NYT says Hitler was right!

Predicts disastrous food shortages

There is here an article in the NYT under the heading "The Next Genocide" by Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University -- who knows nothing about economics or anything much modern.  So he is a Warmist. It's such an easily summarized load of old cobblers that I am not going to reproduce any of it for once.

What he says -- correctly -- is that Hitler's Drang nach Osten was motivated by a fear of running out of resources, food resources, in particular.  Hitler wanted Eastern European farms to produce the food needed to feed Germany's growing population.

And I acknowledge that I did learn one thing from our historian about that.  He says that concern about food supplies was motivated by the food shortages that occurred in Germany during WWI. I had never made that connection but it is obviously right.

All the rest is amazingly uninsightful and ill-informed, however.  He misses the obvious point that Hitler's modern successors in having panic fits over things running out are the Greenies. A reasonable person might have concluded that since Hitler was wrong about things running out, one should also question the Greenie fear of things running out.  That is too obvious for our one-eyed historian, however.  Greenies as Hitler's successors?  Perish the thought!

Instead he basically argues that Hitler was right!  He says that food shortages are a real possibility if we do not do something about it.  He asserts without proof that various wars in Africa were caused by competition for resources and that resources everywhere are in danger of running out because of global warming.   That tribalism in Africa causes a lot of conflict he acknowledges but he thinks he can see more deeply than that.

So what will happen when global warming creates worldwide food shortages?  China!  The millions of troops of the People's Liberation Army will descend on us all and take our land.

So what is wrong with that argument?  Just about everything. To take the searingly obvious, global warming would be GOOD for crops. Crops thrive in warmth.  I come from the tropics and I can assure you that vegetation there almost leaps out and grabs you, it is so lush and vigorous.  Leave your car outside untended for 6 months and at the end of six months you could find it covered with creepers.  I have seen it happen.

It's true that many pest species also thrive in warm weather but now that DDT has decisively been shown to be harmless to humans and birds, a widespread revival of DDT use would cope with that problem very easily.

And warming would be greeted with frabjous joy in both Canada and Siberia. And note what a big place Siberia is. It is 5 million sq. miles versus 3 million sq. miles for CONUS. The cropland that would be produced by a warmer South in Siberia boggles the imagination.

And clever Canadian farmers already produce a great bounty of grains from the chilly North.  How much more they would produce if the land just beyond present useability warmed up!  They would start cropping there very rapidly.

And already in the world as we have it, the characteristic problem of agricultural productivity is glut, not shortage.  Governments all over the developed world do various things to discourage their farmers from farming.  In the USA, the Agriculture Department pays farmers to leave part of their land fallow.  Why?  Because, left to their own devices, farmers would produce so much that food prices would fall greatly and thus trap farmers in a sort of Malthusian trap.  They would get poorer by producing more.  French farmers right at this moment are mounting big anti-government protests over the fact that they get so little money for what they produce.

So the whole basis of Prof. Snyder's scare is total crap.  Food has never before been so plentiful and hence cheaper -- and there is no end to that in sight.  The French government would fervently hope that it were but they are not going to get so lucky.

And Snyder's portrayal of China's present food situation would appear not to have been updated since Mao.  Under capitalism, those incredibly productive Chinese farmers have turned China from a net food importer to a net food exporter -- to the considerable grief of Australian wheat farmers.  Under Mao, Australian wheat put bread on the table for a lot of China.  That is no more.  China now has a surplus of grains -- among many other farm products.  Look at the origin of bargain cans of almost any food in your local supermarket and you will find that it mostly comes from China these days. As well as making most of the world's electrical goods, China now to a significant extent also feeds the world.  It's an amazing example of what capitalism can do.

One small thing that Snyder gets right is that there has been a distressing corn shortage in poorer countries in recent years -- thus bumping up the price and tending to make poor people go hungry.  He shows no knowledge that it is precisely his Greenie friends who are behind that, however.  Mandates to add ethanol to gasoline supplies in the USA have diverted much of the huge U.S. corn crop from export and into distilleries producing alcohol.  It's an inefficient way of producing alcohol but that's another story.  So Greenie meddling with the market can produce food shortages but even amid some shackles the market still produces plenty.  

