Kyoto Protocol is dead!

"BUENOS AIRES -- The Kyoto Protocol is dead -- there will be no further global treaties that set binding limits on the emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) after Kyoto runs out in 2012.

The conventional wisdom that it's the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development."

Commonsense is starting to prevail in the climate industry and the rest may be read here

Update: Reading Hans Labohm's excellent article in TCS he referred to another source where 'The scientific basis to tackle the climate change allegedly caused by human-induced CO2 emissions has collapsed. The newest scientific findings prove that current or near-future (i.e. in the next 100 yrs) CO2 emissions cause no dangerous anthropogenic interference with or dangerous perturbation in the climate system.'

CONCLUSION: The science it settled - CO2 is a benign gas that feeds plants which form the basis of the rest of life. CO2 does not control the earth's temperature, but its historical fluctuations in levels are reactions to changes in temperature, if that at all.

And Business is finally fighting back as Miranda Devine writing in the Sydney Sun-Herald noted that finally business is getting the courage to counter lies perpetrated by PETA, the Wilderness Society and all the other Green organisations.

Miranda concludes "It's about time activists were forced to take responsibility for their actions, instead of blithely threatening other people's livelihoods in order to make themselves feel good or enhance their social lives. If you tell lies or break the law, you should face the consequences, because the company, its workers, contractors and shareholders certainly do."

Otherwise your author spent a few days in the Murchison district of West Australia this week discovering along the way that weather is a most changeable thing, apart from looking at rocks and collecting samples, an activity for which he is paid money to pay the ATO, amongst other debtors. Otherwise it was all "secret diamond business".

Tuesday found your scribe on Wooleen Station, which runs sheep but as the drought has now entered its fifth year up there, not many sheep are to be seen - hence the proprietors run a farm stay business to make ends meet. (Wooleen Station, is located some 200 Km north nor-east of the wheatbelt town of Mullewa, north of Perth and inland).

Tuesday 14th of December was the hottest day in West Australia for 30 years, the temperature peaking at 41.5 degrees Celsius in Perth. I can state that during that day the temperature on the back of the Land Cruiser utility was recorded by the Engel Fridge electro-thermometer to have been 63 degrees Celsius, though that high reading was recorded in the canvas insulation cover pocket. The ambient temperature was a slightly lower, 58 degrees Celsius but the content of the car fridge was a more pleasant 3.8 degrees Celsius, meaning your lowly scribe's beer rations were on temperature! Thank God for Freon, Honda Generators and petrol - warm beer is definitely an unsatisfactory state of affairs.

Now the car-fridge electro-thermometer has another feature - it records the maxima and minima of the daily temperatures, and next morning, after retiring "au-natural" on the swag on the stretcher on the verandah of the "barracks" at Wooleen station (euphemism for workers accommodation), sometime during the night it became rather cold, making the "au-naturel" state decidedly uncomfortable. The station owner, I found out later, was forced to remove himself from the grass lawn, on which he made spent most of the night, back into the house because it became so cold. Being summer and Xmas, Wooleen sent its lady-folk to the more clement climes of Kalbarri, and the cities, leaving a residual core of to manage the station during the "off-season".  The sheep dogs too, go elsewhere for Xmas, dear reader, but not the sheep.

The electro-thermometer recorded a minimum of 13.5 degrees Celsius during the night. And is this the official temperature for the 14th December 2004? Did anyone in West Australia "officially record a lower temperature? They might have and would these temperatures have been factored into the official temperature which is used to estimate the earth's "global" temperature"? Probably not. And now to other more exciting matters.

It seems the ghost of Velikovsky has been resurrected again, which I suspect is my fault. The ad Hominem "Velikovskian" is the means by which the scientific mafia rid themselves of unpleasant truths that contrary scientists utter when facts are considered in preference to complex computer models purporting to be facsimiles of physical  reality.

In 1950 Immanuel Velikovsky, a Jewish - Russian psychoanalyst, published a controversial book - Worlds in Collision - which caused a furore in academia. His apparent sin was to question the omnipotence of gravity as the sole cosmic force, and accepting the Old Testament as literal fact.

