January 7, 2011 by Walter Schneider.

Thanks to Climate Realists:

Canada Free Press
2011 01 06

Blinds on the greenhouse window create cooling. Clouds are nature’s blinds

Greenhouse Effect; Everybody Talks About It But Few Know What It Is

By Dr. Tim Ball

It is amazing how people have very strong opinions about ideas and terms they don’t understand. Greenhouse effect is one of these and lack of understanding about it is exploited to dictate global energy and economic policies at great and unnecessary expense.

They claim the Earth’s atmosphere is like a greenhouse. It isn’t. Most don’t know how ‘official’ greenhouse science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim it works. Some think it’s the same as global warming because they associate greenhouses, which some call hothouses, with high temperature….(Full Story)

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Dr. Tim Ball’s explanation of the “greenhouse effect” illustrates that fears of it are overblown, based on superstitions, that the”science” of global warming is a misrepresentation and at best not settled.  The conclusion is unavoidable that projects like Shell’s CCS Project near Bruderheim serve no practical purpose other than that they are expensive appeasements of climate-alarmism cultists designed to defraud the taxpayers for the sake of political expediency.

Posted in Climate Craziness, Shell CCS Project, Propaganda debunked, Corruption & Fraud, Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

December 23, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Carbon Sense *

20th December 2010

Time to Topple the Pyramid of Frauds

By Viv Forbes

One of the fastest growing industries in the world is based on a pyramid of frauds and its inevitable collapse will be worse than the sub-prime crash.

The Global Warming Industry is now fed by billions of dollars from western taxpayers and consumers. It is based on the unproven and now discredited claim that man’s production of carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming.

The basic fraud is this:

There is no evidence that carbon dioxide controls world temperature – just a theory and the manipulated results from a handful of giant computer models that very few people have checked or understand….

…those who waste millions on projects designed to prove the feasibility of burying carbon dioxide are committing a fraud on taxpayers and shareholders. There are no benefits of burying atmospheric plant food from any source. With zero benefits and huge costs CCS can never be “economic” and it is fraudulent to pretend it can ever be otherwise….

Full Story  (70kB PDF file — Printer-friendly, includes links to information sources)

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* “Carbon Sense” is a newsletter produced by the Carbon Sense Coalition, an Australian based organisation which opposes waste of resources, opposes pollution, and promotes the rational and sustainable use of carbon energy and carbon food.

Please spread “Carbon Sense” around.

For more information visit our web site at www.carbon-sense.com

Literary, financial or other contributions to help our cause are welcomed.

Viv Forbes MS 23, Rosewood Qld 4340 Australia. info@carbon-sense.com
07 5464 0533

A printer-friendly PDF (70kB) of this newsletter is accessible here:
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/pyramid-of-frauds.pdf

Posted in Shell CCS Project, Alarmist Insanity, Corruption & Fraud, Alternative Energy Sources, Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

December 11, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

The Washington Times

6:30 p.m., Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Global warming ideology still on top
The science has crumbled, but too much money backs the scare

By Tom Harris and Bryan Leyland

….Republican climate skeptics have taken control of the U.S. House of Representatives, thereby killing any chance of federal “cap-and-trade” legislation for now. Republican congressional leaders also have vowed to use every trick in the book to block Environmental Protection Agency carbon-dioxide (CO2) regulations scheduled to start on Jan. 2. And, not surprisingly, the United Nations’ 2010 Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico, is failing, with Mother Nature helping to dampen warming fears as an early winter sets in across the Northern Hemisphere.

Some commentators tell us that this is the beginning of the end of the climate scare. More likely, it is just the end of the beginning….

Aside from President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, not a single prominent world leader contests the hypothesis that humanity’s CO2 emissions are causing dangerous global warming. The fact that the basic science behind the scare is crumbling appears to have no impact on these groups….(Full Story)

Posted in Deficits and Debts, The New World Order, Taxes, Corruption & Fraud, Climate Change, Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

December 2, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Thanks to wattsupwiththat.com

guardian.co.uk

Cancún climate change summit: Japan refuses to extend Kyoto protocol

Talks threatened with breakdown after forthright Japanese refusal to extend Kyoto emissions commitments

The delicately balanced global climate talks in Cancún suffered a serious setback last night when Japan categorically stated its opposition to extending the Kyoto protocol – the binding international treaty that commits most of the world’s richest countries to making emission cuts….(Full Story)

Posted in Climate Change, Community & Industry | Print | 1 Comment »

November 26, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

CANADA Views.ca

Approved Orders in Council
by: Government of Alberta | Nov 25th, 2010
Cabinet Meeting – November 23, 2010
Orders Approved – November 24, 2010

HONOURABLE MR. GOUDREAU 400/2010 FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY ACT (section 4)…. – Orders the separation of certain land from Lamont County and the annexation of that land, approximately 300 hectares (741 acres), to the Town of Bruderheim, effective July 1, 2010. 403/2010 MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT ACT (sections 126 and 138)….(Full Story)

I called the Bruderheim Town Office about that.  They were not able to confirm that the order for the annexation of the land in question had gone through or that it had been finalized, as they have not yet received official notification of the approval of the annexation order.

