“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes–and ships–and sealing-wax–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”

The Walrus and The Carpenter, Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872

Once upon a time there was a land where cabbages were very popular. People used them for all sorts of things. There were central farms where they were grown, and distributed to supermarkets from where people bought them. The subjects in this land could buy the cabbages for about 17 cents each.

One day the King decided that it was a bad thing for the cabbages to be produced by these large farms. He said it hurt the environment to have them transported all the way to the supermarkets. He also said too much water was used on those farms.
(more…)

Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong, today released the report, “Climate Change Risks to Australia’s Coast” which estimates, by 2100, “a sea-level rise scenario of 1.1m”. (http://www.climatechange.gov.au/publications/coastline/climate-change-risks-to-australias-coasts.aspx)

In the past, Ms Wong and Kevin Rudd have said they rely on the IPCC reports for their policy decisions. They also criticise those who disagree with the IPCC.

However, the IPCC report (2007) gives a high and low scenario for sea level rises. The high of the high scenario is a rise of 59cm for the 21st century. That is far less than the 110cm in this new report.

So is Ms Wong now saying that the IPCC is wrong? If so, why won’t she listen to the large number of sceptics who also disagree with the IPCC?

Interestingly, the report also says (p. 6), “Over the geological past this dynamism has been even more pronounced, with sea levels up to 4-6 metres higher than today and the shoreline in some places more than 500 kilometres inland.”

Clearly, those increases could not have been caused by humans, but I don’t expect the media, or Wong or Rudd, will make that point!

Bob Long

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called for an end to deceptive advertising regarding Global Warming Policies.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that those calling for a “Price on Carbon” should speak the truth and call it a “Tax on the Production of Carbon Dioxide”.

“Similarly the CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) had nothing to do with pollution but everything to do with imposing taxes and rationing on economic activity.”

Forbes explained:

“The new green mantra chants: “We need a price on carbon”.

“Carbon is the most useful substance on earth and there is already a price on every product containing carbon – coal and oil, bread and butter, beef and bacon, oil and ethanol, beer and whisky, coffee and tea, cotton and wool, diesel and fire wood, methane and carbon dioxide, petrol and rubber – all are carbon products with an established market price.

“Those who chatter about “a price on carbon” are hiding their real aim which is to reduce human activity by taxing the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The Office of Fair Trading should be investigating this deceptive election advertising.

“If this tax attempted to cover all releases of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere it would indeed be “A Monster New Tax”.

“Every man and beast, every car and train, every ship and plane, every cement plant and blast furnace, every power station using coal, oil or gas, every wood stove and gas barbeque, every swamp and termite nest – all emit carbon dioxide and thus recycle carbon. Carbon feeds, powers and clothes our world. Any attempt to stop that is suicidal.

“Every producer of carbon products is already taxed – income tax and payroll tax, royalties and resource rent tax, excise and levies, permits and quotas.

“Another carbon tax would just add to the costs of everything, increase poverty, bloat the bureaucracy and send more jobs to China. The only people promoting more taxes on carbon are the anti-growth crowd and the vested interests in the alternate energy promoters.

“We didn’t want the deceitfully labelled Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, and we don’t want a new tax labelled “A Price on Carbon”.

Viv Forbes
Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition

For a brief report by Ray Evans on the unholy alliance of “Baptists and Bootleggers” supporting more taxes on carbon see: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2010/07/the-price-of-carbon

PDF version of this article: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/carbon-price-means-tax.pdf [PDF, 62 KB]

“The newest game by the banks is carbon emissions trading. The plan is to manufacture emission credit certificates out of thin air, trade them between big financial companies, and compel the rest of us pay for them by producing real goods and services. The new financial slavery.

