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/

By Don Aitkin

“I object to having to pay more for electricity that is produced inefficiently and erratically because some people are worried about the end of the world. In the 1980s, solar energy looked a possible way in the future of protecting our small and diminishing reserves of oil – because even then there were experts telling us that ‘Peak Oil’ had already arrived. It would never have occurred to me that we would be considering it as a source of baseline power. How would we store overnight the energy gained during the day? No one had the answer then, and no one has produced an efficient working model of the answer today. For isolated settlements and properties? Yes. For the grid? No.”

From: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14447

By Carl Brehmer

“Evidence of widespread control of fire dates to approximately 125,000 years.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_of_fire_by_early_humans

Many people assert that environmental extremists want to take civilization back to a pre-industrial state some 150-200 years ago, but the achievement of a “carbon free economy” would take humanity back at least 125,000 years before the discovery and control of fire, because that is the source of the carbon dioxide emissions that have now been declared “pollution.” Even as the somewhat obscure term “cap-and-trade” is a little more clear when called a “carbon tax”, even more clarity would be achieved by calling it a tax on the use of fire, because that is what it is. In their role as fuels, all hydrocarbons are useless until they are burned, which produces the energy that has fuelled human progress and provided the following benefits, which even the environmental extremists and various “rent takers” take for granted:

1) Light; even kerosene lanterns burn fossil fuel and produce carbon dioxide.

2) Heat; ask the victims of hurricane Sandy or anybody who experiences a power outage about the value of heat. Even primitive people use fire for heat.

3) Communication; all modern forms of communication depend upon the power provided by the energy derived from fire.

4) Rapid travel; what form of travel today isn’t powered by the use of fire? Trains, planes and automobiles are all powered with fire.

5) Escape from countless hours of physical labour. Prior to the discovery and use of fire, especially that used to produce electricity, disparate groups of human being were stuck in separate small communities around the world forced to spend most of their time in physical labour.

6) Inventions such as the modern computer and the rapid, worldwide communication network, which includes cell phones, e-mail and the internet would not have been developed nor could they be sustained by the intermittent, low density energy derived from solar cells and wind mills.

7) Satellites, both communication and weather; how many satellites have been launched into space without the use of fire? Many, but not all, are sent to space by hydrocarbon fuels. (Even those satellites that study outgoing long wave radiation and have futilely been attempting to prove that increasing levels of carbon dioxide are causing catastrophic climate change.)

8) One of the consequences of using fire as an energy source is that it has provided many people with enough time on their hands to debate whether or not fire is a good thing, i.e., the global warming AKA climate change AKA biodiversity AKA sustainable development debate.

(Remember also that environmental extremists not only want to ban the use of fire for energy production; they want to ban the use of nuclear energy and hydroelectric energy as well.)

The vast amount of energy that the use of fire has placed at the disposal of humanity has been used to revolutionize the nature of our existence. The mere fact that fire was a source of light and heat independent of the sun meant that humans could roam beyond the tropics into the damp, cold regions of the north with seasons of snow and long freezing nights. It was fire and fire alone that enabled man to become a creature native to the entire world and not just the tropics. In addition, the heat of the fire, i.e. cooking, brought about changes in our food supply that made otherwise inedible food palatable and nourishing. Fire has not only increased the variety of food that humans can eat, it also powers the diesel tractors used in modern farming. Our food supply has consequently multiplied beyond the wildest dreams of our ancient ancestors. Current world hunger problems are primarily distribution problems not quantity problems.

Nor has the importance of fire diminished with time; rather the reverse. Wood was no doubt the first fuel used in building and maintaining a fire, but coal took primacy over wood in the 17th century. In the 20th century these two fuels were join by gasoline and oil. In the 21st century shale oil and natural gas are gaining importance.

If the “powers that be” really thought that the continued use of fire was causing a climate catastrophe they would ban its use all together, but it would seem that they just want a piece of the action. The cap-and-trade scheme is not unlike property tax in which the government just lays claim to your property and starts charging you rent, i.e. property tax. (If you think that you own your home just stop paying your property tax and see what happens.) The cap-and-trade scheme is the government just laying claim on all fossil fuel resource within its jurisdiction and charging people a fee to burn them as an energy source.

“The power to tax is the power to destroy.” (John Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland 17 U.S. 327)

It could be that humans will eventually run out of things to burn, but that day keeps getting pushed back by innovation. For the present I can’t think of a more efficient way to destroy our society’s prosperity, which has brought us all of the above benefits, than to impose a tax on the use of fire. It leaves me wondering; in what kind of society do we now live in which we have to buy a license to use fire as an energy source, something that has been free for 125,000 years? And who exactly are we paying these fees to in order to obtain the privilege of burning that which nature provides?

Carl Brehmer

(Slightly edited from the original.)

