Nature Conservancy to sell Adirondack land

ALBANY NY — The Nature Conservancy plans to sell 93,500 acres of Adirondack timberlands to a private company within the next few weeks and expects within 18 months to sell New York state most of the remaining 161,000 acres of former Finch, Pruyn forests it bought in 2007.

Conservancy officials say they are doing the title work for the sale to a logging company, which they declined to identify, subject to conservation easements that would prevent development and require logging according to certified “green” standards.

The sales are expected to open many of the tracts, including the southwest side of the Hudson River Gorge, to the public. The parcels touch 31 towns in six counties.

Hypocrites. Save the turtles. Save the Everglades. Cap and Trade. Save the whales. Save the trees. Um, except for when we need some money. Then sod ‘em all.

“ ‘green’ standards” my left foot. Yeah, as much green as the loggers can generate as fast as they can. They need some renewable growth in their bank accounts.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/29/2009 at 03:28 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Environment •  
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   Tuesday - January 27, 2009

Ivory tower MOONBAT Bull S.  Lets see how this might work in real life.

ok,
You call your doctor and say doc it hurts when I do this and he/she says, “so don’t do that.”

Right. All in the name of carbon something. The doc is gonna be able to take your blood pressure over the phone. He will be able to listen to your heart and lungs over the phone.

They still haven’t worked out the issue of mixed wards in hospitals but they’re gonna work out how to cut carbon emissions on doctor visits. Who-Ha. Such a deal.

Most doctors, it’s been my experience, will want to see you especially if you’re requesting medication.  They do not want to risk legal problems or law suits if someone gets sick because they weren’t seen by a doctor first.  In other cases sure, where the problem might be minor and the doc can answer a question on the phone, they might do so.  Really?  On what planet?  These ppl are generally so busy (our experience here) that even with an office visit you’re given 10 minutes with the doctor. How long will a phone wait be?  Are there really enough doctors to go around (who speak ENGLISH WELL)?

Screw environmental impact nonsense.  If a doc will give me sleeping pills or Vicodine (not available here in UK. probably because one person had a bad reaction to or abused the drug) without me having to be seen, that’s alright with me. I just get fed up with all the things the bureaucrats dream up in the name of .. GWEEN.

GPs should treat patients by phone to cut NHS carbon footprint, report says
Patients will be encouraged to stay at home and consult their doctor by phone instead of travelling to GPs’ surgeries under plans for a “greener” NHS.

By James Kirkup, Political Correspondent
Last Updated: 12:53AM GMT 27 Jan 2009

More telephone consultations and other “telemedicine” techniques are part of a package of proposals to cut the carbon emissions associated with the health service to be published on Tuesday.

The plans have been drawn up by the NHS Sustainable Development Unit, a team of doctors and managers charged with reducing the environmental impact of healthcare in England.

With more than 1 million employees, the NHS accounts for a quarter of all public sector emissions in England and 3.2 per cent of all carbon emissions.

According to the Carbon Reduction Strategy, the NHS accounts for 5 per cent of all road traffic in England and nearly a fifth of the service’s total “carbon footprint” is caused by the transport used by its staff and patients.

Wherever possible, the NHS should aim to ensure that people travel less, the strategy says.

“Every organisation should routinely and systematically review the need for staff, patients and visitors to travel; consistently monitor business mileage; provide incentives for low carbon transport; and promote care closer to home, telemedicine, and home working opportunities,” it says.

Telemedicine, the delivery of health services via systems including telephones and the internet, is a growing part of NHS work.

Telephone consultations were first proposed by the NHS Modernisation Agency in 2002 to cut the number of visitors to GPs’ surgeries, and have become a significant part of the health service’s work.

Many practices now offer only telephone services outside normal office hours. Some Primary Care Trusts, which are responsible for out-of-hours care, have contracted the service to commercial firms who only offer telephone coverage.

NHS Direct, set up in 1998, also offers a 24 hour a day medical advice line which at weekends and bank holidays often receives more than 30,000 calls a day.

Michael Summers, vice chairman of the Patients’ Association, raised concerns about the prospect of GPs conducting more consultations by phone.

“Telemedicine plays a part in modern medicine, but it also carries risks,” he said.

“It can be very difficult for doctors to make the right diagnosis on the phone and we know there have already been many mistakes, sometimes leading to serious consequences and even deaths, when doctors have misdiagnosed symptoms on the telephone during out-of-hours services.”

Stephen O’Brien, the Tory shadow health spokesman, said: “It is right that such technology should be available to patients and professionals, but it is typical of Labour’s nannystatism that they should even be considering forcing this on patients.”

The carbon strategy also suggests that some clinical equipment should be sterilised and reused instead of being discarded after a single use. Every NHS organisation should be “reviewing whether an item can be reused or recycled prior to ordering new items,” the document says.

Another long-term change would see surgeons and other consultants travelling to local GP surgeries to see patients there, removing the need for them to travel to central outpatient facilities.

