No Honey
by Einar Du Rietz
“Honey has always been considered an entirely pure product for the purposes of food labelling laws. But Europe’s highest court has now decreed that pollen is an ingredient of honey rather than an intrinsic, natural component.”
writes the Telegraph
watch?v=qeGtaSWzFRA for more honey.
It just so happens that I’m quite allergic. Not as severe as some younger friends, as the hassle tends to diminish with age, but still enough to remain careful. The so called allergy family (all allergies belong to groups, for example sea food, which I have no problems with) is nuts. Along with this comes mould – also penicillin in it’s original form – almonds and certain fruits and berries. And pets. The only thing really lethal is normally nuts. A younger friend never enters a Thai restaurant or leave her home without cortisone in her pocket. I’ve outgrown pet allergy, and can try different kinds of food, but I will never in my life test one singe nut again. It’s really not worth it.
Sometimes, however, I get the feeling that the worst threat, at least to my mental well-being, is not the sneezing during springtime, but busy body government. When chocolate bars simply had to list ingredients – and you also could find some safe brands – it was easy to pick something suitable. Since some years back, manufacturers are required to point out that virtually every product “may contain traces of nuts”. My younger friend naturally does not even look at candy, but for me, it would be nice to be able to make an informed choice. “May contain” means that the product is manufactured in an environment where other products, containing nuts, have been produced.
And now they are out to hit on the honey. The European Court that is, eager to put another burden on a struggling line of business. READ MORE…
4th International Conference on Climate and Energy (updated)
Prof. Nir Shaviv at the 2010 International Climate and Energy Conference
For the 4th time, the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), the Berlin Manhattan Institute, CFACT and a few others host an International Climate and Energy Conference, this time in in the Bavarian capital Munich, Nov. 25.-26 (program below).
Renowned scientists such as Professors Svensmark, Shaviv, Veizer and Patzelt, as well as bestselling authors such as Donna Laframboise, Andrew Montford and Christopher Horner confirmed their participation. As in previous years, the event is going to be Europe’s no.1 meeting and debating point for climate and energy realists, bloggers, and their friends from all over Europe and beyond. READ MORE…
Crowded? Not really
by Einar Du Rietz
Just found out that (according to BBC):
“When you were born, you were the:3,453,632,094th person alive on Earth and 77,442,249,607thperson to have lived since history began”
Go on, take the test. Don’t know what it’s really good for, but it’s a bit of fun, at least if you are easily amused. And please help me figure out how the exact numbers were calculated.
It’s apparently the magic in the numbers that now has awaken the Neo Malthusians, as we are supposed to reach seven billion any day now (Monday, according to the UN). Why not 6, 123 or 7,456? No, it’s the magic number. Over population is the scare of the day.
Well, walk outside and check if it’s really that crowded. Every time this scare appears, the doomsayers ignore some basic observations. READ MORE…
Video: Why we need affordable Energy
Just follow the link: Halloween Light Show
Just Politics as Usual
by Einar Du Rietz
All the players are gearing up for the Durban festivities in a month. Though only accounting for about 11 percent of the worlds carbon emissions, the European Union, not surprisingly wants to play a major role.
“Environment ministers of the European Union – responsible for only 11% of global carbon emissions – said they would commit to a new phase of the Kyoto climate change pact, on the condition that nations blamed for the rest join up too.
The environment council conclusions, agreed in Luxembourg on 10 October, outline the bloc’s negotiating position ahead of the next global climate conference in Durban, South Africa, which starts at the end of November.
However. READ MORE…
The Continent Isolated
by Einar Du Rietz
Climate predictions, weather forcasts and a decent overcoat is what makes the world go round.
Here comes the new ice age. Writes the Daily Express:
“BRITAIN is set to suffer a mini ice age that could last for decades and bring with it a series of bitterly cold winters.
Scientists say the anticipated cold blast will be due to the return of a disruptive weather pattern called La Nina. Latest evidence shows La Nina, linked to extreme winter weather in America and with a knock-on effect on Britain, is in force and will gradually strengthen as the year ends.”
Yepp.
I would be the last one to say that London weather is a pleasure, rather it’s a common theme in books and movies. The same goes for the other side of the channel. A walk along the coast around Oostende can be marvelous. A few days per year.
