Fossil fuel combustion at an all time high (but global warming is absent)

June 18, 2014

The BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014 is now out and the consumption of all fossil fuels has never been higher. Coal and gas consumption are particularly strong. And – even though many are in a state of denial about it – global warming has come to a stop over the last 18 years. In the last 10 years global temperatures show a slight downward trend.

There seems to be no purpose to the demonisation of fossil fuels other than for pandering to the religion of global warming. Consider the last 25 years. (I use 1988 as a reference point not only because 25 years should be enough to see some trends but also because the BP data is readily available from that date). During this 25 year period gas consumption has increased by over 80%, coal consumption by 0ver 70% and oil consumption by over 30%. The increased global coal burn since about 1999 is particularly striking. In the same 25 year period the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere has increased from about 355 ppm(v/v) to about 395 ppm(v/v) – a rise of about 11%. And global temperatures have not increased at all for almost 2 decades.

Climate policy is policy without any objectives and without any means of checking any achievements. What exactly could we achieve by not using fossil fuels?

There is not a single climate policy proposed by the IPCC or by any government in the world  which has a definable and measurable climate benefit.

25 years of fossil fuel consumption

25 years of fossil fuel consumption

The global warming hiatus now extends to at least 18 years.

Global warming has gone missing

  • The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 213 months from August 1996 to April 2014. That is more than half the entire 423-month satellite record.
  • The fastest centennial warming rate was in Central England from 1663-1762, at 0.9 Cº per century – before the industrial revolution began. It cannot have been our fault.
  • The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.8 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.

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Posted in Alarmism, Climate, Coal, Energy, Gas, Oil | 1 Comment »

Science needs some scienticians

June 18, 2014

Physic gave rise to physicians long before physics was practiced by a physicist,

Mathematics gives mathematicians, but who would trust a mathematist. 

A practitioner of an “ology” has an honourable profession,

So biologists, oncologists, archaeologists and geologists can be numbered by the million. 

Without the richness of an “ist” modern politics would be barren,

A politicist has a murky trade but he is not a politician. 

We have leftists and rightists and socialists and you can even find some libertarians,

But for all the mayhem in the world, you will not find any extremians.

Environmentalists and conservationists are politically very fashionable,

But their devious methods have now become – rather questionable. 

Philosophy was where it started but we rarely refer to philosophists,

And many of the scientists of today are little more than sophists. 

It was only in 1840 that scientists were one of Whewell’s inventions,

But they are now two-a-penny, and we could do with a few scienticians.

It should be quite clear that I think that there are far too many who claim to be scientists though they do no science. It then becomes useful to distinguish the real scienticians from the rabble. And perhaps the same could apply to the real economians among the multitude of clerks who call themselves economists.

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Is Hilary Clinton a secret neocon?

June 17, 2014

Robert Kagan, the American historian and political analyst would normally be considered a neocon though he prefers the term “liberal interventionist”. He sees the current events in Iraq as an opportunity for the interventionists. Hilary Clinton’s expected foreign policy is something neocons are quite comfortable with. Jason Horowitz writes in the New York Times:

…… He (Kagan) called for Mr. Obama to resist a popular pull toward making the United States a nation without larger responsibilities, and to reassume the more muscular approach to the world out of vogue in Washington since the war in Iraq drained the country of its appetite for intervention. ……. Mr. Kagan, 55, prefers the term “liberal interventionist” to the neoconservative label, but believes the latter no longer has the stigma it did in the early days of the Obama presidency. ….. 

But Exhibit A for what Robert Kagan describes as his “mainstream” view of American force is his relationship with former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who remains the vessel into which many interventionists are pouring their hopes. Mr. Kagan pointed out that he had recently attended a dinner of foreign-policy experts at which Mrs. Clinton was the guest of honor, and that he had served on her bipartisan group of foreign-policy heavy hitters at the State Department, where his wife worked as her spokeswoman.

“I feel comfortable with her on foreign policy,” Mr. Kagan said, adding that the next step after Mr. Obama’s more realist approach “could theoretically be whatever Hillary brings to the table” if elected president. “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue,” he added, “it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.”

