Coal, not candles, should be the symbol of Earth Hour.

It was coal that produced clean electric power which cleared the smog produced by dirty combustion and open fires in big cities like London and Pittsburgh. Much of the third world still suffers choking fumes and smog because they do not have clean electric power and burn wood, cardboard, unwashed coal and cow dung for home heat.

It was coal that saved the forests being felled to fuel the first steam engines and produce charcoal for the first iron smelters.

It was coal that powered the light bulbs and saved the whales being slaughtered for whale oil lamps.

It was coal that produced the steel that replaced shingles on the roof, timber props in the mines, wooden fence posts on the farms and the bark on the old bark hut.

In Australia today, coal provides at least 75% of our lighting, cooking, heating, refrigeration, rail transport and steel. Without it, we would be back in the dark days of candles, wood stoves, chip heaters, open fires, smoky cities, hills bare of trees and streets knee deep in horse manure.

Coal is fossil sunshine as clean as the green plants it came from, and often less damaging to the environment than its green energy alternatives.

Earth Hour candles are green tokenism for rich status-seekers and nostalgic dreamers.

We should spend Earth Hour saluting the real people who produce the coal on which most people on earth depend.

The Real Agenda of Earth Hour

“We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for Capitalists and their projects – we must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to the wilderness millions and tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.” – Dave Foreman, “Earth First”

For those who would like to read more:

Clearing the smog of Beijing with “Coal by Wire”: http://carbon-sense.com/2008/08/04/clearing-the-smog/

Return to the caves: http://carbon-sense.com/2010/05/06/earth-day-blackout-night/

Hail to Electricity: http://carbon-sense.com/2010/04/01/hail-to-electricity/

The Road to more Blackout nights: http://carbon-sense.com/2010/03/26/earth-hour-2010/

Earth Hour – a Dissent: http://carbon-sense.com/2011/03/25/mckitrick-earth-hour/

There is more in the PDF version of this post: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/earth-hour.pdf [PDF, 82 KB]

The Australian government’s plan to sell their un-saleable carbon tax has hit a snag – their pollsters have discovered that the word ”carbon” provokes anger in the electorate. This is no surprise. Most decent people hate liars and the carbon tax campaign has been mired in lies from the start.

There are five big carbon lies.

Read on for more, including:

• Farming Carbon Credits
• The New Brisbane Line?
• The Big Unravelling Starts, in Germany
• Global Warming is not the Threat – Ice is the Killer
• Renewable Electricity for Australia – the Cost
• Practical Weather Prediction
• How we are Winning the Climate Wars
• Carbon Sense will keep up the fight

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/carbon-lies.pdf [PDF, 230 KB]

By Dr. Robert Brown,
Physics Dept. Duke University

One of many, many problems with modern climate research is that the researchers seem to take their thermal reconstructions far too seriously and assign completely absurd measures of accuracy and precision, with a very few exceptions. In my opinion it is categorically impossible to “correct” for things like the UHI (Urban Heat Island) effect — it presupposes a knowledge of the uncorrected temperature that one simply cannot have or reliably infer from the data. The problem becomes greater and greater the further back in time one proceeds, with big jumps (in uncertainty) 250, 200, 100 and 40 odd years ago. The proxy-derived record from more than 250 years ago is uncertain in the extreme, with the thermal record of well over 70% of the Earth’s surface completely inaccessible and with an enormously sparse sampling of highly noisy and confounded proxies elsewhere. To claim accuracy greater than 2-3 K is almost certainly sheer piffle, given that we probably don’t know current “true” global average temperatures within 1 K, and 5K is more likely.

See the full post on: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/04/global-annualized-temperature-full-of-snip-up-to-their-eyebrows/

At presentation to a seminar at the British House of Commons recently, Professor Lindzen clarified what the debate over climate change is really about.

“It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is.
“It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is.
“It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should.
“The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.

For the whole presentation see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/lindzen-reconsidering-the-climate-change-act.pdf [PDF, 1.7 MB]

For another summary see: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/02/22/is-catastrophic-global-warming-like-the-millenium-bug-a-mistake/

Prof Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT.