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Dodging The Icebergs

Posted by Aaron McLucas on Sunday, May 11, 2008 12:38:32 PM
   Icebergs are out of control this year. The iceberg police are have their hands full warning ships of all the icebergs that formed this year.
 
   A surge in the number of icebergs off Newfoundland has imperilled marine traffic and added work for the flight crews who monitor offshore.

About 600 icebergs are currently on the Grand Banks, roughly double the total all last year, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. Two years ago, the area had virtually none.

And the "sheer number" of bergs this spring in the area near the oil rigs has left spotters "very busy," Luc Desjardins, senior ice and iceberg forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service, said from Ottawa in a telephone interview this week.

During the worst of the iceberg season, which typically runs from February to July, the International Ice Patrol and a private company contracted by the Canadian Ice Service monitor the area off Newfoundland.
 
Interesting iceberg info at the end of the article as well.
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Why Kyoto Doesn't Work

Posted by Aaron McLucas on Sunday, May 11, 2008 12:00:32 PM
   Here is just another reason why the Kyoto treaty does not work and how easy it is for some countries to take advantage of its position without having to reduce any of their own emmisions.

One controversial scheme under the agreement allows industrialised countries which are comfortably below their emissions targets to sell the difference to other industrialised nations, in a trade which is not necessarily related to any emissions cuts.

According to available data, Russia may have more than 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide rights, called Assigned Amount Units (AAUs), to sell at the end of Kyoto's first commitment period (2008-2012).

This is more than the estimated AAU demand of every other Kyoto signatory country combined.

Alexander Khanykov, head of Russian clean energy project developers Carbon Project Group, told Reuters on Friday that he believes Russia will save most of its AAUs past 2012 instead of selling them and possibly flooding an already precarious carbon market.
 
Just another reason why the U.S. made the correct choice in not getting involved in that ridiculous CO2/money swaping scheme. I am still waiting for the news to break that someone at the U.N. is getting rich off this scam. Give it tome time.
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350 Is The Magic Number

Posted by Aaron McLucas on Sunday, May 11, 2008 11:24:45 AM
   Bill McKibben, a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and author, wrote a opiniion piece in the LA Times today talking about how we need to get our CO2 back under 350 parts per million; hence his website, www.350.org.
   I am surpised his article was in the opinion section instead of plastered across the front page. He qoutes from Dr. James Hansons latest scientific paper in making his case.
 
   A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."

The tipping point is now 350 PPM of CO2; we are currently at 385 PPM and we have little time to get below 350 before something bad happens.
 
Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.

So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front.

Unfortunantly, he did not tell us what will happen. If your cholesterol is high you will have a stroke. If our CO2 stays above 350 we will...

   Here are the sacrifices we will have to make, just like we did with the Marshall plan:
 -- because "doing everything right" means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they're supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

Sounds like Communism to me. 
   I understand the worry, and we do need to reduce our CO2 emmisions, but once again we are telling people that we have such a short time to fix things. And under that kind of pressure, only a couple of scenerios can possible take place. Either we submit all power to our governments or to one world government to 'control' the climate, or we come up with horrible laws (like our current law of adding ethanol to our fuel) that could bankrupt our economies and do little to change the actual CO2 content of the atmoshpere (like Kyoto). And developing countries like China and India are, all by themselves, contributing huge amounts of CO2 to the Earth's atmosphere and could no longer be exempt from any future agreements. 

   I don't buy into the urgency and doomsday scenerios that some in the climate science field are pushing. Logical and well thought out solutions can be found and should be found, by the private sector, not handed to us by an overly powerful and suspect organization like the U.N. and the IPCC.

   







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Carbon Counting - Brad Pitt Sytle

Posted by Aaron McLucas on Sunday, May 11, 2008 10:26:43 AM
   Seems that Mr. Pitt gets a five star 'Hippy-crite' rating for his poor judgement when it comes to the environment. What a surprise?!
 
   The story goes on to talk about carbon counting and just how complicated it can get.
 
But before anyone gets too hopeful about lowering Americans’ greenhouse emissions, consider some figures from Ron Bailey at Reason. Using the calculator at Carbon Footprint, he found that he and his wife have a typical American footprint of about 20 tons of carbon dioxide apiece per year (with their chief sin being 15 tons from air travel). Then he envisioned a few lifestyle changes:
So in a quest to lower my impact on the environment, I calculated our carbon footprint if we cut our use of electricity and natural gas in half, switched our two cars for a single Toyota Prius and reduced our annual mileage by half, tripled our train travel, and never took an airplane. Furthermore, what if we became vegetarians, ate only local organic food in season, bought only second-hand clothes, furniture and appliances, never went to movies, bars or restaurants, and recycled or composted all our waste? Even then our combined carbon footprint would be 7.3 tons per year, but that would get us just below the world average of 4 tons per capita annually.
 
It's simply not worth it. And there is another problem with the above scenerio...after you have made all these changes, have you not become the classic definition of a 'Hippy'?  No Thanks!!!
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Mayor Bloomberg Dissing The Constitution

Posted by Aaron McLucas on Saturday, May 10, 2008 1:09:15 PM
   Obviously, this is not surprising coming from Bloomberg. He wants nothing more than to see guns vanish from the face of the Earth. And then what? Suddenly everybody will be nice to each other, and there will be no need to defend oneself any longer? That will never be the case in New York City, Mr. Bloomberg.
 
Image Preview
 
The sign behind him is his motto concerning the gun owner.
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The Real Tragedy In Mynmar

Posted by Aaron McLucas on Saturday, May 10, 2008 12:17:12 PM
   While Al Gore is out there talking up how driving our SUV's are killing the planet and causing devastating cyclones to ravage unsuspecting countries, the real tragedy is happening right before our eyes.
 
 Myanmar's military regime distributed international aid Saturday but plastered the boxes with the names of top generals in an apparent effort to turn the relief effort for last week's devastating cyclone into a propaganda exercise.

"We have already seen regional commanders putting their names on the side of aid shipments from Asia, saying this was a gift from them and then distributing it in their region," said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, which campaigns for human rights and democracy in the country.

"It is not going to areas where it is most in need," he said in London.
 
   If there was ever was a time to get involved with regime change, I would say this is it.
What does this say about Al Gore? Does he not see the real evil that is happening? Does he not see that the stagering amount of people who died is because of the leadership of that country, not the cyclone itself? And now the Junta leadership is taking advantage of the help that is arriving! It is sickening to watch! And shame on Al Gore for not speaking out against the real issue.
   
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