I like this article. Nice comment on Wired Science.

This article in Wired Science takes some beating for ignorance and misrepresentation of science. Take this sentence: Already, the acidity of ocean waters, which are generally basic, has shifted about 0.1 on the pH scale, or 10 percent, since pre-industrial times, and could get far more acidic by mid-century.

Within 10 words the author (Alexis Madrigal) contradicts himself; he clearly lacks the most basic of scientific education. Let’s dissect the sentence. ‘…the acidity of ocean waters, which are generally basic’. Well come on Alexis which is it, are they acid or basic (alkaline). They can’t be both at the same time? The pH scale is not a measure of acidity; it is a measure of how acidic OR basic a substance is. Acids and bases work differently, they are not on some convenient sliding scale as Madrigal would have you believe.

‘…has shifted about 0.1 on the pH scale, or 10 percent…’

First let’s look at the math. The pH scale is from 0 to 14. A 10% change would be 1.4, but we are only talking about 0.1 which is a 0.7% change. But that is not the whole story. The pH scale is logarithmic. That means that pH 9.0 is 10 times more alkaline than pH 8.0 and 100 times more alkaline than pH 7.0. Since sea water is between pH 7.9 and 9.0, 0.1 is an infinitesimally small change. But there’s more. Sea water is highly resistant to a change in its pH (buffered). Adding a large amount of highly concentrated acid would only reduce its pH very slightly.

Talk about alarmism!

Rising sea levels benefit corals just look at the historic record. Our sea levels are rising as any global warming alarmist will tell you (though not as much as they would have you believe).

So where did it all go wrong for peak-oil alarmists? Interestingly, for better ‘experts’ than Monbiot, it was their abject failure to understand either energy or the economics of energy. A double failure that led inexorably into a state which economist Mike Munger rightly terms: “peak idiocy”. Munger’s thesis bears repeating:

“Of all the idiotic things people believe, the whole “peak oil” thing has to be right up there. It is literally impossible for us to run out of oil. We have never run out of anything. And we never will.
If we did start to use up the oil we have … three things would happen.
1. Prices would rise, causing people to cut back on use. More fuel efficient cars, better insulation on houses, etc. Quantity supplied goes up.
2. Prices would rise, causing people to look for more. And they would find more oil, and more ways to get at it. Quantity demanded goes down.
3. Prices of oil would rise, making the search for substitutes more profitable. At that point alternative fuels and energy sources would be economical, and would not require government subsidies, because they would pay for themselves. The supply curve for substitutes shifts downward and to the right.

Source

A few days ago, I came across this article ‘Some advantages of being an aging conservative white male’ and it set me thinking/reminiscing.

I too am an aging white male. Conservative? Mmm, I prefer sceptical as my blog will tell you. In 1972 I attended my first environmental indoctrination seminar. Part of a two week schools science conference in London (I was an impressionable 16 year old). The title of the seminar was ‘2010 and all that’. Its premise – that by 2010 we would have run out of all natural resources needed as part of our technological western society. Oil was singled out as a resource long past its peak and heading towards oblivion. I was not worried, after all 2010 was 38 years into the future. It was merely an interesting ‘fact’. Clearly I lacked imagination, something available in shed loads to the legion of alarmists that stalked the school corridors, then as now.

In 1980 I bought my first (perhaps only) environmentalist book ‘Earth our Crowded Spaceship’ by science (and science fiction) writer Isaac Asimov, a tome he penned in 1974. Having read all his science fiction stories, this was (I thought) the first science book of his that I had read. But as an aging white sceptical male, I now realise that it was just more science fiction.

SUMMARY: Discusses the problems faced by the Earth’s inhabitants as population increases and energy sources, food, and land become scarce.

Basically Paul Ehrilch’s ‘The Population Bomb’(1968) and Thomas Malthus’ ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ (1798) with knobs on. Like all alarmists Asimov was not content to predict disaster too far into the future, he wanted to be around to say I told you so, so the last line of Chapter 10 on Oil predictably reads, “…a crisis will come in our use of oil energy long before 2025, the crisis is coming now, in the 1970s —-“ Pause for 1970’s school boy snigger.

Isaac Asimov died in 1992. He was a great man. A hero of mine. He predicted the development of the world wide web, the hand held computer, the use of the atom bomb, and all before 1945. The man was a genius but his socialist leanings got in the way of his ability to see the future clearly when it came to socioeconomic issues.

To all those who like to predict the demise of life as we know it let it be known that some of us have long memories. Some of us read history, some of us remember the predictions of your failed forebears’. If you must cry ‘the end is nigh’, do yourselves a favour and make ‘nigh’ after your dead so as not to make a fool of yourself.

It has been a long time since I have heard a politician no matter what their political hue describe the oil and gas industry as ‘remarkable’. So three cheers to George Osborn (Britain’s Economics Minister) for recognising the essential nature of the fossil fuel industry to keeping the lights on and industry rolling. And while other European nations are banning the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing to increase gas production, Osborn is giving $0.75 Billion in tax breaks to the gas industry to make Britain a “gas hub”.

While France in the 1970’s saw nuclear as their path to energy independence perhaps the UK will do the same with gas. For a moment there I thought they were going to do that by building 6,000 offshore wind turbines. But that would be utterly stupid – wouldn’t it?

Source article.

I read this article with some surprise. The New York Times is usually a strict adherent to the Manmade Global Warming mantra and anything that promotes the tenets of renewables and sustainability. They break faith here with the normal approach of blind sacrifice on the altar of anti-fossil fuel.

Could it be that some sense is creeping in to the tents of the warmist religious – nice fantasy, but probably not.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/opinion/corn-for-food-not-fuel.html?_r=1

Pre the GW Bush Ethanol mandates of 2007 US corn prices bumped along at a sub $3 figure for many years. From 2007 onwards we see an inexorable rise to over $6 and talk of $8 in the wake of the recent drought. Economists such as Paul Krugman (see my previous post – Loading the Climate Dice?) would have us believe that the price rise is all due to the drought but the historical price graph gives the lie to that.

Now I am a firm adherent to the maxim that ‘correlation does not necessarily mean causality’. Having said that when the US is MANDATED yes mandated to convert what could be 50% of its corn crop (40% last year) into Ethanol, in 2012, then is there any wonder that the price of corn has doubled in 5 years.

The current government with its eye on sustainable energy is not going to change tack and the corn producers certainly are not going to look for any change so don’t hold your breath for a U turn on the Ethanol mandate any time soon.

Just another example of blind adherence to a political dogma that flies in the face of commonsense when natural gas prices in the US have halved during the same period.

More interesting takes on this.