1. China has replanted an area the size of Belgium with trees, and by 2020 should have replanted an area the size of France. I’ll say that again; an area the size of France!

2. Rail may not be the best way to get 3rd world economies moving. Rail involves serious infrastructure and relies on trucking and local transport either end. Instead, some are starting to recommend airships that can fly goods and people almost door to door without thousands of kilometres of railway line required! It’s cheaper as well.

From The Science Show

In 1947 the Sydney Basin produced “three quarters of the State’s lettuces, half of the spinach, a third of the cabbages and a quarter of the beans; seventy percent of the State’s poultry farms were in the [Basin] and more than eighteen percent of Sydney’s milk came from the [Basin]”. Sixty years later, the Metropolitan Plan proposes reducing the area of Basin farms to about 600 hectares, through the residential development of 220,000 homes in the north-west and south-west growth areas. The development will pave over 52% or 603 hectares of Sydney’s remaining fresh produce farms.

From The conversation

This cartoon provoked a series of interesting questions from John Mathom. It provided a good opportunity for a good old fashioned rant, so I thought I’d clear out the cobwebs and treat his questions as a Q&A post. Cheers John!

Are we having the better world now?

Sadly, no. Suburban sprawl wastes tens of billions of dollars in traffic jams, lost productivity, and kills millions of people around the world in pointless car accidents and throat and lung cancers burnt into our bodies by fossil fuel exhaust. Our town planners designed a whole lifestyle based on the car, not walking and public transport. We’re eating ourselves to death and not getting enough exercise. People who move into New Urbanism lose weight. It’s a lifestyle thing. With oil fuelling suburban sprawl, we are NOT living the good life! It’s killing us, literally.

Health care? Lower poverty? Does spending all your money on things which have no useful benefit long term really “build a better world?”

You tell me? America loses $600 billion a year, every year, buying overseas oil. That’s $6 trillion a decade. (It could even be as high as $700 billion a year, depending on what oil prices do).

Obama recently ran a committee to investigate how to save a $trillion dollars a decade. It’s easy. Stop buying overseas oil! Mandate electric cars, and accelerate GE’s S-PRISM program to charge all those cars! Generation IV nuclear reactors like GE’s S-PRISM will be able to run the world for 500 years on today’s nuclear waste. As America already owns much of that waste, it could probably run America for the next few millennia! Nuclear waste is not a problem, it’s the solution. Global nuclear waste stocks are now worth $30 trillion dollars precisely because they could run the global economy for 500 years (or the American economy for the next thousand years. In other words, once you build S-PRISM reactors, your fuel is FREE for the next millennia. Close those uranium mines!)

Peak oil is coming. America is frighteningly vulvernable to the coming global oil shocks. I am truly scared for both America and my home country of Australia. It’s going to hurt, bad. And yet it’s avoidable. A legislative program of New Urbanism, clean and efficient public transport and electric cars all fuelled by S-PRISM nukes could both clean our air, save the local environment from suburban sprawl and restore it to local agriculture and forestry and parks, make our cities more attractive, increase public health, lower public health costs, and make us energy secure forever!

Imagine America was not addicted to oil. Imagine you did not have to be in Saudi Arabia, hypocritically backing a Monarchy of the Medieval kind against a possible democratic uprising in their own country. Now, and I’m treading carefully here — imagine the USA being in Saudi Arabia had not alienated Ossama Bin Laden. 9/11 might not have happened! It’s America’s presence in the Muslim holy lands of Saudi Arabia that really gets their goat. I’m not justifying terrorism — PLEASE don’t here me saying that. I’m just pointing out one geopolitical example of what energy security might mean. It’s about having no vulnerability to overseas suppliers, economic or cultural or military or imperial. It’s about being energy independent, and being immune to sudden oil price shocks and immune to further oil wars.

Capitalism is about the allocation of scarce capital among the most productive alternatives. Spending money on things which in the end prove worthless or even in the short term prove worthless leaves us impoverished and where all the poorer countries of the world have been.

