Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain’s Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth’s recent warming. "In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years ... Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth."

Global Warming Conclusively Debunked As Gore Calls For CO2 Tax
The seven graphs that dispel alarmist claims about climate change

Global corporations and governments have joined forces to launch a united propaganda assault about how we must turn “green” while all the real environmental crises - deforestation, GM crops, chemtrails, genetic splicing, and cancer-causing cellphone tower radiation - are completely ignored.

Top Rocket Scientist: No Evidence CO2 Causes Global Warming

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
July 22, 2008

Read Full Article Here

Two Peer-Reviewed Scientific Papers Debunk CO2 Myth

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
July 16, 2008

The paper concludes, “CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100.”

Recent News:

And it's very clear for all to see in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report - Working Group 2 (AR4-WG2), in Chapter 1 and in the Summary for Policymakers.

A bumper 96% of reported changes are from Europe and Europe alone. And what does that mean?

It means that for the whole of Australia/New Zealand, the IPCC could find only 6 significant changes (SC). For the whole of Africa, 7 SCs. For the whole of Latin America, 58 SCs. For the whole of Asia, 114SCs.

In terms of SC per square kilometer, Europe has:

1- 11,978 more than Africa
2- 85 more than North America
3- 853 more than South America
4- 1066 more than Asia
5- 3,702 more than Australia/New Zealand
6- 270 more than Antarctica

But one may reply to that, I am putting too much emphasis on the 28,000+ European biological SCs.

Let’s recompute the above with reference to North America then. In terms of SC per square kilometer, North America has:

1- 142 more than Africa
2- 10 more than South America
3- 12 more than Asia
4- 43 more than Australia/New Zealand
5- 3 more than Antarctica

It is blazingly blatant that before we can speak of global warming, more data has to be collected at least about Africa/Asia/Australia-New Zealand/South America .

We are talking 67% of the total land area of the planet.

Is anybody in the IPCC/Al Gore/James Hansen/Tim Flannery crowd pushing hard to get a complete picture of what is changing where and how?

Som jag sagt tidigare så många gånger:

Och ta hela skojeriet med dessa avgudade klimatmodellerna! Där de INTE ENS KLARAR AV ATT FÖRUTSE många av de viktiga och stora klimatpåverkande fenomen. Än mindre ALLA faktorer som påverkar klimatet. Eller vädret 10 dagar från nu eller hur vädret var för 10 dagar sedan.

OCH DET ÄR SAMMA MODELLER SOM MAN VILL FÅ OSS ATT TRO KAN FÖRUTSÄGA TEMPERATUREN OM 100 år PÅ EN TIONDELSGRAD NÄR!

Det är alltså resultatet av dess av modeller som IPCC, Al Gore et consortes avgudar och som hela Global Warming Hysterin bygger på. Och där man vill "offra" större delen av värt ekonomiska välstånd på dess altare för att blidka CO2 guden.

Återigen: Global Warming Hysterin är den största vetenskapliga och politiska skandalen ALLA kategorier detta århundrade!

Se även mina inlägg:

Global Warming: Has the Climate Sensitivity Holy Grail Been Found?,  Validation, Evaluation and Exaggeration from the IPCC,  Has Global Warming Research Misinterpreted Cloud Behavior?,  Honest Statement Of Current Capability In Climate Forecasts,  Tropical Water Vapor and Cloud Feedbacks in Climate Models,  Basic Greenhouse Equations "Totally Wrong" - ytterligare ett anförande från konferensen i New York,  Hey, Nobel Prize Winners, Answer Me This,  The Sloppy Science of Global Warming!,  IPCC models are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view!,  But the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain!,  There will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.  ROBUSTNESS AND UNCERTAINTIES OF CLIMATE CHANGE PREDICTIONS,  Has the IPCC inflated the feedback factor?,  Climate change confirmed but global warming is cancelled,  Why multiple climate model agreement is not that exciting!,  Open letter to IPCC to renounce its current policy!,  Average Day By Day Variations Of The Global And Hemispheric Average Lower Tropospheric Temperatures,  Scientists Reveal Presence Of Ocean Current ‘Stripes',  Cold in the tropical troposphere but it should be warming if Global Warming "theories" are correct!,  Assessment of the reliability of climate predictions based on comparisons with historical time series,  Mera om Klimat modellernas falsarium,  Klimatmodellernas falsarium,  Klimatmodellernas skojeri - Fel på 100 - 300%!

Artikeln finns här:

http://business.theage.com.au/business/grow-up-sceptics-see-bigger-picture-20080724-3kiw.html

Evaluated computer models just invalid

YOUR correspondent David Jones (BusinessDay, 17/7) claims that there are many studies that "validate" computer models of the climate.

