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Category: Science (Page 13 of 17)

Since Our Car Manufacturers Are Doing So Well

May 22, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has declared his intention to follow Barack Obama’s plan to impose strict limits on CO2 emissions from motor vehicles. This will increase costs, and cost jobs.

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a vital part of the cycle of life. Plants need it. There is no evidence that human produced CO2 has ever had any affect on climate.

In other words, imposing limits on vehicle CO2 emissions is pointless, popularist posturing. Damaging, pointless posturing.

And incidentally, remember all those claims that US cars couldn’t be sold in China because their emissions were too high?

China Daily reports: “Obama’s automobile emission deal enhances the difficulty for Chinese auto manufacturers to export their vehicles to the US market, a highly-matured market Chinese players are dreaming of, as it’s even harder for Chinese vehicles to meet the new and stricter emission requirements,” said Zhong Shi, an independent auto analyst.

Page After Page Of Vitriol

May 22, 2009 / / 0 Comments

On Tim Lambert’s Deltoid blog, all about what’s wrong, or might be wrong, with Ian Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth.

Some of the critics seem not to have read the book at all. Most attack Professor Plimer personally – he’s an idiot, why would you bother with him, just read the science.

Many resort to the consensus argument – I don’t need to look through that stupid telescope, all the scientists say the Sun goes round the Earth.

Some pick on what may be errors in footnotes or minor arguments. You get claims like ‘I found two mistakes on two pages, so statistical analysis proves there’s a mistake on every page. And besides, it hasn’t sold as many copies as Andrew Bolt says it has. So there.’

You can almost imagine Mr Lambert poking his tongue out at the screen.

In any book of this length and complexity there are going to be mistakes. But none of the critics deal with the key issue of whether there is any correlation between human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases and changes in global climate.

Where they venture into climate science at all, their criticisms are quickly trounced.

Perhaps Mr Lambert and his chums could do with a brush-up on both courtesy and integrity in debate.

The desperation is telling.

Dolphins Are Nasty

May 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Be sure to pass this one on to your ‘dolphins are our water-siblings’ loony friends.

Dolphins are violent predators, pack rapists and baby-killers.

The sites linked in that article are worth visiting too.

My favourite was Mystical Dolphin Love. We are related to dolphins. And a new breed of humans is evolving who have psychic links to dolphins. Children with disabilities can recover if they swim with dolphins. And this is why the writer loves water and feels she might be part fish. Even though if she were a fish, dolphins would probably chase her and chomp her to bits.

I bet she believes in global warming too.

Worthwhile Comment On The Budget, But…

May 16, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Paul Kelly makes some typically clear and concise remarks about the budget, and the options now open to both Labor and Liberal leaders.

Budget details often obscure the bigger picture, but Australia is heading into a serious downturn followed by a grim recovery. Swan’s budget shows a $77 billion turnaround for next year leading to a $58 billion deficit and projects government debt to peak at $188 billion by 2012-13 compared with the $96 billion debt that John Howard inherited in 1996 and took a decade to eliminate. ..

Malcolm Turnbull sounded effective when he put the brand of “higher debt, higher unemployment and higher deficits” on Labor, and asked: “How many years, how many decades will it take us to pay off hundreds of billions of dollars of Rudd Labor debt?”

But Kelly loses the plot completely when it comes to how he believes the Liberals should respond to Rudd’s beyond crazy Emission Trading Scheme and other climate control measures.

The Liberals need to retreat from their madness in threatening to block the carbon emission scheme bills, a manifest act of political suicide. This will become the decisive test of Turnbull’s leadership; he must carry the party on this path towards responsibility based on a recognition that the true interests of the Liberal Party are a full-term parliament with an election on the economy at the end.

Kelly’s concern is that blocking the ETS scheme could be used to justify a double dissolution. This would mean an early election, one Kelly believes the Liberals could not win, in part because Labor would then paint them as a bunch of ignorant climate change sceptics.

If the Liberals were able to block the ETS, Labor might indeed use this as an excuse for a double dissolution. They would certainly then paint the Liberals as a bunch of ignorant climate sceptics.

But blocking the ETS is the right thing to do. The scheme has no basis in science.

It tries to stop human induced global warming. Global warming stopped ten years ago. There was never any evidence whatever that the modest rise in average temperature of less than one degree over the last 100 years was any other than entirely natural.

The ETS tries to stop this imaginary bogeyman at an appalling cost to industry and energy production, and consequently to the well-being of every Australian.