Most of his critics seized on his account of Joshua Ben Nun stopping the sun, mentioned last week, as proof of his status as a crank. However if one actually read World's in Collision one would discover, shock and horror, that Velikovsky wrote no such thing, arguing instead that there must be another force operating in the Cosmos, in addition to gravitation.

(Most of Velikovsky's critics have avoided reading any of his books. Your lowly scribe, like the famous American geophysicist, Harry Hess of Princeton University, owned a copy of Earth in Upheaval - Velikovsky's scientific explanation for his historical interpretation described in Worlds in Collision - for some 17 years before finally realising that Velikovsky was onto something).

Velikovsky also wrote, based on the historical evidence, that past civilisations seem to have been destroyed by some sort of cosmic cataclysm involving, at various times, Venus and Mars. I am not going to repeat those stories here as there is plenty of information on the web. However an unfortunate side effect is that religious undamentalists often tend to favour Velikovskian explanations as scientific evidence for their beliefs, so many critics automatically assume that if one favours Velikovskian scenarios, one must be some sort of religious fundamentalist.

Alas, I seem to have been outed! But I must confess I don't have any religious belief, preferring to remain, as H. L. Mencken wrote, a religious moron.

Velikovsky was a man of his time, a European Jew reacting to the German Historical Tradition and in his books, perhaps unconsciously, assigning a more significant contribution to Western civilisation by the Jewish people that available evidence suggests.  We all make errors and Velikovsky was not exempt from this common human affliction. Except for Global Warmers and social democrats of course, most of whom are error free, apparently.

Never the less his main argument, that the earth suffered global catastrophes in the past, is strenuously denied by mainstream science. This is, of course, contradicted by recent publications:

(1) NASA PREPARES SPACECRAFT TO BLOW A HOLE IN SURFACE OF A COMET
    Bloomberg, 13 December 2004

(2) OPTIMAL PLANETARY DEFENSE AGAINST NEO IMPACT HAZARD PROPOSED
    Acta Astronautica, Volume 55, Issue 12 , December 2004, Pages 991-1006

(3) SCIENTISTS CLASH OVER ORIGIN OF 'THE GREAT DYING'
    San Francisco Chronicle, 13 December 2004

(4) DISCOVERY OF THE LARGEST IMPACT CRATER FIELD ON EARTH
    Comptes Rendus Geosciences, Volume 336, Issue 16 , December 2004, Pages 1491-1500

(5) LET'S STOP SCARING OURSELVES
    Parade Magazine, 5 December 2004

(6) HOPE FOR 2005 AND BEYOND
    Michael Martin-Smith

(7) AND FINALLY: TECHNO FIX AND GREAT ESCAPE, OR HOW TO SURVIVE THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
    DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 12 | December 2004

No catastrophes happened in the past but we can expect future catastrophic collisions and all sorts of disasters in the future? Pull the other one.

This situation all came about during the early 19th century in England when the English Whigs (the predecessors of todays social democrats) seized on the nascent science of geology as a political tool to counter the Tory Government based on the authority of the Christian Bible. But the Whigs were in somewhat of a pickle in that they could not refute the Biblical authority as most were as devout as their Tory adversaries.

So a masterstroke was made by Sir Charles Lyell when he suggested that the Old Testament should be considered as literature, rather than historical fact; in one fell swoop he moved biblical creation from 4004 BC to some remote time in the past. Of course moving a fiction back in time does not change its status as a fiction, and any explanation of a fiction remains itself a fiction, despite the change in rhetoric now known as geological uniformitarianism, a belief that catastrophic events in the past never happened.

One of the benefits of being a field geologist is that you spend a lot of time driving a 4 wheel Drive car in the middle of nowhere and this allows one the opportunity to engage in that excellent De Bono practice of thinking; laterally of course.  It was during this week that I suddenly realised that Sir Charles Lyell was the father of Post-Modernism, that intellectual affliction possessed by most in academia these days and now shown to be a totally discreditable philosophy.

What else could a rejection of historical fact be regarded as?

This does not mean at all that one should assume that the Old Testament should be taken as literal fact, since common sense tells us that no human can stop the sun by banging a stick on the ground. And as Keith Windschuttle has shown in his recent book on White Australia, post modernism is quite effective in writing totally misleading recent histories too, ancient history needs to be evaluated on its merits.