This is just not true. I have been an "expert reviewer" to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for the past 18 years. The IPCC's first report in 1990 actually had a chapter "Validation of Climate Models" and the same title appeared in the first draft of the next report.

At the time I said that since no climate model had ever been validated the term was wrong. The IPCC agreed. It changed the word "validated" to "evaluated" no less than 50 times in the next draft, eliminated the word "validated" from every one of the subsequent reports and used "evaluated" instead.

The term "validated" is used by computer engineers to describe the procedures that have to be carried out before a computer model can be considered suitable for forecasting. The procedure must include successful prediction, to a satisfactory level of accuracy, for all the future circumstances for which the model is intended.

No computer model has been subjected to such a discipline, and the IPCC reports have never included a discussion of the procedures that are needed before a computer climate model could be considered a reliable means of predicting future climate.

As a result, the IPCC never "predicts" the future climate. It only "projects" it. A "projection" is a result of the particular assumptions made in a particular model, but it cannot be taken seriously unless it is actually successful. So far, no such model has ever been successful in predicting any future climate.

Vincent Gray, Crofton Downs

Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om <a href=”http://bloggar.se/om/milj%F6“ rel=”tag”>miljö</a> 

How is everyone enjoying the scam so far?

From Strata-Sphere

Well, well. Congress learned something shattering today, which will
have the Church of Al Gore/IPCC running in fear of their lost
credibility. It has been scientifically demonstrated that 70% of the
Global Warming in the last century (and cooling in the last decade) is due to the Pacific Ocean Oscillations, not CO2:

One necessary result of low climate sensitivity is that
the radiative forcing from greenhouse gas emissions in the last century
is not nearly enough to explain the upward trend of 0.7 deg. C in the
last 100 years. This raises the question of whether there are natural
processes at work which have caused most of that warming.

On this issue, it can be shown with a simple climate model that
small cloud fluctuations assumed to occur with two modes of natural
climate variability — the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon (Southern
Oscillation), and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation — can explain 70% of
the warming trend since 1900, as well as the nature of that trend:
warming until the 1940s, no warming until the 1970s, and resumed
warming since then.

The gentlemen making this claim is the lead investigator one of NASA’s flagship Earth Observing Observatories (H/T Ice Cap). I have the honor of working on this mission on the periphery (Aqua), it is operated out of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD.

I posted on some of these effects yesterday.
What this means is no matter how much you change your CO2 footprint,
how much you try to be CO2 green, no matter how much liberal
governments tax you - you cannot save the planet from its natural
cycles. Remember, the draconian actions being proposed by the Church of
Al Gore/IPCC, which will run into the tens of trillions of dollars and
cripple the world economies, is only meant to reduce today’s CO2 levels
by a fraction.

Say they reduced the CO2 25%. Say the CO2 is the driver for the
remaining 30% of Global Warming (which it cannot be, but let’s just be
only half as ridiculous as the IPCC), then all that effort would only
impact 7.5% of the forces driving the global climate. The other 92.5%
would roll on, impervious to the effort. And since CO2 is not 100% of
the remaining 30% of the equation (more like 10%), a more realistic
expectation is that all the suffering that would go into dropping CO2
levels by 25% would result in a less than 1% change in the forces
driving our climate.

In other words, you might as well light a match to all that money
because it would have no effect, you would be throwing it away on a
fool’s errand.

Must be the week to bust myths, because this means all those efforts
to drive down CO2 emissions are a scientifically proven waste of time.
From Strata-Sphere

The comments below are taken out of the Climate Change 2007/Synthesis Report published by the IPCC

The report starts with the observed changes in climate and its effects

• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level
• Observational evidence from all continents and most oceans shows that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases.

It is interesting to note where they got their observations from: A subset of about 29,000 data series was selected from about 80,000 data series from 577 studies. These met the following criteria: (1) ending in 1990 or later; (2) spanning a period of at least 20 years; and (3) showing a significant change in either direction, as assessed in individual studies.

It goes on by reviewing the causes for such change:

• Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.

The panel drew that conclusion by comparing observed continental and global scale changes in surface temperature with the results simulated by 19 climate models using either natural, or both natural and anthropogenic forcings (see the graphs below)

Then the panel proceeds by reviewing the projected climate change and its impacts in abscence of additional climate policies:

• There is high agreement and much evidence that with current climate change mitigation policies and related sustainable development practices, global GHG emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades.
• Continued GHG emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century
  

What about the impacts ?  see the table below:

Afterwards, the panel examinates different strategies/solutions for adaptation and mitigation:

• Adaptation is necessary in the short and longer term to address impacts resulting from the warming that would occur even for the lowest stabilisation scenarios assessed. There are barriers,
  limits and costs, but these are not fully understood. Unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt. The
  time at which such limits could be reached will vary between sectors and regions. Early mitigation actions would avoid further locking in carbon intensive infrastructure and reduce climate
  change and associated adaptation needs.
• There is high confidence that neither adaptation nor mitigation alone can avoid all climate change impacts; however, they can complement each other and together can significantly reduce the risks of climate change.
  

