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Yukon Cornelius
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Yukon Cornelius »

Nonc Hilaire wrote: Is ethanol really a bad concept?
...
I has to be, I can't figure how the thermodynamic inputs to outputs could possibly work. (compared to crude, and considering _all_ inputs, including soil depletion) It's not possible to put that much energy into production of the corn or sugar cane, only to end up with something that has to go through the same refining process. It's like looking at the sum total of what it takes to run/build/dispose a Toyota Pious: if you really wanted to save energy, you'd just buy a used car instead.

Like purely electric cars, it's a shell game that ignores the efficiencies of energy transformation. You end up trying to theoretically replace all the energy supplied by oil for American cars, with coal burnt in electric generation plants, and do it with a more inefficient process due to electrical power conversion and transmission losses. (Because electric cars are "green" -- I guess for no other reason than we wish they were.)
Simple Minded

Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... again.html

http://www.iceagenow.com

Wow! Looks like we overcorrected for our past AGW sins. lavender!!! I knew this was gonna happen!

Maybe a little less eye of newt and wing of bat next time??

Or maybe they were right back in the late 1970s when they tried to scare us about the "coming Ice Age!"

OMG!!! Somebody's gotta do something!!!!

Wait... calm down..... we should be able to combat the upcoming global cooling simply by lighting off those giant Earth farts that are coming

Whew... calmer heads have prevailed.... always pays to have a plan....
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Typhoon
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Briggs | How to do statistics badly

A beautiful explanation of how an apparently simple plot has to be interpreted with care.
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Typhoon
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Image
The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and should not be construed as having any predictive value whatsoever.
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Azrael
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Azrael »

Yukon Cornelius wrote:
Nonc Hilaire wrote: Is ethanol really a bad concept?
...
I has to be, I can't figure how the thermodynamic inputs to outputs could possibly work. (compared to crude, and considering _all_ inputs, including soil depletion) It's not possible to put that much energy into production of the corn or sugar cane, only to end up with something that has to go through the same refining process. It's like looking at the sum total of what it takes to run/build/dispose a Toyota Pious: if you really wanted to save energy, you'd just buy a used car instead.
Or buy a new Prius and hang on to it for 200,000+ miles.
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planctom
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The Anthropogenic Global freezing

Post by planctom »

Poor Europeans,more than 400 killed by global warming in the last weeks.
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Typhoon
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global freezing

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planctom wrote:Poor Europeans,more than 400 killed by global warming in the last weeks.
The experts have predicted a somewhat different scenario:

2000 | Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
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Antipatros
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Antipatros »

Menawhile much of Canada enjoys a very mild winter (contrary to the long term forecasts on the effects of La Nina) while heavy snowfalls in Japan make the news here almost daily.

aJFSaG7eLwo
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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4MQkxXPljMw
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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CounterPunch | Climate Science Goes Megalomaniacal
A February 6 report in the Guardian describes budding efforts to displace decarbonizing with geo-engineering as the goal for reducing the predicted catastrophic effects of global warming. At present, these efforts are being funded by mega-wealthy private citizens like Bill Gates, but some traditional environmentalists as well as some decarbonizers are becoming worried that climate theory is setting off in a new direction. Perhaps that is why the story appeared in the Guardian of all places. Instead of its usual uncritical climate gushiness, the Guardian delves into the smarmier side of climate science — its dependence on money.

Their dependence on money is a subject proponents of anthropogenic global warming avoid like the plague, even though they are wont to accuse anyone who disagrees with them as being in the pay of the fossil fuel companies. The Guardian report is important, because it inadvertently shines a light on how the intersection of money and groupthink among insular cohesive groups sharing a common interest is discrediting climate science in particular, but also science in general. (I am not introducing groupthink as a casual buzz word but in the context the distinguished psychologist Irving Janis used in his classic book Groupthink. Anyone who believes groupthink is not a problem in the insular self-righteous climate science community, should read the Hockey Stick Illusion or wade through just a few of the infamous emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.)
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Pielke | New Paper That Further Documents A Muted Atmospheric Water Vapor Trend – “Surface Water Vapor Pressure And Temperature Trends In North America during 1948-2010″ By Isaac and Van Wijngaarden 2012
The amplification of the radiative effect of the addition of CO2 and other human-emitted greenhouse gases into the atmosphere requires the addition of water vapor to the atmosphere which is assumed to occur primarily from warmer ocean surface temperatures (thus elevated evaporation). However, this increase of water vapor, at least in recent years is either not occurring or is very muted from the predictions made by the IPCC multi-decadal global model predictions.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Very strange behaviour . . .