Snyder is a complete ignoramus -- JR.





The prophecies never stop

Warmism is the modern world's doomsday cult.  There have been many others -- all failed. The claim that CO2 causes significant warming is entirely religious and contrary to the available data

Many of the world's greatest cities - currently home to more than one billion people - will go underwater should we burn all of the planet's available fossil fuels, scientists have warned.

Carbon emissions given off during the burning of oil, gas and coal will lead to further melting of the entirety of the Antarctic ice sheet and a destructive sea level rise, they claim.

While the west Antarctic sheet has formed the focus of most climate change studies, a new report published in Science Advances claims the continent's east may also be under threat.

Professor Anders Levermann, a study co-author, told The Independent: 'If we want to pass on cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Calcutta, Hamburg and New York as our future heritage, we need to avoid tipping in east Antarctica.'

The study concluded that 'unabated carbon emissions', leading to sea-level rise, threatens the Antarctic Ice Sheet 'in its entirety'.

It stated: 'If we were to release all currently attainable fossil fuel resources, Antarctica would become almost ice-free.

'With unrestrained future CO2 emissions, the amount of sea-level rise from Antarctica could exceed tens of meters over the next 1,000 years and could ultimately lead to the loss of the entire ice sheet.

'It is unclear whether this dynamic discharge would be reversible and, if so, on which time scales.'

Professor Levermann's colleague Ken Caldeira told the Independent we could not continue to extract fossil fuels and release it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

'If we don't stop dumping our waste CO2 into the sky, land that is now home to more than a billion people will one day be underwater.'

It comes as scientists earlier this year warned the world must prepare itself for a rapid increase in the speed of climate change.

According to the study, the rate at which temperatures are rising in the northern hemisphere could be 0.25C per decade by 2020 - a level not seen for at least 1,000 years.

The study, carried out by U.S. researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, focused on changes over 40-year periods to determine what changes individuals could see over a lifetime.

Overall, the world is getting warmer due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions that trap the sun's heat.

But, given natural climate variability over short times scales, the likely effect of global warming over humanly relevant periods such as the length of a person's life is not so well understood.

SOURCE





The Myth of Climate Tipping Points

Written by Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser

Tipping is fine but “climate tipping points” are nonsense. I’m talking about climate models that have predicted such “points of no return.” You could view them as the terminal (maximum) speed in a free fall, only to come to a sudden stop when you hit the solid ground.

For example, the disgraced chairman of the IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), R. Pachauri, declared in 2007 that the world had only about four years to save itself. The perceived danger: a runaway (tipping point exceedance) global warming that he claimed to result from carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels. The following year, 2008, one of Germany’s high priests of climate doom, Prof. S. Rahmstorf, Head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) produced a graph showing the then observed decline of sea-ice in the Arctic’s summer (Fig. 1).
klaus fig 1

Then, in 2011, Rahmstorf publicly mused about more ice loss in the Arctic and “Two types of tipping points.” (The IPCC defines tipping point “as a threshold for abrupt and irreversible change”). To explain his theory, he showed a conceptual graph where, initially an increasing decline of Arctic minimum sea-ice that reaches a point of inflection after which the decline will be slower but still lead to a near ice-free situation not much later, reproduced here in Fig. 2.

Just to make sure that the readers got the message he wished to convey, he claimed [translated]: "There is no reason for any “all-clear signal” [with respect to sea-ice in the Arctic].”

Then, in 2012, in another lecture, lo and behold the ice had declined even further compared to 2008 and he expanded on it (see the red line in Fig. 3). The decline appeared to be rapid and unstoppable. Surely, the point of inflection in the models (black line) had well been past. Rahmstorf again made certain that the audience took home his message by emphasizing it with statements like [translated] "Last month, the [Arctic] ice cover was only approximately half the size of that in 1979” and “the actual development shows that the ice melt is much faster than the models predicted” and “unfortunately the problem [of Arctic ice melt] has in the past been strongly under-estimated; and it keeps thinning.” The entire lecture is available at https://vimeo.com/56007848 .

Now to the Real World

In the following, I’d like to look at a few examples of that tipping point theory and what became of it.

