from our ABC .....

MPs go green for year's first Question Time

The Government and Opposition have attacked each other over climate change during the first Question Time of the year.

The Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, says the Government has neither ratified the Kyoto Protocol nor increased the target for renewable energy because it is dominated by sceptics.

"Here we have the citadel of scepticism when it comes to climate change," he said.

But on his first day in Question Time as Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull called Labor a party of climate change fanatics and purists.

"Some new form of totalitarianism - the edicts from the Opposition, the gospel according to the Labor Party - cannot be questioned," he said.

Mr Turnbull says Brisbane people should blame Mr Rudd for their water shortage because he was involved in a decision to cancel the building of the Wolfdene dam when he was a bureaucrat with the Queensland Government.

"Every day when pensioners pull muscles, crack backs, lugging heavy buckets to water their gardens in Brisbane, when they look at their dry and desiccated lawns, their dead roses, they remember the Leader of the Opposition," he said.

Prime Minister John Howard told Parliament that Labor was refusing to consider nuclear power for Australia because of the ideological approach it was taking.

"Let me say to the climate change purists or the climate change fanatics on the other side: the cleanest and greenest energy source of all is the one you won't look at and that's nuclear power," he said.

"It is the cleanest and the greenest, those who sit opposite won't look at it."

Mr Rudd said the Government was driven by opinion polling showing that people are worried about climate change.

"The opinion polls have shifted, the most sure barometer of this Prime Minister's engagement with the serious political questions which face this country and the policy challenges which we face in the future is this: when the opinion polls turn John Howard runs big time after them," he said.

The Federal Opposition also quizzed the Government about the costings for the Prime Minister's $10 billion plan for the Murray Darling Basin.
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Gus: Our rodent and his assistant, Malcolm, are painting themselves green to look green, but they're still the same people who have dragged their feet on the global warming issue so much that they have not moved one iota, despite illusions and appearances... and the freudian slip of the lying rodent tells all when he had to retract his words:

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from our ABC .....

The Prime Minister had to correct himself, saying he misinterpreted a question from the Opposition Leader.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd questioned Mr Howard about the connection between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

Mr Howard answered that there was not enough evidence to link the two.

"Let me say to the Leader of the Opposition that the jury is still out on the degree of connection," he said.

"What matters is what you do about it Mr Speaker, it's not an academic debate, it's what you do about it."

But later, Mr Howard told Parliament he made a mistake in the way he answered Mr Rudd's question.

He says he interpreted the question as being about a connection between greenhouse emissions and the drought, when he realises now it was about climate change.

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Gus: in fact one would be a fool not to link the increase of drought on climate change as most reliable predictions are that withing 60 years, DUE TO CLIMATE CHANGE, drought will increase by 40 per cent... and counting.

 

As the world is too slow bracing against global warming, one cannot escape that whatever our leaders are doing now, it is not much more than pissing in the wind while hoping to extinguish a 100 km-front bushfire. Ah, it was a jolly good show by our Mr Turnbull in Parliament today (07/02/07) playing down the problem as if an excuse for the Labor party to cut jobs under ideological party lines (a sneaky fabrication by our Malcolm) while glorious he, and his government led by Johnnee ratus, the saviour of us-the-plebe, would make sure everything would be fine and gay for all to be. Fools... Yes, Malcolm, some people are prophets-of-doom on this issue. In fact one should be a lot more alarmed than you are, not because these prophets are predicting doom, but because they are not prophets, just serious scientist who have crunched a few new numbers and are right, and afraid.

Yes, the predictions of dire conditions are fast shifting from a conservative estimate to a more accurate get-out-of-here now scenario. Yes, the citrus crops in California have been but nearly all wiped out by coldest frost near record, while warming is going on... Weird, that. Yes, many weather anomalies of hot unseasonal patches intermixing with unseasonal cold weather patterns in the US and Europe are part of the expected patterns of global warming. In Australia, even on the coast, rain dribbles timidly when it should be pouring, because the general temperature is too high above the dew point, and then can plummet in a wink under the influence of a faster melting Antarctica.