Dot Earth | Peter Gleick Admits to Deception in Obtaining Heartland Climate Files
Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case.

Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself.
One has to wonder if Gleick the author of the now shown to be fake "smoking gun" document.

Stranger still, Gleick is the Chair of the AGU Task Force on Scientific Ethics
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

Typhoon wrote:Very strange behaviour . . .

Dot Earth | Peter Gleick Admits to Deception in Obtaining Heartland Climate Files
Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case.

Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself.
One has to wonder if Gleick the author of the now shown to be fake "smoking gun" document.

Stranger still, Gleick is the Chair of the AGU Task Force on Scientific Ethics
thanks typhoon! Since I lead a life that would make Mother Teresa feel like a sinner, I usually don't have much need of lawyers. But here is an excellent application.

Nations and industries should launch a massive class action lawsuit against this guy, Al Gorithm, most politicians and all the scientific lemmings/institutions who promoted AGW, say for....... $100,000,000,000,000..... use it to pay off debts.....

Most of the JAFFOs in DC are lawyers, what are they waiting for....
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Simple Minded wrote:
Typhoon wrote:Very strange behaviour . . .

Dot Earth | Peter Gleick Admits to Deception in Obtaining Heartland Climate Files
Peter H. Gleick, a water and climate analyst who has been studying aspects of global warming for more than two decades, in recent years became an aggressive critic of organizations and individuals casting doubt on the seriousness of greenhouse-driven climate change. He used blogs, congressional testimony, group letters and other means to make his case.

Now, Gleick has admitted to an act that leaves his reputation in ruins and threatens to undercut the cause he spent so much time pursuing. His summary, just published on his blog at Huffington Post, speaks for itself.
One has to wonder if Gleick the author of the now shown to be fake "smoking gun" document.

Stranger still, Gleick is the Chair of the AGU Task Force on Scientific Ethics
thanks typhoon! Since I lead a life that would make Mother Teresa feel like a sinner, I usually don't have much need of lawyers. But here is an excellent application.

Nations and industries should launch a massive class action lawsuit against this guy, Al Gorithm, most politicians and all the scientific lemmings/institutions who promoted AGW, say for....... $100,000,000,000,000..... use it to pay off debts.....

Most of the JAFFOs in DC are lawyers, what are they waiting for....
Stopa | What if they are wrong?

I doubt that any of the billions spent on grants attempting to prove [as opposed to test] the AGW hypotheses will be returned to the US, and other, taxpayers.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Antipatros »

Of course, all of this presupposes the truth of the warmist hysteria:

Bob Weber, Coal, not oilsands, the true climate change bad guy says study

http://www.globalnews.ca/canada/canada/ ... story.html
One of the world's top climate scientists has calculated that emissions from Alberta's oilsands are unlikely to make a big difference to global warming and that the real threat to the planet comes from burning coal.

"I was surprised by the results of our analysis," said Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria climate modeller, who has been a lead author on two reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "I thought it was larger than it was."

In a commentary published Sunday in the prestigious journal Nature, Weaver and colleague Neil Swart analyze how burning all global stocks of coal, oil and natural gas would affect temperatures. Their analysis breaks out unconventional gas, such as undersea methane hydrates and shale gas produced by fracking, as well as unconventional oil sources including the oilsands.

They found that if all the hydrocarbons in the oilsands were mined and consumed, the carbon dioxide released would raise global temperatures by about .36 degrees C. That's about half the total amount of warming over the last century.

When only commercially viable oilsands deposits are considered, the temperature increase is only .03 degrees C.