America has 5% of the population of the world and yet consumes 25% of the oil. China’s on the rise and want’s their turn at the oil party. Yet peak oil is coming. Sooner or later, something’s gotta give. What gives America the right to keep consuming all that oil to the exclusion of others, especially when there are viable transport and energy alternatives?

in the end prove worthless

Why on earth do global warming Denialist’s also deny any alternatives to fossil fuels? This view is ultimately worse than those of us who take global warming seriously, because at least we think that with strong action to get off fossil fuels, we can do something about it. Your view? We’re stuffed. It might not happen immediately, but you seem to think that there is no alternative to fossil fuels. When the fossil fuels run out Industrial Civilisation and Industrial Agriculture that feeds us; it’s all going down. Big time. All because — as you said — investing in anything else will in the end prove worthless.

High minded bureaucrats and do-gooders don’t seem to understand that capital is scarce

Right-wing denialists don’t seem to understand that you need to do this because capital is scarce. Or do you like funding Middle Eastern types that don’t like you very much? Do you like sending $6 trillion dollars a decade overseas when it could be spent back in America, circulating through your own economy, raising your own local tax base, creating local energy and transport and building jobs? Capital is scarce. So why send it overseas?

and must be allocated by people who have proven to make money in the past, not based on moral arguments of do-gooders.

Local government authorities experimented with suburbia after WW2. The experiment has failed. This is an enormous waste of money! As James Howard Kunstler says, “The whole suburban project, I think, can be summarised pretty succinctly as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world! America took all of its post-war wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future.”
preview1.htm

Local governments interfered with how developers were making money in the past. Developers and architects and builders used to build according to a Urban code with its own beautiful semantics and syntax and language and understanding of walkable, dense and diverse and vibrant cities that humanity has used for 10 thousand years!

After WW2 we threw all that in the dumpster and created single purpose boxes that we have to DRIVE home from work to sleep in, and then get up and DRIVE back to work, then DRIVE to the shops, then DRIVE to pick up the kids from after-school-care because mum isn’t home because it takes 2 parents to pay off the over-sized mortgage that it takes to buy the over-sized McMansions everyone is buying today.

We can fix this. We have 10 thousand years of building dense and diverse and liveable cities that are trendy, beautiful, and built around moving PEOPLE, not cars. If I ran my home country of Australia we’d have a national conversation about the fastest way we could building cities to become more European than Europe. More walkable and trendy and diverse. Within a generation we would have everything we needed within a 7 minute walk outside our own front door! This is easy! And it makes money!

That’s why concentration of capital in the hands of the few can make sense. In the end we all benefit if Bill Gates invests his money well and makes a boatload because he builds 30,000 jobs that never existed before and millionaires that got money not from stealing it but out of thin air.

You seem to be under the impression that because I accept global warming, I am therefore a Communist. Have you even looked up my political stance? I really do believe in a free-market for most things. I do. I love the innovation of a free market. The surprises, the dynamics. I love iPad’s and everything Mac, designer jeans, and grabbing a coffee in a good bookstore. I love movies and hiring a DVD on a Friday night with some take away Chinese or Indian — especially Vindaloo Beef. It’s all good.

Why would anyone want to shove society towards North Korean poverty and industrial collapse purely on ideological grounds? Which is exactly my point, and is exactly what YOU are doing! We’re running out of fossil fuels, and the real science says we are also changing our climate! If we don’t get off the fossil fuels soon, we’re going to lose everything we love. If we take your Denialist ideology to its alternatives-denying extremes, we head towards the Book of Eli!

What happens when we invest a bunch of money in people who can’t pay their mortgages is an implosion of wealth and jobs.

This is totally off the subject now. But this is where good town planning like New Urbanism might have saved America from GFC1.0. New Urbanism guarantees good, affordable apartments and other accommodation — even some larger homes with their own backyards — right next to the stuff of life; the bookstores and shops and restaurants and cinema and churches and schools and universities and light industry that gives us employment and the local, circular, economy supporting circular flow of money. Good town planning (with sensible banking regulations) could have saved America from the GFC.