We should worry a lot more. The patterns that are confronting us now, are more or less the weather patterns scientifically calculated for the year 2012-15 by the expert models... But now, many observations show that global warming is coming towards us at three times the speed these most elaborate computer models, that study the observable changes, predicted. To say the least, this speed is spot-on with what I did estimate back in 1994, from our fossil fuel burning output compared with the time it takes to create that fuel. Difficult calculations but can be done within a few percentage point. Fossil fuel, to a certain extend, is solar energy stored by natural earthly processes. On average since 1900, we have been burning the equivalent of 25,000 years of fossil solar-energy-creation/decomposition, every single year. By now we are burning the equivalent of 35,000 to 40,000 years of fossil solar-energy-creation/decomposition per year. This figure is going up by about ten to twelve percent a year, due to increase population, due to populations coming online with better standard of living and due to our general desire for more, all consuming more energy, thus more fossil fuel. Transport, steel making, holidays, electricity... the lot.

Something has to give, in the atmosphere. It becomes loaded with this extraneous energy, which, in the equation of natural balances, makes the CO2 and the methane gas, created by the burning, act like an insulation blanket, trapping the heat below. Usually, nature would reabsorb these gases through plants and the sea but we have released so much of these "greenhouse' gases and cut down so many forests that the "natural" cycle is broken, nor can it cope with the huge excess. And with rising temperature, only certain plants stay efficient at removing the CO2, while some start to reverse cycle and add to the problem by becoming carbon neutral...

Yes, in the blink of an eye, we have released an enormous amount of buried energy, created by aeons of geological and climatic changes... One can only be surprise that the warming is not much faster, but there are some mitigating factors, including the somewhat very slow warming of water, in the sea, that — slow as it is — absorbs a lot of energy. The melting of ice is also slowing the overall temperature rise. Other mitigating factors include dimming by pollution — presenting a silly idea to global warming for the yanks who thought of a "smoke and mirrors" solution before cutting down on their emissions of CO2... Another mitigating factor according to scientists until the 1940s is that we should have entered an Ice Age, according to recorded temperatures, previous to the industrial revolution...

Yes, a silly but successful country that stands alone, with a bit more than 4 per cent of the global population, has consumed and participated into the release of these glasshouse energies to the tune of more than 25 per cent, and is presently consuming more and more: America. Europe has contributed massively too but its member countries are doing as much as possible to cut down on these emissions. not enough though, far from enough.

So, Gus, If the problem is so huge, though unfelt in its full force yet, what is the solution? "If population growth is maintained indefinitely at the rate it was growing in 1970, in less than 4000 years the total mass of humanity would be greater than the mass of the visible universe..." this quote from the ether may not be quite accurate in terms of calculus, since the known universe is mostly unfathomed, but "one has to accept" (to rhetorically mimic our rodent in chief) that population growth is not sustainable forever after.

Thus the question is: at what point do we put the brakes on? before or after we hit the shop front? In what circumstances and how fast do we come to a standstill in population growth? Will we have to go in reverse, mighty fast? Will this come instinctively to the thoughtless hordes? To the "capitalists" who need ten per cent growth minimum at all cost, to sustain the habit? Or like in China, create a single child policy that applies until single child's are in a age to procreate and are allowed two child per couple, children who in turn when grown up will have to follow a single child policy... Human population entered the 20th century with 1.6 billion people and left the century with 6.1 billion. By mid 21st century, the United Nations estimates that world population will be close to 9 billions. With standards of living going up and up for at least forty per cent of this increasing population, are we stressing the planet? You bet.

In Australia, the immensity of the surface of the country gives the illusion it could support more people. But looking at the quality of the surface, the paucity of the soils, the climate of floods and drought with a growing tendency to drought of 40 per cent by 2050, the ecological frailties, all point out that we have outgrown the space and have been in damage mode since the population hit 12 million humans. But we do not see that. We want to "value-add" on "our" own terms with super-phosphate and nitrates, and we decimate the environment with insecticides and herbicides... It works for a while... until the denuded top soil is blown away... and reefs nearby suffer from run off.

Not only humans here have a heavy imprint, with cities, farming, mining and logging, they have brought in cane toads, their sheep, their cattle and rabbits, cats and foxes, dogs, mice and rats, humans have contributed to a fair degradation of the natural environment. Species become extinct. It may not be important at all but it is thoroughly careless and selfish. But on the other hand it could be important, as many essential but fragile environmental balances vanish.

Now, not only we have degraded the earth and the sea —even plundered its fish stock to to point of species extinction— we have modified and still are modifying the weather that supports the planet's lifeline... Big call for a species... Increase of average global temperature in the vicinity of 6 degrees by the end of this century is going to have devastating effects. Sure, it may not be as much as six but it sure is going to be between five and six degrees... Sure, I won't be here to witness this momentous catastrophe but humans by the end of this century will be suffering from our present dilettante attitude of our taxing the entire ecosystem, beyond the pale. Our political rhetoric is useless, if not insanely useless in our desires to maintain what we have, while we think we can fiddle the next, with growth... Fools.

