SETTING CARBON CAPS IS INSANE

We do not set the maximum amount of carbon-dioxide and methane etc., that the atmosphere can take. The planet does. And we were told at the big scientific conference in London at the beginning of 2005 that 400ppm is it--and that 'there is no safe increase' from the 380ppm that we were then at. Which means we have reached the planet's cap. Any figure dreamed up by brain-damaged politicians is therefore irrelevant, and dangerous (because it looks like useful action), and very stupid.

Setting 'carbon caps' is like a doctor telling a cancer patient that he has to have a certain amount of cancer. Just live with it, sir. And die.

DOOM AND GLOOM MERCHANTS

The pushers of the black stuff, the coal and oil peace-criminals, actually sell climate-ruin, disease, death, smog and solar-dimming, Doom and gloom.

RUIN NOT CHANGE; OVER-HEATING NOT WARMING

An old, wise, Roman saying says, 'When men cannot change things they change words', and Winston Churchill said, 'We build our houses then our houses build us.' The words we choose for things are very important, because they shape our thinking on them and generate our actions, or lack of action.

'Climate-change' and 'global-warming' sound so comfortable, so non-threatening. After all, a change is as good as a rest, variety is the spice of life, we are taught by advertising to thirst for the new. and everyone wants to be warm.

The truth is that we have climate-ruin and global-overheating. We have turned the sky into a weapon of mass-destruction; we are the cancer afflicting the planet.

IPCC AND THE MET OFFICE SCIENTIST

BBC News put a very revealing article beside the latest IPCC report, which makes even more gloomy reading than what the IPCC said. The IPCC report is of course a much tugged-at piece, a climate camel assembled by a committee, a throttled-back compromise. But Dr Vicky Pope, Head of the Climate Programme at the UK Met Office's prestigious Hadley Centre, puts things very plainly: 'Man-made climate change is established beyond reasonable doubt and further climate change is inevitable.'

'The latest climate models predict similar possible global average temperature changes to models used five or 10 years ago, ranging from 1.6-4.3C (2.9-7.7F) in the current best estimates using a mid-range emissions scenario.

'However, we are much more confident about these ranges. Using Hadley Centre models we have even been able to start to assign probabilities to more dangerous high temperature changes at the upper end of this range that could arise if climate turns out to be very sensitive to increased greenhouse gases.'

Which means they are not sure. And the actual readings are tracking along the top of the official predictions, which means we are veering towards the worst scenario, certainly not the best nor even the head-in-the-sand middling stuff. Because in a world hooked on the black stuff you can forget the mid-range scenario. So prepare for the worst (which on-the-edge computer models put at 10-14C round 2100).

SYDNEY, GLACIERS, GREAT BARRIER REEF DOOMED

The bad news on this ruined planet keeps coming at an accelerating pace. This week alone we have already been told that the world's glaciers are melting three times faster than they were in the 1980s, that Sydney is headed for almost permanent drought and a temperature rise of 5 degrees Celsius above the new global average, whatever that will be, and that the IPCC says the Great Barrier Reef will become a dead zone.

IPCC SAYS GLOBAL DOOM INEVITABLE

Now, at last, the IPCC is it seems going to tell us that we have passed the point of no-return, as the quotations below from The Observer, London, dated January 22nd, make chillingly clear.

'Global warming is destined to have a far more destructive and earlier impact than previously estimated, the most authoritative report yet produced on climate change will warn next week.

'A draft copy of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows the frequency of devastating storms will increase dramatically. Sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre; snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains; deserts will spread; oceans will become acidic, leading to the destruction of coral reefs and atolls; and deadly heatwaves will become more prevalent.

'The impact will be catastrophic, forcing hundreds of millions of people to flee their devastated homelands, particularly in tropical, low-lying areas, while creating waves of immigrants whose movements will strain the economies of even the most affluent countries.

