Australia No. 1 Polluter in the World

Captain kRudd excitedly took the accolades for agreeing to sign the Kyoto Protocol and while the lyrics of his song ‘its better die on your feet than live on your knees’ played in the background, the environmental stalwart Peter Garrett grinned like the fool he takes the Australian public for.

We were No 1 in Rugby Union, Rugby League and Cricket; however its unlikely most Australians want to be No 1 as the biggest polluters in the world, but thanks to corporate government, that’s where we are and all the bullshit spin the government puts of clean coal and geo-sequestration and throws billions of $ on insulation etc, this is but a drop in the bucket as to the hundreds of billions of $ successive governments have handed to coal, gas and oil companies; aka ‘the green mafia’.

America, once the pin-up boy of per capita worst carbon dioxide polluters in the world had China running a close second, but in a Steven Bradbury, we Australians have taken the world’s worst highest accolade.

As the Australian government is not refuting this report complied by a British company (Maplecroft) and based U.S. Energy Department data, it must be so.

The report calculated that Australia’s per capita output of carbon dioxide is about 18.66 metric tons a year which is four percent higher than the United States.

That means that yearly, we Australians pump 392,000,000 million tonnes of greenhouse gasses into our skies every year; while China remains the world’s biggest overall greenhouse gas polluter (with a population of some 1.2 billion people) followed closely by the United States (with just over 300 million people), being No 1 with a population of just over 21 million people, we have to ask ourselves, is this right ?

Of course global warming sceptics claim that burning all the coal, gas and oil has nothing to do with global warming, and Australian politicians claim ‘good management’ makes Australia strong, but why don’t we have energy efficient housing as mandatory, rather than retro-fitting houses; why do companies that manufacture highly polluting building materials continue to pollute and not have to upgrade ?

In Australia, we receive from the Sun over 100,000 times the energy we use daily, yet we hold the title as the worst per capita emitter of carbon dioxide, because rather than solar power, we have a heavy reliance on coal energy, which puts the money into a few corporations rather than spreading the load. The claim is about 80 % percent of the country’s electricity is generated by coal-fired power stations, but this doesn’t mean the rest is solar or wind power; much it comes from hydro electricity and even burning off native forests to generate energy and mockingly, these companies market that energy as ‘green’ and ‘renewable’ but if it were renewable, they would be burning forest plantations rather than old growth forests.

Canberra has committed to cutting greenhouse gas pollution by up to 25 percent by 2020 compared to 2000 levels, but has no real or workable plans to achieve this; political grandstanding and spin-doctoring are all any of the parties are good at.

I’m currently researching and writing a story about how poor planning by the federal government has resulted in the Insulation Industry Pulls Wool Over Our Eyes.

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BREAKING NEWS: NASA admits Global Warming probably has nothing to do with air pollution, or humans at all

We here at Republibot have long gone on record as being dubious about this whole "Global Warming" thing. Our individual opinions vary from outright disbelief that the phenomenon is actually happening to a grudging admission that something is going on, but we're unsure whether or not it has anything to do with us stupid humans. All three of us agree, however, that fear of Global Warming has been shamefully used to scare people out of their money and their votes. And it's been highly effective at that.

Back during the whole "Inconvenient Truth" thing, when every government agency was forced with the Stalinist reality of either agreeing with the ignorant hippies or being pilloried in public and having their funding cut, NASA went on record as saying that Gore was right, the world was getting warmer, we're all gonna' die, and it's all our fault, now can we please get back to working on that piece-of-crap space station that we don't even own, if it's ok with you?

Nowadays, with the Democrats firmly in office, NASA appears to feel a bit more secure about casting a dissenting voice (Make of that what you will), and have admitted that the Sun probably has a whole lot more to do with temperature on Earth than whether or not you drive a Prius and eat vegitarian.

Daily Tech addressed this in a recent article in which they state:
>>>While the NASA study acknowledged the sun's influence on warming and cooling patterns, it then went badly off the tracks. Ignoring its own evidence, it returned to an argument that man had replaced the sun as the cause current warming patterns. Like many studies, this conclusion was based less on hard data and more on questionable correlations and inaccurate modeling techniques.

The inconvertible fact, here is that even NASA's own study acknowledges that solar variation has caused climate change in the past. And even the study's members, mostly ardent supports of AGW theory, acknowledge that the sun may play a significant role in future climate changes.<<<

If you go to their site here http://www.dailytech.com/NASA+Study+Acknowledges+Solar+Cycle+Not+Man+Res... they've also got some charts that compare global temperatures to cycles of sunspot activity, and not surprisingly they more or less mirror each other.

Science Daily posted a longer version of basically the same story a few months back here http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080512120523.htm

and of course if you want to tool around the NASA site to find the original sources for this info, this link'll get you started http://search.nasa.gov/search/search.jsp?nasaInclude=global+warming

Of course this info comes as no surprise to any of us here, since weather data we've been getting back from Mars over the past 30-odd years strongly suggests that Mars is having a mild bout of Global Warming as well. Clearly, we can't be responsible for that, since there's never been a single person on the Red Planet.

