extracted from weblog three hundred and sixty three on Friday 29th December 2006

A Government Report hailed by Tony Blair as ‘the most important document ever published in the history of the world’ predicts a terrifying scenario for mankind in the very near future. As temperatures soar to levels which will make all life unsustainable and sea levels rise by an estimated 120 feet flooding more than 90 percent of the earth’s land mass, experts have predicted that house prices in the south-east of England may collapse by as much as 20 percent. This catastrophic end of the world scenario could mean that a typical 4-bedroom detached family house in Godalming could see as much as £75 000 wiped off its asking price overnight.

The story was the same throughout Great Britain as hard-pressed decent hardworking homeowners read through the 565-page Stern Report with a sense of mounting despair. Sidney Greenslade a 71-year old retired accountant who lives with his 69-year old wife Pearl in Chertsey Surrey said ‘We bought our executive bungalow in 1989 as our pension scheme. Now we find that the sun is about to fry the earth to a crisp and where does that leave me and Mrs Greenslade? I blame the government.’

First-time buyers wept openly in the streets as the government condemned them to death by drowning as the ice caps melt before they had even got a first foot on the property ladder.

To accompany publication of The Very Stern Report commissioned by Her Majesty’s Treasury the Daily Mail produced this Ten Point Summary headlined We’re All Going To Die Unless We Pay More Tax.

1. Global Warming is the greatest threat which has ever faced the human race;
2. Unless very drastic steps are taken immediately human life as we know it will end in forty-five minutes;
3. It is now an unchallenged fact that as CO2 levels soar to unsustainable levels, scalding hot giant tsunamis will sweep across the world at millions of miles an hour leaving a path of unprecedented devastation in their wake;
4. No form of life will be left unscathed from the mighty elephant to the humblest bacteria;
5. That includes the human race who face imminent and painful extinction unless extremely drastic steps are taken by responsible governments acting in the best interests of humanity as a whole and those of future generations;
6. It is too late for mere talk. It is now the time for action...and unprecedentedly drastic action at that;
7. There can be no half measures;
8. There is only one possible way in which the planet can be saved from a fate too horrible to imagine;
9. Taxes will have to be raised immediately. And by quite a lot;
10. And, to be honest, Gordon’s run out of money, so this end-of-the-world thing couldn’t have come at a better time.

Not to be upstaged the Daily Express published an article headlined Did Global Warming Kill Diana? Here it is.

'Scientists yesterday revealed that the Arctic winter that descended on Paris ten years ago causing Princess Diana’s Mercedes to skid on ice whilst trying to avoid a polar bear driving a white Fiat Uno was actually caused by global warming on the direct orders of the Duke of Edinburgh. Said one meteorological expert yesterday, ‘A thick fug reduced visibility around fuggin’ Paris because the fuggin’ Duke ordered MI6 to increase fuggin’ carbon emissions all over the fuggin’...continued every Monday [Ed.].

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extracted from weblog three hundred and sixty two published on Thursday 28th December 2006

The Chinook is a mountain wind named after a Native American tribe from the Pacific North-West. They named it snow-eater because of the heat of the wind racing down the eastern slopes of the Rockies. Moist winds sweeping off the Pacific are lifted up over the mountain range, cool and condense into thick clouds and pour with rain. Then the winds become dried out and as they race down the other side of the mountain they warm up and dry even more.

The temperature change is so dramatic that on 14th January 1972 at Loma Montana a 57 Celsius rise was registered from -48C to +9C…a world record for a 24-hour temperature increase. Boulder in Colorado often gets particularly hard hit by Chinooks as the winds are funneled down through nearby canyons. A gust of 143 miles per hour was registered during January 1971 and in January 1982 a Chinook caused more than $10 million of damage.

In my Cloud Cuckoo Land blog I mentioned the scientific problem with Temperature Gauge Data in Temperature-Time Series. I wrote that you can either measure the temperature in the same place for as long as possible…hopefully for centuries...or you measure under similar operant conditions. Here is some of what I wrote.

