Clipmarks | amgumen's Environment collection

The Real Population Bomb

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:57:08 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

It’s been 40 years since Stanford University population biologist Paul Ehrlich warned of imminent global catastrophe in his book "The Population Bomb

“In the 1970’s, the world will undergo famines hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death … At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate

Today, world population exceeds 6.6 billion

Have we run out of food?

the number of people in the developing world who were considered to be undernourished in 1968 was estimated at about 900 million. That estimate is on track to be reduced by more than 50 percent by 2015

So while world population has just about doubled, global hunger will just about have been cut in half

Stanford professor is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and has been honored by the United Nations, MacArthur Foundation, Sierra Club, World Wildlife Fund, Ecological Society of America and the American Institute of Biological Sciences to

he’s still at it

Geologic Evidence of the Cause of Global Warming and Cooling

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:10:27 GMT

clipped by: amgumen
clipper's remarks: The warming over the past 50 years is hardly even noticeable on the 15,000 year graph above. Compare the peaks about every 800-1000 years for the past 10,000 years (since the last full ice age), all are much warmer than what we're experiencing now. In fact the last 1,000 years has been unusually cool for this interglacial period, just looking at the graph it certainly looks like we've been over due for warming (or if our interglacial period is over another full ice age which would be much worse).

Clip Source: www.globalwarminghoax.com

"In a Newsweek article (August 13, 2007), author Sharon Begley states “Current warming is 10 times greater than ever before seen in the geologic record. The chance that warming is natural is less than 10 percent.” Every competent geologist knows that this statement is totally false and contrary to vast amounts of well-established data. Global climates have warmed about 4-7° F in a series of ~30 year cycles since the Little Ice Age 400 years ago, all with no correlation with atmospheric CO2, yet the author claims that “the pattern of warming has a human fingerprint.” What is needed to bring clarity to the issue is not rhetoric like this, but a hard look at the huge amount of geologic data that shows we’ve had climate changes 20 times greater than the past century in a fourth of the time."

Temperature changes over the past 15,000 years (central Greenland).
Red lines represent times of sudden warming, blue lines represent times of rapid cooling

Arctica: they began keeping records in 1972

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:55:14 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: www.globalwarminghoax.com

since 1980:

Ice Concentration is down a whopping 5% (down from 8.9 to 8.5 million square km)
Ice Extent is down 8% (down from 12.3 to 11.4 million sq km).

Yet the Arctic is getting most of the news. You see statements such as "On August 21, 2007, the Northwest Passage became open to ships without the need of an icebreaker. According to Nalan Koc of the Norwegian Polar Institute this is the first time it has been clear since they began keeping records in 1972." (Wikipedia) However Roald Amundsen first navigated the passage in 1906 without the use of an icebreaker (at the end of this trip, he walked into the city of Eagle, Alaska, and sent a telegram announcing his success) so the Arctic ice has certainly retreated this far in the near past. When you hear the term "record" coming from the media or the environmentalists that could mean over the past 10-30 years. When you're talking about climate you need to look at time periods over at least 10,000 years for them to have any meaning.

Antarctic Sea Ice Continues To Set Records

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:50:57 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: www.globalwarminghoax.com

18% more Antarctic Sea Ice Concentration (from 9.6 to 11.2 million square km)

10% greater Antarctic Sea Ice Extent (from 13.2 to 14.5 million square km)

Where is the one area of the Antarctic that has less ice today than in 1980? The south side of the Antarctica Western Peninsula, which is all you hear about in the popular news media. If at any time in the last 2 year you've seen fear mongering over ice melting at Antarctica this is what they were talking about.

The sky is falling crowd will tell you that their computer models predicted more inland ice due to increased snow fall (of course their models predict damn near everything to happen, from cooling / warming, drought / floods, etc. / etc). But increases in sea ice is something they hadn't predicted which is why you hear almost nothing about it. They simply point to the Antarctica Western Peninsula and this or that ice shelf that is "breaking apart" (this is called calving and is something that has always happened)

Poll: Conservation takes back seat to drilling

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:44:11 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

WASHINGTON - High gasoline prices have dramatically changed Americans' views on energy and the environment, with more people now viewing oil drilling and new power plants as a greater priority than energy conservation, according to a new survey.

