Biofuel production raises crop prices and threatens the poorest with starvation.
While schools may make 'sacrifices' for global warming, China, the worlds new mega star economy, makes decisions based on its own needs.
Those that got it wrong need to admit it, and allow the public administration to deal with truth.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Global Warming Myth Creates Panic
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Missing: the net price of a warmer world
Andrew Bolt
Terry McCrann gets to the critical weakness in Ross Garnaut’s report, which urged Australia to slash emissions by up to 90 per cent to show “leadership”:
Garnaut got it exactly wrong. There is no benefit in being a - the - leader. But equally, that does not mean we can’t seek a leadership role in pursuing - sensibly - carbonless-energy. That elusive “de-linking can-opener”. Garnaut seems to think the two are inseparable.
Where the report is completely inexcusable is its failure to engage at any level with the most basic cost-benefit analysis of the issue.
It might sound like heresy, but first, the cost-benefit of allowing unrestricted carbon-driven economic growth and the living consequently in the world of, say, 4 degrees higher temperatures. By implication a more “air-conditioned, Dubai-style world”.
Then a rigorous analysis of the costs of carbon abatement; and critically, the timeline of such abatement. Front-end forced or technology-driven.
We haven’t got it from Garnaut.
We didn’t get it, I’m guessing, because Garnaut stopped thinking of a warmer world as an economist should - in terms of profit and loss. He thought of it instead as would a green believer, convinced that the touch of man was sure to be wicked.
Column - China turns up the heat
Andrew Bolt
WHAT a sweet gesture from Trinity Grammar - to pull out its airconditioners and make its students sweat for the planet.
But the big question now with all such useless gestures to “save” us from global warming is: Are the Chinese watching? Are they remotely impressed by our suffering?
Or isn’t it time we realised - after reading last week’s Garnaut report - that China is now big enough to decide the future of the planet on its own, regardless of how many whites go red?
Folks, get over this white man’s burden thing. China is now in charge. It will set the world’s temperature.
But first back to Trinity, which is pulling out its airconditioners and telling its students to just be “resilient” instead, to show that it’s their concern about global warming.
Of course, the world’s temperature will not even blink, no matter how puce the students get after hopping out of mum’s airconditioned Toorak tractor and into their classroom ovens.
In fact, I haven’t seen such pointless pain in a holy cause since Silas strapped a barbed cilice to his leg in The Da Vinci Code to prove his piety.
But all over the country we have global warming believers slipping on their designer hairshirts so they can itch for Gaia. Sweat for Nature. Puff for planet Earth.
The fiercely steaming editor of The Age, for instance, taps out editorials in his Y-fronts denouncing air-conditioners and bemoaning that “our consumer society has long abandoned the fan or the cold bath as the way to keep the summer at bay”, while his soggy columnist Tracee Hutchison urges fellow green drips to stop being “obsessed with sweat prevention”.
Just as uselessly, hundreds of businesses in Australia will next month turn off their lights for just one lousy hour to prove they, too, care about global warming. And will then switch those same lights back on so that no one breaks their neck in the dark and sues.
But for what are these modern flagellants mortifying their hot flesh and sweating up their shirts? After all, nothing we do in little Australia, responsible for just 1.5 per cent of the world’s emissions and falling fast, is remotely likely to affect the planet’s temperature, which in any case still hasn’t risen above the record set 10 years ago.
Last week’s interim report by Professor Ross Garnaut, the Prime Minister’s chief adviser on cutting greenhouse gases, spells it out.
Let’s ignore the report’s obvious flaws - that Garnaut accepts “on the balance of probabilities” the contested claims of many scientists that man is heating the world, and that he takes for granted the word of activists, extremists and the widely discredited economist Sir Nicholas Stern that this warming will be catastrophic.
Skip instead, as does Garnaut, to the argument about what on earth Australians can do about it.
The answer? In the end, nothing remotely effective unless you dream with Garnaut of wonderful inventions suddenly emerging from nowhere over the next decade to save the world on the cheap.
No, nothing Australia does on its own - even going to black - will do any good. We are just too small.
All we can really do, admits Garnaut, is set an “exemplary” example that will have a “demonstration effect” on the countries that truly count now - fast-growing China and India.
These countries are the ones that count because China has been growing at an astonishing rate so far this century, at more than 10 per cent each year. India is not far behind, growing at more than 7 per cent each year.
These countries are just sucking in more coal and oil than ever, and blowing out more greenhouse gases than ever, too - the gases we’re told cause the world to warm, but which also happen to be the gases that come from making poor people rich.
Garnaut says such developing countries are “now responsible for most of the growth of emissions”, and there’s no sign that either India or China will stop booming and belching any time soon.
In fact, China is now the world’s biggest emitter and by 2020, Garnaut estimates, it and other developing countries will pump out more greenhouse gases on their own than the entire world dare emit if we want to stop what Garnaut assumes will be potentially catastrophic warming.
We can fiddle, but what’s the point when China will burn, burn, burn? We can make all the sacrifices we like - closing our coal mines and banning cars from our cities - to make us seem “exemplary”, but none of it makes sense unless our pain persuades China and developing countries to slash their own gases too.
The rest is folly or moral exhibitionism, because, as Garnaut admits, there “will be no adequate global mitigation unless the major developing countries soon become part of the global mitigation effort”.
But what if those countries don’t want to?
And here we hit the fan. Problem: they don’t.
