SEE FOR YOURSELF!

3 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nbz6966mLc
Original paper: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/doran.pdf [PDF, 950KB]

[PDF version of this post PDF, 550KB]

There is a persistent green myth that coal-fired power generation causes city smogs. It does not.

City air pollution is nothing new. King Edward I complained about London pollution in 1306, as did Queen Elizabeth I in 1578, long before the first steam engine operated.

Let’s look at the causes of some famous smogs – London/Pittsburgh, Los Angeles/Santiago, the Dust Bowls and the Asian Smogs.

The London smogs were caused by open-air combustion of newspapers, wood and cheap high-sulphur unwashed coal in domestic fires, stoves and boilers; by coal-burning blacksmiths, brewers and ironworkers in smoky forges, furnaces and coke plants; and by many smoky steam locomotives; all with inefficient combustion and no pollution controls. The smog was slowly eliminated by clean air regulations and by changing to “clean coal by pipe” (town gas) and “clean coal by wire” (electricity).

The Los Angeles smogs were caused mainly by backyard incinerators, vehicle exhausts and natural air inversions. They were reduced by using cleaner fuels, better engines and compulsory pollution-control equipment. Santiago has undergone a similar clean-up.

The Dust Bowl conditions of the Great Plains in USA were caused by drought and wind erosion of newly cultivated soils. Gobi Desert storms produced the Yellow River and the Yellow Sea and contribute to the Asian Brown Cloud today.

Today’s Asian smogs have many sources – forest fires in Indonesia; open air cremations in India; dust from volcanic eruptions and desert storms; soot, ash and other pollutants from millions of domestic rubbish fires, mosquito fires, cooking fires and heaters using anything combustible – cow dung, wood, paper, cardboard, plastic or cheap unwashed coal; and soot and unburnt hydro-carbons from millions of vehicles, many with engines needing maintenance and no pollution controls. Beijing today combines the 1950’s problems of both London and Los Angeles.

The Asian smog is NOT caused by producing electricity in modern power stations with closed boilers, pollution controls and using high-quality washed coal such as exported by Australia to Asia. The “power station pollution” pictured so eagerly in ABC and Green propaganda is actually steam from the cooling towers.

The main products released by modern coal-fired power stations are water vapour and carbon dioxide – both are essential life supporters. Neither one is dangerous. Both make our climate more liveable, but the contribution of carbon dioxide to climate is tiny. And the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal has done more to encourage the growth of plants and the greening of planet Earth than Greenpeace will ever do.

“Clean coal by wire” into every home is the one thing that could solve much of the Asian air pollution.

Disclosure: Viv Forbes has a science degree and long experience in Australia’s primary industries. He is self-employed, owns a farm and holds shares in a small Australian coal explorer which will benefit when Asia decides to solve their energy and pollution problems using “clean coal by wire”.

Further reading:

Gobi Desert Dust Storms: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=scientists-track-asian-du

Desert Dust, Dust Storms and Climate: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/miller_01/

Is Coal Dirty? http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/is-coal-dirty.pdf

Coal combustion products: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/coal-combustion.pdf

Carbon & Carbon dioxide – Clearing up the Confusion: http://carbon-sense.com/2011/05/02/carbon-dioxide-confusion/

Opinion piece by Prof. David Bellamy
28 June 08
Cows and Sheep May Safely Graze?

As a youngster in a post war London I was brought up on lamb and anchor butter from New Zealand.

My first dabble into TV commercials was with WOOLMARK NZ, in what became a successful attempt to slow down the ingress of synthetic fibre into the carpet market. I still meet sheep farmers around the world who greet me their thanks and a pint of beer.

I still delight in your butter and lamb which I can buy in my local supermarket, the latter at half the price of the local product sold in our village butchers shop.

What a strange world we live in now bombarded with the rhetoric of food miles let alone tourist miles.
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By Craig Rucker

So-called “renewable energy” is not clean, renewable, reliable, affordable or sustainable.