We cant afford to spend our precious capital on things which are fantasies.

If a mix of nuclear power and renewables CANNOT get us off fossil fuels, then you’re more of a Doomer than I am! You believe The Book of Eli is inevitable. Therefore, why not just live it up now and stuff the next generation? Yeah, makes me want to run out and buy a Hummer!

If global warming is a fantasy then anything we spent on it in the short term could have been spent better to create jobs which create more jobs. Instead the better world of the future can never come from misallocating resources to activities which have no payoff.

No payoff? Are you serious? Did you even read the chart above, or think it’s based on lies? We really are talking about:-

• much improved public health with vast savings in public health spending,
• better and trendier and more livable city designs that save lives and money lost in traffic accidents and traffic jams,
• more local jobs as $6 trillion dollars a decade is invested in American nukes and trains and trams and trolley buses and jobs rather than being sent overseas to fund people who don’t like you very much,
• less reason to invade other countries and waste all your money (and young lives) fighting unnecessary oil wars.

America should take the Nuclear New Urban option right now — even if global warming were a fantasy. Which it isn’t. Every National Science Academy on the planet says so.

**** below from Google / AFP ****

Paris launches world-first electric car-share scheme

(AFP) – 2 days ago

PARIS — Self-service electric cars appeared on the streets of Paris Sunday, as a French group launched a public car-hire scheme modelled on the capital’s popular bicycle-sharing system and designed to become the world’s largest of its kind.

The Autolib’ venture set up by Vincent Bollore, a prominent businessman with ties to President Nicolas Sarkozy, kicked off a two-month testing phase with around 60 vehicles scattered over 10 stations.

The programme is expected to be scaled up to 250 vehicles on December 5 and could include 2,000 of the small four-seaters over 46 municipalities around the French capital by the end of June 2012.

“This service will complement public transport and taxis. Our aim to widen the range of available transport,” deputy Paris mayor Annick Lepetit said at the launch.

The Bollore group predicts it will need 80,000 users to make a profit and hopes to attract customers with a low fee of 12 euros a month for an annual subscription.

Car-sharing systems exist in New York and cities in the Netherlands but the Autolib’ project in Paris is a novelty in that all vehicles are electric.

Their Lithium Metal Polymer batteries, developped by the Bollore Group, can store more power than any other on the market and can take the Paris “Bluecars” 250 kilometres (155 miles) on a single charge.

The small bubble-shaped Bluecars were designed by legendary Italian coachbuilder Pininfarina, whose workshops have designed generations of Ferraris and Maseratis.

The Conversation asks if dragging old oil rigs out into specially designated areas of the deep ocean and simply dumping them there would be good for the environment!

The gains for the environment are of course an artificial reef with all the benefits that implies; fish hatcheries, nurseries, and a natural barrier to bottom trawlers!

Trawlers are gradually turning the ocean floor into a barren moonscape, literally scraping life off the bottom of the ocean and saving maybe 10% for food markets while the rest is by-catch. It’s disgusting. It should be illegal. In some places it is illegal, but has to be policed. Not any more if this oil rig proposal happens! Sinking oil rigs like this would create an instant marine park with physical — not legislative — protection from bottom-trawlers. Now that’s awesome!

Tom Blees raises a similar prospect for dealing with the (unlikely) scenario of society having too much rock-wool waste from Plasma Burners. In other words, not only will Plasma Burners make landfill tips a wasteful horror of the past, and not only will they recycle everything (but radioactive waste), they’ll also produce so much rock wool for building homes and cars and insulation that the author, Tom Blees, has wondered what to do with the excess? Again, just as with the oil rigs, dump them in strategic points in the ocean.