When I was a kid, Mum did the washing in a copper of boiling water over an open fire in the back yard. We collected the wood from the back paddock with a horse and dray. It was all very “green” (but we thought it was just hard yakka).

Greens want us to return to this primitive method for generating heat, and even electricity.

It is sensible for industrial plants such as sugar mills to burn readily available organic waste such as bagasse to generate power. But to deliberately build power stations to run on wood chips is a step back to the BC (before coal) era when forests were clear-felled to produce fuel and charcoal to feed boilers and furnaces.

Coal is an energy-dense fuel, and often has huge deposits in a concentrated area. Long-life power stations can be built close to the coal deposits, thus minimising transport costs and land disturbance.

Wood, however, has very low energy density and biomass energy is always spread over large areas of land. The fuel gathering operation must move every day, with enormous waste of transport energy and displacement of plants and animals.

Burning coal or burning biomass produces exactly the same harmless combustion gases, and a switch of fuels will have no measurable effect on climate.

Even more stupid than wood power are Green dreams to feed power stations with low grade fuels such as wheat stubble or fowl manure. The collection and transport costs for such inferior fuels will exceed the value of electricity produced. It also robs the bio-sphere of valuable mulch, fertiliser and humus.

Burning biomass to generate electricity is Green madness. Speculators should be free to fritter their own funds on such nonsense but public subsidies, carbon credits and market mandates should not be used to support them.

Here is a new slogan for true environmentalists: “Don’t Burn the Bio-sphere”.

Read how one foolish island nation plans to burn its food (coconuts) in diesel generators:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/09/of-coconuts-the-sun-and-small-isolated-islands/

More:

• Why Bury the Essentials of Life in Carbon Cemeteries?
• Abolish the Two Big Climate Taxes
• The Real Agenda: Agenda 21
• Nothing New about Extreme Weather
• Has the LNP forgotten the battlers?

See: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/burning-the-biosphere.pdf [PDF, 219 KB]

Keywords: Green Energy, biomass, wood power, biofuel, CCS (carbon capture & sequestration), climate taxes, electricity costs, carbon tax, renewable energy targets, Agenda 21, extreme weather.

The Case for Repeal

We support the immediate repeal of the carbon tax. This tax was introduced by stealth, and the justification for its introduction is spurious. It should be repealed or made ineffective immediately.

We are told its purpose is to “reduce carbon pollution” – just three words, each of which is based on a lie.

• “Reduce”: The effect of Australia’s carbon tax on the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so tiny as to be undetectable and any miniscule reduction would be totally swamped in the far bigger natural seasonal variations of carbon dioxide levels. The effect on global climate, if any, would also be too small to be measured and of no benefit to the climate or life on Earth.
• “Carbon”: It is NOT a tax on carbon. Carbon is a solid – either soft and black like graphite and soot, or crystalline, hard and beautiful like diamond. It is definitely not the colourless gas created when carbon is burned. The “carbon” tax falls mainly on carbon dioxide, a colourless, harmless natural gas which has always been present in Earth’s atmosphere, usually in far greater amounts than at present. The use of “carbon” when referring to “carbon dioxide” is a deliberate deception. It would be like calling liquid water by the name “hydrogen”, a major element in the water molecule which is a dangerous explosive flammable gas. Based on the carbon example, a tax on water vapour (another “greenhouse gas) would probably be called “The Hydrogen Tax” by government propagandists.
• “Pollution”: Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and should never have been called one. It is the essential gas-of-life for all plants and they support all animals on Earth. It is no more a pollutant than oxygen, which is the gas-of-life for animals, or water vapour which is essential for all life. All three gases have effects on earth’s surface temperature, and on surface life, and such effects are usually highly beneficial. Additional carbon dioxide has been improving and will continue to improve the growth rate and drought tolerance of all plants on earth. Far from polluting the Earth, extra carbon dioxide has been greening the globe for decades.

There has been no attempt at an independent cost benefit analysis to justify the tax.

More, as well as:

• Petition
• John Howard Joins the Deniers (well almost)
• The Many Benefits of CO2
• Keeping a Sense of Perspective on Global Warming
• Funds Flow in, in Enormous Dollops

Read the full report: http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/cold-turkey2.pdf [PDF, 140KB]

Keywords: Carbon Tax, deceptive advertising, cost-benefits, enquiry into the science, pollution, National Pollution Inventory Scheme, Kyoto Agreement, price surveillance, IPCC, Climate Change Authority, Direct Action, renewable energy targets.

Most of the last 500,000 years have seen Earth gripped by snow and ice, with short warm periods of about 10,000 years long every 100,000 years. We live in this continuing glacial era but are lucky to exist in one of the regular short warm periods.

There is nothing at all unusual about the current warm period, except maybe that it is the period during which modern human civilisation developed.

Within our warm era, we live in a time that is not unusual either – there have been periods warmer and cooler than today, with no real evidence that mankind has caused global warming (apart from minor urban heat bubbles around mega cities).