“Renewable energy” is a sexy term used to drive public policies and spending The Obama Administration and like-minded Green zealots have said repeatedly that they are waging a “war on coal,” intend to bankrupt coal-based power plants, and delay or block oil, natural gas and nuclear projects – while fast-tracking and subsidizing ethanol, wind and solar programs

Another apostle of the renewable energy, anti-hydrocarbon movement is Senator Harry Reid. The chief organizer of and keynote speaker at this week’s falsely named National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, Reid is a true believer in destroying conventional energy through subsidies, regulations and strong-arm tactics. He even wants to shut down every coal power plant in Nevada.

Senator Reid may believe that compelling and subsidizing increased renewable energy use, while undermining and even outlawing conventional energy, is the way to economic growth and energy independence. In reality, this reckless scheme could easily cause the collapse of our energy grid, job creation, economy and living standards, just as it is already doing in Europe.

Unfortunately, Reid and his allies could get away with it, because “renewable” confers an almost Holy Grail status that ensures widespread political, media, public and corporate support (for a lot of wrong reasons). That lofty status, however, ignores two fundamental facts:
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The Carbon Sense Coalition today came out in support of “lights out” during Earth Hour (Saturday 29th) but claimed the time should be renamed “Dark Hour” and suggested that consumers should also forgo the consumption of gasoline and diesel during this period.

The chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, claimed that consumers should spend the hour they sit in the dark with no transport, air conditioning or hot coffee, remembering the contribution that carbon fuels have made to modern society.
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The Carbon Sense Coalition has created “The Gorbel Prize for Green Policies that have Inconvenient Outcomes”.

The Chairman of Carbon Sense, Mr Viv Forbes, said that so many green policies that appear to have useful environmental goals fail to analyse properly the long-term unforeseen consequences.

Quote:
Green politicians need to learn Newton’s Law of Government Regulations: – “Whenever government legislates to force an economic outcome, the long term effect will be equal and opposite to that intended.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of green politics, where laws designed to help the environment are harming the environment. To publicise this stupidity, the Carbon Sense Coalition has created “The Gorbel Prize for Green Policies that have Inconvenient Outcomes”.

The winner of the Inaugural Gorbel Prize is the UK government whose green policies aim to make it uneconomic to burn coal. So the tax-payer funded Green Investment Bank has loaned £100 million to help convert the huge Drax coal-burning power station in Yorkshire to burning “sustainable biomass”. This is part of a huge finance package of one billion pounds to get the biomass green tick, earn renewable energy subsidies, and avoid the need to buy carbon credits.

Where do they plan to get the “sustainable biomass”? Each year 7.5 million tonnes of wood chips will be imported from North American forests to replace 4.5 Mt of coal.

The land required to produce wood at this rate is immense – about three million acres of forest per year.

Also, wood is less dense than coal with less energy per tonne and a greater volume per tonne. Thus a greater tonnage and a far greater volume of wood have to be handled to get the same energy. This huge volume of wood has to be harvested, hauled, chipped, dried, trucked, shipped and stored using more carbon fuels – all to produce more expensive electricity.

There is one real benefit from the scheme. When the whole process is considered, using wood will put more carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere than using coal. This will make the forests grow faster.

The same goofy green policies that have pushed Drax into burning forests also apply in Australia. Maybe wood chips from our carbon credit forests will soon fuel Yallourn or Hazelwood power stations?

Such green stupidity will take us back to the BC era (before coal) when forests and hillsides were stripped bare of trees to fuel stoves, heaters, boilers, charcoal makers and smelters.

We would all be better off if Drax burned coal, produced cheap electricity, saved those forests and, to satisfy green dogma, planted a token forest of new trees.

For those who find the above unbelievable, here is one reference:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-25/biggest-english-polluter-spends-1-billion-to-burn-wood-energy.html

Another:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2290444/Madness-How-pay-billions-electricity-bills-Britains-biggest-power-station-switch-coal-wood-chips–wont-help-planet-jot.html

And here is a detailed report on combustion products from carbon fuels:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/coal-combustion.pdf

Nominations are invited for future recipients of the Gorbel Prize.

