Wednesday, March 14, 2007

The Brits Talk Carbon Trading

An enlightened discussion of U.K. carbon emissions policy by Robert Peston of BBC News. One of his conclusions:

One of the less visible consequences of Government policy on climate change is that it would lead to a massive transfer of wealth from the developed world to the developing world.

He is of course talking about the purchase of "carbon credits" abroad:

The transfer results from the mechanism laid down in the draft Climate Change Bill for achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

It allows the purchase from abroad of “carbon credits” to hit the five-yearly targets for CO2 cuts along the way. What this means is that if the UK invests in projects in China, or India or Africa - for example - which would reduce their emissions, than those reductions in CO2 can be counted in an assessment of whether the UK has met its targets.

As an example, if carbon sequestration became a viable technology, then a British power generator could capture and bury the CO2 produced by a Chinese coal-fired plant and then count that CO2 against is own CO2 “budget” for carbon cuts.

And his other conclusion?

...this would not be dead money, handed over with no prospect of any financial return. If UK businesses were for example financing low-carbon power generation in China, those businesses would expect a share of the profits and dividends generated by the power generation.

And if you're wondering why the Europe is moving so aggressively on Kyoto and climate change policy in general, it is not due to some latent urge towards Socialism. Countries like Spain and Switzerland are already beginning to feel the negative effects of Global warming, the former nation quite severely.

17 comments:

JimBobby said...

Whooee! Well BCL, almost every day we're hearin' about another bigass economist or bank or gummint study toutin' cap & trade. I figger it's only a matter o' time before Harpoon the economist sees the light.

Nobuddy's gonna fall fer intensity targets fer the tar sands. If Harper stays on that course, the new clean air act will be rejected just as the first draft was.

The Merkans an' the Ozzies are both lookin' harder at carbon tradin'. The Yerpeans is already doin' it an' a lot of 'em are already meetin' their Kyoto targets.

Money collected under Kyoto's emissions tradin' scheme have already funded 500 GHG reduction projects.

Our gummint is throwin' millions down the drain in a futile attempt to democratize Afghanistan but, so far, ain't willin' to invest in a proven system that works to reduce GHG's.

There's a new rallyin' cry fer concerned Canajuns --

"Get out of Afghanistan and into Kyoto."

JimBobby

Anonymous said...

Licia Corbella

Wed, March 14, 2007


Debunking global warming myths

By LICIA CORBELLA

The British documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle is, well ... great.

The program, which aired last Thursday in the U.K. to much buzz, has since been watched by hundreds of thousands of others around the world via the Internet. It exposes numerous lies and myths presented as fact by those who believe in the unproven hypothesis that human-created carbon dioxide (CO2) is the driver of the Earth's warming climate.

The same broadcaster -- Channel 4 in the U.K. -- that recently exposed the extremist ideology being preached in Britain's supposedly "moderate" mosques has now similarly helped to tear away the veil of lies and religious zeal surrounding the global warming industry.

The film features an impressive group of experts in the fields of climatology, oceanography, biogeography, meteorology, and paleoclimatology from reputable institutions such as NASA, MIT, The International Arctic Research Centre, the Pasteur Institut in Paris, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of Winnipeg, Ottawa, London, Jerusalem, Alabama and Virginia.

That should help top the claims there is a consensus of scientists who believe in man-made global warming.

Expert after expert in this film blasts craters into the theory that CO2 -- which only makes up 0.054% of the earth's atmosphere -- has ever driven climate. Ice core records, in fact, prove the opposite, that CO2 lags warming by as much as 800 years.

The main cause of warming is, not surprisingly, the sun.

"The analogy I use," says Dr. Tim Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg, "is my car's not running very well, so I'm going to ignore the engine, which is the sun, and I'm going to ignore the transmission, which is the water vapour and I'm going to look at one nut on the right rear wheel which is the human produced CO2. The science is that bad."

The film starts off covering indisputable facts. There was a Medieval Warm Period that was warmer than today -- that led to incredible wealth in Europe when the bulk of the continent's great cathedrals were built and when Britain had thriving vineyards. Then came the Little Ice Age that started in the 17th century and was so cold London's Thames River would freeze so solidly festivals were held on it.

About 10,000 years ago, during a time known as the Holocene Maximum, it was much warmer even than the Medieval times.

Dr. Ian Clark, Prof. of Isotope Hydrogeology and Paleoclimatology at the U of Ottawa, notes polar bears (which have become the poster-animal of the global warming industry) survived that sustained warm cycle and that volcanoes produce more CO2 every year than all human activity.

