Here is the latest Carbon Sense newsletter:

• Lord Monckton & Ian Plimer vs Graham Readfearn & Professor Barry Brook, Brisbane 29th Jan 2010
• The Climate is Changing
• Climate Madness and Electricity Realities
• Gore’s Books cause Warming in Britain
• Power Station Images – incompetence or propaganda?

Full newsletter is here: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/climate-is-changing.pdf [PDF, 170 KB]

Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd want to stimulate the climate conscience of the under-developed world with bribes of $122 billion PER YEAR stolen from western taxpayers and consumers (The Australian 8 July).

Naturally the UN approves. Having failed so spectacularly to combat terrorism, genocide and dictatorship they now see a job they can do – handling the climate change slush fund.

At best, this money will subsidise our competitors in India, China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa to modernise their factories and power stations. More likely, it will evaporate in a carbon credit scam, feed the climate change industry, or disappear into some Swiss bank account.

Our overheated, carbon burning, world travelling PMs needs to do what global warming is doing: pause and cool down.

Viv Forbes

AFS – APOCALYPSE FATIGUE SYNDROME

Hon Keith DeLacy AM

As an inherently impressionable person I have been dealing with the coming apocalypse all my life. It started with the bible. The Book of Revelation in the New Testament vividly warned of impending doom, and many of the Hebrew prophets forecast the apocalypse.

Pope Sylvester II at the beginning of the millennium year 1000, predicted the Millennium Apocalypse, the end of the world. Riots occurred throughout Europe and pilgrims headed to Jerusalem seeking salvation.

And the Apocalypse was always associated with sin, it was deserved. “And these will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.” (Matthew 25:40) If I had been thinking sinful thoughts, I trembled at night, dreaming of the fires of hell. There was no escape.

Thomas Malthus wrote an Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 and became the preeminent father of doom. Unchecked population growth would lead to inevitable catastrophe – population growth was exponential while the growth in food supply was arithmetical.

We were impressionable kids, we grew up with Malthusiasm, waiting for doomsday. It was a compelling argument. Yet 200 years later, despite exponential population growth the world is so much wealthier and better fed. The Malthusian apocalypse was no better than Pope Sylvester’s.

Paul Erhlich became a cult figure in the 1970’s. Malthus’ inability to deliver on his population apocalypse proved no deterrence to Erhlich. He wrote The Population Bomb in 1968 forecasting that “sometime between 1970 and 85 the world will undergo vast famines, hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
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Australia’s Minister for Controlling the Climate, King Combet, has promised that millions of households will be better off under Carbon Tax Mark 3.

Who is he trying to fool?

There is only one tax on the people and that is total government spending. The carbon tax will increase that greatly. And the more complex the system, with more exemptions, more rebates, more electoral bribes and more cash handouts, the more will be wasted on government administration. We will pay more and get less value back.

Every tax levied by the government gets spread around until it rests with the people at the bottom of the pile. Consumers will see increased costs for electricity food and transport, retirees will see lower dividends, job seekers will see contraction of real jobs, other tax receipts will fall thus reducing government income, and too many of us will spend more time trying to join the ranks of the tax avoiders and rorters.

Can we believe that the same incompetents who delivered pink batts, cash-for-clunkers, schools renewals, a computer for every child and the Queensland Health Payroll will suddenly be able to handle the complexities and con-men in yet another money-churning vote-buying scheme?

None of this will have any effect whatsoever on climate, so why crucify ourselves further?

The world is moving on from the global warming scam.

It’s Time for Australia to move on.

Australian Tour by Lord Christopher Monckton

A well organised group who support the Global Warming Swindle and the Carbon Tax Grab have put pressure on the venues that agreed to host the Monckton Functions. Surprisingly the Broncos League Club in Brisbane has reneged on an agreed function. Already our supporters have let the Broncos know what they think of this breach of contract. Keep it up. But the function will go ahead at:

Bardon Conference Centre
390 Simpsons Rd
Bardon QLD 4065
Phone: +61 7 3217 5333
Wednesday 13th July 2011. Doors open 6pm for 7pm start. PLEASE SUPPORT THIS FUNCTION.

There is parking at the venue for about 200 cars. Best public transport would be via taxi.

For Monckton tickets and bookings:
http://premier.ticketek.com.au/search/SearchResults.aspx?k=monckton

To view all dates and times for Lord Monckton’s Tour please go here:
http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.com/2011/06/lord-monckton-tour-dates-and-tickets_28.html

More, including:

• Which Carbon Tax? None of the Above

in the PDF: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/carbon-tax-mark3.pdf [PDF, 44 KB]

Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis

From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society

6 October 2010

Dear Curt:

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
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By David Archibald

News has come from the Duluth office of the National Weather Service that both International Falls & Hibbing broke their records for low temperatures on the morning of September 17. The Falls got to 23°, breaking the old record of 24° set in 1959, and Hibbing to 24°. We shouldn’t be surprised because the Canadian prairies have been cooling for decades now. Also, President Trump, while in California on September 14, had predicted cooling, saying “It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.” Three days later a new cold record is set at the iconic International Falls weather station. Either President Trump actually has some control of the weather or he is getting very good advice. (more…)

The Carbon Sense Coalition today called for an end to the massive subsidies to the green car industry and to rich buyers of green car toys.

