Tag Archives: Carbon dioxide

I Guess This Is One Way To Deal With The Problem Of Farting Cows

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The environmentalist seem very concerned about the problem of farting cows. Somehow they fail to mention that the cow population has actually decreased since 2014 (article here). However, they are sincerely interested in taking away our steak dinners.

Breitbart posted an article yesterday about the latest plan to deal with farting cows.

The article reports:

Ermias Kebreab, an zoology professor at the University of California–Davis, led a team in producing a bovine meal regimen containing varying levels of Asparagopsis armata, a strain of red seaweed, and fed it to 12 dairy cows over a two-month period. In a mix containing just 1 percent seaweed, the cows’ methane emissions went down by a stunning 60 percent.

“In all the years that I’ve worked in this area, I’ve never seen anything that reduced it that much,” Kebreab said.

A 2012 United Nations report revealed that the earth’s cattle population produces more carbon dioxide than automobiles, planes, and all other forms of transport combined. Moreover, the cow pies they drop and the wind they break produce a third of the world’s methane emissions, which traps 84 times as much heat as carbon dioxide.

In the summer of 2016, EcoWatch published an article confirming that greenhouse gas emissions from livestock actually account for a higher percentage of total global emissions than the world’s 1.2 billion automobiles.

Kebreab’s cow experiment sought to replicate results from researchers at Australia’s James Cook University, who mixed bacteria from cows’ digestive systems with red seaweed and discovered a significant decrease in methane production. Their experiment suggested that tweaking a cow’s diet to include 2 percent seaweed could reduce its methane emissions by as much as 99 percent.

The article concludes:

According to Dobbins, seaweed farming may be a “triple win.” It furnishes a way to grow nutritious food for both cows and people, provides coastal jobs, and improves the marine environment.

“Everything you do in food production has pluses and minuses relative to the environment,” he has claimed. “Seaweed farming, if done correctly, actually comes out more on the plus side.”

While flatulence is an issue, studies have suggested that cow belching is a much bigger problem because of the methane produced in cows’ stomachs.

“Despite misconceptions, most cow methane comes from burps (90%) rather than farts (10%),” Michael Battaglia wrote in October, 2016, in the Conversation.

So now we have to start worrying about burping cows?

The Numbers Behind The Conclusions

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Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial today about the mathematics and science between the claims of global warming. The title of the editorial is, “The Stunning Statistical Fraud Behind The Global Warming Scare.”

The editorial points out:

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has made repeated “adjustments” to its data, for the presumed scientific reason of making the data sets more accurate.

Nothing wrong with that. Except, all their changes point to one thing — lowering previously measured temperatures to show cooler weather in the past, and raising more recent temperatures to show warming in the recent present.

This creates a data illusion of ever-rising temperatures to match the increase in CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere since the mid-1800s, which global warming advocates say is a cause-and-effect relationship. The more CO2, the more warming.

The editorial includes some examples of how NOAA has altered temperatures to conform to their theory:

This winter, for instance, as measured by temperature in city after city  and by snow-storm severity, has been one of the coldest on record in the Northeast.

But after the NOAA’s wizards finished with the data, it was merely about average.

Climate analyst Paul Homewood notes for instance that in New York state, measured temperatures this year were 2.7 degrees or more colder than in 1943. Not to NOAA. Its data show temperatures this year as 0.9 degrees cooler than the actual data in 1943.

…By the way, a similar result occurred after the brutally cold 2013-2014 winter in New York. It was simply adjusted away. Do this year after year, and with the goal of radically altering the temperature record to fit the global warming narrative, and you have what amounts to climate fraud.

“Clearly NOAA’s highly homogenized and adjusted version of the Central Lakes temperature record bears no resemblance at all the the actual station data,” writes Homewood. “And if this one division is so badly in error, what confidence can there be that the rest of the U.S. is any better?”

