Organic Foods Have Downsides? Who'Da Thunk It?

Life is a balance between all the choices we have presented before us and all the decisions we make. Yin and Yang, karma, The Secret, et cetera, all speak to this idea that everything has an effect (and affect?) on something. I have written before about our hubris in toying with nature, and our old friend The Law of Unintended Consequences.

Here's an interesting look at the research from some sources (and I am sure that there are others with different results) from a writer at the UK Telegraph, or, more appropriately, a professor that has been known to write about how the environmental/climate movement doesn't pay attention to the above-mentioned Law. I say that to be sure that you read this with a critical eye, knowing that I feel the same way he does and could be experiencing some Confirmation Bias (as I admittedly do, do you?).

Norman Borlaug, who got the Nobel Prize for starting the Green Revolution, liked to point out that organic farming on a global scale would leave billions without food. “I don’t see two billion volunteers to disappear,” he said.

Exactly. That's just one zinger, read the article to see the research about how organic fails at feeding large numbers. Here's an interview with this guy, Bjorn Lomborg, called The Reasonable Environmentalist, which I love, as that's exactly how I've described myself (conserve! reduce, reuse, recycle!), indeed, I try to be reasonable above all else.

His recent column, Trump’s climate plan might not be so bad after all, lays it out. The pledges agreed to in the Paris treaty would cost $1 to $2 trillion a year by 2030 to implement, with virtually no impact: At most it would reduce global temperature by a fraction of degree by the end of the century.

He says money would be better spent developing breakthrough technology that would truly be transformational to our economy (not solar and wind, which are piddling) and funding efforts to combat malnutrition and provide safe drinking water in the developing world.

The upshot is, if you truly care about two billion people living in dire poverty, the Paris treaty is the wrong way to help them.

THIS!!!! I once had an article from the "founder of Greenpeace now a skeptic" that had a great chart about the costs/benefits of spending allllll that cash on AGW versus not that came to the same conclusion, a reduction of a fraction of a degree. I can't find it!!!!

Oh, here's another article of his about the fact that there are good things about a warming world that don't get discussed because of HOW DARE YOU. I have said this as well, that fewer people will die because cold kills more people than heat....

Don't be led around by your nose, think, doubt, and verify from scientific sources not PuffHo, or WinfoArs and their ilk.

Typical "Journalism" Malpractice In One Photo.

Now, the article itself is what you'd expect, feel free to read it (or don't, it's crap) by clicking on the image, but it's the picture that I spotted immediately as a fraud. The commenters were all over it, too: those are cooling towers and the white "smoke" you see is water vapor. That's all. No emissions, no carbon dioxide, or carbon at all. Typical crap yellow journalism from the Independent. Buried in the story is a photo slideshow showing how we are Killing the Planet full of stock Getty images with stupid captions, led off by, you guessed it: cooling towers accused of polluting. It would be embarrassing if The Independent had any shame at all.

How Little We Know

A couple of stories came by my internetting today, one from NASA regarding the sun, one about the deepest borehole in the world, and one about the oceans' role in ending the Ice Age.

We all know the Sun is a big burning ball of gas, but the text in this article reveals something to me (remember, by the way, the principle of Confirmation Bias: I don't believe humans cause global climate change, so these things jump out at me): we don't understand the sun very well.

“The images that have all the pretty loops and arches are extremely hot material,” physicist Dean Pesnell said in an interview with Yahoo News. “We would like to understand where all those arches come from. They are filled with things that are about 2 million degrees. The sun itself is just about 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit.”

The borehole article is filled with things we didn't know, and it's from Mother Nature Network, no doubt a bastion of "humans are killing the planet" thinking (caveat: I haven't checked that claim).

Before the hole was drilled, geologists could only hypothesize about the composition of the Earth's crust. Needless to say, the amount of geological data produced by the project was unprecedented. Mostly, it revealed just how little we really know about our planet.

For instance, one of the most surprising findings was the absence of the transition from granite to basalt at a depth between 3 and 6 kilometers below the surface. Previously, scientists had used seismic waves to glean information about the composition of the crust. They had discovered that a discontinuity existed at this depth, which they assumed was due to a transition in rock type. But the borehole drillers found no such transition; instead they found only more granite. It turns out that the discontinuity revealed by the seismic waves was actually due to a metamorphic change in the rock, rather than a change in rock type. It was a humbling realization for theorists, to say the least.