The poll released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center shows nearly half of those surveyed — or 47 percent — now rate energy exploration, drilling and building new power plants as the top priority, compared with 35 percent who believed that five months earlier.

The Pew poll, conducted in late June, showed the number of people who consider energy conservation as more important declined by 10 percentage points since February from a clear majority to 45 percent. People are now about evenly split on which is more important.

The cost of green tinkering is in famine and starvation

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:22:44 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: www.climateark.org

Biofuels threaten food supplies, rainforest and climate - yet our leaders push them in the name of the environment

Farewell the age of reason, welcome the idiocracy. Only George Orwell could have invented - and named - the government's Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO) that came into operation yesterday. It is the latest in a long line of measures intended to ease the conscience of the rich while keeping the poor miserable, in this case spectacularly so.

The consequences of the RTFO have been much trumpeted on these pages. It says enough that one car tank of bio petrol needs as much grain as it takes to feed an African for a year, or that a reported one-third of American grain production is now subsidised for conversion into biofuel. Jeremy Paxman pleaded the cause of this latest green wheeze on Monday's Newsnight, while the United Nations food expert, Jean Ziegler, screamed for it to stop: "Children are dying ... It is a crime."

All the water and air on earth

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:04:01 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: www.boingboing.net

Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc.
Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at sea-level density. Shown on the same scale as the Earth.

The spheres show how finite water and air supplies are. The water sphere measures 1390 kilometres across and has a volume of 1.4 billion cubic kilometres. This includes all the water in the oceans, seas, ice caps, lakes and rivers as well as ground water, and that in the atmosphere. The air sphere measures 1999 kilometres across and weighs 5140 trillion tonnes. As the atmosphere extends from Earth it becomes less dense. Half of the air lies within the first 5 kilometres of the atmosphere.

The High Cost of McCarbonomics

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:17:32 GMT

clipped by: amgumen
clipper's remarks: McCain's plan amounts to nothing less but stealing from taxpayers to buy political love from ZEV automakers with little or no reduction in CO2 emissions.

Clip Source: us.mc540.mail.yahoo.com

The presumed Republican nominee is proposing a $300 million government prize to whoever can develop an automobile battery that far surpasses existing technology... In addition, a so-called Clean Car Challenge would provide U.S. automakers with a $5,000 tax credit for every zero-carbon emissions car they develop and sell."

McCain's $5,000 tax credit for each zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) sold is ridiculous

1. Based on the average automobile's annual CO2 emissions (6 tons) and the average life of a car (9 years), this works out to taxpayers forking out $5,000 to avoid 54 tons of tailpipe emissions -- that is, $92.60 per ton of CO2. In comparison, a metric ton of CO2 only cost about $5.80 on the Chicago Climate Exchage as of Friday, June 20.

While no CO2 is emitted from a ZEV per se, the emissions are merely shifted from the tailpipe to the smokestack at the power plant that generated the electricity

Pollution From East Asia to North America

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:25:31 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: geology.com

Optical depth of particulate pollution. Much of this pollution is industrial but some is caused by fires. NASA Image.

A pool of air pollution has spread out over eastern China and then slipped over the coast like water over a dam. A river of haze flows across the East China Sea past the Korean Peninsula and northeastward toward Japan, where it arcs along the western coastline of the island chain before disappearing out of the scene at upper right.

This false-color image shows concentrations of carbon monoxide at an altitude of roughly 18,000 feet (500 millibars) in the atmosphere off the coast of Asia and out over the Pacific Ocean.

Skies over China have darkened in the past five decades, thanks to a nine-fold increase fossil-fuel emissions. In January 2006, Yun Qian and collaborators reported this finding in Geophysical Research Letters. According to the Associated Press, Qian stated that pollution absorbs and reflects sunlight, allowing less of it to reach China’s urban areas.

Tags: environment

The Poison Arrow: Corn-Based Ethanol

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:35:47 GMT

clipped by: amgumen
clipper's remarks: The government seeks policy that stimulates industry, growth, wealth creation; corn production is near, easy, and most importantly: large-scale.

