TV Network Tells Kids How Long Their Carbon Footprint Should Allow Them to Live

This is environmentalism jumping the shark:

Click image above to play the game

I don’t know where to begin, except to say that when we see things like this, we should complain loudly and incessantly. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has crossed a line beyond science, beyond decency, and beyond rational thought.

This is what you get after pressing “start”:

 

The screen above says: When you’re done, click on the (skull and crossbones) to find out what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of Earth’s resources!

Hat tip to CallonJim who writes:

This “kids” games at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Tell’s kids depending on their magical “carbon footprint” how long they should live?

The actual title is “Professor Schpinkee’s Greenhouse Calculator - find out when you should die!”

The thing I find amazing is the average foot print is 24.6 tonnes of CO2, which calculates out to 9.3 years old! Where it tells the child “YOU SHOULD DIE AT THE AGE 9.3!” Guess what age this kids games is marketed to? That’s right, 9 year olds.

What is most disgusting about this is that ABC ignores their own published Code of Practice

In section 2.12 they talk about content for children:

2.12 Content for Children. In providing enjoyable and enriching content for children, the ABC does not wish to conceal the real world from them. It can be important for the media, especially television, to help children understand and deal with situations which may include violence and danger. Special care should be taken to ensure that content which children are likely to watch or access unsupervised should not be harmful or disturbing to them.

I venture that any child who takes this carbon footprint test “unsupervised” without mommy and daddy around, and who may be old enough to read, but not old enough to understand he/she is being brainwashed by an agenda, would be “disturbed” find they should die at age nine, since just clicking through with default choices gives you that age.

Here is where you can contact the ABC and give them an inbox full of your opinion. This kind of propaganda needs to be removed.

http://www.abc.net.au/contact/contactabc.htm

UPDATE: There is a row developing in the Austrailian press over this.

UPDATE2: The New York Post highlights this site on June 1st with the headline “Enviro Mental Institution“

I Think, therefore I drive

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a bunch of venture capitalists are now backing Norway’s Think electric-car company. Their plan is to bring the company’s Think City car to the U.S. in 2009 and build it here as well.

I drive a 2002 Ford Think electric car, the open frame model. I’m pretty happy with it, at 3 cents a mile, and I’ve put about 300 miles on it around town since buying it 3 weeks ago. It has gotten a lot of attention in my hometown of Chico, and people are constantly asking me how much it cost and where could they get one? The town is blessed with many alternate back routes, so I don’t have to travel the main congested roads.

The U.S. version is expected to travel 110 miles on a single charge and kind of resembles Smart’s ForTwo. The company expects the car to be priced under $25,000. It’s looking for a site in the U.S. to build U.S.-spec models because it’s cheaper to build an entire line here than it is to ship from Europe, thanks to the weak dollar. Maybe Michigan politicians should be making some calls to Oslo.

The Think City is already in production in Europe, and the company is rushing to produce 10,000 units this year for sale there. One of the people behind the VC funding says they could sell 30,000 to 50,000 Think City cars in the U.S. See Norway’s Think to Produce, Sell Small Electric Cars in U.S. (from WSJ.com)

There is another car that Think has in the pipeline, and it is pretty cool looking, see it below:

Lieberman-Warner Cap and Trade Bill Headed for Defeat

Looks like its support is splintering:

Without widespread corporate support, passage of the bill - already a long shot at best - becomes even more unlikely this year. President Bush remains opposed. House Democrats have been slow to act.

From CNN Money.

According to the WSJ even Hillary and McCain are likely to stay away from it. Voting to increase your local energy prices due to a flawed cap and trade carbon tax scheme which will create 5 new government bureaucracies is never a good thing for somebody trying to get elected.

Even with chances of passage dwindling, write your senator to tell them how you feel about it.

 

UAH Satellite data: Globally, 2008 significantly cooler than last year

One of the great things about our current state of technology is the nearly instant reporting we can get from remote sensing platforms. Thanks to  Dr. Roy Spencer & Dr. Danny Braswell, GHCC at the University of Alabama, Hunsville, we can watch global temperatures of the lower troposphere in near real-time at this page:

http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/

According to UAH: Daily averaged temperatures of the Earth are measured by the AMSU flying on the NOAA-15 satellite. The satellite passes over most points on the Earth twice per day, at about 7:30 am and 7:30 pm local time. The AMSU measures the average temperature of the atmosphere in different layers from the surface up to about 135,000 feet or 41 kilometers. During global warming, the atmosphere near the surface is supposed to warm at least as fast as the surface warms, while the upper layers are supposed to cool much faster than the surface warms.

But as I understand it, the lower troposphere is supposed to be closely coupled to CO2 induced forcings. As we’ve seen from comparison to surface data sets such as HadCRUT, the UAH MSU lower troposphere tracks fairly well with surface temps.