Even more surprising, the rock had been thoroughly fractured and was saturated with water. Free water was not supposed to exist at such depths. Geologists now surmise that the water consists of hydrogen and oxygen atoms that were squeezed out of the surrounding rock by enormous pressure, and is retained there due to a layer of impermeable rock above.

Researchers also described the mud that flowed out of the hole as "boiling" with hydrogen. The discovery of such large quantities of hydrogen gas was highly unexpected.

By far the most riveting discovery from the project, however, was the detection of microscopic plankton fossils in rocks over 2 billion years old, found four miles beneath the surface. These "microfossils" represented about 24 ancient species, and were encased in organic compounds which somehow survived the extreme pressures and temperatures that exist so far beneath the Earth.

The final mystery revealed by the borehole was the reason drilling operations had to be abandoned. Once the drill reached depths in excess of about 10,000 feet, the temperature gradient suddenly began to increase unexpectedly. At the hole's maximum depth, temperatures skyrocketed to 356 degrees Fahrenheit, which was much higher than the 212 degrees Fahrenheit originally predicted. The drill was rendered useless at such temperatures.

The project was officially closed down in 2005, and the site has since fallen into disrepair. The hole itself was welded shut by the rusted metal cap that today covers it, as if to permanently hide the hole's many mysteries from the surface world. 

 Though the hole's depth is impressive, it's a small fraction of the distance to the center of the Earth, which is estimated to be nearly 4,000 miles deep. By comparison, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has reached the outer layers of our solar system, has relayed information from over 10 billion miles away. The human race truly understands less about the ground beneath its very feet than it does about the cosmos that abound. It's humbling to realize just how much mystery still exists right here on our little blue world.

Lastly, let's peruse the article about the oceans.

"The oceans are leaking carbon dioxide to the atmosphere," said study co-author Gavin Foster from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.

The findings suggest these regions were pumping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. The gas concentrations in the two regions spiked at different times, hinting that different processes underlie the rise in ocean carbon, the researchers said. However, in both cases the scientists think carbon dioxide levels in these two regions jumped because water rich in carbon and nutrients welled up from the deep ocean. 

Yet scientists still puzzle over what triggered these giant burps in greenhouse gas. Leading theories include changes in ocean currents or wind patterns. Some researchers recently suggested that sea-level drops triggered underwater volcanoes to erupt more vigorously, belching carbon dioxide in the process.

"We don't know the ultimate case," Foster said. "[But] we're one step toward the answer."

The researchers plan to test additional sites and examine how carbon dioxide levels changed through the glacial cycle, he said.

Not man, certainly 10,000 years ago. They. Don't. Know. There is also no Cause/Effect relationship proven between CO2 and temperature ("proven" being the important word there, by the way)


Seriously, readers, don't get fussed and have your tubes tied or something. We don't know everything we think we know.

..."it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Add this to the list of reasons I will never be a democrat, or a liberal:

"Senate hold global warming all-nighter"

"The last time that Congress seriously attempted to address climate change was in 2009, before the GOP took control in the House. Democrats in that chamber narrowly passed a bill to cap carbon emissions. It never made it through the Senate, and in the end, the effort was thought to have contributed to Democrats’ losses in 2010.

Which explains why some concerned Democrats feel an urgent need to launch a talkathon – which is really a media campaign (follow it on #Up4climate). It also explains why some Democrats will be safely tucked in their beds while one of their colleagues makes an impassioned plea to the C-SPAN camera."

Seriously, folks, they have the Senate, so if they wanted to actually do something they could, right? It's not they actually wrote a bill that needed fillibuster or something. Just another Dem dog and pony show, and you know that the believers were eating it up. 

Winter. It Happens Every Year.

So, WKRC just called this the "winter of our discontent" and is busy now with the Wicked Winter Weather graphic doing a story on Winter Weather Fatigue Setting In. How long will it last? When will it end? (To her credit, after all the gloom, Angenette Levy did say it was beautiful as the poor thing did her live bit from outside).

Seems like I have experienced Winter every year, and every year, without fail, it ends, and Spring arrives. Every year. Yes, it's cold. It's winter. Spring will come.

