By Viv Forbes

Food depends on land access, farmers, fertilisers, tractors, carbon dioxide and carbon fuels.

Famine always follows global cooling, drought and silly politicians.

This article looks at the recent history of the things that have driven world food production since the days of horse drawn ploughs. It examines the large increase in food production caused when tractors replaced horses, and the way the introduction of modern fertilisers saved many farms from bankruptcy. Drawing on his own childhood experience of farming using green (horse) power and other stories from this era, the author exposes the key factors supporting world food production today. And mentions the abuses of some modern farming aids.

Farmers depend on fertilisers to replace the soil minerals shipped off to cities in farm produce. They need machinery such as tractors and trucks, carbon fuel to power these machines, and freedom to find the best ways of producing healthy food while maintaining the productivity and value of their land.

But most of all, our food supply depends on the magic plant food of the atmosphere, carbon dioxide. It is a sad commentary on the state of science education and the strength of alarmist propaganda that carbon dioxide, the gas that supports all life, is now widely thought to be a pollutant in the atmosphere.

Finally it looks at the possible threats to our food supply.

The biggest threat is political – the plan to use taxation, rationing and legislation to force farmers back to the days of the horse and buggy when 40% of farm produce was used to fuel horses. Only now they want the farms to produce all the ethanol and biofuel to fuel our much larger vehicle fleet. The continual closure and restrictions on land use by carbon credit forestry, vegetation clearing bans, ethanol production and other land restrictions is already reducing food supply.

The weather is indeed a threat to farmers and food supplies. But the threat is not global warming – ice, snow and cold weather are the main climate threats to farmers everywhere. Every past warm era has been a time of prosperity and growing population. The current generation of politicians and their bureaucracy has not studied science or history.

And warmer climates must produce increased evaporation from seas and lakes. This aerial moisture must cool, condense into clouds and fall somewhere as rain or snow. No farms are ever threatened by a warm moist era – it is the cold periods and the drought eras we need to fear. The whole climate alarm industry is focussed in the wrong direction, for the wrong reason, and their wrong policy prescriptions can only worsen any food shortages we may encounter.

For the full article with pictures and diagrams in a print-ready state see: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/feast-or-famine.pdf [PDF, 426 KB]

We are winning the war about Man-made Global Warming.

But about half of the population still think that the carbon tax will do some good. Why? It is all about “cleaning up dirty coal energy”.

The seeds of public concern were sewn with Penny Wong’s Machiavellian linking of “carbon” and “pollution”. She was assisted by the gross stupidity of the coal industry leadership in promoting nonsense like carbon sequestration as a “clean coal” option. The public naturally assumed “if they need to spend billions to produce “clean coal”, obviously we are now using “dirty coal”. This generation of coal industry leaders is more culpable than the greens – they should have known better – they have betrayed their shareholders, their employees and the nation.

The whole “dirty coal” program was assisted by the continual portrayal by alarmist media and government propagandists of power station cooling towers belching “pollution”. As carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, this is clearly a lie. What is seen are clouds of water vapour with no more pollution potential than wispy white cumulus clouds or boiling dark nimbus thunderheads.

And of course coal is black, thus dirty and dangerous like “a black mark” which is a de-merit point, a “black act”, which is nasty behaviour, “black magic” which is evil sorcery and “the black death” which kills people. What a pity coal was not rare and pretty like that other form of carbon, diamond.

A local climax of this unrelenting black-guarding of coal was a letter published in the Queensland Times of Ipswich, a town founded on coal mining, describing carbon dioxide as “one of many lethal pollutants released by coal combustion”.

What are the facts on coal combustion?

Read on for more, including:

• Taxing Termites, Wetlands, Volcanoes & Sacred Cows?
• Four Steps to Cheaper Electricity
• Solar Energy Dims and Wind Power Runs out of Puff
• The Measure of our Stupidity
• The Last Word – the Consensus is Destroyed

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/is-coal-dirty.pdf [PDF, 512 KB]

Letter to the Editor

Add more carbon dioxide to green the planet

In western Canada, a ‘BC Greenhouse Growers Association’ spokesperson said on a radio program to the effect, “most greenhouses consume the available CO2 within the first 1/2 hour of the daytime growing cycle, and thereafter the grower must add CO2 within the greenhouse”.

