Saturday 19 December 2009

The Human Condition-III

Everyone uses the term “the Human Condition” without thought of what it actually means. Normally it seems to describe the misery of our daily survival attempts, but it goes a bit deeper than that.
The ideal ‘anthropogenic’ society prescribes characteristics such as being cooperative, loving and selfless.
However, more often than not we are judgemental, competitive, aggressive and selfish.

Kammerat Napoleon (1984), Oligarchs, war-mongering, Business Competition, Party Politics, neighbour-gossip, ordinary human interaction and the prevailing promotion of self-interest (UK MPs come to mind) illustrate what I mean quite well.
We seem to be able of limitless love and sensitivity, but unfortunately it doesn’t eliminate our capability of greed, hatred, brutality, rape, murder and war.
Words are too poor to describe this contradiction.
It seems to be something we just have to live with.

That’s why we call it the “Human Condition”.

In my opinion nothing describes the Human Condition better than the art presented by this marvellous young Ukrainian woman:
http://pelapapas.com.mx/htmls/animacion-arena-2.html

Compare this to the trash produced by the YBA or for the Turner Prize.
That is also "a human condition" - - -

Monday 14 December 2009

l'Annee 2009


This is what it looks like.


Unfortunately you can't taste it in cyber-space!


Tough - - - -
- but it was worth the effort!

Saturday 5 December 2009

The great Climate scam – or AGW nonsense.
The revelations from East Anglia University in Nov. 2009 are terrifying in many ways. Slowly a lot of us begin to realise that the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) theories may be a load of poppycock. The focus on the impact of man-made CO2 is turning our minds away from the real problems.
And that is why signing of the proposed treaty in Copenhagen in December may not only be a red herring but outright dangerous, as it will address the wrong reasons with the wrong measures, investing the wrong money in the wrong causes.

The world has become warmer in the last 50 years. This is beyond dispute.
Just look at the rising sea levels, most significantly apparent in the Island states of the Pacific Ocean, and the slow, but certain disappearance of glaciers across the globe.
Anyone with a 50-60 year memory can remember the icy winters in the 1950s with intermittent re-occurrence in 1970s and 1980s, but what have we seen after that? Temperatures have stabilised since 1998, despite increased “anthropogenic” pumping of CO2 into the atmosphere, ostensibly close to 10 % more now than in the 90s.

If the Earth's atmosphere were 1 km deep, 781 m would be Nitrogene, 209 m Oxygene, 9 m Argon, 18 cm Neon (Ne) - and only 38 cm CO2, the remaining few cm made up of small amounts of other gasses, one being Methane (1cm), apparently the most dangerous of all.
Most of the 38cm CO2 is nature's own and has always been so.
The question is: how large a percentage of the 38cm is man-made?
Even if we assume that 10 cm is the product of our industrial activities (indications from ice-cores and sea-bottom point in that direction) is it then realistic to expect a few cm to have the claimed impact? And couldn't it be something else, e.g. wholesale burning of the rainforrest?

Right now everyone is looking for hard evidence of a correlation between the CO2-emission and rising temperatures, but having great difficulty finding one.
If there were one, the last 10 years would have provided dramatic evidence and these are the 10 years, where we don't see any warming.
Sorry folks: we can’t find it and the Hockey-Stick model is wrong.

Research, deep into the ice-sheets of Greenland, Antarctica and elsewhere, has proved that CO2 emission and global warming is uncorrelated the AGW-way. Temperature rises appear to have come before CO2 levels increased, and often with a time-lapse of 50-100 years, so perhaps it is the other way around: the world warms up and then either the oceans or jungles or something else release more CO2.

Scientific research shows that it is much more likely to find the reason behind the climate swings amongst the many possible parameters totally outside of human control, e.g variations in solar activity and radiation, the Earth’s elliptic path around the sun, the tilt of the Earth’s axis (which seems to ‘wobble’ a couple of degrees around a 23 degree norm for some reason), volcanic activity, ocean currents and, sometimes, an unlucky combination of these. Once started like in the last ice age, which everyone can agree was not initiated by human activity, the process may become self-amplifying.
This could happen if a massive release of icebergs from Greenland suddenly changed the Gulf Stream (the Atlantic conveyor). In that case a northern hemisphere ice-age could be induced in just a couple of months.

A lot of scare-mongering has taken place around ice and sea-levels, in particular the melting away of Antarctica.
At present ca. 50 Bill tonnes of ice is supposedly breaking off, causing a millimetre rise in the level of the oceans pr. year. For comparison, Antarctica holds more than 3.000.000 Bill tonnes of ice. Greenland’s ice and the world’s glaciers are also on retreat, contributing to a small rise in sea-levels, a fact we can measure. However, nature seems to have a built-in breaking effect on the melting process, causing the melt-down to stop.

But something else could happen. At present the Atlantic conveyor and the impact of a high volume of ice-bergs is closely monitored. We now understand that an ice age could happen within a few months, if the Gulf stream is stopped, as it happened 12.000 years ago during the Younger Dryas period, when fresh water from huge American lakes broke into the ocean. A 3 km thick sheet of ice above our heads and 40m lover sea-levels are quite unbearable to consider.

Around 1100 CE we had a globally warmer period than today, allowing the Vikings to settle in Greenland and harvest a crop, while in 16-1700 there was a so-called mini ice age that caused failed harvest and much misery.
None of this was impacted by human activity, only by Mother Nature’s mood.

And then there are the computer models.
We can hardly predict the weather a day before, so how much faith should we put into the AGW Computer models? When you hear that
- the programmed sensitivity to CO2 has been adjusted to be many times greater than
actually measured
- the solar activity has been downgraded despite measurements and better knowledge
- the models predict a warming of the troposphere (6 miles above the tropics) that we have
not been able to verify despite countless weather balloons and
- the models so far have failed to “predict” the climatic weather we can verify, namely by
inputting the data from the past and correlate them with actual observations
then it seems to me that we have a responsibility to ring the alarm bells.
Why is this information suppressed? 1984?

The UN climate models apparently predicted a 20th Century temperature increase of 2-3°.
Actually measured was 0.7°, 3-4 times wrong!

The conclusion is scary.
If we cannot do anything about the change in climate and if the AGW is a false assumption, then we are about to embark on a series of investment programmes that will make the bank bail-out in 2009 look like pocket money. We will fail to have resources left to invest where they should have been invested in the first place, namely in alleviation of the unavoidable effects of Mother Nature’s little games. We could have prevented deforestation, planted trees in the whole of Sahara, ensured evaporation-free irrigation systems world wide to help feed a growing population, generated cleaner energy for all, etc.
The list is endless.

The conference in Copenhagen may represent one of the biggest decision-disasters in our recent history, if the suggested declaration is signed. There will be no way back and the already vested business interests will, for a while, see even greater profits. Politicians will pat each other on the back, in particular the UK politicians, who have now decided that they will “lead the way”.
Ehh? Lead from the back seat? A country that has no double glazing, that produces much more pollution than the agreed limits and that flows over with professors, who state that renewable energy production is useless while the politicians maintain they are doing everything they can? (The UK has 2% green energy production against e.g. Denmark’s 30%).

Just wait until the permafrost, unavoidably, sneaks through the Watford Gap. Perhaps we should look differently, and more friendly, at Afghanistan?