What's more, prior to 1940 temperatures on Earth were rising long before industrialization took place.

Then, when carbon dioxide emissions rose markedly in the post-war economic boom period, temperatures fell for the next three decades, again, in direct contravention of the theory being espoused and believed by so many.

Ironically, in the 1970s, just as scientists started predicting another climate catastrophe -- an impending ice age -- the planet started warming again.

The documentary ends with a quote from Dr. Fred Singer of the U of Virginia.

"There will still be people who believe this is the end of the world, particularly when you have, for example, the chief scientist of the U.K. telling people that by the end of the century the only habitable place on the Earth with be the Antarctic and humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who move to the Antarctic. I mean, this is hilarious," he says with a chuckle.

"It would be hilarious, actually, if it weren't so sad."

See the film at:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog?entry=24760&only

JimBobby said...

Here are links to refutations of the Swindle film -
Atlantic Free Press

Real Climate

Monbiot

The Guardian

From The Guardian --
"
Unfortunately for Channel 4, one of the people who objected to the programme was Professor Carl Wunsch, a highly respected oceanographer from the Massuchusetts Institute of Technology who says he himself was swindled into taking part in the programme.

His own discussion was taken out of context, he said, and he was misrepresented. He has written to the head of production company Wag TV asking that the film is never shown again publicly without his participation, and says that Channel 4 should apologise to viewers.
"

JB

bigcitylib said...

JB,

Well, I am not as optimistic that the act will be rejected if it simply contains intensity targets. For one thing, Jack Layton probably doesn't want to fight an election on this. He's bleeding to the Greens. And if you listen to him lately, about student loans etc., it sounds to me like he might deal away hard caps for some other non-enviro stuff. I doubt Dion will bring the gov. down over this either, since the result of any election would probably be very similar to what we have now. Best I think we can hope for this year is cuts in tax breaks to the oil companies and a regulatory system that can EVENTUALLY be used to bring in hard caps. But we shall see in a couple of weeks.

Anonymous said...

Global warming melting down
J.R. Dunn
Evidence continues to mount that the Greens have failed in their campaign to leverage global warming into a universal acceptance of their pet theories and practices, as suggested here last week.

The New York Times, no less, features an article titled "From a Rapt Audience, Calls to Cool the Hype" in which a number of scientists are given the space to sound off about Al Gore's masterwork, "An Inconvenient Truth". "Part of the scientific audience is uneasy," the article states, going on to quote geologist Don J. Easterbrook, climatologist Kevin Vranes, and even longtime warming skeptic Richard Lindzen of MIT in criticism of Gore. All believe that the film presented an unbalanced picture rife with inaccuracies and exaggerations.

Of course, Al himself is allowed plenty of space to rebut the criticism - more than is ever given to, say, George W. Bush in articles critical of him. And the piece ends with a hymn of praise to the Tennessee Messiah from no less than his own personal scientific advisor. (In real life, this is known as "stacking the deck"). But the fact that the piece appeared at all is a wonderment - I though the debate was over.

The second point involves the collapse of the Bancroft-Arnesen polar expedition on Monday. The expedition was a stunt (a harsh word, I know, but the only one that's appropriate) intended to dramatize the effect of warming on the Arctic. The two trekkers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, planned to walk 530 miles from Canada to the Pole, swimming across rifts in the ice created by warming. Well, the rifts turned out not to exist, and the project had to be called off after only a few miles when Arnesen was threatened with frostbite. It appears that warming has a way to go - outside temperatures were hitting a hundred below zero at night. Bancroft and Arnesen returned little the worse for wear. "One of things we see with global warming," their expedition organizer Ann Atwood said by way of explanation, "is unpredictability." Uhh... right.

Meanwhile, the Telegraph, the UK's major center-right paper (Across Europe, you can publish those without anyone collapsing into hysteria. They still do some things better), reveals that Timothy Ball, a Canadian climatologist who appeared in the British anti-Gore documentary "The Great Global Warming Swindle", has received death threats in response to his defiance of the consensus. An anonymous e-mail message told him that "...if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming."

This is probably the tip of the iceberg (so to speak). There have no doubt been many such incidents where the scientists threatened have chosen not to call attention to it. The Greens, after all, are the movement that has produced such tolerant and openminded groups as Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front. We may yet see people physically attacked for their stance on warming.