“Carbon emission permits are the latest paper currency, brought to you by the same crowd who profited from the world’s largest financial bubble. Same structure, same modus operandi, same beneficiaries, same exaggerations, half-truths, and tricky government statistics.” [P. 2]

“Emissions trading by the finance industry was $120 billion in 2008. This will grow to over $1 trillion by 2012, and carbon emission permit trading will be the largest “commodity” market in the world—larger than oil, steel, rice, or wheat. Typically the finance industry will pocket 1% – 5% of that turnover. So even now their financial interest matches the alarmist spending, and soon will vastly exceed it.” [P. 30]

Dr David Evans 2009, Manufacturing Money and Global Warming, SPPI, Haymarket, VA, USA. www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org

“Well, the thing is we’re dealing with an incomplete understanding of the
way the earth’s system works…”

“When we come to the last few years, where we haven’t seen a continuation
of that warming trend, we don’t understand all of the factors that
create earth’s climate, so there are some things we don’t understand,
that’s what the scientists were emailing each other about, you know, we
just don’t understand the way the whole system works, and we’re trying
to find out.”

“These people work with models, computer modelling, when the computer
modelling and the real world data disagrees you’ve got a very
interesting problem, that’s when science really gets engaged. What Kevin
Trenberth, one of the most respected climate scientists in the world, is
saying is, ‘Guys, we have to get on our horses and find out what we
don’t know about the system, we have to actually understand why the
cooling is occurring, because the current modelling doesn’t reflect it.'”

“…sure for the last few years we have gone through a slight cooling
trend…”

Tim Flannery, ABC Lateline 23 Nov 2009
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2008/s2751390.htm

“The individual sea level records obtained from the SEAFRAME study on 12 Pacific Islands have all been assessed by the anonymous authors of the official reports as indicating positive trends in sea level over all 12 Pacific Islands involved since the study began in 1993. This assessment studies individual records and finds that all of them show no change of sea level in almost all of the records following the 1998 cyclones. It is considered that cyclones and tsunamis not only induce false readings which should be ignored when calculating a trend, but they also disrupt the leveling of the equipment so that previous years’ figures should also not form part of a trend.”

See the full article South Pacific Sea Level: A Reassessment by Vincent R Gray:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sea-levels-gray.pdf [PDF, 1.1 MB]

In addition, Cliff Ollier reports:

“Graphs of sea level for twelve locations in the southwest Pacific show stable sea level for about ten years over the region. The data are compared with results from elsewhere, all of which suggest that any rise of global sea level is negligible. The Darwin theory of coral formation, and subsidence ideas for guyots would suggest that we should see more land subsidence, and apparent sea level rise, than is actually occurring. Sea level studies have not been carried out for very long, but they can indicate major tectonic components such as isostatic rebound in Scandinavia. Attempts to manipulate the data by modelling to show alarming rates of sea level rise (associated with alleged global warming) are not supported by primary regional or global data. Even those places frequently said to be in grave danger of drowning, such as the Maldives, Tuvalu and Holland, appear to be safe.”

See the full article Sea Level in the Southwest Pacific is Stable by Cliff Ollier:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/sea-levels-ollier.pdf [PDF, 881 KB]

Here is a the very latest sea Level data from “The South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project” produced by the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology with technical support from the National Tidal centre and funded by the Australian Agency for International Development. There is no evidence of any dramatic increases in sea levels.

(From http://www.bom.gov.au/oceanography/projects/spslcmp/reports.shtml Nov, 2009)

By John Bignell

Source: http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/religion.htm

It was Michael Crichton who first prominently identified environmentalism as a religion. That was in a speech in 2003, but the world has moved on apace since then and adherents of the creed now have a firm grip on the world at large.

Global Warming has become the core belief in a new eco-theology. The term is used as shorthand for anthropogenic (or man made) global warming. It is closely related to other modern belief systems, such as political correctness, chemophobia and various other forms of scaremongering, but it represents the vanguard in the assault on scientific man.

The activists now prefer to call it “climate change”. This gives them two advantages:

1. It allows them to seize as “evidence” the inevitable occurrences of unusually cold weather as well as warm ones.
2. The climate is always changing, so they must be right.