If any plasma plant found itself with a saturated building materials market and had to look at disposal of the slag, the simple expedient of having some molds handy would be ideal. The molten slag could be poured into molds of various shapes optimally designed for use as artificial reefs. There’s an organization that has been manufacturing what they call “reef balls” for some time now, constructing artificial reefs around the world. (Currently they’re made of concrete, but slag would work great.) Whereas it may seem logical to think that this sort of thing might make sense in the tropics where coral reefs are most commonly found, one need only look at artificial reef projects off New Jersey or even farther north to see that the range of possibilities is nearly endless.

While the sea’s seemingly limitless bounty might lead people to believe that it’s teeming with life, the truth is that the vast majority of the sea bottom is relatively featureless and barren. All along the continental shelves there stretch seemingly limitless expanses of relatively smooth terrain with a minimal amount of animal and plant life. But drop a pile of nearly any solid material onto the bottom and watch what happens. As soon as there’s something to anchor to, planktonic organisms like barnacles, corals, sponges, sea squirts and others will come floating by and latch on. Crustaceans will make their homes in the nooks and crannies. Fish will arrive and take up residence. Pretty soon you’ve created an entire community, a little neighborhood ecosystem where virtually nothing lived before.

Human communities that have created artificial reefs offshore have seen them generate not only fish but dollars. Sport fishermen who had no reason to visit before now suddenly find good fishing. Even commercial fishing is enhanced, especially where extensive reef building has resulted in ever more diverse fish populations. In a time when pollution and destructive fishing and mining practices have damaged or utterly destroyed natural reefs in many parts of the world, this possibility of dramatically increasing the biological carrying capacity of continental shelves is a golden opportunity. Permits to dispose of reef-ready slag could be issued to plasma operators by local boards using the advice of marine biologists hired to advise on the optimum locations and volumes of artificial reef materials. Who would ever have imagined that our garbage could be put to such good use?

http://prescriptionfortheplanet.com/images/P4theP/chapter7.pdf

We live in an age of vanishing rainforests. Half of the world’s tropical forests have disappeared since World War II and roughly another 10 million hectares are being felled each year — the equivalent of 40 football fields every minute.

Then in the comments a Phd student quotes David Brower (1912-2000, founder of the Earth Island Institute & John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies).

“We’re not blindly opposed to progress, we’re opposed to blind progress.”

I got a bit carried away — imagine that!? — and wrote the following comment to the Bill Laurance article above. (I’ve added a few further comments in brackets). It got me thinking about how to solve this while meeting the needs of the world’s poor?

***

1. Lock up all the Old Growth.
I suggest that the global forestry industry needs to be LOCKED OUT of old growth forests and regions that were ‘recently’ old growth forests (degraded forests). Then more scientists like Bill should be put in charge of restoring them.

What about local peasant employment and farms? I’m sorry, but if they are only recent farms or logging areas that occurred in the last 10 to 15 years, then the global ecological crisis means they are simply … a mistake. These farmers and loggers should not have been allowed to move there. It is not their fault they were forced into logging these vital areas.

2. Shrink the cities
When governments capture the vision of attractive New Urban Ecocities, they can easily create jobs as the city both shrinks back in on itself (providing dense and diverse town planning in the core) while restoring the surrounding countryside to local agriculture. Cities should be shrinking away from these vital ecosystems, not expanding into them! These cities could then make money from the primal beauty of these fantastic ecosystems through eco-tourism, not logging and degrading them!

3. Poor peasants into satisfied and secure urban dwellers
When subsistence farmers are integrated into a more secure financial position in a meaningful community, they have less children. Kerala India demonstrates this. It’s called the Demographic Transition and — ultimately — is our only hope. The global population hits 7 billion in October this year. That’s the real reason our forests are vanishing.

4. Materials
“But we need wood to build those Eco-cities!” I hear someone cry? Yes, but New Urbanism is more efficient in all materials, not just wood, than western suburbia or sprawling peasant farms. (This depends on what you classify as a peasant farm. Of course some peasants are doing it so rough that their tiny shacks could not possibly compete with New Urbanism).