The Chairman of “Carbon Sense”, Mr Viv Forbes, said that to waste taxpayer funds helping foreign car manufacturers to produce cars that consumers don’t want is bad policy.

“Worse still is a policy that encourages people to trash a roadworthy car and buy a trendy new one they do not need.”

Forbes explained:

“To collect, transport and scrap one car and build and deliver another one costs a lot in money, metals, and energy.

“These misguided policies benefit car manufacturers, car dealers, car financiers and some consumers. Everyone else, including the environment, is a loser.

“None of the so called green cars are really green.

“Electric motors, compressed air motors and hydrogen “fuel” are promoted as clean and green, but none of them are sources of energy. All of them need conventional electric power to provide their stored energy.

“Electric cars must fill their batteries from a power point. Compressed air cars must fill their tanks from a compressor which probably uses electricity. And a hydrogen car, if one ever appears, must fill its tank from a refinery using heaps of electricity to produce hydrogen from water or hydrocarbons.

“And where will the electricity come from? In Australia right now 93% of electricity comes from combustion of hydrocarbons such as coal, gas and oil. That will not change dramatically or quickly without putting the lights out. And a dramatic switch to “green” cars plus bans and taxes on hydrocarbon energy increases the chance of that.

“Electric cars are nifty and quiet, and may reduce harmful concentrations of hot exhaust gases in city air, but in Australia they will run mainly on carbon fuel. There will be zero reduction in the production of carbon dioxide (as if that matters anyway).

“The market is the best judge whether diesel, hybrid, electric, petrol or compressed air cars are used. The answer will vary from family to family and from city to country.

“For too long governments have been throwing subsidies at foreign car companies and “green” car buyers. Now they are pushing low cost cars out of the market with their “big bucks for old bombs” giveaway.

“Subsidies always encourage waste of the subsidised product – it is not a sustainable policy. The marginal savings in fuel consumption will never compensate for this extravagance.

“Green car subsidies are dud policies and should be subject to an immediate recall notice.”

Full article: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/green-cars.pdf [PDF, 248 KB]

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]

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]

Federal judge tells climate litigants to tally the numerous blessings from fossil fuels since 1859

Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek

Judge William Alsup has a BS in engineering, has written computer programs for his ham radio hobby, delves deeply into the technical aspects of numerous cases before him, and even studied other programming languages for a complex Oracle v. Google lawsuit.

As presiding judge in People of the State of California v. BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell, he insisted that the litigants present their best scientific evidence for and against the state’s assertion that fossil fuel emissions are causing dangerous climate change. Now he wants to see, not just the alleged damages from burning oil, natural gas and coal – but also the immense benefits to humanity and the people of California from using those fuels for the past 150 years and more.

Environmental and climate activists, including cities pursuing climate lawsuits against oil companies, almost never acknowledge those benefits, which are far-reaching and indisputable. We can only hope attorneys Anne Champion, Philip Curtis, Diehl Kemper, et al. and friends of the court will do justice to the many blessings attributable to our use of these once unimaginable energy resources.

For countless millennia, our ancestors struggled to survive amid deprivation and backbreaking dusk-to-dawn labor, often on the brink of starvation – with the bulk of humanity living little better than their domesticated animals. Average nasty, brutish and short life expectancy hovered in the low thirties.

But then, suddenly and miraculously, in barely two centuries, health, prosperity and longevity began to climb. First coal, then oil, then natural gas paved the way, providing the fuels for transportation, communication, refrigeration, electricity and other incredible technologies that improve, enhance, safeguard and save lives. Incomes increased eleven-fold. Mass die-offs so confidently predicted by Malthus and Ehrlich never materialized. In fact, global life spans more than doubled, and today billions of people enjoy living standards that even kings and queens could not dream of 120 years ago.

Sadly, equal numbers of people still struggle on the edge of survival. A billion and a half are still without electricity, two billion still exist on a few dollars a day, and millions still die every year from insect-borne, lung and intestinal diseases – largely because they still burn wood and dung, instead of fossil fuels.

In 1900, New York City’s 3.4 million people relied on 100,000 horses whose “tailpipes” emitted 2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine every day. Sanitation crews cleaned it up, dumped it mostly in local rivers, and hauled dead horses to rendering plants. Farmers devoted thousands of acres just to growing horse feed. Imagine what today’s 8.6 million NYC residents would require and emit.