I should point out that we here at Republibot are not the kinds of people who automatically gainsay any environmental concerns. We do openly admit that there are many serious ecological threats and crises throughout the world - Deforestation, the reduction of Tropical Rain Forests, heavy metal dumping at sea, and of course the alarming increase in the ammount of lead in our atmoshphere over the last century. (The ammount of lead in the air is ONE THOUSAND times what it was 110 years ago!) These are real, clear-and-present dangers to humanity and the world itself. Our objection to the Global Warming mania is that even if it's real, it's a very minor problem that is part of a natural cycle we can't do anything about anyway - there have been 35 "Hot ages" in the last three million years, and obviously we couldn't have caused any of those - and all the money and attention blown on this non-issue is detracting more legitimate and immediate environmental concerns.

Or, to put that another way: We're not anti-environment, we're anti-frightening-the-gullible-public-to-make-a-few-bucks-and-ignore-real-problems. We've got a very strong anti-frightening-the-gullible-public-to-make-a-few-bucks-and-ignore-real-problems agenda here at the 'bot.

Lead Pollution may have Limited Warming in The 70s and 80s

Higher levels of lead pollution in the air during the 1970's and 1980's likely led to global inhibition of rises in temperature to some extent, whereas today almost the full greenhouse effect is kicking in, as there has been a continuing decrease in the rate of anthropogenic lead emissions over the past 20 years, according to professor Joachim Curtius of the Institute for Atmosphere and Environment at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

According to the ScienceDaily article, an international team of scientists has found that particles containing lead are excellent seeds for the formation of ice crystals in clouds.

Heat given off from the earth's surface is more efficiently radiated into space by ice clouds (cirrus) with lead-containing particles than has been hitherto realized. In comparison to clouds with a low lead content, clouds with a high lead content thus actually help cool the earth.

CO2 Absorbed more Efficiently under Polluted Skies

Plants have taken in carbon dioxide (CO2) more efficiently under polluted (hazy) skies in recent decades compared to a cleaner atmosphere, according to a new study from the UK's Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH).

Haze over India and the Bay of Bengal, courtesy of NASA.

"Surprisingly, the effects of atmospheric pollution seem to have enhanced global plant productivity from 1960 to 1999. This resulted in a net 10% increase in the amount of carbon stored by the land once other effects were taken into account," said Dr. Lina Mercado, from the CEH and lead author of the study.

The atmospheric particles (aerosols), which can create these hazy days, scatter light so that the surface receives light from multiple directions (diffuse radiation) rather than coming straight from the sun. Plants are then able to convert more of the available sunlight into growth because fewer leaves are in the shade.

"Although many people believe that well-watered plants grow best on a bright sunny day, the reverse is true. Plants often thrive in hazy conditions such as those that exist during periods of increased atmospheric pollution," said co-author Dr. Stephen Sitch from the Met Office Hadley Centre.

The research team found that by cleaning up the atmosphere (reduction in sulphate aerosols through this century) even steeper cuts in global carbon dioxide emissions would be required to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations below 450 parts per million by volume.

This study was published in the journal Nature just today.

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Note: Some of the paragraphs from above were taken directly from the CEH press release.

Using the Ocean to Sequester Crop Residue Carbon

This story caught my eye........

Researchers from the University of California and Washington propose that the only method that has a long term, efficient, practical and economic impact in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is the removal and burial of crop residues in the deep ocean and preferably off the mouths of major rivers.

Why dump at the end of major rivers?

River’s-end dump sites already receive a fair amount of vegetable matter that flows down river. So any ecological effect would likely be minimized compared with other parts of the deep ocean, according to the Christian Science Monitor Blog.

According to the abstract and full study, which is posted in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, this process is 92% efficient in sequestration of crop residue, such as corn stalks, while cellulosic ethanol production is only 32% efficient.

The research team says that this process (burial of crop residues in the deep ocean) can potentially capture 15% of the current global carbon dioxide annual increase.

Robert Carney, a biological oceanographer from LSU offers some caution with the proposal by lead researchers Stuart Strand (University of Washington) and Gregory Benford (University of California) toward the bottom of the Christian Science Monitor blog page.

Bangladesh Seeks Compensation???

Blog posted by AccuWeather.com meteorologist Mark Paquette.....

I came across this article while browsing the web, and I found it to be a little amusing, curious, and to be completely honest, scary.

I was amused by this article simply from the scientific view, or its complete lack thereof. We don't know if global warming is happening, and even if it is occurring, what is it doing to Bangladesh? This country automatically says global warming is happening, you are more responsible for it than we are, you are rich, we are poor, pay me. The story doesn't mention anything about the subject, but I'll assume the damage from "global warming" is that ocean levels are rising, causing floods and salt water intruding inland. So, the State Minister for Foreign Affairs of Bangladesh Hasan Mahmud wants developed countries to pay for flooding and salt "poisoning" that may or may not be caused by global warming which, of course, may or may not be occurring also. That makes me laugh. Maybe I should come up with some story like this to make some money.

Curiosity worked its way into my mind when I wondered how many other countries may try this? Is this a new way for third-world countries to get financial assistance from the "developed nations"? What kind of science does the government of Bangladesh use for evidence? Or are they just using public opinion to get some money for themselves?

I think it is a little scary because if the government of Bangladesh can get financial assistance for this, the question of how many other countries may try this comes up, but other ponderings as well. What else can they use to try to get money? Can they use water pollution? Air pollution? Ozone depletion? Almost anything? Can they come up with make believe environmental crises to cash in?

What say you?

Mouths of the Ganges River in Bangladesh