Poverty and the environment

I found a fascinating article from September 2006, describing the problems with water and sewage in India, specifically: New Delhi. The caption:"Thirsty giant: In teeming India water crisis means dry pipes and foul sludge"
The description of the dire situation is very vivid and appaling. Maybe half the population doesn't have access to tap water, and those who have, have water only a few hours a day, maybe like 3 hours. Two thirds of the population, or some 700 million people have no sewage. Normal life in India is really beyond what a Westener can imagine - it's harsh, poor, and incredibly dirty, it's really a totally different world. Read the superbly written article by SOMINI SENGUPTA, in the NY Times (linked above). I have visited India and lived a while in "developing" countries, so it was no surprise for me. Still, it makes you think.
India doesn't lack water - as anyone who has experienced some of the mosoon rains there knows. Water pipe laying and sewage treatement isn't rocket science, neither does it cost terribly much. But that's the way the world is. Poverty and incompetence, there is no magic cure to it.
One lesson can be learned: there is no hope for the environment in a poor country. Poor countries are dirty, they can't afford to invest in a clean environment. India is incredibly dirty. Communist Russia was an environmental disaster. So are poor neighborhoods in all countries. You fight poverty, the environment takes care of itself, because affluent people demand, and pay for, a clean environment. Any "green" measures that hinder developement and perpetuate poverty will have a negative effect on the environment.

The amount of CO2 driven warming is miniscule

Here is a quote from David Archibald, that makes sense, I think.

CO2-driven global warming in not totally wrong, but nearly so. It is only good for 0.3 degrees from here to eternity. Emissions to date are worth 0.1 degrees, there will be another 0.2 degrees to 620 ppm and then only a further 0.1 degrees to when the effect peters out due to the logarithmic effect you dread so much. … you might be able to tell the difference between having your car’s air conditioner set at 21 degrees and having it at 22 degrees. But I very much doubt that you could detect a 0.4 degree difference. So there you are. CO2 is one less thing …to worry about, because the effect is so miniscule.


From the comments at Warwick Hughes' site

5 year plan for energy.

Senator Lamar Alexander delivered a plan for energy independence (for the US). It's the usual blah... blah... - all nonsense, like politicians are fond of delivering. Sample:

- Make carbon capture and storage a reality for coal-burning power plants.
- Make solar more cost-competitive with the burning of fossil fuels.

The best reaction was in a comment by peterjackson:

Good Lord, now we've got Republicans proposing Five Year Plans and Seven Step programs like some 1930's Soviet Beet Kommissar. The last thing we need is the know-nothings in Congress pretending they have the expertise required to plan the future of a market segment as huge and critical as energy. They have no such knowledge because that knowledge doesn't exist anywhere as some type of accessible whole. It takes a market with millions upon millions of people, each with their own intimate knowledge of their own needs and capabilities, participating in an open energy marketplace with free prices to coordinate such an unimaginably huge, ever-changing body of knowledge and action. Gas prices have been elevated for several years now due to many reasons, and already the marketplace is responding with the millionth shipped hybrid, high mileage clean diesels, flex-fuel vehicles, and endless number of promising technologies from compressed air vehicles to hydraulic drive trains, all with ZERO input from Washington.

Exactly. Anything the Government will try to do will turn out into a disaster, like the ethanol mandate. The best thing it can do is stay out of the whole mess. (Hat tip: Instapundit)

Who finances UK (and US) universities.

The lefties love to declare that anyone sceptic of AGW must be financed by Exxon-Mobile.
Let's see who finances the left-leaning universities:

From an article in "The Australian" (hat tip: Instapundit):

... the Higher Education Funding Council for England held a special meeting to confront fears that Saudi donations were unduly influencing universities. Brunel University's Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies revealed that eight British universities, including Cambridge and Oxford, received more than $US465 million from Saudi and Muslim sources since 1995, mainly to fund Islamic study centres.
In 2005, a prominent Saudi businessman, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, was reported by The Washington Post to have donated $20million to Georgetown and Harvard universities in the US for the study of Islam and the Muslim world to promote interfaith dialogue and understanding.
At Scotland Yard, a security expert cautions that one of Islam's five pillars - Zakat - requires Muslims to give alms and that charity is considered virtuous and essential.
But Emerson, best-selling author of American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us, says Saudi Arabia should be allowed to bankroll religious initiatives in the West only when it becomes open to the idea of religious reciprocity. "I think there should be a law requiring religious reciprocity for funding coming from regimes that restrict religious freedom on their soil," he says. "Saudi Arabia does not allow the practice of any other religion, bars the operations of churches, confiscates Bibles ... As such, there should be laws passed by Western governments prohibiting Saudi donations to universities until and unless Saudi Arabia operates a pluralistic religious environment.
"Absent such laws, I believe that universities should be required to register as foreign registered agents - a law we have in the US - that designates the Saudi donors and their recipients as agents of a foreign power.
"That would certainly stigmatise the grant giving and give pause before a university accepts such money."