You can learn more about how the Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit on NOAA-15 works and what coverage it has here at my post on it the instrument.

According to the UAH data For 2008, we are averaging about .4 to .5 degrees C cooler than last year. See the graph and click it for a larger one:

Buckets, Inlets, SST’s and all that - part 2

Since this blog has main focused on air temperature measurement, and has not done any discussion of manual measurement techniques of Sea Surface Temperature measurements, I thought it would be good to first review some of the instrumentation used.
Sea Surface Temperature Measurement Instruments:

Standard Thermometer

Measures: Temperature in degrees, typically used in the bucket thermometer

Operates: At any depth by cable or line or by hand

Notes: Mercury in original thermometer has been replaced in many standard
thermometers by less toxic materials

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Bucket Thermometer

Buckets, Inlets, SST’s and all that - part 1

There has been a lot of discussion lately about the accuracy of measuring Sea Surface Temperatures prompted by a new study from Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia and Director of UEA’s Climatic Research Unit. The measurement issue for sea surface temperatures that Dr. Jones is studying was recently showcased in an article in the UK Independent.

I’m going to present the article here first, and then we’ll talk about how sea surface temperatures have been measured, and what sorts of issues the changes between cloth buckets, metal buckets, and engine inlets actually entails.

At first glance, I see this issue raised by Phil Jones as not being well thought through, and ignoring the measurement environment actuality, instead focusing on the change in bucket types as being “absolute”. I think it has a lot of grey area, and a lot of potential errors that haven’t been considered. I’ll cover those in the next part, but for now please read the article and let me know what you think.

Case against climate change discredited by study

A difference in the way British and American ships measured the temperature of the ocean during the 1940s may explain why the world appeared to undergo a period of sudden cooling immediately after the Second World War.

Scientists believe they can now explain an anomaly in the global temperature record for the twentieth century, which has been used by climate change skeptics to undermine the link between rising temperatures and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The record for sea-surface temperatures shows a sudden fall after 1945, which appeared to go against the general trend for rising global average temperatures during the past century.

Skeptics have argued it supports the idea that rising temperatures have more to do with increased solar activity – sunspots – than increasing levels of man-made carbon dioxide exacerbating the greenhouse effect.

NASA Funds Toy Snowmobile Project at Georgia Tech to Monitor Climate Change Affecting Ice Shelves

The “SnoMote Remote Controlled Weather Station”

At first, I though this must be a joke. But, it is not. They call it “an autonomous robot designed by Georgia Tech to gather scientific data in ice environments.” It started life as the Ski-Doo® RC Snowmobile which is 28″ long, and runs for 30 minutes on a charge.

But in a press release from Georgia Tech on May 27th, seen below, it is clear that this is real, true, fully federally funded NASA science project. You can buy one here from Hammacher Schlemmer for $79.95 Ooops, sold out, looks like Georgia Tech bought them out.

My question is, when one of these gets stuck in a crack or crevasse, or simply runs out of power prematurely, do they just leave it there for the polar bears to play with or do they send the lowliest science intern out on the ice to fetch it back, lest it remain to pollute the sea and/or sea ice with it’s Lead or Nickel Cadmium rechargeable batteries?

UAV’s have already been used in the arctic.

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Robots go where scientists fear to tread

SnoMote, an autonomous robot designed by Georgia Tech to gather scientific data in ice environments. Click here for more information.

ATLANTA ( May 27, 2008 ) — Scientists are diligently working to understand how and why the world’s ice shelves are melting. While most of the data they need (temperatures, wind speed, humidity, radiation) can be obtained by satellite, it isn’t as accurate as good old-fashioned, on-site measurement and static ground-based weather stations don’t allow scientists to collect info from as many locations as they’d like.

And unfortunately, the locations in question are volatile ice sheets, possibly cracking, shifting and filling with water — not exactly a safe environment for scientists.

To help scientists collect the more detailed data they need without risking scientists’ safety, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working with Pennsylvania State University, have created specially designed robots called SnoMotes to traverse these potentially dangerous ice environments. The SnoMotes work as a team, autonomously collaborating among themselves to cover all the necessary ground to gather assigned scientific measurements. Data gathered by the Snomotes could give scientists a better understanding of the important dynamics that influence the stability of ice sheets.

Ayanna Howard, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech, with a SnoMote, a robot designed to gather scientific data in ice environments. Click here for more information.

“In order to say with certainty how climate change affects the world’s ice, scientists need accurate data points to validate their climate models,” said Ayanna Howard, lead on the project and an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. “Our goal was to create rovers that could gather more accurate data to help scientists create better climate models. It’s definitely science-driven robotics.”