Meanwhile, Al Gore gets $100 million from Big Oil. See:
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/010313-639260-gore-helps-oil-financed-anti-semitic-platform.htm

More:

• It’s Official – Carbon dioxide is non-Toxic
• Hobbling the Competition
• “Blue Skies are Falling” – a new climate soap opera
• Greedy Gas Giants Gazump Gullible Greens
• Climate Policies create Costly Electricity
• It’s Summer, Stupid, and it’s Usually Hot
• Count your Blessings – a Fairy Story
• The Last Word
• Lord Christopher Monckton is returning to Australia and New Zealand

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/gorbel-prize.pdf [PDF, 147KB]

Keywords: Gorbel Prize, Drax burning wood for electricity, costs of green energy, announcing climate disasters, gas giants gazump greens, electricity costs, heat wave alarms, energy blessings, Christopher Monckton.

Pollute: To make foul or unclean (Macquarie Dictionary).

Carbon dioxide is a trace gas in the atmosphere without which all plants would suffocate. It is odorless and invisible, and plant life flourishes around coal-fired power stations which use scrubbers to remove particulate matter and other nasties from the chimneys to allow sunlight and carbon dioxide to work the miracle of photosynthesis. By no stretch of the imagination can it be deemed a pollutant.

CO2 in the atmosphere is at historically low levels. It is driven by ocean temperatures – warm water expels CO2; cold water takes up CO2.

“The fundamental reason why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is critically important to biology is that there is so little of it. A field of corn growing in full sunlight in the middle of the day uses up all of the carbon dioxide within a metre of the ground in about five minutes.”

– Freeman Dyson, Heretical Thoughts about Science and Society.
(http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dysonf07/dysonf07_index.html)

POLLUTER is surely a title of shame
Obnoxious, like those who misuse it
Labeling something quite clean with this name
Looks a devious way to accuse it
Unless this is challenged, man’s friend CO2
The scapegoat for other agendas
Economically speaking will hurt me and you
Rewarding the lying pretenders.Jock McPoet
April 2011

John McRobert BE (Civ)
Managing Director
CopyRight Publishing Co P/L
William Street, Brisbane
Qld Australia
www.copyright.net.au

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology failed miserably to predict record breaking rainfall this spring. The B.O.M. forecast issued on 24th August 2010 read:

“The chance that the average spring maximum temperature will exceed the long-term median maximum temperature is above 60% over northern parts of Australia, as well as southeastern SA and all of Victoria and Tasmania. The national outlook for total rainfall over spring (September to November) is neutral for most of the country, with the odds favoring neither wetter nor drier conditions. The main exception to this is in southwest WA, where a wetter than normal spring is favoured. There is also a slight shift toward a wetter spring in northeastern NSW, along with a shift toward a drier spring in Tasmania and southern Victoria.”


I am well aware of the difference between weather and climate, but if the “experts” can’t predict correctly over such a short term, do you really have confidence in their long-term predictions?

John McLeish
Wodonga Australia

Sources:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/archive/temperature/20100824.shtml
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/archive/rainfall/20100824.shtml

By David Archibald

Do we live in a special time in which the laws of physics and nature are suspended? No, we do not. Can we expect relationships between the Sun’s activity and climate, that we can see in data going back several hundred years, to continue for at least another 20 years? With absolute certainty.

In this presentation, I will demonstrate that the Sun drives climate, and use that demonstrated relationship to predict the Earth’s climate to 2030. It is a prediction that differs from most in the public domain. It is a prediction of imminent cooling.

The full text continues in the PDF file (770KB):
www.carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/solar-cycle-24-implications-for-the-united-states-archibald.pdf

An audio version of this paper given at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change is here: www.heartland.org/newyork08/audio/Monday/archibald.mp3

Famous environmentalist Doctor David Bellamy on the Irish The Late Late Show (http://www.rte.ie/tv/latelate/) interviewed by Pat Kenny about global warming (broadcast 23^rd January 2009) (9:11 min).

More background and links to other Bellamy interviews here: http://www.dailyexpress.co.uk/posts/view/73486