OZONE AND STRAWBERRIES: A GREENIE SQUAWK

The fact that in 18 years the Montreal Protocol has made absolutely no difference to earth's ozone hole is not mentioned

"This was to be the last year that strawberry farmers in the United States were to be able to use a biocide known as methyl bromide. Instead, the farmers may end up using record quantities of the gas, which significantly contributes to the depletion of Earth's protective shield, the ozone layer. In 1987, leaders from throughout the world, including President Reagan, agreed in Montreal to a treaty pledging to phase out its use. But the pledge has proved harder to live up to than initially hoped. Research has not found a substitute that is as cheap and effective as methyl bromide. That, however, is an inadequate reason for perpetual dependency. Another political solution - a simultaneous, universal phaseout of its use - is the only fair one.

A problem with the initial solution, stemming from the Montreal Protocol, is that it was the equivalent of unilateral disarmament for the California strawberry farmer. Under the original idea, an emerging competitor to the California farmers - Mexico - would not have to stop using methyl bromide at the same time. Farmers south of the border would have at least two more years to keep using the gas, which kills various weeds and insects in the soil to produce a weed-free field of abundant berries. These varying timetables for methyl bromide created the prospect of an unfair playing field. And it left too much doubt whether Mexico would actually ban methyl bromide's use.

Despite lots of research - much of it at the University of California, Davis - a new, painless solution did not emerge. There are some other chemicals that kill insects and weeds and bugs, but they are quite toxic and not as effective. "Basically, we need to breed strawberries that are resistant to soil pests," UC Davis researcher Steve Fennimore told the San Jose Mercury News. But would consumers swallow such a genetically modified strawberry?

Absent a technological breakthrough, strawberry farming without methyl bromide would mean higher costs for farmers, which means higher costs for consumers. The new costs are a function of more labor and less productivity. If every farmer in every country has to live by these rules, however, it ought to be a price consumers should be willing to live with. Earth can't live without its ozone layer".

Source





POLITICS RULE "WARMING" DEBATE

At a recent global warming conference in Exeter called by UK prime minister Tony Blair, all the usual fears were aired. Yet real debate about climate change seems to be strictly prohibited.

The week before, another conference organised by the Scientific Alliance at London's Royal Institution raised critical questions about the global warming thesis. This time the Royal Society's president Sir Bob May received frontpage coverage for arguing that the event would be biased and dangerous.

'On one hand we have the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], the rest of the world's major scientific organisations, and the government's chief scientific adviser, all pointing to the need to cut emissions', he wrote. 'On the other we have a small band of sceptics, including lobbyists funded by the US oil industry, a sci-fi writer, and the Daily Mail, who deny the scientists are right. It is reminiscent of the tobacco lobby's attempts to persuade us that smoking does not cause lung cancer. There is no danger this lobby will influence the scientists. But they don't need to. It is the influence on the media that is so poisonous.'

But in fact, those labelled 'sceptics' and those regarded as 'mainstream' actually share much in common. Professor Richard Lindzen of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), usually regarded as a sceptic but also a lead author for the IPCC, agrees that there is consensus among scientists. That consensus is as follows:

1. While there are inconsistencies in the temperature data, it is very likely that the world has got a bit warmer over the past 100 years - 0.6 degrees Celsius, on average, give or take 0.2 degrees either way.

2. That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the world will tend to get.

3. That human activity has led to a significant increase in carbon dioxide levels, from 280 parts per million in the centuries before 1750, to 380 parts per million now.

4. Economic trends will tend to further increase carbon dioxide levels - so it is very plausible that the world will get warmer in the coming decades, all other things being equal.

The big questions in this debate are about the causes, extent and significance of climate change. While carbon dioxide is one potential cause, it is far from alone. The climate has always been in a state of flux, over shorter or longer periods, so it is likely that there are many natural factors at work in addition to any effect humans might be having.

As to the extent of climate change, almost everyone agrees that we simply don't know. It is true that carbon dioxide levels will increase, but a law of diminishing effect applies - so, as more carbon dioxide is pumped into the atmosphere, each extra percentage increase has less and less effect.

If carbon dioxide levels did eventually double from their pre-industrial levels, all other things being equal, it is likely that the temperature would rise by about 1.2 degrees Celsius. That represents a noticeable warming - but nothing that would demand urgent global action.....

We don't even have sufficiently good data to be able to gauge the accuracy of these models. Satellites to measure temperature evenly across the Earth's surface have been operational since 1979. Data prior to 1979 relies on surface weather stations and weather balloons, which are not evenly spread around the world. Good records exist for North America and Europe over a period of about 100 years, but there have never been many stations for the 70 per cent of the Earth covered by water, or the 38 per cent of the rest that is desert or mountains.

This means that scientists cannot say for sure what the average temperature of the Earth was in 1900 - and the problem gets worse the further back we go. If the starting point data for a model is wrong, even slightly wrong, it could have a major impact on the outcome. Worse, it is impossible to test the model. If you want to see how good a model is, perhaps the best way to test it is to start it from as long ago as possible, and see if the results match what really happened. This doesn't work if we don't know what really happened more than two or three decades back.......

The one thing we can be pretty sure about is that, one way or another, the climate will change. Even during the course of the twentieth century, we have seen global temperatures rise in the period up to 1940, decline through to the 1970s (creating fears of a new Ice Age), and rise again thereafter. Only the last stage of this process could plausibly be caused by greenhouse gas emissions, which suggests there are substantial natural variations going on regardless of anything humans do.

The problem is that the scientific debate has been politicised, which distorts the presentation and discussion of the evidence. Environmentalists are particularly to blame here, for they have a moral message to convey: that human beings are screwing up the world. This message has now been taken on board across society, and has almost become common sense. In an atmosphere where every new report is either leapt upon to produce further gloomy conclusions about our future, or prematurely dismiss the case for global warming, it's unlikely that the science remains uncorrupted..... It is likely that we will only be able to understand and cope with climate change through a rigorously critical examination of data, models and theories. But the climate created by this politicised debate may make that impossible.

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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