Hilary Clinton has not yet confirmed that she will run for President in 2015 but being seen as a secret neocon will not be helpful – especially if the current mess in Iraq (and in Syria) will still be bloody chaos at the end of 2015. She must already contend with Benghazi being part of her baggage.

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US, Iran and Syria are now “allies” against ISIS

June 17, 2014

image: global security

ISIS now controls Tal Afar in northwestern Iraq near Mosul and Saqlawiya west of Baghdad. Fighting is reported in Fallujah, Baqubah and Samarra and within 50km of Baghdad.

But strange bedfellows are emerging.

Iran was once Evil Incarnate and the US was the Great Satan. But the “enemy of my enemy” can lead to once unthinkable alliances.

The US is talking about some form of military cooperation / coordination with Iran while Syrian planes have attacked ISIS convoys within Iraq.

Fox News: The Iranian government, which the White House is now looking to as a possible partner to help counter the insurgency threatening to split Iraq, was cited just months ago by the Obama administration’s own State Department as a prime instigator in that country. Counterterrorism officials warned about Iran’s meddling in Iraq as part of its report on state sponsors of terrorism. 

….. Further complicating the situation, senior U.S. Defense officials confirmed to Fox News that Syrian war planes struck two separate convoys belonging to the insurgent Islamic State of Iraq and Syria on Saturday. 

According to sources familiar with the incident, the Syrian planes struck with the help of Iranian intelligence. There is no bomb damage assessment from the attack, but it is the first time there have been reports of Syrian warplanes having crossed into Iraq since ISIS fighters swept across Iraq beginning a week ago. 

The strike raises the prospect of the United States, Iran and Syria all battling the same enemy in Iraq. ….. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., ….. likened it to the U.S. aligning with Stalin during World War II, because he “was not as bad as Hitler.” 

In Iraq the government is banning access to social media like Facebook and Twitter which have apparently been very successfully used by ISIS in their little “blitzkrieg” last week and in posting horrific videos of their massacre of captured government soldiers.

Meanwhile the US has sent 275 military personnel to Baghdad to protect US interests.

And will the US come to support Assad against the Saudi supported rebel groups in Syria?

 

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100 days to Mars for ISRO’s Mangalyaan

June 16, 2014

Four days ago

  • The second Trajectory Correction Manoeuvre (TCM-2) of India’s Mars Orbiter Spacecraft was successfully performed on June 11, 2014 at 1630 hrs IST. TCM-2 was performed by firing the spacecraft’s 22 Newton thrusters for a duration of 16 seconds.
  • At present, the radio distance between the Spacecraft and the Earth is 102 million km. A radio signal from the Earth to the Spacecraft now takes about 340 seconds. The spacecraft so far has traveled a distance of 466 million km as part of its total Journey of 680 million km.
  • ISRO is continuously monitoring Mars Orbiter Spacecraft using Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN). The spacecraft and its five scientific instruments are in good health.

And 100 days from today on 24th September, ISRO’s “frugally engineered“  Mars Orbiter Mission (called Mangalyaan meaning Mars craft) should be inserted into Mars orbit. The highly over-rated movie “Gravity” had a larger budget at $100 million than ISRO’s $75 million for its Mars mission.

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Obama is now waiting to be rescued by Iran

June 16, 2014

A week ago only Middle East experts knew much about ISIS. And in less than a week the possible break up of Iraq has becomes more than just a distant reality and is now a “work in progress”. Republicans are blaming Obama for the failure of reaching an agreement with al Maliki and the premature withdrawal of troop. Democrats blame Bush Jr. and Cheney and the neo-cons for duping the US and the world in justifying the 2003 invasion. And they are – of course – both right. The initial invasion “broke”Iraq but Obama is the one who has refused to fix it or even to provide the glue with which to fix it.

Over the weekend the mayhem continued in Iraq as the blood-letting by ISIS plunges to new depths.

Twenty three years after the First Gulf war, George Bush Sr. has returned – reincarnated as an aircraft carrier. In an unusual burst of activity President Obama sent the US navy to the Gulf as NBC reports – “The USS George H.W. Bush — accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea and the guided-missile destroyer USS Truxtun — was ordered to the Persian Gulf Saturday to protect American lives and interests in the region.” The ships arrived on Sunday. The size of the fleet makes one suspect the preparation of an evacuation of Baghdad (shades of Saigon!) rather than any significant military opposition to ISIS. Some staff are already being evacuated from the US Embassy.