The Department of Health said: “The clinical evidence and the wishes of patients both show that more people want care closer to home, reducing the need to travel to big acute hospitals. The strategy endorses this approach as clinically effective, as producing a better patient experience, and having the added benefit of reducing travel; reducing energy needs for hospitals and generally being more sustainable, it is a win-win situation.”

There is “no suggestion” that outpatient wards or any other part of the NHS will be closed purely because of sustainability issues, the department said.

Dr David Pencheon, director of the NHS Sustainable Development Unit, said it was right that the service changes its working practices to limit its environmental impact.

He said: “Carbon reduction is something that needs to extend to every part of the organisation. Everyone who works for the NHS should be thinking about reducing their carbon footprint as part of their day job.”

Dr Pencheon rejected a report that the strategy will mean hospitals removing meat from patients’ menus to cut down on “food miles.”

He said: “In line with best practice in sustainable sourcing, the Strategy calls for more use of seasonal food, more local food, and more use of sustainable and nutritionally valuable produce such as fish. Doing this, will of course, reduce the reliance on meat and other products but will not remove them from the menu.”

THE NHS

Posted by peiper     on 01/27/2009 at 12:21 PM   
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   Tuesday - January 06, 2009

There goes that evil Bush again

President Bush is to create the world’s largest marine protection area in a huge swath of the Pacific Ocean.

Mining and commercial fishing will be banned in an area measuring 195,000 square miles which includes the Mariana Trench, the deepest ocean trench on the planet. Rose Atoll in American Samoa and seven islands strung along the equator in the central Pacific will also come under the protection plan.

The atolls, reefs and underwater mountains of the designated area are the habitat of hundreds of unique species of birds and fish including the world’s largest land crab and the rare Malaysian megapode, a bird that incubates its eggs in the heat of underwater volcanoes.

It also harbours some of the rarest geological formations on earth; the Mariana Trench lies 36,000 feet below sea level - 6.8 miles deep. Its deepest point is deeper than Mt Everest is tall, and it is five times the size of the Grand Canyon.

Rose Atoll, the smallest atoll in the world with only about 20 acres of land, is home to giant 85ft tall trees and is a vital nesting ground for threatened green sea turtles and endangered hawksbill sea turtles.

“These locations are truly among the last pristine areas in the marine environment on Earth,” said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, announcing the plans which will be made official by Mr Bush at a White House ceremony today.

The protected areas will extend 50 nautical miles off the coral reefs and atolls at the three monuments, which will be officially called the Marianas Marine National Monument, Rose Atoll Marine National Monument, and the Pacific Islands Marine National Monument.

Posted by Drew458     on 01/06/2009 at 06:35 PM   
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   Sunday - December 21, 2008

THE SKY IS WARMING AND FALLING.  NOW FOR THE FACTS!

Every weekend there’s generally a good article on the subject from Christopher Booker, of The Telegraph.
This one is no exception and he always manages to put a twist in the knickers of the left.
They really don’t like him.  Which is just one more reason I enjoy the guy and read his comments every week.
He just HAS to be right if the left says he’s wrong.

Facts melted by ‘global warming’
Something very odd had happened to the daily updated graph on the official Nansen website last weekend, writes Christopher Booker.

Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:54PM GMT 21 Dec 2008

Last weekend, that heroically diligent US meteorologist Anthony Watts noticed that something very odd had happened to the daily updated graph on the official Nansen website that shows how much sea-ice there is in the Arctic. Without explanation, as he reported on his Watts Up With That website, half a million square kilometres of ice simply vanished overnight.

This might have brought cheer to all those, such as Al Gore and the BBC, who have been obsessively telling us that the Arctic ice will soon disappear altogether. They were dismayed enough last winter when, after reaching its lowest point in 30 years, the ice bounded back to near “normal”. This winter the freeze has been even faster and greater, making the extent of the ice, according to the other main Arctic website, Crysophere Today, 500,000 sq km greater than this time last year. How better to maintain the chosen narrative than to lose that half-million square kilometres simply by “adjusting” the graph downwards?

The warmists are so locked into their general narrative that the plummeting temperatures and abnormal snowfalls of the past two winters have thrown their army of media groupies into quite a tizzy. The BBC did at least deign last week to notice the worst snowstorm to hit Las Vegas for 30 years, but without mentioning the freak snow and ice storms affecting many other parts of the US, as far south as New Orleans. The BBC was also quick to pick up from Pravda the unusual lack of snow in Moscow, without mentioning Siberia’s record freeze that lowered temperatures to -60C.

Elsewhere in recent days, there have been reports of seven species of penguin being put on the endangered list owing to global warming – although Antarctic sea-ice this year reached easily its highest level since satellite records began in 1979.

Another warmist perennial to get an outing, from Dr Martin Warren of Butterfly Conservation, is the threat to the survival of many of our butterflies. As a longtime student of butterflies, I am keenly aware of various factors leading to the alarming decline in their numbers, but global warming is not one of them. If it were, how did such dwindling species as the Mountain Ringlet and even the Small Tortoiseshell survive the much warmer temperatures 1,000 years ago, before SUVs were invented?