'The really chilling thing about the IPCC report is that it is the work of several thousand climate experts who have widely differing views about how greenhouse gases will have their effect. Some think they will have a major impact, others a lesser role. Each paragraph of this report was therefore argued over and scrutinized intensely. Only points that were considered indisputable survived the process.

' "This is a very conservative document -- that's what makes it so scary," one senior UK climate expert said.

'Although the final wording of the report is still being worked on, the draft indicates that scientists now have their clearest idea so far about future climate changes, as well as about recent events. It points out that: twelve of the past thirteen years were the warmest since records began; ocean temperatures have risen at least 3km beneath the surface; glaciers, snow cover and permafrost have decreased in both hemispheres; sea levels are rising at the rate of almost 2mm a year; cold days, nights and frost have become rarer while hot days, hot nights and heatwaves have become more frequent.

'And the cause is clear, say the authors: It is very likely that [man-made] greenhouse gas increases caused most of the average temperature increases since the mid-20th century, the report says.

'To date, these changes have caused global temperatures to rise by 0.6 degrees Celsius The most likely outcome of continuing rises in greenhouses gases will be to make the planet a further 3 degrees hotter by 2100, although the report acknowledges that rises of 4.5 to 5 degrees could be experienced. Ice-cap melting, rises in sea levels, flooding, cyclones and storms will be an inevitable consequence.

'The report reflects climate scientists' growing fears that Earth is nearing the stage when carbon dioxide rises will bring irreversible change to the planet.'

Really? As anyone with half an eye can see we have already passed that stage.

Underlining the point is the resetting of the Doomsday Clock, which now says global-overheating is as serious a threat to the human race as nuclear weapons. The clock now say it's five minutes to midnight. More than a tad optimistic obviously, but tick, tick, tick...

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS IS PSYCHOLOGICAL ABUSE

But it is now far more subtle and lot less messy than when the Nazis did it. Instead of Auschwitz and Buchenwald we now have concentration camps of the mind and gas-ovens of the heart. But the result is the same. Good society goes up in smoke and generations are ruined.

In the story of the Emperor's new clothes, it was politically correct to say that his clothes were magnificent--'only fools cannot see them.'

The wise avoid the trap of allowing such psychological abuse to distort their vision and judgement, and their duty to cry out the truth.

CHRYSLER SCOFFS AT GLOBAL OVERHEATING

Van Jolissaint, Chrysler's chief economist (obviously a very learned scientist!), says
in this BBC item that climate-change is 'way, way in the future, with a high degree of uncertainty.', He was also scathing about the Stern Report, which put the cost of doing nothing at $US10 trillion.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, there is the prediction for 2007--that it will be the hottest on record (since 1860, that is). Is that 'way, way in the future'?

But Van Jolissaint knoweth better. For--behold!--he is the chief economist at Chrysler.

As this article in the New Zealand Herald shows, New Zealand's weather went very pear-shaped last year--and that is a country that used to have a stable climate. Before, that is, all the Van Jolissaints wrecked the planet. Is 2006 'way, way in the future'?

But Van Jolissaint knoweth better. For--behold!--he is the chief economist at Chrysler.

Then there is this dire
scientific prediction for Europe, which the EU takes very seriously.

But Van Jolissaint knoweth better. For--behold!--he is the chief economist at Chrysler.

No, he is a just another of the damned peace-criminals that have made hundreds of millions of planet-trashing machines, and called it good business. He, like them, is guilty of gross crimes against humanity. The number of deaths they have caused, and will cause, make Saddam Hussein look like a jolly saint.

But Van Jolissaint knoweth better. For--behold!--he is the chief economist at Chrysler.

NOW WE LIVE ON EARTH 2

If your thinking is still on Earth 1, the planet the human race used to live on, your brain is on the wrong planet. Your body is now on Earth 2, and heading for Earth 3, Earth 4, Earth 5....who knows?

The Earth we lived on for the past 10,000 years has gone. We now live on a different planet, and it is getting even more different at an accelerating rate. For one of thousands of examples, look at this BBC Report. Or go to the latest data from NOAA-NCDC which says that the September-November 2006 average temperature on land for the northern hemisphere was the highest on record (since 1880), and that 'anomalously warm temperatures have covered much of the globe throughout the year.'

