A Cool Look At Global Warming

There’s a fun, 10 question test on global warming at the web site of Monte Hieb and Harrison Hieb:

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/GlobWarmTest/start.html

The test comes with a health and safety warning:

“This section contains sound science, not media hype, and may therefore contain material not suitable for young people trying to get a good grade in political correctness”

Monte Hieb is chief engineer at the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training. Unfortunately this association with the coal industry will doubtless encourage the dismissal of his test out of hand by those with ad hominem tendencies!

There is a highly amusing post by Mark Steyn about the “Rev. Al Gore” in the Chigago Sun-Times March 4, 2007

I Particularly liked this:

“…George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas is more environmentally friendly than the Gore mansion in Tennessee. According to the Nashville Electric Service, the Eco-Messiah’s house uses 20 times more electricity than the average American home. The average household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours. In 2006, the Gores wolfed down nearly 221,000 kilowatt-hours”

And this on the concept of conscience-salving by “carbon offsets“:

“How do “carbon offsets” work? Well, let’s say you’re a former vice president and you want to reduce your “carbon footprint,” but the gorgeous go-go Gore gals are using the hair dryer every night. So you go to a carbon-credits firm and pay some money and they’ll find a way of getting somebody on the other side of the planet to reduce his emissions and the net result will be “carbon neutral.” It’s like in Henry VIII’s day. He’d be planning a big ox roast and piling on the calories but he’d give a groat to a starving peasant to carry on starving for another day and the result would be calorie-neutral“

More of this excellent knockabout stuff here

The conjecture of AGW (human-caused global warming) is interesting science - but I would argue it is much more contentious than is generally supposed.

I guess most “contrarians” are driven by the idea that the AGW conjecture has been hijacked by various folks to serve some nefarious agenda: anti-capitalism, displaced post-christian guilt, anti-americanism, and so forth.

In the popular imagination the media has created a consensus where that symbol of capitalism the car is deeply implicated with the idea of “global warming”. We have to tax/cut down/ban/ the use of gas-guzzling vehicles (especially in the good ‘ole USA of course!).

How interesting then to discover that in fact according to a new report from LEAD:

The livestock sector is…responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2 equivalent. This is a higher share than transport

Now when you think about it, especially in the current climate of “climate change hysteria”, that is a pretty amazing assertion. It sets a bit of a different perspective, no?

So who is LEAD? If you’re thinking it’s some conservative think-tank “funded by big oil” (the knee-jerk response to inconvenient truths for those sympathetic to Gore’s Incovenient Truth), you’d be quite wrong. LEAD (Livestock, Environment and Development LEAD Initiative) is a multi-institutional initiative of FAO formed “to promote ecologically sustainable livestock production systems”. OK, I hear you ask, who is FAO? Well they are the FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS. Now these good people are NOT contrarians and deniers (what a surprise!). In fact in the same report from LEAD we read the perfectly politically correct:

With rising temperatures, rising sea levels, melting icecaps and glaciers, shifting ocean currents and weather patterns, climate change is the most serious challenge facing the human race

But where in the current political and media debate about global warming do you see any acknowledgment that it is livestock that is a bigger problem than transport?

My little blog consists of the jottings of a global warming sceptic (skeptic/contrarian/denier - whatever).

Ironically though I reckon our household’s “carbon footprint” is pretty darn small. Certainly it’s smaller than most of my pro-global warming friends & relatives. In fact in that admittedly far-from-representative sample there seems to be a clear correlation between global warming advocacy/fanaticism/fervour and air miles expended trotting around the globe! Liberal guilt offset by liberal indulgence I guess…

For my part I love the idea of energy self-sufficiency - but as an end in itself and not to “save the planet”. And here is something I have just come across that I think is really cool.

At http://www.localcooling.com/ you can download a bit of freebie software that can control and monitor your PC’s energy use and settings. What’s fun is that it shows you the energy savings you are making in real-time translated into concrete terms such as how many trees and how many gallons of oil you have saved. Also (if you wish) your savings data can be posted back to localcooling.com where they publish the total savings being made by all participating users.

Here’s how it looks:
(Unfortunately the web servers at localcooling.com that host the application seem to struggle with demand. If all you see is white space below this then that’s because their servers are down. Perhaps their wind farm is becalmed…)

N.B. to get those stats to show in this blog I had to place the code in an HTML iframe. Unfortunately that means the link “Join The Fight” won’t work. Instead you can fight your fight by going here