Therefor assuming a 12 hour daylight growing period, they would add 23 times the ambient (380 parts per million) amount of CO2 to make the plants grow stronger to the desired size, strength and health etc. These CO2 enhanced plants also use less water to grow. If we wanted to green the planet, we should be adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, not less.

Roland Seguin
Langley, BC Canada

Keywords: coal, combustion, pollution, SOX, NOX, mercury, termites, wetlands, volcanoes, sacred cows, electricity costs, solar, wind, carbon trading, consensus, sustainability, censorship.

With the failure of “Global Warming” the climatists have concocted a new alarm – the soda water scare.

Their computer models are forecasting that the oceans, which weigh 300 times more than all the gases in the atmosphere, are being turned acidic by the 0.0012% (12 parts per million) of man-made additions to the carbon dioxide (CO2) in Earth’s atmosphere.

CO2 is a natural gas that dissolves in water. The amount absorbed depends upon how much CO2 there is in the air, and the temperature of the water. CO2 dissolves best in cold water and is expelled as the water warms. And far more would be absorbed if there was 100% CO2 in the atmosphere above.

When concentrated CO2 gas is bubbled under high pressure into ice cold water much CO2 dissolves, producing acidic soda water whose pH (acidity) could be as low as 4. This is 1,000 times more acidic than pure water whose pH is a neutral 7.

But oceans are much warmer than that and atmospheric CO2 is at much lower pressure. Therefore in the open ocean, pH seldom gets below 8, ten times more alkaline than pure water.

This weak soda water could only be described as “acidic” by someone pushing an alarmist agenda. There are no measurements that show that the pH of the ocean is changing more now than in the past – only models. In historical terms, atmospheric CO2 levels are now close to record lows. Corals and other ocean life have flourished in atmospheric levels of CO2 far higher than today’s.

We are told that the tiny bit of natural soda water in still-alkaline sea water will dissolve corals and shells, kill fish and create oceanic mayhem?

If soda water is so dangerous, then how come people consume it in copious amounts in beer, scotch and fizzy drinks?

Read on for more, including:

• The Impact of Carbon Dioxide on Climate Change and Earth’s Plant and Animal Kingdoms
• Saving the Planet?
• Lord Monckton on Agenda 21
• Germany faces some painful Truths on Green Energy
• The Wheels are coming off the Wind Energy Gravy Train
• Green Companies Crash and Teeter
• Rallies to “Smash the Carbon Tax”
• The Last Word: Three Inconvenient Facts

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/soda-water-scare.pdf [PDF, 303 KB]

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]

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/

Cartoon Credit: Steve Hunter http://www.stevehunterillustrations.com.au/political-cartoons/

Australian Senate passes Carbon Tax Bill – Nov 8 2011.
– a date that will be remembered as Carbon Fools Day.

Just a year ago, Australia joined the ranks of Carbon Fools by passing the Carbon Tax Bill (actually 18 separate bills called the “Clean Energy Bills”.) Now the same fools who introduced it are among the front rank of volunteers for carbon suicide by trumpeting their intention to sign Kyoto 2.

Barack Obama and Julia Gillard are founding members of the Carbon Fools Club, and have learned tricks from one another on how to betray the electorate without getting punished.

Before the election Gillard said “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead”. Her Treasurer confirmed the promise. After the election, she changed her mind and introduced it. Now she is proceeding to bribe enough of the electorate into acceptance of the betrayal.
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Big Wind Energy Subsidies: A Hurricane of Carnage, Cronyism and Corruption

To date, under just one program, the US government has awarded US$16 billion to wind and solar energy companies. This crony capitalism is what keeps green energy afloat. The green jobs created have destroyed a bigger number of real jobs.

Read More: http://greencorruption.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/big-wind-energy-subsidies-hurricane-of.html

Switching off the lights for a pleasant “Earth Hour” while we sip champagne by candle-light on the balcony is an annual green ritual.

However, Earth Hour is not such fun when it extends without electricity for 54 hours.

Here is a real story of life in a Megacity during an extended blackout: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/living-the-green-dream-in-megacity.pdf [PDF, 42 KB]

James Lovelock has written a letter of objection regarding a wind-farm development in Devon. The final paragraph of his letter reads:

“I am an environmentalist and founder member of the Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood and misapplied. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation.”

Source: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/1/25/lovelock-recants.html