Climatist– A scientist who believes that if the average temperature of the planet increases as much over the next century as it did where he lives while he was eating breakfast, it will be an unprecedented catastrophe.

Walter Starck

The Carbon Sense Coalition calls on the Australian government to stop forcing the community to waste valuable savings and resources on building useless solar energy plants.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said solar energy was expensive, unreliable and unnecessary.

“Nowhere in the world has solar energy proved a sensible investment of tax payer funds. Green dreamers and speculators should be free to build the own monuments to the sun god, but ordinary mortals should not be forced to pay for their fetish.

“Examples of solar stupidity abound.

“Generating electricity from solar panels in cold, cloudy Northern Europe is like growing paw-paws in Iceland – it can be done, but who would be so silly as to try?

“Germany was silly enough to try. Germany gets about an hour of useful sunshine per day in winter – solar power is weakest just when they need it most. But they have installed about half of the world’s solar panels. Germany’s Q-Cells, once the world’s biggest manufacturer of solar panels, just went broke. So did four other German solar companies.

“Sunny California also tried, but despite a half billion dollar loan from US tax payers, solar panel manufacturer Solyndra went broke. Solar Trust of America, recently offered $2 billion in loan guarantees by US tax payers, has also filed for bankruptcy.

“All the European PIIGS have tried – and the waste of taxpayer funds on failing green energy schemes is a major reason for their parlous financial state.

“The only sensible participant in the solar industry is China – they make panels very cheaply using coal or nuclear power and sell them to green dreamers.

“The reason green energy creates so much red ink is pretty obvious – it just needs one day’s observation of the sun.

“Full strength solar energy is available around midday for maybe 8 hours each day, providing the skies are clear, and there is no dust on the panels, and you are in a tropical zone. For the other 16 hours of the day, most electricity must come from reliable energy sources like gas, hydro, coal or nuclear. This about doubles capital and operating costs for no increase in output.

“With all this compelling evidence of the failures of solar electricity, why is the Australian government frittering $1.5 billion on green toys like the Moree and Chinchilla Solar farms?

“Green gambling is for private speculators not for captive tax payers or electricity consumers.”

[PIIGS = Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain.]

Authorised by Viv Forbes

Viv Forbes is Chairman of the Carbon Sense Coalition which opposes waste of resources, opposes pollution, and promotes the rational and sustainable use of carbon energy and carbon food. www.carbon-sense.com

For those who wish to read more:

EU Climate Policy in Free Fall:
http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=7aa4eeb1b3&e=e1638e04a2

Solar Power Realities:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/solar-realities.pdf

Germany’s Q-Cells files for bankruptcy:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17587830

German Solar on the Ropes:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,825490,00.html

German solar industry horrified as subsidies are questioned:
http://www.thegwpf.org/subject-index/economics/859-revolt-of-the-sun-kings.html

Solar Doomed: Every Solar Job in Germany Costs €250,000 to electricity consumers:
http://thegwpf.org/international-news/4711-doomed-every-solar-job-in-germany-costs-250000.html

Solyndra Scandal:
http://reason.com/blog/2012/03/29/solyndra-scandal-pronounced-dead-again

Solar Trust files for bankruptcy in California:
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/04/a-narrow-escape-for-taxpayers.php

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/worlds-largest-solar-plant-21-billion-energy-department-loan-guarantee-files-bankruptcy

Austerity in Portugal threatens solar subsidies:
http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/2012/february/portugal-s-austerity-plans-break-energy-commitments-/73643.aspx

Near Bankrupt Italy faces huge solar subsidies bill:
http://www.power-eng.com/news/2012/04/03/italy-to-cut-renewable-energy-subsidies.html

Irish solar feed-in tariffs unsustainable:
http://news.uk.msn.com/politics/solar-power-subsidies-face-reform-2

Bankrupt Greece cuts Solar Subsidies:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/01/greece-solar-idUSL5E8D11XY20120201

Spain cuts Green Subsidies to help curb budget deficit:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-27/spain-suspends-subsidies-for-new-renewable-energy-plants.html

Spain fails to control green subsidies:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-18/spanish-solar-projects-on-brink-of-bankruptcy-as-subsidy-policies-founder.html

Britain’s Solar Subsidies Fiasco:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9050088/Solar-panels-subsidy-was-one-of-the-most-ridiculous-schemes-ever-dreamed-up-Lord-Marland-says.html

Australian Government backs plans for world’s largest solar plants:
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/worlds-largest-solar-plants-for-nsw-qld-20110618-1g8my.html

Greens boast of their role in gambling $1.5 billion of tax payer funds on solar toys:
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/solar-stations-down-to-us-greens-say/story-e6frf7jx-1226077940496