Earth 1 thinking is wrong, dangerous, stupid. All our decisions now have to be Earth 2 decisions. We need Earth 2 thinking, Earth 2 planning, Earth 2 attitudes, Earth 2 actions. We have to do everything we can to prevent mass migration to Earth 3, Earth 4, Earth 5... Which is where we are all going IF WE DON'T DO SOMETHING FAST.

ARCTIC ICE MELTING FASTER AND FASTER


In 2004 Arctic research and modelling predicted that it would be free of ice in summer in fifty-five years. Now the prediction has been shunted forward to about thirty-five years from now, perhaps only twenty-five, as this BBC article spells out. See also this article on the same subject in the New Zealand Herald.

As this blog has said many times, we have passed the point of no return in global-overheating, and matters are far worse than most people like to think or officialdom wants to admit (a point given more support by this BBC article).

We are therefore the greatest loonies in all human history, because we are doing nothing about it worthy of the name. We need to go on to a war footing to battle against our own stupidity, so that we at very least knock the top of the worst of the ineluctable effects.

ALGAE, OCEANS, RAIN, 500PPM's NASTY CONSEQUENCES


These excerpts are from the November/December issue of Update, the magazine for members of the New York Academy of sciences, in an article about James Lovelock's latest book The Revenger of Gaia.'

'In 2001, the Amsterdam declaration on Global Change ... said: "The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components. The interactions and feedbacks between the component parts are complex and exhibit multi-sclae temporal and spatial variability." '

'Take the ocean and algae. Above 4 degrees Celsius water expands as it warms, and if it is warmed from above by the sunlight, the top layer of the ocean absorbs the sun's heat and expands to form a lighter layer than the cooler waters running beneath. That layer forms when the sun is strong enough to raise the surface temperature above about 10 degrees Celsius. What then happens is that the surface layer remains stable and does not mix with the lower layers. The surface layer has a depth of only about 30 to 100 metres and it puts a tremendous constraint on ocean life. In the course of a warm season all the nutrients in it can get used up, and their dead bodies sink to the bottom, leaving only small, starving populations of algae. "This is why warm and tropical waters are so clear and blue; they are the deserts of the ocean."

'Algae are unusually influential in the Earth's climate. They remove carbon-dioxide from the air and use it for growth in a process called pumping down. They are also the source of the gas dimethyl sulphide, which oxidises in the air to become the tiny nuclei that seed the droplets of clouds. Algae face threats on several fronts. Besides warming waters, there is a threshold of carbon-dioxide abundance at which they fail to be able to engage the removal process. This occurs at about 500 parts per million (ppm). According to Lovelock, at our present rate of growth we will reach 500ppm within the next 40 years.' [It is now 380ppm, increasing at over 2.5ppm per year, rising.]

EIGHTY PERCENT OF AMERICANS IN DENIAL


This quotation from a BBC News article says it all: 'A recent poll carried out by the Pew Research Centre in Washington suggested that only two out of five Americans think global warming is caused by human activity and only one in five were personally worried by climate change. People in 15 countries, rich and poor, were asked that question. Concern in the US was the lowest of them all.'

The world's worst polluter is also the world's worst sticker of its head in the Arabian sands, down its coal-mines, up its SUV exhausts, etc. Anywhere but into the light of truth.

What a country! Christopher Columbus should have stayed home.

CRITICAL ISSUES DOWN UNDER HAPPENING EVERYWHERE

This review in the New Zealand Herald of a book specifically about New Zealand applies to the whole planet. But the rise of 2-3 degrees Celsius being talked of is the most moderate projection, and the consequences even of that make 'alarming reading.' The earth is being pushed by human action from a 14-million-year-old icehouse to a greenhouse in nothing flat, and we can expect the oceans to rise 12 metres.