1. Global Warming & Arctic Sea-Ice

Ten years ago or so, the IPCC and many “climate modellers” were all in rage: They claimed that the world was in a run-away overheating situation. They also claimed to know why: rising carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations in the atmosphere.

Despite steadily rising CO2 levels since then, the warming trend has stalled for 18+ years now. Obviously, nature missed to learn from Rahmstorf’s lecture and the IPCC predictions or we all would be fried by now.

This “climate tipping point” was (according to PIK’s models) to be particularly apparent in “the most sensitive” area for that, namely the Arctic. If you compare Rahmstorf’s 2008 graph (Fig. 1) with his updated version shown in 2012 (Fig. 3), you really might have fallen for that theory. In fact, Rahmstorf even stated that “the ice extent is declining much more rapidly than predicted by the (then current) computer models. To top off the finger-wagging, he added “and it is getting thinner.” If that statement was not give the message of being past a tipping point already, I don’t know what it was meant to convey.

Once again, nature did not listen. In recent winters and summers, the northern sea-ice extent returned to normal (Fig 4).

Perhaps then, we ought to look further south in “the Arctic,” like the North American or Laurentian Great Lakes (GLs) to get a better picture.

2. Laurentian Great Lakes (GLs)

Now, personally I don’t think that the freshwater Great Lakes are part of the Arctic though it can be quite cold around their shores in winter (and, sometimes, even in summer). However, considering the definition for Arctic sea-ice, the latitude of the upper GLs (Lakes Superior, Huron and Michigan) are certainly within the latitudinal bounds of Arctic sea-ice measurements.

Anyway, the water levels of the GLs have been recorded for over 150 years and such records are widely available.

Beginning with 1980 or so, the level in Lakes Huron and Michigan (LHM, which is identical because of the wide gap at the Straights of Mackinac), was getting higher and higher to reach a new 150-year record in 1986 (Fig. 5). Many lake shore property owners then feared a “tipping point” breach and clamoured for the government(s) “to do something.”

Of course, governments need a while to respond to new situations, so, for a number of years they didn’t do anything to curb the rise. But they didn’t need to do anything after all; nature changed her mind and decided to lower the water level all by her little self. By the year 2000, the water level in LHM had declined sharply, nearly two meters below the 1986 level and it stayed there for a dozen or so years. In fact, a new all-time (150-year) record low level was reached in 2012.

Needless to say, all the people who wanted the government to “do something” about the perceived “for-ever-rise” in the mid-1980’s changed their tune and were then clamouring for the opposite government action, namely to “stop the drop.”  Large “Stop the Drop” banners could be seen at all kinds of places around the lake. Had we reached or even surpassed yet another “tipping point?” It looked that way to many.

Just when everyone was convinced that the lake levels of the 1970s were never to be seen again, Mother Nature changed her mind, once again. Between 2013 and 2015 (this year), LHM levels shot up by 1 m (3.5 ft) and are currently 1.2 m above the 2012 record low. In fact, they are now again much closer to the record high of 1986 than to the record low of 2012 (Fig. 6).

All nature needed to provide was a regular amount of rain and snow, and a couple of cold winters in a row with little wind. If you wonder how those determine the water levels in LHM, see below in section (3), if not, you can jump right to section (4).

3. Your Ice Cubes

Your ice-cubes-to-be in the fridge freeze from the outside, not the inside. The air in the freezer needs to be colder than the freezing point of the water (0 C) for that to happen. With lakes, it’s the same. When the air is colder than that, they tend to freeze over – unless the warmer (4 C) bottom water mixes with the 0 C surface water and keeps it from freezing. With deep lakes like L. Superior and L. Huron (maximum depths 406 m and 229 m, respectively), there is an enormous amount of latent heat energy stored in that relatively warm (4 C) but nevertheless quite cold water. Just a little breeze will do to create the wave action necessary to stir things up sufficiently for the surface not to freeze over.

However, when it’s calm AND cold, the surface will develop a layer of ice overnight. A few more days and nights of the same will do the trick. The entire lake surface freezes over and may stay that way for the next few weeks or months. Without any strong wind action or ship traffic to break it up (like it happens in the Arctic summer, see my previous post on Breaking Ice in the Arctic), that layer of ice reduces the evaporation rate to a fraction of the normal.