Australian Flagship Solar Plants Stagnate:
http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2012/s3465055.htm

Queensland Government ceases support for Chinchilla Solar Farm:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/elections/campbell-newman-orders-anna-blighs-husband-greg-withers-to-kill-green-schemes/story-fnbsqt8f-1226311864712

Delhi’s rooftop solar power policy a non-starter “not viable” and “not cost effective”:
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-12-30/developmental-issues/30572236_1_solar-power-solar-panels-powerscenario

Premier Wen Jiabao says China will put an end to blind expansion of solar and wind power:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/07/an-about-face-by-china-on-solar-power

http://www.elp.com/index/from-the-wires/wire_news_display/1621584677.html

By Alan Caruba

In the “glory years” of the global warming hoax, you had Al Gore picking up Oscars and Nobel Prizes (shared with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and government employees like James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies were picking up wads of cash as awards, speech fees, and grants.

The folks who conjured up the computer models featured in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports also did quite well for themselves, along with all the others who climbed on the gravy train of global warming grants.

And then in 1998 a cooling cycle set in. It was hard to hide because the weather satellite data was indisputable, but try to hide it they did. Even then, however, there was a handful of outspoken meteorologists and climatologists who were trying hard to get out the message that the perfectly natural warming cycle was over and had been replaced, thanks to—guess what?—a lower output of solar radiation by the SUN.

Still the warmists persisted, infiltrating school systems to frighten children, brainwashing students in colleges, and coercing the public through apocalyptic books, through magazine and newspaper articles, and on television and the Internet.

In 2009, the release of a huge cache of emails between the IPCC global warming perpetrators instantly became known as “Climategate” as the world learned that it was all a scam, a hoax, a fraud based on deliberately falsified computer models, and force fed to the public.

The desperation of the warmists was palpable.

In 2006, Grist, an eco-magazine, called for Nurenberg-style trials for skeptics. By 2007, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. had called any doubts about global warming treason. “This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors.” Two years later in 2009, Kennedy called coal companies “criminal enterprises”, declaring that their CEO’s “should be in jail…for all of eternity.” In 2008 NASA’s Hansen was calling for trials of climate skeptics for “high crimes against humanity.”

Didn’t like the warmist’s bogus science? A former member of the Clinton administration, Joe Romm, defended a comment on his Climate Progress website that warned that a generation of brain-washed youth would see to it that skeptics would “be strangled in their beds.”

Today, another Clinton appointee, Carol Browner, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator is one of Obama’s “czars” and the unseen specter whispering in the ear of Lisa Jackson, the current EPA administrator. She is joined by John Holden, an Obama science advisor, and Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu.

If threats of jail and murder couldn’t shut up the skeptics, then Professor Kari Marie Norgaard, speaking at a warmist confab, “Planet Under Pressure”, put forth the notion that any science-based skepticism—based on actual, not fictional data—should be “recognized and treated” as some sort of aberrant behavior.

Doubt global warming? Well, you must be nuts!

Norgaard is a professor of sociology and environmental studies at the University of Oregon. As she put it, “Climate change poses a massive threat to our present social, economic and political order. From a sociological perspective, resistance to change is to be expected. People are individually and collectively habituated to the ways we act and think. That habituation must be recognized and simultaneously addressed at the individual, cultural and societal level—how we think the world works and how we think it should work.”

“Should work”? The Earth—the oceans, the clouds, and its entire eco-system—doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about how warmists and other weather crazies think it “should work.” All that intellectual claptrap adds up to a totalitarian belief that people who disagree with global warming should be jailed or killed.

And in true totalitarian fashion reminiscent of the Stalin era when people simply disappeared from public records and reports, on April 2nd Norgaard’s bio for Whitman College could no longer to be found on the its website. True to the eco-fascist approach, she had become a liability, a non-person for having revealed their plans for humanity.

Regular people who actually do something useful with their lives know that intellectuals like Norgaard hold them in utter contempt, but it is those who profess belief in global warming that should be regarded with grave and serious suspicion.

Those who use global warming, i.e., the assertion that carbon dioxide emissions should be restricted and controlled, are the true enemies of progress, of freedom, and of humanity.

In the twentieth century intellectuals foisted Communism on the world, thus ensuring that millions of Russians, Chinese, Cambodians and others would be killed for their dissent. Intellectuals are always the first to embrace every dictator and to excuse their methods.

The warmists are increasingly desperate as their dreams of global domination are falling apart.