That’s the big question. And for those who think that government officials don’t have political, cultural or other agendas, that’s naivete of the highest sort. They do.

Since the official government mantra for all of the bureaucracies at least since the Clinton era is that CO2 production is an evil that inevitably leads to runaway global warming, those who toil in the bureaucracies’ statistical sweat shops know that their careers and future funding depend on having the politically correct answers — not the scientifically correct ones.

Who would have thought that research into climate science has reached the point where it is simply about money.

Green Energy Isn’t Really Cutting Carbon Emissions

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Yesterday The Daily Caller posted a story about the impact of green energy policies on carbon emissions in various states.

The article reports:

There’s no link between the pro-green energy policies of states and falling carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, but there is a statistically significant link between falling CO2 and natural gas electricity, according to statistical analysis conducted by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Statistical analysis and regressions run by TheDCNF found no statistically significant link existed between the amount a state’s CO2 emissions fell since 2005 and the number of policies supporting green energy implemented by the state. The analysis showed there is an 81 percent chance there’s no link between CO2 emissions and the number of pro-green energy policies, meaning a link between the two likely doesn’t exist. The very small correlation between CO2 emissions and policies was going in the opposite direction from environmentalist claims.

Think about this a minute. According to data from British Petroleum, America ranks fifth in the world for the largest natural gas reserves. We now have a link between lower CO2 emissions and the use of natural gas. We can easily convert our electric plants to natural gas. This would be a big step toward making America energy independent and providing jobs for Americans instead of sending money overseas.

Please follow the link to the article in The Daily Caller to look at the charts which illustrate that the states with fewer green energy policies were the ones that were more successful in cutting CO2 emissions.

The article notes:

The DCNF’s (Daily Caller News Foundation) analysis found states like New Hampshire, Maryland, Maine, Georgia, Nevada and Alaska cut higher percentages of CO2 since 2005 than any others. These states had a combined average of 39 pro-green energy policies. The national average of all states was 51 pro-green energy policies. This suggests the more pro-green energy policies a state has, the less likely it was to reduce CO2 emissions.

This is another example of how excessive government involvement and interference in the free market makes a problem worse instead of solving it. There is a quote, generally attributed to Milton Friedman, that applies to this situation–“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” I truly believe that.

The Truth Eventually Comes Out

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A website called The College Fix posted an article by Dr. Terry Hughes, a professor emeritus of earth sciences and climate change at the University of Maine, about climate change.

The article states:

Dr. Terry Hughes, in an interview with The College Fix, said researchers want to keep federal funding for climate change alive, and politicians want to earn environmentalist votes, and both predict global pandemonium to that end.

…But Hughes – who believes global warming is actually a good thing because more carbon dioxide is good for the environment in many ways – said he does not want to march to that beat.

“Too many (the majority) of climate research scientists are quite willing to prostitute their science by giving these politicians what they want,” he said.

Hughes – who worked for 35 years at the Department of Earth Sciences and the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine – said climate cycles overlap with election cycles, which helps politicians “get electoral visibility by pounding the panic drums.”

But what he wants people to understand is that climate change researchers and politicians collude to create fear of a disaster that will never happen.

“You will never read or hear any of this from the scientific and political establishments,” he said. “I’m now retired, so I have no scientific career to protect by spreading lies.”

Dr. Hughes points out that increased CO2 levels would be beneficial to agriculture and allow the earth to produce more food. He also notes that some degree of global warming would make more of the earth habitable.

 

 

The Co-Founder Of Greenpeace Has Forgotten The Talking Points

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Yesterday the Daily Caller posted a story about a Senate Committee hearing on Tuesday. Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore was testifying.

The article reports:

Moore argued that the current argument that the burning of fossil fuels is driving global warming over the past century lacks scientific evidence. He added that the Earth is in an unusually cold period and some warming would be a good thing.

“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years,” according to Moore’s prepared testimony. “Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.”