Perhaps the get-out for the beleaguered warmists was provided by Friday’s Today programme, when it reported heavy snowfalls on the Cairngorm ski slopes, only two years after the BBC was excitably reporting fears that ski-ing in Scotland might soon be but a memory. A local spokeswoman helpfully suggested that the thing about “climate change” was that it was always coming up with the unexpected.

So whatever happens, hot or cold, wet or dry, it can all be put down to that pesky old “climate change”. As the rest of us might observe with a wry smile, how very true.

JUST THE FACTS PLEASE

Posted by peiper     on 12/21/2008 at 11:02 AM   
Filed Under: • Environment • UK •  
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   Wednesday - December 03, 2008

Light bulbs as dim as the politicians who force them on us.

My favorite hobby horse. Energy efficient light bulbs. 
Some months ago I posted a photo of a cupboard here at the house, devoted solely to the storing of 100w light bulbs and a few 60w.

Like many others over here in the socialist paradise, where soon the horse might be re-introduced as the better means of transportation, I have been hoarding 100w bulbs.  The light bulb of old, the bulb that gives what it was intended to give, will be no more as they are being phased out.  On the last three trips to the market for weekly groceries, the bin that used to hold 100w bulbs has been empty.  I think we will have to start making trips further afield to buy them, using more gas of course and enlarging our carbon footprint.  All in a good cause of course. 

The old really efficient light bulb isn’t exactly being outlawed. Yet.  But more and more stores just won’t be refilling their stock.  Someone told me something very similar is happening in the USA.  Please ... say it ain’t so!  Are we going the same way as the Fraken weenies over here?  Geez, I can’t believe .....
oh hell. Wait a minute.  Yeah, I can believe the same will happen in the US.  Mostly because not enough folks will fight the madness of the green weenies.

I don’t seriously believe anyone has fallen down stairs due to the dim lights of the green bulb. Heck, night lights aren’t bright either.  But I really hate the idea of this stuff being forced on us.  I have yet to meet an energy efficient light bulb that I liked.

It is good to know that I’m not the Lone Ranger on the topic, as letters to the editor of the Telegraph over the last few days seem to echo my sentiments.
And I’m not the only one hoarding 100w bulbs either. 

A BIT OF LIGHT BULB IN YOUR TUNA SANDWICH
By,Christopher Howse

Christopher Howse writes leaders and features and reviews for The Daily Telegraph, which he joined in 1996 as obituaries editor. His Saturday column, Sacred Mysteries, is on religion. He lives in Westminster.

Telegraph readers from all over the country complain that they are tumbling down the stairs because energy-saving light bulbs on the landing do not come on in time when they pop to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

It is quite true that the new bulbs are as dim as the politicians who force them upon us. I found myself in the Midland Hotel earlier this year and, because the bulbs were of the new kind, no light in my room was bright enough to read by. I ended up taking the shade off the bedside lamp and, to catch its glow, balancing it on a rather vulgar metallic box of paper handkerchiefs provided by the thoughtful management. I still had to hold the book up towards the light as if I was trying to read by a full moon.

As one of our readers mentioned in a letter to the Editor, you have to use more of the new bulbs in order to produce enough light, which rather defeats the object.

Proper incandescent bulbs are shortly to be banned in a Europe-wide bureaucratic drive, purportedly on ecological grounds. Yet the dull new bulbs contain mercury, a deadly poison that builds up in the food chain once it reaches waters that flow into the sea. Soon our tuna sandwiches will be thick with mercury, blackening our teeth and turning us as mad as hatters.

The mercury hazard means, to the health and safety police, that if one breaks a new dim bulb, it is necessary to open doors and windows and don protective clothing.

You must not throw the new bulbs away in the dustbin when they fail, as they soon do, but take them to a hazardous waste tip.

So the ideal Christmas present this year is a cache of good old lightbulbs. Mind where you store them or the rust will get at the metal end. One day they’ll be as valuable as 1945 Margaux.

BULBS

Posted by peiper     on 12/03/2008 at 09:03 AM   
Filed Under: • Editorials • Environment • EUro-peons • UK •  
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   Sunday - November 30, 2008

President-elect Barack Obama proposes economic suicide for US.

Viewpoint from a Brit Conservative.  Odds are he’s right on target.
There a lot to worry about America but there’s a line here that is particularly worrisome.  This line.

They will see a video of Mr Obama, in only his second major policy commitment, pledging that America is now about to play the leading role in the fight to “save the planet” from global warming.

What’s most worrisome aside from everything else is, I fear “co-operation” with and closer ties of a political nature, to Europe’s left.
I hope I’m wrong.

President-elect Barack Obama proposes economic suicide for US

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 11:01pm GMT 29/11/2008

If the holder of the most powerful office in the world proposed a policy guaranteed to inflict untold damage on his own country and many others, on the basis of claims so demonstrably fallacious that they amount to a string of self-deluding lies, we might well be concerned. The relevance of this is not to President Bush, as some might imagine, but to a recent policy statement by President-elect Obama.