The Chinese can think for themselves, thank you, white long-nose. And what they think is that the pleasures of getting rich beat the pain of cutting gases.
They’ve been poor too long to hit the brakes now. And, as Garnaut concedes, who are we to tell these poor countries they are wrong and must cut their growth to “save” the planet?
“It is neither desirable nor remotely feasible to seek to remove environmental pressures through diminution of the aspirations of the world’s people for higher material standards of living.”
The Chinese know that if they instead manage to gassily grow as fast as they’ve grown for a decade that by 2050 they’ll be earning 50 times more than they are earning today. And they’ll then be 50 per cent richer, per man and woman, than we gas-slashing, growth-choking Australians.
That doesn’t just appeal to greed but to China’s nationalism.
At these (admittedly unsustainable) rates of growth, China will in this century emerge a superpower to at least rival the United States, and to certainly bury Europe.
As for India, it’s frantically trying to make sure it won’t be overshadowed by its great rival and neighbour.
That is why, as Garnaut notes: “All developing countries . . . continue to reject binding targets.”
Bluntly: China says no. It’s done the maths and figured it will be better off warmer and richer than cooler and poorer. Too bad if the world really does warm a bit from its gases - by 2050 China will be so rich it could put air-conditioning in every Chinese house to beat the heat, so what’s the fuss?
Of course, the Garnaut report doesn’t put the case as brutally as that.
Garnaut himself is there to preach the gospel, not despair. He still wants us to make impossible sacrifices, suggesting we cut our emissions by 2050 by as much as 90 per cent.
That’s crazy stuff, given our emissions are predicted by the Rudd Government to in fact soar to 20 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020, despite all the money state and federal governments have spent on stopping land-clearing, cutting power use, promoting low-energy housing and funding useless wind farms.
But if even we can’t slash our own emissions, faster-growing China will know it most certainly cannot cut its own, even if it wanted to.
Its roaring growth is fuelled by the building of a new coal-fired power station every week, and there is not the slightest chance it will stop building those gassy stations for years yet.
No, China figures it can live with the warm, so we’d best get used to it too.
The Chinese are in charge, and not even the sweat from the brow of a Trinity boy will persuade them to take their slippers off the accelerator.
Feeding humans to Gaia
Andrew Bolt
The Green panic may cause starvation:
THE UN World Food Program warned yesterday it no longer had enough money to keep global malnutrition at bay in the face of dramatically rising food prices and was considering rationing aid....
WFP officials say the extraordinary increases in the global price of basic foods were caused by a “perfect storm” of factors, including a rise in demand for animal feed from increasingly wealthy India and China, the use of more land and agricultural produce for biofuels, and climate change.
Biofuels have shouldered much of the blame for food price hikes, as land and grain are transferred from food to fuel production.
Save the planet. Starve the humans.
Cool, wet summer ... and more to come
By Asa Wahlquist
IT has been a cool and wet summer across eastern Australia, and autumn is shaping up to produce more of the same.
But temperatures over the nation as a whole have been slightly warmer than normal.
Preliminary figures suggest there have been warmer nights in eastern Australia.
"If you combine daytime and night-time temperatures, they have only been very slightly below normal, probably coming in around 0.1 or 0.2 of a degree below normal," Blair Trewin, ofthe National Climate Centre, said yesterday.
"February has been a cool month over most of the country, but January was very warm except for the east coast," Dr Trewin said.
"When you add the months together, the general picture is cool in eastern Queensland and the northeastern half of NSW, very warm in a lot of central Australia as well as in South Australia, quite warm in Victoria and fairly close to normal elsewhere."
The summer brought heavy rains along the east coast and a downpour in Western Australia as a result of Cyclone Nicholas.
Summer rainfall is likely to come in at above average for the eastern two-thirds of Queensland and most of NSW, close to normal for Victoria and South Australia, and well above normal for southern Western Australia. Central Australia was below normal, and the northern tropics probably close to normal.
The Bureau of Meteorology's autumn rainfall outlook is for wetter than normal in northern Queensland and parts of NSW and South Australia. Below-normal falls are more likely in parts of Victoria and Tasmania.
The temperature outlook is for cooler than normal temperatures in southern Queensland and northern NSW.
Dr Trewin said the weather was largely due to the continuing La Nina pattern, which typically brings above-average rains and cooler temperatures.
He said the southern Murray-Darling Basin had not had the full benefit of La Nina.
"The forecast there is still leaning very slightly towards the wetter side, but really there is no significant signal."
The only areas showing a significant shift towards below-normal rainfall are the far south of Victoria, and northern Tasmania. Southern Victoria has been dry for the past decade.
"Southern Victoria is probably the part of Australia that has seen the most extreme dry anomalies in the past 10 to 12 years," Dr Trewin said.
"Victoria south of the divide is a region which has been consistently below normal for 11 years now, and we're not seeing obvious signs of a change in that pattern."
Dr Trewin said the cooler temperatures in the wetter areas were "entirely consistent with the leaning towards higher rainfall and increased cloud cover".
He pointed out that other La Nina summers had been even wetter and cooler.
"There have been some very, very wet Februarys in the past," he said.
"Some of the past La Nina summers have been extremely cool, like 1973-74 and 1975-76 - you saw statewide anomalies of -3C. We are nowhere near those summers, either in terms of temperature or in terms of rainfall."
Post a Comment