Nature ISN’T fragile nor a bossy mother-in-law

Andrew Orlowski writes at TheRegister:

The Green movement needs to rethink its philosophy from the ground-up. That’s according to Peter Kareiva, a leading conservation expert and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, the world’s biggest environmental group.

It must abandon the idea that nature is “feminine” and in particular that it’s “fragile”, he said, because not only is this artificial, it’s wrong, and so many bad ideas follow.

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“The trouble for conservation is that the data simply do not support the idea of a fragile nature at risk of collapse,” he [Kareiva] write. “Ecologists now know that the disappearance of one species does not necessarily lead to the extinction of any others, much less all others in the same ecosystem. In many circumstances, the demise of formerly abundant species can be inconsequential to ecosystem function.”

“Nature is so resilient that it can recover rapidly from even the most powerful human disturbances,” scientists now conclude. Well, some of them do.

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The problem with turning the ship of environmentalism around to a more humane and less fearful philosophy is that it has been so successful – at least up until now. Although the public, when asked, doesn’t share the apocalyptic worldview, eco-mentalism remains embedded among the political and media elites.

The environmentalists who have succeeded using this version of Mother Nature now have successful bureaucratic empires as a result; they’re now really the New Establishment, and have seats at the table. They won’t voluntarily give these up.

Read the lot at TheRegister

(Update 2012-04-07)

Also, spend invest an hour to watch this video of an interesting presentation by Peter Kareiva.

Deep-Fried QANTAS

Sustainable?

Qantas to operate Australia’s first biofuel flight in April

Qantas (QF) and SkyNRG will operate Australia’s first commercial biofuel flight April 13 between Sydney and Adelaide. The flight, using an Airbus A330, will operate using a 50:50 blend of biofuel derived from used cooking oil and conventional jet fuel, QF said in a statement.

Hmmm… a sustainable fuel resource? The only way to keep QANTAS flying this way is for everybody in Australia to eat ONLY lots of deep-fried food. Consider half of the 139,000 litres of the A330′s fuel capacity will be deep-fried product. Consuming up to seventy-thousand litres (approx 18,500 US gallons) of used cooking oil per flight.

Airport staff will no doubt be issued with guns loaded with bird-shot to maintain a safe air space for other aircraft following QF1121 and QF1120; from seagulls looking for free chips. Baggage handlers to be issued with bio-hazard gear so that the droppings of 100,00 gulls don’t give them bird-flu.

At least the chip-shops under the flight path will get a run of salivating customers.

The flights are on Friday the 13th. So all the stars are aligned.

Joycey; are you sure you want to humour the nitwits with such a useless, unsustainable exercise?

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Footnote 2012-04-03: For those who doubt, here’s the official press release:
QANTAS TO OPERATE BIOFUEL FLIGHT

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Update 2012-04-22: SkyNRG is a fuel broker that hypes alternative fuels. QANTAS used the product to half-fuel one of the two engines. It turns out to have been made from WVO (waste vegeable oil, apparently by Dynamic Fuels, Louisiana) which had gone through a refining (“Synfining”) process which includes heating the oil to around 850°C acting at high pressure in order to crack the long-chain molecules into something closer to kerosene.  This and other processing is energy-intensive processing which (guesstimating) consumes about a third of the original stock to provided sufficient energy to make the end-product. The process also “buys in” energy in the form of the hydrogen gas used for the process, equivalent to around 500 kg CO2e/tonne of fuel.

No More Earth Hour.

To paraphrase Queensland’s new Premier Campbell Newman; now that we have a Carbon Tax saving the planet, we don’t need Earth Hour.

From the linked article in The Australian (March 28, 2012):

Mr Newman yesterday declared his LNP government would axe seven other green schemes, on the grounds the carbon tax would make them redundant. “We now have a federal government that is imposing a great big carbon tax on us and the rest of the country that is meant to solve all these (environmental) problems,” he said.

IPCC SREX

IPCC Special Report

Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX)

From the report:

4.5.3.3. Attribution of Impacts to Climate Change: Observations and Limitations

…

There is high confidence, based on high agreement and medium evidence, that economic losses from weather- and climate-related disasters have increased. A key question concerns whether trends in such losses, or losses from specific events, can be attributed to climate change. In this context, changes in losses over time need to be controlled for exposure and vulnerability. Most studies of long-term disaster loss records attribute these increases in losses to increasing exposure of people and assets in at-risk areas, and to underlying societal trends – demographic economic, political, and social – that shape vulnerability to impacts.  Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses, but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.

