Low-income coal miners rest before starting their shift in a privately run coal mine close to You Fang Liang, Ningxia Province, north eastern China (Photo: EPA)
One of the great lies told us by our political leaders in order to persuade us to accept their swingeing and pointless green taxes and their economically suicidal, environmentally vandalistic wind-farm building programmes is that if we don’t do it, China will. Apparently, just waiting to be grabbed out there are these glittering, golden prizes marked “Green jobs” and “Green technologies” – and if only we can get there before those scary, mysterious Chinese do, well, maybe the West will enjoy just a few more years of economic hegemony before the BRICs nations thwack us into the long grass.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. The Chinese do not remotely believe in the myth of Man-Made Global Warming nor in the efficacy of “alternative energy”. Why should they? It’s not as if there is any evidence for it. The only reason the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming myth has penetrated so deeply into Western culture is… No. I’m going to save that stuff for my fairly imminent (Nov?) book on the subject which I hope you’re all going to buy.
What do the Chinese think about CAGW? Well, until now it was largely a question of educated guesswork, based on inferences like the fact that it was the Chinese who derailed the Copenhagen negotiations. But thanks to a new book called Low Carbon Plot by Gou Hongyang we know exactly what the official view is.
Ozboy – one of the finest commenters in this parish as well as proprietor of the Liberty Gibbet website – sets the scene nicely:
The argument [that China leads the world in renewable energy technology investment] rings a little hollow when you consider Beijing plans to build coal-fired power stations at the equivalent rate of one Australia, per year, for the next twenty-five years. The reputed Chinese fascination with renewable energy looks at best, a very long-term fallback position; at worst, a façade.
That’s what makes what you’re about to read even more startling. It’s a book called Low Carbon Plot, by Gou Hongyang and, as it’s freely available in China’s government-controlled bookstores, carries Beijing’s nihil obstat. No English translation is currently available, but our own China correspondent, Locusts, has translated the introduction from the original Mandarin, and (not entirely without risk to himself) has asked me to make it publicly available on this forum. At four thousand words, it’s a little long to insert onto a blog page, but you can navigate to it from the Rare Scribblings menu option at the top, or just click here.
It’s not so much an eye-opener as it is a bombshell. If true, it shows the Chinese government as rejecting CAGW in its entirety, believing it a conspiracy between Western governments and business to protect their own way of life, at the expense of the entire developing world—in other words, 80% of the world’s population.
Ozboy does not exaggerate.
Here, for example, is the author’s damning verdict on the Climate Change industry. Noting the irony of the spate of freezing cold weather that greeted the Copenhagen summit, the author wrily notes:
It was as if the freezing cold winter was having a laugh at all of these “Global Warming” theories. If the world was warming at an ever quickening pace, as all of these environmentalists say, then whence from such extreme cold? Whenever there are any doubts about Global Warming, it is almost as though environmentalists turn everything around and claim that this is too, a result of Global Warming. The Greenhouse Effect has turned in to a big basket, no matter what bad thing it is, just chuck it in.
He is even more damning about solar power in which, let it not be forgotten, China is supposed to be the world’s most shining example of just how well it can work.
First, he neatly captures the wishy-washy, John-Clare-esque pastoral utopianism which drives greenies to throw commonsense out of the window and pursue “renewable energy” regardless of all the facts:
Isn’t this the most beautiful thought possible, no pollution, everywhere is just greenery mountains and rivers, people won’t need to worry about coal mines collapsing, no need to worry about forests being chopped down, no need to worry about rising sea levels submerging island nations. It is as if, if only humanity could adopt clean energy, then all of our problems would be resolved with one sweep of the knife. But is the result really thus?
There is a very real problem staring everybody in the face. Solar power, wind power, can they be implemented on a large scale? Can they provide large scale industries with enough electricity? Can they supply trains with the power to fly along the tracks?
It is obvious, that the answer is in the negative.
He then – rather daringly, I think – weighs into the environmental unsoundness of this supposedly clean energy source:
Is solar power really clean? Investigations show that the base silicon that solar panels rely on is extracted via a energy intensive, heavily polluting industry. And where is this industry based? China.
