At least Dr Karl Kruszelnicki was prepared to initially engage me, pity he failed to answer my question based on his earlier one word answer to my initial statement.
Does Dr Karl honestly think our sun plays no significant role whatsoever in driving our planets climate?
What would our planet be like if the Sun suddenly went cold?
Seriously, Dr Karl, it’s presumptuous to think we humans are a match for the sun.
Obviously, the Mammoth’s didn’t build any Wind Turbines…
A giant meteor was probably responsible for wiping out the woolly mammoth, scientists believe.
It has long been thought that hunting was the cause of the creatures’ extinction, but researchers have now revised their opinion.
They believe a huge meteor smashing through the Earth's atmosphere broke up into ten million tonnes of fiery fragments, scattering over four continents.
These fragments are thought to have released toxic gas which poisoned the air and blacked out the sun, causing temperatures to plummet, plants to die and landscapes to alter forever.
Via Huff Post
Without sunlight, photosynthesis would cease. After all, photosynthesis is how plants and some organisms use sunlight to make food from carbon dioxide and water.
"This is huge, 99.9 percent of the natural productivity on Earth is done by photosynthesis, which requires the sun," video blogger Michael Stevens says. "Without the sun, plants would no longer be able to inhale carbon dioxide and exhale life-sustaining oxygen."
And without sunlight, the Earth would get very, very cold. Earth's surface temperature now averages about 57 degrees Fahrenheit, but by the end of the first week without the sun, the average surface temperature would be below the freezing point.
It’s an American article that equally applies here in Australia.
Via the Fiscal Times
Why in the world is the government still forcing ethanol down the gas tanks of American consumers? Ethanol was meant to help clean up the air and to keep gasoline prices in check. It does neither. Instead, it degrades the environment and is currently boosting gas prices. Talk about a teachable moment. No program could better explain why so many Americans oppose Big Government.
Most Americans probably assume that corn-based ethanol is “green” -- it is not. Numerous studies have shown that ethanol use does not significantly lower emissions, but instead actually harms the environment. That conclusion has led numerous green groups to abandon their earlier support for ethanol.
…Production of ethanol requires enormous amounts of (sometimes scarce) water. A Salon piece last year reported, “The World Policy Institute has calculated…that it takes 32 gallons of water to produce enough oil to drive from New York to D.C. and back again. The production of enough corn-based biofuel to fuel the same drive requires more than 35,000 gallons of water”.Another problem is that the fertilizers spread on corn-growing acreage pollute streams feeding the Mississippi watershed and the Gulf of Mexico. On their website, Friends of the Earth reports, “Chemical runoff from corn fields is a primary cause of the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico — an aquatic area the size of Massachusetts so polluted that nothing can survive in it.” Further, the nitrogen in fertilizer also releases nitrous oxide, a more toxic substance than CO2, into the atmosphere. So much for ethanol as a clean fuel.
…According to a 2010 piece by Craig and Andrew Hug for the Environmental Working Group, “Between 2005 and 2009, taxpayers spent a whopping $17 billion to subsidize ethanol. In return, they got a reduction in overall oil consumption equal to an unimpressive 1.1 mile-per-gallon increase in overall fuel economy.” Now Americans are paying above-market prices for gasoline. Will the Obama administration and Congress confront the powerful ethanol lobby and undo this albatross? Not likely. Our central planners are hard at work trying to increase the ethanol in our tank. As said earlier, a teachable moment.
Via the Daily Mail
The graph above blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.
Steadily climbing orange and red bands on the graph show the computer predictions of world temperatures used by the official United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The estimates – given with 75 per cent and 95 per cent certainty – suggest only a five per cent chance of the real temperature falling outside both bands.
But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely.
The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated.
Meanwhile…
TAXPAYERS have already seen their power bills rise by almost $200 a year on average under the carbon tax - and now they will have to fork out for it a second time.
NSW Treasurer Mike Baird said almost $1 billion was predicted to be wiped from the state's declining economy as the Gillard government raided its coffers under the tax.
He said consumers, who have been stung with energy bill increases of 52 per cent in the past three years, were already contributing $580 million to the federal government this year. And in what he described as a "double hit," new Treasury modelling revealed the state-owned electricity generators would also forgo $355 million in revenue to the federal government.
Climate Change has been subverted by the watermelons of the green movement. There aims: to extend the powers of government; to raise taxes; to weaken the capitalist system; to curtail personal freedom; to redistribute income; to bring ever-closer the advent of an eco-fascist New World Order.
Update:
And the Carbon Tax is now being blamed for the record number of company closures
The carbon tax is contributing to a record number of firms going to the wall with thousands of employees being laid off and companies forced to close factories that have stood for generations.
Soaring energy bills caused by the Government's climate change scheme have been called the "straw that broke the camel's back" by company executives and corporate rescue doctors who are trying to save ailing firms.