Tomorrow, delegates from 190 countries will meet in Poznan, Poland, to pave the way for next year’s UN conference in Copenhagen at which the world will agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. They will see a video of Mr Obama, in only his second major policy commitment, pledging that America is now about to play the leading role in the fight to “save the planet” from global warming.

Mr Obama begins by saying that “the science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”. “Sea levels,” he claims, “are rising, coastlines are shrinking, we’ve seen record drought, spreading famine and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.”

Far from the science being “beyond dispute”, we can only deduce from this that Mr Obama has believed all he was told by Al Gore’s wondrously batty film An Inconvenient Truth without bothering to check the facts. Each of these four statements is so wildly at odds with the truth that on this score alone we should be seriously worried.

It is true that average sea levels are modestly rising, but no faster than they have been doing for three centuries. Gore’s film may predict a rise this century of 20 feet, but even the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change only predicts a rise of between four and 17 inches. The main focus of alarm here has been the fate of low-lying coral islands such as the Maldives and Tuvalu.

Around each of these tiny countries, according to the international Commission on Sea Level Changes and other studies, sea levels in recent decades have actually fallen. The Indian Ocean was higher between 1900 and 1970 than it has been since. Satellite measurements show that since 1993 the sea level around Tuvalu has gone down by four inches.

Coastlines are not “shrinking” except where land is subsiding, as on the east coast of England, where it has been doing so for thousands of years. Gore became particularly muddled by this, pointing to how many times the Thames Barrier has had to be closed in recent years, unaware that this was more often to keep river water in during droughts than to stop the sea coming in.

Far from global warming having increased the number of droughts, the very opposite is the case. The most comprehensive study (Narisma et al, 2007) showed that, of the 20th century’s 30 major drought episodes, 22 were in the first six decades, with only five between 1961 and 1980. The most recent two decades produced just three.

Mr Obama has again been taken in over hurricanes. Despite a recent press release from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration claiming that 2008’s North Atlantic hurricane season “set records”, even its own release later admits that it only tied as “the fifth most active” since 1944. NOAA’s own graphs show hurricane activity higher in the 1950s than recently. A recent Florida State University study of tropical cyclone activity across the world (see the Watts Up With That? website) shows a steady reduction over the past four years.

Alarming though it may be that the next US President should have fallen for all this claptrap, much more worrying is what he proposes to do on the basis of such grotesque misinformation. For a start he plans to introduce a “federal cap and trade system”, a massive “carbon tax”, designed to reduce America’s CO2 emissions “to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them an additional 80 per cent by 2050”. Such a target, which would put America ahead of any other country in the world, could only be achieved by closing down a large part of the US economy.

Mr Obama floats off still further from reality when he proposes spending $15 billion a year to encourage “clean energy” sources, such as thousands more wind turbines. He is clearly unaware that wind energy is so hopelessly ineffective that the 10,000 turbines America already has, representing “18 gigawatts of installed capacity”, only generate 4.5GW of power, less than that supplied by a single giant coal-fired power station.

He talks blithely of allowing only “clean” coal-fired power plants, using “carbon capture” - burying the CO2 in holes in the ground - which would double the price of electricity, but the technology for which hasn’t even yet been developed. He then babbles on about “generating five million new green jobs”. This will presumably consist of hiring millions of Americans to generate power by running around on treadmills, to replace all those “dirty” coal-fired power stations which currently supply the US with half its electricity.

If this sounds like an elaborate economic suicide note, for what is still the earth’s richest nation, it is still not enough for many environmentalists. Positively foaming at the mouth in The Guardian last week, George Monbiot claimed that the plight of the planet is now so grave that even “sensible programmes of the kind Obama proposes are now irrelevant”. The only way to avert the “collapse of human civilisation”, according to the Great Moonbat, would be “the complete decarbonisation of the global economy soon after 2050”.

For 300 years science helped to turn Western civilisation into the richest and most comfortable the world has ever seen. Now it seems we have suddenly been plunged into a new age of superstition, where scientific evidence no longer counts for anything. The fact that America will soon be ruled by a man wholly under the spell of this post-scientific hysteria may leave us in wondering despair.

Obama proposes economic suicide for US

Posted by peiper     on 11/30/2008 at 08:45 AM   
Filed Under: • Economics • Environment • International • Obama, The One • Scary Stuff •  
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   Tuesday - November 18, 2008

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO:  THE DEPT. of ENERGY .. ?

I really had forgotten all about this agency.  Wonder how many more there are out there.  ???

Subject: Remember why the Department of Energy was established??


Does anybody out there have any memory of the reason given for the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY during the Carter Administration?

Anybody? Anything? No?

Didn’t think so!!

Bottom line . . . we’ve spent several hundred billion dollars in support of an agency the reason for which (probably) not one person who reads this can remember.

Ready?

It was very simple, and at the time everybody thought it very appropriate:

The Department of Energy was instituted 8-04-1977-TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.

HEY, PRETTY EFFICIENT, HUH?