The reason is the large difference between vapour pressure of water molecules on the surface of (unfrozen) water and cold ice. In winter, the moisture content of air is very low. For that reason people need to humidify their houses in order to keep at least happy if not healthy. Without humidification, you are nature’s target for getting zapped by a high voltage discharge at every step or so; it can be annoying.

Now back to the water and ice. In order to evaporate H2O (water) molecules from any surface, the evaporation energy needs to be supplied. That is easily obtained on an open water surface (at 0 C) by the warmer water below. In contrast, a poor heat conductor like ice can only take it from the ice immediately below the surface and only with a considerable delay from the water below the ice. Together with the much lower vapour pressure of cold ice, it results in much less evaporation from the lake in a cold winter with ice cover. The magnitude of that difference can be astounding, up to 0.5 m (1.5+ ft) of lake level drop in a “warm” winter (without ice cover) and next to no drop in a cold winter with full ice cover.

I quite agree, this is a bit counter-intuitive but true nonetheless. Of course, people who model nature’s escapades from a cozy “climate office” may find it difficult to explain that to their super computer; perhaps, a (permanent) move to the real Arctic would teach the right lesson.

4. Tipping Point Theory—and Practice

The gurus who have warned of climate tipping points and predicted a runaway-warming, melting ice, rising sea levels and so forth invoking the tipping point idea were all quite coy about exactly what numerical value(s) they considered as the tipping point(s) in this or that measurement. In fact, I suspect they had no idea themselves – and for good reason – as there are no tipping points in such things as temperature, ice extent, etc. They are physical measurements that are observed on earth over a wide range and can vary tremendously at any given location and in short time. There are no points of no return in such natural variations many of which can exhibit large amplitudes and lengthy cycles.

For example, at the same time of year (late-August) at a friend’s place up north, the conditions have varied over the years from near freezing to 30+ C, from dead calm to violent storms, from lush green plant cover to the severe droughts with the maple trees shedding their leaves for lack of water and oak leaves just shriveling on the stem while still green, and a 2 m lake water level change first to a 150-year record high and then back to a 150-year low. In all those extremes over several decades, I have not noticed any tipping point from which there was no return to longer-term normal levels or even the opposite extremes.

How quickly nature can reverse course was also seen in Australia not long ago. After years of below-normal precipitation the Great Artesian Basin aquifer had lost much of its water. Then, in 2011 and 2012, so much rain fell that it replenished the reservoir for many years to come. Of course that water was evaporated from the ocean and it was claimed to have lowered the ocean level by 7 mm or 1/3 inch. You can also look at more historic events, for example the decades-long droughts in the southwest of the U.S. that forced many of the pueblo cultures to abandon their long-held settlements. Since that time the areas have undergone more recovery and drought cycles.

In other words, the entire climate tipping point theory is pure bunk.

SOURCE  (See the original for links and graphics)





Enron Environmentalism: Carbon Credits Scam Pumps out More 'Greenhouse Gases'

Written by James Delingpole

A UN-endorsed carbon offset scheme designed to reduce emissions has actually increased them massively, a study by a green think tank has found.

As well as pumping much as 600 million tonnes more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the carbon credits scheme has been abused by countries like Russia and the Ukraine which have used them as a money making scam.

Vladyslav Zhezherin, one of the co-authors of the study by the Stockholm Environment Institute says:  “This was like printing money.”

Another co-author Anja Kollmuss has told BBC News.  “We were surprised ourselves by the extent [of the fraud], we didn’t expect such a large number.”

    “What went on was that these countries could approve these projects by themselves there was no international oversight, in particular Russia and the Ukraine didn’t have any incentive to guarantee the quality of these credits.”

To which the two obvious questions are:   Have any of these people actually been to Russia or the Ukraine?

and:

    This stuff that these greenies have been smoking sounds totally amazing. How do we go about getting some?

The corruption they describe is by no means a recent thing. It dates back to Enron whose entire business model was based on dodgy carbon credits, which it used not to save the planet but to close down its rivals in the coal industry.

