AGW as Mass Delusion

Heh. Couldn't have put this better meself. There are two mass delusion abroad IMHO: AGW being one (natch) and the notion that financial Ponzi schemes will not cause pain, the other. Sigh. As Dylan sings (Things have Changed):

People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

Another climactic known is revealed to be unknown

This leetle bombshell affects, oh, around half the marine organisms in the world. In essence, by omitting the 'assumed in the current paradigm' step of releasing oxygen while consuming carbon dioxide, these organisms have never done a darn thing in the carbon cycle.

That sound you may hear if you listen closely is a whole bunch of Gerbil Worming gravy train riders saying 'bugger' and re-calibrating their GCM's to show that We're All Freaking Doomed, still. Gotta keep them grant shekels flowing.

The shekel quote:

Wolf Frommer, director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology, agrees about the discovery's ground-breaking importance. "If we thought we have understood photosynthesis, this study proves that there is much to be learned about these basic physiological processes."

Solar is subject to Moore's Law

This piece (ht: Instapundit) is a useful reminder that the good ol' entrepreneurial business is the way forward. Earnest Gummint committess won't cut it. Bit like the UN in Darfur - no skin in the game, so no real incentive to step in and help.

Moore's law: explanation here - capability rises/price halves roughly every 18-24 months. Works for me.

The money quote:

"You may not like their politics, or their attitude, or their style. But if we really do have an energy revolution in this country and free ourselves from our addiction to fossil fuels, it will be because of hard-charging, take-no-prisoners entrepreneurs like T.J. Rodgers — not UN committees, environmental groups, or government officials."

I plan to fully solarise my house in 2-5 years time. Like, net grid-producer, not consumer. Bye-bye to power bills, and much more resilience. There is a host of up-and-coming firms making thin-film solar, and the grid-tie plus feed-in-tarriff contractual stuff is starting to get worked on by the more aware power companies.

I thus don't fret too much about the lakes, the need for more power stations burning whatever - plutonium, coal, natural gas - or the State of Fear pronouncements about pylons, wind power or draining Gaia of all her internal heat via geothermal take.

The Sun will do it for me. Oh wait. It seems to be cooling. Toyota!

Weather cooling?

I follow Anthony Watts, and he's come across this, from the wonderfully named Joe Bastardi. JB sees a re-run of the early-50's pattern of a La Nina which stopped the global warming (which had peaked in the '30's) in its tracks.

Yup, we need to be more worried about cooling than warming. As someone who actually farms for a living notes, one nights cooling can kill your crop. One night's warming never can.

And as NOAA has just noted, this January of 2008 has been 0.35 F cooler than the 20th century average.

Hmm. Add a quiet sun (check the sunspot count and then go figure the Chilling Stars theory) - quiet sun, cool Earth.

Oh, and coolist or warmist, don't forget to Be afraid, be very afraid. After all, a State of Fear is the default setting for the zeitgeist, no?

The Food Channel strikes again

This little anecdote has to be one of this season's LOL hits....

How's about:

a huhu grub inside a
rifleman inside a
tui inside a
pigeon inside a
blue duck inside a
little bush moa inside a
New Zealand eagle

I'd just be exerting my customary/culinary/cultural rights.

Oh dear. Some of these here boids seem to have been extincificated.

Culinary rights clearly have a Lot to Answer For.

No, wait. Some of 'em went west during the Little Ice Age. So we'll blame a lack of Globble Warmening.

No, wait...

Abiotic Oil - Gaia's fruit after all?

This is the latest (and, to my mind, clearest) statement about the origin of Oil - it ain't a 'fossil' fuel at all, according to those contararian Ruskies. It's a natural product, created deep within the Earth and slow-erupted up into the crust. Where it can be found by following geological signs, but just not the ones the Western scientific world tends to use.

All this rather does blow a big hole in Peak Oil theories, and indeed in any theory which treats oil as a finite resource. According to the Asia Times article (and I guess, to the book behind it) by F. William Engdahl, the Russians have followed an abiotic-origin theory since Wegener's time - the 1930's. They find oil where Western geological wisdom says there shouldn't be any.

So cars, SUV's and other devil-spawn are going to have four energy sources in future:

1 - oil, the natural, Gaia-created product of the deep
2 - hydrogen - and note the recent breakthrough in making this directly from plant starch
3 - electricity - I'll have a Wrightspeed, please
4 - Liquid fuels with similar energy density to petrol, from biomass

Who says that science isn't fun? Or that it can't save us (yet again - remember that hysterical old ninny Paul Erlich, anyone? "The edge of the crisis - we describe our first encounters with the age of scarcity and outline the greatest threat in the immediate future: the food crunch" - chapter One heading from "The End of Affluence", 1974).

I'll take Science over State of Fear, any day.

Climate Change runs out of gas

This piece of actual science shows the value of actually doing the sums. Essentially, there jest ain't enough recoverable hydrocarbons in the entire world, to support assumptions made in the IPCC's climate model. Like, IPCC assume 11-15 trillion barrel-of-oil-equivalent (TBoe) is going to go up in smoke.

Bzzt...wrong. There's only 2.7-3.5 TBoe left in the whole freakin' world, according to this. That's (counts on fingers) only 38% (3.5/11 - the best case) of the IPCC assumption.

It's really embarrassing, if you are of the Chicken Little persuasion, or (needless to say) a UN bureaucrat or activist scientist on the Gerbil Worming Gravy Train, to trip over such a basic misapprehension about our world.

But wait, there's more.....

And, of course, the real story is well away from the neg-heads, over here. Solar (particluarly thin-film solar) is going to power us in a generation or so.

The Key to All Mythologies

This article (ht: Gods of the Copybook Headings) sums up my own attitude to The Gerbil Worming debate. A teaser quote:

"it speaks in the doom-laden accents of pure certitude of what will happen in 50 or 75 or a hundred years from now - and, with the same ferocious certitude, demands decisions of immense consequence be made now to forestall its bleak and definitive projections."

Right on, bro'.