In contrast, the paper concludes that burning all the globe's vast coal deposits would create a 15-degree increase in temperature. Burning all the abundant natural gas would warm the planet by more than three degrees....
N.C. Swart and A.J. Weaver, Alberta oil-sands and climate: Warming from well-to-wheel emissions

http://climate.uvic.ca/people/nswart/or ... arming.pdf

1 Well-to-wheel emissions
[*] See calculations of bitumen carbon content (1.32 x 10^5gC / bbl bitumen) in the supplementary material of Swart and Weaver (online at Nature Climate Change).
[*] There is debate over theWTWfigures below. They WERE NOT part of the peer-review Nature Climate Change commentary
[/b]
In a ”wells to wheels” (WTW) approach, emissions incurred during extracting, refining and transporting of bitumen are added to the emissions associated with ultimate use in an internal combustion engine. Bitumen can either be extracted by surface mining (about 20% of the reserve is thought to be accessible this way) or a more energy intensive in-situ process (which applies to 80% of the reserve). For in situ extraction, the bitumen is heated and diluted underground before being pumped to the surface. We call the surface mining and upgrading path IS&UP, and the in situ and upgrading path IS&UP. After extraction, most bitumen is subsequently upgraded to form synthetic crude oil (SCO), and eventually primarily refined into gasoline and diesel. The majority of the additional energy invested for the extraction and upgrading processes is currently provided by natural gas. Part of the required energy may be supplied by heavier oil sands feedstock, and this may be increasingly true in the future as natural gas supplies become limiting....
The Alberta Oil Sands and Climate

http://climate.uvic.ca/people/nswart/Al ... imate.html
Key Points

• There are 1.8 trillion barrels of oil-in-place (OIP) in Alberta's oils sands; 170 billion of those are the 'economically viable proven reserve'.

• Burning the OIP would lead to a climate warming of 0.36°C (0.24-0.50°C, 5th-95th percentile).

•Burning the proven reserve would lead to a warming of 0.03°C (0.02-0.05).

• For global temperatures to remain below 2°C below pre-industrial levels, cumulative (over time) per capita carbon emissions must be less than 85 tonnes of carbon, based on todays global population.

•By utilizing the oil-sands proven reserves, Canadians and Americans would achieve a per-capita carbon footprint of 64 tonnes (read more about oil-sands emissions and 2°C warming).

• The global fossil-fuel resource base is enormous, and could easily yield over 2°C of warming, if exploited to meet growing global energy demands (particularly coal and unconventional gas).

•To keep warming below 2°C will require a rapid transition to non-emitting renewable energy sources, while avoiding commitments to infrastructure that supports fossil fuel dependence
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Atmosphere-Ocean is the official journal of CMOS, the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society. This is the sort of basic science needed to decide the existence or extent of global warming. As such, it should precede and inform policy decisions, not be trampled in the Kyotoist rush to proclaim that the sky is falling.

E. Milewska and W.D. Hogg, Continuity of Climatological Observations with Automation - Temperature and Precipitation Amounts from AWOS (Automated Weather Observing System)

ATMOSPHERE-OCEAN 40 (3) 2002, 333–359
ABSTRACT

Recent automation of meteorological observations affects homogeneity of the long-term climatological records, which are used to study climate change and variability. In order to avoid false conclusions regarding apparent climate trends, these records must be adjusted to account for biases caused by new instrumentation, computerized processing algorithms and relocation of the observing sites. This study of the effects of automation on two primary climatological elements, temperature and precipitation amounts, was conducted at five stations situated in various climatological regimes across Canada, where concurrent Automated Weather Observing System (AWOS) and manual observations were collected over the period of one year. The authors attempted to assess observations at higher temporal scales: average daytime and night-time temperature; daily maximum and minimum temperature; daily precipitation – in addition to the usual annual, seasonal or monthly precipitation. Individual hourly or daily observations of temperature were grouped according to meteorological conditions that either maximize or minimize instrumental and site differences, e.g., sky cover and wind speed. Similar electronic temperature sensors were used by both the observer and AWOS, which resulted in a rather small instrumental bias: AWOS reported temperatures that were warmer by up to 0.2°C. The siting bias, caused by AWOS typically being installed in the middle of an airfield, was often much more pronounced due to the greater radiative cooling: on average AWOS reported temperature minima that were colder by up to 1.3°C. Differences between gauges, especially in resolution and height of the orifice above the ground, were identified as the main source of observed biases. It was not possible to quantify the siting portion of the overall bias. Precipitation was categorized according to the amounts reported by AWOS. In the category of light daily amounts up to 5 mm d–1, no consistent reliable relationship between AWOS and the observer could be established, while in the moderate to heavy category of amounts higher than 5 mm d–1, AWOS underestimates precipitation by up to 13%. Cases, when either the observer or AWOS reported some precipitation, while the other reported null, were also examined in detail. Over time periods of one month or longer, undercatch by the AWOS automated weighing gauge, as compared to the Type B gauge for rain and the Nipher gauge for snow, is quite severe, on the order of tens of percentage points.