…Moore argued that the current argument that the burning of fossil fuels is driving global warming over the past century lacks scientific evidence. He added that the Earth is in an unusually cold period and some warming would be a good thing.

“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years,” according to Moore’s prepared testimony. “Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.”

I, for one, have always been in favor of slight global warming. It is encouraging to me to know that I can now use hairspray, air conditioning, and my blow dryer without endangering the planet. However, on a serious note, it is the responsibility of all of us to do what we can within reason to keep our planet clean.

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When Green Isn’t Green

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On Monday the Wall Street Journal posted an article by Bjorn Lomborg,  director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center in Washington, D.C., is the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” (Cambridge Press, 2001) and “Cool It” (Knopf, 2007). The article explores the idea that electric cars actually have a smaller carbon footprint than regular cars.

The article reports:

A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission. The amount for making a conventional car: 14,000 pounds.

…If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it is driven—three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car.

Mr. Lomborg states that he is not opposed to electric cars–he believes that eventually we will find a way to design and manufacture them to be environmentally friendly. Unfortunately, right now we are spending money subsidizing the industry and the people who purchase electric cars rather than putting the money into research. It is quite possible that at some point in the future we will have an electric car that makes sense environmentally, but right now all we have is symbolism over substance.

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Whoops!

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On June 15th, WattsUpWithThat posted a graph of climate predictions made in 1988 contrasted with what has actually occurred. This is the graph:

Figure 1: Temperature forecast Hansen’s group from the year 1988. The various scenarios are 1.5% CO 2 increase (blue), constant increase in CO 2 emissions (green) and stagnant CO 2 emissions (red). In reality, the increase in CO 2 emissions by as much as 2.5%, which would correspond to the scenario above the blue curve. The black curve is the ultimate real-measured temperature (rolling 5-year average). Hansen’s model overestimates the temperature by 1.9 ° C, which is a whopping 150% wrong. Figure supplemented by Hansen et al. (1988) .

As the chart clearly shows, there was definitely something wrong with their calculations.

The article concludes:

The CO 2 emissions since 2000 to about 2.5 percent per year has increased, so that we would expect according to the Hansen paper a temperature rise, which should be stronger than in model A. Figure 1 shows the three Hansen scenarios and the real measured global temperature curve are shown. The protruding beyond Scenario A arrow represents the temperature value that the Hansen team would have predicted on the basis of a CO 2 increase of 2.5%. Be increased according to the Hansen’s forecast, the temperature would have compared to the same level in the 1970s by 1.5 ° C. In truth, however, the temperature has increased by only 0.6 ° C.

It is apparent that the next to it by the Hansen group in 1988 modeled temperature prediction by about 150%. It is extremely regrettable that precisely this type of modeling of our politicians is still regarded as a reliable climate prediction.

This is more science than I am comfortable dealing with, but the bottom line is simple–they got it wrong. The politicians in many countries are still using these faulty predictions as an excuse to grab more power and limit the ability of their citizens to prosper. It’s time we held them accountable for their reliance on faulty information. The global warming debate was never about saving the planet–it was about more government control.

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The Global Warming Hoax

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On Monday, John Hinderaker at Power Line posted an article titled, “The Global Warming Hoax In Charts.” I am not scientifically inclined enough to understand exactly what the charts show, but it is obvious that climate change is not solely dependent on carbon dioxide levels.

This chart shows the relationship between ocean temperatures and the earth’s temperature:

This chart shows the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperatures:

The article concludes:

Even a casual investigation reveals that carbon dioxide levels are not the driver of global temperatures. Rather, a combination of solar activity and other earthly phenomena, most notably cycles associated with the oceans, explain the rise and fall of global temperatures that have gone on for millenia.

Even my unscientific mind tells me that the first chart shows a closer relationship than the second. My question then becomes, “Why are some scientists trying so hard to convince us that human activity is responsible for climate change?” I don’t know.

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