China has already become the world’s biggest photovoltaic industrial market. The most important ingredient in solar power is polycrystalline silicon. The efficiency of manufacturing the panels is rather low, and a lot of pollution is generated as a by-product. When local industries started producing polycrystalline silicon, they were mostly reliant on outdated technology. Apart from high energy consumption, for every ton of pure polycrystalline silicon created, there were also more than 8 tons of ammonium chlorid[adized] silcon as by-product, as well as [other shit that a cursory look at google translate doesn’t answer].
The prosperity of China’s solar power industry, at the price of the environment of those rather weak distant regions, in order to attract commerce and investment, in order to collect tax revenue, very many environmental appraisal programmes have not yet been strictly implemented.
Here is the author eloquently demolishing the Carbon = Poison meme:
Will the increase in Carbon Dioxide definitely lead to the planet warming? Although there have been many many reports published by research institutes that verify this, but from the viewpoint of the history of man, and scientific method, the theories have not yet achieved scientific proof.
But, after many years of repeated indoctrination from every kind of propaganda machine, and the mixing together of environmental pollution and the exhaustion of natural resources, people have already formed a conditioned reflex, when the wind blows, the grass bends with it, and quickly hang these things on the hook of “carbon”, and attempted to get rid of carbon at a faster rate. We need to start peeling, and get back to the real world, and cannot stick labels everywhere. “Carbon” is the same “carbon” it was before, we must not get in to too much of a fluster. It is with polluted water/effluent, acid rain, destructive logging and waste with which we must struggle over the long term.
And here he is concluding that it is a fiendish plot – a new Cold War to all intents and purposes – by the West to suppress the economic growth of the BRICS nations.
Behind the back of the demonizing of “carbon”, we must recognize that it is the sinister intention of the Developed Countries to attempt to use “carbon” to block the living space of the Developing Countries.
There is only one Earth, natural resources are limited. If according to current technological conditions, and Developing Countries had the same living standard as Developed Countries, then we’d need at least 3 to 5 Earth’s to satisfy our appetites. This is what Developed Countries are most afraid of, the development of the Developing Countries poses an enormous threat to their way of lives.
In 2008, the price of foodstuffs substantially increased, a certain President actually said that the primary reason was because suddenly, one day, 300 million Indians started to eat two bowls of rice, and one billion Chinese started to drink milk.
In the eyes of some Westerners, the many developing countries have absolutely no right to enjoy the same standard of life as them.
If we really are equal, are of one mind, and together protect the Earth – our garden, we really can see a beautiful utopia in the future. But the Developed countries do not in the slightest wish to take any responsibility, they have set up double standards over “carbon emissions”, everywhere reflecting their arrogance and selfishness.
Behind “the Carbon Plot” is national interest, it is the bitter struggle for the right to existance for every country.
At this time, we again see the struggle between two camps, Europe, the USA and other developed countries, and China, India, Brazil, and Russia as the representatives of the Developing Countries, owing to their common interest, now walking closely together.
Personally, I think his conclusion says more about BRICs chippiness and paranioa than it does socio-political actualite. The CAGW scam owes much more to an attempted power grab by the left in order to achieve “environmentally” in the 21st century what it couldn’t achieve economically in the 20th Century, viz: total state control of the means of production, in the guise of ecological correctness.
But it doesn’t really matter whether the author is right or wrong in what he thinks. What matters is simply that this IS how the Chinese think, which, whether you love China or loathe it is fantastically good news for those of us in the realist/sceptics camp. China, after all, is the world’s future dominant economic power and, this being so, it makes an absolute nonsense of attempts by the EU and the US to hamper our industrial growth by imposing on our economies eco-taxes and eco-regulations which the Chinese intend to ignore completely.
This truth hasn’t hit home yet: not in the EU; not in the Cleggeron Coalition; not in Obama’s USA. Here’s my bet. The first to see sense on this will be whichever Republican administration takes over from Obama’s one-term presidency in 2012. From that point on – by which time we’ll have had two more exceptionally cold winters to concentrate our minds – British and European environmental policy will look increasingly foolish and irrelevant.
Take a look at the 520,000 year long Vostok ice-core record. What it shows is Earths temperature and CO2 record. What that shows is temperature rise leads to CO2 rise, with an 800 year lag to CO2 rising.
So Temp is the horse, and CO2 is a cart. Cause and effect, got it?
