Kyoto -- Global Warming -- Myths & Fear -- The Bottomless Well -- The Skeptical Environmentalist -- Black Holes

Licia Corbella: Fiction fuels global warming -- Myth of Jurassic proportions has world mired in false State of Fear April 17, 2005, Calgary Sun

[. . . . ] The video, put out by the University of Calgary in co-operation with The Friends of Science Society, quotes: Dr. Tim Patterson, Professor of Paleoclimatology at Carleton University; Dr. Ian Clark, Professor of Hydrogeology and Paleoclimatology at the University of Ottawa; Dr. Vincent Gray, climate scientist and official IPCC reviewer from New Zealand; Dr. Sallie Baliunus, astrophysicist and climate researcher in Boston; Dr. Tad Murty, a former senior research scientist for Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans, past director of the National Tidal Facility of Australia and a current researcher at Carleton University; and Dr. Timothy Ball, Canada's first climatology PhD and a recently retired professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg, amongst others. [. . . . ]

Look for that video.




Kyoto is now a $10B boondoggle

Canada's plan to comply with the Kyoto "hot air" accord now has all the makings of a $10-billion boondoggle.

[. . . . ] Canada produces less than 2% of the world's greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

The U.S., the world's biggest emitter (23%), has refused to sign on to Kyoto, citing the potentially devastating effect on its economy. Other big emitters such as China (13%) and India (5.5%), are exempt because they're developing nations. [. . . . ]

Kyoto and Energy Matters Posted by HenryW on 17:27:47 2005/04/18

[. . . . ] Fine. But, despite the conventional political wisdom, conservation has not cut our energy use. To the contrary. "The more efficient our technology, the more energy we consume," write Peter Huber and Mark Mills in their brilliant new book, The Bottomless Well. Energy becomes more desirable if it works faster and better. "To curb energy consumption, you have to lower efficiency, not raise it." [. . . . ]

That leads to Ignorance on Energy Matters Is Profound April 18, 05, James K. Glassman is a resident fellow at AEI.

James K. Glassman Posted: Monday, April 18, 2005 ARTICLES Scripps Howard News Service Publication Date: April 18, 2005 There's no public-policy topic more prone to intellectual abuse than energy.

Take conservation. Refrigerators, automobiles, houses, factories. . . . They're more than twice as efficient in using energy than they were 50 years ago. [. . . . ]

It is worth reading the rest.




Kyoto -- The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomberg

Green with Ideology -- The hidden agenda behind the "scientific" attacks on Bjørn Lomborg’s controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. By Ronald Bailey, Reason

Ronald Bailey is Reason’s science correspondent, the author of ECO-SCAM: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (1993), and the editor of Earth Report 2000: Revisiting the True State of the Planet (1999). He is the editor of a new volume of original essays on environmental issues, available this summer from Prima Publishing.

The bitter anti-Lomborg campaign reveals the hidden crisis of what we might call ideological environmentalism. Ideological environmentalism goes far beyond sensible efforts to reduce pollution or protect wilderness. It argues that the modern world fosters institutions and ideas that exploit and oppress people and degrade and destroy the environment. According to this view, the only solution to the supposedly looming ecological crisis is the sweeping, global transformation of the world’s economies and political systems. The notion is neatly captured in former Vice President Al Gore’s demand that humanity "make the effort to save the global environment the central organizing principle of our civilization."

Unfortunately for the doomsayers, their central predictions are simply not coming true. And so their best and perhaps only defense against a dispassionate analysis of their claims has been to smear the analyst. [. . . . ]

The Skeptical Environmentalist -- Bjorn Lomborg's website has links source locations, and, perhaps, more important are the links for "reviews, sample chapters, errors and corrections, critiques and replies" on the site.

In The Skeptical Environmentalist Bjørn Lomborg challenges widely held beliefs that the global environment is progressively getting worse. Using statistical information from internationally recognized research institutes, Lomborg systematically examines a range of major environmental issues and documents that the global environment has actually improved. He supports his argument with over 2900 footnotes, allowing discerning readers to check his sources.

Lomborg criticizes the way many environmental organizations make selective and misleading use of scientific data to influence decisions about the allocation of limited resources. The Skeptical Environmentalist is a useful corrective to the more alarmist accounts favored by green activists and the media.

There are reviews from The Daily Telegraph, The Economist and The Washington Post Book World. Dates and links are on Lomborg's site.




Early Black Holes May Have Heated the Universe
Michael Schirber, Staff Writer, Apr. 18, 05

Though invisible, big black holes are not hard to find. Astronomers have noted evidence in the center of many galaxies for supermassive black holes weighing millions to billions of times our Sun.

Where these huge holes came from is an open question. One theory is that they are the result of a progressive build-up of smaller black holes, starting from the stellar mass black holes that formed from the explosions of the first stars. [. . . . ]