However, they indicated that the land to be annexed is identified on their website.

Posted in Town of Bruderheim, Maps, Community & Industry | Print | No Comments »

November 22, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

It was a few years ago, when I said that the media don’t always tell the truth, and that even the evening news on TV are often used to tell falsehoods, either by distorting the truth, putting the wrong spin on things or by not reporting some things at all, and someone commented: “Why should I believe you, when professionals tell me something that is quite different from what you tell me?”

Well, it seems that a good answer to that is not that easy to come by; but is that true?

I have not ever knowingly tried to pull  a fast one on people by deliberately telling a lie in anything I told on this blog or anything else I presented as the truth on the Internet.  Still, why should anyone believe me?

The answer to that is that no one needs to believe me or believe anything I state, but if they don’t believe me, why should they believe anyone else who is making an effort to tell them anything? The truth is out there, and, thanks to the Internet, the truth about anything is as accessible as are lies about it.  All that is necessary is to be able to tell the truth from lies that are intentional or unintentional.  The difference is often easy to tell.

Let’s take the truth with respect to what is being told in Richard Lindzen’s testimony to the US Congress about global warming hype and hysteria and compare it to what some parties like Shell, the Canadian federal government and the Alberta provincial government want us to do.  That is, buy in and pay for, at a billion dollars and more a shot,  to allegedly alleviate the consequences of global warming through Shell’s CCS project that is proposed to be constructed in Alberta’s Industrial Heartland, north-east of Fort Saskatchewan and north of Bruderheim.

Richard Lindzen, one of the foremost climatologists in the world, said in concluding his testimony to the US Congress, Nov. 17, 2010, that,

You now have some idea of why I think that there won’t be much warming due to CO2, and without significant global warming, it is impossible to tie catastrophes to such warming. Even with significant warming it would have been extremely difficult to make this connection.

Perhaps we should stop accepting the term, ‘skeptic.’ Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating.

In the meantime, while I avoid making forecasts for tenths of a degree change in globally averaged temperature anomaly, I am quite willing to state that unprecedented climate catastrophes are not on the horizon though in several thousand years we may return to an ice age.

Richard Lindzen provided the following information on slides 11, 12, and 13 of his presentation to the US Congress:

(Click on each image to see it in full resolution.)

Will anyone in their right mind truly believe that the range of temperature trends for global average temperatures (the area covered by the red line in the preceding image) compared to local measurement for Boston (or anywhere else for that matter) will be impacted in any measurable fashion by what is contemplated through Shell’s CCS Project?  After all, the width of the red line would at best be reduced by no more than an infinitesimally tiny fraction of 4 percent of the width of the red line.

Mind you, Richard Lindzen uses well-mannered language in his presentations.  Instead of using words like “anyone in their right mind”, he uses words such as these: “Given the above, the notion that alarming warming is ‘settled science’ should be offensive to any sentient individual, though to be sure, the above is hardly emphasized by the IPCC.” (Emphasis as in the original on page 4 of the full PDF file of Richard Lindzen’s testimony to the US Congress)

Whether one says “anyone in their right mind” or that the claims of global-warming alarmism are based on ’settled science’ is “offensive to any sentient individual,” makes little difference.  Someone who is right in his mind is a sentient individual, and the facts are the same.  Cries of climate alarmism and all attempts to use “Carbon Capture and Storage” as a thermostat for regulating global temperature trends are bunk.

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By the way, besides Richard Lindzen, there were other prominent authorities who set straight the facts at the US Congress Hearing on Global Warming:

Watch: The House Hearing on Global Warming today

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Anthony Watts

Posted in Propaganda debunked, Taxes, Censorship, Shell CCS Project, Alarmist Insanity, Corruption & Fraud, Community & Industry, Climate Change, Health issues, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

November 18, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Here is an item from the world of climate science that should make Stephen Harper feel good about his Canadian Conservative Party’s opposition to the Climate-Change Bill (Bill C-311), which the prime minister called “a completely irresponsible bill.” (See full story on that)

The other side of the coin is that the same item makes Shell’s CCS Project (a.k.a. Quest) look like a billion-dollar-plus boondoggle, which, if it should go through in spite of common sense, it most certainly will be.

