Category: Environmentalism & Global Warming

Global warming—some speculations.

In the book The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg, it was clear that one fabricated environmental disaster after another was irrelevant to the quality of life. One great concern was lower sperm counts—then couples will just have to have more sex for their intended results! Now the rage is organic foods, when the non-organic foods are far less toxic than the toxic filled plants that hunter-gatherers consumed. Plants try to protect themselves by using toxins, but the agricultural breeding programs made food products less toxic. (I have not seen any research where organic foods are anything but a fad.)

If I remember right, Lomborg did admit that global warming may be a real threat to the environment. The question is what are humans going to do about it? Advanced and backward societies alike burn fossil fuels, the assumed politically correct source of carbon dioxide that causes global warming. Many alarmists are stating now that it is even too late—that there is already so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that if we add little more, global warming would radically alter our environment anyway.

From my perspective, there are two obvious outcomes if global warming does change our climate and especially our ability to grow crops adequate for a world population far in excess of 6 billion people. First, as the crisis sets in, some activists will try to get humans to radically cut back on carbon dioxide emissions. Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” is a well-known human (and animal) behavioral pattern—if grazing lands are open to all cattle farmers, the land will be overgrazed until there is nothing left for the cattle to eat.

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Hydropower

The emotional subject of white American resettlement out of the south-west has been featuring here pretty regularly of late.  James has posted some related material.  But most of the energy for this discussion is on the threads where the chief proponent of resettlement is GT, who you will recall also guest-blogged for us on black serial killers three weeks ago.

Now, the 5th April issue of Nature is carrying a feature that will greatly interest GT.  The headline, “Return of the dustbowl”, is alarmist and doesn’t really do credit to the seriousness of the research.  But here’s the straight from the shoulder payoff:-

The drought that spawned the great American Dust Bowl of the 1930s may become the new climatic norm for much of the southwestern United States and other subtropical regions of the world. In a report published today, researchers in the United States and Israel project an imminent increase in aridity in subtropical regions over the next century, which will affect several important agricultural regions.

The results indicate that growing drought in the southwest is a problem that is likely to affect agriculture. “This is something that is already under way. It’s not an end of the twenty-first century thing where we have the luxury to sit around and wait,” says Richard Seager, a climatologist with the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, who led the 13-member research team ...

“This is a robust prediction that’s been backed by observation,” says Dennis Hartmann, a climatologist in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. “It seems like a reasonable scenario for the future.”

The implications for such a drying are far-reaching. California, for instance, accounts for approximately 16% of all US agricultural exports. Seager suggests that North American farmers need to rethink certain agricultural practices, including adopting more water-efficient irrigation systems such as those being used in Israel.

And, where there are water shortages, there is also the potential for political conflict. “As Mark Twain wrote, ‘Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting over’,” says Seager. Mexico depends on water originating from the Colorado River, he notes, whereas Iraq and Syria depend on the waters of the Euphrates, which originate in Turkey. Cross-border conflicts are likely to arise as these streams of water dry up.

It is not, therefore, at all unreasonable to posit, as GT does, that ethnic competition in the south-west will centre on water - and thus food - availability.  Watch for the early signs that others, who may not intend white Americans much good, understand both this and the need to secure the situation for themselves first.

Beer, skittles, global warming and the redemption of the West

Forced by the suspension of the blog to find some other source of intellectual diversion, and having re-thumbed my entire stock of Chronicles back copies, I hit the TV remote before Sunday lunch and, for my pains, saw (turn away NOW, if you of a squeamish nature) the big, bland face of David Bloody Cameron.

He was being interviewed by John Sopel for the BBC’s Politics Show.  They were fencing with one another about the political flavour of the moment, the Stern Report on climate change.