NOW its 2008, 31 YEARS LATER, AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS NECESSARY DEPARTMENT IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR, THEY HAVE 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES, AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES AND LOOK AT THE JOB THEY HAVE DONE!

THIS IS WHERE YOU SLAP YOUR FOREHEAD AND SAY ‘WHAT WAS I THINKING?’

Ah yes, good ole bureaucracy.

And now we are going to turn the Banking system over to them?

God Help us.

H/T J. Miller
thanks

Posted by peiper     on 11/18/2008 at 09:49 AM   
Filed Under: • Environment • Outsourcing •  
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   Sunday - October 12, 2008

EU instructions on climate change.  The sky is falling and only the stupid don’t believe.

Ed Miliband will follow EU instructions on climate change

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 12/10/2008

Have your say Read comments

For all the acres of newsprint devoted to the return to the Cabinet of Peter Mandelson, by far the most important and potentially damaging move in Gordon Brown’s recent Government reorganisation could well be his setting up of a wholly new ministry, laughably called the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Under a new Secretary of State, Ed Miliband, the new department merges two groups of officials who, over the past year, have been ever more obviously at war with each other; and on the outcome of that battle hangs nothing less than whether, within a few years, Britain can still continue to operate as an economically viable nation.

On the one hand have been the civil servants charged with running Britain’s energy policy at the former DTI, now known as BERR (Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform). As became increasingly evident from speeches by John Hutton, our former business secretary now moved to Defence, his officials had become acutely aware that Britain is fast approaching an unprecedented energy crisis.

Within seven years, or even much sooner, we stand to lose nearly 40 per cent of the generating capacity which meets our current peak electricity needs. All but one of the 10 nuclear power stations which provide a fifth of our electricity are due to close and, as we were warned last week, they are all now so decrepit that much of that capacity may not be available even this winter.

Also due to close, under the EU’s Large Combustion Plants directive, are nine more large power stations, six coal-fired, which will soon be running out of the remaining quota of hours Brussels has allowed them.

This was why, as “realists”, the BERR officials recognised that our only hope of keeping our lights on and Britain’s economy functioning was to make it a top national priority to build, as fast as possible, at least a dozen new nuclear and coal-fired power stations, such as that planned at Kingsnorth. As Mr Hutton told the recent Labour Party conference, “no coal, plus no nuclear, equals no lights, no power, no future”.

On the other hand, totally opposed to them at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) down the road, have been the climate change fanatics, obsessed with global warming, for whom the highest national priority, as expressed in their recent Climate Change Act, is for Britain to lead the world by cutting its carbon emissions by 60 per cent in the next 40 years.

(HERE COME THE SCARIEST PART)

The most influential of these officials, as Defra’s chief scientific adviser, has been Dr Robert Watson, until 2002 chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a man so passionately committed to fighting climate change that he was once hailed by Al Gore as “the hero of the planet”.

For the rest of the article, link below.

http://tinyurl.com/4mescl

Posted by Drew458     on 10/12/2008 at 12:15 PM   
Filed Under: • Climate-Weather • Environment •  
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   Tuesday - September 30, 2008

Now it’s methane that will kill us all

Oh noes!!!

The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.

The Independent has been passed details of preliminary findings suggesting that massive deposits of sub-sea methane are bubbling to the surface as the Arctic region becomes warmer and its ice retreats....
Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species. Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia’s northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.

In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through “methane chimneys” rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a “lid” to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.

They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.

Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.

“The conventional thought has been that the permafrost ‘lid’ on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane… The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed.”

The Arctic region as a whole has seen a 4C rise in average temperatures over recent decades and a dramatic decline in the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by summer sea ice. Many scientists fear that the loss of sea ice could accelerate the warming trend because open ocean soaks up more heat from the sun than the reflective surface of an ice-covered sea.

Hey, way ahead of you there buddy! The Japanese have already mostly figured out how to do it. But, surprise!, the eco-whackos are against it.

Japan is celebrating a groundbreaking science experiment in the Arctic permafrost that may eventually reshape the country’s fragile economy and Tokyo’s relationships with the outside world.

For an unprecedented six straight days, a state-backed drilling company has managed to extract industrial quantities of natural gas from underground sources of methane hydrate - a form of gas-rich ice once thought to exist only on the moons of Saturn.

In fact, the seabeds around the Japanese coast turn out to conceal massive deposits of the elusive sorbet-like compound in their depths, and a country that has long assumed it had virtually no fossil fuels could now be sitting on energy reserves containing 100 years’ fuel. Critically for Japan, which imports 99.7 per cent of the oil, gas and coal needed to run its vast economy, the lumps of energy-filled ice offer the tantalising promise of a little energy independence.

Environmentalists, though, are horrified by the idea of releasing huge quantities of methane from under the seabeds. Although methane is a cleaner-burning fossil fuel than coal or oil, the as yet untapped methane hydrates represent “captured” greenhouse gasses that some believe should remain locked under the sea. The mining of methane ice could also wreak havoc on marine ecosystems.