Here it is:

South Pacific Oscillation and Cosmic Radiation
(German Title: “Südpazifische Oszillation und Kosmische Strahlung”)

By Horst Borchert, Ph.D. *
Mainz, Germany, 2010

Abstract
It was found that the South Pacific Oscillation (SO) is influenced by solar activity, similar to the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Especially during the warming period from 1980 to 2009 the oscillation of [the solar wind] – Index “aa “ was in good resonance with the delayed South Pacific Oscillation. The same observation was found between the Oscillation of Cosmic Radiation, which is controlled by the Forbush – Reduction by the magnetic fields of the solar protons of the [solar wind] and the delayed SO (K=0,8). The consequence of this observation is the postulation, that the increase of global temperature in the Southern Hemisphere was caused by solar activity with strong emissions of Proton-rays in Earth‘s direction during the 22nd and 23rd Sunspot-Periods reducing Cosmic Rays, with the consequence of reduction of cloudiness, increasing global rays and warming up the lower atmosphere (Svensmark–Effect). As a consequence resolved CO2 was continuously emitted from the slowly warming Ocean giving a good fertilizer of the flora of the world. A relevance of CO2 concerning Climate Change could not be found. [My emphasis, –WHS] With the end of solar activity in 2006 a cold weather period has started in the Southern Hemisphere, too.

*) Physics Director, Ph.D. rer. nat. Horst Borchert, Ret., Assistant Professor at the Geographical Institute of the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany, Bcht01@aol.com, www.drborchert.com

In the conclusion of his discussion paper, Horst Borchert stresses that, “The examination illustrates that the temperature increase from 1980 to 2009 in the southern hemisphere, too, was not caused by humans but by extraordinary solar activity.” (Original emphasis)  Furthermore, he states there that, “CO2 is not relevant in relation to climate.  It cannot be shown through measurement techniques that its actual increasing trend is the cause of climate change and the warming of the air near the surface.”  Elsewhere in his discussion paper Horst Borchert identifies that, “CO2 is at the moment still rising linearly and is attributed to about 98.5% to CO2 emissions by the warmed oceans and other natural sources (UBA 1998, Ahlbeck, J., Schulze, E. 2009); the rest is anthropogenic.”(Page 3, par. 2)

Posted in Climate Change, Community & Industry, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

November 18, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Defeating legislation passed by House unprecedented, opposition parties say
Last Updated: Wednesday, November 17, 2010 | 4:53 PM ET
CBC News

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has defended Tory senators who voted down a climate change bill ahead of an upcoming United Nations meeting on the issue in Mexico.

Harper, in responding to a query from NDP Leader Jack Layton in question period Wednesday in Ottawa, said Conservatives have been consistent and clear in their opposition to Bill C-311, which the prime minister called “a completely irresponsible bill.”….(Full Story)

That is an interesting development.  I wonder what the financial impact of that will be on Shell’s CCS Project.  From what Shell told me at their Bruderheim open house (Nov. 3, 2010), at which they promoted public awareness and acceptance of their proposed CCS Project, the contributions by the federal and provincial governments are supposed to be $150 million and $700 million, respectively, with an additional 20 percent of the overall price tag to come from funding by Shell.

A few hundred million here, a few hundred million there, and soon we are talking about real money — all of which is no skin off  the backs of either the governments or of Shell, as it will be the end consumers and taxpayers who will shell out the money for the Shell CCS Project, even though CCS will not have the slightest impact on global climate trends.

CO2 comprises 390 parts per million of our atmosphere (0.0039%). All man-made contributions of CO2 in the world amount to about 4 percent of total atmospheric CO2 content (0.000156% of total atmospheric CO2).  Canada’s contributions amount to a very tiny fraction of that.  The amount of CO2 that would be sequestered by Shell’s CCS Project would be an even much tinier fraction of that, at a price of more than a billion dollars.  The effect of that on global climate trends cannot ever be measured and would be exactly what?

I had asked Shell about that at their Bruderheim open house (Nov. 3, 2010).  They could not tell me then, and I am still waiting for their answer.   I expected no better and am not disappointed, even though common sense would demand that a corporation spending more than a billion dollars of the people’s money to do good would be able to tell the world how much good they will do at that price.  However, this is not about common sense.  It is propaganda, very expensive propaganda.

It is a good thing that Stephen Harper and the Canadian Conservative Party put an end to the waste.  Let’s hope that the provincial government will do the same, but that would be taking a page out of the book by the Wild Rose Party, and that would never do, unless the voters wake up and do something about it, right?

Posted in Shell CCS Project, Climate Change, Community & Industry, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

November 18, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Potential Impacts of Leakage from Deep CO₂ Geosequestration on Overlying Freshwater Aquifers

Mark G. Little*^† and Robert B. Jackson^†‡

Center on Global Change, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, United States, and Nicholas School of the Environment and Biology Department, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0338, United States

Environ. Sci. Technol., Article ASAP

DOI: 10.1021/es102235w
Publication Date (Web): October 26, 2010

Copyright © 2010 American Chemical Society

* Corresponding author phone: (919)681-7180; fax: (919)660-7425; e-mail: 6r4h@post.harvard.edu., † Center on Global Change., ‡ Nicholas School of the Environment and Biology Department.