Am I the only one that is more sick of people complaining about the weather than the weather itself?

My Mom said not to waste any energy complaining about the weather, you can't do anything about it other than dress appropriately. We also used to sit on the porch and watch storms, because it was cool seeing the trees blow and the rain fall. She also said, as I do, that Cincinnati is a great place because we get all 4 seasons. It is!

Not everyone agrees, and everyone can't move to their preferred climate. I get that. Wallowing in your discontent is, however, not helping you feel better, is it?

One last weather anecdote. Larry Valmore (UMYF counselor, leader, role model) used to tell the story of delivering papers, and how miserable he was on those early mornings when he sat on the tailgate in the rain, throwing papers. One day, he accepted the fact that he was going to get wet, and getting wet wasn't a big deal anymore.

It's winter. It gets cold in the winter. Spring will come.

Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

News Busters nails this.

"The Russian ship, Akademic Shokalskiy, was stranded in the ice while on a climate change research expedition, yet nearly 98 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers failed to mention their mission at all. Forty out of 41 stories (97.5 percent) on the network morning and evening news shows since Dec. 25 failed to mention climate change had anything to do with the expedition."

In fact, rather than point out the mission was to find evidence of climate change, the networks often referred to the stranded people as “passengers,” “trackers” and even “tourists,” without a word about climate change or global warming."

Again, it's all about how the media communicates the stories to the unwashed masses. They lie.

This is Awesome

This is also an indictment of the way in which all of these stories are communicated. Shame on you, media and "scientists" that behave this way.

'There are strong signs that these recent climate disasters were not random deviations from the usual weather, but instead signals of the emergence of a new normal for world climates'

A Like Mind (with more time and expertise)

I have been enjoying this blog about AGW, and the bunk that gets propped up as "science."

We are especially like minds in the media's role in the hysteria, like this post is which he destroys the headlines about the storm on St. Judes's Day. The British Press is just as bad, if not worse than the US.

"The Met Office have now issued their comprehensive report on the St Jude’s Day storm, that hit southern England in October.

Readers will recall idiotic headlines at the time, describing it as “The Storm of the Century”, “Unprecedented”, “Superstorm” and “A repeat of 1987”. I pointed out at the time that such claims were patent nonsense, and that the storm was not an unusual event.

The Met Office report now confirms what I was saying."

Much like the hype over typhoon Haiyan being the worst ever (like this Guardian article asserts) one of the strongest ever, or the deadliest ever, it wasn't. Every article that reveals the truth has to share how horrible it was to fend off accusations of callousness, I'm sure, but the criticism is rightly directed at the media outlets that hyped the horrible storm into the "worst, deadliest, strongest" so that more people would buy their papers or watch their telecasts (I can't bring myself to call them "newscasts" anymore). My new-found writer above also comments about this.

Simply put, don't listen to the talking heads. They lie.

Unintended Consequences, Again. Surprised?

This article has its share of good reporting and stupidity, but the fact remains that actions have consequences. Duh.

"As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies, an Associated Press investigation found.

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama's watch.

Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil.

Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can't survive.

The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact."

What happens when you allow a policy belief to override science? You kill eagles and marine life chasing Global Warming alarmism. You destroy the environment to enact your policies which are more designed to control your population and the economy than to save the Earth.

"Fundamental Transformation" has a price, after all.....

Bwaaaaa Haaaaaaaaaa! Unintended Consequences and Hubris Alert!

"Just come in to my house and feel the walls shaking," he said. "They say it's the nocebo effect, but people who sit on my front porch have to leave within a half hour -- they felt it. Early on, I had a financial adviser sit in my kitchen and within five minutes he was complaining about ear popping.

Yup, wind turbines. That's stinks, for sure ( I want a home turbine to reduce my dependency on my local utility company, and some solar cells would be nice), but we always have unintended consequences, it seems.

IPCC Commentary Starting To Flow

First, this ridiculous, ridiculous story that has gotten press thanks to Yahoo.

A meteorologist who has covered weather for the Wall Street Journal tweeted that he has decided not to have children in order to leave a lighter carbon footprint, and is considering having a vasectomy.

He also vowed to stop flying after the world's recent climate-change report made him cry.