Now we come to the theory of CO2 which is CO2 rise and CAUSE Temp rise (ie. putting the cart before the horse). But the Vostok record shows high CO2 levels, even above todays 380ppm has NO EFFECT on earths Temp. Instead Earths Tempt continues to decline through high CO2 peaks.
So forget your CO2 theory, earth already has proven it to be total bollocks.
So hwo about you go have a lookey at it, learn something even a 12 year old can follow and inform your AGW believers to STFU
I am getting so bored of reading the same old stuff …
ALL DENIALIST RED-HERRINGS BEBUNKED HERE FOR FREE:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html
For goodness sake, wake up!
However, as I said to Nige Cook yesterday, “You can believe in your conspiracy theory; and I will believe in mine. However, whereas yours requires a multifarious global cosnpiracy to exist; mine only requires a small number of extremely influential scientists to exist and propogate doubt and disinformation (as you and your well-meaning kind do the rest).”
While you are waiting for climate change to become incontivertable, why don’t you take up smoking? After all, if you believe those that tell you it is not the burning of fossil fuels over the last 200 years that is the problem, you must surely also accept that smoking does not cause lung cancer….
“You can believe in your conspiracy theory; and I will believe in mine. However, whereas yours requires a multifarious global cosnpiracy to exist; mine only requires a small number of extremely influential scientists to exist and propogate doubt and disinformation (as you and your well-meaning kind do the rest).”The “multifarious” and “small number of extremely influential scientists” are the same people.
Totally agree with you its like he’s frightened of being ignored.Did you see his pathetic performance on the Horizon program, when presented with facts he just resorts to the same tired old rants that were left behind in the 1970’s
It seems that you are incapable of being succinct and to the point (and have a penchant for fitting the word “Nazi” into just about every post). However, that is all I have ever tried to be (i.e. succinct rather than a Nazi)!
I believe that the New Scientist website contains a comprehensive debunking of all your pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, including claiming that water vapour (which has always been a transient component of the atmosphere) is more important GHG than the CO2 (which is well on the way to being double pre-industrial levels).
When presented with just the CO2 data for the last 500,000 years, even my 15-yr old son could recognise that the the only thing that is “new” or “different” (and therefore must be prime suspect for causation) is the release of fossilised carbon in the last 200 yrs.
If the truth hurts; I suggest that you stop lying to yourself!
4. The most prolific period of life on earth was the Cambrian explosion beginning 545 million, which (according to GEOCARB 1.0) led to a CO2 abundance over 15 times higher than today 460 million years ago than it is now, with mean global temperature was 7 Celsius higher than now. Even just 100 million years ago (nothing in the 4.5 billion years long history of this planet), there were no continuous ice caps at the poles (just winter snow): all the ice melted in the summer at the poles, and deciduous rain forests existed within 1,000 km of the poles. This was opposed by the cooling from the interruption to air flow by the Alps, which arose from the result of a collision beginning 120 million years ago between Africa and Eurasia, and beginning 50 million years ago, the rise of the Himalayas and Tibet due to the collision of the plates of India and Eurasia cooled the whole planet by strengthening the monsoon system in southern Asia.
5. Mars is experiencing natural “global warming” without any human intervention:
“… for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars’ south pole have shrunk from the previous year’s size, suggesting a climate change in progress.”
– NASA, September 20, 2005: Orbiter’s Long Life Helps Scientists Track Changes on Mars.
6. If the mainstream H2O vapour positive-feedback doubling model was correct (amplifying CO2 temperature increases by a factor of two), then H2O vapour itself would have long since saturated the atmosphere made the temperature on Earth rise to boiling point. It can’t, because hot moist air rises to form clouds with a high albedo, that reflects sunlight away from Earth, cooling the planet and regulating climate: H2O opposes CO2, it doesn’t amplify it! The NASA scientist who discovered this resigned in protest when censored, and his associate, Dr. Miklos Zagoni, states: “Since the Earth’s atmosphere is not lacking in greenhouse gases [water vapor], if the system could have increased its surface temperature it would have done so long before our emissions. It need not have waited for us to add CO2: another greenhouse gas, H2O, was already to hand in practically unlimited reservoirs in the oceans.” They can prove it, too: the NOAA data on humidity in air shows a fall in H2O atmospheric water vapour (not the predicted rise!) between 1948 and 2008. H2O is 30 times more important than CO2 as a “greenhouse gas” so the small fall in H2O vapour plus the increase in condensed H2O (cloud cover) offsets the effect of CO2 on temperature. The “greenhouse” gases are in stable equilibrium, with H2O falling as CO2 and CH4 increase, and vice-versa! This is an example of Le Châtelier’s principle of disturbed equilibria.