I don't know why I just remembered the anti Israel boycott proposed recently by the British lecturers...

Congress: "We didn't know what we were doing".

Congress has second thoughts on the ethanol madness:

"The view was to look to alternatives and try to become more dependent on the Midwest than the Middle East. I mean, that was the theory. Obviously, sometimes there are unforeseen or unintended consequences of actions," Mr. Hoyer, Maryland Democrat, told reporters yesterday.

Only a year ago, Congress and President Bush seemed to view ethanol as a near magic solution to the nation's dependence on oil and counted on it to make a dent in greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans and Democrats together piled up the incentives and mandates that pushed farmers into planting corn for ethanol and consumers into buying gasoline blended with it.


"This is a classic case of the law of unintended consequences," said Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, who introduced a bill this week to end the entire slate of federal supports, including the mandates for blended gasoline, the tax credits for ethanol producers, and tariffs that keep out cheaper foreign ethanol.

"Congress surely did not intend to raise food prices by incentivizing ethanol, but that's precisely what's happened. A jump in food prices is the last thing our economy needs right now," Mr. Flake said.

If they are so terribly dumb that they understood nothing about ethanol, and had no idea what they were doing a year ago, maybe they should be prohibitted from passing any legislation at all.
It's incredible that they adopted this dumb legislation without the least study of the effects.
Throw out the bums.

Update:

Things every last person knows. Only congress-critters are surprised by the "unintended consequences" of their dumb act.

5 Myths About Breaking Our Foreign Oil Habit By Robert Bryce:

The new energy bill requires that the country produce 36 billion gallons of biofuels per year by 2022. That sounds like a lot of fuel, but put it in perspective: The United States uses more than 320 billion gallons of oil per year, of which nearly 200 billion gallons are imported. So biofuels alone cannot wean the United States off oil. Let's say the country converted all the soybeans grown by American farmers into biodiesel; that would provide only about 1.5 percent of total annual U.S. oil needs. And if the United States devoted its entire corn crop to producing ethanol, it would supply only about 6 percent of U.S. oil needs.

Food and fertilizer scarcity vs ethanol madness.

There is a new article in the NY Times about fertilizer shortages. Fertilizer is essential to getting good crop harvests, but demand outpaces supply and prices have risen sharply.

Interesting figures:

From 1900 to 2000, worldwide food production jumped by 600 percent. Scientists said that increase was the fundamental reason world population was able to rise to about 6.7 billion today from 1.7 billion in 1900.

Then this:

“This is a basic problem, to feed 6.6 billion people,” said Norman Borlaug, an American scientist who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his role in spreading intensive agricultural practices to poor countries. “Without chemical fertilizer, forget it. The game is over.”

How on earth our "beloved" leaders in the West think it is a good idea to burn our food, and how they think we have agricultural resources (land, water, fertilizer) to spare, is beyond me. These people are crazy, stark crazy. There is no other way to explain the fact that they passed legislation mandating the use of 10%-15% ethanol (produced from our food crops) in the fuel.

As UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler said: "this is a crime against humanity". (A very rare ocasion when I am able to quote a UN person approvingly).

The decadence of Academia in the West

A good article by British academic Fabian Tassano on the nonesense and idiocy that much of Western Academia has become.

The larger part of academia has become obsessed with jargon and formalism, at the expense of meaningful content....

The purpose of academia has changed from producing real insights to generating reinforcement for the preferred world view. Academics are encouraged to generate spurious legitimacy for anti-individualistic social trends such as the abolition of civil liberties, or the ‘rights’ of doctors and psychiatrists to make decisions about people’s lives.

According to the Chief Executive of HEFCE, "it was once the role of Governments to provide for the purposes of universities; it is now the role of universities to provide for the purposes of Governments."
While one can't expect academics to have no ideological biases, the collectivised way the academy is nowadays run was bound to generate a monolithic consensus. Once established, we end up with a kind of ideological closed shop, with dissenters refused entry or hounded out.

There are academic disciplines, such as applied chemistry or cell biology, where the criterion of generating testable hypotheses still dominates. As for the rest, you can more or less take it as read that they've been infected by left wing ideology and/or what I have called "technicality" - unnecessary (and often totally vacuous) technical complexity.

...even when it becomes impossible to suppress awareness that something is seriously wrong with some area of academia, the fallout is remarkably limited. Everyone seems to keep on going pretty much in the same old way. Another area which it has becomepositively fashionable in some quarters to deride (because it's easy to do so), but where the effect of the derision has been minimal, is postmodernist philosophy...