In Britain, the changes are already being felt. As its Climate-Change Minister says: 'Rising sea temperatures, ocean acidification and melting polar ice and not just predictions, they are happening now.'

Yet we still persist in our insane, murderous addiction to the black stuff. Cold turkey is required. Otherwise we will carry on turning the earth from a benign planet to a killing planet.

MASSIVE ICE-SHELF COULD COLLAPSE ANY TIME

This New Zealand Herald article spells it out. The whole Ross Ice Shelf could collapse at any time, with a significant effect on global sea-levels, and the huge West Antarctic iceshelf could follow it. The latter would raise the oceans at least 5 metres--perhaps as much as 17 metres.

Meanwhile, as the BBC reports, carbon emissions have been increasing two and half times faster since 2000 than in they were towards the end of the twentieth century.

We never learn. We refuse to connect the dots.

THE MYTH THAT BIO-FUEL IS SAFE


There is an old Roman saying, 'When men cannot change things they change words.' In our age there are countless examples of that arrant dishonesty. 'Bio-fuels' is one. It sounds good, because 'bio' means life, so it looks as if we can have our cake and eat it too: we can carry on with that abysmally crude nineteenth-century technology--the internal-combustion engine (ICE)--we can carry on getting from A to B on serial explosions, but without messing up the global environment.

Really? The test of whether something really does have human life at heart is to see if you can breathe, drink or eat the exhaust. If you survive, and healthily, you know it was good for you. If you end up sick or dead it was probably a bad idea.

What comes out the exhaust-pipe of a bio-fuelled vehicle is certainly not going to make you delirious with joie de vivre. Depending on the fuel, you may have no vivre at all. And the planet is unlikely to benefit one iota. For example, the incomplete combustion you get in ICEs gives you soot, which fouls the sky; and the particles are so fine they can pass straight through the walls of your lungs and lodge in your tissues, such as heart tissues. The label on the tank may say 'bio' but the soot is just as ruinous, not matter what the label says.

Then there is the notion that 'bio-fuel' is 'carbon-neutral.' True? No. The theory says that the next crop of the bio-fuel feedstock will remove from the atmosphere all the carbon-dioxide and carbon-monoxide produced by burning the fuel from the last crop. That assumes that it goes into the atmosphere and stays there. But it is not intelligent, it does not understand English, so it may not. It may go into the oceans. If so it will stay there for a thousand years, making them more acidic; then it will come out into the atmosphere and stooge about for an average of a century.

There is also a lag between when the fuel it burnt and when the next crop reaches maturity, and it is only at that point that could take out all the carbon produced from the previous year's mature crop. There may be some evening-out over the globe, but in that long lag there is a vast amount of carbon busy having its greenhouse effect. So the 'neutral' bit, even if it is there, is not there constantly; it goes up and down, like any feedback effect. There is no instant subtraction to blance the addition.

The blunt, inconvenient truth is that we have to stop pumping carbon into our sky, in any form. We already have far too much for optimal human life.

A major problem with adding more is that the effect is cumulative,; volcanic eruptions add yet more; and major ones add huge quantities. That means adding a huge amount on top of whatever we have put there. So the more we put there, the greater the peaks that we make through our additions, the more likely it is that anything added by Nature will take us over a climatic tipping-point, known or unknown.

Then there is the very tiny, very unimportant fact that human beings have to eat. Every square metre of land that is producing 'bio-fuels' is a square metre not producing food. But don't worry about starvation. So long as your bang-bang car can run you'll be fine. Dead behind the wheel, but still mobile, so you'll be fine. Yessir, fine. O goody! There is not way we have enough land to supply more than a fractio of the fuel we need.

On top of that, producing 'bio' fuels takes a huge amount of water. A lot is needed to grow the plant feedstock and a lot is needed to process it into whatever fuel you want.

If the process of producing the fuel involves fermentation that produces a lot of carbon-dioxide, the very gas we should not be producing. You also have to transport the feedstock and the fuel to where it is to be burnt, which consumes fuel, adding to the carbon-neutral falsehood.