Here are some of the adaptation strategies considered:

It is to be noted that:

• Future energy infrastructure investment decisions, expected to exceed US$20 trillion (=20,000 billion) between 2005 and 2030, will have long-term impacts on GHG emissions, because of the long lifetimes of energy plants and other infrastructure capital stock. The widespread diffusion of low-carbon technologies
  may take many decades, even if early investments in these technologies are made attractive.
  

And here are some of the mitigation strategies considered:

As for the level of stabilisation that we can reach (= CO2 concentration measured in ppm / 2005 level was 379 ppm) depending on the strategy we implement and the global average temperature and sea level expected:

Eventually in terms of what it would cost to implement such strategies (measured as a reduction of the GDP), the studies done by the panel show the following:

Another way to look at it, considering the setting of a carbon price:

Or the potential of mitigation by sectors:

To go beyond this quick review, you may visit the following website:

http://www.skepticalscience.com

http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/books/index.html

...because a "stupid" is somebody that damages others without a gain for himself: whilst the APS has only damaged itself.

Look at the "peer-reviewed" issue. Monckton is likely to be behind a wildly-exaggerated press release by the SPPI

Mathematical proof that there is no “climate crisis” appears today in a major, peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 46,000-strong American Physical Society, SPPI reports.

Should have been child's play to issue a counter-release explaining that there cannot be any mathematical proof in a scientific field (outside of mathematics, that is); that "Physics and Society" is a newsletter, and not a "learned journal"; and that Monckton's invited article was only part of the beginning of a debate.

Look what's happened instead: Monckton is now perfectly in the right to state that he's been unfairly, and uncourteously treated. He's been invited to write an article that has been published, that then caused APS to undergo all sorts of fits, including a series of unwarranted put-downs plastered all over the place in apparent panic.

In fact: at this very moment both Monckton's article and the IPCC-consensus piece by Hafemeister and Schwarz sport on top the following statement in black ink (my emphasis) (this is similar to what appeared in red ink on Monckton's article alone):

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical Society newsletters. The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007: "Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate."

Something similar has materialized at the beginning of the FPS July 2008 issue's web page:

The Forum on Physics and Society is a place for discussion and disagreement on scientific and policy matters. Our newsletter publishes a combination of non- peer- reviewed technical articles, policy analyses, and opinion. All articles and editorials published in the newsletter solely represent the views of their authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Forum Executive Committee 

But that is not the way the FPS is presented:

Physics and Society is the quarterly of the Forum on Physics and Society, a division of the American Physical Society. It presents letters, commentary, book reviews and reviewed articles on the relations of physics and the physics community to government and society.

Now..what is the difference between peer-reviewed and reviewed?

Is there such a thing in scientific circles as an article reviewed but not by peers?

Has anybody ever heard of an inferior-reviewed article? Or of a superior-reviewed article? Who knows?

Looks like at the APS they have been cavalier with the issue of reviewing, until now. But if they need to sort out their own house, it should be for the future, and not for the past (unless they want to go against the principle of cause and effect).

And so Monckton on one thing is certainly right: for all intents and purposes, maybe the wrong way, maybe without thinking at the consequence, but Monckton's article has been peer-reviewed indeed.

Hay calentamiento global, es culpa del progreso y del capitalismo salvaje, hay que acatar el protocolo de Kioto y si lo dudas considérate un embustero o un loco. A esa conclusión llegamos luego del fallo de Ofcom, el órgano regulador de los medios de comunicación británicos, contra el documental The Great Global Warming Swindle ("El gran timo del calentamiento global", ubicable en 8 partes en YouTube), al que acusan de no ser objetivo y de haberse saltado las normas básicas de la veracidad y la imparcialidad, según informa El Mundo.

De un tiempo a esta parte cualquier intento de debatir las tesis de Al Gore es instantáneamente estigmatizado. Académicos y científicos de todo el mundo son amenazados con el ostracismo ante cualquier planteamiento crítico a la teoría oficial. Las sugerencias del Consenso de Copenague, que acepta el cambio climático sin considerarlo apocalíptico pero ofreciendo una alternativa a Kioto, son permanentemente ignoradas. Y ahora esto...

Ofcom, con un dudoso papel de policía, asegura que Channel 4 -la cadena que coprodujo el documental- no cumplió con su obligación de imparcialidad y de reflejar las distintas opiniones existentes sobre el asunto, por lo que tendrá que emitir un resumen con estas conclusiones.