Quoting Robert Fisk:

It's a new and dangerous phenomenon I'm talking about, a language of exclusion that must have grown up in universities over the past 20 years; after all, any non university-educated man or woman can pick up an academic treatise or PhD thesis written in the 1920s or '30s and - however Hegelian the subject - fully understand its meaning. No longer.

More:

The definition of e.g. philosophy has become, “whatever is done under that name at a recognised academic institution”. Certification has become more important than content, and quality is no longer seen as assessable by an untrained person. The fact that many of the key innovations in the history of knowledge were made outside universities is conveniently forgotten. Someone working outside a university today can be ignored, since by definition they cannot be doing research.

Massification of degrees is said to be inevitable because everyone now aspires to higher education. Fine, but instead of letting the market provide this extension to the old model, it’s taken to mean turning the university system into an arm of the welfare state, rather like the NHS. I.e. run by the state, with everyone having equal entitlement to a low grade product, and subsidy based on poverty rather than ability.

The fact that little of benefit is acquired by most undergraduates is concealed by ensuring that everyone receives a qualification at the end of the process.

The net result is that academics are being forced to become badly paid handmaidens to a system which will be primarily about promoting equality and inclusion, like state school teachers already are. They are now also required to comply with increasing levels of state bureaucracy, and are monitored and assessed by government auditors

I myself, though not an academic, was appalled by the huge amount of nonesense and gobbledygook that many of the academic papers I heppened to read are filled with. The Academia has been taken over by the ignorant barbarians.

"Will President Bush join in the chorus of dead-end energy proposals?"

A good, forceful article by Dr. Roy Spencer on energy policy:

The fact is that there is simply nothing we can do — short of shutting down the global economy — that will substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Prosperity requires access to abundant, affordable energy. Thus, any mandated limits or taxes meant to slow the use of fossil fuels will limit prosperity as well, period.

While the developed countries take for granted conveniences like heating, air conditioning, refrigerated food, and the freedom to travel, our politicians continue to feed the myth that we have any realistic alternatives to carbon-based fuels. With the possible exception of a very slow (several decade) transition from coal-fired power plants to nuclear ones, there are simply no other options that will make any measurable difference for future global temperatures.

...and unless someone has the courage to stand up for the rights of humans to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the momentum we have generated due to our irrational fears will cause us all to topple into the sea.

Read the whole thing (it isn't long). (Emphasis mine).

Dr. Roy W. Spencer is a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and is author of the new book, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Hysteria Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians, and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor.

The credibility of UN's IPCC.

Here is a comment from the above Coyote blog post by Dr. T.
It sounds authentic to me, though I don't know who he is.

I thoroughly read the most recent IPCC report, and I conclude that it is total garbage. I'm a chemist and a pathologist, not a climatologist, but I certainly know how to read scientific reports. I have taught statistics, and I also understand mathematical models and their limitations. The IPCC report contained poor science, terrible models, and completely unsupported conclusions.

The CO2 issue is more complex than what Adiran and Pieter noted. Even if we assume that CO2 is a 'warming' gas in the atmosphere, its impact is small compared to water vapor (which, based on greenhouse studies, has 20 times the warming effect because of better solar heat absorption and higher concentration). Methane is also a 'warming' gas, but its concentration is too low to have any significant impact on global temperatures.

The positive feedback discussion by the IPCC and by Warren Meyer irks me. First, positive feedback is a psychology term about how an organism responds to good (positive) stimuli. The term the IPCC really wants is something like multiplicative effects or potentiation (when two or more things combined give an effect that is multiplicative rather than additive, such as ethanol and barbiturates). But, in chemistry and physics, examples of multiplicative effects are rare. The IPCC models are so bad that they can essentially apply their forcing factors to anything (too many people hopping on one foot) and claim it relates to global warming. I trust nothing from the IPCC, because the group is about keeping itself funded and influential with governments. The IPCC is not about climatology.

"the group [IPCC] is about keeping itself funded and influential with governments" - true, but I would add to it: it's also about spewing their (vile) ideological viewpoint.

The confidence I have in the UN's IPCC report is about the same I have in the UN's human rights comission, headed by Ghaddafi's (Lybia) representative.

Positive feedback in Global warming

Over at Coyote blog there is an important post, highlighting the issue of positive feedback which is at the core of the alarmist global warming scare.

Interestingly, the key to understanding this issue of the amount of warming does not actually lie in greenhouse gas theory. Most scientists, skeptics and alarmists alike, peg the warming directly from CO2 at between 0.3 and 1.0 degrees Celsius for a doubling in CO2 levels ... If this greenhouse gas warming was the only phenomenon at work, we would expect man-made warming over the next century even using the most dire assumptions to be less than 1C, or about the same amount we have seen (non-catastrophically) over the last century.

As I said before, man-produce greenhouse gases (CO2) may produce a small, minuscule, amount of warming, which is insignificant, quantitatively, among the natural variations. The catastrophic predictions aren't based on this minuscule warming. They are based on "positive feedback loops".