‘The first course of action seems to make sense because the shape of the landscape affects the local climate. A number this side of the hill will not be the same as one from the other side. But there is a problem. A hundred years ago your measuring point was in the middle of a field five miles out of town. Today it’s in the middle of a shopping centre’.

The operant conditions of your data point matter because built-up environments are typically several degrees warmer. I ended by remarking that ‘even something as simple as collecting data is far from simple’. This data quality effect might be enough to explain the fact that global temperature data from the Northern Hemisphere appears to suggest that it has warmed more than the Southern Hemisphere…something that is puzzling scientists as it is inherently unlikely.

In a scientifically-literate world this 200-word caveat about Data Quality would be unnecessary. But Public Science is now a branch of Public Relations...and truth an early casualty.

The reported average 30-year temperature in Britain from 1961 to 1990 was 9.47 Celsius. Since 1990 every second year has been at least one degree higher than this. The top yearly averages since have been 1995-10.52C; 1997-10.53C; 1999-10.63C; 2002-10.60C; 2003-10.50C; 2004-10.48C and 2006-10.84C.

This year has been particularly warm. July was billed as Britain’s warmest month ever at 19.66 Celsius and we also had the warmest September since 1729 at 16.55C. Globally 2006 will be our sixth warmest year since 1850.

There are Carbonistas who point the finger of suspicion at The Carbon Economy to explain all this but little of their science stands up to rigorous scrutiny.

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extracted from weblog three hundred and fifty six first published on Friday 22nd December 2006

Two years ago a massive earthquake off the coast of Sumatra triggered the biggest and most devastating tsunami known in recent history. The quake measuring more than 9.0 on the Richter Scale released monstrous waves up to 100 feet high along coastlines across the Indian Ocean from Somalia to Thailand that left 230 000 people killed or lost. The immediate cause of the Asian Tsunami was a sideways rupture of about 50 feet along a seismic fault line under the sea with the sea bed lifting up some ten feet or so.

But the moon may also have played a part in it because recent research has shown that this fault line is sensitive to the monthly lunar cycle. A team of British scientists compared the patterns of quakes and tremors including the Boxing Day 2004 Tsunami with the phases of the moon. Publishing in Geophysical Research Letters the scientists reported that quakes were 86% more likely around full moons and 38% more likely around new moons when tides are at their most extreme. The movement of huge masses of water at these tides could stress fault lines under strain.

As our planet whizzes across the face of the sun at this time of the year on its elliptical orbit...and summer is now on the way...it has always seemed surprising to me that the tilt of the earth?s axis is responsible for the difference between hot summers and cold winters. At the Winter Solstice the Northern Hemisphere is leaning away from the Sun while at the Summer Solstice it is leaning towards it. Why should a few thousand miles make so much difference in ninety three million. Perhaps someone can explain before I try to set up my life to spend half of it in New Zealand.

One person asking such questions was James Croll. In 1864 he published a ground-breaking scientific paper on how fluctuations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun could explain the coming and going of Ice Ages. He had figured out that ice ages came and went as the earth's orbit changed from a circle to an oval-shape...and with changes in the tilt of the Earth. According to his calculations only small changes in the Earth's Orbit were needed because the cooling was amplified by the huge ice sheets reflecting heat from their white surface back into space.

It took some 60 years for these ideas to become widely accepted...and another hundred years to be buried as Bad News by the Global Warming Conspirators. But at least Croll who died in 1890 gained recognition as an inspirational scientist in his own lifetime suggesting there was more good honest horse sense talked about our planet's climate before the Computer Boys hijacked the subject with their Clip Boards and Computer Forecasting Models.

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extracted from weblog three hundred and nineteen first published on Wednesday 15th November 2006

2006 broke the record for the hottest September. UK temperatures averaged sixty degrees Fahrenheit and broke the previous record from 1949 by one and a half degrees. Ireland also broke its September record…as did Oslo. The other side of the world has been unusually warm too. It is spring in New Zealand which has had the third warmest September on record. And Melbourne logged its warmest September since records began in 1907.

Australia has been unusually dry with drought meaning poor grain harvests and rising bread prices next year. Price hikes may be a Dead Cert but not for this reason. Three quarters of the world’s corn exports come from the US but these are vanishing fast.

