Iberica

PAT SWORDS BLOWS THE WHISTLE :

Here are some of my thoughts on the GREEN ECONOMY presently being developed in Ireland.

In a Nutshell :

The Ventomobil (above) designed by the University of Stuttgart that won the international Aelous race in Holland in August 2008 with a record speed of 24 km/h. However, it required a wind speed of 36 km/h (20 knots), which is nearly double the average wind speed in Ireland. The second day of racing did not provide sufficient wind for the same vehicular speeds to be reached again.
This is a cute University experiment. However, the rest of us have to go to work, pay the bills, educate the children, hope they will get a job, etc! And we do need vehicles that work.

Unfortunately, most Irish politicians seem to be blind to such needs. They have approved in 2008 a massive project in the order of 30 billion Euros to build a second duplicate electricity system that is wind powered. Despite the huge expenditure it will only deliver significant power when the wind is blowing at twice its average speed. 70% of the capacity we have paid for will not deliver any power.

Wind energy is the cornerstone of the Green Economy. Such a programme is not part of the pragmatic approach of EU Environmental Policy. Indeed, despite this massive expenditure on wind energy, Ireland will not meet EU environmental targets. And its electricity prices will soar to become the highest in the world, leading to unsustainable losses in manufacturing industry.

Like the property bubble, there will be winners, those that get in early in the distorted economy and make the quick money on the pyramid schemes before the whole unsustainable edifice comes crashing down. However, the overwhelming majority of us will be severe losers.

And as the wind does not blow constantly, we will continue to operate our fossil fuel power plants - but now in a highly inefficient fashion : on a variable output to match the highly volatile wind generation. It is like driving a car in the city instead of on the motorway, it burns an awful lot more fuel for the same kilometres travelled. This sums up the windpower madness.

Why have the Irish turned their backs on their engineers and scientists, the very specialists who developed the high technology manufacturing sector that gave birth to the Celtic Tiger? Why have they decided that the future direction of their energy policy should be in the hands of journalists and populist politicians ?

It’s a mess, and all because people can’t accept the facts and figures. Instead, they insist on their visions, and abuse those who do not conform to their ideology. Competence has become irrelevant : as in the Middle Ages, faith is trumping science.

Biography : Pat Swords is a Fellow of the Institute of Chemical Engineers and a Chartered Environmentalist.

By Alan Caruba

From December 6 through the 18th, a conference sponsored by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will gather in Copenhagen, Denmark, to explore ways to “prevent global warming” and I would like to be among the first to tell all those idiots checking their passports and deciding what to pack that they can all stay home.

This is not an original thought on my part and, in fact, is occasioned by Prof. Henrik Svensmark. He is director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Technical University of Denmark and, not surprisingly, knows a lot about the Sun and climate.

Permit me to share some of his thoughts. In a September 9th opinion titled, “While the Sun Sleeps”, Prof. Svensmark wrote, “Last week, the scientific team behind the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) reported that the number of sunspot-free days suggest that solar activity is heading towards its lowest level in about 100 years.”

“Everything indicates that the Sun is moving into a hibernation-like state and the obvious question is whether it has any significance for us on Earth.” Good question, Professor! Particularly since the Sun is the sole source of heat for the Earth. When it takes a nap, everybody takes notice.

The professor then had a little professorial fun describing the Little Ice Age that occurred after a period of medieval warmth that had begun around 1000 AD. After 1300, however, it got a lot colder. Settlements in Greenland disappeared. The Thames froze over repeatedly. And here’s where we need to pay attention, there were “long periods of crop failure.” Between starvation and disease, it reduced the population of Europe by about a third.

“It is important to note that the Little Ice Age was a global event,” said Prof. Svensmark. It did not end until the mid-to-late 19th century; around 1850 in America. Do your math. That’s five centuries. As the Earth began to warm up and particularly in the last fifty years, “solar activity has been the highest since the medieval warmth of 1,000 years ago.”

Now, keep in mind that a couple of hundred, perhaps a thousand or more diplomats, scientists, and environmentalists are going to gather in Copenhagen for the single purpose of extending or expanding the Kyoto Protocols that are based on the assertion that the Earth is warming even though it is not.

Moreover, the IPCC will announce that, if the industrialized nations do not dramatically reduce the production of “greenhouse gases” (carbon dioxide), we are all doomed. In the United States, the Cap-and-Trade bill which passed the House by a slim margin will be up for consideration in the Senate. It is based on the global warming lie. It will drive up the cost of energy for all Americans and basically wreck the economy!