(Cites elided)

In plain language; there is no physical evidence that climate change has anything to do with losses from natural disasters; the so-called “extreme events”.

via Roger Peilke Jr who writes:

Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where “right” means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.

The Seven Rules of Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy: A Root Evil

At the root of this growing evil is the very nature of bureaucracy, especially political bureaucracy. French economist Frédéric Bastiat offered an early warning in 1854 that laws, institutions, and acts — the stuff of political bureaucracy — produce economic effects that can be seen immediately, but that other, unforeseen effects happen much later. He claimed that bad economists look only at the immediate, seeable effects and ignore effects that come later, while good economists are able to look at the immediate effects and foresee effects, both good and bad, that come later.

Rules of Bureaucracy

• Rule #1: Maintain the problem at all costs! The problem is the basis of power, perks, privileges, and security.
• Rule #2: Use crisis and perceived crisis to increase your power and control.
• Rule 2a. Force 11th-hour decisions, threaten the loss of options and opportunities, and limit the opposition’s opportunity to review and critique.
• Rule #3: If there are not enough crises, manufacture them, even from nature, where none exist.
• Rule #4: Control the flow and release of information while feigning openness.
• Rule 4a: Deny, delay, obfuscate, spin, and lie.
• Rule #5: Maximize public-relations exposure by creating a cover story that appeals to the universal need to help people.
• Rule #6: Create vested support groups by distributing concentrated benefits and/or entitlements to these special interests, while distributing the costs broadly to one’s political opponents.
• Rule #7: Demonize the truth tellers who have the temerity to say, “The emperor has no clothes.”
• Rule 7a: Accuse the truth teller of one’s own defects, deficiencies, crimes, and misdemeanors.

Read the rest of the  article by Loyd S. Pettegrew and Carol A. Vance at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Canada's Senate, David Suzuki & The Delinquent Teenager

Reblogged from NoFrakkingConsensus:

Last week my book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, was mentioned in the Canadian Senate. Since governments at various levels rely on the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Senator Nancy Greene Raine thinks my book could help her colleagues make more informed decisions. In her words, a Senate committee:

Read more… 907 more words

Suzuki worn out. Making a lot of smoke. Not much power. Using lots of fuel.

An Adjustment Like Alice

Reblogged from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT:

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By Paul Homewood

 

                                         Before                                                                          After

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501943260004&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=501943260000&data_set=12&num_neighbors=1

 

Not content with reducing past temperatures in the Arctic thus creating an artificial warming trend, GHCN have now been up to their tricks in Alice Springs down under in Oz.

A sharp drop in temperatures in 1976, confirmed in B.O.M. records, seems to have convinced the algorithm that adjustments were needed.

Read more… 97 more words

Historic adjustments at the BoM

“Near Enough For a Sheep Station”

Reblogged from kenskingdom:

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An Audit of Australia’s Temperature Observations

Ken Stewart

March 2012

While the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) maintains what it insists on calling a “High Quality” dataset of temperature records with which it and the CSIRO analyse Australia’s climate, an independent audit by a team of scientists, statisticians, data analysts, lawyers and engineers has uncovered convincing evidence that the record is decidedly not high quality and is in fact inaccurate and riddled with errors.

Read more… 4,525 more words

"Scientists say" that temperatures have risen by half a degree. But how can they when temperature measurements were rounded to the nearest degree in the past?

New Paper "Is There Any Support In The Long Term Tide Gauge Data To The Claims That Parts Of Sydney Will Be Swamped" By Boretti 2012

Reblogged from Climate Science: Roger Pielke Sr.:

I was alerted to a new paper on sea level by the author

Boretti, A., 2012: Is there any support in the long term tide gauge data to the claims that parts of Sydney will be swamped by rising sea levels?, Coast. Eng., doi:10.1016/j.coastaleng.2012.01.006.

The topic is not in my area of expertise, but in order to promote the dissemination of peer-reviewed perspectives, I am posting on it.

Read more… 321 more words

Data don't support government claims about rising sea levels. CSIRO/BoM reports tainted by politics.

Germany’s Church of Absurdities

Pierre Gosselin observes a shift in German attitudes via the Spiegel

Finally all the absurdities of the Church of Environmentalism are being communicated by a persuasive messenger. The religion is being exposed. Now it’s only a question of time before the passions of rebellion flare up. And there are signs of it everywhere in Germany. The genie is out of the bottle.

Read the rest at the link.