Hace cuatro siglos a un tal Galileo Galilei también se lo obligó a desdecirse, cuando enfrentó con su loca y absurda teoría heliocéntrica a la ciencia oficial. Cuando tras el derroche de 200.000 millones de euros anuales no solucionemos nada, salvo los bolsillos de los lobbistas ¿cómo le explicaremos a nuestros hijos, o a los hijos de nuestros hijos que el mundo entero, como corderos, le ha dado alas y poder a esta nueva inquisición?

Hi - you are using the wrong picture to accompany one article about the Ofcom ruling on the "Global Warming Swindle" documentary.

The page "Opinion: A reluctant whistle-blower" is using the IPCC TAR (2001) "Hockey Stick" graph

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="226" caption="IPCC TAR (2001) Hockey Stick"][/caption]

The above can be seen in a 2004 BBC News article "Climate legacy of 'hockey stick'".

Obviously, you should have used the more recent IPCC (2007) temperature graph, as per your own website

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="416" caption="IPCC AR4 (2007) Temperature Graph"][/caption]

That graph is published in the BBC News website's "Climate Change: The evidence".

Please have it fixed asap. After all, the article with the wrong picture is about...accuracy in the media!!

regards - maurizio

This was actually created as a briefing and presentation. Many of the terms and concepts used would be familiar and shared with the intended audience.

Making the Case for Biofuels.

In 2008, with rapidly rising fuels costs from traditional hydrocarbon sources, there is increasing pressure on business and society to provide energy for our national needs, and for our growing and ever power-hungry global civilization. Currently, it is estimated that we use approximately 15 terawatts of electricity globally[1], much of this being use in the internal combustion engines of modern cars or in electrical power generation from liquid, solid, or gas fossil fuels. Rising costs of power have a cascading effect on all costs in our world, since all processes in the modern world require or rely on electrical powered industrial activities. If we are to keep increasing our energy demands, the cost of power will continue to rise if we continue to rely so heavily on non renewable energy. Some form of replacement power source that can expand with our demand expansion need to be found. This principle is generally known as scalability. For us to grow, we don’t need to merely do “more for less”. It is also crucial that we find new and expandable sources of energy.

[2]

There is another factor pushing our need for new energy sources to replace the traditional fossil fuels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has announced that anthropogenic[3] sources of greenhouse gases seem to be driving temperatures higher and higher. "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations," it says. According to the IPCC, this means a greater than 90 % chance.[4] A huge source of this temperature increase is likely to be from carbon and other “greenhouse gases” released into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels. Whether or not one chooses to agree with the IPCC, it is hard to argue that liberating massive amounts of carbon formerly sequestered into the Earth over geological timescales, in the short span of a few hundred years, is completely benign. There is no question that human activity has changed the carbon cycle in the last 8,000 years.

The following chart shows carbon cycle flux of the earth, with boxes indicating reservoir values and the arrows indicating annual change. Red arrows indicate the changes made by human beings in the time we have been conducting the ecological experiment of civilization.

[5]

In addition to the above reasons to investigate alternative fuels and sources of energy, one can include a grab-bag of other agendas and motivations. “The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007”, recently signed by U.S. President George W. Bush may be one.[6] This act mandates the inclusion of biofuel into the traditional gasoline available at the pumps, in part the key provisions include "Near-term usage requirement goes to 9 billion gallons in 2008 and 15.2 billion gallons in 2011" and “expands mandate for U.S.-grown biofuels such as ethanol, to 36 billion gallons in 2022, versus current levels near 6.5 billion gallons”. Other similar provisions in Canada[7] and Europe[8] seem to suggest a shift of public and governmental direction in the use of energy.

[9](The “The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007” seeks to provide energy security for the United States against uncontrollable import irregularities.)

There are a number of interesting proposed methods to supply this power, but due to the above mentioned legislations, as well as the popular and media interest, I will look at biofuels directly. It is also my personal feeling that biofuels can be made to work well in replacing traditional energy sources and providing a crucial bridge from current technologies to a truly energy independent future.

Biofuels, in particular biodiesel, can be made to work with existing technology and using existing infrastructure, which is an important step since an ‘energy-constrained’ future also means a future in which large scale infrastructure change is more difficult. They provide a solution with minimum disruption that can be easy fit into our existing economic models. They are also, as I will demonstrate, capable of remediating the negative impact we have already caused on the biosphere that is condemned by the IPCC report.