The positive side is that, in this case at least, media is back to recognicing the climate pattern, even making paralelles to the “little ice age”, about 300 years ago.
Are we finally back to talking science, instead of politics and money? At least something to consider in Durban, while we Europeans put on our winter coats.
No More Butter on the Fish
by Einar Du Rietz
Yesterday, I watched that widely acclaimed movie by Nora Ephron about Julia Childs and her later follower. Marvelous. And somehow, all about butter.
I seldom use butter, as I prefere olive oil, but for certain dishes it’s the best option. All sorts of fish, for example.
How interesting then that there is a current butter crisis in the stores. The cows to blame? Some people have actually suggested that.
But then there is this peculiar thing called the Butter Mountain in the EU. Simply put, a surplus (according to the politicians), calling for regulations within the CAP system, and – surprise – you suddenly have a shortage.
Let’s see what comes next. In Venezuela, one of the largest coffee been producers in the world, there is currently a coffee shortage.
In all cases of shortages, my Professor once told me, look for the price mechanism. And if a politician has meddled with it.
Sure, I can live without butter (after all there are substitutes), maybe even coffee, but there are worse situations out there, where regulations, or simply playing around with the market, cause real starvation.
Immobility Week
by Einar Du Rietz
The Mobility Week is on again. The sort of expansion of the Green Week/In Town Without my Car Week, sponsored by the EU and participating cities, in other words tax money to make life harder for people.
This has been a yearly event for ten years now, making lives more difficult.
I don’t mind any of the suggested alternatives to cars. I walk. I bike. I use public transportation.
What I don’t like is people walking into me, crazy bikers or waiting for public transportation for an hour.
And I tend to care for those who can’t do any of this. This morning, I once again met my neighbour. I simply can’t resist being impressed by the way she gets out of her wheelchair, gets it into the vehicle and drives off. Once, she asked me for help. Normally, never.
I’d like to meet the cop who will tell her – or the ambulance driver for that matter – that she should take the bus.
£1.2 million to not produce wind power
The Daily Telegraph Reports that a Norwegian wind company was paid £1.2 million to not produce electricity during a period of high winds. This was a hair shy of 10 times the artificially above market rate wind farms receive to make power. British ratepayers will fit the bill.
We’re not making this up.
This is part of an astonishing £523 million in subsidy payments British ratepayers sent to foreign wind corporations.
Foreign oil was not enough? Foreign wind?
_____
UPDATE:
Telegraph Editorial: Wind power: a policy spinning out of control
Telegraph View: The Government’s policy on renewable energy is based on dogma not evidence.
Play methane madness: Put a cork in Gore’s day of hype
Click to play Methane Madness!
“Put a cork in it, Al!”
That’s the message students are sending Al Gore, radical climate campaigners and assorted other bohemians, grant-seekers and profiteers cashing in on the global warming craze.
Al Gore is calling on folks to make September 14th a day of climate action through a series of propaganda videos he will be broadcasting worldwide. CFACT calls for a day of genuine “climate realism” instead. CFACT Collegians are spreading the word with a bit of online levity.
CFACT’s Methane Madness game trains online players to help “Pal Gore” control the climate by corking cows and watching them float away. Methane is more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas but less than 1% of atmospheric greenhouse gases come from cattle. Even so, radical climate campaigners call for shutting down our cattle and dairy industries along with much of the rest our economy. They’d like us to go vegan.
However, climate science IS NOT SETTLED; computer models are not all that; observations don’t fit the models; man’s impact on climate and atmosphere is dwarfed by nature’s; Climategate is just the tip of the corrupt science iceberg; more scientists find the courage to match their analysis every day and declare against the scare; offsets are a scam; alternative energy is inefficient; citizens can now spot warming propaganda; economies in crisis can’t afford t
he waste; carbon profiteers rake in tax dollars but don’t affect the climate; consensus is not science; there has never been a consensus; freedom and prosperity are the proven path to cleaner environments; our meat and dairy industries are home-based, thriving industries that feed multitudes and employ the nicest people you’ll ever meet; developed nations have enough to eat for the first time in history; etc; etc; etc; etc….