7. CO2 absorbing rainforests can’t spread (migrate) very quickly, so they can be easily killed off by temperature fall rates which CO2 emitting animals easily survive by migration of CO2 emitting animals. This proved mechanism increases the atmospheric CO2 level in response to a change in temperature in the geological record. Hence, atmospheric levels of CO2 in geological history have not been driving temperature, but just responding to it. Because of the amazing speed at which tropical vegetation can grow in hot, humid, conditions, a rise in temperature increases CO2 absorbing rainforests faster than animals can proliferate, causing a fall in atmospheric CO2 levels. Therefore, the fossil record correlation between CO2 and temperature is not due to CO2 driving temperature, but is due to temperature driving CO2 changes!
“How many countries will have to be flooded by rising sea levels? How much desertification will it take? What percentage loss in crop yields? How much consequential migration? How many wars started over access to food or water?” – Martin Lack
My experience with climate change liars began with “nuclear winter”, hyped in 1983, which claimed that cold weather would reduce the number of frost-free days for farming in Canada and some Northern American states. Now if you have global warming instead of “nuclear winter”, you don’t need Einstein to tell you that warming will allow farming to be extended to previously permafrost areas, “you gain some, you lose some”. People can adapt to global warming by moving farm areas closer to the poles. However, the warming rate is too slow. CO2 isn’t having a long-term effect, because it’s been proven by the censored NASA climate scientists that H2O cloud cover increases oppose CO2, preventing positive feedback from water vapour. So there isn’t a problem, but if there were a problem, the solution wouldn’t be to try to cut CO2 emissions, just to live with it. Cutting annual CO2 emissions just slows down the time taken to pump CO2 into the atmosphere; and it’s cost inefficient even if CO2 was the problem (it isn’t).
“In a special message to Congress in February 1965, US President Lyndon B. Johnson noted: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” ” – Martin Lack
Actually, Edward Teller in 1958 was using using the CO2 argument against fossil fuels. See Edward Teller and Albert L. Latter, Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities (Criterion Books, New York, 1958), page 167:
“If we continue to consume [fossil] fuel at an increasing rate, however, it appears probable that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will become high enough to raise the average temperature of the earth by a few degrees. If this were to happen, the ice caps would melt and the general level of the oceans would rise. Coastal cities like New York and Seattle might be innundated. Thus the industrial revolution using ordinary chemical fuel could be forced to end … However, it might still be possible to use nuclear fuel.”
Like Teller’s dismissal of Feynman’s path integrals in 1948, he was wrong. I’m sure you’ll also find a hot air “warning” in Jeremiah, Dante, Nostradamus, and every “the end is nigh” opinion piece in the Guardian since its inception in 1821. Scare-mongering doesn’t count as science, no matter what it’s history, no matter how many people supported eugenics, how famous they were, what prizes they received, how wealthy they were, etc. In science, if you’re wrong, you’re wrong. That’s what makes science different from subjective horseshit.
Since you mentioned SO2, what ever happened to the global disaster that was ‘acid rain’?
Was the problem that acid rain lacked longevity. As the theory of acid rain would result in fairly immediate, and measurable consequences; whereas AGW can go on for ever… “are we there yet?… are we there yet?… are we there yet?”
You’re still assuming that the temperature proxies, “Mike’s Nature trick” of gluing false tree-ring proxies to false weather station data post-1960 (mostly downwind of expanding cities, causing temperature rises by direct heat pollution from central heating, not CO2!), is true. All this data is faked statistics. Tree rings are no temperature proxy because tree growth is provably affected by sunlight/cloud-cover (not the same thing as air temperature!). Tree ring data doesn’t correlate with temperature due, as you suggest to global dimming from sulphur dioxide, much of which comes from natural volcanic pollution, not industry.
But there is also a cloud cover effect from extra H2O evaporating from slightly warmed oceans, increasing Earth’s albedo. This has a natural cooling effect, and is why Earth is not a greenhouse. To exaggerate this mechanism: if the sun boils the oceans, clouds of steam form which stop the sunlight reaching the oceans. Thus, Earth regulates its temperature automatically, once the oceans heat very slightly.