This study emphasizes that the availability of at least one or two years of concurrent conventional and automated observations is crucial to the development of adjustment factors, especially for observations of sub-diurnal resolution. With the growing demand for good quality sub- and diurnal resolution data for construction of scenarios of impacts of global climate change on humans and the environment, it is expected that more research on adjusting high temporal resolution data will be required and conducted in the future.
Full text.
Be not too curious of Good and Evil;
Seek not to count the future waves of Time;
But be ye satisfied that you have light
Enough to take your step and find your foothold.

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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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WUWT - Rawls | Omitted variable fraud: vast evidence for solar climate driver rates one oblique sentence in AR5
Guest post by Alec Rawls

“Expert review” of the IPCC First Order Draft of AR5 closed on the 10th. Here is the first paragraph of my submitted critique:

My training is in economics where we are very familiar with what statisticians call “the omitted variable problem” (or when it is intentional, “omitted variable fraud”). Whenever an explanatory variable is omitted from a statistical analysis, its explanatory power gets misattributed to any correlated variables that are included. This problem is manifest at the very highest level of AR5, and is built into each step of its analysis.

Like everyone else who participated in this review, I agreed not to cite, quote or distribute the draft. The IPCC also made a further request, which reviewers were not required to agree to, that we “not discuss the contents of the FOD in public fora such as blogs.”
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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Bit of a scandal brewing in the ongoing man made global warming [MMGW] wars:

Peter Gleick confesses

Apparently this full time activist and part time scientist, well known in the MMGW community, acquired some documents from the Heartland Insttute, a tiny think tank that supports questioning the science of MMGW, by misrepresenting who he was.

Not satisfied with the mundane nature of the fraudulently acquired documents, Gleick and/or an associate, forged a fake document claiming that it came from the Heartland Institute.

The irony is that, among other things, he did this while he was the Chair of the AGU [American Geophysical Union] Task Force on Ethics - now removed and an elected member of the US NAS [National Academy of Sciences].

A further irony is that Gleick has a history of histrionically lecturing others on the importance of ethics in science and accusing any scientist who questioned the MMGW dogma of unethical behaviour.

As one wag wryly observed, this is probably the greatest own goal in the history of the climate wars.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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MIT | Prof. Lindzen on MMGW

A very informative set of slides.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

Typhoon wrote:Bit of a scandal brewing in the ongoing man made global warming [MMGW] wars:

Peter Gleick confesses

Apparently this full time activist and part time scientist, well known in the MMGW community, acquired some documents from the Heartland Insttute, a tiny think tank that supports questioning the science of MMGW, by misrepresenting who he was.

Not satisfied with the mundane nature of the fraudulently acquired documents, Gleick and/or an associate, forged a fake document claiming that it came from the Heartland Institute.

The irony is that, among other things, he did this while he was the Chair of the AGU [American Geophysical Union] Task Force on Ethics - now removed and an elected member of the US NAS [National Academy of Sciences].

A further irony is that Gleick has a history of histrionically lecturing others on the importance of ethics in science and accusing any scientist who questioned the MMGW dogma of unethical behaviour.

As one wag wryly observed, this is probably the greatest own goal in the history of the climate wars.
This is a huge huge story, it seems as if the FBI has been called in...Dr.Gleick is in for a world of trouble.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

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NapLajoieonSteroids wrote:
Typhoon wrote:Bit of a scandal brewing in the ongoing man made global warming [MMGW] wars:

Peter Gleick confesses

Apparently this full time activist and part time scientist, well known in the MMGW community, acquired some documents from the Heartland Insttute, a tiny think tank that supports questioning the science of MMGW, by misrepresenting who he was.