In Europe and here in America all their schemes to replace the real production of electricity with solar panels and wind turbines are being rejected. Their plans for herding populations into cities and onto mass transit meet with resistance. Parents are objecting to their eco-curricula in schools. Al Gore has become a joke.

Consider this, if they were in charge, anyone who voiced dissent from their global warming-climate change lies would be in concentration camps, undergoing “re-education”, being “treated” with mind-altering drugs, or dead.

© Alan Caruba, 2012
http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/utter-desperation-of-global-warmists.html

From May 21 to 23, 2012, The Heartland Institute will host its Seventh International Conference on Climate Change, a three-day event in Chicago piggybacking on the NATO Summit occurring on May 19-20.

This year’s theme is “Real Science, Real Choices.” “Real science” refers to the distinctions that must be made between science has it has been practiced since the Enlightenment and “post-normal science” that isn’t science at all. Real science has falsifiable hypotheses and is data-driven, while “post-normal science” does not. “Real choices” refers to the choices being made as a consequences of unjustified alarmism over man-made global warming. We are shutting down or refusing to develop safe and affordable reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, and we are “burning food” by using ethanol to power SUVs. These are real choices with real consequences for human well-being as well as the environment.

More: http://climateconference.heartland.org/

Ocean acidification is like the Castle Ghost – everyone is scared of it but no one has seen it.

Dozens of learned articles and millions of media words tell us that ocean acidity has increased alarmingly since man started using carbon fuels. The worry is that the carbon dioxide being generated by man’s industry is dissolving in the ocean thus creating acidic water. And the computer models forecast that, by some future date, sea shells and corals will be dissolved or killed by the acidic ocean and/or the associated global warming.

However a close look at the chemistry of the oceans and the evidence provided by past records and present observations reveals that the open ocean is alkaline and never acidic, except locally near active submarine volcanic vents. It is deceptive to suggest that sea life is threatened by “the rising acidity of the oceans”. The oceans are still quite alkaline. Nothing unusual or abnormal has yet been detected. Other conclusions are:

• The pH of the oceans varies naturally from place to place and time to time, depending on temperatures and the activities of plant and animal life. It is impossible to determine a meaningful figure for “average” ocean acidity (pH). It is also impossible to say with any certainty that average ocean pH has changed because of man’s use of carbon fuels. Such “measurements” are an exercise in guided guess-work. (“What would you like the answer to be?”)
• It is a myth that acidic waters necessarily kill aquatic life. Rain water is slightly acidic and many fresh water lagoons, swamps and reed beds are also acidic. Nevertheless, aquatic life flourishes in these wetlands.
• The oceans have a huge capacity resist being destabilised by changes in temperature or composition of the atmosphere. Whenever there is a change, the reactions of other chemicals or life in the sea act to moderate and even reverse those changes. Oceans cover about 71% of the Earth’s surface and the hydrosphere contains over 300 times the mass of gases in the atmosphere. The oceans thus have a huge capacity to buffer any variations in heat content or gas content emanating from the thin veil of atmospheric gases. The effect of man’s supposed 3% contribution to the tiny 0.039% of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s thin atmosphere would not register a long-term effect in the massive oceans.
• Cold ocean currents from the deep ocean periodically up-well to the surface. These currents are rich in dissolved carbon dioxide and other chemicals and decayed organic matter. Where this cold nutrient-rich water surfaces, there is a staggering profusion of aquatic life.
• Oceans have an unlimited ability to remove carbon dioxide from their waters and store it in thick beds of shells and corals, limestone, chalk, dolomite, magnesite, siderite, marls, methane hydrate and oil shales. Fresh water swamps and lakes on land have also laid down massive deposits of coal and lignite formed from carbon dioxide extracted from the atmosphere. Many of these deposits were laid down when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was far higher than it is today.
• Carbon dioxide present in the oceans is essential to plant life and current very low levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean are limiting plant growth. All animal life depends on these plants. Man’s mining and industrial activities are harmlessly recycling some of this valuable carbon dioxide from natural limestones and hydrocarbons buried in the dead lithosphere, back to the living biosphere.
• Corals are hardy and adaptable and have survived for 500 million years. During that time they have had to cope with warm eras, ice ages, extinction events, eras of massive volcanic activity, dramatic rising and lowering in sea levels and eons of time when levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide were far higher than today.
• A very recent extensive study of the Great Barrier Reef concluded that the changes forecast under the “business as usual greenhouse gas emissions” were unlikely to cause great harm to the reef.
• Any change in global temperature or the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will cause life on land and in the ocean to adjust and adapt. However, on balance, a warmer world with more plant food in the atmosphere and a more vigorous water cycle is very beneficial for the biosphere. The killer climates are associated with ice ages when the atmosphere is cold and dry, the sea levels are much lower and much of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in vast lifeless sheets of ice.
• There is no justification to use the baseless fear of “acidification of the oceans” as an excuse for a massive dislocation of our transport, food and energy industries. We should instead be focussing on real pollution problems (such as man’s rubbish floating in the oceans) and/or on preparing to cope with real and likely natural disasters (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, floods, fires, cyclones and droughts).