Satellite temperature data is also all fake, because it is biased. It can at best only measure surface temperatures in areas not covered with clouds, which is a biased sample because cloud cover has been increasing since 1948 as NOAA data on humidity imply. So you need to know the average temperature under the cloudy skies, and a sensitive measure of exactly how the average cloud cover of the Earth has varied, to get a correct overall average temperature. Cloud cover traditionally was recorded using a subjective glance at the sky and a simple fraction, e.g. 1/4 of sky covered or 1/3rd, which isn’t very accurate.
However, there is data on the lack of H2O feedback: http://nige.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/new.gif This data proves that water vapour hasn’t been increasing with CO2 emissions! Atmospheric H2O has fallen by 1% since 1946, while CO2 has risen. Since 1 kg of H2O as vapour in the atmosphere (not as condensed cloud droplets!) absorbs 30 times as much solar radiation energy as 1 kg of CO2, it follows that the 1% fall in H2O vapour is equivalent to a 30% fall in CO2 “greenhouse” gas equivalent! This is countering global warming, and NASA banned its researcher Dr Ferenc Miskolczi who discovered this from publishing it! IPCC computer models still assume falsely that H2O amplifies, rather than opposes, CO2.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/11/08/the-global-cooling-myth-dies-again/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/18/how-to-handle-climate-cha_n_467671.htmlYou conveniently forget that CH4 is also >20 times more potent as a GHG than CO2 and, therefore, that the ongoing thawing of the permafrost (i.e another positive feedback mechanism) is far more significant than any negative feedback caused by any reduction in average humidity.
The NOAA data show a decrease in H2O vapour by 0.8% since 1958, equivalent to a 30×0.8 = 24% (from 30 x 0.8%) decrease in CO2. Therefore, the H2O vapour decrease is cancelling out the CO2 rise. Your denialism of the H2O fall can’t last forever!
http://delingpoleworld/blog/the-real-cost-of-global-warming-1329/comment-page-1/#comment-10420
Although unable to edit this post I accept that you did mention methane.
See the video of Dr Miklos Zagoni (an Hungarian government adviser) explaining NASA contractor Dr Ferenc Miskolczi discovery of how H2O prevents further global warming: http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/ferenc-miskolczi%e2%80%99s-saturated-greenhouse-effect-theory-c02-cannot-cause-any-more-global-warming/
The problem with both Dr Zagoni and Miskolczi is technical obfuscation. They take a crystal clear mechanism supported by NOAA data, but then built a spurious set of calculations based on an idealized model. Critics then ignore the mechanism and the data and simply dispute details the idealized (wrong) model, so the public never hear the facts!
1. CO2 causes a slight warming of the surface waters in the oceans up to 1997 AD.
2. The slight warming increases H2O evaporation slightly.
3. The extra humid sea level air caused by H2O evaporation absorbs sunlight radiation. (Everybody agrees up to this point!)
4. The sunlight-absorbing humid air is heated by the sunlight it absorbs, and hot air always rises due to bouyancy. Since the temperature and pressure fall with altitude, the humid air which rise like a hot air balloon expands and condenses to form extra cloud cover, which has a high albedo and reflects back more sunlight into space, cooling the Earth. Thus, H2O is a negative-feedback mechanism, and the only reason why IPCC models say the opposite (positive feedback from H2O) is that they omit the bouyancy of hot air!
In other words, the fact heated air rises disproves current global warming models, which ignore this fact! In science, if you find a gross error in a model and don’t correct it, you know the model is defective. 62% of the Earth’s skies are covered by clouds, and this percentage is a function of CO2. Inject more CO2, and cloud cover increases, regulating temperature. This negative-feedback mechanism was censored from publication by NASA.
1. The ” trick” referred t in the UEA emails was a standard method of correcting two sets of data that do not fit together even when you know they should.
2. We are not reliant on tree ring/growth data anymore and, as the New Scientist points out, the evidence that things are now warming more rapidly than ever (since 1850) are all around us (i.e. the shifting seasons etc).
3. There is no significant difference between recent land-based and satellite-based temperature data.As I said to JimmyGiro, if the truth hurts then I suggest you stop lying to yourself (or listening to liars).