So it comes with some irony that our scientific post-modernists, the scientific uniformists, deny past catastrophes happened despite an abundance of contrary oral and written evidence, but then have no difficulty predicting future catastrophes. One suspects there are more than the normal number of oxymorons in this mind set. (Excuse me for the use of a misplaced metaphor). Clearly their prognostications of the future are not based on historical precedent.

Anthropogenic global warming is one imagined impending catastrophe.

Benny Peiser in a recent CCnet newsletter also pointed to a number of recent books all based on the topic of avoiding future catastrophes, some which I list here.

(1) CATASTROPHE: RISK AND RESPONSE
    Oxford University Press, November 2004

(2) A BOOK TRIES, AND FAILS, TO QUANTIFY CATASTROPHIC RISK
    Slate, 22 November 2004

(3) CALAMITY JUDGE: RICHARD POSNER'S "CATASTROPHE"
    The American Lawyer, 1 November 2004

Ironic isn't it - totally rejecting past catastrophes as Velikovskian fantasy, mainstream science has no difficulty coping with future catastrophes, whether climatic, meteoritic or asteroidal. I am sure many would have been excellent subjects for Velikovsky's skills as a psychoanalyst.

Was Velikovsky right in raising questions about gravitation being an unsatisfactory force to explain the historical recorded facts?

Yes - it is called Plasma cosmology and I quote a leading scientist in this field, anonymously of course, from an email I received from him a few days ago in response to a comment I posted on a restricted scientific forum, to which both of us contribute, about a question a poster asked reading a new book on the Plasma Universe without crediting existing scientific workers.

I replied - "Not to matter Ian, it is the next generation which will change ideas, not ours. We are setting the foundations for others to build on".

I received the reply-

"Louis,

Correct and that is really all I want. I am aware of the book Ian has found and like so many other new books on Birkeland, Auroral dynamics, and Space Plasma, we old-timers often don't see our names mentioned at all.

But in fact, the Plasma Universe is now PROMOTED by the American Physical Society, parts of the American Astrophysical Society, and most certainly the IEEE. At conferences, the term Plasma Universe is freely used, but presenters at APS and AAS most certainly don't understand the importance of the circuit aspect and usually try a Tycho-Brahe compromise, acknowledging plasma throughout the universe, but trying to meld it with 'traditional' astrophysics ideas.

And why not? It is all about funding. On the other hand, the schools belonging to the American Geophysical Union, Space Plasmas division and the IEEE present the material in the true tradition of Alfven and Birkeland, avoid the non-physical 'magnetic-reconnection' nonsense.

Nevertheless, while I saw several presentations of the Plasma Universe at the APS conference in Savannah in November, some even mentioning the big-bang as part of it, there were no presentations on a Big Bang Universe. Of course, it is different in the Astrophysical Cosmological group whose 'standard' cosmology today resembles in no way that presented a decade ago.

Anon. "

The Plasma Universe is the scientific result by those of us who thought Velikovsky's ideas had merit. But the science of geology remains hamstrung in its Lyellian Post-modernism and some us, including your lowly scribe, are starting to develop the science of Plasma Geology. The plasma universe incorporates electricity, in addition to gravity, as the dominant cosmic force.

An excellent site is that of the US Scientist Anthony Peratt, the discoverer of Peratt Instabilities described in the scientific Plasma Physics literature.

So why do I even bother with this arcane topic of a Plasma Universe? Because it shows our mainstream understanding of the Sun, and the solar system, is seriously in error, an error that is being propagated into the Anthropogenic global warming frenzy we are being made to suffer by the Greens and their fellow travellers.

While we are on the topic, Michael Crichton has written a new book which has the Green Movement apoplectic - I have bought it for Xmas reading. It is titled "State of Fear". Clearly it is a must read to form the basis of countering the inanities of the global warming crowds.

Benny Peiser pointed to this paper -

NEW STUDIES SUGGEST MOST OF 20TH CENTURY WARMING MAY BE DUE TO NATURAL CAUSES

These results suggest that 20th Century warming trends are plausibly a continuation of past climate patterns. Results are not precise enough to solve the attribution problem by partitioning warming into natural versus human-induced components. However, anywhere from a major portion to all of the warming of the 20th Century could plausibly result from natural causes according to these results. Six of the models project a cooling trend (in the absence of other forcings) over the next 200 years of 0.2-1.4 C.