Quoted from the abstract:

Carbon Capture and Storage may use deep saline aquifers for CO₂ sequestration, but small CO₂ leakage could pose a risk to overlying fresh groundwater….(Full Story and links to study report and supporting information)

(Thanks to Anthony Watts at wattsupwiththat.com)

The study report is behind a pay wall.  The cost of accessing the report is $30 for 48 hours — more than I can afford to pay.

The Shell CCS Project (CCS meaning Carbon Capture and Storage or, correctly, CO2 Capture and Storage or Sequestration) in the area NE from Fort Saskatchewan, with a CO2 pipeline proposed to run north of Bruderheim, crossing the North Saskatchewan River and then running to the vicinity of Thorhild, where the CO2 is to be injected at a depth of about 2,400 m underground, will inject the CO2 into deep layers of porous rock that may border on saline aquifers into which the injected CO2 may and quite possibly will expand.

The study by Mark G. Little and Robert B. Jackson from Duke University identified that when CO2 was bubbled for more than 300 days through core samples from injection sites, “CO₂ caused concentrations of the alkali and alkaline earths and manganese, cobalt, nickel, and iron to increase by more than 2 orders of magnitude.”  That means  increases in concentrations a hundred-fold and more.

The study furthermore showed, “Potentially dangerous uranium and barium increased throughout the entire experiment in some samples.”

However, although some of that is bad news, the study also identified that “Manganese, iron, calcium, and pH could be used as geochemical markers of a CO₂ leak, as their concentrations increase within 2 weeks of exposure to CO₂.”

From reading Shell’s information that has been provided to me as of now, I neither recall that Shell’s CCS Project (also known by the creative name “Quest”) will employ such markers nor what action will be taken by Shell if a CO2 leak occurs underground at their CO2 injection sites.  That does not mean that Shell does not have contingency plans for possible CO2 leaks into overlying fresh groundwater.

Shell could well have contingency plans for possible underground CO2 leaks, but from the information provided at their Bruderheim open house (Nov. 3, 2010) it appears that Shell relies on the assumption that the CO2 they propose to inject will not move to the surface for at least a thousand years.

It is comforting to know that if nothing goes wrong with the premises of Shell’s CCS Project,  the residents who draw their drinking water out of the wells in the large area into which the injected CO2 will expand will be safe for at least for an estimated 1000 years.

Mind you, if something does go wrong, then all bets are off, and there is no telling as to what steps may  need to be taken to alleviate the impact of increases of mineral and metal concentrations in drinking water to objectionable and dangerous levels.

Have a look at what a CO2-driven water geyser looks like.  Here is more information on how the Chaffin Ranch Geyser came to be.

Posted in Health issues, Shell CCS Project, Climate Change, Community & Industry, Heavy-Metal Poisoning & Pollution, Pollution: Health Issues, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »

September 20, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

Thompsons part 4: Every slope is a watercourse

When Matt and Janet first came to Western Australia they were told they could run a feedlot without regular licenses as long as they were not within 100m of a watercourse. It makes a big difference. If a farm is a category 68, it can run thousands of cattle (and many dairy farms do) without being licensed. This is the ongoing saga of how Big-Government can use complexity to play Kingmaker.

I didn’t think I’d ever find agricultural codes interesting, but by paying attention to the detail we can see just how powerful The Department of Environment (DEC) is, and how selective it can be. You would think it would be easy to measure off 100 m toward a waterway, but how do you define a waterway? You can I might expect that it would have banks, or that in a 100 year flood the water flowing in the gully might have a chance of reaching a body of water big enough to have a fish. Don’t apply for a job at DEC WA.

DEC has declared that Narrogin Beef Producers are a Category 1 property needing licenses because there are watercourses to the North of the feedlot, and to the South West. This picture below,  is a photo (slightly amended) of that paddock to the north in winter. Would you call this a watercourse?

A photo of the Northern “watercourse” of The Thompsons property. (Sign added).

This is the “watercourse” to the South West, a remnant waterway.

Thompsons South West “watercourse”

This is a dry gully visible in aerial shots in the south western edge of their property (see the map image below). There’s no running water in it, and there hasn’t been as long as the Thompsons have been there, and even in the event of a major flood, the gully leads to nowhere in particular. It doesn’t flow into anything. You can follow the tree line of these dry gullies in a google map and see that they eventually might meander into salt pans that are kilometers away….(Full Story)

Related and original story

Posted in Alarmist Insanity, Propaganda debunked, Fines & Penalties, Community & Industry, Pollution: Health Issues, Emission Incidents & Issues | Print | No Comments »