Can we keep trying to fuel an ever-upward curve of consumption with fragile oil replacements like food crops? So far, the answer seems a resounding no.

Meanwhile, we’re turning the Pacific into a garbage dump, and hoarding seeds for “doomsday”.

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

In a government-supported rush to supply the ethanol industry, US corn growers may be hastening the large-scale destruction of life in the Gulf of Mexico.

The “dead zone”–over 7,000 square miles and growing–begins as nitrogen fertilizer in US Midwest fields. The fertilizer runoff makes its way into the Mississippi river, which dumps effluent directly into the Gulf of Mexico.

A recent Senate energy policy proposal recommended the manufacture of 15 billion to 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by the year 2022,

Like “green” building, however, the problem is already so bad that scientists and calling for radical action:

“We’re already at a point where recommendations have been made that nitrogen levels in the Mississippi River have to decrease by up to 55 percent in order to shrink the dead zone,”

Biofuel proponents might say “so let’s make fuel from other sources–algae, or palm oil, or something less bad”, missing entirely how blunt-force politics really work to shape and destroy the envir

Tags: environment

Stupid Media Tricks

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:40:17 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: junkscience.com

Juliet Eilperin’s front-page article in today’s Washington Post entitled, "Carbon Output Must Near Zero to Avert Danger, New Studies Say," is accompanied by the photo below. It’s captioned, "A heavy haze could be seen in Beijing in August 2007. Two recent studies call for a heightened global effort to reduce carbon emissions."

But carbon dioxide is a colorless and odorless gas that is incapabale of producing such haze (aka smog).

To paraphrase Shakespeare [Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II], "But soft what nonsense through yonder newspaper breaks. It is BS, and Juliet is the fool…"

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Tags: global warming hoax

Al Gore's Fascist Liberal Global Warming Corrupt Data

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 04:06:19 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: www.youtube.com

[Video]

Tags: climate

'Plastic soup' in Pacific Ocean bigger than the United States

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:17:54 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: www.care2.com

Discovered by American sailor Charles Moore in 1997, this massive "plastic soup" is alarming scientists all over the world.

The debris is two huge, linked areas of trash, Dr. Marcus Eriksen, research director of the U.S.-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, told the Sydney Daily Telegraph.

While the boundaries shift with the tides, the floating debris spans about 500 nautical miles in the Pacific, from Japan to California. Smack dab in the middle, the Hawaiian islands' regularly clean up piles of this flotsam from its beaches.

"The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup," Eriksen told the Sydney Daily Telegraph. "It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Underwater currents pull floating trash into the mass where it is trapped. The trashy, wet mess is composed largely of plastic as it does not biodegrade.

Tags: environment

More In Their Own Words

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:41:50 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: scienceandpublicpolicy.org

In Their Own Words

"Since the late 1960s, much of the North Atlantic Ocean has become less salty, in part due to increases in fresh water runoff induced by global warming, scientists say."

-Michael Schirber, LiveScience
June 29, 2005

"The surface waters of the North Atlantic are getting saltier, suggests a new study of records spanning over 50 years. They found that during this time, the layer of water that makes up the top 400 metres has gradually become saltier. The seawater is probably becoming saltier due to global warming, Boyer says."

-Catherine Brahic, New Scientist
August 23, 2007

Tags: environment, climate change, global warming

The imminent destruction of Earth unless you do what we say!

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 02:46:58 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: scienceandpublicpolicy.org

What of that massive political movement known as global warming, today’s fashionable secular substitute for the Biblical apocalypse? Bored of combating everyday environmental problems such as mercury in seafood and hormones in drinking water, environmentalists invented something much sexier: The imminent destruction of Earth unless you do what we say! Why trudge to local land-use meetings to lobby for preserving open space when you can preach the salvation of the world like an Old Testament prophet? One gains so much more social importance if people think you have the answer to averting Armageddon.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but global warming theology produces the same practical results as the socialism Western leftists have been forced to abandon: An immense increase in the power of the political/regulatory class and an immense reduction in the standard of living of ordinary people.

Tags: environment, climate change