Challenges posed by biofuels

There are a number of problems associated with the wide scale use of biofuels. One of these is the ecological damage they can cause when unregulated market forces drive economic activity that is destructive to the ecology that we seek to protect. According to the CBC:

“Rainforests are now being cleared to make way for palm oil plantations, a rich source of biodiesel. The problem is particularly serious in Malaysia where the palm oil industry began in 1917. The country hopes to apply its experience to meet the rising demand for biofuels coming from Europe and India.”[10]

This pattern is repeated in the Amazon and other tropical forest areas around the world, as poor nations attempt to cash in on the high price of energy and food. This pattern is not new, however it is exacerbated to supply energy when every newly cleared section of forest becomes a potential “oil well” for vegetable and cellulose energy. The ‘vanishing rainforest’ problem of the 1980s has not disappeared, in fact it has accelerated.[11] Much of the worlds forest cover has already disappeared, as evidenced on the following map created by Canadian Geographic:

Converting our already farmed cropland into “Oil well” can also have very negative consequences, as we have witnessed in the lead up to summer 2008. Bob Macdonald of the CBC observes:

“In North America and Mexico, another disturbing trend is developing: The use of corn as biofuel stock. Other than the fact that it takes a lot of energy to grow corn in the first place, corn is food. With the rising threat of droughts brought on by climate change, and a growing world population, how long will our thirst for fuel go before we’re putting food in vehicles instead of mouths?”[12]

So, biofuels threaten to exacerbate already current problems and negate any gains they might make with unseen offsets and consequences. Is there a way to keep the benefits of plant-based fuel solutions while mitigating or controlling the consequences?

Algae?

Algae is one of the oldest known forms of life on earth, and it has a wide variety of species filling a wide variety of ecological niches. Algal farming has been practiced by humans for thousands of years, and is currently farmed industrially in the west to provide nutrient and health products as well as various chemical food applications. It is known to be a prolific grower, and a primary producer getting its energy directly from the sun. The photosynthesis performed by algae gives us an opportunity to tap the enormous power of the sun to meet our current and future fuel needs.

"While a number of bio-feedstock are currently being experimented for biodiesel (and ethanol) production, algae have emerged as one of the most promising sources especially for biodiesel production, for two main reasons (1) The yields of oil from algae are orders of magnitude higher than those for traditional oilseeds, and (2) Algae can grow in places away from the farmlands & forests, thus minimizing the damages caused to the eco- and food chain systems. There is a third interesting reason as well: Algae can be grown in sewages and next to power-plant smokestacks where they digest the pollutants and give us oil!"[13]

I will break down this claim and see it if stands up to facts.

To begin with, how productive can algae farming be? Algae is a single celled organism, its not carrying around a lot of superfluous specialized equipment. It is extremely efficient at using light and available nutrients to its advantage. Its growth and productivity is 30 to 100 times higher than crops like soybeans. It has the potential to be remarkably productive.

Secondly, it is claimed that “Algae production does not compete with agriculture. Algae production facilities are closed and do not require soil for growth, use 99% less water than conventional agriculture, and can be located on non-agricultural land far from water. Since the whole organism converts sunlight into oil, algae can produce more oil in an area the size of a two-car garage than an entire football field of soybeans.”[14] We will explore this further later, to see if other scientists agree. As for the third claim, “Algae thrive on a high concentration of carbon dioxide. And nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a pollutant of power plants, is a nutrient for the algae. Algae production facilities can thus be fed exhaust gases from fossil fuel power plants, and even breweries, to significantly increase productivity and clean up the air.” This is in fact one of the impetuses that lead us to look at biofuels in the first place, that is their potential to clean up the environment and scrub our industrial activities. Algae live specifically on the gas that we would like to remove from effluent. [15](Algae LIVE on CO2)

The comparisons between algae productivity and other biofuel feedstocks can be summed up as follows:

Yield of Various Plant Oils

Crop Oil in Liters per hectare

Castor 1413

Sunflower 952

Safflower 779

Palm 5950

Soy 446

Coconut 2689

Algae 100000

[16]

The numbers represented here seem to be a fairly accurate representation of much of the literature I surveyed. The numbers for algae may be slightly on the high side, and probably represent a “bioreactor” factory process. Nevertheless all the sources seem to agree that algae is extremely prolific and productive, with up to 50% of their weight taken up by lipids[17], depending on the species.

, Hawaii)[18]

Here we must address scalability. Is it possible to grow enough algae in North America to supply our needs? After all, as Nathan Lewis has pointed out, using traditional biofuels it would take a significant portion of the Earths total biotic production to power our civilization.[19]

According to some, the growing area needed using an ‘open pond’ system is actually quite reasonable when compared to other crops. Information from the University of New Hampshire indicates the following:

"NREL[20]'s research showed that one quad (7.5 billion gallons) of biodiesel could be produced from 200,000 hectares of desert land (200,000 hectares is equivalent to 780 square miles, roughly 500,000 acres), if the remaining challenges are solved (as they will be, with several research groups and companies working towards it, including ours at UNH). In the previous section, we found that to replace all transportation fuels in the US, we would need 140.8 billion gallons of biodiesel, or roughly 19 quads (one quad is roughly 7.5 billion gallons of biodiesel). To produce that amount would require a land mass of almost 15,000 square miles. To put that in perspective, consider that the Sonora desert in the southwestern US comprises 120,000 square miles.”[21]