As democratic persons, it is our duty to warn, loud and clear, the entire world about the massive problem ahead if we do not arrest our emissions NOW.  And I mean Zero emission of CO2 and methane NOW for at least a hundred years. With this, we can slow the process down to an increase of three degrees tops... Barely bearable but not as bad as six. still the ramification of global warming would be felt for another 500 to 1500 years. With our projected reductions of emission (in fact an addition of a lesser degree) we are looking down the barrel of an increase of nine degrees by the year 2200 — to be felt for more than 10,000 years...

We are in trouble. The situation in SERIOUS.

Mind you, religious fanatics won't listen, claiming that life will be better in the next fanciful godly world so why worry about this one, hey? And sleepy masses won't register anything until their own arse is on fire, individually. Capitalists wont register either because the drastic solution is to have massive negative growth — an anathema of the hip pocket of the investor. But if we do not something as drastic as that now, it will be too late to do anything that would have an impact. Carbon trading, "nucular" (to paraphrase the illustrious dummy in Washington) power, etc., all is like pissing in the wind. In the case of nuclear power, we are likely to be sprayed with the waste in the form of bombs (as tempers will become frayed) and stuck with unusable material that will have to be buried for 250,000 years for a half-decay...

And we can't even see past the next ten years. moronic, our leaders are...

So, is there something that can be done? Is rethinking capitalism in negative growth such a stupid concept? should we share more in our burning far less? Or should we just accept the inevitability of it, making small tokenistic contribution to the lip service, just enough to give us the conscience we've tried all, and go merrily as if things will sort themselves out until the hot muck hit the fan we have turned on to max.?

By then we'll be burning so much energy trying to stay cool with air conditioning that we won't even be able to go outside. Compounding the problem ten fold. Unless we start diggin' and live underground... The naked apes are mutating into silly white ants. Lovely... No, this is serious. Terribly serious.

In my comment above, re the USA releasing more than 25 per cent of the greenhouse gases, one should of course read nearly 50 per cent... but despite the yearly increase in the US nominal output, this percentage is decreasing worldwide as China and India start burning fossil fuel as if there was no tomorrow. Why should they stop considering the US and Australia have not signed the Kyoto Protocol...  Don Quijote Bushito and Johnnee Sancho Pansa are wagging war on windmills, with nothing else better to do than support more "clean" coalfirepower or "safe-for-the-moment" nuke disasters ahead... If our Malcolm wants to do something true instead of glorified pontification, he would start to lay the ground for a worldwide deflation of capitalistic enterprises, a tightening of consumption and a zero emission of greenhouse gases within a couple of years... That's all we've got left to stop temperature rising beyond 3 degrees before the end of the Century.

From the NYT

Lawmakers Push for Big Subsidies for Coal Process

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
Published: May 29, 2007

WASHINGTON, May 28 — Even as Congressional leaders draft legislation to reduce greenhouse gases linked to global warming, a powerful roster of Democrats and Republicans is pushing to subsidize coal as the king of alternative fuels.

Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, is drafting a bill to promote renewable fuels, but not liquefied coal, for electricity.

Richard A. Gephardt, a former Democratic House majority leader, has been hired by Peabody Energy to help make the case for liquefied coal.

Prodded by intense lobbying from the coal industry, lawmakers from coal states are proposing that taxpayers guarantee billions of dollars in construction loans for coal-to-liquid production plants, guarantee minimum prices for the new fuel, and guarantee big government purchases for the next 25 years.

With both House and Senate Democrats hoping to pass “energy independence” bills by mid-July, coal supporters argue that coal-based fuels are more American than gasoline and potentially greener than ethanol.

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Gus: Why bother with coal fiddles when you can burn the stuff directly for your steam turbines? Our UnAustralian of the decade knows that and sells the stuff raw, as long as there is not too much water in it, to whoever wants to buy...

On the other hand the coal lobby in the US should be spanked (a bit harder than Rattus) for thinking of "liquefying" coal... Not only the end product of the process can add the same amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, but the liquefaction will suck oxygen out the air and use a lot of energy to get there...

Bravo. The CO2 in the ether will shoot through the roof despite my expensive weirdo lights.