets of opportunistic individuals. It is no great secret that the “green” label has provided the path for the extraction (or is it extortion) of subsidies by developers and companies who have never had any intention other than maximising what could be extracted.
ABC News (here and here) lists a number of cases in the US where subsidies have been extracted, huge bonuses paid and then bankruptcy filings prevents any possibility of getting any recourse to the beneficiaries. They point out that “the Energy Department explicitly allows for federal funds to be used to pay out executive bonuses.” The “subsidy” industry is of course already well established in Europe with exorbitant “feed in tariffs”, carbon trading certificates and grants to solar and wind developers.
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Tags:Abound Solar, Beacon Power, bonuses from subsidies, Chapter 11 filing, corruption, Ener1, Green subsidies, Solyndra
Posted in Business, Corruption, Environment, Ethics | Comments Off on “Green” is also the colour of slime – when companies take their subsidies, pay their bonuses and then go bankrupt..
February 27, 2012
Thai show elephants
The Thai Government relies heavily on the $2 billion tourist industry which in turn uses elephants as a focus for attracting tourists. But most of these “show” elephants (estimated to be 100- 200 per year) are captured as young calves by poachers who kill their mothers when trying to protect their calves. But the Thai Government which makes all the politically correct noises about protecting elephants is reluctant to disturb the poachers and the tourist industry. So when poachers are threatened the Thai Government (ironically through its National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department) rushes to their defence.
The Age: A partly Australian-funded wildlife rescue foundation whose chief spoke out about the illegal poaching of baby elephants in Thailand has been raided and had 103 animals taken away by Thai parks officials. … witnesses say many of the animals, including endangered species, were injured during the raids on the Wildlife Friends Foundation Thailand centre by up to 100 armed men, some of whom wore balaclavas to hide their identities.
The raids over four days followed claims by the organisation’s founder and director, Edwin Wiek, that more than half the elephants in tourist camps across Thailand had been illegally caught in the wild when they were young, sometimes by poachers who shot their mothers or other members of their herd that tried to protect them. …….
Thailand’s National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation Department said the animals were seized because the foundation failed to produce paperwork showing they were being kept legally. “We need to enforce Thai laws that have been issued to protect those animals,” said the department’s director-general, Damrong Pidech.
Ironically many of the animals seized were originally rescued from government centres and will now find themselves back in these centres.
Tags:elephant poaching, Poaching, Thailand, Tourism
Posted in Business, Corruption, Environment, Thailand | Comments Off on Thai Government rushes in to protect elephant poachers
February 21, 2012
The key requirement for the method of science is scepticism.
The scientific method is to make falsifiable hypotheses and then to check the hypothesis by gathering the evidence to check the falsifiability.
The IPCC and the Global Warming Orthodoxy have been making alarmist predictions for the last 20 years and their hypothesis comes in three parts:
- That global warming is occurring and will continue for at least the next 100 years
- That human activities are the primary cause of the global warming being observed, and
- That man-made emission of carbon-dioxide is the most significant human activity driving climate change.
In the last 20+ years, comparing actual observations show that each one of these 3 parts of this global warming hypothesis is – at best – oversimplified and – at worst – just plain wrong. “Wrong” in the sense that the causality proposed does not exist and that the mechanisms proposed for the causality are incorrect or non-existent. The IPCC predictions are being proved wrong and it is time to ditch the hypothesis.
IPCC predictions falsify global warming hypothesis
The 27th January article in the Wall Street Journal “No Need to Panic about Global Warming” by a number of scientists displaying true scientific scepticism was immediately criticised by members of the Orthodoxy. The original authors now reply to these criticisms in the WSJ:
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Tags:Alarmism, Falsifiable hyptheses, global warming, IPCC, Scientific misconduct, Wall Street Journal
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Environment, Science | Comments Off on When IPCC model predictions are wrong it is time to ditch the hypothesis
November 17, 2011
Most subsidies for the introduction of uneconomic technologies are in an effort to make them commercially viable. But after 30+ years in the power generation industry I have yet to see a case where this has happened. Instead, subsidies have nearly always been counter-productive. In virtually every case I have seen, subsidies have always been used first to maintain margins rather than to reduce costs. If costs are not reduced then the “indirect” costs for every taxpayer which a subsidy represents eventually end up becoming direct costs for the consumer when the subsidies end.