Or approximately 1/8^th of the size of the Sonora desert in the United States. This compares favorably not only to other crops considered for biofuels, but also with space needs for projects like a Photo Voltaic power system proposed by Mr. Lewis.[22]

B. Greg Mitchell is a Research Biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He works on algae, and has an apparently keen interest in using algae as a renewable energy. According to him,

"Soybean Based Biodiesel will never contribute more than a few percent of the possible US diesel fuel market… (however) approximately 20-30 million acres of algae would supply ALL U.S. transportation fuel"[23]

This is a little less optimistic than the previous estimate we looked at from University of New Hampshire, which for comparison converts to 9.6 million acres. However, they are clearly in the same ballpark. B. Greg Mitchell goes on to detail what he considers to be the biggest benefits of developing an algae feedstock for biofuel production.

Advantages of Algae

• Uses all nutrients, minimizing eutrophication

• Uses underutilized land, e.g. deserts

• Yields >10x those for land plants

• Can grow in salt, or brackish water

• Non-fuel fraction is high in protein

• capture CO2 at point source

• Can produce high yields of – Lipids for biodiesel & starch / polysaccharides for ethanol

You will recall that the University of New Hampshire estimates placed the hypothetical fields in the Sonora desert. This is not merely for comparison; it highlights one of the strengths of algae farming. Namely, that it can be done in conditions that are suboptimal for other agriculture. Algae needs sun, carbon, and water. Just about any water will do, depending on the species.

As noted by B. Greg Mitchell, salty or brackish water is fine so there is no need to divert precious drinking water. So is sewage waste, which algae could actually help clean up by using the carbon and nitrogen found there. Ideally then, water treatment facilities could use algae ponds to help them clean up their waste mimicking services already performed by natural systems. The non fuel components are high in protein, so dead algae could be used as animal feed or even supply more human foods.

We already use oil for food, why not use algae?

[24]

So harvest the algae from salt water desert ponds, put it through a digester process like that shown above, and out comes food, fuel, and probably some Ambrosia[25] from Olympus. At least, that’s the model. Is this a reality or a fantasy? Is this kind of progress achievable and if so how close are we?

What we have, what we need.

Stephen Mayfield[26] of the Scripps research Institute (a college of Dr. Mitchells), gives an assessment of where we are at. According to Mayfield, these are the things we need to achieve in order to get to the vision above:

-"We need Bigger and better knowledge base on algae."

-"We need to identify and characterize a large number of diverse algal species; Genomic, proteomic and metabolic profiles."

-"We need to develop molecular tools for breeding”

-"We need to develop molecular tools for engineering"

-"We need to develop agricultural practices for algal growth, harvesting, and processing." i.e. “Industrializing algae”

And this is what we now have:

-"We have many species identified with limited characterization, but showing ...fantastic potential."

-"We already know how to grow algae on a modest scale"

-"We have a few algal genomes sequenced and annotated."

"We have nuclear and chloroplast transformation for a handful of species." (engineering)

"We know that algae can be grown at agricultural scale at costs approaching agricultural costs."

What would an algae feedstock farm business look like?

It turns out that there are already quite a few companies who are developing or have developed what they consider to be a workable business model. One particularly interesting company is Greenfuel technologies.

According to their website,

“Using technology licensed from a NASA project, GreenFuel builds bioreactors--in the shape of 3-meter-high glass tubes fashioned as a triangle--to grow algae. The algae are fed with sunlight, water and carbon-carrying emissions from power plants. The algae are then harvested and turned into biodiesel fuel.”[27]

According to Smart Economy, quoting New Scientist[28]:

"To produce fuel from CO2, the flue gases are fed into a series of transparent “bioreactors”, which are 2 metres high and filled with green microalgae suspended in nutrient-rich water.  The algae use the CO2, along with sunlight and water, to produce sugars by photosynthesis, which are then metabolised into fatty oils and protein.  As the algae grow and multiply, portions of the soup are continually withdrawn from each reactor and dried into cakes of concentrated algae.  These are repeatedly washed with solvents to extract the oil.  The algal oil can then be converted into biodiesel through a routine process called transesterification, in which it is processed using ethanol and a catalyst.  Enzymes are then used to convert starches from the remaining biomass into sugars, which are fermented by yeasts to produce ethanol."