President Obama continues to contemplate his dwindling options. Tony Blair is still living in his own deluded fantasies. Blair jets around as a Middle East Peace envoy and is now calling for more bombings and more bloodshed to try and defend his own blood-drenched legacy. But Obama may get help from an unlikely source:

Al Jazeera: Iran’s president held out the prospect of working with the U.S. in a bid to stabilize strife-torn Iraq on Saturday, but denied reports that troops had already been sent across the border to bolster its failing neighbor’s counter-insurgency efforts.

Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatist who is presiding over a nascent thaw in Iran’s relations with the West, said if Washington was willing to confront “terrorist groups in Iraq and elsewhere,” then Tehran would contemplate cooperating with its traditional foe over Iraq.

Echoing comments made by President Barack Obama on Friday, Rouhani added that Tehran was unlikely to send forces to Iraq but stood ready to provide help within the framework of international law. Baghdad has not as yet requested such assistance, he added.

The BBC reports that the US and Iran may hold talks about possible cooperation later this week. And this gives Obama the perfect excuse to continue with his “do-nothing” policy as he waits to be rescued by Iran.

BBC: Washington is considering direct talks with Iran on the security situation in Iraq, a US official has told the BBC. The move comes as US President Barack Obama weighs up options on action to take in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the US condemned as “horrifying” photos posted online by Sunni militants that appear to show fighters massacring Iraqi soldiers. In the scenes, the soldiers are shown being led away and lying in trenches before and after their “execution”.

But this mending of fences between the US and Iran will not go down very well in Israel. Netanyahu will now be under pressure from his hawks to carry out pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the rapprochement goes too far.

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Posted in Iran, Iraq, Middle East, US | 1 Comment »

Toilets before temples – lack of toilets stunts growth in India

June 15, 2014

I tend to take anything coming out of the UN with a very healthy dose of salt. As long as it is separated from policy, not all information from the UN is worthless. Such as this report from UNICEF India from November 2013. Lack of sanitation exemplified by the lack of toilets and open defecation is strongly correlated with stunted growth of children. If Narendra Modi can make good his promise of “toilets before temples”, he will have done very well indeed. To get past the innate conservatism of rural India and get toilets to take a higher priority than the mushrooming (pun intended) shrines and temples is easier said than done.

Of the 1.1 billion people globally who defecate in the open, nearly 60 percent live in India, which means they make up more than half of the population of India. Around 55% of all households in India have no access to a toilet or even a latrine. (But 63% of all households have telephones.) Children in India are shorter, on average, than children in Africa who are poorer, on average and this paradox is called “the Asian enigma”.

UNICEF Report: Madhya Pradesh is also home to some of the most undernourished children in India with 58 per cent of under three’s suffering from malnutrition (compared with 45 per cent nationally). 50 per cent of children under-five also suffer from stunting, an indicator of long-term persistent malnutrition, associated with a child’s low height relative to its age. Stunting is also associated with an under-developed brain and low IQ.

The effects of stunting are said to result in a 10 per cent decrease in future income over the lifetime of stunted adults – with tragic implications for child survival, growth and development, seriously impeding India’s development. The implications for stunted mothers giving birth to stunted children are very real. 

Economists have long debated the ‘Asian Enigma’ of why Indians are more stunted – shorter in height – compared to relatively poorer children in Sub Saharan Africa for example. Now, new research has shown a correlation between long-term under-nutrition with its resultant stunted children in India, and the lack of access to toilets and hygiene. Provide children with the right nutrition at the right time, and ensure an environment free of excreta, and there will be no Asian Enigma.

“The height of Indians is not simply about genetics or down to poverty – there is a strong correlation to the poor sanitation environment many live in. India’s lack of sanitation with its high population density, stunts its children through both the loss of food, and the reduced absorption of nutrients,” says Dean Spears, of the Delhi School for Economics.

Dean Spears, How much international variation in child height can sanitation explain ?, World Bank Policy Research working paper ; no. WPS 6351, May 2013.