And they aren’t alone. There is methane hydrate under the seafloor all over the world. Off all the coasts. The US has loads of it. Zillions of tons of the crap. Why? Because it’s naturally produced! It’s the half decayed remains of billions of years worth of sea critters. All we have to do is figure out how to get it up, either in a frozen state, or thaw it out and suck it up and bottle it. And that’s exactly what the oil companies are working on right now.

Anchorage, Alaska - Scientists from the U.S. Energy Department are looking for ways to tap a new and unusual source of natural gas underneath the frozen ground near Prudhoe Bay. 
Gas hydrates—methane gas trapped in ice—were recently drilled by oil giant BP near its Milne Point well.

Have you ever seen ice burn? It will, when the ice contains methane gas, and that simple fact has scientists from around the globe looking to Prudhoe Bay and a new test well drilled by BP.

“You would probably say it looked like snow,” said Scott Digert. 

What to most may look like an especially hard-hitting snowball could be a source of energy for researchers at BP, including Digert, who is BP Alaska’s Milne Point Resource manager.

“It’s a gas molecule contained in an ice lattice, which provides quite a good storage for methane molecules inside a frozen zone,” said Digert. 

Methane gas trapped in ice. And it burns.  Scientists with the federal Energy Department paid $4.6 million to drill for the hot ice just below the surface of the Milne Point well, which is situated northwest of Prudhoe Bay. Methane will only stay in its solid or frozen state at extremely cold temperatures and under lots of pressure, both of which are abundant in Alaska’s frozen grounds.  Until recently, though, hydrates were seen as a drilling hazard.

“When you warm it up or you take the pressure off of it, it starts to thaw, basically. So you get free water and free gas, the methane, and so we try to control the release of that gas,” Digert said. 

Now, scientists from around the world are waiting for pieces of this strange ice to conduct their own tests and determine whether Alaska’s frozen grounds contain untapped, clean-burning energy. BP says it found two separate layers of gas containing ice at Milne Point, each about 25-feet thick.  Operators drilled it many times over to come up with about 400 feet of 3-inch diameter ice cores that will be sent via cryogenic packaging to labs around the world for further study. But if gas hydrates contain clean burning energy, why hasn’t any one done test drilling to find them on the North Slope before? Methane needs extremely cold temperatures and pressure to stay in its solid form. BP says it new this form of methane was under the tundra all along. On the surface, it is a flammable gas, and only recently have scientists determined how to safely bring the ice to surface without melting it first.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/30/2008 at 11:51 AM   
Filed Under: • Environment • Oil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices •  
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   Saturday - September 27, 2008

Now councils tell us what to eat.  (now I ask you. how could I ignore this one?) for real? yup.

Ain’t this stupid?  See where tree hugging left wing PC leads?
I don’t have time to make the MANY comments running through my head at the moment. Or the questions.

Like most ppl have the time for this stupidity.  Sure, many folks grow their own veggies and such. But this goes way beyond that and anyway, you’d need to involve the whole country to get anywhere.  Fat chance of that.

Have to go off line for some hours.  Just couldn’t save this for later.  Duh! 

Bin collections row: Now councils tell us what to eat
Householders are being told what to eat by councils in the latest controversial plan to cut down on domestic waste.

By Christopher Hope, Home Affairs Editor
Last Updated: 2:06PM BST 26 Sep 2008

Local authorities have devised a “council cook book” featuring such culinary delights as beans and egg on toast, lentil salad and home-made muesli, which can be made without buying anything in throwaway packaging.

It has been produced as part of Zero Waste Challenge Week, in which four councils in the West Country are challenging residents to go for a seven days without producing any rubbish.

But critics claim it is yet more evidence of a sustained assault on people’s rights to weekly bin collections, as well as being patronising.

Among the tips contained in leaflets produced by the councils are that people should make their own food, such as yogurt, and take resealable boxes to the butcher so meat does not have to be put in plastic bags.

Recipes contained in the leaflets are made up of ingredients which can all be bought either in paper bags, cardboard boxes, tins or jars, which can all be recycled.

Zero Waste Challenge Week, which has been devised by Bristol City Council, Bath and North East Somerset Council, South Gloucestershire Council and North Somerset Council, starts on Monday.

The councils want community groups, schools and residents to sign up to the challenge not to throw anything away in the dustbin by only using products that can be reused or recycled.

A leaflet says: “That way we’re left with nothing else to throw away in the bin.”

The leaflet adds: “We believe that if you make enough changes, it is possible to achieve a Zero Waste Week. However, the aim of the challenge is to see how close you can go.

“Circumstances are different for everyone and even if you don’t quite manage to achieve Zero Waste, you’ll find you can have a dramatic effect on the amount you throw away.”

The results will be used by the councils to advise on future recycling and rubbish collection strategies.

The councils say: “Completing and returning your record sheet will allow us to assess the success of the scheme and help us to find ways to tackle waste minimisation in the future.”

Crucially, commercial waste – such as rubbish thrown away at work – is not included in the project.

Last night the Conservatives criticised the plans.