(A Greenfuel Bioreactor)

They have a pilot project, which has successfully created biodiesel for local school buses. This process uses a carbon stream straight from a heavy carbon source and ideally it would use the carbon and prevent it from being released into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, there have been a few design hitches, including a problem with the algae actually growing over abundantly and clogging up the system. Algae deep in the reactor could not get sunlight and died. The Biofuel reactor had to be shut down for redesign, but the company hopes to have it up again shortly.

Another company which shows some promise is Global Green Solutions. They have solved a problem that Greenfuels has encountered, by growing their algae in thin tubes, constantly circulating to allow all the algae to receive the necessary light. Global Green Solutions have a very interesting website, on which can be seen a video of their process in action along with interviews with their scientists explaining the process.[29] They also claim to have various strains of algae which produce for them various types of fuel, such as jet fuel, gasoline, etc.

A third company is Solix Solutions[30], which has an interesting website that provides a lot of basic information. They are the descendant of the NERL National Renewable Energy Lab Government program in the U.S. Solix has a second generation prototype of a bioreactor which they are currently testing.

It seems that there are a lot of good concepts out there, and some workable proofs-of-concept, but very little that’s ready to roll out right now for a profitable industry. This concern cannot work as a charity. One of the bigger problems is that the algae must themselves be harvested and digested in order to get at the oils they are producing and storing in their systems. In essence, everything we have been talking about up till now has been a ‘crop’ model.

(Industrial Algae Process)

Another model

Can we cut out the harvesting and processing altogether? Scientists have known for some time that algae will produce very small amount of hydrogen under certain conditions. Enter Tesios Melis and other new geneticists to rethink the entire process and bring some economy to the whole system.

"Researchers have found a metabolic switch in algae that allows the primitive plants to produce hydrogen gas -- a discovery that could ultimately result in a vast source of cheap, pollution-free fuel."[31]

Tesios Melis at the University of Berkeley discovered this in 2000, experimenting with an algae species called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii in the lab. He explains that ``an alternative metabolic pathway'' exists in the algae to exploit stored energy reserves anaerobically -- in the absence of oxygen. A hydrogenase enzyme was activated, splitting large amounts of hydrogen gas from water and releasing it as a byproduct. The algae still doesnt produce all the hydrogen that it should. A "hydrogen gap" exists between what it should be producing, by the laws of chemistry, and what it is. If that hydrogen gap is solved it could boost the hydrogen production up to levels needed to be industrially feasible.

"Switching 100 percent of the algae's photosynthesis to hydrogen might not be possible."The rule of thumb is, if we bring that up to 50 percent, it would be economically viable," Melis says. “With 50 percent capacity, one acre of algae could produce 40 kilograms of hydrogen per day. That would bring the cost of producing hydrogen to $2.80 a kilogram. At this price, hydrogen could compete with gasoline, since a kilogram of hydrogen is equivalent in energy to a gallon of gasoline."

This is a factory model of algae fuel production, with the algae acting as tiny living factories.

Carbon inà(algae growth)àharvestingàprocessingàfuel

Vs.

Carbon inà (algae growth and processing) à fuel

Designing life

Tasios has done some work for another likeminded scientist, Dr. J. Craig Venter. Dr. Venter has been widely regarded in the biosciences community as a saint and a devil. Dr. Venter has made friends, gathered often worshipful attention from the media, and angered a lot of people including his own shareholders who still seem to easily forgive him and flock to the next project.

Venter is the former president and a co-founder of Celera Genomics, famous for running a private version of the Human Genome Project of its own, for economic commercial purposes, using so called “shotgun sequencing” technology. His method widely criticized by the international scientific community who doubted its effectiveness. The aim of the Celera project was to create a database of data to which users could subscribe – for a price. However when Both Celera and the Human Genome project both announced jointly the completion of their projects, much of the criticism stopped. However, giving in to international pressure to reveal their results, Celera failed to recoup much of their investment and Venter was hounded out of his position.

This however did not deter him. He set up the private foundation “J. Craig Venter Institute” and launched a sloop to sail around the world taking surveys of the ocean life. According to the Institute[32]:

“In a quest to unlock these mysteries, the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) launched the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling (GOS) Expedition in 2004. Inspired by 19th Century sea voyages like Darwin’s on the H.M.S. Beagle and Captain George Nares on the H.M.S. Challenger, The Sorcerer II circumnavigated the globe for more than two years, covering a staggering 32,000 nautical miles, visiting 23 different countries and island groups on four continents."

There have been some amazing discoveries made on that trip, the details of which I won’t delve into here. Much of it, however, concerned the most basic of life; bacterial, algal, photosynthetic organisms.