There are other ways of growing food, fuel, and fibre. First, let’s re-brand forestry. Foresters can convert badlands into woodlands.

American Tropical Hardwoods have converted a 14 000 acre cattle ranch in Costa Rica into tropical forest. Watch the video on the home page, or just check these 2 photos.

Before:

After:

Why even risk degrading old growth forest when degraded farms and badlands can be turned into new forests like this one, complete with vibrant biodiversity?

Now that’s sustainable forestry! That’s the only kind of forestry we should be encouraging. The extinction levels are simply that bad. Someone needs to say it.

There are other ways to meet our growing needs for fuel and fibre and food than cutting down trees in old growth forests! We should lock up vast tracks of the Amazon and other threatened areas, and even reverse this trend and restore these precious areas that are so important for biodiversity, waste processing, storing carbon, and pumping oxygen into our atmosphere.

Biochar can restore many degraded marginal soils, and alternative crops like Hemp (the low THC variety that does not get you high) can yield enormous volumes of both food and fibre. Hemp fibres can be turned into cabinets and furniture with modern glues, and the glues can come from ordinary household waste thrown into a modern plasma burner. In other words, our ordinary house hold waste including dirty diapers, asbestos, pizza boxes and old toothbrushes are blown apart at the molecular level and converted into new toothbrushes and building materials and glues that can help build New Urbanism.

I’m optimistic that we can both provide economic security for the poor while saving our old growth forests and restoring areas cleared in the last 15 years; while also solving the primary cause of it all, population growth. It just takes vision and guts. It takes new legislative approaches and town planning practices, and a culture willing to think about what is possible with our wonderful new agricultural and waste processing technologies.

Filed under: Biodiversity loss, New Urbanism ]]> http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/are-conservationists-opposed-to-development/feed/ 0 Eclipsenow http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/climatologists-give-up-on-correcting-the-australian/ http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/climatologists-give-up-on-correcting-the-australian/#comments Sun, 11 Sep 2011 07:42:38 +0000 Eclipse Now http://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/?p=2973 Continue reading →]]> The Conversation is one of my favourite new online haunts. I’ve given up on “Online Opinion” because the founder runs a campaign of unfair censorship and misinformation and character attacks against climate activists who, like myself, dare to mention that global warming did NOT stop in 1998. I got up his nose pointing out that 2 of the top 3 climate monitoring agencies in the world both say 2005 and 2010 were hotter, and eventually was banned from the forum. So that’s that. Good riddance! It was hideous being censored by his unfair regime of lies and discrimination.

Now it seems the lies and misinformation — or FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) are being spread by The Australian. I’ll put you in the hands of Professor of Astrophysics, Michael Ashely.

****

But, as The Conversation so eloquently shows, it could all go dreadfully wrong for the Denialists.

On one side would be essentially the whole of the scientific community, on the other would be the climate change sceptics, who would be required to make a case for their belief. On one side would be the accumulated theory and evidence of man made climate change. On the other would be the vacuity of Lord Monckton and Co. declaring that the science is wrong or undecided.

As an aside here, anyone who says that the “science of climate change is undecided” as Tony Abbott has, is demonstrating a misunderstanding of the nature of scientific inquiry. Of course it is not decided — science is never “decided”. Scientific theories are always contestable. If you can bring to ongoing scientific discourse a better explanation to observed phenomena, or better observations, then your theory or observations will (eventually) displace the dominant theory. The science of climate change is not settled — yes, we can all agree on that.

An analysis by the Breakthrough Institute finds that the entire German solar sector produces less than half the power that Fukushima Daiichi – a single nuclear complex – generated before it was hit by the tsunami. To build a Fukushima-sized solar industry in Germany would, it estimates, cost $155bn. To build a Fukushima-sized nuclear plant would cost $53.5bn. And the power would be there on winter evenings.

But they can’t do that any more. 1998′s been beaten, twice.