New data from the corporate regulator reveals insolvencies have hit a record high over the past 12 months, led by widespread failures in manufacturing and construction, which accounted for almost one-fifth of collapses.
The Australian Securities & Investments Commission reports there were 10,632 company collapses for the 12 months to March 1 - averaging 886 a month - with the number of firms being placed in administration more than 12 per cent higher than during the global financial crisis
While the high Australian dollar is seen as the main factor behind manufacturing closures, experts say the carbon tax is adding to increasing cost burdens for many firms struggling to stay afloat.Peter Macks, principal of Adelaide-based insolvency firm Macks Advisory, said the carbon tax was "quite debilitating" for a number of hotel operators who he said had been "struggling for a long time".
Well done, Labor…
It would seem sensible to me to spend R&D money on this very promising development rather than continuing to subsidise unless ‘renewables’ such as wind and solar.
Via MIT Tech Review
Transatomic Power, an MIT spinoff, is developing a nuclear reactor that it estimates will cut the overall cost of a nuclear power plant in half. It’s an updated molten-salt reactor, a type that’s highly resistant to meltdowns. Molten-salt reactors were demonstrated in the 1960s at Oak Ridge National Lab, where one test reactor ran for six years, but the technology hasn’t been used commercially.
The new reactor design, which so far exists only on paper, produces 20 times as much power for its size as Oak Ridge’s technology. That means relatively small, yet powerful, reactors could be built less expensively in factories and shipped by rail instead of being built on site like conventional ones. Transatomic also modified the original molten-salt design to allow it to run on nuclear waste.
…The new reactor is expected to save money not only because it can be built in a factory rather than on site but also because it adds safety features—which could reduce the amount of steel and concrete needed to guard against accidents—and because it runs at atmospheric pressure rather than the high pressures required in conventional reactors.
A conventional nuclear power plant is cooled by water, which boils at a temperature far below the 2,000 °C at the core of a fuel pellet. Even after the reactor is shut down, it must be continuously cooled by pumping in water. The inability to do that is what caused the problems at Fukushima: hydrogen explosions, releases of radiation, and finally meltdown.
Using molten salt as the coolant solves some of these problems. The salt, which is mixed in with the fuel, has a boiling point significantly higher than the temperature of the fuel. The reactor has a built-in thermostat—if it starts to heat up, the salt expands, spreading out the fuel and slowing the reactions. That gives the mixture a chance to cool off. In the event of a power outage, a stopper at the bottom of the reactor melts and the fuel and salt flow into a holding tank, where the fuel spreads out enough for the reactions to stop. The salt then cools and solidifies, encapsulating the radioactive materials. “It’s walk-away safe,” says Dewan, the company’s chief science officer. “If you lose electricity, even if there are no operators on site to pull levers, it will coast to a stop.”
The new design improves on the original molten-salt reactor by changing the internal geometry and using different materials. Transatomic is keeping many of the design details to itself, but one change involves eliminating the graphite that made up 90 per cent of the volume of the Oak Ridge reactor. The company has also modified conditions in the reactor to produce faster neutrons, which makes it possible to burn most of the material that is ordinarily discarded as waste. A conventional reactor produces about 20 metric tons of high-level waste a year, and that material needs to be stored for 100,000 years. The 500-megawatt Transatomic reactor will produce only four kilograms of such waste a year, along with 250 kilograms of waste that has to be stored for a few hundred years.
And they did it with only $5 million in R&D funding.
New technological advances may make it possible in the near future to engineer a coal-powered car so clean that it produces nearly no polluting emissions, including carbon dioxide, experts tell FoxNews.com.
“There are many exciting possibilities for the clean coal technology,” says Liang-Shih Fan, a chemical engineer and director of Ohio State University’s Clean Coal Research Laboratory. “We found a way to release the heat from coal without burning it. This could be applicable for many industries.”
Fan last week disclosed that he had discovered a way to get the energy out of coal without burning it, using iron-oxide pellets as an oxygen source, and contain the reaction in a small chamber from which pollutants cannot escape. The only waste product would be water and solid coal ash -- no greenhouse gases. As an added benefit, the metal from the iron-oxide is recyclable.
The energy creation process is commonly known as “oxidation,” and is the chemical combination of a substance with oxygen. The use of the process is envisioned by Fan and his colleagues as a replacement for old-fashioned coal power plants, which spew greenhouse gases.
No wonder Labor is about to do a complete 180 and consider dissolving the $218 million-a-year Climate Change Department as part of a cost-saving restructure that could see it merged with another government bureaucracy.
So who is better at solving problems? A useless bureaucracy that costs $218 million a year to run or a bunch of real scientists who are given a modest $5 million R&D grant?
So why is Flannery still Climate Commissioner?
Special thanks to Steve Hunter for permission to reproduce his cartoons exclusively on Andy’s RANT!
Steve Hunter is a freelance cartoonist and illustrator and lives in Buderim Queensland.
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