There is evidence of a correlation between sunspots and Earth temperature, as well as suggested mechanisms to explain this link. The sun clearly has an effect on Earth temperature, and the evidence tends to suggest we could expect global cooling in the near future.

Even within historical times, the Central England Temperature Record, which goes back to 1659, shows a general rising trend since the depths of the Little Ice age, rising to a peak with the solar cycles, and now signalling a falling trend.

Statistics on human usage of carbon fuels show that it is the undeveloped world not the developed world where usage is rising most sharply. Even in emissions per head of population, it is countries like China where the significant growth is occurring. Carbon taxes and targets are costly and futile.

However when we look at how carbon dioxide affects global temperature, the effect is so small as to be insignificant. It is the behaviour of the sun we should be watching.

Ed Hoskins has looked at all of the above factors in a short but revealing essay.

To read more see:http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/hoskins-global-warming-climate-change.pdf [PDF, 1.8MB]

Alley, R.B 2000 The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19: pp 213-226.

by Viv Forbes

Carbon dioxide must be an almighty gas – it gets blamed for almost every human disaster.

Now we have the alarmist Climate Council blaming bushfires on carbon dioxide and global warming. Focussing on the wrong problem is doing more harm than good. It is disappointing to see respected firefighters like Greg Mullins now blaming “climate change” for more and worse bushfires, and now even promoting the misguided Climate Council.

We have heat waves, dry spells and bushfires in Australia every year – bushfires were burning all up the coast when Captain Cook sailed by in 1770. But today we know what causes dangerous fires. It needs deliberate political mismanagement to create disastrous wild-fires which destroy everything – houses, sheds, fences, wildlife and mature trees.

A good wet season can result in nature building up a dangerously large fuel load. In the past this was usually removed safely by many small fires lit by lightning strikes, aboriginals, graziers or foresters. Today massive fuels loads are too often allowed to accumulate for more than one season in forests, reserves, parks and around suburbs. Then one match or spark on a windy day can produce massive fires.

Image acknowledgement: www.pixabay.com

Today’s stupid green policies that discourage and prohibit burning-off, encourage the accumulation of bushfire fuel and exclude grazing animals from large areas of parks and reserves are making uncontrollable wildfires more common. (more…)

by Mike Bailey

I am a retired Surveyor who spent his whole career (1965 to 2010) measuring and recording:

• Water depths, to enable safe navigation of ships and boats into harbours.
• Coastal features, such as shorelines and beaches, to monitor changes in depth that occur over time.
• Near shore constructions, such as sea walls, groynes wharves, piers and jetties and boat ramps to monitor their effect on the surrounding areas.

In order for these depth measurements to have any coherence they have to be related to a common reference level. In Australia this common reference level or Datum is the Australian Height Datum (AHD).

AHD is a mean sea level datum and was established by analysis of data from recording tide gauges which operate in ports around Australia and which in some cases have been operating for around a century. (see below) I have not found any proposal that this datum be changed due to the rising sea level.

AHD was adopted by the National Mapping Council in May 1971 as the datum to which all vertical control for mapping was to be referred.

(more…)

Watching Weather Waves, but Missing Climate Tides.

By Viv Forbes, 17 July 2018

The climate alarm media, the bureaucracy and the Green Energy industry follow an agenda which is served by inflating any short-term weather event into a climate calamity. They should take a long-term view.

Earth’s climate is never still – it is always changing, with long-term trends, medium-term reversals and minor oscillations. Humanity is best served by those who use good science to study geology, astronomy and climate history searching for clues to climate drivers and the underlying natural cycles and trends hidden in short-term weather fluctuations.

For the last 10,000 years Earth has basked in the Holocene Interglacial which is the latest of many warm cycles within the Pleistocene Ice Age. There are small warm and cool cycles within the Holocene. Today we enjoy the Modern Warm Cycle (which started about calendar 1900) following the Little Ice Age which bottomed in about 1750.

What does the future hold? The past gives clues to the future.
(more…)

The Environmental Insane Asylum
By Alan Caruba

Earth Day was declared in 1970 and for the past 45 years we have all been living in the Environmental Insane Asylum, being told over and over again to believe things that are the equivalent of Green hallucinations. Now the entire month of April has been declared Earth Month, but in truth not a day goes by when we are not assailed with the bold-faced lies that comprise environmentalism.

Around the globe, the worst part of this is that we are being victimized by people we are told to respect from the President of the United States to the Pope of the Catholic Church. Their environmentalism is pure socialism.

Organizations whom we expect to tell the truth keep telling us that “climate change is one of the biggest global security threats of the 21st century.” This was a recent statement by “world leaders” like the G7, a group of finance ministers and central bank governors of seven advanced economies, the International Monetary Fund, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States. On April 17 they adopted a report about the “threat” put together by think tanks that included the European Union Institute for Security Studies and the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.
(more…)