To see a full report on “The Acid Ocean Bogey Man” by Viv Forbes with illustrations and explanations see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/acid-ocean-bogeyman.pdf [PDF, 1.2 MB]

Further reading: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/03/25/ocean-acidification-natural-cycles-and-ubiquitous-uncertainties/

By Ken Ring

According to climate experts and politicians, if we persist in burning fossil fuels, this insensitivity by man could cause an environmental catastrophe, only avertable we are told by paying extra taxes. But is life on earth really that finely balanced?

Life as we know it has existed for at least half a billion years, starting as primeval slime and evolving to present day, during which time every environmental calamity did happen. Yet oddly, life is still here.

Read More: http://nz.news.yahoo.com/opinion/post/-/blog/news_makers/post/95/comment/1/

CO2Australia boasts of planting three million carbon credit trees. This is “just the beginning” of a new bubble industry, the CO2.con.

This bubble is set to inflate rapidly. To offset just one day of Qantas operations, CO2 promoters must plant more than 200,000 trees in permanent forests covering 130 hectares. How much land is required to offset all Australian power stations, industry and transport?

Yes these trees will consume carbon dioxide. However CO2 levels today are well below what is ideal for plant growth. While they are growing strongly, these trees will suck the gas of life from the atmosphere, competing strongly with nearby crops and plant life for the traces of carbon dioxide remaining.

Then as the trees mature, growth stops. The aging forest just sits there, some trees growing, some dying and net carbon sequestration ceases. It becomes a sterile shrine to the green religion whose main impact on the biosphere is providing a haven for feral animals and noxious weeds.

Green spruikers claim that they only use land not suitable for anything else. Wrong! Every bit of Australia not covered by road, cities, parks or deserts can support crops, timber-getting or grazing animals. Carbon-credit forests gnaw away at this national land asset every year.

Moreover, CO2.con investors, like all speculators, want quick returns. Their quick return demands rapidly growing trees in arable country – deserts and salt pans are uneconomical. Thus the wheat/sheep belt is shrinking.

No one can demonstrate any climate or environmental benefit from the CO2.con.

Forcing consumers and taxpayers to fund this large scale permanent land sterilisation is clearly unsustainable. All Australians fund this destruction via increased prices for electricity, cement, steel, air tickets and rail fares, and reduced land for food production. The carbon tax will increase their burden.

Like all bubble industries, the CO2.con industry must end in tears, and the sooner it ends the better.

Read on for more, including:

1. Vested Interests in the Climate Debate
2. Solving Three Problems
3. The Rice Video: Carbon Dioxide in perspective
4. Flogging a Dead Horse
5. Two Green Prophets Recant

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/co2-dot-con.pdf [PDF, 171 KB]

When Europeans settled Australia, much of the country was covered by grasslands and open forests. In 1770, that great botanist Sir Joseph Banks reported “very few tree species, but every place was covered with vast quantities of grass”. Many other explorers and settlers made similar observations.

The land had been kept in this state for centuries by aboriginal land managers using their main tool, fire. However, since 1788, the use of fire was progressively suppressed by settlers, foresters, city dwellers, bureaucrats and environmentalists.

Trees invade and then suffocate grasslands unless tree seedlings are kept in check by fire or by mechanical or chemical means.

The destruction of Australia’s ancestral grasslands has received a massive boost in recent years by green extremists aiming to remove human activities from rural Australia using national parks, reservations, crown land, heritage areas, Wild Rivers, vegetation orders, logging bans and now Kyoto bans on regrowth clearing.

Prevention of hazard reduction burning (the key tool used by generations of aborigines to maintain Australia’s landscape), lockout of grazing animals and the spread of carbon credit forests is completing the destruction of our savannah lands.

Once the grasslands become infested by woody scrubs, these quickly give protection to noxious weeds such as lantana, groundsel and boxthorn, and vermin such as foxes and wild dogs, cats, and pigs.

The amazing grasses of the world and their seeds feed most of the animal kingdom. The deliberate sacrifice of native grasslands to woody weeds is another suicidal green policy.

For those who would like read some fascinating comments by early explorers and settlers see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/fire-and-landscape.pdf [PDF, 1.8 MB]

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]