Full report as PDF: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/global-warming-religion.pdf [59 KB]

Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide
ARTHUR B. ROBINSON, NOAH E. ROBINSON, AND WILLIE SOON

Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, 2251 Dick George Road, Cave Junction, Oregon 97523 [artr@oism.org]

ABSTRACT A review of the research literature concerning the environmental consequences of increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide leads to the conclusion that increases during the 20th and early 21st centuries have produced no deleterious effects upon Earth’s weather and climate. Increased carbon dioxide has, however, markedly increased plant growth. Predictions of harmful climatic effects due to future increases in hydrocarbon use and minor greenhouse gases like CO2 do not conform to current experimental knowledge. The environmental effects of rapid expansion of the nuclear and hydrocarbon energy industries are discussed.

Full article: http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm

71% of the earth’s surface is covered by water and large areas of the land are covered by frozen water. Water and water vapour are also significant components of the atmosphere.

The atmosphere and its trace component of carbon dioxide is a very thin skin in close contact with the surface of all of this water. Carbon dioxide is very soluble in water and Henry’s Law says that as the temperature of water changes the quantity of carbon dioxide dissolved in that water will change.

Thus if the sea surface temperature increases, carbon dioxide will be expelled to the atmosphere just like carbon dioxide bubbles are expelled from a warming beer. And as sea surface temperature falls, carbon dioxide will dissolve in the cooling water and this reduces the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

This effect can be seen in seasonal, medium term and long term trends.

The seasonal variation in atmospheric content of carbon dioxide is well known, and the huge southern oceans are key players. See the short paper by Bob Beatty on the carbon dioxide cycle at : http://www.bosmin.com/HenrysLaw.pdf [PDF, 689 KB]

When it is winter in the southern hemisphere, the cold surface water of the oceans absorb carbon dioxide and the content of carbon dioxide in the air falls suddenly by about 4 ppm. This is reversed when the southern oceans warm in summer, and the carbon dioxide is expelled from the oceans. (The seasonal summer growth and winter fall of northern hemisphere vegetation adds to this seasonal fluctuation caused mainly by the southern oceans.)

On a medium time scale (21 year moving average) Professor Lance Endersbee published a short paper in August 2008 and he concluded that the oceans regulate the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the influence of human-generated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is negligible. His paper included the following diagram:

See full article at: endersbee-co2-and-oceans.pdf [PDF, 490 KB; Source: ATSE No 151, August 2008.]

See also this paper by Alan MacRae: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRae.pdf [PDF, 286 KB]

On longer time scales, ocean mixing caused by deep ocean currents causes long term changes in ocean temperatures. These changes also affect long term carbon dioxide trends. Carbon dioxide held in large quantities in cold deep ocean water is slowly released as ocean currents mix this cold water with warmer surface water. The reverse occurs as the sea surface cools, absorbs carbon dioxide and the cold dense water sinks to the ocean floor.

The most dramatic evidence of this lagged response comes from ice core data. These show that significant turning points in temperature precede the corresponding turning points in carbon dioxide content in air by between 650 and 1600 years.

See: http://carbon-sense.com/2009/10/03/taxing-ambulances/

Henry’s Law can and has been tested in laboratory experiments. The other data provides additional evidence for the conclusion that the major factor regulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, on all time scales, is the temperature of the oceans. Ocean temperature is controlled by solar cycles, cloud cover, ocean currents and undersea volcanism.

– Viv Forbes

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has told German businessmen that they may have to rely on Russian firewood for heating if they do not want to construct new nuclear power plants or bring in Russian gas supplies. At a business conference organized in Berlin by the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Putin recognised that “the German public does not like the nuclear power industry for some reason.” He continued: “But I cannot understand what fuel you will take for heating. You do not want gas, you do not develop the nuclear power industry, so you will heat with firewood?” Putin then noted, “You will have to go to Siberia to buy the firewood there,” as Europeans “do not even have firewood.”

World Nuclear News
1 Dec 2010

www.world-nuclear-news.org/newsarticle.aspx?id=28907