    In the early 1990s Enron had helped establish the market for, and became the major trader in, EPA’s $20 billion-per-year sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade program, the forerunner of today’s proposed carbon credit trade. This commodity exchange of emission allowances caused Enron’s stock to rapidly rise.

Then, as now, this crony capitalist scam was only made possible by the enthusiastic endorsement of greenie-lefty politicians:

    "Al Gore took office in 1993 and almost immediately became infatuated with the idea of an international environmental regulatory regime. He led a U.S. initiative to review new projects around the world and issue ‘credits’ of so many tons of annual CO2 emission reduction. Under law a tradeable system was required, which was exactly what Enron also wanted because they were already trading pollutant credits. Thence Enron vigorously lobbied Clinton and Congress, seeking EPA regulatory authority over CO2."

And also the support of other key figures in the Green Blob, such as the all-powerful environmental NGOs.

    "From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation contributed nearly $1 million dollars – $990,000 – to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promotes global warming theories. Enron philanthropists lavished almost $1.5 million on environmental groups that support international energy controls to “reduce” global warming. Executives at Enron worked closely with the Clinton administration to help create a scaremongering climate science environment because the company believed the treaty could provide it with a monstrous financial windfall."

Everyone involved in the green circle jerk stood – and stands – to benefit from the scam.  These include: privileged countries like India and China

    "The largest and easily the most lucrative component of the CDM market, administered under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is a peculiar racket centred on the manufacture of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), classified under Kyoto as greenhouse gases infinitely more potent than CO2. The way the racket works is that Chinese and Indian firms are permitted to carry on producing the refrigerant gas known as HCFC-22 until 2030. But a by-product of this process is HCFC-23, 11,700 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. The firms can then destroy the HCFC-23, claiming allocations of carbon credits worth billions for doing so…"

Eco-Blofelds, like the shady one-world-government freak and Communist sympathiser who devised the Rio Earth Summit:

    "Thus we pay billions of dollars to the Asian countries for the right to continue emitting CO2 and other greenhouse gases here in the West, including the £60 million contributed by British taxpayers to keep our civil servants warm. As a result we enrich a small number of people in China and India, including Maurice Strong, who now lives in exile in Beijing, having been caught out in 2005 for illicitly receiving $1 million from Saddam Hussein in the “Oil for Food” scandal. He played a key part in setting up China’s carbon exchange, to buy and sell the CDM credits administered by the UNFCCC – of which Strong himself was the chief architect."

Green gangster NGOs, like the WWF, which stood to make millions from the carbon protection racket:

    "If it then emerged, however, that a hidden agenda of the scheme to preserve this chunk of the forest was to allow the WWF and its partners to share the selling of carbon credits worth $60 billion, to enable firms in the industrial world to carry on emitting CO2 just as before, more than a few eyebrows might be raised. The idea is that credits representing the CO2 locked into this particular area of jungle – so remote that it is not under any threat – should be sold on the international market, allowing thousands of companies in the developed world to buy their way out of having to restrict their carbon emissions. The net effect would simply be to make the WWF and its partners much richer while making no contribution to lowering overall CO2 emissions."

And what a racket this is. In 2011, the global carbon trading market was worth $176 billion – which, as Jo Nova noted, was the same value as total global wheat production. One industry supplies about 20 per cent of the total calories consumed by the seven billion people on the planet. The other pays for Al Gore’s waterside homes, private jet travel and intimate massages.

SOURCE






Residence time of CO2 much exaggerated

Written by Dr Klaus L.E. Kaiser

Some scientists claim that anthropogenic (human-produced) CO2 (carbon dioxide) lasts in the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years.  Of course, they also think that CO2 is the mother of all evils and, therefore, argue that the world needs to decarbonize, forget about using fossil resources (coal, oil, gas), and reduce the population from seven billion to one billion humans.

Well, if that’s so, the world must be suffering from CO2 exhalations by the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, Romans, and everyone else who lived since that time.

How much CO2 is in the Air?

On a percentage basis, there is approximately 0.04% (or 400 ppm [parts per million]) CO2 in the air; (all numbers here are rounded to the nearest integer, just to keep things simple and not to get lost in small numerical details). Well, 0.04% does not sound like much, but when you consider the entire atmosphere, it’s a lot of tiny carbon dioxide molecules. Just to give you an idea as to how many there are, we need to count all gas molecules in the air first.