Not satisfied with the mundane nature of the fraudulently acquired documents, Gleick and/or an associate, forged a fake document claiming that it came from the Heartland Institute.

The irony is that, among other things, he did this while he was the Chair of the AGU [American Geophysical Union] Task Force on Ethics - now removed and an elected member of the US NAS [National Academy of Sciences].

A further irony is that Gleick has a history of histrionically lecturing others on the importance of ethics in science and accusing any scientist who questioned the MMGW dogma of unethical behaviour.

As one wag wryly observed, this is probably the greatest own goal in the history of the climate wars.
This is a huge huge story, it seems as if the FBI has been called in...Dr.Gleick is in for a world of trouble.
What is most bemusing is the moral relativism of various global warming activists attempting to portray Gleick's laughably inept and probably criminal actions as somehow heroic.

Meanwhile, back in the real world

Climate Audit | Gleick and America’s Dumbest Criminals
The newest entrant into the hallowed ranks of America’s Dumbest Criminals is surely Peter Gleick, MacArthur Genius. Gleick, who fancied himself the scourge of climate skeptics and imagined that Heartland’s climate program was funded by fossil fuel corporations and the Koch brothers, had admitted that he managed to trick a Heartland administrator and obtain confidential financial information by fraudulently impersonating a Heartland director. But the actual documents didn’t show that Gleick was feared by Heartland. Nor was even he mentioned. Nor did the documents show that Heartland’s climate program was funded by fossil fuel corporations or the Koch brothers.
So Gleick appears to have forged a document placing himself as Heartland’s nemesis, garnering the recognition and praise from Andy Revkin and others that he apparently desired.

Image

The forged document read like an epistle from Dr Evil. (Megan McArdle of the Atlantic used the phrase “secret villain lair”). And like the famous scene where Dr Evil’s henchmen are dumbfounded by Dr Evil’s plan to extort a mere “milllll-yun” dollars for not destroying the world, one can picture the supposed Heartland henchmen in consternation at Dr Evil’s proposed Confidential Strategy against [long Dr Evil pause ....] Peter Gleiiiiiick. #2, #3 and the rest must have been scratching their heads. Not Al Gore. Not James Hansen. Not even the Climategaters. Peeeeeeeter Gleiiiiiiick.
And like Leno’s bank robber and the snowboarding Aussies, Gleick was identified almost immediately. Within hours of the so-called Confidential Strategy being announced as a fake, Steve Mosher identified Gleick as its author. In addition to Gleick being painted into the picture, parts of the document were written in Gleick’s own distinctive style – with distinctive word choices and punctuation. With the scan even saved in Pacific time zone.
Weekly Stand | Why the Climate Skeptics Are Winning
Too many of their opponents are intellectual thugs.
More than a few observers have asked why anyone should trust Gleick’s scientific judgment if his judgment about how to deal with climate skeptics is so bad. -Gleick’s defense of his motives would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic: “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts​—​often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated​—​to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

Let’s take these in order. Anony-mous? True, Heartland’s board documents reveal seven-figure contributions for their climate work from one “anonymous donor,” but environmental organizations take in many multiples of Heartland’s total budget in anonymous donations washed through the left-wing Tides Foundation. The Environmental Defense Fund thanks 141 anonymous donors in one recent report. “Well-funded”? Heartland’s total budget for all its issues, which include health care, education, and technology policy, is around $4.4 million, an amount that would disappear into a single line item in the budget for the Natural Resources Defense Council ($99 million in revenues in 2010). Last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, the World Wildlife Fund spent $68.5 million just on “public education.”

The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources​—​and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noire of the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do.

Finally, “coordinated”? Few public policy efforts have ever had the massive institutional and financial coordination that the climate change cause enjoys. That tiny Heartland, with but a single annual conference and a few phone-book-sized reports summarizing the skeptical case, can derange the climate campaign so thoroughly is an indicator of the weakness and thorough politicization of climate alarmism.
The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Simple Minded »

Typhoon,
Thanks for all your posts on this subject. AFAIK, no one on this forum is old enough to remember the Tulip Bulb Mania, but we can all tell our descendents about the Great Man Made Global Warming (and the Y2K) hysteria of the 1990s-2000s. MMGW has probably destroyed a greater share of existent wealth than did the Tulip bulb Mania.