This theory hypothesizes that small changes in temperature from greenhouse gas increases would be multiplied 3,4,5 times or more by positive feedback effects, from changes in atmospheric water vapor to changing surface albedo.

Let me emphasize again: The catastrophe results not from greenhouse gas theory, but from the theory of extreme climactic positive feedback. In a large sense, all the debate in the media is about the wrong thing! When was the last time you saw the words "positive feedback" in a media article about climate?

Now, this positive feedback has absolutely no scientific base or proof, it's just a guess based on nothing - well, based on the ideological bias of the"scientists". It is not based on scientific data or theory.

Here is what Christopher Monckton writes about it:

The feedback factor f accounts for at least two-thirds of all radiative forcing in IPCC (2007); yet it is not expressly quantified, and no “Level Of Scientific Understanding” is assigned either to f or to the two variables b and κ upon which it is dependent....

Indeed, in IPCC (2007) the stated values for the feedbacks that account for more than two-thirds of humankind’s imagined effect on global temperatures are taken from a single paper. The value of the coefficient z in the CO₂ forcing equation likewise depends on only one paper. The implicit value of the crucial parameter κ depends upon only two papers, one of which had been written by a lead author of the chapter in question, and neither of which provides any theoretical or empirical justification for the IPCC’s chosen value. The notion that the IPCC has drawn on thousands of published, peer-reviewed papers to support its central estimates for the variables from which climate sensitivity is calculated is not supported by the evidence.

As I said, there is absolutely no scientific basis to the alarmist scare mongering. The IPCC, including the dubious positive feedbacks, predicts (i.e. guesses) a rise of 2-4 deg C in temperature, and 60-100 cm in sea levels for the year 2100. Even these predictions aren't yet catastrophic.

The chief scare mongers, Al Gore and Dr. James Hanson speak of 8-10 degrees, 10 m sea level rise and "tipping points" within 30 years. This scare mongering is based on absolutely nothing, not even on the exaggerated IPCC numbers.

Ideological bias in scientists

The article "Usufruct & the Gorilla" by main climate alarmist scientist Dr. James E. Hansen is several months old, but worth mentioning and remembering.

An excrept:

Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important. The real deal is this: the ‘royalty’ controlling the court, the ones with the power, the ones with the ability to make a difference, withthe ability to change our course, the ones who will live in infamy if we pass the tipping points, are the captains of industry, CEOs in fossil fuel companies such as EXXON/Mobil, automobile manufacturers, utilities, all of the leaders who have placed short-term profit above the fate of the planet and the well-being of our children. The court jesters are their jesters, occasionally paid for services, and more substantively supported by the captains’ disinformation campaigns.

This reveals a deep anti-capitalist, anti-human, vile ideology or mentality.
The "captains of industry" are people just like you and me, nay, they are more able and talented than average, and they provide us with all the food, clothes and goods we need for living. They provide what we need and want.

Now, scientists, like all people, are entiteled to their ideology, opinions and biases. But they should not try to let their biases influence their science, or to present their biases as science. Hansen is oblivious to the fact that what he has uttered above is the expression of his ideological bias. Two senteces later he writes:

I am puzzled by views expressed by some conservatives, .... It is a bit
disconcerting as I come from a moderately conservative state, and I consider myself a moderate conservative in most ways.

It's puzzling to me that he doesn't understand the deep ideological (anti-capitalist) nature of his rant, and sees it as normal, uncontroversial, self evident opinions.

I think that the ideological roots of the main AGW alarmist need to be exposed.

Food security - biofuel madness.

The blog EU referendum has an interesting piece on "Food Security the coming crisis".

The NY Times also writes "A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill "

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,”said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.
Food prices are rising sharply and fast, already causing difficulties, especially to the poor people in the world ... A tailor in Lagos, Nigeria, named Abel Ojuku said recently that he had been forced to cut back on the bread he and his family love.

Yet the governments of the EU and US continue with their totally insane policy of biofuel and ethanol mandates. Currently biofuels provide some 5% of automotive fuel, but under existing mandates, they should rise to 20% within a decade.
It won't happen. There simply isn't enough land and agricultural resources (water, fertilizers ) to provide the food we need, let alone biofuel.

Global Warming hasn't caused any tangible damage yet (and is unlikely to, in the future), but global warming hysteria is already harming the hungry people of the world today (not in 2050).
While we debate whether temparatures have risen by some 0.6 deg Celsius over the last hundred years, and whether they are going to rise by another degree or two in the next hundred years - food prices have risen by 40-60% in the last year alone, and that's a fact, not a prediction based on models.

The governments should reverse course, fast, and strictly prohibit the burning of any agricultural products (biofuel, ethanol) as fuel.