WHOA! All those dreary, inconvenient facts! Gore won’t enjoy those. As Scarlett O’Hara said, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
If they succeed in corking all the cows, Methane Madness players can move on to further levels and put a cork in Gore and company’s hot air.
Don’t worry, CFACT’s always been about free speech. Corks come out. Gore and his celebrity buddies can go right back to spewing their hot air. It will take cold facts for realism to triumph over alarmism on climate. CFACT wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Jobs just aren’t waiting for us when we graduate the way they used to,” said Methane Madness player Josh Smith, a student at University of Wisconsin. “Al Gore preaches we should live with less, while he flies from mansion to mansion. I don’t even know how I’m going to pay my student loans. Put a cork in it, Al!”
If levity’s not your bag, there’s always plenty of global warming facts and analysis debunking the scare here at www.CFACT.eu, www.CFACT.org and at www.ClimateDepot.com.
New publication: NIPCC vs. IPCC
A new publication by S. Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, came out last week. Its title: NIPCC vs. IPCC – Adressing the Disparity between Climate Models and Observations: Testing the Hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming. It is meant to be an interim science update of the 2008-NIPCC-report. The base of the 28-pages-booklet was the author’s presentation at the Majorana conference in Erice, Sicily, in August 2011.
What is it about? Whether global warming is natural or manmade is of crucial importance for both climate science and climate policy. Hence the the update on this issue. Besides, the author, an expert in atmospheric and space physics and founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service, discusses chaotic uncertainties of climate models and how to overcome them, Climategate and the Hockeystick graph – and shows “what we can say about the absence of post-1979 warming in the temperature data of the 20th century.”
The brochure has been/is presented by Prof. Singer during his (ongoing) lecture tour in Europe. Editions in German, French, Spanish and other languages are in preparation (German will be next). The book has been published with the support of the European Institute for Climate and Energy.
NIPCC vs. IPCC, Addressing the Disparity between Climate Models and Observations: Testing the Hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming, Interim Science Update, Presented at Majorana Conference in Erice, Sicily, August 2011, ISBN 978-3-940431-28-8, TvR 2011, 28 p. (29×21,5 cm). 27 illustrations and graphs (19 in color). 10,00 EUR.
German University of Leipzig Suppresses Climate-Critical Seminar
Blatant censorship of dissenting scientific opinions on the subject of climate change and its causes is the post-modern trend. After recent attempts to ban the scientifically undesirable paper by renown scientists Spencer & Braswell and the ban of the climate-critical conference at the Belgian Society of European Engineers and Industrialists (SEII) by IPCC Vice Chair Prof. J. van Ypersele, the Faculty for Physics and Geosciences of the University of Leipzig, Germany, is the next to suppress open scientific debate.
Last Tuesday, University of Leipzig science faculty dean Prof. Dr. Jürgen Haase barred a climate seminar organized by (his own) geography professor Werner Kirstein, as well as the use of an auditorium of his own institute (!) and participation by European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) Vice President Michael Limburg as one of the the main speakers. Fortunately the ban was later relaxed and the seminar was allowed to go ahead.
The reason for originally having banned the seminar was a dissertation authored by Michael Limburg, which was critical of climate-science and was submitted to the faculty in March 2010. Two reviewers rejected the dissertation claiming, among other points, that it was inadequate. This is why Limburg was not welcome as a speaker, according to a letter from the Dean. The fact that the same dissertation had been recommended for acceptance by 4 other renowned professors went unmentioned by Haase. Limburg immediately challenged the ban.
What was so inconvenient about Limburg’s dissertation?
Under the supervision of Prof. Werner Kirstein, Limburg had written a dissertation that examined the quality of historical global temperature and sea level data in detail. His conclusions were damning. Using accepted rules for science and measurement, Limburg’s results showed that the datasets did not allow sea level and temperature change over the last 120-150 years to be determined anywhere near the alleged accuracies of millimetres or tenths of a degree Celsius respectively as claimed by the IPCC. The range of uncertainty, in both global mean temperature and sea level, is considerably greater than the total respective changes given by the IPCC. Every factor in attributing the possible causes of the changes was, at best, scientifically questionable. READ MORE…
The New Antidote – Garlic
by Einar Du Rietz
Maybe we should just skip this project
That it was fairly good for preventing colds I knew, but now apparently garlic is the way to prevent global warming.