This is happening to an increasing extent with solar and wind power as subsidies are reduced or withdrawn in the current financial crisis. The costs have then to be borne directly by the consumers and it is not surprising that virtually all countries which have introduced wind power to any extent have seen electricity prices to the consumer increase.
Now it is the turn of the Dutch government to reduce subsidies and pass on the costs directly to consumers.
Reuters reports:
Dutch fall out of love with windmills
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Tags:Electricity generation, Netherlands, off-shore wind power, Subsidy, wind power
Posted in Business, Energy, Environment, Renewable Energy | Comments Off on Now Holland cannot afford to subsidise off-shore wind power
November 15, 2011
There are some simple and rather obvious matters that the “green” lobbies prefer to ignore.
- In spite of twenty years of subsidies wind power is still not commercially viable without subsidy. Solar thermal power plants enjoy feed in tariffs some 3 times higher than the cost of conventional fossil power generation. Wherever renewables have been used to any extent, electricity prices for the consumer have increased.
- Intermittent sources of power (which cease when the wind does not blow, or blows too hard or when the sun does not shine at night or when clouds appear) are – by definition – unreliable. They do not add to the reliable, base-load, generating capacity that any electricity grid requires and must be backed up. In Scotland for example – as Professor Colin McInnes points out – wind power capacity now exceeds nuclear capacity but only produces about one-third of the energy.
- Electricity is energy in motion and cannot be stored as electricity. For any electrical grid, at any instant, generation must, perforce, equal demand – and pumped storage schemes are merely devices to try and ensure such balance. Since the outages of wind and solar power are unpredictable (though it is generally predictable that solar power will not be available at night), and cannot be relied on to meet load demand fluctuations, “balancing power” (usually from gas turbines) must be arranged for whenever wind or solar capacity is added.
- In addition to the direct subsidies, whenever wind or solar power is available at times when there is low load, the subsidised regime forces the turning-down of other capacity – to the detriment of that capacity – and adds to the total cost of the grid.
Now – finally – some of the real numbers are beginning to be acknowledged but not, of course, by the green lobbies. KPMG has produced a new report
“Thinking about the Affordable” and
Power Engineering International reports that:
Tags:Business, Energy, grid balancing, KPMG, rnewable power, Scotland, wind power
Posted in Business, Energy, Environment, Renewable Energy | 3 Comments »
October 21, 2011
The origin of language was once a forbidden subject and in 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject – because it was considered too speculative to be a matter for serious people! But I find the question fascinating. When and how language developed remains a mystery. But with communication and language being such a clear measure of the distinction between humans and other primates, it seems obvious that there must be some genetic basis for this difference.
The “Language Gene” Turns Ten
Ten years ago this month, a team of University of Oxford scientists published a description of a family who struggled with words. By comparing their DNA, the scientists zeroed in for the first time on a gene associated with language, dubbed FOXP2.
Genetic evidence suggests that the basis of language appeared among hominids prior to the evolutionary split that gave rise to Homo neanderthalensis. Having the genetic wherewithal for having language does not of course prove that hominids had language 400,000 years ago. But I would suggest that the need for a particular characteristic (whether for survival or merely for coping better with the prevailing environment) itself predisposes for those factors which enable the correct expression of the relevant genes to enhance the characteristic. And this leads to the role that epigenetics and the inheritance of factors controlling gene expression – rather than mutations of the genome – may have had in the development of language.
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Tags:communication needs and language development, FOXP2, Gene, Human, Neanderthal, Origin of language
Posted in Environment, Evolution, Language | 1 Comment »
August 25, 2011
Even making allowance for the fact that it is August when “silly season” stories come to the fore, this nonsense does not bring much credit to the authors, Columbia University, Nature or the sponsors of the “study” who include the U.S. EPA, the brother of George Soros and the Environmental Defense Fund. Gullible journalists who are short of copy and create headlines from this kind of junk science are plentiful.
Civil conflicts are associated with the global climate Solomon M. Hsiang, Kyle C. Meng & Mark A. Cane, Nature 476, 438–441 (25 August 2011) doi:10.1038/nature10311
pdf version here
The Guardian leads –
Climate cycles linked to civil war, analysis shows
Cyclical climatic changes double the risk of civil wars, with analysis showing that 50 of 250 conflicts between 1950 and 2004 were triggered by the El Niño cycle, according to scientists.
