The Economist displays a lack of perspective in much of its commentary, so here’s a quick glance at all 4½ billion years of Earth’s history of temperature and the atmospheric trace gas carbon dioxide. Temperature and CO2 levels are now very low, and they’re not linked. Lesson 1: Current modest increases won’t hurt us. Lesson 2: The temperature isn’t controlled by CO2. Is that simple enough? Click for larger version.

First sins of emission, now earth-moving

Here’s an amazing story from the Economist of 26 May. Why is it amazing? Three reasons. It casually and thoughtlessly swallows the IPCC global warming myth. Then it becomes an unquestioning advocate for that fatally tarnished, scientifically indefensible, “moral” crusade. Finally, for an extra spiciness I have never seen, it conflates our invisible sins of emission with the newborn sin of (may God protect us) earth-moving, to present a hideous picture of our terrestrial depravity.

Earth-moving? Yes, that’s right. Terrible, isn’t it? Of all the wicked things we do! Read more… »

Consumer groups want end to EU bulb ban

Compact fluorescent light bulb. Big in the environment for a year or two, but now it appears to be a big mistake in the environment. Mercury vapour, of all things, perhaps the most demonised of environmental hazards; after asbestos. Forcing a dangerous product on consumers before adequate testing – what were you thinking, Greenpeace? You should hang your organisational head in shame.

From Germany comes confirmation of the danger of compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Official tests show the new compact fluorescent lamps to be dangerous if broken.

The energy saving bulbs show mercury levels 20 times higher than regulations allow in the air surrounding them for up to five hours after they are broken, according to tests released on Thursday by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA).

“If the industry can’t manage to offer safe bulbs, then the incandescent bulbs must remain on the market until autumn of 2011,” said Gerd Billen, the leader of the Federation of German Consumer Organisations (VZVB).

His group encouraged the federal government to push for a suspension of the ban in Brussels until there was a safe and practical alternative.

“It can’t be that the state bans a safe product and replaces it with a dangerous one,” Billen said. read more…

They’re expensive, slow to deliver the promised illumination, can make a buzzing noise and frequently fail well before the claimed seven to 20-year lifetime. Which ruins their claims of saving anything.

No effect on climate

Concerns have been expressed before that they’re unsafe, but now we have confirmation from nothing less than a German environmental organisation.

Why were we persuaded to use them? Because they save energy. So what, you ask? Less energy use means less global warming – did you know that?

It will have no effect on the climate, but that really is the only reason to put these expensive, dangerous light bulbs into our homes.

I hope our politicians get some sense into their heads and don’t ban the incandescent versions until we have adequate LED replacements or make the fluorescent ones truly, honestly safe.

Is that too much to ask?

A giant wind turbine in northern Germany — one of the world’s largest. However, the bigger they are, the more power generation you must replace when the wind fails to turn them. This is caused not only by a lack of wind: the strongest winds are useless. Because the turbines are destroyed operating in winds over about 45–80 mph (70–130 kph), the brakes go on or the blades furl themselves automatically. Free energy? There’s no such thing. These megoliths are expensive to build and maintain and they are ruinous when idle. But their Achilles heel is, without doubt, their inability to supply a community of any importance (is yours important?) without power cuts. They need backup generation available at a moment’s notice 24 hours a day, every day of the year, for when the wind fails to blow or blows too hard. Expensive is hardly an adequate word for this! You pay for two power stations but get the electricity from only one. Nandor Tanczos, pot-smoking ex-Green MP, said insensitively last Monday that the “real destruction” from coal mining is “the deaths it causes outside the mines” (though he provides no evidence for us to believe it). What is the Green Party’s answer to the incompetence of wind power to prevent those deaths?

This account is the more arresting for being written by a man clearly well-informed about and sensitive towards environmental considerations. If even he is questioning the wisdom — financial and environmental — of wind turbines, we should take notice. It is also instructive that this is the experience of the largest and strongest economy in Europe; if they cannot solve the problems even with their enormous resources in both research and manufacturing, then New Zealand cannot. You’ll read below how German consumers are grossly overcharged for the generation AND DISTRIBUTION of electricity — surely the only financial reason these behemoths can survive. If you want energy now, don’t rely on wind generation. I’ve said before that the only sensible use for wind power is for digging a big hole you don’t need yet.
- Richard Treadgold

A new dark age for Germany?

published at CFACT Europe December 1, 2010 – h/t Roger Dewhurst

by Edgar L. Gaertner

Offshore wind power projects pave the way to frequent blackouts

This is an adopted article.

Thousands of bureaucrats are preparing for another cushy climate confab in Cancun — while U.S. Senators Bignaman, Brownback and Reid are contemplating how to ram renewable energy standards through a lame-duck session of Congress. If they’re wise, American voters and congressmen will pay extra careful attention to the awful dilemma of German climate and energy policy, as exemplified by recent events, and make sure their country doesn’t make the same “green” mistakes Germany did. Read more… »

 

pinna: cartilaginous outer ear; also called the auricle.

The Herald last Friday reported a Greenpeace protest in Auckland which barricaded the entrance to a building used by Fonterra. The activists sparked a bomb scare by chaining a package to an elevator car. The package contained a speaker system. The police complain that because they were not advised of its contents they had to treat it as suspicious and staff were kept out of the building for about an hour. Greenpeace claim they did in fact tell the police what was in the package before the protest.

What was the protest about? Palm kernel oil, rain forests, the orangutan and climate change. It was aimed at Fonterra, our best and biggest exporter and a company that feeds more people than you could imagine. Therefore undeniably a company of untrammelled wickedness. Read more… »

So, it’s official: the possibility of a replacement being hammered out for the Kyoto Treaty now appears remote.

It will be “physically impossible” to have a detailed deal to tackle climate change by this December’s summit in Copenhagen, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said on Wednesday in Bonn.

The “four tough nuts”, as he termed them, were proving extremely difficult to crack because, he said, the “delivery on four political essentials”, on which success in Copenhagen would depend, was turning out to be “impossible”. Read more… »

Written for TOOL Magazine, August 2008

Once upon a time, street-corner zealots shouting “the end is nigh” and warning us to abandon our sins did it for religious reasons. These days, zealots shout the same message with the same warning about sinning, but they do it for climatic reasons. Read more… »