“Reducing farm animals’ wind by adding garlic to feed could substantially reduce greenhouse emissions, according to research by West Wales’ scientists featured by Euronews.
An organosulphur compound obtained from garlic kills off methane-producing bacterium in the digestive system of cows, according to Professor Jamie Newbold, who heads up a €5 million-research programme at Aberystwyth University.
Cows eating feed enriched with the garlic compound — called Allicin – release 40% less gas without interference to their normal digestive fermentation, according to the research.”
Hope the cows will like it. Personally, I a fan, especially when I’m eating cows, but I don’t want it in my milk.
And the report does not mention the smell. And not any other potential side effects. What about the bugs? At least on humans, garlic is believed to be a repellant. Will this in turn affect the bird life? Guess a new bunch of money would be welcome, before the entire idea is picked up by the Comission, for a garlic cow directive.
Guess the five millions were well spent so far. At least the garlic growers and distributors will think so.
Svensmark & CERN: cosmic rays influence climate
A cloudy day for global warming zealots
Climate science is anything but settled.
For years, physicist Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Institute (who has presented at conferences organized by CFACT and EIKE) has been asking inconvenient questions about the relationship between the sun, clouds and climate. He demonstrated in the lab that cosmic rays from the sun affect cloud
Henrik Svensmark
formation. Cosmic rays are a factor not meaningfully considered in the computer climate models which global warming proponents have declared to be so robust that they are beyond discussion.
To the vexation of true climate believers, Svensmark’s work has been confirmed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN is home to the Hadron super conducting super collider near Geneva. CERN simulated the effect of cosmic rays in the earth’s atmosphere and found that it does indeed influence cloud formation.
This is very inconvenient science for the global warming campaigners, researchers and myriad carbon carpetbaggers, all of whose incomes have come to depend on government willingness to accept the authority of climate models as gospel. The more people know about computer climate models, the less they are willing to curtail the freedom and prosperity of the developed world.
Can E
uropean scientists like Svensmark and the researchers at CERN restore rigorous scientific questioning to climate science? Will scientists again research, question, write and speak without fear of political reprisal? Is this the beginning of a new enlightenment? Europe’s done it before.
London Olympics drops carbon offsets
Greens see red as organizers cut waste
When London submitted its bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games, it sweetened its offer with a promise “to purchase emission reduction credits and to invest directly in clean energy projects in the developing world to offset … emissions.” Organizers estimated that “international travel to London by competitors, officials and members of the Olympic Family would generate an estimated 35,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions.”
The scheme called for large transfers of funds from London to the developing world. “Our approach goes beyond merely offsetting emissions,” London 2012 Environmental Project Manager David Stubbs promised, “and aims to spread environmental and social benefits beyond London to countries where the impacts of climate change are most acutely felt.”
These promises were made in 2005, when climate propaganda stood unchallenged — before the specter of economic crisis, joblessness and government spending came to haunt Britain as they do today. London is a city recently set ablaze by a no longer hidden underclass of voluntarily uneducated and unemployed wards of the state.
Harsh reality has sounded a wake up call for Londoners and the prospect of shipping millions of pounds overseas to finance projects with no connection to the Olympics (that will have no meaningful impact on our climate) no longer seems so sporting.
Bloomberg Business quotes Green Party member of the London Assembly Darren Johnson as saying, the decision to drop the offsets is “not fair … Obviously we want the Olympics to benefit London, but environmentally they should be a green Olympics to benefit the whole world as well.”
In place of offsets, organizers will look for local ways to “reduce their carbon footprint.” CFACT expects that as disappointed as investors who had sought to profit from the overseas carbon offset schemes may be, there are others with schemes rooted closer to home who will be all to willing to cash in.
We can no longer afford the waste and abuse that are part and parcel of feel-good schemes like offsets and subsidies. CFACT calls on London to blaze a path to an environment where large scale public and business enterprises can proceed with no obligation to pay baksheesh to radical green campaigners and carbon profiteers.
We’ve reached a new tipping point. Henceforth use of the term “carbon footprint,” where tongue is not planted firmly in cheek, identifies a scheme unlikely to pass rigorous examination. Policy makers, accountants and fraud examiners take note.