Kelly is right about this: it is a decisive test of Turnbull’s leadership. Will he do what is right, and do everything he can to stop the most damaging legislation ever introduced into Australian parliament?  Or will he take the easy way, and go with the flow?

I fear it could be the latter. But if Turnbull does take a stand on this, I doubt very much it will be the political suicide Kelly suggests. More and more well known scientists are publicly saying they believe global warming is junk science, and more and more of the public agree with them.

Give voters real information about the fraud of global warming ‘science,’ and the costs of the ETS and other nonsensical schemes, and this could be one time when doing the right thing is rewarded at the ballot box.

Your iPod Is Melting My Snow

May 14, 2009 / / 0 Comments

In many rich countries electricity use by appliances which had previously accounted for most usage – white goods such as refrigerators and clothes washers – is falling.

But the growth in use of electronic devices such as iPods, games consoles, TVs and computers has more than offset those falls.

Keep those iPods blasting, I say. Keep that CO2 pumping.  Cover the Arctic with soot.

No, seriously.

For 90% of the last million years, the Earth has been in an ice age. The last ice age started instantaneously about 114,000 years ago, and lasted till about 12,000 years ago. We are due for another one. Now.

Politicians are falling over themselves trying to stop a minor and natural warming, which has stopped anyway and amounted to less than one degree over the last century.

If they had any regard for science and history, they would be preparing us for inevitable, and far more dire for health and production, catastrophic cooling.

Global Warming – The Science Is Settled

May 11, 2009 / / 0 Comments

It really might be so – just not the way Al Gore thinks.

 Via Jennifer Marohasy.

Measurements show that global atmospheric temperature has been static or cooling for the last ten years, despite increasing levels of CO2.

According to anthropogenic (human caused) warming theory, increasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases means increasing heat retention in the atmosphere. So how can the world be getting cooler when CO2 levels are increasing?

In 2005 James Hansen, global warming guru, along with a number of other NASA scientists, proposed that the oceans formed a reservoir for heat, and that ocean temperatures would continue to increase, even in the face of temporary (as they thought) blips in average global atmospheric temperature.

“Confirmation of the planetary energy imbalance,” they maintained, “can be obtained by measuring the heat content of the ocean, which must be the principal reservoir for excess energy”

Put simply, increasing CO2 and other greenhouse gases meant more heat was being retained. If that extra heat could not be found in the atmosphere, it must be being stored somewhere else. The only other place it could be stored was in the oceans.

So even when atmospheric temperature appeared to fluctuate in the short term (and they were confident any leveling or declines could only be short-term), ocean temperatures would continue to rise.

If this was not so, global warming theory was false.

The following graph shows predicted ocean temperatures if global warming theory is correct, compared with observed ocean temperatures.

Predicted vs Observed Changes in Ocean Temperature

Predicted vs Observed Changes in Ocean Temperature

 If the oceans have not warmed despite increases in levels of atmospheric CO2, then additional CO2 is not causing any additional heat retention.

If additional CO2 is not causing additional heat retention, global warming theory is false.

The oceans are not warming. Global warming theory is false.

DDT – From De Facto Ban To Real Ban

May 10, 2009 / / 0 Comments

And more people, possibly millions, will die as a result.

Every 30 seconds someone dies from Malaria. The same number as were killed in the 9/11 attacks every day and a half.

Most of these deaths – millions over the last 30 years – could have been avoided, and Malaria largely eradicated, through consistent and careful spraying with DDT, along with other protective measures.

At the UN’s  Stockholm Convention in 2001, 12 chemicals were banned, including DDT. The convention declaration permitted limited use of DDT for Malaria control.

DDT has actually been banned in a number of countries including the US, since the early seventies. A de facto ban has effectively been enforced in developing countries since then because foreign aid, including food and medical aid has been provisional on the non-use of DDT.

Some environmental activists and others have claimed that no ban, de facto or otherwise, ever existed. JF Beck has answered some of those claims.

There has never been any recorded case of DDT causing harm to any person, and no evidence that it causes any harm to anything other than insects.

Despite efforts to find alternatives, there is nothing as fast and as effective in controling malarial parasite carrying mosquitoes as DDT.

Spokesmen for Greenpeace and the World Wildife Fund have agreed that where there are no alternatives, DDT should be used.