Like the witches in Macbeth, for years the IPCC has been stirring a cauldron of lies about global warming and the world’s media, intoxicated by the fumes rising from the pot, have never ceased from telling us that the Earth is warming when it is not.

The Sun, however, is not cooperating.

“It now appears that the Sun…is heading towards what is called ‘a grand minimum’ as we saw in the Little Ice Age,” says Prof. Svensmark.

“Indeed, global warming has stopped and cooling is beginning.” At a recent World Climate Conference in Geneva one of the participants predicted the cooling will likely continue through the next 10 to 20 years.

All those IPCC computer models that have been predicting global warming were wrong, are wrong, and will remain wrong for all time until the Earth actually begins to warm again.

If, however, the Earth slips into a new Ice Age and not just a “little” one, it will be several hundred thousand years before they are valid.

The Copenhagen conference is, like global warming, a hoax.

I hear it’s very cold in Copenhagen in the winter.

See post here.

Today is the 206th sunspotless day this year as we chase last year’s 266 to put us in the top 5. A total of 716 spotless days this cycle. Most recent cyles have had less than 300. The cycle and prior 3 look a lot like cycles #1-4in the last 1700 and early 1800s, the so-called Dalton Minimum, the age of Dickens and snowy London town.

Update: Please note: GOP Beware, Even though Now Stalled, Cap-and-Tax is alive and well - see Senator Inhofe’s Op Ed here.

By David A. Ridenour, Sacramento Bee

If you worry about what Congress could do in its health-care legislation, you should be terrified by the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. It’s legislation that would gut the economy and likely cost millions of Americans their medical insurance.

Nearly 15 million Americans are now looking for work, bringing the official unemployment rate to 9.7 - the highest in 26 years. If the Senate passes Waxman-Markey, that rate will go much higher. Employment and access to health insurance are inextricably linked.

There’s no debating a cap-and-trade system would harm the economy. The only question is how costly it would be.

The Congressional Budget Office low-balled the costs of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill passed by the House in June, saying it would cost just $175 per household per year. This is the “less than the price of a postage stamp per day” figure we keep hearing. But to arrive at this number, the CBO had to ignore employment and income losses from cap-and-trade measures - costs estimated to be thousands of dollars per household per year. After figuring that in, yes, cap-and-trade would cost less than a postage stamp per day, but only if you’re buying a $13.05 Express Mail stamp daily.

The Heritage Foundation provides a more comprehensive estimate, projecting a family of four would pay an additional $4,609 per year by 2035. Annual job losses would average 1.15 million between 2012 and 2030, with job losses rising to nearly 2.5 million in 2035.

Higher unemployment rates mean more uninsured. In 2007, employers provided health insurance for 63 percent of Americans under age 65 and paid for nearly 90 percent of all private health insurance policies.

Although the newly unemployed may extend their health benefits through COBRA, many can’t afford to. According to Families USA, family health insurance premiums under COBRA equal, on average, 84 percent of unemployment benefits received.

The Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured estimates that for every percentage point increase of unemployment - in present terms, the loss of about 1.54 million jobs - the number of Americans without health insurance rises by 1.1 million.

For illustrative purposes, using Heritage’s job loss projections and the Kaiser figures, we estimate that cap-and-trade could lead to more than 820,000 people losing their health insurance annually, on average, between 2012 and 2030, with about 1.8 million losing coverage in 2035 alone.

But that’s not the half of it.

The stress and loss of self-esteem that accompanies job loss can lead to unhealthy lifestyles, including substance abuse and poor eating habits. The unemployed are more likely to be diagnosed for hypertension, heart disease, diabetes and stroke, and because discretionary income drops with the loss of a job, so too do routine screenings that might prevent late-stage diseases. Researchers at the University of California, University of Oxford and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found a 28 percent increase in alcohol-related deaths with a 3 percent increase in unemployment. Associate Professor Kate W. Strully of the State University of New York at Albany, in a survey of 8,000 unemployed factory workers, found unemployed workers were 83 percent more likely to develop a new health problem than were workers who kept their jobs.

Ralph Catalano, director of the Robert Woods Johnson Health and Society Program at University of California at Berkeley, found a strong correlation between unemployment and low birth weight babies. Low birth weight accounts for more than 64 percent of all infant fatalities. Catalano has also found higher incidence of advanced-stage breast tumors among women dealing with unemployment. The diagnosis is clear: If we want to move the American health-care system from the intensive care unit to the recovery room, we must first send cap-and-trade to the morgue. Read post here.