Of the top 3 climate monitoring units on the planet only Hadley says 1998 was the warmest, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has pointed to a cooling bias with the Hadley data.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998-intermediate.htm

Two of the three most powerful temperature databases on the planet confirm 1998 as the THIRD warmest year on record, even when 1998 had one of the most frighteningly powerful El Nino’s we’ve ever seen. Check it out — NOAA, NASA, then Hadley’s CRU.

NASA GISTEMP confirms the same thing and says:

Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20110112/

The NCDC at NOAA says:

For 2010, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature tied with 2005 as the warmest such period on record, at 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F). 1998 is the third warmest year-to-date on record, at 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2010/13

And now Phil Jones at the Hadley CRU, but don’t forget the ECMWF has had a go at this particular dataset.

“The time series shows the combined global land and marine surface temperature record from 1850 to 2010. According to the method of calculation used by CRU, the year 2010 was the equal third (see footnote) warmest on record (with 2003), exceeded by 1998 and 2005. The years 2003, 2005 and 2010 are only distinguishable in the third decimal place. The error estimate for individual years (two standard errors is about ±0.1°C, see Brohan et al., 2006) is at least ten times larger than the differences between these three years.

The period 2001-2010 (0.44°C above 1961-90 mean) was 0.20°C warmer than the 1991-2000 decade (0.24°C above 1961-90 mean). The warmest year of the entire series has been 1998, with a temperature of 0.55°C above the 1961-90 mean. After 1998, the next nine warmest years in the series are all in the decade 2001-2010. During this decade, only 2008 is not in the ten warmest years. Even though 2008 was the coldest year of the 21st century it was still the 12th warmest year of the whole record.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/

Here is the Met office (runs Hadley) graph that summarises the findings of the three agencies.

Even Denialist’s are admitting it. At the 2009 Heartland Institute conference (of global warming sceptics), well known climate denialist Dr Patrick J Michaels warned against using the 1998 El Nino super-spike as some sort of ‘proof’ of a cooling trend. Take the advice of the words of a fellow Denialist.

“Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all… If you loose credibility on this issue you lose this issue!”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4

If you’re going to selectively zoom in on data you can concoct whatever story you want to. It will just be Cherry-Picking the data. Anyone can do that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y15UGhhRd6M

Due to time constraints I won’t address everything in their report, but the first thing I noticed was a scary looking quote from Mike Hulme, a prestigious climatologist. Mike had written a report on the political, sociological, and epistemological approaches of the IPCC in which they claim the following.

Hulme specifically rejects the well-known consensus declaration of 2,500 scientists agreeing that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate, and notes “That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies”.

This is a classic example of Denialist journalists’s pulling a quote right out of context. Unlike Cox and Stockwell I committed to reading the 22 page report myself. After reading it was I horrified to discover that Mike Hulme has indeed debunked the whole IPCC and uncovered a massive international conspiracy? (Politically driven Denialists salivate at that prospect). Sadly, no.

(Sadly because I honestly long for the day the PEER-REVIEWED science actually discovers some mysterious new climate ‘safety-valve’. Then we might use all that coal to make synthetic oil to help mitigate peak oil, until such time as we have truly miraculous battery or hydrogen technology.)

But sadly there is no story here other than the usual dishonesty from Denialist journalists. Cox and Stockwell have just plucked it all out of context.  Hulme was so outraged at the joyous raptures exploding like a shockwave through the Denialist blogosphere that he wrote the following clarification. Check the links and everything.

If they had actually read the report they’d see Hulme was discussing how to improve the political systems of the IPCC, not debunking climate science itself. He was clarifying how the consensus has actually emerged within various branches of speciality, and debunking the image of 2500 climatologist and oceanographers and solar experts all sitting in the one large room together running tests together. That is indeed a silly image, and is not one the IPCC has promoted. (Greenpeace and other groups may have). But it is also not like Hulme was arguing the absorption spectra properties of Co2 had been fudged by 12 guys in a smoky room. He was most certainly NOT arguing there had been some sort of false consensus or cover up!