But now another UN conference of over 150 nations has agreed that DDT must be phased out over the next few years, despite the fact that there are no effective alternatives to the use of DDT.

The UN and the World Health Organisation have lost the plot, with one commentator claiming the worst emerging disease threat facing the world is incompetent and obstructive WHO bureaucrats:

UN agencies’ virtual ban on DDT for mosquito control and their stultifying regulation of agricultural biotechnology are lamentable examples. The result is a more precarious, more dangerous and less resilient world. Why is there such relentless incompetence within the sprawling organization?

For more information, I recommend Paul Driessen’s book Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death which catalogues in detail the hunger, sickness and death which are the frequent result in developing countries of ill-informed western environmental activism.

Or see this earlier post for another book recommendation on a similar subject.

Experts: We Have No Idea If This Could Happen

May 9, 2009 / / 0 Comments

And it has never happened before. But hey, you know, anything’s possible. So just be scared, OK?

A ‘top flu expert’ is warning of the dangers of a mutant swine/bird flu – one that is as infectious as swine flu (that is, about as infectious as any other flu) and as deadly as bird flu.

Bird flu is pretty deadly – mortality rates of up to 60% in the elderly or those in poor health. But only those already in poor health or with compromised immune systems seem susceptible. And there has never been a recorded case of human to human transmission of bird flu.

But who knows, swine flu and bird flu could get together and end up being a super flu with the worst characteristics of both. It is possible. Just. Viruses change and develop all the time.

But is it so likely that we should be worried about it and spend lots of money on it?  Definitely not. Especially not when the death toll from TB and Malaria are so high, and we could quite easily do something about those right now.

After all, leprosy and TB could get together, or bubonic plague and tooth decay. But we aren’t panicking about them. Yet.

Even MSN Says Swine Flu Warnings Overdone

May 8, 2009 / / 0 Comments

A longish article with lots of quotes from poeple saying the Swine Flu alarms were a perfect example of authorities crying wolf.

Many blame such alarms and the breathless media coverage for creating an overreaction that disrupted many people’s lives.

Coming from the breathless to the point of asphyxiation MSNBC that’s…   interesting.

The so-far mild swine flu outbreak has many people saying all the talk about a devastating global epidemic was just fearmongering hype. But that’s not how public health officials see it, calling complacency the thing that keeps them up at night.

Yes but when you are constantly screeching about dangers that don’t materialise, why would you expect people to be anything other than complacent?

Frogs Misunderestimated

May 7, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Up to 221 new species of amphibian have been discovered after a survey of Madagascan forests. Some interesting photos at that link to National Geographic.

The work suggests that tropical amphibian diversity has been underestimated at an “unprecedented level” worldwide, the study authors write in the May 4 online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It is pretty clear we have no idea how many species there are. Lots more than we thought a few years ago. Somewhere between 2 million and 100 million. Maybe.

But if we have no idea how many species there are, how come scientists are falling over themselves predicting the sixth great extinction event?

They are able to point to very few species they know for certain have become extinct recently. The rates of extinction actually observed seem to be about the same as they have been for the last couple of thousand years.

But the threat of mass extinction ‘is not overestimated,’ says Bob Scholes, an ecologist at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. ‘There is much uncertainty about how many species will be lost, and where and when, but it is clear that the world is entering a period of species loss that is dramatic and unprecedented in human history.’

OK. So we have no idea how many species there are, we have  no idea how many extinctions have actually occurred, we have no idea how many species are facing extinction or where or when.

But whatever is happening it’s bad and it’s our fault.

Ecologists say the world needs an equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change so the global scientific community can inform policymakers about the implications on biodiversity loss and actions that can be taken to limit it. They note that biodiversity loss is more complex than issues such as the ozone hole or climate change, and that existing bodies such as the CBD (the UN Convention on Biological Diversity) lack the means to mobilise scientific expertise across a broad range of disciplines.

Oh right. Well that may not save any species, but it will certainly provide some ecologists with ample job security.

Solar Panel Subsidies

May 7, 2009 / / 2 Comments

The Kangaroo Island Council has decided it will take responsiblity for local management of a government subsidised scheme to install solar panels on the roofs of homes.

Even with proposed government subsidies, the installation of solar panels will not be a cost-effective option for most householders.

It is easy to be wowed by power production figures which talk vaguely about ‘up to 5kw per day.’

The ‘up to’ is the problem. Rather than being swayed by marketing material which talks about potential, it is better to consider real world results in Australian situations.