PDF (55 pages)

Summary: Physical height is an important economic variable reflecting health and human capital. Puzzlingly, however, differences in average height across developing countries are not well explained by differences in wealth. In particular, children in India are shorter, on average, than children in Africa who are poorer, on average, a paradox called “the Asian enigma” which has received much attention from economists. This paper provides the first documentation of a quantitatively important gradient between child height and sanitation that can statistically explain a large fraction of international height differences. This association between sanitation and human capital is robustly stable, even after accounting for other heterogeneity, such as in GDP. The author applies three complementary empirical strategies to identify the association between sanitation and child height: country-level regressions across 140 country-years in 65 developing countries; within-country analysis of differences over time within Indian districts; and econometric decomposition of the India-Africa height differences in child-level data. Open defecation, which is exceptionally widespread in India, can account for much or all of the excess stunting in India.

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Noted in passing on the ides of June

June 15, 2014

15th June 2014.

Five hours time difference to Brazil makes for very late nights and little time for blogging.

Poor little rich Tony Blair. He is desperately trying to defend his part in the Iraq invasion of 2003. With his gold tinted glasses his view of the world reveals that the present problems in Iraq are due to the world not following his advice on Syria. In any event – he protests – he did not cause the Iraq crisis.

I don’t usually expect the Huffington Post to print anything that even faintly deviates from “political correctness” but this opinion piece by John Tirman on how do-gooders do more harm than good comes as a breath of fresh air. “The human-rights lobby has been at the center of the Arab Spring fiasco, egging on the rebels and feeding the media narrative of despicable despots that needed deposing. .. The same thing happened in Afghanistan 13 years ago, when prominent feminists argued for war to liberate Afghan women. ….. war for human rights is increasingly being exposed as an oxymoron.”

Cambodian orphanages have provided new business opportunities and are more brothels than orphanages. Cambodia’s most famous activist, Somaly Mam, who has been feted indiscriminately in the US has proved to be a fraud. But she has made enough money to keep her quite comfortable for the rest of her days.

Another “politically correct” do-gooder which has been hijacked by the loony left since 1991 is Greenpeace. In India they are being asked to justify their foreign funding as “the ministry of home affairs served a show cause notice to the international NGO on Friday asking why its permission to get foreign funding under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010 (FCRA) should not be withdrawn”.

Humans separated from chimpanzees about 6 – 8 million years ago. But the chimpanzees of today are not the chimpanzees we diverged from. “The offspring of chimpanzees inherit 90% of new mutations from their father, and just 10% from their mother, a finding which demonstrates how mutation differs between humans and our closest living relatives, and emphasises the importance of father’s age on evolution.”

Unsettled science. Neither the Carbon cycle nor the water cycle on earth are as well understood as some would like to claim. There is more evidence that vast amounts of water are locked up in rocks in the depths of the earth’s mantle. And we have not the slightest inkling of how water is exchanged between the surface and the deep mantle by volcanos and earthquakes.

The sun is the only significant source for our energy (with nuclear reactions in the earth’s interior – even if they are ongoing – paling into insignificance). It is not fashionable to say so but the sun, through the oceans, controls our climate and carbon dioxide has no significant role to play. A new paper gives further evidence of the link between the oceans and the climate.

Last Friday was not only the 13th of June but in Sweden, with a full moon also present, was considered particularly unlucky – apparently. It will not happen again till 13th August 2049. The top 9 Swedish superstitions.

Sepp Blatter (who never played football) is turning to attack as the best form of defence over the Qatar 2022 World Cup curruption scandal. He – and his underlings – are trying to muddy the waters and flailing around looking for scapegoats. So they have banned Beckenbauer for 90 days!! Time for Blatter to step down and for Qatar to be stripped of the World Cup.

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Where Iraq goes today, Afghanistan will go tomorrow

June 14, 2014

History will come to see the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq as an Axis of Evil.

