by Geoffrey Luck
June 24, 2011

Take a big deep breath, Bob Brown – savour the 78 parts of nitrogen, 21 of oxygen, and the smidgen of carbon dioxide – and contemplate the folly of your alternative energy ideas. Renewables are not green. That’s the view of one of the pioneers of climate science politics. Jesse Ausubel, Senior Research Associate in The Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment, helped organise the first UN World Climate Conference in Geneva in 1979. He is an avowed ‘deep green’ scientist who believes the essence of being green, and therefore his mantra, is no-new-structures. For years he has been arguing heretical views on energy. In the wake of the Productivity Commission’s scathing comments on renewables, now is the time to listen to him.

Ausubel has a list of heresies that might horrify the true believers in wind and solar power, electric cars and distorting government subsidies:

• Renewables are not green.
• The idea of resource exhaustion is irrelevant.
• Hydrocarbons are not the stored energy of the sun.
• Little more than 50% of energy will ever be electrified.
• Nuclear is green, but nuclear plants must make hydrogen as well as electricity.
• Most surprising of all – decarbonisation has been going on for almost two centuries – without a policy for it.

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Last week while driving, I happened to hear part of the farewell speech of Senator Nick Minchin. We will sorely miss people like this stalwart senator. It struck me that this one sad event was like the bell tolling for the new Dark Age to come. In the next few weeks, unless a miracle occurs, and for the first time ever, dark greens and their fellow travellers will gain control of the both houses of parliament in Australia.

No doubt we have won the battle for the minds of the Australian people – every poll shows a strong majority is opposed to the tax on carbon dioxide. And there is growing scepticism for the claim that man causes climate change. But the green elite, who have never won majority support in their own right, are determined to pursue their destructive goals.

Their long-term agenda is to destroy human industry and reduce human population. Thus they are opposed to farming, mining, fishing, forestry, exploration and cheap power.

Their preferred strategy is to divide and conquer. Their tactics are to grab any real concern and magnify and divert it into another reason to destroy or hobble the industries they hate – cattle, sheep, mining, oil and gas, uranium, farming, forestry, fishing and land developers. Their greatest success is achieved when they harness and inflame one industry and use it to ram another – use farmers to destroy the gas industry, use animal lovers and meat workers to destroy live exports, use small business to attack big business, make all industries compete against one another for a dwindling supply of emission permits, get farmers to fight food retailers, cry crocodile tears about the loss of fertile land, and then lock up grazing land in trees, heritage areas and other sterilised ground. And all the time they use their domination of the government media and education empires to spread their half-truths.

More, including:

• BRICS or PIGS?
• Australian Tour by Christopher Monckton
• What is really going on with the climate?
• U.S. Supreme Court kicks out global warming
• The Galileo Movement
• Camel Cull Creates Consternation

in the PDF here: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/new-dark-age.pdf [PDF, 73 KB]

We are told that we must embrace “green” renewable energy and impose a carbon tax if we are not to be left behind in the world. Exactly why or how this tax will promote economic growth is a mystery that Garnaut and the Australian government are having difficulty articulating.

But the real world provides some clues to one secret of economic strength.

Looking around the world today it appears there is a direct relationship between the economic decline of those embracing climate alarmism and green technologies and the economic rise of those who do not – the PIGS are failing and the BRICS are rising.

Full article: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/brics-vs-pigs.pdf [PDF, 269 KB]

Volcanoes emit enormous volumes of the two main “greenhouse gases” – water vapour and carbon dioxide.

Erupting volcanoes are big news these days. There are over 1500 active volcanoes which are above sea level and many of these show signs of current activity including explosions, lava flows, gaseous emissions and tremors. On average, there are about five eruptions per year that are above sea level.

However, few people realise that there are more than 200,000 known submarine volcanoes, many of which are active. It is reasonable to estimate that there could be a total of 3 million submarine volcanoes.

Carbon dioxide and methane are abundant gases in the earth’s mantle and they are being continually released to the atmosphere. Volcanic carbon dioxide cannot be distinguished from the carbon dioxide produced by burning carbon fuels like coal.

There are very large deposits of methane calthrate on the continental shelf and lakes of frozen carbon dioxide in the deep ocean. Just one new eruption or earthquake can mobilise these into the atmosphere.

We are continually told about the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but almost all of the world’s carbon dioxide recording stations are beside active volcanoes such as Mauna Loa, Kilauea and Raoul Island. Is the rise merely nature’s breath?