Gas Molecules in the Air

The air consists to 99% of nitrogen and oxygen. On a volume basis, each Mole (a unit of measurement) of all these gases (nitrogen, oxygen, CO2, etc.) occupies the same space, as was learned a couple of hundred years ago. One Mole of gas occupies 23 [L], (L= liters) or roughly 5 gallons of space (at common air pressure). Further, there are 6x10^23 molecules in that space of 23 L of gas. That number is known as the Avogadro Constant (AC), named after Italian chemist Amedeo Avogadro (1776-1856).

Using a rough estimate of 5x10^18 [m^3] air in the atmosphere and 1000 [L]/[m^3], and the AC, the total number of all molecules in the entire atmosphere is then:

    1.3x10^44 molecules of “air” of which there are 0.04%, or

    6x10^40 molecules of CO2.

Now, in regular notation, that’s:

60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of CO2 in the atmosphere, give or take a few.

I am using the long notation here, rather than a power function, simply for the reason to show to you that, if you believe the claims of a long residence time of CO2 in the air, our forbearers are to blame for the claimed and CO2-ascribed “climate change.” That would clearly follow from the (also) claimed longevity (residence time) of human-produced CO2 (provided that it had any effect on climate change at all)

As you might appreciate, the longevity or residence time of carbon dioxide in the air is a critical value when it comes to determine if that so-called greenhouse gas CO2 could even remotely have any effect on the climate.

Residence Time of CO2 in Air

The mean residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere has been determined by a number of people using quite different approaches. Their results show an astounding range of conclusions, diverging by nearly three orders of magnitude between the short and long residence time or longevity estimates.

Of course, most agree that the CO2 in the atmosphere is constantly being removed from the air and either biologically assimilated into plant matter, both on land and in the water, or is chemically precipitated in water as a carbonate salt. After all, the world’s vast limestone and dolomite mountains with ammonite and other organisms’ shells clearly show that they were precipitated from the water.

The question then is strictly how long it takes for the average CO2 molecule in the air to be so taken up and converted. That conversion, by the way, also makes the oceans alkaline, a fact that few “climate modelers” seem to understand.

The residence time or longevity of CO2 in air plays an important role in the “carbon capture” and storage ideas as well. As pointed out by RH Essenhigh,if that residence time is less than 100 years, the whole carbon capture idea is nonsense, regardless of whether CO2 has any effect on the climate or not.

Cleopatra’s CO2

If the human-produced or naturally-produced CO2 in the atmosphere were really as long-lived as some like to claim, i.e. hundreds or thousands of years, it would stand to reason that the plants near you are now still living on CO2 expelled by Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt (51-12 BC) or her good friend Mark Antony and all their contemporaries. Cleo reigned for 21 years and died at age 39. Having exhaled breath with 50,000 ppm CO2, say 20,000 times a day at 0.25 L each, she alone must have emitted in her lifetime in the order of 4,000 m^3 of pure CO2. That’s about 10^5 Mole or 3x10^28 CO2 molecules. Now add to that similar amounts for her friends, enemies, and other contemporaries and you are getting into serious numbers.

Using the logic of the people who claim a 1,000+ year residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere, it follows that there are still gazillions of CO2 molecules in the air from ancient times. Hence, the present “global warming” or “climate change” clearly was brought on by Cleo and her associates. Though some of Cleo’s CO2 molecules may indeed still be around today, it could not be proven or disproven, other than with statistics. However, it also would be entirely irrelevant in the natural world.

The problem with that (Cleo) type of math is that it implies that any HUMAN-PRODUCED CO2 molecules, including those exhaled by Cleopatra, are different from those that are continuously blasted into the air by volcanoes and other natural sources.

That’s simply not true; ALL CO2 MOLECULES ARE EQUAL!

Living nature does not differentiate between your, mine, or Cleo’s CO2 emissions at all. Nor do the molecules stay around in the atmosphere for thousands of years, not even hundreds, and not even tens of years. For example, the rate of removal of carbon isotopes from the atmosphere after nuclear tests showed a half-life in air (mean residence time) of a few years only, see attached figure.