In South Dakota, Ethanol Distilleries now claim half the corn harvest. And if all the Ethanol Plants proposed for Iowa get built they would use all the corn grown in the state. There is a US Ethanol Subsidy of 51¢ per gallon until 2010 so with oil at $70 per barrel distilling Fuel Alcohol promises huge profits. World grain consumption grew by 20 million tons in 2006…with 14 million tons of it going into the fuel tanks of American cars.

Almost everything we eat can be converted into fuel so the line between Food and Energy Economics is rapidly disappearing. Ten years ago Food Processors and Livestock Producers converted Farm Commodities into products for Supermarket Shelves. Now the Ethanol Distilleries and Biodiesel Refineries are piling into the market for Farm Commodities to supply fuel to service stations.

So the Oil Price is now the support price for Food Commodities. The vast number of distilleries coming on stream is also drawing grain away from beef, pork, poultry, milk, and eggs production. Another problem is that corn and soybean production in the American Midwest is ecologically unsustainable. It produces massive topsoil erosion and pollutes surface and groundwater with pesticides and fertilizer runoff that travels down the Mississippi River to deplete oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico.

The world’s crop-based fuel production is concentrated in Brazil, the United States and Europe. Last year the US and Brazil each produced over four billion gallons of ethanol. Brazil uses sugarcane as the feedstock while the US distillers use grain…mostly corn. The 55 million tons of US corn going into ethanol this year represent 16% of the country’s grain harvest…and supplies 3% of its automotive fuel.

Brazil is converting half of its sugar harvest into Fuel Ethanol …doubling the world sugar price by effectively withdrawing 10% of the harvest. In 2005 the European Union produced 1600 million gallons of biofuels…half of it biodiesel produced from vegetable oil in Germany and France and the other half ethanol from grain in France, Spain and Germany.

Last year China converted two million tons of grain into ethanol mostly corn but also some wheat and rice. In India ethanol is produced largely from sugarcane. Thailand is concentrating on ethanol from cassava, while Malaysia and Indonesia are investing heavily in additional palm oil plantations as well as biodiesel refineries. Malaysia has approved 32 biodiesel refineries but has also had the sense to call a pause to assess the future for Palm Oil Supplies.

The grain required to fill a 25-gallon SUV gas tank with ethanol can feed one person for a year. Ominously the world grain stocks are at their lowest level in 34 years with 76 million more mouths to feed each year. As the reality of this trade-off works its way through global markets the poorest 2 000 million people in the world who already spend well over half of any income they have on food will be priced out. Grain importers like Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria and Mexico will need to find the money to match their grain imports with imports of tanks and guns and riot gear.

Back to our European superstate where its joined-up government has decreed that by 2020 ten percent of all transport fuel in the EU must be biofuels. Forget the science and get the arithmetic. To meet their share of the EU target Brits will need 14 million tons of wheat. At present the country only grows half of this…and puts it on the kitchen table. But ever since a barrel of oil set the bread price, wheat prices have doubled. Goodness knows where they will be by 2020.

What to do? Reclaim set-aside and annihilate the country’s bird and wildlife populations? Global set-aside trading exchange like Jimmy Carter promised Robert Mugabe & Joshua Nkomo back at Lancaster House in 1980? Import palm oil from Indonesia and massacre orang-utans whose tropical forest habitats have made way for palm oil plantations? Looks like those tanks, guns and riot gear will be needed here.

Picture the scene. Lunch-time at the Travellers’ Club in St. James. No briefcases or files allowed in the member’s lounge. Just the sound of hushed voices from the leather upholstery.

‘Time we set the terrorist laws on those tree huggers at CAAT. Had it up to here with their bloody FOIRs.’
‘Only a thousand media chaps at the MOD? Double it. Get the girls in.’
‘Should let BAE have those arms salesmen over at the DESO. Learn from the Yanks. Call ‘em private contractors. Funding from black ops. Get 'em off balance sheet.’
‘Good piece by Roberts. That’s the way to go, old boy. Must stay ahead of the dykes and pinkos, eh what? Them or us!
Your father in the Guards? Well, I’ll be blowed! And at Eton together too!’

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