Venter also set up Synthetic Genomics[33] which now leads the world in bioinformatics[34] research, and hard science. Their list of current projects reads like a wish list of future biological technologies. The crown jewel, the centerpiece of his work, is a stripped down “minimal cell”. That is, a cell that is capable of living at the most basic level, with the barest minimum of genes. With this cell, they will then be able to insert any other genes they want, in packages. The combined effect will be like building any custom designed cell you want, out of lego blocks. Want a cell that produces hydrogen? Or any other product you care to name?

(Minimal cell)+(Tasios Melis’ Metabolic Pathway for Hydrogen)+(Photosynthesis)+(Highest available Algae reproduction rates)+(Squid gene for luminosity) = An algae cell that will glow while its delivering you cheap, fast hydrogen from the sun.

Sitting on a salty wastewater pond in the middle of the desert.

Too good to be true? Maybe. But if anybody can deliver on something like this, it’s probably Nobel Laureate, first man to have a full sequence of his own DNA, J. Craig Venter. He says he’ll have it in two years.

Is it worth looking forwards to? Absolutely.

what is the point of shooting against Monckton when the real offending statement for AGWers, the one that elicited all the "blogosphere brouhaha", was written by FPS editor Jeffrey Marque?

There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution

Without the above, there would have been no NewsBusters article, no DailyTech comment, etc etc...

Monckton is one, a "considerable presence" is MANY

the claim that anthropogenic CO₂ is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable

I had mentioned it at the time but had not had the time or memory to read it again. For those in need of a quick, heavily emphasized (by me) quote:

The proper response to adamant certainty in the face of complete ignorance is rational skepticism. And aren’t we much better off accumulating resources to meet urgent needs than expending resources to service ignorant fears?

Here a longer extract, from the final remarks (my emphasis):

It’s not that we, “lack … full scientific certainty,” it’s that we lack any scientific certainty. We literally don’t know whether doubling atmospheric CO2 will have any discernible effect on climate at all.

If our knowledge of future climates is zero then for all we know either suppressing CO2 emissions or increasing them may make climate better, or worse, or just have a neutral effect. The alternatives are incommensurate but in our state of ignorance either choice equally has two chances in three of causing the least harm. Complete ignorance makes the Precautionary Principle completely useless. There are good reasons to reduce burning fossil fuels, but climate warming isn’t one of them.

Some may decide to believe anyway. “We can’t prove it,” they might say, “but the correlation of CO2 with temperature is there (they’re both rising, after all), and so the causality is there, too, even if we can’t prove it yet.” But correlation is not causation, and cause can’t be assigned by an insistent ignorance. The proper response to adamant certainty in the face of complete ignorance is rational skepticism. And aren’t we much better off accumulating resources to meet urgent needs than expending resources to service ignorant fears?

So, then, what about melting ice-sheets, rising sea levels, the extinction of polar bears, and more extreme weather events? What if unusually intense hurricane seasons really do cause widespread disaster? It is critical to keep a firm grip on reason and rationality, most especially when social invitations to frenzy are so pervasive. General Circulation Models are so terribly unreliable that there is no objectively falsifiable reason to suppose any of the current warming trend is due to human-produced CO2, or that this CO2 will detectably warm the climate at all. Therefore, even if extreme events do develop because of a warming climate, there is no scientifically valid reason to attribute the cause to human-produced CO2. In the chaos of Earth’s climate, there may be no discernible cause for warming. Many excellent scientists have explained all this in powerful works written to defuse the CO2 panic, but the choir sings seductively and few righteous believers seem willing to entertain disproofs

Note: there is one thing I agree with the APS. Monckton's paper has not undergone any scientific peer review. You see, he's a Lord (a Viscount, no less) whilst on the "Council of the APS"'s side there is obviously no trace of nobility. They have been "discorteous" indeed.

Time will tell about the position (and nobility) of Jeffrey Marque, the Editor of the FPS that has seen his July 2008 comments severely rebuked by the Executive Committee of the FPS. Who's going to choose what will be published in the October 2008 issue, is anybody's guess.

Interestingly, the FPS and the APS did not make too much of a fuss in the past, when publishing "heretical" climate-related opinions. For an example, see Gerald E. Marsh's "Climate Stability and Policy" in April 2008.

Mr Marsh is not exactly your average AGW proponent: he argues that current CO2 levels are too low and contributing to climate instability, suggests that even 750ppmv could still be not enough to stop an upcoming, catastrophic Ice Age. and recommends that the IPCC switch its focus towards "determining the optimal range of carbon dioxide concentrations that will stabilize the climate, and extend the current interglacial period indefinitely".

For some reason, the above did not cause any digestive pain at the FPS, either with its Editor, with its Executive Committee, or with the Council of the APS itself.

Is Monckton's paper simply too hot to handle? Plenty of nutrients for conspiracy theorists there, no doubt.

The right wing blogosphere has been all atwitter the past couple of days over a blog post by Michael Asher at DailyTech alleging that the