And how like a cherrypicking Denialist cult to zoom in and focus on the IPCC in this manner, and, full of triumphant  joy, declare that all climate science depends on just 12 guys on this or that specific panel? They need to pull back their focus a bit and xan around the breadth of climate science analysis across the entire globe! There is not one National Academy of Science or reputable scientific organisation for that matter that disagrees with AGW! Not one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

Now of course ‘consensus’ doesn’t prove a thing in itself — ONE new fact might make climate change evaporate overnight, in which case — if it is verifiable and not from the lunatic fringe — you would see all the National Academies of Science gradually dump climate science as the truth is revealed by more experimentation. That is how science works. But until that day (if it ever comes) we have every reason to believe that the IPCC may have been too conservative! Hulme goes on to explain why just a few paragraphs after the contested lines that started all this.  (If only Denialists actually read all the material they raved about! Or do they rely on the fact that most of their blog reader’s will not read the entire report?)

“That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields. But consensus-making can also lead to criticism for being too conservative, as Hansen (2007) has most visibly argued. Was the IPCC AR4 too conservative in reaching its consensus about future sea-level rise? Many glaciologists and oceanographers think they were (Kerr, 2007; Rahmstorf, 2010), leading to what Hansen attacks as ‘scientific reticence’. Solomon et al. (2008) offer a robust defence, stating that far from reaching a premature consensus, the AR4 report stated that in fact no consensus could be reached on the magnitude of the possible fast ice-sheet melt processes that some fear could lead to 1 or 2 metres of sea-level rise this century. Hence these processes were not included in the quantitative estimates.”

Hulme is saying that global warming might indeed be far more serious than the IPCC reports!

So in the end I guess I should thank these ABC reporters for illustrating just how suspect EVERYTHING from Denialist journalists and scientists really is. They cherry-pick without any conscience. If Cox and Stockwell did not publish Hulme’s response to this blatant out-of-context misreading of his rather sophisticated (but in the end simple) argument, then you can write these journalists off as reliable sources.

Denialists fight an incredibly well researched discipline with gossip from the toilet wall. They should just grow up.

******

Apple has a valuation of $369 billion (as the stock price closes on $400 per share) At $449 per share (if Exxon Mobil remained shares were flat), Apple would be the world’s most valuable company.

Apple is worth more than Microsoft ($235 billion) and Intel ($122 billion) combined.
Apple is close to the value of Google ($199 billion) and Walmart ($187 billion) combined.

Apple is 12% away from the valuation of Exxon Mobile ($416 billion, the most valuable American Company).

Microsoft (Bill Gates) is worth $235 billion and Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet is worth $178 billion. Apple is 11% away from being worth more than those two companies.

Steve Jobs has 1.7% of Disney. Disney is worth $76.6 billion. Apple and Disney combined are worth $446 billion.

Financial Analysts have 12 months forecasts $468 to 666 per share. At any valuation in that range, Apple will easily be worth more than the next two technology companies (IBM and Microsoft combined). At the high end, Apple would likely start getting close to the valuation of Exxon Mobil and PetroChina (the next two most valuable companies worldwide.)

Gizmag reports that the solar updraft tower is go go go!

And they have the GenIV feature of being modular. Think about that for a moment. Older nukes were the “Rolls Royce” of the energy world. They were hand-crafted site-constructed expensive beasts! But GenIII reactors can be modularised and put up on the assembly line. Safety systems can be standardised as part of the production line process. It will bring the costs down dramatically, and cuts Rolls Royce costs down to the Hyundai level, while being better than the original.

Now, GenIV reactors are still my favourite as they burn nuclear waste. They breed it up. I’ve said repeatedly that we have about 500 years of fuel sitting around in cooling ponds, just waiting for GenIV reactors to burn it.