Then if the fuel produced is ethanol or butynol or something else that can only be used as a blend with fossil-fuels, you will only have saved 10-20% fossil-fuel.

And having gone through all the process of getting the stuff to the pumps, you then put it through your bang-bang engine which the laws of physics in the form of the Carnot Cycle says cannot possibly be more than 33% efficient. Add to that all the losses in the mechanical linkages getting the power out to the wheels and you get only 16% where the rubber meets the road--you lost 84% of what you put in the tank. A huge effort and energy-investment for very little return.

'Bio-fuel', in short has nothing to do with life. It should be called 'morifuel' (mori means death).

HUMAN ENEMIES NUMBERS ONE AND TWO


China, which is fast overhauling the Number One Enemy of Humanity (the world's worst polluter, the United States of America, in case you haven't heard), is adding a new coal-fired power-station every week, according to the BBC World Service. Goody! Just what we needed: a second USA on filthy steroids.

ANY MURDEROUS FOOL CAN MAKE MONEY


Only the wise can make a habitable planet.

This article by James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University's Earth Institute, lays out the stark horror of what all the murderous black-stuff addicts have unleashed upon this planet.

And unless draconian action is taken against them, such that they are stopped in ten years at most (hah!), we shall thus, amongst other things, have set the world's oceans rising unstoppably to where they were three million years ago, the last time the global temperature was the least we are now heading for. They will be 24 metres higher (80 feet). And they could get there at up to a metre every twenty years, which has happened in the ancient past: half a metre a decade for centuries.

A metre rise every twenty years till the water is 24 metres higher might even make a few thieving murderers sit up. Might...

Of course, all that will start with a trickle. Perhaps the fact that the sea has risen 45mm since 1995, more than double the rate in previous decades, is the trickle starting to gather pace...

OCEANS AND GREENHOUSE GASES STARE DOWN THE BARREL


Collapse Of Ocean Fisheries Looming:

If we keep abusing the oceans the way we have been there will be no wild fish, no fish in the open oceans, worthy of mention by the middle of the century. That is the conclusion of a major, four-year, international study.

Different Trading World:

Global-overheating plus the inevitable end of the oil-supply will mean a huge change in oceanic trade, unless the thousands of ships plying the trade-routes get a different source of power. Without that, any country that cannot import and export over land will have to produce all its needs itself, or go without.


But Two Things Are Universal: Hydrogen and Stupidity

In spite all that, the greenhouse emissions from rich countries are rising and rising and rising and rising.... BBC News

DNA IS FAR MORE THAN WAS THOUGHT


Genetic researchers have long dismissed as 'junk' stretches of DNA that were not genes, a view I always refused to accept. But during the past year it has been found that the 'junk' has been faithfully reproduced generation after generation after generation, thus showing that it has an important function. Nature would not bother to take great pains to replicate junk. Also during the past year other researchers built a simple computer from DNA.

It is therefore obvious that DNA is not what the traditional view would have us believe. To see it only as genes is, literally, like seeing a computer as nothing but program and dismissing the rest as junk. Genes are only part of the story. DNA is far, far more. It is integrated processor, data-storage, program and power-source. It can therefore be seen as intelligent; it has design-intelligence; it is design-intelligence: stored design with the intelligence and power to manufacture it.

That applies not only to DNA: cell-proteins in general are processors. Which explains why the folding that is so critical alters the way that protein processor functions. Folding affects the shape and therefore the function of the processor; it also affects its internal power-level because it alters the electrical potential of the molecule. When the processor and its level of self-power are different the function of the molecule are different.

It has been found that bacteria communicate with chemicals and by that means intelligently co-ordinate their actions. Therefore DNA and other complex proteins also communicate using lesser chemicals, thus forming processing molecular networks, just as computers communicate with packets of data over networks; there is also electrical communication. Thus there is an intelligent processing network at the level of complex bio-molecules, literally making the cell; on top of that is the network of cells, together making up simple organisms, or organs in higher organisms; on top of that is the network of organs together making up the organism.