Eric Pickles, the shadow local government secretary, said: “We are entering a brave new world of fortnightly rubbish collections that we all know is going to fuel a surge in fly-tipping and backyard burning.

“This is not a responsible or practical way of encouraging recycling but merely a cleverly disguised form of propaganda attempting to peddle the benefits of fortnightly rubbish collections for town halls. This is bureaucratic convenience, without any public benefit.

“Recycling rates are going up which begs the question why do we need this. We want people to be environmentally responsible but employing the heavy hand of the state is not the solution.”
Top Tips for Zero Waste Week

* Avoid food contained in packaging that cannot be recycled, like crisps

* Try making your own food, like yogurt

* Take your own plastic boxes to the local butcher or green grocer to cut back on packaging

* Plan ahead so that you are not caught out throwing something away.

* Buy bread wrapped in paper, rather than plastic packaging

http://tinyurl.com/3ut5qc

Posted by Drew458     on 09/27/2008 at 03:30 AM   
Filed Under: • Environment • Nanny State • Stoopid-People • UK •  
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   Thursday - September 25, 2008

WIND TURBINES CAN BE A WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY.  (don’t say)

Kinda bringing BMEWSers up ta date case they didn’t already know.
Also wanted to get this posted fast before Drew put one on his house or Grumpy. All the regulars.  Now you’ve seen this you won’t rush out to buy.

However ... I do have an idiot cousin born on April 1st who is also a donk libtard that I don’t usually acknowledge and do not speak to.
She might have this.  Hey ... every family has one ya know.  How about, almost every family.

Wind turbines in suburban areas a ‘waste of time and money’
Wind turbines are a waste of time and money for any householder that lives in a built-up or suburban area, according to a leading consumer watchdog.

By Harry Wallop, Consumer Affairs Editor
Last Updated: 12:12AM BST 25 Sep 2008

The ultimate green lifestyle statement could, in fact, end up using up energy rather than creating it, said Which?, the consumer organisation, which has tested one over the last year.

Between December 2007 and June 2008 the turbine, on top of a roof in Milton Keynes, used up more electricity that it generated. That is due to an inverter that converts energy into a form that is usable by the mains – but it constantly uses power, even when the turbine is not turning.

Chirstopher Christoforou, principal researcher at Which?, said: “This house is not in the centre of town, it’s in a suburban area. We can’t recommend any domestic wind turbine if you live in a built-up environment of any sort. It really isn’t worth the money.”

The tester installed a Windsave WS1000 turbine – the most popular domestic turbine, which is sold at the B&Q chain – late last year. The machine costs £1,5000 but between December 2007 and June 2008 it actually used up 9.4 kilowatt hours of power – the equivalent of boiling a litre of water in a kettle 85 times.

This is the latest report to suggest that wind turbines – famously championed by David Cameron atop of his Notting Hill house – can never solve Britain’s lack of cheap energy.

Friends of the Earth have admitted that domestic wind turbines are too often a “glamourous statement” and that consumers should invest in other, more efficient forms of energy saving such as loft insulation.

Earlier this month a joint study by the Carbon Trust and Met Office said small-scale wind energy could in theory generate some 41.3 terawatt hours of electricity – 12 per cent of UK electricity consumption – each year.

But with current electricity prices and the cost of small wind turbines, only a fraction of that is deliverable. The study concluded that if one in ten households had turbines, they would produce just 0.4 per cent of total UK energy consumption a year.

Windsave, the manufacturers of the turbines, have rounded on Which?, claiming the organisation was “inept” and failed to listen to its advice that the tester’s house was not in an windy enough area.

The house in Milton Keynes has an average wind speed of 4.7 meters per second.

The company says the speed needs to average 5 meters per second before the turbine generates energy. The average across Britain is 5.8 meters per second.

David Gordon, the chief executive of the company, said: “They are out to castigate a pioneer in the industry.”

The company sent a disclaimer to the tester saying the site was not windy enough – but this was a full year after tester ordered the turbine, but had yet to install it because of planning problems.

Mr Christoforou said: “Our tester did sign the disclaimer, but let’s face it 4.7 meters per second is not far off 5 meters per second and yet we ended up using energy rather than generating it.”

Mr Gordon insisted that at 5 meters per second one of his turbines would generate enough energy for a consumer to make a return on their £1,500 machine in seven years.

http://tinyurl.com/5yc4ro

Posted by Drew458     on 09/25/2008 at 11:42 AM   
Filed Under: • Environment •  
• Comments (5) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

   Sunday - September 21, 2008

CARBON CREDIT SCAM and OUR WEEKLY LOOK AT ENVIRO-WACKOS & FIBS

Financial crisis: Lehman misses out on carbon credit scam

By Christopher Booker
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/09/2008

What is the connection between the bankrupt Lehman Brothers and the likelihood that in four years’ time our electricity bills will jump another 25 per cent (on top of the rises likely from soaring coal and gas prices)?

The answer is that, before its collapse, Lehman was pitching to become the leader in the vast trade created by the new worldwide regulatory system to “fight climate change” by curbing emissions of carbon dioxide.