Uhm, wow.

Then, another story from Fox News. I can only imagine that it is on Fox because no one else would publish it, which is a shame, because the guy is absolutely a life-long ecologist, he's just committing what has become the mortal sin of "doubting."

"I've studied climate and its effects on life—all kinds of life ---for more than four decades, starting in 1968. Along the way, among other things, I developed a computer model of forests that in the 1990s we used to forecast the effects of climate on jack pine forests in Michigan that were the only habitat of the endangered Kirtland’s warbler.  A lot of effort was going into saving the bird’s habitat, and I wondered if, with global warming, it might all be in vain.

As a result I'm one of the reviewers of sections of the latest report on climate change and its impact by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the first part of which was released last week in the form of a general summary for policymakers.

I had some serious concerns about the sections of the much bigger report that I reviewed — which hasn't yet been released---and I have some of the same reservations about the document that was published last week.  

The report’s language appears to be sometimes coupled with a selective reading or oversimplification of the facts, so that the authors have "high confidence" in something that is not the whole story.  

My biggest concern about the climate report is that it presents a number of speculative, and sometimes incomplete, conclusions embedded in  language that gives them more scientific heft than they deserve. The report, in other words, is "scientific-sounding," rather than clearly settled and based on indisputable fact.  Established facts about the global environment exist less often in science than laymen usually think.

...

Having worked for decades on climate change and its possible effects on life, I come away from the just published "summary for policymakers" believing that it does not allow a scientist, let alone a policymaker, to decide that we are, or are not, creating a global warming.   

As a result, I foresee two dangers. One is that it will simply  intensify the political, ideological and, yes, moral debate that has erupted over who does and does not believe we are causing global warming, and thus move us even farther from the important scientific effort that the issue deserves.

The second danger may be even worse: it reinforces the belief that there is some kind of climate normality, usually characterized as existing earlier in the twentieth century or before the Industrial Revolution (but after the Little Ice Age, which lasted from approximately the mid-1400s to 1700) that is desirable, even necessary, for our species and for the ecology of the planet.

In fact, there has never been such a thing, which is one of the reasons that biological evolution and adaptation exist in the first place. "

Exactly the point I've been making for years.

How Much We Just Don't Know

"It is far below the level the panel predicted. "Not only is this the smallest cycle we've seen in the space age, it's the smallest cycle in 100 years," according to a NASA research scientist cited in the popular blog Universe Today("Solar Cycle 24: On track to be the weakest in 100 years)."


It never ceases to amaze me how much some folks think we know, compared to how little we truly know. Making trillion dollars worth of policy on things we don't really know is stupid.

Hubris, remember?

*image from NASA: Visible in the lower left corner, the sun emitted an M6 solar flare on Nov. 12, 2012, which peaked at 9:04 p.m. EST. This image is a blend of two images captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), one showing the sun in the 304 Angstrom wavelength and one in the 193 Angstrom wavelength. Credit: NASA/SDO

Go Ahead, Tax Carbon, But Nothing Will Change

Thanks to Junk Science, I saw this today:

The Carbon Tax: Washington's Latest Bad Idea, Oddly Shepherded By Republicans

I love this:

"One can use the EPA’s own model (curiously, acronymed MAGICC) to assess the effects on global temperature of emissions reductions that would be caused by a carbon tax. Assuming outrageously high taxes that would reduce them by 83% (giving Americans the per-capita emissions of 1867), the amount of warming that would be prevented is too small to measure on the 50-year time scale. Anything less does even less."

In other words, the effects are essentially the same as doing nothing. Why then, should we do it??

FOLLOW THE MONEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Math is Hard, Climate Edition

Found this article from the BBC about the less warm warming, and while the usual crap still exists in the article, (obfuscation, guesswork, consensus rather than data and actual science), this part really struck me:

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2007 that the short-term temperature rise would most likely be 1-3C (1.8-5.4F).

But in this new analysis, by only including the temperatures from the last decade, the projected range would be 0.9-2.0C."

So, it's totally ok to be off in prediction by over 100%? WTH???????

It's all so much guesswork, just read the article. Seriously, what a crock. Highlights for me include phrases like

Since 1998, there has been an unexplained "standstill" in the heating of the Earth's atmosphere.