The developments in Iraq are clearly showing the way for what is going to happen in Afghanistan. Barack Obama’s risk aversion and his desperation to disentangle the US from the quagmire that Bush led them into, is increasingly looking like an abdication. If the Bush-Blair objectives for the sexed-up invasion of Iraq were

  • to redefine the country,
  • to help create a new Kurdistan,
  • to permit Sunni extremists to establish an own state – Sunnistan,
  • permit an Iran backed Shia state to be Iran’s buffer against the Sunni and
  • to get hundreds of thousands of people killed (including many thousands of US and allied troops,
  • to create a precedent and a vision for Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia

then the entire adventure has been a spectacular success with the final phases being completed by Barack Obama. If the purpose was to combat modern terrorism then it has been an abject failure. In fact Bush and Blair and Obama have done more to increase terrorism than any rabid Mullah could have.

The Ralph Peters imagined map of a better Middle East in his book “Never Quit the Fight“ of 2006 is looking increasingly prescient and real.

Turkey better get used to the idea loosing a chunk of Eastern Turkey to an integrated Kurdistan. Iran will be reshaped and Pakistan will have to accept a new state of a Free Baluchistan in the west. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will splinter into many pieces.

Ralph-Peters-Remapped-Middle-East

Ralph-Peters-Remapped-Middle-East

As Ralph Peters wrote in his Blood Borders article for the Armed Forces Journal:

A just alignment in the region would leave Iraq’s three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn. The Shia south of old Iraq would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian Gulf. Jordan would retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan.

A root cause of the broad stagnation in the Muslim world is the Saudi royal family’s treatment of Mecca and Medina as their fiefdom. With Islam’s holiest shrines under the police-state control of one of the world’s most bigoted and oppressive regimes — a regime that commands vast, unearned oil wealth — the Saudis have been able to project their Wahhabi vision of a disciplinarian, intolerant faith far beyond their borders. The rise of the Saudis to wealth and, consequently, influence has been the worst thing to happen to the Muslim world as a whole since the time of the Prophet, and the worst thing to happen to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the Mongol) conquest. ……

…….. True justice — which we might not like — would also give Saudi Arabia’s coastal oil fields to the Shia Arabs who populate that subregion, while a southeastern quadrant would go to Yemen. Confined to a rump Saudi Homelands Independent Territory around Riyadh, the House of Saud would be capable of far less mischief toward Islam and the world.

Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat in today’s Afghanistan — a region with a historical and linguistic affinity for Persia. Iran would, in effect, become an ethnic Persian state again, with the most difficult question being whether or not it should keep the port of Bandar Abbas or surrender it to the Arab Shia State.

What Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the west, it would gain in the east, as Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren (the point of this exercise is not to draw maps as we would like them but as local populations would prefer them). Pakistan, another unnatural state, would also lose its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining “natural” Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi.

The abdication of Barack Obama ensures that all the lives lost in Iraq will have been in vain. And that Afghanistan will go the way of Iraq.The Middle East is going to keep the world on tenterhooks for the next 50 years at least.

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Posted in Afghanistan, Behaviour, Iraq, Middle East | 1 Comment »

Are all spammers watching the World Cup? or why the Spanish team are like potato plants

June 14, 2014

I usually check my spam folder once a day every morning. Once in a while I find something there which isn’t spam. I have enrolled for a number of subscriptions but where my interest in the subject waxes and wanes. Sometimes, therefore, I delete a number of consecutive  mails and the spam filter picks that up and starts putting these into spam. But retrieving such mail seems to be sufficient to reset the filter to again accept them. I typically get around 50 – 60 spam messages a day and about half of them are in Chinese. Many are of course for Viagara. Most of the Indian spam is for real estate deals. Always 5 – 10 messages regarding some “Register/Query from the home page”  with weird, female, Eastern-Europe- sounding, sender’s names (clearly generated by a very poor program).

But the number of spam messages have been sharply down yesterday and today. This morning there were only 3. It is Saturday morning so it could be the weekend effect. But my working hypothesis is that even the spammers are watching the World Cup matches. And they were all watching yesterday’s Spain – Netherlands match .

In the first half the Spanish flattered to deceive. But in the second half it was just abject surrender. The Spanish team, like the potato plants of the old Spanish saying, were basking in past glories and forgot they were playing a match.

“A man who prides himself on his ancestry is like the potato plant, the best part of which is underground”

Netherlands 5   –  Spain -1!!

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