News Bits for the Day
Some news bits for the day
on 12/19/2007 at 01:17 PM
I expect the fanatics will still ascribe this cold weather to glowbull warming. They will claim these anomalies are all part of the big warm up.I agree this glowball warming nonsense is going to leave a lot of people looking very foolish. I doubt they will own up though. More likely they will slink off and pretend it never happened.
It’s not ‘glowbull warming’ anymore. It’s ‘climate change’. A far more flexible term. No matter what happens, we (mankind) are at fault.
I was just listening to a podcast from Travel with Rick Steves about Scotland. In it he interviewed one Arthur Smith from Glencoe, Scotland, who quoted his grandfather:
As me Grandfather used to say, he had a soft spot for politicians–there’s a peat bog just further doon the road…
Gotta love them Scots!
As politicians try to tell me what to do, I try to find a ‘soft spot’ for them.
Too much to choose from here.
O.K. I’ll take Glowball Warming for 5!
Rush Limbaugh this morning had a neat piece on the signatories and non-signatories of Kyoto. The signatories averaged over 20% increase in carbon emissions since Kyoto. The over all rate world wide increase was 18%. The U.S. rate was about 6%.
Can Mr. Gore read? What else is being missed here?
Fuels linked to greenhouse gases ... yeah, well, sure. What can you burn that doesn’t release CO<sub>2</sub> and water vapor? Absolute perfect combustion releases heat and water vapor, along with carbon dioxide if you’re burning something organic. Hey, isn’t that what we were aiming for when we got catalytic convertors on our cars, so they wouldn’t pollute? Now they’re calling it greenhouse gases and saying its bad? Puh-leez.
Any plant matter in any form - grass, wood, camel poop, corn likker, charcoal, peat, coal, coke, methane, natural gas, or oil - will give off heat, steam, and various carbon-oxygen compunds. That pretty much defines what “burning” is; breaking down the hydrocarbons through rapid oxidation and releasing our old friend Delta H!
The ethanol thing is a con. It’s as big a lie as globul worming. When it can be made by putting less energy into distilling the mash than we can get out of it, then I’ll be all for it. Solar stills perhaps?
We have coal, we have lots of uranium, and we have plenty of oil right off our coasts. Use them. Screw the poor little fish and put in some damns and make more hydroelectricity. Wanna throw the hippies a bone? Build some wind farms, tide generators and solar arrays, but when you show them to be a cash loser, stop building them until the technology gets way better.
As far as I know, there are only two “fuels” that have no greenhouse gas output: uranium and plutonium. So are we going to go fwench now, and turn all our power generation over to nukes? Fine by me.
The Iraqi politicians learn quickly don’t they? More paid holidays!!
Here’s some better detail on the Greenhouse Gas increases from Instapundit:
December 19, 2007
GEORGE W. BUSH, CLIMATE-CHANGE HERO:
The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.
* Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
* Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
* Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
* Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.In fact, emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of over 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto.
They told me that if George W. Bush were elected, the United States would lag behind the rest of the world on greenhouse gases And they were right!
UPDATE: Actually, if you look at the most recent years the news gets better:
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels decreased by 1.3 percent in 2006, from 5,955 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (MMTCO2) in 2005 to 5,877 MMTCO2 in 2006, according to preliminary estimates recently released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
The economy, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), grew by 3.3 percent and energy demand fell by 0.9 percent indicating that energy intensity (energy use per unit of GDP) fell by 4.2 percent. Carbon dioxide intensity (CO2 emission per unit of GDP) fell by 4.5 percent.
The market seems to be doing what Kyoto hasn’t. (Somewhat related item here).
posted at 02:47 PM by Glenn ReynoldsI just love reality, don’t you?
If you want some perspective on this issue, read the book ‘The Little Ice Age’ by Brian Fagan. He cites first person accounts that tell of the hardships caused by the sudden global cooling that occurred around 1250. Remember, Greenland was warm enough to be colonized by the Vikings. It got so cold that polar bears were crossing the ice to Iceland.
We are nowhere near as warm as during the Medieval Warm Period. Polar bears survived, Inuit survived, and everybody thrived. The sudden cooling brought famines and plagues. Crops failed, storms got worse, etc.
We are just coming out of the Little Ice Age. 1816 is remembered here in the US as the ‘year without summer.’ Scientists say we’ve been warming since 1850.
Just saw a great movie on Youtube calle “the Global Warming Swindle” It is an hour and fifiteen minutes long but worth every miute. Anybody know that the co-founder of Greenpeace quit over these issues and calls Global Warming the biggest scam ever? Bet we will never hear that one on the nightly news.
12/19/2007 at 02:56 PM
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