Researchers connected the climate phenomenon known as El Niño, which brings hot and dry conditions to tropical nations and cuts food production, to outbreaks of violence in countries from southern Sudan to Indonesia and Peru.
Solomon Hsiang, who led the research at Columbia University, New York, said: “We can speculate that a long-ago Egyptian dynasty was overthrown during a drought. This study shows a systematic pattern of global climate affecting conflict right now. We are still dependent on climate to a very large extent.”
JunkScience gives it short shrift:
Weather causes war, a new study claims. So should we limit CO2 emissions and give peace a chance? Make love not CO2?
The study published in this week’s Nature claims to correlate El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycles with wars around the world during 1950-2009. The study’s intended implication, then, is that if only we can stop climate change (i.e., limit CO2 emissions), peace will be at hand.
The study’s major problem, however, is that even if there is a statistical correlation (pardon the redundancy) between ENSO events and wars, the study authors failed to examine any of the actual socio-political circumstances surrounding the wars. To insinuate weather cycles as a cause of or contributor to war simply because they can be correlated is to mindlessly exalt numerology over socio-political reality.
Next ENSO cycles are real and result in actual weather phenomena. Extrapolating the actuality of ENSO to the dubious hypothesis of catastrophic manmade global warming, is yet another leap of faith. The goal of this research is to link CO2 emissions with national security. That is, we don’t just have to wish for world peace anymore; we can stop burning fossil fuels, cooling our homes, driving SUVs, eating meat, etc. It is merely a ploy to tug at the consciences of conservatives who, as a tribe, otherwise generally oppose Al Gore-ism.
Tags:climate, climate and conflict, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, global warming, Junk Science, Nature (journal), non-science
Posted in Climate, Environment, Media, Non-Science, Politics | 1 Comment »
August 24, 2011
Man-made carbon-dioxide emissions are of little significance in the global concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the effect of carbon dioxide concentration on global climate is of even less significance. In fact it is much more likely that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere follow global temperature rather than the other way around.
Nevertheless there are perceptions of fossil fuel fired power plants being terribly polluting and of being the dominant source of man-made emissions while hydro-power plants are perceived as being totally non-polluting. These perceptions are mainly based on pre-determined political positions and not necessarily on measurements or reality.
A new study from Brazil looking at the impact of hydro power plants and the Balbina dam has been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research. One caveat of course with many such studies is that it is not based on measurements but on some measurement followed by hypotheses built into computer models. Nothing wrong with that of course but the weakness with many model results – as with climate models – is that the results can neither be verified or dis-proved by measurements.
Kemenes, A., B. R. Forsberg, and J. M. Melack (2011), CO2 emissions from a tropical hydroelectric reservoir (Balbina, Brazil), J. Geophys. Res., 116, G03004, doi:10.1029/2010JG001465
Swedish Radio P1:
Electricity from hydropower can lead to several times the emissions of greenhouse gas emissions than produced from fossil fuels. At least from hydro-electric dams in the rain forest areas, according to a new study from Brazil.
The Balbina dam, which was built fifteen years ago, is located north of Amazonas state capital Manaus. When the rain forest area here was flooded large amounts of organic material ended up at the bottom of the pond. Rotting vegetation then caused large emissions of carbon dioxide and methane. According to this study this corresponded to three tonnes of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour of energy produced, which is almost ten times that of a coal-fired power plants, and just over half of the emissions from burning fossil fuels in the city of São Paulo.
A recently published study of 85 hydroelectric dams in the world shows that emissions vary between different ponds, depending on size, age and what kind of soil is soaked. How big emissions Swedish hydroelectric dams produce has not yet been studied, but estimates indicate that they are significantly lower than from those in tropical areas in Brazil says Professor Philip Fernside of Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA) in Manaus. “It is true that dams in tropical areas such as the Amazon produces more than ponds in temperate climate, but there are emissions in these areas also” says Philip Fernside.
A pdf version of the paper is here.
Tags:carbon dioxide, emissions from hydro plant, fossil fuel power plant, Hydro power plant, Journal of Geophysical Research
Posted in Brazil, Energy, Environment | 1 Comment »
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