But it’s not that simple. We don’t have access to all that energy yet. Even if I waved a magic wand and overnight and we had the thousands of GenIV nukes we need,  it would still take a few decades to breed up our nuclear waste to the right purity to run them! That is, although we *already* have 500 years worth of nuclear fuel sitting around in our ‘waste’ cooling ponds, it will take a few decades to get at it all as the fuel only doubles every 7 years.

So build the safe GenIII nukes now, and then we’ll have all the waste we need ready for the GenIV reactors when they finally come off the production line! As a friend over on BNC said,

Gen III+ reactors (AP1000, ESBWR) are also largely ‘modular’ with parts built in a factory and assembled on site. We can do this now. New designs should be developed, but there is no need to wait. In 10 years China will be building AP1000 (or their higher-power variant the CAP1400) reactors at rates that will astonish the world. They are building the module factories now.

We have the technology right now. We can do this! We should build AP1000 assembly lines to fly them out the doors onto the trucks and freight them straight to site for assembly like so much giant-sized Lego. It’s time to do this, and the faster we start the better we’ll cope with peak oil and climate change.

Check it out.

No surprise to those who saw this video last year, Dr Willie Soon, one of the most frequently cited climate deniers with any science background, (although his Phd is in aerospace engineering, not climate..) is in the news, as a new Greenpeace report shows where the bodies are buried. Soon has admitted the details are correct, that he has received a million dollars in funding from a rogues galle … Read More

via Climate Denial Crock of the Week

Normally, floods of the magnitude now being seen in North Dakota and elsewhere around the world are expected to happen only once in 100 years. But one of the predictions of climate change models is that extreme weather—floods, heat waves, droughts, even blizzards—will become far more common. “Big rain events and higher overnight lows are two things we would expect with [a] warming world,” says Deke Arndt, chief of the center’s Climate Monitoring Branch. Arndt’s group had already documented a stunning rise in overnight low temperatures across the U.S.

So are the floods and spate of other recent extreme events also examples of predictions turned into cold, hard reality? Increasingly, the answer is yes. Scientists used to say, cautiously, that extreme weather events were “consistent” with the predictions of climate change. No more. “Now we can make the statement that particular events would not have happened the same way without global warming,” says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

That’s a profound change—the difference between predicting something and actually seeing it happen. The reason is simple: The signal of climate change is emerging from the “noise”—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.
Normally, floods of the magnitude now being seen in North Dakota and elsewhere around the world are expected to happen only once in 100 years. But one of the predictions of climate change models is that extreme weather—floods, heat waves, droughts, even blizzards—will become far more common. “Big rain events and higher overnight lows are two things we would expect with [a] warming world,” says Deke Arndt, chief of the center’s Climate Monitoring Branch. Arndt’s group had already documented a stunning rise in overnight low temperatures across the U.S. So are the floods and spate of other recent extreme events also examples of predictions turned into cold, hard reality?

Increasingly, the answer is yes. Scientists used to say, cautiously, that extreme weather events were “consistent” with the predictions of climate change. No more. “Now we can make the statement that particular events would not have happened the same way without global warming,” says Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo.

That’s a profound change—the difference between predicting something and actually seeing it happen. The reason is simple: The signal of climate change is emerging from the “noise”—the huge amount of natural variability in weather.

“consumption will increase at about 1.1% per year for the period 2009-2035. If that growth rate continues into the future, U.S. recoverable coal reserves would be exhausted in about 119 years if no new reserves are added. “

http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=coal_reserves

But there’s a few problems!

1. There’s no reference to peak coal, which means moving from increasing production of higher grade coal to decreasing production of lower grade coal. This happens in all resource mining, whether discussing copper, gold, iron ore, or oil gas and coal. It means the cost of coal rises exponentially at the half-way mark, not the end.
2. There’s no reference to peak oil, and how many see coal-to-liquids as a short term stop-gap for peak oil. (Such as the famous Hirsch Report to the DOE). Coal consumption would increase much faster than 1.1% each year if we turn to coal to save us from peak oil.

What was that about building our house on the sand — I mean coal?