Today, far more powerful, far less polluting, trucks, cars, buses, trains, subways and airplanes move people, food and products far more quickly and efficiently. They take us to work, school and worship services; to the grocery, bank, drug store, doctor and restaurant; to movies, picnics and sporting events. Fire trucks help us battle devastating conflagrations, and ambulances take our injured to hospitals.

All these vehicles (internal combustion and electric) exist because of, are fueled by – and travel on roadways made with fossil fuels: asphalt from oil, metal and concrete manufactured using fossil fuels.

Even electric cars require oil, gas and coal for manufacturing and recharging. Indeed, the earth-moving machines, drilling rigs and production platforms, pipelines, foundries, factories and other technologies needed to extract, process and fabricate raw materials into the world around us exist because of fossil fuels. Every bit of metal, plastic, concrete, wood, fabric and food we see results from fossil fuels. Even wind turbines, solar panels and biofuels are impossible without the fuels that California so loves to hate.

Medical devices, computers, cell phones, radios and televisions, kitchen appliances, household and office heating and air conditioning, millions of other products of every description require fossil fuels for their components, manufacturing and daily operation. The schools and research laboratories that made our amazing technologies and other advancements possible are themselves made possible by fossil fuels.

The modern agricultural equipment and practices that feed the world share the same ancestry: tractor and harvester fuel, ammonia fertilizer from natural gas, pesticides and herbicides from petrochemicals. Carbon dioxide from burning these fuels helps crop, forage, forest and grassland plants grow faster and better, with less water and better resistance to droughts and diseases. Our bounteous grain and other crops mean fewer famines, except where forced starvation is used to subdue and eliminate enemies.

Indeed, between 1961 and 2011, the total monetary value of CO2 enhancement for 45 crops reached an estimated cumulative value of $3.2 trillion! Carbon dioxide’s annual enrichment value rose from $19 billion in 1961 to $140 billion in 2010. Between 2012 and 2050, these benefits will total $9.8 trillion!

Pharmaceutical and cosmetic products all have their roots in petrochemicals – as do paints, synthetic fibers and plastics. Hockey and football players are dressed head to toe in fossil-fuel-sourced materials.

High-rise office and residential buildings made possible by steel and concrete allow our cities to grow upward, instead of just outward, preserving millions of acres of wildlife habitats and scenic areas.

Then there’s electricity. Look around you, and try to imagine your life without this wondrous, pervasive energy source. Electricity was properly ranked humanity’s second most significant innovation of the past 6,000 years, after the printing press! It has created, shaped, defined and powered the modern world, and facilitated virtually every technological achievement of the past century. Electrification of nations is undeniably the world’s most significant engineering and life-enhancing achievement of the past century.

Economic growth, quality of life and longevity are directly correlated to sufficient, reliable, affordable electricity. In today’s world, nothing happens without it: communication, transportation and research; the operation of every home, office, hospital, factory and airport; refrigeration to preserve food and medicine; heating and air conditioning to save lives and enable people to survive and prosper in any climate.

Electrification will be increasingly important in the 21st century, and world electricity consumption is forecast to double within four decades, as electricity supplies an increasing share of the world’s ever-increasing energy demand. Fossil fuels will continue generating at least 75% of electricity, even in 2050.

Hydroelectric and nuclear (which radical environmentalists also despise and oppose), a bit of geothermal, and a smattering of unreliable, weather-determined wind and solar power will supply the rest. The land, resource and environmental impacts of building and operating wind and solar must also be considered.

Social media and internet search engines (to run biased searches for alarmist climate news) also depend on electricity – 91.4% of which was generated by fossil fuels, nuclear and hydro in 2016 in the USA.

Increased productivity generated by all these technologies creates the leisure time and wealth that enable everyone to enjoy evenings, weekends and holidays – and the fossil fuel transportation to go places (including to faraway, exotic locales and 5-star hotels for IPCC climate change confabs).

Finally, aside from nuclear-powered ships, our highly mechanized military gets there “the fastest with the mostest” thanks to fossil fuels, to combat terrorism and provide for our national defense.

Judge Alsup’s case is thus really about highly speculative manmade climate disasters versus indisputable fossil fuel benefits – as further documented here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere. Indeed, today’s undeniable fossil fuel benefits outweigh any hypothesized climate, sea level and other costs by literally orders of magnitude: at least 50:1 to more than 200:1.

Barring major efficiency, battery storage and other technology improvements, renewable energy cannot possibly replace fossil fuels. Judge Alsup has no choice but to rule in favor of the oil company defendants … and all who rely on oil, gas and coal for the countless, life-enhancing benefits barely touched on here.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of articles and books on energy, climate change, carbon dioxide and economic development. Roger Bezdek is an internationally recognized energy analyst and president of Management Information Services, Inc.