Nature Devours all CO2 Equally

The photosynthetic plants or algae near you that try to make a living by assimilating CO2 from their surroundings to grow and reproduce don’t give the slightest hoot as to where or when that CO2 originated that they are now converting to plant matter. For them, one CO2 molecule is as good as the next. The growing plants and alkaline oceans devour all CO2 molecules equally, regardless whether they were exhaled by a dinosaur 100 million years ago, or by Cleopatra 2,000 years ago, or emitted from a volcano yesterday, or by your car’s exhaust system this morning.

The miniscule differences that exist for some isotope ratios of carbon or oxygen atoms in the CO2 are similarly irrelevant for the growth of today’s plants that want to prosper and procreate. That’s why the increased atmospheric CO2 makes California’s giant sequoia and redwood trees grow faster than before, that’s why florist shops are able to offer you all those spectacular flowers (grown in high CO2 and other nutrient level conditions), or why pine seedling growers use high CO2 levels to get them off to a good start. All plants live on CO2 and the more of it (higher concentration) the better.

The Scientific Falsehood

For the same reason, it is scientifically false to claim that anthropogenic CO2 remains in the air for hundreds or even thousands of years (while claiming that other CO2 is short-lived). It may be (partially) correct ON A STATISTICAL BASIS but that is completely irrelevant when it comes to the mean residence time of the AVERAGE CO2 MOLECULE in air. That is two to three orders of magnitude shorter than “thousands of years.”

Numerous independent studies have conclusively shown that the mean residence time of CO2 in the air is in the range of five to 10 years only. TV Segalstad of the University of Oslo reviewed the findings of some 30 publications and they were all in a narrow range with a mean residence time of seven years or so.

You might ask then what’s wrong here? Perhaps a simple analogy can demonstrate the fallacy of the Cleo-type math.

Analogy

If you had 400 coins of equal denomination and market value but various years of minting, would it make any difference to the amount of money remaining in your possession, after you had spent a few of such coins, as to which year of minting those spent coins were? Clearly, none at all, but some climate scientists try to tell you otherwise when it comes to CO2 molecules. For those people, it makes a difference in the amount left in your wallet as to when these coins or CO2 molecules were “minted,” or by whom, or for what reason.

Of course, that’s rubbish!

However, if you’re still unconvinced, you have my permission to blame any and all of today’s problems on Cleopatra and Marc.

SOURCE





Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s puzzling about-face on cancer study

My guess is that they did not wish to upset environmentalists by bringing out yet another "no effect" finding

THERE HAVE long been questions about whether living near a nuclear power plant raises the risk of cancer, but no credible scientific link has been established between radiation emissions from reactors and the disease. That hasn’t stopped some people from worrying about it, nor have calls for more research into the issue abated.

Responding to such concerns, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission three years ago commissioned the nonprofit National Academy of Sciences to update a 1990 National Cancer Institute study of cancer cases in populations around 52 power plants. (That report said there was no “excess occurrence” of the disease).

At the time, the NRC said it was moving forward with the new pilot study, because “more modern analysis methods, combined with up-to-date information sources, will provide contemporary cancer information.” Seven nuclear power plant sites were designated for the five-year project, including two in Connecticut.

This week, however, the NRC called a halt to the pilot program, saying it was going to take too long, cost too much, and — apparently — produce no new findings. The agency said it already knows, based on a raft of routine environmental data, that radiation leaks don’t cause neighbors of nuclear power plants to get cancer. Any releases that do take place are “too small to cause observable increases in cancer risk near the facilities,” it said in a statement Tuesday.

Existing science backs that up, but the NRC’s reasoning for scuttling the study is puzzling and raises concerns. It was known from the start that the research and analysis would take years to complete. And while the cost — $8 million over five years, including the $1.5 million already spent — may be significant, it is hardly the “prohibitively high” price tag cited by Brian Sheron, who runs the NRC’s Office of Regulatory Research. Cindy Folkers, with the national antinuclear group Beyond Nuclear, called it “a drop in the bucket” for an agency with an annual budget of about $1 billion.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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