It has amazed me for years how many people I know who I would otherwise consider intelligent and competant who bought into this hook, line, and sinker. Not surprisingly, they were all upper middle class, they possessed enough wealth to shield themselves from the "environment" quite well.

IMO, MMGW is one of the best examples of human herding in history. Infinite amount of data was available, everyone had incoming sensory data incoming, yet so many succumbed (either consciously or unconsciously) to peer pressure, believe the "experts," or succumbed to media pressure that those who actually thought for themselves were not part of the enlightened elite, Holocaust deniers or flat Earthers.

We will probably never know how much was orchestrated by the players to gain money/control, or if they were also unconsciously running with the herd.... how many of the scientists/climatologists were simply following the dictates of management, or in the face of intense pressure, simply doubted the data they had.....

http://classes.dma.ucla.edu/Fall07/9-1/ ... ltures.pdf

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/10/ ... neer/all/1
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

The Nonsense of Biofuels, Hartmut Michel, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2012, 51, 2–4
When the yields of biofuels per hectare
are known, one can easily calculate how
much of the energy of the sunlight is
stored in the biofuels. For German
“biodiesel” which is based on rapeseed,
it is less than 0.1%, for bioethanol less
than 0.2%, and for biogas around 0.3%.
However, these values even do not take
into account that more than 50% of the
energy stored in the biofuel had to be
invested in order to obtain the biomass
(for producing fertilizers and pesticides,
for ploughing the fields, for transport)
and the chemical conversion into the
respective biofuel. This energy normally
is derived from fossil fuels. The production
and use of biofuels therefore is not
CO2-neutral. In particular, the energy
input is very large for the production of
bioethanol from wheat or maize, and
some scientists doubt that there is a net
gain of energy. Certainly the reduction
of CO2 release is marginal. The yield of
second-generation biofuels where entire
plants are used may be doubled. However,
the energy input probably also
increases. For example, in the production
of biodiesel by the Fischer–Tropsch
process, hydrogen has to be added
because syngas obtained from biomass
contains insufficient amounts of hydrogen.
Taken together, the production of
biofuels constitutes an extremely inefficient
land use. This statement is true
also for the production of bioethanol
from sugar cane in Brazil.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Typhoon
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

Bishop Hill | Lying and deception can be justified, says climate change ethics expert

In other words, "If the cause is true and just, then any ends justify the means."

How familiar. Unfortunately.
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Re: The Anthropogenic Global Warming Controversy

Post by Typhoon »

Spiked | Greens, face it: we’re just not that into you
One of the endlessly recurring themes of the environmental narrative is – in the words of the man at the centre of the ‘Fakegate’ mess, water and climate researcher Peter Gleick – that an ‘anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated’ effort exists ‘to cast doubt on climate science’, and ‘muddy public understanding about climate science and policy’. According to this mythology, right-leaning think tanks are funded by big energy companies that are keen to protect their profits from environmental regulation.

There are two problems for environmentalists convinced by this mythology.

The first is that it has never been plausible. Large corporations do not suffer from regulation. They are simply able to pass costs on to the consumer. Moreover, regulation creates firm ground on which to base longer-term strategic decisions about capital investments. And finally, regulation creates opportunities for companies that are able to mobilise resources to enter new markets. Wind farms, for example, are not cottage industries. Regulation suits larger companies.

The second problem for environmentalists has been to demonstrate that the myth is anything more than a myth. An ongoing Greenpeace project launched in 2004, for instance, aimed to provide a ‘database of information on the corporate-funded anti-environmental movement’. However, the sums of money involved were paltry. According to Greenpeace, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the most vilified organisations, had received just $2million from Exxon between 1998 and 2005. Yet between 1994 and 2005, total donations to Greenpeace amounted to over $2 billion. According to the greens’ conspiratorial narrative, a handful of conservative think tanks with relatively small resources were seemingly able to undo the campaigning of a host of huge international environmental NGOs, national governments, international agencies, and yes, corporate interests, whose combined resources were many, many thousands of times greater.

The myth of the climate change denier exists in the heads of environmentalists, and seems to prevent them entering into conversation with anyone that dares to criticise environmentalism.
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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