--Craig Loehle, Ecological Modelling, February 2004

 Ecological Modelling, Volume 171, Issue 4 , 1 February 2004, Pages 433-450

Sea Shells are sea shells and they can reveal much of the past as geologist Dr.Jan Veizer discusses here

It seems that a cyclic period of global warming/cooling every 135 millions years has been identified in the sea shell record which is linked to a similar 135 million year cycle of cosmic rays.

135 millions years ago, one might suggest, was somewhat devoid of humanity, so previous episodes of global warming can't be blamed on us.

Well not yet.

In short, earth temperatures are not driven by CO2.

Last week I wrote that one ought to factor in the earth's internal heat into the calculation of the earth's global temperature.  I noticed a critic contended that as the earth itself only contributed some 4% of the thermal energy to the earth's temperature, its effect can be ignored.

Those of us experienced dealing with natural quantities, be they mineral ore bodies or atmospheric gases, wonder whether or not a gas such as CO2 which forms 0.038% of the earth's atmosphere, ought also to be ignored as a factor in the earth's  temperature. Equally we also know that CO2 forms 5% of the earth's Greenhouse effect, water vapour forming the rest of the effect. 5% is near enough to 4%, and from a realistic point of view, one may as well ignore CO2 as well as the earth itself as making any real contribution to the earth's global temperature.

So it is permissable to ignore the 4% earth's internal heat contribution to the earth's temperature but not the 5% contributed by Co2 to the Greenhouse effect?

The hypocrisy in the Australian Global Warming camp is a site to behold, isn't it?

Below is an interesting graph of the measured temperature of the earth's gaseous envelope. Note that the temperature does not increase gradually the closer we get to the earth's surface but fluctuates significantly.

Melvin the Martian taking a temperature measurement in the mesopause might conclude the earth is cold and forbidding. On the other hand if he measured the temperature in the ozone layer a different result would have been obtained. And if this temperature profile is representative of the interface between the surface of the earth and space, then what of the rest of the profile down to the earth's core?

Conventionally it is represented as a gradually increasing linear function determined from heat flow measurements in the first 5 kilometres of the earth's crust. Is it therefore true that the earth's internal temperature increases regularly with increasing depth?  Wikpedia seems to summarise all the relevant statistics here .

Note that the earth's diameter is approximately 12,750 km which makes 5/12750 expressed as a percentage, 0.18%, and from this minute distance so much is extrapolated in terms of the earth's internal temperature. One would have thought that the anything but gradual atmospheric temperature profile might be repeated "down-under". From such observational molehills might theoretical mountains are built.

Then we have the Europeans still screaming that all of the warming in the is totally due to anthtropogenic warming

20TH CENTURY GLOBAL WARMING IS ALMOST ENTIRELY ANTHROPOGENIC
 
Daniel Fischer <dfischer@astro.uni-bonn.de>
 
Too bad Mr Whitehouse is not up to date regarding the evidence for variations in solar *luminosity* which is not necessarily a direct function of the solar *activity* we see on the surface or measure by C-14 (as in Solanki & al., Nature 431, 1084 [Oct. 28]) or other proxies. While the variations in the Sun's activity level on long timescales are amazing (and unexplained), there is also growing evidence that the luminosity of our Sun is exceptionally stable. There is a fine review of the state of the art in Foukal, Science 306, 68 [Oct. 1]: In a nutshell, all apparent evidence for a low solar flux during major long minima (like Maunder's) that were derived from observations of seemingly solar-like stars has gone away in recent years. Thus even the modest role that modern climate change has been attributing to the Sun is probably a factor 5 too large - and the evidence that the excess global warming in the 20th century is almost entirely anthropogenic now stands stronger than ever.
 
Daniel Fischer, science writer, Germany

Except Mr Fischer might not be aware that Kyoto is dead!

Benny Peiser balances this warming extremism with an interesting paper which interest our economist readers -
 
P.S.: This is not to say that solar activity variations might not be able to influence the Earth's climate in some complicated way - just have a look, e.g., at  [Nov. 6] where
"Space Climate Manifestation in Earth Prices" is claimed by Israeli researchers, "from Medieval England Up to Modern USA" ...