A computing analogy is that the complex molecules are the components in a computer, with DNA being the CPU; on top of that computers are formed into local networks; on top of that they are formed into the global Internet.

DNA is not only a programmed computer, complete with memory, data-storage and a power-source, it is self-programming, self-improving, exploring, like T-cells, for a better 'fit' to the external needs of the organism.

The few-percent different in genetic instructions between chimps and humans (although significant in such a huge total) is therefore only a fraction of the story. The processors are different, so the resulting organisms are different. A different design-intelligence, a different level of processing power, implements a different design. The DNA processor of a human being is far more intelligent and complex than the DNA processor of an insects or bacteria, so we are far more intelligent and complex. Even when the same code or data is processed the result is different. To adapt Marshall McLuhan, the processing is the organism.

That is true not only of the making on an organism it is also true of its behaviour and activities. For instance, a bird is not taught how to build a nest or rear young, etc.. It just knows, because its molecular processing informs its actions. There is behavioural intelligence, stored behavioural design at molecular level.

The same applies to memory--indeed to thinking in general. It is essentially molecular. Above that is the neural level, the functioning of neurons; above that is the functioning of the brain, all the neurons acting in concert, firstly in the sub-networks that are the discrete areas of the brain, then in the complete network.

A thought or a memory may thus be a unique network of neurons identified by marker proteins stored only in that neural set. Then to recall the memory would just be a matter of re-establishing the same network by establishing the start of it, or sufficient of it to begin the trace, then that starter neuron would interrogate all the ones linked to it to establish which have that protein, and so on, till that entire 'thought-net' has been searched out, retrieved and be firing. Any neuron could be in thousands of thought-nets, each very different, because each cell can have thousands of different proteins; it would just be linked to a different neural set characterised by the marker protein unique to that set. Modification of a thought or memory would be then the addition or deletion of neurons from a thought-net by making or eliminating the relevant marker neuron specific to that net.

The only argument left between the ungodly and the godly is whether that fundamental DNA and molecular intelligence arose spontaneously from nothing or was put there. If put there, was it processed into being by the quantum computer called Earth (Gaia, if you prefer), a subset of the quantum computer called the Universe? Or was it all put there by God?

But both sides of that puerile ID argument (i.e., 'intelligent design' versus evolution) have to accept that absolute proof, and also therefore absolute disproof, of the ultimate source are beyond the reach of human science. Neither side can absolutely prove the existence of anything, not even their own existence.

Relative proof, however, which is knowledge of communication, or knowledge of sensory awareness both internally with oneself and externally with others, is another matter. We all do that every day. And as Winston Churchill neatly put it: Men often stumble over the truth. Most of them manage to pick themselves up and carry on as if nothing had happened.

BUSINESS IS NOT THE ECONOMY, STUPIDS

These five paragraphs by the BBC's Science Corrrespondent, Richard Black, should be required reading for every politician, especially those with their heads in the Arabian sands on the subject of global-overheating, more especially those who refuse to act because it would be 'bad for business,' such as George W et alia:

'And while [Blair] warns of "catastrophic" consequences of climate change in one breath, in the next he can say, as he did at the Davos economic forum last year and again last week, that no climate action will be taken which damages business.

'There are two big problems here. One is that Mr Blair is mistaking "business" for "the economy"; the other is that he is neglecting the trans-generational nature of climate impacts and solutions.

'Business is not the only driver of a healthy economy. It is affected by war, disease, storms, global events: even (if you live in north Africa) by plagues of locusts.

'Stern's fundamental message is that business as usual is doing a certain amount of harm to the economy - not too much now, but much more later unless things change.

'If a mild pinprick for business now will save it from wholesale cauterisation later, we surely need a level of politics rather more subtle than a simple ban on moves which are "bad for business".'

The economy is the planet, life, society. Business is only money.

The full text of Black's item can be found by clicking here.