Experience in Queensland suggests a six panel solar system will generate an average of not five, but two kilowatts per day.

Let’s do some maths. And let’s be generous, since we all know that Kangaroo Island is sunnier than Queensland (not), and say the actual average power production will be 2.5kw.

If you now pay 25c per kw for electricity, this means the power your solar panels generate will save you 50c per day. This adds up to $182.50 per year.

At that rate it will take nearly fifteen years to repay the $2650 cost of installation.

But that doesn’t take into account the cost of that money in interest lost if the money had been invested, or paid if the money was borrowed.

For example, at the moment Australian personal loan rates vary from about 12% to about 15%. Let’s say that you are able access a discount loan at a 10% rate to buy your solar panels. You would be paying $265 a year in interest (not counting any other fees).

This means that, far from saving money and paying for itself over time, your solar installation would cost you $265 -$185 = $80 per year more than you are paying now.

In a study completed in 2008, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors found that in most circumstances it would take over 100 years of undiminished supply from domestic solar panels to repay the cost of installation.

For example, even with hyper-inflated prices paid by the government for power fed back into the grid, some Queensland families have calculated they are saving about $13 per month on an investment of close to $30,000. This means the repayment time, not including any interest/finance cost, is over 300 years.

The life of a solar panel installation is about 25 years.

Some people, of course, may be willing to pay extra for their power in the belief that they are doing something to help the environment.

But even this is questionable. A NSW government study found that solar panels were amongst the least efficient methods of reducing power consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The cost of CO2 abated through the use of domestic solar panels is approximately $400 per ton. This compares with the current international trade price of $26 per ton abated.

Most home owners will save more money and do more for the environment by simply ensuring their homes are adequately insulated, and that they turn off lights and appliances when not in use.

Science A Political Tool

May 7, 2009 / / 1 Comment

John McLean has some interesting comments on the politics of climate change in an article in yesterday’s Australian.

THE notion that human activity has an alarming influence on climate is based on Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and spurious claims about a scientific consensus.

Independent scientists who question these claims are accused of being in the pay of the energy industry and of believing that the notion of man-made climate change is a conspiracy.

To the best of my knowledge, no climate conspiracy has ever existed. But another force has driven science into its present parlous state where the output of computer software is held in higher regard than observational data, where marketing spin is more important than fact and evidence, and where a trenchant defence of the notion of man-made global warming is seen as paramount.

The key phrase is this: the output of computer software is held in higher regard than observational data.

I know I have said this dozens of times before, but what is actually happening in the world does not even remotely bear out the predictions of the climate alarmists. There has been no increase in the rate of sea level rise, there is no correlation between human activity and global climate change, and the world is not getting warmer.

The only thing that says otherwise is already thoroughly discredited computer models. Thoroughly discredited because they cannot predict past climate change from earlier data, and have failed to yield any predictions about current climate that matches real world observations.

More articles from John McLean.

Homophobia And Heterophobia

May 6, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Some interesting observations here on healing, hope, and homosexuality.

The article is not long, and is worth reading in its entirety. This is an excerpt:

I saw a genuine love and acceptance of men and women who were struggling to move away from behaviors they themselves viewed as destructive and dangerous, possibly deadly. They were choosing it, freely and voluntarily.

Psychiatrist and physicist Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, a world authority on homosexuality, a man who describes himself as a skeptic about religion, says that the scientific evidence all points to the possibility of change. For over 35 years, his profession has believed the lie that homosexuals form a “class” whose boundaries are defined by a stable “trait”. It is not true, he says.

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, whose new ground -breaking book, “Shame and Attachment Loss: The Practical Work of Reparative Therapy”, says homosexual change is both possible and advisable. His book shows that initially conceptualizing homosexual attraction as a striving “to repair gender deficits,” has moved to the realization as a striving “to repair deep self-deficits” and as a “defense against trauma to the core self.”

Writes Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, after he attended a Leanne Payne conference, “I met a large number of people who had left the lifestyle and changed their sexuality. There I met hundreds of people struggling with that issue, and many who had successfully emerged on the other side and were married with children. As I got to know them, I found them to be quite remarkable. The struggle to be healed had left an indelible imprint. I saw a humility, an empathy and a fearlessness about life. They knew exactly what it meant to stand up for what they believed in, since the struggle to become who they truly were had exacted such a cost in suffering. Since then I have met plenty of people who have moved away from same sex attractions.”

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