All of this says, we have no idea how much carbon dioxide nature is adding to the atmosphere. The models used to justify the war on carbon start with dream-time forecasts of world economic activity. These figures drive forecasts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which are linked to assumptions and complex formula in a big black box that spits out forecasts of global temperature for a century ahead. No one but an Australian Climate Commissioner could take any notice of these forecasts.

Timothy Casey, an experienced geologist, has produced a well reasoned article entitled Volcanic Carbon Dioxide. It is worth reading at: http://carbon-budget.geologist-1011.net/

The truth about greenhouse gases and the dubious science of the climate crusaders.

By William Happer

Will Happer is a physicist at Princeton University. This article appeared in the internet magazine First Things under the title The Truth About Greenhouse Gases.

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.

I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon. A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere) per day. Before the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 ppm. At the present time, the concentration is about 390 ppm, 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1 percent of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.

To read the rest of this article, click: http://www.firstthings.com/article/2011/05/the-truth-about-greenhouse-gases.

The people who brought us pink bats and cash-for-clunkers have a new scheme – we can earn carbon credits by shooting wild camels, humanely of course.

Surely it would be far easier to shoot tame cattle? There are big mobs near all of our northern ports going nowhere.

And if greens have their way and stop all live exports, we can earn heaps more by shooting millions of sheep and goats, humanely of course.

What about those mobs of kangaroos? They burn carbon fuel and emit dreaded carbon dioxide. Why should they be spared when the future of the planet is at stake?

One small problem – what do we do with all those carcasses? Left alone they will release all the carbon sequestered within their bodies within a couple of weeks, thus incurring massive carbon debits.

And who counts the dead camels? To prevent carbon cull fraud the economy will boom with jobs for regulators, inspectors, auditors and prosecutors.

And of course, we must not burn diesel, av-gas or gun powder to do the slaughter, so the hunting must be done from horses using bows and arrows.

And if killing camels earns carbon credits, why can’t cattle, sheep and goat abattoirs also earn them?

More: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/camel-cull-credits.pdf [PDF: 414 KB]

For lots of comments on this post, and to add your own comments see:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/11/craziest-carbon-credit-scheme-yet-shooting-camels-in-australia

(The Repairman)

(SCENE: Front door of BRYAN’s home. Door bell rings. BRYAN answers door. It is JOHN.)

John: G’day. I’m here about the climate.

Bryan: What climate?

John: Your climate. Our climate. THE climate. I’m here to fix it.

Bryan: What’s wrong with it?

John: It’s buggered. Absolutely buggered.

Bryan: No it isn’t. I was using it this morning.

John: What for?

Bryan: For drying the washing out the back.

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Heartland Institute is sponsoring the Sixth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-6) to take place in Washington, DC from breakfast Thursday, June 30, to noon Friday, July 1, at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. This event will be more modest than in the past, yet as informative and, perhaps, even more challenging to the orthodoxy. The principal speakers are S. Fred Singer, Craig Idso, and Bob Carter – all major contributors to the NIPCC reports. Of course, SEPP is a co-sponsor. See: http://climateconference.heartland.org/

Peter Lang
21 May 2011

This paper presents a simple analysis to estimate the amount of CO2 emissions avoided by wind generation and the cost per tonne avoided as wind penetration increases from 0% to 20%. The carbon price implications are discussed.

For wind power to be viable in Australia the price for electricity would need to be about $120/MWh. The current average wholesale price of electricity is about $30/MWhi. So wind energy must be subsidised by about $90/MWh. If we have a carbon price of $25/MWh then the Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) need to reach $65/MWh to make wind viable. (That means the consumer must subsidise wind by $90/MWh, or three times the current wholesale price of electricity.)

The paper concludes that as wind energy penetration increases from 1% to 20% the CO2 avoidance cost increases from $100 to $2,500 per tonne of CO2 production avoided.

Wind energy is a high cost way to avoid CO2 emissions.

For a print-friendly copy of the full article see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/lang-wind-and-emissions.pdf [PDF, 49 KB]

Volcanoes emit huge quantities of the main greenhouse gases – water vapour and carbon dioxide. They also affect wind patterns and put large amounts of other gases like sulphur dioxide and particles of ash, smoke and dust.

All of these have a dramatic effect on the weather events and the biosphere.

For an article on this subject by Wyss Yim of the University of Hong Kong, see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/yim-volcanoes-water-vapour.pdf [PDF, 418 KB]