Now, I readily acknowledge that climate change is the only issue bigger than the survival of Western Man, and I don’t seek to belittle it in any way.  But it wasn’t Cameron’s fine intentions and general planetary high-mindedness that piqued my interest.  It was his repeated refusal to identify holiday air travel as a frivolity that - if “the polluter pays” is to mean anything - must shoulder its share of the CO2 burden.  He wouldn’t, he informed Sopel, be the one who told the common man that he can’t have his sun ‘n sangria.

In so doing Cameron revealed himself to be too much of a politician to be much of an environmentalist.  He also demonstrated that his abiding concerns are specifically voter-related rather than UK industry-related (ie flightwise, outbound rather than inbound).  In the Opposition’s perfectly understandable struggle to get elected frivolity, it seems, is more important than profits and jobs.  That’s probably a correct strategy.  These days, the economy is not a strong electoral card for the Conservatives and the generality of employment in UK tourism is, anyway, very poorly paid and far too frequently filled by Poles and Filipinos.

So it’s beer and skittles all across the cloudscape to sunny Espagne, and CO2 be damned.  And if the on-line tabloids are a good judge of their own audience, young master Cameron and his pet tarantula are right.

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A less sensationalist look at the Atlantic conveyor

In the December 1st issue of Nature magazine, Harry Bryden and colleagues at Britain’s National Oceanography Centre report that the Atlantic meridional circulation (also known as the thermohaline circulation (THC)—the density driven current that carries warm surface water northward and returns colder deep water southward—has slowed by 30 percent between 1957 and 2004.  The significance of this finding is difficult to assess in light of other recent observations.

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Convey or not, that is the question.

The Atlantic conveyor is perhaps being itself conveyed the way of all fish flesh and good red herring.

The North Atlantic’s natural heating system, which brings clement weather to western Europe, is showing signs of decline. Scientists report that warm Atlantic Ocean currents, which carry heat from the tropics to high latitudes, have substantially weakened over the past 50 years.

The article in Nature is here, and a longer paper is here (pdf),

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The material conditions of a form of life

There is a television show about a planeload of people mysteriously stranded on a large island in the Pacific. When I watch it my enjoyment is hampered by a strange thing: I cannot stop wondering what they eat. How do they live? From whence do they eke their 2000 odd kcal apiece in food energy? No doubt an episode or two dealt with fish, or tubers, or something of the kind: but, no doubt as well, not in a believable way. Well, TV works by magic, so it’s OK, but there is a larger point.

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Ecofascist fraud

Seeing another contributor to this blog has posted on this story, I thought I should put it in context

“The Independent” is a British Leftist newspaper (the only thing it is independent of is the truth) with some pretensions to being a “quality” paper.  They must however have been losing market-share lately because they have descended into scare stories that differ from what you read in the tabloids only in their being much longer.  Their last ecocatastrophe scare story so outraged the scientist that they were supposedly quoting that he vowed never to speak to them again.  See my post of Oct 1st.

The last story must have been good for circulation, however, because they have now come up with another story of the same ilk that leaves no stone unturned in seeking out ecological disasters.  Amusingly, one of the authors is an “Andrew Buncombe” (pronounced “bunkum") so I suppose that is fair warning.

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White nationalism is not enough.

You may remember the prophecies of ecological doom from the 1960s. Guess what?

We also need ecofascism.

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Blair goes all the way with the USA again

The following report shows that, in return for GWB saying that global warming is a problem, Blair has endorsed the American approach to it—research only.  No-one for many years has done as much as Blair has to draw the USA and the UK closer together.  As it was in ancient times, an intervening stretch of water has become more a highroad than a barrier

“Disputes over climate change will not be resolved by renegotiating the Kyoto treaty, said British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He said the only way to move ahead was to try to achieve a new international consensus that included the US along with China, India and other large emerging economies. He added that it would be right for China and India to be at future G8 summits, although he acknowledged that restructuring talks to accommodate other nations was difficult.  ‘What I hope at this summit is that we can set a different direction of travel that gives us the possibility—when Kyoto expires in 2012—(to) get an international consensus that will include America and include also China India and the big emerging countries,’ Blair said.

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