Howard unveiled the SnoMotes at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Pasadena on May 23. The SnoMotes will also be part of an exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in June. The research was funded by a grant from NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) Program.

Howard, who previously worked with rovers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is working with Magnus Egerstedt, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Derrick Lampkin, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Penn State who studies ice sheets and how changes in climate contribute to changes in these large ice masses. Lampkin currently takes ice sheet measurements with satellite data and ground-based weather stations, but would prefer to use the more accurate data possible with the simultaneous ground measurements that efficient rovers can provide.

An Inconvenient Truth - The Opera

La Scala to stage Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’

MILAN, Italy (AP) — First it was the film and the book. Now the next stop for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is opera.

La Scala officials say the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli has been commissioned to produce an opera on the international multiformat hit for the 2011 season at the Milan opera house. The composer is currently artistic director of the Arena in Verona.

Bring your marshmallows.

Surprise - UN Carbon Credits Being Abused

See related articles from the Guardian: Billions Wasted On UN Climate Programme and Discredited Strategy

“It looks like between one and two thirds of all the total CDM offsets do not represent actual emission cuts.” — David Victor, Stanford University and co-author of a study examining 3000 UN funded offset programs

This article below was reposted from TriplePundit

 

World’s Largest Carbon Market Facilitates Pollution

An article in the Guardian newspaper reveals that billions worth of ‘clean’ investment on the world’s largest carbon offsets market ends up polluting the environment. The article cites researchers who’ve reviewed the participating companies in the Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). They issued a report which seriously undermines the credibility of the CDM.

The CDM certificates facilitate the funding of clean technology investments by Third World companies that are expanding their operations. Western companies can buy the certificates to offset their own pollution. But it turns out that in reality most of the funds go to coal and oil companies, builders of destructive dams and other enterprises that are not green in the slightest.

The research that revealed the practices is of major importance not least because policymakers are set to review the CDM in the near future as the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. CDM credits are the world’s largest offset market, with annual trading last year totalling around EUR40 billion. Most credits are currently traded on the European Trading System (ETS) by European countries and companies but when the US starts to participate, something that’s more or less a given, trading will rise to over EUR 100 billion within two years easily.

The Stanford scholars opened a can of worms. They say that “Much of the market does not reflect actual reductions in emissions, and that trend is poised to get worse.” They researched more than 3,000 projects that had been applying/granted for up to $10bn of credits for the next four years and said that most of the applications should be rejected. If the scheme operated in any way realistically, we’d see a much smaller market, they say cautioning that there’s hardly enough clean air available for the demand that will build up in the near future. That’s rather an important point to consider ahead of next week’s Warner-Lieberman cap and trade bill which proposes US companies are allowed to buy up to 15% of their needed carbon credits from the (successor to the) CDM.

How not to measure temperature, part 63

One of the strangest things I’ve learned in the past year about the US Historical Climatological Network is the propensity for placement of weather stations at sewage treatment plants.

The reason of course has to do with putting a thermometer at a facility that is staffed 7 days a week. That thermomter must be manually read once a day and the readings transcribed into a logbook. Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTP’s) fit that requirement (as they have an operator on duty, often 24/7) but they themselves are their own mini islands of waste heat and humidity, especially in winter and overnight. Yet, a significant portion of the US climate data comes from these locations.

Some have grassy areas where a climate monitoring station could be placed, such as the one in Morrison, IL, and you’d think they would place it there, away from the sewage tanks. Unfortunately, no.

Click for a larger image, additional photos available here at surfacestations.org

My sincere thanks to volunteer surveyor Scott Finegan for these photos.

The Stevenson Screen housing the thermometer is about 5 feet away from each tank, while the concrete building in the background is some 50 feet away. You’d think that they could have placed the station a little further away. Again, as we’ve seen time and time again, the placement is not often about the best location, it is about convenience for the observer.

The GISS graph of temperature over the station history shows a fairly strong warming trend from about 1980 to the present. The question is, how much of that is from increased throughput of the sewage treatment plant responding to population growth, and how much of it is climate change?

Click for source graph from NASA GISS

According to NCDC’s Multi Metadata System database, this station has been at this location since at least 1948, even though a lat/lon accuracy update makes it appear to have been relocated in 1997, it has in fact been at this location all that time.

A nearby station, 25km away, Clinton, IA, is also in the GISS database and shows less of a trend during the same period:

Separating a climate change signal from the waste heat (and increasing effluent volume of the WWTP due to population growth) may not be a simple matter to disentangle. Since each WWTP has different conditions, coming up with a blanket correction would not be easy. Therefore, since the USA is highly oversampled spatially with weather stations that report daily data which can used for climate, it would be prudent in my opinion, to remove stations like this from the climatic database since the data produced by USHCN stations at WWTP’s may not be truly representative of climate.