Climate sensitivity looks to see what would happen if we doubled concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and let the Earth's oceans and ice sheets respond to it over several thousand years.

"The hottest of the models in the medium-term, they are actually looking less likely or inconsistent with the data from the last decade alone," said Dr Alexander Otto from the University of Oxford.

"It is a bigger range of uncertainty," said Dr Otto.

"But it still includes the old range. We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn't." 

The authors say there are ongoing uncertainties surrounding the role of aerosols in the atmosphere and around the issue of clouds.

The first one cracks me up, it's like economic news reporting here in the states, every increase in jobless numbers or drop in the dollar's value is "unexpected." 
"If" should never appear in a science article, right? I mean, we report on what we know based on observations and data, I thought. maybe I misunderstand the whole "scientific method" thing.

Well, if the models are "inconsistent with the data," then the models are wrong, right?
So, Dr. Otto, you are saying that you are more wrong than you thought you were?
Who cares what anyone "would like?" for Pete's sake SCIENCE IS ABOUT DATA NOT FEELINGS YOU FAKE!
Uhm, what's "the issue of clouds?" That you haven't/can't/didn't account for them in your models? NASA (which has accepted the IPCC crap hook, line, and sinker) can't account for clouds, they are working on it, but it's too complex!!!!! Again, what a joke.

Happy Belated Earth Day, George Carlin Style.

I can't believe how many things he says here that I say as well. Maybe I've seen this before and forgot?

Hubris, As I Have Often Said.

"Your time on earth is barely the size of a head of a pin, if that big. In 10,000 years or a billion years of the existence of the earth, what is the normal temperature? What kind of vanity does it take to think that the state of perfection, the state of perfection and normalcy happens to be when you're alive."  -Rush

How many times have I said as much?

Here

Here

Here

Here

Here is a page of mine with a bunch of "here" links in it already....

Oh, and the data we use is Unreliable, anyway.

Unreliable

Not me!

The US temperature data. Thanks to Joe Bastardi's twitter stream for this one, and feel free to go to his site for all kids of weather data.

From the report:

"During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.

We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.

In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.

It gets worse. We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time also has caused them to report a false warming trend. We found major gaps in the data record that were filled in with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. We found that adjustments to the data by both NOAA and another government agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable."

So, The Science Is Settled....

I love when we discover stuff. Really! I love science. We are such curious beings, yet, we fall into the trap of complacency so easily, don't we? One of the many conundrums of humanity.

Here is a Yahoo! story about a bunch of previously undocumented species (they call them "new") that reminds me of my favorite word when I read stories about how much we pretend to know: hubris.


"More than 1,700 new species have been described by science in the Greater Mekong since 1997. In 2011, 82 plants, 13 fish, 21 reptiles, five amphibians and five mammals were discovered."

We just don't know what we think we know, you know?

What? No Warming? For How Long?

Glad somebody is willing to report this kind of stuff:


The opening:

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.


Here's the conclusion, read the middle for yourself at the link!

Why all this matters should be obvious. Every quarter, statistics on the economy’s output and models of future performance have a huge impact on our lives. They trigger a range of policy responses from the Bank of England and the Treasury, and myriad decisions by private businesses.
Yet it has steadily become apparent since the 2008 crash that both the statistics and the modelling are extremely unreliable. To plan the future around them makes about as much sense as choosing a wedding date three months’ hence on the basis of a long-term weather forecast.

Few people would be so foolish. But decisions of far deeper and more costly significance than those derived from output figures have been and are still being made on the basis of climate predictions, not of the next three months but of the coming century – and this despite the fact that Phil Jones and his colleagues now admit they do not understand the role of ‘natural variability’.

The most depressing feature of this debate is that anyone who questions the alarmist, doomsday scenario will automatically be labelled a climate change ‘denier’, and accused of jeopardising the future of humanity.

So let’s be clear. Yes: global warming is real, and some of it at least has been caused by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels. But the evidence is beginning to suggest that it may be happening much slower than the catastrophists have claimed – a conclusion with enormous policy implications.

Wait, the Earth Regulates its Temperature?

"For humans to presume that they are more than a gnat on an elephant’s rump in terms of impact on climate change is vain and delusive."    Or, as I like to say, Hubris.