Friday, February 08, 2008
Warming Over! Cooling Starting! (Con)
The Sun Also Sets
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Thursday, February 07, 2008 4:20 PM PT
Climate Change: Not every scientist is part of Al Gore's mythical "consensus." Scientists worried about a new ice age seek funding to better observe something bigger than your SUV the sun.
To many, those data were convincing. Now, Canadian scientists are seeking additional funding for more and better "eyes" with which to observe our sun, which has a bigger impact on Earth's climate than all the tailpipes and smokestacks on our planet combined.
And they're worried about global cooling, not warming.
Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity.
Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century.
Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle.
This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe.
Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a "stethoscope for the sun." But he and his colleagues need better equipment.
In Canada, where radio-telescopic monitoring of the sun has been conducted since the end of World War II, a new instrument, the next-generation solar flux monitor, could measure the sun's emissions more rapidly and accurately.
As we have noted many times, perhaps the biggest impact on the Earth's climate over time has been the sun.
For instance, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.
R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."
Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."
Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."
"Solar activity has overpowered any effect that CO2 has had before, and it most likely will again," Patterson says. "If we were to have even a medium-sized solar minimum, we could be looking at a lot more bad effects than 'global warming' would have had."
In 2005, Russian astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov made some waves and not a few enemies in the global warming "community" by predicting that the sun would reach a peak of activity about three years from now, to be accompanied by "dramatic changes" in temperatures.
A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion.
"The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz.
The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."
The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."
But if the sun shuts down, we've got a problem. It is the sun, not the Earth, that's hanging in the balance.
-Bob-sled
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Green Light Bulbs (Pro)
Junk Science: Looming Lightbulb LiabilityThursday, February 21, 2008
By Steven Milloy
The speeding freight train carrying toxic waste liability for makers, sellers and purchasers of compact fluorescent lightbulbs, or CFLs, was only faintly audible in the distance last spring when this column first warned of it. Now we're beginning to see that environmentalist-stoked train speed toward its victims, whom President Bush and Congress just finished tying to the tracks.
CFLs and all other fluorescent lightbulbs require special clean-up and disposal procedures because they contain small amounts of mercury, which is neurotoxic at sufficiently high exposures. For example, you're not supposed to vacuum breakage or toss used bulbs in household trash.
Despite these clean-up and disposal hassles, environmental groups, bulb makers and retailers relentlessly have promoted CFL use as a strategy for reducing electricity consumption and the power plant emissions allegedly causing global warming.
Eco-activist groups, such as Environmental Defense, which historically have agitated to banish toxic substances from homes, workplaces and the environment, surprisingly have said that the mercury in CFLs is nothing to worry about.
But this new posturing flies in the face of the multitude of scary activist-inspired studies that hyperventilate about potential health risks from the slightest exposures to mercury, not to mention a 1987 article in Pediatrics reporting real-life mercury poisoning of a 23-month old from a broken fluorescent light bulb.
Bush and Congress joined the CFL promotion racket, too. The energy bill enacted last December mandates that traditional incandescent bulbs be phased out starting in 2012. CFLs pretty much are the only alternative.
This activist-business-government marketing juggernaut has succeeded. Wal-Mart alone sold 100 million CFLs last year.
But the partnership is about to implode. As predictable as Lucy pulling away the football from a determinedly charging Charlie Brown, the environmentalists are preparing to turn the tables on the CFL businesses and consumers.
The signal came in a Feb. 17 New York Times editorial entitled "That Newfangled Light Bulb."
The editorial read, in part, "Across the world, consumers are being urged to switch to [CFLs]. ... Now the question is how to dispose of [CFLs] once they break or quit working each [CFL] has a tiny bit of a dangerous toxin almost 300 million CFLs were sold in the U.S. last year. That is already a lot of mercury to throw in the trash and the amounts will grow ever larger in coming years the dangers are real and growing."
The Times piece continued, "Businesses and government recyclers need to start working on more efficient ways to deal with that added mercury. Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is raising the cry about the moment when millions of these light bulbs start landing in landfills or incinerators all at once. The pig in the waste pipeline, she calls it."
Aside from the editorial's implicit targeting instructions for eco-agitators and trial lawyers, I could only chuckle at the editorial's nod to, and partial disclosure about, Silbergeld. For many years, she was a "senior scientist" with Environmental Defense who, before moving on to left-wing academia, excelled at fomenting dubious scares about "toxic" substances in the environment.
During Silbergeld's days with Environmental Defense in the 1990s, the group's pitch to the media was "when fluorescent bulbs are crushed, traces of mercury vaporize and enter the atmosphere. If the lamps are buried, the toxic element seeps into the soil."
Until the Times editorial, the activists and the media had been holding back their customary attacks against mercury-containing fluorescent light bulbs.
In lamenting the bulbs, Clean Water Action told the media in 1997, for example, that the mercury level in tuna is so high that a 35-pound child eating more than 2 ounces a week would exceed the EPA's "safe" level.
But while CFL-mandating legislation was pending in Congress, the enviros did a temporary flip-flop: Environmental Defense began pooh-poohing mercury concerns stating, "In short, the exposure from breaking a CFL is in about the same range as the exposure from eating a can or two of tuna fish."
Two ounces of tuna used to be a horror, but in the name of CFLs, two cans became no problem.
The Associated Press reported in 1992 that fluorescent light bulbs were helping to "poison the Everglades with toxic mercury, threatening humans [and wildlife]."
In December 2000, a Massachusetts newspaper reported in an article entitled "Environmentalists Call for Mercury Product Ban" that the Massachusetts governor had proposed that trash-burning incinerators develop plans to separate fluorescent light bulbs and other mercury-containing consumer products from waste.
The business fantasy is for the nation's 4 billion-plus light sockets to sport CFLs. There's much more ka-ching in selling 4 billion $5 light bulbs as opposed to incandescent bulbs costing $0.75. But what about the mercury problem that may impose substantial liabilities on businesses and consumers faster than CFL light bulbs turn on?
Today's business leaders apparently have forgotten the infamous Superfund program that needlessly and retroactively imposed tens of billions of dollars of costs for pre-1980 waste disposal practices regardless of whether they were legal at the time. CFL-maker GE, in particular, is involved in a senseless $500 million clean-up of industrial chemicals known as PCBs buried long ago in Hudson River sediments.
Imagine the clean-up costs from billions of CFLs disposed in landfills and burned in incinerators across the country. Superfund even imposed bankrupting liability on mom-and-pop businesses. Imagine the peril of home-based businesses that casually toss CFLs in the household trash.
First mercury was dangerous. Then, temporarily, it became no big deal. Now that the Greens have caught us in the CFL trap, they're reverting to form on mercury all to cause the sort of chaos resulting in increased government control of our lives.
As Johnny Cash sang, "I hear the train a-comin, it's rollin round the bend. " The question is: Will President Bush and Congress just leave us on the tracks?
-John G.