Which will mean, of course, that the Greens will have utterly failed, as occurred previously with overpopulation, nuclear winter, and the coming ice age. The Greens have long believed that all they need to do is convince the elites and the media and then the rest of us will follow like so many sheep. If we keep very quiet about it, maybe they'll fail to figure it out, and continue wasting their time on empty stunts, death threats, and star turns by the Saint of Nashville.

Now there's an idea... why not have Al Gore walk to the North Pole? Even I'd pay good money to see that


http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/03/global_warming_melting_down.html

Anonymous said...

Frostbite Ends Arctic Trek to Protest Global Warming

The AP reports the end of the expedition to draw attention to the dangers of Global Warming:

Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said. "My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said. She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen's foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze.

Anonymous said...

Damn those Martians and their SUVs

Mars Is Warming, NASA Scientists Report

The planet Mars is undergoing significant global warming, new data from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) show, lending support to many climatologists' claims that the Earth's modest warming during the past century is due primarily to a recent upsurge in solar energy.

According to a September 20 NASA news release, "for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress." Because a Martian year is approximately twice as long as an Earth year, the shrinking of the Martian polar ice cap has been ongoing for at least six Earth years.

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=17977

Anonymous said...

UK Documentary: The Great Global Warming Swindle

This was produced by channel 4 in the UK which is similar to PBS in the US. It is publicly funded, not-for-profit and sources its material from hundreds of independent sources. It is well worth a look if you still have an open mind. The battle has been joined.

Here is a Google link:
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?
docid=-4520665474899458831&q=
BBC+duration%3Along

JimBobby said...

denial sez --
"This was produced by channel 4 in the UK which is similar to PBS in the US. It is publicly funded, not-for-profit and sources its material from hundreds of independent sources."

Channel 4 sez --
"Channel 4's revenues are solely generated through advertising and this model will be replicated on these new platforms: Online, Video On Demand (VOD) and mobile. Subsequently there are a number of exciting advertising opportunities that are available to Advertising Agencies and Clients alike."

Deny that.

JB

Ti-Guy said...

Rimshot! THe denial troll has been totatlly discredited for all eternity.

Never fails. The deniers come off as liars because they believe things without being aware of any facts.

How they manage to do this is beyond me.

canuckistanian said...

BY Licia Corbella (RE: The Global Warming Swindle)

"it exposes numerous lies and myths presented as fact by those who believe in the unproven hypothesis that human-created carbon dioxide (CO2) is the driver of the Earth's warming climate."

"the unproven hypothesis"??? is this person stupid or just dishonest??? for anyone with the most superficial understanding of the scientific method should know that you CANNOT prove a hypothesis, you can only DISPROVE a hypothesis. hence, if the scientific community is unable to disprove a hypothesis(such as darwinian evolution and anthropogenic climate change) than it is accepted as scientific fact.

i am sick and fucking tired of hearing the same talking point ad nauseam: "the theory hasn't been proven", "the theory hasn't been proven". now clearly corbella isn't stupid, but rather rhetorically brilliant in manipulating the language of the scientific method for the purpose of: OBFUSCATION!

as for dr. tim ball, who works for the oil industry as a schill and who hasn't done research in the field in two decades: what a reliable resource???

Anonymous said...

I should have said "publicly owned."

"Channel four television is a publicly owned, not for profit broadcaster... The main public service channel, channel 4, is a free to air service funded entirely by advertising and sponsorship. Unlike the BBC it does not receive licence fee funds"

http://www.channel4.com/about4/overview.html

Anonymous said...

KILL ALL THE COWS

Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars, UN report warns.

Cattle-rearing generates more global warming greenhouse gases, as measured in CO2 equivalent, than transportation.

Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems,” senior UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) official Henning Steinfeld said. “Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.” - UN News Centre

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=20772&Cr=global&Cr1=environment

Ti-Guy said...

I should have said "publicly owned."

When you're in a hole, stop digging. The fact that you don't know what "publicly owned" means indicates you probably barely have enough brain power to keep your autonomic systems functionning, and not nearly enough to talk about something complicated like climate change. Only the truly stupid don't realise what they don't know.

You're discredited and...DISMISSED! Now, shut off the computer and go read a book.

*snort*

Anonymous said...

Poke some holes in their pet theory and watch Kyoto cultists in full melt down, like the wicked witch of Oz. It's a beautiful thing.

Ti-Guy said...

Awww..."Kyoto cultists"...That's so cute.

I love it when the kids play-act at using language.

Anonymous said...

"Only the truly stupid don't realise what they don't know."

talking to yourself again there buddy ??