The biggest money-spinners will be the schemes whereby industry will pay for permits to emit CO2 at so much a ton, either directly to governments or by buying them on an international market.

This market, soon to be worth trillions of pounds, was where Lehman hoped to be “the prime brokerage for emissions permits”, as it set out in two hefty reports on “The Business of Climate Change”.

Advised by some of the world’s leading global warming activists, such as Dr James Hansen and Al Gore (a close friend of the firm’s erstwhile managing director Theodore Roosevelt IV), Lehman bought their message wholesale. GIM, the company set up by Gore to sell “carbon offsets” in return for planting trees, was a prized Lehman client.

The particular market that Lehman hoped to dominate is centred on the buying and selling of carbon permits, through the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) set up in 2005, the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and the “cap and trade” system proposed for the US by both McCain and Obama.

This may still seem abstract but it will affect all our lives, because ultimately we will all be paying for it, through the colossal costs it will impose on industry, not least electricity.

The EU scheme already adds more than a billion pounds a year to our electricity bills. In four years’ time it will become much more obvious when, under phase two of the ETS, permits will be auctioned, at a projected initial figure of £35 per ton of CO2.

On the basis of current wholesale prices, the annual cost of electricity used in the UK alone is around £32 billion. Adding £35 for every ton of CO2 emitted in producing it will mean that our electricity supply companies will have to pay £8 billion for their permits, adding 25 per cent to the total cost. Under EU rules, this must be passed on to all of us in our bills.

The idea is that, to reduce carbon emissions by an eventual 60 per cent, the number of permits auctioned will reduce year by year, leaving an ever larger shortfall which firms will have to account for either by reducing emissions or by buying additional permits - not least from the developing world under the UN’s CDM.

Everything about this grandiose scheme betokens the economics of the madhouse.

The new costs it will impose are so colossal that whole industries, including aluminium, steel and Germany’s chemical companies, threaten to move their operations outside the EU unless they are given free allocations. It has not even been agreed who - whether national governments or the EU itself - will run the auctions or keep the hundreds of billions of euros a year the scheme will raise.

China, by virtue of having built giant dams to produce electricity, will be a net “carbon creditor”, able to sell permits to the EU worth billions more, despite continuing to build a new coal-fired power station every four days.

So will Russia, thanks to it having closed down so much of its polluting industry after the fall of Communism. There is not the slightest indication that the scheme itself will result in any lowering of global CO2 emissions.

What is certain is that it will pile astronomic costs onto everyone in the EU, inevitably impacting most severely on poorer householders that will face bills they cannot afford. The only other certainty - perhaps a consolation - is that those sharing in this bonanza will not include Lehman Brothers, now excluded from cashing in on what threatens to become the maddest scam the world has ever seen.

BBC series stitches up sceptics in counter-attack over climate change

As informed questioning of the global warming orthodoxy rises on all sides, the BBC’s three-part series Climate Wars, ending tonight, bears all the marks of a carefully planned counter-attack.

BBC science producers were apoplectic at the attention given last year to Martin Durkin’s Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, featuring a galaxy of the world’s more sceptical climate scientists. This is their riposte.

Last week, against a range of far-flung locations from Greenland to California, the presenter, Dr Iain Stewart, tackled three of the main arguments of Durkin’s film.

In each case the technique was the same. After caricaturing the sceptics’ point, with soundbite clips that did not allow them to develop their scientific argument, he then asserted that they had somehow been discredited.

For example, doubts had been raised over the reliability of satellite temperature records which do not show the same degree of warming as surface readings. Dr Roy Spencer, who designed Nasa’s satellite system for measuring temperatures, was allowed to admit that a flaw had been found in the system.

But his interview ended before he could explain that, when the flaw was discovered in 1998, it was immediately corrected (although it made little difference to the results).

Likewise, there is a growing case for a correlation between global temperatures and solar activity. Dr Stewart accused Durkin’s programme of cutting off a graph which illustrated this at a point when the data failed to support the thesis. Then he did exactly the same himself, not extending his own graph to 2008 in a way that would reinforce the thesis.

Most hilarious of all, however, was a long sequence in which Stewart defended the notorious “hockey stick” graph, which purports to show that temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level on record.

The BBC had a huge blow-up of this “iconic” graph carted triumphantly round London, from Big Ben to Buckingham Palace, as if it were proof that the warming alarmists are right.

There was no hint that the “hockey stick” is among the most completely discredited artefacts in the history of science, not least thanks to the devastating critique by Steve McIntyre, which showed that the graph’s creators had an algorithm in their programme which could produce a hockey-stick shape whatever data were fed into it.

There was scarcely a frame of this clever exercise which did not distort or obscure some vital fact. Yet the “impartial” BBC is sending out this farrago of convenient untruths to schools, ensuring that the “march of the lie” continues.

http://tinyurl.com/4kcqkv

Posted by Drew458     on 09/21/2008 at 08:04 AM   
Filed Under: • Environment •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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